Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (169 page)

“Dad,” she cried, “are you here?”

He rose slowly from a high-backed chair beside the fire.

“It is you,” he said. He seemed a little dazed.

She ran to him and, seizing his listless arms, put them round her.

“Give me a hug, Dad,” she commanded. “A real hug.”

He held her to him for what seemed a long while. There was strength in his arms, in spite of the bowed shoulders and white hair.

“I was afraid you had forgotten how to do it,” she laughed, when at last he released her. “Do you know, you haven’t hugged me, Dad, since I was five years old. That’s nineteen years ago. You do love me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I have always loved you.”

She would not let him light the gas. “I have dined — in the train,” she explained. “Let us talk by the firelight.”

She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees. “What were you thinking of when I came in?” she asked. “You weren’t asleep, were you?”

“No,” he answered. “Not that sort of sleep.” She could not see his face. But she guessed his meaning.

“Am I very like her?” she asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. I thought, for the moment, as you stood there by the door . . . “ He did not finish the sentence.

“Tell me about her,” she said. “I never knew she had been an actress.”

He did not ask her how she had learnt it. “She gave it up when we were married,” he said. “The people she would have to live among would have looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they should.”

“How did it all happen?” she persisted. “Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?” She wished she had not added that last. The words had slipped from her before she knew.

“Very beautiful,” he answered, “in the beginning.”

“It was my fault,” he went on, “that it was not beautiful all through. I ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice.”

“It’s difficult to tell, isn’t it?” she said. “I wonder how one can?”

He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.

“Did you ever see her act?” asked Joan.

“Every evening for about six months,” he answered. A little flame shot up and showed a smile upon his face.

“I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew.”

Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of jealous passion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music turned to waste.

“How did she come to fall in love with you?” asked Joan. “I don’t mean to be uncomplimentary, Dad.” She laughed, taking his hand in hers and stroking it. “You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic woman.”

“It wasn’t so incongruous at the time,” he answered. “My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn’t run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn’t give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I’d have faced Hell itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I’d died she’d have gone back with them, and killed him.”

Joan did not speak for a time. She could see him grave — a little pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his hand.

“Couldn’t you have saved a bit, Daddy?” she asked, “of all that wealth of youth — just enough to live on?”

“I might,” he answered, “if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately.”

“And so you married her and took her drum away from her,” said Joan. “Oh, the thing God gives to some of us,” she explained, “to make a little noise with, and set the people marching.”

The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling.

“But you still loved her, didn’t you, Dad?” she asked. “I was very little at the time, but I can just remember. You seemed so happy together. Till her illness came.”

“It was more than love,” he answered. “It was idolatry. God punished me for it. He was a hard God, my God.”

She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face was very close to his. “What has become of Him, Dad?” she said. She spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.

“I do not know,” he answered her. “I don’t seem to care.”

“He must be somewhere,” she said: “the living God of love and hope: the God that Christ believed in.”

“They were His last words, too,” he answered: “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”

“No, not His last,” said Joan: “‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’ Love was Christ’s God. He will help us to find Him.”

Their arms were about one another. Joan felt that a new need had been born in her: the need of loving and of being loved. It was good to lay her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.

He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday.

“Do you still go to the chapel?” she asked him a little hesitatingly.

“Yes,” he answered. “One lives by habit.”

“It is the only Temple I know,” he continued after a moment. “Perhaps God, one day, will find me there.”

He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.

“Have you heard from Arthur?” he asked, suddenly turning to her.

“No. Not since about a month,” she answered. “Why?”

“He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him,” he said with a smile, handing her the letter. “He will be here some time to-morrow.”

Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them — when she did not forget to do so — in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.

“It only came an hour or two ago,” her father explained. “If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived.”

“So long as he doesn’t think that I came down specially to see him, I don’t mind,” said Joan.

They both laughed. “He’s a good lad,” said her father.

They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table. Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.

Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper. A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her; but was not surprised.

“I called at your diggings,” he said. “I had to go through London. They told me you had started. It is good of you.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Joan. “I came down to see Dad. I didn’t know you were back.” She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.

“How are you?” she added, holding out her hand. “You’ve grown quite good-looking. I like your moustache.” And he flushed again with pleasure.

He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair. He looked lithe and agile rather than strong. He was shy at first, but once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.

His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks. He described the life of the people, very little different from what it must have been in Noah’s time. For months he had been the only white man there, and had lived among them. What had struck him was how little he had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over the first shock. He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum and hunted with them. Provided one was a little hungry and tired with toil, a stew of goat’s flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down with wine out of a sheep’s skin, made a feast; and after, there was music and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather round him his rapt audience. Paris had only robbed women of their grace and dignity. He preferred the young girls in their costume of the fourteenth dynasty. Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate life and render it less enjoyable. All the essentials of happiness — love, courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse, and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.

Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man’s happiness as more important to him than his self-development. It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain. Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us. But the pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.

He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling his bread. When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia. But he stuck to his guns.

How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets? They had sprung from a shepherd race. Yet surely there was genius, literature. Greece owed nothing to progress. She had preceded it. Her thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from nature, not civilization. Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil. We had never surpassed it.

“But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would not so utterly have disappeared,” suggested Mr. Allway. “Unless you reject the law of the survival of the fittest.”

He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.

“So did Archimedes disappear,” he answered with a smile. “The nameless Roman soldier remained. That was hardly the survival of the fittest.”

He thought it the tragedy of the world that Rome had conquered Greece, imposing her lower ideals upon the race. Rome should have been the servant of Greece: the hands directed by the brain. She would have made roads and harbours, conducted the traffic, reared the market place. She knew of the steam engine, employed it for pumping water in the age of the Antonines. Sooner or later, she would have placed it on rails, and in ships. Rome should have been the policeman, keeping the world in order, making it a fit habitation. Her mistake was in regarding these things as an end in themselves, dreaming of nothing beyond. From her we had inherited the fallacy that man was made for the world, not the world for man. Rome organized only for man’s body. Greece would have legislated for his soul.

They went into the drawing-room. Her father asked her to sing and Arthur opened the piano for her and lit the candles. She chose some ballads and a song of Herrick’s, playing her own accompaniment while Arthur turned the leaves. She had a good voice, a low contralto. The room was high and dimly lighted. It looked larger than it really was. Her father sat in his usual chair beside the fire and listened with half-closed eyes. Glancing now and then across at him, she was reminded of Orchardson’s picture. She was feeling sentimental, a novel sensation to her. She rather enjoyed it.

She finished with one of Burns’s lyrics; and then told Arthur that it was now his turn, and that she would play for him. He shook his head, pleading that he was out of practice.

“I wish it,” she said, speaking low. And it pleased her that he made no answer but to ask her what he should sing. He had a light tenor voice. It was wobbly at first, but improved as he went on. They ended with a duet.

The next morning she went into town with them. She never seemed to have any time in London, and wanted to do some shopping. They joined her again for lunch and afterwards, at her father’s suggestion, she and Arthur went for a walk. They took the tram out of the city and struck into the country. The leaves still lingered brown and red upon the trees. He carried her cloak and opened gates for her and held back brambles while she passed. She had always been indifferent to these small gallantries; but to-day she welcomed them. She wished to feel her power to attract and command. They avoided all subjects on which they could differ, even in words. They talked of people and places they had known together. They remembered their common love of animals and told of the comedies and tragedies that had befallen their pets. Joan’s regret was that she had not now even a dog, thinking it cruel to keep them in London. She hated the women she met, dragging the poor little depressed beasts about at the end of a string: savage with them, if they dared to stop for a moment to exchange a passing wag of the tail with some other little lonely sufferer. It was as bad as keeping a lark in a cage. She had tried a cat: but so often she did not get home till late and that was just the time when the cat wanted to be out; so that they seldom met. He suggested a parrot. His experience of them was that they had no regular hours and would willingly sit up all night, if encouraged, and talk all the time. Joan’s objection to running a parrot was that it stamped you as an old maid; and she wasn’t that, at least, not yet. She wondered if she could make an owl really happy. Minerva had an owl.