Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (192 page)
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Authors: Jerome K. Jerome
Labourers together with God. The mighty host of those who through the ages had heard the voice of God and had made answer. The men and women in all lands who had made room in their hearts for God. Still nameless, scattered, unknown to one another: still powerless as yet against the world’s foul law of hate, they should continue to increase and multiply, until one day they should speak with God’s voice and should be heard. And a new world should be created.
God. The tireless Spirit of eternal creation, the Spirit of Love. What else was it that out of formlessness had shaped the spheres, had planned the orbits of the suns. The law of gravity we named it. What was it but another name for Love, the yearning of like for like, the calling to one another of the stars. What else but Love had made the worlds, had gathered together the waters, had fashioned the dry land. The cohesion of elements, so we explained it. The clinging of like to like. The brotherhood of the atoms.
God. The Eternal Creator. Out of matter, lifeless void, he had moulded His worlds, had ordered His endless firmament. It was finished. The greater task remained: the Universe of mind, of soul. Out of man it should be created. God in man and man in God: made in like image: fellow labourers together with one another: together they should build it. Out of the senseless strife and discord, above the chaos and the tumult should be heard the new command: “Let there be Love.”
The striking of the old church clock recalled her to herself. But she had only a few minutes’ walk before her. Mary had given up her Church work. It included the cleaning, and she had found it beyond her failing strength. But she still lived in the tiny cottage behind its long strip of garden. The door yielded to Joan’s touch: it was seldom fast closed. And knowing Mary’s ways, she entered without knocking and pushed it to behind her, leaving it still ajar.
And as she did so, it seemed to her that someone passing breathed upon her lips a little kiss: and for a while she did not move. Then, treading softly, she looked into the room.
It welcomed her, as always, with its smile of cosy neatness. The spotless curtains that were Mary’s pride: the gay flowers in the window, to which she had given children’s names: the few poor pieces of furniture, polished with much loving labour: the shining grate: the foolish china dogs and the little china house between them on the mantelpiece. The fire was burning brightly, and the kettle was singing on the hob.
Mary’s work was finished. She sat upright in her straight-backed chair before the table, her eyes half closed. It seemed so odd to see those little work-worn hands idle upon her lap.
Joan’s present lay on the table near to her, as if she had just folded it and placed it there: the little cap and the fine robe of lawn: as if for a king’s child.
Joan had never thought that Death could be so beautiful. It was as if some friend had looked in at the door, and, seeing her so tired, had taken the work gently from her hands, and had folded them upon her lap. And she had yielded with a smile.
Joan heard a faint rustle and looked up. A woman had entered. It was the girl she had met there on a Christmas Day, a Miss Ensor. Joan had met her once or twice since then. She was still in the chorus. Neither of them spoke for a few minutes.
“I have been expecting every morning to find her gone,” said the girl. “I think she only waited to finish this.” She gently unfolded the fine lawn robe, and they saw the delicate insertion and the wonderful, embroidery.
“I asked her once,” said the girl, “why she wasted so much work on them. They were mostly only for poor people. ‘One never knows, dearie,’ she answered, with that childish smile of hers. ‘It may be for a little Christ.’”
They would not let less loving hands come near her.
* * * * *
Her father had completed his business, and both were glad to leave London. She had a sense of something sinister, foreboding, casting its shadow on the sordid, unclean streets, the neglected buildings falling into disrepair. A lurking savagery, a half-veiled enmity seemed to be stealing among the people. The town’s mad lust for pleasure: its fierce, unjoyous laughter: its desire ever to be in crowds as if afraid of itself: its orgies of eating and drinking: its animal-like indifference to the misery and death that lay but a little way beyond its own horizon! She dared not remember history. Perhaps it would pass.
The long, slow journey tried her father’s strength, and assuming an authority to which he yielded obedience tempered by grumbling, Joan sent him to bed, and would not let him come down till Christmas Day. The big, square house was on the outskirts of the town where it was quiet, and in the afternoon they walked in the garden sheltered behind its high brick wall.
He told her of what had been done at the works. Arthur’s plan had succeeded. It might not be the last word, but at least it was on the road to the right end. The men had been brought into it and shared the management. And the disasters predicted had proved groundless.
“You won’t be able to indulge in all your mad schemes,” he laughed, “but there’ll be enough to help on a few. And you will be among friends. Arthur told me he had explained it to you and that you had agreed.”
“Yes,” she answered. “It was the last time he came to see me in London. And I could not help feeling a bit jealous. He was doing things while I was writing and talking. But I was glad he was an Allway. It will be known as the Allway scheme. New ways will date from it.”
She had thought it time for him to return indoors, but he pleaded for a visit to his beloved roses. He prided himself on being always able to pick roses on Christmas Day.
“This young man of yours,” he asked, “what is he like?”
“Oh, just a Christian gentleman,” she answered. “You will love him when you know him.”
He laughed. “And this new journal of his?” he asked. “It’s got to be published in London, hasn’t it?”
She gave a slight start, for in their letters to one another they had been discussing this very point.
“No,” she answered, “it could be circulated just as well from, say, Birmingham or Manchester.”
He was choosing his roses. They held their petals wrapped tight round them, trying to keep the cold from their brave hearts. In the warmth they would open out and be gay, until the end.
“Not Liverpool?” he suggested.
“Or even Liverpool,” she laughed.
They looked at one another, and then beyond the sheltering evergreens and the wide lawns to where the great square house seemed to be listening.
“It’s an ugly old thing,” he said.
“No, it isn’t,” she contradicted. “It’s simple and big and kind. I always used to feel it disapproved of me. I believe it has come to love me, in its solemn old brick way.”
“It was built by Kent in seventeen-forty for your great-great grandfather,” he explained. He was regarding it more affectionately. “Solid respectability was the dream, then.”
“I think that’s why I love it,” she said: “for it’s dear, old-fashioned ways. We will teach it the new dreams, too. It will be so shocked, at first.”
They dined in state in the great dining-room.
“I was going to buy you a present,” he grumbled. “But you wouldn’t let me get up.”
“I want to give you something quite expensive, Dad,” she said. “I’ve had my eye on it for years.”
She slipped her hand in his. “I want you to give me that Dream of yours; that you built for my mother, and that all went wrong. They call it Allway’s Folly; and it makes me so mad. I want to make it all come true. May I try?”
* * * * *
It was there that he came to her.
She stood beneath the withered trees, beside the shattered fountain. The sad-faced ghosts peeped out at her from the broken windows of the little silent houses.
She wondered later why she had not been surprised to see him. But at the time it seemed to be in the order of things that she should look up and find him there.
She went to him with outstretched arms.
“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said. “I was just wanting you.”
They sat on the stone step of the fountain, where they were sheltered from the wind; and she buttoned his long coat about him.
“Do you think you will go on doing it?” he asked, with a laugh.
“I’m so afraid,” she answered gravely. “That I shall come to love you too much: the home, the children and you. I shall have none left over.”
“There is an old Hindoo proverb,” he said: “That when a man and woman love they dig a fountain down to God.”
“This poor, little choked-up thing,” he said, “against which we are sitting; it’s for want of men and women drawing water, of children dabbling their hands in it and making themselves all wet, that it has run dry.”
She took his hands in hers to keep them warm. The nursing habit seemed to have taken root in her.
“I see your argument,” she said. “The more I love you, the deeper will be the fountain. So that the more Love I want to come to me, the more I must love you.”
“Don’t you see it for yourself?” he demanded.
She broke into a little laugh.
“Perhaps you are right,” she admitted. “Perhaps that is why He made us male and female: to teach us to love.”
A robin broke into a song of triumph. He had seen the sad-faced ghosts steal silently away.
THE END
ANTHONY JOHN
A BIOGRAPHY
This novel was first published in 1923. Subtitled ‘A Biography’, it is a fictional bildungsroman telling of the rise and rise of its title character – the son of an engineer who ends up marrying a baronet’s daughter. Despite this conclusion, the novel is socialist in its attitudes, especially with regard to religion.
The first edition
CONTENTS
Title page of the first edition
CHAPTER I
ANTHONY JOHN STRONG’NTH’ARM — to distinguish him from his father, whose Christian names were John Anthony — was born in a mean street of Millsborough some forty-five years before the date when this story should of rights begin. For the first half-minute of his existence he lay upon the outstretched hand of Mrs. Plumberry and neither moved nor breathed. The very young doctor, nervous by reason of this being his first maternity case since his setting up in practice for himself, and divided between his duty to the child or to the mother, had unconsciously decided on the latter. Instinctively he knew that children in the poorer quarters of Millsborough were plentiful and generally not wanted. The mother, a high-cheeked, thinlipped woman, lay with closed eyes, her long hands clawing convulsively at the bed-clothes. The doctor was bending over her, fumbling with his hypodermic syringe.