Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (208 page)

They stood there for a while in silence.

“I suppose it’s only my fancy,” said Mr. Mowbray, “but you seem to me to grow more like Ted every year. I don’t mean in appearance, though even there I often see a look in your eyes that reminds me of him. But in other ways. Sometimes I could almost think it was he speaking.”

“I have changed,” said Anthony. “I feel it myself. His death made a great void in my life. I felt that I had been left with a wound that would never heal. And then one day the thought came to me — it can hardly be called a thought. I heard his very voice speaking to me, with just that little note of irritation in it that always came to him when he was arguing and got excited. ‘ I am not dead,’ he said. ‘How foolishly you are talking. How can I be dead while you are thinking of me — while you still love me and are wanting me. Who wants the dead? It is because you know I live, and that I love you, and always shall, that you want me. I am not dead. I am with you.’”

“Yes,” said Mr. Mowbray after a little pause, “he loved you very dearly. I was puzzled at first, because I thought you so opposite to one another. But now I know that it was my mistake.”

They did not talk during the short remainder of their walk. At the gate of The Priory the old gentleman stopped and turned.

“Kiss me, Anthony,” he said, “there’s nobody about.”

Anthony did so. It seemed quite natural somehow. He watched Mr. Mowbray pass up the flagged causeway to the door and then went back to his work.

Betty had been quite frank with him, or so he had thought.

“It’s fortunate we didn’t marry,” she said. “What a muddle it would have ended in — or else a tragedy. Do you remember that talk we had one evening?”

“Yes,” he answered. “You said that if you ever married it would be a man who would ‘like’ you — think of you as a friend, a comrade.”

“I know,” she laughed. “To be candid, I had you in my mind at the moment. I thought that you would always be so sane — the sort of husband one could rely upon never to kick over the traces. Curious how little we know one another.”

“Would you really have been satisfied?” he asked, “when it came to the point. Would not you have demanded love as your right?”

“I don’t think so,” she answered, musing. “I suppose the explanation is that a woman’s love is maternal rather than sexual. It is the home she is thinking of more than the lover. Of course, I don’t mean in every case. There are women for whom there exists one particular He, or no other. But I fancy they are rare.”

“I wonder sometimes,” he said, “what would have happened to me if I’d never met her? I suppose I should have gone on being quite happy and contented.”

“There are finer things than happiness,” she answered.

A child was born to them late in the year.

Anthony had never seen a baby before, not at close quarters. In his secret heart, he was disappointed that it was not more beautiful. But as the days went by it seemed to him that this defect was passing away. He judged it to be a very serious baby. It had large round serious eyes. Even its smile was thoughtful. They called it John Anthony.

The elder Mrs. Strong’nth’arm resented the carriage being sent down for her. She said she wasn’t so old that she could not walk a few miles to see her own grandson. Both she and Eleanor agreed that he was going to be like Anthony. His odd ways it was that so strongly reminded the elder Mrs. Strong’nth’arm of his father at the same age. They came together over John Anthony, the elder and the younger Mrs. Strong’nth’arm.

“It’s her artfulness,” had argued the elder Mrs. Strong’nth’arm to herself at first; “pretending to want my advice and hanging upon my words, while all the time, I reckon, she’s laughing at me.”

But the next day or the day after she would come again to answer delightedly the hundred questions put to her — to advise, discuss, to gossip and to laugh — to remember on her way home that she had kissed the girl, promising to come again soon.

Returning late one afternoon she met Anthony on the moor.

“I’ve left her going to sleep,” she said. “Don’t disturb her. She doesn’t rest herself sufficiently. I’ve been talking to her about it.

“I’m getting to like her,” she confessed shamefacedly. “She isn’t as bad as I thought her.”

He laughed, putting an arm about her.

“You’ll end by loving her,” he said. “You won’t be able to help it.”

“It’ll depend upon you, lad,” she answered. “So long as your good is her good I shall be content.”

She kissed him good night, for it was growing dusk. Neither he nor Eleanor had ever been able to persuade her to stay the night. With the nursery, which had been the former Lady Coomber’s dressing-room, she was familiar, having been one of the housemaids. But the big rooms on the ground floor overawed her. She never would enter by the great door, but always by a small side entrance leading to the housekeeper’s room. Eleanor had given instructions that it should always be left open.

He walked on slowly after he had left his mother. There, where the sun was sinking behind the distant elms, she lay sleeping. At the bend of the road was the old white thorn that had witnessed their first kiss. Reaching it, he looked round stealthily and, seeing no one, flung himself upon the ground and, stretching out his arms, pressed his lips to the sweet-smelling earth.

He laughed as he rose to his feet. These lovers’ rhapsodies he had once thought idle nonsense! They were true. Going through fire and water, dying for her, worshipping the ground she trod on. This dear moorland with its lonely farmsteads and its scattered cots; its old folks with their furrowed faces, its little children with shy, wondering eyes; its sandy hollows where the coneys frisked at twilight; its hidden dells of fern and bracken where the primroses first blossomed; its high banks beneath the birches where the red fox had his dwelling; its deep woods, bird-haunted: always he would love it, for her sake.

He turned and looked back and down the winding road. The noisome town half hidden by its pall of smoke lay stretched beneath him, a few faint lights twinkling from out the gloom. There too her feet had trod. Its long sad streets with their weary white-faced people; its foul, neglected places where the children played with dirt. This city of maimed souls and stunted bodies! It must be cleansed, purified, made worthy for her feet to pass. It should be his life’s work, his gift to his beloved.

CHAPTER XIV

LADY COOMBER joined them in the spring. Jim’s regiment had been detained at Malta longer than had been anticipated. Her presence passed hardly noticed in the house. Anthony had seen to it that her little pensioners, the birds, had been well cared for; they began to gather round her the first moment that they saw her, as if they had been waiting for her, hoping for her return. She herself could not explain her secret. She had only to stretch out her hand for them to come to her. She took more interest in the child than Eleanor had expected. She stole him away one morning, and was laughing when she brought him back. She had shown him to her birds and they had welcomed him with much chirruping and fluttering; and after that, whenever he saw her with her basket on her arm, he would stretch out his arms to her for her to take him with her.

Another child was born to them in the winter. They called him after Eleanor’s brother Jim; and later came a girl. They called her Norah. And then Eleanor fell ill. Anthony was terror-stricken. He had never been able to accept the popular idea of God as a sort of kindly magician to whom appeal might be made for miraculous benefits in exchange for praise and adulation, who would turn aside sickness, stay death’s hand in response for importunity. His common sense had revolted against it. But suddenly his reasoning faculties seemed to have deserted him. Had he been living in the Middle Ages he would have offered God a pilgrimage or a church. As it was, he undertook to start without further delay his various schemes to benefit the poor of Millsborough. He would set to work at once upon those model dwellings. It was always easy for him now to find financial backing for his plans. He remembered Betty’s argument: “I wouldn’t have anything started that couldn’t be made to pay its own way in the long run. If it can’t do that it isn’t real. It isn’t going to last.” She was right. As a sound business proposition, the thing would live and grow. It was justice not charity that the world stood most in need of. He worked it out. For the rent these slum landlords were exacting for insanitary hovels the workers could be housed in decent flats. Eleanor’s illness had been pronounced dangerous. No time was to be lost. The ground was bought and cleared. Landripp, the architect, threw himself into his labours with enthusiasm.

Landripp belonged to the new school of materialists. His religion was the happiness of humanity. Man to him was a mere chance product of the earth’s crust, evolved in common with all other living things by chemical process. With the cooling of the earth — or maybe its over-heating, it really did not matter which — the race would disappear, be buried, together with the history of its transient passing, beneath the eternal silences. Its grave might still roll on — to shape itself anew, to form out of its changed gases another race that in some future æon might be interested in examining excavated evidences of a former zoological period.

Meanwhile the thing to do was to make man as happy as possible for so long as he lasted. This could best be accomplished by developing his sense of brotherhood, out of which would be born justice and goodwill. Man was a gregarious animal. For his happiness he depended as much upon his fellows as upon his own exertions. The misery and suffering of any always, sooner or later, resulted in evil to the whole body. In society, as it had come to be constituted, the happiness of all was as much a practical necessity as was the health of all. For its own sake, a civilized community could no more disregard equity than it dare tolerate an imperfect drainage system. If the city was to be healthy and happy it must be seen to that each individual citizen was healthy and happy. The pursuit of happiness for ourselves depended upon our making others happy. It was for this purpose that the moral law had developed itself within us.

So soon as the moral law within us came to be acknowledged as the only safe guide to all our actions, so soon would Man’s road to happiness lie clear before him.

That something not material, that something impossible to be defined in material terms had somehow entered into the scheme, Mr. Landripp was forced to admit. In discussion he dismissed it — this unknown quantity — as “superfluous energy.” But to himself the answer was not satisfactory. By this reasoning the superfluous became the indispensable, which was absurd. There was his own favourite phrase: The preservation of the species; the moral law within compelling all creatures to sacrifice themselves for the good of their progeny. To Mr. Arnold S. Landripp, aware of his indebtedness for his own existence to the uninterrupted working of this law, aware that his own paternal affections had for their object the decoying of Mr. Arnold S. Landripp into guarding and cherishing and providing for the future of Miss Emily Landripp, who in her turn would rejoice in labour for her children, and so ad infinitum, the phrase might have significance. His reason, perceiving the necessity of the law, justified its obligations.

But those others? Unpleasant-looking insects — myriads of them — who wear themselves out for no other purpose than to leave behind them an egg, the hatching of which they will not live to see. Why toil in darkness? Why not spend their few brief hours of existence basking in their beloved sunshine? What to them the future of the Hymenoptera? The mother bird with outstretched wings above the burning nest, content to die herself if only she may hope to save her young. Natural affection, necessary for the preservation of the species. Whence comes it? Whence the origin of this blind love, this blind embracing of pain that an unknown cause may triumph.

Or take the case of Mr. Arnold S. Landripp’s own particular family. That hairy ancestor, fear-haunted, hunger-driven, fighting against monstrous odds to win a scanty living for himself. Why burden himself still further with a squawling brood that Mr. Arnold S. Landripp may eventually evolve? Why not knock them all on the head and eat the pig himself? Who whispered to him of the men of thought and knowledge who should one day come, among whom Mr. Arnold S. Landripp, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone, should mingle and have his being?

Why does the present Mr. Landripp impair his digestion by working long into the night that Millsborough slums may be the sooner swept away and room be made in Millsborough town for the building of decent dwellings for Mr. Landripp’s poorer brethren? The benefiting of future generations! The preservation and improvement of the species? To what end? What sensible man can wax enthusiastic concerning the progress of a race whose final goal is a forgotten grave beneath the debris of a derelict planet?

To Mr. Landripp came also the reflection that a happiness that is not and cannot by its nature be confined to the individual, but is a part of the happiness of all, that can be marred by a withered flower and deepened by contemplation of the milky way, must of necessity have kinship with the Universal. That a happiness, the seeds of which must have been coeval with creation, that is not bounded by death, must of necessity be linked with the Eternal.

Working together of an evening upon the plans for the new dwellings, Anthony and he would often break off to pursue the argument. Landripp would admit that his own religion failed to answer all his questions. But Anthony’s religion contented him still less. Why should a just God, to whom all things were possible, have made man a creature of “low intelligence and evil instincts,” leaving him to welter through the ages amid cruelty, blood and lust, instead of fashioning him from the beginning a fit and proper heir for the kingdom of eternity? That he might work out his own salvation! That a few scattered fortunates, less predisposed to evil than their fellows or possessed of greater powers of resistance, might struggle out of the mire — enter into their inheritance: the great bulk cursed from their birth, be left to sink into destruction. The Christ legend he found himself unable to accept. If true, then God was fallible. His omniscience a myth — a God who made mistakes and sought to rectify them. Even so, He had not succeeded. The number of true Christians, the number of those who sought to live according to Christ’s teaching, were fewer to-day than under the reign of the Cæsars. During the Middle Ages the dying embers of Christianity had burnt up anew. Saint Francis had insisted upon the necessity of poverty, of love, had preached the brotherhood of all things living. Men and women in increasing numbers had for a brief period accepted Christ not as their scapegoat, but as their leader. There had been men like Millsborough’s own Saint Aldys — a successful business man, as business was understood in his day, who on his conversion had offered to the service of God not ten per cent, of his booty, but his whole life. Any successful business man of to-day who attempted to follow his example would be certified by the family doctor as fit candidate for the lunatic asylum. Two thousand years after Christ’s death one man, so far as knowledge went, the Russian writer Tolstoy, had made serious attempt to live the life commanded by Christ. And all Christendom stood staring at him in stupefied amazement. If Christ had been God’s scheme for the reformation of a race that He Himself had created prone to evil then it had tragically failed. Christianity, a feeble flame from the beginning, had died out, leaving the world darker, its last hope extinguished.