Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (256 page)

“The first few months they were as happy as a couple in a play, she thinking almost as much of him as he thought of himself, which must have been a comfort to both of them, and he as proud of her as if he made her himself. And then some fifteenth cousin or so of his, a man he had never heard of before, died in New Zealand and left him a fortune.

“That was the beginning of his troubles, and hers too. I don’t say it was enough to buy a peerage, but to a man accustomed to dream of half-crown tips it seemed an enormous fortune. Anyhow, it was sufficient to turn his head and give him ideas above his station. His first move, of course, was to chuck his berth and set fire to his dress suit, which, being tolerably greasy, burned well. Had he stopped there nobody could have blamed him. I’ve often thought myself that I would willingly give ten years of my life, provided anybody wanted them, which I don’t see how they should, to put my own behind the fire. But he didn’t. He took a house in a mews, with the front door in a street off Grosvenor Square, furnished it like a second-class German restaurant, dressed himself like a bookmaker, and fancied that with the help of a few shady City chaps and a broken-down swell or two he had gathered round him, he was fairly on the road to Park Lane and the House of Lords.

“And the only thing that struck him as being at all in his way was his wife. In her cap and apron, or her Sunday print she had always looked as dainty and fetching a little piece of goods as a man could wish to be seen out with. Dressed according to the advice of his new-found friends, of course she looked like nothing else so much as a barn-yard chicken in turkey-cock’s feathers. He was shocked to find that her size in gloves was seven-and-a-quarter, and in boots something over four, and that sort of thing naturally irritates a woman more even than finding fault with her immortal soul. I guess for about a year he made her life pretty well a burden for her, trying to bring her up to the standard of the Saturday-to-Monday-at-Brighton set with which he had surrounded himself, or which, to speak more correctly, had got round him. She’d a precious sight more gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better for him. But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only convinced him of her natural unfitness for an exalted station.

“He grumbled at her accent, which, seeing that his own was acquired in Lime-house and finished off in the Minories, was just the sort of thing a fool would do. And he insisted on her reading all the society novels as they came out — you know the sort I mean, — where everybody snaps everybody else’s head off, and all the proverbs are upside down; people leave them about the hotels when they’ve done with them, and one gets into the habit of dipping into them when one’s nothing better to do. His hope was that she might, with pains, get to talk like these books. That was his ideal.

“She did her best, but of course the more she got away from herself the more absurd she became; and the rubbish and worse that he had about him would ridicule her more or less openly. And he, instead of kicking them out into the mews — which could have been done easily without Grosvenor Square knowing anything about it, and thereby having its high-class feelings hurt — he would blame her when they had all gone, just as if it was her fault that she was the daughter of a respectable bootmaker in the Mile End Road instead of something more likely than not turned out of the third row of the ballet because it couldn’t dance, and didn’t want to learn.

“He played a bit in the City, and won at first, and that swelled his head worse than ever. It also brought him a good deal of sympathy from an Italian Countess, the sort you find at Homburg, and that generally speaking is a widow. Her chief sorrow was for society — that in him was losing an ornament. She explained to him how an accomplished and experienced woman could help a man to gain admittance into the tiptop circles, which, according to her, were just thirsting for him. As a waiter, he had his share of brains, and it’s a business that requires more insight than perhaps you’d fancy, if you don’t want to waste your time on a rabbit-skin coat and a paste ring, and give the burnt sole to the real gent. But in the hands of this swell mob he was, of course, just the young man from the country; and the end of it was that he played the game down pretty low.

“She — not the Countess, I shouldn’t like you to have that idea, but his wife — came to be pretty friendly with my missus later on, and that’s how I got to know the details. He comes to her one day looking pretty sheepish-like, as one can well believe, and maybe he’d been drinking a bit to give himself courage.

“‘We ain’t been getting along too well together of late, have we, Susan?’ says he.

“‘We ain’t seen much of one another,’ she answers; ‘but I agree with you, we don’t seem to enjoy it much when we do.’

“‘It ain’t your fault,’ says he.

“‘I’m glad you think that,’ she answers; ‘it shows me you ain’t quite as foolish as I was beginning to think you.’

“‘Of course, I didn’t know when I married you,’ he goes on, ‘as I was going to come into this money.’

“‘No, nor I either,’ says she, ‘or you bet it wouldn’t have happened.’

“‘It seems to have been a bit of a mistake,’ says he, ‘as things have turned out.’

“‘It would have been a mistake, and more than a bit of a one in any case,’ answers she.

“‘I’m glad you agree with me,’ says he; ‘there’ll be no need to quarrel.’

“‘I’ve always tried to agree with you,’ says she. ‘We’ve never quarrelled yet, and that ought to be sufficient proof to you that we never shall.’

“‘It’s a mistake that can be rectified,’ says he, ‘if you are sensible, and that without any harm to anyone.’

“‘Oh!’ says she, ‘it must be a new sort of mistake, that kind.’

“‘We’re not fitted for one another,’ says he.

“‘Out with it,’ says she. ‘Don’t you be afraid of my feelings; they are well under control, as I think I can fairly say by this time.’

“‘With a man in your own station of life,’ says he, ‘you’d be happier.’

“‘There’s many a man I might have been happier with,’ replies she. ‘That ain’t the thing to be discussed, seeing as I’ve got you.’

“‘You might get rid of me,’ says he.

“‘You mean you might get rid of me,’ she answers.

“‘It comes to the same thing,’ he says.

“‘No, it don’t,’ she replies, ‘nor anything like it. I shouldn’t have got rid of you for my pleasure, and I’m not going to do it for yours. You can live like a decent man, and I’ll go on putting up with you; or you can live like a fool, and I shan’t stand in your way. But you can’t do both, and I’m not going to help you try.’

“Well, he argued with her, and he tried the coaxing dodge, and he tried the bullying dodge, but it didn’t work, neither of it.

“‘I’ve done my duty by you,’ says she, ‘so far as I’ve been able, and that I’ll go on doing or not, just as you please; but I don’t do more.’

“‘We can’t go on living like this,’ says he, ‘and it isn’t fair to ask me to. You’re hammering my prospects.’

“‘I don’t want to do that,’ says she. ‘You take your proper position in society, whatever that may be, and I’ll take mine. I’ll be glad enough to get back to it, you may rest assured.’

“‘What do you mean?’ says he.

“‘It’s simple enough,’ she answers. ‘I was earning my living before I married you, and I can earn it again. You go your way, I go mine.’

“It didn’t satisfy him; but there was nothing else to be done, and there was no moving her now in any other direction whatever, even had he wanted to. He offered her anything in the way of money — he wasn’t a mean chap, — but she wouldn’t touch a penny. She had kept her old clothes — I’m not sure that some idea of needing them hadn’t always been in her head, — applied for a place under her former manager, who was then bossing a hotel in Kensington, and got it. And there was an end of high life so far as she was concerned.

“As for him, he went the usual way. It always seems to me as if men and women were just like water; sooner or later they get back to the level from which they started — that is, of course, generally speaking. Here and there a drop clings where it climbs; but, taking them on the whole, pumping-up is a slow business. Lord! I have seen them, many of them, jolly clever they’ve thought themselves, with their diamond rings and big cigars. ‘Wait a bit,’ I’ve always said to myself, ‘there’ll come a day when you’ll walk in and be glad enough of your chop and potatoes again with your half-pint of bitter.’ And nine cases out of ten I’ve been right. James Wrench followed the course of the majority, only a little more so: tried to do others a precious sight sharper than himself, and got done; tried a dozen times to scramble up again, each time coming down heavier than before, till there wasn’t another spring left in him, and his only ambition victuals. Then, of course, he thought of his wife — it’s a wonderful domesticator, ill luck — and wondered what she was doing.

“Fortunately for him, she’d been doing well. Her father died and left her a bit, just a couple of hundred or so, and with this and her own savings she started with a small inn in a growing town, and had sold out again three years later at four times what she had paid for it. She had done even better than that for herself. She had developed a talent for cooking — that was a settled income in itself, — and at this time was running a small hotel in Brighton, and making it pay to a tune that would have made the shareholders of some of its bigger rivals a bit envious could they have known.

“He came to me, having found out, I don’t know how — necessity smartens the wits, I suppose, — that my missis still kept up a sort of friendship with her, and begged me to try and arrange a meeting between them, which I did, though I told him frankly that from what I knew his welcome wouldn’t be much more enthusiastic than what he’d any right to expect. But he was always of a sanguine disposition; and borrowing his fare and an old greatcoat of mine, he started off, evidently thinking that all his troubles were over.

“But they weren’t exactly. The Married Women’s Property Act had altered things a bit, and Master James found himself greeted without any suggestion of tenderness by a business-like woman of thirty-six or thereabouts, and told to wait in the room behind the bar till she could find time to talk to him.

“She kept him waiting there for three-quarters of an hour, just sufficient time to take the side out of him; and then she walks in and closes the door behind her.

“‘I’d say you hadn’t changed hardly a day, Susan,’ says he, ‘if it wasn’t that you’d grown handsomer than ever.’

“I guess he’d been turning that over in his mind during the three-quarters of an hour. It was his fancy that he knew a bit about women.

“‘My name’s Mrs. Wrench,’ says she; ‘and if you take your hat off and stand up while I’m talking to you it will be more what I’m accustomed to.’

“Well, that staggered him a bit; but there didn’t seem anything else to be done, so he just made as if he thought it funny, though I doubt if at the time he saw the full humour of it.

“‘And now, what do you want?” says she, seating herself in front of her desk, and leaving him standing, first on one leg and then on the other, twiddling his hat in his hands.

“‘I’ve been a bad husband to you, Susan,’ begins he.

“‘I could have told you that,’ she answers. ‘What I asked you was what you wanted.’

“‘I want for us to let bygones be bygones,’ says he.

“‘That’s quite my own idea,’ says she, ‘and if you don’t allude to the past, I shan’t.’

“‘You’re an angel, Susan,’ says he.

“‘I’ve told you once,’ answers she, ‘that my name’s Mrs. Wrench. I’m Susan to my friends, not to every broken-down tramp looking for a job.’

“‘Ain’t I your husband?’ says he, trying a bit of dignity.

“She got up and took a glance through the glass-door to see that nobody was there to overhear her.

“‘For the first and last time,’ says she, ‘let you and me understand one another. I’ve been eleven years without a husband, and I’ve got used to it. I don’t feel now as I want one of any kind, and if I did it wouldn’t be your sort. Eleven years ago I wasn’t good enough for you, and now you’re not good enough for me.’

“‘I want to reform,’ says he.

“‘I want to see you do it,’ says she.

“‘Give me a chance,’ says he.

“‘I’m going to,’ says she; ‘but it’s going to be my experiment this time, not yours. Eleven years ago I didn’t give you satisfaction, so you turned me out of doors.’

“‘You went, Susan,’ says he; ‘you know it was your own idea.’

“‘Don’t you remind me too much of the circumstances,’ replies she, turning on him with a look in her eyes that was probably new to him, ‘I went because there wasn’t room for two of us; you know that. The other kind suited you better. Now I’m going to see whether you suit me,’ and she sits herself again in her landlady’s chair.

“‘In what way?’ says he.

“‘In the way of earning your living,’ says she, ‘and starting on the road to becoming a decent member of society.’

“He stood for a while cogitating.

“‘Don’t you think,’ says he at last, ‘as I could manage this hotel for you?’

“‘Thanks,’ says she; ‘I’m doing that myself.’

“‘What about looking to the financial side of things,’ says he, ‘and keeping the accounts? It’s hardly your work.’

“‘Nor yours either,’ answers she drily, ‘judging by the way you’ve been keeping your own.’

“‘You wouldn’t like me to be head-waiter, I suppose?’ says he. ‘It would be a bit of a come-down.’

“‘You’re thinking of the hotel, I suppose,’ says she. ‘Perhaps you are right. My customers are mostly an old-fashioned class; it’s probable enough they might not like you. You had better suggest something else.’

“‘I could hardly be an under-waiter,’ says he.

“‘Perhaps not,’ says she; ‘your manners strike me as a bit too familiar for that.’

“Then he thought he’d try sarcasm.

“‘Perhaps you’d fancy my being the boots,’ says he.