Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (268 page)

“Her nine times,” nodded Miss Greene.

Mr. Korner sat down upon his chair and stared with stony eyes into the future.

“What’s to be done?” said Mr. Korner, “she’ll never forgive me; I know her. You are not chaffing me?” he cried with a momentary gleam of hope. “I really did it?”

“You sat in that very chair where you are sitting now and ate poached eggs, while she stood opposite to you and said her nine times table. At the end of it, seeing you had gone to sleep yourself, I persuaded her to go to bed. It was three o’clock, and we thought you would not mind.” Miss Greene drew up a chair, and, with her elbows on the table, looked across at Mr. Korner. Decidedly there was a twinkle in the eyes of Mrs. Korner’s bosom friend.

“You’ll never do it again,” suggested Miss Greene.

“Do you think it possible,” cried Mr. Korner, “that she may forgive me?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Miss Greene. At which Mr. Korner’s face fell back to zero. “I think the best way out will be for you to forgive her.”

The idea did not even amuse him. Miss Greene glanced round to satisfy herself that the door was still closed, and listened a moment to assure herself of the silence.

“Don’t you remember,” Miss Greene took the extra precaution to whisper it, “the talk we had at breakfast-time the first morning of my visit, when Aimee said you would be all the better for ‘going it’ occasionally?”

Yes, slowly it came back to Mr. Korner. But she only said “going it,” Mr. Korner recollected to his dismay.

“Well, you’ve been ‘going it,’” persisted Miss Greene. “Besides, she did not mean ‘going it.’ She meant the real thing, only she did not like to say the word. We talked about it after you had gone. She said she would give anything to see you more like the ordinary man. And that is her idea of the ordinary man.”

Mr. Korner’s sluggishness of comprehension irritated Miss Greene. She leaned across the table and shook him. “Don’t you understand? You have done it on purpose to teach her a lesson. It is she who has got to ask you to forgive her.”

“You think — ?”

“I think, if you manage it properly, it will be the best day’s work you have ever done. Get out of the house before she wakes. I shall say nothing to her. Indeed, I shall not have the time; I must catch the ten o’clock from Paddington. When you come home this evening, you talk first; that’s what you’ve got to do.” And Mr. Korner, in his excitement, kissed the bosom friend before he knew what he had done.

Mrs. Korner sat waiting for her husband that evening in the drawing-room. She was dressed as for a journey, and about the corners of her mouth were lines familiar to Christopher, the sight of which sent his heart into his boots. Fortunately, he recovered himself in time to greet her with a smile. It was not the smile he had been rehearsing half the day, but that it was a smile of any sort astonished the words away from Mrs. Korner’s lips, and gave him the inestimable advantage of first speech.

“Well,” said Mr. Korner cheerily, “and how did you like it?”

For the moment Mrs. Korner feared her husband’s new complaint had already reached the chronic stage, but his still smiling face reassured her — to that extent at all events.

“When would you like me to ‘go it’ again? Oh, come,” continued Mr. Korner in response to his wife’s bewilderment, “you surely have not forgotten the talk we had at breakfast-time — the first morning of Mildred’s visit. You hinted how much more attractive I should be for occasionally ‘letting myself go!’”

Mr. Korner, watching intently, perceived that upon Mrs. Korner recollection was slowly forcing itself.

“I was unable to oblige you before,” explained Mr. Korner, “having to keep my head clear for business, and not knowing what the effect upon one might be. Yesterday I did my best, and I hope you are pleased with me. Though, if you could see your way to being content — just for the present and until I get more used to it — with a similar performance not oftener than once a fortnight, say, I should be grateful,” added Mr. Korner.

“You mean—” said Mrs. Korner, rising.

“I mean, my dear,” said Mr. Korner, “that almost from the day of our marriage you have made it clear that you regard me as a milksop. You have got your notion of men from silly books and sillier plays, and your trouble is that I am not like them. Well, I’ve shown you that, if you insist upon it, I can be like them.”

“But you weren’t,” argued Mrs. Korner, “not a bit like them.”

“I did my best,” repeated Mr. Korner; “we are not all made alike. That was
my
drunk.”

“I didn’t say ‘drunk.’”

“But you meant it,” interrupted Mr. Korner. “We were talking about drunken men. The man in the play was drunk. You thought him amusing.”

“He was amusing,” persisted Mrs. Korner, now in tears. “I meant that sort of drunk.”

“His wife,” Mr. Korner reminded her, “didn’t find him amusing. In the third act she was threatening to return home to her mother, which, if I may judge from finding you here with all your clothes on, is also the idea that has occurred to you.”

“But you — you were so awful,” whimpered Mrs. Korner.

“What did I do?” questioned Mr. Korner.

“You came hammering at the door—”

“Yes, yes, I remember that. I wanted my supper, and you poached me a couple of eggs. What happened after that?”

The recollection of that crowning indignity lent to her voice the true note of tragedy.

“You made me say my tables — my nine times!”

Mr. Korner looked at Mrs. Korner, and Mrs. Korner looked at Mr. Korner, and for a while there was silence.

“Were you — were you really a little bit on,” faltered Mrs. Korner, “or only pretending?”

“Really,” confessed Mr. Korner. “For the first time in my life. If you are content, for the last time also.”

“I am sorry,” said Mrs. Korner, “I have been very silly. Please forgive me.”

THE COST OF KINDNESS

“Kindness,” argued little Mrs. Pennycoop, “costs nothing.”

“And, speaking generally, my dear, is valued precisely at cost price,” retorted Mr. Pennycoop, who, as an auctioneer of twenty years’ experience, had enjoyed much opportunity of testing the attitude of the public towards sentiment.

“I don’t care what you say, George,” persisted his wife; “he may be a disagreeable, cantankerous old brute — I don’t say he isn’t. All the same, the man is going away, and we may never see him again.”

“If I thought there was any fear of our doing so,” observed Mr. Pennycoop, “I’d turn my back on the Church of England to-morrow and become a Methodist.”

“Don’t talk like that, George,” his wife admonished him, reprovingly; “the Lord might be listening to you.”

“If the Lord had to listen to old Cracklethorpe He’d sympathize with me,” was the opinion of Mr. Pennycoop.

“The Lord sends us our trials, and they are meant for our good,” explained his wife. “They are meant to teach us patience.”

“You are not churchwarden,” retorted her husband; “you can get away from him. You hear him when he is in the pulpit, where, to a certain extent, he is bound to keep his temper.”

“You forget the rummage sale, George,” Mrs. Pennycoop reminded him; “to say nothing of the church decorations.”

“The rummage sale,” Mr. Pennycoop pointed out to her, “occurs only once a year, and at that time your own temper, I have noticed—”

“I always try to remember I am a Christian,” interrupted little Mrs. Pennycoop. “I do not pretend to be a saint, but whatever I say I am always sorry for it afterwards — you know I am, George.”

“It’s what I am saying,” explained her husband. “A vicar who has contrived in three years to make every member of his congregation hate the very sight of a church — well, there’s something wrong about it somewhere.”

Mrs. Pennycoop, gentlest of little women, laid her plump and still pretty hands upon her husband’s shoulders. “Don’t think, dear, I haven’t sympathized with you. You have borne it nobly. I have marvelled sometimes that you have been able to control yourself as you have done, most times; the things that he has said to you.”

Mr. Pennycoop had slid unconsciously into an attitude suggestive of petrified virtue, lately discovered.

“One’s own poor self,” observed Mr. Pennycoop, in accents of proud humility—”insults that are merely personal one can put up with. Though even there,” added the senior churchwarden, with momentary descent towards the plane of human nature, “nobody cares to have it hinted publicly across the vestry table that one has chosen to collect from the left side for the express purpose of artfully passing over one’s own family.”

“The children have always had their three-penny-bits ready waiting in their hands,” explained Mrs. Pennycoop, indignantly.

“It’s the sort of thing he says merely for the sake of making a disturbance,” continued the senior churchwarden. “It’s the things he does I draw the line at.”

“The things he has done, you mean, dear,” laughed the little woman, with the accent on the “has.” “It is all over now, and we are going to be rid of him. I expect, dear, if we only knew, we should find it was his liver. You know, George, I remarked to you the first day that he came how pasty he looked and what a singularly unpleasant mouth he had. People can’t help these things, you know, dear. One should look upon them in the light of afflictions and be sorry for them.”

“I could forgive him doing what he does if he didn’t seem to enjoy it,” said the senior churchwarden. “But, as you say, dear, he is going, and all I hope and pray is that we never see his like again.”

“And you’ll come with me to call upon him, George,” urged kind little Mrs. Pennycoop. “After all, he has been our vicar for three years, and he must be feeling it, poor man — whatever he may pretend — going away like this, knowing that everybody is glad to see the back of him.”

“Well, I sha’n’t say anything I don’t really feel,” stipulated Mr. Pennycoop.

“That will be all right, dear,” laughed his wife, “so long as you don’t say what you do feel. And we’ll both of us keep our temper,” further suggested the little woman, “whatever happens. Remember, it will be for the last time.”

Little Mrs. Pennycoop’s intention was kind and Christianlike. The Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe would be quitting Wychwood-on-the-Heath the following Monday, never to set foot — so the Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe himself and every single member of his congregation hoped sincerely — in the neighbourhood again. Hitherto no pains had been taken on either side to disguise the mutual joy with which the parting was looked forward to. The Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe, M.A., might possibly have been of service to his Church in, say, some East-end parish of unsavoury reputation, some mission station far advanced amid the hordes of heathendom. There his inborn instinct of antagonism to everybody and everything surrounding him, his unconquerable disregard for other people’s views and feelings, his inspired conviction that everybody but himself was bound to be always wrong about everything, combined with determination to act and speak fearlessly in such belief, might have found their uses. In picturesque little Wychwood-on-the-Heath, among the Kentish hills, retreat beloved of the retired tradesman, the spinster of moderate means, the reformed Bohemian developing latent instincts towards respectability, these qualities made only for scandal and disunion.

For the past two years the Rev. Cracklethorpe’s parishioners, assisted by such other of the inhabitants of Wychwood-on-the-Heath as had happened to come into personal contact with the reverend gentleman, had sought to impress upon him, by hints and innuendoes difficult to misunderstand, their cordial and daily-increasing dislike of him, both as a parson and a man. Matters had come to a head by the determination officially announced to him that, failing other alternatives, a deputation of his leading parishioners would wait upon his bishop. This it was that had brought it home to the Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe that, as the spiritual guide and comforter of Wychwood-on-the Heath, he had proved a failure. The Rev. Augustus had sought and secured the care of other souls. The following Sunday morning he had arranged to preach his farewell sermon, and the occasion promised to be a success from every point of view. Churchgoers who had not visited St. Jude’s for months had promised themselves the luxury of feeling they were listening to the Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe for the last time. The Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe had prepared a sermon that for plain speaking and directness was likely to leave an impression. The parishioners of St. Jude’s, Wychwood-on-the-Heath, had their failings, as we all have. The Rev. Augustus flattered himself that he had not missed out a single one, and was looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to the sensation that his remarks, from his “firstly” to his “sixthly and lastly,” were likely to create.

What marred the entire business was the impulsiveness of little Mrs. Pennycoop. The Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe, informed in his study on the Wednesday afternoon that Mr. and Mrs. Pennycoop had called, entered the drawing-room a quarter of an hour later, cold and severe; and, without offering to shake hands, requested to be informed as shortly as possible for what purpose he had been disturbed. Mrs. Pennycoop had had her speech ready to her tongue. It was just what it should have been, and no more.

It referred casually, without insisting on the point, to the duty incumbent upon all of us to remember on occasion we were Christians; that our privilege it was to forgive and forget; that, generally speaking, there are faults on both sides; that partings should never take place in anger; in short, that little Mrs. Pennycoop and George, her husband, as he was waiting to say for himself, were sorry for everything and anything they may have said or done in the past to hurt the feelings of the Rev. Augustus Cracklethorpe, and would like to shake hands with him and wish him every happiness for the future. The chilling attitude of the Rev. Augustus scattered that carefully-rehearsed speech to the winds. It left Mrs. Pennycoop nothing but to retire in choking silence, or to fling herself upon the inspiration of the moment and make up something new. She choose the latter alternative.