Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (303 page)

I did what he had requested of me. Indeed, I could not help it. I thought of him constantly. That may have been the explanation of it.

I was bicycling through Norfolk, and one afternoon, to escape a coming thunderstorm, I knocked at the door of a lonely cottage on the outskirts of a common. The woman, a kindly bustling person, asked me in; and hoping I would excuse her, as she was busy ironing, returned to her work in another room. I thought myself alone, and was standing at the window watching the pouring rain. After a while, without knowing why, I turned. And then I saw a child seated on a high chair behind a table in a dark corner of the room. A book of pictures was open before it, but it was looking at me. I could hear the sound of the woman at her ironing in the other room. Outside there was the steady thrashing of the rain. The child was looking at me with large, round eyes filled with a terrible pathos. I noticed that the little body was misshapen. It never moved; it made no sound; but I had the feeling that out of those strangely wistful eyes something was trying to speak to me. Something was forming itself before me — not visible to my sight; but it was there, in the room. It was the man I had last looked upon as, dying, he sat beside me in the hut below the Jungfrau. But something had happened to him. Moved by instinct I went over to him and lifted him out of his chair, and with a sob the little wizened arms closed round my neck and he clung to me crying — a pitiful, low, wailing cry.

Hearing his cry, the woman came back. A comely, healthy-looking woman. She took him from my arms and comforted him.

“He gets a bit sorry for himself at times,” she explained. “At least, so I fancy. You see, he can’t run about like other children, or do anything without getting pains.”

“Was it an accident?” I asked.

“No,” she answered, “and his father as fine a man as you would find in a day’s march. Just a visitation of God, as they tell me. Sure I don’t know why. There never was a better little lad, and clever, too, when he’s not in pain. Draws wonderfully.”

The storm had passed. He grew quieter in her arms, and when I had promised to come again and bring him a new picture-book, a little grateful smile flickered across the drawn face, but he would not talk.

I kept in touch with him. Mere curiosity would have made me do that. He grew more normal as the years went by, and gradually the fancy that had come to me at our first meeting faded farther into the background. Sometimes, using the very language of the dead man’s letter, I would talk to him, wondering if by any chance some flash of memory would come back to him, and once or twice it seemed to me that into the mild, pathetic eyes there came a look that I had seen before, but it passed away, and indeed, it was difficult to think of this sad little human oddity, with its pleading helplessness, in connection with the strong, swift, conquering spirit that I had watched passing away amid the silence of the mountains.

The one thing that brought joy to him was his art. I cannot help thinking that, but for his health, he would have made a name for himself. His work was always clever and original, but it was the work of an invalid.

“I shall never be great,” he said to me once. “I have such wonderful dreams, but when it comes to working them out there is something that hampers me. It always seems to me as if at the last moment a hand was stretched out that clutched me by the feet. I long so, but I have not the strength. It is terrible to be one of the weaklings.”

It clung to me, that word he had used. For a man to know he is weak; it sounds a paradox, but a man must be strong to know that. And dwelling upon this, and upon his patience and his gentleness, there came to me suddenly remembrance of that postscript, the significance of which I had not understood.

He was a young man of about three- or four-and-twenty at the time. His father had died, and he was living in poor lodgings in the south of London, supporting himself and his mother by strenuous, ill-paid work.

“I want you to come with me for a few days’ holiday,” I told him.

I had some difficulty in getting him to accept my help, for he was very proud in his sensitive, apologetic way. But I succeeded eventually, persuading him it would be good for his work. Physically the journey must have cost him dear, for he could never move his body without pain, but the changing landscapes and the strange cities more than repaid him; and when one morning I woke him early and he saw for the first time the distant mountains clothed in dawn, there came a new light into his eyes.

We reached the hut late in the afternoon. I had made my arrangements so that we should be there alone. Our needs were simple, and in various wanderings I had learnt to be independent. I did not tell him why I had brought him there, beyond the beauty and stillness of the place. Purposely I left him much alone there, making ever-lengthening walks my excuse, and though he was always glad of my return I felt that the desire was growing upon him to be there by himself.

One evening, having climbed farther than I had intended, I lost my way. It was not safe in that neighbourhood to try new pathways in the dark, and chancing upon a deserted shelter, I made myself a bed upon the straw.

I found him seated outside the hut when I returned, and he greeted me as if he had been expecting me just at that moment and not before. He guessed just what had happened, he told me, and had not been alarmed. During the day I found him watching me, and in the evening, as we sat in his favourite place outside the hut, he turned to me.

“You think it true?” he said. “That you and I sat here years ago and talked?”

“I cannot tell,” I answered. “I only know that he died here, if there be such a thing as death — that no one has ever lived here since. I doubt if the door has ever been opened till we came.”

“They have always been with me,” he continued, “these dreams. But I have always dismissed them. They seemed so ludicrous. Always there came to me wealth, power, victory. Life was so easy.”

He laid his thin hand on mine. A strange new look came into his eyes — a look of hope, almost of joy.

“Do you know what it seems to me?” he said. “You will laugh perhaps, but the thought has come to me up here that God has some fine use for me. Success was making me feeble. He has given me weakness and failure that I may learn strength. The great thing is to be strong.”

SYLVIA OF THE LETTERS.

Old Ab Herrick, so most people called him. Not that he was actually old; the term was an expression of liking rather than any reflection on his years. He lived in an old-fashioned house — old-fashioned, that is, for New York — on the south side of West Twentieth Street: once upon a time, but that was long ago, quite a fashionable quarter. The house, together with Mrs. Travers, had been left him by a maiden aunt. An “apartment” would, of course, have been more suitable to a bachelor of simple habits, but the situation was convenient from a journalistic point of view, and for fifteen years Abner Herrick had lived and worked there.

Then one evening, after a three days’ absence, Abner Herrick returned to West Twentieth Street, bringing with him a little girl wrapped up in a shawl, and a wooden box tied with a piece of cord. He put the box on the table; and the young lady, loosening her shawl, walked to the window and sat down facing the room.

Mrs. Travers took the box off the table and put it on the floor — it was quite a little box — and waited.

“This young lady,” explained Abner Herrick, “is Miss Ann Kavanagh, daughter of — of an old friend of mine.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Travers, and remained still expectant.

“Miss Kavanagh,” continued Abner Herrick, “will be staying with us for—” He appeared to be uncertain of the length of Miss Kavanagh’s visit. He left the sentence unfinished and took refuge in more pressing questions.

“What about the bedroom on the second floor? Is it ready? Sheets aired — all that sort of thing?”

“It can be,” replied Mrs. Travers. The tone was suggestive of judgment reserved.

“I think, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Travers, that we’d like to go to bed as soon as possible.” From force of habit Abner S. Herrick in speaking employed as a rule the editorial “we.” “We have been travelling all day and we are very tired. To-morrow morning—”

“I’d like some supper,” said Miss Kavanagh from her seat in the window, without moving.

“Of course,” agreed Miss Kavanagh’s host, with a feeble pretence that the subject had been on the tip of his tongue. As a matter of fact, he really had forgotten all about it. “We might have it up here while the room is being got ready. Perhaps a little—”

“A soft boiled egg and a glass of milk, if you please, Mrs. Travers,” interrupted Miss Kavanagh, still from her seat at the window.

“I’ll see about it,” said Mrs. Travers, and went out, taking the quite small box with her.

Such was the coming into this story of Ann Kavanagh at the age of eight years; or, as Miss Kavanagh herself would have explained, had the question been put to her, eight years and seven months, for Ann Kavanagh was a precise young lady. She was not beautiful — not then. She was much too sharp featured; the little pointed chin protruding into space to quite a dangerous extent. Her large dark eyes were her one redeeming feature. But the level brows above them were much too ready with their frown. A sallow complexion and nondescript hair deprived her of that charm of colouring on which youth can generally depend for attraction, whatever its faults of form. Nor could it truthfully be said that sweetness of disposition afforded compensation.

“A self-willed, cantankerous little imp I call her,” was Mrs. Travers’s comment, expressed after one of the many trials of strength between them, from which Miss Kavanagh had as usual emerged triumphant.

“It’s her father,” explained Abner Herrick, feeling himself unable to contradict.

“It’s unfortunate,” answered Mrs. Travers, “whatever it is.”

To Uncle Ab himself, as she had come to call him, she could on occasion be yielding and affectionate; but that, as Mrs. Travers took care to point out to her, was a small thing to her credit.

“If you had the instincts of an ordinary Christian child,” explained Mrs. Travers to her, “you’d be thinking twenty-four hours a day of what you could do to repay him for all his loving kindness to you; instead of causing him, as you know you do, a dozen heartaches in a week. You’re an ungrateful little monkey, and when he’s gone you’ll—”

Upon which Miss Kavanagh, not waiting to hear more, flew upstairs and, locking herself in her own room, gave herself up to howling and remorse; but was careful not to emerge until she felt bad tempered again; and able, should opportunity present itself, to renew the contest with Mrs. Travers unhampered by sentiment.

But Mrs. Travers’s words had sunk in deeper than that good lady herself had hoped for; and one evening, when Abner Herrick was seated at his desk penning a scathing indictment of the President for lack of firmness and decision on the tariff question, Ann, putting her thin arms round his neck and rubbing her little sallow face against his right-hand whisker, took him to task on the subject.

“You’re not bringing me up properly — not as you ought to,” explained Ann. “You give way to me too much, and you never scold me.”

“Not scold you!” exclaimed Abner with a certain warmth of indignation. “Why, I’m doing it all—”

“Not what
I
call scolding,” continued Ann. “It’s very wrong of you. I shall grow up horrid if you don’t help me.”

As Ann with great clearness pointed out to him, there was no one else to undertake the job with any chance of success. If Abner failed her, then she supposed there was no hope for her: she would end by becoming a wicked woman, and everybody, including herself, would hate her. It was a sad prospect. The contemplation of it brought tears to Ann’s eyes.

He saw the justice of her complaint and promised to turn over a new leaf. He honestly meant to do so; but, like many another repentant sinner, found himself feeble before the difficulties of performance. He might have succeeded better had it not been for her soft deep eyes beneath her level brows.

“You’re not much like your mother,” so he explained to her one day, “except about the eyes. Looking into your eyes I can almost see your mother.”

He was smoking a pipe beside the fire, and Ann, who ought to have been in bed, had perched herself upon one of the arms of his chair and was kicking a hole in the worn leather with her little heels.

“She was very beautiful, my mother, wasn’t she?” suggested Ann.

Abner Herrick blew a cloud from his pipe and watched carefully the curling smoke.

“In a way, yes,” he answered. “Quite beautiful.”

“What do you mean, ‘In a way’?” demanded Ann with some asperity.

“It was a spiritual beauty, your mother’s,” Abner explained. “The soul looking out of her eyes. I don’t think it possible to imagine a more beautiful disposition than your mother’s. Whenever I think of your mother,” continued Abner after a pause, “Wordsworth’s lines always come into my mind.”

He murmured the quotation to himself, but loud enough to be heard by sharp ears. Miss Kavanagh was mollified.

“You were in love with my mother, weren’t you?” she questioned him kindly.

“Yes, I suppose I was,” mused Abner, still with his gaze upon the curling smoke.

“What do you mean by ‘you suppose you were’?” snapped Ann. “Didn’t you know?”

The tone recalled him from his dreams.

“I was in love with your mother very much,” he corrected himself, turning to her with a smile.

“Then why didn’t you marry her?” asked Ann. “Wouldn’t she have you?”

“I never asked her,” explained Abner.

“Why not?” persisted Ann, returning to asperity.

He thought a moment.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he told her.

“Yes, I would,” retorted Ann.

“No, you wouldn’t,” he contradicted her quite shortly. They were both beginning to lose patience with one another. “No woman ever could.”

“I’m not a woman,” explained Ann, “and I’m very smart. You’ve said so yourself.”

“Not so smart as all that,” growled Abner. “Added to which, it’s time for you to go to bed.”