Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (459 page)

“Such an odd thing,” he called down to me. “I never noticed it last night. A pair of swallows are building a nest here in the hall. You’ve got to be careful you don’t mistake it for a hat-peg. The old lady says they have built there regularly for the last three years.”

Then it came to me what it was the gentleman had been saying to me: “I say, sir, you with the bit of wood in your mouth, you have been and shut the door and I can’t get in.”

Now, with the key in my possession, it was so clear and understandable, I really forgot for the moment he was only a bird.

“I beg your pardon,” I replied, “I had no idea. Such an extraordinary place to build a nest.”

I opened the door for him, and, taking up his brick again, he entered, and I followed him in. There was a deal of talk.

“He shut the door,” I heard him say, “Chap there, sucking the bit of wood. Thought I was never going to get in.”

“I know,” was the answer; “it has been so dark in here, if you’ll believe me, I’ve hardly been able to see what I’ve been doing.”

“Fine brick, isn’t it? Where will you have it?”

Observing me sitting there, they lowered their voices. Evidently she wanted him to put the brick down and leave her to think. She was not quite sure where she would have it. He, on the other hand, was sure he had found the right place for it. He pointed it out to her and explained his views. Other birds quarrel a good deal during nest building, but swallows are the gentlest of little people. She let him put it where he wanted to, and he kissed her and ran out. She cocked her eye after him, watched till he was out of sight, then deftly and quickly slipped it out and fixed it the other side of the door.

“Poor dears” (I could see it in the toss of her head); “they will think they know best; it is just as well not to argue with them.”

Every summer I suffer much from indignation. I love to watch the swallows building. They build beneath the eaves outside my study window. Such cheerful little chatter-boxes they are. Long after sunset, when all the other birds are sleeping, the swallows still are chattering softly. It sounds as if they were telling one another some pretty story, and often I am sure there must be humour in it, for every now and then one hears a little twittering laugh. I delight in having them there, so close to me. The fancy comes to me that one day, when my brain has grown more cunning, I, too, listening in the twilight, shall hear the stories that they tell.

One or two phrases already I have come to understand: “Once upon a time”—”Long, long ago”—”In a strange, far-off land.” I hear these words so constantly, I am sure I have them right. I call it “Swallow Street,” this row of six or seven nests. Two or three, like villas in their own grounds, stand alone, and others are semi-detached. It makes me angry that the sparrows will come and steal them. The sparrows will hang about deliberately waiting for a pair of swallows to finish their nest, and then, with a brutal laugh that makes my blood boil, drive the swallows away and take possession of it. And the swallows are so wonderfully patient.

“Never mind, old girl,” says Tommy Swallow, after the first big cry is over, to Jenny Swallow, “let’s try again.”

And half an hour later, full of fresh plans, they are choosing another likely site, chattering cheerfully once more. I watched the building of a particular nest for nearly a fortnight one year; and when, after two or three days’ absence, I returned and found a pair of sparrows comfortably encsonced therein, I just felt mad. I saw Mrs. Sparrow looking out. Maybe my anger was working upon my imagination, but it seemed to me that she nodded to me:

“Nice little house, ain’t it? What I call well built.”

Mr. Sparrow then flew up with a gaudy feather, dyed blue, which belonged to me. I recognised it. It had come out of the brush with which the girl breaks the china ornaments in our drawing-room. At any other time I should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a “Liberty interior.” She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one — had been born and bred in Regent Street, no doubt.

“There is not much justice in this world,” said I to myself; “but there’s going to be some introduced into this business — that is, if I can find a ladder.”

I did find a ladder, and fortunately it was long enough. Mr. and Mrs. Sparrow were out when I arrived, possibly on the hunt for cheap photo frames and Japanese fans. I did not want to make a mess. I removed the house neatly into a dust-pan, and wiped the street clear of every trace of it. I had just put back the ladder when Mrs. Sparrow returned with a piece of pink cotton-wool in her mouth. That was her idea of a colour scheme: apple-blossom pink and Reckitt’s blue side by side. She dropped her wool and sat on the waterspout, and tried to understand things.

“Number one, number two, number four; where the blazes” — sparrows are essentially common, and the women are as bad as the men—”is number three?”

Mr. Sparrow came up from behind, over the roof. He was carrying a piece of yellow-fluff, part of a lamp-shade, as far as I could judge.

“Move yourself,” he said, “what’s the sense of sitting there in the rain?”

“I went out just for a moment,” replied Mrs. Sparrow; “I could not have been gone, no, not a couple of minutes. When I came back—”

“Oh, get indoors,” said Mr. Sparrow, “talk about it there.”

“It’s what I’m telling you,” continued Mrs. Sparrow, “if you would only listen. There isn’t any door, there isn’t any house—”

“Isn’t any—” Mr. Sparrow, holding on to the rim of the spout, turned himself topsy-turvy and surveyed the street. From where I was standing behind the laurel bushes I could see nothing but his back.

He stood up again, looking angry and flushed.

“What have you done with the house? Can’t I turn my back a minute—”

“I ain’t done nothing with it. As I keep on telling you, I had only just gone—”

“Oh, bother where you had gone. Where’s the darned house gone? that’s what I want to know.”

They looked at one another. If ever astonishment was expressed in the attitude of a bird it was told by the tails of those two sparrows. They whispered wickedly together. The idea occurred to them that by force or cunning they might perhaps obtain possession of one of the other nests. But all the other nests were occupied, and even gentle Jenny Swallow, once in her own home with the children round about her, is not to be trifled with. Mr. Sparrow called at number two, put his head in at the door, and then returned to the waterspout.

“Lady says we don’t live there,” he explained to Mrs. Sparrow. There was silence for a while.

“Not what I call a classy street,” commented Mrs. Sparrow.

“If it were not for that terrible tired feeling of mine,” said Mr. Sparrow, “blame if I wouldn’t build a house of my own.”

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Sparrow, “ — I have heard it said that a little bit of work, now and then, does you good.”

“All sorts of wild ideas about in the air nowadays,” said Mr. Sparrow, “it don’t do to listen to everybody.”

“And it don’t do to sit still and do nothing neither,” snapped Mrs. Sparrow. “I don’t want to have to forget I’m a lady, but — well, any man who was a man would see things for himself.”

“Why did I every marry?” retorted Mr. Sparrow.

They flew away together, quarrelling.

DO WRITERS WRITE TOO MUCH?

On a newspaper placard, the other day, I saw announced a new novel by a celebrated author. I bought a copy of the paper, and turned eagerly to the last page. I was disappointed to find that I had missed the first six chapters. The story had commenced the previous Saturday; this was Friday. I say I was disappointed and so I was, at first. But my disappointment did not last long. The bright and intelligent sub-editor, according to the custom now in vogue, had provided me with a short synopsis of those first six chapters, so that without the trouble of reading them I knew what they were all about.

“The first instalment,” I learned, “introduces the reader to a brilliant and distinguished company, assembled in the drawing-room of Lady Mary’s maisonette in Park Street. Much smart talk is indulged in.”

I know that “smart talk” so well. Had I not been lucky enough to miss that first chapter I should have had to listen to it once again. Possibly, here and there, it might have been new to me, but it would have read, I know, so very like the old. A dear, sweet white-haired lady of my acquaintance is never surprised at anything that happens.

“Something very much of the same kind occurred,” she will remember, “one winter when we were staying in Brighton. Only on that occasion the man’s name, I think, was Robinson.”

We do not live new stories — nor write them either. The man’s name in the old story was Robinson, we alter it to Jones. It happened, in the old forgotten tale, at Brighton, in the winter time; we change it to Eastbourne, in the spring. It is new and original — to those who have not heard “something very like it” once before.

“Much smart talk is indulged in,” so the sub-editor has explained. There is absolutely no need to ask for more than that. There is a Duchess who says improper things. Once she used to shock me. But I know her now. She is really a nice woman; she doesn’t mean them. And when the heroine is in trouble, towards the middle of the book, she is just as amusing on the side of virtue. Then there is a younger lady whose speciality is proverbs. Apparently whenever she hears a proverb she writes it down and studies it with the idea of seeing into how many different forms it can be twisted. It looks clever; as a matter of fact, it is extremely easy.

Be virtuous and you will be happy
.

She jots down all the possible variations:
Be virtuous and you will be unhappy
.

“Too simple that one,” she tells herself.
Be virtuous and your friends will be happy if you are not
.

“Better, but not wicked enough. Let us think again.
Be happy and people will jump to the conclusion that you are virtuous
.

“That’s good, I’ll try that one at to-morrow’s party.”

She is a painstaking lady. One feels that, better advised, she might have been of use in the world.

There is likewise a disgraceful old Peer who tells naughty stories, but who is good at heart; and one person so very rude that the wonder is who invited him.

Occasionally a slangy girl is included, and a clergyman, who takes the heroine aside and talks sense to her, flavoured with epigram. All these people chatter a mixture of Lord Chesterfield and Oliver Wendell Holmes, of Heine, Voltaire, Madame de Stael, and the late lamented H. J. Byron. “How they do it beats me,” as I once overheard at a music hall a stout lady confess to her friend while witnessing the performance of a clever troup, styling themselves “The Boneless Wonders of the Universe.”

The synopsis added that: “Ursula Bart, a charming and unsophisticated young American girl possessed of an elusive expression makes her first acquaintance with London society.”

Here you have a week’s unnecessary work on the part of the author boiled down to its essentials. She was young. One hardly expects an elderly heroine. The “young” might have been dispensed with, especially seeing it is told us that she was a girl. But maybe this is carping. There are young girls and old girls. Perhaps it is as well to have it in black and white; she was young. She was an American young girl. There is but one American young girl in English fiction. We know by heart the unconventional things that she will do, the startlingly original things that she will say, the fresh illuminating thoughts that will come to her as, clad in a loose robe of some soft clinging stuff, she sits before the fire, in the solitude of her own room.

To complete her she had an “elusive expression.” The days when we used to catalogue the heroine’s “points” are past. Formerly it was possible. A man wrote perhaps some half-a-dozen novels during the whole course of his career. He could have a dark girl for the first, a light girl for the second, sketch a merry little wench for the third, and draw you something stately for the fourth. For the remaining two he could go abroad. Nowadays, when a man turns out a novel and six short stories once a year, description has to be dispensed with. It is not the writer’s fault. There is not sufficient variety in the sex. We used to introduce her thus:

“Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade” — here would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a light. Or he was to get up at five o’clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine’s hair might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save himself time and trouble by taking the author’s word for it. Many of them did.

“Her eyes!” They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be pretty deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them; sunlight and shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions, strange wild yearnings. Anything we didn’t know where else to put we said was hidden in her eyes.

“Her nose!” You could have made it for yourself out of a pen’orth of putty after reading our description of it.

“Her forehead!” It was always “low and broad.” I don’t know why it was always low. Maybe because the intellectual heroine was not then popular. For the matter of that I doubt if she be really popular now. The brainless doll, one fears, will continue for many years to come to be man’s ideal woman — and woman’s ideal of herself for precisely the same period, one may be sure.

“Her chin!” A less degree of variety was permissible in her chin. It had to be at an angle suggestive of piquancy, and it had to contain at least the suspicion of a dimple.