Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (480 page)

I tried school-mastering. One did not in those days have to be possessed of diplomas and certificates. I obtained an assistant mastership at a Day and Boarding School in the Clapham Road. English and mathematics were my department. But it seemed to include most things: my chief, a leisurely old gentleman, confining himself to the classics and theology. My duties included also “general supervision” of the boarders, the teaching of swimming and gymnastics, and of proper deportment during our daily walk round Clapham Common, and at church on Sundays. It was up to me to see that each boy did really drop his threepenny bit into the bag; but I have the suspicion that one or two of them, occasionally, may have been too clever for me. I had to wear gloves and a top hat; and once a week I had an evening out. The house-and parlour-maid, combined, a jolly little thing, only laughed at me. “Now you know what it’s like,” she said, “and when you’re married you can tell your wife.” Things have changed since then, I am informed. I stuck it for a term. My shorthand had suffered for want of practice. The House of Commons’ gallery loomed distant. I answered advertisements. For secretarial work my shorthand was sufficient. I could have been secretary to Herbert Spencer. A friend in London to whom he had deputed the business, tested and approved me. I was to have gone down to Brighton the next week. I was eager and excited. But my sister, when I told her, was heartbroken. The stage had been a long way towards perdition, and journalism a step further. After Herbert Spencer, what hope could remain for my salvation? During my days of evil fortune, I had hidden myself from friends and relatives; writing lying letters from no address. I had caused her much suffering, I knew, and shrank from inflicting another blow. I saw Herbert Spencer’s friend — I forget his name — and told him. He laughed, but was sure that Mr. Spencer would think that I had done right. So, instead, I became secretary to a builder in the north of London. He was a wonderful old fellow. He could neither read nor write; but would think nothing of undertaking a ten-thousand-pound contract. He had invented an hieroglyphic that his bank accepted as his signature. He would write it with the pen grasped firmly in his fist and, after each completion, would pause and take a deep breath. His memory was prodigious. Until I came, he had kept no accounts whatever. Every detail of his quite extensive business had its place in his head; and according to common report no one had ever succeeded in doing him out of a halfpenny. I tried to reform him. At first he was grateful; but after a time grew worried and dejected. Until one Saturday, he planked down five weeks’ wages in front of me and, assuring me of his continued friendship, begged me as a personal favour to take myself off. My next job was with a firm of commission agents. People in India — white or coloured it mattered not — sent us orders, accompanied by cheques; and we got the things and packed them into tin-lined cases and despatched them. The idea suggested in our advertisement was that we possessed a staff of expert buyers, rich in knowledge and experience: but I did most of it. I bought for far-off ladies their dresses, boots, and underwear, according to accompanying measurements. I matched their hair and chose their birthday presents for their husbands — at least, so one hopes. I selected wines and cigars for peppery old Colonels — I take it they were peppery. I judged what guns would be most serviceable to them for tiger-shooting or for hippopotami; and had saddles made for them under my own eye. It was interesting work. I felt myself a sort of universal uncle; and honestly I did my best. I was sorry when my employer left suddenly for South America. From there I went to a firm of Parliamentary agents. Society is fearfully and wonderfully contrived. It is calculated that out of every apple, between the time it leaves the tree and is finally eaten, eleven people got a bite. When public necessity requires that a new railway line should be constructed, a new tramway laid, or a new dock built, Parliamentary sanction must very properly be obtained. This might be a simple affair. The promoters might present their case before three or four intelligent members of the House of Lords, and the needful business be at once set going. But then nobody would get anything out of it; excepting only those that did the work and the people who would benefit by the result of their enterprise. This would never do. What would become of the parasites? Opposition must be whipped up. Somehow or another, briefs must be found, marked anything up to a thousand guineas, for half-a-dozen eminent K.C.’s. The case must be argued for a couple of years, providing bills of costs for half-a-dozen Parliamentary firms, fees and expenses for expert advisers, engineers, surveyors, newspaper men. When everyone has gorged his fill and new prey is in sight, it can suddenly be discovered that really, as a matter of fact, there is nothing whatever to be said against the scheme — and never was. Maybe a hundred thousand pounds or so has been added to the cost of it. The affair ends in a dinner where everybody proposes a vote of thanks to everybody else, and thanks God for the British Constitution.

Later, I drifted to a solicitor’s office. Memoirs of any old family solicitor should make good reading. Almost in every dust-covered, black tin box there lurks a story. Now and again I would open one, re-arrange its contents. Bundles of old faded letters; fly-blown miniatures and photographs. Purchase of Harlowe Manor, together with adjoining lands, April 1832. Draft mortgage. Foreclosed 11.8.’69. Cosgrove
v.
Cosgrove and Templeton, with note as to custody of children. Ellenby dec
^d
. — provision for Laura and two children secured under separate deed. Crown v. Manningham, with cutting from
The Morning Post
describing scene in Court. A will enclosing an advertisement for one Munroe George Hargreaves, and across it in red ink “Never discovered.” And so on. Slowly I would close the lid. The shadowed shapes I had unloosed would fade into their hiding-place.

“Ouida” was one of our clients. Once a year, she would leave her beloved Florence to spend a few weeks in London. Her books earned her a good income, but she had no sense of money. In the course of a morning’s stroll she would, if in the mood, order a thousand pounds’ worth of goods to be sent to her at the Langham Hotel. She never asked the price. She was like a child. Anything that caught her fancy she wanted. Fortunately for herself, she always gave us as a reference. I would have to go round and explain matters. One or two of the less expensive articles we would let her have. She would forget about the others.

I remember having to answer an inquiry as to whether Alfred Harmsworth was likely to prove a desirable tenant for a room in Chancery Lane at thirty pounds a year. My instructions were to reply “guardedly.” But it turned out all right. It was there he started
Answers
.

We had a client, the Lord Lieutenant of a Welsh county. One day, in Pembroke, he saw a little fisher girl. He took her up on his shoulder and carried her to her home. He arranged with her parents that she should be sent abroad to school; and when she was eighteen he would marry her. The programme was carried out, but it proved an unhappy marriage. He was nearly fifty by then and, as may be guessed, a somewhat eccentric person. He died a few years afterwards, leaving her two thousand a year, provided she never remarried. She was a handsome young woman, and solved the problem by going out to America with a cousin, a young sailor. Only instead of her taking his name, he took hers.

I remember another will case that would have made good drama. The characters were an elderly clerical gentleman who had just come into some property, and a vamp — to use the modern slang. But what made the play remarkable was the lady who played the vamp. She was a woman of over forty, a devoted wife and mother. It was love of her children, I take it, that prompted her. The elder boy was at Oxford, and the younger at Sandhurst. But how to keep them there had long been her difficulty. They met first in our waiting-room, and got into conversation. The progress of the affair I could only guess; though I observed that later on their appointments always happened to coincide, to within half-an-hour or so; and invariably they left together. This had been going on for about a year when, one morning early, a slatternly girl brought a note to the office. My chief had not arrived, and I opened the letter. It was from the old gentleman — a shaky scrawl in pencil, begging someone for God’s sake to come at once to an address off the Euston Road. A postscript explained that he was known there by the name of Wilson. I jumped into a cab and was soon there. I found him lying in bed in a comfortably furnished room on the first floor. He was evidently most desperately ill. He could speak only in a whisper.

“She got me last night,” he said, “to sign a will. She had a couple of witnesses outside the door. It leaves her nearly everything. I must have been mad. When I woke this morning she was gone. She has taken it with her.”

I sought to comfort him by the assurance that such a will could easily be set aside — that she would not dare to defend it.

“You don’t know her,” he said. “Besides, my wife will sacrifice herself rather than drag my name into the mud. She is reckoning on that.”

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked him.

“Heart,” he managed to answer. “She excited me on purpose, I am sure of it. I am dying.”

I told him his only chance was to keep calm. A hansom was the quickest thing in London in those days; but I seemed to be hours getting back to the office. My chief rushed off a four-line will, leaving everything the man possessed to his wife, and expressly cancelling the will made the day before. He was in great pain when we got back, but was just able to sign. And then I went for a doctor. He died in the evening. The lady changed her solicitors. I met her years afterwards, at a reception at the Foreign Office. She remembered me, and was most gracious. She had grown grey, but was still a handsome woman.

All this time I had been writing stories, plays, essays. But it was years before anything came of it.

Chapter IV

MY FIRST BOOK, AND OTHERS

My first book! He stands before me, bound in paper wrapper of a faint pink colour, as though blushing all over for his sins. “On the Stage — and Off. By Jerome K. Jerome” (the K very large, followed by a small j; so that by many the name of the author was taken to be Jerome Kjerome). “The Brief Career of a would-be Actor. One shilling nett. Ye Leadenhall Press. London. 1885.”

He was born in Whitfield Street, Tottenham Court Road, in a second floor back overlooking a burial ground. The house is now a part of Whitfield’s Tabernacle. A former tenant of the room — some young clerk like myself, I guessed him to be — had been in love with a girl named Annie. The bed was in a corner, and, lying there, he had covered the soot-grimed wall-paper with poetry to her — of sorts. It meandered in and out among Chinese temples, willow-trees and warriors. One verse I remember ran:

“Oh, Annie fair, beyond compare, To speak my love I do not dare. Oh, cruel Fate that shakes her head, And tells me I’m too poor to wed.”

Being directly opposite the pillow, it greeted me each morning when I opened my eyes. It was applicable to my own case also, and had a depressing effect upon me.

I had tried short stories, essays, satires. One — but one only — a sad thing about a maiden who had given her life for love and been turned into a water-fall, and over the writing of which I had nearly broken my heart, had been accepted by a paper called
The Lamp
. It died soon afterwards. The others, with appalling monotony, had been returned to me again and again: sometimes with the Editor’s compliments and thanks, and sometimes without: sometimes returned with indecent haste, seemingly by the next post; sometimes kept for months — in a dustbin, judging from appearances. My heart would turn to lead whenever the dismal little slavey would knock at the door and enter with them. If she smiled as she handed me the packet, her thumb and finger covered with her apron so as not to soil it, I fancied she was jeering at me. If she looked sad, as more often she did, poor little overworked slut, I thought she was pitying me. I shunned the postman when I saw him in the street, feeling sure he knew my shame. I wonder if the smart journalists who make fun in the comic papers of the rejected contributor have ever been themselves through that torture-chamber.

By luck, my favorite poet, just then, was Longfellow. It has become the fashion to belittle him. Perhaps all his verse does not reach the level of, say, “The Building of the Ship.” But even Wordsworth nods. To youth, face to face with giants, he will long remain a helpful voice. Some two years before, on a sudden impulse, I had written him a long rigmarole of a letter, pouring out my troubles to him, addressing it simply to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America; and had received an answer proving to me that he understood my case exactly and knew all about me. Always when things were at their worst, or nearly so, I would go to him for comfort; and one evening, crouching over my small fire, I struck the poem beginning:

“By his evening fire the artist Pondered o’er his secret shame;”

I had the feeling that Longfellow must have been thinking about me. And when I read the last two lines:

“That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art,”

it came to me that Longfellow was telling me not to bother about other people’s troubles — those of imaginary maidens turned into waterfalls, and such like — but to write about my own. I would tell the world the story of a hero called Jerome who had run away and gone upon the stage; and of all the strange and moving things that had happened to him there. I started on it that same evening, and in three months it was finished. I hunted up an old actor named Johnson — the oldest actor on the boards, he boasted himself; and he certainly looked it. He had played with Edmund Kean, Macready, Phelps and Booth, not to mention myself. We had been at Astley’s together, during the run of “Mazeppa.” It had fallen to our lot, in the third act, to unbind Lisa Weber from the exhausted steed, and carry her across the stage. I took her head and old Johnson her heels. She was what Mr. Mantalini would have called a demmed fine woman, weighing, I should think, some fourteen stone; and during the journey she would pour out blood-curdling threats as to what she would do to both or either of us if we dropped her. Old Johnson lost his temper one night: “Oh, come on, young ‘un,” he called out to me in a loud whisper, “let’s chuck her into the orchestra.” He began to heave his end. She kept quiet after that. He was now with Wilson Barrett at the old Princess’s. I used to wait for him at the stage door, and we would adjourn to a little tavern in Oxford Market. It really was a market in those days, with wooden booths all round, and stalls in the centre; where now stands Oxford Mansions. He would look over my MS. to see that I had made no blunders; and the anecdotes and stories that he told me would have made a rattling good book of themselves. I meant to write it. But he died before we had completed it.