Jerome Jerome - Tommy and Co

"Love," said Miss Ramsbotham to the bosom friend, "is not regulated by reason. As you say, there were many men I might have married with much more hope of happiness. But I never cared for any other man. He was not intellectual, was egotistical, possibly enough selfish. The man should always be older than the woman; he was younger, and he was a weak character. Yet I loved him."

"I am glad you didn't marry him," said the bosom friend.

"So am I," agreed Miss Ramsbotham.

"If you can't trust me," had said the bosom friend at this point, "don't."

"I meant to do right," said Miss Ramsbotham, "upon my word of honour I did, in the beginning."

"I don't understand," said the bosom friend.

"If she had been my own child," continued Miss Ramsbotham, "I could not have done more--in the beginning. I tried to teach her, to put some sense into her. Lord! the hours I wasted on that little idiot! I marvel at my own patience. She was nothing but an animal. An animal! she had only an animal's vices. To eat and drink and sleep was her idea of happiness; her one ambition male admiration, and she hadn't character enough to put sufficient curb upon her stomach to retain it. I reasoned with her, I pleaded with her, I bullied her. Had I persisted I might have succeeded by sheer physical and mental strength in restraining her from ruining herself. I was winning. I had made her frightened of me. Had I gone on, I might have won. By dragging her out of bed in the morning, by insisting upon her taking exercise, by regulating every particle of food and drink she put into her mouth, I kept the little beast in good condition for nearly three months. Then, I had to go away into the country for a few days; she swore she would obey my instructions. When I came back I found she had been in bed most of the time, and had been living chiefly on chocolate and cakes. She was curled up asleep in an easy-chair, snoring with her mouth wide open, when I opened the door. And at sight of that picture the devil came to me and tempted me. Why should I waste my time, wear myself out in mind and body, that the man I loved should marry a pig because it looked like an angel? 'Six months' wallowing according to its own desires would reveal it in its true shape. So from that day I left it to itself. No, worse than that--I don't want to spare myself--I encouraged her. I let her have a fire in her bedroom, and half her meals in bed. I let her have chocolate with tablespoonfuls of cream floating on the top: she loved it. She was never really happy except when eating. I let her order her own meals. I took a fiendish delight watching the dainty limbs turning to shapeless fat, the pink-and-white complexion growing blotchy. It is flesh that man loves; brain and mind and heart and soul! he never thinks of them. This little pink-and-white sow could have cut me out with Solomon himself. Why should such creatures have the world arranged for them, and we not be allowed to use our brains in our own defence? But for my looking-glass I might have resisted the temptation, but I always had something of the man in me: the sport of the thing appealed to me. I suppose it was the nervous excitement under which I was living that was changing me. All my sap was going into my body. Given sufficient time, I might meet her with her own weapons, animal against animal. Well, you know the result: I won. There was no doubt about his being in love with me. His eyes would follow me round the room, feasting on me. I had become a fine animal. Men desired me, Do you know why I refused him? He was in every way a better man than the silly boy I had fallen in love with; but he came back with a couple of false teeth: I saw the gold setting one day when he opened his mouth to laugh. I don't say for a moment, my dear, there is no such thing as love--love pure, ennobling, worthy of men and women, its roots in the heart and nowhere else. But that love I had missed; and the other! I saw it in its true light. I had fallen in love with him because he was a pretty, curly-headed boy. He had fallen in love with Peggy when she was pink-and-white and slim. I shall always see the look that came into his eyes when she spoke to him at the hotel, the look of disgust and loathing. The girl was the same; it was only her body that had grown older. I could see his eyes fixed upon my arms and neck. I had got to grow old in time, brown skinned, and wrinkled. I thought of him, growing bald, fat--"

"If you had fallen in love with the right man," had said Susan Fossett, "those ideas would not have come to you."

"I know," said Miss Ramsbotham. "He will have to like me thin and in these clothes, just because I am nice, and good company, and helpful. That is the man I am waiting for."

He never came along. A charming, bright-eyed, white-haired lady occupies alone a little flat in the Marylebone Road, looks in occasionally at the Writers' Club. She is still Miss Ramsbotham.

Bald-headed gentlemen feel young again talking to her: she is so sympathetic, so big-minded, so understanding. Then, hearing the clock strike, tear themselves from her with a sigh, and return home--some of them--to stupid shrewish wives.

The most popular member of the Autolycus Club was undoubtedly Joseph Loveredge. Small, chubby, clean-shaven, his somewhat longish, soft, brown hair parted in the middle, strangers fell into the error of assuming him to be younger than he really was. It is on record that a leading lady novelist--accepting her at her own estimate--irritated by his polite but firm refusal to allow her entrance into his own editorial office without appointment, had once boxed his ears, under the impression that he was his own office-boy. Guests to the Autolycus Club, on being introduced to him, would give to him kind messages to take home to his father, with whom they remembered having been at school together. This sort of thing might have annoyed anyone with less sense of humour. Joseph Loveredge would tell such stories himself, keenly enjoying the jest--was even suspected of inventing some of the more improbable. Another fact tending to the popularity of Joseph Loveredge among all classes, over and above his amiability, his wit, his genuine kindliness, and his never-failing fund of good stories, was that by care and inclination he had succeeded in remaining a bachelor. Many had been the attempts to capture him; nor with the passing of the years had interest in the sport shown any sign of diminution. Well over the frailties and distempers so dangerous to youth, of staid and sober habits, with an ever-increasing capital invested in sound securities, together with an ever-increasing income from his pen, with a tastefully furnished house overlooking Regent's Park, an excellent and devoted cook and house-keeper, and relatives mostly settled in the Colonies, Joseph Loveredge, though inexperienced girls might pass him by with a contemptuous sniff, was recognised by ladies of maturer judgment as a prize not too often dangled before the eyes of spinsterhood. Old foxes--so we are assured by kind-hearted country gentlemen-- rather enjoy than otherwise a day with the hounds. However that may be, certain it is that Joseph Loveredge, confident of himself, one presumes, showed no particular disinclination to the chase. Perhaps on the whole he preferred the society of his own sex, with whom he could laugh and jest with more freedom, to whom he could tell his stories as they came to him without the trouble of having to turn them over first in his own mind; but, on the other hand, Joey made no attempt to avoid female company whenever it came his way; and then no cavalier could render himself more agreeable, more unobtrusively attentive. Younger men stood by, in envious admiration of the ease with which in five minutes he would establish himself on terms of cosy friendship with the brilliant beauty before whose gracious coldness they had stood shivering for months; the daring with which he would tuck under his arm, so to speak, the prettiest girl in the room, smooth down as if by magic her hundred prickles, and tease her out of her overwhelming sense of her own self-importance. The secret of his success was, probably, that he was not afraid of them. Desiring nothing from them beyond companionableness, a reasonable amount of appreciation for his jokes--which without being exceptionally stupid they would have found it difficult to withhold--with just sufficient information and intelligence to make conversation interesting, there was nothing about him by which they could lay hold of him. Of course, that rendered them particularly anxious to lay hold of him. Joseph's lady friends might, roughly speaking, be divided into two groups: the unmarried, who wanted to marry him to themselves; and the married, who wanted to marry him to somebody else. It would be a social disaster, the latter had agreed among themselves, if Joseph Loveredge should never wed.