Jerome Jerome - They and I

The new binder, Miss Janie told us, had just arrived. She was anxious her father should see it was in working order before the men went back. "Otherwise," so she argued, "old Wilkins will persist it was all right when he delivered it, and we shall have no remedy."

We turned towards the house.

"Speaking of the practical," I said, "there were three things I came to talk to you about. First and foremost, that cow."

"Ah, yes, the cow," said St. Leonard. He turned to his daughter. "It was Maud, was it not?"

"No," she answered, "it was Susie."

"It is the one," I said, "that bellows most all night and three parts of the day. Your boy Hopkins thinks maybe she's fretting."

"Poor soul!" said St. Leonard. "We only took her calf away from her―when did we take her calf away from her?" he asked of Janie.

"On Thursday morning," returned Janie; "the day we sent her over."

"They feel it so at first," said St. Leonard sympathetically.

"It sounds a brutal sentiment," I said, "but I was wondering if by any chance you happened to have by you one that didn't feel it quite so much. I suppose among cows there is no class that corresponds to what we term our 'Smart Set'―cows that don't really care for their calves, that are glad to get away from them?"

Miss Janie smiled. When she smiled, you felt you would do much to see her smile again.

"But why not keep it up at your house, in the paddock," she suggested, "and have the milk brought down? There is an excellent cowshed, and it is only a mile away."

It struck me there was sense in this idea. I had not thought of that. I asked St. Leonard what I owed him for the cow. He asked Miss Janie, and she said sixteen pounds. I had been warned that in doing business with farmers it would be necessary always to bargain; but there was that about Miss Janie's tone telling me that when she said sixteen pounds she meant sixteen pounds. I began to see a brighter side to Hubert St. Leonard's career as a farmer.

"Very well," I said; "we will regard the cow as settled."

I made a note: "Cow, sixteen pounds. Have the cowshed got ready, and buy one of those big cans on wheels."

"You don't happen to want milk?" I put it to Miss Janie. "Susie seems to be good for about five gallons a day. I'm afraid if we drink it all ourselves we'll get too fat."

"At twopence halfpenny a quart, delivered at the house, as much as you like," replied Miss Janie.

I made a note of that also. "Happen to know a useful boy?" I asked Miss Janie.

"What about young Hopkins," suggested her father.

"The only male thing on this farm―with the exception of yourself, of course, father dear―that has got any sense," said Miss Janie. "He can't have Hopkins."

"The only fault I have to find with Hopkins," said St. Leonard, "is that he talks too much."

"Personally," I said, "I should prefer a country lad. I have come down here to be in the country. With Hopkins around, I don't somehow feel it is the country. I might imagine it a garden city: that is as near as Hopkins would allow me to get. I should like myself something more suggestive of rural simplicity."

"I think I know the sort of thing you mean," smiled Miss Janie. "Are you fairly good-tempered?"

"I can generally," I answered, "confine myself to sarcasm. It pleases me, and as far as I have been able to notice, does neither harm nor good to anyone else."

"I'll send you up a boy," promised Miss Janie.

I thanked her. "And now we come to the donkey."

"Nathaniel," explained Miss Janie, in answer to her father's look of enquiry. "We don't really want it."

"Janie," said Mr. St. Leonard in a tone of authority, "I insist upon being honest."

"I was going to be honest," retorted Miss Janie, offended.

"My daughter Veronica has given me to understand," I said, "that if I buy her this donkey it will be, for her, the commencement of a new and better life. I do not attach undue importance to the bargain, but one never knows. The influences that make for reformation in human character are subtle and unexpected. Anyhow, it doesn't seem right to throw a chance away. Added to which, it has occurred to me that a donkey might be useful in the garden."

"He has lived at my expense for upwards of two years," replied St. Leonard. "I cannot myself see any moral improvement he has brought into my family. What effect he may have upon your children, I cannot say. But when you talk about his being useful in a garden―"

"He draws a cart," interrupted Miss Janie.

"So long as someone walks beside him feeding him with carrots. We tried fixing the carrot on a pole six inches beyond his reach. That works all right in the picture: it starts this donkey kicking."

"You know yourself," he continued with growing indignation, "the very last time your mother took him out she used up all her carrots getting there, with the result that he and the cart had to be hauled home behind a trolley."

We had reached the yard. Nathaniel was standing with his head stretched out above the closed half of his stable door. I noticed points of resemblance between him and Veronica herself: there was about him a like suggestion of resignation, of suffering virtue misunderstood; his eye had the same wistful, yearning expression with which Veronica will stand before the window gazing out upon the purple sunset, while people are calling to her from distant parts of the house to come and put her things away. Miss Janie, bending over him, asked him to kiss her. He complied, but with a gentle, reproachful look that seemed to say, "Why call me back again to earth?"

It made me mad with him. I was wrong in thinking Miss Janie not a pretty girl. Hers is that type of beauty that escapes attention by its own perfection. It is the eccentric, the discordant, that arrests the roving eye. To harmony one has to attune oneself.

"I believe," said Miss Janie, as she drew away, wiping her cheek, "one could teach that donkey anything."

Apparently she regarded willingness to kiss her as indication of exceptional amiability.

"Except to work," commented her father. "I'll tell you what I'll do," he said. "If you take that donkey off my hands and promise not to send it back again, why, you can have it."

"For nothing?" demanded Janie woefully.

"For nothing," insisted her father. "And if I have any argument, I'll throw in the cart."

Miss Janie sighed and shrugged her shoulders. It was arranged that Hopkins should deliver Nathaniel into my keeping some time the next day. Hopkins, it appeared, was the only person on the farm who could make the donkey go.

"I don't know what it is," said St. Leonard, "but he has a way with him."

"And now," I said, "there remains but Dick."

"The lad I saw yesterday?" suggested St. Leonard. "Good-looking young fellow."

"He is a nice boy," I said. "I don't really think I know a nicer boy than Dick; and clever, when you come to understand him. There is only one fault I have to find with Dick: I don't seem able to get him to work."

Miss Janie was smiling. I asked her why.

"I was thinking," she answered, "how close the resemblance appears to be between him and Nathaniel."

It was true. I had not thought of it.

"The mistake," said St. Leonard, "is with ourselves. We assume every boy to have the soul of a professor, and every girl a genius for music. We pack off our sons to cram themselves with Greek and Latin, and put our daughters down to strum at the piano. Nine times out of ten it is sheer waste of time. They sent me to Cambridge, and said I was lazy. I was not lazy. I was not intended by nature for a Senior Wrangler. I did not see the good of being a Senior Wrangler. Who wants a world of Senior Wranglers? Then why start every young man trying? I wanted to be a farmer. If intelligent lads were taught farming as a business, farming would pay. In the name of common-sense―"