Jerome Jerome - They and I

I could have made myself quite interesting to these good squires and farmers talking to them about theatres and the literary celebrities I have met; and they could have told me dog stories and given me useful information as to the working of the Small Holdings Act. They said some very charming things about my books―mostly to the effect that they read and enjoyed them when feeling ill or suffering from mental collapse. I gathered that had they always continued in a healthy state of mind and body it would not have occurred to them to read me. One man assured me I had saved his life. It was his brain, he told me. He had been so upset by something that had happened to him that he had almost lost his reason. There were times when he could not even remember his own name; his mind seemed an absolute blank. And then one day by chance―or Providence, or whatever you choose to call it―he had taken up a book of mine. It was the only thing he had been able to read for months and months! And now, whenever he felt himself run down―his brain like a squeezed orange (that was his simile)―he would put everything else aside and read a book of mine―any one: it didn't matter which. I suppose one ought to be glad that one has saved somebody's life; but I should like to have the choosing of them myself.

I am not sure that Ethelbertha is going to like Mrs. St. Leonard; and I don't think Mrs. St. Leonard will much like Ethelbertha. I have gathered that Mrs. St. Leonard doesn't like anybody much―except, of course, when it is her duty. She does not seem to have the time. Man is born to trouble, and it is not bad philosophy to get oneself accustomed to the feeling. But Mrs. St. Leonard has given herself up to the pursuit of trouble to the exclusion of all other interests in life. She appears to regard it as the only calling worthy a Christian woman. I found her alone one afternoon. Her manner was preoccupied; I asked if I could be of any assistance.

"No," she answered, "I am merely trying to think what it can be that has been worrying me all the morning. It has clean gone out of my head."

She remembered it a little later with a glad sigh.

St. Leonard himself, Ethelbertha thinks charming. We are to go again on Sunday for her to see the children. Three or four people we met I fancy we shall be able to fit in with. We left at half-past six, and took Bute back with us to supper.

"She's a good woman," said Robina.

"Who's a good woman?" I asked.

"He's trying, I expect; although he is an old dear: to live with, I mean," continued Robina, addressing apparently the rising moon. "And then there are all those children."

"You are thinking of Mrs. St. Leonard," I suggested.

"There seems no way of making her happy," explained Robina. "On Thursday I went round early in the morning to help Janie pack the baskets for the picnic. It was her own idea, the picnic."

"Speaking of picnics," I said.

"You might have thought," went on Robina, "that she was dressing for her own funeral. She said she knew she was going to catch her death of cold, sitting on the wet grass. Something told her. I reminded her it hadn't rained for three weeks, and that everything was as dry as a bone, but she said that made no difference to grass. There is always a moisture in grass, and that cushions and all that only helped to draw it out. Not that it mattered. The end had to come, and so long as the others were happy―you know her style. Nobody ever thought of her. She was to be dragged here, dragged there. She talked about herself as if she were some sacred image. It got upon my nerves at last, so that I persuaded Janie to let me offer to stop at home with her. I wasn't too keen about going myself; not by that time."

"When our desires leave us, says Rochefoucauld," I remarked, "we pride ourselves upon our virtue in having overcome them."

"Well, it was her fault, anyhow," retorted Robina; "and I didn't make a virtue of it. I told her I'd just as soon not go, and that I felt sure the others would be all right without her, so that there was no need for her to be dragged anywhere. And then she burst into tears."

"She said," I suggested, "that it was hard on her to have children who could wish to go to a picnic and leave their mother at home; that it was little enough enjoyment she had in her life, heaven knows; that if there was one thing she had been looking forward to it was this day's outing; but still, of course, if everybody would be happier without her―"

"Something of the sort," admitted Robina; "only there was a lot of it. We had to all fuss round her, and swear that without her it wouldn't be worth calling a picnic. She brightened up on the way home."

The screech-owl in the yew-tree emitted a blood-curdling scream. He perches there each evening on the extreme end of the longest bough. Dimly outlined against the night, he has the appearance of a friendly hobgoblin. But I wish he didn't fancy himself as a vocalist. It is against his own interests, I am sure, if he only knew it. That American college yell of his must have the effect of sending every living thing within half a mile back into its hole. Maybe it is a provision of nature for clearing off the very old mice who have become stone deaf and would otherwise be a burden on their relatives. The others, unless out for suicide, must, one thinks, be tolerably safe. Ethelbertha is persuaded he is a sign of death; but seeing there isn't a square quarter of a mile in this county without its screech-owl, there can hardly by this time be a resident that an Assurance Society would look at. Veronica likes him. She even likes his screech. I found her under the tree the other night, wrapped up in a shawl, trying to learn it. As if one of them were not enough! It made me quite cross with her. Besides, it wasn't a bit like it, as I told her. She said it was better than I could do, anyhow; and I was idiot enough to take up the challenge. It makes me angry now, when I think of it: a respectable, middle-aged literary man, standing under a yew-tree trying to screech like an owl. And the bird was silly enough to encourage us.

"She was a charming girl," I said, "seven-and-twenty years ago, when St. Leonard fell in love with her. She had those dark, dreamy eyes so suggestive of veiled mysteries; and her lips must have looked bewitching when they pouted. I expect they often did. They do so still; but the pout of a woman of forty-six no longer fascinates. To a pretty girl of nineteen a spice of temper, an illogical unreasonableness, are added attractions: the scratch of a blue-eyed kitten only tempts us to tease her the more. Young Hubert St. Leonard―he had curly brown hair, with a pretty trick of blushing, and was going to conquer the world―found her fretfulness, her very selfishness adorable: and told her so, kneeling before her, gazing into her bewildering eyes―only he called it her waywardness, her imperiousness; begged her for his sake to be more capricious. Told her how beautiful she looked when displeased. So, no doubt, she did―at nineteen."

"He didn't tell you all that, did he?" demanded Robina.

"Not a word," I reassured her, "except that she was acknowledged by all authorities to have been the most beautiful girl in Tunbridge Wells, and that her father had been ruined by a rascally solicitor. No, I was merely, to use the phrase of the French police courts, 'reconstructing the crime.'"

"It may be all wrong," grumbled Robina.

"It may be," I agreed. "But why? Does it strike you as improbable?"

We were sitting in the porch, waiting for Dick to come by the white path across the field.

"No," answered Robina. "It all sounds very probable. I wish it didn't."

"You must remember," I continued, "that I am an old playgoer. I have sat out so many of this world's dramas. It is as easy to reconstruct them backwards as forwards. We are witnessing the last act of the St. Leonard drama: that unsatisfactory last act that merely fills out time after the play is ended! The intermediate acts were probably more exciting, containing 'passionate scenes' played with much earnestness; chiefly for the amusement of the servants. But the first act, with the Kentish lanes and woods for a back-cloth, must have been charming. Here was the devout lover she had heard of, dreamed of. It is delightful to be regarded as perfection―not absolute perfection, for that might put a strain upon us to live up to, but as so near perfection that to be more perfect would just spoil it. The spots upon us, that unappreciative friends and relations would magnify into blemishes, seen in their true light: artistic shading relieving a faultlessness that might otherwise prove too glaring. Dear Hubert found her excellent just as she was in every detail. It would have been a crime against Love for her to seek to change herself."