Anthony John by Jerome K. Jerome - HTML preview

CHAPTER XVIII

He had not asked her for an answer. She had promised to think it out. She might wish to talk it over with Jim. She and Jim had always been very near to one another. And there were the children to be consulted. She was to be quite free to choose. Everything would be arranged according to her decision. He had said nothing to persuade her—unless he had hoped that by explaining to her his own reasons he might influence her,—and beyond a few questions she had remained a silent listener. It was shamefacedly, as one confessing a guilty secret, that he had told her. From the tones of his voice, the look in his eyes, she had read his unconscious pleading to her to come with him. But whether she went with him or stayed behind would make no difference to his going. It was that had hardened her.

To a certain extent she had been prepared. Ever since the child John’s death she had felt the change that was taking place in him. There was an Anthony she did not know, dimly associated in her mind with that lover of her dream who standing by the latchet gate had beckoned to her, and from whom she had hidden herself, afraid. She had set herself to turn his thoughts aside towards social reform, philanthropy. It was with this idea she had urged him to throw himself into public affairs, to prepare for Parliament. She had hoped for that. There she could have helped him. It would have satisfied her own craving to be doing something herself.

And then the war had engulfed them, obliterating all other horizons: it had left her nothing but her animal emotions. Her boy’s life! She could think of nothing else. Norah was in France: and she also was in the danger zone. The need of work obsessed her. She had found a rambling old house, far away upon the moors, and had converted it into a convalescent hospital.

Labour was scarce and the entire management had fallen upon her own shoulders. Anthony’s duties had confined him to Millsborough. For years they had seen one another only for a few hours at a time. There had been no opportunity for intimate talk. It was not until her return home to The Abbey that her fear had come back to her. There was no definable reason. It was as if it had always been there—a presence, waiting its time. One evening, walking in the garden, she had seen him standing there by the latchet gate, and had crept back into the house. She had the feeling that it would be there, by the latchet gate, that he would tell her. So long as she could avoid meeting him there she could put it off, indefinitely. The surer she felt of it, the more important it seemed to her to put it off—for a little while longer: she could not explain to herself why. It was when, without speaking, he had pressed her to him so close that she had felt the pain in his body, that she knew the time had come for her to face it.

What answer was she to make him? It seemed such a crazy idea. To give up The Abbey. To think of strangers living there. It had been the home of her people for five centuries. Their children had been born there. For twenty years they had worked there lovingly together to make it more beautiful. It would be like tearing oneself up by the roots. To turn one’s back upon the glorious moors—to go down into the grimy sordid town, to live in a little poky house with one servant; presuming the Higher Christianity permitted of even that. Yes, they would get themselves talked about: no doubt of that.

To do her own shopping. She had noticed them—passing them by swiftly in her shining car—tired women, carrying large network bags bulging with parcels. Some of them rode bicycles. She found herself wondering abstractedly whether she would be able to afford a bicycle. She had learnt to ride a bicycle when a girl. But that was long ago. She wondered whether she would be able to pick it up again. She pictured herself bargaining outside the butchers’ shops, examining doubtful looking chickens—when chickens were cheap. There was a particular test you had to apply. She would have to make enquiries. She could see the grinning faces of the tradesmen, hear their oily tongues of mock politeness.

Her former friends and acquaintances—county folk who had motored in for a day’s shopping, the stout be-jewelled wives of the rich magnates and manufacturers of Millsborough. Poor ladies! how worried they would be, not knowing what to do, meeting her by chance in the street. She with her umbrella and her parcels. And their red-faced husbands who would squeeze her hand and try to say the right thing. There would be plenty of comedy—at first, anyhow. That was the trouble. Tragedy she could have faced. This was going to be farce.

The dulness—the appalling dulness of it. The long evenings in the one small living room. She would have to learn sewing—make her own dresses, while Anthony read aloud to her. He read rather well. Perhaps, by help of great economy in the housekeeping, they might be able to purchase a piano, on the hire system—or would it have to be a harmonium?

She had risen. From the window, she could see the cloud of smoke beneath which the people of Millsborough moved and had their being.

Why should it seem so impossible. Her present ordered existence, mapped out from year to year, calling for neither thought nor effort, admitting of neither hope nor fear, the sheltered life of a pampered child—had not that also its dulness, its monotony? Why did rich people rent saeters in Norway, live there for months at a time on hunter’s fare, doing their own cooking and cleaning—welcome the perils and hardships of mountain climbing; of big game shooting; of travels into unknown lands; choose danger, privation and toil, and call it a “holiday”? Had not she herself found the simple living and hard work of the hospital a welcome change from everlasting luxuriousness? Would the Garden of Eden have been the ideal home for men and women with brains and hands? Might not earning one’s living by the sweat of one’s brow be better sport?

Need those evenings after the day’s work was done be of necessity so deadly? Her great dinners at The Abbey, with all their lights and lackeys, had they always been such feasts of intellectuality? Surely she had had social experience enough to teach her that brains were a thing apart from birth and breeding, that wit and wisdom were not the monopoly of the well-to-do. It came back to her, the memory of her girlhood’s days when they had lived in third-rate boarding-houses in Rome and Florence; rented small furnished appartements in French provincial towns; cheap lodgings in Dresden and Hanover. There had been no lack of fun and laughter in those days. Those musical evenings to which each student brought his own beer, and was mightily careful to take back with him the empty bottles, for which otherwise ten pfennigs would be charged. How busy she and her mother had been beforehand, cutting the sandwiches, and how sparing of the butter! Some of the players had made world-famous names; and others had died or maybe still lived—unknown. One of them she had heard just recently, paying ten guineas for her box; but his music had sounded no sweeter than when she had listened to it sitting beside Jim on the uncarpeted floor, there not being chairs enough to go round. Where had she heard better talk than from the men with shiny coat sleeves and frayed trousers who had come to sup with her father off maccaroni and chianti at two lire the flask. There might be clever brilliant men and women even in Millsborough. So far as she could judge she had never succeeded in securing any of them for her great receptions at The Abbey. They might be less shy of dropping in at Bruton Square.

It was what one felt, not what one had, that was the source of our pleasure. It was the school boy’s appetite, not a Rockefeller’s wealth that purchased the good dinner. The nursery filled with expensive toys: the healthy child had no need of them. It was the old rag doll, clutched tight to our bosom that made the attic into heaven. It was astride on the wooden horse without a head that we shouted our loudest. We over-burdened life with empty show, turned man into a mannikin. We sacrificed the play to the scenery and dresses. Four walls and a passion were all that the poet demanded.

Whence had come this idea that wealth brought happiness? Not from the rich. Surely they must have learnt better, by this time.

It was not the enjoyable things of life that cost money. These acres of gardens where one never got away from one’s own gardeners! What better were they than a public park? It was in the hidden corner we had planted and tended ourselves—where we knew and loved each flower, where each whispering tree was a comrade that we met God in the evening. It was the pleasant living room, where each familiar piece of furniture smiled a welcome to us when we entered, that was home. Through half-a-dozen “reception rooms,” we wandered, a stranger. The millionaire, who, reckoning interest at five per cent., paid ten thousand a year to possess an old master—how often really did he look at it? What greater artistic enjoyment did he get out of it than from looking at it in a public gallery? The joy of possession, it was the joy of the miser, of the dog in the manger. Were the silver birches in the moonlight more beautiful because we owned the freehold of the hill?

She remembered her walking tours with Jim. Their packs upon their backs, and the open road before them. The evening meal at the wayside Inn, and the sweet sleep between coarse sheets. She had never cared for travel since then. It had always been such a business: the luggage and the crowd, and the general hullaballoo.

What would the children say? Well, they could not preach, either of them: there was that consolation. The boy, at the beginning of the war, and without saying a word to either of them, had thrown up everything, had gone out as a common soldier—he had been so fearful they might try to stop him—facing death for an ideal. She certainly was not going to be afraid of anything he could say, after that.

Norah’s armour would prove even yet more vulnerable. Norah, a young lady brought up amid all the traditions of respectability, had dared even ridicule; had committed worse than crimes—vulgarities. A militant suffragette reproving fanaticism need not be listened to attentively.

But this case she was thinking of was exceptional. Whatever Anthony and she might choose to do with the remainder of their lives need not affect their children. Norah and Jim would be free to choose for themselves. But the young mother faced with the problem of her children’s future? Ten years ago, what answer would she herself have made?

The argument took hold of her. She found herself working it out not as a personal concern, but in terms of the community. Was it necessary to be rich that one’s children should be happy? Childhood would answer “no.” It is not little Lord Fauntleroy who clamours for the velvet suit and the lace collar. It is not Princess Goldenlocks who would keep close barred the ivory gate that leads into the wood. Childhood has no use for riches. Childhood’s joys are cheap enough. Youth’s pleasures can be purchased for little more than health and comradeship. The cricket bat, the tennis racket, the push bike, the leaky boat that one bought for a song and had the fun of patching up and making good; even that crown of the young world’s desire, the motor-cycle itself—these and their kindred were not the things for which one need to sell one’s soul. Education depended upon the scholar not the school. Was the future welfare of our children helped by our being rich? or hindered?

Suppose we brought up our children not to believe in riches, not to be afraid of poverty: not to be afraid of love in a six-roomed house, not to believe that they were bound to be just twice as happy in a house containing twelve, and thereby save themselves the fret and frenzy of trying to get there: the bitterness and heart break of those who never reached it. The love of money, the belief in money, was it not the root of nine-tenths of the world’s sorrow? Suppose one taught one’s children not to fall down and worship it, not to sacrifice to it their youth and health and joy. Might they not be better off—in a quite material way?

It occurred to her suddenly that she had not as yet thought about it from the religious point of view. She laughed. It had always been said that it was woman who was the practical. It was man, was the dreamer.

But was she not right? Had that not been the whole trouble: that we had drawn a dividing line between our religion and our life, rendering our actions unto Caesar, and only our lips unto God? Christianity was Common Sense in the highest—was sheer Worldly Wisdom. The proof was staring her in the face. From the bay of the deep window, looking eastward, she could see it standing out against the flame-lit sky, the great grey Cross with round its base the young men’s names in golden letters.

The one thing man did well—make war. Man’s one success—the fighting machine. The one institution man had built up that had stood the test of time. The one thing man had made perfect—War.

The one thing to which man had applied the principles of Christianity. Above all things required of the soldier was self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice. The place of suffering became the place of honour. The forlorn hope a privilege to be contended for. To the soldier, alone among men, love thy neighbour as thyself—nay, better than thyself—was inculcated not as a meaningless formula, but as a sacred duty necessary to the very existence of the Regiment. When war broke out in a land, the teachings of Christ were immediately recognized to be the only sensible guide to conduct. At the time, Anthony’s suggestion had seemed monstrous to her; that he should ask her to give up riches, accept poverty, that he should put a vague impersonal love of humanity above his natural affection for her children and herself! But if it had been England and not God that he had been thinking of—if, at any moment during the war, it had seemed to him that the welfare of England demanded this, or even greater sacrifice, she would have approved. The very people whose ridicule she was now dreading would have applauded. Who had suggested to the young recruit that he should think of his wife and children before his country, that his first duty was to provide for them, to see to it that they had their comforts, their luxuries: and then—and not till then—to think of England? She had regarded his determination to go down into the smoky dismal town, to live his life there among common people, as foolish, fantastic. He could have helped the poor of Millsborough better by keeping his possessions, showering down upon them benefits and blessings. He could have been of more help to God, powerful and rich, a leader among men. As a struggling solicitor in Bruton Square of what use could he be?

Had she thought like that, during the war, of the men who had given money but who had shirked the mud and blood of the trenches—of the shouters who had pointed out to others the gate of service?

Neither rich nor poor, neither great nor simple—only comrades. Would it ever be won, the war to end war—man’s victory over himself.

The pall of smoke above the distant town had merged into the night. In its place there gleamed a dull red glow, as of a pillar of fire.

She turned and faced herself in the great Cheval glass with its frame of gilded cupids. She was still young—in the fulness of her life and beauty; the years with their promise of power and pleasure still opening out before her.

And suddenly it came to her that this was the Great Adventure of the World, calling to the brave and hopeful to follow, heedless, where God’s trumpet led. Somewhere—perhaps near, perhaps far—there lay the Promised Land. It might be theirs’ to find it—at least to see it from afar. If not—! Their feet should help to mark the road.

Yes, she too would give up her possessions; put fear behind her. Together, hand in hand, they would go forward, joyously.

THE END