The Angel and the Author and others
J >>
Jerome K. Jerome >> The Angel and the Author and others
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
from the 1908 Hurst and Blackett edition.
THE ANGEL AND THE AUTHOR--AND OTHERS
by Jerome K. Jerome
CHAPTER I
I had a vexing dream one night, not long ago: it was about a
fortnight after Christmas. I dreamt I flew out of the window in my
nightshirt. I went up and up. I was glad that I was going up.
"They have been noticing me," I thought to myself. "If anything, I
have been a bit too good. A little less virtue and I might have
lived longer. But one cannot have everything." The world grew
smaller and smaller. The last I saw of London was the long line of
electric lamps bordering the Embankment; later nothing remained but a
faint luminosity buried beneath darkness. It was at this point of my
journey that I heard behind me the slow, throbbing sound of wings.
I turned my head. It was the Recording Angel. He had a weary look;
I judged him to be tired.
"Yes," he acknowledged, "it is a trying period for me, your Christmas
time."
"I am sure it must be," I returned; "the wonder to me is how you get
through it all. You see at Christmas time," I went on, "all we men
and women become generous, quite suddenly. It is really a delightful
sensation."
"You are to be envied," he agreed.
"It is the first Christmas number that starts me off," I told him;
"those beautiful pictures--the sweet child looking so pretty in her
furs, giving Bovril with her own dear little hands to the shivering
street arab; the good old red-faced squire shovelling out plum
pudding to the crowd of grateful villagers. It makes me yearn to
borrow a collecting box and go round doing good myself.
"And it is not only me--I should say I," I continued; "I don't want
you to run away with the idea that I am the only good man in the
world. That's what I like about Christmas, it makes everybody good.
The lovely sentiments we go about repeating! the noble deeds we do!
from a little before Christmas up to, say, the end of January! why
noting them down must be a comfort to you."
"Yes," he admitted, "noble deeds are always a great joy to me."
"They are to all of us," I said; "I love to think of all the good
deeds I myself have done. I have often thought of keeping a diary--
jotting them down each day. It would be so nice for one's children."
He agreed there was an idea in this.
"That book of yours," I said, "I suppose, now, it contains all the
good actions that we men and women have been doing during the last
six weeks?" It was a bulky looking volume.
Yes, he answered, they were all recorded in the book.
[The Author tells of his Good Deeds.]
It was more for the sake of talking of his than anything else that I
kept up with him. I did not really doubt his care and
conscientiousness, but it is always pleasant to chat about one's
self. "My five shillings subscription to the Daily Telegraph's
Sixpenny Fund for the Unemployed--got that down all right?" I asked
him.
Yes, he replied, it was entered.
"As a matter of fact, now I come to think of it," I added, "it was
ten shillings altogether. They spelt my name wrong the first time."
Both subscriptions had been entered, he told me.
"Then I have been to four charity dinners," I reminded him; "I forget
what the particular charity was about. I know I suffered the next
morning. Champagne never does agree with me. But, then, if you
don't order it people think you can't afford it. Not that I don't
like it. It's my liver, if you understand. If I take more--"
He interrupted me with the assurance that my attendance had been
noted.
"Last week I sent a dozen photographs of myself, signed, to a charity
bazaar."
He said he remembered my doing so.
"Then let me see," I continued, "I have been to two ordinary balls.
I don't care much about dancing, but a few of us generally play a
little bridge; and to one fancy dress affair. I went as Sir Walter
Raleigh. Some men cannot afford to show their leg. What I say is,
if a man can, why not? It isn't often that one gets the opportunity
of really looking one's best."
He told me all three balls had been duly entered: and commented
upon.
"And, of course, you remember my performance of Talbot Champneys in
Our Boys the week before last, in aid of the Fund for Poor Curates,"
I went on. "I don't know whether you saw the notice in the Morning
Post, but--"
He again interrupted me to remark that what the Morning Post man said
would be entered, one way or the other, to the critic of the Morning
Post, and had nothing to do with me. "Of course not," I agreed; "and
between ourselves, I don't think the charity got very much.
Expenses, when you come to add refreshments and one thing and
another, mount up. But I fancy they rather liked my Talbot
Champneys."
He replied that he had been present at the performance, and had made
his own report.
I also reminded him of the four balcony seats I had taken for the
monster show at His Majesty's in aid of the Fund for the Destitute
British in Johannesburg. Not all the celebrated actors and actresses
announced on the posters had appeared, but all had sent letters full
of kindly wishes; and the others--all the celebrities one had never
heard of--had turned up to a man. Still, on the whole, the show was
well worth the money. There was nothing to grumble at.
There were other noble deeds of mine. I could not remember them at
the time in their entirety. I seemed to have done a good many. But
I did remember the rummage sale to which I sent all my old clothes,
including a coat that had got mixed up with them by accident, and
that I believe I could have worn again.
And also the raffle I had joined for a motor-car.
The Angel said I really need not be alarmed, that everything had been
noted, together with other matters I, may be, had forgotten.
[The Angel appears to have made a slight Mistake.]
I felt a certain curiosity. We had been getting on very well
together--so it had seemed to me. I asked him if he would mind my
seeing the book. He said there could be no objection. He opened it
at the page devoted to myself, and I flew a little higher, and looked
down over his shoulder. I can hardly believe it, even now--that I
could have dreamt anything so foolish:
He had got it all down wrong!
Instead of to the credit side of my account he had put the whole bag
of tricks to my debit. He had mixed them up with my sins--with my
acts of hypocrisy, vanity, self-indulgence. Under the head of
Charity he had but one item to my credit for the past six months: my
giving up my seat inside a tramcar, late one wet night, to a dismal-
looking old woman, who had not had even the politeness to say "thank
you," she seemed just half asleep. According to this idiot, all the
time and money I had spent responding to these charitable appeals had
been wasted.
I was not angry with him, at first. I was willing to regard what he
had done as merely a clerical error.
"You have got the items down all right," I said (I spoke quite
friendly), "but you have made a slight mistake--we all do now and
again; you have put them down on the wrong side of the book. I only
hope this sort of thing doesn't occur often."
What irritated me as much as anything was the grave, passionless face
the Angel turned upon me.
"There is no mistake," he answered.
"No mistake!" I cried. "Why, you blundering--"
He closed the book with a weary sigh.
I felt so mad with him, I went to snatch it out of his hand. He did
not do anything that I was aware of, but at once I began falling.
The faint luminosity beneath me grew, and then the lights of London
seemed shooting up to meet me. I was coming down on the clock tower
at Westminster. I gave myself a convulsive twist, hoping to escape
it, and fell into the river.
And then I awoke.
But it stays with me: the weary sadness of the Angel's face. I
cannot shake remembrance from me. Would I have done better, had I
taken the money I had spent upon these fooleries, gone down with it
among the poor myself, asking nothing in return. Is this fraction of
our superfluity, flung without further thought or care into the
collection box, likely to satisfy the Impracticable Idealist, who
actually suggested--one shrugs one's shoulders when one thinks of it-
-that one should sell all one had and give to the poor?
[The Author is troubled concerning his Investments.]
Or is our charity but a salve to conscience--an insurance, at
decidedly moderate premium, in case, after all, there should happen
to be another world? Is Charity lending to the Lord something we can
so easily do without?
I remember a lady tidying up her house, clearing it of rubbish. She
called it "Giving to the Fresh Air Fund." Into the heap of lumber
one of her daughters flung a pair of crutches that for years had been
knocking about the house. The lady picked them out again.
"We won't give those away," she said, "they might come in useful
again. One never knows."
Another lady, I remember coming downstairs one evening dressed for a
fancy ball. I forget the title of the charity, but I remember that
every lady who sold more than ten tickets received an autograph
letter of thanks from the Duchess who was the president. The tickets
were twelve and sixpence each and included light refreshments and a
very substantial supper. One presumes the odd sixpence reached the
poor--or at least the noisier portion of them.
"A little decolletee, isn't it, my dear?" suggested a lady friend, as
the charitable dancer entered the drawing-room.
"Perhaps it is--a little," she admitted, "but we all of us ought to
do all we can for the Cause. Don't you think so, dear?"
Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are
any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do
without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced
squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor?
Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go
about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive
presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us
all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very
thoughtful in providing us with poor.
Dear Lady Bountiful! does it not ever occur to you to thank God for
the poor? The clean, grateful poor, who bob their heads and curtsey
and assure you that heaven is going to repay you a thousandfold. One
does hope you will not be disappointed.
An East-End curate once told me, with a twinkle in his eye, of a
smart lady who called upon him in her carriage, and insisted on his
going round with her to show her where the poor hid themselves. They
went down many streets, and the lady distributed her parcels. Then
they came to one of the worst, a very narrow street. The coachman
gave it one glance.
"Sorry, my lady," said the coachman, "but the carriage won't go
down."
The lady sighed.
"I am afraid we shall have to leave it," she said.
So the gallant greys dashed past.
Where the real poor creep I fear there is no room for Lady
Bountiful's fine coach. The ways are very narrow--wide enough only
for little Sister Pity, stealing softly.
I put it to my friend, the curate:
"But if all this charity is, as you say, so useless; if it touches
but the fringe; if it makes the evil worse, what would you do?"
[And questions a Man of Thought]
"I would substitute Justice," he answered; "there would be no need
for Charity."
"But it is so delightful to give," I answered.
"Yes," he agreed. "It is better to give than to receive. I was
thinking of the receiver. And my ideal is a long way off. We shall
have to work towards it slowly."
CHAPTER II
[Philosophy and the Daemon]
Philosophy, it has been said, is the art of bearing other people's
troubles. The truest philosopher I ever heard of was a woman. She
was brought into the London Hospital suffering from a poisoned leg.
The house surgeon made a hurried examination. He was a man of blunt
speech.
"It will have to come off," he told her.
"What, not all of it?"
"The whole of it, I am sorry to say," growled the house surgeon.
"Nothing else for it?"
"No other chance for you whatever," explained the house surgeon.
"Ah, well, thank Gawd it's not my 'ead," observed the lady.
The poor have a great advantage over us better-off folk. Providence
provides them with many opportunities for the practice of philosophy.
I was present at a "high tea" given last winter by charitable folk to
a party of char-women. After the tables were cleared we sought to
amuse them. One young lady, who was proud of herself as a palmist,
set out to study their "lines." At sight of the first toil-worn hand
she took hold of her sympathetic face grew sad.
"There is a great trouble coming to you," she informed the ancient
dame.
The placid-featured dame looked up and smiled:
"What, only one, my dear?"
"Yes, only one," asserted the kind fortune-teller, much pleased,
"after that all goes smoothly."
"Ah," murmured the old dame, quite cheerfully, "we was all of us a
short-lived family."
Our skins harden to the blows of Fate. I was lunching one Wednesday
with a friend in the country. His son and heir, aged twelve, entered
and took his seat at the table.
"Well," said his father, "and how did we get on at school today?"
"Oh, all right," answered the youngster, settling himself down to his
dinner with evident appetite.
"Nobody caned?" demanded his father, with--as I noticed--a sly
twinkle in his eye.
"No," replied young hopeful, after reflection; "no, I don't think
so," adding as an afterthought, as he tucked into beef and potatoes,
"'cepting, o' course, me."
[When the Daemon will not work]
It is a simple science, philosophy. The idea is that it never
matters what happens to you provided you don't mind it. The weak
point in the argument is that nine times out of ten you can't help
minding it.
"No misfortune can harm me," says Marcus Aurelius, "without the
consent of the daemon within me."
The trouble is our daemon cannot always be relied upon. So often he
does not seem up to his work.
"You've been a naughty boy, and I'm going to whip you," said nurse to
a four-year-old criminal.
"You tant," retorted the young ruffian, gripping with both hands the
chair that he was occupying, "I'se sittin' on it."
His daemon was, no doubt, resolved that misfortune, as personified by
nurse, should not hurt him. The misfortune, alas! proved stronger
than the daemon, and misfortune, he found did hurt him.
The toothache cannot hurt us so long as the daemon within us (that is
to say, our will power) holds on to the chair and says it can't.
But, sooner or later, the daemon lets go, and then we howl. One sees
the idea: in theory it is excellent. One makes believe. Your bank
has suddenly stopped payment. You say to yourself.
"This does not really matter."
Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row
in the passage.
You fill yourself up with gooseberry wine. You tell yourself it is
seasoned champagne. Your liver next morning says it is not.
The daemon within us means well, but forgets it is not the only thing
there. A man I knew was an enthusiast on vegetarianism. He argued
that if the poor would adopt a vegetarian diet the problem of
existence would be simpler for them, and maybe he was right. So one
day he assembled some twenty poor lads for the purpose of introducing
to them a vegetarian lunch. He begged them to believe that lentil
beans were steaks, that cauliflowers were chops. As a third course
he placed before them a mixture of carrots and savoury herbs, and
urged them to imagine they were eating saveloys.
"Now, you all like saveloys," he said, addressing them, "and the
palate is but the creature of the imagination. Say to yourselves, 'I
am eating saveloys,' and for all practical purposes these things will
be saveloys."
Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed-
looking youth confessed to failure.
"But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?" the host persisted.
"Because," explained the boy, "I haven't got the stomach-ache."
It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond,
invariably and immediately disagreed with him. If only we were all
daemon and nothing else philosophy would be easier. Unfortunately,
there is more of us.
Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters,
because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead.
What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along
while we are still alive. I am not worrying about my centenary; I am
worrying about next quarter-day. I feel that if other people would
only go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who
come round about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a
philosopher myself. I am willing enough to make believe that nothing
matters, but they are not. They say it is going to be cut off, and
talk about judgment summonses. I tell them it won't trouble any of
us a hundred years hence. They answer they are not talking of a
hundred years hence, but of this thing that was due last April
twelvemonth. They won't listen to my daemon. He does not interest
them. Nor, to be candid, does it comfort myself very much, this
philosophical reflection that a hundred years later on I'll be sure
to be dead--that is, with ordinary luck. What bucks me up much more
is the hope that they will be dead. Besides, in a hundred years
things may have improved. I may not want to be dead. If I were sure
of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off that
water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before
that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made
returnable, I might--I don't say I should--be amused, thinking how I
was going to dish them. The wife of a very wicked man visited him
one evening in prison, and found him enjoying a supper of toasted
cheese.
"How foolish of you, Edward," argued the fond lady, "to be eating
toasted cheese for supper. You know it always affects your liver.
All day long to-morrow you will be complaining."
"No, I shan't," interrupted Edward; "not so foolish as you think me.
They are going to hang me to-morrow--early."
There is a passage in Marcus Aurelius that used to puzzle me until I
hit upon the solution. A foot-note says the meaning is obscure.
Myself, I had gathered this before I read the foot-note. What it is
all about I defy any human being to explain. It might mean anything;
it might mean nothing. The majority of students incline to the
latter theory, though a minority maintain there is a meaning, if only
it could be discovered. My own conviction is that once in his life
Marcus Aurelius had a real good time. He came home feeling pleased
with himself without knowing quite why.
"I will write it down," he said to himself, "now, while it is fresh
in my mind."
It seemed to him the most wonderful thing that anybody had ever said.
Maybe he shed a tear or two, thinking of all the good he was doing,
and later on went suddenly to sleep. In the morning he had forgotten
all about it, and by accident it got mixed up with the rest of the
book. That is the only explanation that seems to me possible, and it
comforts me.
We are none of us philosophers all the time.
Philosophy is the science of suffering the inevitable, which most of
us contrive to accomplish without the aid of philosophy. Marcus
Aurelius was an Emperor of Rome, and Diogenes was a bachelor living
rent free. I want the philosophy of the bank clerk married on thirty
shillings a week, of the farm labourer bringing up a family of eight
on a precarious wage of twelve shillings. The troubles of Marcus
Aurelius were chiefly those of other people.
"Taxes will have to go up, I am afraid," no doubt he often sighed.
"But, after all, what are taxes? A thing in conformity with the
nature of man--a little thing that Zeus approves of, one feels sure.
The daemon within me says taxes don't really matter."
Maybe the paterfamilias of the period, who did the paying, worried
about new sandals for the children, his wife insisting she hadn't a
frock fit to be seen in at the amphitheatre; that, if there was one
thing in the world she fancied, it was seeing a Christian eaten by a
lion, but now she supposed the children would have to go without her,
found that philosophy came to his aid less readily.
"Bother these barbarians," Marcus Aurelius may have been tempted, in
an unphilosophical moment, to exclaim; "I do wish they would not burn
these poor people's houses over their heads, toss the babies about on
spears, and carry off the older children into slavery. Why don't
they behave themselves?"
But philosophy in Marcus Aurelius would eventually triumph over
passing fretfulness.
"But how foolish of me to be angry with them," he would argue with
himself. "One is not vexed with the fig-tree for yielding figs, with
the cucumber for being bitter! One must expect barbarians to behave
barbariously."
Marcus Aurelius would proceed to slaughter the barbarians, and then
forgive them. We can most of us forgive our brother his
transgressions, having once got even with him. In a tiny Swiss
village, behind the angle of the school-house wall, I came across a
maiden crying bitterly, her head resting on her arm. I asked her
what had happened. Between her sobs she explained that a school
companion, a little lad about her own age, having snatched her hat
from her head, was at that moment playing football with it the other
side of the wall. I attempted to console her with philosophy. I
pointed out to her that boys would be boys--that to expect from them
at that age reverence for feminine headgear was to seek what was not
conformable with the nature of boy. But she appeared to have no
philosophy in her. She said he was a horrid boy, and that she hated
him. It transpired it was a hat she rather fancied herself in. He
peeped round the corner while we were talking, the hat in his hand.
He held it out to her, but she took no notice of him. I gathered the
incident was closed, and went my way, but turned a few steps further
on, curious to witness the end. Step by step he approached nearer,
looking a little ashamed of himself; but still she wept, her face
hidden in her arm.
He was not expecting it: to all seeming she stood there the
personification of the grief that is not to be comforted, oblivious
to all surroundings. Incautiously he took another step. In an
instant she had "landed" him over the head with a long narrow wooden
box containing, one supposes, pencils and pens. He must have been a
hard-headed youngster, the sound of the compact echoed through the
valley. I met her again on my way back.
"Hat much damaged?" I inquired.
"Oh, no," she answered, smiling; "besides, it was only an old hat.
I've got a better one for Sundays."
I often feel philosophical myself; generally over a good cigar after
a satisfactory dinner. At such times I open my Marcus Aurelius, my
pocket Epicurus, my translation of Plato's "Republic." At such times
I agree with them. Man troubles himself too much about the
unessential. Let us cultivate serenity. Nothing can happen to us
that we have not been constituted by Nature to sustain. That foolish
farm labourer, on his precarious wage of twelve shillings a week:
let him dwell rather on the mercies he enjoys. Is he not spared all
anxiety concerning safe investment of capital yielding four per
cent.? Is not the sunrise and the sunset for him also? Many of us
never see the sunrise. So many of our so-termed poorer brethen are
privileged rarely to miss that early morning festival. Let the
daemon within them rejoice. Why should he fret when the children cry
for bread? Is it not in the nature of things that the children of
the poor should cry for bread? The gods in their wisdom have
arranged it thus. Let the daemon within him reflect upon the
advantage to the community of cheap labour. Let the farm labourer
contemplate the universal good.
CHAPTER III
[Literature and the Middle Classes.]
I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary
profession, but observation shows me that it still contains within
its ranks writers born and bred in, and moving amidst--if, without
offence, one may put it bluntly--a purely middle-class environment:
men and women to whom Park Lane will never be anything than the
shortest route between Notting Hill and the Strand; to whom Debrett's
Peerage --gilt-edged and bound in red, a tasteful-looking volume--
ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-room ornament and not a
social necessity. Now what is to become of these writers--of us, if
for the moment I may be allowed to speak as representative of this
rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still numerous section of the
world of Art and Letters? Formerly, provided we were masters of
style, possessed imagination and insight, understood human nature,
had sympathy with and knowledge of life, and could express ourselves
with humour and distinction, our pathway was, comparatively speaking,
free from obstacle. We drew from the middle-class life around us,
passed it through our own middle-class individuality, and presented
it to a public composed of middle-class readers.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11