Kabanata Kabanata 3 · 第3章

. In the early years of the century five little children and a couple of

nurses began to make periodical visits to Paleham. It is needless to

say they were a rising generation of Pontifexes, towards whom the old

couple, their grandparents, were as tenderly deferential as they would

have been to the children of the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Their

names were Eliza, Maria, John, Theobald (who like myself was born in

1802), and Alethea. Mr Pontifex always put the prefix “master” or

“miss” before the names of his grandchildren, except in the case of

Alethea, who was his favourite. To have resisted his grandchildren

would have been as impossible for him as to have resisted his wife;

even old Mrs Pontifex yielded before her son’s children, and gave them

all manner of licence which she would never have allowed even to my

sisters and myself, who stood next in her regard. Two regulations only

they must attend to; they must wipe their shoes well on coming into the

house, and they must not overfeed Mr Pontifex’s organ with wind, nor

take the pipes out.

By us at the Rectory there was no time so much looked forward to as the

annual visit of the little Pontifexes to Paleham. We came in for some

of the prevailing licence; we went to tea with Mrs Pontifex to meet her

grandchildren, and then our young friends were asked to the Rectory to

have tea with us, and we had what we considered great times. I fell

desperately in love with Alethea, indeed we all fell in love with each

other, plurality and exchange whether of wives or husbands being openly

and unblushingly advocated in the very presence of our nurses. We were

very merry, but it is so long ago that I have forgotten nearly

everything save that we _were_ very merry. Almost the only thing that

remains with me as a permanent impression was the fact that Theobald

one day beat his nurse and teased her, and when she said she should go

away cried out, “You shan’t go away—I’ll keep you on purpose to torment

you.”

One winter’s morning, however, in the year 1811, we heard the church

bell tolling while we were dressing in the back nursery and were told

it was for old Mrs Pontifex. Our man-servant John told us and added

with grim levity that they were ringing the bell to come and take her

away. She had had a fit of paralysis which had carried her off quite

suddenly. It was very shocking, the more so because our nurse assured

us that if God chose we might all have fits of paralysis ourselves that

very day and be taken straight off to the Day of Judgement. The Day of

Judgement indeed, according to the opinion of those who were most

likely to know, would not under any circumstances be delayed more than

a few years longer, and then the whole world would be burned, and we

ourselves be consigned to an eternity of torture, unless we mended our

ways more than we at present seemed at all likely to do. All this was

so alarming that we fell to screaming and made such a hullabaloo that

the nurse was obliged for her own peace to reassure us. Then we wept,

but more composedly, as we remembered that there would be no more tea

and cakes for us now at old Mrs Pontifex’s.

On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old Mr

Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village

according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of the

century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this custom

before, besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves, we had

never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as

inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up people, for

our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them, but

only one. We had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all;

finally, the little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of

new bread, which we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was

supposed not to be good for us. Our affection, therefore, for our old

friend had to stand against the combined attacks of archæological

interest, the rights of citizenship and property, the pleasantness to

the eye and goodness for food of the little loaves themselves, and the

sense of importance which was given us by our having been intimate with

someone who had actually died. It seemed upon further inquiry that

there was little reason to anticipate an early death for anyone of

ourselves, and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone

else’s being put away into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a

short time from extreme depression to a no less extreme exultation; a

new heaven and a new earth had been revealed to us in our perception of

the possibility of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear

that for some time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the

village whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least

likely.

Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we

were astonished to find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living

person. We had thought such a great man could only have lived a very

long time ago, and here he was after all almost as it were at our own

doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement might

indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was all right

now, and she knew. In those days the snow lay longer and drifted deeper

in the lanes than it does now, and the milk was sometimes brought in

frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the back kitchen to see

it. I suppose there are rectories up and down the country now where the

milk comes in frozen sometimes in winter, and the children go down to

wonder at it, but I never see any frozen milk in London, so I suppose

the winters are warmer than they used to be.

About one year after his wife’s death Mr Pontifex also was gathered to

his fathers. My father saw him the day before he died. The old man had

a theory about sunsets, and had had two steps built up against a wall

in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and watch the sun go

down whenever it was clear. My father came on him in the afternoon,

just as the sun was setting, and saw him with his arms resting on the

top of the wall looking towards the sun over a field through which

there was a path on which my father was. My father heard him say

“Good-bye, sun; good-bye, sun,” as the sun sank, and saw by his tone

and manner that he was feeling very feeble. Before the next sunset he

was gone.

There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the

funeral and we remonstrated with them, but did not take much by doing

so. John Pontifex, who was a year older than I was, sneered at penny

loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must be because my papa

and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we did

something like fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got the worst

of it, but it may have been the other way. I remember my sister’s

nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses myself, reported the matter to

higher quarters, and we were all of us put to some ignominy, but we had

been thoroughly awakened from our dream, and it was long enough before

we could hear the words “penny loaf” mentioned without our ears

tingling with shame. If there had been a dozen doles afterwards we

should not have deigned to touch one of them.

George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in

Paleham church, inscribed with the following epitaph:—

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

JOHN PONTIFEX

WHO WAS BORN AUGUST 16TH,

1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812,

IN HIS 85TH YEAR,

AND OF

RUTH PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE,

WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED JANUARY 10, 1811,

IN HER 84TH YEAR.

THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT EXEMPLARY

IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR

RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND SOCIAL DUTIES.

THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED

BY THEIR ONLY SON.