Chương Chương 86 · 第86章

. And now I must bring my story to a close.

The preceding chapter was written soon after the events it records—that

is to say in the spring of 1867. By that time my story had been written

up to this point; but it has been altered here and there from time to

time occasionally. It is now the autumn of 1882, and if I am to say

more I should do so quickly, for I am eighty years old and though well

in health cannot conceal from myself that I am no longer young. Ernest

himself is forty-seven, though he hardly looks it.

He is richer than ever, for he has never married and his London and

North-Western shares have nearly doubled themselves. Through sheer

inability to spend his income he has been obliged to hoard in

self-defence. He still lives in the Temple in the same rooms I took for

him when he gave up his shop, for no one has been able to induce him to

take a house. His house, he says, is wherever there is a good hotel.

When he is in town he likes to work and to be quiet. When out of town

he feels that he has left little behind him that can go wrong, and he

would not like to be tied to a single locality. “I know no exception,”

he says, “to the rule that it is cheaper to buy milk than to keep a

cow.”

As I have mentioned Mrs Jupp, I may as well say here the little that

remains to be said about her. She is a very old woman now, but no one

now living, as she says triumphantly, can say how old, for the woman in

the Old Kent Road is dead, and presumably has carried her secret to the

grave. Old, however, though she is, she lives in the same house, and

finds it hard work to make the two ends meet, but I do not know that

she minds this very much, and it has prevented her from getting more to

drink than would be good for her. It is no use trying to do anything

for her beyond paying her allowance weekly, and absolutely refusing to

let her anticipate it. She pawns her flat iron every Saturday for 4d.,

and takes it out every Monday morning for 4.5d. when she gets her

allowance, and has done this for the last ten years as regularly as the

week comes round. As long as she does not let the flat iron actually go

we know that she can still worry out her financial problems in her own

hugger-mugger way and had better be left to do so. If the flat iron

were to go beyond redemption, we should know that it was time to

interfere. I do not know why, but there is something about her which

always reminds me of a woman who was as unlike her as one person can be

to another—I mean Ernest’s mother.

The last time I had a long gossip with her was about two years ago when

she came to me instead of to Ernest. She said she had seen a cab drive

up just as she was going to enter the staircase, and had seen Mr

Pontifex’s pa put his Beelzebub old head out of the window, so she had

come on to me, for she hadn’t greased her sides for no curtsey, not for

the likes of him. She professed to be very much down on her luck. Her

lodgers did use her so dreadful, going away without paying and leaving

not so much as a stick behind, but to-day she was as pleased as a penny

carrot. She had had such a lovely dinner—a cushion of ham and green

peas. She had had a good cry over it, but then she was so silly, she

was.

“And there’s that Bell,” she continued, though I could not detect any

appearance of connection, “it’s enough to give anyone the hump to see

him now that he’s taken to chapel-going, and his mother’s prepared to

meet Jesus and all that to me, and now she ain’t a-going to die, and

drinks half a bottle of champagne a day, and then Grigg, him as

preaches, you know, asked Bell if I really was too gay, not but what

when I was young I’d snap my fingers at any ‘fly by night’ in Holborn,

and if I was togged out and had my teeth I’d do it now. I lost my poor

dear Watkins, but of course that couldn’t be helped, and then I lost my

dear Rose. Silly faggot to go and ride on a cart and catch the

bronchitics. I never thought when I kissed my dear Rose in Pullen’s

Passage and she gave me the chop, that I should never see her again,

and her gentleman friend was fond of her too, though he was a married

man. I daresay she’s gone to bits by now. If she could rise and see me

with my bad finger, she would cry, and I should say, ‘Never mind,

ducky, I’m all right.’ Oh! dear, it’s coming on to rain. I do hate a

wet Saturday night—poor women with their nice white stockings and their

living to get,” etc., etc.

And yet age does not wither this godless old sinner, as people would

say it ought to do. Whatever life she has led, it has agreed with her

very sufficiently. At times she gives us to understand that she is

still much solicited; at others she takes quite a different tone. She

has not allowed even Joe King so much as to put his lips to hers this

ten years. She would rather have a mutton chop any day. “But ah! you

should have seen me when I was sweet seventeen. I was the very moral of

my poor dear mother, and she was a pretty woman, though I say it that

shouldn’t. She had such a splendid mouth of teeth. It was a sin to bury

her in her teeth.”

I only knew of one thing at which she professes to be shocked. It is

that her son Tom and his wife Topsy are teaching the baby to swear.

“Oh! it’s too dreadful awful,” she exclaimed, “I don’t know the meaning

of the words, but I tell him he’s a drunken sot.” I believe the old

woman in reality rather likes it.

“But surely, Mrs Jupp,” said I, “Tom’s wife used not to be Topsy. You

used to speak of her as Pheeb.”

“Ah! yes,” she answered, “but Pheeb behaved bad, and it’s Topsy now.”

Ernest’s daughter Alice married the boy who had been her playmate more

than a year ago. Ernest gave them all they said they wanted and a good

deal more. They have already presented him with a grandson, and I doubt

not, will do so with many more. Georgie though only twenty-one is owner

of a fine steamer which his father has bought for him. He began when

about thirteen going with old Rollings and Jack in the barge from

Rochester to the upper Thames with bricks; then his father bought him

and Jack barges of their own, and then he bought them both ships, and

then steamers. I do not exactly know how people make money by having a

steamer, but he does whatever is usual, and from all I can gather makes

it pay extremely well. He is a good deal like his father in the face,

but without a spark—so far as I have been able to observe—any literary

ability; he has a fair sense of humour and abundance of common sense,

but his instinct is clearly a practical one. I am not sure that he does

not put me in mind almost more of what Theobald would have been if he

had been a sailor, than of Ernest. Ernest used to go down to Battersby

and stay with his father for a few days twice a year until Theobald’s

death, and the pair continued on excellent terms, in spite of what the

neighbouring clergy call “the atrocious books which Mr Ernest Pontifex”

has written. Perhaps the harmony, or rather absence of discord which

subsisted between the pair was due to the fact that Theobald had never

looked into the inside of one of his son’s works, and Ernest, of

course, never alluded to them in his father’s presence. The pair, as I

have said, got on excellently, but it was doubtless as well that

Ernest’s visits were short and not too frequent. Once Theobald wanted

Ernest to bring his children, but Ernest knew they would not like it,

so this was not done.

Sometimes Theobald came up to town on small business matters and paid a

visit to Ernest’s chambers; he generally brought with him a couple of

lettuces, or a cabbage, or half-a-dozen turnips done up in a piece of

brown paper, and told Ernest that he knew fresh vegetables were rather

hard to get in London, and he had brought him some. Ernest had often

explained to him that the vegetables were of no use to him, and that he

had rather he would not bring them; but Theobald persisted, I believe

through sheer love of doing something which his son did not like, but

which was too small to take notice of.

He lived until about twelve months ago, when he was found dead in his

bed on the morning after having written the following letter to his

son:—

“Dear Ernest,—I’ve nothing particular to write about, but your letter

has been lying for some days in the limbo of unanswered letters, to wit

my pocket, and it’s time it was answered.

“I keep wonderfully well and am able to walk my five or six miles with

comfort, but at my age there’s no knowing how long it will last, and

time flies quickly. I have been busy potting plants all the morning,

but this afternoon is wet.

“What is this horrid Government going to do with Ireland? I don’t

exactly wish they’d blow up Mr Gladstone, but if a mad bull would chivy

him there, and he would never come back any more, I should not be

sorry. Lord Hartington is not exactly the man I should like to set in

his place, but he would be immeasurably better than Gladstone.

“I miss your sister Charlotte more than I can express. She kept my

household accounts, and I could pour out to her all little worries, and

now that Joey is married too, I don’t know what I should do if one or

other of them did not come sometimes and take care of me. My only

comfort is that Charlotte will make her husband happy, and that he is

as nearly worthy of her as a husband can well be.—Believe me, Your

affectionate father,

“THEOBALD PONTIFEX.”

I may say in passing that though Theobald speaks of Charlotte’s

marriage as though it were recent, it had really taken place some six

years previously, she being then about thirty-eight years old, and her

husband about seven years younger.

There was no doubt that Theobald passed peacefully away during his

sleep. Can a man who died thus be said to have died at all? He has

presented the phenomena of death to other people, but in respect of

himself he has not only not died, but has not even thought that he was

going to die. This is not more than half dying, but then neither was

his life more than half living. He presented so many of the phenomena

of living that I suppose on the whole it would be less trouble to think

of him as having been alive than as never having been born at all, but

this is only possible because association does not stick to the strict

letter of its bond.

This, however, was not the general verdict concerning him, and the

general verdict is often the truest.

Ernest was overwhelmed with expressions of condolence and respect for

his father’s memory. “He never,” said Dr Martin, the old doctor who

brought Ernest into the world, “spoke an ill word against anyone. He

was not only liked, he was beloved by all who had anything to do with

him.”

“A more perfectly just and righteously dealing man,” said the family

solicitor, “I have never had anything to do with—nor one more punctual

in the discharge of every business obligation.”

“We shall miss him sadly,” the bishop wrote to Joey in the very warmest

terms. The poor were in consternation. “The well’s never missed,” said

one old woman, “till it’s dry,” and she only said what everyone else

felt. Ernest knew that the general regret was unaffected as for a loss

which could not be easily repaired. He felt that there were only three

people in the world who joined insincerely in the tribute of applause,

and these were the very three who could least show their want of

sympathy. I mean Joey, Charlotte, and himself. He felt bitter against

himself for being of a mind with either Joey or Charlotte upon any

subject, and thankful that he must conceal his being so as far as

possible, not because of anything his father had done to him—these

grievances were too old to be remembered now—but because he would never

allow him to feel towards him as he was always trying to feel. As long

as communication was confined to the merest commonplace all went well,

but if these were departed from ever such a little he invariably felt

that his father’s instincts showed themselves in immediate opposition

to his own. When he was attacked his father laid whatever stress was

possible on everything which his opponents said. If he met with any

check his father was clearly pleased. What the old doctor had said

about Theobald’s speaking ill of no man was perfectly true as regards

others than himself, but he knew very well that no one had injured his

reputation in a quiet way, so far as he dared to do, more than his own

father. This is a very common case and a very natural one. It often

happens that if the son is right, the father is wrong, and the father

is not going to have this if he can help it.

It was very hard, however, to say what was the true root of the

mischief in the present case. It was not Ernest’s having been

imprisoned. Theobald forgot all about that much sooner than nine

fathers out of ten would have done. Partly, no doubt, it was due to

incompatibility of temperament, but I believe the main ground of

complaint lay in the fact that he had been so independent and so rich

while still very young, and that thus the old gentleman had been robbed

of his power to tease and scratch in the way which he felt he was

entitled to do. The love of teasing in a small way when he felt safe in

doing so had remained part of his nature from the days when he told his

nurse that he would keep her on purpose to torment her. I suppose it is

so with all of us. At any rate I am sure that most fathers, especially

if they are clergymen, are like Theobald.

He did not in reality, I am convinced, like Joey or Charlotte one whit

better than he liked Ernest. He did not like anyone or anything, or if

he liked anyone at all it was his butler, who looked after him when he

was not well, and took great care of him and believed him to be the

best and ablest man in the whole world. Whether this faithful and

attached servant continued to think this after Theobald’s will was

opened and it was found what kind of legacy had been left him I know

not. Of his children, the baby who had died at a day old was the only

one whom he held to have treated him quite filially. As for Christina

he hardly ever pretended to miss her and never mentioned her name; but

this was taken as a proof that he felt her loss too keenly to be able

ever to speak of her. It may have been so, but I do not think it.

Theobald’s effects were sold by auction, and among them the Harmony of

the Old and New Testaments which he had compiled during many years with

such exquisite neatness and a huge collection of MS. sermons—being all

in fact that he had ever written. These and the Harmony fetched

ninepence a barrow load. I was surprised to hear that Joey had not

given the three or four shillings which would have bought the whole

lot, but Ernest tells me that Joey was far fiercer in his dislike of

his father than ever he had been himself, and wished to get rid of

everything that reminded him of him.

It has already appeared that both Joey and Charlotte are married. Joey

has a family, but he and Ernest very rarely have any intercourse. Of

course, Ernest took nothing under his father’s will; this had long been

understood, so that the other two are both well provided for.

Charlotte is as clever as ever, and sometimes asks Ernest to come and

stay with her and her husband near Dover, I suppose because she knows

that the invitation will not be agreeable to him. There is a _de haut

en bas_ tone in all her letters; it is rather hard to lay one’s finger

upon it but Ernest never gets a letter from her without feeling that he

is being written to by one who has had direct communication with an

angel. “What an awful creature,” he once said to me, “that angel must

have been if it had anything to do with making Charlotte what she is.”

“Could you like,” she wrote to him not long ago, “the thoughts of a

little sea change here? The top of the cliffs will soon be bright with

heather: the gorse must be out already, and the heather I should think

begun, to judge by the state of the hill at Ewell, and heather or no

heather—the cliffs are always beautiful, and if you come your room

shall be cosy so that you may have a resting corner to yourself.

Nineteen and sixpence is the price of a return-ticket which covers a

month. Would you decide just as you would yourself like, only if you

come we would hope to try and make it bright for you; but you must not

feel it a burden on your mind if you feel disinclined to come in this

direction.”

“When I have a bad nightmare,” said Ernest to me, laughing as he showed

me this letter, “I dream that I have got to stay with Charlotte.”

Her letters are supposed to be unusually well written, and I believe it

is said among the family that Charlotte has far more real literary

power than Ernest has. Sometimes we think that she is writing at him as

much as to say, “There now—don’t you think you are the only one of us

who can write; read this! And if you want a telling bit of descriptive

writing for your next book, you can make what use of it you like.” I

daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of

the words “hope,” “think,” “feel,” “try,” “bright,” and “little,” and

can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of

them more than once. All this has the effect of making her style

monotonous.

Ernest is as fond of music as ever, perhaps more so, and of late years

has added musical composition to the other irons in his fire. He finds

it still a little difficult, and is in constant trouble through getting

into the key of C sharp after beginning in the key of C and being

unable to get back again.

“Getting into the key of C sharp,” he said, “is like an unprotected

female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at

Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is

she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction? And Clapham Junction

won’t quite do either, for Clapham Junction is like the diminished

seventh—susceptible of such enharmonic change, that you can resolve it

into all the possible termini of music.”

Talking of music reminds me of a little passage that took place between

Ernest and Miss Skinner, Dr Skinner’s eldest daughter, not so very long

ago. Dr Skinner had long left Roughborough, and had become Dean of a

Cathedral in one of our Midland counties—a position which exactly

suited him. Finding himself once in the neighbourhood Ernest called,

for old acquaintance sake, and was hospitably entertained at lunch.

Thirty years had whitened the Doctor’s bushy eyebrows—his hair they

could not whiten. I believe that but for that wig he would have been

made a bishop.

His voice and manner were unchanged, and when Ernest remarking upon a

plan of Rome which hung in the hall, spoke inadvertently of the

Quirinal, he replied with all his wonted pomp: “Yes, the QuirInal—or as

I myself prefer to call it, the QuirInal.” After this triumph he

inhaled a long breath through the corners of his mouth, and flung it

back again into the face of Heaven, as in his finest form during his

head-mastership. At lunch he did indeed once say, “next to impossible

to think of anything else,” but he immediately corrected himself and

substituted the words, “next to impossible to entertain irrelevant

ideas,” after which he seemed to feel a good deal more comfortable.

Ernest saw the familiar volumes of Dr Skinner’s works upon the

bookshelves in the Deanery dining-room, but he saw no copy of “Rome or

the Bible—Which?”

“And are you still as fond of music as ever, Mr Pontifex?” said Miss

Skinner to Ernest during the course of lunch.

“Of some kinds of music, yes, Miss Skinner, but you know I never did

like modern music.”

“Isn’t that rather dreadful?—Don’t you think you rather”—she was going

to have added, “ought to?” but she left it unsaid, feeling doubtless

that she had sufficiently conveyed her meaning.

“I would like modern music, if I could; I have been trying all my life

to like it, but I succeed less and less the older I grow.”

“And pray, where do you consider modern music to begin?”

“With Sebastian Bach.”

“And don’t you like Beethoven?”

“No, I used to think I did, when I was younger, but I know now that I

never really liked him.”

“Ah! how can you say so? You cannot understand him, you never could say

this if you understood him. For me a simple chord of Beethoven is

enough. This is happiness.”

Ernest was amused at her strong family likeness to her father—a

likeness which had grown upon her as she had become older, and which

extended even to voice and manner of speaking. He remembered how he had

heard me describe the game of chess I had played with the doctor in

days gone by, and with his mind’s ear seemed to hear Miss Skinner

saying, as though it were an epitaph:—

“Stay:

I may presently take

A simple chord of Beethoven,

Or a small semiquaver

From one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words.”

After luncheon when Ernest was left alone for half an hour or so with

the Dean he plied him so well with compliments that the old gentleman

was pleased and flattered beyond his wont. He rose and bowed. “These

expressions,” he said, _voce suâ_, “are very valuable to me.” “They are

but a small part, Sir,” rejoined Ernest, “of what anyone of your old

pupils must feel towards you,” and the pair danced as it were a minuet

at the end of the dining-room table in front of the old bay window that

looked upon the smooth shaven lawn. On this Ernest departed; but a few

days afterwards, the Doctor wrote him a letter and told him that his

critics were a σκληροὶ καὶ ἀντίτυποι, and at the same time ἀνέκπληκτοι.

Ernest remembered σκληροὶ, and knew that the other words were something

of like nature, so it was all right. A month or two afterwards, Dr

Skinner was gathered to his fathers.

“He was an old fool, Ernest,” said I, “and you should not relent

towards him.”

“I could not help it,” he replied, “he was so old that it was almost

like playing with a child.”

Sometimes, like all whose minds are active, Ernest overworks himself,

and then occasionally he has fierce and reproachful encounters with Dr

Skinner or Theobald in his sleep—but beyond this neither of these two

worthies can now molest him further.

To myself he has been a son and more than a son; at times I am half

afraid—as for example when I talk to him about his books—that I may

have been to him more like a father than I ought; if I have, I trust he

has forgiven me. His books are the only bone of contention between us.

I want him to write like other people, and not to offend so many of his

readers; he says he can no more change his manner of writing than the

colour of his hair, and that he must write as he does or not at all.

With the public generally he is not a favourite. He is admitted to have

talent, but it is considered generally to be of a queer unpractical

kind, and no matter how serious he is, he is always accused of being in

jest. His first book was a success for reasons which I have already

explained, but none of his others have been more than creditable

failures. He is one of those unfortunate men, each one of whose books

is sneered at by literary critics as soon as it comes out, but becomes

“excellent reading” as soon as it has been followed by a later work

which may in its turn be condemned.

He never asked a reviewer to dinner in his life. I have told him over

and over again that this is madness, and find that this is the only

thing I can say to him which makes him angry with me.

“What can it matter to me,” he says, “whether people read my books or

not? It may matter to them—but I have too much money to want more, and

if the books have any stuff in them it will work by-and-by. I do not

know nor greatly care whether they are good or not. What opinion can

any sane man form about his own work? Some people must write stupid

books just as there must be junior ops and third class poll men. Why

should I complain of being among the mediocrities? If a man is not

absolutely below mediocrity let him be thankful—besides, the books will

have to stand by themselves some day, so the sooner they begin the

better.”

I spoke to his publisher about him not long since. “Mr Pontifex,” he

said, “is a _homo unius libri_, but it doesn’t do to tell him so.”

I could see the publisher, who ought to know, had lost all faith in

Ernest’s literary position, and looked upon him as a man whose failure

was all the more hopeless for the fact of his having once made a

_coup_. “He is in a very solitary position, Mr Overton,” continued the

publisher. “He has formed no alliances, and has made enemies not only

of the religious world but of the literary and scientific brotherhood

as well. This will not do nowadays. If a man wishes to get on he must

belong to a set, and Mr Pontifex belongs to no set—not even to a club.”

I replied, “Mr Pontifex is the exact likeness of Othello, but with a

difference—he hates not wisely but too well. He would dislike the

literary and scientific swells if he were to come to know them and they

him; there is no natural solidarity between him and them, and if he

were brought into contact with them his last state would be worse than

his first. His instinct tells him this, so he keeps clear of them, and

attacks them whenever he thinks they deserve it—in the hope, perhaps,

that a younger generation will listen to him more willingly than the

present.”

“Can anything,”’ said the publisher, “be conceived more impracticable

and imprudent?”

To all this Ernest replies with one word only—“Wait.”

Such is my friend’s latest development. He would not, it is true, run

much chance at present of trying to found a College of Spiritual

Pathology, but I must leave the reader to determine whether there is

not a strong family likeness between the Ernest of the College of

Spiritual Pathology and the Ernest who will insist on addressing the

next generation rather than his own. He says he trusts that there is

not, and takes the sacrament duly once a year as a sop to Nemesis lest

he should again feel strongly upon any subject. It rather fatigues him,

but “no man’s opinions,” he sometimes says, “can be worth holding

unless he knows how to deny them easily and gracefully upon occasion in

the cause of charity.” In politics he is a Conservative so far as his

vote and interest are concerned. In all other respects he is an

advanced Radical. His father and grandfather could probably no more

understand his state of mind than they could understand Chinese, but

those who know him intimately do not know that they wish him greatly

different from what he actually is.