 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Czechris, London, UK The Idol Thoughts of an Idol Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome Section 12 On Furnished Apartments Oh, you have some rooms to let? Mother? Well, what is it? Here's a gentleman about the rooms. Ask him in. I'll be up in a minute. Will you step inside, sir? Mother, I'll be up in a minute. So you step inside. And after a minute, mother comes slowly up the kitchen stairs, untying her apron as she comes and calling down instructions to someone below about the potatoes. Good morning, sir, says mother, with a washed-out smile. Will you step this way, please? Oh, it's hardly worth my while coming up, you say. What sort of rooms are they, and how much? Well, says the landlady, if you'll step upstairs, I'll show them to you. So, with a protesting murmur, meant to imply that any waste of time complained of hereafter must not be laid to your charge, you follow mother upstairs. At the first landing, you run up against a pale and a broom, whereupon mother expatiates upon the unreliability of servant-girls and balls over the balusters for Sarah to come and take them away at once. When you get outside the rooms, she pauses with her hand upon the door to explain to you that they are rather untidy just at present as the last lodger left only yesterday, and she also adds that this is their cleaning-day. It always is. With this understanding, you enter and both stand solemnly feasting your eyes upon the scene before you. The rooms cannot be said to appear inviting. Even mother's face betrays no admiration. Untenanted furnished apartments, viewed in the morning sunlight, do not inspire cheery sensations. There is a lifeless air about them. It is a very different thing when you have settled down and are living in them. With your old familiar household gods to greet your gaze whenever you glance up, and all your little knick-knacks spread around you, with bits of all the girls that you have loved and lost ranged upon the mantelpiece, and half a dozen disreputable-looking pipes scattered about in painfully prominent positions, with one carpet-slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box and the other perched on the top of the piano, with the well-known pictures to hide the dingy walls, and these dear old friends, your books, higgledy-piggledy all over the place, with bits of old blue china that your mother prized, and the screen she worked in those far bygone days when the sweet old face was laughing and young, and the white soft hair tumbled in gold-brown curls from under the coal-scuttlebonnet. Ah! old screen! What a gorgeous personage you must have been in your young days when the tulips and roses and lilies, all growing from one stem, fresh in their glistening sheen. Many a summer and winter have come and gone since then, my friend, and you have played with the dancing fire-light until you have grown sad and grey. Your brilliant colours are fast-fading now, and the envious moths have gnawed your silken threads. You are withering away like the dead hands that wove you. Do you ever think of those dead hands? You seem so grave and thoughtful sometimes that I almost think you do. Come, you and I and the deep glowing embers, let us talk together. Tell me in your silent language what you remember of those young days when you lay on my little mother's lap, and her girlish fingers played with your rainbow tresses. Was there never a lad near sometimes? Never a lad who would seize one of those little hands to smother it with kisses, and who would persist in holding it, thereby sadly interfering with the progress of your making. Was not your frail existence often put in jeopardy by this same clumsy headstrong lad who would toss you disrespectfully aside that he, not satisfied with one, might hold both hands and gaze up into the loved eyes? I can see that lad now through the haze of the flickering twilight. He is an eager bright-eyed boy with pinching dandy shoes and tight-fitting smalls, snowy shirt-frill and stock, and o' such curly hair, a wild, light-hearted boy. Can he be the great grave gentleman upon whose stick I used to ride cross-legged, the care-worn man into whose thoughtful face I used to gaze with childish reverence, and whom I used to call father? You say yes, old screen, but are you quite sure? It is a serious charge you are bringing. Can it be possible? Did he have to kneel down in those wonderful smalls and pick you up and rearrange you before he was forgiven and his curly head smoothed by my mother's little hand? Ah, old screen! And did the lads and the lassies go making love fifty years ago just as they do now? How men and women so unchanged? Did little maidens' hearts beat the same under pearl-embroidered bodices as they do under mother-hubbored cloaks? Have steel casks and chimney-pot hats made no difference to the brains that work beneath them? Oh, time! Great Cronos! And is this your power? Have you dried up seas and levelled mountains and left the tiny human heart-strings to defy you? Ah, yes, they were spun by a mightier than thou, and they stretch beyond your narrow ken, for their ends are made fast in eternity. Aye, you may mow down the leaves and the blossoms, but the roots of life lie too deep for your sickle to sever. You refashion nature's garments, but you cannot vary by a jot the throbbing's of her pulse. The world rolls round obedient to your laws, but the heart of man is not of your kingdom, for in its birthplace a thousand years are but as yesterday. I am getting away, though I fear, from my furnished apartments, and I hardly know how to get back. But I have some excuse for my meanderings this time. It is a piece of old furniture that has led me astray, and fancies gather somehow round old furniture, like moss around old stones. One's chairs and tables get to be almost part of one's life, and to seem like quiet friends. What strange tales the wooden-headed old fellows could tell, did they but choose to speak? At what unsuspected comedies and tragedies have they not assisted? What bitter tears have been sobbed into that old sofa-cushion? What passionate whisperings the setee must have overheard? New furniture has no charms for me compared with old. It is the old things that we love, the old faces, the old books, the old jokes. New furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a home. Not merely old in itself, lodging-house furniture generally is that, but it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections. The furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in reality, is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get on with it. As, too, in the case of all fresh acquaintances, whether wooden or human, and there is very little difference between the two species sometimes, everything impresses you with its worst aspect. The knobby woodwork and shiny horse-hair covering of the easy chair suggest anything but ease. The mirror is smoky, the curtains want washing, the carpet is frayed, the table looks as if it would go over the instant anything was rested on it. The grate is cheerless, the wallpaper hideous. The ceiling appears to have had coffee spilt all over it, and the ornaments, well, they are worse than the wallpaper. There must surely be some special and secret manufacturing for the production of lodging-house ornaments. Precisely the same articles are to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they are never seen anywhere else. There are the two, what do you call them? They stand one at each end of the mantel-piece where they are never safe, and they are hung round with long triangular slips of glass that clank against one another and make you nervous. In the commoner class of rooms, these works of art are supplemented by a couple of pieces of china which might each be meant to represent a cow sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of Diana at Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you like to fancy. Somewhere about the room you come across a bilious-looking object, which at first you take to be a lump of dough left about by one of the children, but which, on scrutiny, seems to resemble an underdone cupid. This thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is a sampler worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the Huguenots, two or three scripture texts, and a highly framed and glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated, or is an odd fellow, or something of that sort. You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the rent is. That's rather a good deal, you say, on hearing the figure. Well, to tell you the truth, answers the landlady with a sudden burst of candour, I've always had, mentioning a summer good deal in excess of the first named amount, and before that I used to have a still higher figure. What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, just to get twice as much for her rooms as you were paying, young men lodges of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have had to live in an attic. Curious that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higher you get up in the world, the lower you come down in your lodgings. On the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the first floor. A good many great men have lived in attics, and some have died there. Attics, says the dictionary, are places where lumber is stored, and the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths that no one wants to hear, these are the lumber that the world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic, and Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly, too soundly sometimes, upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself. De Quince spent his youth among them. Moreland his old age, alas, a drunken premature old age. Hans Anderson, the fairy-king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables. Prigish Benjamin Franklin, savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep. Young Bloomfield, Bobby Burns, Hogarth, what's the engineer? The role is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were reared two stories high, has the garret been the nursery of genius. No one who honours the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of acquaintanceship with them. Their damp, stained walls are sacred to the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its art, all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes. And this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study where the bust of palace looks serenely down on the leather-centred shelves. And this heap belongs to the crowded street and that to the daisyed field. The heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say, this noblest pile of all, these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their airies, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls. There, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed joves have heard their thunderbolts and shaken before now the earth to its foundations. Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, O world! Shut them fast in and turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars and let them fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to starve and rot and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by, forgotten. But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the fabled phoenix, wobble sweet melodies in their agony. Sometimes they spit venom. Venom you must breathe whether you will or know, for you cannot seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and call out over the housetops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded wild Russo into the meanest garret of the Roussaint Jacques and jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin piping tones swelled a hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution and civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his voice. As for myself, however, I like an attic, not to live in as residences they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and downstairs connected with them to please me. It puts one unpleasantly in mind of the treadmill. The form of the ceiling offers too many facilities for bumping your head and too few for shaving. And the note of the tomcat as he sings to his love in the stilly night outside on the tiles becomes positively distasteful when heard so near. No, for living in, give me a suite of rooms on the first floor of a Piccadilly mansion. I wish somebody would. But for thinking in, let me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of the city. I have all hair-toiffles-drocks affection for attics. There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to sit at ease and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath. To listen to the dull murmur of the human tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the narrow streets and lanes below. How small men seem. How like a swarm of ants sweltering in endless confusion on their tiny hill. How petty seems the work on which they are hurrying and scurrying. How childishly they jostle against one another and turn to snarl and scratch. They jabber and screech and curse, but their puny voices do not reach up here. They fret and fume and rage and pant and die. But I, my inverter, sit above it all. I am alone with the stars. The most extraordinary attic I ever came across was one a friend and I once shared many years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, from Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that room was the most eccentric. The architect who designed it must have been a genius, though I cannot help thinking that his talents would have been better employed in contriving puzzles than in shaping human habitations. No figure in Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. It contained seven corners, two of the walls sloped to a point, and the window was just over the fireplace. The only possible position for the bedstead was between the door and the cupboard. To get anything out of the cupboard we had to scramble over the bed, and a large percentage of the various commodities thus obtained was absorbed by the bedclothes. Indeed, so many things were spilled and dropped upon the bed that toward nighttime it had become a sort of small cooperative store. Coal was what it always had most in stock. We used to keep our coal in the bottom part of the cupboard, and when any was wanted we had to climb over the bed, fill a shovel full, and then crawl back. It was an exciting moment when we reached the middle of the bed. We would hold our breath, fix our eyes upon the shovel, and poise ourselves for the last move. The next instant we and the coals and the shovel and the bed would be all mixed up together. I've heard of the people going into raptures over beds of coal. We slept in one every night, and were not in the least stuck up about it. But our attic, unique though it was, had by no means exhausted the architect's sense of humour. The arrangement of the whole house was a marvel of originality. All the doors opened outward, so that if anyone wanted to leave a room for any moment that you were coming downstairs, it was unpleasant for you. There was no ground floor. Its ground floor belonged to a house in the next court, and the front door opened direct upon a flight of stairs leading down to the cellar. Visitors on entering the house would suddenly shoot past the person who had answered the door to them and disappear down these stairs. Those of a nervous temperament used to imagine that it was a trap laid for them, and would shout murder as they lay on their backs at the bottom till somebody came and picked them up. It is a long time ago now that I last saw the inside of an attic. I have tried various floors since, but I have not found that they have made much difference to me. Life tastes much the same whether we quaff it from a golden goblet or drink it out of a stone mug. The hours come laden with the same mixture of joy and sorrow, no matter where we wait for them. A whisket of broadcloth or a fustian is alike to an aching heart, and we laugh no merrier on velvet cushions than we did on wooden chairs. Often have I sighed in those low-ceiling rooms, yet disappointments have come neither less nor lighter since I quitted them. Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another. As our means increase so do our desires, and we ever stand midway between the two. When we reside in an attic we enjoy a supper of fried fish and stout. When we occupy the first floor it takes an elaborate dinner at the Continental to give us the same amount of satisfaction. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Czechris London UK The Idol Thoughts of an Idol Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome On Dress and Deportment They say, people who ought to be ashamed of themselves do, that the consciousness of being well-dressed imparts a blissfulness to the human heart that religion is powerless to bestow. I'm afraid these cynical persons are sometimes correct. I know that when I was a very young man, many, many years ago as the storybooks say, and wanted cheering up, I used to go and dress myself in all my best clothes. If I had been annoyed in any manner, if my washerwoman had discharged me, for instance, or my blank verse poem had been returned for the tenth time with the editor's compliments and regrets that owing to want of space he is unable to avail himself of kind offer, or I had been snubbed by the woman I loved as man never loved before. By the way, it's really extraordinary what a variety of ways of loving there must be. We all do it as it was never done before. I don't know how our great-grandchildren will manage. They will have to do it on their heads, by their time, if they persist in not clashing with any previous method. Well, as I was saying, when these unpleasant sort of things happened and I felt crushed, I put on all my best clothes and went out. It brought back my vanishing self-esteem. In a glossy new hat and a pair of trousers with a fold down the front, carefully preserved by keeping them under the bed. I don't mean on the floor, you know, but between the bed and the mattress. I felt I was somebody, and that there were other washerwomen. I, and even other girls, to love, and who would perhaps appreciate a clever, good-looking young fellow. I didn't care. That was my reckless way. I would make love to other maidens. I felt that in those clothes I could do it. They have a wonderful deal to do with courting, clothes have. It is half the battle. At all events the young man thinks so, and it generally takes him a couple of hours to get himself up for the occasion. His first half-hour is occupied in trying to decide whether to wear his light suit with a cane and drab billy-cock, or his black tails with a chimney-pot hat and his new umbrella. He is sure to be unfortunate in either decision. If he wears his light suit, and takes the stick, it comes on to rain, and he reaches the house in a damp and muddy condition, and spends the evening trying to hide his boots. If, on the other hand, he decides in favour of the top hat and umbrella, nobody would ever dream of going out in a top hat without an umbrella, it would be like letting baby, blessed, toddle out without its nurse. How do I hate a top hat? One lasts me a very long while, I can tell you. I only wear it when— Well, never mind when I wear it. It lasts me a very long while. I've had my present one five years. It was rather old-fashioned last summer. But the shape has come round again now, and I look quite stylish. But to return to our young man and his courting. If he starts off with the top hat and umbrella, the afternoon turns out fearfully hot, and the perspiration takes all the soap out of his moustache and converts the beautifully arranged curl over his forehead into a limp wisp resembling a lump of seaweed. The fates are never favourable to the poor wretch. If he does by any chance reach the door in proper condition, she has gone out with her cousin and won't be back till late. How a young lover made ridiculous by the gawkiness of modern costume must envy the picturesque glance of seventy years ago. Look at them, on the Christmas cards, with their curly hair and natty hats, their well-shaped legs encased in smalls, their dainty Hessian boots, their ruffling frills, their canes and dangling seals. No wonder the little maiden in the big poke-bonnet and the light-blue sash casts down her eyes and is completely one. Men could win hearts in clothes like that. But what can you expect from baggy trousers and a monkey-jacket? Clothes have more effect upon us than we imagine. Our deportment depends upon our dress. Make a man get into CD-worn-out rags and he will skulk along with his head hanging down like a man going out to fetch his own supper-beer. But deck out the same article in Gorgeous Raymond in fine linen and he will strut down the main thoroughfare swinging his cane and looking at the girls as perky as a bantam-cock. Clothes alter our very nature. A man could not help being fierce and daring with a plume in his bonnet, a dagger in his belt and a lot of puffy white things all down his sleeves. But in an Ulster he wants to get behind a lamppost and call police. I am quite ready to admit that you can find sterling merit, honest worth, deep affection and all such like virtues of the roast-beef-and-plum-pudding school as much and perhaps more under broad cloth and tweed as ever existed beneath silk and velvet. But the spirit of that nightly chivalry that rode a tilt for ladies' love and fought for ladies' smiles needs the clatter of steel and the rustle of plumes in it from its grave between the dusty folds of tapestry and underneath the musty leaves of mouldering chronicles. The world must be getting old, I think. It dresses so very soberly now. We have been through the infant period of humanity when we used to run about with nothing on but a long loose robe and like to have our feet bare. And then came the rough barbaric age, the boyhood of our race. We didn't care what we wore then, but thought it nice to tattoo ourselves all over and we never did our hair. And after that the world grew into a young man and became foppish. It decked itself in flowing curls and scarlet doublets and went courting and bragging and bouncing, making a brave show. But all those merry, foolish days of youth are gone and we are very sober, very solemn and very stupid, some say, now. The world is a grave middle-aged gentleman in this nineteenth century and would be shocked to see itself with a bit of finery on. So it dresses in black coats and trousers and black hats and black boots and, dear me, it is such a very respectable gentleman to think it could ever have gone gadding about as a troubadour or a nighterrant dressed in all those fancy colours. Ah, well, we are more sensible in this age. Or at least we think ourselves so. It is a general theory nowadays that sense and dullness go together. Goodness is another quality that always goes with blackness. Very good people indeed, you will notice, dress all together in black, even to gloves and neckties, and they will probably take to black shirts before long. Medium goods indulge in light trousers on weekdays and some of them even go so far as to wear fancy waistcoats. On the other hand, people who care nothing for a future state go about in light suits and there have been known wretches so abandoned as to wear a white hat. Such people, however, are never spoken of in gentile society and perhaps I ought not to have referred to them here. By the way, talking of light suits, have you ever noticed how people stare at you the first time you go out in a new light suit? They do not notice it so much afterward. The population of London have got accustomed to it by the third time you wear it. I say you because I am not speaking from my own experience. I do not wear such things at all myself. As I said, only sinful people do so. I wish though it were not so and that one could be good and respectable and sensible without making oneself a guy. I look in the glass sometimes at my two long cylindrical bags, so picturesquely rugged about the knees, my stand-up collar and billy-cock hat and wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good and respectable. I never can be sensible, I'm told, so that don't matter. I want to put on lavender-colored tights with red velvet britches and a green doublet slashed with yellow to have a light blue silk cloak on my shoulder and a black eagle's plume waving from my hat and a big sword and a falcon and a lance and a prancing horse so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust heap? Why shouldn't we dress a little gaily? I'm sure if we did we should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race and what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like but let me be a butterfly. Women, at all events, ought to dress prettily. It is their duty. They are the flowers of the earth and were meant to show it up. We abuse them a good deal, we men, but goodness knows the old world will be dull enough without their dresses and fair faces. How they brighten up every place they come into. What a sunny commotion they, relations, of course, make in our dingy bachelor chambers. And what a delightful litter their ribbons and laces and gloves and hats and parasols and kerchiefs make. It is as if a wandering rainbow had dropped in to pay us a visit. It is one of the chief charms of the summer, to my mind, the way our little maids come out in pretty colours. I like to see the pink and blue and white glancing between the trees, dotting the green fields and flashing back the sunlight. You can see the bright colours such a long way off. There are four white dresses climbing a hill in front of my window now. I can see them distinctly, though it is three miles away. I thought at first they were milestones out for a lark. It's so nice to be able to see the darlings a long way off. Especially if they happen to be your wife and your mother-in-law. Talking of fields and milestones reminds me that I want to say, in all seriousness, a few words about women's boots. The women of these islands all wear boots too big for them. They can never get a boot to fit. The bootmakers do not keep sizes small enough. Over and over again have I known women sit down on the top rail of a style and declare they could not go a step further because their boots hurt them so. And it has always been the same complaint. Too big. It is time this state of things was altered. In the name of the husbands and fathers of England I call upon the bootmakers to reform. Our wives, our daughters and our cousins are not to be blamed and tortured with impunity. Why cannot narrow twos be kept more in stock? That is the size I find most women take. The waistband is another item of feminine apparel that is always too big. The dressmakers make these things so loose that the hooks and eyes by which they are fastened burst off every now and then with a report like thunder. Why women suffer these wrongs? Why they do not insist in having their clothes made small enough for them? I cannot conceive. It can hardly be that they are disinclined to trouble themselves about matters of mere dress, for dress is the one subject that they really do think about. It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly interested in and they talk about it all day long. If you see two women together you may bet your bottom dollar they are discussing their own or their friend's clothes. You notice a couple of childlike beings conversing by a window and you wonder what sweet helpful words are falling from their sainted lips. So you move nearer and then you hear one say, So I took in the waistband and let out a seam and it fits beautifully now. Well, says the other, I shall wear my plum-coloured body to the Joneses with a yellow plastron and they've got some lovely gloves at Puttix, only one and eleven pence. I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire once with a couple of ladies. It was a beautiful bit of country and they enjoyed themselves immensely. They talked dressmaking the whole time. Pretty view, that, I would say, waving my umbrella round. Look at those blue distant hills. That little white speck nestling in the woods is Chatsworth and over there— Yes, very pretty indeed, one would reply. Well, why not get a yard of Sarsnet? What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is? Certainly. What place do you call this? Then I would draw their attention to the fresh beauties that kept sweeping into view and they would glance round and say, charming, sweetly pretty, and immediately go off into raptures over each other's pocket-hanker-chiefs and mourn with one another over the decadence of Cambric thrilling. I believe if two women were cast together upon a desert island they would spend each day arguing the respective merits of seashells and bird's-eggs considered as trimmings and would have a new fashion in fig-leaves every month. Very young men think a good deal about clothes, but they don't talk about them to each other. They would not find much encouragement. A fob is not a favourite with his own sex. Indeed, he gets a good deal more abuse from them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing and it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has no phoppery at twenty would be a slatenly dirty-collar unbrushed coat-man at forty. A little fob-ishness in a young man is good. It is human. I like to see a young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck and crow as if the whole world belonged to him. I don't like a modest retiring man. Nobody does, not really. However much they may pray about modest worth and other things they do not understand. A meek deportment is a great mistake in the world. Uriah Heap's father was a very poor judge of human nature, or he would not have told his son, as he did, that people liked humbleness. There is nothing annoys them more as a rule. Rows are half the fun of life and you can't have rows with humble, meek answering individuals. They turn away our wrath and that is just what we do not want. We want to let it out. We have worked ourselves up into a state of exhilarating fury and then just as we are anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous set to, they spoil all our plans with their exasperating humility. Zantipi's life must have been one long misery tied to that calmly irritating man's socrates. Fancy a married woman doomed to live on from day to day without one single quarrel with her husband. A man ought to humour his wife in these things. Heaven knows their lives are dull enough, poor girls. They have none of the enjoyments we have. They go to no political meetings. They may not even belong to the local amateur parliament. They are excluded from smoking carriages on the Metropolitan Railway and they never see a comic paper. Or if they do, they do not know it is comic. Nobody tells them. Surely with existence such a dreary blank for them as this we might provide a little row for their amusement now and then, even if we do not feel inclined for it ourselves. A really sensible man does so and is loved accordingly for it is little acts of kindness such as this that go straight to a woman's heart. It is such like proofs of loving self-sacrifice that make her tell her female friends what a good husband he was. After he's dead. Yes, poor Zantipi must have had a hard time of it. The bucket episode was particularly sad for her. Poor woman. She did think she would rouse him up a bit with that. She had taken the trouble to fill the bucket. Perhaps been a long way to get specially dirty water and she waited for him. And then to be met in such a way after all. Most likely she sat down and had a good cry afterward. They must have seemed also hopeless to the poor child. And for all we know she had no mother to whom she could go and abuse him. What was it to her that her husband was a great philosopher? Great philosophy don't count in married life. There was a very good little boy once who wanted to go to sea and the captain asked him what he could do. He said he could do the multiplication table backward and paste seaweed in a book. That he knew how many times the word begat occurred in the Old Testament and could recite the boy stood on the burning deck and Wordsworths we are seven. Very good, very good indeed said the man of the sea. And can ye carry coals? It is just the same when you want to marry. Great ability is not required so much as little usefulness. Brains are at a discount in the married state. There is no demand for them, no appreciation even. Our wives summers up according to a standard of their own in which brilliancy of intellect obtains no marks. Your lady and mistress is not at all impressed by your cleverness and talent, my dear reader, not in the slightest. Give her a man who can do an errand neatly without attempting to use his own judgment over it or any nonsense of that kind and who can be trusted to hold a child the right way up and not make himself objectionable whenever there is lukewarm mutton for dinner. That is the sort of a husband a sensible woman likes not one of your scientific or literary nuisances who go upsetting the whole house and putting everybody out with their foolishness. End of section 13 This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Czechress London UK The Idol Thoughts of an Idol Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome Section 14 on memory I remember I remember in the days of chill November how the blackbird on the... I forget the rest. It is the beginning of the first piece of poetry I ever learned for hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle I take no note of, it being of a frivolous character and lacking in the qualities of true poetry. I collected fourpence by the recital of I remember I remember. I knew it was fourpence because they told me that if I kept it until I got twopence more I should have sixpence which argument, albeit undeniable, moved me not and the money was squandered to the best of my recollection on the very next morning although upon what memory is a blank? That is just the way with memory. Nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child. All her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust hole when a very small boy but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again and if memory were all we had to trust to I should be compelled to believe I was there still. At another time, some years later I was assisting at an exceedingly interesting love scene but the only thing about it I can call to mind distinctly is that at the most critical moment somebody suddenly opened the door and said Emily, you're wanted. In a supple-crawl tone that gave one the idea the police had come for her. All the tender words she said to me and all the beautiful things I said to her are utterly forgotten. Life altogether is but a crumbling ruin when we turn to look behind. A shattered column here where a massive portal stood the broken shaft of a window to mark my lady's bower and a mouldering heap of blackened stones where the glowing flames once leaped and over all the tinted lichen and the ivy clinging green. For everything looms pleasant through the softening haze of time even the sadness that is past seems sweet. Our boyish days look very merry to us now all nutting hoop and gingerbread. The snubbings and toothaches and the Latin verbs are all forgotten the Latin verbs especially. And we fancy we were very happy when we were hobbled ahoyes and loved and we wish that we could love again. We never think of the heartaches or the sleepless nights or the hot dryness of our throats when she said she could never be anything to us but a sister as if any man wanted more sisters. Yes, it is the brightness not the darkness that we see when we look back the sunshine casts no shadows on the past the road that we have traversed stretches very fair behind us we see not the sharp stones we dwell but on the roses by the wayside and the strong briars that stung us are to our distant eyes all tendrils waving in the wind God be thanked that it is so that the ever-lengthening chain of memory has only pleasant links and that the bitterness and sorrow of today are smiled at on the morrow. It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its highest and best so that as our little lives sink back behind us into the dark sea of forgetfulness all that which is the lightest and the most gladsome is the last to sink and stands above the waters long in sight when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep below the waves and trouble us no more. It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that makes old folk talk so much nonsense about the days when they were young. The world appears to have been a very superior sort of place then and things were more like what they ought to be boys were boys then and girls were very different also winters were something like winters and summers not at all the wretched things we get put off with nowadays as for the wonderful deeds people did in those times and the extraordinary events that happened it takes three strong men to believe half of them I like to hear one of the old boys telling all about it to a party of youngsters who he knows cannot contradict him it is odd if after a while he doesn't swear that the moon shone every night when he was a boy and that tossing mad bulls in a blanket was the favourite sport at his school it always has been and always will be the same the old folk of our grandfathers' young days sang a song bearing exactly the same burden and the young folk of today will drone out a nicely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday take up the literature of 1835 and you will find the poets and novelists asking for the same impossible gift as did the German minorsingers long before them and the old Norse saga writers long before that asking for the same thing side the early prophets and the philosophers of ancient Greece from all accounts the world has been getting worse and worse ever since it was created all I can say is that it must have been a remarkably delightful place when it was first opened to the public for it is very pleasant even now if you only keep as much as possible in the sunshine and take the rain good-temperedly yes, there is no gain saying there must have been somewhat sweeter in that dewy morning of creation when it was young and fresh when the feet of the tramping millions had not trodden its grass to dust nor the din of the myriad cities chased the silence forever away life must have been noble and solemn to those free-footed, loose-robed fathers of the human race walking hand in hand with God under the great sky they lived in sun-kissed tents flowing herds they took their simple wants from the loving hand of nature they toiled and talked and thought and the great earth rolled round in stillness not yet laden with trouble and wrong those days are past now the quiet childhood of humanity spent in the far-off forest glades and by the murmuring rivers is gone forever and human life is deepening down to manhood doubt and hope its age of restful peace is past it has its work to finish and must hasten on what that work may be what this world's share is in the great design we know not though our unconscious hands are helping to accomplish it like the tiny coral insect working deep under the dark waters we strive and struggle each for our own little ends nor dream of the vast fabric we are building up for God let us have done with vain regrets and longings for the days that never will be ours again our work lies in front, not behind us and forward is our motto let us not sit with folded hands gazing upon the past as if it were the building it is but the foundation let us not waste heart and life thinking of what might have been and forgetting the maybe that lies before us opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost and the happiness that comes to us we heed not because of the happiness that is gone years ago when I used to wander of an evening from the fireside to the pleasant land of fairy tales I met a doubty night and true many dangers had he overcome in many lands had been and all men knew him for a brave and well-tried night and one that knew not fear except maybe upon such seasons when even a brave man might feel afraid and not be ashamed now as this night one day was pricking wearily along a toilsome road his heart misgave him and was sore within him because of the trouble of the way rocks, dark and of a monstrous size hung high above his head and like enough it seemed unto the night that they should fall and he lie low beneath them chasms there were on either side and dark some caves where in fierce robbers lived and dragons very terrible whose jaws dripped blood and upon the road there hung a darkness as of night so it came over that good night that he would no more press forward but seek another road less grievously beset with difficulty unto his gentle steed but when in haste he turned and looked behind much marvelled our brave night for low of all the way that he had ridden there was naught for eye to see but at his horse's heels there yawned a mighty gulf whereof no man might ever spy the bottom so deep was that same gulf then when Sir Gelland saw that of going back there was none he prayed to Good Saint Cuthbert and setting spurs into his steed rode forward bravely and most joyously and naught harmed him there is no returning on the road of life the frail bridge of time on which we tread sinks back into eternity at every step we take the past is gone from us forever it is gathered in and garnered it belongs to us no more no single word can ever be unspoken no single step retraced therefore it besiems us as true knights to prick on bravely not idly weep because we cannot now recall a new life begins for us with every second let us go forward joyously to meet it we must press on whether we will or know and we shall walk better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast behind a friend came to me the other day and urged me very eloquently to learn some wonderful system by which you never forgot anything I don't know why he was so eager on the subject unless it be that I occasionally borrow an umbrella and have a knack of coming out in the middle of a game of wist with a mild law I've been thinking all along that clubs were trumps I declined the suggestion however in spite of the advantages he so attractively set forth I have no wish to remember everything there are many things in most men's lives that are better be forgotten there is that time many years ago when we did not act quite as honourably quite as uprightly as we perhaps should have done that unfortunate deviation from the path of strict probity we once committed and in which more unfortunate still we were found out that act of folly, of meanness, of wrong ah well, we paid the penalty suffered the maddening hours of vain remorse the hot agony of shame the scorn perhaps of those we loved let us forget oh father time lift with your kindly hands those bitter memories from off our overburdened hearts for griefs are ever coming to us with the coming hours and our little strength is only as the day not that the past should be buried the music of life will be mute if the chords of memory were snapped asunder it is but the poisonous weeds not the flowers that we should root out from the garden of Nemocene we remember Dickon's haunted man how he prayed for forgetfulness and how when his prayer was answered he prayed for memory once more we do not want all the ghosts laid it is only the haggard cruel eyed specters that we flee from let the gentle kindly phantoms haunt us as they will we are not afraid of them the world grows very full of ghosts as we grow older we need not seek in dismal church yards nor sleep in motored granges to see the shadowy faces and hear the rustling of their garments in the night every house, every room, every creaking chair has its own particular ghost they haunt the empty chambers of our lives they throng around us like dead leaves whirled in the autumn wind some are living, some are dead we know not we clasped their hands once, loved them quarreled with them, laughed with them told them our thoughts and hopes and aims as they told us theirs till it seemed our very hearts had joined in a grip that would defy the puny power of death they are gone now, lost to us forever their eyes will never look into ours again and their voices we shall never hear only their ghosts come to us and talk with us we see them dim and shadowy through our tears we stretch our yearning hands to them but they are air ghosts they are with us night and day they walk beside us in the busy street under the glare of the sun they sit by us in the twilight at home we see their little faces looking from the windows of the old school house we meet them in the woods and lanes where we shouted and played as boys Hark! cannot you hear their low laughter from behind the blackberry bushes and their distant whoops along the grassy glades? down here through the quiet fields and by the wood where the evening shadows are lurking winds the path where we used to watch for her at sunset look, she's there now in the dainty white frock we knew so well with the big bonnet dangling from her little hands and the sunny brown hair all tangled five thousand miles away dead for all we know what of that? she is beside us now and we can look into her laughing eyes and hear her voice and the shadows will creep out across the fields and the night wind will sweep past moaning ghosts they are always with us and always will be while the sad old world keeps echoing to the sob of long goodbyes while the cruel ships sail away across the great seas and the cold green earth lies heavy on the hearts of those we loved but oh, ghosts the world would be sadder still without you come to us and speak to us oh, you ghosts of our old loves ghosts of playmates and of sweethearts and old friends of all you laughing boys and girls oh, come to us and be with us for the world is very lonely and new friends and faces are not like the old and we cannot love them, nay, nor laugh with them as we have loved and laughed with you and when we walked together, oh, ghosts of our youth the world was very gay and bright but now it has grown old and we are growing weary and only you can bring the brightness and the freshness back to us memory is a rare ghost-raiser like a haunted house its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet through the broken casements we watch the flitting shadows of the dead and the saddest shadows of them all are the shadows of our own dead selves all those young bright faces so full of truth and honour of pure good thoughts of noble longings how reproachfully they look upon us with their deep clear eyes I fear they have good cause for their sorrow, poor lads lies and cunning and disbelief have crept into our hearts in those pre-shaving days and we meant to be so great and good it is well we cannot see into the future there are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty I like to sit and have a talk sometimes with that odd little chap that was myself long ago I think he likes it too for he comes so often of an evening when I am alone with my pipe listening to the whispering of the flames I see his solemn little face looking at me through the scented smoke as it floats upward and I smile at him and he smiles back at me but his is such a grave old-fashioned smile we chat about old times and now and then he takes me by the hand and then we slip through the black bars of the great and down the dusky glowing caves to the land that lies behind the firelight there we find the days that used to be and we wander along them together he tells me as we walk all he thinks and feels I laugh at him now and then but the next moment I wish I had not for he looks so grave I am ashamed of being frivolous besides it is not showing proper respect to one so much older than myself to one who was myself so very long before I became myself we don't talk much at first but look at one another I down at his curly hair and little blue bow he up sideways at me as he trots and somehow I fancy the shy round eyes do not altogether approve of me and he heaves a little sigh as though he were disappointed but after a while his bashfulness wears off and he begins to chat he tells me his favourite fairy tales he can do up to six times and he has a guinea pig and Pa says fairy tales ain't true and isn't it a pity because he would so like to be a knight and fight a dragon and marry a beautiful princess but he takes a more practical view of life when he reaches seven and would prefer to grow up to be a bar G and earn a lot of money maybe this is the consequence of falling in love which he does about this time with the young lady at the milk shop at the age of six God bless her little ever-dancing feet whatever size they may be now he must be very fond of her for he gives her one day his chiefest treasure a witt, a huge pocket knife with four rusty blades and a corkscrew which latter has a knack of working itself out in some mysterious manner and sticking into its owner's leg she is an affectionate little thing and she throws her arms round his neck and kisses him for it then and there outside the shop but the stupid world in the person of the boy at the cigar emporium next door jeers at such tokens of love whereupon my young friend very properly prepares to punch the head of the boy at the cigar emporium next door but fails in the attempt the boy at the cigar emporium next door punching his instead and then comes school life with its bitter little sorrows and its joyous shoutings its jolly larks and its hot tears falling on beastly Latin grammars and silly old copy books it is at school that he injures himself for life as I firmly believe trying to pronounce German and it is there too that he learns of the importance attached by the French nation to pens, ink and paper have you pens, ink and paper is the first question asked by one Frenchman of another on their meeting the other fellow has not any of them as a rule but says that the uncle of his brother has got them all three the first fellow doesn't appear to care a hang about the uncle of the other fellow's brother what he wants to know now is has the neighbour of the other fellow's mother got him the neighbour of my mother has no pens, no ink and no paper replies the other man beginning to get wild has the child of thy female gardener some pens, some ink or some paper he has him there after worrying enough about these wretched inks, pens and paper to make everybody miserable it turns out that the child of his own female gardener hasn't any such a discovery would shut up anyone but a French exercised man it has no effect at all though on this shameless creature he never thinks of apologising but says his aunt has some mustard so in the acquisition of more or less useless knowledge soon happily to be forgotten boyhood passes away the red brick school house fades from view and we turn down into the world's high road my little friend is no longer little now the short jacket has sprouted tails the battered cap so useful as a combination of pocket handkerchief drinking cup and weapon of attack has grown high and glossy and instead of a slate pencil in his mouth there is a cigarette the smoke of which troubles him for it will get up his nose he tries a cigar a little later on as being more stylish a big black Havana it doesn't seem altogether to agree with him for I find him sitting over a bucket in the back kitchen afterward solemnly swearing never to smoke again and now his moustache begins to be almost visible to the naked eye whereupon he immediately takes to brandy and sodas and fancies himself a man he talks about two to one against the favourite refers to actresses as little Emmy and Kate and baby and murmurs about his losses at cards the other night in a style implying that thousands have been squandered though to do him justice the actual amount is most probably one and tuppence also if I see a right for it is always twilight in this land of memories he sticks an eyeglass in his eye and stumbles over everything his female relations much troubled at these things pray for him bless their gentle hearts and see visions of old Bailey trials and halters as the only possible outcome of such reckless dissipation and the prediction of his first schoolmaster that he would come to a bad end assumes the proportions of inspired prophecy he has a lordly contempt at this age for the other sex a blatantly good opinion of himself and a sociably patronising manner toward all the elderly male friends of the family altogether it must be confessed he is somewhat of a nuisance about this time it does not last long though he falls in love in a little while and that soon takes the bounce out of him I notice his boots are much too small for him now and his hair is fearfully and wonderfully arranged he reads poetry more than he used and he keeps a rhyming dictionary in his bedroom every morning Emily Jane finds scraps of torn-up paper on the floor and reads there on of cruel hearts and love's deep darts of beautyous eyes and lover's sighs and much more of the old old song that lads so love to sing and lassies love to listen to while giving their dainty heads a toss and pretending never to hear the course of love however seems not to have run smoothly for later on he takes more walking exercise and less sleep poor boy than is good for him and his face is suggestive of anything but wedding bells and happiness ever after and here he seems to vanish the little boyish self that has grown up beside me as we walked is gone I am alone and the road is very dark I stumble on I know not how nor care for the way seems leading nowhere and there is no light to guide but at last the morning comes and I find that I have grown into myself End of section 14 End of Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow by Jerome K. Jerome