Novel Notes

by Jerome Klapka Jerome

  "'Never mind,' he said, half rising, 'I'll―'; then, enamoured of the brilliancy of his plan, checked himself; and she was gone.

  "He heard her footsteps passing along the matted passage, and smiled to himself. He thought the affair was going to be rather amusing. One finds it difficult to pity him even now when one thinks of it.

  "The smoking-room door opened and closed, and he still sat gazing dreamily at the ash of his cigar, and smiling.

  "One moment, perhaps two passed, but the time seemed much longer. The man blew the gray cloud from before his eyes and waited. Then he heard what he had been expecting to hear―a piercing shriek. Then another, which, expecting to hear the clanging of the distant door and the scurrying back of her footsteps along the passage, puzzled him, so that the smile died away from his lips.

  "Then another, and another, and another, shriek after shriek.

  "The native servant, gliding noiselessly about the room, laid down the thing that was in his hand and moved instinctively towards the door. The man started up and held him back.

  "'Keep where you are,' he said hoarsely. 'It is nothing. Your mistress is frightened, that is all. She must learn to get over this folly.' Then he listened again, and the shrieks ended with what sounded curiously like a smothered laugh; and there came a sudden silence.

  "And out of that bottomless silence, Fear for the first time in his life came to the man, and he and the dusky servant looked at each other with eyes in which there was a strange likeness; and by a common instinct moved together towards the place where the silence came from.

  "When the man opened the door he saw three things: one was the dead python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody heap in the middle of the floor.

  "He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head torn off.

  "That is the incident that changed the character of my man―if it be changed," concluded Jephson. "He told it me one night as we sat on the deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay. He did not spare himself. He told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind. I asked him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it.

  "'Recall it!' he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; 'it is always with me.'"

  CHAPTER VIII

  One day we spoke of crime and criminals. We had discussed the possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would be uninteresting.

  "It is a terribly sad reflection," remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly; "but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people. Do you know," he continued, "when I hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous. Once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past. Without the criminal classes we authors would starve."

  "I shouldn't worry," replied Jephson, drily; "one half mankind has been 'reforming' the other half pretty steadily ever since the Creation, yet there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of human nature left in it, notwithstanding. Suppressing sin is much the same sort of task that suppressing a volcano would be―plugging one vent merely opens another. Evil will last our time."

  "I cannot take your optimistic view of the case," answered MacShaughnassy. "It seems to me that crime―at all events, interesting crime―is being slowly driven out of our existence. Pirates and highwaymen have been practically abolished. Dear old 'Smuggler Bill' has melted down his cutlass into a pint-can with a false bottom. The pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our hero from his approaching marriage has been disbanded. There's not a lugger fit for the purposes of abduction left upon the coast. Men settle their 'affairs of honour' in the law courts, and return home wounded only in the pocket. Assaults on unprotected females are confined to the slums, where heroes do not dwell, and are avenged by the nearest magistrate. Your modern burglar is generally an out-of-work green-grocer. His 'swag' usually consists of an overcoat and a pair of boots, in attempting to make off with which he is captured by the servant-girl. Suicides and murders are getting scarcer every season. At the present rate of decrease, deaths by violence will be unheard of in another decade, and a murder story will be laughed at as too improbable to be interesting. A certain section of busybodies are even crying out for the enforcement of the seventh commandment. If they succeed authors will have to follow the advice generally given to them by the critics, and retire from business altogether. I tell you our means of livelihood are being filched from us one by one. Authors ought to form themselves into a society for the support and encouragement of crime."

  MacShaughnassy's leading intention in making these remarks was to shock and grieve Brown, and in this object he succeeded. Brown is―or was, in those days―an earnest young man with an exalted―some were inclined to say an exaggerated―view of the importance and dignity of the literary profession. Brown's notion of the scheme of Creation was that God made the universe so as to give the literary man something to write about. I used at one time to credit Brown with originality for this idea; but as I have grown older I have learned that the theory is a very common and popular one in cultured circles.

  Brown expostulated with MacShaughnassy. "You speak," he said, "as though literature were the parasite of evil."

  "And what else is she?" replied the MacShaughnassy, with enthusiasm. "What would become of literature without folly and sin? What is the work of the literary man but raking a living for himself out of the dust-heap of human woe? Imagine, if you can, a perfect world―a world where men and women never said foolish things and never did unwise ones; where small boys were never mischievous and children never made awkward remarks; where dogs never fought and cats never screeched; where wives never henpecked their husbands and mothers-in-law never nagged; where men never went to bed in their boots and sea-captains never swore; where plumbers understood their work and old maids never dressed as girls; where niggers never stole chickens and proud men were never sea-sick! where would be your humour and your wit? Imagine a world where hearts were never bruised; where lips were never pressed with pain; where eyes were never dim; where feet were never weary; where stomachs were never empty! where would be your pathos? Imagine a world where husbands never loved more wives than one, and that the right one; where wives were never kissed but by their husbands; where men's hearts were never black and women's thoughts never impure; where there was no hating and no envying; no desiring; no despairing! where would be your scenes of passion, your interesting complications, your subtle psychological analyses? My dear Brown, we writers―novelists, dramatists, poets―we fatten on the misery of our fellow-creatures. God created man and woman, and the woman created the literary man when she put her teeth into the apple. We came into the world under the shadow of the serpent. We are special correspondents with the Devil's army. We report his victories in our three-volume novels, his occasional defeats in our five-act melodramas."

  "All of which is very true," remarked Jephson; "but you must remember it is not only the literary man who traffics in misfortune. The doctor, the lawyer, the preacher, the newspaper proprietor, the weather prophet, will hardly, I should say, welcome the millennium. I shall never forget an anecdote my uncle used to relate, dealing with the period when he was chaplain of the Lincolnshire county jail. One morning there was to be a hanging; and the usual little crowd of witnesses, consisting of the sheriff, the governor, three or four reporters, a magistrate, and a couple of warders, was assembled in the prison. The condemned man, a brutal ruffian who had been found guilty of murdering a young girl under exceptionally revolting circumstanc
es, was being pinioned by the hangman and his assistant; and my uncle was employing the last few moments at his disposal in trying to break down the sullen indifference the fellow had throughout manifested towards both his crime and his fate.

  My uncle failing to make any impression upon him, the governor ventured to add a few words of exhortation, upon which the man turned fiercely on the whole of them.

  "'Go to hell,' he cried, 'with your snivelling jaw. Who are you, to preach at me? YOU'RE glad enough I'm here―all of you. Why, I'm the only one of you as ain't going to make a bit over this job. Where would you all be, I should like to know, you canting swine, if it wasn't for me and my sort? Why, it's the likes of me as KEEPS the likes of you,' with which he walked straight to the gallows and told the hangman to 'hurry up' and not keep the gentlemen waiting."

  "There was some 'grit' in that man," said MacShaughnassy.

  "Yes," added Jephson, "and wholesome wit also."

  MacShaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him.

  "You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office of The Daily―well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper. It was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow. An endeavour had been made to launch a discussion on the question 'Are Babies a Blessing?' The youngest reporter on the staff, writing over the simple but touching signature of 'Mother of Six,' had led off with a scathing, though somewhat irrelevant, attack upon husbands, as a class; the Sporting Editor, signing himself 'Working Man,' and garnishing his contribution with painfully elaborated orthographical lapses, arranged to give an air of verisimilitude to the correspondence, while, at the same time, not to offend the susceptibilities of the democracy (from whom the paper derived its chief support), had replied, vindicating the British father, and giving what purported to be stirring midnight experiences of his own. The Gallery Man, calling himself, with a burst of imagination, 'Gentleman and Christian,' wrote indignantly that he considered the agitation of the subject to be both impious and indelicate, and added he was surprised that a paper holding the exalted, and deservedly popular, position of The―should have opened its columns to the brainless vapourings of 'Mother of Six' and 'Working Man.'

  "The topic had, however, fallen flat. With the exception of one man who had invented a new feeding-bottle, and thought he was going to advertise it for nothing, the outside public did not respond, and over the editorial department gloom had settled down.

  "One evening, as two or three of us were mooning about the stairs, praying secretly for a war or a famine, Todhunter, the town reporter, rushed past us with a cheer, and burst into the Sub-editor's room. We followed. He was waving his notebook above his head, and clamouring, after the manner of people in French exercises, for pens, ink, and paper.

  "'What's up?' cried the Sub-editor, catching his enthusiasm; 'influenza again?'

  "'Better than that!' shouted Todhunter. 'Excursion steamer run down, a hundred and twenty-five lives lost―four good columns of heartrending scenes.'

  "'By Jove!' said the Sub, 'couldn't have happened at a better time either'―and then he sat down and dashed off a leaderette, in which he dwelt upon the pain and regret the paper felt at having to announce the disaster, and drew attention to the exceptionally harrowing account provided by the energy and talent of 'our special reporter.'"

  "It is the law of nature," said Jephson: "we are not the first party of young philosophers who have been struck with the fact that one man's misfortune is another man's opportunity."

  "Occasionally, another woman's," I observed.

  I was thinking of an incident told me by a nurse. If a nurse in fair practice does not know more about human nature―does not see clearer into the souls of men and women than all the novelists in little Bookland put together―it must be because she is physically blind and deaf. All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; so long as we are in good health, we play our parts out bravely to the end, acting them, on the whole, artistically and with strenuousness, even to the extent of sometimes fancying ourselves the people we are pretending to be. But with sickness comes forgetfulness of our part, and carelessness of the impression we are making upon the audience. We are too weak to put the paint and powder on our faces, the stage finery lies unheeded by our side. The heroic gestures, the virtuous sentiments are a weariness to us. In the quiet, darkened room, where the foot-lights of the great stage no longer glare upon us, where our ears are no longer strained to catch the clapping or the hissing of the town, we are, for a brief space, ourselves.

  This nurse was a quiet, demure little woman, with a pair of dreamy, soft gray eyes that had a curious power of absorbing everything that passed before them without seeming to look at anything. Gazing upon much life, laid bare, had given to them a slightly cynical expression, but there was a background of kindliness behind.

  During the evenings of my convalescence she would talk to me of her nursing experiences. I have sometimes thought I would put down in writing the stories that she told me, but they would be sad reading. The majority of them, I fear, would show only the tangled, seamy side of human nature, and God knows there is little need for us to point that out to each other, though so many nowadays seem to think it the only work worth doing. A few of them were sweet, but I think they were the saddest; and over one or two a man might laugh, but it would not be a pleasant laugh.

  "I never enter the door of a house to which I have been summoned," she said to me one evening, "without wondering, as I step over the threshold, what the story is going to be. I always feel inside a sick-room as if I were behind the scenes of life. The people come and go about you, and you listen to them talking and laughing, and you look into your patient's eyes, and you just know that it's all a play."

  The incident that Jephson's remark had reminded me of, she told me one afternoon, as I sat propped up by the fire, trying to drink a glass of port wine, and feeling somewhat depressed at discovering I did not like it.

  "One of my first cases," she said, "was a surgical operation. I was very young at the time, and I made rather an awkward mistake―I don't mean a professional mistake―but a mistake nevertheless that I ought to have had more sense than to make.

  "My patient was a good-looking, pleasant-spoken gentleman. The wife was a pretty, dark little woman, but I never liked her from the first; she was one of those perfectly proper, frigid women, who always give me the idea that they were born in a church, and have never got over the chill. However, she seemed very fond of him, and he of her; and they talked very prettily to each other―too prettily for it to be quite genuine, I should have said, if I'd known as much of the world then as I do now.

  "The operation was a difficult and dangerous one. When I came on duty in the evening I found him, as I expected, highly delirious. I kept him as quiet as I could, but towards nine o'clock, as the delirium only increased, I began to get anxious. I bent down close to him and listened to his ravings. Over and over again I heard the name 'Louise.' Why wouldn't 'Louise' come to him? It was so unkind of her―they had dug a great pit, and were pushing him down into it―oh! why didn't she come and save him? He should be saved if she would only come and take his hand.

  "His cries became so pitiful that I could bear them no longer. His wife had gone to attend a prayer-meeting, but the church was only in the next street. Fortunately, the day-nurse had not left the house: I called her in to watch him for a minute, and, slipping on my bonnet, ran across. I told my errand to one of the vergers and he took me to her. She was kneeling, but I could not wait. I pushed open the pew door, and, bending down, whispered to her, 'Please come over at once; your husband is more delirious than I quite care about, and you may be able to calm him.'

  "She whispered back, without raising her head, 'I'll be over in a little while. The meeting won't last much longer.'

  "Her answer surprised and nettled me. 'You'll
be acting more like a Christian woman by coming home with me,' I said sharply, 'than by stopping here. He keeps calling for you, and I can't get him to sleep.'

  "She raised her head from her hands: 'Calling for me?' she asked, with a slightly incredulous accent.

  "'Yes,' I replied, 'it has been his one cry for the last hour: Where's Louise, why doesn't Louise come to him.'

  "Her face was in shadow, but as she turned it away, and the faint light from one of the turned-down gas-jets fell across it, I fancied I saw a smile upon it, and I disliked her more than ever.

  "'I'll come back with you,' she said, rising and putting her books away, and we left the church together.

  "She asked me many questions on the way: Did patients, when they were delirious, know the people about them? Did they remember actual facts, or was their talk mere incoherent rambling? Could one guide their thoughts in any way?

  "The moment we were inside the door, she flung off her bonnet and cloak, and came upstairs quickly and softly.

  "She walked to the bedside, and stood looking down at him, but he was quite unconscious of her presence, and continued muttering. I suggested that she should speak to him, but she said she was sure it would be useless, and drawing a chair back into the shadow, sat down beside him.

  "Seeing she was no good to him, I tried to persuade her to go to bed, but she said she would rather stop, and I, being little more than a girl then, and without much authority, let her. All night long he tossed and raved, the one name on his lips being ever Louise―Louise―and all night long that woman sat there in the shadow, never moving, never speaking, with a set smile on her lips that made me long to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

  "At one time he imagined himself back in his courting days, and pleaded, 'Say you love me, Louise. I know you do. I can read it in your eyes. What's the use of our pretending? We KNOW each other. Put your white arms about me. Let me feel your breath upon my neck. Ah! I knew it, my darling, my love!'