Paul Kelver
Copyright© 2025 by Jerome K. Jerome
Chapter 2
IN WHICH PAUL MAKES ACQUAINTANCE OF THE MAN WITH THE UGLY MOUTH.
The case of my father and mother was not normal. You understand they had been separated for some years, and though they were not young in age—indeed, before my childish eyes they loomed quite ancient folk, and in fact my father must have been nearly forty and my mother quit of thirty—yet, as you will come to think yourself, no doubt, during the course of my story, they were in all the essentials of life little more than boy and girl. This I came to see later on, but at that time, had I been consulted by enquiring maid or bachelor, I might unwittingly have given wrong impressions concerning marriage in the general. I should have described a husband as a man who could never rest quite content unless his wife were by his side; who twenty times a day would call from his office door: “Maggie, are you doing anything important? I want to talk to you about a matter of business.”... “Maggie, are you alone? Oh, all right, I’ll come down.” Of a wife I should have said she was a woman whose eyes were ever love-lit when resting on her man; who was glad where he was and troubled where he was not. But in every case this might not have been correct.
Also, I should have had something to say concerning the alarms and excursions attending residence with any married couple. I should have recommended the holding up of feet under the table lest, mistaken for other feet, they should be trodden on and pressed. Also, I should have advised against entry into any room unpreceded by what in Stageland is termed “noise without.” It is somewhat disconcerting to the nervous incomer to be met, the door still in his hand, by a sound as of people springing suddenly into the air, followed by a weird scuttling of feet, and then to discover the occupants sitting stiffly in opposite corners, deeply engaged in book or needlework. But, as I have said, with regard to some households, such precautions might be needless.
Personally, I fear, I exercised little or no controlling influence upon my parents in this respect, my intrusions coming soon to be greeted with: “Oh, it’s only Spud,” in a tone of relief, accompanied generally by the sofa cushion; but of my aunt they stood more in awe. Not that she ever said anything, and, indeed, to do her justice, in her efforts to spare their feelings she erred, if at all, on the side of excess. Never did she move a footstep about the house except to the music of a sustained and penetrating cough. As my father once remarked, ungratefully, I must confess, the volume of bark produced by my aunt in a single day would have done credit to the dying efforts of a hospital load of consumptives; to a robust and perfectly healthy lady the cost in nervous force must have been prodigious. Also, that no fear should live with them that her eyes had seen aught not intended for them, she would invariably enter backwards any room in which they might be, closing the door loudly and with difficulty before turning round: and through dark passages she would walk singing. No woman alive could have done more; yet—such is human nature!—neither my father nor my mother was grateful to her, so far as I could judge.
Indeed, strange as it may appear, the more sympathetic towards them she showed herself, the more irritated against her did they become.
“I believe, Fanny, you hate seeing Luke and me happy together,” said my mother one day, coming up from the kitchen to find my aunt preparing for entry into the drawing-room by dropping teaspoons at five-second intervals outside the door: “Don’t make yourself so ridiculous.” My mother spoke really quite unkindly.
“Hate it!” replied my aunt. “Why should I? Why shouldn’t a pair of turtle doves bill and coo, when their united age is only a little over seventy, the pretty dears?” The mildness of my aunt’s answers often surprised me.
As for my father, he grew positively vindictive. I remember the occasion well. It was the first, though not the last time I knew him lose his temper. What brought up the subject I forget, but my father stopped suddenly; we were walking by the canal bank.
“Your aunt”—my father may not have intended it, but his tone and manner when speaking of my aunt always conveyed to me the impression that he regarded me as personally responsible for her existence. This used to weigh upon me. “Your aunt is the most cantankerous, the most—” he broke off, and shook his fist towards the setting sun. “I wish to God,” said my father, “your aunt had a comfortable little income of her own, with a freehold cottage in the country, by God I do!” But the next moment, ashamed, I suppose, of his brutality: “Not but what sometimes, of course, she can be very nice, you know,” he added; “don’t tell your mother what I said just now.”
Another who followed with sympathetic interest the domestic comedy was Susan, our maid-of-all-work, the first of a long and varied series, extending unto the advent of Amy, to whom the blessing of Heaven. Susan was a stout and elderly female, liable to sudden fits of sleepiness, the result, we were given to understand, of trouble; but her heart, it was her own proud boast, was always in the right place. She could never look at my father and mother sitting anywhere near each other but she must flop down and weep awhile; the sight of connubial bliss always reminding her, so she would explain, of the past glories of her own married state.
Though an earnest enquirer, I was never able myself to grasp the ins and outs of this past married life of Susan’s. Whether her answers were purposely framed to elude curiosity, or whether they were the result of a naturally incoherent mind, I cannot say. Their tendency was to convey confusion.
On Monday I have seen Susan shed tears of regret into the Brussels sprouts, that she had been debarred by the pressure of other duties from lately watering “his” grave, which, I gathered, was at Manor Park. While on Tuesday I have listened, blood chilled, to the recital of her intentions should she ever again enjoy the luxury of getting her fingers near the scruff of his neck.
“But, I thought, Susan, he was dead,” was my very natural comment upon this outbreak.
“So did I, Master Paul,” was Susan’s rejoinder; “that was his artfulness.”
“Then he isn’t buried in Manor Park Cemetery?”
“Not yet; but he’ll wish he was, the half-baked monkey, when I get hold of him.”
“Then he wasn’t a good man?”
“Who?”
“Your husband.”
“Who says he ain’t a good man?” It was Susan’s flying leaps from tense to tense that most bewildered me. “If anybody says he ain’t I’ll gouge their eye out!”
I hastened to assure Susan that my observation had been intended in the nature of enquiry, not of assertion.
“Brings me a bottle of gin—for my headaches—every time he comes home,” continued Susan, showing cause for opinion, “every blessed time.”
And at some such point as this I would retire to the clearer atmosphere of German grammar or mixed fractions.
We suffered a good deal from Susan one way and another; for having regard to the admirable position of her heart, we all felt it our duty to overlook mere failings of the flesh—all but my aunt, that is, who never made any pretence of being a sentimentalist.
“She’s a lazy hussy,” was the opinion expressed of her one morning by my aunt, who was rinsing; “a gulping, snorting, lazy hussy, that’s what she is.” There was some excuse for my aunt’s indignation. It was then eleven o’clock and Susan was still sleeping off an attack of what she called “new-ralgy.”
“She has seen a good deal of trouble,” said my mother, who was wiping.
“And if she was my cook and housemaid,” replied my aunt, “she would see more, the slut!”
“She’s not a good servant in many respects,” admitted my mother, “but I think she’s good-hearted.”
“Oh, drat her heart,” was my aunt’s retort. “The right place for that heart of hers is on the doorstep. And that’s where I’d put it, and her and her box alongside it, if I had my way.”
The departure of Susan did take place not long afterwards. It occurred one Saturday night. My mother came upstairs looking pale.
“Luke,” she said, “do please run for the doctor.”
“What’s the matter?” asked my father.
“Susan,” gasped my mother, “she’s lying on the kitchen floor breathing in the strangest fashion and quite unable to speak.”
“I’ll go for Washburn,” said my father; “if I am quick I shall catch him at the dispensary.”
Five minutes later my father came back panting, followed by the doctor. This was a big, black-bearded man; added to which he had the knack of looking bigger than even he really was. He came down the kitchen stairs two at a time, shaking the whole house. He brushed my mother aside, and bent over the unconscious Susan, who was on her back with her mouth wide open. Then he rose and looked at my father and mother, who were watching him with troubled faces; and then he opened his mouth, and there came from it a roar of laughter, the like of which sound I had never heard.
The next moment he had seized a pail half full of water and had flung it over the woman. She opened her eyes and sat up.
“Feeling better?” said the doctor, with the pail still in his hand; “have another dose?”
Susan began to gather herself together with the evident intention of expressing her feelings; but before she could find the first word, he had pushed the three of us outside and slammed the door behind us.
From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan’s thick, rancorous voice raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the man’s savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would flag for a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting: “Bravo! Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to hear you,” applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.
“What a beast of a man,” said my mother.
“He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,” explained my father.
Replied my mother, stiffly: “I don’t ever mean to know him.” But it is only concerning the past that we possess knowledge.
The riot from below ceased at length, and was followed by a new voice, speaking quietly and emphatically, and then we heard the doctor’s step again upon the stairs.
My mother held her purse open in her hand, and as the man entered the room she went forward to meet him.
“How much do we owe you, Doctor?” said my mother. She spoke in a voice trembling with severity.
He closed the purse and gently pushed it back towards her.
“A glass of beer and a chop, Mrs. Kelver,” he answered, “which I am coming back in an hour to cook for myself. And as you will be without any servant,” he continued, while my mother stood staring at him incapable of utterance, “you had better let me cook some for you at the same time. I am an expert at grilling chops.”
“But, really, Doctor—” my mother began. He laid his huge hand upon her shoulder, and my mother sat down upon the nearest chair.
“My dear lady,” he said, “she’s a person you never ought to have had inside your house. She’s promised me to be gone in half an hour, and I’m coming back to see she keeps her word. Give her a month’s wages, and have a clear fire ready for me.” And before my mother could reply, he had slammed the front door.
“What a very odd sort of a man,” said my mother, recovering herself.
“He’s a character,” said my father; “you might not think it, but he’s worshipped about here.”
“I hardly know what to make of him,” said my mother; “I suppose I had better go out and get some chops;” which she did.
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