Transcribed from the 1920 J. W. Arrowsmith edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
Sketches in Lavender
Blue and Green
BY
JEROME K. JEROME
AUTHOR OF "THREE MEN IN A BOAT"
"THREE MEN ON THE BUMMEL," "NOVEL NOTES"
"THE IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW," ETC.
BRISTOL
J. W. ARROWSMITH LTD., QUAY STREET
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
1920
Contents:
Reginald Blake, Financier and Cad
An item of Fashionable Intelligence
Blase Billy
The Choice of Cyril Harjohn
The Materialisation of Charles and Mivanway
Portrait of a Lady
The Man Who Would Manage
The Man Who Lived For Others
A Man of Habit
The Absent-minded Man
A Charming Woman
Whibley's Spirit
The Man Who Went Wrong
The Hobby Rider
The Man Who Did Not Believe In Luck
Dick Dunkerman's Cat
The Minor Poet's Story
The Degeneration of Thomas Henry
The City of The Sea
Driftwood
La-ven-der's blue, did-dle, did-dle!
La-ven-der's green;
When I am king, did-dle, did-dle!
You shall be queen.
Call up your men, did-dle, did-dle!
Set them to work;
Some to the plough, did-dle, did-dle!
Some to the cart.
Some to make hay, did-dle, did-dle!
Some to cut corn;
While you and I, did-dle, did-dle!
Keep ourselves warm.
REGINALD BLAKE, FINANCIER AND CAD
The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly
defined, and act consistently. Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure
in creating the impossible. Reginald Blake was as typical a specimen of
the well-bred cad as one could hope to find between Piccadilly Circus and
Hyde Park Corner. Vicious without passion, and possessing brain without
mind, existence presented to him no difficulties, while his pleasures
brought him no pains. His morality was bounded by the doctor on the one
side, and the magistrate on the other. Careful never to outrage the
decrees of either, he was at forty-five still healthy, though stout; and
had achieved the not too easy task of amassing a fortune while avoiding
all risk of Holloway. He and his wife, Edith (_nee_ Eppington), were as
ill-matched a couple as could be conceived by any dramatist seeking
material for a problem play. As they stood before the altar on their
wedding morn, they might have been taken as symbolising satyr and saint.
More than twenty years his junior, beautiful with the beauty of a
Raphael's Madonna, his every touch of her seemed a sacrilege. Yet once
in his life Mr. Blake played the part of a great gentleman; Mrs. Blake,
on the same occasion, contenting herself with a singularly mean
_role_--mean even for a woman in love.
The affair, of course, had been a marriage of convenience. Blake, to do
him justice, had made no pretence to anything beyond admiration and
regard. Few things grow monotonous sooner than irregularity. He would
tickle his jaded palate with respectability, and try for a change the
companionship of a good woman. The girl's face drew him, as the
moonlight holds a man who, bored by the noise, turns from a heated room
to press his forehead to the window-pane. Accustomed to bid for what he
wanted, he offered his price. The Eppington family was poor and
numerous. The girl, bred up to the false notions of duty inculcated by a
narrow conventionality, and, feminine like, half in love with martyrdom
for its own sake, let her father bargain for a higher price, and then
sold herself.
To a drama of this description, a lover is necessary, if the
complications are to be of interest to the outside world. Harry Sennett,
a pleasant-looking enough young fellow, in spite of his receding chin,
was possessed, perhaps, of more good intention than sense. Under the
influence of Edith's stronger character he was soon persuaded to
acquiesce meekly in the proposed arrangement. Both succeeded in
convincing themselves that they were acting nobly. The tone of the
farewell interview, arranged for the eve of the wedding, would have been
fit and proper to the occasion had Edith been a modern Joan of Arc about
to sacrifice her own happiness on the altar of a great cause; as the girl
was merely selling herself into ease and luxury, for no higher motive
than the desire to enable a certain number of more or less worthy
relatives to continue living beyond their legitimate means, the sentiment
was perhaps exaggerated. Many tears were shed, and many everlasting good-
byes spoken, though, seeing that Edith's new home would be only a few
streets off, and that of necessity their social set would continue to be
the same, more experienced persons might have counselled hope. Three
months after the marriage they found themselves side by side at the same
dinner-table; and after a little melodramatic fencing with what they were
pleased to regard as fate, they accommodated themselves to the customary
positions.
Blake was quite aware that Sennett had been Edith's lover. So had half a
dozen other men, some younger, some older than himself. He felt no more
embarrassment at meeting them than, standing on the pavement outside the
Stock Exchange, he would have experienced greeting his brother jobbers
after a settling day that had transferred a fortune from their hands into
his. Sennett, in particular, he liked and encouraged. Our whole social
system, always a mystery to the philosopher, owes its existence to the
fact that few men and women possess sufficient intelligence to be
interesting to themselves. Blake liked company, but not much company
liked Blake. Young Sennett, however, could always be relied upon to
break the tediousness of the domestic dialogue. A common love of sport
drew the two men together. Most of us improve upon closer knowledge, and
so they came to find good in one another.
"That is the man you ought to have married," said Blake one night to his
wife, half laughingly, half seriously, as they sat alone, listening to
Sennett's departing footsteps echoing upon the deserted pavement. "He's
a good fellow--not a mere money-grubbing machine like me."
And a week later Sennett, sitting alone with Edith, suddenly broke out
with:
"He's a better man than I am, with all my high-falutin' talk, and, upon
my soul, he loves you. Shall I go abroad?"
"If you like," was the answer.
"What would you do?"
"Kill myself," replied the other, with a laugh, "or run away with the
first man that asked me."
So Sennett stayed on.
Blake himself had made the path easy to them. There was little need for
either fear or caution. Indeed, their safest course lay in recklessness,
and they took it. To Sennett the house was always open. It was Blake
himself who, when unable to accompany his wife, would suggest Sennett as
a substitute. Club friends shrugged their shoulders. Was the man
completely under his wife's thumb; or, tired of her, was he playing some
devil's game of his own? To most of his acquaintances the latter
explanation seemed the more plausible.
The gossip, in due course, reached the parental home. Mrs. Eppington
shook the vials of her wrath over the head of her son-in-law. The
father, always a cautious man, felt inclined to blame his child for her
want of prudence.
"She'll ruin everything," he said. "Why the devil can't she be careful?"
"I believe the man is deliberately plotting to get rid of her," said Mrs.
Eppington. "I shall tell him plainly what I think."
"You're a fool, Hannah," replied her husband, allowing himself the
licence of the domestic hearth. "If you are right, you will only
precipitate matters; if you are wrong, you will tell him what there is no
need for him to know. Leave the matter to me. I can sound him without
giving anything away, and meanwhile you talk to Edith."
So matters were arranged, but the interview between mother and daughter
hardly improved the position. Mrs. Eppington was conventionally moral;
Edith had been thinking for herself, and thinking in a bad atmosphere.
Mrs. Eppington, grew angry at the girl's callousness.
"Have you no sense of shame?" she cried.
"I had once," was Edith's reply, "before I came to live here. Do you
know what this house is for me, with its gilded mirrors, its couches, its
soft carpets? Do you know what I am, and have been for two years?"
The elder woman rose, with a frightened pleading look upon her face, and
the other stopped and turned away towards the window.
"We all thought it for the best," continued Mrs. Eppington meekly.
The girl spoke wearily without looking round.
"Oh! every silly thing that was ever done, was done for the best. _I_
thought it would be for the best, myself. Everything would be so simple
if only we were not alive. Don't let's talk any more. All you can say
is quite right."
The silence continued for a while, the Dresden-china clock on the
mantelpiece ticking louder and louder as if to say, "I, Time, am here. Do
not make your plans forgetting me, little mortals; I change your thoughts
and wills. You are but my puppets."
"Then what do you intend to do?" demanded Mrs. Eppington at length.
"Intend! Oh, the right thing of course. We all intend that. I shall
send Harry away with a few well-chosen words of farewell, learn to love
my husband and settle down to a life of quiet domestic bliss. Oh, it's
easy enough to intend!"
The girl's face wrinkled with a laugh that aged her. In that moment it
was a hard, evil face, and with a pang the elder woman thought of that
other face, so like, yet so unlike--the sweet pure face of a girl that
had given to a sordid home its one touch of nobility. As under the
lightning's flash we see the whole arc of the horizon, so Mrs. Eppington
looked and saw her child's life. The gilded, over-furnished room
vanished. She and a big-eyed, fair-haired child, the only one of her
children she had ever understood, were playing wonderful games in the
twilight among the shadows of a tiny attic. Now she was the wolf,
devouring Edith, who was Red Riding Hood, with kisses. Now Cinderella's
prince, now both her wicked sisters. But in the favourite game of all,
Mrs. Eppington was a beautiful princess, bewitched by a wicked dragon, so
that she seemed to be an old, worn woman. But curly-headed Edith fought
the dragon, represented by the three-legged rocking-horse, and slew him
with much shouting and the toasting-fork. Then Mrs. Eppington became
again a beautiful princess, and went away with Edith back to her own
people.
In this twilight hour the misbehaviour of the "General," the importunity
of the family butcher, and the airs assumed by cousin Jane, who kept two
servants, were forgotten.
The games ended. The little curly head would be laid against her breast
"for five minutes' love," while the restless little brain framed the
endless question that children are for ever asking in all its thousand
forms, "What is life, mother? I am very little, and I think, and think,
until I grow frightened. Oh, mother, tell me, what is life?"
Had she dealt with these questions wisely? Might it not have been better
to have treated them more seriously? Could life after all be ruled by
maxims learned from copy-books? She had answered as she had been
answered in her own far-back days of questioning. Might it not have been
better had she thought for herself?
Suddenly Edith was kneeling on the floor beside her.
"I will try to be good, mother."
It was the old baby cry, the cry of us all, children that we are, till
mother Nature kisses us and bids us go to sleep.
Their arms were round each other now, and so they sat, mother and child
once more. And the twilight of the old attic, creeping westward from the
east, found them again.
The masculine duet had more result, but was not conducted with the
_finesse_ that Mr. Eppington, who prided himself on his diplomacy, had
intended. Indeed, so evidently ill at ease was that gentleman, when the
moment came for talk, and so palpably were his pointless remarks mere
efforts to delay an unpleasant subject, that Blake, always direct bluntly
though not ill-naturedly asked him, "How much?"
Mr. Eppington was disconcerted.
"It's not that--at least that's not what I have come about," he answered
confusedly.
"What have you come about?"
Inwardly Mr. Eppington cursed himself for a fool, for the which he was
perhaps not altogether without excuse. He had meant to act the part of a
clever counsel, acquiring information while giving none; by a blunder, he
found himself in the witness-box.
"Oh, nothing, nothing," was the feeble response, "merely looked in to see
how Edith was."
"Much the same as at dinner last night, when you were here," answered
Blake. "Come, out with it."
It seemed the best course now, and Mr. Eppington took the plunge.
"Don't you think," he said, unconsciously glancing round the room to be
sure they were alone, "that young Sennett is a little too much about the
house?"
Blake stared at him.
"Of course, we know it is all right--as nice a young fellow as ever
lived--and Edith--and all that. Of course, it's absurd, but--"
"But what?"
"Well, people will talk."
"What do they say?"
The other shrugged his shoulders.
Blake rose. He had an ugly look when angry, and his language was apt to
be coarse.
"Tell them to mind their own business, and leave me and my wife alone."
That was the sense of what he said; he expressed himself at greater
length, and in stronger language.
"But, my dear Blake," urged Mr. Eppington, "for your own sake, is it
wise? There was a sort of boy and girl attachment between them--nothing
of any moment, but all that gives colour to gossip. Forgive me, but I am
her father; I do not like to hear my child talked about."
"Then don't open your ears to the chatter of a pack of fools," replied
his son-in-law roughly. But the next instant a softer expression passed
over his face, and he laid his hand on the older man's arm.
"Perhaps there are many more, but there's one good woman in the world,"
he said, "and that's your daughter. Come and tell me that the Bank of
England is getting shaky on its legs, and I'll listen to you."
But the stronger the faith, the deeper strike the roots of suspicion.
Blake said no further word on the subject, and Sennett was as welcome as
before. But Edith, looking up suddenly, would sometimes find her
husband's eyes fixed on her with a troubled look as of some dumb creature
trying to understand; and often he would slip out of the house of an
evening by himself, returning home hours afterwards, tired and
mud-stained.
He made attempts to show his affection. This was the most fatal thing he
could have done. Ill-temper, ill-treatment even, she might have borne.
His clumsy caresses, his foolish, halting words of tenderness became a
horror to her. She wondered whether to laugh or to strike at his
upturned face. His tactless devotion filled her life as with some sickly
perfume, stifling her. If only she could be by herself for a little
while to think! But he was with her night and day. There were times
when, as he would cross the room towards her, he grew monstrous until he
towered above her, a formless thing such as children dream of. And she
would sit with her lips tight pressed, clutching the chair lest she
should start up screaming.
Her only thought was to escape from him. One day she hastily packed a
few necessaries in a small hand-bag and crept unperceived from the house.
She drove to Charing Cross, but the Continental Express did not leave for
an hour, and she had time to think.
Of what use was it? Her slender stock of money would soon be gone; how
could she live? He would find her and follow her. It was all so
hopeless!
Suddenly a fierce desire of life seized hold of her, the angry answer of
her young blood to despair. Why should she die, never having known what
it was to live? Why should she prostrate herself before this juggernaut
of other people's respectability? Joy called to her; only her own
cowardice stayed her from stretching forth her hand and gathering it. She
returned home a different woman, for hope had come to her.
A week later the butler entered the dining room, and handed Blake a
letter addressed to him in his wife's handwriting. He took it without a
word, as though he had been expecting it. It simply told him that she
had left him for ever.
* * * * *
The world is small, and money commands many services. Sennett had gone
out for a stroll; Edith was left in the tiny _salon_ of their
_appartement_ at Fecamp. It was the third day of their arrival in the
town. The door was opened and closed, and Blake stood before her.
She rose frightened, but by a motion he reassured her. There was a quiet
dignity about the man that was strange to her.
"Why have you followed me?" she asked.
"I want you to return home."
"Home!" she cried. "You must be mad. Do you not know--"
He interrupted her vehemently. "I know nothing. I wish to know nothing.
Go back to London at once. I have made everything right; no one
suspects. I shall not be there; you will never see me again, and you
will have an opportunity of undoing your mistake--our mistake."
She listened. Hers was not a great nature, and the desire to obtain
happiness without paying the price was strong upon her. As for his good
name, what could that matter? he urged. People would only say that he
had gone back to the evil from which he had emerged, and few would be
surprised. His life would go on much as it had done, and she would only
be pitied.
She quite understood his plan; it seemed mean of her to accept his
proposal, and she argued feebly against it. But he overcame all her
objections. For his own sake, he told her, he would prefer the scandal
to be connected with his name rather than with that of his wife. As he
unfolded his scheme, she began to feel that in acquiescing she was
conferring a favour. It was not the first deception he had arranged for
the public, and he appeared to be half in love with his own cleverness.
She even found herself laughing at his mimicry of what this acquaintance
and that would say. Her spirits rose; the play that might have been a
painful drama seemed turning out an amusing farce.
The thing settled, he rose to go, and held out his hand. As she looked
up into his face, something about the line of his lips smote upon her.
"You will be well rid of me," she said. "I have brought you nothing but
trouble."
"Oh, trouble," he answered. "If that were all! A man can bear trouble."
"What else?" she asked.
His eyes travelled aimlessly about the room. "They taught me a lot of
things when I was a boy," he said, "my mother and others--they meant
well--which as I grew older I discovered to be lies; and so I came to
think that nothing good was true, and that everything and everybody was
evil. And then--"
His wandering eyes came round to her and he broke off abruptly. "Good-
bye," he said, and the next moment he was gone.
She sat wondering for a while what he had meant. Then Sennett returned,
and the words went out of her head.
* * * * *
A good deal of sympathy was felt for Mrs. Blake. The man had a charming
wife; he might have kept straight; but as his friends added, "Blake
always was a cad."