They and I

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Jerome Klapka Jerome. They and I

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

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“And what is this place like?” demanded Robin, “this place you have bought.”

“The agent,” I explained, “claims for it that it is capable of improvement. I asked him to what school of architecture he would say it belonged; he said he thought that it must have been a local school, and pointed out – what seems to be the truth – that nowadays they do not build such houses.”

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“I suppose that, with myself, he thought better of it in the end. But I’m tired of having my life turned into one perpetual first of April. This house that I have bought is not my heart’s desire, but about it there are possibilities. We will put in lattice windows, and fuss-up the chimneys. Maybe we will let in a tablet over the front-door, with a date – always looks well: it is a picturesque figure, the old-fashioned five. By the time we have done with it – for all practical purposes – it will be a Tudor manor-house. I have always wanted an old Tudor manor-house. There is no reason, so far as I can see, why there should not be stories connected with this house. Why should not we have a room in which Somebody once slept? We won’t have Queen Elizabeth. I’m tired of Queen Elizabeth. Besides, I don’t believe she’d have been nice. Why not Queen Anne? A quiet, gentle old lady, from all accounts, who would not have given trouble. Or, better still, Shakespeare. He was constantly to and fro between London and Stratford. It would not have been so very much out of his way. ‘The room where Shakespeare slept!’ Why, it’s a new idea. Nobody ever seems to have thought of Shakespeare. There is the four-post bedstead. Your mother never liked it. She will insist, it harbours things. We might hang the wall with scenes from his plays, and have a bust of the old gentleman himself over the door. If I’m left alone and not worried, I’ll probably end by believing that he really did sleep there.”

It is unexplainable, the average woman’s passion for cupboards. In heaven, her first request, I am sure, is always, “Can I have a cupboard?” She would keep her husband and children in cupboards if she had her way: that would be her idea of the perfect home, everybody wrapped up with a piece of camphor in his or her own proper cupboard. I knew a woman once who was happy – for a woman. She lived in a house with twenty-nine cupboards: I think it must have been built by a woman. They were spacious cupboards, many of them, with doors in no way different from other doors. Visitors would wish each other good-night and disappear with their candles into cupboards, staggering out backwards the next moment, looking scared. One poor gentleman, this woman’s husband told me, having to go downstairs again for something he had forgotten, and unable on his return to strike anything else but cupboards, lost heart and finished up the night in a cupboard. At breakfast-time guests would hurry down, and burst open cupboard doors with a cheery “Good-morning.” When that woman was out, nobody in that house ever knew where anything was; and when she came home she herself only knew where it ought to have been. Yet once, when one of those twenty-nine cupboards had to be cleared out temporarily for repairs, she never smiled, her husband told me, for more than three weeks – not till the workmen were out of the house, and that cupboard in working order again. She said it was so confusing, having nowhere to put her things.

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