________________________________________________
_ Ernest told Ellen of his difficulty about finding employment.
"But what do you think of going into a shop for, my dear," said
Ellen. "Why not take a little shop yourself?"
Ernest asked how much this would cost. Ellen told him that he might
take a house in some small street, say near the "Elephant and
Castle," for 17s. or 18s. a week, and let off the two top floors for
10s., keeping the back parlour and shop for themselves. If he could
raise five or six pounds to buy some second-hand clothes to stock
the shop with, they could mend them and clean them, and she could
look after the women's clothes while he did the men's. Then he
could mend and make, if he could get the orders.
They could soon make a business of 2 pounds a week in this way; she
had a friend who began like that and had now moved to a better shop,
where she made 5 pounds or 6 pounds a week at least--and she, Ellen,
had done the greater part of the buying and selling herself.
Here was a new light indeed. It was as though he had got his 5000
pounds back again all of a sudden, and perhaps ever so much more
later on into the bargain. Ellen seemed more than ever to be his
good genius.
She went out and got a few rashers of bacon for his and her
breakfast. She cooked them much more nicely than he had been able
to do, and laid breakfast for him and made coffee, and some nice
brown toast. Ernest had been his own cook and housemaid for the
last few days and had not given himself satisfaction. Here he
suddenly found himself with someone to wait on him again. Not only
had Ellen pointed out to him how he could earn a living when no one
except himself had known how to advise him, but here she was so
pretty and smiling, looking after even his comforts, and restoring
him practically in all respects that he much cared about to the
position which he had lost--or rather putting him in one that he
already liked much better. No wonder he was radiant when he came to
explain his plans to me.
He had some difficulty in telling all that had happened. He
hesitated, blushed, hummed and hawed. Misgivings began to cross his
mind when he found himself obliged to tell his story to someone
else. He felt inclined to slur things over, but I wanted to get at
the facts, so I helped him over the bad places, and questioned him
till I had got out pretty nearly the whole story as I have given it
above.
I hope I did not show it, but I was very angry. I had begun to like
Ernest. I don't know why, but I never have heard that any young man
to whom I had become attached was going to get married without
hating his intended instinctively, though I had never seen her; I
have observed that most bachelors feel the same thing, though we are
generally at some pains to hide the fact. Perhaps it is because we
know we ought to have got married ourselves. Ordinarily we say we
are delighted--in the present case I did not feel obliged to do
this, though I made an effort to conceal my vexation. That a young
man of much promise who was heir also to what was now a handsome
fortune, should fling himself away upon such a person as Ellen was
quite too provoking, and the more so because of the unexpectedness
of the whole affair.
I begged him not to marry Ellen yet--not at least until he had known
her for a longer time. He would not hear of it; he had given his
word, and if he had not given it he should go and give it at once.
I had hitherto found him upon most matters singularly docile and
easy to manage, but on this point I could do nothing with him. His
recent victory over his father and mother had increased his
strength, and I was nowhere. I would have told him of his true
position, but I knew very well that this would only make him more
bent on having his own way--for with so much money why should he not
please himself? I said nothing, therefore, on this head, and yet
all that I could urge went for very little with one who believed
himself to be an artisan or nothing.
Really from his own standpoint there was nothing very outrageous in
what he was doing. He had known and been very fond of Ellen years
before. He knew her to come of respectable people, and to have
borne a good character, and to have been universally liked at
Battersby. She was then a quick, smart, hard-working girl--and a
very pretty one. When at last they met again she was on her best
behaviour, in fact, she was modesty and demureness itself. What
wonder, then, that his imagination should fail to realise the
changes that eight years must have worked? He knew too much against
himself, and was too bankrupt in love to be squeamish; if Ellen had
been only what he thought her, and if his prospects had been in
reality no better than he believed they were, I do not know that
there is anything much more imprudent in what Ernest proposed than
there is in half the marriages that take place every day.
There was nothing for it, however, but to make the best of the
inevitable, so I wished my young friend good fortune, and told him
he could have whatever money he wanted to start his shop with, if
what he had in hand was not sufficient. He thanked me, asked me to
be kind enough to let him do all my mending and repairing, and to
get him any other like orders that I could, and left me to my own
reflections.
I was even more angry when he was gone than I had been while he was
with me. His frank, boyish face had beamed with a happiness that
had rarely visited it. Except at Cambridge he had hardly known what
happiness meant, and even there his life had been clouded as of a
man for whom wisdom at the greatest of its entrances was quite shut
out. I had seen enough of the world and of him to have observed
this, but it was impossible, or I thought it had been impossible,
for me to have helped him.
Whether I ought to have tried to help him or not I do not know, but
I am sure that the young of all animals often do want help upon
matters about which anyone would say a priori that there should be
no difficulty. One would think that a young seal would want no
teaching how to swim, nor yet a bird to fly, but in practice a young
seal drowns if put out of its depth before its parents have taught
it to swim; and so again, even the young hawk must be taught to fly
before it can do so.
I grant that the tendency of the times is to exaggerate the good
which teaching can do, but in trying to teach too much, in most
matters, we have neglected others in respect of which a little
sensible teaching would do no harm.
I know it is the fashion to say that young people must find out
things for themselves, and so they probably would if they had fair
play to the extent of not having obstacles put in their way. But
they seldom have fair play; as a general rule they meet with foul
play, and foul play from those who live by selling them stones made
into a great variety of shapes and sizes so as to form a tolerable
imitation of bread.
Some are lucky enough to meet with few obstacles, some are plucky
enough to over-ride them, but in the greater number of cases, if
people are saved at all they are saved so as by fire.
While Ernest was with me Ellen was looking out for a shop on the
south side of the Thames near the "Elephant and Castle," which was
then almost a new and a very rising neighbourhood. By one o'clock
she had found several from which a selection was to be made, and
before night the pair had made their choice.
Ernest brought Ellen to me. I did not want to see her, but could
not well refuse. He had laid out a few of his shillings upon her
wardrobe, so that she was neatly dressed, and, indeed, she looked
very pretty and so good that I could hardly be surprised at Ernest's
infatuation when the other circumstances of the case were taken into
consideration. Of course we hated one another instinctively from
the first moment we set eyes on one another, but we each told Ernest
that we had been most favourably impressed.
Then I was taken to see the shop. An empty house is like a stray
dog or a body from which life has departed. Decay sets in at once
in every part of it, and what mould and wind and weather would
spare, street boys commonly destroy. Ernest's shop in its
untenanted state was a dirty unsavoury place enough. The house was
not old, but it had been run up by a jerry-builder and its
constitution had no stamina whatever. It was only by being kept
warm and quiet that it would remain in health for many months
together. Now it had been empty for some weeks and the cats had got
in by night, while the boys had broken the windows by day. The
parlour floor was covered with stones and dirt, and in the area was
a dead dog which had been killed in the street and been thrown down
into the first unprotected place that could be found. There was a
strong smell throughout the house, but whether it was bugs, or rats,
or cats, or drains, or a compound of all four, I could not
determine. The sashes did not fit, the flimsy doors hung badly; the
skirting was gone in several places, and there were not a few holes
in the floor; the locks were loose, and paper was torn and dirty;
the stairs were weak and one felt the treads give as one went up
them.
Over and above these drawbacks the house had an ill name, by reason
of the fact that the wife of the last occupant had hanged herself in
it not very many weeks previously. She had set down a bloater
before the fire for her husband's tea, and had made him a round of
toast. She then left the room as though about to return to it
shortly, but instead of doing so she went into the back kitchen and
hanged herself without a word. It was this which had kept the house
empty so long in spite of its excellent position as a corner shop.
The last tenant had left immediately after the inquest, and if the
owner had had it done up then people would have got over the tragedy
that had been enacted in it, but the combination of bad condition
and bad fame had hindered many from taking it, who like Ellen, could
see that it had great business capabilities. Almost anything would
have sold there, but it happened also that there was no second-hand
clothes shop in close proximity so that everything combined in its
favour, except its filthy state and its reputation.
When I saw it, I thought I would rather die than live in such an
awful place--but then I had been living in the Temple for the last
five and twenty years. Ernest was lodging in Laystall Street and
had just come out of prison; before this he had lived in Ashpit
Place so that this house had no terrors for him provided he could
get it done up. The difficulty was that the landlord was hard to
move in this respect. It ended in my finding the money to do
everything that was wanted, and taking a lease of the house for five
years at the same rental as that paid by the last occupant. I then
sublet it to Ernest, of course taking care that it was put more
efficiently into repair than his landlord was at all likely to have
put it.
A week later I called and found everything so completely transformed
that I should hardly have recognised the house. All the ceilings
had been whitewashed, all the rooms papered, the broken glass hacked
out and reinstated, the defective wood-work renewed, all the sashes,
cupboards and doors had been painted. The drains had been
thoroughly overhauled, everything in fact, that could be done had
been done, and the rooms now looked as cheerful as they had been
forbidding when I had last seen them. The people who had done the
repairs were supposed to have cleaned the house down before leaving,
but Ellen had given it another scrub from top to bottom herself
after they were gone, and it was as clean as a new pin. I almost
felt as though I could have lived in it myself, and as for Ernest,
he was in the seventh heaven. He said it was all my doing and
Ellen's.
There was already a counter in the shop and a few fittings, so that
nothing now remained but to get some stock and set them out for
sale. Ernest said he could not begin better than by selling his
clerical wardrobe and his books, for though the shop was intended
especially for the sale of second-hand clothes, yet Ellen said there
was no reason why they should not sell a few books too; so a
beginning was to be made by selling the books he had had at school
and college at about one shilling a volume, taking them all round,
and I have heard him say that he learned more that proved of
practical use to him through stocking his books on a bench in front
of his shop and selling them, than he had done from all the years of
study which he had bestowed upon their contents.
For the enquiries that were made of him whether he had such and such
a book taught him what he could sell and what he could not; how much
he could get for this, and how much for that. Having made ever such
a little beginning with books, he took to attending book sales as
well as clothes sales, and ere long this branch of his business
became no less important than the tailoring, and would, I have no
doubt, have been the one which he would have settled down to
exclusively, if he had been called upon to remain a tradesman; but
this is anticipating.
I made a contribution and a stipulation. Ernest wanted to sink the
gentleman completely, until such time as he could work his way up
again. If he had been left to himself he would have lived with
Ellen in the shop back parlour and kitchen, and have let out both
the upper floors according to his original programme. I did not
want him, however, to cut himself adrift from music, letters and
polite life, and feared that unless he had some kind of den into
which he could retire he would ere long become the tradesman and
nothing else. I therefore insisted on taking the first floor front
and back myself, and furnishing them with the things which had been
left at Mrs Jupp's. I bought these things of him for a small sum
and had them moved into his present abode.
I went to Mrs Jupp's to arrange all this, as Ernest did not like
going to Ashpit Place. I had half expected to find the furniture
sold and Mrs Jupp gone, but it was not so; with all her faults the
poor old woman was perfectly honest.
I told her that Pryer had taken all Ernest's money and run away with
it. She hated Pryer. "I never knew anyone," she exclaimed, "as
white-livered in the face as that Pryer; he hasn't got an upright
vein in his whole body. Why, all that time when he used to come
breakfasting with Mr Pontifex morning after morning, it took me to a
perfect shadow the way he carried on. There was no doing anything
to please him right. First I used to get them eggs and bacon, and
he didn't like that; and then I got him a bit of fish, and he didn't
like that, or else it was too dear, and you know fish is dearer than
ever; and then I got him a bit of German, and he said it rose on
him; then I tried sausages, and he said they hit him in the eye
worse even than German; oh! how I used to wander my room and fret
about it inwardly and cry for hours, and all about them paltry
breakfasts--and it wasn't Mr Pontifex; he'd like anything that
anyone chose to give him.
"And so the piano's to go," she continued. "What beautiful tunes Mr
Pontifex did play upon it, to be sure; and there was one I liked
better than any I ever heard. I was in the room when he played it
once and when I said, 'Oh, Mr Pontifex, that's the kind of woman I
am,' he said, 'No, Mrs Jupp, it isn't, for this tune is old, but no
one can say you are old.' But, bless you, he meant nothing by it,
it was only his mucky flattery."
Like myself, she was vexed at his getting married. She didn't like
his being married, and she didn't like his not being married--but,
anyhow, it was Ellen's fault, not his, and she hoped he would be
happy. "But after all," she concluded, "it ain't you and it ain't
me, and it ain't him and it ain't her. It's what you must call the
fortunes of matterimony, for there ain't no other word for it."
In the course of the afternoon the furniture arrived at Ernest's new
abode. In the first floor we placed the piano, table, pictures,
bookshelves, a couple of arm-chairs, and all the little household
gods which he had brought from Cambridge. The back room was
furnished exactly as his bedroom at Ashpit Place had been--new
things being got for the bridal apartment downstairs. These two
first-floor rooms I insisted on retaining as my own, but Ernest was
to use them whenever he pleased; he was never to sublet even the
bedroom, but was to keep it for himself in case his wife should be
ill at any time, or in case he might be ill himself.
In less than a fortnight from the time of his leaving prison all
these arrangements had been completed, and Ernest felt that he had
again linked himself on to the life which he had led before his
imprisonment--with a few important differences, however, which were
greatly to his advantage. He was no longer a clergyman; he was
about to marry a woman to whom he was much attached, and he had
parted company for ever with his father and mother.
True, he had lost all his money, his reputation, and his position as
a gentleman; he had, in fact, had to burn his house down in order to
get his roast sucking pig; but if asked whether he would rather be
as he was now or as he was on the day before his arrest, he would
not have had a moment's hesitation in preferring his present to his
past. If his present could only have been purchased at the expense
of all that he had gone through, it was still worth purchasing at
the price, and he would go through it all again if necessary. The
loss of the money was the worst, but Ellen said she was sure they
would get on, and she knew all about it. As for the loss of
reputation--considering that he had Ellen and me left, it did not
come to much.
I saw the house on the afternoon of the day on which all was
finished, and there remained nothing but to buy some stock and begin
selling. When I was gone, after he had had his tea, he stole up to
his castle--the first floor front. He lit his pipe and sat down to
the piano. He played Handel for an hour or so, and then set himself
to the table to read and write. He took all his sermons and all the
theological works he had begun to compose during the time he had
been a clergyman and put them in the fire; as he saw them consume he
felt as though he had got rid of another incubus. Then he took up
some of the little pieces he had begun to write during the latter
part of his undergraduate life at Cambridge, and began to cut them
about and re-write them. As he worked quietly at these till he
heard the clock strike ten and it was time to go to bed, he felt
that he was now not only happy but supremely happy.
Next day Ellen took him to Debenham's auction rooms, and they
surveyed the lots of clothes which were hung up all round the
auction room to be viewed. Ellen had had sufficient experience to
know about how much each lot ought to fetch; she overhauled lot
after lot, and valued it; in a very short time Ernest himself began
to have a pretty fair idea what each lot should go for, and before
the morning was over valued a dozen lots running at prices about
which Ellen said he would not hurt if he could get them for that.
So far from disliking this work or finding it tedious, he liked it
very much, indeed he would have liked anything which did not overtax
his physical strength, and which held out a prospect of bringing him
in money. Ellen would not let him buy anything on the occasion of
this sale; she said he had better see one sale first and watch how
prices actually went. So at twelve o'clock when the sale began, he
saw the lots sold which he and Ellen had marked, and by the time the
sale was over he knew enough to be able to bid with safety whenever
he should actually want to buy. Knowledge of this sort is very
easily acquired by anyone who is in bona fide want of it.
But Ellen did not want him to buy at auctions--not much at least at
present. Private dealing, she said, was best. If I, for example,
had any cast-off clothes, he was to buy them from my laundress, and
get a connection with other laundresses, to whom he might give a
trifle more than they got at present for whatever clothes their
masters might give them, and yet make a good profit. If gentlemen
sold their things, he was to try and get them to sell to him. He
flinched at nothing; perhaps he would have flinched if he had had
any idea how outre his proceedings were, but the very ignorance of
the world which had ruined him up till now, by a happy irony began
to work its own cure. If some malignant fairy had meant to curse
him in this respect, she had overdone her malice. He did not know
he was doing anything strange. He only knew that he had no money,
and must provide for himself, a wife, and a possible family. More
than this, he wanted to have some leisure in an evening, so that he
might read and write and keep up his music. If anyone would show
him how he could do better than he was doing, he should be much
obliged to them, but to himself it seemed that he was doing
sufficiently well; for at the end of the first week the pair found
they had made a clear profit of 3 pounds. In a few weeks this had
increased to 4 pounds, and by the New Year they had made a profit of
5 pounds in one week.
Ernest had by this time been married some two months, for he had
stuck to his original plan of marrying Ellen on the first day he
could legally do so. This date was a little delayed by the change
of abode from Laystall Street to Blackfriars, but on the first day
that it could be done it was done. He had never had more than 250
pounds a year, even in the times of his affluence, so that a profit
of 5 pounds a week, if it could be maintained steadily, would place
him where he had been as far as income went, and, though he should
have to feed two mouths instead of one, yet his expenses in other
ways were so much curtailed by his changed social position, that,
take it all round, his income was practically what it had been a
twelvemonth before. The next thing to do was to increase it, and
put by money.
Prosperity depends, as we all know, in great measure upon energy and
good sense, but it also depends not a little upon pure luck--that is
to say, upon connections which are in such a tangle that it is more
easy to say that they do not exist, than to try to trace them. A
neighbourhood may have an excellent reputation as being likely to be
a rising one, and yet may become suddenly eclipsed by another, which
no one would have thought so promising. A fever hospital may divert
the stream of business, or a new station attract it; so little,
indeed, can be certainly known, that it is better not to try to know
more than is in everybody's mouth, and to leave the rest to chance.
Luck, which certainly had not been too kind to my hero hitherto, now
seemed to have taken him under her protection. The neighbourhood
prospered, and he with it. It seemed as though he no sooner bought
a thing and put it into his shop, than it sold with a profit of from
thirty to fifty per cent. He learned book-keeping, and watched his
accounts carefully, following up any success immediately; he began
to buy other things besides clothes--such as books, music, odds and
ends of furniture, etc. Whether it was luck or business aptitude,
or energy, or the politeness with which he treated all his
customers, I cannot say--but to the surprise of no one more than
himself, he went ahead faster than he had anticipated, even in his
wildest dreams, and by Easter was established in a strong position
as the owner of a business which was bringing him in between four
and five hundred a year, and which he understood how to extend. _
Read next: CHAPTER LXXIII
Read previous: CHAPTER LXXI
Table of content of Way of All Flesh
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book
