Paul Kelver

Jerome Klapka Jerome

Jerome K. Jerome

Paul Kelver

PROLOGUE.

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR SEEKS TO CAST THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS STORY UPON ANOTHER

At the corner of a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East End of London – one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end, suggesting petrified diagrams proving dead problems – stands a house that ever draws me to it; so that often, when least conscious of my footsteps, I awake to find myself hurrying through noisy, crowded thoroughfares, where flaring naphtha lamps illumine fierce, patient, leaden-coloured faces; through dim-lit, empty streets, where monstrous shadows come and go upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow, noisome streets, where the gutters swarm with children, and each ever-open doorway vomits riot; past reeking corners, and across waste places, till at last I reach the dreary goal of my memory-driven desire, and, coming to a halt beside the broken railings, find rest.

The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still a country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a barren patch of stones and dust where clothes – it is odd any one should have thought of washing – hang in perpetuity; while about the door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has left exposed in all its naked insincerity.

Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the hoarse, wailing cry of “Coals – any coals – three and sixpence a sack – co-o-o-als!” chanted in a tone that absence of response has stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the unpitying sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I pass.

Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws her veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse, sought out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the teeming life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the flickering flare from the “King of Prussia” opposite extinguished, will it talk with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding me of many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come the well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not seeing me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as two cronies, turning the torn leaves of some old album where the faded portraits in forgotten fashions, speak together in low tones of those now dead or scattered, with now a smile and now a sigh, and many an “Ah me!” or “Dear, dear!”

This bent, worn man, coming towards us with quick impatient steps, which yet cease every fifty yards or so, while he pauses, leaning heavily upon his high Malacca cane: “It is a handsome face, is it not?” I ask, as I gaze upon it, shadow framed.

“Aye, handsome enough,” answers the old House; “and handsomer still it must have been before you and I knew it, before mean care had furrowed it with fretful lines.”

“I never could make out,” continues the old House, musingly, “whom you took after; for they were a handsome pair, your father and your mother, though Lord! what a couple of children!”

“Children!” I say in surprise, for my father must have been past five and thirty before the House could have known him, and my mother’s face is very close to mine, in the darkness, so that I see the many grey hairs mingling with the bonny brown.

“Children,” repeats the old House, irritably, so it seems to me, not liking, perhaps, its opinions questioned, a failing common to old folk; “the most helpless pair of children I ever set eyes upon. Who but a child, I should like to know, w