The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler (book club recommendations .TXT) 📖

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 woodwork 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 secondhand 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