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JEROME K.
JEROME
IDLE THOUGHTS
OF AN IDLE
FELLOW • III
Москва, 2018
УДК 82
ББК 84(0)
Jerome K. Jerome
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow III / J.K. Jerome. – М. :
T8RUGRAM / Original, 2018. – 118 с. – (Top 100 Classic Books)
ISBN 978-5-521-08039-7
Jerome Klapka Jerome was an English writer and humourist.
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow is a collection of humorous and
entertaining essays. These are amusing thoughts on all aspects
of life, from love to poverty, vanity to ambition, babies to cats
and dogs.
УДК 82
ББК 84(0)
BIC FC
BISAC FIC004000
© T8RUGRAM, оформление, 2018
ISBN 978-5-521-08039-7 © Original, 2018
CONTENTS
ON THE MINDING OF
OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
ON THE TIME WASTED IN LOOKING BEFORE
ONE LEAPS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
ON THE NOBILITY OF OURSELVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
ON THE MOTHERLINESS OF MAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
ON THE INADVISABILITY
OF FOLLOWING ADVICE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
ON THE PLAYING OF MARCHES AT
THE FUNERALS OF MARIONETTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102
ON THE MINDING OF OTHER
PEOPLE’S BUSINESS
I wa lked one bright September morning in the Strand.
I love London best in the autumn. Then only can one see the
gleam of its white pavements, the bold, unbroken outline of
its streets. I love the cool vistas one comes across of mornings
in the parks, the soft twilights that linger in the empty byestreets. In June the restaurant manager is off-hand with me;
I feel I am but in his way. In August he spreads for me the
table by the window, pours out for me my wine with his own
fat hands. I cannot doubt his regard for me: my foolish jealousies are stilled. Do I care for a drive after dinner through
the caressing night air, I can climb the omnibus stair without
a preliminary fi ght upon the curb, can sIt with easy conscience
and unsquashed body, not feeling I have deprived some hot,
tired woman of a seat. Do I desire the play, no harsh, forbidding “House full” board repels me from the door. During her
season, London, a harassed hostess, has no time for us, her intimates. Her rooms are overcrowded, her servants overworked,
her dinners hurriedly cooked, her tone insincere. In the spring,
to be truthful, the great lady condescends to be somewhat vulgar – noisy and ostentatious. Not till the guests are departed is
she herself again, the London that we, her children, love.
114
5
THE SECOND THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW
JEROME K. JEROME
Have you, gentle Reader, ever seen London – not the London of the waking day, coated with crawling life, as a blossom
with blight, but the London of the morning, freed from her
rags, the patient city, clad in mists? Get you up with the dawn
one Sunday in summer time. Wake none else, but creep down
stealthily into the kitchen, and make your own tea and toast.
Be careful you stumble not over the cat. She will worm
herself insidiously between your legs. It is her way; she means
It in friendship. Neither bark your shins against the coal-box.
Why the kitchen coal-box has its fi xed place in the direct line
between the kitchen door and the gas-bracket I cannot say.
I merely know It as an universal law; and I would that you escaped that coal-box, lest the frame of mind I desire for you on
this Sabbath morning be dissipated.
A spoon to stir your tea, I fear you must dispense with.
Knives and forks you will discover in plenty; blacking brushes
you will put your hand upon in every drawer; of emery paper,
did one require it, there are reams; but It is a point with every
housekeeper that the spoons be hidden in a different place
each night. If anybody excepting herself can fi nd them in the
morning, It is a slur upon her. No matter, a stick of fi rewood,
sharpened at one end, makes an excellent substitute.
Your breakfast done, turn out the gas, remount the stairs
quietly, open gently the front door and slip out. You will fi nd
yourself in an unknown land. A strange city grown round you
in the night.
The sweet long streets lie silent in sunlight. Not a living
thing is to be seen save some lean Tom that slinks from his gutter feast as you approach. From some tree there will sound per-
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JEROME K. JEROME
IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • III
haps a fretful chirp: but the London sparrow is no early riser; he
is but talking in his sleep. The slow tramp of unseen policeman
draws near or dies away. The clatter of your own footsteps goes
with you, troubling you. You fi nd yourself trying to walk softly,
as one does in echoing cathedrals. A voice is everywhere about
you whispering to you “Hush.” Is this million-breasted City
then some tender Artemis, seeking to keep her babes asleep?
“Hush, you careless wayfarer; do not waken them. Walk lighter;
they are so tired, these myriad children of mine, sleeping in
my thousand arms. They are over-worked and over-worried; so
many of them are sick, so many fretful, many of them, alas, so
full of naughtiness. But all of them so tired. Hush! they worry
me with their noise and riot when they are awake. They are so
good now they are asleep. Walk lightly, let them rest.”
Where the ebbing tide fl ows softly through worn arches to
the sea, you may hear the stone-faced City talking to the restless waters: “Why will you never stay with me? Why come but
to go?”
“I cannot say, I do not understand. From the deep sea I come,
but only as a bird loosed from a child’s hand with a cord. When
she calls I must return.”
“It is so with these children of mine. They come to me,
I know not whence. I nurse them for a little while, till a hand
I do not see plucks them back. And others take their place.”
Through the still air there passes a ripple of sound. The
sleeping City stirs with a faint sigh. A distant milk-cart rattling by raises a thousand echoes; It is the vanguard of a yoked
army. Soon from every street there rises the soothing cry,
“Mee’hilk – mee’hilk.”
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THE SECOND THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW
JEROME K. JEROME
London like some Gargantuan babe, is awake, crying for its
milk. These be the white-smocked nurses hastening with its
morning nourishment. The early church bells ring. “You have
had your milk, little London. Now come and say your prayers.
Another week has just begun, baby London. God knows what
will happen, say your prayers.”
One by one the little creatures creep from behind the
blinds into the streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished
from the City’s face. The fretful noises of the day have come
again. Silence, her lover of the night, kisses her stone lips, and
steals away. And you, gentle Reader, return home, garlanded
with the self-suffi ciency of the early riser.
But It was of a certain week-day morning, in the Strand
that I was thinking. I was standing outside Gatti’s Restaurant,
where I had just breakfasted, listening leisurely to an argument between an indignant lady passenger, presumably of
Irish extraction, and an omnibus conductor.
“For what d’ye want thin to paint Putney on ye’r bus, if ye
don’t go to Putney?” said the lady.
“We do go to Putney,” said the conductor.
“Thin why did ye put me out here?”
“I didn’t put you out, yer got out.”
“Shure, didn’t the gintleman in the corner tell me I was
comin’ further away from Putney ivery minit?”
“Wal, and so yer was.”
“Thin whoy didn’t you tell me?”
“How was I to know yer wanted to go to Putney? Yer sings
out Putney, and I stops and in yer jumps.”
“And for what d’ye think I called out Putney thin?”
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JEROME K. JEROME
IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW • III
“’Cause it’s my name, or rayther the bus’s name. This ’ere is
a Putney.”
“How can It be a Putney whin It isn’t goin’ to Putney, ye
gomerhawk?”
“Ain’t you an Hirishwoman?” retorted the conductor.
“Course yer are. But yer aren’t always goin’ to Ireland. We’re
goin’ to Putney in time, only we’re a-going to Liverpool Street
fust. ’Igher up, Jim.”
The bus moved on, and I was about cross the road, when
a man, muttering savagely to himself, walked into me. He
would have swept past me had I not, recognizing him, arrested
him. It was my friend B – , a busy editor of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared able to struggle
out of his abstraction, and remember himself. “Halloo,” he
then said, “who would have thought of seeing you here?”
“To judge by the way you were walking,” I replied, “one
would imagine the Strand the last place in which you expected
to see any human being. Do you ever walk into a short-tempered, muscular man?”
“Did I walk into you?” he asked surprised.
“Well, not right in,” I answered, “I if we are to be literal.
You walked on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you
would have walked over me.”
“It is this confounded Christmas business,” he explained.
“It drives me off my head.”
“I have heard Christmas advanced as an excuse for many
things,” I replied, “but not early in September.”
“Oh, you know what I mean,” he answered, “we are in the
middle of our Christmas number. I am working day and night
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THE SECOND THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW
JEROME K. JEROME
upon it. By the bye,” he added, “that puts me in mind. I am arranging a symposium, and I want you to join. ‘Should Christmas,’” – I interrupted him.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “I commenced my journalistic career when I was eighteen, and I have continued It at intervals
ever since. I have written about Christmas from the sentimental point of view; I have analyzed It from the philosophical
point of view; and I have scarifi ed It from the sarcastic standpoint. I have treated Christmas humorously for the Comics,
and sympathetically for the Provincial Weeklies. I have said
all that is worth saying on the subject of Christmas – maybe
a trifl e more. I have told the new-fashioned Christmas story –
you know the sort of thing: your heroine tries to understand
herself, and, failing, runs off with the man who began as the
hero; your good woman turns out to be really bad when one
comes to know her; while the villain, the only decent person
in the story, dies with an enigmatic sentence on his lips that
looks as if It meant something, but which you yourself would
be sorry to have to explain. I have also written the old-fashioned Christmas story – you know that also: you begin with
a good old-fashioned snowstorm; you have a good old-fashioned squire, and he lives in a good old-fashioned Hall; you
work in a good old-fashioned murder; and end up with a good
old-fashioned Christmas dinner. I have gathered Christmas
guests together round the crackling logs to tell ghost stories to
each other on Christmas Eve, while without the wind howled,
as It always does on these occasions, at its proper cue. I have
sent children to Heaven on Christmas Eve – It must be quite
a busy time for St. Peter, Christmas morning, so many good
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