The Way of All Flesh | Page 4

the
organ in the church with his own hands, and made a smaller one which he kept in his own
house. He could play as much as he could draw, not very well according to professional
standards, but much better than could have been expected. I myself showed a taste for
music at an early age, and old Mr Pontifex on finding it out, as he soon did, became
partial to me in consequence.
It may be thought that with so many irons in the fire he could hardly be a very thriving
man, but this was not the case. His father had been a day labourer, and he had himself
begun life with no other capital than his good sense and good constitution; now, however,
there was a goodly show of timber about his yard, and a look of solid comfort over his
whole establishment. Towards the close of the eighteenth century and not long before my
father came to Paleham, he had taken a farm of about ninety acres, thus making a
considerable rise in life. Along with the farm there went an old- fashioned but
comfortable house with a charming garden and an orchard. The carpenter's business was
now carried on in one of the outhouses that had once been part of some conventual
buildings, the remains of which could be seen in what was called the Abbey Close. The
house itself, embosomed in honeysuckles and creeping roses, was an ornament to the
whole village, nor were its internal arrangements less exemplary than its outside was
ornamental. Report said that Mrs Pontifex starched the sheets for her best bed, and I can
well believe it.
How well do I remember her parlour half filled with the organ which her husband had
built, and scented with a withered apple or two from the pyrus japonica that grew outside
the house; the picture of the prize ox over the chimney-piece, which Mr Pontifex himself
had painted; the transparency of the man coming to show light to a coach upon a snowy
night, also by Mr Pontifex; the little old man and little old woman who told the weather;
the china shepherd and shepherdess; the jars of feathery flowering grasses with a
peacock's feather or two among them to set them off, and the china bowls full of dead
rose leaves dried with bay salt. All has long since vanished and become a memory, faded
but still fragrant to myself.

Nay, but her kitchen--and the glimpses into a cavernous cellar beyond it, wherefrom
came gleams from the pale surfaces of milk cans, or it may be of the arms and face of a
milkmaid skimming the cream; or again her storeroom, where among other treasures she
kept the famous lipsalve which was one of her especial glories, and of which she would
present a shape yearly to those whom she delighted to honour. She wrote out the recipe
for this and gave it to my mother a year or two before she died, but we could never make
it as she did. When we were children she used sometimes to send her respects to my
mother, and ask leave for us to come and take tea with her. Right well she used to ply us.
As for her temper, we never met such a delightful old lady in our lives; whatever Mr
Pontifex may have had to put up with, we had no cause for complaint, and then Mr
Pontifex would play to us upon the organ, and we would stand round him open-mouthed
and think him the most wonderfully clever man that ever was born, except of course our
papa.
Mrs Pontifex had no sense of humour, at least I can call to mind no signs of this, but her
husband had plenty of fun in him, though few would have guessed it from his appearance.
I remember my father once sent me down to his workship to get some glue, and I
happened to come when old Pontifex was in the act of scolding his boy. He had got the
lad--a pudding-headed fellow--by the ear and was saying, "What? Lost again--smothered
o' wit." (I believe it was the boy who was himself supposed to be a wandering soul, and
who was thus addressed as lost.) "Now, look here, my lad," he continued, "some boys are
born stupid, and thou art one of them; some achieve stupidity--that's thee again, Jim--thou
wast both born stupid and hast greatly increased thy birthright--and some" (and here
came a climax during which the boy's head and ear were swayed from side to side) "have
stupidity thrust upon them, which, if it please the Lord, shall not be thy case, my lad, for I
will thrust stupidity from thee, though I have to box thine