The Way of All Flesh | Page 5

ears in doing so," but I did not
see that the old man really did box Jim's ears, or do more than pretend to frighten him, for
the two understood one another perfectly well. Another time I remember hearing him call
the village rat-catcher by saying, "Come hither, thou three-days-and- three-nights, thou,"
alluding, as I afterwards learned, to the rat- catcher's periods of intoxication; but I will tell
no more of such trifles. My father's face would always brighten when old Pontifex's name
was mentioned. "I tell you, Edward," he would say to me, "old Pontifex was not only an
able man, but he was one of the very ablest men that ever I knew."
This was more than I as a young man was prepared to stand. "My dear father," I
answered, "what did he do? He could draw a little, but could he to save his life have got a
picture into the Royal Academy exhibition? He built two organs and could play the
Minuet in Samson on one and the March in Scipio on the other; he was a good carpenter
and a bit of a wag; he was a good old fellow enough, but why make him out so much
abler than he was?"
"My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the work in
connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a
picture into the Exhibition? Would a single one of those frescoes we went to see when we
were at Padua have the remotest chance of being hung, if it were sent in for exhibition
now? Why, the Academy people would be so outraged that they would not even write to
poor Giotto to tell him to come and take his fresco away. Phew!" continued he, waxing

warm, "if old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he would have done all that
Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto's chances he would have done
all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I will
undertake to say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life."
"But," said I, "we cannot judge people with so many 'ifs.' If old Pontifex had lived in
Giotto's time he might have been another Giotto, but he did not live in Giotto's time."
"I tell you, Edward," said my father with some severity, "we must judge men not so much
by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man
has done enough either in painting, music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I
might trust him in an emergency he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually
put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to speak, upon the
canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and
aimed at. If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be loveable which I hold
loveable myself I ask no more; his grammar may have been imperfect, but still I have
understood him; he and I are en rapport; and I say again, Edward, that old Pontifex was
not only an able man, but one of the very ablest men I ever knew.
Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to silence. Somehow or
other my sisters always did eye me to silence when I differed from my father.
"Talk of his successful son," snorted my father, whom I had fairly roused. "He is not fit to
black his father's boots. He has his thousands of pounds a year, while his father had
perhaps three thousand shillings a year towards the end of his life. He IS a successful
man; but his father, hobbling about Paleham Street in his grey worsted stockings, broad
brimmed hat and brown swallow-tailed coat was worth a hundred of George Pontifexes,
for all his carriages and horses and the airs he gives himself."
"But yet," he added, "George Pontifex is no fool either." And this brings us to the second
generation of the Pontifex family with whom we need concern ourselves.



CHAPTER II

Old Mr Pontifex had married in the year 1750, but for fifteen years his wife bore no
children. At the end of that time Mrs Pontifex astonished the whole village by showing
unmistakable signs of a disposition to present her husband with an heir or heiress. Hers
had long ago been considered a hopeless case, and when on consulting