The Way of All Flesh | Page 9

Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
fear that for some time we took an interest in the health of everyone in
the village whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely.
Those were the days in which all great things seemed far off, and we were astonished to
find that Napoleon Buonaparte was an actually living person. We had thought such a
great man could only have lived a very long time ago, and here he was after all almost as
it were at our own doors. This lent colour to the view that the Day of Judgement might
indeed be nearer than we had thought, but nurse said that was all right now, and she knew.
In those days the snow lay longer and drifted deeper in the lanes than it does now, and the
milk was sometimes brought in frozen in winter, and we were taken down into the back
kitchen to see it. I suppose there are rectories up and down the country now where the
milk comes in frozen sometimes in winter, and the children go down to wonder at it, but I
never see any frozen milk in London, so I suppose the winters are warmer than they used
to be.

About one year after his wife's death Mr Pontifex also was gathered to his fathers. My
father saw him the day before he died. The old man had a theory about sunsets, and had
had two steps built up against a wall in the kitchen garden on which he used to stand and
watch the sun go down whenever it was clear. My father came on him in the afternoon,
just as the sun was setting, and saw him with his arms resting on the top of the wall
looking towards the sun over a field through which there was a path on which my father
was. My father heard him say "Good-bye, sun; good-bye, sun," as the sun sank, and saw
by his tone and manner that he was feeling very feeble. Before the next sunset he was
gone.
There was no dole. Some of his grandchildren were brought to the funeral and we
remonstrated with them, but did not take much by doing so. John Pontifex, who was a
year older than I was, sneered at penny loaves, and intimated that if I wanted one it must
be because my papa and mamma could not afford to buy me one, whereon I believe we
did something like fighting, and I rather think John Pontifex got the worst of it, but it may
have been the other way. I remember my sister's nurse, for I was just outgrowing nurses
myself, reported the matter to higher quarters, and we were all of us put to some
ignominy, but we had been thoroughly awakened from our dream, and it was long
enough before we could hear the words "penny loaf" mentioned without our ears tingling
with shame. If there had been a dozen doles afterwards we should not have deigned to
touch one of them.
George Pontifex put up a monument to his parents, a plain slab in Paleham church,
inscribed with the following epitaph:-
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN PONTIFEX WHO WAS BORN AUGUST
16TH, 1727, AND DIED FEBRUARY 8, 1812, IN HIS 85TH YEAR, AND OF RUTH
PONTIFEX, HIS WIFE, WHO WAS BORN OCTOBER 13, 1727, AND DIED
JANUARY 10, 1811, IN HER 84TH YEAR. THEY WERE UNOSTENTATIOUS BUT
EXEMPLARY IN THE DISCHARGE OF THEIR RELIGIOUS, MORAL, AND
SOCIAL DUTIES. THIS MONUMENT WAS PLACED BY THEIR ONLY SON.



CHAPTER IV

In a year or two more came Waterloo and the European peace. Then Mr George Pontifex
went abroad more than once. I remember seeing at Battersby in after years the diary
which he kept on the first of these occasions. It is a characteristic document. I felt as I
read it that the author before starting had made up his mind to admire only what he
thought it would be creditable in him to admire, to look at nature and art only through the
spectacles that had been handed down to him by generation after generation of prigs and

impostors. The first glimpse of Mont Blanc threw Mr Pontifex into a conventional
ecstasy. "My feelings I cannot express. I gasped, yet hardly dared to breathe, as I viewed
for the first time the monarch of the mountains. I seemed to fancy the genius seated on
his stupendous throne far above his aspiring brethren and in his solitary might defying the
universe. I was so overcome by my feelings that I was almost bereft of my faculties, and
would not for worlds have spoken after my first exclamation till I found some relief in a
gush of tears. With pain I tore myself
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