Anthony John

by Jerome K. Jerome

It was essential that he should earn his living. That seemed to him of tremendous importance. If the world were to be saved it must be saved by all men working together for God. That must be the dream, the goal. He wanted to tell men that the Christ-life could be lived not by the few but by all; not alone by celibates and mendicants—of what use would that be—but by men with wives and children. It must come to be the life of the street, the market-place, the home.

If she would come with him, join her voice with his, tell the people that man and woman could live happily together without this luxury and ostentation for which Youth daily sold its birthright of love and joy, condemned itself to frenzied toil and haunting fear; that life was not a thing of furniture and clothes, of many servants, of fine houses and rich foods; that a man and woman who had known these things could choose to give them up, find comfort and content without them; that having food and raiment there was no need of this savage struggling for more—this greed and covetousness that for so long had pierced the world with many sorrows. If only she would come with him. Together they might light a lamp.

How could he ask her? The mere physical discomforts and privations, it would not be the fear of these that would hold her back. Demand the heroic of her—call upon her, in the name of any cause worth fighting for, to face suffering, death itself, and she would put her hand in his and go with him gladly. She had envied Betty, going out alone to fight starvation and disease amid the terrors of a winter in the Russian steppes.

“I’d have loved to be going with her,” she had told him. “It must be from my mother that it comes to me. Some strange thing happened to her when she was a girl. She would never tell me what, though I knew it had been her trouble all her life. And when she lay dying she drew me down to her, and whispered to me that in her youth God had called to her and she had not obeyed. It was dad and we children that had hindered her. She had married a husband so she could not come.”

She had laughed and kissed him. He remembered the tears in her eyes and the little catch in her voice.

But there was nothing heroic about this thing that he wanted to do. It was the littleness, the meanness of it that would freeze her sympathies. Her sense of humour would rise up against it. Was there no better way of serving Christ than by setting up as a pettifogging solicitor in a little square of faded gentility. And a solicitor of all professions! A calling so eminently suggestive of the Scribe and Pharisee. Was there not danger of the whole thing being smothered under laughter?

And why here in Millsborough where everybody knew him? Where they would be stared at, called after in the street, snapshotted and paragraphed in the local Press; where they would be the laughing stock of the whole town, a nuisance round the neck of all their friends and acquaintances. The boy’s career: he would be the butt of the messroom. Norah’s engagement: it would have to be broken off. What man wants to marry into a family of cranks? Could it serve Christ for His would-be followers to cover themselves with ridicule.

It was just because his going on with his own business had seemed to him the simplest, plainest path before him that he had chosen it. He had thought at one time of asking Matthew Witlock to let him come as his assistant in the workshop. He had retained much of his old skill as a mechanic. With a little practice it would come back to him. He would have enjoyed the work: the swinging of the hammer, the flashing of the sparks, the harmony of hand and brain. His desk had always bored him. The idea had grown upon him. It would have been like going home. He would have met there the little impish lad who had once been himself. Old Wandering Peter would have sat cross-legged upon the bench and talked to him. He would have come across his father, pottering about among the shadows; would have joked with him. Strong kindly Matthew of the dreamy eyes would have been sweet, helpful company. Together they would have listened to the passing footsteps. There, if anywhere, might have come the Master.

It had cost him an effort to dismiss the desire. He so wanted to preach the practical, the rational. We could not all be blacksmiths. We could not all do big things, heroic things. But we could all work for God, wherever and whatever we happened to be; that was the idea he wanted to set going.