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_ When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I remember an
old man who wore knee-breeches and worsted stockings, and who used
to hobble about the street of our village with the help of a stick.
He must have been getting on for eighty in the year 1807, earlier
than which date I suppose I can hardly remember him, for I was born
in 1802. A few white locks hung about his ears, his shoulders were
bent and his knees feeble, but he was still hale, and was much
respected in our little world of Paleham. His name was Pontifex.
His wife was said to be his master; I have been told she brought him
a little money, but it cannot have been much. She was a tall,
square-shouldered person (I have heard my father call her a Gothic
woman) who had insisted on being married to Mr Pontifex when he was
young and too good-natured to say nay to any woman who wooed him.
The pair had lived not unhappily together, for Mr Pontifex's temper
was easy and he soon learned to bow before his wife's more stormy
moods.
Mr Pontifex was a carpenter by trade; he was also at one time parish
clerk; when I remember him, however, he had so far risen in life as
to be no longer compelled to work with his own hands. In his
earlier days he had taught himself to draw. I do not say he drew
well, but it was surprising he should draw as well as he did. My
father, who took the living of Paleham about the year 1797, became
possessed of a good many of old Mr Pontifex's drawings, which were
always of local subjects, and so unaffectedly painstaking that they
might have passed for the work of some good early master. I
remember them as hanging up framed and glazed in the study at the
Rectory, and tinted, as all else in the room was tinted, with the
green reflected from the fringe of ivy leaves that grew around the
windows. I wonder how they will actually cease and come to an end
as drawings, and into what new phases of being they will then enter.
Not content with being an artist, Mr Pontifex must needs also be a
musician. He built 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 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. _
Read next: CHAPTER II
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