The way of all flesh - Samuel Butler [142]
“Then,” said he, “I will not take the £100 from my father, and I will never see him or my mother again.”
I said: “Take the £100, Ernest, and as much more as you can get, and then do not see them again if you do not like.”
This Ernest would not do. If he took money from them, he could not cut them, and he wanted to cut them. I thought my godson would get on a great deal better if he would only have the firmness to do as he proposed, as regards breaking completely with his father and mother, and said so. “Then don’t you like them?” said he, with a look of surprise.
“Like them!” said I, “I think they’re horrid.”
“Oh, that’s the kindest thing of all you have done for me,” he exclaimed, “I thought all—all middle-aged people liked my father and mother.”
He had been about to call me old, but I was only fifty-seven, and was not going to have this, so I made a face when I saw him hesitating, which drove him into “middle-aged.”
“If you like it,” said I, “I will say all your family are horrid except yourself and your aunt Alethea. The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.”
“Thank you,” he replied, gratefully, “I think I can now stand almost anything. I will come and see you as soon as I come out of gaol. Good-bye.” For the warder had told us that the time allowed for our interview was at an end.
CHAPTER LXVII
As soon as Ernest found that he had no money to look to upon leaving prison he saw that his dreams about emigrating and farming must come to an end, for he knew that he was incapable of working at the plough or with the axe for long together himself. And now it seemed he should have no money to pay any one else for doing so. It was this that resolved him to part once and for all with his parents. If he had been going abroad he could have kept up relations with them, for they would have been too far off to interfere with him.
He knew his father and mother would object to being cut; they would wish to appear kind and forgiving; they would also dislike having no further power to plague him; but he knew also very well that so long as he and they ran in harness together they would be always pulling one way and he another. He wanted to drop the gentleman and go down into the ranks, beginning on the lowest rung of the ladder, where no one would know of his disgrace or mind it if he did know; his father and mother on the other hand would wish him to clutch on to the fag-end of gentility at a starvation salary and with no prospect of advancement. Ernest had seen enough in Ashpit Place to know that a tailor, if he did not drink and attended to his business, could earn more money than a clerk or a curate, while much less expense by way of show was required of him. The tailor also had more liberty, and a better chance of rising. Ernest resolved at once, as he had fallen so far, to fall still lower—promptly, gracefully and with the idea of rising again, rather than cling to the skirts of a respectability which would permit him to exist on sufferance only, and make him pay an utterly extortionate price for an article which he could do better without.
He arrived at this result more quickly than he might otherwise have done through remembering something he had once heard his aunt say about “kissing the soil.” This had impressed him and stuck by him perhaps by reason of its brevity; when later on he came to know the story of Hercules and Antæus, he found it one of the very few ancient fables which had a hold over him—his chiefest debt to classical literature. His aunt had wanted him to learn carpentering, as a means of kissing the soil should his Hercules ever throw him. It was too late for this now—or he thought it was—but the mode of carrying out his aunt’s idea was a detail; there were a hundred ways of kissing the soil besides becoming a carpenter.
He had told me this during our interview, and I had encouraged him to the utmost of my power. He showed so much more good sense than I had given him credit for that I became comparatively easy about him, and determined to let him play his own game, being always, however, ready to hand in case things went too far wrong. It was not simply because he disliked his father and mother that he wanted to have no more to do with them; if it had been only this he would have put up with them; but a warning voice within told him distinctly enough that if he was clean cut away from them he might still have a chance of success, whereas if they had anything whatever to do with him, or even knew where he was, they would hamper him and in the end ruin him. Absolute independence he believed to be his only chance of very life itself.