JERRY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVII, Issue XXI, 21 November 1896, Page 87

JERRY.

A SUBURBAN STUDY. We know him, not out of Shakespeare’s art, for be is essentially a modern ; nor even by those full curses that he spake, though we fancy that he has a very pretty vocabulary of his own ; but in a much simpler and more prosaic manner. Two years ago we took possession of a suburban villa, in what was then, comparatively speaking, the country. Within a few months Jerry appeared, and his cohorts were gleaming with corduroys and nails ; and he began to cast up walls and towers ag rinst us, till to-day we look sadly around and the trees are cut down and all the green herbs are withered—instead of grass there is lime, and even the flails of the carpet-beaters are silent. But Jerry—the imperturbable, industrious, übiquitous, speculative Jerry—is with us morning, noon, and night. His personal appearance is in no way remarkable. I have sometimes observed him attentively, in a good light, from a moderate distance, and I find him distinctly bourgeois and commonplace. He is of the middle height, of a full colour, inclined to plumpness, with black hair and grizzled whiskers. To look at, I say, there is nothing remarkable about him ; yet twice at least he has seemed to me transfigured into the likeness of a hero. The first occasion was a chilly spring morning when a fierce toothache drove me from my bed at the awful hour of half-past six. I looked out of the window ; and there, just across the half-made road, sat Jerry, greatly daring, on a wall of his own erection. He was leaning forward, and his averted head seemed buried in his hands. All round him lay ruin and chaos. Something in the scene struck me as familiar.

Suddenly I recalled it. It was a frontispiece to my old school History of Rome. • Ah, Jerry !’ I exclaimed, *is this thy Carthage ; and art thou, like another Marius * — here my tooth gave a horrid twinge, and, Jerry lifting his bead, I perceived he had been occupied in cleaning his PipeAnd again one glorious autumn evening, when the sky glowed red behind the one great tree which Jerry had hitherto spared, I stood in my garden contemplating his latest masterpiece. It was not yet at its best or worst. The bricks had not yet blushed beneath the ochre-brush, nor had the dtbri* been covered with a couple of inches of earth to form the * beds ’ and * borders.’ In the beautiful rosy light the thin scaffold poles stood out tall and black, and the slender beams—there is nothing coarse, except the grain, about Jerry's timber—looked positively graceful. And there, just under the skeleton roof, on a temporary platform, I saw him stand for a moment, dark, too, outlined against the sky. His face I could not see ; but something in bis attitude recalled to my mind the story of that proud Eastern monarch walking in the cool of the evening on his palace roof. Perhaps it was mere fancy, but he seemed to me to be looking round on the long rows of commodious detached villa residences, and I could almost hear his words of swelling pride : ‘ Is not this great London which I have built ?’

Ah, Jerry, if we could only turn you out to grass !

I have called him industrious, yet candour compels me to add that I have never seen him engaged in any manual labour. But he is always on the spot (when he is not in the Bankruptcy Court), waiting, like Mr Micawber, for something or somebody to turn up. I think he must be of a sociable disposition, for he seems to spend half his time inconversation. When there are no possible tenants in view, he will converse with his workmen, apparently on a footing of perfect equality. I have even seen him exchange amenities with a shock headed errand-boy, and with still smaller urchins on their way back from school. His business manners, so far as I have been able to observe them, have, I must admit, fairly surprised me. I imagined him cringing and obsequious ; but of these vices I can see but few traces. On the

contrary, he appears to cultivate a brusque conceisness which might easily be mistaken for honesty. * There’s the house ; that’s the price ; if that don't suit yon, say what will, I can’t speak fairer than that.’ This, or something like it, seems to be his usual mode of address. As for the purchasers or tenants, they fall mainly into two classes. There are the young husband and wife with half-a-dozen plated biscuit boxes and a brandnew perambulator, and there is the elderly business man retired on a modest competence and impatient to devote the evening of his life to the cultivation of the Paris daisy and the canary creeper. They come, they see, they are conquered. The great black board is shifted one garden lower down the road, and for a season Jerry disappears from the immediate neighbourhood. This is one of his choice devices. So well does he know the qualities of his houses, that he can calculate almost to a day when the mice and the beetles will begin to promenade the kitchen and prospect in the larder. He can tell just bow sharp a shower his tender roof can tnrn, how soon his sappy woodwork will begin to warp and the chimneys to smoke. Then may the wrathful occupiers seek him in vain ; he is down the road, or ronnd the corner, or gone to the city on bnsiness. Until at last, angry and ashamed, they make the best of a bad bnsiness and caulk the leaking ship themselves. For it must be sadly and reluctantly admitted that Jerry’s commodious villas are very much indeed in the natnre of leaky vessels. From the brittle powdery slates that hardly touch each other, on the roof, to the wet mud that forms the foundation, there is nothing sound or stout or strong. It is all shoddy and sham—a museum of inutilities, a treasure-house of * premature decay.’ And what about the surveyor ’ That thought has often occurred to me. What transcendent cunning, what subtle artifice can Jerry have used to blind and gag that sturdy watch-dog’ The cynical Greek had surely no such case in his mind when he wrote : * If thou wonldest convince a man of aught, put thine argument into the palm of his hand.’ Such a solution of the mystery would be simply incredible. So sometimes—the sequence of ideas may

seem obscure—l have managed the halcyon days when Jerry wandered, not alone, through flower-starred meadows beneath the shining of the harvest in ton. His arm was round her waist. She was—incongruously enough—well built, and the mouldings of her figure were chaste and elegant He himself was in a state of thorough and substantial repair. * Why detached ’’ he whispered, and her answer was a smile. With delight his wooing tilled her. ■ There is none/ehe cooed, 'like thee ' He is but a jerry-builder. The surveyor's daughter she.