{"id":29963,"date":"2015-03-01T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-01T06:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29963"},"modified":"2015-02-22T16:32:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-22T21:32:18","slug":"qotd-being-a-house-guest-in-a-family-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/01\/qotd-being-a-house-guest-in-a-family-home\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Being a house-guest in a family home"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew that if he slept at \u201cBeggarbush\u201d he would be up in time; I have slept there myself, and I know what happens. About the middle of the night, as you judge, though in reality it may be somewhat later, you are startled out of your first sleep by what sounds like a rush of cavalry along the passage, just outside your door. Your half-awakened intelligence fluctuates between burglars, the Day of Judgment, and a gas explosion. You sit up in bed and listen intently. You are not kept waiting long; the next moment a door is violently slammed, and somebody, or something, is evidently coming downstairs on a tea-tray.<\/p>\n

\u201cI told you so,\u201d says a voice outside, and immediately some hard substance, a head one would say from the ring of it, rebounds against the panel of your door.<\/p>\n

By this time you are charging madly round the room for your clothes. Nothing is where you put it overnight, the articles most essential have disappeared entirely; and meanwhile the murder, or revolution, or whatever it is, continues unchecked. You pause for a moment, with your head under the wardrobe, where you think you can see your slippers, to listen to a steady, monotonous thumping upon a distant door. The victim, you presume, has taken refuge there; they mean to have him out and finish him. Will you be in time? The knocking ceases, and a voice, sweetly reassuring in its gentle plaintiveness, asks meekly:<\/p>\n

\u201cPa, may I get up?\u201d<\/p>\n

You do not hear the other voice, but the responses are:<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, it was only the bath \u2014 no, she ain\u2019t really hurt, \u2014 only wet, you know. Yes, ma, I\u2019ll tell \u2019em what you say. No, it was a pure accident. Yes; good-night, papa.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then the same voice, exerting itself so as to be heard in a distant part of the house, remarks:<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to come upstairs again. Pa says it isn\u2019t time yet to get up.\u201d<\/p>\n

You return to bed, and lie listening to somebody being dragged upstairs, evidently against their will. By a thoughtful arrangement the spare rooms at \u201cBeggarbush\u201d are exactly underneath the nurseries. The same somebody, you conclude, still offering the most creditable opposition, is being put back into bed. You can follow the contest with much exactitude, because every time the body is flung down upon the spring mattress, the bedstead, just above your head, makes a sort of jump; while every time the body succeeds in struggling out again, you are aware by the thud upon the floor. After a time the struggle wanes, or maybe the bed collapses; and you drift back into sleep. But the next moment, or what seems to be the next moment, you again open your eyes under the consciousness of a presence. The door is being held ajar, and four solemn faces, piled one on top of the other, are peering at you, as though you were some natural curiosity kept in this particular room. Seeing you awake, the top face, walking calmly over the other three, comes in and sits on the bed in a friendly attitude.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh!\u201d it says, \u201cwe didn\u2019t know you were awake. I\u2019ve been awake some time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I gather,\u201d you reply, shortly.<\/p>\n

\u201cPa doesn\u2019t like us to get up too early,\u201d it continues. \u201cHe says everybody else in the house is liable to be disturbed if we get up. So, of course, we mustn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

The tone is that of gentle resignation. It is instinct with the spirit of virtuous pride, arising from the consciousness of self-sacrifice.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t you call this being up?\u201d you suggest.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, no; we\u2019re not really up, you know, because we\u2019re not properly dressed.\u201d The fact is self-evident. \u201cPa\u2019s always very tired in the morning,\u201d the voice continues; \u201cof course, that\u2019s because he works hard all day. Are you ever tired in the morning?\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point he turns and notices, for the first time, that the three other children have also entered, and are sitting in a semi-circle on the floor. From their attitude it is clear they have mistaken the whole thing for one of the slower forms of entertainment, some comic lecture or conjuring exhibition, and are waiting patiently for you to get out of bed and do something. It shocks him, the idea of their being in the guest\u2019s bedchamber. He peremptorily orders them out. They do not answer him, they do not argue; in dead silence, and with one accord they fall upon him. All you can see from the bed is a confused tangle of waving arms and legs, suggestive of an intoxicated octopus trying to find bottom. Not a word is spoken; that seems to be the etiquette of the thing. If you are sleeping in your pyjamas, you spring from the bed, and only add to the confusion; if you are wearing a less showy garment, you stop where you are and shout commands, which are utterly unheeded. The simplest plan is to leave it to the eldest boy. He does get them out after a while, and closes the door upon them. It re-opens immediately, and one, generally Muriel, is shot back into the room. She enters as from a catapult. She is handicapped by having long hair, which can be used as a convenient handle. Evidently aware of this natural disadvantage, she clutches it herself tightly in one hand, and punches with the other. He opens the door again, and cleverly uses her as a battering-ram against the wall of those without. You can hear the dull crash as her head enters among them, and scatters them. When the victory is complete, he comes back and resumes his seat on the bed. There is no bitterness about him; he has forgotten the whole incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like the morning,\u201d he says, \u201cdon\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome mornings,\u201d you agree, \u201care all right; others are not so peaceful.\u201d<\/p>\n

He takes no notice of your exception; a far-away look steals over his somewhat ethereal face.<\/p>\n

\u201cI should like to die in the morning,\u201d he says; \u201ceverything is so beautiful then.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWell,\u201d you answer, \u201cperhaps you will, if your father ever invites an irritable man to come and sleep here, and doesn\u2019t warn him beforehand.\u201d<\/p>\n

He descends from his contemplative mood, and becomes himself again.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s jolly in the garden,\u201d he suggests; \u201cyou wouldn\u2019t like to get up and have a game of cricket, would you?\u201d<\/p>\n

It was not the idea with which you went to bed, but now, as things have turned out, it seems as good a plan as lying there hopelessly awake; and you agree.<\/p>\n

You learn, later in the day, that the explanation of the proceeding is that you, unable to sleep, woke up early in the morning, and thought you would like a game of cricket. The children, taught to be ever courteous to guests, felt it their duty to humour you. Mrs. Harris remarks at breakfast that at least you might have seen to it that the children were properly dressed before you took them out; while Harris points out to you, pathetically, how, by your one morning\u2019s example and encouragement, you have undone his labour of months.<\/p>\n

On this Wednesday morning, George, it seems, clamoured to get up at a quarter-past five, and persuaded them to let him teach them cycling tricks round the cucumber frames on Harris\u2019s new wheel. Even Mrs. Harris, however, did not blame George on this occasion; she felt intuitively the idea could not have been entirely his.<\/p>\n

It is not that the Harris children have the faintest notion of avoiding blame at the expense of a friend and comrade. One and all they are honesty itself in accepting responsibility for their own misdeeds. It simply is, that is how the thing presents itself to their understanding. When you explain to them that you had no original intention of getting up at five o\u2019clock in the morning to play cricket on the croquet lawn, or to mimic the history of the early Church by shooting with a cross-bow at dolls tied to a tree; that as a matter of fact, left to your own initiative, you would have slept peacefully till roused in Christian fashion with a cup of tea at eight, they are firstly astonished, secondly apologetic, and thirdly sincerely contrite. In the present instance, waiving the purely academic question whether the awakening of George at a little before five was due to natural instinct on his part, or to the accidental passing of a home-made boomerang through his bedroom window, the dear children frankly admitted that the blame for his uprising was their own. As the eldest boy said:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ought to have remembered that Uncle George had a long day, before him, and we ought to have dissuaded him from getting up. I blame myself entirely.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel<\/em><\/a>, 1914.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew that if he slept at \u201cBeggarbush\u201d he would be up in time; I have slept there myself, and I know what happens. About the middle of the night, as you judge, though in reality it may be somewhat later, you are startled out of your first sleep by what sounds like a rush […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,41],"tags":[374,968,948],"class_list":["post-29963","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-quotations","tag-children","tag-family","tag-jkjerome"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Nh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29963","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29963"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29963\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29965,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29963\/revisions\/29965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}