The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler (new ebook reader .txt) 📗

freely you will soon bring him round. However, Mr. Pontifex is not well enough to stand so great a change as going abroad yet; from what you tell me I should think he had had as much change lately as is good for him. If he were to go abroad now he would probably be taken seriously ill within a week. We must wait till he has recovered tone a little more. I will begin by ringing my London changes on him.”

He thought a little and then said:⁠—

“I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients. I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals. Don’t let him think he is taking them medicinally, but let him go to their house twice a week for a fortnight, and stay with the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the elephants, till they begin to bore him. I find these beasts do my patients more good than any others. The monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they do not stimulate sufficiently. The larger carnivora are unsympathetic. The reptiles are worse than useless, and the marsupials are not much better. Birds again, except parrots, are not very beneficial; he may look at them now and again, but with the elephants and the pig tribe generally he should mix just now as freely as possible.

“Then, you know, to prevent monotony I should send him, say, to morning service at the Abbey before he goes. He need not stay longer than the Te Deum. I don’t know why, but Jubilates are seldom satisfactory. Just let him look in at the Abbey, and sit quietly in Poets’ Corner till the main part of the music is over. Let him do this two or three times, not more, before he goes to the Zoo.

“Then next day send him down to Gravesend by boat. By all means let him go to the theatres in the evenings⁠—and then let him come to me again in a fortnight.”

Had the doctor been less eminent in his profession I should have doubted whether he was in earnest, but I knew him to be a man of business who would neither waste his own time nor that of his patients. As soon as we were out of the house we took a cab to Regent’s Park, and spent a couple of hours in sauntering round the different houses. Perhaps it was on account of what the doctor had told me, but I certainly became aware of a feeling I had never experienced before. I mean that I was receiving an influx of new life, or deriving new ways of looking at life⁠—which is the same thing⁠—by the process. I found the doctor quite right in his estimate of the larger mammals as the ones which on the whole were most beneficial, and observed that Ernest, who had heard nothing of what the doctor had said to me, lingered instinctively in front of them. As for the elephants, especially the baby elephant, he seemed to be drinking in large draughts of their lives to the recreation and regeneration of his own.

We dined in the gardens, and I noticed with pleasure that Ernest’s appetite was already improved. Since this time, whenever I have been a little out of sorts myself I have at once gone up to Regent’s Park, and have invariably been benefited. I mention this here in the hope that some one or other of my readers may find the hint a useful one.

At the end of his fortnight my hero was much better, more so even than our friend the doctor had expected. “Now,” he said, “Mr. Pontifex may go abroad, and the sooner the better. Let him stay a couple of months.”

This was the first Ernest had heard about his going abroad, and he talked about my not being able to spare him for so long. I soon made this all right.

“It is now the beginning of April,” said I, “go down to Marseilles at once, and take steamer to Nice. Then saunter down the Riviera to Genoa⁠—from Genoa go to Florence, Rome and Naples, and come home by way of Venice and the Italian lakes.”

“And won’t you come too?” said he, eagerly.

I said I did not mind if I did, so we began to make our arrangements next morning, and completed them within a very few days.

LXXX

We left by the night mail, crossing from Dover. The night was soft, and there was a bright moon upon the sea. “Don’t you love the smell of grease about the engine of a Channel steamer? Isn’t there a lot of hope in it?” said Ernest to me, for he had been to Normandy one summer as a boy with his father and mother, and the smell carried him back to days before those in which he had begun to bruise himself against the great outside world. “I always think one of the best parts of going abroad is the first thud of the piston, and the first gurgling of the water when the paddle begins to strike it.”

It was very dreamy getting out at Calais, and trudging about with luggage in a foreign town at an hour when we were generally both of us in bed and fast asleep, but we settled down to sleep as soon as we got into the railway carriage, and dozed till we had passed Amiens. Then waking when the first signs of morning crispness were beginning to show themselves, I saw that Ernest was already devouring every object we passed with quick sympathetic curiousness. There was not a peasant in a blouse driving his cart betimes along the road to market, not a signalman’s wife in her husband’s hat and coat waving a green flag, not a shepherd taking out his sheep to the dewy pastures, not a bank of opening cowslips as we passed through the railway cuttings, but he was drinking it all in with an