Samuel Butler: The Way of All Flesh

18. CHAPTER XVIII (continued)

I called a day or two afterwards and found Mr Pontifex still at Battersby, laid up with one of those attacks of liver and depression to which he was becoming more and more subject. I stayed to luncheon. The old gentleman was cross and very difficult; he could eat nothing--had no appetite at all. Christina tried to coax him with a little bit of the fleshy part of a mutton chop. "How in the name of reason can I be asked to eat a mutton chop?" he exclaimed angrily; "you forget, my dear Christina, that you have to deal with a stomach that is totally disorganised," and he pushed the plate from him, pouting and frowning like a naughty old child. Writing as I do by the light of a later knowledge, I suppose I should have seen nothing in this but the world's growing pains, the disturbance inseparable from transition in human things. I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling--but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

About a year and a half afterwards the tables were turned on Battersby--for Mrs John Pontifex was safely delivered of a boy. A year or so later still, George Pontifex was himself struck down suddenly by a fit of paralysis, much as his mother had been, but he did not see the years of his mother. When his will was opened, it was found that an original bequest of 20,000 pounds to Theobald himself (over and above the sum that had been settled upon him and Christina at the time of his marriage) had been cut down to 17,500 pounds when Mr Pontifex left "something" to Ernest. The "something" proved to be 2500 pounds, which was to accumulate in the hands of trustees. The rest of the property went to John Pontifex, except that each of the daughters was left with about 15,000 pounds over and above 5000 pounds a piece which they inherited from their mother.