THE ANTECEDENTS OF ROSALIND NIGHTINGALE, SALLY'S MOTHER. HOW BOTH CAME
FROM INDIA TO ENGLAND, AND TOOK A VILLA ON A REPAIRING LEASE. SOMEWHAT
OF SALLY'S UPBRINGING. SOME MORE ROPER GOSSIP, AND A CAT LET OUT OF A
BAG. A PIECE OF PRESENCE OF MIND
Sally Graythorpe (our Mrs. Nightingale) was the daughter of a widowed
mother, also called Sally, the name in both cases being (as in that of
her daughter whom we know) Rosalind, not Sarah. This mother married
_en secondes noces_ a former sweetheart; it had been a case of a match
opposed by parents on the ground of the apparent hopelessness of the
young man's prospects. Mr. Paul Nightingale, however, falsified the
doleful predictions about his future by becoming a successful
leader-writer and war correspondent. It was after the close of the
American Civil War, in which he had gained a good deal of distinction,
that he met at Saratoga his old flame, Mrs. Graythorpe, then a widow
with a little daughter five or six years old. Having then no wishes to
consult but their own, and no reason to the contrary appearing, they
were married.
They did not find the States a pleasant domicile in the early days
following the great war, and came to England. The little daughter soon
became like his own child to Mr. Paul Nightingale, and had his wish
been complied with she would have taken his name during his life. But
her mother saw no reason, apparently, for extinguishing Mr. Graythorpe
_in toto_, and she remained Sally Graythorpe.
Miss Graythorpe was, at a guess, about fifteen when her stepfather
died. Her mother, now for the second time a widow, must have been
very comfortably off, as she had an income of her own as well as a
life-interest in her late husband's invested savings, which was
unfettered by any conditions as to her marrying again, or otherwise.
She was not long in availing herself of this liberty; for about the
time when her daughter was of an age to be engaged on her own account,
she accepted a third offer of marriage--this time from a clergyman,
who, like herself, had already stood by the death-beds of two former
mates, and was qualified to sympathize with her in every way,
including comfortable inheritances.
But the young Sally Graythorpe kicked furiously against this new
arrangement. It was an insult to papa (she referred to Mr.
Nightingale; her real papa was a negligible factor), and she wouldn't
live in the same house with that canting old hypocrite. She would go
away straight to India, and marry Gerry--_he_ would be glad enough to
have her--see how constant the dear good boy had been! Not a week
passed but she got a letter. She asked her mother flatly what could
she want to marry again for at her time of life? And such a withered
old sow-thistle as that! Sub-dean, indeed! She would _sub-dean_ him!
In fact, there were words, and the words almost went the length of
taking the form known as "language" _par excellence_. The fact is,
this Sally and her mother never _did_ get on together well; it wasn't
the least like her subsequent relation with our special Sally--Sally
number three--who trod on Mr. Fenwick in the Twopenny Tube.
The end of the "words" was a letter to Gerry, a liberal trousseau,
and a first-class passage out by P. and O. The young lady's luggage
for the baggage-room was beautifully stencilled "Care of Sir Oughtred
Penderfield, The Residency, Khopal." Perfectly safe in his keeping no
doubt it would have been. But, then, that might have been true also of
luggage if consigned to the Devil. If the tale hinted at in our last
chapter _was_ true, its poor little headstrong, inexperienced heroine
would have been about as safe with the latter.
Anyhow, this club gossip supplies all the broad outline of the story;
and it is a story we need not dwell on. It gives us no means of
reconciling the like of the Mrs. Nightingale we know now with the
amount of dissimulation, if not treachery, she must have practised on
an unsuspicious boy, assuming that she did, as a matter of course,
conceal her relation with Penderfield. One timid conjecture we have
is, that the girl, having to deal with a subject every accepted phrase
relating to which is an equivocation or an hypocrisy, really found it
impossible to make her position understood by a lover who simply
idolized the ground she trod on. Under such circumstances, she may
either have given up the attempt in despair, or jumped too quickly to
the conclusion that she had succeeded in communicating the facts, and
had been met half-way by forgiveness. Put yourself in her position,
and resolve in your mind exactly how you would have gone about it--how
you would have got a story of that sort forced into the mind of a
welcoming lover; wedged into the heart of his unsuspicious rapture.
Or, if you fancied he understood you, and no storm of despairing
indignation came, think how easy it would be to persuade yourself you
had done your duty by the facts, and might let the matter lapse! Why
should not one woman once take advantage of the obscurities of decorum
so many a man has found comforting to his soul during confession of
sin, when pouring his revelations into an ear whose owner's experience
of life has not qualified her to understand them. Think of the
difficulty you yourself have encountered in getting at the absolute
facts in some delicate concurrence of circumstances in this connexion,
because of the fundamental impossibility of getting any one, man or
woman, to speak direct truth!
Let us find out, or construct, all the excuses we can for poor Miss
Graythorpe. Let us imagine the last counsel she had from the only one
of her own sex who would be likely to know anything of the matter--the
nefarious partner (if the Major's surmise was true) in the crime of
her betrayer. "You are making a fuss about nothing. Men are not so
immaculate themselves; your Gerry is no Joseph! If he rides the high
horse with you, just you ask him what _he_ had to say to Potiphar's
wife! Oh, we're not so strait-laced out here--bless us alive!--as we
are in England, or pretend to be." We can fancy the elegant brute
saying it.
All our surmises bring us very little light, though. It is not that
we are at such a loss to forgive poor Sally Graythorpe as a mere human
creature we know nothing about. The difficulty is to reconcile what
she seems to have been then with what she is now. We give it up.
Only, we wish to remark that it is her offence against her _fiancé_
alone that we find it hard to stomach. As to her relations with
Colonel Penderfield, we can say nothing without full particulars. And
even if we had them, and they bore hard upon Miss Graythorpe, our mind
would go back to the Temple in Jerusalem, and a morning nearly two
thousand years ago. The voice that said who was to cast the first
stone is heard no more, or has merged in ritual. But the Scribes and
Pharisees are with us still, and quite ready to do the pelting. We
should be harder on the Colonel, no doubt, with our prejudices; only,
observe! he isn't brought up for judgment. He never is, any more
than the other party was that day in Jerusalem. But, then, the
Scribes and Pharisees were male! And they had the courage of their
convictions--their previous convictions!--and acted on them in their
selection of the culprit.
Without further apology for retailing conjecture as certainty, the
following may be taken as substantially the story of this lady--we do
not know whether to call her a divorced or a deserted wife--and her
little encumbrance.
She found a resource in her trouble in the person of this old friend
of her stepfather Paul Nightingale, Colonel (at that time Major) Lund.
This officer had remained on in harness to the unusual age of
fifty-eight, but it was a civil appointment he held; he had retired
from active service in the ordinary course of things. It was probably
not only because of his old friendship for her stepfather, but because
the poor girl told him her unvarnished tale in full and he believed
it, that he helped and protected her through the critical period
that followed her parting from her husband; found her a domicile and
seclusion, and enlisted on her behalf the sympathies of more than one
officer's wife at our Sally's birth-place--Umritsur, if Major Roper
was right. He corresponded with her mother as intercessor and
mediator, but that good lady was in no mood for mercy: had her
daughter not told her that she was too old to think of marriage? Too
old! And had she not called her venerable sub-dean a withered old
sow-thistle? She could forgive, under guarantees of the sinner's
repentance; for had not her Lord enjoined forgiveness where the bail
tendered was sufficient? Only, so many reservations and qualifications
occurred in her interpretations of the Gospel narrative that
forgiveness, diluted out of all knowledge, left its perpetrator free
to refuse ever to see its victim again. But she would pray for her.
A subdiaconal application would receive attention; that was the
suggestion between the lines.
The kind-hearted old soldier pooh-poohed her first letters. She would
come round in time. Her natural good-feeling would get the better of
her when she had had her religious fling. He didn't put it so--a
strict old Puritan of the old school--but that was Miss Graythorpe's
gloss in her own mind on what he did say. However, her mother never
did come round. She cherished her condemnation of her daughter to the
end, forgiving her again _morê suo_, if anything with increased
asperity, on her death-bed.
This Colonel Lund is (have we mentioned this before?) the "old fossil"
whom we have seen at Krakatoa Villa. He was usually called "the Major"
there, from early association. He continued to foster and shelter his
_protégée_ during the year following the arrival of our own particular
young Sally on the scene, saw her safely through her divorce
proceedings, and then, when he finally retired from his post as deputy
commissioner for the Umritsur district, arranged that she herself,
with her encumbrance and an ayah, should accompany him to England. His
companion travelled as Mrs. Graythorpe, and Sally junior as Mrs.
Graythorpe's baby. She was excessively popular on the voyage; Sally
was not suffering from sea-sickness, or feeling apparently the least
embarrassed by the recent bar-sinister in her family. She courted
Society, seizing it by its whiskers or its curls, and holding on like
grim death. She endeavoured successively to get into the Indian Ocean,
the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic,
but failed in every attempt, and was finally landed at Southampton in
safety, after a resolute effort to drag the captain, who was six feet
three high and weighed twenty stone, ashore by his beard. She was
greatly missed on the remainder of the voyage (to Bremen--the boat was
a German boat) by a family of Vons, who fortunately never guessed at
the flaw in Sally's extraction, or there's no knowing what might not
have happened.
But the arrival was too late for her poor mother to utilise her
services towards a reconciliation with her own offended parent. A
sudden attack of influenza, followed by low diet on high principles,
and uncombated by timely port wine and tonics, had been followed by
heart-failure, and the sub-dean was left free to marry again, again.
Whether he did so or not doesn't matter to us. The scheme Mrs.
Graythorpe had been dwelling on with pleasure through the voyage of
simply dropping her offspring on its grandmother, and leaving it to
drive a coach and six through the latter's Christian forgiveness, was
not to come to pass. She found herself after a year and a half of
Oriental life back in her native land, an orphan with a small--but
it must be admitted a very charming--illegitimate family. It was
hard upon her, for she had been building on the success of this
manoeuvre, in which she had, perhaps, an unreasonable confidence. If
she could only rely on Sally not being inopportunely sick over mamma
just at the critical moment--that was the only misgiving that crossed
her mind. Otherwise, such creases and such a hilarious laugh would be
too much for starch itself. Poor lady! she had thought to herself more
than once, since Sally had begun to mature and consolidate, that if
Gerry had only waited a little--just long enough to see what a little
duck was going to come of it all--and not lost his temper, all
might have been made comfortable, and Sally might have had a little
legitimate half-brother by now. What _had_ become--what would become
of Gerry? That she did not know, might never know.
One little pleasant surprise awaited her. It came to her knowledge
for the first time that she was sole heir to the estate of her late
stepfather, Paul Nightingale. The singular practice that we believe
to exist in many families of keeping back all information about
testamentary dispositions as long as possible from the persons they
concern, especially minors, had been observed in her case; and her
mother, perhaps resenting the idea that her daughter--a young
chit!--should presume to outlive her, had kept her in ignorance of the
contents of her stepfather's will. It did not really matter much. Had
the sum been large, and a certainty, it might have procured for her a
safer position when a temporary guest at the Residency at Khopal, or
even caused her indignant young bridegroom to think twice before he
took steps to rid himself of her. But, after all, it was only some
three hundred and fifty pounds a year, and depended on the life of a
lady of forty-odd, who might live to be a hundred. A girl with no more
than that is nearly as defenceless as she is without it.
A condition was attached to the bequest--not an unwelcome one. She was
to take her stepfather's name, Nightingale. She was really very glad
to do this. There was a _faux air_ of a real married name about Mrs.
Nightingale that was lacking in Mrs. Graythorpe. Besides, all
troublesome questions about who Sally's father was would get lost
sight of in the fact that her mother had changed her name in connexion
with that sacred and glorious thing, an inheritance. A trust-fund
would always be a splendid red-herring to draw across the path of Mrs.
Grundy's sleuth-hounds--a quarry more savoury to their nostrils even
than a reputation. And nothing soothes the sceptical more than being
asked now and again to witness a transfer of stock, especially if it
is money held in trust. It has all the force of a pleasant alterative
pill on the circulation of Respectability--removes obstructions
and promotes appetite--is a certain remedy for sleeplessness, and
so forth. So though there wasn't a particle of reason why Mrs.
Nightingale's money should be held by any one but herself, as she had
no intention whatever of marrying, Colonel Lund consented to become
her trustee; and both felt that something truly respectable had been
done--something that if it didn't establish a birthright and a correct
extraction for Miss Sally, at any rate went a long way towards it.
By the time Mrs. Nightingale had got settled in the little house at
Shepherd's Bush, that she took on a twenty-one years' lease five or
six years after her return to England, and had christened it
Saratoga, after her early recollection of the place where she first
saw her stepfather, whose name she took when she came into the money
he left her--by this time she, with the assistance of Colonel Lund,
had quite assumed the appearance of a rather comfortably off young
widow-lady, who did not make a great parade of her widowhood, but
whose circumstances seemed reasonable enough, and challenged no
inquiry. Inquisitiveness would have seemed needless impertinence--just
as much so as yours would have been in the case of the hypothetical
So-and-sos at the beginning of our last chapter. A vague impression
got in the air that Sally's father had not been altogether
satisfactory--well, wasn't it true? It may have leaked out from
something in "the Major's" manner. But it never produced any effect
on friends, except that they saw in it a reason why Mrs. Nightingale
never mentioned her husband. He had been a black sheep. Silence about
him showed good feeling on her part. _De mortuis_, etc....
Of one thing we feel quite certain--that if, at the time we made this
lady's acquaintance, any chance friend of hers or her daughter's--say,
for instance, Lætitia Wilson, Sally's old school-friend and present
music-colleague--had been told that Mrs. Nightingale, of Krakatoa
Villa, No. 7, Glenmoira Road, Shepherd's Bush, W., had been the
heroine of divorce proceedings under queer circumstances, that her
husband wasn't dead at all, and that that dear little puss Sally was
Goodness-knows-who's child, we feel certain that the information would
have been cross-countered with a blank stare of incredulity. Why, the
mere fact that Mrs. Nightingale had refused so many offers of marriage
was surely sufficient to refute such a nonsensical idea! Who ever
heard of a lady with a soiled record refusing a good offer of marriage?
But while we are showing our respect for what the man in the street
says or thinks, and the woman in the street thinks and says, are we
not losing sight of a leading phrase of the symphony, sonata,
cantata--whatever you like to call it--of Mrs. Nightingale's life? A
phrase that steals in, just audibly--no more, in the most _strepitoso_
passage of the stormy second movement--a movement, however, in which
the proceedings of the Divorce Court are scarcely more audible,
_pianissimo legato_, a chorus with closed lips, all the stringed
instruments _sordini_. But it grows and grows, and in _allegro con
fuoco_ on the voyage home, and only leaves a bar or two blank, when
the thing it metaphorically represents is asleep and isn't suffering
from the wind. It breaks out again _vivacissimo accelerando_ when Miss
Sally (whom we allude to) wakes up, and doesn't appreciate Nestlé's
milk. But it always grows, and in due course may be said to become
the music itself.
More intelligibly, Mrs. Nightingale became so wrapped up in her baby,
that had seemed to her at first a cruel embarrassment--a thing to be
concealed and ignored--that very soon she really had no time to think
about where she broke her molasses-jug, as Uncle Remus says. The new
life that it had become hers to guard took her out of herself, made
her quite another being from the reckless and thoughtless girl of two
years ago.
As time went on she felt more and more the value of the newcomer's
indifference to her extraction and the tragedy that had attended it.
A living creature, with a stupendous capacity for ignoring the past,
and, indeed, everything except a monotonous diet, naturally gave
her mind a bias towards the future, and hope grew in her heart
unconsciously, without reminding her that it might have been despair.
A bad alarm, when the creature was six months old, that an enteric
attack might end fatally, had revealed to its mother how completely
it had taken possession of her own life, and what a power for
compensation there was even in its most imperious and tyrannical
habits. As it gradually became articulate--however unreasonable it
continued--her interest in its future extinguished her memories of her
own past, and she found herself devising games for baby before the
little character was old enough to play them, and costumes before she
was big enough to wear them. By the time Saratoga Villa had become
Krakatoa, Miss Sally had had time to benefit by a reasonable
allowance of the many schemes her mother had developed for her
during her infancy. Had all the projects which were mooted for her
further education at this date been successfully carried out, she
would have been an admirable female Crichton, if her reason had
survived the curriculum. Luckily for her, she had a happy faculty
for being plucked at examinations, and her education was consequently
kept within reasonable bounds.
There was, however, one department of culture in which Sally outshot
all competitors. This was swimming. She would give a bath's length at
the Paddington Baths to the next strongest swimmer in the Ladies'
Club, and come in triumphant in a race of ten lengths. It was a grand
sight to see Sally rushing stem on, cleaving the water with her head
almost as if breath were an affectation, and doubling back at the end
while the other starters were scarcely half-way. Or shooting through
the air in her little blue costume straight for the deepest water, and
then making believe to be a fish on the shiny tiles at the bottom.
Her mother always said she was certain that if that little monkey
had managed to wriggle through some hole into the sea, on her voyage
home, she would have swum after the ship and climbed up the rudder
chains. Possibly, but she was only twelve months old! If, however, she
had met with an early death, her mother's lot would have lacked its
redemption. The joint life of the two supplies a possible answer
to the conundrum that has puzzled us. For in a certain sense the
absorption of her own existence in that of another than herself had
made of Rosalind the woman, at the date of our introduction to her,
quite another person from Rosalind the hot-headed and thoughtless girl
that had quarrelled with her natural guardian for doing what she had
a perfect right to do, and had steered alone into unknown seas, a ship
without a rudder or a compass, and very little knowledge of the stars
of heaven for her guide. We can see what she is now much better than
we can judge what she was then.
It need not be supposed that this poor lady never felt any interest,
never made any inquiry, about the sequel of the life she had so
completely _bouleversé_; for, whatever blame we feel bound to express,
or whatever exculpation we contrive to concoct for her, there can be
no doubt what the result was to the young man who has come into the
story, so far, only under the name of Gerry. We simply record his
designation as it has reached us in the data we are now making use of.
It is all hearsay about a past. We add what we have been able to
gather, merely noting that what it seems to point to recommends itself
to us as probable.
"Nobody knoo, nobody cared," was our friend Major Roper's brief reply
to an inquiry what became of this young man. "Why, good Lard, sir!" he
went on, "if one was to begin fussin' about all the Johnnies that shy
off when there's a row of that sort, one would never get a dam night's
rest! Not but what if I could recollect his name. Now, what _was_ his
confounded name? Thought I'd got it--but no--it wasn't Messiter. Fancy
his Christian name was Jeremiah.... I recollect Messiter I'm thinkin'
of--character that looked as if he had a pain in his stomach--came
into forty thousand pounds. Stop a bit--was it Indermaur? No, it
wasn't Indermaur. No use guessin'--give it up."
Besides, the Major was getting purple with suppressed coughing. When
he had given it up, he surrendered unconditionally to the cough, but
was presently anxious to transmit, through its subsidence, an idea
that he found it impossible to shake across the table between us out
of an inarticulate forefinger end. It assumed form in time. Why not
ask the lady herself? We demurred, and the old soldier explained.
"Not rushin' at her, you know, and sayin', 'Who the dooce was
it married you, ma'am?' I'm not a dam fool. Showin' tact, you
know--puttin' it easy and accidental. 'Who was that young beggar
now?--inspector--surveyor--something of the sort--up at Umballa in
seventy-nine? Burrumpooter Irrigation--that's what _he_ was on.' And,
Lard bless you, my dear sir, you don't suppose she'll up and say, 'I
suppose you mean that dam husband of mine.' Not she! Sensible woman
that, sir--seen the world--knows a thing or two. You'll see she'll
only say, 'That was Foodle or Parker or Stebbins or Jephson,' as may
be, accordin' to the name."
We did not see our way to this enterprise, and said so. We drew a
line; said there were things you could do, and things you couldn't do.
The Major chuckled, and admitted this might be so; his old governor
used to say, "Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines." The last
two words remained behind in the cough, unless, indeed, they were
shaken out off the Major's forefinger into a squeezed lemon that was
awaiting its Seltzer.
"But I can tell you thing, Mr.," said he, forgetting our name, as
soon as he felt soothed by the lemon-squash. "He didn't keep his name,
that young man didn't. You may bet he didn't safely! Only, it's no use
askin' me why, nor what he changed it to. If it _was_ him that was
lost in the Bush in New South Wales, when I was at Sydney, why, of
course that chap's _name_ was the same. I remember that much. Can't
get hold of the name, though." He appeared to consult the pattern on
his silk pocket-handkerchief as an oracle, and to await its answer
with a thoughtful eye. Presently he blew his nose on the oracle, and
returned it to his pocket, adding: "But it's a speculation--little
speculation of my own. Don't _ask me_!" We saw, however, that more
would come, without asking. And it came.
"It made a talk out there at the time. But _that_ didn't bring him to
life. You may talk till you're hoarse, but you won't bring a dead man
to--not when he's twenty miles off in a forest of gum-trees, as like
as tallow-candles.... Oh yes, they had the natives put on the
scent--black trackers, they call 'em--but, Lard! it was all no use.
They only followed the scent of his horse, and the horse came back a
fortnight after with them on his heels, an hour or so behind.... He'd
only just left his party a moment, and meant to come back into the
open. I suppose he thought he was sure to cross a cutting, and got
trapped in the solid woodland."
"But what was the speculation? You said just now...."
"Not much to go by," said the Major, shaking a discouraging head.
"Another joker with another name, who turned up a hundred miles off!
Harrisson, I fancy--yes, Harrisson. It was only my idea they were the
same. I came away, and don't know how they settled it."
"But something, Major Roper, must have made you think this man the
same--the same as Jeremiah Indermaur, or whatever his name was--Mrs.
Nightingale's man?"
"Somethin' must! What it was is another pair of shoes." He cogitated
and reflected, but seemed to get no nearer. "You ask Pelloo," he said.
"He might give you a tip." Then he called for a small glass of cognac,
because the Seltzer was such dam chilly stuff, and the dry sherry was
no use at all. We left him arranging the oracle over his face, with
a view to a serious nap.
We got a few words shortly after with General Pellew, who seemed a
little surprised at the Major's having referred to him for
information.
"I don't know," said he, "why our friend Roper shouldn't recollect as
much about it as I do. However, I do certainly remember that when this
young gentleman, whatever his name was, left the station, he did go to
Sydney or Melbourne, and I have some hazy recollection of some one
saying that he was lost in the Bush. But why old Jack fancies he was
found again or changed his name to Harrisson I haven't the slightest
idea."
So that all we ourselves succeeded in getting at about Gerry may be
said to have been the trap-door he vanished through. Whether Mrs.
Nightingale got at other sources of information we cannot say.
Whatever she learned she would be sure to keep her own counsel about.
She may have concluded that the bones of the husband who had in a fit
of anger deserted her had been picked by white ants, twenty years ago,
in an Australian forest; or she may have come to know, by some means,
of his resuscitation from the Bush, and his successes or failures in
a later life elsewhere. We have had our own reasons for doubting that
she ever knew that he took the name of Harrisson--if he really did--a
point which seemed to us very uncertain, so far as the Major's
narrative went. If she did get a scrap of tidings, a flying word,
about him now and again, it was most likely all she got. And when she
got it she would feel the danger of further inquiry--the difficulty of
laying the reasons for her curiosity before her informant. You can't
easily say to a stranger: "Oh, do tell us about Mrs. Jones or Mr.
Smith. She or he is our divorced or separated wife or husband." A
German might, but Mrs. Nightingale was not a German.
However, she _may_ have heard something about that Gerry, we
grant you, in all those twenty long years. But if you ask us our
opinion--our private opinion--it is that she scarcely heard of him,
if she heard at all, and certainly never set eyes on him, until one
day her madcap little daughter brought him home, half-killed by
an electric shock, in a cab we were at some pains to describe
accurately a few pages ago. And even then, had it not been for the
individualities of that cab, she might have missed seeing him, and let
him go away to the infirmary or the police-station, and probably never
been near him again.
As it was, the face she saw when a freak of chance led to her following
that cab, and looking in out of mere curiosity at its occupant, was the
face of her old lover--of her husband. Eighteen--twenty--years had
made a man of one who was then little more than a boy. The mark of the
world he had lived in was on him; and it was the mark of a rough,
strong world where one fights, and, if one is a man of this sort, maybe
wins. But she never doubted his identity for a moment. And the way in
which she grasped the situation--above all, the fact that he had not
recognised her and would not recognise her--quite justified, to our
thinking, Major Roper's opinion of her powers of self-command.
Nevertheless, these were not so absolute that her demeanour escaped
comment from the cabby, the only witness of her first sight of the
"electrocuted" man. He spoke of her afterwards as that squealing party
down that sanguinary little turning off Shepherd's Bush Road he took
that sanguinary galvanic shock to.