HOW JIM FOUND A MISSION IN LIFE, AND LIZARANN MOVED TO MRS. FORKS'S
COTTAGE. OF A FINE AUTUMN, AND HOW ALL WAS RIGHT TILL SOMETHING WENT
WRONG. OF A SEASIDE SCHEME, AND ITS EFFECTS ON JIM
If you stand up at the rifle-butts when they are not shooting, and look
away from Royd village towards the Hall, you will see a sharp curve in
the road, maybe a mile from Mrs. Fox's cottage on your left. You will
identify that by the little shop built out from it towards the road,
and the covered arbour where Jim smoked his pipe, over a year ago now
at the date of the story. He continues to do so when not professionally
employed. For Jim found an employment, strange to say, shortly after he
talked to Adeline Fossett about Lizarann's health, and got his first
scare about his little lass.
It is just within that curve of the road that his vocation is plied.
Not for gain--nothing so low as that! His is an official appointment,
in the gift of the Rector of Royd, and there is a parish fund of ij
shillings a month, with the additional emolument of a fat capon at
Christmas, for the man at the well-head. The Charity Commissioners have
never found it out; and the Rector has long since appropriated the
fund, and turned it into four shillings, with appendices and addenda;
while a composition has been effected in the matter of the capon, the
holder of the office receiving instead as much barker as is good for
him, all the year round, whether actively employed or not. For the
employment Jim had the luck to step into is one that may have to be
suspended during hard winter weather, being, in fact, the turning of
the well-handle whenever applicants come for water.
It was through Miss Fossett hearing that tale of Jim's, about how his
blind strength had come in so mighty handy in that steerage business
aboard of the undermanned coal-tramp. She recollected it when, on the
afternoon of next day, it came out that the office of water-drawer was
vacant, the last man at the well-head having retired at eighty-seven
years of age. Not that he had turned the handle himself for a long
time past. He had only given official sanction to the efforts of
customers; who, when very small, had to way-ut till soombody else coom
for t' wa-ater. Obviously, Jim was made for the place, and the place
for Jim. And he--poor chap!--for whom all personal life had merged in
solid gloom and hampered movement, felt like the prisoner in solitary
confinement whom the boy threw his pegtop and string to, through the
bars.
It is hardly a fair comparison, though, for the lonely gaol-bird had
to spin his top with never a soul to speak to, day or night, and Jim
had constant intercourse with his species; for as soon as the cottagers
round became alive to the fact that they could send little Mary or
Sally with a pail to t' wa'all, with a reasonable chance of return in
half-an-hour, his services were in constant requisition. Royd village
is at least five hundred feet higher than Grime; and the light soil,
though good for the beech-woods, is bad for the water-supply. That
is why the Abbey Well, so-called, has a clear bucket-shoot of fifty
fathoms before it strikes the water. So, even in answer to Jim's
effective appeals, the supply came slowly; and there was plenty of
time, before the responsible bucket came in sight, to hear family
history from Mary or Sally, or the latest news from seniors with two
large pails stirruped on a shoulder-saddle.
Besides, there was Jim's chief resource, to which all these were as
nothing. There was his little lass. Whenever she was not complying
with the Education Act, and whenever the weather permitted, the child
was pretty sure to be with her father in the little semi-enclosure,
half-hidden by hawthorns, where the well with its interesting
parclose--some of it as old as the thirteenth century, if you
choose--tempts the passing excursionist to stop and be antiquarian
for five minutes; and to put a little jewel of a memory in some close
corner of his brain, to be found there on a winter's night in the days
to come, when all the excursions are over and the merry year is dead.
The fine warm months that followed Jim's entry on his duties were
surely the halcyon months of his broken life. Because for all that he
and Lizarann, with a sort of _ex-post-facto_ optimism, had decided to
construct an image of a glorious past from their memories of Bladen
Street and Tallack Street, misgiving of the soundness of its materials
would creep into _his_ mind, at least; never to the child's. That image
was all beaten gold and ivory to her. Tallack Street, that would have
seemed to you and me a sordid avenue of hovels, grudgingly complying
with a Building Act, and enclosing imperfectly a rich atmosphere of
Lower Middle Class families, was to Lizarann an illuminated stage
on which moved the majestic figures of the heroes of her past, into
which flitted at intervals visions of delights now extinct: organs
with a monkey, that played slow, not to tax the nervous system of
their obsessor; organs without, that played quick, so you could dance
to it--played music-hall airs that had three phases apiece, and lent
themselves to being done over and over again, and nobody any fault to
find; the man with the drum that couldn't raise his voice to holler,
and potatoes he run out of unless you looked sharp; and, above all,
that pre-Wagnerian contrivance without a name, that you could set on
and go round for a halfpenny all through the tune, and no cheating--so
"Home, Sweet Home" was more popular than the National Anthem, along of
the hextry at the end. And the highroad itself, that took two policemen
to get them children safe acrost after Board-School! What a scene of
maddening--more than Parisian--gaiety it was Saturday nights! And what
a mysterious antechamber to some Institution undefined, but with a
flavour of Trinity House or the Vatican, was that corner where it was
wrote up, "Vatted Rum, fivepence-halfpenny!"
Jim lent himself, you may be sure, to gilding these remnants of
bygone glory, whatever doubts he may have felt about them himself.
Through that happy season when Lizarann could be so frequently his
companion--for Dr. Sidrophel said the child couldn't be too much in
the air: it would do her good rather than otherwise--recollections of
Tallack Street and Vatted Rum Corner rang the changes on tales of the
high-seas and the Flying Dutchman. Lizarann had never seen the sea!
Wouldn't she just like to it! Patience! Lizarann was to see the sea in
time.
Her domicile at the Rectory came to an end a week or so after her
Daddy got his appointment. It had begun with what was intended to be
a stay long enough to get rid of that bad inflammatory cold caught in
London; had been prolonged at the petition of Phoebe and Joan till
that half-a-mile-off tea-party at Royd Park. After this it consisted
of postponements, due to reluctance that she should run risks from
moving till quite strong again, but growing shorter and shorter as Dr.
Pordage laid more and more stress on the definite character of the
chest-delicacy, and the modern belief in its communicability. And the
fact was that Aunt Bessy, and, indeed, the Rector, were not a little
ill at ease about the constant association of the children. The Rector
tried to fence with his own uneasiness, and made but a poor show.
"_I_ don't know!" said he to his sister-in-law. "Only a few years since
doctors were treating the idea with derision. Now it's all the other
way. You never know where to have 'em--never!"
"Do as you like, Athel! But I'm for being on the safe side, if you ask
me." And the Rector was obliged to admit to himself that accepting the
advice that enjoins caution is a very different thing from running a
risk on permission given. The doctor said that if all disorders were
accounted infectious until the contrary was shown to be the case, it
would be a good thing for the public, but a bad one for the profession
and the bacilli. A man must live. So must a bacillus, from his point of
view.
Discussion was afoot at one time about the possibility of sending
Lizarann to Tunis, where the ex-incumbent of St. Vulgate's would
take her in hand and look after her. He was sending highly-coloured
reports of his own progress. But these schemes never fructified. The
fact, though it was admitted, that it would have been an excessive
interpretation of Samaritan good-nature had less to do with their
rejection than the inevitable separation of the child from her father.
"She'll never come back to England if she goes," said Dr. Sidrophel;
meaning that she would only be safe in Africa if she did outgrow her
symptoms. But would she be sure to outgrow them?--said Athelstan
Taylor, Miss Fossett, and Miss Caldecott, all at once. "That's more
than I would swear to," said the doctor. It was a relief, because _you_
know what a stiff job this sending patients abroad is. Most of us do.
But, short of sending Lizarann to be nursed in an antitubercular
climate, everything was done for her that could have been done in
Samaria itself, with additions up-to-date, such as ozone, peptone,
hypophosphites, and several other "ites" and "ones."
So dexterously was her removal to Mrs. Fox's cottage brought about that
neither she nor her Daddy ever had a suspicion of the truth. Obviously,
so everyone thought, the reason was that she should guide her Daddy to
the well-head every morning before going to school, and bring him back
in the evening. Lizarann's rejoicing over her importance made up to
her for her separation from Phoebe and Joan. The whole manoeuvre was
executed without a mishap, and Lizarann started in the summer weather
to install her Daddy in safety, and to return for him in the course of
the afternoon, duly calling out "Pi-lot!" at a chosen point. Phoebe and
Joan gave her up with reluctance, but acknowledged the force of the
reasons for the change. They were plausible.
Mrs. Fox put her to sleep in a sweet little room under the thatch, with
a lattice-window you could stand open and hear the wind in the trees
all night. And a bed with a white tester and a fringe, and a white
vallance all round underneath. Only the curtains were chintz, with
roses done on them, shiny-like; and the counterpane was made of pieces
of everything sewn together. Wherever anyone could have got 'em all
from Lizarann couldn't think.
From underneath which counterpane the occupant of that bed continued
an early riser throughout those three satisfactory months. Because
Lizarann had nothing the matter with her. Ridiculous! Why shouldn't she
cough if she chose? That was her view. And why shouldn't she go to the
window to see how the sunflower was getting on! The sunflower grew on a
giant plant that had shot up flush with the roof--a record in growth.
Lizarann looked out at it every morning, and wondered how big ever
_was_ it going to get. She didn't know which she liked best, the back
or the front of that sunflower. Sunflower-backs are very fascinating.
She had a little triumph over her Daddy and Mrs. Forks about that
window. For they belonged to the old school of nursing, which went for
suffocation, and had told her not to go to the window at six in the
morning in her nightgown. Dr. Sidrophel, when appealed to, said: "Hurt
you to go to the open window? Not a bit of it! More open windows the
better!" So Lizarann kept on looking out at it until the rime frostis
come in October; and then Jarge coot it off for her, not too high up to
the coop, and Lizarann's prevision that it would be as big as her head
was shown to be very, very far short of truth.
"There, now, Daddy," said the convalescent, on her way to the well,
with her convoy in tow, after Dr. Sidrophel had endorsed the views of
the new school so vigorously. "Dr. Spiderophel said I was-s-s-s-S quite
well!" The climax of a prolonged sibilant, _crescendo_, burst like a
shell against the coming initial, and stung its adverb to vigorous
action.
"Who said you warn't, lassie?" said her father, affecting indignation.
"Phoebe and Jones. And Mr. Yorick, he's always for asking what did the
doctor said."
"Vary right and proper, little lass! Wouldn't ye have him know?
Nay-tur-ally, such a good gentleman likes to know you're well. That's
where the enquiring comes in. He'd be martal sorry to hear the lassie
was ill. What do ye make out the young ladies said?" Jim's tactics of
raising false issues were compatible with an attempt at a side-light on
public opinion.
"Phoebe and Jones said--nurse said--Dr. Spiderophel said"--here
concentration became necessary--"that simpsons was favourable, but
to continue the medicine two stable-spoonfuls free times a day." She
then corrected herself, as though the pronunciation might vitiate the
treatment. "No!--_three_ times a day." And added corroboratively,
"Yass!"
Jim knew that the sky-sign of an engineering firm in the neighbourhood
of Tallack Street was responsible for a confusion of the little lass's
ideas, or at least speech. He accepted the name, to escape discussion,
saying: "If Simpson's is favourable, and the medecine's nice, what
more can a lassie want? In coorse you're quite well, with such like
medecine. When little lass's medecine's nasty, that's when they're ill."
Optimism in any form was welcome on such an autumn morning, with such
a many larks afloat in the blue above the shorn stubble-fields--more
songs than Lizarann could count, in token of a million more
unheard--and the Royd church-bell striking seven a mile off, and some
sheepbells making it difficult to hear if it struck right; and the same
bees as last month making the same noise about an entirely new supply
of honey. Besides, Daddy had to be guided through the sheep, who were
filling up the road on ahead, and repeating themselves sadly, though in
a variety of keys. Sheep ought never to come in the opposite direction,
because no dog can influence them to leave other people space to pass.
This time they would have been enough alone to knock medical discussion
on the head, even if there had been no other distracting combinations.
During just that fine perfect autumn time no one who was not in the
confidence of that useless implement of Dr. Sidrophel's, that you
could neither play on nor see through, would have picked out Lizarann
as a patient at all. The change came with the chill of the year. Not
the first morning frost of all; that, when it scatters diamond drift,
every speck of which means to be a mirror to the great sun it knows is
coming--coming from beyond the Eastern red, to quench the glow of the
Morning Star--is but a fall of temperature, with repentance to follow.
It is all right again after breakfast. But the real chill of the year
comes soon--too soon! And then there is sunshine at Westminster; and
it's going to snow, and does it. And you have fires, and catch cold.
It all happened just as usual that year. Only something had gone wrong
with Lizarann. She was no longer the Lizarann of Tallack Street, to
whom the first frost that meant business, the first fog that meant to
interrupt it, the first fire we did without and the first we didn't--a
day or five minutes later, according to our powers of endurance--were
one and all mere annual incidents, fraught with holly and mistletoe
and intensification of butchers. In those days Lizarann's greeting to
winter was to go out in the snow and avail herself of it as ammunition,
or develope it as slides. In these, as often as not it was doubtful
whether she would be allowed out at all. And even if it was only to the
little schoolroom near the church, not unless she was wropt up real
careful, and her red woollen comforter round and round and round, like
that. The way was never so in Tallack Street.
Lizarann herself confused between cause and effect. She ascribed
her cough to mixtures, and a place in her chest, that prevented her
coughing and done with it, to its location by that malign little
stethoscope. It was either that or the linseed meal of Teacher's
careful slow poulticing that had done it all. She considered that the
linseed meal had penetrated through that vermilion disc on the area she
called her chest, which had afforded her such unmixed amusement seen
in Miss Fossett's little hand-mirror. She was haunted by the flavour
of that linseed meal; was convinced it had got through and stuck.
But these were views she kept to herself. She tolerated the strange
scientific fancies and fallacies of the grown-up world, recognizing in
them the benevolence of its intentions.
But the something that had gone wrong never made any real concession.
It seemed to have made up its mind which direction it would take, and
jogged on without remorse. Now and again it may have sat down by the
roadside, and set the credulous a-thinking that it might turn back and
start again and go right; but it always went on again refreshed in the
end. Sometimes it travelled slowly--came to a hill, perhaps? But the
road was a give-and-take road, only just a little more downhill than
up. It always is, in this complaint.
Dr. Sidrophel gave the Rector very little hope of any real success.
He did not say the child would die. Nobody ever says that. He only
said she would never make old bones. He probably thought her skeleton
would not reach its teens. He continued the treatment; was in favour
of plenty of air, plenty of nourishment, the last new chemical _elixir
vitæ_--wasn't it called "Maltozone," and didn't every teaspoonful
contain an ox from Argentina?--and so on. The cottage smelt of iodine;
and dear old Mrs. Fox's lozenges, which had been active in the early
stages of the complaint, had to die away before the new agencies and
real prescriptions that had to go to the village apothecary to be
made up. Even so the parish engine, that the fire took no notice of,
has to give way to the brigade from the nearest station. If only the
metaphor would hold good a little farther! If only the parallel could
be found for the efficiency of the waterblast that comes so swiftly
on the heels of their arrival--steam at high-pressure panting to show
its elasticity to advantage--blood-horses that have touched the last
speed-record--serpent-coils of hose that mean salvation; if only the
latest rescue-powers of Science were on all fours with these! But....
Well!--we must hope.
When Sir Rhyscombe Edison, the great London physician, paid a visit
to the Hall just before the Family started to go abroad--no one was
ill there: it was the head of Thanes Castle he was summoned to consult
about--Lady Arkroyd begged him to overhaul a little patient she and
the Rector were interested in. He made as careful an examination
of Lizarann as he had done of the Duke; was as encouraging to the
one patient about her chest as he had been to the other about his
hemiplegia; and was nearly as explicit in his second verdict to her
ladyship and the Rector as he had been in his first to the family at
Thanes. It was a well-marked characteristic case, but one lung was
free, so far; and as long as that was so the duration--by which he
meant the duration of the patient--was a thing the ablest pathologist
in the world could not pronounce upon. The little thing might live to
be an old woman--at Davos. He instanced cases of one-lung life in the
high Alps going on to old age. But in England, no!... Still, she might
go on for a year or so. Sea-air would be the best thing. Anywhere on
the south coast.
Do not suppose that any means were left undiscussed that could be
reasonably entertained of sending Lizarann to live by the sea. The
higher Alps did not come into practical politics. But there were
sea-possibilities. Inquiry discovered nursing homes, havens of
convalescence, where a very moderate payment would obtain sea-breezes
and good food and medical supervision for a patient either curable
or doomed--either would do. But the separation of the child from her
father would have been almost inevitable. The thing worked out so;
all details would want too much telling. Besides, Lizarann's friends
flinched from sending her to live among "cases" confessed and palpable.
It had too much of the character of surrender. How could the truth be
softened to her father, if it came to that?
It had come out through Mrs. Fox, who held a roving commission to tell
Jim things gradually, that a scheme was under consideration for packing
off both together, father and daughter, to a cottage by the seaside.
It had been pronounced quixotic, and condemned, before Mrs. Fox had an
opportunity to report its effect on Jim; so what she told of had no
influence in procuring its rejection. But it made its impracticability
less to be regretted.
"It would just be like to carry on, Mr. Coupland." So the old woman,
extenuating absence from Royd in any form. "It might be a bit lonesome,
and I would miss your pipe of an evenings--so I tell 'ee! But what is
three months, after all, when you come to name it?" Mrs. Fox, with true
tact, ignored the main evil, the cause of the whole, and chose her own
loss as the thing to dwell upon.
"It's not a big turnover of time," said Jim. A moment after he said,
referring back: "That's very kind of ye, mother, about the pipe. Thank
ye kindly!"
"You've no need to thank me, Mr. Coupland. All the fill-out of the
smoke's away up the big chimney in the thoroughdraft, when there's a
bit of flare to help it. I like to watch it find its way. Summer-time
the gap of the little window scarcely favours the letting of it out.
More by token, too, I can mind the many that's gone, by the very smell.
My husband, he would always have a yard o' clay ... ah!--that name he
gave it...."
"I know 'em, mother. Churchwa'ardens they call 'em."
"That sort. And my Daniel, he'd none of 'em, but just a cherry-wood. I
can hear the voices of them now, in the smoke."
"Thank ye, mother, for leave given, too! But I'd bring ye back the
little lass, safe and sound. Afore the end o' January would be the
time."
"'Tis nothing to speak of. But this I do tell 'ee, Mr. Coupland: I
shall have a fair miss of the little maid, with her clack."
"Ah--the little lass! But she'll have the more to tell ye, mother, when
she comes again in the spring-time. All set up and hearty, hay?"
It was then that the dear old thing, with the best of intentions, made
a mistake. She must needs refer--bless her!--to the length of time that
had passed since ever Jim had seen the sea. Then, concerned at the
sound of the blind man's "Ah, mother!" she misinterpreted her mistake,
conceiving it to have been in the reference to sight. Poor old lady!
How hurt she was when she found it out!
Jim was equally concerned on her account. He understood what her
thought had been almost before she had begun to explain. "Oh no,
no, no, mother!" he cried out, filling the little cottage with his
big voice. "Never you think it was that! Where should we be if I
couldn't bide to hear a word about my own bad luck? It don't make it
neither more nor less, ye know! And it might just as easy have been
anybody else." Jim's meaning was that the sum of human misery had been
arranged, and this tribulation had to be borne by someone, to balance.
If _he_ had it, someone else escaped. "No, no," he continued; "that's
not to be thought on, mother!"
But there had been a something, very distinct; and it was equally clear
that Mrs. Fox would like to know what, without asking intrusively.
Besides, Jim wanted to make that wrong guess a thing of the past. He
would try to explain why he was so moved. "It's none so easy, mother,
now and again, to say just what you have an inklin' to say. Not if the
other party's to understand, mind you! But ... did ye never see the
sea, mother?" No--Mrs. Fox had never seen the sea. But she had been
in Worcestershire, to her uncle's, many was the time. Jim declined
Worcestershire, but gently, not to seem scornful. "It might be a
far-off sight," he said. "Not like seafaring folk see it, from sun-up
to sun-up; just a fair offing all round ye, and the sky overhead."
However, Worcestershire had only been referred to that the old lady
might not seem quite untravelled. So Jim returned to his explanation.
"It was just a queer feel I had," said he, "about the sound of it
again, after such a many years."
Mrs. Fox's slip of the tongue had given her a fright, and she sat
silent. A log tumbled on the great open hearth, and a shower of sparks
went up the chimney to whirl away in the wind that was roaring down it
about the cold white drift of the winter night. Jim sat and thought of
his watches out upon the sea, and the same wind whistling through the
shrouds, and his strong arm and keen eyesight in the days gone by. All
gone--for ever! Nights by the galley-fire, or in some warm corner of a
steamer's 'tween-decks, welcome in the spells of look-out duty, when
the look-out was for icebergs in the Atlantic--the sort that wait till
a ship is well alongside, and choose a clever moment to turn turtle and
catch her in the nick. Nights in sailing traders--there are some left
still--on a still sea in the tropics, with not a breath of wind below,
and strange activity of meteors in an unresponsive universe of stars
above. Nights of battle with the storm-fiend--of whirling spray-drench
and decks swept by the torrent of the crested seas, all vanished in the
past, with that little wicked reason in between that lay in ambush for
Jim's eyes on the quay at Cape Town, in the bunghole of an oil-cask.
And then the broken sailor said to his heart: "Can we bear it, you and
I?--we that have borne so much; we that must live perforce in dread of
so much more still left to bear; we that may even have to say good-bye
to the little voice that has been the stronger half of our strength
till now? But this--oh, this!--to stand again in hearing of the sea;
to know it as of old by the endless intermittent rush of the shoaling
beach in its caress, by the music of the curling ridge of its wavelets,
nearer, nearer to the shore; to breathe the scent of it in the landward
wind--and then!... What then? Just to go mad in an aching void of
darkness, and cry out in agony for but one glimmer of the daylight that
has been once and shall never be again, just one momentary image of the
living world that void can never know."
Presently Mrs. Fox rose, saying quietly, "It's the remindin' brings
it back," and busied herself to get some toddy for her tenant. She
condemned a lemon-scrap as too dry; her stimulated pity for poor Jim
suggested a new one from "the shop," and she disappeared to get it.
Jim sat on in the glimmering firelight he did not know from sunshine,
thinking of the sea. He did not put his consolatory pipe down; it was
something, if not much, against thoughts that ran close on the lines
the story guessed for them, if not word for word. But it could not
stop the tears that _would_ come from the eyes that were good now for
nothing else but to shed them.