HOW LIZARANN SAW THE SEA, AND A CHINESE LADY WROTE A BAD ACCOUNT OF
HER TO HER FRIENDS. HOW IT NEVER REACHED JIM, AND MISS FOSSETT WAS
WIRED FOR. HOW THE RECTOR HAD TO GO TO CHIPPING CHESTER.
The tide was coming in at Chalk Cliff, and the Children, meaning
thereby all those on the coast at the time, were little glowing
spots of perfect unconcern; entire freedom from care, from memory
of the past and apprehension for the future; things as unencumbered
of responsibility and pain as tracts of smooth and furrowed sands,
beneath a broiling July sun, with endless pools at choice awaiting
the returning flood, and little boats to navigate them, and nets
to capture prawns, and sand-castles and spades and wooden panniers
you could pat the sand into, could make them. And the Children were
paddling in the pools, and insuring swift and prosperous passages to
the vessels under their control by pushing them--for there was never
a breath of wind--and chasing elusive prawns and unknown specimens
beneath the rocks, and putting their fingers in anemones, and molesting
crabs, and not succeeding in removing limpets suddenly from their
holdings, because the limpets were too sharp for them. Also they were
hard at work, the more purposeful ones, erecting sand castles the
very self-same shape as the limpets, and meeting in the middle, when
they--the Children--burrowed from opposite sides to complete the said
castles with four or even more tunnels, essential to perfect structure;
and, ending with their country's flag, in tin, upon the summit,
contentedly awaited the coming of the tide to wash it all away, and
leave them new clean spaces for to-morrow.
Why is Lizarann content to watch the Children in the sun, to be
dissociated from them as she lies upon the sand in the shade of that
big white umbrella a guardian nurse manipulates in her interest? Why
does she not seize the glorious opportunities of Life at its best; of
Life those babies yonder, too happy now to measure their own happiness,
will look back on one day not so very far hence as a sweet Elysium
of the past, a heaven of unquestioning content the clouds of the
years to come will never let them know again? Why does Lizarann--our
Lizarann!--prefer to lie still and converse with the good woman who
has charge of her?
Well!--you see, she got tired with the journey yesterday. That's all.
You'll see she'll pick up when she's been here a few days, and the
sea air has had time to tell. Besides, it is notorious that its first
effect on you is always enervating; and then you take quinine, and it
gives you a headache.
Whatever the cause, Lizarann accepted the effect, and was content to
watch the Children in the middle zone of best building sand, not too
wet and not too dry, all working hard to be ready for the tide that
was heralding its coming in a major key, as is the manner of tides
that have died sadly away to sea, six hours since, in a minor. A false
musical metaphor to him whose hearing goes no deeper than the surface
of sound--true! But not to Lizarann, though she knew as little as we
how to word the difference rightly between the joy of the sea returning
and the lament of its departure. For this is written because Lizarann
wanted to ask the lady in charge of her questions about this varied
sounding of the waters, noted by her in the wakeful hours of her first
night at the nursing-home.
This lady was benevolent, Lizarann was convinced. But for all that,
she was like the stout Chinese carved in wood who sat all day long in
the window of the tea-shop Aunt Stingy bought a quarter of a pound
at a time at, nearly opposite Trott Street. Only then this image was
evidently a portrait of a benevolent Chinese, of whom no little girl
would have been afraid to ask questions about the tides. Lizarann
reasoned on the position before she ventured on speech. Then she said:
"I heard that all the time I was in bed. Yass!--through the open
window."
"Poor little woman!" said the lady. "Yes, my dear, that's the water.
It's the sound it makes."
"It didn't kept me awike," said Lizarann, anxious not to reflect upon
the sea, of which she knew her Daddy had a high opinion. But the lady
had said, "Poor little woman!" on general principles; not, as the
little girl supposed, with reference to wakefulness caused by it.
"Some little girls like it very much," was the comment.
Lizarann wished this lady had thrown out a hint, for her guidance, as
to whether these were good little girls or bad little girls. She would
have to risk something, evidently. "I like it very much, please," she
said tentatively. "Please, ma'am, don't you?"
"I can't say I do, my dear. It fusses me. But then I sleep at the
back." Lizarann was disappointed. She had, in fact, been cherishing an
idea that the Mandarin-like, placid seeming of this lady had resulted
from the soothing lullaby of the ocean, heard night and day. Clearly
it would be safest to leave personal experiences and speak of Physical
Geography. Lizarann had a question to ask:
"Did it went on just like that when my Daddy went viyages aboardship?"
"Did it go on just like that? Yes, dear! It went on just like that.
More so, sometimes!"
"Louderer and louderer? And then it blowed a gale?"
"And then it blew a gale. I dare say." The Mandarin looked benevolently
round at her patient, and added: "We're very nautical."
Now Lizarann missed the last syllable, and therefore thought that she
and the lady, for some reason unknown, were very naughty. Of course,
the lady knew best; and, as she herself was inculpated, would never be
so dishonourable as to tell. So Lizarann asked for no explanations.
But she wanted to know about the tides, and some points in navigation.
Presently an incident supplied a text.
"Why did the lady ran away from the water?"
"Because she didn't want wet stockings." Yes--that was clear enough.
But why did the water run after the lady?--Lizarann asked, recasting
her question. "Because the tide's coming in," said her informant.
Explanations followed--not embarrassingly deep ones; the moon was left
out altogether. The water would come right up to where we were at two
o'clock because it was spring-tide. Then it would go back again for
the same reason; which seemed inconsistent to Lizarann, who was no
politician. But she was not really keen about the physical questions
involved. As soon as courtesy permitted, she reintroduced her personal
interest.
"When my Daddy was sarving aboardship"--it was funny to hear the child
repeat her father's words, said the Mandarin after--"did he _seed_ the
water go in and out, like we do?"
"If he was on the coast."
"Are _we_ on the scoast?"
"We are at Chalk Cliff, and Chalk Cliff's on the coast." Lizarann
didn't see why we should wash our hands of the coast, and throw the
whole responsibility on Chalk Cliff. But she accepted this too; only,
further definition would be welcome.
"Those are ships?" she half asked, half affirmed, looking out to sea.
"Those are ships. Some big, some little."
"Are they on the scoast?"
"Oh dear no!--miles away." Then Lizarann was beginning, languidly, a
demonstration that her Daddy, when voyaging on board ship, could not
also be on the coast and observe the tides, when the Mandarin--good,
well-intentioned woman that she was--must needs feel her patient's
pulse, and say she mustn't talk too much and make herself cough, and
advised her to lie quiet, and even go to sleep. Lizarann repudiated
sleep, as she wanted to watch the life around, and was only wishing
she hadn't got so tired with that railway-journey yesterday. It would
have been so nice to catch prawns and make sand-castles, like the
Children. But she acquiesced in inaction, to her own surprise; and to
her still greater surprise waked suddenly, shortly after, from a dream
of Bridgetticks and her small self building sand-castles in the gutter
in Tallack Street, and terribly in dread of the Boys.
Still, through it all, the little patient saw nothing strange in her
own readiness to submit to being nursed. She was first and foremost
among the disbelievers in the seriousness of her malady, and ascribed
all the solicitude that was being shown about her to an epidemic of
public benevolence, more or less due to misapprehensions set on foot
by Dr. Spiderophel's imperfect auscultations. It was a whim he had
inoculated a kind-hearted world with; and she felt, for some reason she
could not analyze, that it was easiest to indulge it.
So when her eyes opened again on the glorious vision of the great wide
sea her Daddy had told her of so many a time, as she nestled to his
heart by that dear bygone fireside in the London slum, with Uncle Bob
ending the day in a drunken drowse, and Aunt Stingy adding a chapter
to her long chronicle of her world's depravity and her own merits,
she made no effort towards movement--just lay still unexplained, and
watched the flood coming nearer, ever nearer, to a grand sand-castle
just below; and listened to the music of its ripples, and wondered
at the builders' exultation over the coming cataclysm, the wreck of
their morning's work. It seemed illogical, that shout of joy when a
larger wavelet than its fellows glanced ahead of them, and catching
sight of the majestic structure, rushed emulously on to be the first
to undermine it. But not illogical neither, to be proud of the gallant
stand that castle made against the seas; a miniature Atlantis dying
game, protesting to the last! Nor when the final effort of the British
Channel made of it mere oblivion--an evanescence in sand and foam and
floating weed--to mingle a general concession towards going home to
dinner now, with resolutions to come at sunrise, or thereabouts, and
build a bigger one still to-morrow.
The Mandarin lady was conversing with a family when Lizarann opened her
eyes, and all were looking towards the patient. But if what they said
was overheard by her, it was not understood; it was to the child only a
part of the general goodwill the World seemed bent on showing towards
herself.
"Very quick sometimes," said the lady, who couldn't have been really
Chinese, or the family wouldn't have called her Miss Jane. Then the
family's mamma, whose beauty seized on Lizarann so, almost, as to take
her attention off the sand-castle, said, "Poor, darling little thing!
How sad!" And then the castle was overwhelmed, turrets, battlements,
and flag; and if Lizarann had heard that much, she certainly heard no
more, and attached little meaning to that.
Besides, a very succulent little boy, who could not speak for himself
yet, owing to his youth, who had been interpreted as anxious to show
his prawn to the little girl, was being urged by his nurse to that
course, he having to all seeming suddenly wavered, and resolved to
conceal the prawn--who was lukewarm and unhappy from being held too
tight--in a commodious crease under his chin. Lizarann's attention was
at the moment divided between solicitude for the prawn's welfare and an
affection for this little boy she could not conceal, in spite of his
callous indifference to the lifelong habits of his prisoner.
And then the beach and its glories had passed away, and Lizarann was
aware that she had been carried indoors from a donkey-carriage she had
accompanied other patients home in, and was lying down indisposed for
food she recognized as nice; but trying to eat it too, to oblige Miss
Jane, the Mandarin, who seemed to have taken a great fancy to her.
Only she couldn't the least account for _why_ it should be such an
effort to eat her dinner; and ended by putting it down to the absence
of her Daddy, and wanting sorely to be back with him at Mrs. Fox's;
or--strange preference!--bringing him home from Bladen Street an intact
Daddy as of old, albeit eyeless by hypothesis, and all the dreadful
accident a dream.
There were reservations, though, to the way she let her heart go back
to those sweet stethoscopeless days. To make none would have been
disloyal to Teacher and to Mr. Yorick--oh yes!--and to Phoebe and Joan,
and Mrs. Fox, and even to Aunt Bessy, though the latter was not a
really well-informed person, and Dr. Spiderophel, who was more sinned
against than sinning, the victim of a fraudulent black pipe! If she
were still the little pilot of her eyeless Daddy through the crowded
streets, what would she now be to Teacher, who had got to be a sort of
mother to her?--what but one of a swarm of little girls in time, or
otherwise, for religious instruction at a quarter-to-nine, and breaking
loose in possession of two hours' more secular information at twelve,
except Saturday? What but an unknown unit of a crowded slum to Mr.
Yorick? Just think!--if there were no Mr. Yorick...!
"I think we may put it down to the fatigue of the journey yesterday.
You'll back me up in that, doctor?"
But the head physician of the Convalescent Home, who answered
Miss Jane, the Mandarin, wasn't a firmly outlined character. "I
see no objection to that," he answered. "But there's very strong
feebleness--very strong feebleness! Shouldn't say too much about
anything."
"I see," said Miss Jane. And that was all she said. But Lizarann, who
heard more than she was supposed to hear, this time, formed a very
low opinion of her new medical adviser. As if she had anything the
matter with her! She had a better opinion of Miss Jane; and when that
lady asked her, referring to a letter she wrote that afternoon to
Adeline Fossett--who was a friend of hers, it seemed--what message she
was to give on Lizarann's behalf, the patient had no misgiving about
entrusting a full cargo of loves and kisses for delivery to her.
As she lay and listened in a half-dream in the sunny room, with the air
coming in from the sea, to its distant murmur mixing with the drone of
those untiring flies on the ceiling, and the scratching of Miss Jane's
pen near at hand, the recent arrival at the Home had no suspicion
how serious a report of her case that lady was framing. She lay and
wondered when that long letter would come to an end, and looked forward
to the sweet experience of rejoining her Daddy, and talking more to
him about the sea he had known so well in the days when there was no
Lizarann. _She_ knew it now too; and was going to know it better still
to-morrow.
* * * * *
"We shall have to make up our minds, Bess," said Athelstan Taylor two
or three days later to his sister-in-law, at Royd.
"To...?" said Miss Caldecott, in brief interrogation.
"We shall have to make up our minds what to say to Jim Coupland. You
see what Addie thinks?"
Aunt Bessy saw, she said. But after reflection hit upon an escape from
painful inferences. Didn't Addie sometimes look on the worst side of
things? "Perhaps she does," said the Rector, and felt more cheerful
over it. Then he got sundry letters from his pocket, and re-read them.
His little access of cheerfulness seemed chilled by the reading, for
when he had ended he shook his head, in his own confidence, and sighed
as he refolded the letters.
"Let me look at them again," said Miss Caldecott. Both knew the
contents of these letters perfectly, and each knew the other knew them.
But it looked like weighing them in a more accurate pair of scales than
the last, every time of reading.
"Make anything of them?" the Rector asked, but got no answer. The
letters were being read slowly. Justice was being done to the question.
But the truth was Aunty Bessy was suppressing her inspirations because
she couldn't trust her voice with them. She was a dry and correct lady,
but affectionate for all that; and it was her affection for Lizarann
that had got in her throat, and would have to subside before she could
screw herself up to pooh-poohing the letter Miss Jane the Chinese had
written to Adeline Fossett, with such a bad account of her patient.
This was the letter we left Lizarann listening to, as she lay looking
forward to the sea, next day.
Presently the answer came, following on a short cough or two connected
with the throat-symptom:--"I do think people of that sort are often
very inconsiderate. Don't you?"
"Which sort?"
"People who are constantly in contact with this kind of thing--matrons
of hospitals--nurses--all that sort! However, you know best."
"Miss Fanshawe's a very old friend of Addie's, and tells her the truth
perhaps more freely because of her own experience--knows about Gus,
and remembers Cecilia." The name of the Chinese, then, was Fanshawe.
Cecilia was the sister that died.
"Perhaps," said Miss Caldecott. "Isn't the post very late?"
The post was audible without, with a powerful provincial accent. After
debate--which accounted for the post's lateness--its boots departed
down the garden gravel-path, and Rachel brought in the letters, and
said, "Shall I shut up, miss?" as Pandora's box might have said, if
willing to oblige.
The Rector was keen on one letter; the others might wait. Miss
Caldecott said, "Addie, I see," and waited also to read her own
letters. Then the usual course was followed in such cases. The Rector
read, and said, "All right! Directly," and, "Just half-a-second!" in
response to, "Well?" which came at intervals, like minute-guns with
notes of interrogation after them. Then expansive relief followed in
his voice. "Oh yes!--that's very satisfactory. Now I shall be able to
tell Jim." Then he surrendered one letter and read the other, saying
as he neared the end, "Ah well!--it's _substantially_ the same. I'm so
glad we got them to-night."
"I thought it was that," said Miss Caldecott. "Naturally, people who
see so many cases of this sort get frightened at every little thing."
She read the letter aloud, making selections: "'Was up and walked about
on the beach this morning.' You see, Athel? 'Sea air very often has
that effect at first'--oh, that's what Addie herself says--'expect the
Vim Æthericum will do wonders.' Some new medicine, I suppose. What does
Miss Fanshawe's own letter say?"
"Only what Addie reports. But I don't quite like...."
"What?"
"You'll see at the end there. 'Must be thankful she suffers so little'?"
"Oh, Athel! Now you _are_ begging and borrowing troubles."
"Well--I didn't like the wording of it. However, I think I shall be
justified in not reading that bit to her father. Poor Jim!"
* * * * *
This was in July, a fortnight or thereabouts before Challis paid his
visit to the Rectory. It is a good sample of the sort of thing that
had gone on in the interim. The sort of thing only very young or very
lucky folk are unfamiliar with--the bulletin-foundry's intense anxiety
to make the most of every little scrap of nourishment for Hope, on the
one hand; on the other, the amazing capacity of Hope for growing quite
bloated on starvation diet.
All the news that reached Jim about his dying child--the words give
the truth, brutally; but what does the story gain by flinching from
them?--was what a succession of kind hearts had tried to make the best
of, each without a particle of conscious wish to falsify or suppress.
What wonder that when Challis saw him at the well that day, Jim was
using the mere letter of the daily tidings he received to silence the
misgivings that were whispering to his heart? But they were there for
all that, making deadly forecasts in his mind of a life he would have
to live, he knew not how--a life that was darkness now, but still had
a light shining in that darkness that it heeded--a light that helped
oblivion of the cruel past. What would be left for him if that solace
were withdrawn?
He had always an undercurrent of suspicion that the evil was being
made the best of, for his sake. And in the greatness of his heart--for
Jim had a great heart--he felt pity for those who had to be the bearers
of ill news; none of them cut out for indifference to the suffering
of its hearers. If he lost his little lass, the Master--so he still
called Athelstan Taylor--would have to come and tell him; and Jim would
have been glad he should be spared the pain, after so much kindness
to himself and the lassie. Only, that pain would not be outside the
range of pity; a practicable human pain that could be thought of
and dealt with--not a pain like his own if the lassie followed her
mother. Or rather, that last pain would be no pain at all; merely the
dumb extinction of a soul. Or would it be like the anæsthetic that
multiplies suffering tenfold, and leaves its victim inexpressive--just
mere adamant? So much the better! Death would come the sooner.
But all the information Jim received was softened down, and he knew it.
A murmur he could not have found voice to speak aloud was always in
the inmost chambers of his mind, prompting doubt of the reports that
reached him. But he never showed a sign of his growing consciousness of
the gathering cloud, unless it were that he listened to his news, as he
got it, more and more in silence.
* * * * *
"How would he be the better if we did send him?" said Athelstan
Taylor to his sister-in-law, less than three weeks later. "He might
just arrive to find her dying. How would he know his little lass? Not
'by the feel' now! Addie says she's gone to a mere shadow. Not by
the voice...." His own broke, and he stopped. Aunt Bessy sobbed in a
window-recess, and thought she dried her tears unnoticed.
They had been walking to and fro and about the room in restless
perturbation, she interlacing the uneasy fingers of hands that wandered
to her brows when free, then interlaced again; he somewhat firmer,
but with lips not quite within control. He held the yellow paper of
a telegram to hand an hour since, and kept re-reading the twenty-odd
words that made it up, failing always to read any new and better
meaning into the heart of their brevity. It had come enclosed in a
letter from Adeline Fossett, who had the day previously been wired for
suddenly by Miss Jane, the Chinese lady at Chalk Cliff. A short and
grisly summons she knew the meaning of at once, following as it did on
a forewarning letter thirty-six hours ago--a letter that teemed with
excruciating assurance that there was no "immediate danger," but that
when there was the writer would send a telegram at once. She had kept
her word.
That letter, forwarded promptly on to the Rectory, had made heart-sick
discussion between Athelstan Taylor and Aunt Bessy since its arrival by
this morning's post. What ought to be said?--what _could_ be said to
the father of the dying child, who was now looking forward to her near
return home, building still whatever structures of hope the hesitating,
irresolute tidings of a month past had left a weak foundation for?
Who was to say to Jim that the time had come to give up that sweet
vision he to this hour was trying hard to cherish, of a miraculous late
summer and his little lass again, beside him at the well-head, in the
sunshine? Who was to shatter the thin crust of artificial hopes that
still kept under the fires of his misgivings, and leave them free to
break loose through the crater of a volcano of despair?
"How would he be the better?" the Rector asked again presently. "And if
I say to him now, 'Lizarann is dying, but you cannot be beside her when
she dies'--why--will not that be quite the worst thing of all? I can
only judge by imagining myself in his position. Poor Jim!"
"You must do as you think best, Athel dear," said Aunt Bessy. She was
not a tower of strength in a crisis, this good lady; but she wouldn't
hinder, though she couldn't help. Only, there are ways and ways of not
hindering. Her brother-in-law would have liked another sample, this
time one with less flavour of protest.
"Just look at it this way, Bessy," said he. "If I could say to Jim,
'The doctors are sending bad accounts of the little one, and you must
come with me straight away to see how things are going'--well!--that
would be quite another thing. But to prepare him for bad news, and the
rest of it, and then leave him alone in the cottage...!"
"He will be alone in the cottage. I had forgotten that. But it won't
be so soon ... surely...?" The hushed voice shows what is referred
to--the "arch-fear in a terrible form" on whose face Europe at least
cannot bear to look. How rarely does even the bravest among us speak
of the grim terror by name, with reference to a particular case!
What does it matter? Ways of saying the same thing are provided by
conventions that seem quite alive to the whereabouts of the sting
of Death, of the victory of the Grave. If the language of the daily
press is any evidence on the subject, the Immortalism of the Creeds is
only skin-deep. Disorders terminate fatally; folk breathe their last;
they share the common lot; they succumb; none is so old and weary
with the storms of Fate that the vernacular forecast of his release
will not "anticipate the worst." But nobody _dies_, except paupers,
in contemporary speech. Did you ever hear of a disorder "terminating
fatally" in a workhouse? Or perhaps insolvents die--was one ever known
to succumb?
Aunt Bessy was flinching before the inexorable, and pleading for
useless respite. "I know what it means," said the Rector, "when
telegrams like this begin. The old story!" He put the point aside with
a sigh. "Ah well!--anyhow, Jim may be alone for some days. It isn't
even as if I could be with him now and again. I _must_ go to this
Memorial business at Chipping Chester, and I can't get off stopping
to marry Audrey: she would never forgive me." He enumerated other
engagements--things that would keep him absent a week--even longer.
They were matters quite outside the story.
"When do you suppose old Margy will be back?"
"How can I tell? When do you suppose her niece's baby intends to be
born?"