"What I should recommend," she said--and she winced obtrusively at every
sixth word--"is an 'arty meal at one, and a light supper at height."
"That will suit me admirably," I said.
She tapped her fingers together indulgently.
"So I thought," she murmured. "Now, what do you fancy, sir?"
"Dear me!" I exclaimed, for her face was horribly contorted. "Are you in
pain?"
"Agonies!" said Miss Whiffle.
"Toothache?"
"Neuralgia, sir, for my sins."
"Is there--is there no remedy?"
She was taken with a sharp spasm of laughter, mirthless, but consciously
expressive of all the familiar processes of self-effacement under
torture.
"I arks nothing but my duty, sir," she said. "That is the myrrh and
balsam to a racking 'ed. Not but what I owns to a shrinking like unto
death over the thought of what lays before me this very morning. Rest and
quiet is needful, but it's little I shall get of either out of a kitching
fire in the dog days. And what would you fancy for your dinner, sir?"
"I am sorry," I murmured, "that you should suffer on my account. I
suppose there is nothing cold--"
"Not enough, sir, in all the 'ouse to bait a mousetrap. Nor would I
inconvenience you, if not for your own kind suggestion. But potted meats
is 'andy and ever sweet, and if I might make bold to propose a tin--"
"Very well. Get me what you like, Miss Whiffle."
"I must arks your pardin, sir. But to walk out in this 'eat, and every
rolling pebble under my foot a knife through my 'ed--no, sir. I make bold
to claim that consideration for myself."
"Leave it to me, then. I will do my own catering this morning."
Then I added, in the forlorn hope of justifying my moral ineptitude to
myself, "If you take my advice, you will lie down."
"And where, sir?" she answered, with a particularly patient smile. "The
beds is unmade as yet, sir," she went on, in a suffering decline, "and
rumpled sheets is thorns to a bursting brain."
Then she looked meaningly at the sitting-room sofa.
"I made bold to think, if you _'ad_ 'appened to been a-going to bathe,
the only quiet place in the 'ouse--" she murmured, in semi-detached
sentences, and put her hand to her brow.
Five minutes later (I fear no one will credit it) I was outside the
house, and Miss Whiffle was installed, towel and all, upon my sofa.
For a moment I really think the outrageous absurdity of the situation did
goad me to the tottering point of rebellion. I had not the courage,
however, to let myself go, and, as usual, succumbed to the tyranny of
circumstances.
It was a blazing morning. The flat sea lay panting on its coasts, as if,
for all its liquid sparkle, it were athirst; and the town, under the oven
of its hills, burned red-hot, like pottery in a kiln.
I went and bought my tinned meat (a form of preserve quite odious to me)
and strolled back disconsolately to the Parade. Occasionally, flitting
past the lantern window, I would steal a side glance into the cool
luminosity of my own inaccessible parlour; and there always, reclining at
her ease upon my sofa, was the ineradicable presentment of Miss Whiffle.
At one o'clock I ventured to reclaim my own, and sat me down at table, a
scorched and glutinous wreck, too overcome with lassitude to tackle the
obnoxious meal of my own providing. And to the sofa, already made
familiar of that dishonoured towel, I was fain presently to confide the
empty problem of my own aching head.
All this was but the forerunner and earnest of a month's long martyrdom.
That night the sea had me by the nerves again, and for many nights
after; and, although I grew in time to a certain tolerance of the booming
monotony, it was the tolerance of a dully resigned, not an indifferent,
brain.
When it came to the second morning, not only the novel, but the mere idea
of my ever having contemplated writing one, was a thing with me to feebly
marvel over. And from that time I set myself down to exist and broil
only, doling out a languid interest to the locality, the shimmer of whose
baking hill-sides made all life a quivering, glaring phantom of itself.
Miss Whiffle tyrannized over me more or less according to her mood; but
she did not usurp my sitting-room again. I used to sit by the hour at
the lantern window, in a sort of greasy blankness, like a meat pudding,
and vacantly scrutinize the loiterers who passed by on the hot asphalt of
the Parade. Screened by the window curtains, I could see and hear without
endangering my own privacy; and many were the odd interchanges of speech
that fell from strangers unconscious of a listener.
One particularly festering day after dinner I had the excitement of quite
a pretty little quarrel for dessert. Miss Whiffle had stuffed me with
suet, in meat and pudding, to a point of stupefaction that stopped short
only of absolute insensibility; and in this state I took up my usual post
at the window, awaiting in swollen vacuity the possibilities of the
afternoon.
On the horizon violet-hot sea and sky showed scarce a line of demarcation
between them. Nearer in the waves snored stertorously from exhausted
lungs, as if the very tide were in extremis. Not a breath of air fanned
the pitiless Parade, and the sole accent on life came from a droning,
monotonous voice pitched from somewhere in querulous complaint.
"Frarsty!" it wailed, "Frarsty! I warnt thee!" and again, "I warnt thee,
Frarsty! Frarsty! Frar--r--r--rsty!" drawn out in an inconceivable
passionlessness of desire again and again, till I felt myself absorbing
the ridiculous yearning for an absurd person and inclined to weep
hysterical tears at his unresponsiveness.
Then through the suffocating miasma thridded another sound--the whine of
a loafing tramp slowly pleading along the house fronts--vainly, too, as
it appeared.
"Friends," went his formula, nasal and forcibly spasmodic in the best
gull-catcher style, "p'raps you will ask why I, a able-bodied man, are
asking for ass--ist--ance in your town. Friends, I answer, becorse I
cannot get work and becorse I cannot starve. Any honest work I would be
thankful for; but no one will give it to me."
Then followed an elaborate presentation, in singsong verse, of his own
undeserved indigence and the brutality of employers, and so the
recitation again:--
"Friends, the least ass--ist--ance would be welcome. I am a honest
British workman, and employ--ment I cannot ob--tain. You sit in your
com--for--ta--ble 'ouses, and I ask you to ass--ist a fellow creature,
driven to this for no fault of his own--for many can 'elp one where one
cannot 'elp many."
Then he hove into sight--a gastropodous tub of a fellow, with a rascally
red eye; and I shrank behind my curtains, for I never court parley with
such gentlemen.
He spotted me, of course,--rogues of his feather have a hawk's eye for
timid quarry,--and his bloated face appeared at the window.
"Sir--friend," he said, in a confidential, hoarse whisper, "won't you
'elp a starvin' British workman?"
I gave him sixpence, cursing inwardly this my concession to pure
timorousness, and the bestial mask of depravity vanished with a grin.
After that I was left to myself, heat and haze alone reigning without;
and presently, I think, I must have fallen into a suetty doze, for I was
semi-conscious of voices raised in dispute for a length of time, before I
roused to the fact that two people were quarrelling just outside my
window.
They were a young man--almost a boy--and a girl of about his own age; and
both evidently belonged to the labouring classes.
She was, I took occasion to notice, aggressively pretty in that hot red
and black style that finds its warmest admirers in a class cultivated
above that to which she belonged; and she was scorning and flouting her
slow, perplexed swain with that over-measure of vehemence characteristic
of a sex devoid of the sense of proportion.
"Aw!" she was saying, as I came into focus of their dispute. "That's the
moral of a mahn, it is. Yer ter work when ye like an' ter play when ye
like, and the girls hahs ter sit and dangle their heels fer yer honours'
convenience."
"I doan't arlays get my likes, Jenny, or I shud a' met you yesterday."
"Ay, as yer promused."
"We worked ower late pulling the lias, I tell yer. 'Twould 'a' meant half
a day's wages garn if I'd com', and theer, my dear, 'ud been reason
for another delay in oor getting spliced."
"You're fine and vulgar, upon my word! A little free, too, and a little
mistook. I've no mind ter get spliced, as yer carls it, wi' a chap as
cannot see's way ter keep tryst."
"Yer doan't mean thart?"
"Doan't I? Yer'll answer fer me in everything, 't seems. But yer've got
enough ter answer fer yerself, Jack Curtice. I'm none of the sort ter go
or stay at anny mahn's pleasure. There's kerps and dabs in the sea yet,
Jack Curtice; and fatter ones ter fish fer, too."
"But yer doan't understand."
"I understand my own vally; and that isn't ter be kep' drarging my toes
on the Parade half an a'rtenoon fer a chap as thinks he be better
engaged summer else."
"And yer gone ter break wi' me fer thart?"
"Good-bye, Mr. Curtice," she said, and jerked her nose high and walked
off.
Now here was an inconsistent jade, and I felt sorry and relieved for the
sake of the young fellow.
He stood, after the manner of his kind, amazed and speechless. Man's
saving faculty of logic was in him, but tongue-tied; and he could not
express his intuitive recognition of the self-contradictory. Such natures
frequently make reason articulate through a blow--a rough way of knocking
her into shape, but commonly effectual. Jack, however, was evidently a
large gentle swain of the dumb-suffering type--one of those unresisting
leviathans of good-humour, upon whom a woman loves to vent that passion
of the illogical which an antipathetic sex has vainly tried to laugh her
out of conceit with.
I peered a little longer, and presently saw Mr. Curtice walk off in a
state compound of bewilderment and abject depression.
This was the beginning to me of an interest apart from that which had
brought me to King's Cobb. A real nutshell drama had usurped the place of
that fictitious one that had as yet failed to mark an epoch by so much as
a scratch. I accepted the former as some solace for the intolerable
wrong inflicted upon me by the sea and Miss Whiffle.
I happened across my unconscious friends fairly frequently after that my
first introduction to them; so often, indeed, that, judged by what
followed, it would almost seem as if Fate, desiring record of an incident
in the lives of these two, had intentionally worked to discomfit me from
a task more engrossing.
Apart, and judged on their natural merits, I took Jack for a good stolid
fellow, innately and a little aggravatingly virtuous, and perhaps a
trifle more just than generous.
Jenny, I felt, had the spurious brilliancy of that division of her sex
that claims as intuition an inability to master the processes of thought,
and attributes to this faculty all fortunate conclusions, but none that
is faulty. I thought, with some commiseration for him, that at bottom her
manner showed some real leaning towards the lover she had discarded--that
she felt the need of a pincushion, as it were, into which to stick the
little points of her malevolence. I think I was inclined to be hard on
her. I have felt the same antagonism many times towards beauty that was
unattainable by me. For she was richly pretty, without doubt.
When in the neighbourhood of one another, however, they were wont to
assume an elaborate artificiality of speech and manner in communion with
their friends, that was designed with each to point the moral of a
complete indifference and forgetfulness. But the girl was by far the
better actor; and not only did she play her own part convincingly, but
she generally managed to show up in her rival that sense of mortification
that it was his fond hope he was effectually concealing.
A fortnight passed; and, lo! there came the end of the lovers' quarrel in
all dramatic appropriateness.
By that time the doings of Jack and Jenny had come to be my mind's only
refuge from such a vacancy of outlook as I had never before experienced.
"All down the coast," that summer, "the languid air did swoon." The earth
broiled, and very thought perspired; and Miss Whiffle's voice was like a
steam-whistle.
One day, as I was exhaustedly trifling with my meridian meal, and
balancing the gratification against the trouble of eating lumpy tapioca
pudding, a muffled, rolling thud broke upon my ears, making the window
and floor vibrate slightly. It seemed so distant and unimportant that I
took no notice of it; and it was only when, ten minutes later, I became
aware that certain excited townsfolk were scurrying past outside that I
roused slowly to the thought that here was something unusual toward.
Then, indeed, a sort of insane _abandon_ flashed into life in me, and I
leapt to my feet with maniac eyes. Something stirring in King's Cobb! I
should have thought nothing less than the last trump could have pricked
it out of its accustomed grooves; and that even then it would have
slipped back into them with a sluggish sense of grievance after the first
flourish.
I left my congealing dish, snatched up my hat, and joined the attenuated
chase. It was making in one direction--a point, apparently, to the east
of the town. As I sped excited through the narrow and tortuous streets, a
great bulge of acrid dust bellied upon me suddenly at a corner; and,
turning the latter, I plunged into a perfect fog of the same gritty
smoke. In this, phantom figures moved, appeared, and vanished; hoarse
cries resounded, and a general air of wild confusion and alarm prevailed.
For the moment, I felt as if some history of the town's past were
re-enacting, as if a sudden swoop of Frank or Dutchman upon the coast had
called forth all the defensive ardour of its people. There was nothing of
gunpowder in the stringent opacity, however; but, rather, a strong
suggestion of ancient and disintegrated mortar.
A shape sped by me in the fog, and I managed to stay and question it.
"What is it all?" I asked.
"House fell down," was the breathless answer; "and a poor chap left aloft
on the ruins."
Then I grew as insane as the rest of the company. I strode aimlessly to
and fro, striving at every coign to pierce with my eyesight the white
drift. I pushed back my hat; I gnawed my knuckles; I felt that I could
not stay still, yet knew not for what point to make. Almost I felt that
in another moment I should screech out--when a breath of sea air caught
the skirt of the cloud, and rolled the bulk of it up and away over
the house-tops.
Then, at once, was revealed to me the cause and object of all this
gaggle, and confusion, and outcry. It was revealed to the crowd, too,
that stood about me, and, in the revelation, the noise of its mouthing
went off and faded, till a tense silence reigned and the murmur of one's
breathing seemed a sacrilege.
I saw before me a ruinous space--a great ragged gap in a lofty block of
brick and mortar. This block had evidently, at one time, consisted of two
high semi-detached houses, and of these, one lay a monstrous heap of
tumbled and shattered _débris_. A ruin, but not quite; for, as the course
of a landslip will often tower with great spires and pinnacles of rock
and ragged earth that have withstood the pull and onset of the moving
hill-side, so here a high sheet of shattered wall, crowned with a cluster
of toppling chimneys, stood up stark in the midst of the general
overthrow. And there aloft, clinging to the crumbling stack, that might
at any moment part, and fling and crush him into the savage ruin below,
stood the figure of a solitary man. And the man was my friend of the
Parade, Jack Curtice.
I could see and recognise him plainly--even the frantic clutch of his
hands and the deadly pallor of his face.
The block--an ancient one--had been, as I afterwards learned, in course
of demolition when the catastrophe took place. At the moment the poor
fellow had been alone at his work, and now his destruction seemed a mere
matter of seconds.
White dust rose from the heap, like smoke from an extinguished fire; and
ever, as we looked, spars and splinters of brick tore away from the high
fragment yet standing, and plunged with a thud into the wrack underneath.
It was glaringly evident that not long could elapse before wall and man
would come down with a hideous, shattering run. A slip, a wilder clutch
at his frail support, might in an instant precipitate the calamity.
Then from the upturned faces of the women cries of pity and anguish broke
forth, and men nipped one another's arms and gasped, and knew not what
counsel to offer.
"Do summut! do summut!" cried the women; and their mates only shook off
their pleadings with a peevish show of callousness, that was merely the
dumb anguish of undemonstrativeness. For, while their throats were thick,
their practical brains were busy.
Some one suggested a ladder, and in a moment there was an aimless
scurrying and turning amongst the women.
"Why don't 'ee stir theeself and hunt for un, Jarge?" panted one that
stood near me, twisting hysterically upon a slow youth at her side.
"Shut up, 'Liza!" he answered gruffly; then, with a sort of indrawn
gasp--"Look art the wall, lass--look art the wall!"
It was obvious to the least knowing what he meant. To lean so much as a
broomstick, it seemed, against that tottering ruin would infallibly
complete its destruction.
One foot of the clinging figure high up was seen to move slightly, and a
little bomb of mortar span out into the air and burst into dust on a
projecting brick. A long shrill sigh broke from the crowd.
Then the male wiseheads came together, and, desperate to snap the chord
of impotent suspense, mooted and rejected plan after plan that their sane
judgment knew from the first to be impracticable.
At the outset it was plainly impossible for a soul to approach the ruins.
Apart from the almost certain mangling such a venture would entail upon
the explorer, the least stirring or shifting of the great heap of rubbish
flung about the base of the wall would certainly risk the immediate
collapse of the latter.
Success, it was evident, must come, if at all, from a distance--but how?
One suggested slinging a rope from window to window of adjacent houses
across the path of the broken chimney-stack--a good method of rescue had
circumstances lent themselves to it. They did not. On the ruin side a
wide space intervened; on the other, the sister house to that which had
fallen, and which was also included in the order of demolition, was
itself affected by the loss of its support, and leaned in a sinister
manner, its party walls bulged and rent towards the scene of devastation.
Nothing short of the great Roc itself could, it seemed, snatch the poor
fellow from his death perch.
There came suddenly an ominous silence. Then strode out in front of his
fellows--and he moved so close to the ruin that the women whimpered and
held one another--an old, rough-bearded chap in stained corduroy.
"Whart's he gone to do?" gasped the sibilant voices.
He hollowed his hands to his mouth, he cleared his hoarse throat two or
three times. Only a little trailing screech came from it at first. Then
he cursed his weakness, and pulled himself together.
"Jark! Jark Curtus!" he hailed, in an explosive voice.
"Hullo!"
The weak, small response floated down.
"My lard! my poor lard! we've thought oor best, arnd we can do nothun
fower 'ee."
Instantly a shrill protest of horror went up from the women. This was not
what they had expected.
"What! leave the mis'rable boy to his fate!"
There followed a storm of hisses from them--absolutely unreasonable, of
course. The old fellow turned to retire, with hanging head.
At the moment a girl, flushed, blowzed, breathless, broke through the
skirt of the mob and barred his retreat.
"Oh!" she panted, shaking her jet-black noddle at him--"here's a parcel
o' gor-crows for discussin' help to a Christian marn! What! a score o'
wiselings, and not one to hit oot the means and the way?"
She had only just heard, and had run a mile to the rescue of her old lad.
The women caught her enthusiasm, and jeered and cheered formlessly, as
their manner is; for each desired for her own voice a separate
recognition.
Jenny pushed rudely past the abashed gaffer. She was hatless, and her
hair had tumbled abroad. She raised her face, with the eyes shining.
"Jack!" she cried, in a shrill voice--"Jack!"
The little weak response wailed down again.
"Jenny! I'm anigh done."
"Hold on a bit longer, Jack!" she screamed. "Don't move till I tell 'ee.
I'm agone to save thee, Jack!"
Again from the women a rapturous cry broke out. What incompetent noodles
appeared their masters in juxtaposition with this fearless, defiant
creature.
The man up aloft seemed to shiver in the shock of the outcry; and once
more some fragments of mortar rolled from under his feet and bounded into
the depths. The girl rounded upon the voicers.
"Hold thee blazing tongues!" she cried in fury. "D'ee warnt to shake un
from his perch?"
She turned to the foremost group of men.
"A couple o' long scaffold poles fro' yonder!" she cried hurriedly, "and
twenty fathom o' rope!"
Her quick eyes and intelligence had found what she wanted in a builder's
yard no great distance away.
"Follow, a dozen o' you!" she cried; and sped off in the direction she
had indicated.
Just twelve men, and no more, obeyed her. She was mistress of the
situation, and the crowd felt it. They made room for the dominant
intellect, and awaited developments, watching, in suppressed excitement
and trepidation, the figure--whom exhaustion was slowly mastering--high
up above them.
Suddenly a sort of huge L-shaped structure moved down the street, until
it stood opposite the ruined house. Then, twisting and rearing itself
aloft, it took to itself the form of a lofty, slender gallows.
It was formed of a couple of forty-foot scaffolding poles, stoutly bound
and corded together, the base of one to the top of the other, so that
they stood at right angles. Five or six feet of the butt of the
horizontal one was projected beyond its lashings, and to this three
lengths of rope were fastened, and trailed long ends in the dust as the
structure was held aloft and pushed and dragged into position.
"Now!" shrieked the girl, red-hot, reliant, never still for a moment; "as
marny as can hold to each end there, and swing the blessed boom out
towards him!"
Fifty may have responded. They swarmed like ants about the upraised pole,
and she drove them into position--a black knot of men hauling on the
triple cordage--left, right, and middle, like the ribs of a tent.
They saw her meaning and fell into place with a shout. To hold the
projecting pole levered up at that height was a test of weight and
muscle, even without their man on the end of it; but there were plenty
more to help pull, did their united force waver.
"Jack!" screamed the girl again, in a wildness of excitement. "Only a
second longer, Jack! Hold on by your eyelids, and snatch the stick
the moment it comes agen thee!"
The horizontal spar pointed down the street. Slowly the men worked round
with the ropes, and slowly the point of the pole turned in the direction
of the chimney-stack and its forlorn burden. There was room and to spare
for the process in the wide gap made by the tumbled house.
The crowd held its breath. Here and there a strangled sob was rent from
overstrained lungs; here and there the wailing voice of a baby whined
up and subsided.
The pole swung round with the toiling men--neared him on the ruin. He
turned his head and saw, shifted his position and staggered. Jenny gave a
piercing screech. The men, thinking something was wrong, paused a moment.
On the instant there came a crackling, tearing sound--a heaving roll--a
splintering crash and uproar. The man aloft was seen to make a flying
leap--or was it only a hurled fragment of the falling chimney?--and white
dust rose in a fog once more and blotted out all the tragedy that
might be enacting behind it.
A horrible silence succeeded, then a single woman yelled, and her cry was
echoed by fifty hoarse voices.
The noise came from those at the ropes. They were straining and tugging,
and some of them bobbed up and down like peas on a drum.
"More on ye! more on ye! We've hooked un, and he's got the pull of a sea
sarpint!"
The ropes became thick with striving men. The whole street resounded with
a medley of cries.
Then the point of the boom swung slowly out of the fog, and there was the
rescued man swinging and swaying at the end of it.
They lowered him gradually into the street. But the strain upon them was
awful, and he came down with a run the last few yards.
Then they let the angle of the gallows wheel over as it listed, and stood
and mopped their hot foreheads, while the crowd rushed for the poor shaky
subject of all its turmoil.
I could not get within fifty feet of him; or, I think, I should have
given him and Jenny then and there all my fortune.
Later, I made their acquaintance in a casual way, and compromised with my
conscience by presenting them with a very pretty tea-service to help them
set up house with.