OF LIZARANN COUPLAND, HER FATHER AND HER FAMILY. OF HIS PREVIOUS STORY, AND LIZARANN'S BIRTH
Lizarann Coupland did not know what her father's employment was; but she knew that, every morning, she saw him to the corner of Bladen Street, put his left hand on the palin's of number three, and left him to shift for himself. She was on honour not to watch him down Bladen Street, and she had a keen sense of honour. She also knew by experience that when her aunt, Mrs. Steptoe, said she would learn her a lesson she wouldn't easy forget, Mrs. Steptoe was not referring to teacher-book instruction like at school. And this lesson, Lizarann understood, would be imparted by her aunt with some blunt instrument, perhaps a slipper, in case she failed to observe her promise. She was not to go spyin' and starin' after Father no farther than where it was wrote up "Old Vatted Rum, fivepence-halfpenny" at the Green Man and Still. It was a compact, and Lizarann observed it—always running away as fast as possible to get out of reach of temptation as soon as ever her father's fingers closed on the knob of a particular low paling. It was a paling good to turn upside down over, which affirmed the territorial rights of the Green Man over a certain six-foot foreshore of pavement liable else to be claimed by the Crown, or the Authority.
Lizarann's father, James Coupland, was stone-blind, and the reason she was sent with him every morning was because he had to cross Cazenove Street, and Dartley Street, and Trott Street, before you come to pavement all the way, and it wasn't safe. As soon as you got to the Green Man, why there you were! Only like touchin' the wall, and your stick on the right, and on you kep' direck. But as to what Lizarann's father did, at some place on this side of the next bad crossing, his six-year-old daughter never could guess. All she knew was that she was useful, and assisted towards some public object, not easily understood by a little girl, when she piloted her father to and from his starting-point of continuous pavement, as a ship through shoals and cross-currents, to the mouth of a canal. But the metaphor of Lizarann's flight when she left the ship to its captain is not an easy one. If only metaphors would not be so lobsided!
That her father was a supplicant for public charity was a surmise that never crossed Lizarann's mind. An idea can be got of how she thought of him by any young lady who knows, for instance, that her father is in the Custom-House, but who has never seen the Custom-House, and has no idea what he does there; or even by one who, having for parent a sexton, and being kept in ignorance of his functions, conceives of him as the Archbishop of Canterbury; or more easily—to take yet another parallel—by one situated like Lizarann's little friend Bridgetticks, down a turnin' out of Trott Street, whose grandfather was in an almshouse; but who was inflated past all bearing by his livery or uniform when the old chap was out for his holiday, and Bridget was allowed to walk with him all along Trott Street and round the Park. There was no abidin' of her, struttin' about!
"My grandfather's richer than your father," said Bridgetticks, after one such occasion, "and he's got his heyesight, too."
"Fathers are better than grandfathers," said Lizarann. "Fathers goes down Bladen Street holdin' on to nuffin', and ain't they rich, neither? My father he fetches home nine shillings in coarpers. Aunt Stingy, she let Uncle Steptoe get at it, and he laid some of it out in gin." The name of this aunt, as Lizarann pronounced it, seemed to ascribe a waspish character to its owner rather than a parsimonious one.
"You lyin' little thing, how you ever can!" exclaimed Bridgetticks. This was because the daring sum of nine shillings took her aback. But on consideration another line of tactics seemed more effective. "Nine shillin's ain't nothin'," she said. "My grandfather, he's got an allowance regular, he has."
Lizarann paused before replying. She was confronted with an unforeseen thing, foreign to human experience. What was an allowance? On the whole, it would be better to keep clear of it. She changed the venue of the discussion. "He's dressed up, he is," she said. But she spoke with diffidence, too, and her friend felt conciliated.
"Dressed up's a falsehood," she said, but without asperity. "If you'd 'a said cloze like the Lord Mayor's Show, now! But little infant-school pippings like you don't know nothink." Lizarann felt put upon her mettle.
"My father," she said, "he's got a board with wrote upon. Hangs it round his neck, he does. Like on Harthurses carts and the milk."
"You never see it on his neck, not yet you can't read. You can't read the words on Arthurses cart." But Lizarann could read one—the middle one—and did it, a syllable at a time: "Prov-i-ded." It was correct, and a triumph for the decipherer. But she was doomed to humiliation. Bridgetticks was a great reader, like Buckle, and could read what was wrote on milk-carts all through.
"Any little biby could read that! You can't read 'fammy-lies,' nor yet 'dyly.' It's no use your tryin'." But Lizarann felt unhappy, and yearned for Culture, and tried very hard to read "families" and "daily" on each side of "provided," while Bridgetticks gave attention to a doll's camp on the doorstep. But "families" is very hard to read—you know it is!—and Lizarann quite forgot to put back a beautiful piece of stick-liquorice in her mouth during her efforts to master it.
Anybody would have thought, to look along Tallack Street, where this colloquy took place, that the announcement on Arthurses cart "Families provided daily" was followed out literally by Arthurs, and that that Trust or Syndicate was driving a brisk trade in the families it provided daily. To-day was a holiday at the Board school, and the whole street teemed with prams. And in every pram was one biby, or more, assimilating Arthurses milk. But they themselves had not been provided by Arthurs; merely the milk.
The prams were nearly the only vehicles in Tallack Street, which ran straight acrost from the railway-arch to the 'Igh Road, parallel-like, as you might say, to Trott Street. Even Arthurses cart wasn't a real cart, only drove by hand. A nearer approach to an ideal was the coal, which came behind a horse, and sold itself for a shillin' a hundred, more or less, accordin' as the season. The scales, they'd weigh down to twenty-eight pound, if you didn't want to have capital lying idle; but then it was a sight easier to be cheated at that, and you could always bring two coal-scuttles, and if one of 'em was wore through, why, a stout bit of brown paper, coverin' in the hole, and there you were! Because the dropping of fragments of coal on the pavement was not only wasteful, but giv' them boys something to aim with. Ammunition was scarce, owing to the way the road was kep'; similar, them boys took every opportunity.
There were two other vehicles that were known to Tallack Street. One came every day with a drum, and sold vegetables. The proprietor had made himself hoarse, many years since, with shouting about the freshness of his stock between the outbreaks on the drum, and, as life advanced and his lung-power declined, the drum-performances encroached on the oratory. This suited a large majority of the inhabitants, conveying a sense of Life—was, in fact, thought almost equal to the Play—by those who had been to it—and was so appreciated by Lizarann and Bridgetticks that they would petition to be allowed to stand in contact with the drum to feel the noise inside of 'em like.
The other vehicle was, however, the climax of the Joy of Living in Tallack Street, only it demanded a 'apenny a time, and you had to save up. But if you could afford it, it was rapture. How describe it? Well, it was drawed by a donkey, and went round and round and round. You yourself, and your friends, sat on truncated chairs at the end of radial spokes rotating horizontally on a hub, which played melancholy tunes, and you could tell what they were by looking, because there was the ticket of it, every time a new tune come. But the execution supplied no clue, or very little, to its identity.
Tallack Street, as you will have inferred, was a cul-de-sac, and therefore very popular as a playground with the children of the neighbourhood. It ended in a dead wall, formerly enclosing an extinct factory, which had survived the coming of the railway, by which it had been acquired, and for some reason spared; about which factory, or, rather, its remains, an understanding had been current for about a generation that it could be took on lease from the Company and adapted as workshops. The board was almost illegible, except one word "inquire," of no value apart from its sequel, which anyone who could read would have told you at once was a name and address; but as to what name and what address, it would have taken a scollard to tell that.
There came occasionally to Tallack Street a lady, who appeared to Lizarann to make her way into her Aunt Steptoe's home on insufficient pretexts. She certainly was not the sort of lady to get her shoes mended by a working cobbler in a suburban slum, and Lizarann made no pretence of understanding her. She saw very little of any of her aunt's visitors, because she was always sent, or bundled, out the moment they appeared, and only allowed in the house again after their departure.
She was interested and pleased, therefore, when this lady, who was dressed quite beautiful, developed as a friend of Teacher, the familiar spirit of the Dale Road Schools, where this little girl was learning to sew quite beautiful. She was still more interested when she became aware that the conversation between these two ladies related to her own family. Teacher and the lady talked out quite loud close to her—as if she didn't matter, bless you!
"All the streets are not as bad as Tallack Street," said the lady. "And all the houses in Tallack Street are not so bad as that house at the end. People named Townroe, I think—awful people!"
"Do you mean Steptoe?"
"Oh yes—Steptoe. I've tried to talk to the woman, and it's perfectly useless. You can't do anything when the man's in the way. And as for him—well, you know, Adeline, when these people don't attend either church or chapel, it's simply hopeless. There's nothing to begin upon."
"The man drinks. Of course!"
"Of course! He seemed sober, though, the only time I saw him, but very sulky. Oh dear!—he was trying."
"What did he say?"
"He wouldn't say anything—wouldn't answer! And he said to his wife: 'You say a something word'—you understand, Adeline?—'you say a something word, and see if I don't smack your eye. You try it!' My daughter talked for an hour, and then he said: 'If you think you'll sedooce me into committing of myself, you'll find you're mistook. So I should think better of it, if I was you. Yours werry truly, Robert Steptoe.' Just as if he was writing a letter." Both ladies laughed, and Lizarann pricked her finger badly, and it redded all over the 'emstitch. But she couldn't understand the laugh. She was not fond of her aunt's husband; you can't love pock-marks unless they have some counterpoise in beauty of disposition. But she had a certain spirit of partisanship about her belongings, too!
"I suppose the children go to some school—Board School or something," said Teacher.
"They haven't children, thank Heaven! these people," said the outside lady. "But there's a little girl—somehow—with a father. They said she came here—at least, I suppose the 'school-house up the road' meant here."
"Then she must be here now. What was her name? Did you make out?"
"Eliza Ann something—Doubleday, I think, as near as I can recollect. No, it wasn't Doubleday. What could it have been?..." And this lady tapped one hand with the other, to keep on showing how hard she was thinking.
"Was it Eliza Ann Coupland? Come here, Lizarann, and tell the lady if it was you."
Lizarann approached by instalments, in awe. She had received false impressions from the conversation—one that her uncle could write a letter, and this lady knew it. A second that her aunt's children—if any—would have been all over little sand-pits that would catch and hold the grime awful, like their father, and that therefore we ought to be thankful. A third that she was a "little girl somehow," and she had never been told that she was one somehow, only that she was a little girl.
"Are you the little girl?" said the lady.
"I don't know, miss," said Lizarann. She thought the lady seemed impatient. And whom did she mean by "they" when she said, "Oh dear!—how trying they are!"?
"Ought I to tell her to say 'My lady,' or not?" said Teacher.
"Oh, bother!" said the lady. "What does your father do, my dear? You're a nice little thing, only your mouth's too big."
Timid murmurs came from the catechumen. "What's that you say? Father goes out to work? What does father go out to work at?"
"That's impossible!" said Teacher. "Her father's blind, and she leads him about."
"I hope you're not telling stories, child, like the rest, because I like you all except your mouth. Come close here, so that I can hear you, and tell me what your father does. Only don't splutter or gabble!"
Whereupon Lizarann gave her version of her father's professional employment. She knew she was to say, if pressed on the point, that her father was "an asker," and she said it, standing first on one leg and then on the other uneasily. She had a mixture of misgiving and confidence that the statement would be sufficient; just as you or I might have felt in stating, for instance, that our father was an apparitor, or a stevedore, or a turnover-at-press. But she had absolutely no idea of the meaning of her phrases.
"What on earth does the child mean? Say it again, small person!" Thus the lady.
"A asker!" The child had the name perfectly clear, and added "Yass!"—to drive it home—with eyes of assurance standing wide open. Both ladies made her repeat it, and asked her what she meant by it; but she evidently did not know. They pondered and speculated, till on a sudden a light broke. "Is it possible she means a beggar?" said Miss Fossett. Then the two of them spoke in an undertone, and Lizarann felt that her family affairs were being discussed over her head, but by creatures too great for her to take exception to, or even to interpret. Presently the lady addressed her again:
"What does he ask for, little stuffy? Yes, you may come as close as that. What does he ask for, child?"
Thereat Lizarann, in support of her family credit, said: "He took all of nine shillings in coarpers once on a time." She couldn't compete with the lady in birth and position, but she had a proper pride in her race, for all that.
The lady and Miss Fossett looked at one another, and the latter said: "It's quite possible. They do sometimes." And Lizarann felt flattered and that she had done her duty. And that when she told her father, he would certainly give her a peppermint-drop. She had a sense of an improved position as she went back to her sewing. But the two ladies went on talking about her under their breath, and she fancied they were resuming some incidents of the previous Saturday at Tallack Street. Teacher seemed to have heard something of them, and she now connected them with her pupil. As the lady ripened towards departure she became more audible.
"It only shows the truth of what I'm always saying to Sir Murgatroyd. How can you expect them to be any better when they have such wretched homes? Give them air and light and sanitation and things, and then talk goody to them if you like.... Oh dear!—I must rush. I've promised to go with Sibyl and those Inglis girls to Hurlingham this afternoon." Then the lady had a recrudescence of her perception that Lizarann was funny, for she turned round, going away, to say to Miss Fossett: "Oh dear, how funny they are! Fancy an Asker!" and, as it were, fell a little into Miss Fossett's bosom to find sympathy, afterwards kissing her, and saying, "But how good you are!" rather gushily, and making off. She did say, however, to Lizarann: "Good-bye, little person! Consider I've kissed you. I would, only it's such a sticky day."
Much of this conversation would have been quite unintelligible to the child, even if she had heard the whole of it. Her mind was not prepared to receive it, as, not having had much time to reflect since her birth, she had not noticed that her domestic life had anything exceptional about it. Extension of her social circle had not, so far, convinced her that there was anything unusual in their rows and quarrels; in fact, she was gently creeping on to a belief that Steptoes—their inclusive name—was the rule, and the balance of the Universe the exception. But her unconsciousness of the actual was liable to inroads from without, and that day at school roused the curiosity of an inquiring mind. Lizarann asked herself for the first time whether the conditions of her home-life were really normal, and nothing better was to be looked forward to in the future. No doubt Tallack Street would have sided with the lady in the views she expressed of any one house in it, though each house would have laid claim to an exceptional character for itself. But in the case of Steptoe's its unanimity would have been impressive; for Lizarann's Uncle Steptoe he'd be in liquor as often as not, and frequently aim a stool or suchlike at his wife's head—besides language you could hear the length of the street.
It does not follow that he had no provocation. Mrs. Steptoe was a fine study of the effect of exasperating circumstances on a somewhat uncertain temper, and Lizarann conceived of the result as a typical aunt. She had married, some twelve years since, from motives difficult of analysis, a cobbler who drank, towards whom she had always professed indifference. She seemed to have based a low opinion of all mankind on an assumption that they were none on 'em much better than her husband, and most of 'em were a tidy sight worse. If so, the tidiness of the sight might have disappointed orderly, old-fashioned folk. Not that Bob Steptoe was a bad sort when he was sober. Only that was so seldom.
Now, on the Saturday evening in question, this uncle by marriage of Lizarann, having previously taken too much beer, took too much whisky, and became quarrelsome. "A man ain't always answerable, look at it how you may!" said Tallack Street. Let us hope Mr. Steptoe was not, as on this occasion he loosened three of his wife's front teeth and indented the bridge of her nose. His blind brother-in-law, returning at this moment, personally conducted by his small daughter, was unable to see, but guessed that Steptoe was under restraint by neighbours, and from mixed sounds of pain and rage and inarticulate spluttering that his wife had been the victim of his violence. Poor Jim, mad with anger, besought the restraining party only to let him get hold of his brother-in-law, and he would give him what would recall him to his memory on future occasions. Feeling the desirableness of this, they complied; and Mr. Steptoe, when, after a painful experience of the superior strength of Jim, he got his head out of Chancery, felt ill, and was conducted to bed by his wife. Of whom Lizarann afterwards reported that when she heard Uncle Bob get louder, Aunt Stingy, she said, "You do, and I'll call Jim back again," and then Uncle Bob he shut up.
This little girl's father had been in the Merchant Service and had lost his eyesight through an explosion of petroleum in the harbour at Cape Town. Current belief held that it was his own fault, saying that Jim Coupland hadn't any call to drop a lighted match into a hole in an oil-cask that was standing in the January sun; still less was it necessary that he should look after it through the hole, and receive the full blast of the inevitable explosion in his face. He admitted these facts, but maintained that a hundred oil-casks might have exploded in his face, and no harm done, if he had not, a few days before, seen the Flying Dutchman. This belief could not be shaken by argument, not even by the fact that the other men on his watch, all of whom had seen the Phantom Ship, had retained their eyesight intact. Didn't old Sam Nuttall—and nobody could pretend he hadn't been forty years in the Navy—say the very first thing of all, when he told him he'd seen the Dutchman: "Look you here, my son," he said, "you've got to look sharp and get yourself hanged or shot or drownded, if you want to die with eyes in your head"? And warn't he right? Anyhow, the coincidence of the accident a few days later had created a firm faith in the mind of Jim Coupland, and very few had the heart to try to shake it.
Whatever the cause, Jim Coupland came back eyeless from that voyage, and found his wife lately delivered of a female infant that did well, and became Lizarann. But her mother did ill, presumably, and the doctor that attended her did certainly, if the verdict of Tallack Street was warranted. She had no call to die, said Tallack Street. Perhaps its many matrons did not allow enough for the hideous shock of poor eyeless Jim's reappearance. She did die, and poor Jim, the happy bridegroom of a year ago, was left a widower at eight-and-twenty, hopelessly blind, with a baby he could never see.
Oh the tragedies Life's records have to show, that remain unpublished, and must do so!—all but a chance one or two, such as this one just outlined.
Lizarann was named after the ship her father made his last voyage in, or almost after it. The ship was the Anne Eliza, and the parson got the name wrong. Jim said it wasn't any odds, that he could reckon; and Mrs. Steptoe, his sister, said, on the contrary, it ran easier, took that way. So Lizarann she became, and Lizarann she remained. And the tale how father lost his eyesight through seeing the Flying Dutchman was the ever-present Romance of her youth, and would constantly creep into her conversation, even when the subject-matter thereof was already interesting—as, for instance, when she was discussing with Bridgetticks an expected, or perhaps we should say proposed, addition to the family of Lizarann's doll, which had been fixed for the ensuing Sunday. There could be no doubt—as there is usually in the case of human parents—about the exact hour of arrival, as the Baby was ready dressed for the event her intended mother was looking forward to, in hypothetical retirement, on the house-doorstep. She and her friend were comparing notes on previous events of a like nature.
"Oh, you story!" said Lizarann, but not offensively—it was only current chat. "My father says I understand. He says I understand ship's victuals and port and starboard." Grasp of these involved proficiency in other departments of thought, so the implication seemed to run. But Bridget wouldn't have it so.
"Ya'ar little silly!" she said, standing on the parapidge, and hanging to the riling, so as to project backwards into the little forecourt; you couldn't, speakin' accurately, call it a garden, but it had the feelin' about it, too. "Ya'ar little silly Simplicity Sairah in a track! Ship's victuals ain't nothing to understand, nor yet port and starboard! Wait till you can understand fly-wheels and substraction engines! They'll make you sit up and talk!" This little girl's father was an engineer in charge of a steam-roller.
Bridget would have said the exact reverse if the two excursions into the relative fields of knowledge had been exchanged between them. Lizarann respected her friend too much to conceive of her as a time-server, and her mind cast about to fortify her position on other lines.
"My father he says I can understand the Flying Dutchman, and he seen her. Yass! Afore ever he lost his heyesight!"
"He's lyin', then. Dutchmen ain't women. I seen a picter-Dutchman in trowsers." Lizarann cogitated gravely on this before she answered. "A ship's a her," she then said. "All ships is hers." She then added, but not as a saddening fact, merely as a thing true and noticeable, "He never seen me, father didn't."
OF JIM'S MATCH-SELLING, AND HOW HE CAME TO TAKE TO IT. HOW HE WALKED HOME WITH LIZARANN
Can anyone among us whose life is full of action, with Hope in his heart and Achievement on his horizon; whose pillow whispers at night afterthoughts of a fruitful day, and on the day that follows can, without affectation, reproach the head that lies too long on it with having lost something precious that cannot be regained—can such a one conceive the meaning of blind or crippled life, that left Hope dead by the roadside long ago, and dares not look ahead to see the barren land; whose pillow speaks no word about the past, but only welcome hints about oblivion, and a question with the daylight—why rise? Why rise, indeed, and maybe miss a dream of a bygone day? Better lie still, and thank God for the dream-world!
"I wonder what that poor devil feels like," said one first-class traveller outside the railway-station to another, who, like himself, gave the impression that he had plenty of luggage somewhere else, which was being well looked after by a servant whose wages were too high. Both were young men, well under twenty-five at a guess; and though one was fair and the other was dark, and they were not the same height, and their features were not alike, still the predominant force of their class-identity was so strong that individuality was lost in it, and most folk, seeing them en passant would have spoken of them thenceforth as "those two young swells," and dismissed them with an impression that either might be at any time substituted for the other without any great violence to contemporary history. They appeared to be sauntering to the train, and the poor devil was Jim Coupland, at his usual post by the long blank wall he used to feel his way down, after leaving Lizarann at the corner she might not pass. The wonderer had bought matches of Jim that he didn't want—for Jim was obliged to make a show of selling matches, to be within the law—and had returned change for sixpence, honourably offered by Jim. "I can't see you, master," said the blind man, "and I never shall, not if the sky falls, but I thank ye kindly. And I'll tell my little lass on ye, home to-night." It was the only recompense Jim had to offer, and he offered it.
"I should kill myself straight off," said the other traveller. His speech was quite as consequent on his friend's as most current speech is on its antecedent; you listen closely when you hear talk, and see if this is not the case! "Stop a bit! Don't make me split this cigar. I haven't got another, and nothing fit to smoke is procurable in this neighbourhood ... there!—that's right, now.... The little chocket wouldn't snickle out. Let's see! What topic were we giving our powerful brains to? Oh, ah!—the blind beggar. You recollect the fellah?"
"Never saw him before, that I know of."
"Perhaps you haven't. I have. But you remember the two little girls?"
"Which two?"
"That morning we went to inquire about the railroad arch. Of course, you remember." His friend assented. "Well!—that little girl is this chap's kid. She'll come in the evening to take him home. I've seen 'em about together, many a time."
"I remember two little girls, where we went down that street my mother and sister slum in. Tallack Street. Which was the kid? The bony one with the nostril ajar, and the front teeth, that called you a cure?"
"No—the little plummy modest one, with both eyes stood open, and something to suck. Large dark eyes." No really nice young man, such as we like, can ever mention a girl's eyes, even a young child's, without a shade of tenderness.
"What a sensitive youth you are, Scipio!" His friend sees through him. "The other was a little Jezebel."
"Came out of Termagant's egg, I should say. Isn't there a bird called a Termagant? There ought to be."
"I quite agree, but I doubt it. Well—to return to the point—you say you would kill yourself, straight off. How do you know that? You think you would now, but you wouldn't when it came to the scratch. This man doesn't want to kill himself."
"Because of the little girl. He'd kill himself fast enough if he had nothing to live for."
"My dear Scipio, that is sheer petitio principii. A man's having no wish at all to live takes his wish to die for granted. Unless he has an unnatural taste for mere equilibrium for its own sake. But the real point is that if you were this chap, you would have exactly the same inducements to live that he has—the little girl, for instance."
"Be calm, William! Allow me to point out that you are begging the question yourself. The hypothetical form—'If you were this chap'—if interpreted to imply an exchange of identity in all particulars, takes for granted that what this chap does now I should do then. Clearly, I shouldn't kill myself, or shouldn't have done so up to date, as he hasn't. But the meaning of my remark is obvious to any mind not warped and distorted by casuistry. I refer more particularly to your own. Its meaning is that if I had two scabs instead of eyes, and was reduced to flattering the vanity of my fellow-countrymen in order to stimulate their liberality, I should by preference select Euthanasia." And he lighted his cigar, which had been waiting.
"I wish that little girl was here now, to call you a 'cure' again, Scipio. She did you a lot of good."
Jim Coupland heard as far as "I should kill myself straight off," which he certainly was not meant to do by the speakers. But neither of them were on their guard against the quickened hearing of the blind, and neither of them heard that Jim answered, though each had an impression the blind man was talking to himself. As for Jim, his impression was that his words reached. But then he had no means of knowing how far off the young men were, and that, as against the shrewdness of his own hearing, they were little better than deaf at that distance. What he said was:
"I was minded to, young Master, at the first go off. But the wish was on me strong for the voice of my wife, and the lips of her. And when I lost her—ye understand—it was the cry of the baby new-born that held me. I'd be shamed to think upon it now, young Master. The day's bound to go by, and I mean to bide it out."
"Who are you lecterin' to? Polly—pretty Polly!" Thus an unfeeling fiend of a boy, who hears poor Jim talking to the empty air. But Jim, if he hears, does not heed him. His mind is far away, thinking of the dreadful day of his return to his wife and her week-old baby, and his coming to know that his mishap, announced by letter the day before, had been kept from her, and was still to tell. Of the ill-judged attempt to keep it from her yet a while, and let him be beside her in the half-dark. And the fatal sudden light of a fire that blazed out, and her cry of terror: "Oh, Jim, man, what have you done to your eyes?"...
Then of yet one more forlorn hope—the ill-wrought, ill-sustained pretext that this was but a passing cloud, a mere drawback of the hour, a thing that time would remedy—so ill-sustained that even in the few short days before her death Jim's wife had come to know that his eyes, stone-blind beyond a doubt, would never laugh into her face again, would never rest with hers upon the little face she longed to show him was so like his own. And then the end, and a grave in the parish burial-ground he could not see.
Then of a dream of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and of a child's cry that reached him and called him back, even as he longed of his own free choice and will to plunge into its utter darkness. Then of a growth of ease—a sort of working ease to get through life with—and a term of reading, day by day, hour by hour, each tiniest change in the inflection of the baby's cry, until one day Lizarann, to whom it had occurred to glance round at the Universe she had been pitchforked into, burst into a not very well executed laugh at its expense, and made poor Jim for the first time fully conscious that he had a daughter.
It would be hard to tell all the struggles he went through before he could reconcile himself to a new position in life, mendicancy under pretence of match-selling. He did it at last, urged by grim necessity and Mrs. Steptoe. Perhaps we should say stung by the latter rather than urged, for her attitude was that, eyes or no eyes, if her brother wasn't going to do a hand's turn for himself, he might pack up his traps and go, brat and all! Who was he that he was to eat his sister out of house and home? And all because he was too proud to beg, forsooth! Wasn't he begging already, and wasn't she alms-giving? Yes!—only it was to be all underhanded! Nothing fair or above-board! Why should he be ashamed to ask the public for what he wasn't ashamed to take from two toiling relatives, the weaker of whom had suffered so much already from the disgusting drinking habits of the other? Jim gave way, and found excuses for his sister—he always did—in these same disgusting habits. Perhaps he was right. Anyhow, he gave way. And an old mate of his faked him up the inscription afore-mentioned, and supplied the picture of the Flying Dutchman from his narrative of the incident. And well Jim remembered how the cord he hung it from his neck by got frayed and broke, and brought back to his mind another cord his hand once grasped, as he swayed to and fro at the weather ear-ring of a topsail; and his wondering—would the frayed strands of the sheet hold under the great strain of his back-draw, or snap and fall with him into the black gulf that was hungering for him below? He could hear again the music of the gale that sang in the shrouds, feel again the downward plunge of the hull into the trough of the sea, and breathe again the air that bore its flying foam. Then he thought to himself, would not a plunge into that black gulf, then and there, have been, after all, the best thing for him? And answered his own thought without noting a strangeness in its wording: "What!—and never seen my little lass!"
But the happy fancy that Jim did not beg, but only asked, took hold of the imagination. Of course he would not beg—he would scorn to do so—he, the strong seaman, who had lived a life of danger half of those whose footsteps passed him daily would have flinched to think of! Why should he hesitate to ask of them what he would have given so freely to any one of them himself—to any one of them left in the dark? So when Lizarann said to him one day, apropos of the fact that people's fathers were their aunt's brothers, "Bridgettickses brother's a 'Orsekeeper. Are you a 'Orsekeeper?" He replied that he wasn't, exactly. But he was an Asker, to be sure! And the child, catching a sort of resemblance between the words, remembered it. And, referring to her Aunt Steptoe, got it confirmed. It served as a barrier for a time against an insight into the facts.
When poor Jim's speech was so brave of how the day was bound to go by and he would bide it out, was his whole heart in his utterance? Was there no reserve—no suppressed execration of that mysterious unsolicited Cause that had stinted him down to darkness after a short half-time of light? At that moment he was conscious of none—a moment when he felt the world about him—heard the voices of his fellow-men—felt on his face, without shrinking, the full stress of the mid-day sun, whose rays he should never see again. But how about the darkness of the night, that he had learned to know only by the loneliness and the silence? In its solitude was it not now and again almost his resolve to die, and not await another day? Almost, yes!—but never quite. Always a decision to hear just once again the voice of his little lass in the morning. If it were only this once, and he should fail in strength to bear that other day; still, let it be, for now! Just once again!
But the longest nights led each to its dawn, and poor Jim knew of each dawn by hearsay, and started off early, on all days weather forbade not too grossly, hold of Lizarann's 'and, and takin' good care not to crost only when other parties done the same, actual-like, so you might place reliance, and not get under the 'orses' 'oofs; and throughout each day that followed Jim treasured the anticipation of its end, and looked forward to the coming of his little lass to take him home. He would sit and think of what her small hand would feel like in his when the welcome hour should come for his departure; and each day as that hour came, and he found his way back to Vatted Rum Corner to wait for her, came also a short spell of tense anxiety lest he should not hear her voice this time. And then the relief, when he caught the signal he had taught her, through the noise of the traffic and the railway-whistles near at hand.
"Ye shouldn't sing out Poylot, little lass," said he, when she turned up at the end of that day—the day of the two young men and the sixpence. "Ye should say Pie-lott. Else ye might be anyone else's little lass, not Father Jim's."
"I ain't," said Lizarann resolutely. "I'm Father Jim's. Pi-lot!" She threw her soul into a reproduction of her father's articulation.
"Nor yet you've no need to lose your front teeth over it. Easy does it in the end. Now again! Pi-lot!" Whereupon Lizarann repeated the word with self-restraint, and received approval. "Not for to tear up the paving-stones, lassie," added her father, explanatorily.
"What was that young varmint a-saying?" he asked, as they started to return home. He was referring to words overheard—winged words that had passed between his daughter and a boy. It was the same boy that had called him Pretty Poll, who had followed him to the street-corner; and had then gone on to greet Lizarann with the report that her Daddy was waiting to give her "what-for," for being late—which she wasn't.
Probably he was the worst boy in existence—at least, Lizarann thought he was. She was too young to appreciate his only virtue, a total absence of hypocrisy.
"Saying as it was your eyes as was out, and it didn't hurt him." Jim seemed mightily amused.
"What did you say to him over that, little lass?" said he.
"Didn't say nuffint!" And, indeed, Lizarann had not seen her way to quarrelling with two such obvious truths.
"What else was he a-saying? He said a bit more than that. I could hear him giving it mouth."
"Sayin' he'd four nuts he hadn't ate, and me to guess which 'and they was in beyont his back for a 'apenny." Lizarann then explained the proposed deal at some length.
"He's a nice young sportin' charackter! Thimble-rigging isn't in it. Why, lassie, if you had guessed right, he'd just have swopped 'em across, and took your ha'penny. He wants attendin' to with a rope's end, he does—wants his trousers spilin'. His mother she sells the fried eels and winkles, next door against the little shop where I"—Jim hesitated a minute—"where I get my shaving-soap." For Jim remembered in time that his connection with this shop was not to come to his child's ears. His board was to be kept in the background.
Lizarann wanted badly to frame a question about this boy. Were all boys nefarious whose mothers sold fried eels and winkles? And if so, had this one acquired a low moral tone by contact with fried fish, or had his parent's humble walk in life resulted from his depravity? Lizarann gave up the idea of asking this question. It was too complex. But she could get information about the barber's shop. She approached the subject indirectly.
"Bridgetticks she can read what's wrote up on shaving-shops."
"What can she read on 'em, little lass?"
"She can read Easy Shaving Twopence. And Hegg-Shampoo Fourpence. And Fresh Water Every Customer. Round in the winder in Cazenove Street."
"Brayvo, Bridgetticks! But my little lass she's going to read ever so well as Bridgetticks—ah! and a fat lot better. And larn manners belike, as well!"
"Bridgetticks said she'd learn Simpson's boy manners. Down the yard where there's a dog killed his sister's cat." Lizarann spoke evidently with some idea of joining the class. But her father had other views.
"Bridgetticks indeed! She couldn't teach manners to a biled owl, to speak of. She better give her time to studying of 'em herself. Whatever was the name she called the gentleman, lass? Tell us again."
"The long gentleman?"
"Ah!"
"She didn't call him nuffint."
"Well, then—the short gentleman."
"A Cure."
"Well!—that wasn't manners, lassie. She had ought to have called him Sir—or his name, for that matter, if she'd come by it. Couldn't she say his name with Mister? In course she could, only she didn't know it."
Lizarann stopped and stood nodding on the pavement. "Bridgetticks, she knowed his name—the short one," she said. "Because the tall gentleman, he called it him." Then the two went on again, Jim having reclaimed the hand he had let go for a moment to confirm a strange quick perception of the child's emphatic nods by touching her head.
"What was the name of the short one the tall gentleman called him by?" he asked. This was not merely to make conversation. Jim had fancied he caught a familiar sound in the name one of his young swells of the morning had applied to the other. He had not heard their reference to Tallack Street. Had he done so, he would at once have identified them as the subjects of a narrative of Lizarann's some days since. She now offered an imperfect version of the name, and Jim at once caught the connection. He had heard the name Scipio—used by the young man when he gave him his sixpence for a box of Vesuvians.
"Sippy-oh—was that it?" said he. "Well, that's a queer start too. I've seen your two gentlemen, little lass, only this morning. One of 'em, he planked down a tanner for one box. Not Sippy-oh—t'other young master. What were the two of 'em doing again down in Tallack Street?"
Lizarann braced herself for her narrative by drawing a long breath and standing with her eyes very wide open, then plunged in medias res with an oppressive sense of responsibility for historical truth, but without punctuation. She pooled all her stops, however, and by throwing in a handful at long intervals gave her lungs an opportunity of expanding.
"They was two gentleman in one hansom and I seen 'em through the open winder and Aunt Stingy she shet the winder and Bridgetticks she come lookin' in at the winder and Aunt Stingy she says I'll flat your nose for you she says an impident little hussy and she goes out for to catch hold on her and Bridgetticks she sings out Old Mother Cobblerswax and hooks it off...." All the consolidated overdue stops came in here.
Jim put in a word to steady the narrative, derived from its earlier recital: "And then you got round behind your aunt, and the gentlemen were talking to the cab-driver, hey, lassie?"
Lizarann nodded at her father exactly as if he could have seen her. However, the way she said "yass" did all the work of her nod, as well as its own, and she continued with a new lease of breath: "The driver he says 'Don't see no spremises' he says, and the gentlemen they says 'Don't see no spremises' they says, and then—'Ho here's a little girl' they says all at wunst...."
"And that was my little lass, warn't it, lassie? And she showed 'em where the board was up. That was the way of it, I lay. And whereabout was Bridgetticks the whilst?" Lizarann was becoming more reposeful in style, and was working round to a proper distribution of stops.
"Bridgetticks," she replied, "was in behind the palin's at 'Acker's, and was for biting Aunt Stingy if she laid 'ands. And Jimmy 'Acker's granny she come out, and 'Leave the child alone' she says. But the two gentleman come down out of the hansom scab and said there was no spremises, but I was a nice little girl and should have a trep'ny bit. Yass!"
"And then your aunt she looked round after you, I'll go bail. Wasn't she in it, little lass?"
"Then Aunt Stingy she giv' over, 'cos of Jimmy 'Acker's granny, and come to see. And the tall gentleman, he needn't trouble her, he says, and she kep' a little way off. And I kep' the threp'ny bit in my mouf, I did."
"So she mightn't get it?" Lizarann nodded. "And where was Bridgetticks?"
"Over acrost, feelin' up like, 'cos of Aunt Stingy."
An image passes through Jim's mind of a powerful rodent working stealthily round, clear of its enemy, to join the colloquy, and perhaps secure another threepence. His image of Bridgetticks is not a pleasing one. He doesn't believe in her sex or her girlhood—classes her with the fiendish boy at the fish-shop, and rather wishes he could let her loose on him to run him down, as one slips a dog from a leash. She would do it.
"And how came she to cut in? It was my little lassie's cake."
But Lizarann felt hurt on her friend's account. "She giv' me two apples," she said, and left the point, as one sure to be understood. Then she continued: "The gentlemen wanted for to know our names, and Bridgetticks said not if took down. So the gentleman put the pencil away and she says Bridgetticks and I says Lizarann Toopland."
"Right you were! And then what did the gentleman say?"
"Not to shout both at once."
"Which did ye like best, little lass—which gentleman?" But the child is uncertain on this point. Being pressed, she admits a tendresse for the one called Scipio; but it appears that Bridgetticks has condemned him on account of his jaw, pointing to a certain sententiousness of style, which has already been in evidence in this story. Her discrimination of him as a Cure, too, will show those who are familiar with the use of this term that she placed a low value on his reflections.
Her father, having certainly spoken with these two gentlemen, felt some curiosity about what they could want in Tallack Street. His having spoken with them himself had, of course, given them an interest for him he had not felt before. But inquiry of a child not seven years old has to be conducted cautiously. If too hard pushed, she will invent. "What did ye make out they came for, lassie?" he asked.
"Spremises," was the reply, given with confidence. But this seemed ill-grounded when she added, "What does spremises mean, daddy?"
"Houses with bills in the winder, lass. Sure! But didn't they never say where they come from, nor what they wanted?"
"Bridgetticks she knew."
"Where did she say they came from?"
"Smallporks Hospital." Jim wondered how on earth Lizarann's friend had struck on this vein of invention, but he only expressed the mildest doubt of its accuracy lest he should upset his informant. As it was, he disturbed her slightly. "She ain't tellin' no lies," she added.
"P'raps it warn't so bad as all that come to, lassie. P'raps it was only Guy's or 'Tholomoo's?" But the little person was not prepared to accept any composition that threw doubt on Bridgetticks. She might have questioned her statements personally, even to the extent of calling her a story. But she felt bound to defend her, even against her father. So she nailed her colours, so to speak, to the Smallpox Hospital. That was to be the very hospital, and no other, that these two gentlemen were connected with. She gave illustrations of untruthfulness, as shown by contemporaries.
"Jimmy 'Acker he's a liar. And Uncle Steptoe he's a liar. Aunt Stingy says so. Bridgetticks she ain't. She speaks the troof, she does. Yass! She says so." Very open eyes and a nod.
"In coorse she does, and in coorse she knows." Then poor Jim wondered to himself what this young person was like that his little lass had such faith in. He continued: "What's she like to look at, by way of describing of her now?"
Lizarann had never described anybody, so far. That is to say, not consciously. She might have done it without knowing it was description. But she knew quite well what her father meant, and braced herself up to authorship.
"She's very 'ard, all over," she said, as a first item. "And she's awful strong. She is—yass! And she don't stick out nowhere neither." A form the reverse of svelte is impressed upon her hearer's inner vision. But she repents of the last item, and adds, "Only her nose!"
"What's her colour of hair—black colour?—yaller colour?"
"T'int no colour at all, Daddy."
"Just plain hair-colour—is that it?"
"Yass! Pline hair-colour."
"What's her eyes?" But this is too difficult. Lizarann gives it up. To say plain eye-colour would be poor and unoriginal. However, particulars could be given of Bridgettickses eyes, apart from questions of their colour.
"She can squint, she can. Yass—acrost!"
"She don't want to it—not she!"
"Don't she want to it, Daddy?" A timid expression of doubt this. "I said—I said—to Bridgetticks...."
"Hurry up, little lass! What was it ye said?"