John Holdsworth, Chief Mate

by William Clark Russell

Dolly watched to see if he would step across to Mrs. Parrot’s; but he walked straight on.

“Hush, my darling, hush!” she exclaimed, catching up the sobbing child. “Dolly shall have her parasol; I will buy it myself. Hush, my pet! Nelly’s tears break poor mamma’s heart.... Oh, John! oh, husband!” she murmured; “why did God take you from me? Why did He lead me and my little one into this misery?”

Truly, it was misery, of a forlorn and hopeless kind. But you have seen the man Dolly had married at his worst. The most brutal husband is not always brutal. The drunkard is not always drunk. More colours than black and white go to the painting of a man off the stage, where corked eyebrows strike no horror, and blood-boltered cheeks prove nothing more than a neglect of soap.

Mr. Conway had his soft hours, when he would shed tears, smite his breast, and call himself a fiend—having reference, by this flattering title, to nothing but his behaviour to Dolly.

He was undoubtedly in love with her when he married her; and the sweet face which had made him haunt Southbourne, to the neglect of his patients, would still, even after two years, have too much potency not to occasionally soften and give movement to the humanities which lay in him, hardened and drowned in drink. Though he had always, as long as people could remember him in Hanwitch, been what they called a dissipated man, he had managed somehow or other to get a living, to keep his landlord civil and wear good clothes. Ladies were not wanting who called him handsome. His manner, when sober, was courteous; his language correct; his fingers dexterous in pulling teeth out or putting teeth in. Those who knew anything of him knew that he never saved a penny; that were he to make ten thousand a year he would never save a penny; but they always said that, if he would only take a deep-rooted dislike to beer and brandy, go to bed at ten and rise at seven, attend to his business and give up smoking pipes in the streets, he might obtain enough money to enable him to keep a carriage and live in good style.

How he met Dolly matters little. She was living in one room at Southbourne at that time, trying to obtain a livelihood by taking in needlework. She was miserably poor, with a little baby at her breast. Old Mr. Newcome, the rector, did his best for her, and allowed her what little he could afford out of his slender income, which enabled her to pay her rent. But she had to clothe and feed her child and herself, and the work she procured was scanty and poorly paid for. God knows how she managed to struggle through those days! Mr. Conway asked her to marry him, but she answered “No,” bitterly, for her love for Holdsworth was a passion. Then her only friend, Mr. Newcome, died; her health broke down; she was absolutely destitute; and so, for her baby’s sake—but shrinking from the marriage as one shrinks from the commission of an evil deed, and with a heart in her so heavy that nothing but her love for her child seemed to keep her alive—she gave her hand to Mr. Conway, and went to live with him at Hanwitch.

She had no affection for the man. Her marriage was a bitter necessity, and she hated it and herself for that. She had no knowledge of Conway’s habits, though she had had penetration enough to miss certain moral qualifications which are to be felt and cannot be explained. Now she discovered that he was an intemperate, improvident man, hasty in his temper, selfish, and at the same time neglectful of his own interests.

He was some way ahead in his downward career when he married her. The addition his marriage made to his expenses quickened his pace, as an object, rolling slowly at first, improves its velocity in proportion to the increase of its distance from the starting-point. One by one his patients deserted him. He insulted his landlord, to whom he owed money, who gave him notice to quit. He then hired the little house in which we have found him, and was now illustrating one of the great mysteries of social life—the mystery of living without money, of keeping a house over his head without a shilling in his pocket, of wearing boots and coats without the means in his purse to pay off the milkman’s sixpenny score.

How is this done? There are people doing it every day. They are doing more: they are keeping men-servants, renting big houses, wearing fine dresses, frequenting fashionable haunts, on nothing a year. How Thackeray puzzled over this problem! How Dickens tried to explain it and failed: for he is always driven to a last moment, when some good genius steps forward to help. Imagination can’t deal with a feat which makes nothing do the work of a great deal.

There is no doubt something aggressive, even to good nature, in the brooding melancholy that goes about its duties lifelessly, which gives spiritless attention to matters of moment and significance, which looks complaint without speaking it, and addresses itself to every task of life with an air of reproachful endurance.