It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

HOW JIM FOUND A MISSION IN LIFE, AND LIZARANN MOVED TO MRS. FORKS'S COTTAGE. OF A FINE AUTUMN, AND HOW ALL WAS RIGHT TILL SOMETHING WENT WRONG. OF A SEASIDE SCHEME, AND ITS EFFECTS ON JIM

If you stand up at the rifle-butts when they are not shooting, and look away from Royd village towards the Hall, you will see a sharp curve in the road, maybe a mile from Mrs. Fox's cottage on your left. You will identify that by the little shop built out from it towards the road, and the covered arbour where Jim smoked his pipe, over a year ago now at the date of the story. He continues to do so when not professionally employed. For Jim found an employment, strange to say, shortly after he talked to Adeline Fossett about Lizarann's health, and got his first scare about his little lass.

It is just within that curve of the road that his vocation is plied. Not for gain—nothing so low as that! His is an official appointment, in the gift of the Rector of Royd, and there is a parish fund of ij shillings a month, with the additional emolument of a fat capon at Christmas, for the man at the well-head. The Charity Commissioners have never found it out; and the Rector has long since appropriated the fund, and turned it into four shillings, with appendices and addenda; while a composition has been effected in the matter of the capon, the holder of the office receiving instead as much barker as is good for him, all the year round, whether actively employed or not. For the employment Jim had the luck to step into is one that may have to be suspended during hard winter weather, being, in fact, the turning of the well-handle whenever applicants come for water.

It was through Miss Fossett hearing that tale of Jim's, about how his blind strength had come in so mighty handy in that steerage business aboard of the undermanned coal-tramp. She recollected it when, on the afternoon of next day, it came out that the office of water-drawer was vacant, the last man at the well-head having retired at eighty-seven years of age. Not that he had turned the handle himself for a long time past. He had only given official sanction to the efforts of customers; who, when very small, had to way-ut till soombody else coom for t' wa-ater. Obviously, Jim was made for the place, and the place for Jim. And he—poor chap!—for whom all personal life had merged in solid gloom and hampered movement, felt like the prisoner in solitary confinement whom the boy threw his pegtop and string to, through the bars.

It is hardly a fair comparison, though, for the lonely gaol-bird had to spin his top with never a soul to speak to, day or night, and Jim had constant intercourse with his species; for as soon as the cottagers round became alive to the fact that they could send little Mary or Sally with a pail to t' wa'all, with a reasonable chance of return in half-an-hour, his services were in constant requisition. Royd village is at least five hundred feet higher than Grime; and the light soil, though good for the beech-woods, is bad for the water-supply. That is why the Abbey Well, so-called, has a clear bucket-shoot of fifty fathoms before it strikes the water. So, even in answer to Jim's effective appeals, the supply came slowly; and there was plenty of time, before the responsible bucket came in sight, to hear family history from Mary or Sally, or the latest news from seniors with two large pails stirruped on a shoulder-saddle.

Besides, there was Jim's chief resource, to which all these were as nothing. There was his little lass. Whenever she was not complying with the Education Act, and whenever the weather permitted, the child was pretty sure to be with her father in the little semi-enclosure, half-hidden by hawthorns, where the well with its interesting parclose—some of it as old as the thirteenth century, if you choose—tempts the passing excursionist to stop and be antiquarian for five minutes; and to put a little jewel of a memory in some close corner of his brain, to be found there on a winter's night in the days to come, when all the excursions are over and the merry year is dead.

The fine warm months that followed Jim's entry on his duties were surely the halcyon months of his broken life. Because for all that he and Lizarann, with a sort of ex-post-facto optimism, had decided to construct an image of a glorious past from their memories of Bladen Street and Tallack Street, misgiving of the soundness of its materials would creep into his mind, at least; never to the child's. That image was all beaten gold and ivory to her. Tallack Street, that would have seemed to you and me a sordid avenue of hovels, grudgingly complying with a Building Act, and enclosing imperfectly a rich atmosphere of Lower Middle Class families, was to Lizarann an illuminated stage on which moved the majestic figures of the heroes of her past, into which flitted at intervals visions of delights now extinct: organs with a monkey, that played slow, not to tax the nervous system of their obsessor; organs without, that played quick, so you could dance to it—played music-hall airs that had three phases apiece, and lent themselves to being done over and over again, and nobody any fault to find; the man with the drum that couldn't raise his voice to holler, and potatoes he run out of unless you looked sharp; and, above all, that pre-Wagnerian contrivance without a name, that you could set on and go round for a halfpenny all through the tune, and no cheating—so "Home, Sweet Home" was more popular than the National Anthem, along of the hextry at the end. And the highroad itself, that took two policemen to get them children safe acrost after Board-School! What a scene of maddening—more than Parisian—gaiety it was Saturday nights! And what a mysterious antechamber to some Institution undefined, but with a flavour of Trinity House or the Vatican, was that corner where it was wrote up, "Vatted Rum, fivepence-halfpenny!"

Jim lent himself, you may be sure, to gilding these remnants of bygone glory, whatever doubts he may have felt about them himself. Through that happy season when Lizarann could be so frequently his companion—for Dr. Sidrophel said the child couldn't be too much in the air: it would do her good rather than otherwise—recollections of Tallack Street and Vatted Rum Corner rang the changes on tales of the high-seas and the Flying Dutchman. Lizarann had never seen the sea! Wouldn't she just like to it! Patience! Lizarann was to see the sea in time.

Her domicile at the Rectory came to an end a week or so after her Daddy got his appointment. It had begun with what was intended to be a stay long enough to get rid of that bad inflammatory cold caught in London; had been prolonged at the petition of Phœbe and Joan till that half-a-mile-off tea-party at Royd Park. After this it consisted of postponements, due to reluctance that she should run risks from moving till quite strong again, but growing shorter and shorter as Dr. Pordage laid more and more stress on the definite character of the chest-delicacy, and the modern belief in its communicability. And the fact was that Aunt Bessy, and, indeed, the Rector, were not a little ill at ease about the constant association of the children. The Rector tried to fence with his own uneasiness, and made but a poor show.

"I don't know!" said he to his sister-in-law. "Only a few years since doctors were treating the idea with derision. Now it's all the other way. You never know where to have 'em—never!"