It Never Can Happen Again

by William De Morgan

"Vary right and proper, little lass! Wouldn't ye have him know? Nay-tur-ally, such a good gentleman likes to know you're well. That's where the enquiring comes in. He'd be martal sorry to hear the lassie was ill. What do ye make out the young ladies said?" Jim's tactics of raising false issues were compatible with an attempt at a side-light on public opinion.

"Phœbe and Jones said—nurse said—Dr. Spiderophel said"—here concentration became necessary—"that simpsons was favourable, but to continue the medicine two stable-spoonfuls free times a day." She then corrected herself, as though the pronunciation might vitiate the treatment. "No!—three times a day." And added corroboratively, "Yass!"

Jim knew that the sky-sign of an engineering firm in the neighbourhood of Tallack Street was responsible for a confusion of the little lass's ideas, or at least speech. He accepted the name, to escape discussion, saying: "If Simpson's is favourable, and the medecine's nice, what more can a lassie want? In coorse you're quite well, with such like medecine. When little lass's medecine's nasty, that's when they're ill."

Optimism in any form was welcome on such an autumn morning, with such a many larks afloat in the blue above the shorn stubble-fields—more songs than Lizarann could count, in token of a million more unheard—and the Royd church-bell striking seven a mile off, and some sheepbells making it difficult to hear if it struck right; and the same bees as last month making the same noise about an entirely new supply of honey. Besides, Daddy had to be guided through the sheep, who were filling up the road on ahead, and repeating themselves sadly, though in a variety of keys. Sheep ought never to come in the opposite direction, because no dog can influence them to leave other people space to pass. This time they would have been enough alone to knock medical discussion on the head, even if there had been no other distracting combinations.

During just that fine perfect autumn time no one who was not in the confidence of that useless implement of Dr. Sidrophel's, that you could neither play on nor see through, would have picked out Lizarann as a patient at all. The change came with the chill of the year. Not the first morning frost of all; that, when it scatters diamond drift, every speck of which means to be a mirror to the great sun it knows is coming—coming from beyond the Eastern red, to quench the glow of the Morning Star—is but a fall of temperature, with repentance to follow. It is all right again after breakfast. But the real chill of the year comes soon—too soon! And then there is sunshine at Westminster; and it's going to snow, and does it. And you have fires, and catch cold.

It all happened just as usual that year. Only something had gone wrong with Lizarann. She was no longer the Lizarann of Tallack Street, to whom the first frost that meant business, the first fog that meant to interrupt it, the first fire we did without and the first we didn't—a day or five minutes later, according to our powers of endurance—were one and all mere annual incidents, fraught with holly and mistletoe and intensification of butchers. In those days Lizarann's greeting to winter was to go out in the snow and avail herself of it as ammunition, or develope it as slides. In these, as often as not it was doubtful whether she would be allowed out at all. And even if it was only to the little schoolroom near the church, not unless she was wropt up real careful, and her red woollen comforter round and round and round, like that. The way was never so in Tallack Street.

Lizarann herself confused between cause and effect. She ascribed her cough to mixtures, and a place in her chest, that prevented her coughing and done with it, to its location by that malign little stethoscope. It was either that or the linseed meal of Teacher's careful slow poulticing that had done it all. She considered that the linseed meal had penetrated through that vermilion disc on the area she called her chest, which had afforded her such unmixed amusement seen in Miss Fossett's little hand-mirror. She was haunted by the flavour of that linseed meal; was convinced it had got through and stuck. But these were views she kept to herself. She tolerated the strange scientific fancies and fallacies of the grown-up world, recognizing in them the benevolence of its intentions.

But the something that had gone wrong never made any real concession. It seemed to have made up its mind which direction it would take, and jogged on without remorse. Now and again it may have sat down by the roadside, and set the credulous a-thinking that it might turn back and start again and go right; but it always went on again refreshed in the end. Sometimes it travelled slowly—came to a hill, perhaps? But the road was a give-and-take road, only just a little more downhill than up. It always is, in this complaint.

Dr. Sidrophel gave the Rector very little hope of any real success. He did not say the child would die. Nobody ever says that. He only said she would never make old bones. He probably thought her skeleton would not reach its teens. He continued the treatment; was in favour of plenty of air, plenty of nourishment, the last new chemical elixir vitæ—wasn't it called "Maltozone," and didn't every teaspoonful contain an ox from Argentina?—and so on. The cottage smelt of iodine; and dear old Mrs. Fox's lozenges, which had been active in the early stages of the complaint, had to die away before the new agencies and real prescriptions that had to go to the village apothecary to be made up. Even so the parish engine, that the fire took no notice of, has to give way to the brigade from the nearest station. If only the metaphor would hold good a little farther! If only the parallel could be found for the efficiency of the waterblast that comes so swiftly on the heels of their arrival—steam at high-pressure panting to show its elasticity to advantage—blood-horses that have touched the last speed-record—serpent-coils of hose that mean salvation; if only the latest rescue-powers of Science were on all fours with these! But.... Well!—we must hope.

When Sir Rhyscombe Edison, the great London physician, paid a visit to the Hall just before the Family started to go abroad—no one was ill there: it was the head of Thanes Castle he was summoned to consult about—Lady Arkroyd begged him to overhaul a little patient she and the Rector were interested in. He made as careful an examination of Lizarann as he had done of the Duke; was as encouraging to the one patient about her chest as he had been to the other about his hemiplegia; and was nearly as explicit in his second verdict to her ladyship and the Rector as he had been in his first to the family at Thanes. It was a well-marked characteristic case, but one lung was free, so far; and as long as that was so the duration—by which he meant the duration of the patient—was a thing the ablest pathologist in the world could not pronounce upon. The little thing might live to be an old woman—at Davos. He instanced cases of one-lung life in the high Alps going on to old age. But in England, no!... Still, she might go on for a year or so. Sea-air would be the best thing. Anywhere on the south coast.