The Project Gutenberg eBook, It Never Can Happen Again, by William De Morgan

By WILLIAM DE MORGAN

JOSEPH VANCE

An intensely human and humorous novel of life near London in the '50s. $1.75.

"If the reader likes both 'David Copperfield' and 'Peter Ibbetson' he can find the two books in this one."—The Independent.

"The first great English novel that has appeared in the 20th Century."—New York Times Review.

ALICE-FOR-SHORT

The story of a London waif, a friendly artist, his friends and family. $1.75.

"If any writer of the present era is read half a century hence, a quarter century, or even a decade, that writer is William De Morgan."—Boston Transcript.

"It is the Victorian age itself that speaks in these rich, interesting, overcrowded books.... Will be remembered as Dickens's novels are remembered."—Springfield Republican.

SOMEHOW GOOD

A lovable, humorous romance of modern England. $1.75.

"A higher quality of enjoyment than is derivable from the work of any other novelist now living and active in either England or America. Absolutely masterly."—Dial.

"A book as sound, as sweet, as wholesome, as wise, as any in the range of fiction."—Nation.

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN

WILLIAM DE MORGAN

AUTHOR OF "JOSEPH VANCE," "ALICE-FOR-SHORT"
AND "SOMEHOW GOOD"

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1909

Copyright, 1909.
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published November, 1909

[CONTENTS]

IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN

IT NEVER CAN HAPPEN AGAIN

[CHAPTER I]

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."

[CHAPTER II]

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?"

"I said—to Bridgetticks—I said the boys said she couldn't be off of it, they did. That's what the boys said."

"And she said they was liars, I'll go bail. Hay, little lass?"

"She said they was liars. Yass!" And then the difficulties of negotiating the passage across Cazenove Street, where they had by this time arrived, stopped the conversation.

When the couple were safely landed on the opposite pavement, talk went on again. Jim's image of Bridgetticks had not been improved by Lizarann's description. And an incident of her narrative had caused him to picture to himself a terrifying vision of her.

"She must have looked a queer un, lassie, flattening her nose against the winder-pane."

"Aunt Stingy said she'd welt her down fine if she could once catch holt."

"Your aunt don't seem to have thought her a beauty. Not with her nose against the glass! What did you think yourself, lassie?"

"I didn't seen her." Her head shook a long continuous negative.

"How do ye make that out, lass?"

"We ply at bein' oarposite sides of the winder-pine. Her outside—me in!"

"Well, then—o' course you saw her, lassie. You've got eyes in your head."

"I was a-flotting of my own nose against the glast, inside, too clost to see. Right oarposite—yass!" And then explained, at some expense of words, that this gyme, or game, was played by two little girls, or little boys, or a sample of each, jamming their noses one against the other as it were with the cold, unpleasant glass between. The gratification of doing this, whatever it was, might be enhanced and intensified by a similar treatment of their tongue-tips. This last variation caused Lizarann to end up with: "Outside tistés of rine. Inside tistés of cleanin' windows."

"I don't see no kissin' to be got out of that," said Jim. But the inventors of this game had evidently never anticipated its adoption by grown-up persons, and did not advise it. Their low natures could not enter into it. It was, however, made clear why Bridgetticks was invisible during an innings—if the term is permissible.

But oh, to think of it! Poor Jim had never seen his little lass, whose chatter had supplied him with a vivid image—albeit, perhaps, a false one—of her friend of ten years old. Her voice and touch were all he had to live for; but the only image of her he could get was from a grudging admission of his sister's that she might grow to be like her mother in time, but she would never have her looks. These looks were only admitted by Mrs. Steptoe for strategic purposes—videlicet, the cheapening of her brother's one possession and emphasizing of his losses. She may have had no defined intention of giving him pain, but the attitude of thought implied formed part of a scheme of Jeremiads her life was devoted to fostering and maturing. The looks of Lizarann's mother were the only pivot on which discussion of the child's own could turn naturally and easily. The embittered and unsympathetic disposition of her aunt made communication about them on other lines difficult or impossible to poor Jim.

But he treasured in his heart the idea that one day he would meet with some congenial soul whom he could take into his confidence, and petition for a description of what his little lass was really like. Unless, indeed, when she grew older, she was able to tell him what her image in a mirror resembled better than she had done when once or twice he had tried that way of eliciting information. For on those occasions Lizarann had at first shown symptoms of becoming what her aunt called a little giggling, affected chit, and had only been able to report that she looked "like Loyzarann in the glast," and then had grown uneasy, betrayed a tendency towards panic, and hid her face on her father when he became earnest, and begged her for his sake to tell him what she really looked like. She couldn't understand it at all, and may have had misgivings that she was being entrapped into some sort of ritual of a Masonic nature. So Jim had to wait for enlightenment from herself, and looked forward to the day when she should become more old and serious. Meanwhile what would he not have given for one little glimmer to help his imperfect image of what his little lass was like, now—now that her childhood was there?

But the darkness was upon him for all time. And the world that once was his to see had vanished—vanished with the last image his eyes had known; the quay at Cape Town in the blazing sun, the Dutch-built houses on the hot hill-side, and Table Mountain dark against the sky; and all the wide sea, a blaze of white beneath the blue, whose strongest glare might never reach his cancelled sight again. And there—so Jim believed, on the strength of a legend his informant may have invented on the spot—when the winds were at their worst round the Cape of Storms, might still be seen the source of all his evil, the Phantom Ship that had blasted his eyesight and made him what he had become. So fixed was this article of Jim's faith that it is not exaggeration to say that he drew comfort from the unending doom of her shadowy crew. Come what might to him, he always had this consolation, that as long as the sea should last, there was no hope of rest for the soul of the Flying Dutchman. It was something, if it wasn't much; and he told and retold the tale to his little lass, who was grieved on his behalf; but had somewhere, in the unrevengeful background of her mind, a chance thought of pity now and again for the unhappy seaman who was the cause of his misfortune.

[CHAPTER III]

OF ROYD HALL, AND ITS LITERARY GUEST WHO HAD AN IMPOSSIBLE WIFE

The lady who had shown an interest in Lizarann at the Dale Road Schools was the wife of Sir Murgatroyd Arkroyd, of Royal in Rankshire and Drum in Banffshire, and even more places. The young man who had bought Jim's matches and returned his change was their eldest son, William Rufus Arkroyd. His friend, whom he called Scipio, who was his college chum at Cambridge a year or so since, and had remained his inseparable companion, was on this particular day starting with him to pay an autumn visit to his paternal mansion, Royd Hall, about seven miles from Grime, where the new Translucent Cast Steel Foundries are.

The two young men got a carriage to themselves, and played picquet all the way to Furnivals, the little station where you get out for Royd and Thanes Castle, and the omnibus meets you. Because you are the sort probably that omnibuses meet. And it may be considered to have met William Rufus and Scipio on this occasion, but only platonically; for they rode to the house in a dog-cart that awaited them. However, the omnibus had the consolation of being ridden in by Mr. Arkroyd's man Schott, who came on in it with such luggage as would not go under a seat amenable only to card-cases or the like.

The model groom, Bullett, who had driven the trap to the station, had just time to establish himself on the back-seat, when the model mare was off at a spin, and an agricultural population, whose convictions and diet changed very little since the days of William the Norman, were abasing themselves in a humiliating manner unworthy of the age we live in—uncovering male heads and bobbing female skirts—at the doors of cottages whose hygienic arrangements were a disgrace to a Christian country and a reflection on civilization. So said the Grime Sentinel, in an editorial; and, as it spoke as though the editor had tried all these arrangements and found them wanting, no doubt it was right.

"Now, what have you and my affectionate brother been talking about all the way here?" Thus Judith, the sister of the one she is not addressing.

Scipio replies at leisure. He is evidently accustomed to being patronized by this handsome and self-possessed young lady, who is two years his senior, and speaks as to a junior. But, though she patronizes him, she waits until he chooses to answer.

"Your affectionate brother and myself, Miss Arkroyd, are so accustomed to each other's society, after a long residence in college together, that it is only on rare and special occasions that we exchange any remarks at all. We agreed some time since that the edge of conversation—that, I believe, was the expression—was taken off when each of the parties to it is always definitely certain what the other is going to say."

"Nonsense!—ridiculous boy! Do you expect me to believe that you two rode all that way and never spoke?"

Scipio reconsiders, and takes exception to his own speech, with the air of a person drawing on a reserve of veracity, a higher candour: "Perhaps I have overstated the case. We played picquet all the way from Euston. Picquet, as you are aware, involves an occasional interchange of monosyllables...."

"I know. One for his heels and two for his nob. Go on."

"Excuse me. Allow me to correct a misapprehension. The expressions you have quoted belong to another game—cribbage."

"Does it matter? Do go on with what you were saying ... 'involves an occasional interchange of monosyllables'...." The young lady is a little impatient, and taps.

"Which can scarcely be regarded as conversation." He completes the sentence with deliberation. He seems to take a pleasure in doing so, simply because of her impatience. "But with the exception of allusions to the game, I can recall no remark or observation whatever, wise or otherwise."

Whereupon the young lady, seeming to give him up as hopeless, calls to her brother in an adjoining room: "Will!" and he replies: "What? Anything wanted?"

"Yes!—come and make Lord Felixthorpe reasonable." From which it is clear that Scipio is a lord, or has a right to be called one. He is somebody's son, supposably.

This conversation is taking place in the drawing-room at Royd, where the two young men arrived just in time to delay dinner half-an-hour, that they might have time to dress. At Royd, undue hurry about anything was unknown, and Mr. Schott had arranged young Mr. Arkroyd's shirt-studs in his shirt, black silk stockings, coat, waistcoat, and trousers in a most beautiful pattern on his bed almost before his apologies to his mother were over for giving the wrong time of his train. He ought to have arrived an hour sooner, and Bullett and the dog-cart—or, rather, its mare—had been kicking their heels all that time at Furnival Station, enjoying the great luxury of enforced idleness, with a grievance against its cause. However, it was all right by now, and everyone who had not eaten too many macaroons at tea had dined extremely well.

"Smoke a cigarette," said William Rufus to his sister, as he settled down on the split fauteuil. "Never mind Sibyl!" She disclaimed Sibyl's influence, and lighted the cigarette he gave her at his own. He continued: "I can't make Scip reasonable. Nobody can."

"He says you and he never exchanged a word, and that you played cribbage in the train all the way without speaking."

"It was picquet. I don't know cribbage."

"Oh dear!—how trying you boys are! As if that mattered! The point is, did you speak, or didn't you?"

Whereupon each of the young men looked at the other, and said: "Did we speak, or didn't we?"

"I can wait," said the young lady; and waited with a passiveness that had all the force of activity.

"I understand"—thus Scipio, more deliberately than ever—"that technical remarks relating to the game are excluded by hypothesis."

"Yes!" from the catechist.

"Stop a bit, Scip. We did speak. We spoke about the blind beggar."

"I knew you were talking nonsense. You talked all the way. But who was the blind beggar?"

"A friend of Scip's—at least, a father of one of his young ladies."

Miss Arkroyd looked amused more than curious. "You haven't told us of this one," said she. "Or have you?"

"I have had nothing official to communicate, so far. Possibly a mere passing tendresse. I have only known the young lady a very short time. I will promise further information as soon as there is anything to communicate."

Miss Arkroyd continued to look at the speaker as though to find out his real meaning, half in doubt, half taking him au sérieux. But her brother struck in, saying: "Nothing interesting, Judith. This one's too young, and might be unsuitable from other points of view—eh, Scip?"

"The family connection," Scipio answers reflectively, "may have drawbacks. Nevertheless, I find, when I indulge in the position, hypothetically, of a son-in-law, that I do not shrink from the image of the relation I have created. It has a sort of sense about it of the starboard watch, and keeping a good look-out on foc'sles, and knowing how to splice cables. By-the-by, Will, this is an accomplishment that might prove useful in my family—splicing cables, I mean. I am certain that we can't, at present, any of us. Even my half-brother, though his grandfather—on his mother's side—is an Admiral, cannot splice a cable...."

"Never mind the cables! Go on about the blind beggar."

Her brother, as one who knows his friend's disposition to wander, supplies consecutive narrative: "The blind beggar's that sailor at the railway. Most likely you've seen him.... No?"—replying to a disclaiming headshake.—"Well!—take him for granted. The child's his child."

"What child?"

"You've seen her yourself, I think; or the same thing—the madre has. You remember?—in that Tallack Street place, on the Remunerative Artisans' Domicile Company's estate. You told us of it yourself, you know."

"I know Tallack Street perfectly well. It's the place where there was land for a factory that I thought would do for the New Idea. Have you seen it?"

"Why, of course! Scip and I went over next day. Well—it's that little girl." But Judith has slummed so many little girls in Tallack Street, all alike, that she can't recall any special one. She remembers the front teeth of one very plainly. Her brother also remembers Bridgetticks—not a young lady easily forgotten, clearly. But he has forgotten her name.

"Yes, I know her. So does Scip. She called him a Cure. But not that one—a younger child. I rather think our mother knows something about her." He leans his head well back towards his mother in the next room—sees its ceiling, perhaps, as he blows his cigarette-smoke straight upwards—and calls to her, "Madre!" The Italian word may be some mere family habit, without reason. A perceptive guest in the next room makes a mental note of it as a useful point in his next novel. For he is a literary celebrity. Lady Arkroyd answers: "Yes, dear, what?" She looks quite round the high back of the chair she sits in, and speaks fairly towards her son. He continues to throw his voice back over his head to her:

"What was the name of the queer kid that said her father was 'an Asker'? You told us about her, you know.... At the school place, down by Tallack Street...."

"I know. Her father's blind, and she leads him about. Be quiet, and don't ask, and perhaps I shall remember the name." Lady Arkroyd shuts her eyes over the job and waits on Memory. It may take time. Her son decides that he can listen just as well with his head down, and becomes normal. Presently his mother reports: "I think it was Steptoe—no!—not Steptoe. Eliza Ann Copeland, Adeline Fossett's schoolroom." If you look back to where Lizarann made this lady's acquaintance, you will see that there was underlying method in the seeming-disjointed action of her memory.

Her son replies, "Yes—that child"; and adds, "All right—that'll do," meaning that he has now got all the information wanted for the moment. So the perceptive guest infers, and listens with interest for the use he is going to make of it. But he loses the thread of the conversation; for, just as he is going to speak, the sister says to Scipio, "What did you say 'er' for?"—meaning, why did you begin and stop?

"The expression," his lordship replies with intense deliberation, "was an involuntary prefix to a statement I was preparing to make concerning the patronymic of the little girl who——" He stops dead on the pronoun, without finishing the sentence; then continues: "I need go no farther, especially as I foresee a fresh confirmation forming on the lips of my dear friend William Rufus of the view taken of my personal character by the other little-girl-who. But perhaps the name of the first little-girl-who may be taken as decided on. In that case I need not adduce my evidence."

"Do shut up, Scip," is the comment of William Rufus. "The other little girl spoke the truth. You are a Cure—not the least doubt of it."

"What is a Cure?" says Judith. "I don't know. But please don't shut up; never mind Will! What was it you were going to say?"

"Merely this:—When your intractable brother and myself visited Tallack Street, having previously interviewed Mr. Illingworth, the courteous secretary of the Remunerative...."

"Do get along, Scip!" from Mr. Arkroyd.

"My dear Will, I assure you that your impatience only defeats its own object. If you will balance the time gained by skipping passages in my statement—which may in the end prove essential to the context—against the time lost in administering verbal stimulus to the speaker, you will find—if I am not mistaken—that the latter exceeds the former."

"All right, old chap! I give up. Go ahead!"

"I shall have to go and talk to the new visitors. You had better get on." These speeches come simultaneously from his two hearers; the last speaker with her fine eyes fixed on a wrist-watch, little larger than the iris of either. Scipio accelerates with docility.

"After getting the particulars of the land and buildings from Illingworth, we drove round by Tallack Street to look at the site. We always make a point of seeing everything. Illingworth was not justified in saying that a small shed on the land, in the last stages of disintegration, could be utilized for a motor-garage ... but never mind that! We are at present concerned with the name of the little-girl-who. The plummy little dark-eyed one, Will—not that shrill little fiend. Well!—when we arrived at Tallack Street, and could see nothing the least resembling a suitable site for a factory—or, indeed, anything else—your accomplished brother, Miss Arkroyd, who cannot get in or out of a hansom without breaking his knee-caps, urged upon me the propriety of descending and inquiring at the Robin Hood. The Robin Hood was congenial to me—the sort of pub I always frequent when I have a choice. It had a picture of Robin dressed like a member of what I always suppose to be a benefit-club, which extends to me, when I sit at windows, a long pole with a collection-box, suggesting an inversion of the way we fed bears in our youth...." His hearers become restive.

"This is irrelevant," says the brother. And the sister looked again at her wrist.

"I am aware of it. I will not detain Miss Arkroyd long at the Robin Hood. I will merely note the fact that it had a water-trough for horses, and a space in front—it is in the main road, just as you reach Tallack Street—and that it is a House of Call for Plasterers. I mention this in case...."

"In case any of us should plaster unexpectedly? Do you feel that you wish to plaster, Will?"

"I might. Sibyl probably will, sooner or later. Go on, Scip.... Yes, we interrupted you—admitted!... Now go on."

"In the private bar of the Robin Hood—for it boasts a public and private bar, though it stops short of making parade of a saloon bar—I encountered a cobbler drinking a tumblerful of spirits. He was becoming a cobblerful of tumblerfuls...."

"I'm sure I know that man," Judith says, in brackets. "It was the one that said he was 'mine very truly, Robert Steptoe.' Never mind!—go on...."

"But he was not too drunk to tell me that if I kept my eyes open I should see a blooming board at the end of the street. There wasn't any too much reading on it now, the boys having aimed at it successfully ever since he came to Rose Cottage—'ouse on the right—but he took it a board was always a board, reading or no. I could see for myself, by looking. It warn't trespassers; he knew that.... Do not be impatient. I am coming to the gist of my communication.... Shortly after leaving the bar of the Robin Hood, I heard some boys singing a monotonous chant. A name was frequently repeated in it; it sounded like:

'Lizarann Coupland's

Father begs for 'apence

Just round the corner

Down by the gasworks....'

And so on over and over again. I inquired of one small boy whose father it was that begged for halfpence, but he turned the conversation, and suggested that I should give him a farden kike. However, another one repeated the name gratis; and though he was too young to be quite intelligible I was satisfied that the name was Eliza Ann Copeland or Coupland."

"Why couldn't you tell us that straight off, Lord Felixthorpe?" says Judith. To which the narrator replies with a sweet smile, "My inherent prolixity, no doubt." She says absently to the wrist-watch, "No doubt!" and then, looking up at the speaker, illogically asks, "What was the rest of the story? Go on."

Her brother protests: "Come, Judith, be reasonable! You're just like the people that author-chap has been telling us about downstairs ... people who complain that his books are too long, and then ask for more. He says he's badgered for sequels, and untold gold wouldn't induce him to bring an old character into a new book."

"He's perfectly right. Anyhow, I am sure he always finishes a story when he begins it. I want the rest of what happened. Only I want this one cut short—not too prosy, please! Did you give that little boy the farthing cake?"

"I gave him a halfpenny. He ignored my application for change, and walked away hand-in-hand with his friend towards a shop. I accompanied the cab on foot to the end of Tallack Street, where we found the blooming board, and decided on its illegible character. But there was no doubt the piece of land was the one Illingworth had shown us on the map. The fictitious motor-garage was a place that could only have been a source of danger to rash intruders. We exclaimed together that there were no premises, and the cabman endorsed our opinion. At this juncture an exacerbated female rushed from a doorway to intercept and chastise, if possible, a little girl about ten years old, who had been peering at her through a window on the ground-floor. This little girl slipped through an impassable orifice and got away, shouting derision, but pursued by the woman...."

"Who was more than half afraid of her." Thus Mr. Arkroyd parenthetically.

"I agree with you. However, she left her door open, and the little girl, whom I think we may consider to be identified as Eliza Ann Coupland, came out timidly, and sucked a corner of her neck-handkerchief in our immediate neighbourhood. She seemed to regard the clash between the other little girl and her mother as normal, and appeared to court conversation with us...."

"It's not her mother. It's her aunt. I know the people." The interruption is Judith's. "But go on."

"Her aunt. Our conversation with her was handicapped by her shyness; also by her objection to removing the handkerchief from her mouth. But she appeared to be attracted to us by a kind of fascination, showing itself in a fixed gaze in a direction contrary to the pull of the handkerchief. Her aunt's injunction to her to put it out of her mouth and answer the gentleman led the gentleman to prevail on the aunt to withdraw. We then understood her to refer us to a friend, Bridget Hicks, for local information...."

"Exactly. And Bridget Hicks called you a Cure."

"That is so. With what justice I am not in a position to say, without a more exact acquaintance with the meaning of the term. Bridget Hicks was the little girl who had fled before the wrath of the aunt. She joined her friend on witnessing the discomfiture of that lady by the tactics of your accomplished brother, who, I think, impressed her as Royalty."

"Very well, then!—it comes to this." It is Judith who is reporting progress. "The last time you spoke in the train was about a blind beggar whose little girl walks him about, and lives in that abominable slum papa has allowed to be built on the Cazenove estate, where I sent you because there was a board with something about vacant premises suitable for a factory on it. Why couldn't you say so at once?"

"May I be pardoned for suggesting," Scipio replies with a reinforcement of his sententious manner, which had lapsed slightly, "that, had I done so, a lengthy cross-examination would have been necessary to put my hearers in possession of details I have been able to supply."

His friend seems to think there is something in this. "Just consider, Judith," he says. "If Scip had cut himself down, as you suggest, you would have known nothing about Eliza Ann's neck-handkerchief. I consider that it speaks volumes."

"Scip, as you call him, could have thrown it in."

And Miss Arkroyd, who is more tall, impressive, and handsome than her mother, collects herself, which spreads over a great deal of fauteuil, to join the party in the other room. Her brother and his friend follow her.

The house-party in the room adjoining—that is, the large drawing-room with the Tintoret; perhaps you have been at Royd, and know it?—had been making a good deal of noise, considering the connection. One mustn't laugh too loud, if it's to be high-tension sweetness and light. This thought passed through the mind of Mr. Alfred Challis, better known to the world as "Titus Scroop," the great Author, who was one of the party; it was to him we referred as the perceptive guest. But he could not blame himself for causing any of the too-loud laughs; because, whenever he thought of a good thing, instead of speaking it out as he used to do when he was an Accountant, he kept it to himself and made a mental note of it for copy. But when he was clear in his mind, that a thing was not good enough for copy, he revealed it; and then the company laughed gently and obligingly, because he was a great Author. He felt sorry usually.

Mrs. Challis wasn't there. Mr. Challis used to visit at distinguished houses alone. But there was nothing against her. Discussion of whether she couldn't be asked this time always admitted that. But it invariably ended in a decision that Mrs. Challis was an Impossible Person—although Mrs. Candour had made every inquiry, and there was nothing whatever against her. "Still," said Lady Arkroyd to the Duchess of Rankshire, "even if there had been!..." And her Grace, predisposed to forgiveness of antecedents by native good-nature and a flawless record, saw regretfully that even then the lady would have been welcome, if only she had been Possible. Not being so, and being also, report said, huffy, she had never come to pass in polite society. Her husband believed he believed she was just as happy at home because a working hypothesis of life was de rigueur. She had certainly been almost rude to Lady Arkroyd on the occasion of a conciliatory visit; misunderstanding may have helped, but one thing is certain—she either was not asked to Royd this time or refused the invitation.

As to other folks, there were several. Only it was not easy to say which was which; it often isn't when there are several. They have to be left alone to assume identities, and a certain percentage succeeds. The balance dies away. And then one of them afterwards writes a daring story, or ventilates a startling theory, or commits an interesting murder. And there he was, all that time, at the Simpkins's garden-party and you never knew! Were you also—you yourself—a nonentity some of the others were thinking of as a Person-at-a-Party, et præterea nihil? And is one of them now thinking to himself—dear him!—was that little, snuffy, unobtrusive chap really the author of this remarkable work, which appeals to the better side of my nature, and has scarcely a dull passage from beginning to end? Meaning, of course—you! And just to think!—he lost his chance, and may never get another. How sorry you feel for him!

These reflections are really in the story, because they were passing through the mind of Mr. Challis while a lady who had been asked to sing Carpathian Ballads was making up her mind which she would sing. In these philosophizings of his—especially the last one—may be detected the disagreeable sneering tone you never would have suspected him of. You would have thought him an easy-going chap—no more. It was there, though, and it affected his mind more or less all through the Carpathian Ballads. Whenever he was thrown on his own resources for a few minutes, the disagreeable sneering tone was apt to be audible to himself in his communings with his innermost soul. On this occasion, his innermost soul, being left alone with him for a short time, took occasion to decide that his host was a pompous old Ass. All these heavy landed proprietors were pompous Asses, more or less. The Woman—thus it referred to the lady of the house—was more interesting, of course. Women were. But she was a worldling, and a Philistine at heart, for all this pretence of worshipping Art and Letters and Song. As for the son, he gave himself airs; but it, the soul, wouldn't say anything against him because his cigars were undeniable. And the soul shared its owner's—if, indeed, he could call his soul his own!—appreciation of good 'baccy. The young Lord, it decided, was not a bad sample of his depraved class—would find his level in Parliament and be Under-Secretary of something, sometime. But he would have to learn to shout louder and speak faster. As for the two young women, the soul's owner had really only just distinguished one from the other. As for the music, the singer couldn't sing ballads, whatever else she could sing. She was nothing much to look at; but the eldest daughter had a fine throat and shoulders. Only nowadays you never could tell how much was real. As for the others, he hadn't made them out yet. Lady Arkroyd had been civil to him at dinner, certainly. But then she had invited him. He had a vague sense that he was regarded as her property, and that the others all shirked responsibility on his account, and that he was, in fact, to them an outsider. Anyway, it was bad form of the son and his friend and the pair of shoulders, to go away and talk in the back room, and take no notice of—well!—of himself, for instance. At which point his innermost soul turned traitor—rounded on him, and accused him of allowing his disagreeable sneering tone to get the better of him—of giving way to ill-temper, in fact.

Perhaps these presents will be read by someone who has had a similar experience as a newcomer in a great house. He or she may also have found out that there is honey as well as wormwood, frankincense as well as assafœtida, to be met with in such a position, even as did Mr. Alfred Challis, the eminent novelist.

For, the Carpathian ballads coming to an end, that gentleman found himself suddenly being apprized, by the owner of the shoulders, that she had been longing for a word—with so eminent a writer—all the evening. And there was a question she was dying to ask him. Only they would have plenty of time to talk about that to-morrow. When was his next book coming out?... not till the spring?... oh dear! And what was the title?... "Titus Scroop" always had such interesting titles.... What? Not decided on? The fine eyes that went with the shoulders seemed surprised at this. "No doubt," said the Author, "the novel is as anxious as anyone to know what its title is going to be." This wasn't worth keeping for copy. The lady laughed the laugh that concedes that a joke has been made or meant, not the laugh of irresistible appreciation. What did that matter? Mr. Challis's ill-humour was being charmed away. Probably some student of human nature has noticed that it is not very material that the flattery of a good-looking woman should be sincere, provided mankind gets enough of it. Mr. Challis suspected that he was being soothed, and "Titus Scroop" spoken of in inverted commas, as compensation for having been left to choose between the company of other males and no company at all. But still, he was being soothed. No more words about it! Mr. Challis acquitted the shoulders, and even the mass of rich black hair, of any assistance from Art; and when the party broke up for the night, went to his couch contented.

Having, as it were, obsessed this gentleman, in order to get a clear view of this autumn's house-party at Royd, we may as well make further use of him and peep over his shoulder as he writes his first letter to his impossible wife in the cretonne bedroom at the end of the passage where the German Baroness saw the ghost—you know that story, of course? Oh dear, what a lot of candles one does light to write letters by in other people's houses when one hasn't got to pay for them!