When Ghost Meets Ghost. William De Morgan
bare the ends of the top-floor joists in Mrs. Prichard's front attic it turned out just like he said it would—six-inch jystes with no hold to 'em, and onto that all perished at the ends! Why ever they couldn't go to a new floor when they done the new roof Mr. Bartlett could not conceive. They had not, and what was worse they had carried up the wall on the top of the old brickwork, adding to the dead weight; and it only fit to pull down, as you might say.
However, the weather was fine and warm all the time Mr. Bartlett rebuilt two foot of wall by sections; which he did careful, a bit at a time. And all along, till they took away the scaffolding and made good them two or three pudlock-holes off of a ladder, they was no annoyance at all to Mrs. Prichard, nor yet to Mrs. Burr, excepting a little of that sort of flaviour that goes with old brickwork, and a little of another that comes with new, and a bit of plasterers' work inside to make good. Testimony was current in and about the house to this effect, and may be given broadly in the terms in which it reached Uncle Moses. His comment was that the building trade was a bad lot, mostly; you had only to take your eye off it half a minute, and it was round at the nearest bar trying the four-half. Mr. Jerry's experience had been the same.
Mrs. Burr was out all day, most of the time; so it didn't matter to her. But it was another thing for the old woman, sometimes alone for hours together; alone with her past. At such times her sleeping or waking dreams mixed with the talk of the bricklayers outside, or the sound of a piano from one of the superior houses that back-wall screened the Court from—though they had no call to give theirselves airs that the Court could see—a piano on which talent was playing scales with both hands, but which wanted tuning. Old Mrs. Prichard was not sensitive about a little discord now and again. As she sat there alone, knitting worsteds or dozing, it brought back old times to her, before her troubles began. She and her sister could both play easy tunes, such as the "Harmonious Blacksmith" and the "Evening Hymn," on the square piano she still remembered so well at the Mill. And this modern piano—heard through open windows in the warm summer air, and mixing with the indistinguishable sounds of distant traffic—had something of the effect of that instrument of seventy years ago, breaking the steady monotone of rushing waters under the wheel that scarcely ever paused, except on Sunday. What had become of the old square piano she and Phoebe learned to play scales on? What becomes of all the old furnishings of the rooms of our childhood? Did any man ever identify the bed he slept in, the table he ate at, half a century ago, in the chance-medley of second-hand—third-hand—furniture his father's insolvency or his own consigned it to? Would she know the old square piano again now, with all its resonances dead—a poor, faint jargon only in some few scattered wires, far apart? Yes—she would know it among a hundred, by the inlaid bay-leaves on the lid that you could lift up to look inside. But that was accounted lawless, and forbidden by authority.
She dreamed herself back into the old time, and could see it all. The sound of the piano became mixed, as she sat half dozing, with the smell of the lilies of the valley which—according to a pleasing fiction of Dolly Wardle—that little person's doll had brought upstairs for her, keeping wide awake until she see 'em safe on the table in a mug. But the sound and the smell were of the essence of the mill, and were sweet to the old heart that was dying slowly down—would soon die outright. Both merged in a real dream with her sister's voice in it, saying inexplicably: "In the pocket of your shot silk, dear." Then she woke with a start, sorry to lose the dream; specially annoyed that she had not heard what the carman—outside with her father—had begun to say about the thing Phoebe was speaking of. She forgot what that was, and it was very stupid of her.
That was Mr. Bartlett outside, laying bricks; not the carman at all. What was that he was saying?
"B'longed to a Punch's show, he did. Couldn't stand it no longer, he couldn't. The tune it got on his narves, it did! If it hadn't 'a been for a sort o' reel ease he got takin' of it quick and slow—like the Hoarperer—he'd have gave in afore; so there was no pretence. It's all werry fine to say temp'ry insanity, but I tell you it's the contrairy when a beggar comes to his senses and drownds hisself. Wot'd the Pope do if he had to play the same tune over and over and over and over? … Mortar, John! And 'and me up a nice clean cutter. That's your quorlity, my son." And the Court rang musically to the destruction of a good brick.
John—who was only Mr. Bartlett's son for purposes of rhetoric—slapped his cold unwholesome mortar-pudding with a spade; and ceded an instalment, presumably. Then his voice came: "Wot didn't he start on a new toon for, for a wariation?"
Mr. Bartlett was doing something very nice and exact with the three-quarter he had just evolved, so his reply came in fragments as from a mind preoccupied. "Tried it on he had—that game—more times than once. … But the boys they took it up, and aimed stones. … And the public kep' its money in its pocket—not to encourage noo Frenchified notions—not like when they was a boy. So the poor beggar had to jump in off of the end of Southend Pier, and go out with the tide." He added, as essential, that Southend Pier was better than two mile long; so there was water to drownd a man when the tide was in.
The attention of very old people may be caught by a familiar word, though such talk as this ripples by unheeded. The sad tale of the Punch's showman—the exoteric one, evidently—roused no response in the mind of old Mrs. Prichard, until it ended with the tragedy at Southend. The name brought back that terrible early experience of the sailing of the convict-ship—of her despairing effort at a farewell to be somehow heard or seen by the man whom she almost thought of as in a grave, buried alive! She was back again in the boat in the Medway, keeping the black spot ahead in view—the accursed galley that was bearing away her life, her very life; the man no sin could change from what he was to her; the treasure of her being. She could hear again the monotonous beat of her rowers' pair of oars, ill-matched against the four sweeps of the convicts, ever gaining—gaining. …
Surely she would be too late for that last chance, that seemed to her the one thing left to live for. And then the upspringing of that blessed breeze off the land that saved it for her. She could recall her terror lest the flagging of their speed for the hoisting of the sail should undo them; the reassuring voice of a hopeful boatman—"You be easy, missis; we'll catch 'em up!"—the less confident one of his mate—"Have a try at it, anyhow!" Then her joy when the sail filled and the plashing of her way spoke Hope beneath her bulwark as she caught the wind. Then her dread that the Devil's craft ahead would make sail too, and overreach them after all, and the blessing in her heart for her hopeful oarsman, whose view was that the officer in charge would not spare his convicts any work he could inflict. "He'll see to it they arn their breaffastis, missis. He ain't going to unlock their wristis off of the oars for to catch a ha'porth o' blow. You may put your money on him for that." And then the sweet ship upon the water, and her last sight of the man she loved as he was dragged aboard into the Hell within—scarcely a man now—only "213 M"!
Then the long hours that followed, there in the open boat beneath the sun, whose setting found her still gazing in her dumb despair on what was to be his floating home for months. Such a home! Scraps of her own men's talk were with her still—the names of passing craft—the discontent in the fleet—the names of landmarks on either coast. Among these Southend—the word that caught her ear and set her a-thinking. But there was no pier two miles long there then. She was sure of that.
What was it Mr. Bartlett was talking about now? A grievance this time! But grievances are the breath of life to the Human Race. The source of this one seemed to be Sapps proprietor, who was responsible for the restrictions on Mr. Bartlett's enthusiasm, which might else have pulled the house down and rebuilt it. "Wot couldn't he do like I told him for?"—thus ran the indictment—"Goard A'mighty don't know, nor yet anybody else! Why—he don't know, hisself! I says to him, I says, just you clear out them lodgers, I says, and give me the run of the premises, I says, and it shan't cost you a fi'-pun note more in the end, I says. Then if he don't go and tie me down to a price for to make good front wall and all dy-lapidations. And onlest he says wot he means by good, who's to know? … Mortar, John!" John supplied mortar with a slamp—a sound like the fall of a pasty Titan on loose boards. The grievance was resumed, but with a consolation. "Got 'im there, accordin' as I think of it! Wot's his idear of good?—that's wot I want to know. Things is as you see 'em. … " Mr. Bartlett would have said the esse of things was percipi, had he been