It Never Can Happen Again. William De Morgan
this after, he pretended it had made him laugh.
The sound of a child crying, surely? Yes—the voice of the little girl, in an agony of grief or fear, in the next room! He flung the madman from him, and passed out of the room, locking him in. "I heard him," said he, afterwards, "begging me to keep Simon Magus off, but I couldn't stop to see to it." He went into the back room, where Lizarann, roused by memory of her miseries from the lighter sleep of morning, was shedding bitter tears because Daddy was not there, but in the Hospital. Who does not know how the consciousness of affliction awaiting us will drag us awake, however much we may strive to remain in dreamland? Lizarann was glad of the gentleman, though, whatever he was. And it was all the easier for her to give a short abstract of her tragedy of the night before, that her aunt had gone upstairs to dress, as a preliminary to action in connection with the front parlour, whatever it was that was going on there. For whether anyone was there with her husband—the gentleman of the night before, or a policeman, or doctor perhaps—she had yet to learn. And she was horribly cold. A favourable disposition towards lighting a bit of fire in the kitchen was all the more marked on this account.
The very small person sobbing in a very dirty nightgown in the middle of the back room could not—so Athelstan Taylor decided—go on indefinitely unwarmed on such a morning as this. He rejoiced to feel that there was still plenty of vital heat in her rudiment of a carcass, as he wrapped it in the first thing that came to hand, a stray relic of a blanket of days gone by. He picked the little bundle, so compacted, up on his knee, and helped the subsidence of its sobs with a word or two of consolation. While doing so, he could hear what difficulties his case next door was getting into with Simon Magus.
"Berbecause derdaddy's in the Sussospital and hurted his leg," said Lizarann, as far as our spelling will carry us, in reply to inquiry.
"That's a good little woman! Now she'll tell me all about it. How did Daddy hurt his leg?"
Lizarann settled down to her narrative. Here was human sympathy, at last, for her real trouble. For all the dreadful scene of last night was only Uncle Bob; and of course that sort of thing was always happening, more or less, with uncles. Not daddies, look you!—that was quite another pair of shoes.
"There was free spoleecemen," said she, beginning like a true artist with the strong, conspicuous points of her narrative, "took Daddy along like carrying a Guy, only the spoleeceman he pictited me up and held me inside of the skirting for Daddy for to kiss me. And Daddy, he says why didn't I call out like he told me 'Pi-lot!' so he could hear?..."
"But was Daddy being carried on a chair?" The reference to a Guy had complicated matters.
"Not a chair to set upon. A hospital-barrer. With skirtings. Yass! But I hadn't called out Pi-lot, so Daddy could hear...." Lizarann's conscience torments her on this point, which is one her hearer cares very little about. He wants to find out what hurt Daddy's leg, and the extent of the damage. He waits a moment to listen; thinks he hears a silence in the next room, as though Simon Magus had vanished and left his victim in peace. Something like knocking about of furniture follows. But the drunkard is safe locked in. He can do no great harm for a few minutes anyhow.
"Was it an accident, or did he tumble down of himself?" he asks. He knows the child will understand. A mere fall on a slippery pavement would hardly rank as an accident with her. An accident, unclassified otherwise, almost implies a vehicle, among this class of Londoners.
"Yass!—an accident. The boy said so." A self-explanatory boy, the speaker seems to think. The hearer accepts him as explained. But what was the accident, and how much was Daddy hurt? Didn't the boy tell? Gradually all that Lizarann has to communicate is elicited, and Mr. Taylor takes a cheerful view of the outlook.
"Then Daddy's gone to the Hospital? They'll set Daddy on his legs again. What does Daddy do for his living?"
"He's a Asker. Askin', he does. Yass!" Lizarann's large dark eyes, and her gravity, added force to this. "Every dye, by the Rilewye Stytion, where I goes to fotch 'im."
Athelstan Taylor gave a low whistle. "Oho!—that's where we are, is it?" He at once recognised the little girl whose fame had reached him from the great house at Royd, with which he was of course in frequent communication. "You're Lizarann Coupland, then; Lady Arkroyd's friend?"
"Yass!" said Lizarann, nodding. Not that she was sure of it. But she knew there was a Lidy, come to see Teacher at School, she did; and she couldn't have been certain, off-hand, that this wasn't the Lidy's nime, in the face of the gentleman's statement. So she assented. She felt rather proud. Her daddy was well spoken of among the élite evidently. She continued: "And the boy said, he did, they could mike Daddy's leg well any day of the week at the Sospital, because they done his Aunt and Uncle. And a gentleman was a corpse they done, out of a shore. And Mr. Parker's teef they done, as good as new! So they was all singin'! Yass—they was!" This came in instalments; our report is shortened, for convenience.
Athelstan Taylor said afterwards to his friend: "I was getting so sleepy by that time, that I didn't above half enjoy the little maid's hopeful chatter about her Daddy, which of course I confirmed. I had to commit it to memory to laugh at it afterwards." Indeed, his great strength and endurance had been sorely taxed by the trying nature of his long vigil; mere sitting up all night he would have made light of.
When Aunt Stingy appeared a few minutes after, having been employed in lighting the kitchen fire as projected, she found Lizarann still on Mr. Taylor's knee, kept warm in the extemporized wrap, and filling in the blanks in her narrative, in reply to his cross-questionings. With a curious lack of tact and insight, Mrs. Steptoe immediately denounced her niece's presumption, suggesting that the child had taken the gentleman by storm, as it were; and alleging that little g'yells ought to know better how to behave than that. The gentleman cut this ill-judged attempt to creep up his sleeve very short indeed.
"Now listen to me, if you please, Mrs. ... what's your name? ... oh—Steptoe. Mrs. Steptoe. I am going at once to get the nearest doctor to see your husband. And I think the best thing you can do will be to leave him quiet in the front room till I come back. He won't take any harm. And I hope when I come back I shall find the little girl dressed, with a nice warm fire to warm herself at. I suppose you can't get any breakfast for her yet awhile?... Well!—do what you can in that direction. Yesterday's milk is better than no milk." And with a very decisive refusal to take a cup of tea at any future time, on any terms, he buttoned his coat tight round him, and left the room. Lizarann heard the street door open and close, and then she was left friendless and alone with a formidable aunt. That good woman stepped out after the street door closed, and listened a moment at that of the front room, but finding all silent did not open it. She saw it had been locked, as the key had been inside overnight. Evidently her visitor had locked it.
She returned and afflicted Lizarann by a destructive co-operation in the gettin' of her frock on, a form of help that twitched its victim to and fro under the pretext of promoting her stability; that resented her offered assistance and denounced it as henderin'; that left her penalized by a sense of wrong hooks in wrong eyes, buttons adrift from their holes, and holes aghast at the intrusion of strange buttons. But Lizarann was used to this, and discerned in it the shortness of her aunt's temper. Her Daddy he'd always said poor Aunty she couldn't help her nater, and we must bottle up according. Lizarann beheld her aunt through a halo of Jim's patience and forgiveness.
Athelstan Taylor soon found the doctor in Cazenove Street, who came readily in answer to his summons. It wouldn't do to lose sight of the case, he said. The man, who was quite well known to him as a typical case of Alcoholism, to the police as an habitual drunkard, and to the neighbourhood as always the worse for liquor, might very easily die of collapse if he wasn't carefully nourished when the reaction came. He would be much safer in a Hospital. Often in cases of this sort, life or death would turn on an injection of morphine on the spot. Heart-failure might be very rapid. He spoke as though Mr. Steptoe's decease would be a real calamity. Mr. Taylor, tramping beside him through the snow, tried to shape a thought that hung in his mind. How if he himself, who preached a Resurrection or Hereafter that as like as not this scientific gentleman did not believe in—how if he was less keen to preserve this depraved life, as a chance to clean it up a bit for a wholesomer departure