It Never Can Happen Again. William De Morgan
it was far from certain, after all, that she could have seen Daddy if she had been taken to the Hospital. It would have been the worst result of all to fail in that, and have all the exposure for nothing.
So the Rev. Athelstan—or Yorick—certainly thought, as he started to walk to St. Brides, meaning to avail himself of a townward-bound hansom if one should overtake him before he got to the tram. Omnibuses were all full, apparently, inside and out; and the opportunity of enjoying a rapid thaw was open to those who had for three weeks been praying for one. Streets overwhelmed with insufferable slush, and what was beautiful clean snow only a few hours since turned to torrents of an inkiness defying explanation. Roads that made even the sufferer by the slides we so enjoyed the making of in the early morning wish that he, too, was on our side, and could benefit by them, and knock double-knocks on them and never tumble. And see them now, turned to mere ill-mixed morass—floating pea-soup ankle-deep! Scavengers' carts that seemed to spill more than they removed, and persons of low ideals of energy losing sight of the objects for whose attainment they had been entrusted with brooms and rakes, and contented to do nothing particular with them, in rows. Malignant persons on roof-tops discharging wicked accumulations on unsuspecting heads, and shouting out "Be-low!" at the moment of impact. Butchers' carts coming as close to you as possible, to splash mud in your mouth and inside your collar, and reaching the horizon long before you become articulate to curse them. And then that saddest of all depressing sights, the skater who has been warned off the ice that won't be dangerous for another hour at least, and is going home swinging his skates and doubting the benevolence of his Maker.
So onward, through abating suburb and increasing town, to the zone of the Effectual. Of impatient carts that won't wait for the snow to thaw, but snap it up and carry it away without offering to account for their conduct; of mowing-machines fitted with Brobdingnag revolving hair-brushes that will have to be washed now to be put to their proper use again, after sweeping up all that equivocal mess parallel with the kerbstone; of turncocks looking happy from human appreciation in great force, and alone able to cope with obstructions or relaxations in the bowels of the earth whose nature we outsiders can only dimly guess at. So travelling onward, on foot and by tram, the Rev. Athelstan arrived at his destination, and slipping the fare he had provided for the cab he had discarded into the contribution-box at the gate, entered St. Brides Hospital.
"I didn't know you were in these parts, Taylor," said his friend, the House Surgeon. "Haven't seen you for a century.... Yes!—I know I am right. It's two years next Lady Day. How's the family? How's Miss Caldecott?... all right, are they? That's well. Now let's have a look at you. Turn round to the light...."
"I'm all right."
"Didn't say you weren't. Let's have a look! Turn well round and show yourself ... h'm!"
"Well!—what's the matter?"
"I thought as much! You've been dissipating, my man. Your sort of dissipation! What was it this time? You've been up all night, my good sir! It's no use your trying to deceive me."
"'I will not deceive you, my sweet!'" Mr. Taylor quoted Mrs. Gamp, and was understood. "I chanced upon a bad case of delirium tremens threatening its lawful wife with a knife, and I stayed to see it out. Poor fellow!"
"H'm—why poor fellow?"
"Because I locked him up and went for the doctor round the corner. He said he knew you. Man of the name of Ferris. Good sort of little chap...."
"I know him. Saw him yesterday—came to see a patient here. Well!—what did he say to your man?"
"He never saw him alive. While I was away the poor fellow escaped out of the room, ran a mile and a half through the snow, and pitched himself into a canal-lock.... Oh yes!—he was fished out dead from under the ice...."
"Rather a good job, I should think.... However, perhaps I oughtn't to say that...."
"Glad to hear you say so, Crumpton! It sounds hopeful."
"I didn't mean that way. I meant he might have been an interesting case. Anyhow, there's an end of him!"
"I wish I could think that. But suppose I tell you what brings me here now: we can quarrel about the human soul after. I want to hear about a man that was brought in yesterday night, a blind sailor-beggar that was run over. Have you seen him?"
"Rather! I helped to get his leg off, just above the knee. A very good case—a very good case!"
"What does that mean!—a very good case?"
"Means that if the limb hadn't been taken off on the nail, septic poisoning might have set in—yes!—already!—By the merest chance Brantock was here when he was brought in—he's our visiting surgeon, you know—and he operated immediately.... Save it? Not a chance—arteries all torn—circulation stopped—nothing for it but the knife! The other leg we may save. He has a splendid constitution. Couldn't have kept him so long under chloroform else."
"The other leg?"
"Compound comminuted fracture of tibia and fibula, with extensive laceration of soft parts. Much extravasation. But vitality retained. Oh yes!—we may save that one. It's in plaster of Paris. He was removed into the surgical ward an hour ago. Do you want to see him?—he can't talk, I fancy, and he'd better not try. He's had a good deal of opium to allay pain, you see."
"May I see him? I should like to say I have to his little girl. Poor child! The delirium tremens case was her uncle, and she has no mother. She's the poor chap's only child."
The House Surgeon put a book he had been looking into as he talked, inside a desk and locked it; wrote with extreme rapidity on half a sheet of note-paper as people write on the stage; handed it to a chubby nurse who seemed to have been indulging optimism while waiting for it; remarked to her, "That's three hundred and forty-nine. I'll see about the other presently;" and said to the Rev. Athelstan, briefly, "Come along!"
Poor Jim was worse now, as far as his own feelings went, than when he spoke to Lizarann off of the hospital-barrer. Then he was, in his own eyes, a chap that had been knocked over and come by some damage to his legs, which a week in hospital would set right. Pain enough!—ah, to be sure!—and what might you expect? Not for to lie up in cotton-wool all the days of your life. As a Spartan, and as against pain, with the normal courage of his healthy hours upon him, Jim was matchless. Add to that, that when he said those few words to his little lass, all the pain was as nothing in itself, measured against the need that she should not know it.
It was that nasty suffocating stuff that knocked all the heart out of a man, getting at his innards and stopping his clock. For when the time came to shift Jim from the couch he was first laid on to the operating-table, and to place him under chloroform as a preliminary, he was conscious enough of much that was going on—had drawn his own inferences from the rapid undertone of consultation ending in a raised voice: "Perfectly useless to try for the left. May save the right!" In that instant he gave no thought to his own share in the matter; all he could think of was the coming of the knowledge to his child that her Daddy was legless as well as eyeless. Three things made up his universe—his little lass, a crushed and spoiled thing on a couch, and that mysterious thing, Jim's Self, independent of both, but mad with anxiety for the former—until the chloroform came and made all three things Nothing.
However, Jim never knew he was Nothing, because he had no sooner swallowed the nasty stuff into his lungs than he was feeling very bad, and sick-like, on a bed he had never been moved to at all, to his very certain knowledge. And he was able to guess, although he could not move his limbs to test it, that he was in the form in which he was to fossilize. Then, as the slow rally of a splendid constitution against the shock began, there grew with it an intense longing to know what manner of figure he was going to cut when reinstated. Would it be one wooden leg or two wooden legs? Would he be able to walk at all? Would he, in short, be in trim to persuade his little lass that he was on the whole rather better off than before his accident? He really thought of nothing else when awake. But he chiefly slept, rousing himself for dexterous doses of nourishment at short intervals. And when he slept, he dreamed, as folk dream whose pain opium has half quenched.
He