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.