"Then he isn"t buried in Manor Park Cemetery?"
"Not yet; but he"ll wish he was, the half-baked monkey, when I get hold of him."
"Then he wasn"t a good man?"
"Who?"
"Your husband."
"Who says he ain"t a good man?" It was Susan"s flying leaps from tense to tense that most bewildered me. "If anybody says he ain"t I"ll gouge their eye out!"
I hastened to a.s.sure Susan that my observation had been intended in the nature of enquiry, not of a.s.sertion.
"Brings me a bottle of gin--for my headaches--every time he comes home,"
continued Susan, showing cause for opinion, "every blessed time."
And at some such point as this I would retire to the clearer atmosphere of German grammar or mixed fractions.
We suffered a good deal from Susan one way and another; for having regard to the admirable position of her heart, we all felt it our duty to overlook mere failings of the flesh--all but my aunt, that is, who never made any pretence of being a sentimentalist.
"She"s a lazy hussy," was the opinion expressed of her one morning by my aunt, who was rinsing; "a gulping, snorting, lazy hussy, that"s what she is." There was some excuse for my aunt"s indignation. It was then eleven o"clock and Susan was still sleeping off an attack of what she called "new-ralgy."
"She has seen a good deal of trouble," said my mother, who was wiping.
"And if she was my cook and housemaid," replied my aunt, "she would see more, the s.l.u.t!"
"She"s not a good servant in many respects," admitted my mother, "but I think she"s good-hearted."
"Oh, drat her heart," was my aunt"s retort. "The right place for that heart of hers is on the doorstep. And that"s where I"d put it, and her and her box alongside it, if I had my way."
The departure of Susan did take place not long afterwards. It occurred one Sat.u.r.day night. My mother came upstairs looking pale.
"Luke," she said, "do please run for the doctor."
"What"s the matter?" asked my father.
"Susan," gasped my mother, "she"s lying on the kitchen floor breathing in the strangest fashion and quite unable to speak."
"I"ll go for Washburn," said my father; "if I am quick I shall catch him at the dispensary."
Five minutes later my father came back panting, followed by the doctor.
This was a big, black-bearded man; added to which he had the knack of looking bigger than even he really was. He came down the kitchen stairs two at a time, shaking the whole house. He brushed my mother aside, and bent over the unconscious Susan, who was on her back with her mouth wide open. Then he rose and looked at my father and mother, who were watching him with troubled faces; and then he opened his mouth, and there came from it a roar of laughter, the like of which sound I had never heard.
The next moment he had seized a pail half full of water and had flung it over the woman. She opened her eyes and sat up.
"Feeling better?" said the doctor, with the pail still in his hand; "have another dose?"
Susan began to gather herself together with the evident intention of expressing her feelings; but before she could find the first word, he had pushed the three of us outside and slammed the door behind us.
From the top of the stairs we could hear Susan"s thick, rancorous voice raging fiercer and fiercer, drowned every now and then by the man"s savage roar of laughter. And, when for want of breath she would flag for a moment, he would yell out encouragement to her, shouting: "Bravo!
Go it, my beauty, give it tongue! Bark, bark! I love to hear you,"
applauding her, clapping his hands and stamping his feet.
"What a beast of a man," said my mother.
"He is really a most interesting man when you come to know him,"
explained my father.
Replied my mother, stiffly: "I don"t ever mean to know him." But it is only concerning the past that we possess knowledge.
The riot from below ceased at length, and was followed by a new voice, speaking quietly and emphatically, and then we heard the doctor"s step again upon the stairs.
My mother held her purse open in her hand, and as the man entered the room she went forward to meet him.
"How much do we owe you, Doctor?" said my mother. She spoke in a voice trembling with severity.
He closed the purse and gently pushed it back towards her.
"A gla.s.s of beer and a chop, Mrs. Kelver," he answered, "which I am coming back in an hour to cook for myself. And as you will be without any servant," he continued, while my mother stood staring at him incapable of utterance, "you had better let me cook some for you at the same time. I am an expert at grilling chops."
"But, really, Doctor--" my mother began. He laid his huge hand upon her shoulder, and my mother sat down upon the nearest chair.
"My dear lady," he said, "she"s a person you never ought to have had inside your house. She"s promised me to be gone in half an hour, and I"m coming back to see she keeps her word. Give her a month"s wages, and have a clear fire ready for me." And before my mother could reply, he had slammed the front door.
"What a very odd sort of a man," said my mother, recovering herself.
"He"s a character," said my father; "you might not think it, but he"s worshipped about here."
"I hardly know what to make of him," said my mother; "I suppose I had better go out and get some chops;" which she did.
Susan went, as sober as a judge, on Friday, as the saying is, her great anxiety being to get out of the house before the doctor returned. The doctor himself arrived true to his time, and I lay awake--for no human being ever slept or felt he wanted to sleep while Dr. Washburn was anywhere near--and listened to the gusts of laughter that swept continually through the house. Even my aunt laughed that supper time, and when the doctor himself laughed it seemed to me that the bed shook under me. Not liking to be out of it, I did what spoilt little boys and even spoilt little girls sometimes will do under similar stress of feeling, wrapped the blanket round my legs and pattered down, with my face set to express the sudden desire of a sensitive and possibly short-lived child for parents" love. My mother pretended to be angry, but that I knew was only her company manners. Besides, I really had, if not exactly a pain, an extremely uncomfortable sensation (one common to me about that period) as of having swallowed the dome of St. Paul"s. The doctor said it was a frequent complaint with children, the result of too early hours and too much study; and, taking me on his knee, wrote then and there a diet chart for me, which included one tablespoonful of golden syrup four times a day, and one ounce of sherbet to be placed upon the tongue and taken neat ten minutes before each meal.
That evening will always live in my remembrance. My mother was brighter than I had ever seen her. A flush was on her cheek and a sparkle in her eye, and looking across at her as she sat holding a small painted screen to shield her face from the fire, the sense of beauty became suddenly born within me, and answering an impulse I could not have explained, I slipped down, still with my blanket around me, from the doctor"s knee, and squatted on the edge of the fender, from where, when I thought no one was noticing me, I could steal furtive glances up into her face.
So also my father seemed to me to have become all at once bigger and more dignified, talking with a vigour and an enjoyment that sat newly on him. Aunt Fan was quite witty and agreeable--for her; and even I asked one or two questions, at which, for some reason or another, everybody laughed; which determined me to remember and ask those same questions again on some future occasion.
That was the great charm of the man, that by the magnetic spell of his magnificent vitality he drew from everyone their best. In his company clever people waxed intellectual giants, while the dull sat amazed at their own originality. Conversing with him, Podsnap might have been piquant, Dogberry incisive. But better than all else, I found it listening to his own talk. Of what he spoke I could tell you no more than could the children of Hamelin have told the tune the Pied Piper played. I only know that at the tangled music of his strong voice the walls of the mean room faded away, and that beyond I saw a brave, laughing world that called to me; a world full of joyous fight, where some won and some lost. But that mattered not a jot, because whatever else came of it there was a right royal game for all; a world where merry gentlemen feared neither life nor death, and Fate was but the Master of the Revels.
Such was my first introduction to Dr. Washburn, or to give him the name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr.
Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then he was more brute than man--brutish in his instincts, in his appet.i.tes, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would grow soft as a mother"s, and then you might have thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to suggest the possibility of his wings being folded away underneath. Often have I tried to make up my mind whether it has been better for me or worse that I ever came to know him; but as easy would it be for the tree to say whether the rushing winds and the wild rains have shaped it or mis-shaped.
Susan"s place remained vacant for some time. My mother would explain to the few friends who occasionally came from afar to see us, that her "housemaid" she had been compelled to suddenly discharge, and that we were waiting for the arrival of a new and better specimen. But the months pa.s.sed and we still waited, and my father on the rare days when a client would ring the office bell, would, after pausing a decent interval, open the front door himself, and then call downstairs indignantly and loudly, to know why "Jane" or "Mary" could not attend to their work. And my mother, that the bread-boy or the milkman might not put it about the neighbourhood that the Kelvers in the big corner house kept no servant, would hide herself behind a thick veil and fetch all things herself from streets a long way off.
For this family of whom I am writing were, I confess, weak and human.
Their poverty they were ashamed of as though it were a crime, and in consequence their life was more full of paltry and useless subterfuge than should be perhaps the life of brave men and women. The larder, I fancy, was very often bare, but the port and sherry with the sweet biscuits stood always on the sideboard; and the fire had often to be low in the grate that my father"s tall hat might shine resplendent and my mother"s black silk rustle on Sundays.
But I would not have you sneer at them, thinking all pretence must spring from sn.o.bbishness and never from mistaken self-respect. Some fine gentleman writers there be--men whose world is bounded on the east by Bond Street--who see in the struggles of poverty to hide its darns only matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from the confectioner"s.
But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous. Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of beer upon the table, and helped His Royal Highness to half. But my father and mother"s tea was very weak that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith might have a gla.s.s of wine should they come to dinner. I remember the one egg for breakfast, my mother arguing that my father should have it because he had his business to attend to; my father insisting that my mother should eat it, she having to go out shopping, a compromise being effected by their dividing it between them, each clamouring for the white as the most nourishing. And I know however little the meal looked upon the table when we started I always rose well satisfied. These are small things to speak of, but then you must bear in mind this is a story moving in narrow ways.