It Never Can Happen Again. William De Morgan

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 would have done very well in his dreams if he could only have had them to himself, and been free from an awful something that ran through them all. Whereof the only certainty was that it was always the same, and a curse. Preferably, as to form, it was cubic and immovable, but of hideous weight. But then, it was by no means certain that it was not a continuous sound, a sustained hoot of appalling power and persistency that struck terror to the heart, and jarred the brain. Or was it a wild beast, that kept the ship's crew from going ashore? Or an evil fire Jim was hard at work to crawl away from, but could not, seeing that it could follow him on wheels? Or, hardest to describe of all—when he woke from his dream to recognize a fact he had recognized fifty times uselessly, that it was merely his pain and nothing else—was it a strange concerted action of malignant battalions, always coming nearer, never in sight? It made him sick to know that it was each and all of the others, just the same. Now if he could only have enjoyed his dreams—for, look you, he could see in his dreams, plain—he wouldn't have minded the pain, if he could only have kept it square and intelligible. It was just the confusion that made him so hot and dry, so unable to get properly rangé.

      For instance, there was a dream of eight years back with Dolly in it. Dolly was Lizarann's mother, and the reason Lizarann was not called Dolly was that Aunt Stingy had always thought it such a selly name, and it had appeared to Jim that it couldn't much matter what anything so small was called. Its size was all he knew of it, and a milky flavour, and some squeaks. And Jim was in the dark, and Dolly in her grave, and nothing mattered.

      Jim was in the dark now, with a vengeance; but he could dream Dolly out of her grave, and did it, in this dream. It was a dream of the day he met her, when he came off his first voyage, a mere boy, and a perfect stranger to her. There was the bar he and his mates off the Pera had trooped into for refreshment, just paid off and feeling good, with money in their pockets. There were the square bottles with names on the glass, and the round ones all over labels, and the pump-handles in a row that Dolly's red-faced cousin Jane, the barmaid, was in the confidence of, but which everyone else would have pulled wrong. There, too, was the girl that came in behind the bar and berthed up alongside the red-faced cousin, just as Murtagh O'Rourke called back to him through the swing-door, "We're lavin' ye behind, James, me boy," and vanished. And the girl was Dolly—Dolly herself. Jim didn't know in his dream that he had married Dolly since, and that she was dead—not he! It was all new and young again, and in a moment he would hear Dolly say what she did then, when after some chat—during which the eyes of each saw the other solely, Dolly's flinchingly, Jim's greedily—the red face was called away and left them. Yes!—he knew what she would say, "You never daren't come across to me," and that he in defiance of all Law and Order would be over that bar like a shot, and then would be driven forth by the righteous rage of the returning barmaid, with the remains of a kiss on his lips, the spoil of war in this audacious enterprise. And all the sequel of the story—how Dolly ran after him to say he might come back, under reserves; and the lightning speed of their unsophisticated courtship, under none—all this he knew in the dream beforehand, but did not wonder why he knew it—took it as a matter of course.

      It never came off, though, for the dream never got as far as the kiss, to Jim's bitter disappointment. Jane, the cousin, instead of clearing out and leaving the introduction to nature, swelled and became redder still and very hot, and ended inexplicably by becoming the pain that had passed through so many vicissitudes. Whereupon Jim was awake in the dark, somewhere. And a man's voice, one good to hear, was saying, "I'll sit down by him and wait till he wakes, nurse. I promised little Lizarann I would see him."

      "That's my little lass!" said Jim faintly. And the nurse said, "I thought I heard him speak." Then Jim felt that a big man came and sat beside him, who asked him what he had said. So he repeated, "The name of my little lass at home, master," and then had said all he could, and went off again in a drowze, and was far away in a new dream in two seconds. In perhaps five he woke again with a start and said: "Have ye been here long, master?" But his mind must have travelled quick from the dream he was in, and his place in it. For he had to come back to bed No. 146 at St. Brides Hospital from Singapore—from the hold of a ship a Malay sailor had hidden himself in, after running amuck through the decks, wounding right and left. And Jim and Ananias Driscoll, the second mate, were the only men who would dare to ferret him out in the dark, with a horn lantern and loaded revolvers, to use in earnest if need was. And, mind you!—the fugitive might have put fire to the ship, as lief as not, except they caught him. Now the bilge in this ship, or something broke out of a cask in the hold, had a powerful bad smell with it, that had a mortal strange effect on your legs. And when Jim said so to Driscoll, a СКАЧАТЬ