Somehow Good - William Frend De Morgan (the little red hen read aloud .TXT) 📗

gossip having made her look for a suitable image to place there, she suddenly recalled that it was he that had actually seen her father; talked to him in India twenty years ago; could, and no doubt would, tell her all about the divorce. But there!--she couldn't speak to him about it here and now. It was impossible.

Still, she was curious to see him, and the fusty but genteel one had evidently expected him. So, during the remainder of what seemed to Sally the darkest day, morally and atmospherically, that she had ever spent--all but the bright morning when she ran into the fog somewhere near Surbiton, full of tales to tell of the house-party that now seemed a happy dream--during this gloomy remainder Sally wondered what could have happened that the other Major should not have turned up. The fog would have been more than enough to account for any ordinary non-appearance; hardly for this one.

For it turned out, as soon as it got full powers to assert itself, the densest fog on record. The Londoner was in his element. He told the dissatisfied outsider with pride of how at midday it had been impossible to read large pica on Ludgate Hill; he didn't say why he tried to do so. He retailed frightful stories--but always with a sense of distinction--of folk crushed under hoofs and cart-wheels. If one half were true, some main thoroughfares must have been paved with flattened pedestrians. The satisfaction he derived from the huge extra profits of the gas-companies made his hearer think he must be a shareholder, until _pari passu_ reasoning proved him to have invested in fog-signals. His legends of hooligans preying on the carcasses of strangled earls undisturbed had a set-off in others of marauders who had rushed into the arms of the police and thought them bosom friends; while that of an ex-Prime Minister who walked round and round for an hour, and then rang at a house to ask where he was, ended in consolation, as the door was opened by his own footman, who told him he wasn't at home. Exact estimates were current, most unreasonably, of the loss to commerce; so much so that the other Londoner corrected him positively with, "Nearer three-quarters of a million, they say," and felt proud of his higher knowledge. But neither felt the least ashamed, nor the least afraid of the hideous, inevitable future fog, when a suffocated population shall find, as it surely will, that it is at the bottom of a sea of unbreathable air, instead of one that merely makes it choke its stomach up and kills an old invalid or two. On the contrary, both regarded it as the will of a judicious Providence, a developer of their own high moral qualities and a destroyer of their germs.

Bronchitis and asthma are kittle-cattle to shoe behind, even where the sweet Mediterranean air blows pure upon Rapallo and Nervi, but what manner of cattle are they in a London fog? Can they be shoed at all? As Mrs. Fenwick sits and waits in terror to hear the first inevitable cough as the old man wakes, and talks in whispers to her daughter in the growing darkness, she feels how her own breath drags at the tough air, and how her throat resents the sting of the large percentage of sulphur monoxide it contains. The gas-jet is on at the full--or rather the tap is, for the fish-tail burner doesn't realise its ideal. It sputters in its lurid nimbus--gets bronchitis on its own account, tries to cough its tubes clear and fails. Sally and her mother sit on in the darkness, and talk about it, shirking the coming suffocation of their old friend, and praying that his sleep may last till the deadly air lightens, be it ever so little. Sally's animated face shows that she is on a line of cogitation, and presently it fructifies.

"Suppose every one let their fires out, wouldn't the fog go? It couldn't go on by itself."

"I don't know, chick. I suppose it's been all thought out by committees and scientific people. Besides, we should all be frozen."

"Not if we went to bed."

"What! In the daytime?"

"Better do nothing in bed than be choked up."

"I dare say the fog wouldn't go away. You see, it's due to atmospheric conditions, so they say."

"That's only because nobody's there to stop 'em talking nonsense. Look at all that smoke going up our chimney." So it was, and a jolly blaze there was going to be when the three shovelfuls Sally had enthusiastically heaped on had incubated, and the time was ripe for the poker.

Had you been there you would have seen in Sally's face as it caught the firelight-flicker and pondered on the cause of the fog, that _she_ had not heard a choking fit of the poor old sleeper in the next room. And in her mother's that she _had_, and all the memory of the dreadful hours just passed. Her manner, too, was absent as she talked, and she listened constantly. Sally was to know what it was like soon. The opium sleep would end.

"Isn't that him?" The mother's sharp ear of apprehension makes her say this; the daughter has not heard the buried efforts of the lung that cannot cough. It will succeed directly, if the patient is raised up, so. Both have gone quickly and quietly into the sick-chamber, and it is the nurse who speaks. Her prediction is fulfilled, and the silent struggle of suffocation becomes a tearing convulsion, that means to last some while and does it. How the old, thin tenement of life can go on living unkilled is a problem to solve. But it survives this time. Perhaps the new cough-mixture will make the job easier next time. We shall see.

Anyhow, this attack--bad as it was--has not been so bad as the one he had at three this morning. Rosalind and Nurse Emilia invent a paroxysm of diabolical severity, partly for the establishment of a pinnacle for themselves to look down on Sally from, partly for her consolation. He wasn't able to speak for ever so long after that, and this time he is trying to say something.... "What is it, dear?"

"Couldn't we have a window open to let a little air in?"

Well!--we could have a window open. We could let a little air in--but only a very little. And that very little would bring with it copious percentages of moisture saturated with finely subdivided carbonaceous matter, of carbon dioxide, and sulphur dioxide, and traces of hydric chloride, who is an old friend of our youth, known to us then as muriatic acid.

"It's such a thick fog, Major dear. As soon as it clears a little we'll open the window. Won't we, Sally?"

"Is Sally there?... Come and touch my hand, kitten.... That's right...." What is left of the Major can still enjoy the plump little white hand that takes the old fingers that once could grasp the sword that hangs on the wall. It will not be for very long now. A newspaper paragraph will soon give a short record of all the battles that sword left its scabbard to see, and will tell of its owner's service in his later days as deputy Commissioner at Umritsur, and of the record of long residence in India it established, exceeding that of his next competitor by many years. Not a few old warriors that were in those battles, and many that knew his later time, will follow him beyond it very soon. But he is not gone yet, and his hand can just give back its pressure to Sally's, as she sits by him, keeping her heart in and her tears back. The actual collapse of vital forces has not come--will not come for a few days. He can speak a little as she stoops to hear him.

"Young people like you ought to be in bed, chick, getting beauty-sleep. You must go home, and make your mother go.... _You_ go. _I_ shall be all right...."

"It isn't night, Major dear"--Sally makes a paltry attempt to laugh--"it's three in the afternoon. It's the fog." But she cannot hear what he says in answer to this, go close as she may. After a pause of rest he tries again, with raised voice:

"Roper--Roper--Old Jack ... mustn't come ... asthma in the fog ... somebody go to stop him." He is quite clear-headed, and when Sally says she will go at once, he spots the only risk she would run, being young and healthy:

"Sure you can find your way? Over the club-house--Hurkaru Club----" And then is stopped by a threat of returning cough.

But Sally knows all about it, and can find her way anywhere--so she says. She is off in a twinkling, leaving her mother and the nurse to wait for the terrible attack that means to come, in due course, as soon as the new cough-mixture gets tired.

Sally is a true Londoner. _She_ won't admit, whoever else does, that a fog is a real evil. On the contrary, she inclines to Prussian tactics--flies in the face of adverse criticism with the decision that a fog is rather a lark when you're out in it. Actually face to face with a human creature choking, Sally's optimism had wavered. It recovers itself in the bracing atmosphere of a main-thoroughfare charged to bursting with lines of vehicles, any one of which would go slowly alone, but the collective slowness of which finds a vent in a deadlock a mile away--an hour before we can move, we here.

By what human agency it comes about that any wheeled vehicle drawn of horses can thunder at a hand-gallop through the matrix of such a deadlock, Heaven only knows! But the glare of the lamps of the fire-brigade, hot upon the wild excitement of their war-cry, shows that this particular agglomeration of brass and copper, fraught with suppressed energy of steam well up, means to try for it--seems to have had some success already, in fact. It quite puts Sally in spirits--the rapid _crescendo_ of the hissing steam, the gleaming boiler-dome that might be the fruitful mother of all the helmets that hang about her skirts, the sudden leaping of the whole from the turgid opacity behind and equally sudden disappearance into the void beyond, the vanishing "Fire!" cry from which all consonants have gone, leaving only a sound of terror, all confirm her view of the fog as a lark. For, you see, Sally believed the Major might pull through even now.

Also the coming of the engine relieved her from what threatened to become a permanent embarrassment. A boy, who may have been a good boy or may not, had attached himself to her, under pretext of either a strong organ of locality or an extensive knowledge of town.

"Take yer 'most anywhere for fourpence! Anywhere yer like to name. 'Ammersmith, 'Ackney Wick, Noo Cross, Covent Garden Market, Regency Park. Come, I say, missis!"

Sally shouldn't have shaken her head as she did. She ought to have ignored his existence. He continued:

"I don't mind makin' it thruppence to the Regency Park. Come, missis, I say! Think what a little money for the distance. How would _you_ like to do it yourself?" Sally rashly allowed herself to be led into controversy.

"I tell you I don't want to go to Regents Park." But the boy passed this protest by--ignored it.

"You won't get no better oarfer. You ask any of the boys. They'll tell you all alike. Regency Park for thruppence. Or, lookey here now, missis! You make it acrorst Westminster Bridge, and I'll say twopence-'a'penny. Come