Somehow Good by William Frend De Morgan (best short novels TXT) 📕

fishes, and now you'll tell us all about dolly."

"I seeps wiv dolly, because my bid sister Totey said 'Yes.' Dolly seeps in her fings. I seep in my nightgown. Kean from the wass----"

"How nice you must be! Well, then, what next?" Sally may be said to imbibe the narrator at intervals. Tishy calls her a selfish girl. "You've got her all to yourself," she says. The story goes on:

"I seep vethy thound. Papa seeps vethy thound. Dolly got between the theets and the blangticks, and came out. It was a dood dob. Dane _said_ it _was_--a dood dob!"

"What did Jane say was a good job? Poor dolly coming out?" A long, grave headshake denies this. The constructive difficulties of the tale are beyond the young narrator's skill. She has to resort to ellipsis.

"Or I sood have been all over brang and sawduss. Dane _said_ so."

"Don't you see, Sally," says Tishy, "dolly was in another compartment--the other side of the sheet." But Sally says, of course, _she_ understands, perhaps even suspects Tishy of claiming more acquaintance with children than herself because she has been married three weeks. This isn't fair patronising.

"Dolly came out at ve stisses"--so the sad tale goes on--"and tyed, dolly did. Dane put her head on to ty wiv my pocket-hanshtiff!"

"I see, you little ducky, of course her head had come off, and she couldn't cry till it was put on, was that it? Don't dance, but say yes or no." This referred to a seated triumphal dance the chronicler indulged in at having put so much safely on record. Having subsided, she decided on _zass_ as the proper thing to say, but it took time. Then she added suddenly: "But I _told_ ze fisses." Sally took a good long draught, and said: "Of course you did, darling. You shan't be done out of that!" But an addendum or appendix was forthcoming.

"My mummar says I must tate dolly to be socked for a penny where the man is wiv buttons--and the man let Totey look froo his pyglass, and see all ve long sips, sits miles long--and I shall see when I'm a glowed-up little girl, like Totey."

"Coastguard's telescope, evidently," says Sally. "The man up at the flagstaff. Six miles long is how far off they were, not the length of the ships at all."

"I saw that. But what on earth were the socks? Does his wife sell doll's clothes?"

"We must try to find that out." And Sally sets herself to the task. But it's none so easy. Some mystery shrouds the approach to this passage in dolly's future life. It is connected with "kymin up," and "tandin' on a tep," and when it began it went wizzy, wizzy, wizz, and e-e-e-e, and never stopped. But Gwendolen had not been alarmed whatever it was, because her "puppar" was there. But it was exhausting to the intellect to tell of, for the description ended with a musical, if vacuous, laugh, and a plunge into Sally's bosom, where the narrator remained chuckling, but quite welcome.

"So Gwenny wasn't pitened! What a courageous little poppet! I wonder what on earth it was, Sally."

Thus Tishy, at a loss. But Sally is sharper, for in a moment the solution dawns upon her.

"What a couple of fools we are, Tishy dear! It wasn't _socks_--it was _shocks_. It was the galvanic battery at the end of the pier. A penny a time, and you mustn't have it on full up, or you howl. Why on earth didn't we think of that before?"

But Nurse Jane comes in on the top of the laughter that follows, which Miss Gwendolen is joining in, rather claiming it as a triumph for her own dramatic power. She demurs to removal, but goes in the end on condition that all present shall come and see dolly galvanised at an early date. Jane agrees to replace dolly's vitals and sew her up to qualify her for this experience. And so they depart.

"What a dear little mite!" says Mrs. Julius; and then they let the mite lapse, and go back to the previous question.

"No, Sally dear, mamma will be mamma to the end of the time. But I didn't tell you all papa said, did I?"

"How on earth can _I_ tell, Tishy dear? You had got to 'any dutiful daughter would,' etcetera. Cut along! Comes of being in love, I suppose." This last is a reflection on the low state of Tishy's reasoning powers.

"Well, just after that, when I was going to kiss him and go, papa stopped me, and said he had something to say, only he mustn't be too long because he had to finish a paper on, I think, 'Some Technical Terms in use in Cnidos in the Sixth Century, B.C.' Or was it...?"

"That was it. That one'll do beautifully. Go ahead!"

"Well--of course it doesn't matter. It was like papa, anyhow.... Oh, yes--what he said then! It was about Aunt Priscilla's thousand pounds. He wanted to repeat that the interest would be paid to me half-yearly if by chance I married Julius or any other man without his consent. 'I wish it to be distinctly understood that if you marry Bradshaw it will be against my consent. But I only ask you to promise me this, Laetitia, that you won't marry any other man against my consent at present.' I promised, and he said I was a dutiful daughter. There won't be any trouble with papa."

"Don't look like it! I say, Tishy, that thousand pounds is very nice. How much will you have? Forty pounds a year?"

"It's more than that. It's gone up, somehow--sums of money do--or down. They're never the same as at first. I'm so glad about it. It's not as if I brought Julius absolutely nothing."

"How much is it?" Sally is under the impression that sums of money that exist on the word of signed documents only, and whose materialisation can only be witnessed by bankers, are like fourpence, one of whose properties is that it _is_ fourpence. They are not analogous, and Laetitia is being initiated into the higher knowledge.

"Well, dear, you see the stock has gone up, and it's at six three-quarters. You must ask Julius. He can do the arithmetic."

"Does that mean it's sixty-seven pounds ten?"

"You'd better ask Julius. Then, you know, there's the interest." Sally asked what interest. "Why, you see, Aunt Priscilla left it to me eleven years ago, so there's more." But a vendor of mauve and magenta woollen goods, known to Sally as "the beach-woman," was working up towards them.

"That woman never goes when she comes," said Sally. "Let's get up and go!"

* * * * *


We like lingering over this pleasant little time. It helps on but little, if at all, with our story. But in years to come this young couple, who only slip into it by a side-chance, having really little more to do with it than any of the thousand and one collaterals that interest the lives of all of us, and come and go and are forgotten--this Julius and Laetitia will talk of the pleasant three days or so they had at St. Sennans when they came back from France. And we, too, having choice of how much we shall tell of those three or four days, are in little haste to leave them. Those hours of unblushing idleness under a glorious sun--idleness fostered and encouraged until it seems one great exertion to call a fly, and another to subside into it--idleness on matchless moonlight nights, on land or on water--idleness with an affectation of astronomical study, just up to speculating on the identity of Aldebaran or Arcturus, but scarcely equal to metaphysics--idleness that lends itself readily to turning tables and automatic writing, and gets some convincing phenomena, and finds out that so-and-so is an extraordinary medium--idleness that says that letter will do just as well to-morrow, and Smith must wait--such hours as these disintegrate the moral fibre and anaesthetize our sense of responsibility, and make us so oblivious of musical criticism that we accept brass bands and inexplicable serenaders, white or black, and even accordions and hurdy-gurdies, as intrinsic features of the _ensemble_--the _fengshui_ of the time and place--and give them a penny if we've got one.

That is and will be Mr. and Mrs. Julius Bradshaw's memory of those three days or so, when they have grown quite old together, as we hope they may. And if you add memory of an intoxicated delirium of love--of love that was on no account to be shown or declared or even hinted at--and of a tiresome hitch or qualification, an unselfish parent in full blow, you will have the record that is to remain in the mind of Conrad Vereker.


CHAPTER XXXI


HOW SALLY DIDN'T CONFESS ABOUT THE DOCTOR, AND JEREMIAH CAME TO ST. SENNANS ONCE MORE

That evening Sally sat with her mother on the very uncomfortable seat they affected on what was known as the Parade, a stone's throw from the house for a good stone-thrower. It had a little platform of pebbles to stand on, and tamarisks to tickle you from behind when the wind was northerly. It was a corrugated and painful seat, and had a strange power of finding out your tender vertebrae and pulverising them, whatever your stature might be. It fell forward when its occupants, goaded to madness, bore too hard on its front bar, and convinced them they would do well, henceforward, to hold it artificially in its place. But Rosalind and her daughter forgave it all these defects--perhaps because they were really too lazy to protest even against torture. It was the sea air. Anyhow, there they sat that evening, waiting for Padlock's omnibus to come, bringing Fenwick from the station. Just at the moment at which the story overtakes them, Rosalind was looking wonderfully handsome in the sunset light, and Sally was thinking to herself what a beautiful mother she had; and how, when the after-glow dies, it will leave its memory in the red gold that is somewhere in the rich brown her eyes are resting on. Sally was fond of dwelling on her mother's beauty. Perhaps doing so satisfied her personal vanity by deputy. She was content with her own self, but had no admiration for it.

"You _are_ a dear good mammy. Fancy your losing all the best time of the morning indoors!"

"How the best time of the morning, chick?"

"Sitting with that old cat upstairs.... Well, I can't help it. She _is_ an old cat."

"You're a perverse little monkey, kitten; that's what _you_ are!" Rosalind laughed with an excuse--or caress, it may be--in her laugh. "No," she continued, "we are much too hard on that old lady, both of us. Do you know, to-day she was quite entertaining--told me all about her own wedding-day, and how all the bridesmaids had the mumps."

"Has she never told you that before?"

"Only once. Then she told me about the late-lamented, and what a respect he had for her judgment, and how he referred to her at every crisis. I didn't think her at all bad company."

"Because you're a darling. I suppose you had it all about how Prosy, when he was a boy, wanted to study music, and how his pa said that the turning-point in the career of youth lay in the