Complete Works of Bram Stoker (424 page)

‘“Little one, you know that I love you?”

‘“Yes, daddy!” came the pretty voice, in a flood of tears.

‘“And you know I wouldn’t hurt you but for your good, darling?”

‘“Yes, daddy! But, oh, daddy, daddy, don’t hurt me! - don’t hurt me!”

‘“I must, my little one, I must! You will have to remember all your life what it is to lie; that fire on earth or in hell is the liar’s portion. And it is better that you learn it now than suffer it hereafter and make others suffer!” He bent down towards the fire, holding her hand in his; her pitiful little struggles were as nothing in his powerful grasp. Seeing me instinctively draw near, for I thought to protect the child, he motioned me back gravely.

‘“Do not interfere. It is necessary that my child learn a little lesson to save her a harder one later on.”

‘With an iron determination, and with lips set and growing white as snow, he put for a moment the rosy fingers of the child on the hot bar of the grate. Despite her shriek of pain, he held it there quite a second or two, and then drew her back almost fainting. The child loved and trusted him in spite of the cruel act, and clung to him, sobbing as if her little heart would break. He held her close to him, and then disengaged her arm very gently from his neck. He stepped closer to the fire, and saying to her: “See, little one, you have no pain that is not mine!” thrust his own right hand down into the very heart of the glowing fire. He held it there a few seconds without a quiver, whilst fine child shrieked and flew to him and dragged the hand away.

‘“Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy!” she wailed, “and I have by my lying made you suffer this!” As I am a living man, I saw a glad light flash into his eyes, though the pain he suffered must have been excruciating. With his other hand he stroked the child’s golden locks as he said:

‘“It was worth pain, my little one, that you should learn so great a truth.”

‘I could not but be silent in face of such a splendid heroism, and offered to use such medical knowledge as I possessed on his behalf. He accepted cheerfully, and when I had got oil and lint he made me dress the child’s burn before allowing me to attend to his own. It was a bad burn, and I was in real fear that it might have an ill ending. He made light of it, however, and tried to keep up the child’s spirits. I tried to help him, and she went to bed less unhappy than I expected. Macrae’s strength and constitution stood to him, and, though the hand was badly scarred, he fully recovered its use.

‘That night he was so feverish that I insisted on sitting up with him. I was able to give him some ease, and he was grateful for it. He talked with me more freely than he had ever done. He insisted on going several times to see how the child slept. He came back after one of these visits with his eyes wet, and as he lay down on his bed said softly:

‘“Poor little mite! God forgive me if I was wrong; but I thought it best!” Then turning to me, he went on:

‘“I suppose you thought me not merely brutal, but fiendish. But if you knew how deeply for her own future happiness I value truth, you would perhaps be tolerant with me. It was a lie that ruined her mother’s life and my own; and I would guard her against such an evil. Her mother and I loved each other, and there seemed no flaw in our lives; but once when in danger of death as we were rushing through a seething flood, she confessed to me that the innocence which had charmed me at the first was but an acted lie; that she had loved another man before she had seen me, and had lived with him guiltily. But, there! that page of my life is closed for ever.” He said no more, and, of course, I never referred to the subject again. It struck me afterwards as strange that two people whom I had met had each suffered from a similar cause - as I myself had suffered - but it never struck me to connect them.

‘After that night we became better friends, for we seemed to understand each other. I grew to love the child almost as much as if she had been my own daughter. During all that time I worked hard, and had few distractions; but I promised myself a treat when I should go over to Warrow, the nearest town beyond the Creek, for I had heard from Nurse Dora that she had become matron of the hospital there. The time which I had promised myself for my holiday was at hand, when little Dora fell ill of a fever. The white woman who was with us got it at the same time, and Macrae and I had to do the nursing ourselves. The floods were out, and the Creels was like a sea; the natives, seeing a fever in the house, ran away. It was a quick fever, though a low one, and in a few days the woman died. The child got worse and worse, and her moaning was pitiful to hear. The father used to sit hour after hour with his head in his hands and groan. One evening I heard him say that if we had a woman to nurse her she might be saved; and this gave me an idea. I said nothing except that I was going out for a bit, for my mind was made up that I would try to fetch my friend the matron. I took my mare, Wild Meg, and swam the flooded Creek; and early in the morning, riding for all I was worth, fetched up at Warrow. I went to the hospital and asked for the matron. When she came my heart leaped, and something within me seemed to cry out. It was as though two ends of an electric current were come together. Little Dora’s fever-wasted face, as I had seen it the night before on the pillow, was reproduced in the pale lineaments of her who stood before me. I understood it all now. The man with the story; the woman with the story; the child parted from the mother; the mother who lied! Heaven had sent at the moment me, who, coming across the world, held in his hand the two ends of this chain of destiny. I told her of the child who was ill, dying; she wept, but said her duty held her to her post. Then I described the child and the solitary man, and a quick light leaped to her eyes. Hope had dawned in that withered heart! She said not a word, but with a gesture to me to wait, disappeared behind the hospital. In a minute she reappeared, leading by the bridle a magnificent roan horse.

‘“Come!” she said, and sprang to the saddle.

‘We rode all day without a word. Late in the afternoon we struck the creek, just as a thunderstorm came on, which in a moment lashed the flood into a raging torrent. But nothing daunted her. She rode boldly into the water, I following, and together we battled the watery element. Through danger and toil we won the further shore, though our two gallant steeds fell dead within sight of the house. We hurried in, she leading, I following. When she stood in the doorway Macrae rose to his feet with a wild cry:

“Dora, Dora, my darling, come at last! Now the child must live!” Then he fell fainting on the floor.’

Mr Sparbrook paused and looked round. Some of the womenkind were wiping their eyes, and sniffed, their bosoms heaving. Some office men said ‘Hear! hear!’ feebly. The only audible remark was the comment of the Wardrobe Mistress:

‘Mr Bloze is a-goin’ of it this evening. He’ll be a-puttin’ of it into a ply. Him in Australiar! W’y, I’ve known ‘im since ‘e was a nipper, which ‘is mother ‘ad a puddin’ shop at Ipswich close along of the theyatre, an’ ‘e never was hout of England in ‘is life!’

‘You’re next on the list,’ said the MC to the Second Heavies, Mr Hemans, who was sipping his hot grog with a preternaturally solemn look and manner.

‘I know it, alas! I pity you all; but duty must be done. I suppose it is not necessary that I wander into the fields of romance?’ - this with a covert look at the last story-teller.

‘You give us fact, old man!’ said the MC. ‘After the heroics, a little sordid realism won’t come amiss. If you could manage to tell us something funny we should all be grateful.’

‘Anything in the shape of a Dead Byby?’ he asked, with his face for one instant illumined by a humorous twinkle in his eye.

‘Lydies and gents, not forgettin’ of you, Mr Benville Nonplusser, sir, whenever ye likes I’m ready to go on with the ‘arrowin’ tyle of the Dead Byby what I eluded to before if - ‘She was cut short by the Second Heavies, who had no intention of being ‘queered’ at the start by this species of realism:

‘No dead babies in mine, thank you; but I was going to tell you of a somewhat humorous episode of a live baby - I may say a very- much-alive baby, ‘

‘Hear! hear!’ ‘Silence!’ ‘Hus-s-sh!’

‘Next!’ said the MC to the Second Heavies, who was ready to begin:

‘Some of you may perhaps know that I was not always an actor! That I am not one even now,’ he added quickly, seeing the Tragedian take his pipe from his lips preparatory to making a caustic comment. ‘Having had aspirations towards the stage, and in especial towards high tragedy, I naturally became a commercial traveller, for I thought that self-possession and sheer, unadulterated, unmitigated impudence were the qualities which I ought to cultivate most assiduously!’

‘Look here,’ said the Tragedian, half rising from his seat. Seeing, however, no sympathy in the faces of the Company, he sat down again and smoked hard. The Second Heavies went on:

‘From that I graduated into the undertaking business, for I soon saw that lugubriousness was a still more important item of stock-in- trade if my ambition was ever to be materialised. It was strange, however, that in neither branch of tragic art did I succeed. The clients considered me as a “drummer” too solemn, and suspected a levity of manner superimposed upon a lugubriety of appearance. I found the greater centres of civilisation slow to compete for my mature efforts. So, crossing the seas, I gradually drifted towards the Setting Sun, earning for a time a precarious livelihood by drumming in the neighbourhood of the Black Mountains a new “Curative Compound” calculated to obviate equally the ravages of sunstroke or frost-bite.

CHIN MUSIC

‘One night we were journeying in the west of the Rockies over a road bed which threatened to jerk out our teeth with every loosely-laid sleeper on the line.

‘Travelling in that part of the world, certainly in the days I speak of, was pretty hard. The travellers were mostly men, all over-worked, all over-anxious, and intolerant of anything which hindered their work or interfered with the measure of their repose. In night journeys the berths in the sleeping cars were made up early, and as all the night trains were sleeping cars, the only thing to be done was to turn in at once and try and sleep away the time. As most of us were tired out with the day’s work, the arrangement suited everybody.

‘The weather was harsh; sneezing and coughing was the order of the day. This made the people in the sleeper, all men, irritable: all the more that as most of them were contributing to the general chorus of sounds coming muffled through quilts and curtains, it was impossible to single out any special offender for general execration. After a while, however, the change of posture from standing or sitting to lying down began to have some kind of soothing effect, and new sounds of occasional snoring began to vary the monotony of irritation. Presently the train stopped at a way station; then ensued a prolonged spell of shunting backwards and forwards with the uncertainty of jerkiness which is so peculiarly disturbing to imperfect sleep; and then two newcomers entered the sleeper, a man and a baby. The baby was young, quite young enough to be defiantly ignorant and intolerant of all rules and regulations regarding the common good. It played for its own hand alone, and as it was extremely angry and gifted with exceptionally powerful lungs, the fact of its presence and its emotional condition, even though the latter afforded a mystery as to its cause, were immediately apparent. The snoring ceased, and its place was taken by muttered grunts and growls; the coughing seemed to increase with the renewed irritation, and everywhere was the rustling of ill-at-ease and impotent humanity. Curtains were pulled angrily aside, the rings shrieking viciously on the brass rods, and faces with bent brows and gleaming eyes and hardening mouths glared savagely at the intruder on our quiet, for so we now had tardily come to consider by comparison him and it. The newcomer did not seem to take the least notice of anything, but went on in a stolid way trying to quiet the child, shifting it from one arm to the other, dandling it up and down, and rocking it sideways.

‘I took considerable amusement, myself, from the annoyance of my fellow-passengers. I had no cold myself, and so had been worried by their discomforting sounds; besides, I had come to the car from a dinner with clients, where the wine of the country had circulated with quite sufficient freedom. When a man has a large family - I regret to say that at that time my first wife was nursing her seventh - he acquires a certain indifference to infantile querulousness. As a matter of fact, he does not feel sympathy with the child at all, his pity being reserved for other people.

‘All babies are malignant; the natural wickedness of man, as elaborated at the primeval curse, seems to find an unadulterated effect in their expressions of feeling.

‘I confess that the sight of a child crying, and especially crying angrily - unless, of course, it disturbs me in anything I may be doing - affords me a pleasure which is at once philosophical, humorous, contemplative, reminiscent and speculative.’

‘Oh, Mr Hemans, how horrid you are to say such things!’ said the Leading Lady. ‘You know you don’t think anything of the kind. There’s no one who loves little children better than you do, or who is so considerate to them!’ He made no reply, but only held up a hand in protest, smiling sweetly as he resumed:

‘This baby was a peculiarly fine specimen of its class. It seemed to have no compunction whatever, no parental respect, no natural affection, no mitigation in the natural virulence of its rancour. It screamed, it roared, it squalled, it bellowed. The root ideas of profanity, of obscenity, of blasphemy were mingled in its tone. It beat with clenched fist its father’s face, it clawed at his eyes with twitching fingers, it used its head as an engine with which to buffet him. It kicked, it struggled, it wriggled, it writhed, it twisted itself into serpentine convolutions, till every now and then, what with its vocal and muscular exertions, it threatened to get black in the face. All the time the stolid father simply tried to keep it quiet with eternal changes of posture and with whispered words, “There, now, pet!” “Hush! lie still, little one.” “Rest, dear one, rest!” He was a big, lanky, patient-looking, angular man with great rough hands and enormous feet, which he shifted about as he spoke; so that man and child together seemed eternally restless.