# The King of Schnorrers (Collection)/An Odd Life

Contents
An Odd Life.
It was the most curious case of croup I had ever attended.
Not that there was anything unusual about the symptoms —they were so correct as to be devoid of the slightest interest. Certainly they were not worth while being called up for in the middle of the night. The patient it was that attracted my attention. He was a handsome baby of one year and nine months—by name Willy Streetside—with such an expression of candour and intelligence that I was moved to see him suffer. I sat down by his bedside, took his poor little feverish hand, and felt the weak quick pulse, and knew it had not much longer to beat. I put the glass of barley and water to his lips, and he drank eagerly. He seemed to be an orphan, in charge of a strange, silent serving-man, apparently the only other occupant of the luxurious and artistically furnished flat. I judged Downton to be a man of some culture, from the latest magazines strewn about the bedroom; but I could not help thinking that a female, more familiar with infantile ailments, might have been more useful. Apathetic and torpid though I was, from eighteen hours' continuous activity in a hundred sickrooms, my eyes filled with tears, and I sat for an instant, holding the little hand, listening to the poor child's painful breathing, and speculating on the mystery of that existence so early recalled. All his organs were sound. But for this accidental croup, I told myself, he might have lived till ​260 AN ODD LIFE.
eighty. " Poor Willy Streetside ! " I murmured, for his curious name clung to my memory.
Suddenly the baby turned his blue eyes full on me, and said :
" I suppose it's all up, doctor? "
I started violently, and let go his hand. The words were perhaps not altogether beyond the capacity of an infant ; but the air of manly resignation with which they were uttered was astonishing. For more reasons than one, I hesitated.
"You need not be afraid to tell me the truth," said the baby, with a wistful smile ; " I'm not afraid to hear it."
" Well — well, you're pretty bad," I stammered.
" Ah ! thank you," the child replied gratefully. " How many hours do you give me? "
The baby's gravity took my breath away. He spoke with an old-world courtesy and the ingenuous stateliness of an infant prince.
" It may not be quite hopeless," I murmured.
Willy shook his head, the pretty, wan features distorted by a quaint grimace.
" I suppose I'm too young to rally," he said quietly, and closed his eyes.
Presently he re-opened them, and added :
" But I should have liked to live to see the Irish question settled."
"You would? " I ejaculated, overwhelmed.
" Yes," he said, adding with a whimsical expression in the wee blue eyes : " You mustn't think I crave for earthly im- mortality. I use ' settled ' in a merely rough sense. My mother was an Irish poetess, over whose songs impetuous Celts still break their hearts and their heads."
I gazed speechless at this wonder-child, pushing the ​AN ODD LIFE. 261
golden locks back from his feverish baby-brow, as if to assure myself by touching him that he was not a phantom.
" Ah, well ! " he finished, " it doesn't matter. I have had my day, and mustn't grumble. I scarcely thought, when I witnessed the dissolution of the third Gladstone Government, that I should have lived to see him Premier a fourth time. Three doctors told me I was breaking up fast."
I began to be frightened of this extraordinary infant, divining some wizardry behind the candid little face — some latter-day mystery of re-incarnation, esoteric Buddhism, what-not. The child perceived my perturbation.
"You are thinking I have packed a good deal into my short life," he said, with an amused smile. "And yet some men will make a Gladstone bag hold as much as a port- manteau. Gladstone has done so ; and why not I, in my humble degree? "
"True," I answered; "but you cannot begin to pack before you are born."
"You are entirely mistaken," replied the baby, "if you think I have done anything so precocious as that."
"Then you must have lived an odd life," I said, puzzled.
" You have hit it ! " exclaimed the child, with a suspicion of eagerness, not unmingled with surprise. " I did not mean to tell anyone ; but since you are a man of science and I am on the point of death, you may as well know you have guessed the truth."
"Have I?" I said, more bewildered than ever.
"Yes. In all these years no one has suspected it. It has been carefully kept from outsiders. But now it would, perhaps, be childish folly to be reticent about it. It is the truth — the plain, literal truth — I have lived an odd life."
"How did it begin?" I asked, scarce knowing what I said or what I meant. ​262 'AN ODD LIFE.
"You shall know all," said Willy. " I must begin before I was born — before I could begin packing, as you put it."
His breath came and went painfully. Overwrought with curiosity as I was, I experienced a pang of compunction.
"No, no; never mind," I said; "you have not the strength to speak much — you must not waste what you have."
"It can only cost me a few minutes of life — I can spare the time," he answered, almost peevishly.
Now that he had been strung up to speaking point, he seemed to resent my diminished interest.
I put the glass of barley and water to his lips, and forced him to moisten his throat.
" I can spare the time," he repeated, while an air of grim satisfaction came over the tiny features. " I have stolen plenty — I have outwitted the arch-thief himself. I have survived my own death."
"What ! " I gasped. "Have you already died? "
" No, no," he replied fretfully ; " I am only just going to die. That is how I have survived my death. How dull you are ! "
" You were going to begin at the beginning," I murmured feebly.
" No ! What is the use of beginning at the beginning?" this enfant terrible enquired, in the same peevish tones. " I was going to begin before the beginning."
"Yes, yes," I said soothingly, patting his golden curls; " you were going to begin before you were born."
" With my mother," he said more gently. " She did not lead a very happy life — it enabled her to hymn the wrongs of her country. Her childhood was a succession of sorrows, her girlhood a mass of misfortunes ; and when she married the man she loved, she found herself deserted by him a few ​AN ODD LIFE. 263
months later. It was then that she first conceived the thought that has changed my life. It came to her in a moment of tears, as she sat over the ashes of her happiness. From that moment the thought never left her."
There was a wild look in the baby's eyes. I began to suspect him of premature insanity.
"What was this thought?" I murmured.
" I am coming to it. There came into her head suddenly the refrain of a song she had learnt at school : ' Life like a river with constant motion.' ' The river of life ! The stream of life ! How true it is ! ' she mused. ' How much more than mere metaphors these phrases are ! Verily, one's life flows on towards the dark ocean of death, irresistibly, un- restingly, willy-nilly — whether swift or slow, whether long or short — whether it flows through pleasant champaigns or dreary marshes, past romantic castled crags, or by bleak quarries. What is the use of experience, of knowledge of past bits of the route, when no two bits are ever really alike, when the future course is hidden and is always a pano- rama of surprises, when no life-stream knows what awaits it round the corner every time it turns, when the scenery of the source avails one nothing in one's resistless progress towards the scenery of the mouth ? What is life but a series of mistakes, whose fruit is wisdom, maybe, but wisdom over- ripe? We do not pluck the fruit till it will no longer serve our appetites. Nothing repeats itself on the stage of existence — always new situations and new follies. Experi- entia docet. Experience teaches, indeed ; but her lesson is that nothing can be learnt.' "
The baby paused, and reached out his wasted hand for the glass. His pinafore and his tiny shoes on the chest of drawers caught my eye, and moistened it with the thought he would never don them again. ​264 AN ODD LIFE.
" As my mother brooded upon this bitter truth," he resumed, when he had refreshed himself, "and saw how sad an illustration of it was her own life — with its sufferings and its mistakes — she could not help wishing existence had been ordered otherwise. If we had had at least two lives, we might profit in the second by the first. But, she told herself, with a sigh, this was vain day-dreaming. Then sud- denly the thought flashed upon her. Granting that more than one life was impossible upon this planet, why should it not be differently distributed ? Suppose, instead of flow- ing on like a stream, one's life progressed like a London street — the odd numbers on the one side and the even on the other, so that after doing the numbers i, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, &c, &c, one could return and do the numbers 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, &c, &c. Without craving from Providence more than man's allotted span, what if, by a slight re-arrangement of the years, it were possible to extort an infinitely greater degree of happiness from one's life-time ! What if it were possible to live the odd years, gleaning experience as well as joys, and then to return to the even years, armed with all the wisdom of one's age ! What if her child could enjoy this inestimable privilege ! The thought haunted her, she brooded on it day and night ; and when I was born, she drew me eagerly towards her, as if to see some mark of promise written on my forehead. But a year passed before she dared to think her wish had found fulfilment. On the eve of my first birthday she measured and weighed me with intense anxiety, though pretending to herself she only wished to keep a register of my growth. In the morning I was more by a year's inches and pounds. I had shot up at a bound into my third year, and manifested sudden symptoms of walking and talking. She almost fainted with joy when my unexpected teeth bit her finger. She could not get my ​AN ODD LIFE. 265
shoes on me, nor my frock. But, although my mother had made no preparations for my changed condition, she wel- comed the trouble I put her to, and carefully laid aside my useless garments, knowing I should want them again. The neighbours noticed nothing; they thought me a big boy for my age, and extremely precocious. When I was in my fifth year I went on the stage as an ' infant phenomenon,' my age being attested by my certificate of birth, though you will of course see that I was really in my ninth. In the next few years I made enough money to gild my mother's few declin- ing years ; and when I retired temporarily from the boards at the advice of my critics, it was of course with the inten- tion of studying and returning to the stage when I was younger. And so I advanced to manhood, skipping the alternate years. I rejoice to say that my mother, though she died when I was seventy-three, had the satisfaction of knowing what felicity her unselfish aspiration had brought into my life, She told me of my strange exemption from the common burden of continuous existence, as soon as I had skipped into years of discretion. Not for me did Time pass with that tragic footstep which never returns on itself; f or me he was not the irrevocable, the relentless. I regretted my lost youth — but it was not with hopeless, passionate tears, with mutinous yearnings after the impossible ; it was as one who waves a regretful adieu to a charming girl he will meet again."
"Ah ! but you will not meet her again," I said softly.
" No ; but the feeling was the same. Of course, when I was thirty I did not know I should die before I was two. I had no more privilege of prescience than the ordinary mortal. But in everything else how enviable was my lot compared to his whom every day is sweeping towards Death, for whom no vision of renewed youth gleams behind ​266 AN ODD LIFE.
the black hangings ! Oh ! the glory of growing old without dread, with the assurance that age, which is ripening you, is not ripening you for the Gleaner, that the years will add wisdom without eternally subtracting the capacity for joy, and that every tottering step is bringing you nearer, not the Grave, but the joyous resurrection of your youth ! "
"And you have experienced that?" I cried, with envious incredulity.
"Yes," answered the baby solemnly. "Of course I pre- pared for the Great Change. Not that Nature did not her- self smooth the metamorphosis. The loss of teeth, the gradual baldness, the feeble limbs, everything pointed to the proximity of my Second Childhood. I knew that my odd life had not much longer to run, that at any moment the transformation might take place and the even numbers begin. Giving out that I was going to explore the African deserts, and accompanied only by my faithful body-servant, Downton, I retired to Egypt to await the great event, having previously ordered baby-linen and the various requisites of infantile toilette. I had at one time meditated providing myself with parents, but ultimately concluded that they would prove too troublesome to manage, and that it would be better to trust myself entirely to the management of Downton, since I had already placed myself in his power by leaving him all my money."
" But what necessity was there for that? " I enquired.
" Every necessity," he replied gravely. " Do you not see that I had to arrange all my affairs and make my will before being born again, because afterwards I should not be of legal age for ten years. At first I thought of leaving all my money to myself and passing as my own child, but there would have been difficulties. I was unmarried and seventy-seven. Downton could easily pretend his septuagenarian master ​AN ODD LIFE. 267
had died in the African deserts, but he could nut so easily patch up a marriage there. I had no option, therefore, but to make Downton my heir, and I have never had occasion to regret it from the day of my rebirth to this, the day of my death. As soon as I was born we returned to England, and I wrote my obituary and drove to the Press Association with it. Downton took it into the office while I waited in Fleet Street in the hansom. I can scarcely hope to convey to you an idea of the intensity and agreeableness of my sensations at this unprecedented epoch. The variegated life of Fleet Street gave me the keenest joy : every sight and every sound — beautiful or sordid — thrilled my nerves to rapture. I was interested in everything. Imagine the delicious freshness of one's second year supervening upon the jaded sensibilities of seventy-seven. All my wide and varied knowledge of life lay in my soul as before, but trans- figured. Over my large experience of men and things was shed a stream of sunshine which irradiated everything with divine light ; every streak of cynicism faded. I had the wisdom of an old man and the heart of a little child. I believed in man again, and even in woman. I shed tears of pure ecstasy ; and when I heard a female of the lower classes say : ' Poor little thing ! What a shame to leave it crying in a cab ! ' I laughed aloud in glee. She exclaimed : 1 Ah ! now it's laughing, my petsy-wootsy ! ' Her conversa- tion saddened me again, and I was glad I had not burdened myself with a mother, and that I took my milk from a bot- tle instead of a doting nurse. And how exquisite was this same apparently monotonous menu of milk to an epicurean who had ruined his digestion ! I felt I was recuperating on a vegetarian diet, and I rejoiced to think some years must elapse before I would care for champagne or re-acquire a taste for full-flavoured Manillas. Perhaps somewhat unrea​268 AN ODD LIFE.
sonably, I was proud of my strength of will, which had enabled me in one day to abandon tobacco without a pang, and seven-course dinners without repining. I slept a good deal, too, at this period, whereas I had previously been greatly exercised by insomnia. But these joys of the senses were as nothing to the joys of the intellect. An exquisite curiosity played like a sea-breeze about my long-stagnant soul. All my early interests revived ; worldly propositions I had thought settled showed themselves unstable and volant ; everything was shaken by the moving spirit of youth. The- ology, poetry, and even metaphysics became alive ; all sorts of unpractical questions became suddenly burning. I saw in myself the seeds of a great thinker : a felicitous congruity of opposite capacities that had never before met in a single man — the sobriety of age tempered by the audacity of youth, fire and water, judgment and inspiration. I was revolutionist and reactionary in one. I read all the new books, and agreed with all the old."
" All you tell me only makes the pathos of your premature death more intolerable," I said in moved accents. "You are, like Keats and Chatterton, — only an earlier edition, — an inheritor of unfulfilled renown."
The little blue eyes smiled wistfully at me.
" Not at all," said the wee rose-lips, with a quiver. " Don't you see, I have already dodged Death ? Evidently, if I had taken my second year in its natural order, I should have been cut short by croup at the outset. Apparently I had enough vital energy in me to have lasted till seventy-seven, if I could only get over the croup. I think one ought to be satisfied with having survived himself by thirty ■ odd years."
" Yes, if you put it like that, the pathos lightens," I ad- mitted. " Of course I saw from the first that you were ​AN ODD LIFE. 269
considerably in advance of your age. Did you assure your life?" I asked, with a sudden thought.
" I did ; but by an oversight I let the policy be invalidated by my imaginary expedition to the African deserts. Down- ton has, however, taken out a fresh policy for my new life."
" What a baffling complex of probabilities would be added to Life Assurances if your way of living were to become general ! " I observed. " Downton will probably more than recoup himself for his first loss. Have you always been a bachelor, by the way? " I asked.
"Yes," said the baby, with a sigh. " I missed marriage ; it probably fell in an even year."
" Poor child ! " I cried, my eyes growing humid again. To think, too, of that beautiful young girl, that fond wife, waiting for him who would never come ; that innocent maiden cheated of love and happiness because her appointed hus- band had not lived in the other alternate series of years, — to think of this tangled tragedy moved me to fresh tears, not a few of which were for the husband who never was.
" Nay, do not pity me," said the baby, and his tones were hushed and low, and in his heavenly blue eyes I seemed to read the high sorrowful wisdom of the ages ; " for, since I have lain here on this bed of sickness with no spectacular whirl to claim my thoughts, with four walls for my horizon, and the agony of death in my throat, the darker side of my dual existence has been borne in upon me. I see the shadow cast by the sunshine of my privilege of double birth ; I see the curse which is the obverse of the blessing my mother's prayers brought me ; I see myself dissipating a youth which I knew would recur, throwing away a manhood which I knew would come again, and sinking into a sensual senility which I knew would pass into an innocent infancy. ​270 AN ODD LIFE.
I see myself rejecting the best gifts and the highest duties of To-Day for the illusory felicities and the far-away virtues of the Day~After-To-Morrow. I see myself passing by Love with the reflection that I should be passing again ; putting off Purity with the thought that I should be round that way presently ; and waving to Duty an amicable salute of ' Ex- pect me soon.' And in this moment of clear vision I see not only my past, I realise what my future would be if I lived. I see the influx of fresh feeling gradually exhausted, overcome, ousted, and finally replaced by a satiety more horrible than that of the septuagenarian, as I came to realise that life for me held no surprises, no lures to curiosity, that the future was no enchanted realm of mysterious possibil- ities, that the white clouds revealed no seraph shapes on the horizon, that Hope did not stand like a veiled bride with beckoning finger, that fairies were not lurking round every corner nor magic palaces waiting to start up at every turn. I see life stretching before me like old ground I had been over — in my mother's image like a street one side of which I had walked down. What could the other offer of fresh, of delightful? It is so rarely one side differs from the other: a church for a public-house, a grocer's instead of a book- shop. Conceive the horror of foreknowledge : of having no sensations to learn and few new emotions to feel ; to have, moreover, the enthusiasm of youth sicklied over with the prescience of senile cynicism, and the healthy vigour of manhood made flaccid by anticipations of the dodderings of age ! I foresee the ever-growing dismay at the leaps and bounds with which my youth was fleeting. I see my- self, instead of profiting by my experience, feverishly clutch- ing at every pleasure on my path, as a drowning man, borne along by a torrent, snatches at every scrap of flotsam and jetsam. I see manhood arrive only to pass away, as an ​express passes through a petty station, full speed for the terminus. I see a panic terror close upon me with every hurrying year at the knowledge that my hours were thirty minutes and my months virtually fortnights, and that I was
leading the fastest life on record. Add to this the anguish of feeling myself torn from the bosom of the wife I loved and hurried away from the embraces of the children whose careers it would be my solicitude to watch over. Imagine the agony if I had been cruelly spared to my seventy-eighth ​272 AN ODD LIFE.
year — the agony of a condemned criminal who does not know on what day he is to be execu — "
His voice failed suddenly. He had slightly raised him- self on his pillow in his excitement, but now his head fell back, revealing the fatal white patches on the baby throat. I seized his hand quickly to feel his pulse. The little palm lay cold in mine. I started violently and sat up rigidly in my chair.
The child was dead. Downton was sobbing at my side.
As I was writing out the certificate, an odd thought came into my head. I scribbled what I thought an appropriate epitaph and showed it to Downton, but he glared at me furiously. I hastened home to bed.
My epitaph ran :
HERE LIES
WILLIAM ("WILLY") STREETSIDE,
WHO LED A DOUBLE LIFE,
AND DIED IN BLAMELESS REPUTE,
AT THE AVERAGE AGE
OF 39 YEARS.
c * 4nd in their death they were not divided"
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