The Kingfisher

Jim was not sure when it first dawned on him that there was such a thing as security. When he did realise it he supposed it to be like one of those things, procurable for others, but unprocurable for him, which were marked at a shilling in the shop windows.
He had never known bodily safety except for the first few weeks of his life, when his mother by a species of enlightened tact threatened to come to pieces altogether and was retained by a reluctant matron in the hospital beyond her allotted time. When they returned home they promptly resumed the cup-and-ball existence produced by Tom Barton’s intemperance.
Tom Barton was quite good-tempered when he was sober, and he was rarely drunk except during the week-ends, but from Friday to Monday the house rose and fell in the tempest of his intoxication. He was a good workman, and their income see-sawed between affluence and penury.
Nothing was more normal to Jim than the appearance and disappearance of the furniture. Wash-stands floated in and out of rooms, sofas precariously furnished shelters for games, and then, like Rachel’s children, were not. Mantelpieces held clocks, china dogs and thrilling blue-beaded mats, and at a turn of the wrist—nothing but the bread-knife.
Hazily, like a far-off dream, a mute piano broke over his baby consciousness, and as swiftly and irrevocably vanished.