Despair's Last Journey Part 15

'I work in the office.'

'Compositor?'

'Compositor and pressman.'

'Many a nugget has come out of that pocket What do you read? Tennyson, I know. Whom else?'

'Anything I can get, Mr. Ralston.9

'Tell me. You're eighteen at a guess. Tell me last year's love and this year's love, and I'll prophesy.'

'It was Hazlitt at the beginning of last year, sir. Then it was Hunt, and Lamb. Now it's Thackeray.'

'Keats anywhere?'

'Oh! Keats?9 The tone was enough.

'Favourite bit of Keats now?'

'Oh, sir, you can't have favourite bits of Keats.'

'Come! _The_ darling.'

'"St Agnes,"' said Paul; 'Chapman's Homer, "The Nightingale,"

"Hyperion."'

'Oh! One love at a time.'

'I can't, sir.'

'Wordsworth?'

'That's easier, Mr. Ralston. "The Intimations."' 'Byron?'

'Oh! "The Don"--miles and miles, sir.' 'Where's Shakespeare--eh?'

'In the bosom of G.o.d Almighty.'

So cheerily the talk had gone, so rapidly, he had no taint of shyness left. Here was the man of his wors.h.i.+p since he had first dared to play the pious truant from chapel, the one man of the whole world he esteemed the greatest and the wisest. They had talked for three minutes and he was at home with his deity, and yet had lost no tremor of the adoring thrill.

'Good!' said Ralston. 'd.i.c.kens?' Paul's answer was nothing more than an inarticulate gurgle of pleasure, neither a laugh nor an exclamation.

'Carlyle?' Paul was silent, and Ralston asked in a doubtful voice: 'Not read Carlyle?'

'I'd go,' said Paul in a half whisper, 'from here to Chelsea on my hands and knees to see him.'

'The best of magnets won't draw lead,' said Ralston, and at the time Paul was puzzled by the phrase, but he blushed with pleasure when he recalled it later on. 'And Browning?'

'Ugh!' said Paul.

'Ah, well, that's natural. But, mind you, Mr. Armstrong, in a year or two you'll feel humiliated to think of your present position.'

They talked, marching up and down the platform, until the train came.

'You have been very kind, sir,' said Paul when at last the dreaded bell rang and the distant engine screamed.

'Have I?' asked Ralston. 'Remember it as a debt you'll owe to some aspiring youngster thirty years hence.'

The train came up before anything further was said. They shook hands and parted.

Then for days and weeks Paul waited for a letter, waylaying the postman every morning at the door. The letter came at last, brief and to the point:

'Have read your poem. A bright promise--not yet an achievement. Command of language more evident than individual thought. Be more yourself, but go on in hope. Let nothing discourage. Remember that personal character reveals itself in art Lofty conduct breeds the lofty ideal.'

The last phrase hit Paul hard. He was in search of the lofty ideal, and if lofty conduct would bring it, he meant to have it.

He was strolling on the next Sat.u.r.day afternoon, with Ralston's letter in his pocket Sat.u.r.day was a half-holiday, and he was free to do with it what he pleased. His feet took him by an unfrequented way, and in the course of an hour's devious ramble he found himself on the ca.n.a.l spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at least a grouse-peopled moor.

Paul sat down in such a hollow and read Ralston's letter for the thousandth time, and resolved anew on lofty conduct Suddenly he was aware of an approaching noise of voices, and in a little while a rabble of some twenty men and youths came charging down the slope to where he lounged in communion with his own fancies. The small crowd was noisy and excited, and Paul noticed some pallid, staring faces as it hurried by.

The whole contingent, wrangling and cursing unintelligibly, came to a sudden halt in the bend of the hollow. Here a man in corduroys and a rabbit-skin waistcoat called in a stentorian voice for order, and the babel gradually died down.

'These are the draws,' said the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, waving a dirty sc.r.a.p of paper in a dirtier hand--'these are the draws for the first encounter.'

He began to read a list of names. The first was answered in a tone of bullying jocundity. The second and the third name each elicited a growl At the call of the fourth name there was no response.

'Blades!' called the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat--'Ikey Blades of Quanymoor!'

Everybody turned to stare at Paul.

'That's him,' said one. 'Course it is,' said another.

'Bin yo Ikey Blades from Quarrymoor?' asked the man with the list.

'No,' said Paul

The man cursed, devoting himself and Paul to unnameable penalties.

He wound up by asking Paul what he was doing. He wrapped this simple inquiry in a robe of blasphemies. 'Nothing particular,' Paul answered. 'What's the matter?' 'Tak' it easy with him,' said a burly, hoa.r.s.e-voiced man. 'Beest thee i' the Major's pay?' 'Major?' asked Paul.

'What Major?' 'Why--Major Fellowes!'

'No,' said Paul, laughing. 'I've got no more to do with the police than thee hast. What is it, lads? A bit of a match, eh? Goo along. Need'st ha' no fear o' me.'

He had been fighting his way out of the local dialect for half a dozen years, but it was expedient not to forget it here.

'I dunno about that,' said the man with the waistcoat. 'Who bist?'

'Armstrong's my naam,' said Paul. 'I've lived i' the Barfield Road all my life.'

'Can ye put 'em up?' was the next query. 'Why, yes,' said Paul. 'I can put 'em up if I see rayson for it.'