Despair's Last Journey Part 26

'There is enough glean water in the tay's rainfall to wash it off,'

Darco answered. 'Did you efer read "The Orichinal"?

'No,' said Paul.

'The man who wrote it vos so healthy that he nefer hat need to wash himself. His skin was too bure to hold dirt.'

'Filthy beggar!' said Paul.

'I make it a baraple,' Darco declared. 'Id is true of the immordal soul.

I am as bure-minded as a child, and I haf heardt den thousand fillainous sdories. Vot does it madder?'

The rivets of Paul's armour rotted, as the rivets of most men's armour rot, and he grew to tolerate what had been abominable. And that is the way of life, which is a series of declensions from high ideals, and is meant to be so because things must be lost before their worth can be known. The society in which he lived and moved was as rich as any in the world in the kind of narrative he had discussed with Darco. Little by little he got to take Darco's view. It is the view of ninety per cent, of men of the world. A naturally pure mind never learns to love nastiness, but it learns to tolerate it, for the sake of the wit which sometimes lives with it.

Darco was a man whom n.o.body ever saw for an instant under the influence of liquor, but then it was impossible to make him drunk. It seemed to Paul as if it were just as unlikely for him to become intoxicated by drinking as for a decanter to grow tipsy by having liquor poured into it. If he ate--as he did--twice as much as the average keen-set sportsman, he drank as much as the average hopeless drunkard, and no man could have guessed from his speech, or acts, or aspect that he was not a total abstainer. Paul, too, began to discover that he had a cast-iron pot of a head, and took an infantile pride in the fact; but this kind of vanity was not often indulged in, and he had no physical predisposition to it.

Darco made money by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation.

Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels.

It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour and enjoyment in them. Every week showed him a new town or city: cla.s.sic Edinburgh, dirty Glasgow--cleaner nowadays--roaring Liverpool, rainy Manchester, smoke-clouded Birmingham and Sheffield, granite-built Aberdeen, jolly Dublin, with an unaccustomed tw.a.n.g in the whisky, after the Scottish progress; Belfast, Cork, Waterford. Everywhere character studies in shoals; dialect studies every day and all day long. Paul could train his tongue, before the twelve months' tour was over, to the speech of Exeter, or Norwich, or Brighton, or Newcastle, or Berwick, or Aberdeen, or Cork, or the black North. He set himself to the task conscientiously, and with a rich enjoyment. What a Gargantuan table was the world!

How lovable, laughable, hateful were the men who sat at it! What a feast of feeling was spread daily!

The tour came near to its end, and Darco was arranging a new series for half a dozen companies, so that work grew furious. A man might have commanded an army or ruled a great department of State with less expenditure of energy. There was no advertising or consulting of agencies, but everything was done by personal letter. There were reams and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized ma.s.s of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing three men's work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came near him. He could be princely with it all in his own way.

'You haf learned your pusiness, young Armstrong,' he said to Paul when the rush was over. 'I gan deach anypoty his pusiness if he is not a vool. I am Cheorge Dargo. You haf done your work gabidally, and you are vorth fife dimes vot I am baying you. But I alvays like the shady site of a pargain, and I shall only gif you four dimes.'

So at four times the original sum Paul's salary was fixed, and he began to feel himself a man of consequence.

'I am Mr. Darco's private secretary,' he was told to say to people with whom he was empowered to deal. 'I am entirely in Mr. Darco's confidence, and you may deal with me exactly as if Mr. Darco were here.'

At the beginning of the second year the great provincial cities had begun to take advantage of the Public Libraries Act, and here was a new joy for Paul. The Free Library was the first place he asked for in any big town, and at every spare hour he stuck his nose into a book, and kept it there until duty called him away again. Something in 'Gil Bias'

about poverty in observation struck his fancy, and he cast about in his own mind asking where he could observe, not knowing yet that he was observing all things. He hit upon the landlady. A man who has fifty-two landladies in a year has surely a fertile field. He sorted and cla.s.sified in the light of experience: the honeyed, the acidulated, and bibulous-G.o.dly (mostly Scottish), the bibulous-unG.o.dly (mostly English), the s.l.u.t with a clean outside to things, the painstaking sloven, the peculative (here one majestic sample), the reduced in circ.u.mstances, the confidential, the reserved, the frisky, the motherly, the step-motherly--a most excellent a.s.sembly for mirth and pity.

Mrs. Brace came back again. How many years was it since the memory of Mrs. Brace had touched the Exile's mind?

Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.

'Vere is my other zausage,' cries Darco. 'There vere zeven. Now there are six. Vere is my other zausage?'

'Really you know, sir,' says Mrs. Brace. 'Sausages do shrink so in the cooking.'

Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco stormed like a beaten gong.

Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller's plan to convey a portion of the guests' clean linen from the chest of drawers into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat newspaper parcel, and to say, 'If you please, gentlemen, the rest of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it's two and elevenpence halfpenny.' Oh, the days--the days when a jest like this could shake the ribs with mirth!

And Mistress MacAlister, painfully intoxicated at the dinner hour of 2 p.m., and the uncooked leg of young pork in the larder.

'D'ye thenk ah'm goin' to cuik till ye on the Sabba' Day? Ye'll no be findin' th' irreligious sort o' betches that'll do that for ye in Dundee, ah'm thenkin'.'

And the little soft-spoken lady from New Orleans, whose husband had been a General--in Del Oro--and an old friend of Darco's in his campaigning days. And the execution in the house. And Darco signing a cheque for twice the amount claimed, and blubbering like a great fat baby, and swearing to burn the cheque if she thanked him by another word. Old Darco, the nerve-tearer, the inordinate pyramid of vanity, the tender, the generous, the loyal. Sweetest fruit in sourest rind! Sleep on, old Darco. G.o.d makes none gentler in heart, though He makes many more beloved.

And how men do, on all hands, unconsciously lay themselves out to delight the budding genial satirist! Here is Darco, wealthy and prosperous as he has never been before, launching out fearlessly, and bearing with him _the_ splendour of the stage--the great Montgomery Ba.s.sett. Darco, in consultation with the glorious creature, the question being in which of his unrivalled and majestic a.s.sumptions he shall first appear:

'It doesn't matter, dear boy,' says Mr. Montgomery Ba.s.sett, in that n.o.ble voice, a voice rich as the king of all the wines of Burgundy--'it doesn't matter the toss up of a blind beggar's farthing. The people don't come to see the play, my boy; they come to see me. They'd come to see me if I played in Punch and Judy.'

And the late leading man, now dethroned, and put to second business:

'Ba.s.sett! Montgomery Ba.s.sett! I could act his head off, dear boy. He is the rottenest stick that ever stalked upon a stage. He can't get in front of that infernal Roman nose, sir. "Now," says Ba.s.sett, "I'm going to be pathetic;" and the Roman nose says, "I'll see you d.a.m.ned first."

"And now," says Ba.s.sett, "we'll have a bit of comedy." "Oh no, you won't," says the nose. You might as well try to act behind a barn-door as to act behind that nose. Just fill me out a little tot of Scotch, darling laddie. I want to lose the taste of Ba.s.sett.'

And the leading lady and the _ingenue_ who hung together like twin cherries on one stalk, bathed in soft dews of tenderness, until Ba.s.sett praised the one and not the other, and the leading lady called the ingenue 'Chit' and the ingenue retorted 'Wrinkles!' And the reconciliation at the champagne supper which Darco gave when Ba.s.sett went away, when the tears they shed must have tasted of the wine.

Oh, the days--the days, long years before he set out on his Journey of Despair, when mirth had no malice, and tears were tributaries to pity!

'I have vound oudt,' said Darco, one day, 'that our paggage man is a pant.i.t He is ropping eferypoty, and I have kiven him a fortnight's vages, and the bag to carry. That is my liddle chockular vay to say he has got the zack. I haf dele-graphed for a new man, and he will come from Lonton by the seven-thirty train. His name is Warr, and you will know him by his nose, which is pigger than your fist, and as hot to look at as the powels of the Phalarian Pull. It ought to be an acony to garry it, but he laughs pehint it in the distance. But I nodice it always zeems to make his eyes vater.'

Paul went to meet this phenomenon, and from the train Mr. Warr of the Nonconformist printing-office stepped out, carrying the work of art before him like an oriflamme.

'Mr. Warr, I believe?' said Paul.

'The same, sir,' said Mr. Warr, with a spinal inclination.

Paul's face was framed in a virginal fringe of brown beard, and he was dressed by a London theatrical tailor. Mr. Wan-had no memory of him.

'I am Mr. Darco's private secretary,' said Paul. 'That is the address of your lodgings, and when you have taken your traps there Mr. Darco will meet you at the theatre.'

'I am at your disposal, sir,' said Mr. Warr.

He gathered up two newspaper parcels, each of which leaked ragged hosiery and soiled linen at either end, and pottered along the platform at Paul's side, subservient and timid. Paul spurted laughter and affected a cough to hide it.

'Here is the refreshment-room, Mr. Warr,' he said. 'May I ask if you care at this moment to administer a coating of varnish to the work of art?'

'Have I had the pleasure to encounter you before, sir?' asked Mr. Warr, peering at him sideways across that astonis.h.i.+ng nose, with a brown eye bright with moisture. It was like an old cat looking out from the side of a fireplace.

'Come in and see,' said Paul.

Mr. Warr went in, and being offered a choice in varnishes, selected cold gin.

'My highly superior respects, sir. You either know me, or my fame has reached you.' He smiled a propitiatory smile. 'I do not recall you, sir.'

'I have varnished the work of art before to-day,' said Paul. 'Do you remember Bucklersbury?'

'I should do so,' Mr. Warr returned. 'I drudged there for eight long years, and had it not been for Mr. Darco's kindly memories of an old a.s.sociate, I might have drudged there still. But two and fifty s.h.i.+llings per week, sir, with freedom and travel thrown in, are highly superior to thirty-six, with slavery superadded. But I do not recall your face and figure, sir.'

'My name is Armstrong,' said Paul. 'I worked beside you for a week or two.'

'The friend of my youth,' said Mr. Warr. 'Permit me to shake hands. Rely upon me, Mr. Armstrong, not to be presumptuous. Rely upon me, sir. I shall respect bygones. Mr. Darco will tell you who I was and what I was when he first knew me. I was first low com., sir, at the Vic, upon my soul and honour, Mr. Armstrong. But the work of art, sir, so grew and prospered that at last the very gallery guyed me. I went for the varnish, Mr. Armstrong, in sheer despair. As G.o.d is my highly superior judge, sir, I never drank until I had a drunkard's nose. Then I made a jest of a deformity, and the joke carried me too far. This infernal feature is an unnatural legacy. It is from my maternal grandfather, who once owned the town of Guildford. I have heard my mother say that his cellars covered a quarter of an acre, and held nothing but port and brandy--packed, sir, seven feet deep. To-morrow, in Mr. Darco's presence, I sign the pledge till the end of the tour, as per our highly superior arrangement. I do not know, sir, whether behind that aspect of prosperity there lurks the probability of another fourpennyworth.'

'You mustn't get tipsy to meet Mr. Darco,' said Paul.