Despair's Last Journey Part 3

CHAPTER I

The first hint of memory showed a hearth, a fire, and a woman sitting in a chair with an outstretched finger. An invisible hand bunched his petticoats behind, and at his feet was a rug made of looped fragments of cloth of various colours. He lurched across the rug and caught the finger with a sense of adventure and triumph. Somebody clapped hands and laughed. Memory gave no more.

Then there was a long, narrow, brick-paved yard, a kind of oblong well, with one of the narrower sides broken down. The bricks of the pavement were of many colours--browns, purples, reds. They were full of breakages and hollows, and in rainy weather small pools gathered in the petty valleys. The loftiest boundary wall had once been whitewashed, but was now streaked green and yellow with old rains. A pump with a worn trough of stone stood half-way up the yard, and near it was a boy--a very little boy, in petticoats, and a yellow straw hat with ribbons. The frock he wore was of some tartan pattern, with red and green in it He had white thread socks, and shoes with straps across the instep. The straps were fastened with round gla.s.s b.u.t.tons, and the child, with his feet planted close together, was looking down at the b.u.t.tons with a flush of pride. He was conscious of being prettily attired, and this was his first remembered touch of personal vanity.

He was walking and crying in an old-fas.h.i.+oned village street, crying because his fat small thighs were chafing one another. It was Sunday, or a holiday, for his father was in a tall silk hat and black broadcloth and high collar, and a satin stock which fastened with a s.h.i.+ny buckle high up in the neck behind. His father stooped and lifted him, and carried him all the way to an old house with three front-doors, and porches over the doors, and a cage with two doves in it hanging on the lichened wall. There was a hedged garden opposite the house, with four poplars in the hedgerow. Their tops went right into the blue. Inside the old house was an old gentleman who was called Uncle. Round the room he sat in were hung a number of fiddles in green-baize bags. How he had learned what the bags held the child could not tell, but he knew.

The old gentleman took him on his knee, and allowed him to touch his whiskers, which were crisp and soft, and snipped pieces of white paper into the shapes of trees and animals and houses, with a little pair of scissors. He had blue veins on the back of his white hands, and little cords the like of which were not on the child's, as examination proved.

This was his first memory of any house which was not home.

There he first saw a piano. It was open, and he beat the keys, sounding now one note at a time and now two or three together. This was a fascinating exercise, but he was bidden to desist from it, and was given a picture-book to look at It was full of wiry-looking steel plates of men in cauldrons, and on crucifixes, and on racks, and bound to stakes in fires. He remembered it as Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,' but by a later knowledge.

There was a well in a yard, with a rope and a windla.s.s, and an old wooden bucket all over trailing green mosses. Off the yard there was a blacksmith's shop, with a disused anvil and disused tools in it, and a cold hearth covered with scattered slack and iron filings. A dog, whose chain allowed him to come within a yard of the door of this workshop, woke up at the clank of the tools and barked. The child cried until his mother came and took him away with some show of angry impatience, not with his father's gentleness. He knew her for his mother, of course, but this was his first remembrance of her.

It was baking-day, and so it could not have been a Sunday. In a big 'jowl' of earthenware--that was the local word for it--a batch of dough was set before a fire to rise. It had a clean cloth spread over it, and the dough had been slashed across and across with a knife. Somebody said the sign of the cross was made to keep the devil out of the bread. There was a vague wonder at that, but it soon died. A portion of the dough was used to make what were called 'rough-and-ready cakes.' Dripping was rolled into the dough, and it was sprinkled with sugar and currants.

Then it was pulled into all manner of rough shapes, so as to bake with crisp edges, and was put on a greased dripping-pan into an oven. The cakes were served hot with new milk, and made a regal feast.

It grew dark, which for summer-time was a new experience. The child, tired, but wakeful, stood at the door in fear of the dog. Suddenly he roused the household with screams of joy.

'Mother! mother! Look what I've found!'

There was a rush and a swirl of petticoats. The infant had seen the stars for the first time, and had some trouble in explaining the nature of his find. When it was known that he had discovered the solar system and its neighbouring fragment of the universe, there was a laugh, and he was left alone, humiliated.

'I have made many equally valuable and original discoveries since then,'

said Paul Armstrong, and so went on staring down the canon, seeing nothing of what lay before him, but beholding his child-self so clearly that he seemed to be living over again the life of forty years ago.

The child was shy, dreamy, sensitive, inventive, and a liar. He and his brother d.i.c.k were together walking in the shabby High Street, and talking about cricket.

'I'll bet you haven't seen what I've seen,' said Paul. He was seven years old by now, breeched in corduroys, which had had time to grow rusty. The middle-aged man, sitting at his tent-door, smelt the odour of the new cords, and heard their disgusting whistle as he moved his limbs in them for the first time. Only the poorest boys went clothed in corduroy, and Paul and brother d.i.c.k were bitterly lowered in their own esteem when they were forced by motherly economy into that badge of social servitude. 'I'll bet you haven't seen what I've seen.'

'What have you seen? asked d.i.c.k.

He was rather a fatuous boy, with round, innocent eyes, easily opening at tales of marvel, and a temptation to a liar.

'Why, when I was in Scotland three years ago with father,' Paul began, 'I saw the Highlanders play cricket.' He had never in his life been a mile away from his native parish, and d.i.c.k knew that as well as he did, but it made no difference. 'They wore kilts, and father wore a kilt, and had a feather in his bonnet, and top-boots like Robin Hood, all loose about the tops, and a bow and arrow. And he smoked a cigar, and gave me a whole lot of vesuvians to strike by myself behind a tent. You could smell vesuvians and cigars and suns.h.i.+ny trod-on gra.s.s everywhere.'

'Tell us about the Highlanders,' said d.i.c.k.

'They was all ten foot high,' said Paul. 'They wouldn't have 'em in the eleven without they was ten foot high.'

d.i.c.k said that stood to reason.

'And they played in their kilts, and they didn't wear pads, and they had their bats all made of iron, and the ball was iron, too. It was a cannon-ball, and they fired it out of a cannon, and the wickets was a mile and a half apart--no, a mile and a quarter--and one man hit the ball, and the other men shouted, "Run it out!" and he ran sixty-four runs. Then he dropped down stone-dead, and Mr. Murchison read the funeral service.'

Then the talk drifted. Next Sunday the Rev. Roderic Murchison, M.A., read out from the pulpit a text which gave over all liars to fire and brimstone. Paul went quaking all day. d.i.c.k and he slept together in a gaunt attic chamber. Mary, their sister, twenty years Paul's elder, saw them to bed, put them through a rough form of prayer, and took away the candle. d.i.c.k, with nothing on his conscience, went to sleep. Paul lay and sweated, dreading fire, and wondering with open-eyed horror, 'Why brimstone?' and imagining extraordinary terrors from its addition.

At last conscience would have no Nay, and brimful of fear and contrition--for the one was as real as the other--he woke up d.i.c.k in the black hollow of the night This was hard work, but he was bent on self-purgation, and would not confess until d.i.c.k was really wide awake.

'd.i.c.k!' he said, gripping his brother in the dark and straining him in his childish arms. 'd.i.c.k! Oh, d.i.c.k, I've been a liar, and I daresn't go to sleep. Do you remember what I said about the Highlanders last Thursday?'

'Blow the Highlanders!' said d.i.c.k. 'What did ye wake _me_ up for?'

'It wasn't true, d.i.c.k,' the penitent whimpered. 'I never saw a Highlander, and father didn't take me to Scotland with him. It was all made up.'

'I know that,' said d.i.c.k. 'You _are_ a fool to wake a chap up in the dark to tell him that.'

That was the child's first remembered penitence and confession. The man remembered how he had sobbed himself to sleep. Why had he lied, and _was_ a portion his in the lake of fire and brimstone, and what was the good of being repentant and confessing, and being called a fool for one's pains?

When the childish Paul came out of the kitchen-door into that three-sided well of a brick-paved yard, and walked towards the printing-office at the far end of the narrow strip of garden, the first door beyond the pump-trough led him to a flight of stairs. The flight of stairs, dirty and littered, mounted to a lumber-room, where there were great piles of waste-paper, refuse from the shop and office. There were many torn and battered old books here, and most of them were deserving of the neglect into which they had fallen. The father had bought old books literally by the cart-load at auction, and had weeded from the ma.s.ses of rubbish such things as promised to be saleable. The rest were Paul's prey, and there were sc.r.a.ps of romance here and there, and fugitive leaves of Hone's 'Everyday Book,' and the _Penny Magazine_, with dingy woodcuts. One inestimable bundle of leaves unbound held the greater part of 'Peregrine Pickle,' the whole of 'Robinson Crusoe,' and part of 'The Devil on Two Sticks.' Brother Bob, dead and gone these many years, had once kept pigeons in that lumber-room, and had driven a hole in the wall, so that the birds might have free going out and in. This was one of the family remembrances. Before there had been so many mouths to fill and so many small figures to be clothed, there had been room in the Armstrong household for some things which were not wholly utilitarian. This keeping of pigeons was, as it were, a link with a golden past, a bright thread in the tapestry of the bygone, which hung on the eye of imagination in contrast with the sordid present, where few of the threads were bright except to the inexhaustible fancy of a child, who can see brightness almost anywhere.

The lumber-room had many memories for the dreamer in the tent-door. He was often banished there for punishment, and he sometimes confessed to faults which were not his, if they were not of too dark a dye, in the hope of being sent thither. There he would grub amongst the mouldy refuse of the place, and would find treatises of forgotten divines on Daniel and the end of the world, and translations of Ovid on the Art of Love sadly mutilated by rats, and nautical almanacs of a long bygone date, and much other doubtful treasure.

The mother came into the brick-paved yard and shrilled 'Paul! Paul lay quiet. The voice called up and down, and was lost in the recesses of the heaped timber in the yard which lay beside the ill-kempt strip of garden. The hedge which had once divided the neighbouring domains was broken down in many places, and Paul and his brother played often on the timber-stacks, and in the aromatic groves of sawn planks which inclined towards each other in row on row, making an odorous cloistered shade, excellent for enacted memories of Chingachgook and Uncas and the Pathfinder. There was a sawpit in the yard, a favourite hiding-place for the boys, and the turpentiny scent of fresh sawdust had always been a thing to conjure with in the Solitary's memory. The smell of printer's ink which hung about the dowdy, untidy, bankrupt printing-office had a hint of it. Years afterwards and years ago in the studio of the President of the Belgian Academy, when Paul was famous and on easy terms with famous people, a servant uncorked a tin of turpentine to clean his master's palette, and the sawpit yawned again, and every broken brick in the floor of the old office showed so clear that he could have drawn the finest crevice. The odour was in his nostrils now as he sat at the tent-door, and he did not dream that it sweated from the sun-smitten pines. It was all memory to his fancy, and the voice went shrilling 'Paul!' among the timber-stacks, and was lost in the cavernous shed at the far-end of the yard. Then everything went quiet for an hour, and Paul made acquaintance with the poverty-stricken artist who could not take his mistress to the ball because she had no stockings fit to go in, and who hit on the expedient of painting stockings on her legs. How simply and innocently comic the episode was to the child's mind, to be sure! and how harmless were the naughtiest adventures exposed under the lifted roofs when the lame devil waved his crutch from the top of the steeple!

But in the full tide of this retired joy Paul hears a step at the bottom of the lumber-room stairs, and knows it for his mother's. She is coming here, and there is no hiding-place for anything bigger than a rat. The motherly temper is sharp, and the motherly hand is heavy. He has been called and has not answered--a crime deserving punishment, and sure to earn it. The step grows nearer and trouble more a.s.sured. Suddenly a ray of hope darts through him, and he feigns sleep. His heart labours, but he keeps his breath regular by a great effort. Mother gazes for a minute, and goes away on tiptoe. There is quiet for five minutes, and Paul is back in fairyland. But mother is here again on tiptoe, and the voice of doom sounds on his ear.

'I thought you was foxing, you little beast!'

Then Paul takes his thras.h.i.+ng as well as he can, aiming to receive most of it on his elbows, and is in bitter disgrace for days and days. The phenomenally guilty and degraded young ruffian who _acted_ a lie!---a far viler thing, it would seem, than to speak one!

This is the worst of the household, to the Solitary's mind, that all combine in prolonged reprobation for any crime of his. He has no memory for d.i.c.k's offences or Jack's or David's; but d.i.c.k and Jack and David are unforgetting, and the girls sniff unutterable holiness and contempt.

He knows he is a liar, and he knows that liars have their portion in that awful lake, but he is high-spirited and fanciful, and he forgets, sealing his doom weekly at the least, and making it more sure. This reputation of liar began when Wombwell's Menagerie of Wild Beasts first visited the parish, and the neighbourhood of lions and tigers so flushed his imagination that he saw them everywhere. He came home one day with a story of a tiger running away with the shop-shutters of a neighbouring grocer on his back. He was chastised for this gratuitous unwarrantable yarn, and stuck to it Perhaps he had dreamed it and believed it true, but on that point memory was silent. Anyway it was fixed and decided that he was a liar, and 'A liar we can ne'er believe, though he should speak the thing that's true.' So n.o.body believed Paul under any conditions, not even when truth was crystalline.

He was a little older, a very little older, and he lay in bed one moonlight night in summer. He had been to chapel that Sunday evening, and the Rev. Roderic Murchison had preached a sermon from the text, 'To depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.' Paul's small soul was filled to the brim with a sort of yearning peace. The moon yearned at him through the uncurtained window of the bare attic chamber, and he longed back to it. Oh how sweet, how sweet to pa.s.s to peace for ever, to lie asleep for ever, with the gra.s.s and the daisies for a counterpane, and yet to be somewhere and wideawake and happy! 'Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.' Paul was of the kingdom for a time, but he had the blundering ill-luck to mention it. He put his arms round d.i.c.k, who lay awake there, and he cried and said good-bye, and told d.i.c.k that he was going to die and be an angel. And in his heart he forgave d.i.c.k--nebulously but with sincerity--not particularizing things, but offering plenary grace for all offences. And d.i.c.k took fright and ran with bare legs projecting from his scanty nights.h.i.+rt, and blubbered that Paul was dying--that he said so, that he was sure of it. And Paul, listening at the top of the stairs, heard the news given and forgave everybody, and went back to bed again and was filled with inexpressible joy of a.s.sured longing. The good mother came upstairs carrying d.i.c.k, who had been solaced with unaccustomed supper of bread and treacle--he was sticky and crumby with it hours afterwards when Paul still lay crying--and she gave Paul such a hiding for his heartless wickedness as he had never had in all his days till then. It was not the pain of the flogging, though he had been chastened with a liberal hand, that kept him in tears throughout that wretched night. It was the bitter sense of injustice, for Paul had imputed his dream to himself for holiness, and had believed so truly and had meant so well.

And the matter did not end there Paul had slept on his trouble and had forgotten it, as children can. He was stripped to the waist, and was taking his morning wash at the sink in the back-kitchen when his father came, carrying in his left hand an instrument called the 'tawse,' a broad flat leathern strap, cut into strips at one end. The strips had been hardened in the fire, and the 'tawse 'was a holy horror to the boys, who saw it often and were threatened with it sometimes, but who had felt it never. Armstrong the father came in pale and gray, his hands quivering, and he gave Paul a little sermon. The ineradicable Ayrs.h.i.+re accent shook out in his voice more strongly than common, for he was an idle dreamer, and a man who hated to see pain, and to whom it was an agony to inflict it.

'This will hurt me far more than it will hurt you, my lad, said Armstrong senior; and Paul, by a swift, sidelong movement of the mind, decided that he had been born a liar because his father was one before him.

Then the father expanded upon the enormity of his wickedness, and told him how he had shamefully trifled with the thought of death, which was the most serious of all things, and how in his vanity he had tried to alarm his brother, and how this evil lying spirit must be beaten out of him. Paul was silent, for how could he explain? And the kindly father, who had had to work himself up to this cold-blooded severity, went half hysterical when he had once begun, and overdid the thing. Paul's flesh ached and stung and quivered on his bones for days. A fortnight afterwards, when he went to bathe, having forgotten his flogging, his stripes were seen, and a schoolmate christened him Tiger on account of them. To that day there were people who knew him as Tiger Armstrong, though they had forgotten the reason of the nickname.

This was one of the inconveniences of having a reputation. There were more such doleful comedies in the lonely man's mind as he looked down the gorge.

The scenes came back as if they were enacted before him. The old eight-day dock ticked in its recess; the fire rustled and dropped a cinder; the cat purred on the hearth; Paul sat reading, absorbed, and yet in memory he knew of the cat and the dock and the fire, and even of a humming fly somewhere, and a gleam of suns.h.i.+ne on the weather-stained whitewash of the wall outside.

In came Mrs. Armstrong, with the little household servant at her heels, and laid something on the ledge of the old clock face. She was an uncommonly tall woman, and had a knack of putting things on high out of other people's reach.

'That's for the potatoes,' she said; 'run and get 'em as soon as ever you've peeled the turnips.'

'Yes, ma'am,' said the girl; and they both went out together.

Two or three minutes later Paul went out. His father sat behind the counter of the shop, and Paul was afraid that if he went that way he would be seized upon and compelled to take his place. So he ran up the garden, climbed a wall or two, and dropped into Badger's field. He had not gone twenty yards when he found a halfpenny lying on the gra.s.s. He laid hands on it, and made for the confectioner's, where he expended it on a sickly sweet called 'paper-suck'--a treacly, sticky abomination with a spiral of old newspaper twined about it Brother d.i.c.k appeared by chance, and shared the treat. Paul at this time had taken to making verses on his own account, incited by a great deal of miscellaneous reading. This was an exercise which demanded quiet and retirement, and he got away into the fields, and, lying face downwards on the gra.s.s, gave himself over hand and foot to fancy. It was quite late in the afternoon when appet.i.te brought him to himself. He had forgotten his dinner, but relying on his ability to filch something, he walked home with a light heart He marched innocently through the open door of the shop.

'Paul!' His father stopped him, his spectacles tipped up into his white hair, and his gray eyes half hidden under eyebrows like a s.h.a.ggy Scotch deer-hound's. The portrait of Sir Walter's 'Maida' had a strong suggestion of the Scottish face, wistful, affectionate, and full of simple sagacity. Just now the gray eyes looked doom. Paul knew he had done something awful, and felt guilty, though he knew nothing as yet of the charge against him. 'What ha' ye dune wi' the threepenny-bit ye stole this morning?'

'What threepenny-bit?' said Paul. 'I haven't seen no threepenny-bit, father.'

The verse he hammered out in his lonely moments was grammatical, because his exemplars would have it so; but to have been grammatical in common speech would have seemed like a pedantry.

'The threepenny-bit your mother put on the clock-ledge, ye pelferin'

vag'bond!' said his father sternly.