Despair's Last Journey Part 35

'A bit,' said the doctor; 'enough to justify those gloomy hopes of yours.'

Paul hung his head in a transient shame, and murmured that he was sorry.

'Pooh, pooh!' cried the doctor; 'you're all right now. You can bear to hear a little bit of news about the lady?'

'Yes,' said Paul, 'anything.'

'She's married,' said the doctor--'married to the Honourable Captain MacMadden, and has left the stage.'

'Did she ever come to see me?' Paul asked.

'No,' said the doctor.

The pa.s.sion of the youth went to join the calf-love of the boy, and the man accomplished looked on them both with a half-humorous wonder. He was learning his world, he thought. It would not be easy to fool him in that way again.

He sat propped up with pillows in an arm-chair now, and could hold a book; but the lubricant at his joints had all been licked up by the fever, and it was slow to come back again, so that he had hideous twinges when he moved. He had plenty of society now that he was fit for it, for the fellow-boarders were idle during the day, and spared time to sit and talk with him.

'You recognised old Darco when you saw him, didn't you?' one of them asked.

'Oh yes,' said Paul, 'I knew him. What brought him here? I behaved very badly toold Darco.'

'Well, to tell you the truth,' said the other, 'he said so. "Ant I nefer forgive an incradidude," says he, and proved it by paying the doctor's bill.'

Every man in the profession had a more or less plausible imitation of old Darco's 'leedle beguliaridies.' He was as well known as the Strand, and loved and hated as few men are.

'I treated Darco very badly,' said Paul. 'I can't rest under that sort of obligation to him. How much did he pay?'

'You'd better ask the doctor.'

Paul asked the doctor next time he saw him, but elicited nothing.

'But I can't allow it,' Paul cried; 'I can't endure it I behaved abominably to Darco; I behaved like a beast and a fool. I'd take his scorn and hatred if he thought I was worth either; but I can't accept his benefits after the way in which I served him. I left the kindest friend I ever had, the man who took me out of the gutter--and that's G.o.d's truth, doctor; and I left him to follow that----'

He ground his teeth hard on the word he was fain to use.

'Steady!' said the doctor--' steady!'

'That Ignis Fatuus,' groaned Paul. 'Is that mild enough for you?'

The doctor knew everything. There was no further shame in making a clean breast of it.

'It's better than what you were going to say,' the doctor answered, 'whatever it was. I hate vulgarity as the devil hates virtue. It's a pretty s.e.x; I know something about it You seem to have lighted upon a pretty sample.'

Just at this instant there came a tap at the door, and the voice of the maid was heard saying, 'This is the room, sir.' The door opened, and in walked Armstrong the elder.

'Dad!' cried Paul

His father held his hand and looked at him.

'I've been sore troubled by your silence, lad,'he said. 'I've had hard work to find ye. Ye might have written.'

'I was coming to see you,' said Paul, 'so soon as I could travel. When will that be, doctor?'

'In a fortnight's time, perhaps,' the doctor answered--'not much earlier.'

The doctor went his way, and the father and son were together.

'You're out of Darco's service, I understand?' said Armstrong. 'He wrote kindly about ye, but he said you'd parted. Why did you leave him, Paul?'

Paul was penitent and feeble of body, and his father was his dearest.

Bit by bit he told his story, or as much of it as he could be told.

'Man,' said Armstrong, 'ye're beginning airly.'

CHAPTER XIII

The Dreamer dreamed, and the dream showed the old ramshackle, bankrupt printing-office at Castle Barfield again. Paul was back there. The thing had happened with a strange in-evitableness. He had gone home and had suffered a relapse, and had again recovered, and all his savings were expended. There had come a rush of work with which the solitary journeyman and his boy could not cope. Paul had gone to their a.s.sistance, and, the unusual flow of work continuing, he had stayed there. He made many applications by letter for other employment, and answered many advertis.e.m.e.nts, but nothing happened to deliver him. His heart galled him daily, for he had seen something of the world, and had tasted a first-night triumph as part-author of a play, and had mixed on equal terms with people who were very far away from his present sphere.

The county election, which had brought the increase of business, was over and done with. Paul succeeded the journeyman, who went his way and found employment elsewhere.

In the dim local yokel mind Paul was a failure, and he knew it. He had gone away, and his brothers and sisters had magnified his successes, and he was back again, a refugee, as it were, from a world which he had apparently misused. He was taciturn and gloomy, and, to the fancy of those who held themselves his equals and superiors, was disposed to give himself airs. Two years with Darco had made him something of an epicure.

He had grown to hate soiled hands and coa.r.s.e clothes, and the trivial talk of people who only lived for trifles. He suffered doubly, therefore, as one who had failed, and as one who took the airs which belong only to success. Life was not happy for a while.

The 'stand-by' of Armstrong's poor business was the printing of a certain coa.r.s.e label from stereotype plates, and, when there was nothing else to be done, this would be taken in hand for unbroken days together.

It was an operation as purely mechanical as any in the world, and the thoughts of the worker had time and chance to roam anywhere. Paul made hundreds of verses. The clean sheet set home to the pins, frisket and tympan down, the turn of the drum-handle, the pull of the bar, the backward turn of the drum, frisket and tympan up, and the printed sheet laid on the ordered pile-day in, day out, ten hours a day, the same things done and done again. Hands growing into horn; muscles swelling like a blacksmith's. A healthy life enough, with a rough, plain diet, and yet a purgatory in its way, with prospect and horizon bound.

In a year or more they widened, for Paul had set up for himself something of a study in the old lumber-room, where on a broken table, with an upturned box for a chair, and a candle stuck in a gingerbeer-bottle, he wrote down the verses he had hammered out during the day, and he began stealthily to send these here and there to magazine editors, who sometimes sent them back and sometimes printed them, but never seemed to dream of payment, until at last one offered him two guineas for a long Christmas story in rhyme, and he began to see a hope of escape from the treadmill round. He set to work on a blank-verse play, and spent the greater part of a year on it, and was prepared to find himself enthroned with Shakespeare. He put his drama into type, a page at a time, pulling but a single impression of each page, and distributing the type jealously before he went to bed, and jealously hiding his pages. And when it was all complete, and his brows were familiar with the touch of laurel, he sent the great work to a London manager, and never heard word of it afterwards, good, bad, or indifferent He waited for months in sick hope and sick despair, and then wrote asking for a judgment. He waited more months, and no answer came.

He wrote for the return of his work, humbly, then impatiently, and finally with wrathful insult No answer ever came. The muse seemed as vile a jade as Claudia. But he had his tattered and stained old ma.n.u.script, interlined and entangled so that no creature but, himself could read it, and he put it all in type once more, and sent his printed copy to an eminent firm of publishers, who, after considering the matter for six months, offered to take the risk of publication for a hundred pounds, on which he burned his ma.n.u.script in the cracked office stove, and left the printed copy of it in the publishers' hands to do as they pleased with it.

He turned to prose and wrote short stories, and sent them broadcast They came back, and he sent them out again. He made a list of magazines and a list of the stories, and each one went the rounds. One stuck and brought proof-sheets, and in due time a ten-pound note. He poured in all the rest on the one discerning editor, who had already refused one half of them. In a month the man of discernment offered ten s.h.i.+llings per page for the lot. Paul accepted, and in another month was back in London, resolute to try a new backfall with the world.

He found lodgings far away in the northern district, apprised the one discerning editor of his whereabouts, and sat down to wait and work for glory. And, oh! how kind again on a sudden seemed the Fates who for four years had been so harsh with him. Scarce had he been settled a week when there came a letter addressed to Paul Armstrong, Esq., care of Messrs.

Blank and Blank, reporting that the editor of a certain magazine had read with much pleasure a tale from Mr. Armstrong's pen, and would be happy to receive from him one of the same length. Paul danced and sang, and then plunged into labour, wrote his story, received his proof-sheet and his cheque, and with the letter a request that he would submit anything he might have in the way of a three-volume story. He was a.s.sured that it would receive instant attention.

'I'm five-and-twenty,' said Paul, 'and the world is at my feet'

But books are not to be written in a day, though they may be commissioned in an instant, and the financial stock was small, seeing how big an enterprise was to be started on it, and somehow the story would not form. What ghostly wrestling of the spirit with vague shadows which would take no shape! what sleepless tossings there were!--what fruitless rambles in the darkened streets! what hurried walks to Hampstead Heath! and what slow prowlings there amongst the gone! And, then, how the Concept came suddenly from nowhere, without a warning, without an effort, and stood up serene and strong, and bursting through and through with pa.s.sion as if it had been alive and fully grown for years. Then to pen and ink and paper, not yet a weariness to soul and fles.h.!.+ as they were to be in after days, the virgin page an invitation, the ink-pot a magic fountain, the very feel of the pen between thumb and finger a pleasure. There was no thought in those fresh days of stinting labour or of making rules for it--so many hours for work and so many hours for recreation, and such and such hours for meals. The book--the book was everything. He went to sleep with his people. He awoke to them.

He lived all day with them. He found them more real than the living.

Life was one vivid rage of emotion, of laughter, and of tears. His own pathetics and his own humours were the sweetest things he had ever known, and he cried at the one and laughed at the other more than the most sentimental of readers ever laughed and cried over any book that was ever written. And it was at this time that he wrote certain verses in which he set forth his beliefs in art. The lonely man in his eyrie in the Rockies, reviewing the bygone time, murmured what he could recall of these:

'"A land of fire and a land of frost Build!" said the Lord of the Soul; "And lay me an ocean from coast to coast, And let it be awful with many a ghost Of galleons laden with gold, and lost In the smothering surge's roll.

'"And make me a myriad rounded stars To spangle my firmament, Sweet like Hesper, glad with the balm Of a ceaseless, pa.s.sionless, changeless calm And hot like Sirius, and red like Mars With a G.o.d-like discontent.

'"And frame in the land of fire," he said, "Frame me a soul like thine: Swift as the snail's soft horn to feel, Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel, And be there a fire in heart and head Demoniac and divine."'