Despair's Last Journey Part 37

'You've had hard times, old Darco?'

'I have had a million dollars. I haf had nothings. Once I sdole a loaf.

I gave the paker ten dollars the week after and dold him vat I had done.' He puffed idly and sipped his Gloria. 'I am Cheorge Dargo,' he murmured nosily. 'There is nothings I haf not been. There is nothings I have not seen.

There is nothings worth doing that I have not done.' He smoked and sipped again. 'But I haf not got a liderary sdyle. You haf a liderary sdyle. Come again with me to write blays. We will both great fortunes make.'

'Shake hands on that,' said Paul vehemently; and Darco shook hands with phlegm.

'It is a pargain,' he said. 'See me in five hours' time--Hotel Meurice, Rue de Rivoli I will write it for you. And now I must go apout my work.

I am encaged in ten minutes.'

Paul paid the bill, slipped Darco's address into his waistcoat pocket, shook hands with him at the door, and walked away, unconscious, to his life's undoing.

CHAPTER XIV

The voice of the river spoke from the great gorge in accents of exultation and despair, and the voice was a part of the primeval silence, as it had been from the moment when the Solitary had first listened to it. The impalpable, formless brown fog was about him Its acrid scent of burning was in his nostrils. And, all the same, he was in Paris, in the Rue de Quenailles, where he had lived so long, and where he had begun the real troubles of his lifetime.

He saw and heard as if he had been there. The street was lined on either side with picturesque houses of an ancient date, the fronts of which were parcel-coloured, blue, pink, buff, white, green, all worn into a varied grayish harmony by years of exposure to the weather. The cobbled roadway was drenched in sunlight, and the green jalousies on the sunny side of the street had their own effect on the physiognomy of the thoroughfare.

Paul made his way towards his hotel, foreboding nothing, but full of youth and high spirits, and somewhat unfairly inspired by wine, considering the hour of the day. He was aware of this, and his one desire was to reach his own cool and shadowed chamber, and there sleep himself back into a sober possession of his faculties. Had any person suggested to him that he was tipsy, he would have had a right to repel the accusation with scorn. He walked without hesitation or uncertainty; he saw quite clearly and thought quite clearly. He had taken a gla.s.s more champagne than was entirely good for him, and that was all. Had the thing happened after dinner, he would simply have put on the brake for the rest of the evening, and would have carried his load with ease. As it was, nothing but a nap was needed to bring him back to a comfortable afternoon sensation. He told himself this as he strolled homeward, tasting his cigar in an occasional whiff, but using it mainly as a sort of fairy baton with which to beat time to the spirit ditties of no tune which filled his harmless mind.

On the side of the street on which he walked he saw the figure of a girl, but he took no especial notice of her until he was almost in the act of pa.s.sing. Then he noticed that she was tall and lithe, and that she had fine brown eyes and hair. There was nothing in the slightest degree compulsive or imperative about her. She was just a girl, and there was an end of it He might have pa.s.sed her a thousand times without a second thought, or without a thought at all, but that unhappy extra gla.s.s of wine was in his blood, and he must needs accost her--more, perhaps, to show off his French than for any other reason. His att.i.tude towards women had hitherto been chivalrous and shy, and he was aware of the overcoming of a difficulty which had frequently given him some concern when he flourished off his hat and asked, with a smiling insolence:

'Why are you wandering here, I pray?'

The girl looked at him innocently enough, with a gaze quite free from anger, coquetry, or embarra.s.sment. It might have been a common thing in her experience to be thus accosted by a stranger.

'I am waiting for my sister,'she responded simply.

Did she suppose she would have to wait long? asked Paul. The girl did not know. Would she wait under shelter from the sun? She shrugged her shoulders, and inclined her head on one shoulder with lifted eyebrows.

'Come along,' said the vacuous idiot 'Let us have a gla.s.s of wine together.'

The girl smiled sedately, and they went off together.

The extraordinary part of this business was not that a young man who had lunched a little too freely should make a fool of himself, but that the girl was a good girl, of average breeding, and, as Paul lived to convince himself, in spite of all the unhappiness she brought him, had never entered upon anything remotely resembling such an adventure as the present in all her life. But the readiness of her acquiescence misled him, and in the little hard-trodden wjne-garden in which they sipped a sugary champagne together, in a trellised alcove like a relic of old Vauxhall, he grew amorous, and told her that her eyes were like beryls, and that their whites were like porcelain. The lonely man in the brown smoke-fog, with the roar of the river in his ears, as unregarded as the roar of traffic in a city, recalled it all, and laughed as he threw his hands abroad, and fell into a frowning thoughtfulness as he allowed them to drop laxly between his knees. The girl had eyes, to be sure--two of them--and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and, conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor affronted by the vacuous a.s.s's compliments, and when he praised her hair and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a waxen lady in a barber's window.

It may have been that this very aloofness of stupidity appealed to him as a thing to conquer, but, anyway, he got an arm about her waist, and went on praising her with ridiculous emphasis. She allowed him to squeeze, and she allowed him to praise, and when he pressed her gla.s.s upon her she sipped at it with reasonable relish and set it down again.

When they had been sitting in the arbour for a quarter of an hour or so she became loquacious. She said it was a fine day, but that she had feared in the morning that it would rain. It was a much finer day than the Thursday of last week had been, for then it had rained in the afternoon, and since she had been beguiled from home by the treacherous pretence of the day without an umbrella she had had a feather spoiled--a feather 'que m'a coute cinq francs, m'sieu!' Paul answered that she was a little angel, and she told him a parcel of nothings which under fair and reasonable conditions would have bored his head off. But it is a notable thing that when a youth is beginning to learn a foreign language--and Paul was only now entering upon a colloquial familiarity with French--he has so much satisfaction in understanding what is said to him that a very stupid conversation can interest him. It is not what is said which pleases, but the fact that he can follow it, and this, with a man who is not easily susceptible of boredom, will last him well into the knowledge of a novel tongue. He gathered from the confidences exchanged that the young lady lived at home with papa and mamma and her sister; that papa was engaged in a big drapery establishment, and came home late at night; that mamma was a suburban modiste, and was also away from home all day; that her sister and herself did some kind of fancy work at home--his French was not complete enough to enable him to understand accurately what it was--and that she always made holiday on a Thursday afternoon.

Now, Paul had never played the conquering dog until now. He had so far been the victim of the s.e.x, and in his own small way had suffered scorn and beguilement enough. What with the luncheon and the sticky champagne, he began to feel mighty and vainglorious, and he took the airs which he supposed to be appropriate to the situation. He praised the lady, therefore, with a humorous appreciation of the manner in which she accepted flatteries which were pa.s.sed, so to say, upon a shovel, and he tasted with a gratified palate his own fine flavour as a man of the world.

That was the silly beginning of it, and the lonely man, recalling it all as if he had been back in the midst of it again, asked himself with that tired scorn of his own career and nature which had become a part of him, if any creature with as much brain as earwax had ever before been so easily beckoned to the devil.

'Millions, I suppose,' he said half aloud, in answer to his own mental query--'millions.'

And so went on with his dream.

Of the variety of fools there is literally no end, but for the king of fool who is predestined to come a cropper in the field of life, and to spill other people in his own downfall, there is no rival for the Quixote. The man who is over-anxious to pay in the market of morals is the man who goes bankrupt You may be a good deal of a scoundrel and retain your own esteem and that of the world, but you must not palter with your own offences. The world resents a half-virtue, and the world is right It is the half-virtue which breeds hypocrisy and self-deception, and these are the most despicable of human vices.

Courage is at the root of manhood, and even the courage which dares to do wrong and have done with it is better than the cowardice which patches vice with virtue until it can no longer discern the colour of either.

Here, for instance, began a liaison of the vulgarest and simplest kind, for which a man of any wisdom would have repented in due course whilst he would have compounded with it, and would have parted from it, and, whilst counting it amongst the sins and follies of his youth, would have left it behind him.

Paul and the girl parted innocently that night, but made an appointment to meet again on the morrow. He had no stomach for the encounter, but he would not break his word, and so, for the sake of a punctilio, he wrecked himself. He and Annette went to the Mabille together, and in his character of man of the world he made love to her with as fine a relish as if he had sat down to bread-and-water after dinner; then, in order not to be quite a blackguard, he met her again, and, to save himself from his own conscience, again, and at last the compound of vanity, weakness, and virtue landed him with her in London, where they set up housekeeping together.

For a time this was great, with its tw.a.n.g of Rue Monsieur le Prince and Murger and the old Bohemia, and Paul was convinced that he had done a n.o.ble thing in not deserting the little woman. In a flaccid sort of a way she seemed to love him, and in that respect, since his own mind was by no means urgent, he was satisfied. He was faithful to the tie, and flaunted his own magnanimity.

But his true mistress was his work, and this he loved with an increasing ardour. How devotedly he laboured he never knew until long afterwards, when what had once been a pa.s.sion of delight and a necessity of nature degenerated into a stale drudgery practised for the sake of mere money.

But, oh! the sweetness of brain-toil whilst the heart was fresh and whilst it still seemed worth while to preach some kind of gospel to mankind! To pace the streets and read the faces of people as they went by, to weave a thousand stories in a day around the destinies of strangers, to sit far into the night fed with rich and glowing fancies, to express them with conscious power, to work with living vigour for the love of work alone!

These were rich days, and if the domestic intercourse were poverty-stricken there was the bachelor intercourse at the clubs to make up for it, and even amongst his married friends Annette was an ignorable quant.i.ty unless he took to waving her like a flag of virtue.

There was Fortescue, a man of medium fame, but of real genius, whose delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all about Paul's eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool he was, he had grown to an astonis.h.i.+ng charm of manner. The lonely man smoking his idle pipe at his tent door in the canon looked back at him across such a distance of time and fate that his inspection of the youth was almost impersonal. The lad pa.s.sed for a piece of nave nature, and not altogether unjustly. He was eager and ardent, and absurdly tender-hearted. He loved all his friends, and he had a crowd of them.

'Because,' as Balzac says, 'he had known a time when a sou'sworth of fried potatoes would have been a luxury,' he threw about his money with a lordly liberality. A simple ballad, if sung with any approach to art, would bring tears into his eyes. He had all the virtues which came easy to him, and, leaving Annette out of question for the moment, he was without vices. He had rubbed against the world long enough to have grown polished. n.o.body questioned his origin or upbringing. His talk was brilliant, if it bore no searching a.n.a.lysis, and he had his circle of listeners wherever he went. He was a born raconteur, and had proved himself in that particular, and his increasing acquaintance with the stage and the professors of its trifling art helped him in this direction.

Fortescue's house was his one haunt apart from the clubs, the one civilized and civilizing home he knew with intimacy, and one night there over a cigarette and a whisky-and-soda he turned his jejune philosophy of life upon his host.

'I confess,' he said, 'that I have no great opinion of the marriage tie. Let there be a loyal a.s.sociation between man and woman, let each recognise the responsibilities which belong to it, and where's the fear of any priestly ban or the need of any priestly blessing?'

'My dear Armstrong,' said Fortescue, who was very much his senior, and a man of a rather starched propriety by nature, 'I would beg you, if you permit me, to avoid that theme. The marriage tie to me means a full half of the whole sanct.i.ty of life. To my mind, the man who derides it is, so far as his derision carries him, an a.s.s.'

'Oh,' cried Paul, laughing, 'I like a straight hitter.'

Fortescue s.h.i.+fted the theme with some adroitness, but the talk grew stiff and formal. The younger man felt the disapproval of the elder, and was ill at ease under it. He rather s.h.i.+ed at the house from that time forward, and, since an awkwardness of that kind grows easily and rapidly, his visits dwindled into rarity, until they ceased by automatic process.

It was years before he found a home again.

'Along with many n.o.ble and admirable qualities the English people have one defect, which is recognised in the satires of every neighbouring nation, but is never acknowledged by themselves.' Thus Paul Armstrong at his tent door, with the voice of the torrent to emphasize the waste silence of his dwelling-place, and the fog to clear his mental vision by shutting out from his perception all extraneous things; not thinking in these words, or thinking in words at all, but dunking thus: 'Propriety is a British legend and a British lie.'

He was back in the old chambers, which were in one of the smaller Inns of Court, and was looking at the stale mirth and madness of the bygone days. Eight out of ten of the men he remembered had settled down, and two of the ten, to make an average, had gone to the devil The two were mainly of the better sort--fellows who stuck to an absurd responsibility, and let it ruin them. The eight were the good citizens who had had the wit to cut responsibility adrift. That was life as he knew it, as the boys of his day who studied divinity or medicine, or who read for the Bar, or who worked in painting or at journalism or letters, all knew it. Clerics, lawyers, painters, authors, men on 'Change, all married and settled and respected, admirable citizens by the dozen and the score, and where are Lorna, and Clara, and Kate, and Caroline, and f.a.n.n.y? Heaven knows--possibly. The knack of prosperity, surely, is to bury your indiscretions.

Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter to have loaded life with such a burden, not to have had the courage of a hundred others, and to have left the poor responsibility to sink or swim, to have compounded between vice or virtue instead of making a clean bargain with one or the other like the rest of the world, to have permitted a foolish pity to look like a resolute manhood to his eyes, to have throttled his own soul for a scruple!

He stages his own soul, and this is what he sees and hears and knows.

Annette is ailing, is seriously ill indeed, and he has taken her into the country. He has rented a cottage, in the front of which there is a great level common reaching for a mile or two on either side, and covered with golden gorse. In front of the cottage and across the common is a coppice, all browns and purples and yellows and siennas, and beyond that, as seen from the upper windows of the cottage, the land fades into misty autumnal blues, to join a whitened horizon which seems to shun the meeting, until for very weariness it can postpone it no longer--a bell-tent of sky, as it were, with a lifted edge, and beyond the skirts of the nearer sky another. Annette is lying in bed, and Paul is looking out of the window; he will see the landscape in that way always. He has known it under broad summer suns.h.i.+ne, in springtide freshness, under winter snow, obscured in sheeting rain, in moonlight, starlight, dawn, sunset; but whenever his thoughts go backwards to the place he is looking out of the window on that particular aspect of the scene, and Annette is behind him, propped in her bed with pillows.

'Paul!' He turns.

'Come to me a moment. Sit down beside me. Take my hand'

He lays down the empty pipe he has been twirling in his fingers, and obeys her.

'Paul!'

'Yes, dear.'