Despair's Last Journey Part 5

'All right,' the girl responded. 'You'll find 'em in the garden. They'll be rare and proud to see you.'

Paul, somewhat shamefaced, took the familiar way into the garden, and stood rooted. A small striped tent of pink and white had been set up on the unshaven gra.s.s-plot, and five or six girls, all in white dresses, were seated near it round a tea-table. One, who had black hair and dark eyes, wore a crimson sash, and the rest had blue sashes with prodigious bows. Paul knew them all with one exception, but after the first glance he had eyes for the exception only. She was a lackadaisical young person of eighteen, with pale sandy ringlets and a cold-boiled-veal complexion; but he thought her a creature of another sphere, and his heart s.h.i.+vered with a strange, delicious sense of wors.h.i.+p. He stood and stared, and his inward thoughts were poorly translated by his aspect, as happens with most people How long the dream held him he did not know, but the Vision turned, and he met the young person's eye.

'Who is that dirty boy? asked the Vision. 'I suppose he wants to speak to you, Zillah.'

Zillah, who was the elder of the two orphan girls, turned, and blushed till she looked the colour of her sash. But she rose from her seat and came to Paul and whispered to him:

'You mustn't come here to-day, Paul We've got company. And goodness gracious, child, how untidy you are to be sure!'

Then shame fell like an avalanche, and Paul went altogether dizzy and silly under the shock of it How he got home he never knew, but an hour later he was in the back-kitchen, standing on a mat in his stocking-feet, with his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves turned up to his elbows, and was polis.h.i.+ng his boots until the leather grew hot beneath the brush. He washed himself in a frenzy of remorse and resolve, and scoured his hands with yellow soap, silver sand, and a stubbly scrubbing-brush until they tingled. Then he fell upon the family stock of hair-oil, which was kept in a medicine-bottle in the kitchen cupboard, and, except on Sundays, was held sacred to the girls. Then he put on a clean collar (which was a daring and outrageous defiance of authority, which allowed but two a week), and prepared to face consequences. The family brush and comb were kept in a small bag which hung on a nail beside the scratched and defaced old family looking-gla.s.s, and Paul was artistically at work upon his hair when his mother entered the kitchen. The excellent woman sat down to laugh, and Armstrong came in with his customary vague air of patient thinking.

'William,' said Mrs. Armstrong, 'look at our Paul. Niver tell me the hage of merricles is past Why, I believe he's fell in love!'

It was the perpetual astonishment of Paul's life that his mother always knew and understood the things he would not have her know and understand. Even now, at his tent-door, seeing all these dead hours so clearly that he forgot his present existence altogether, he thought of her half-malicious, wholly-humorous intuition with wonder. Why had she never understood the things he would have given so much to have her understand?

Armstrong smiled with a melancholy, tired sweetness.

'Larn to be tidy, lad,' he said. 'I like a self-respecting fellow that honours his own person.'

'M'm,' said Mrs. Armstrong. 'You've got a five days' beard on, William.'

He looked at her, stroking his own bristly chin.

'Ay,' he said. 'This'll be Thursday. Paul, just be getting me my razor and the brush and soap-box, there's a good lad.'

Paul obeyed, and then betook himself to the timber-grove, where he sat rapt into meditations on the Vision. He had read whatever came within his reach, good, bad, or indifferent, and his conscious thoughts were always a patchwork of phrases. When he was put to mind the shop he read the penny weeklies. He was fresh from one of the works of J. F. Smith, the un-remembered prose laureate of the _London Journal_, who would have been reckoned a giant of invention if he had lived in these days, and a sentence from his latest chapter got into Paul's head and went round and round: 'There lay the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl.' In Mr.

Smith's moving page the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl was dying, and Paul did not as yet know enough of the story-teller's craft of that day to be sure that she would recover in the next chapter. She mixed herself with the lady of the sandy ringlets who had described him as a dirty boy, and the pathos of the situation lent an added anguish to his thoughts. How beautiful was the lady of the ringlets, how ethereal in aspect, how far removed, how wors.h.i.+pful, how adorable! How refined was her voice, how elegant her accent! She had spoken of him as a b'y, but that was a local fas.h.i.+on, and Paul knew no better. She was far and far away--a being of the skies, at once an aristocrat and an angel. He began to make verses about her, of course--ghastly, fustian stuff, at the recollection of which the Solitary shuddered, and then laughed. But from that day forward Paul had spasmodic rages of personal cleanliness and adornment.

There was a jar of goose-oil always kept on the top of the baking-oven in the back-kitchen, and, learning that goose-oil was an unfailing specific for the growth of whiskers and moustache, he began to rub his lip and cheeks with this unguent Many a time when he was left alone he lit a candle, and getting his face between it and the mirror, tried to trace on the outline a fringe of hair. He found an occasional momentary satisfaction in burned cork, but the joy was futile, and impermanent.

He met the Vision in the street one day when he was carrying a parcel, and the shame of his menial employment, and the sense of the coa.r.s.eness of his clothes made him long for the earth to open. The fact that the young person did not know him, or look at him, or think about him, made no difference. The young head was filled with absurd dreams. Sometimes he was a prince in disguise. He was being bred up to know nothing of his princedom, so that he might be splendidly and properly astonished when the revelation came. At other times he recognised his lowly origin, and went away into the boy's Somewhere--a n.o.ble country full of beneficent chances--and came back great and glorious, in gloves and patent-leather boots, and a hat and moustache, and conquered the Vision and married her. At other times he died, with his great heart unspoken, and was buried in the parish churchyard.

But whilst he was full of all manner of ambitions and yearnings, and dreams which n.o.body else in the wide world dreamed about, a family conclave was held to decide what Paul should be. One Simmons, a dapper, perky draper in the High Street, wanted a shop-boy, and Mrs. Armstrong was for asking the place for Paul There was not a grain of ambition in the household, and the melancholy fact was that there was no money to bind Paul apprentice anywhere. But Paul would have none of the draper.

He was cuffed in corners by the maternal hand, but he held his own.

He would run away, he declared, he would drown himself, he would do anything rather than submit to that. So finally he was turned into the ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean. He wore a brown-paper ap.r.o.n tied about his waist with string, and lived so obscured in printer's ink, for which he seemed to have a natural affinity, that he hardly looked like a white boy at all.

He was still a liar, but he told his lies on paper now, and hid them. He told them in prose and verse--prose which was measled with 'Oh's,' and 'Alas's,' and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had deserved his discovery.

There was one idle and worthless journeyman in the ramshackle office, and one only. He kept the place like a pigsty, and the floor was littered with boards on which unlocked formes of type fell about into confusion. Paul could pick his way through these blindfold, and many and many a night in the dark he raged out his verses, marching to and fro with the four big dim windows staring dully at him, wall-eyed with countless paper patches, seen as darker blots on the darkness.

One night he was there in hiding. He had played truant from Sunday-school and chapel, and had been all day in the fields, hungry, but happy beyond all dreaming. And, oh! the Sundays! the dreary, b.e.s.t.i.a.l days, with Sunday-school at half-past nine and chapel at eleven, and Sunday-school at half-past two and chapel at half-past six and family prayers at nine, and bed at half-past nine, and books forbidden, and speech a crime, and whistling a felony. Paul had broken loose, and knew not what to look for, and cared little for the hour. For his head was full of verses, and his heart was full of the summer day, and for the first time in his life he had gone to Nature, and forgotten his thrice-thirty-times copied emotions, and had dared to speak in his own voice. The lines he had made that day were unutterably sacred and sweet to him. The dreaming Solitary, staring down the gorge, heard the boy's awestruck whisper, and, forgetting all the rest of the verses, remembered this one only:

'Why, all is happy! Not a worm that crawls, Or gra.s.shopper that chirps about the gra.s.s, Or beetle basking on the sunny walls, Or mail-clad fly that skims the face of gla.s.s The river wears in summer;--not a bird That sings the tranquil glory of the fields, Or single sight is seen or sound is heard, But some new pleasure to my full soul yields!'

Paul, standing there in the darkness, whispered this many times as if struck with awe by it, and indeed the boy wondered, and thought it an inspiration.

'That is poetry,' said Paul 'I am a poet--a poet--a poet!'

He fell on his knees, with his face on his hands in the open quoin drawer, feeling as if he had uttered a blasphemy. How long he was there he never knew, but he was disturbed by the grating of a door below, and his father's voice called up the stairs:

'Paul! Where are ye?'

'Here, father,' Paul answered

A sob met his voice half-way, and Armstrong came stumbling up the stairs.

'What's the matter, lad?' he asked, in a tone between concern and impatience.

'Nothing,' said Paul.

'Why is't ye're here alaun?' his father demanded 'And whaur have ye been the livelong day? And what are ye cryin' for?

'Nothing,' said Paul again.

'Ye're not such a fule,' said Armstrong, 'as to be cryin' an' hidin' for naething, an' I'm not such a fule as to believe it.'

He paused, but Paul made no reply. The old man struck a lucifer match and lit the gas. The boy stood blinking in the light, his face stained with tears, his eyelids red and a little swollen. To the father's eye he looked sullen and defiant Of course he was neither, but he was entirely hopeless of being understood, and therefore helpless to explain.

'Noo, Paul,' said Armstrong, with a severity which he felt to be justified, 'I'm goin' to the bottom o' this business. Ye've absented yourself the haul day from the House o' G.o.d. Ye've not been seen since morning's light, and it's nigh-hand on midnight Whaur _have_ ye been?

Answer me that at once, sir.'

'In the h.o.a.rstone Fields,' said Paul.

'And wha's been with ye, helping ye to desecrate G.o.d's day?'

'n.o.body, father. I've been by myself all the while.'

'And what's been your work, my lad?' There was silence, and the silence began to have a threat in it 'I'm goin' to the bottom o' this affeer, Paul,' said the father. He meant that honestly, but he was not taking the right way. 'I'm not to be put off by ony lies or inventions. Ye've been alaun in the h.o.a.rstone Fields all day? What took ye there? And hoo have ye pa.s.sed the time? I'll know!' he added, after another long pause.

Perhaps there was n.o.body in the world who stood less chance of knowing, but how should Armstrong have guessed that? He was a just man, and as kind-hearted a father as might have been found within a hundred miles.

If he could have known the truth, he would not only have been disarmed, but proud and glad. But Paul at this time had a holy terror of him. It grew to a close and reverent affection later on, and there was such a confidence between this pair as is not often found. But now? Paul would have suffered anything rather than tell the truth. It was not that he would not. He could not His tongue was fettered.

'Noo, Paul,' said Armstrong. 'Let's have a luik at this. Ye're not supposin' in your inmost mind that I'm in the least small degree likely to believe the yarn ye've tauld me. Ye've been in the lonely fields all day, doing naething and speaking to naebody. And for that ye've stayed away from your meals, an' noo ye're in hiding like a creminal? It hasn't an air o' pro-babeelity, Paul; it has _no_ air o' pro-babeelity. You see that?

Paul saw it--quite as clearly as his father. But how was it to be explained? Could Paul say, 'My good sir, I am a boy of genius. I have been filled with the Divine afflatus, and have been driven into solitude by my own thoughts. I have been so held by dreams of beauty that I have forgotten everything'? Could Paul offer that intolerable cheeky boast?

And yet to offer to explain was to do that, and nothing less than that.

'Vary well,' said Armstrong. 'Ye'll go to your bed, and I'd advise ye to thenk the matter over. I'll gev ye till morning. But I'll have the truth, or I'll know the reason why.'

The gas went out under Armstrong's thumb and finger on the tap, and in the sudden darkness the gray, patient, reproachful face still burned in the boy's eyes.

'Father!' said Paul, and stretching out both hands, he caught hold of him by the sleeve.

'Well!' answered Armstrong sternly.

He thought it his duty to be stern, but the tone killed the rising impulse of courage in Paul's heart He could have stammered a hint of the truth then, and the darkness would have been friendly to him. A caress, a hand on head or shoulder, would have done the business, but caresses were not in fas.h.i.+on in the Armstrong household. There was another silence, and Armstrong said:

'I gev ye till morning, and then Paul, my lad, ye'll have yourself to thank for what may happen. I'll be at the bottom o' this matter, or I'll know the reason why. I'm no friend to the rod, but I'll not stand by open-eyed an' see you walkin' straight to the deevil without an effort to turn ye. An' I'll have naething less than a full confession. Ye may luik for a flogging if I don't get it, and a daily flogging till I do.