Despair's Last Journey Part 64

'I mean that, and more than that,' said Ralston. 'Turn your next play on this theme; turn your next book on it. Never mind the odium of seeming to fight a selfish battle; you're past that now. Your story is that the man mires his feet in the ordinary manner, that he makes a fool of himself in the usual fas.h.i.+on; that the saving woman comes to him pure and clean, and does her healthful, beautiful work for him at such a cost as you know of. Whether her life is tragedy modified or tragedy unalloyed rests with the story-teller; but you're there to champion that innocence.'

'You recoiled from a little tube of ma.n.u.script once,' said Paul, 'as if it had held a poisonous explosive. Do you remember? Ralston laughed and nodded. 'If you're bolder now, I'll show you something.'

'I am bolder now,' said Ralston; and Paul, leaving him for a moment, raced upstairs, and, having made a brief search in his study, returned with a big sheaf of type-written matter in his hand.

'There is my case,' he said. 'Old Darco calls it madness to challenge such a truth in such a fas.h.i.+on. Weldon will take the piece and play it.

He will produce it anonymously by preference, but as I choose. I choose to have my fling at the world, and to take it without disguise. Tell me when you have read it.'

'I am your man,' cried Ralston, catching at the paper.

'I don't know whether I have done well or ill in doing it,' said Paul. 'I suppose there never was a writer who didn't hawk the secret of his soul about the streets--if he had a secret and a soul.'

'More of this hereafter,' Ralston said, and bore away the ma.n.u.script that night.

There had been little need to spur Paul to courage on this matter. The wiser thing might have been to counsel him to moderation. He had set his back to his corner already.

But just hereabouts a small thing happened which had, as small things will, an undue influence upon his mind. There was loose on Fleet Street at this time an extraordinary devil of a man of genius whose appropriate real name was Wild-blood.

He had dropped that too characteristic patronymic, and had renamed himself, with a touch of mocking cynicism which only those who knew him understood, Wilder. What scholars.h.i.+p was possible for six- or seven-and-twenty was his. That he was more or less crazed with much learning and more drink was generally understood of him. Men of small originality and some memory said of Wilder that he could knock a slang song into Greek iambics in five minutes. His most fervent admirers were, perhaps, poor judges of Greek iambics. Fleet Street may at one time have been familiar with that kind of thing, but is not nowadays. But Wilder's reputation soared on higher voices than those of the journalistic crowd, and he was, beyond dispute, a person of genius--one of those odd distorted bundles of broken nerve who help to establish the theory that fine thinking, a n.o.ble vocabulary, deep scholars.h.i.+p, and foolish living are neighbours and hard to separate.

With this very queer fish Paul had established a certain intimacy. The man, as a matter of course, was periodically hard up, and he had come to the stage when it was here five s.h.i.+llings and there half a crown as a charge for the charm of his society with the most casual of acquaintances. He made his breakfast on a salt-spoonful of cayenne and a gla.s.s of brandy, and he pa.s.sed from intellectual G.o.dhood to a hiccuping imbecility in a breath. At from four to five in the afternoon he carried his lofty head and a prematurely pimpled countenance into some unwatched obscurity. He habitually emerged from this hiding-place within an hour of midnight, and thence his flight was an owl's.

The social chill which surrounded Paul's household had grown arctic, and Madge, Mrs. Hampton, and Phyllis had all been bundled away to Ostend, in a sunken ident.i.ty. The house in which the cause of disturbance had so long been unreasonably happy was closed. The servants had been dismissed, and a commissionaire and his wife lived in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Paul had taken lodgings at a Fleet Street hostelry, and thither in the dead of night came Wilder and other night-birds, to the much disturbance of the porter at the grille. It chanced one night that Wilder came with a declaration that he had found his soul's salvation through beer. His stream of life should flow, so he declared, through Burton-on-Trent. He was done with noxious liquids, and proposed to bathe his spirit clear in the vats of Ba.s.s and Allsopp. Wilder was-not outside the sphere of reformation, and Guinness would share with the others the credit of his uprising. He drank a tankard or two of each and either as an evidence of good faith, and he left an hour after midnight, more sober than Paul had ever known him at such a time. He had talked a heap of brilliant sense and nonsense, and had borrowed two half crowns. Paul went to bed almost regretting the loss of even this mad companions.h.i.+p, and tossed, half-dozing, on a s.h.i.+fting sea of troubles. Suddenly, when he had lost all consciousness of time and place, there came a thundering summons at his door, and in answer to his startled call there came in a huge policeman in a greatcoat and a helmet, and behind him a quaking waiter with a candle in a gla.s.s funnel. The officer appealed to a piece of paper he carried in his hand.

'Paul Armstrong,' he read, with a brogue as wide as the ocean. 'Is that you?'

'That is my name,' said Paul.

'Then ye're wanted,' said the official.

'Wanted? Where?'

'At Bow Street,'the official answered stolidly.

Paul rolled round to consult his watch. It indicated three o'clock within a minute or so.

'What on earth am I wanted at Bow Street for?' he asked in great bewilderment.

'Party of the name of Wilder,' said the officer, referring once more to his paper. 'Says you're his first cousin, and that you'll bail him out.'

'Wilder? First cousin?' His mind was fogged with broken sleep. 'Oh, that fellow! What has he been doing?'

The man in uniform consulted his paper again, and read out:

'Dhrunk and dishortherly.'

'And he had the cheek to send you here and to say that I'm his first cousin?'

'Yes, sorr.'

'Well,' said Paul, with a brief laugh, 'I don't know that I've anything better to do. Wait downstairs whilst I dress, and have a cab ready if you can find one. Give the officer a drink, waiter.'

In a weary fas.h.i.+on he was tickled by this incident; and when he had made a hasty toilette he descended, and was driven to Bow Street, where, after a spell of waiting, he was introduced to his 'first cousin' in a corridor.

'What's all this, Wilder?'he asked.

'It's this, me man,' said Wilder. 'I took a fancy to declaim a favourite little bit of Euripides in Endell Street, and a uniformed a.s.s came along and ran me in. And being penniless as I am----'

'Penniless!' said Paul 'You had five s.h.i.+llings to my certain knowledge.'

'Oh, I had,' said Wilder, 'but I met some poor devil that was harder up than I am--at least, he said so--and I bestowed it on him with my blessing.'

'We know your name, Mr. Armstrong,' said the officer who had the man of genius in his charge, 'and if you'll be surety that the gentleman will be here at ten o'clock this morning, he can go.'

'You want my word for that only?'

'That will be enough, sir.'

'Very well; he shall be here.'

'He shall be here,' said Wilder, 'and the idiot who brought him here shall have a lesson.'

'You take my tip, sir,' said the officer. 'You was pretty fairly full, and you was very noisy, and you cracked on pretty awful. Talk of eloquence,' said the officer, interrupting himself to turn to Paul.

'I've heard a thing or two in my time--it comes here, you know, sir, in the way of business--but I've never met anybody as could hold a candle to this gentleman.'

Wilder smiled, and pulled up a dirty apology for a collar with an air of self-applause.

'But what I want to advise is this, sir,' said the officer genially: 'Say nothing, and it's five bob and costs, and there's an end of it; make a song about it, and it's forty s.h.i.+llings or a month, and it gets into all the papers. For this is a shop, sir, where the more you say the more you pay. And that's the truth about justice in a general way throughout the land, and so you'll find, sir, if you'll take the trouble to look into it. The more you say the more you pay. That's the fruit of thirty years' experience, sir, and you'll find it pretty sound Say nothing, and a little thing blows over. Make a talk about it, and it lasts, as you might say, for ever. The more you say, the more you pay.'

Paul was not greatly inclined to idle superst.i.tion as a general thing, but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by force of repet.i.tion. There was no reason under heaven why he should have attended the insolent call of Mr. Wilder, and he had not even been conscious of a kindly impulse towards the man. There was a sort of providential finger laid upon his own sense here. Of course, he denied the belief, but it was active with him none the less. It was so active that he resigned all the preparations he had contemplated for his own defence, and absented himself from London.

During his absence the case of Armstrong against Armstrong was heard in the Divorce Court. A Boanerges of a Queen's Counsel was entrusted with Annette's side of it. He made a speech, and that speech was reported in a hundred journals. Had it been true, the unlucky Paul would have been a comrade for the devil, but there was no defence, and it pa.s.sed as true.

Paul read the speech, and came tearing back express to London in a tumult of rage and resentment. He was a day behind the fair, and could do nothing. The world seemed to ring of him, and he had abandoned all means of redress. He was publicly shunned, and shunned for ever.

So fruitful may be the smallest accident of life that this chance episode with the drunken Wilder and the foolish resolve to which it led seemed to have darkened Paul's skies for good and all. He might have beaten Boanerges on every point save one, and have come out of the fight with but one wound in place of a hundred, and that very far from fatal Now he felt stabbed to death, and seemed to bleed at every pore.

The manager who was under contract with him to produce the comedy the first ma.n.u.script of which he had placed in Ralston's hands, called to see him, and advised strongly against production--at all events, for the present The suffering fool was furious, and would listen to no reason.

'I put three thousand pounds behind it,' he cried. 'I give you that as a guarantee. The play is a good play, and the public will listen to it, slander or no slander.'

Playgoers remember the first nightof 'Myra'--the yells, howls, whistles, cat-calls which made the whole three acts a pantomime in dumb show. The moral tiger was awake.

The play ran in spite of all and everything, and ran at the author's cost It came to a sudden end in the middle of a week, when the author's last cheque was returned with an official 'N. S.' marked upon it The lately prosperous dramatist was ruined.

Thus the man and his memories are growing nearer and nearer to each other, and very soon they must meet. There is yet but a year to traverse before the Dreamer and the Dream stand face to lace with actual Fact and Time. It is a year of frustrated hope and barren effort, of surrenders and shames. It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong's latest expression of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume was gathered out of the desert of the writer's soul. It served one purpose, since it provided Madge with at least a staff of silver with which to beat the wolf from the door. The wild beast bayed and threatened, but it never actually crossed the threshold. The discredited man kept himself alive by sc.r.a.ps of anonymous journalism, until a half-chance suggestion of fortune bore him away to the United States as a member of a theatrical company of no great merit, which clung together through desperately failing fortunes for a month or two, and then, dissolving, left him stranded.

He floated, a pseudonymous unit, acting, writing, lecturing. Somehow or other the weekly two or three pounds reached Madge, and the wolf still howled outside her door and found no entrance.