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Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray · English · Gutenberg #22276 · 844,182 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Despair's Last Journey

Author: David Christie Murray


        
Release date: August 8, 2007 [eBook #22276]
                Most recently updated: September 16, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22276

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DESPAIR'S LAST JOURNEY ***




Produced by David Widger





DESPAIR’S LAST JOURNEY

By David Christie Murray



1901




INTRODUCTION--HOW AND WHERE THE STORY OF DESPAIR’S LAST JOURNEY WAS TOLD





I

A solitary passenger alighted from the train, and many people looked
curiously after him. The mulatto porter handed to the platform a
well-battered portmanteau, which was plastered thickly over with
luggage-labels and the advertising tickets of hotels in every quarter of
the globe. A great canvas bag followed, ornamented in like fashion. Then
from the baggage-van an invisible person tumbled, a canvas bale.
The coffee-coloured mulatto held out a grayish-white palm for the
quarter-dollar the passenger was ready to drop into it, and stepped
back to the platform of the car. The engine bell tolled slowly, as if it
sounded a knell, and the train wound away. The curve of the line carried
it out of sight in less than a minute, but in the clear mountain air the
quickened ringing of the bell, the pant of the engine, and the roll of
the wheels were audible for a long time. Then the engine, with a final
wail of good-bye, plunged into the tunnel of a distant snow-shed, and
the whole region seemed as quiet as a grave.

The little weatherboard railside station was void of life, and there
was not a soul in sight. The passenger had given up the ticket for his
sleeping-berth an hour before, and had announced his intention to stop
over at this lonely place. An altercation with the conductor as to the
possibility of releasing the canvas bale from the baggage-van before it
arrived at its expressed destination at Vancouver had reached the ears
of other travellers who were on duty in the observation car, painfully
conscious of the scenery and the obligations it imposed. To experience
some ecstasy, more or less, was imperative, and it was weary work for
most of them. They stuck to it manfully and woman-fully, with abysmal
furtive yawns; but the skirmish between the conductor and their
fellow-passenger came as a sort of godsend, and when the transfer of
a dollar bill, incredibly dirty and greasy and tattered, had brought
warfare to a close, they still had the voluntary exile to stare at. He
was a welcome change from scenery, and they stared hard.

He was a city man to look at, and had the garb of cities--tall silk hat,
well worn, but well brushed; frock-coat in similar condition; dark-gray
trousers, a little trodden at the heels; patent-leather boots; high
collar; silken scarf. Everything he wore was slightly shabby, except his
linen; but a millionaire who was disposed to be careless about his dress
might have gone so attired. People had a habit of looking twice at this
passenger, for he bore an air of being somebody; but the universal stare
which fastened on him as the train steamed away was the result of his
intent to deliver himself (at evident caprice) at a place so lonely, and
so curiously out of accord with his own aspect. What was a clean-shaven
man of cities, with silk hat, and frock-coat, and patent leathers, doing
at Beaver Tail, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains? Why had he suddenly
decided to stay there, of all places in the world? And why had he made
up his mind without having so much as seen the place? These questions
kept the occupants of the observation car in better talk than scenery
long after the lonely passenger had landed, and long after the last wail
of the engine had sounded in his ears.

If he had come here in search of landscape splendours, he might have
had his fill at once. The railside shanty stood at a height of some four
thousand feet above sea-level, but the mountains heaved vast shoulders
and white heads about him.

Below, in the tremendous gorge, a torrent ran recklessly, tearing at its
rocky confines with raging hands, and crying out in many voices like a
multitude bent on some deed of vengeance--hurrying, delaying, turning
on itself, maddening itself. Its bellowing seemed a part of universal
silence. Silence brooded here, alone, with those wild voices for an
emphasis.

Right and left the gorge swept out into dreadful magnificences of height
and depth, and glow and shadow. Cliffs of black basalt, scarred and
riven by the accidents of thousands of years, frowned like eyeless giant
faces. One height, with a supernal leap, had risen from the highest,
and stood poised a mile aloft, as if it were a feat to stand so for
a second, with a craggy head cut out of the sheet of blue. Mountain
torrents, too far away to bring the merest murmur to the ear, spun and
plaited their quivering ropes of silver wire. The shadows in the clefts
of near hills were like purple wine in a glass. Above and beyond they
were bloomed like an ungathered plum. The giant firs looked like orderly
pin-rows of decreasing size for half a mile along the climbing heights.
Before they reached the snow-line they seemed as smooth as the smallest
moss that grows.

The passenger regarded none of these things, but stared thoughtfully
at the platform at his feet. He drew a cigarette from amongst a loose
handful in a waistcoat pocket, struck a lucifer match upon his thigh,
and smoked absently for a minute or so. Then he took the portmanteau
in one hand and the brown bag in the other, and, leaving the railway
platform, crossed the single line, and made a plunging, careless
scramble through a narrow belt of undergrowth. In a minute or less he
came upon a moss-grown way cut through the wood along the side of the
mountain--the old Cariboo Track men used before the days of the railway.
Weighted as he was, he found it warm work here, shut in from the cool
breezes of the mountains and yet exposed to the rays of the mid-day sun.
He wrestled along, however, for some quarter of a mile, and, reaching
a small wooden bridge which crossed a runnel of clear water, set his
burden down and looked about him, mopping his brow with a handkerchief.

‘This will do, I fancy,’ he said aloud, and then began to undress.

He stripped to socks, drawers, and vest before opening the brown bag,
from which he took an old black felt hat, a shirt of gray patternless
flannel, coat and trousers of gray tweed, a belt of leather, and a
pair of mountain boots. Having attired himself in these things, he lit
another cigarette, and smoked broodingly until it was finished. Then he
walked back to the railside shanty, found the canvas bale, and slowly
and with great exertion lugged it down the slope and along the trail. He
panted and perspired at this task; for though he was sturdily set, and
large of limb and stature, he was obviously unused to that kind of work,
and by the time it was over he was fain to throw himself upon the
moss and rest for a full half-hour. Being rested, he rolled over, and,
stretching out a hand towards the discarded frock-coat, drew from its
inner pocket a ball of Canadian and American notes, crushed and tangled
together like papers of no value. He smoothed them out, flattening them
upon his knee one by one, and, having counted them over, rolled them up
tidily, and thrust them to the bottom of the brown bag. Next, he began
to untie the cords which fastened the canvas bale, muttering ‘Damn the
thing!’ at intervals, as the knots refused to yield to his unskilful
handling. Finally, when the work was two-thirds done, he made search
for a pen-knife, and, having found it, severed the remaining knots, and
threw the cords away into the runnel.

‘That’s emblematic,’ he said. ‘Anything’s emblematic if you’re on the
look-out for emblems.’

The canvas bale, being unrolled, displayed a bundle of gray blankets;
a tent-pole, jointed like a fishing-rod, and in three pieces; an axe; a
leather gun-case; a small gridiron; a small frying-pan; a tin quart pot,
close-packed with loose cartridges; and a pair of folding trestles and
a folding board for the construction of a little table. The canvas in
which all these things had been packed afforded material for a tent,
and the Solitary, with a seeming custom and alertness which no man
would have argued from his aspect of an hour ago, began to set up his
abiding-place in the narrow natural clearing he had chosen.

In a while everything was tidy and ship-shape, and when he had made a
fire, and had constructed a tripod of branches from which to hang the
quart pot, newly filled with water from the sparkling runnel near at
hand, the lonely man sat down and smoked again, letting his eyes rove
here and there, and seeming to scan the scene before him with a dreamy
interest. The pot boiled over, and the hissing of the wet embers awoke
him from his contemplations. The brown portmanteau, being opened, proved
to be filled with packets of provisions of various kinds. He made tea,
broke into a tin of sardines and a packet of hard biscuits, and then sat
munching and sipping, with his feet stretched wide apart, and his back
against a tree--a picture of unthinking idleness.

A rustle near at hand awoke attention, and he rolled his head lazily
on one shoulder. The rustle drew nearer yet, and round the bend of the
trail came a man in moleskin trousers, a gray shirt, and a shapeless
felt hat, which seemed to have no colour but those lent to it by years
of sun and rain.

‘Hillo, mate!’ said the new man.

‘Hillo!’ said the camper-out.

‘Come here by the last train, I suppose?’

‘By the last train.’

‘Got a mate with you?’

‘No.’

The new-comer stared, and said ‘Hm!’ doubtfully. He looked from the
other man’s pale, clean-shaven face to his white hands.

‘New to this kind of game, ain’t you? he asked, at length.

‘For a year or two,’ the other answered.

‘I spotted the trail you made from the platform,’ said the new-comer. ‘I
seen something had been dragged away. I was bound to follow.’ There was
a part apology in his tone, as if he knew himself unwelcome. ‘You might
have been Indians,’ he added, ‘or any kind of riff-raff.’

‘Quite so,’ said the man of the camp. ‘Not many of ‘em hereabouts, I
suppose?’

‘One or two in a year, perhaps. And harmless, what there is of ‘em; but
as thievish as a set of jackdaws.’

‘You in charge of the station?’ asked the man of the camp, looking
composedly down the canon and sipping at his tea.

‘Yes, I’m in charge.’

‘Alone?’

‘Alone? Yes.’

‘Fond of being alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘So am I.’

‘All right.’ The man in the moleskin trousers and the shapeless hat
laughed, lounged indeterminately for a minute, rolled his quid in his
cheek, spat, wiped his bearded mouth with the back of a sunburnt hand,
and laughed again. ‘There’s room enough for both of us. Good-night,
mate.’

‘Good-night’

The keeper of the station strolled away with a backward glance, and the
man of the camp sipped his tea and stared straight before him. The sound
of the retreating footsteps had died away, when the Solitary raised a
powerful voice and cried, ‘Hillo!’

‘Hillo!’ came the answer, so muffled by the trees that it sounded as if
from a considerable distance. The two men walked towards each other and
met face to face. They had exchanged a greeting of good-night together,
but the sun had some two hours to travel before it set upon the plains.
Here it was out of sight already behind a monstrous hill, and although
the dome of the sky was one translucent quiet splendour, dusk lay in the
shadow of the mountain and the nearer shadows of the sombre pines.

‘I want to ask you,’ said the camper-out, ‘if you’re a teetotaler?’

‘No,’ said the station-keeper, ‘not in particular.’

‘Any whisky about here just now?’

‘A gallon,’ said the station-keeper; ‘new in yesterday. Like a tot?’

‘No.’

The word was snapped out savagely, and the station-keeper said ‘Oh!’
like an astonished echo.

‘It’s not at all unlikely that I may ask you for some,’ the camper-out
went on.

‘You’re sweetly welcome,’ said the other; but he was waved down by an
impatient gesture.

‘It’s not at all unlikely that I may come and beg for it. You’re not to
give me any. You understand?’ The station-keeper stared in the dusk, but
made no answer or sign of answer. ‘It’s not at all unlikely that I may
come and try to persuade you that this was a joke, and that I didn’t
mean it. I may offer you ten dollars for a drink--twenty, thirty, a
hundred. I’m not to have it. And if you allow yourself to be persuaded
to give me so much as one teaspoonful, no matter when or why, I’ll shoot
you next day, so sure as I am a living sinner.’

‘Oh, you will, will you?

‘I will, by God!’

‘That’s all right,’ said the station-keeper. ‘You’re a very pretty
neighbour, you are, _by_ George!’

‘I am,’ the other man assented--‘a very pretty neighbour.’

They parted there without another word. The man of the camp went back to
his fire, and the man of the station to his shanty. Away below the camp
the cañon was dense with shade, but far off up the valley one rod of
blinding sunlight struck the most distant peak, and made its snows
dazzle on the eye. The snow-peak shone for half an hour, and then
by imperceptible changes mellowed to a clear pale gold. Then by fine
gradations it grew to a pale rose, a deep rose, a cold gray, a solemn
purple. By this time the sky beyond the peak was a fiery glory. This
faded in turn, first in a gush of liquid amber, then in soft green, then
in blue, then violet. A lone star scintillated over the for crest, went
out, relit itself, went out again, twinkled for a time, and at last
shone steadfast with a diamond lustre.

As the darkness gathered, the fire, which fora while gleamed more
brightly, sank to a dull red, fading and brightening at the falling and
rising of the wind, but growing with every minute less responsive to
that soft influence.

The stars twinkled over the sky in myriads. The man of the camp threw
away the stump of his last cigarette, entered his tent, pulled off his
boots, rolled himself in a blanket, and lay down, facing the distant
peak and the one shining speck of a world above it.

‘You have made a hideous muddle of things.’ he said at last--‘a hideous
muddle. Nothing to fear, for everything has happened. Nothing to hope
for, for nothing can happen any more. Fortune wasted, friends wasted,
genius wasted, heart wasted, life wasted. Ah, well! I ought to sleep
to-night; I’m tired.’

The torrent roared in the heart of the primeval silence. The peak and
the star swam apart from each other in the solemn spaces of the sky.
Under the tent, which showed ghostly in the starlight, the man lay
silent for hours, but when next he spoke his voice was choked with
tears.

‘Not that,’ he said--‘not that! I can endure the rest, but no
repentance. To repent would drive me mad.’




II

Twice a day the mountains echoed to the clangour of the passing express
train, and at intervals less settled and orderly to the slower rumble of
luggage-trucks, laden or empty. The iron artery stretched from coast
to coast, and here and there touched and fed a ganglion. To one living
alone in those mountain fastnesses the roar and shriek and roll brought
insistent memories of the world. No inmate of the oubliette could have
been more lonely, and yet life was accessible, and even near.

A month went by. The solitary man of the camp fished and shot, ate,
drank, wandered, slept, and saw no face and heard no voice. He had run
out of supplies, and having pencilled a note to that effect, had slipped
it, with a five-dollar bill, under the door of the railside shanty. His
wants had been supplied--they extended to tea and biscuit only--and he
had taken care to be out of the way. Sometimes he heard a distant shot,
and knew that the man of the shanty was afoot in search of game. Within
a very little distance of the railway track sport could be had in
plenty.

Loneliness was broken at last. The rustle of boughs and the sound of
steps and voices reached the Solitary’s ears one day as he sat at his
favourite outlook staring down the gorge. At the first note of one of
the voices he started and changed colour. Nobody would have taken him
for a man of cities now, with his beard of a month’s growth, and his
tanned hands and face. The open-air colour was the stronger for being
new. With continued exposure it would fade from a red tan to a yellow.
Deep as it was now, it paled at the first-heard sound of the approaching
voice. The man threw a soul of anger and hatred into his ears and
listened.

‘About a month?’ the voice said ‘Yes. I heard of his leaving Winnipeg on
the twentieth. I went on to Vancouver and found he wasn’t there. Then I
got news of a fellow stopping off here, and, of course, it couldn’t
be anybody else. He’s my brother-in-law, and I’ve got a letter for him
which I’m pledged to put into his hands.’

‘Indeed, sir!’

The answering voice was the voice of the man of the shanty. It sounded
very rough and uncultured after the dandified drawl it followed, but it
sounded manlier for the contrast, too.

‘He’s a queer fellow,’ said the first speaker; ‘but this is the queerest
trick I’ve known him play. Tell me, is he--is he drinking at all?’

‘No,’ the other answered. ‘He’s not drinking. The first day he was here
he promised to put a load of shot into me if ever I gave him liquor.’

‘Did he really? That’s Paul all over. Oh, this the tent? Nobody here,
apparently. Well, I must wait. I have a book with me, and I must spend
four-and-twenty hours here in any case. Good-afternoon. Thank you.’

The listener was within twenty yards, but invisible beyond the crowded
undergrowth. The new arrival was perfectly attired, and handsome, in
a supercilious, brainless way. He wore a Norfolk Jacket and
knickerbockers, and his tanned boots were polished till they shone like
glass. For a while he poked about the tent and its neighbourhood, and,
having satisfied his curiosity, drew out a cigar-case from one pocket, a
silver matchbox from another, and a paper-clad novel from a third. Then
he disposed himself so as to command a view of the landscape, and began
to smoke and read.

He had occupied himself in this way for perhaps half an hour, when a
sudden voice hailed him, and startled him so that he dropped his book.

‘Hillo, you there! Come here!’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘is that you, Paul, old fellow? Where are you?’

‘Here,’ said the voice ungraciously.

The latest arrival made his way in the direction indicated, but though
the voice had sounded not more than a score of yards away, he had to
call out twice or thrice, and wait for an answer. The brush was dense
and tangled, and he could have lost himself for a lifetime in it.

‘Oh, there you are, Paul! Upon my word, I shouldn’t have known you.’

‘I heard you say you had a letter for me. I’d a good deal rather not
have seen you, but since you are here you may as well discharge your
commission, and when you’ve done that you can go.’

‘I’ve got a letter for you, Paul. It’s from poor dear Madge, and I’m
bound to say that I think she’s beastly ill-used, and very unfortunate.’

‘Doubly unfortunate,’ said the camper-out--‘unfortunate in a brute of a
husband and a cad of a brother. Give me the letter.’

‘Here it is, Paul. You may think what you like about me, of course, but
I have travelled something like seven or eight thousand miles to find
you.’

‘On Madge’s money?’ asked the other, balancing the letter in a careless
grip between thumb and finger. ‘Nobody asks you to stop to hear yourself
described. You were a cad from your cradle; you were a liar as soon as
you could learn to lisp, and a sponge from the happy hour when you found
the first fool to lend you half a crown. You needn’t wait, George, but
so long as you are here I will do my best to tell you what you are. You
are a fruitful theme, and I could be fluent for a week or two. Going?
Well, luck go with you, of the sort you merit. I’d call you a cur, but
there isn’t a cur in all the world who wouldn’t walk himself blind
and lame to bite me in revenge for the insult I put upon him. Go--you
infinitesimal! you epitome of unpitiable little shames!’

The bearer of the letter, who had travelled so far for so curious a
welcome, had found a beaten trail which led him back to the woodland
road. He had gone a score of yards by this time; but the voice pursued
him--level, heavy, sonorous, driven by full lungs.

‘Put your fingers in your ears, George, or I shall find a word to scorch
you. You are the poorest thing in Nature’s bag of samples. A well-bred
woodlouse wouldn’t employ you for a scavenger. If you shrank to your
soul’s dimensions you might wander lost for a century on the point of
a cambric needle. You are the last rarefied essence of the
contemptible--the final word of the genius of the mean.’

This was not shouted, but was sent out in a steady trumpet-note
that swelled fuller and fuller, like the voice of a great speaker in
haranguing a clamorous audience, rising steadily, as if measured just
to dominate clamour, and no more. In the pauses of his speech the
camper-out had heard the noise of running feet. The sound seemed still
faintly audible, though perhaps only fancy caught it. He sent out one
clarion cry of ‘Good-bye, George!’ and surrendered himself to a fit of
uncontrolled laughter. This coming to an end of sudden gravity, he took
up the letter, which had fallen on the moss between his outstretched
legs, and looked at the superscription.

‘Madge!’ he said. ‘Poor little Madge!’

He put the envelope to his bristly lips and kissed it. Then he broke the
seal and began to read:

‘My own darling Husband,

‘You _must_ have the enclosed, and George has promised not to rest until
he finds you and lays it in your hands. The last lines your father ever
wrote in this world----’

‘What?’ he said aloud. ‘What?

‘The last lines your father ever wrote in this world arrived on
Saturday, the twentieth, and news of his death reached me by wire on
Monday, the twenty-second.’

‘That’s a big enough dose for one day,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand
any more.’ He thrust the letter into his breast-pocket. ‘Another
impossibility. No prodigal’s return to end _that_ story. Veal was never
a favourite meat of mine. Lord! I could laugh to see what a mess I have
made of things. I could cry if anybody else had made it, and had meant
as well, and hoped as blindly.

‘Monday, the twenty-second. That was the day I came here. Strange it
is--strange! I’d have sworn he was alive that night--that first night in
the tent here. I seemed to feel him near me. We had that knack--the old
governor and I--poor old chap! He could jog my mental elbow when I was
a thousand miles away from him, and I could make him talk of me at any
time.

‘Ghosts? No. Death is death, and there’s an end of it. Ah!’ He stood
suddenly arrested. ‘Six hours’ difference between here and England. That
explains it. His last wish was towards me. He loved nobody as he loved
me, I think. Well, I shall vex him no more. His tribulation is over.

‘Why cant a wrong-doer have a hell of his own, and be saved from
singeing innocent people? The smoke of my torment ascendeth, and even
George goes coughing at the smell of brimstone. George would be much
more comfortable if I had been virtuous--Madge would have more to lend
him.

‘Now, if I had a bottle of whisky here, I’d put an end to this for an
hour or two. But I haven’t, and I must do something. I must drug this
down. Bodily labour.’ He laid his open palm on the knotted rind of the
big tree against which he had leaned his back whilst he read the first
phrases of the letter. ‘You’ll do as well as anything. It took many a
score of years to bring you here, but now you must come down. You’ll
sleep in the gorge before I have done with you, old piny monster, three
hundred feet below your roots.’

He walked to the tent, and returning jacketless, axe in hand, fell upon
the tree with a measured frenzy. The sun was still high, and before he
had been at work ten minutes the sweat poured from his brow like rain.
He paused to breathe, and to survey the gash he had made in the side
of the tree. Compared with the girth of the forest giant, it looked the
merest trifle, but he nodded gaspingly.

‘You’ll sleep in the gorge before I have done with you, you old goliath
of your tribe. I shall have you down.’

He laboured with dogged fury. His hands blistered at the unaccustomed
task. The helve of the axe was stained with blood, and clung to his
grasp as if his palms were glued. His blows grew altogether ineffectual
The axe fell sideways often, and at such times the blow jarred him to
the spine. ‘You will come down,’ he said, ‘if I die for it’ He went back
to the tent, and casting himself on the turf before it, laved his hands
in the ice-cold mountain-stream. In half an hour he returned to his
task, and worked at it until he could no longer lift a hand. Even then,
as he walked brokenly away, he turned with an angry murmur:

‘I’ll have you down!’

He built his fire, and brewed and sipped his tea and munched his rations
in great weariness that night, and it was earlier than usual when he
rolled himself in his blanket and lay down. But though he ached with
fatigue from neck to heel, there was no sleep for him. He seemed to hang
suspended over a great lake of slumber, and to hold, in spite of his own
will, to a bar which magnetized his burning palms. He had but to release
the bar to fall deep into oblivion, but his grasp was fixed, and he
had no power to loose it. So, after many hours of tumbling this way and
that, he arose, and fed his fire with dry chips until it flamed; and
then, in alternate gushes of light and darkness, he read his father’s
letter.

‘Hendricks has just left me, and I succeeded in getting from him at the
last a plain statement of his opinion. I may last a month longer, but
he thinks it unlikely. I may go in a week. A chill, or a shock, or any
little trifle may precipitate the change, and make an end at any moment.
I can write for a few minutes at a time, and I am trying for Paul’s sake
to say one or two things which will make my future task more likely of
success....

‘I was fifty when my father died. I had been bred in the strictest
Calvinistic school; but my heart had revolted against the creed, and
from the time when I was five-and-twenty my mind had rejected it with
equal decision and disdain. I looked for no other faith or form of
faith. At the centre of the negation in which I lived there was this one
thought: There may, for anything I can tell, be a great First Cause. I
cannot know. I can neither affirm nor deny, for the whole question is
beyond my understanding. But this at least seems clear: If there be a
God at all, He is far away. He is great beyond our dreaming--distant
beyond our dreaming. If there be a scheme in the universe, there is at
least no care for the atoms which compose it. God sits far withdrawn,
beyond our prayers, beyond our tears and fears. This fretful insect
of an hour, who cannot even measure the terms he uses, speaks of
the Eternal, the Immutable, and strives by his prayers to change Its
purposes. I am writing now by lamplight, and the agonies of the singed
moths whose little bodies encrust my lamp-glass do not move me from my
purpose. I realize their anguish at this moment with a deep pity, but
I do not stay to save them. My heavier purpose will not wait for them.
Thus I dreamed it was, likening smallest things to the greatest, with
God.

‘At my father’s death a change began to work in my opinions. I had
convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered,
but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first
faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father’s spirit and my
own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he
had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed
greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the
grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The
creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there,
was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, God
rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest
estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these,
and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as gods to us, but
within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then God seemed no
longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And
whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me
a better man than I should have been without it My beloved father, wise
and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the
knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been
tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that
life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and
innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that
fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again
after a great purgation of pain and repentance.

‘It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can
barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul. He has gone far wrong. He will
come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my
prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh until
he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him. Goodbye,
dear child. Be at peace, for all will yet be well.

‘When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with
him.’


The letter ended there, and the reader’s dazzled eyes looked into the
darkness. One flickering flame hovered above the embers of the fire and
seemed to leave them and return, to die and break to life again. At last
it fluttered upward and was gone.

The runnel, like the greater stream below, had many voices. It chattered
light-hearted trifles, lamented child-like griefs, and sobbed itself to
sleep over and over and over. In the black cañon the river bellowed its
rage and triumph and despair. The shadows of the night were deep, and
silence brooded within them, and the ears thrilled and tingled to the
monitions of its voiceless sea.

‘Father!’ he whispered.

The night gave no response, but the answer sounded in the lonely man’s
heart:

‘I am here.’




III

In the broad daylight it was not easy to believe that the experience of
the night-time was more than an excitement of the nerves. The tide of
habitual conviction set strongly against a superstitious fancy. None the
less the Solitary spent many hours in tender and remorseful musings over
the lost father, and all day long he wondered at the voice which had
seemed to answer him.

‘It would be well for me, perhaps,’ he said, when he had spent
two-thirds of the day under the spell of these clear recollections--‘it
would be well for me, perhaps, if I could think it true.’

An inward voice said, as if with deliberate emphasis, ‘It is true.’

The words did not seem to be his own, and the thought was not his
own, and he was startled, almost wildly. But he had been much given to
introspection. He was accustomed to the study of his own mind’s working,
and the inward voice impressed him less than if he had been a man of
simpler intellect. The intelligence of man plays many curious tricks
upon itself, and he was ready with explanations. He pored upon these,
turned them over, criticised them, sat secure in them.

The inward voice said ‘Paul,’ and nothing more. No call had sounded on
the waking ear, and yet an echo seemed to live in the air, as if a real
voice had spoken. His heart thrilled and his breast ached with a great
longing. He subdued himself, sitting with bowed head and closed eyes,
his chin sunk upon his folded hands. There was a bitter pain in his
throat.

‘No,’ he said half aloud, as if he had need to form his thoughts in
words; ‘it is all at an end, dear old dad It was well for you that you
died with that good hope in your mind It shed a ray of peace on your
heart in the last dark hour. It would be well for me if I could think
that you were here.. I could stand the pain of it I could bear, I think,
to turn my whole life’s stream back upon itself if that would bring you
peace. I could bear to repent if my repentance could avail But you are
gone into the great dark. You will be sad no more and glad no more. I
broke your heart, and you tried to patch it with that futile hope. And
you were not the man to ask me to be a coward, and a liar to my own
soul. I will keep what little rag of manliness I have.’

The inward voice seemed to say ‘Wait.’

‘It would be easy to go mad,’ he said, rising wearily. ‘“They rest from
their labours, and their works do follow them.”’

He had wandered a mile or two from his tent, along the track, and now
turned his footsteps home again. The afternoon light was mellowing. A
great range of hills, with a line of cloud shining across the breast of
it like a baldric of silver, lifted parcel-coloured masses of white and
violet into a rolling billowy glory of cloud which half obscured and
half relieved them. The sky above was of an infinite purity. He stood
and looked, until his heart yearned.

The yearning spoke itself in words which had been familiar since
childhood:

‘“Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away and be at
rest!”’

‘Old earth,’ he said, ‘why is it? You seem to long for me. You seem to
stretch out hands to me, as if you would say, “Sleep here!” We belong
to one another, I suppose. This flesh and bone, this breathing, thinking
apparatus, grew out of the slime of you, old world, and will go back to
your dust and flourish in grass and flower, and float in cloud and fall
in rain. You have hidden in your green breast all the millions who have
gone before me. Fecund mother! kind grave! And you, too, for all so
green and kisty as you look, you are dying. Your life is longer than
mine, but you are no Immortal. Your hills roll down to your valleys.
Every stream that tumbles from their heights wears away a little. The
light snow and lighter air are heavy on those heights of steel, and will
make them into dust at last. Your inward fires will cool, and the air
that clothes you like a delicate robe will shrink and vanish, and leave
you naked to the sun. I shall come to your bosom and be quiet, and you
will find the bourne of death likewise, and we shall swing together
round and round And the fires of the sun will cool, and you will go
spinning in blackness, and split in silent explosions of cold in the
blind dark. Dying heart, beating strong in full manhood! dying earth,
smiling and yearning there with pity and rest in your bosom! we are but
creatures of a day--my day the briefer. And that would matter little if
I had been worthy of my day. But I have played the fool with life, and
have earned my own contempt and creep into my hiding-place with shame.’

He strolled back to the tent, and whether he would have it or no, and
whether he would believe it or no, the inward voice spoke now and then.
Twice in the wide daylight he stood still, and his hair crisped and his
blood tingled. The voice was there, and yet he could not guess what it
had to say to him. It was as though it spoke in a language to which he
had no key.

As he sat musing his eye fell upon the axe, and he started up and seized
it as if suddenly reminded of some forgotten urgent duty. He fell
to work at the big tree again, and laboured doggedly till nightfall.
Inexperienced as he was, he brought observation and intelligence to the
task, and knew already the kind of stroke which told most with the least
expenditure of effort. When he could see no longer, he leaned gasping on
the axe, and gave a grim nod of the head. ‘I shall have you down.’

He was at it again next morning light and early. He toiled all day.
The great pine leaned somewhat over the cliff, and though the angle was
slight, it told as the gash deepened, and when the sun dipped over the
top of the western mountain the huge doomed thing gave its first groan
and hung a little towards its grave. At this sign the tired worker fell
to with a freshened vigour. He was still striking when the royal head
bowed, and then swept downward with a rush. He sprang to one side just
in time to avoid the backward kick and the enormous flying splinters.
Ten feet from its base and a hundred from its lowest branch the trunk
caught the edge of the rock. The leverage and the weight of the fall
snapped the two or three square feet of stanch fibre the axe had spared.
That last strong anchorage broke, and the tree flashed into the rapids.
The churning, shooting waters made a plaything of it.

The next day he fell into deep ennui, and to beguile himself he rummaged
out of the canvas bag an old note-book and a pencil, and began a clumsy
and uninstructed effort to sketch the scene before him. The effort
proving quite abortive, he began to scrawl beneath it, ‘Paul Armstrong.’
‘Yours very truly, Paul Armstrong.’ ‘Disrespectfully yours, Paul
Armstrong.’ ‘Sacred to the memory of Paul Armstrong, who died of boredom
in the Rocky Mountains.’ ‘Paul Armstrong: the Autobiography of an Ass.’

He was in the very act of throwing the book away from him when he felt
suddenly arrested. Why not ‘Paul Armstrong: an Autobiography? It would
fill the time. But the idea was no sooner formed than it began to pain.
What sort of a record would it have to be if it were honest? What a
confession of folly, of failure!

But as he sat his thoughts shaped themselves--

Thus.




THE STORY OF PAUL ARMSTRONG’S LIFE AND OF DESPAIR’S LAST JOURNEY




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 glass buttons, and the child, with his
feet planted close together, was looking down at the buttons 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-fashioned 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 shiny 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 windlass, 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 Dick 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 Dick 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 Dick.

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 Dick 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 sunshiny trod-on grass everywhere.’

‘Tell us about the Highlanders,’ said Dick.

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

Dick 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. Dick 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. Dick, 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 Dick in
the black hollow of the night This was hard work, but he was bent on
self-purgation, and would not confess until Dick was really wide awake.

‘Dick!’ he said, gripping his brother in the dark and straining him in
his childish arms. ‘Dick! Oh, Dick, 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 Dick. ‘What did ye wake _me_ up for?’

‘It wasn’t true, Dick,’ 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 Dick. ‘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
masses of rubbish such things as promised to be saleable. The rest
were Paul’s prey, and there were scraps 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 assured. 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 thrashing 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 Dick’s offences or Jack’s or David’s; but Dick 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 nobody 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 pass to peace for ever, to
lie asleep for ever, with the grass 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 Dick, who lay awake there,
and he cried and said good-bye, and told Dick that he was going to die
and be an angel. And in his heart he forgave Dick--nebulously but with
sincerity--not particularizing things, but offering plenary grace for
all offences. And Dick took fright and ran with bare legs projecting
from his scanty nightshirt, 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 assured longing. The
good mother came upstairs carrying Dick, 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 Ayrshire
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 sunshine 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 grass. 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 Dick 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 grass,
gave himself over hand and foot to fancy. It was quite late in the
afternoon when appetite 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 shaggy
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.

‘I never seen it,’ Paul declared.

‘There, there!’ said Armstrong; ‘it comes natural to lie, and I’ll not
tempt ye. Not another word. Ye’ll go to your chamber, and ye’ll stop
there till ye’re in the mind to confess. There’s the fruits of
your crime marked on your lips this minute, and Dick saw ye at the
sweet-stuff shop. Away with ye, before I lay hands on ye!’

Paul’s hob-nailed boots went lingeringly up the uncarpeted stairs to
the attic room, and there he spent the long, long afternoon. There was
nothing to do, nothing to think about, nothing to read. He stared at the
tinman’s shop opposite, and at the cheesemonger’s fat widow, and at the
window of the Berlin wool shop next door to the cheesemonger’s, and
when a customer went in he speculated idly on his purchase. He was very
hungry and lonely and dull, and the three other attic rooms which were
open to him were as uninteresting as his own. Evening came on, and he
seemed to be forgotten. He took off his boots, and crept to the lower
flight of stairs and listened. Everything was going on just as it would
have done if he had not been alone and miserable and martyred Well, he
could starve and die and go to heaven, and then perhaps they would all
be sorry, and discover some little good in him. Evening deepened into
night, and still he sat there. A little insect behind the wall-paper
against which he leaned his disconsolate head ticked and ticked like a
watch. Paul had heard of the death-watch, and this, of course, was
it, and its token was, of course, of his own untimely end. He wept
luxuriously.

By-and-by he got up, and crept on tiptoe past the door of the best
bedroom, which stood a little open, and invited him inwards by the
mysterious gleam on the ceiling and the thrilling shadows of the great
four-poster with its dusky hangings--a family heirloom, hint of far-off
family prosperity, big enough for a hearse and quite as gloomy to look
at. A heavy, solid mahogany chest of drawers stood near the window, and
Paul, aided by the gaslights glistening amongst the polished tinware
in the shop opposite, went through every drawer. His hands lighted on
something done up in tissue-paper--an oblong parcel. He investigated
it, and it turned out to be a big sponge loaf. He had seen one like it
before, and guessed that it came as a gift from the old-maid cousins
at the farm. He pinched off a bit from one of the bottom corners, and
nibbled it He had not known till then how hungry he was, and the cake
was more than delicious. He pinched off more, and was frightened to
find how much he had taken. Detection was sure, and who but he could
be suspected? Nothing could save him now, and though he had never heard
either proverb, he acted on both--‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ and
‘As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.’ A voice and a footstep below
startled him, and he fled guiltily. Now he was a thief, and then he was
a beleaguered citizen, forced to make excursions by night, and live
at risk of life on the provisions of the foe. He lay on the bed, and
watched the lights on the ceiling until the cheesemonger’s shop and the
tinman’s were closed; then he went to sleep, and in a while Dick came
and awoke him.

‘You’ll get nothing to eat till you confess,’ said Dick, ‘and then
you’ll get a licking.’

‘Then I shall die,’ said Paul. ‘I shan’t confess what I never done.’

He undressed and got into bed, and was more of a Christian martyr than
he had ever been before. He slept fairly well, all things considered;
but when in the morning his father’s deep, asthmatic cough sounded on
the stairs, he felt as if his heart had slipped through his spine and
had dropped upon the floor. He sat up in bed as his father entered the
room.

‘Well, sir, are ye in any mind to tell the truth yet?’

‘I didn’t take it, father; I never seen it’ ‘Vary good; yell just stay
there.’

Dick, with his hair staring from his head in all directions, pulled
on his boots and trousers, and, gathering his other belongings in both
arms, went off to make his toilet in the back-kitchen. The heavy day
began for Paul, and when he had dressed he prowled disconsolately about
his prison limits. In the ceiling of one of the back rooms there was
a trap-door, and he began to wonder if he could open it There was a
crippled three-legged table in the next apartment, and two old chairs,
the rush bottoms of which had given way. He lugged these beneath the
trap and mounted. He had two or three tumbles, and anything but a cat
or a boy would have broken its neck several times over; but at last he
succeeded in forcing the trap, and scrambled up. The joists of the roof
and the rough inside of the slates were all he saw at first; but in a
while he discerned a solid-looking shadow in the near distance, and made
towards it. It proved to be a small table, and on it, covered thick with
dust, were a broken jug, a broken cup, and a broken table-knife. What
brought these things in so curious a place Paul never knew; but there
they were, and the spot in an instant was a robber’s cave, and full
of the most palpitating and delicious fears. He seized the broken
table-knife as a weapon, and dashed back towards the trap-door. His
movement towards the table must have taken him over some protected
place--some region where a wall or beam made the lath-and-plaster
flooring sound beneath his feet. But in his backward dash he missed
this. The thin and fragile stuff gave way beneath him, and he came
through with a tearing crash, and fell on the floor of the room beneath
with a shock which snapped his teeth together and left him dizzy and
half stunned. There was a big rent in the ceiling, and the floor was
covered for a square yard or two with hairy plaster and fragments of
wood.

Paul thought at first that he was broken all over, but, coming to gather
himself together, found himself whole. He transferred the crippled
table and the chairs to their original places, and stowed away the
knife between the cords and the mattress of his bed. Then he listened
dreadfully to discover if the noise of his fall had awakened any
answering commotion below stairs. Growing easy on this point, he began
to be aware that he was hungry again, and bethought him of the remnant
of the sponge loaf. Nothing much worse than had already happened
could befall him, and after brief temptation he kicked off his unlaced
hobnails and stole downstairs. With some such vague idea of disguising
crime as a thievish monkey might have had, he packed up a pair of
neatly folded towels in the paper which had once held the loaf, and so
retreated to his prison. All day long the familiar noises of the
house, exaggerated into importance by his own loneliness, went on. Feet
travelled here and there, voices called, the tingling shop-bell rang.
The little servant came to make the bed, and treated him with the
disdain which befitted a convicted criminal. In a while she went away,
and left him lonelier than before. Even disdain had something of human
companionship in it.

And now, hunger’s pangs having been fairly well appeased by the remnant
of the sponge loaf, Paul had time to surrender himself to the thought
of impending starvation. He convinced himself that a boy could die of
starvation in two days. Morrow at noontide would see him stark and cold.
He grew newly holy at this reflection, and forgave everybody afresh with
flattering tears. It became a sort of essential that he should leave a
memorial on the wall of the cell in which he was about to perish, and
so he got out the broken knife from under the mattress, and carved a big
cross in the papered plaster of the wall. It was less artistic in its
outline than he could have hoped; but its symbolism, at least, was
clear, and he wept and exulted as he worked at it.

The heavy day went by and the heavy night, and he began to be really
hollow, and to believe with less than his original sense of comfort
that his end was near. With the morning came his father with yesterday’s
question. Paul broke into wild tears and protests. He wasn’t, wasn’t,
wasn’t guilty.

‘Vary good. Yell just stay there.’

Dick, touched by the agony of despair with which Paul threw himself upon
the bed, advised surrender.

‘What’s a lickin’?’ said Dick. ‘Have it over.’

‘Oh, Dick,’ cried Paul, clipping at the air between them, ‘plead for
me!’

‘Not me,’ said Dick, who was less literary than Paul, and misunderstood
the unfamiliar word--‘bleed for yourself.’

And again the heavy day went on, and Paul wept and wept alone. But it
happened that this was scouring day; and a sort of wooden fender which
fenced in the foot of the eight-day clock being moved, the missing bit
of silver was found behind it, and the martyr was released. There were
no apologies; but Paul was told to clean himself, and was whispered by
Dick that there was a tea-party that afternoon, and that he was to be
allowed to be present at it.

Then fell misery. He knew why the sponge loaf had been saved, and though
everybody was kind now, and seemed to feel in an unspeaking way that he
had been ill-used, he foresaw the near future and trembled.

He had been made to black his Sunday boots, he had been washed with such
desperate earnestness that his face and neck tingled, and he diffused
an atmosphere of yellow soap as he walked. He was in his best clothes,
which fitted him as a sausage is fitted by its skin; he was guillotined
in a white collar with a serrated inside edge, and guilt filled every
crevice of his soul.

‘Fanny Ann,’ said Mrs. Armstrong, putting the last finishing touches to
the tea-table, ‘fetch the sponge loaf.’

A rollicking shout of laughter rose from the tent door, and went rolling
down the gorge, and the dream was over for the time.




CHAPTER II

It was mid-July, and even at an altitude of four thousand feet the sun
could scorch at noonday. The lonely man sat at his outlook, gazing down
the valley. There was a faint haze abroad, a thickening of the air so
apparently slight, and in itself so imperceptible, that he would not
have noticed it but for the fact that it blotted out many familiar
distant peaks, and narrowed his horizon to some four or five miles. He
waited for the sun to pierce this impalpable fog, but waited in vain.
The sun itself was red and angry in colour, and shrunk to half its
common size. Even at noontide the eye could look on it for a second or
two without being unbearably dazzled.

The shade in which he sat moved slowly eastward, and had almost deserted
him, when his hand felt a sudden fierce pang of pain as if an insect had
stung him. He moved hastily and examined the mark of what he took for
a sting. It was round, small, and red, as if the end of a hot
knitting-needle had been pressed upon the skin. Whilst he sat sucking
at the place to draw the pain away, and looking round in search of the
insect foe, the same quick burning pang struck him on the cheek. He
moved hastily again, and stared and listened keenly. There was not a
buzz of wings anywhere near at hand, and not an insect in sight. But as
he looked and harkened he was enlightened. A great tear of resinous gum
had caught and hardened in a fork of the branches, and the sun’s rays
falling on and through this were concentrated as if by a burning-glass.
The fiery point had stung him.

He broke away the cause of mischief, and then looked about him with
a new understanding. The forest fires had begun, and it was the smoke
which so closed in the view. He could detect now a faintly aromatic
smell of burning, and wondered that he had not noticed it before.

There was not a breath of air stirring, and not a hint of flame in all
the haze which on every side blotted out the far-off hills, and changed
to a dull tint of smoke those which still loomed upon him. At night the
moon hung in the starless sky like a globe of blood, and day by day the
dimness of the air increased. The cloud took no form of cloud, and not
a sound came through it except for the voice of the water, and the
occasional roll and clangour of the trains. The distances in view grew
briefer and more brief, and within a week of the date of his discovery
the nearest peaks were obliterated, and the air had grown pungent with
its charge of invisible burned atoms.

He sat in the midst of this narrowed and darkened world, this world of
silence and solitude, as he sat in the middle of his own despairs. His
life had fallen away to this--an aching heart in a world where no man
came. Had it not been for pride, he could have wept for pity of himself.
Had it not been for a sense of rebellion against fate and the world,
he could have died of his own disdain. He had played the fool, but the
world had taken an unjust advantage of his folly. He loathed himself and
it.

Thus trebly banished--from friends, from the world, from Nature--he
dreamed his dreams. The past came back again.

Paul was keeping shop. The door, rarely passed by the foot of a
customer, stood open to invite the world at large. Armstrong came in
with his spectacles resting on his shaggy brows. Paul, who had been
wool-gathering, went back to nominative, dative, and ablative. He hated
the Eton Latin grammar as he had not learned to hate anything else in
life.

‘Any custom?’ asked the father.

‘Nobody,’ said Paul.

‘Paul, lad,’ said Armstrong, after a lengthy pause. He cleared his
throat, and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Yell reach your twalth
birthday next week. It’s time ye were doing something in the warld.’
He pulled down his glasses and looked at the lad gravely. ‘I’ve tauld
Mester Reddy ye’ll not be going back to school after the holidays.
There’s over-many mouths to keep, and over-many backs to clothe, lad.
Ye’ll have to buckle to, like the rest of us.’

‘Yes, father,’ said Paul. The prospect looked welcome, as almost any
change does to a boy.

‘What would ye like to be?’ his father asked

‘I dunno,’ said Paul, rubbing his nose hard with the back of one
freckled hand.

‘Well, I’ll thenk it over. Ye can get away to your plays now, but the
serious purpose o’ life’s beginnin’ for ye.’

Paul needed no further leave. He snatched his cap and was away up the
High Street before anybody could find time to tell him that his neck
was unwashed, his boots unblacked or unlaced, or his collar disarranged.
These reminders were an unfailing grievance to him when they came, and
they seemed to hail upon him all day long. With the thought that he was
entering the world and beginning his career in earnest, he thrust his
hands into his corduroy pockets, swaggering in his walk, and so absorbed
that he forgot to touch the street lamp-posts for two or three hundred
yards. He stood overcome by this discovery, retraced his steps almost to
the shop-door, in spite of his fear of being recalled, and then raced
on his original way, laying a hand on each lamp-post as he passed it
In this fashion he arrived at the gate of an unpretentious little house
which had many reasons for looking glorious and palatial in his eyes.
For one thing, it was a private house. No business of any sort was done
there, and its inhabitants lived on their own money. Then it stood back
from the road, behind iron railings, and had a gravel pathway leading
to the front door, and a little bit of orderly garden with one drooping
laburnum in it, which in its season hung clear gold blossoms over the
roadway. There was a small coach-house beside the main building. It held
no vehicle of any sort, but it was a coach-house all the same. Inside
the house everything was neat and clean, and to Paul’s mind luxurious.
There were carpets in all the living-rooms and bedrooms. There was a
piano, there were marble mantelpieces with gold-framed mirrors over
them, one to each front-room, and the chambers which held these
splendours were familiarly used, and not merely kept for show. Paul had
the run of this house, for the orphan children of his mother’s second
cousin lived there, and the relationship was recognised.

He rang the bell, and a fresh-coloured, prettyish girl in a smart cap
came to the door.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you, is it! Come to see the young ladies, are
you?’ Paul nodded with his hands in his pockets.

‘You’re in pretty fettle!’ said the girl. ‘Look at your boots! Look at
your hair! Look at the smut on your nose!’

Paul looked at his boots, tried to look at his hair, squinted downwards
in search of the smut, and said: ‘Bother!’

‘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 grass-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 shivered
with a strange, delicious sense of worship. 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 shirt-sleeves turned up to his elbows, and was
polishing 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-glass, 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 worshipful, 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 fashion, 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 coarseness
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 noble 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 nobody 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 apron 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, bestial
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 grasshopper that chirps about the grass,
     Or beetle basking on the sunny walls,
        Or mail-clad fly that skims the face of glass
     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’ God. 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 Hoarstone Fields,’ said Paul.

‘And wha’s been with ye, helping ye to desecrate God’s day?’

‘Nobody, 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 Hoarstone Fields all day? What took ye there? And hoo
have ye passed the time? I’ll know!’ he added, after another long pause.

Perhaps there was nobody 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 fashion 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.
For, my lad, if I flay your back, and break my heart to do it, I’ll win
at the truth.’

They went down the long dark garden together, and at the kitchen-door
Armstrong paused.

‘It’s a sore thing,’ he said, ‘for a man to have to misuse his ain flesh
an’ blood. But ye’re not of an age to understand that. Remember, Paul,
this is not my seeking; but I’ll have the truth by foul means or fair.
And it’s just you to choose.’

Paul entered the kitchen, and his mother was for instant justice, as she
saw it, but Armstrong intervened.

‘This matter is in my hands,’ he said.

He was a very quiet and yielding man in many things, but when he chose
to speak in that way he made his word law.

Then came the lonely night. The wretched poet, a weedy lad who had
overgrown his strength, lay in bed and cried in anguish. He topped his
father by a head already, though he was but three months beyond his
fifteenth birthday, and if he had chosen to fight he might perhaps have
held his own. But a thought so impious never entered his mind. He was
helpless, and he lay blubbering, undignified, with a breaking heart. He
did not think much or often of the coming pain, but he brooded on the
indignity and injustice until he writhed with yelps of wrath and hatred
and agony of heart, and awoke Dick, who wanted to know what was the
matter, and was roughly sympathetic for a time, until, finding he could
make out nothing, he turned and went to sleep again.

There were black looks in the morning everywhere, for Paul was known
to be in deep disgrace again. He swallowed a cup of the thin, washy
coffee--its flavour of chicory and coarse brown sugar was nauseous on
the palate of the man at the tent door--and then his father, pale as
himself, rose amidst the affrighted boys and girls, and motioned him
silently to the sitting-room. This was a sort of family vault, with its
scanty furniture in grave-clothes, and a smell of damp disuse about it
always, even in summer-time.

‘Are ye ready with the truth?’ asked Armstrong. Paul looked at him like
a dumb thing in a trap, but said never a word. ‘Very well,’ The gray
man’s hands shook and his voice, and his face was of the colour of gray
paper. ‘Go to the back-kitchen and strip.’

Paul, dry-eyed, gloomy, and desperate, walked before, and his father
followed. The girls clung to each other. There had been no such scene as
this in the house for years. The tawse had hung idle even for Paul for
many and many a day. Armstrong took the instrument of justice from its
hook, and laid it on the table He took off his coat, and rolled up his
left shirt-sleeve. He was left-handed. The arm he bared was corded and
puny. It shook as if he had the palsy. His wife had a sudden pity for
him, and ran at him with a gush of tears.

‘William,’ she said, ‘don’t break your heart for the young vil’in; he
isn’t worth it Oh, God! I wish he was no child o’ mine.’

She dropped into a chair and cried. Armstrong passed out of the kitchen.
The girls listened, and Dick, chalky white, with his mouth open, as Paul
had seen him on his way through. They heard the swish, swish, swish of
the tawse, and not another sound but hard breathing for a full minute;
then Paul began to groan, and then to shriek.

‘Now,’ panted Armstrong, ‘shall I have the truth?’

There was no answer, and he fell to again; but Paul turned and caught
his arm, and after an ineffectual struggle, the old man dropped the
tawse and walked into the kitchen. Paul dressed and sat on the table,
quivering all over. He sat there for hours, and nobody approached him
until at last the servant, with frightened eyes, came to make ready for
dinner; then he got up and went to his old refuge in the lumber-room.
One of his sisters brought him food after the family dinner-hour, but he
refused it passionately.

‘Oh, Paul,’ she said, clinging to him till he shook her from his
writhing shoulders, ‘why don’t you confess?’

‘Confess what? snarled Paul. ‘Confess I was born into a family of fools
and nincompoops? That’s all I’ve got to confess.’

He was left to himself all day, and at night he went un-chidden to the
larder, and helped himself to bread and cheese. He took a jug to the
pump, and coming back, ate his meal, standing amongst his people like an
outlaw.

‘Well, Paul,’ said his father, ‘are ye in the mind to make a clean
breast of it?’

‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I’m not.’

The defiance fell like a thunderbolt, and eyes changed with eyes all
round the room in horror and amazement.

‘We’ll see in the morning,’ Armstrong said.

‘All right,’ answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap
from its hook behind the door.

‘Where are you going?’ cried his mother.

‘That’s my business,’ said Paul, breaking into sudden passionate
defiance. ‘What am _I_ flogged like a dog for? _You_ don’t know. There
isn’t one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I’ve been
doing. I can’t remember an hour’s fair play from the day that I was
born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and
next day, you can come on every morning till I’m as old as you are, but
you’ll never get a word out of me. I’ve done no harm, and anybody with
an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his
own flesh and blood as you’ve served me.’

He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to
the vulgar accent of his childhood. ‘Father’ was ‘feyther’ and ‘born’
was ‘boorn.’ He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose
full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts hit Paul, and he
laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.

The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened
of the enterprise, and gave it up.

The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice
seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonishingly vivid
that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the
sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.

‘There’s no rancour, Paul, lad?’ the voice had said, or seemed to say.

‘Rancour?’ he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. ‘You dear old
dad!’

For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him,
and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his
father’s soul was near.




CHAPTER III

Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in
which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A
sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way
through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which
he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.

To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet
rested upon it.

The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to
the June sunlight, framing its scrap of landscape, with the windlass of
the well and the bucket overgrown with mosses and brimming with water
crystal clear, and there were flowering plants in the window, with
leaves and blossoms all translucent against the outer dazzle. The
whole family was gathered there: Uncle Dan, with his six feet of yeoman
manhood, bald and rufous-gray; Aunt Deborah, with her child’s figure and
the kind old face framed in the ringlets of her younger days; the girls
and the boys, a houseful of them, ranging in years from six-and-twenty
to four or five, and every face was puckered with laughter, and every
hand and voice applauded. In their midst was a stranger to Paul, a
girl of eighteen, who marched up and down the room with a half-flowered
foxglove in her hand. She carried it like a sabre at the slope, and her
step was a burlesque of the cavalry stride. She issued military orders
to an imaginary contingent of troops, and her contralto voice rang like
a bell. Her upper lip was corked in two dainty black lines of moustache,
and on her tumbled and untidy curls she had perched a shallow chip
strawberry-pottle, which sat like a forage-cap.

‘Carry--so! she sang out; and at that instant, discerning a stranger,
she turned, with bent shoulders and a swift rustle of skirts, and
skimmed into the back garden.

‘Oh, you silly!’ cried one of the girls; ‘it’s only Paul.’

She came back, and as she passed the old moss-grown bucket she bent to
it and scooped up a palmiul of water, and washed away the moustache of
burnt cork; then, with a coquettish lingering in her walk, she came in,
patting her lips with her apron, her roguish head still decorated with
the strawberry-pottle. Her eyes sparkled with an innocent baby devilry,
but the rest of her face was as demure as a Quakeress’s bonnet Her hair
was of an extraordinary fineness and plenty, and as wayward as it was
fine, so that with the shadow of the doorway round her, and the bright
sunlight in every thread of it, it burned like a halo.

‘Paul?’ she said, pausing in front of him, and looking from a level
right into his eyes, whilst her rosy little hands smoothed her apron.
‘Is Paul a cousin, too?’

‘Of course he is,’ said the girl who had called her back; ‘he’s our
first cousin, Paul is.’

‘Is he,’ she asked, with demure face and dancing eye--’ is he--in a
kissing relationship?’

‘Try him, my wench,’ said Paul’s uncle.

She bunched her red lips for a kiss, like a child, and advanced her
head. Paul’s face was like a peony for colour, but he pouted his lips
also, and bent to meet hers. When they had almost met, she drew her
head back with a demure shake and a look of doubt The kitchen rang
with laughter at Paul’s hangdog discomfiture. The innocent, wicked,
tantalizing eye mocked him, and he was awhirl with shame; but he found
in the midst of it a desperate courage, and, throwing one arm around her
neck, he kissed her full on the lips with a loud rustic smack.

‘Well,’ she said, with a face of horrified rebuke, all but the eyes,
which fairly danced with mirth and mischief, ‘if that’s Castle Barfield
manners, I’d better go home again.’

‘Quite right, Paul,’ said Paul’s uncle. ‘Stand none o’ their nonsense,
lad.’

‘Oh, but, uncle,’ said she, ‘you _would_ think him milder to look at
him--now, wouldn’t ee?’

Paul knew the speech of the local gentry, he knew his father’s Ayrshire
accent, and his own yokel drawl; but this new cousin spoke an English
altogether strange to his ears, and it sounded fairylike. He stared in
foolish worship.

‘You’d better know who you be,’ said Paul’s uncle, ‘and shake hands.
This is your grand-uncle’s grand-niece, Paul. May Gold her name is. May,
my darlin’, this is Paul Armstrong.’

She held out her hand, and Paul took it shyly in his own. He had very
rarely touched a hand which was not roughened more or less by labour.
The warm, soft pressure tightened on his own hard palm for an instant
only, but he tingled from head to foot as if he had touched something
electric.

‘Oh!’-she said, ‘this is Uncle Armstrong’s little boy? She was by two
years his senior, and for a girl she was tall; but he was more than on a
level with her so far as mere height went, and the phrase cut him at the
heart. She took the strawberry-pottle from her head with both hands, as
if it had been a crown, and laid it on the kitchen dresser. ‘I’ve heard
my father talk of his father five hundred times. My father thinks no
end of Uncle Armstrong. He says that for a man of learning he never met
anybody one half so sensible.’

Paul fell head over heels in love with the pretty cousin from
Devonshire. That is to say, he fell in love with his own dreams about
her, and they were sweet enough for any lad to fall in love with. She
sang and she played, she brimmed over with accomplishment, which was
all rustic enough, no doubt, but angel-fine to Paul, and exotic, and
not like anything within his knowledge. She played and she sang that
afternoon, and never again had Paul’s ears drunk in such tones of
heaven.

He went home in an ecstasy of delight and anguish. How beautiful she
was! what a grace enveloped her! Her very name was a ravishment--a name
of spring and flowers and pure bright skies. May! He dared to whisper
it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May!
May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then
her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with
hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame!
His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back
to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself
again, and the deep damnation of the button which was missing from his
waistcoat Paul was a poet, and should have had a soul above buttons; but
before the phantom of that missing button his soul grovelled, until it
sprang up once more to hover round her foot, her hand, her eyes, her
voice, her name of May! May! May! and, with shudders of frostiest
self-reproach and richest pleasure, round the memory of that kiss!

In a week or two Paul had grown devoutly religious, and had no idea of
the real why. The Church Vale cousins were ardent churchgoers, for the
girls were at the time of life for ardour, and both the Vicar and his
Curate were unmarried. Paul, whose proper place of Sabbath boredom was
Ebenezer, was welcome as a proselyte, and had a seat in the family
pew, and the rapture of walking homeward sometimes by the side of the
feminine magnet.

So the dweller at the tent door sees himself at church, a pious varier
from chapel. The July sunbeams are falling through stained glass; the
roof-beams of the nondescript old building are half visible in shadow.
The windows are open, and a warm, spiced wind flutters through in
pleasantly successful disputation with odours of dry-rot and chilly
earth and stone. The sheep are bleating amongst the mounded graves, and
the curate is bleating at the lectern. A yearning peace is in Paul’s
heart, and the pretty distant cousin is near at hand, with a smell of
dry lavender in her dress. The first twining of feeling and belief is
here, the earliest of many of those juggleries of Nature which make a
fool of reason. Oh, sweet hour! oh, happy world! oh, holy place, where
she is! Oh, harmless, innocent calf-love! A jolly old throstle is
singing away in the elm which overhangs the parson’s gate. There is a
disembodied skylark voice somewhere high up in the mare’s-tail clouds
which veil the earth from too much heat and brightness; and the young
heart is unhardened and unspotted from the world.

And oh! oho! the elysium of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul,
and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their
Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate,
gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are
no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry
sunshine; there is no such nectar any more as foamed in the shining
pail.

On the way from Church Vale to Beacon Hargate there is a brook, which
now runs ink and smells of evil, and in those days flowed so clear that
you could count the parcel-coloured pebbles at the bottom, through water
which was sometimes pellucid as diamond, and sometimes of a cairngorm
colour. The arched pathway over it, with its weather-stained, square-cut
timber guards at either side, was called June Bridge, and above and
below the bridge, in curved hollows of the banks where the bed of the
brook was earthy, water-lilies floated, sliding with the stream, and
tugging back on their oozy anchorage. Paul found his goddess leaning on
this bridge, watching the lilies, and began to hum whilst he was yet out
of hearing,

‘May, on June bridge, in July weather,’ and to make a song in his head.

‘Can ee swim, Paul?’ asked his goddess.

‘Oh yes,’ said Paul, ‘I can swim right enough. Want them lilies?’ She
nodded, smiling. ‘I’ll get ‘em for you.’

He climbed the bridge, and dropped into the meadow.

‘I’ll wait for ee,’ said May, and sauntered on out of sight.

Paul stripped and dived, came up with a shake of the head, and swam
down-stream. He reached the water-lilies in a dozen strokes, laid a hand
on the stalk of one in passing, and tugged at it. The stem proved to be
tougher than he had guessed, and he dropped his feet to find bottom. He
was out of his depth, but he set both hands low and twisted at the stem.
This took him under water, but he came up smiling triumph, threw his
prize into the meadow, and paddled round the group on an outlook for the
finest blooms. One in the very middle of the floating bed was fresh and
flawless, and he swam for it. A number of cold weedy things were round
his legs at once, and before he knew it he was thickly meshed. The slimy
touch sent an unpleasant thrill through him, but he had no sense of fear
as yet He wrenched off the bloom he had aimed for, and again he went
under water. Then he found he could not rise, and a sudden spasm of
terror shook him. He struggled madly, and the pulses in his head beat
like bells. Just when the case seemed desperate, and he felt as if he
must take breath or die, something gave way. He surged upward, and got
one great gulp of air. His senses came back to him, and the terror died
away. He threw himself upon his back and paddled, and, keeping his face
above water thus, he tried artrully and slowly to extricate his legs
from the net which held them. A minute went by, and he was bound as fast
as ever. Instinct told him that another struggle meant ruin, and yet
instinct bade him struggle. He set his teeth and paddled softly. How
long could he last like this? he asked himself; and at that instant he
seemed to find an answer. The attitude in which he floated was becoming
rapidly more and more upright. There was a sinking weight upon his feet.

At this he shrieked for help, but he paddled softly and without hurry
all the same. He listened as well as he could for the beating in his
ears. The fields seemed deserted, but he called again. He closed his
eyes and listened, paddling softly, with set teeth. He was nearly
upright in the water now, and the weight still dragged But there was
yet an inch or two to spare, and he was resolved to make the most of his
chances. He called for help again, and a voice answered him petulantly
from the bank.

‘You silly toad!’ said the pretty cousin. ‘What do you want to frighten
me like that for?’ ‘I’m drowndin’!’ Paul answered.

‘Not you!’ said the pretty cousin. She made a movement of disdain, and
turned away; but Paul yelled at her with a fear so vivid that she turned
again with a white face, and fell upon her knees. ‘Oh, Paul,’ she cried,
‘are ee really drownin’?’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Paul doggedly. ‘These blasted weeds is pullin’ me
down. Be quick! Tie that there lace thing to your parasawl, and shy it
to me. Look slippy, or it’ll be all up with me. Hold your end tight.
Now, shy! Pull now! Gently--gently.’

He reached the bank, and gripped it with both hands. There was no need
to say that he had had a fright. His wide eyes and the colour of his
face said that.

‘Can ee get out now?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Paul; ‘I’m anchored.’

‘I’ll pull ee out,’ said she, rising to her feet; and Paul thrust one
hand towards her. She took him by the wrist, stuck both heels in the
crisp turf, and pulled. Paul set an elbow on the brink, and strained
upwards with all his might Something sucked out of the stream-bed, and
the waters went muddy. ‘You’re coming!’ cried May, and gave a haul which
was meant to be victorious; but Paul still hung like a log.

‘There’s about a ton of it,’ said Paul. ‘It’s tied like ropes.’

‘Gimme t’other hand,’ returned young Devon. ‘I’ll pull ee out if I dies
for’t.’

Paul surrendered the other hand, and she pulled. There was another
suck at the bottom of the stream, and Paul came up by a foot. She went
backwards for a new vantage-ground, and pulled again, and Paul came to
bank, clothed from the waist downward in water-lily leaf and weed, and
lay face downwards helpless on the turf at her feet.

‘Now,’ she said tartly, ‘you’re not goin’ to faint, I hope!’ Paul said
nothing. ‘Like a girl,’ she added, with disdain.

‘Not me,’ answered Paul, with his nose in the turf. ‘What have I got to
feint for?’

He asked the question with feeble scorn, and fainted.

May Gold stooped to a basket which lay near her, and, taking from it a
pair of garden scissors, knelt beside Paul, and began to snip his bonds.
He woke to find her thus engaged, and a virginal sweet sense of shame
filled him. Her fingers touched his skin at times, and he tingled with a
soft fire.

‘Nobody’d think it from they grimy paws,’ said May Gold to herself; ‘but
he’ve got a skin as fair as a maid’s.’

Paul heard the words, and shuddered exquisitely as she laid her soft
warm hand on his shoulder, leaning over him, and slicing away at the
withes in a business-like fashion.

‘I’ll finish that,’ he said tremulously.

‘La,’ she cried, ‘the child’s awake all the time! There’s the scissors;
I’ll go and wait in the lane.’

Paul lay still for a moment listening to the rustle of her dress; and
when it had gone out of hearing he rolled over, and with a shaking hand
began to free himself of the remnant of his bonds. He had not, so far,
had time to think of the imminent peril from which he had escaped. He
had been near death. Death! What a grip at the heartstrings! He had
had his second of terror in the fact, but the fact was nothing like the
looking back on it There was no urgent fear now to compel him to the
restraint of cowardice, and at this instant he was coward from scalp to
sole--from heart to skin coward. The peril escaped was a thousand times
more horrible than the peril endured, and he quailed now that the danger
was over.

All his thoughts and half his feelings had hurried for weeks past
towards prayer. In his extremity he had not prayed or thought of
praying. A cool, self-centred, self-preserving something in his mind had
taught him to command all his own forces for one purpose. Would he have
been damned if he had lost the power to pray before that cunning mentor
of the flesh deserted him?

He dressed lingeringly and feebly, and when he had done so he went back
to the tangle of water-weeds he had left on the river-bank. There were
a dozen of the lovely waxlike blooms amongst them, uninjured. He snipped
them away with the scissors, and, climbing the stile with heavy feet,
surrendered them to May.

‘Oh,’ she said shrilly, ‘take ‘em away! I couldn’t bear to look at ‘em!’

‘Take ‘em,’ said Paul. ‘They jolly nigh cost me my life.’

Before he answered (or before she caught the meaning of his answer) she
had flung them into the roadway; but at the instant when she understood
him she made a dart at them, gathered them all together in her hands,
and sped to the brookside. There she lay at length upon the turf, and
washed the blooms in the flowing water. Then she gathered long tough
grasses, and looped them together until she had made a cord, with which
she bound the waxen posy. Paul followed and sat near, languidly propped
on one hand to watch her.

‘Paul Armstrong,’ said May, and he knew at once by this manner of
address that she was going to be severe with him, ‘I’d no idea you was
so wicked.’

‘Oh,’ Paul answered defensively, ‘I ain’t wicked--not over and above.’

‘You’re a very wicked boy indeed,’ she said. ‘You was in danger of your
life--there’s no mistake about that, though at first I didn’t believe
you.’

‘There’s nothing wicked in that,’ said Paul

‘Ah 1’ she cried, her little white teeth gripping one end of the grassy
cord whilst she wound the other about the stems of the water-lilies,
‘I can see you know what I mean. Using bad language in the very face of
death and danger! I wonder you wasn’t drowned for a judgment.’

‘Oh, come,’ Paul answered. ‘I didn’t use bad language.’

‘Oh, yes, you did, though,’ she retorted. ‘And I’m not going to be
friends with a boy as talks like that.’

‘Not friends!’ said Paul. ‘Why, May?’ He spoke in an accent of
incredulous reproach.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m properly shocked, I tell ee. I’m never going to be
friends again.’

‘If I thought that was goin’ to be true,’ said Paul, ‘do you know what
I’d do?’

‘No, I don’t,’ she answered, ‘and I don’t want to.’

‘I’d hull myself into that brook this minute and never come out again.’

‘You’d do what? she asked.

To ‘hull’ is to hurl in the dialect Paul spoke in youth. The word was
strange to her.

‘I’d throw myself into that brook this minute, and never come out
again.’

‘Oh, you wicked boy!’ she cried, but her eyes sparkled with triumph. She
quenched the sparkle. ‘It _is_ true; and after that piece of wickedness,
it’s truer than ever.’

Paul rose to his feet; his face was white, and his eyes stared as they
had done when she had just rescued him.

‘Good-bye, May,’ he said.

‘Good-bye,’ she answered coolly.

‘You’re never goin’ to be friends any more, May?’

‘No,’ she said, but rose to her feet with a shriek, for Paul had taken
two swift paces, and had plunged back into the brook, clothes and all.
‘Paul!’ she shrilled after him. ‘Paul! Don’t ee drown. Don’t ee now.
Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t ee!’

Paul stood shoulder-deep in the stream, and she besought him from the
bank with clasped hands and frightened eyes.

‘Goin’ to be friends,’ said Paul grimly.

‘Yes, yes, yes!’ she cried. ‘Come out, do, there’s a dear!’

Paul reached the bank in a stroke, and climbed back into the meadow.
The instant he gained his feet she rushed at him and boxed his ears
furiously. Paul laughed with pleasure. He had had his head punched by
every fighting peer within a mile of home, and the soft little hands
fell like a sort of fairy snowflakes.

‘Oh, you wicked, wicked, wicked boy!’ she raged, stamping her foot at
him. ‘You can go in again as soon as ee want to. _I_ won’t be so fullish
as to call ee out.’

‘D’ye mean it?’ asked Paul, suddenly grim again.

‘No,’ she said, fawning on him with her hands, but doing it at a
distance for fear of his wet clothes. ‘But, Paul, child, you’ll catch
your death. Run home.’

‘I’m not a child,’ said Paul. ‘I’m within two years as old as you are,
May. I say, May------’

‘Oh, do run home!’ she coaxed him. ‘Do ee, now, Paul, for my sake.’

‘I’m off,’ said Paul. ‘Ask me anything like that, and I’ll walk into
fire _or_ water.’

‘Why, Paul,’ said the little Vanity, turning her face down, and looking
up at him past her beautiful lashes and arched brows, ‘whatever makes
you talk like that?’

‘Because it’s the simple truth,’ said Paul ‘You try me, May.’

‘But why is it the simple truth?’ she asked.

‘Because----’ said Paul fiercely, and then stopped dead.

‘Oh, that’s no answer,’ she said, with a little sway of her hips. She
kept her eye upon him, but turned her head slightly aside. She might
have practised glance and posture all her life and made them no more
telling. But Paul’s teeth were beginning to chatter, and she was
alarmed. ‘Don’t stop to tell me now,’ she said, and seeing that he was
about to protest, she added swiftly: ‘Come and tell me to-night, Paul,
won’t ee, now? And run home now, Paul, do, there’s a dear. Run, and then
you won’t catch cold--to please me, Paul.’

So Paul ran, and ran himself into a glow, and felt as if the fire of
comfort in his heart would have warmed the Polar regions. Until time and
experience taught him better, he always wanted a big word for even the
least of themes.

‘Man,’ said old Armstrong once (but that was years later), ‘ye’d borrow
the lungs of Gargantua to sing the epic of a house-fly.’

‘Yes, dad,’ said Paul; ‘that’s a capital imitation of my style,’ and
they both chuckled affectionately.

But now his mind was a mere firework of interjections--squibs, bombs,
and rockets of ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ and ‘Now!’ and ‘She’ll listen! and
‘She’ll despise me!’ He was within a month of sixteen, and he was in
receipt of sixpence a week as pocket-money, but the second fact was to
be no more durable than the first. He could neither stay at sixteen nor
at the sixpence. Time would take care of the one event, and Paul of the
other. An immediate marriage, perhaps even an early marriage, was out of
question. It might be necessary to wait for years. There was a fortune
to be made, of course, and though it might come by some rare chance
to-morrow, it might, on the other hand, take time.

‘We’ve got to be practical,’ said Paul.

Whether Paul were a greater ass than most imaginative boys of his years
may be a question, but he was as serious about this matter as if he had
been eight-and-twenty, and when he reached home he had been rejected and
had died of it, and accepted and married many times over. He got into
his working clothes after a thorough rub down, and, except for a touch
of languor, was none the worse for his morning’s adventure. Armstrong
was out on business for the day, and in the drowsy afternoon Paul laid
an old press blanket on the office floor, took a ream of printing-paper
for a pillow, and slept like a top. This made an end of languor, and
when the hour of freedom struck, he ran down the weedy garden and raced
upstairs to his attic-chamber, and there attired himself in his best.
These were days when the cheapest of cheap dandies wore paper cuffs
and collars, then newly discovered, and Paul made himself trim in this
inexpensive fashion. He had spent half an hour at his ablutions before
leaving the office, and walked towards his rendezvous all neat and
shining.

May met him at the door with a finger on her lips and a pretty air of
mystery.

‘I’ve had to fib about ee. Uncle Dan saw you run past all wet this
morning, and he asked. I had to tell him something. I said you fell in
trying to reach them watter-lilies. I didn’t want your own uncle to know
your wickedness.’

There was not time for more, for Uncle Dan himself appeared at this
moment.

‘None the worse for your duckin’, eh, Paul?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘We’re goin’ to have a bit of music, lad. Come in and sit down, if
you’ve a mind to it.’

Paul half welcomed and half resented the putting off of the decisive
moment He was in a dreadful nervous flutter, his hopes alternately
flying like a flag in a high wind, and drooping in a sick abandonment of
everything. And May was more ravishing than ever. She had stuck the
stem of a rose in one little ear like a pen, and the full flower itself
nestled drooping at her cheek. There was never anything in the world
more demure than her face and her manner, but the frolic eye betrayed
her mood now and then, and Paul was half beside himself at every furtive
smile she shot at him. A local tenor, the pride of the church choir, was
there, and May and he sang duets together, amongst them ‘Come where my
love lies dreaming.’ Paul’s heart obeyed the call with a virgin coyness,
and his thoughts stole into some dim-seen shadowed sanctuary, some place
of silence where the feet fell soft, and a pale curtain gleamed, and
where behind the curtain lay something so sacred that he dared not draw
the veil, even in fancy. ‘Her beauty beaming,’ sang the local tenor.
‘Her beauty beaming,’ May’s voice carolled. Heaven, how it beamed! The
boy’s emotion choked him. If shame had not lent him self-control, he
would have broken into tears before them all.

The musical hour wore away, and the local tenor had a supper engagement,
and must go. May slid from the room, and soon after her voice was heard
calling ‘Paul.’

Paul answered.

‘Come here a minute,’ she said. ‘I want to speak to ee.’

Paul stumbled out, blind and stupid. She was standing at the open door
with some gauzy white stuff loosely folded over her hair and drawn over
her bosom. The July moon was at the full, and low in the heavens.

‘Look at that,’ she said, and Paul looked.

The four poplars clove the intense dark blue, but not so loftily as
in his first remembrance of them. The street was quiet Not a sound
disturbed the humming spicy silence of the summer night Paul turned from
that sweet intoxication to her face. She smiled at him, and his heart
seemed to swoon. He did not know till later, but she suffered from some
very slight tenderness of the eyes which made them shrink from too much
light, and he had never seen her in her full beauty until this moment,
when they seemed so large and deep that he could scarcely bear to look
at them. She had a hat in her hand, and she held it out to him, still
smiling, but so dreamily, so unlike herself, that he could but look and
tremble and wonder. He took the hat mechanically, and saw that it was
his own. He thought himself dismissed, and his heart changed from a soft
ethereal fire to cold lead.

‘Auntie!’ she called--‘Aunt Deb ‘Me and Paul’s goin’ to take a bit of a
walk. I’ve got to give him a lecture.’

Some affectionate assenting answer came, and May floated into the
moonlight, across the street, and into a shady alley which lay between
two high-hedged gardens; then into moonlight again, across another road,
through a clinking turnstile, and into a broad field, where Paul had
played many a game of cricket before and after working hours. From
here the open country gleamed, mystic and strange; every hill and dale
familiar, and all unlike themselves, as a friend’s ghost might be unlike
the living friend.

Her first words jarred his dream to pieces.

‘You’re a funny boy, Paul. After all that fullishness of yours this
morning I met your brother Dick. He gave me something. I’ve got it here
this minute. I want to know if it belongs to you--really. Dick says it’s
all your very own, but I don’t more’n half believe him. I say you must
have copied it out of some book. Now, di’n’t ee?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul huskily. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a piece of poetry,’ she said. ‘Can you make poetry?’

‘I try sometimes,’ said Paul.

It cost an effort to answer. He wanted her to know, and he shrank from
her knowing.

‘Did you make this?’

‘What?’

‘I’ll tell it.’

She spoke the lines prettily, and put away her rustic accent, all but
the music:

     ‘“Down in the West dwells my lady Clare:
     Blow, O balmy wind, from the West!
     Bathe me in odours of her hair,
     Bring me her thoughts ere she fell to rest!

     ‘“Beam, O moon, through her casement bars;
     Bathe in thy glory her glorious hair:
     Keep guard over her, sentinel stars;
     Watch her and keep her, all things fair!”’

‘You didn’t make that up out of your own head, did ee, Paul?

‘Yes,’ said Paul.

Here was his divinity reciting the lines with which she herself had
inspired him.

‘Now, couldn’t ee make a piece of poetry about me?’ she asked.

Paul’s heart gave one great thump at his breast and stopped.

‘That was about you,’ he said.

‘Why, you silly boy,’ she said, ‘you’ve got the name wrong. But oh,
Paul, ain’t ee beginning very young? Askin’ for maids’ thoughts afore
they go to sleep! Mine, too! You’ll be a regular gallows young reprobate
afore you’re much older. That I’m sure of.’

There was a trembling wish deep down in his heart that she had left
this unsaid, but how could he be so disloyal as to let it float to the
surface? He drowned it deep, but it was there. She had misunderstood.
She read him coarsely, not as the May of his dreams had read him.

‘Now, you write something about me, will ee, Paul?--something in my
own name. Will ee?’ Paul made no answer for the moment, for the request
fairly carried him off his balance. ‘Will ee, now?’ she asked, bringing
her face in front of his.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he half sighed, half panted.

‘Here’s a stile,’ she said, springing forward with a happy gurgle of a
laugh. The laugh to Paul’s ear was as musical as the sad chuckle of
the nightingale, and as far from sorrow as its one rival is from mirth.
There was _camaraderie_ in it, sympathy, a touch even of something
confidential. ‘Now, well sit down here together, and you shall make it
up.’

She perched on the stile as light as a perching bird, and drew her lithe
figure on one side to make room for Paul. The stile was narrow, and
there was barely room for two. Paul hesitated shyly, but she patted the
seat in a pretty assumption of impatience, and he obeyed.

‘Paul,’ she said, sliding an arm behind him, and taking hold of the
side-post. ‘What was it ee wanted to tell this morning?’

‘This morning?’ said Paul stupidly. It is one thing to resolve to be
courageous in battle. It may be another thing when the fight begins.

‘Now, I’m sure you haven’t forgot already,’ she said. ‘Here! You catch
hold of the post on my side. Then we shall be comfortable.’ She swayed
forward to make easier for him the movement she advised, and her whole
figure from ankle to shoulder touched him lightly. He obeyed, and she
swung back again, nestling into the curve of his arm. ‘That’s nice,
isn’t it? Now, what was ee going to tell?’ Paul had not a word to say
for himself. If he had ever had the audacity to picture anything in his
own mind like this present truth, he would have thought it certain to
be deliriously happy; but as a matter of fact he was miserable, and felt
himself at the clumsiest disadvantage. ‘You said,’ she murmured, half
reproachfully, you’d go through fire _or_ water for me, Paul.’

‘So I would,’ said Paul.

‘Why? she asked, nestling a little nearer. ‘Why, Paul?’

‘I would,’ said he, rather sulkily than otherwise.

‘Why?’ She swayed forward again, and looked into his face. Her breath
fanned his cheek. Her eyes were wide open and looked into his almost
mournfully. ‘Why?’ Her glance hypnotized him. ‘Why?’

‘I love you,’ he said, in a whisper.

‘Do ee? she cooed. ‘Oh, you silly Paul! What for?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘There never was anybody as lovely as you are.’

The words seemed to slide from him, apart from his will.

‘Oh, you silly Paul Am I lovely?’

‘Lovely? sighed Paul, and tangled his eyes in hers more and more.

‘You’ll make up that piece of poetry about me, won’t ee, Paul?’

‘Yes.’

The word was just audible, a breath, no more.

‘You dear!’ she said; and, leaning nearer and yet nearer to him, she
laid her lips on his. They rested there for one thrilling instant, and
then she drew back an inch or two only. ‘Make it up about that,’ she
said, looking point blank into his eyes. Paul drooped his head and the
lips met again, and fastened. A delicate fire burned him, and he curled
his arm about her waist, and drew her to him. She yielded for one
instant, and then slipped away with a panting laugh. ‘Oh, Paul?’ she
said; ‘you really are too dreadful for anything! Fancy! A mere child
like you. I should like to know what Mr. Filmer’d say if ever he knew
I’d let ee do that.’

By one of those curious intuitions to which the mind is open at times
of profound excitement, Paul knew what her answer would be, but he
asked the question. At first his voice made no sound; but he cleared his
throat and spoke dryly, and in a tone of commonplace:

‘Who is Mr. Filmer?’

‘Mr. Filmer’s the gentleman I’m going to be married to,’ said May.
‘He’s a very jealous temper, and I shouldn’t like him to know I’d been
flirting, even with a child like you.’

It was all over.




CHAPTER IV

Paul survived. He left the church, and returned with a doubtful
allegiance to Ebenezer. He joined the singing-class there, for his voice
had suddenly grown harsh and deep, and he conceived himself to be a
basso. The parish swarmed with vocal celebrities, and he would be one of
them. He made his first visit to the class, and got there early.

Came in two young ladies in hoops, with pork-pie hats and hair done up
in bags of chenille. The like figures may be seen in the drawings of
John Leech, _circa_ 1860. Each young lady had a curved nose. One nose
curved inward at the bridge, and the other outward at the bridge, and if
the curves had been set together they would have fitted with precision.
Came in a lean lady with a purse mouth, rather open--looking like an
empty voluntary-bag. Came in a stout lady, like a full voluntary-bag,
the mouth close shut with a clasp. Came in a gentleman with shining
rabbit teeth, smiling as if for a wager. Came in a gentleman with a deep
bass voice consciously indicated in the carriage of his head--the voice
garrotting him, as it were, rather high up in the collar. Came in a
gentleman with heavy movable eyebrows, which looked too big for the
limited playground a very small forehead afforded. Came in a small
apoplectic man, bald and clean-shaven, and red and angry in the face,
like an ill-conditioned baby. Came in ladies and gentlemen who smirked
and slid; ladies and gentlemen who loitered, and were sheepish when by
hazard they caught an eye; ladies and gentlemen crammed to suffocation
with a sense of their own importance; ladies and gentlemen miserably
overwhelmed with a sense of the importance of other people.

Paul knew every one of them, and had known them from childhood; and
somehow they were all transformed from commonplace, and dignified into
a comedy which was at once sympathetic and exquisitely droll. His
narrow world had widened; his neighbours had sprung alive. His heart was
tickled with a genial laughter, and his mirth tasted sweet to him, like
a mellow apple. He could have hugged the crowd for sheer delight.

The conductor of the singing-class weeded Paul out at the close of the
first glee, and brought his musical ambitions to an end.

‘Theer are at least twelve notes in an ordinary singin’ voice,’ said the
conductor, ‘and theer ought to be eight half-tones scattered in among
‘em, somewheer. You’ve got two notes at present, and one’s a squeak
and t’other’s a grumble. I think you might find a more advantageous
empl’yment for your time elsewheer.’

Paul submitted to this verdict with high good-humour. He retired to the
far end of the schoolroom, and sat out ‘the practice’ with a growing
sense of pleasure. He exulted in the possession of a new sense which
made all these people lovable.

‘Now I’ve found this out,’ said Paul to himself, ‘I shall never be
lonely any more. There’ll always be summat to think about--summat with a
relish in it.’

He must needs, of course, try to get the relish on paper, and he wrote a
great deal of boyish stuff in flagrant imitation of Dickens, and hid
it, jackdaw-like, in such places as he could find. In the slattern old
office where Paul was learning more or less to be a workman at his trade
there was no such thing as a ceiling. Frayed mortar, with matted scraps
of cow-hair in it, used to fall frequently into the type-cases
whenever a high wind shook the crazy slates, and, to obviate this, some
contriving person had nailed a number of sheets of brown paper to the
rafters. Paul’s hiding-place for his literary work was above these
sheets of paper, and one day when old Armstrong stood by his side, a
tintack gave way beneath the superincumbent weight, and the whole bundle
of scraps in verse and prose fell at the author’s feet Armstrong stooped
for it, and Paul went red and white, and his legs shook beneath him.
There was an upturned box by the side of the cracked and blistered old
stove which warmed the room in winter, and Armstrong went to it and sat
down to untie his bundle. The author had never had any confidences with
anybody, and his father was one of the last people in the world to whom
he would have dared to make appeal for advice or help. In his agitation
he went on pecking at the case of type before him, and setting the
stamps on end at random, inside out and upside down, and in any
progression chance might order. The old man coughed, and Paul dropped
his composing-stick into the space-box with a clatter, and spilt its
contents there. Armstrong slipped the string which bound the roll of
papers, and began to glance over his discovery. Paul felt as if the
ramshackle building had been out at sea.

‘M’m,’ said Armstrong, with the merest dry tick of a tone which seemed
to express inquiry and surprise. Paul started as if an arrow had gone
through him, and dropped his composing-stick a second time. ‘Ye’re very
clumsy, there, my lad,’ said the old man. ‘What’s happening?’

Paul made no answer, and the father went back to his papers.

‘“Bilsby,”’ the old man hummed, half aloud, ‘“Bilsby is fat--fat with
the comfortable fatness which has grown about him in the course of
five-and-forty years of perfect self-approval. Bilsby is not great,
or good, or magnanimous, or wise, or wealthy, or of long descent, or
handsome, or admired; but he is happy. He gets up with Bilsby in the
morning, has breakfast, dinner, tea and supper with him, and goes to bed
with him at night. If Bilsby had a choice--and Bilsby hasn’t--he would
make no change. He has himself to feed on--an immortal feast He sits at
that eternal board, before that unfailing dish, which grows the more
he ruminates upon it. Fat of the fat, sweet of the sweet is Bilsby to
Bilsby’s palate. What will become of Bilsby when he dies? There can be
no heaven for Bilsby, for he would have to hymn another glory there;
There can be no fate of pain, for even if the Devil take him, there will
still be Bilsby, and that fact alone would keep him happy.”

‘What’s all this rampant wickedness, y’ irreverent dog?’ asked
Armstrong. ‘This is your writing, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Paul, feeling his throat harsh and constricted like a
quill.

Armstrong said no more, but rolling up the bundle and sliding the
knotted string once more about it, put it in his pocket and walked
downstairs. Paul hardly dared to meet him at the mid-day dinner, but he
put the best face he could upon the matter--a very pale and disturbed
face it was--and presented himself at table. Nothing was said. The gray
man sat with his book propped up against the bread-basket, as usual,
and ate without knowing what passed his lips. The meal over, he took his
arm-chair by the kitchen fire, and lit his pipe, and read with the cat
perched on his shoulder. Mrs. Armstrong went to mind the shop, the rest
of the family dispersed to their various avocations, and Paul sat still,
listening to the ticking of the clock, and awaiting the stroke of two
to take him back to work. He felt as if it would be cowardice to go
earlier, but he was unhappy, and would willingly have been elsewhere.

Suddenly Armstrong reached out his hand towards the table and set down
his book. Then from the coat-pocket where Paul had plainly seen it
bulging he drew the roll of manuscript.

‘Paul,’ said the old man, ‘I’ve been readin’ this farrago, and the less
that’s said about it the better. I obsairve that the main part of it’s
devoted to the exaggerated satire of your neighbours. That’s a spirit
I’m sorry to notice in ye, and I regret to see that ye’re already
looking sulky at rebuke. The vairse,’ pursued Armstrong, ‘is mainly
sickly, whining, puling stuff, as far away from Nature and experience as
it’s easily possible to be. Now, I invite ye. Listen to this.’

He began to read with a fine disdain:

     ‘“Come not when I am dead
     To drop thy foolish tears upon my grave.”’

Paul averted his head, and set one hand before his face. Months ago,
when May Gold’s perfidy was a new thing, and the whole world was
darkened, he had copied these lines from the Poet Laureate with tears,
and they had seemed to him a perfect expression of himself. The old man
ground out the lines with increasing scorn, and Paul began to grin, and
then to shake with suppressed laughter. Armstrong went on to the end
unyieldingly.

‘I’m not denying,’ he said, a moment later, ‘that I’ve found here and
there a salt sprinkle o’ common-sense. But _that_, my lad,’ banging
a hand on the manuscript page before him, ‘is simply unadulterated
rubbish. It’s the silliest thing in the haul collection.’

Paul’s reverence for his father’s judgment in such matters was a
tradition and a religion. ‘Old Armstrong’ was the parish pride as
scholar and critic. The Rev. Roderic Murchison, who was a Master of Arts
of Aberdeen, sat at the gray little man’s feet like a pupil. Armstrong
had none of the minister’s Greek and Latin, but he was his master in
English letters. In spite of this awful prescription of authority Paul
spirted laughter.

‘It’s Tennyson!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s the Poet Laureate!’

‘Then,’ said Armstrong, ‘the Poet Laureate’s a drivelling idiot, like
his predecessor.’

‘What?’ Paul asked, underneath his breath. He had never listened to such
blasphemy.

‘In my day,’ said Armstrong, ‘a poet laid a table for men to eat and
drink at. We’d Sir Walter’s beef and bannocks, and puir young Byron’s
Athol brose. Wha calls this mingling o’ skim milk an’ treacle the wine
o’ the soul a poet ought to pour?

‘Scott and Byron!’ cried Paul, amazed out of all reverence. ‘Why,
there’s more poetry in Tennyson’s little finger than in both their
bodies.’

‘Hoots, man! hauld your silly tongue,’ cried his father.

‘Have you read “In Memoriam”?’ cried Paul.

‘No,’ returned Armstrong curtly, ‘I have not.’

‘Then,’ Paul stormed, ‘what’s your opinion good for?’

The old man’s eyes flashed, and he made a motion as if to rise. He
controlled himself, however, and reached out a hand to the hob for the
clay he had relinquished a minute or two before.

‘The question’s fair,’ he said; ‘the question’s fair--pairfectly fair,
Paul. I misliked the manner of it, but the question’s fair.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Paul.

He could have knelt to him.

‘They’ll be having Tennyson at the Institute Library?’ the old man
asked. ‘I’ll walk over for him.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Paul, ‘but Tennyson----’

‘Ay, ay!’ said Armstrong, ‘age fossilizes. It’s like enough the man has
a word to say. I’ll look at him.’

He took his rusty old silk hat from its hook beside the eight-day clock,
and went out quietly.

For the first minute in his life Paul truly loved him.

‘It would ha’served me right,’ he mourned, ‘if he’d ha’ knocked me down.
It’s a lot better as it is, though; but it’s hard to bear.’

That afternoon, and for many a morning and afternoon for months, old
Armstrong shuffled swiftly along the weedy garden, and took his seat on
the upturned box beside the stove, and there studied his Tennyson and
smoked his pipe. These were halcyon days for Paul, for the old man was
not long obdurate, and began to halve the delight of his own reading.

‘Ay, ay!’ he said, by way of making his first admission, ‘“in My
Father’s house are many mansions.” This chap has the key to the
organ-loft’ Then, a little later: ‘It’s clean thinking, and a bonny
music’ Later still, with a long, slow sigh on the word: ‘Eh!’ and then,
unconsciously: ‘Deep waters, lad, deep waters.’

He read slowly, for the dialect was new, and he was bent on mastering
it. His occasional difficulties seemed strange to the boy, but then,
Paul had been suckled at this fountain, and could make no allowances for
the prepossessions of age, and the distaste of an old palate for a new
flavour. An occasional question startled him, the answer was so obvious
and simple.

     ‘“Or where the kneeling hamlet drains
     The chalice of the grapes of God,”’

Armstrong read out ‘D’ye find the meaning of that, Paul, lad,’ he asked.

‘Village church,’ said Paul ‘Holy Communion.’

‘To be sure,’ said the old man, ‘to be sure. It’s tight packed, but it’s
simple as A B C.’

There were questions Paul could not answer, and he and the old man
puzzled them out together. They drew closer and closer. The boy dared
to reveal his mind, and the father began to respect his opinion. By
the time the warm weather was round again they were fast friends. They
tramped up and down the path of the neglected garden arm-in-arm, and
talked of literature and politics and the world at large. Paul had
dreams, and sometimes he gave his father a glimpse of them. Armstrong
preached humility.

‘L’arn, my lad,’ he would say, almost sternly, ‘l’arn before ye try to
teach.’

Paul had turned public instructor already, but that was his secret There
was a sort of treason in it, for Armstrong’s rival, a young and pushing
tradesman, had started a weekly paper, and Paul was an anonymous
contributor to its pages. This journal was called the _Barfield
Advertiser, and Quarry-moor, Church Vale, and Heydon Hay Gazette_; but
it was satirically known in the Armstrong household as the _Crusher_,
and its leading articles (which were certainly rather turgid and
pompous) were food for weekly mirth. But one day this was changed.

‘Why, William,’ cried Mrs. Armstrong, ‘this fellow’s turned quite
sensible. You might ha’ wrote this yourself. It’s simply nayther more
nor less than you was sayin’ last Wednesday at this very table.’

Paul’s coffee went the wrong way, and his cough caused a momentary
diversion. But when Dick had vigorously thumped him on the back, and he
had resumed his seat at table, Armstrong read the article aloud.

‘Ay, ay!’ he said at the close, ‘it’s certainly my own opinion, and vary
cleanly put.’

Paul’s coffee went the wrong way again, and again Dick thumped him
on the back. When the paper had gone the round of the household the
anonymous writer stole it, and carried it, neatly folded beneath his
waistcoat, to the office. He knew it by heart already, but he read it
insatiably over and over again. He was in print, and to be in print for
the first time is to experience as fine a delirium as is to be found in
love or liquor. The typed column ravished his senses, and the editorial
‘we’ looked imperial. He was ‘we’ in spite of shirt-sleeves and
ink-smeared apron of herden. In those days the _Times_ could uproot a
Ministry, but its editor in his proudest hour would have been a dwarf if
he had measured himself by Paul’s self-appreciation. Sweet are the uses
of a boy’s vanity, sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.

The dreamer in his mountain eyrie felt his heart warm with a sort of
fatherly pity over these bumpkin raptures. The lad blows a bubble of
foolery, and it glitters and floats and bursts, and who is the worse
for it? The man carves folly in brass, and breaks his head on his own
monument; or forges it in steel, and stabs his own heart with it. The
vanities of youth are yeast in wholesome ale. The follies of later life
are mildew in the cask. The lad who never tasted Paul’s intoxication may
make a worthy citizen, but he will never set the Thames afire.

Paul went on writing, and thundered from the editorial pulpit weekly. He
gave the _Crusher_ a policy. Castle Barfield was to be a borough at the
next redistribution of seats. Its watchwords were ‘Peace, Retrenchment,
and Reform.’ It was to uphold the traditions of Manchester in a curious
blend with the philosophy, or the want of it, of Thomas Carlyle. It
assailed the Vicar of All Saints’ for the introduction of a surpliced
choir, and it showed a bared arm and a clenched fist to Popery.

The Jovian wielder of the _Crusher’s_ lightnings got used to being
discussed at the Saturday morning table, and encountered praise and
blame there with an equal countenance. In his own unplummeted depths he
was Scott before the discovery of the authorship of the Waverley series;
he was Junius; he was S. G. O. And not a soul ever guessed at the truth,
for just as Paul had resolved to reveal his identity and claim his fame
the _Crusher_ died.

Then for a long time he was voiceless, and, having no paper balloon
to float him, he went about in his own thoughts, quite like a common
person. A year later, routing out the whole series of printed articles
from one of his jackdaw hiding-places, he was inspired by an intense
disdain, and burned them in the office stove.

All the time the world he lived in was the world he took least heed
of. Until Ralston crossed him--Ralston, his man of men, and king, and
deity--the only real creature was the gray old man who had begotten
him. Father and son had grown to a curious sympathy, in which age never
domineered because of age, or youth presumed because of youth. Armstrong
the elder was a poet, though he had never printed a line; and he and
Paul brought their verses to each other. They used to print at times the
productions of the local bard, and their first bond of genial and equal
laughter (which is one of the best bonds in life) came of their joint
reading of one of his effusions. Paul had given it the dignity of type.
Armstrong was his own proof-reader, and Paul read the MS. aloud, whilst
his father, with balanced pen, ticked off the lines. They were headed
‘Lines on a Walk I once took in the Country,’ and they opened thus:

‘It was upon a day in May When through the field I took my way, It was
delightful for to see The sheep and lambs--they did agree.

‘And as I went forth on that day I met a stile within my way, That stile
which did give rest to me Again I may not no more see.

‘As on my way I then did trod, The lark did roar his song to God.’

There they laughed, with tears, for this was not a jest of anybody’s
purposed making, but a pinch from Nature’s pepper-castor, and it tickled
the lungs to madness.

‘Paul, lad,’ said Armstrong, coming to a sudden serious end of
laughter, and wiping his eyes, ‘it’s not an ungentle heart that finds it
delightful to see the fleecy, silly people o’ the fields in harmony. And
the reflection on the stile’s a fine bit o’ pathetics. “I’ve been happy
there,” says the poor ignorance; “and I may never see it more.” It’s
the etairnal hauntin’ thoct o’ man in all ages. “We’ve no abiding city
here.” “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.” “Never, never more,”
 says poor Poe’s raven. Listen, m’n! Ye’ll hear Shakespeare’s immortal
thunder. The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces dissolve with the
great globe itself and all that it inherits. It’s all there, Paul. It’s
in the hiccoughing throat of him. Puir felly! Well just put him into
decent English, and see that naebody else shall laugh at him.’

So they trimmed the local bard, and made him sober, and even mildly
sweet; and when, with their joint amendments, they sent the poem home,
the bard refused to be edited, declined the parcel, and took his trade
elsewhere.

But the tinkering of the poor verses brought Paul and his father finally
together, and from that hour onward they were friends.




CHAPTER V

And now the mind of the Exile turned to the episode of Norah
MacMulty--grotesque, pitiable, laughable.

Paul had pssed his seventeenth birthday, and reckoned himself a man.
He was in love again, but tentatively. He had read ‘Don Juan,’ and had
learned a thing or two. He conceived that he had rubbed off the first
soft bloom of youth, and the idea, natural to his time of life, that he
was aged and experienced had taken full hold of him.

He was not wholly certain that he adored the pretty girl at the
bonnet-shop. He had never spoken to her, for one thing, and had only
seen her from a distance, but she did well enough to moon about, and
made an excellent peg to hang verses on.

He had been away on a lovely summer evening’s ramble into the quiet of
the country. He had been verse-making or verse-polishing, and was in a
high state of mental exaltation when he reached the darkened main street
of the town about ten o’clock. He turned the corner, and walked straight
into the arms of a woman, who hugged him with a drunken ardour. Her
breath was fiery with gin, and the coarsely-sweet scent of it filled him
with an impulse of loathing.

‘Let go,’ said Paul

‘Deed I’ll not let go,’ the woman answered, in a drunken voice. ‘Ye’re
just sent here be Providence to see a poor lonely little craychure
home.’

‘Let go,’ said Paul again; but she clung and laughed, and, in a sudden
spasm of downright horror, he put out more strength than he guessed,
and wrenched himself free. The woman tottered backwards, swayed for an
instant, and then fell. The back of her head came into sharp contact
with the corner of the wall. She lay quite still, and Paul grew
frightened. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take my hand. Let me help you up.’ He had
not expected her to answer, but her continued silence seemed dreadful.
He kneeled to look closely into her face. She was quite young--not more
than two or three and twenty at the outside--and she had a quantity of
light auburn hair, which, though untidy, had a soft beauty of its own.
Her eyes were closed, and her face was white. ‘Now, don’t lie there
pretending to be killed,’ said Paul, in an unsteady voice. She made no
movement, and he rose and looked about him in dismay.

There was not a creature in the street, and the public lamps were never
lighted in the summer-time. A long way off the windows of a gin-shop
cast a light upon the road, and nearer, on the opposite side, a red
lamp burned. With a lingering glance of fear and pity at the recumbent
figure, Paul sped towards the red lamp as fast as he could lift a leg.
In his agitation he gave such a tug at the bell that it clanged like a
fire-alarm. The doctor’s assistant, a dashing young gentleman whom Paul
knew from afar, and who was remarkable to him chiefly for an expensive
taste in clothing, came briskly to the door.

‘There’s a woman at the corner,’ said Paul, ‘badly hurt; I thought it
best to let you know.’

The assistant snatched a hat from the hall table, and came out at once.

‘Where is she?’

Paul pointed, and they ran together. The assistant had the quicker turn
of speed, and reached the corner first. He was kneeling beside the woman
when Paul reached him.

‘Got a handkerchief?’ he asked

Paul lugged half a square yard of turkey-red cotton from his pocket.
‘That’s the ticket,’ said the assistant. He folded the handkerchief..
‘Now, hold her head up whilst I get this under it.’

Paul obeyed again, but the hair was all in a warm wet mesh of blood.

‘What are you shaking at?’ the assistant asked him. ‘You’re a pretty
poor plucked un,’ he added, as he tied the bandage tight across the
woman’s forehead.

‘I’m not used to it,’ said Paul, choking with nausea and pity.

‘That’s pretty evident,’ returned the other. ‘Now, get her shawl round
her head whilst I hold her up. That’ll do. We must get her down to the
surgery. Take her by her shoulders; there. Get your arms well under her.
Heave ho! Wait a minute till I settle her dress and get a good hold of
her knees. Upsy daisy; march!’

They went staggeringly, not because of the weight, but by reason of the
giddiness which assailed Paul. He thought it had suddenly grown foggy,
for there was a mist between him and all the dimly visible objects of
the night There were coloured sparks in the mist by-and-by, and when
once they had got their burden through the open hall and had laid it
on a plain straight couch in the surgery, Paul was glad to sit down
uninvited.

‘Take a sniff at that,’ said the assistant, pressing an un-stoppered
bottle into his hand.

Paul obeyed him. The pungent ammonia brought the tears to his eyes and
took his breath away, but it dispersed the fog and stilled the wheel
which had been whirling in his head The assistant had taken off his
coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves, and was going about his task with
professional dexterity and coolness.

‘How did this happen?’ he asked.

He was Paul’s senior by three years at most, but he had as magisterial
and assured a manner as if he had been fifty.

Paul told the story just as it happened.

‘Well,’ said the assistant, ‘this is a pretty grave old case, and so I
tell you. You may find yourself in trouble over this.’

‘Find myself in trouble?’ said Paul. ‘Me?’

‘Yes,’ said the assistant; ‘you.’

‘You’ve got better work in hand than talkin’ rubbish,’ Paul retorted;
‘stick to it.’

‘Ah,’ said the budding surgeon, ‘well wait till the woman’s conscious,
if ever she is, and see what sort of a tale she has to tell.’

‘It’s the simple truf he’s tould ye,’ said the patient, in a feeble
voice. ‘What do ye be tryin’ to frighten him for?’

‘Oh, you’re coming round, are you? asked the assistant; ‘didn’t expect
it. That’s a pretty nasty crack you’ve got.’

‘Twill take more than that to kill Norah MacMulty,’ said the young
woman, struggling into a sitting posture, and beginning mechanically to
arrange her disordered dress. ‘The MacMultys is a fine fightin’ famly,
and it runs in the blood to take a cracked skull quite kindly. I’ll be
takin’ a glass at the Grapes, and then I’ll be goin’ home, but not till
I’ve thanked ye kindly. Has anybody seen me bonnut?’

‘I shan’t allow you to go to the Grapes to-night, my good woman,’ said
the assistant. ‘Where do you live?’

She named her address, a wretched little row of tenement houses some ten
score yards away.

‘What’s your trade?’

‘Me trade, is it?’ she answered, with a feeble, good-humoured laugh.
‘Tis not much of a trade, anyhow; I’m a street-walker.’

She made the statement wholly commonplace in tone, and gave it with as
little reluctance or embarrassment as if she had laid claim to the most
respectable calling in the world.

The assistant stared and laughed, but she caught Paul’s look of amazed
horror.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘why wouldn’t I be? I’ll go to hell for it, av coorse,
for that’s God’s will on all of us. Tis hard lines, too, for ‘tis none
so fine a life when ye’ve tried ut. Thank ye kindly, both of yez. I’d
pay ye for ut, but ye’d not be takin’ a poor girl’s last shillin’, I
know, from the good-tempered purty face of ye.’

‘You’re sweetly welcome,’ said the assistant, busily washing his hands
at the sink, and looking sideways at her. ‘You’re a queer fish, any
way.’

‘’Tis a queer fish I am,’ she answered, ‘an’ by-an’-by they’ll have
the cookin’ of me. Fried soul,’ she said, with a faint laugh. ‘Begobs!
that’s funny; I never thought o’that before. Fried soul!’

‘How old are you?’ the assistant asked.

‘Faith,’ she said, ‘I’m just past two-an’-twinty. ‘Tis an agein’ life,
an’ I look more; but ‘tis God’s truf I’m tellin’ ye.’

‘Very likely,’ said the assistant, towelling his hands.

‘I’ll go now,’ said Norah MacMulty. ‘I’m a trifle unsteady with the
shakin’, but the drink’s out of me, worse luck! and I’ll be able to
walk.’

‘No calling at the Grapes, mind you,’ said the assistant ‘You’d better
look in at the infirmary about eleven o’clock to-morrow.’

‘I’ll do that,’ she answered. ‘Will ye be lendin’ me your shoulder as
far as the dure, young man? I’ll be better in a minute.’

Paul did as she requested, but he crawled with repulsion beneath her
hand. The touch inspired him with loathing. He had lived a sheltered
life, and had never seen an open abandonment to shame. He wondered why
God allowed the degraded thing to live, and his heart ached with pity
at the same time. He led her to the door, and then across the road. The
assistant sent a curt ‘Good-night’ after him. He answered it, and the
door dosed.

‘Can you walk alone now?’ he asked.

‘I’ll try,’ she said, and made a staggering attempt at it.

Paul caught her, or she would have fallen.

‘Take my arm,’ he said to her, hardening his heart with an effort.

He blessed the darkness and the quiet of the street, but before they had
gone a score of yards a door opened in a house he knew, and Armstrong
came out of it.

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the old man would have gone by
dreaming, but he was alert enough at odd moments, and this chanced to be
one of them. He saw Paul arm-in-arm with a bandaged drunken woman, and
as he recognised his son the pair reeled together.

‘Paul!’ he cried. ‘Good God!’

‘I’m glad it’s you, father,’ said Paul. ‘This poor creature fell at the
corner yonder and cut her head terribly. I fetched young Marley to her
from Dr. Hervey’s, and he has seen to her. She wants to get home.’

‘I’ll take the other side,’ said Armstrong, and the three lurched slowly
along in the dimness.

‘Ye’re good people,’ Norah MacMulty said when they had brought her to
her door.

A slattern woman answered Armstrong’s knock, heard the news with no
discernible emotion, and helped the arrival in as if she had been a
sack of coals. Armstrong and Paul went home with few words. ‘Don’t be
startled when you see me,’ Paul said at the door. ‘I helped to carry her
to the doctor’s, and she bled horribly.’

It was not meant for an exaggeration, but he was unused to such scenes,
and the woman’s language more than anything else had helped to scare him
from his self-possession. The hour was late already, reckoning by his
custom. He washed, and went upstairs, but not to bed. He threw the
window open and let in the soft, heavy night-air. Strange thoughts made
a jumble in his mind. From his attic he could see, over the roofs of the
houses opposite, the outlines of the Quarrymore Hills, clearly defined
in the light of the rising moon. Half way between him and them the air
was dimly red with the glow of the unseen furnaces in the valley. He
heard the loud roar of the invisible fires, and now and then the clank
of iron. His thoughts were not on these things, but he was vaguely
conscious of them.

He had taken his earliest look at the real tragedy of life. The peril of
the woman’s soul was the first thing to emerge clearly from the chaos of
his thoughts. Her flippant, reckless acceptance of the certainty of
her own damnation horrified him. Out of the streets, out of the bestial
degradation of that life of shame and drink, into sheer hell? No chance?
No hope? Surely Christ had died! But only for those who owned Him,
and called upon Him! No, no, and a thousand times no! It was not to be
believed, not to be borne. It was hateful, horrible, monstrous. The poor
degraded thing had punishment enough already. She was in hell already.

The bruised reed, the smoking flax! He fell upon his knees, and his soul
seemed to melt in a flood of anguished pity. He wept passionately, with
an incoherent clamour in his heart of ‘God--God--God!’

The storm wore itself out, but he knelt there long, with his hands on
the window-sill, and his face buried in them. He had been too agitated
to find words, and now he was too tired and empty even to wish for them.
His eyes were dry, and his lips were harsh and salt with his tears.

He looked up, and the whole night had changed. The moon rode high,
and was nearly at the full. The skies were spangled with thousands on
thousands of glittering stars. He thrust out his head and looked upward
into the vast blue of the night Out from the stainless sky fell one
warm, heavy drop full on his upturned forehead. To his worn thoughts it
was like an angel’s tear. He nestled beside the open window, and gazed
from star to star, seeming idly to trace an intricate winding road of
blue amongst them. Peace came back to him, an empty peace, no more than
a mental languor. He slept at last, and awoke stiff and chill to find
the light of morning creeping along a clouded east.

All that day one purpose was present to his mind. When the day’s work
was over and he was free, he dressed and walked into the street He
roamed up and down it from end to end, and several times he diverged
from it to pace the road in which Norah MacMulty lived, and to linger
about the house into which he had helped her. He had something to say to
Norah MacMulty, but he caught no sight of her. He went home, and to bed.
Next evening he paced the streets again. There was still no sign of her,
but he encountered the assistant, who nodded to him in passing. Paul
stopped him.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘Is there any news of that poor woman?’

‘Yes,’ said the assistant. ‘She’s in for a touch of erysipelas. They
kept her at the Infirmary to-day. If they’d left her at large she’d have
killed herself.’

‘How?’ said Paul.

‘Drink,’ returned the assistant, and went his own way.

So Paul ceased his wanderings for a while, and a fortnight had passed
before he saw the woman again.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was off for his customary lonely
ramble. Armstrong always went upstairs for a nap after Sunday’s dinner,
and Paul was left without companionship.

The woman was a mile away from her home, and was sitting on the lower
steps of a stile by the side of the highway. She was tidily attired, and
sober. Her recent illness had left a pensive look upon her face.

‘You’re better?’ said Paul, stopping in front of her.

She looked up in some surprise.

‘Oh,’ she answered. ‘’Tis you? I’m better, thank ye kindly. There’s not
many cares to ask.’

‘Do you remember,’ Paul demanded, with a face whiter than her own, ‘what
you said at the doctor’s the night you were hurt?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘What was it?’

‘The doctor asked you what your trade was,’ said Paul.

‘Yes,’ she said; ‘I mind it now.’

‘Did you mean it?’ Paul asked.

‘Ye’re a trifle over-young to turn parson,’ she responded. ‘Go your
ways, child, and don’t be bothering.’

‘Don’t ask me to go yet,’ said Paul ‘I’ve something I want to say to
you.’ His voice stuck in his throat, and she turned her glance towards
him in a new surprise. ‘You said,’ he went on with difficulty, ‘that you
were sure to go to hell.’

‘I’m that,’ she answered dryly, drawing her shawl about her shoulders.

‘Well,’ said Paul, ‘you shan’t. I’m not going to let you.’ She laughed
oddly with a mere ejaculation, and stared along the road. ‘Do you ever
think what hell is like?’ he asked.

‘Would I drink if I didn’t?’ she answered without looking at him.

‘You can’t put it away by drinking.’

‘I know that,’ she answered, with a sudden sullen fierceness. Then, ‘Ye
mean well, I dare say, but ye’re wastin’ time. Go your ways.’

‘It’s no use asking,’ said Paul; ‘I can’t do it.’ She looked up at him
again, and he hurried on, with a dry husk in his throat: ‘I can’t rest
for thinking of it I can’t eat I can’t sleep. I can’t think of anything
else.’

A slight spasm contorted her lips for a mere instant, but she looked
down the road again, and answered drearily:

‘That’s a pity.’

There was a tone of tired scorn in her words, but this, as it were, was
only on the surface. There was something else below, and the sense of it
urged him on.

‘You have a good face,’ he said. ‘You were not meant----’

He checked himself.

‘Me poor boy,’ she answered, with another motion to arrange her shawl,
‘ye can’t tell me anything I don’t know.’

‘I can tell you something you’ve forgotten,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t care
what you’ve done; you’re God’s child, and while there’s life there’s
hope.’

‘Ye’re not a man yet,’ said Norah MacMulty; ‘but if ever ye mean to be
one, hould your tongue an’ go.’

‘I don’t mind hurting you if I can do you any good by it.’ ‘Ye can do me
no good, nor yourself neither. Here’s people coming along the road, and
it’s ten to one they’ll know ye. Ye’ve no right to be seen talkin’ to
the likes of me at your age.’

‘I don’t care for the people,’ he answered. ‘I don’t care for anything
but what I’ve got to say.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you don’t care, I’m sure I don’t. ‘Tis no odds to
me what anybody thinks.’

The people who approached were strangers, two men and two women of the
working class. They passed the pair without notice, talking of their own
affairs.

‘I’m only two days from the hospital,’ said the girl when they were out
of hearing, ‘and me legs gives way underneath me. If ‘twas not for that,
I’d not stay here. Go now; I’m tired of ye.’

‘Look here,’ said Paul, with the dry husk in his throat again, ‘you
don’t like your life.’

‘Faith, then,’ she answered, ‘I do not.’

‘Then why not leave it?’

‘Ye’re talking like a child. How the divvle _can_ I leave it?’

‘Leave it with me,’ said Paul.

That was what he had meant to say from the first, and now that he had
spoken his word his difficulties seemed to fall away.

‘I can’t earn full wages yet, but I can get two-thirds anywhere. I can
make eighteen shillings a week, and I can live on half of it. You can
have the other half, and there will be no need, then---- You will find
something to do in time--sewing, or ironing, or something--and then it
will be easier for us both.’

‘Ye’re mad!’ said Norah MacMulty.

‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I’m not mad. I’m going to save your soul, Norah.’

She looked at him fixedly.

‘Ye mean it?’ she asked.

‘I mean it,’ he answered. ‘I mean it in God’s hearing.’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m mightily obliged to ye.’

‘You’re coming, Norah?’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Armstrong--Paul Armstrong.’

‘I’ll remember that,’ she said. ‘Good-bye to ye, Paul Armstrong.’

‘No,’ said Paul, ‘you will come to me. I shall go to look for work
to-morrow, and as soon as I have found it I shall send for you, and you
will come.’

‘D’ye want me to live with ye?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he answered with a strong shudder. She saw that clearly, and her
colour changed. The swift distortion showed itself about her lips again.
It passed away in an instant, but it left the mouth trembling. ‘I want
you to be away somewhere where nobody can say a word against you. I want
to see you and talk to you sometimes, and know that you are going on
prosperously.’

‘I’m mightily obliged to ye,’ she said again. ‘Ye’re a good little fool,
but a fool you are.’

‘I am not a fool for this, Norah. Nobody is a fool who tries to do God’s
work.’

‘Anybody’s a fool that tries to do God’s work that way,’ she answered.

‘You say you are going to hell, Norah.’

‘And so I am, but not for ruinin’ a child that’s got hysterics. I can
face the divvle without havin’ that on my conscience. And I’ll tell ye
somethin’ that’ll maybe turn out useful when ye grow older. Ye think
because I folly a callin’ that no decent woman can think of and because
ye know that I drink, that I’ve no pride of me own. Ye’re mistaken, Paul
Armstrong. If ye were ten years older, and I me own woman, I’d set these
in your face. D’ye mind me now?’ She shook her hands before her for
an instant, and withdrew them under her shawl again. ‘Ye mean well, I
think, but ye’re just in-sultin’ past bearin’, an’ so you are! Would I
live on the ‘arnin’s of a child? Oh, Mary, Mary, Mother o’ God!’ ‘she
burst out, ‘look down an’ see how I’m trodden in the mud. Go away, go
away; go away, I tell ye! I know what I am. Right well I know what I am.
But d’ye think I’m that?

Black misery on your---- No. Ill not curse ye, for I believe ye meant
well. But if ye’re not gone, I’ve a scissors here, an’ I’ll do meself a
mischief.’

The outburst overwhelmed him. The man of the world who could have stood
unmoved against it would have needs been brave and cool. The torrent of
her passion swept him like a straw.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he stammered; ‘I beg your pardon with all my heart
and soul.’

‘Go!’ she said.

He obeyed her, and the episode of Norah MacMulty came to a close.

‘Paul,’ said the Solitary, waking for a moment from the dream in which
these old things acted themselves again before him, ‘you were always a
fool, but the folly of that time was better than to-day’s.’




CHAPTER VI

Ralston was on the scene--Ralston in ripe middle age, massive and short
of stature, with a square head and a billowy, sable-silvered head of
hair; full lips, richly shadowed by his beard; an eye which twinkled
like some bland star of humour at one minute and pierced like a gimlet
at the next; a manner suavely dogged, jovially wilful, calmly hectoring,
winning as the wiles of a child; a voice of husky sweetness, like a
fog-bound clarion at times; a learning which, if it embraced nothing
wholly, had squeezed some spot of vital juice out of well-nigh
everything; wise, loquacious, masterful, _bon-vivant_; the most perfect
talker of his day in England; half parson and half journalist; loyal to
the bone; courageous to the bone; not an originating man, but original;
a receiver, and, through his own personality, a transmitter of great
thoughts to the masses; a fighting theologian; a fighting politician; a
howling scoff to orthodoxy; a flying flag and peal of trumpet and tuck
of drum to freedom everywhere. This was Ralston.

What should bring Paul from the inky apron, and the dusty type-cases,
and the battered old founts of metal, and the worm-eaten old founts of
wood, and the slattern bankrupt office into the society of such a man as
this?

The Exile dreamed his dream, and a year was gone in a breath.

The Armstrong household was asleep. It was one o’clock--noon of the
slumberous hours. Paul slipped downstairs in his stocking-feet, struck
a match, lit the kitchen gas, and drew on his boots. Then back came the
creaking bolts of the door which led to the garden. Out went the gas,
and Paul, matchbox in hand, sped stealthily to the office, the summer
dews falling and the weeds smelling sweet. The battered padlock on the
staple of the door had been a pure pretence for years past. It locked
and opened as well without the aid of a key as with it Paul lifted the
outer edge of the door in both hands and swung it back cautiously, to
avoid the shriek it gave when merely thrust open, and then lifted it
to its former place. He mounted the stairs--there was not a nail in his
boots which did not know each shred of fraying timber in them--thridded
an unerring way through the outspread lumber on the floor to the stand
at which he commonly worked, set the gas-bracket blazing there, and
began to stack type as if for dear life, but without a copy. The clock
at Trinity struck the hours half a mile away. The clock at Christ’s
followed a second or two later, nearer and clearer. Then a mile off,
soft and mellow, but unheard unless the ear waited for them, the bells
of the Old Church chimed. Three o’clock was sounding, and the summer
dark was at its deepest, when Paul secured a first proof of the work on
which he had been engaged, and hid away the forme in a hollow beneath
the stairs.

In this wise he stole two hours from sleep nightly for a month; and at
the end of that time, lo! a printed poem, molten and cast, and re-molten
and re-cast, chiselled and fined and polished, and all in Paul’s
brain-factory, without a guiding touch of pen or pencil--the work of a
year.

The night after the completion of this task Ralston lectured for the
Young Men’s Christian Institute, and Paul was there. He was there right
early, and secured a seat in the front row. The theme was ‘In Memoriam.’
Ralston talked and Paul listened. In five minutes Ralston was talking to
Paul. Even now, in this strange review of the things that had helped or
daunted him in all his days, the self-exiled Solitary, perched alone in
his eyrie in the Rocky Mountains, encompassed by amorphous smoke-cloud,
whilst the unseen river gnashed on its rocky teeth and howled--even now
he felt the controlling magic of the voice and manner, even now he felt
the triumph which sprang from the knowledge that this man chose him from
the throng, played on him with splendid improvisations, made him the
receptive and distributive instrument for his thoughts.

‘I know,’ said the living Paul Armstrong, looking back on the dead
aspiring creature he had been. ‘Not a self-accusing thought! Pure
worship in the eyes. And the visage! not this battered mask, but the
face of eighteen! Not an ounce of alcohol ever fired his blood from his
cradle till now. A meagre table all his life through--enough and barely
enough. Clean hands and a pure heart, and burning ardour in the eyes.
_I_ could talk to a lad like that. Eh, me!’

The lecture was over; the audience had drained away; the great man and
the Secretary were closeted for a minute; there was a chinking sound of
gold. Ralston came out with a cheery ‘Good-night,’ and Paul was waiting
at the head of the stairs.

‘Mr. Ralston,’ said Paul.

‘Oho!’ said Ralston in his sounding bass, hoarse like the deeper notes
of a reed. ‘My audience!’

‘Will you read this, sir?’

Paul offered a paper-roll. The orator made a sideway skip out of the
range of the tube, as if it had held an explosive. Paul’s face fell
woefully, and the great man laughed and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Walk to the station,’ he said, and rolled downstairs, Paul after him,
and in seventh heaven. ‘What have you there?’ asked Ralston, as they
reached the street. ‘Prose? verse? print? manuscript?--what?’

‘It’s in type,’ said Paul. ‘It is a poem, sir.’

‘What will you bet on that?’ asked Ralston.

‘I’ll take odds, sir,’ said Paul ‘It’s never even betting.’

‘Ha!’ The orator turned and stopped and looked at him. ‘You are in my
debt, young gentleman.’

‘For years past, sir.’

‘What? Eh?’

‘For years past.’

‘I never saw your face before to-night’

‘No, sir. I walk in on Sunday nights to hear you, but I go to the back
of the gallery.’

‘You tramp twelve miles of a Sunday night to hear me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Summer-time, eh?’

‘Any weather.’

‘Present the deadly tube. I’ll stand the charge.’ He thrust Paul’s poem
into the pocket of a loose alpaca overcoat ‘I was saying that you were
in my debt. You made me talk ten minutes longer than I ought to have
done, and I’ve lost my train. There’s not another for forty minutes.
Come and march the platform.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Paul Armstrong, sir.’

‘Armstrong? Armstrong? Father’s house here in the High Street? Printer
and stationer? Ah! Old Bill Armstrong. Ayrshire Scotch. Anti-Corn Law.
Villiers’ Committee. I know him. How do you get on together--eh?’

‘My father, sir? He’s the dearest friend I have in the world.’

‘That’s as it should be. Tell me about yourself. What are you?’

‘I work in the office.’

‘Compositor?’

‘Compositor and pressman.’

‘Many a nugget has come out of that pocket What do you read? Tennyson, I
know. Whom else?’

‘Anything I can get, Mr. Ralston.9

‘Tell me. You’re eighteen at a guess. Tell me last year’s love and this
year’s love, and I’ll prophesy.’

‘It was Hazlitt at the beginning of last year, sir. Then it was Hunt,
and Lamb. Now it’s Thackeray.’

‘Keats anywhere?’

‘Oh! Keats?9 The tone was enough.

‘Favourite bit of Keats now?’

‘Oh, sir, you can’t have favourite bits of Keats.’

‘Come! _The_ darling.’

‘“St Agnes,”’ said Paul; ‘Chapman’s Homer, “The Nightingale,”
 “Hyperion.”’

‘Oh! One love at a time.’

‘I can’t, sir.’

‘Wordsworth?’

‘That’s easier, Mr. Ralston. “The Intimations.”’ ‘Byron?’

‘Oh! “The Don”--miles and miles, sir.’ ‘Where’s Shakespeare--eh?’

‘In the bosom of God Almighty.’

So cheerily the talk had gone, so rapidly, he had no taint of shyness
left. Here was the man of his worship since he had first dared to play
the pious truant from chapel, the one man of the whole world he esteemed
the greatest and the wisest. They had talked for three minutes and he
was at home with his deity, and yet had lost no tremor of the adoring
thrill.

‘Good!’ said Ralston. ‘Dickens?’ Paul’s answer was nothing more than
an inarticulate gurgle of pleasure, neither a laugh nor an exclamation.
‘Carlyle?’ Paul was silent, and Ralston asked in a doubtful voice: ‘Not
read Carlyle?’

‘I’d go,’ said Paul in a half whisper, ‘from here to Chelsea on my hands
and knees to see him.’

‘The best of magnets won’t draw lead,’ said Ralston, and at the time
Paul was puzzled by the phrase, but he blushed with pleasure when he
recalled it later on. ‘And Browning?’

‘Ugh!’ said Paul.

‘Ah, well, that’s natural. But, mind you, Mr. Armstrong, in a year or
two you’ll feel humiliated to think of your present position.’

They talked, marching up and down the platform, until the train came.

‘You have been very kind, sir,’ said Paul when at last the dreaded bell
rang and the distant engine screamed.

‘Have I?’ asked Ralston. ‘Remember it as a debt you’ll owe to some
aspiring youngster thirty years hence.’

The train came up before anything further was said. They shook hands and
parted.

Then for days and weeks Paul waited for a letter, waylaying the postman
every morning at the door. The letter came at last, brief and to the
point:

‘Have read your poem. A bright promise--not yet an achievement. Command
of language more evident than individual thought. Be more yourself, but
go on in hope. Let nothing discourage. Remember that personal character
reveals itself in art Lofty conduct breeds the lofty ideal.’

The last phrase hit Paul hard. He was in search of the lofty ideal, and
if lofty conduct would bring it, he meant to have it.

He was strolling on the next Saturday afternoon, with Ralston’s letter
in his pocket Saturday was a half-holiday, and he was free to do with
it what he pleased. His feet took him by an unfrequented way, and in
the course of an hour’s devious ramble he found himself on the canal
spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the
artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They
bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the
chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of
the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at least a
grouse-peopled moor.

Paul sat down in such a hollow and read Ralston’s letter for the
thousandth time, and resolved anew on lofty conduct Suddenly he was
aware of an approaching noise of voices, and in a little while a rabble
of some twenty men and youths came charging down the slope to where he
lounged in communion with his own fancies. The small crowd was noisy and
excited, and Paul noticed some pallid, staring faces as it hurried by.
The whole contingent, wrangling and cursing unintelligibly, came to a
sudden halt in the bend of the hollow. Here a man in corduroys and a
rabbit-skin waistcoat called in a stentorian voice for order, and the
babel gradually died down.

‘These are the draws,’ said the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, waving
a dirty scrap of paper in a dirtier hand--‘these are the draws for the
first encounter.’

He began to read a list of names. The first was answered in a tone of
bullying jocundity. The second and the third name each elicited a growl
At the call of the fourth name there was no response.

‘Blades!’ called the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat--‘Ikey Blades of
Quanymoor!’

Everybody turned to stare at Paul.

‘That’s him,’ said one. ‘Course it is,’ said another.

‘Bin yo Ikey Blades from Quarrymoor?’ asked the man with the list.

‘No,’ said Paul

The man cursed, devoting himself and Paul to unnameable penalties.
He wound up by asking Paul what he was doing. He wrapped this simple
inquiry in a robe of blasphemies. ‘Nothing particular,’ Paul
answered. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Tak’ it easy with him,’ said a burly,
hoarse-voiced man. ‘Beest thee i’ the Major’s pay?’ ‘Major?’ asked Paul.
‘What Major?’ ‘Why--Major Fellowes!’

‘No,’ said Paul, laughing. ‘I’ve got no more to do with the police than
thee hast. What is it, lads? A bit of a match, eh? Goo along. Need’st
ha’ no fear o’ me.’

He had been fighting his way out of the local dialect for half a dozen
years, but it was expedient not to forget it here.

‘I dunno about that,’ said the man with the waistcoat. ‘Who bist?’

‘Armstrong’s my naäm,’ said Paul. ‘I’ve lived i’ the Barfield Road all
my life.’

‘Can ye put ‘em up?’ was the next query. ‘Why, yes,’ said Paul. ‘I can
put ‘em up if I see rayson for it.’

‘All right We’ll tak’ yo on in place of Ikey Blades. This is the fust
chap yo’n ha’ to tackle. Billy Tunks he is--comes from Virgin’s End.’

Billy Tunks (or Tonks, more probably) carried one of the pale and
staring faces Paul had already noticed. He and Paul surveyed each other.

The man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, having arranged preliminaries,
explained to Paul. This was ‘a little bit of a friendly turn-up with
the weepons of Natur’,’ intended to settle the disputed qualities of
the youth of eight local parishes. Paul’s presence, it appeared, was
entirely providential, for, with the exception of the seven candidates
here in search of glory, there was nobody present who had not at one
time or another ‘fowt’ for money.

‘I suppose,’ said Paul’s informant, ‘you’ve never fowt for money?’

‘No,’ Paul answered, ‘I’ve never fowt for money. Mek yourself easy on
that score.’

‘Oh,’ said the other, ‘I wasn’t castin’ no suspicion. But it’s just a
quiet bit o’ fun like for them as ain’t been blooded in a reg’lar way.
It’s a bit o’ fun for the young uns. Billy an’ yov comes second.’

‘All right,’ said Paul.

He thought of Ralston’s letter, and laughed. Lofty conduct breeds the
lofty ideal. What would Ralston say to this, he wondered? Not that the
thing had a touch of barbarism to his mind. It was rough, of course,
but it was inspiring, and he was used to it. He had seen a great deal
of this peculiar sport, and had a warm liking for it. Being in it was
better than looking on, but even looking on was pleasant.

‘Now, lads,’ said the master of the ceremonies, ‘get to your corners.
An’, gentlemen-sports all, no shoutin’.’

The business of the afternoon began in earnest A brace of lads stood up,
stripped to the waist They shook hands, and set to work. The men were
mere clowns, but the exhibition was anything but clownish. In that part
of the world, at least, the traditions of the game were kept alive,
and there was plenty of sound scientific fighting to be seen. Paul
knew enough to recognise it when he saw it, and he had not watched
two minutes before he knew that in this instance he was hopelessly
outclassed.

‘I’m in for a hiding,’ he said to himself. ‘A chap in search of the
lofty ideal will have to make up his mind to a pretty good hiding,
too. If you’re eating for honour, you mustn’t leave anything on the
trencher.’ He watched the fight keenly, but he watched it with a
heart that danced unevenly. ‘Yes,’ he thought; ‘I shall have to take a
bellyful.’

The combat was brief and decisive.

‘Sivin an’ a quarter minutes of a round,’ said the master of the
ceremonies; ‘an’ a pretty bit o’ fightin.’ Theed’st best get ready,’
turning to Paul. ‘The little un’s pumped. He’ll ask for a second
helpin’, but that’ll finish him.’

The prophecy was realized, and Paul found himself in a brief space of
time standing hand in hand with Master Tonks, and looking him squarely
in the eye. The fist Paul held in his own was like a mason’s mallet, but
its owner was of a clumsy and shambling build. Paul silently breathed
the one word ‘tactics,’ and he and his opponent fell back from each
other. He thought Master Tonk’s attitude curiously awkward, but he had
no guess as to what lay behind it. He sparred for an opening. It looked
all opening, and he wondered, and half dropped his hands.

‘Goo in!’ said somebody, in a jeering voice. ‘Goo in, one or t’other on
ye!’

Paul went in, and Master Tonks went down. He was picked up, and knocked
down again.

‘Why, what is it,’ asked Paul. ‘You’ve got no guard, lad.’

‘I told thee how it ud be,’ said one of the onlookers, addressing Master
Tonks, as he sat upon the turf nursing his nose in the hollow of his
arm. ‘Ye see, lads,’ he continued, ‘it’s like this: This is Turn Tunks,
this is--Billy’s brother. They’m my nevews, the pair on ‘em. Billy’s
laid up with a broken leg, and Turn’s come here to show for him for the
honour o’ the family. I thought he knowed a bit about it, or I wouldn’t
ha’ suffered him to come.’

So this part of the contest ended in fiasco, but the next combat and the
next were spirited and skilful The four victors in the first bout drew
straws for the second. The winner of the first fight fell to Paul’s
share.

‘Lofty conduct!’ said Paul to himself, with a little rueful grin. ‘I’m
in for it, and I must make the best of it.’

He made the best of it for one fast five minutes, and all on a sudden
he found himself looking at the sky, his opponent and the little crowd
clean vanished. He was dreamy and quiet, and had no opinions about
anything, and no interest in anything. Somebody picked him up and set
him on somebody else’s knee, where he was sponged and fanned. There was
a faint suggestion in his mind to the effect that somebody, somewhere,
had a shocking headache. Then he knew that one or two men were roughly
helping him to dress. He himself mechanically aided this work, and
by-and-by found himself watching a new encounter, aware by this time
that the headache was his own. He handled nose, and upper-lip, and eye
delicately, and came to the conclusion that he presented a picture to
the gaze of man. Then, gradually pulling himself together, he watched
the business of the day with tranquil interest.

Four had had it out with four, and then two with two; and now the
survivors of the match were engaged for the final prize of honour. Each
man had fought twice already, and they were both too tired to do much
execution upon each other; but at last Paul’s late antagonist won, and
the simple game was over. The man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat thanked
Paul for having preserved the symmetry of the day.

‘Eight’s a shapely little handful,’ this authority said. ‘It’s the pick
of the basket for a number, eight is. Sixteen’s on-widdy, and it knocks
a hole in a long summer’s day. Four’s a flash in the pan; but eight’s a
pretty little number.’ He added genially: ‘We’m all very much obliged to
you, young man.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul, ‘I like to be neighbourly.’

The muscles of his face were stiffening, and his inclination to laugh
cost him a twinge.

The man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat said his sentiment did him credit,
and shook hands with him on the strength of it. The crowd went away as
it had come, and left him where it found him. He was not going to walk
home in broad daylight with such a visage as he carried. He paced about
the trampled hollow to keep his blood in circulation, and in a little
while the friendly darkness began to gather. Then he set out for home
at leisure, choosing unlighted ways; and after a circuitous journey,
climbed a gate and a garden wall or two, and landed at the office. There
he made his toilet with the aid of a piece of yellow soap, a bucket of
water, and a jack-towel, and then walked down the darkened garden to
the house. He paced the paved yard on tiptoe, and peeping through the
kitchen-window, saw his father seated alone at the fireside Armstrong
looked up with his customary mild, abstracted gaze.

‘Why, Paul, lad!’ he cried. ‘Who’s handled ye like that?’

‘There’s no harm done, sir,’ said Paul ‘I’ve been putting a precept of
Mr. Ralston’s into effect in a way he never dreamt of.’

‘Ye’ve been fighting,’ said his father, with a voice of reproof. ‘Unless
ye’ve a vera guid reason for it, that’s a blackgyard way of settling
differences.’

‘I’m like Othello, sir,’ Paul answered: “Nought I did in hate, but all
in honour.” I had no difference with the gentleman who did this for me.
We met and parted on the most excellent terms.’

But even when Paul had told his story, Armstrong was un-appeased, and
declined to see any form of humour in it.

‘It’s just a wanton defacing of the Divine image,’ he said, ‘and a
return upon the original beast.’

Paul was constrained to let the incident rest there, but he comforted
himself by fighting the battle over again in fancy. In this wise he beat
the champion of the afternoon hands down, and came off without a scar.




CHAPTER VII

Armstrong and Paul were keeping house alone, and were playing chess
together. The big eight-day clock ticked, the cat purred noisily on
Armstrong’s shoulder, the clear burning fire made slight crisp sounds
in the grate, and now and then slack fell from the bars. The two sat in
silence, poring over the board. Paul made a move.

‘That’s vile play,’ said Armstrong. ‘Mate in four.’

‘Go on, sir,’ Paul answered.

‘Chick,’ said Armstrong.

‘But you lose your castle.’

‘Do I so? But I get a pawn for it, and chick again.’

‘Yes,’ said Paul, ‘I see.’ He turned down his king and sat absent-eyed.

‘Ye’re falling off, Paul,’ said Armstrong, ‘or else your mind’s not on
the game.’

‘To tell you the truth, sir,’ Paul returned, sitting up with a sudden
sprightliness, ‘my mind’s not on the game.’

‘Where is it, lad?’

‘Well, sir, it’s in London.’ ‘London?’

‘London, sir. I can’t stop here all my days. I want to see the world.’

Armstrong rose to light his pipe at the gas. He dropped into his seat
slowly, took the cat from his shoulder, and set it on his knees. The
purr rose louder as he stroked lingeringly.

‘Ay!’ he said after a long pause; ‘ay, ay!’

‘I was afraid you wouldn’t like it, sir,’ said Paul ‘I’m not misliking
it, lad,’ his father answered. ‘I’m not misliking it What’s your
proposition, Paul?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I’ve formed no plans. I don’t know how to go about
things. I’m stifling here.’

‘It’s natural,’ said Armstrong; ‘I’ve stifled here for twenty years,
lad. But then,’ he added, with his own dry, wistful twinkle of a
fleeting smile, ‘I was born to stifle. What’ll you do in the world,
Paul, when ye get into it, if ye’re out of it here?’

‘I don’t know, sir. I shall try to do something.’

‘Ay!’ said Armstrong again; ‘ay, ay!’

His gray-blue eyes dreamed behind his grizzled brows, and Paul sat
watching him. There was a touching something in the gray, bowed figure
and the gray patience of his face. Paul seemed to see him alone, thus
dreaming.

‘I won’t go, dad, unless you like.’

‘It’s best, Paul; it’s best.’

A knock sounded at the front-door, and Paul walked down the long narrow
passage which lay alongside the sitting-room and the shop, and admitted
the major part of the household. They had been to a tea-meeting and
concert at Ebenezer, and they all trooped chattering into the big
kitchen, bringing a smell of frost and night air in their raiment.

‘Mary,’ said Armstrong, at the first gap of silence, ‘Paul is going to
London.’

Paul’s heart swelled at this unlooked-for acceptance of his plans, but
the household stood in wonder.

‘What’s Paul got to go to London for?’ asked Mrs. Armstrong.

‘We’ve talked it over within the last few minutes,’ returned Armstrong.
‘The lad’s coming to discretion. He wants to see the world. I’ll find
something for him to do there.’

‘William,’ said his wife, ‘you’re mad.’

Armstrong lit his pipe and said nothing, but the wife uplifted her voice
and spoke.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’ve got your proper look on, as if you were half a
million miles away, and me a insect, crawling about somewhere in another
planet and not worthy of a thought I know your ways--I’ve got a right to
know ‘em after nine-and-thirty ‘ears o’ married life, I reckon. You’ve
spoke your word, and you’ll sooner die than go back on it. Another man
‘ud give some sort of a why an’ a wherefore. But you! You’re Sir Horacle,
you are. You’ve opened your lips, and other folks’ talk is just no more
than so many dogs a-chelpin’! What’s our Paul want to go to London
for? Answer me that, if you please, William Armstrong. If it was in me,
William, to be a downright vulgar woman, I’d take the poker to you.’

Armstrong looked up with his swift, dry twinkle, and she laughed.
She tried to make the laugh sound angry, but the effort was useless.
Armstrong twinkled again, and she burst into a peal.

‘Children,’ she said, wiping her eyes with the fringe of her shawl,
‘remember what I tell you. That’s the best man in the world, but I hope
to gracious goodness as none of you will ever grow up like him. He’s
enough to break the patience of a saint. If Job’d ha’ lived with him,
he’d ha’ broke his head with one of his potsherds.’

Then the household laughed at large, for of late years this was the
fashion--this, or something very like it--in which all combative
disputes had ended. It had not always been so. In the earlier years,
which Paul could well remember, before the gray little man had achieved
his triumph of speechless mastery, there had been scenes which bordered
on the terrible.

‘And now,’ said Mrs. Armstrong, ‘what’s our Paul to go to London for?’

‘He’ll finish learning his business there,’ said Armstrong. ‘In two or
three years’ time he ought to be able to come back and take charge of
the place. There’s the nucleus of a good trade here, if it had energy
and knowledge brought to bear on it.’

There was an end of spoken opposition, and the fact that Paul was going
to London was accepted. A month went by, and all arrangements were made.
The Rev. Roderic Murchison had left Barfield, and had accepted a call
from some congregation in the outskirts of the great city. He held a
salaried post as well as Metropolitan secretary to his sect, and had
become a person of importance. He was in association with a firm of
printers who worked mainly for the big Nonconformist bodies, and an
odour of sanctity was supposed, by the Armstrong household at least,
to rest upon the labours upon which Paul was about to enter in their
office. Paul had examples of the office craftsmanship set before him.
Technically they were excellent, but their literary form was not of the
highest order. He learned that a hundred and odd workmen were engaged,
and he pictured them as a set of square-toes whose talk would be guarded
and pious and narrow, for in his innocence he imagined the men who
translated good books into type were necessarily good, and the men who
translated into type the goody-goody were of that spiritual complexion.

Paul and his father travelled up to London together on a Thursday.
They found lodgings in Charterhouse Square at the house of a sprightly
black-eyed lady, whose husband, long deceased, had been a Nonconformist
minister. She was very smiling and gracious, and Paul thought her a
charming woman, but he got out of her good books very early, and never
knew how for years after.

‘Oh yes, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said at the Sunday dinner, ‘anybody would
know you were from the country.’

‘How?’ Paul asked.

‘By your hair,’ said the lady.

‘Oh, well,’ said Paul, ‘I must get it cut London fashion.’

Mrs. Bryne bit her lips and flashed a look at him. The boarders
tittered, but Paul sat unconscious. He knew that ignorant people
misplaced their aspirates at times, but Mrs. Bryne was a lady, and wore
silk dresses on week-days.

But he had sown a seed of misliking, and it had opportunity to ripen.
Armstrong the elder, with that wholesale want of worldly wisdom which
distinguished him, had arranged that Paul should have a room in Mrs.
Bryne’s house, with breakfast and supper on week-days and whole board
on Sundays, on terms which fitted accurately with his earnings. He gave
Paul a pound for pocket-money, and went away without a thought as to
what the lad was to do for his daily dinner. This admirable business
arrangement bore fruit, of course.

At eight o’clock on a February morning Paul presented himself at the
office. The day was foggy and bitter. The street-lamps were alight, and
all the shops yet open were dull yellow with gas-lamps in the fog. He
had to ask his way several times, and only one passenger in four or
five took any notice of him, but he reached his destination as some
neighbouring church clock boomed the hour out of the nowhere of the
upper air. He announced himself by name to a man in a glass-case at the
head of the stairs. The man gave him a surly side-way nod, and Paul, not
understanding, waited for something more.

‘Upstairs, ye fool!’ said the man.

‘It’s a cold mornin’,’ said Paul. That nose o’ yours looks a bit
pinched with it. I’ve half a mind to warm it for you.’

‘Well,’ said the surly man, ‘how often do you want to be spoken to?’

‘Once is enough,’ said Paul. ‘Come outside and I’ll gi’ thee a lesson in
manners.’

The surly man declined this invitation, and slid down the glass in front
of him. Paul mounted wrathfully. He was more grieved at himself than
at the other fellow, because he had made up his mind to be civil to
everybody, and above all things to put away the Barfield accent, which
he could do quite easily when he thought about it.

In the great room he entered there were rows on rows of compositors’
frames, all dimly illuminated by a single gas-jet, and the air was thick
with fog. One prematurely sharp-looking small boy was performing a sort
of rhythmic dance with a shrill whistle for accompaniment. He had a big
can of water, which he swung like a censer as he danced. The can had a
small hole pierced in the bottom, and the boy was laying the dust When
the can had yielded its last drop he took up a big broom and swept the
place rapidly, keeping up his shrill whistle meanwhile.

‘Isn’t it time somebody was here?’ Paul asked at length.

‘Manday’s a saint’s day,’ said the boy. ‘You a-comin’ to work ‘ere?’ he
asked. Paul nodded. ‘You’ll know better next taime. Why, even the “O.”
 doesn’t come before naine on a Manday.’

That was the fashionable Cockney dialect of the time. It is dead, as are
the many fashions of Cockney speech which have followed it until now,
and as the present accent will be in a year or two. It tickled Paul’s
ear, and to get more of it he beguiled the boy to talk.

‘Who’s the “O.”?’ he asked

‘“O.”?’ said the boy sharply. ‘Overseer.’

‘Why are they late on Monday?’

‘I suppose,’ said the boy, ‘they stop too late at church on Sanday. They
are a pretty old ikey lot as works ‘ere, and so I tell you.’

Paul began to revise his opinion as to the probable character of his
associates. But perhaps the boy was purposely misleading him. He thought
it worth while to wait and see.

‘What’

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