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.