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.