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.