In a month’s time from this Paul’s soul sat chuckling all day long. He
lived with the quaintest set he had ever conceived, and there was no
page of ‘Nickleby’ which was fuller of comedy than a day of his own
life. He met Crummies, and actually heard him wonder how those things
got into the papers. He met the Infant Phenomenon. With his own hands
he had helped to adjust the immortal real pump and tubs. He was still in
the days when there was a farce in an evening’s performance to play the
people in, and a solid five-act melodrama for the public’s solid fare,
and a farce to play the people out.
Darco travelled with his own company, majestically Astrachan-furred
and splendid, but rarely clean-shaven. Nine days in ten an aggressive
stubble on cheek and chin seemed to sprout from an inward sense of his
own glorious import.
‘I am Cheorge Dargo,’ he said unfailingly to every provincial
stage-manager he met ‘I nefer sbeaks to beobles twice.’
His brutalities of demeanour earned for him the noisy hatred of scores
of people. His hidden benefactions bought for him the silent blessings
of some suffering unit in every town. He bullied by instinct in public.
He blessed the suffering by instinct in private. He was cursed by
ninety-nine in the hundred, and the odd man adored him. Paul’s heart
fastened to the uncouth man, and he did him burningly eager service.
Paul was in clover, and had sense enough to know it.
‘I regognise the zymptoms,’ said Darco, when they had been on tour a
week. ‘I am not going to haf my insbirations in the tay-dime any longer.
All my crate iteas will gome to me now for some dime in the night. You
haf got to be near me, young Armstrong. You must sday vith me in the
zame lotchings.’
This meant that Darco paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came
to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the
same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to
patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker’s,
but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of
jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a
cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he
meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in his chest, and had thrown
the gewgaw into the fire. But the watch for the first week or two was a
token of established manhood, and it was consulted a full hundred times
a day, and was corrected by every public clock he passed.
His occupation was no sinecure, for Darco was running half-a-dozen
companies, and kept up a fire of correspondence with each. He had dramas
on the anvil, too, and dictated by the hour every day. Often he woke
Paul in the dead of night, and routed him out of bed, and gave him notes
of some prodigious idea which had just occurred to him.
Darco had an unfailing formula with his landladies: ‘Prek-fasd for
three, lunge for three, tinner for three; petrooms and zidding-room for
two,’ He worked for three and ate for two.
‘I am in many respegs,’ he told Paul, ‘a most remarkaple man. I am a
boet, and a creat boet; but I haf no lankwage. My Vrench is Cherman, and
my Cherman is Vrench, ant my Enklish is Alsatian. My normal demperadure
is fever heat. I am a toctor; I am a zoldier. I haf peen a creat agdor
in garagder bards--Alsatian garagder bards--in Vrance and in Chermany.
I can write a blay, ant I can stage id, ant I can baint the scenery for
id. I am Cheorge Dargo, ant vere I haf not been it is nod vorth vile to
co; and vot I do not know apout a theatre it is not vorth vile to learn.
Sdob vith me, and I will deach you your business.’
The company played a week within five miles of Castle Barfield, and
Paul snatched an hour for home. There the brown velveteen and the patent
leathers and the watch made a great impression, and the eight sovereigns
Paul was able to jingle in his pockets and display to wondering eyes.
‘There’s danger in the life, lad,’ said Armstrong wistfully. ‘I know
it, for I saw a heap of it in my youth. Keep a clean heart, Paul. High
thinking goes with chaste and sober living. There’s nothing blurs faith
like our own misdeeds.’
Paul was thankful for the dusk which hid his flaming cheeks at this
moment. His mother had taken away the candle, and the old man had chosen
the instant’s solitude for this one serious word.
‘I’m not denying,’ said Armstrong, ‘that it is a good worldly position
for a lad of your years, but what’s it going to lead to, Paul, lad?
What’s the direction, I’m asking?
‘I’m going to be a dramatist,’ said Paul.
‘A play-actor!’ cried the mother, who was back again.
‘A play-writer,’ Paul corrected. ‘I’ve got the best tutor in the world.’
‘Do you mean to tell me,’ his mother asked, ‘that you think o’ making
that a trade for a lifetime?’
‘Why not? asked Pau.
‘Why not, indeed!’ she cried, with an angry click of her
knitting-needle. ‘Writing a parcel o’ rubbidge for fools to speak, and
other fools to laugh at.’
‘It was Shakespeare’s trade, Mary,’ said Armstrong.
‘It’s a pretty far cry from our Paul to Shakespeare, I reckon,’ said the
mother with sudden dryness.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Paul, laughing; ‘but there are degrees in every
calling. Wait a bit I don’t mean that you shall be ashamed of me.’
Paul had been away from home for half a year, and absence had altered
many things. The High Street of the town had grown mean and sordid to
the eye. Shops which had once been palatial had lost all the glamour
which childhood had given them and custom had preserved. The dusty,
untidy shop at home had shrunk to less than half its original
dimensions. Armstrong seemed changed more than anything or anybody
else. He looked suddenly small and old and gray. He was not much over
five-and-sixty, but he had always seemed old to Paul, even from the
earliest recollections of infancy. But his age had been the age of
dignity and authority, and now it was age without disguise, white-haired
and withered, and bowed in uncomplaining patience.
But Paul felt that there was no such change anywhere as in himself. A
certain complacency had stolen across the horror which had shaken him
at the first contemplation of his own fall. He had made a step towards
manhood; he heard the talk of men--not the best, not the wisest, yet
neither the worst nor the most stupid--and he knew now how lightly they
valued that which he had once esteemed priceless. He had written in his
note-book:
‘To forgive is godlike. Be as God unto thyself.’
He had made a step towards manhood. He had thought it a hideous,
irremediable plunge to ruin, and yet somehow he seemed to stand the
higher for it. The episode was to be hateful for ever in memory. But
it was to cloud life no longer--only to stand as a sign of warning,
a danger-signal. Surely the net is spread in vain in the sight of any
bird. The burned child dreads the fire. He did not as yet reckon that
man is a moral Salamander, and accommodates himself to all temperatures
of heat and asceticism. How should a raw lad of less than nineteen think
in such a fashion? But he knew what he had not known; he had passed
through the fire, and the smell of burning had left his raiment.
The Midland mother gave him a cold cheek to kiss when he went away, but
the Scottish father embraced him with a trembling arm.
‘Ye’ll be remembering Sir Walter’s last words to Lockhart,’ he said. ‘Be
a good man, my dear.’
Paul pressed his smooth cheek against the soft white whiskers of his
father’s face, and held his right hand hard. There was a lump in his
throat, and his good-bye had a husk in it. He went back to the society
of men who had never thought manly chastity a virtue or the unchastity
of men a crime. He went back armed in steel, and the armour lasted a
full fortnight in its perfection. Then here and there a rivet came out,
and by-and-by the whole suit fell to pieces.
‘Id is gurious,’ said Darco, ‘that all the vunniest sdories in the vorlt
should be vhat they gall imbrober. Look at Arisdophanes; look at Jaucer;
look at the “Gontes Troladigues”; look at the “Tegameron.”’
‘Look at Pickwick,’ said Paul.
‘Vell!’ cried Darco, ‘look at Bigvig. Bigvig woult haf peen a creat teal
vunnier if Tickens had lived at the dime of Zmollet.’
‘I don’t mind drinking out of a jug,’ said Paul, ‘but I like a clean
jug. I’ve read Aristophanes--in translation. It’s like drinking wine out
of a gold cup that has been washed in a sewer.’
‘Who says that?’ asked Darco.
‘I do,’ said Paul.
‘It is a ferry coot ebicram,’ said Darco. ‘I vill rememper id. But,
mindt you, to be squeamish is not to be glean-minded.
If a sdory is vunny, I laugh. Vy not? If a man tells me a sdory that is
only dirdy, I co someveres else. I am a goot man. For dwendy-three hours
and fifty-eight minutes in a tay I am as bure-minded as a child; then,
in the ott dwo minutes somepoty tells me a dirdy sdory. I laugh, and I
go avay, and I think of my blays and my boedry and my pusiness. It is
water on a duck’s pack.’
‘Dirty water,’ said Paul.
‘There is enough glean water in the tay’s rainfall to wash it off,’
Darco answered. ‘Did you efer read “The Orichinal”?
‘No,’ said Paul.
‘The man who wrote it vos so healthy that he nefer hat need to wash
himself. His skin was too bure to hold dirt.’
‘Filthy beggar!’ said Paul.
‘I make it a baraple,’ Darco declared. ‘Id is true of the immordal soul.
I am as bure-minded as a child, and I haf heardt den thousand fillainous
sdories. Vot does it madder?’
The rivets of Paul’s armour rotted, as the rivets of most men’s armour
rot, and he grew to tolerate what had been abominable. And that is the
way of life, which is a series of declensions from high ideals, and is
meant to be so because things must be lost before their worth can be
known. The society in which he lived and moved was as rich as any in the
world in the kind of narrative he had discussed with Darco. Little by
little he got to take Darco’s view. It is the view of ninety per
cent, of men of the world. A naturally pure mind never learns to love
nastiness, but it learns to tolerate it, for the sake of the wit which
sometimes lives with it.
Darco was a man whom nobody ever saw for an instant under the influence
of liquor, but then it was impossible to make him drunk. It seemed to
Paul as if it were just as unlikely for him to become intoxicated by
drinking as for a decanter to grow tipsy by having liquor poured
into it. If he ate--as he did--twice as much as the average keen-set
sportsman, he drank as much as the average hopeless drunkard, and no man
could have guessed from his speech, or acts, or aspect that he was not
a total abstainer. Paul, too, began to discover that he had a cast-iron
pot of a head, and took an infantile pride in the fact; but this kind of
vanity was not often indulged in, and he had no physical predisposition
to it.
Darco made money by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation.
Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels.
It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to
think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour
and enjoyment in them. Every week showed him a new town or city: classic
Edinburgh, dirty Glasgow--cleaner nowadays--roaring Liverpool, rainy
Manchester, smoke-clouded Birmingham and Sheffield, granite-built
Aberdeen, jolly Dublin, with an unaccustomed twang in the whisky, after
the Scottish progress; Belfast, Cork, Waterford. Everywhere character
studies in shoals; dialect studies every day and all day long. Paul
could train his tongue, before the twelve months’ tour was over, to the
speech of Exeter, or Norwich, or Brighton, or Newcastle, or Berwick,
or Aberdeen, or Cork, or the black North. He set himself to the task
conscientiously, and with a rich enjoyment. What a Gargantuan table was
the world!
How lovable, laughable, hateful were the men who sat at it! What a feast
of feeling was spread daily!
The tour came near to its end, and Darco was arranging a new series
for half a dozen companies, so that work grew furious. A man might
have commanded an army or ruled a great department of State with
less expenditure of energy. There was no advertising or consulting of
agencies, but everything was done by personal letter. There were reams
and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts
with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and
scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized
mass of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing
three men’s work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came
near him. He could be princely with it all in his own way.
‘You haf learned your pusiness, young Armstrong,’ he said to Paul when
the rush was over. ‘I gan deach anypoty his pusiness if he is not a
vool. I am Cheorge Dargo. You haf done your work gabidally, and you are
vorth fife dimes vot I am baying you. But I alvays like the shady site
of a pargain, and I shall only gif you four dimes.’
So at four times the original sum Paul’s salary was fixed, and he began
to feel himself a man of consequence.
‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ he was told to say to people with
whom he was empowered to deal. ‘I am entirely in Mr. Darco’s confidence,
and you may deal with me exactly as if Mr. Darco were here.’
At the beginning of the second year the great provincial cities had
begun to take advantage of the Public Libraries Act, and here was a new
joy for Paul. The Free Library was the first place he asked for in any
big town, and at every spare hour he stuck his nose into a book, and
kept it there until duty called him away again. Something in ‘Gil Bias’
about poverty in observation struck his fancy, and he cast about in
his own mind asking where he could observe, not knowing yet that he was
observing all things. He hit upon the landlady. A man who has fifty-two
landladies in a year has surely a fertile field. He sorted and
classified in the light of experience: the honeyed, the acidulated, and
bibulous-godly (mostly Scottish), the bibulous-ungodly (mostly English),
the slut with a clean outside to things, the painstaking sloven, the
peculative (here one majestic sample), the reduced in circumstances,
the confidential, the reserved, the frisky, the motherly, the
step-motherly--a most excellent assembly for mirth and pity.
Mrs. Brace came back again. How many years was it since the memory of
Mrs. Brace had touched the Exile’s mind?
Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for
breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.
‘Vere is my other zausage,’ cries Darco. ‘There vere zeven. Now there
are six. Vere is my other zausage?’
‘Really you know, sir,’ says Mrs. Brace. ‘Sausages do shrink so in the
cooking.’
Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco
stormed like a beaten gong.
Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that
bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller’s plan to
convey a portion of the guests’ clean linen from the chest of drawers
into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat
newspaper parcel, and to say, ‘If you please, gentlemen, the rest
of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it’s two and
elevenpence halfpenny.’ Oh, the days--the days when a jest like this
could shake the ribs with mirth!
And Mistress MacAlister, painfully intoxicated at the dinner hour of 2
p.m., and the uncooked leg of young pork in the larder.
‘D’ye thenk ah’m goin’ to cuik till ye on the Sabba’ Day? Ye’ll no
be findin’ th’ irreligious sort o’ betches that’ll do that for ye in
Dundee, ah’m thenkin’.’
And the little soft-spoken lady from New Orleans, whose husband had been
a General--in Del Oro--and an old friend of Darco’s in his campaigning
days. And the execution in the house. And Darco signing a cheque for
twice the amount claimed, and blubbering like a great fat baby, and
swearing to burn the cheque if she thanked him by another word. Old
Darco, the nerve-tearer, the inordinate pyramid of vanity, the tender,
the generous, the loyal. Sweetest fruit in sourest rind! Sleep on,
old Darco. God makes none gentler in heart, though He makes many more
beloved.
And how men do, on all hands, unconsciously lay themselves out to
delight the budding genial satirist! Here is Darco, wealthy and
prosperous as he has never been before, launching out fearlessly, and
bearing with him _the_ splendour of the stage--the great Montgomery
Bassett. Darco, in consultation with the glorious creature, the question
being in which of his unrivalled and majestic assumptions he shall first
appear:
‘It doesn’t matter, dear boy,’ says Mr. Montgomery Bassett, in that
noble voice, a voice rich as the king of all the wines of Burgundy--‘it
doesn’t matter the toss up of a blind beggar’s farthing. The people
don’t come to see the play, my boy; they come to see me. They’d come to
see me if I played in Punch and Judy.’
And the late leading man, now dethroned, and put to second business:
‘Bassett! Montgomery Bassett! I could act his head off, dear boy. He
is the rottenest stick that ever stalked upon a stage. He can’t get in
front of that infernal Roman nose, sir. “Now,” says Bassett, “I’m going
to be pathetic;” and the Roman nose says, “I’ll see you damned first.”
“And now,” says Bassett, “we’ll have a bit of comedy.” “Oh no, you
won’t,” says the nose. You might as well try to act behind a barn-door
as to act behind that nose. Just fill me out a little tot of Scotch,
darling laddie. I want to lose the taste of Bassett.’
And the leading lady and the _ingénue_ who hung together like twin
cherries on one stalk, bathed in soft dews of tenderness, until Bassett
praised the one and not the other, and the leading lady called
the ingénue ‘Chit’ and the ingénue retorted ‘Wrinkles!’ And the
reconciliation at the champagne supper which Darco gave when Bassett
went away, when the tears they shed must have tasted of the wine.
Oh, the days--the days, long years before he set out on his Journey of
Despair, when mirth had no malice, and tears were tributaries to pity!
‘I have vound oudt,’ said Darco, one day, ‘that our paggage man is
a pantit He is ropping eferypoty, and I have kiven him a fortnight’s
vages, and the bag to carry. That is my liddle chockular vay to say he
has got the zack. I haf dele-graphed for a new man, and he will come
from Lonton by the seven-thirty train. His name is Warr, and you will
know him by his nose, which is pigger than your fist, and as hot to look
at as the powels of the Phalarian Pull. It ought to be an acony to garry
it, but he laughs pehint it in the distance. But I nodice it always
zeems to make his eyes vater.’
Paul went to meet this phenomenon, and from the train Mr. Warr of the
Nonconformist printing-office stepped out, carrying the work of art
before him like an oriflamme.
‘Mr. Warr, I believe?’ said Paul.
‘The same, sir,’ said Mr. Warr, with a spinal inclination.
Paul’s face was framed in a virginal fringe of brown beard, and he was
dressed by a London theatrical tailor. Mr. Wan-had no memory of him.
‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ said Paul. ‘That is the address of
your lodgings, and when you have taken your traps there Mr. Darco will
meet you at the theatre.’
‘I am at your disposal, sir,’ said Mr. Warr.
He gathered up two newspaper parcels, each of which leaked ragged
hosiery and soiled linen at either end, and pottered along the platform
at Paul’s side, subservient and timid. Paul spurted laughter and
affected a cough to hide it.
‘Here is the refreshment-room, Mr. Warr,’ he said. ‘May I ask if you
care at this moment to administer a coating of varnish to the work of
art?’
‘Have I had the pleasure to encounter you before, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr,
peering at him sideways across that astonishing nose, with a brown eye
bright with moisture. It was like an old cat looking out from the side
of a fireplace.
‘Come in and see,’ said Paul.
Mr. Warr went in, and being offered a choice in varnishes, selected cold
gin.
‘My highly superior respects, sir. You either know me, or my fame has
reached you.’ He smiled a propitiatory smile. ‘I do not recall you,
sir.’
‘I have varnished the work of art before to-day,’ said Paul. ‘Do you
remember Bucklersbury?’
‘I should do so,’ Mr. Warr returned. ‘I drudged there for eight long
years, and had it not been for Mr. Darco’s kindly memories of an old
associate, I might have drudged there still. But two and fifty shillings
per week, sir, with freedom and travel thrown in, are highly superior to
thirty-six, with slavery superadded. But I do not recall your face and
figure, sir.’
‘My name is Armstrong,’ said Paul. ‘I worked beside you for a week or
two.’
‘The friend of my youth,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘Permit me to shake hands. Rely
upon me, Mr. Armstrong, not to be presumptuous. Rely upon me, sir. I
shall respect bygones. Mr. Darco will tell you who I was and what I was
when he first knew me. I was first low com., sir, at the Vic, upon my
soul and honour, Mr. Armstrong. But the work of art, sir, so grew
and prospered that at last the very gallery guyed me. I went for the
varnish, Mr. Armstrong, in sheer despair. As God is my highly superior
judge, sir, I never drank until I had a drunkard’s nose. Then I made
a jest of a deformity, and the joke carried me too far. This infernal
feature is an unnatural legacy. It is from my maternal grandfather, who
once owned the town of Guildford. I have heard my mother say that his
cellars covered a quarter of an acre, and held nothing but port
and brandy--packed, sir, seven feet deep. To-morrow, in Mr. Darco’s
presence, I sign the pledge till the end of the tour, as per our highly
superior arrangement. I do not know, sir, whether behind that aspect of
prosperity there lurks the probability of another fourpennyworth.’
‘You mustn’t get tipsy to meet Mr. Darco,’ said Paul.
‘There is no fear of that, sir,’ Mr. Warr answered. ‘That,’ pointing to
the empty glass, ‘is my first to-day, and I as thirsty as I am hungry.’
‘Eat, man, eat,’ said Paul.
‘May I, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr.
‘Your fill,’ said Paul.
There were hard-boiled eggs and cold sausages on the marble-topped
counter, and Mr. Warr fell to work among them, and mumbled gratitude
with his mouth full. When he had half cleared the counter, Paul paid for
the depredations, and Mr. Warr, who knew the town of old, picked up his
leaking parcels and made off for the address given him.
‘Veil,’ said Darco when Paul got back to him, ‘you haf seen him? Had he
any package and luckage?’ Paul described Mr. Warr’s kit. ‘You must puy
for him a jeap, useful bordmandeau, and jarge id to me. I shall sdop it
out of his wages,’ which of course he never did.
Mr. Warr presented himself at Darco’s lodging next morning wrapped in
a perfume of gin and cloves. He laid upon the table a wordy document in
foolscap with a receipt stamp in one corner, and read it aloud in his
own breathless chuckle. It set forth that whereas he, the undersigned
William Treherne Macfarvel Warr, of the one part, late of, et cetera,
had entered into an engagement with George Darco, Esq., et cetera, et
cetera, of the other part, to such and such an effect of polysyllabic
rigmarole, he, the aforesaid and undersigned, did seriously and truly
covenant with the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of et cetera, et
cetera, all over again, not to drink or imbibe or partake of any form of
alcoholic liquor, whether distilled or fermented, until such time as the
agreement or engagement between the aforesaid and undersigned on the one
part, and the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of the other part, should
end, cease, and determine. He signed this document with a great
sprawling flourish, and Darco and Paul having appended their names to
it also, Mr. Warr wrote the date of the transaction across the receipt
stamp, and handed the paper to his employer with a solemn bow.
‘You haf peen zaying goot-bye to the dear greature,’ said Darco; ‘I can
see that.’
‘In the words of Othello, sir,’ said Mr. Warr: ‘“I kissed her ere I
killed her.”’ He smiled self-consciously, but instantly grew grave
again. ‘You know me, Mr. Darco. You have my highly superior word. I
never go back on it, sir.’
Mr. Warr kept his word, but he grew insufferably self-righteous, and
preached total abstinence to everybody, from Darco to the call-boy. He
atoned for this unconsciously by the longing calculations he made.
‘I have consulted the almanac,’ he confided to Paul; ‘it is two hundred
and seventy-one days to my next drink.’
After this he offered a figure almost daily: ‘Two seventy. A dry
journey, Mr. Armstrong.’’ Two fifty, sir, two fifty. The longest lane
must turn, sir.’ Then, after a long spell of yearning: ‘Only two hundred
now, sir. I should like to obliterate two hundred. But a Warr’s word is
sacred.’
‘Now,’ said Paul one day, ‘why don’t you take advantage of this sober
spell to cure yourself of the craving, in place of looking forward to
the next outburst and counting the days between? Why don’t you make up
your mind to have done with it altogether?
‘Sir,’ said Mr. Warr with intense solemnity, ‘if I thought I had tasted
my last liquor, I’d cut my throat.’
‘If ever I find myself disposed to feel like that,’ Paul answered, ‘I
will cut my own.’
‘Oh dear no, you won’t, sir,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘If ever you go that way at
all, you’ll slide into it. You will always believe that you could drop
it at any moment until you find you can’t. Then you’ll be reconciled,
like the rest of us.’
Paul had little fear. His temptation, he told himself, did not lie in
that direction.