The Dreamer dreamed, and the dream showed the old ramshackle, bankrupt
printing-office at Castle Barfield again. Paul was back there. The thing
had happened with a strange in-evitableness. He had gone home and had
suffered a relapse, and had again recovered, and all his savings
were expended. There had come a rush of work with which the solitary
journeyman and his boy could not cope. Paul had gone to their
assistance, and, the unusual flow of work continuing, he had stayed
there. He made many applications by letter for other employment, and
answered many advertisements, but nothing happened to deliver him. His
heart galled him daily, for he had seen something of the world, and had
tasted a first-night triumph as part-author of a play, and had mixed on
equal terms with people who were very far away from his present sphere.
The county election, which had brought the increase of business, was
over and done with. Paul succeeded the journeyman, who went his way and
found employment elsewhere.
In the dim local yokel mind Paul was a failure, and he knew it. He had
gone away, and his brothers and sisters had magnified his successes,
and he was back again, a refugee, as it were, from a world which he had
apparently misused. He was taciturn and gloomy, and, to the fancy of
those who held themselves his equals and superiors, was disposed to give
himself airs. Two years with Darco had made him something of an epicure.
He had grown to hate soiled hands and coarse clothes, and the trivial
talk of people who only lived for trifles. He suffered doubly,
therefore, as one who had failed, and as one who took the airs which
belong only to success. Life was not happy for a while.
The ‘stand-by’ of Armstrong’s poor business was the printing of a
certain coarse label from stereotype plates, and, when there was nothing
else to be done, this would be taken in hand for unbroken days together.
It was an operation as purely mechanical as any in the world, and the
thoughts of the worker had time and chance to roam anywhere. Paul made
hundreds of verses. The clean sheet set home to the pins, frisket and
tympan down, the turn of the drum-handle, the pull of the bar, the
backward turn of the drum, frisket and tympan up, and the printed sheet
laid on the ordered pile-day in, day out, ten hours a day, the same
things done and done again. Hands growing into horn; muscles swelling
like a blacksmith’s. A healthy life enough, with a rough, plain diet,
and yet a purgatory in its way, with prospect and horizon bound.
In a year or more they widened, for Paul had set up for himself
something of a study in the old lumber-room, where on a broken
table, with an upturned box for a chair, and a candle stuck in a
gingerbeer-bottle, he wrote down the verses he had hammered out during
the day, and he began stealthily to send these here and there to
magazine editors, who sometimes sent them back and sometimes printed
them, but never seemed to dream of payment, until at last one offered
him two guineas for a long Christmas story in rhyme, and he began to
see a hope of escape from the treadmill round. He set to work on a
blank-verse play, and spent the greater part of a year on it, and was
prepared to find himself enthroned with Shakespeare. He put his drama
into type, a page at a time, pulling but a single impression of each
page, and distributing the type jealously before he went to bed, and
jealously hiding his pages. And when it was all complete, and his brows
were familiar with the touch of laurel, he sent the great work to a
London manager, and never heard word of it afterwards, good, bad, or
indifferent He waited for months in sick hope and sick despair, and then
wrote asking for a judgment. He waited more months, and no answer came.
He wrote for the return of his work, humbly, then impatiently, and
finally with wrathful insult No answer ever came. The muse seemed
as vile a jade as Claudia. But he had his tattered and stained old
manuscript, interlined and entangled so that no creature but, himself
could read it, and he put it all in type once more, and sent his printed
copy to an eminent firm of publishers, who, after considering the matter
for six months, offered to take the risk of publication for a hundred
pounds, on which he burned his manuscript in the cracked office stove,
and left the printed copy of it in the publishers’ hands to do as they
pleased with it.
He turned to prose and wrote short stories, and sent them broadcast They
came back, and he sent them out again. He made a list of magazines and a
list of the stories, and each one went the rounds. One stuck and brought
proof-sheets, and in due time a ten-pound note. He poured in all the
rest on the one discerning editor, who had already refused one half of
them. In a month the man of discernment offered ten shillings per page
for the lot. Paul accepted, and in another month was back in London,
resolute to try a new backfall with the world.
He found lodgings far away in the northern district, apprised the one
discerning editor of his whereabouts, and sat down to wait and work for
glory. And, oh! how kind again on a sudden seemed the Fates who for four
years had been so harsh with him. Scarce had he been settled a week when
there came a letter addressed to Paul Armstrong, Esq., care of Messrs.
Blank and Blank, reporting that the editor of a certain magazine had
read with much pleasure a tale from Mr. Armstrong’s pen, and would be
happy to receive from him one of the same length. Paul danced and sang,
and then plunged into labour, wrote his story, received his proof-sheet
and his cheque, and with the letter a request that he would submit
anything he might have in the way of a three-volume story. He was
assured that it would receive instant attention.
‘I’m five-and-twenty,’ said Paul, ‘and the world is at my feet’
But books are not to be written in a day, though they may be
commissioned in an instant, and the financial stock was small, seeing
how big an enterprise was to be started on it, and somehow the story
would not form. What ghostly wrestling of the spirit with vague shadows
which would take no shape! what sleepless tossings there were!--what
fruitless rambles in the darkened streets! what hurried walks to
Hampstead Heath! and what slow prowlings there amongst the gone! And,
then, how the Concept came suddenly from nowhere, without a warning,
without an effort, and stood up serene and strong, and bursting through
and through with passion as if it had been alive and fully grown for
years. Then to pen and ink and paper, not yet a weariness to soul and
flesh! as they were to be in after days, the virgin page an invitation,
the ink-pot a magic fountain, the very feel of the pen between thumb and
finger a pleasure. There was no thought in those fresh days of stinting
labour or of making rules for it--so many hours for work and so many
hours for recreation, and such and such hours for meals. The book--the
book was everything. He went to sleep with his people. He awoke to them.
He lived all day with them. He found them more real than the living.
Life was one vivid rage of emotion, of laughter, and of tears. His
own pathetics and his own humours were the sweetest things he had ever
known, and he cried at the one and laughed at the other more than the
most sentimental of readers ever laughed and cried over any book that
was ever written. And it was at this time that he wrote certain verses
in which he set forth his beliefs in art. The lonely man in his eyrie in
the Rockies, reviewing the bygone time, murmured what he could recall of
these:
‘“A land of fire and a land of frost
Build!” said the Lord of the Soul;
“And lay me an ocean from coast to coast,
And let it be awful with many a ghost
Of galleons laden with gold, and lost
In the smothering surge’s roll.
‘“And make me a myriad rounded stars
To spangle my firmament,
Sweet like Hesper, glad with the balm
Of a ceaseless, passionless, changeless calm
And hot like Sirius, and red like Mars
With a god-like discontent.
‘“And frame in the land of fire,” he said,
“Frame me a soul like thine:
Swift as the snail’s soft horn to feel,
Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel,
And be there a fire in heart and head
Demoniac and divine.”’
The rest of the words had no duelling in his memory, though he was sure
they had been made and written; but they were meant to say that all
labour conceived and executed in a land of fire should be remodelled
in the land of frost at the risk of being cast away in its passage from
one to the other. This in plain English meant the union of hot zeal and
cold diligence, which is a worthy recipe for any worker in any craft It
served Paul’s turn for six prodigious weeks, from the rising of the
sun until long after the going down of the same. The book was done in a
quarter of the time he had apportioned to it. For six weeks the forces
of every waking minute had strained fiercely forward to one purpose, and
at seven o’clock on an autumn Friday he wrote the words ‘The End,’
and, looking up, saw the sunlight in dazzling strips between the green
painted laths of the blind, and found that his lamp was pale. He drew
up the blind and opened the window, and the sweet air bathed his head.
There was a deep sadness in his heart, and when he arose and by chance
saw his face in the glass it was the face of a ghost If the halest of
young men will live in alternations of frost and fire for six weeks on
end, he must expect to pay for it.
Paul paid dearly in lassitude, and broken sleep, and loss of appetite,
and afterwards in six weeks of idle waiting in poverty, for there was
no work or power of thought left in him for the time. He pawned the
dressing-case old Darco had given him and the dress-suit which he had
not worn for four years, and he had his meals, such as they were, at a
cabman’s restaurant, and his last penny went, and tobacco famine set in;
and his landlord, who was a maudlin man with a cultured turn for drink,
would come in at night to his sitting-room and cry, and say that the
water-rates were going to cut the supply; and the butcher had said, ‘No
more credit after Saturday.’
And whilst he was thus agreeably engaged on one occasion a knock came to
the door, and a slattern slavey came in with a plate in her hand, and on
the plate a wet and flabby oblong something crusted with dirt and slime.
‘I can’t quite make it out, sir,’ said the slavey, ‘but I think as this
is a letter, and it hasn’t been opened, sir, and I fancy it’s addressed
to you.’
And within the slimy envelope was a soaked letter, in which the ink had
so run as to leave it scarcely legible, and being diligently pored upon,
the letter was found to indicate that the recipient of the story had
read it with great charm and interest, and was willing to purchase the
serial rights of the same for the sum of £250, £150 on the author’s
signature to terms, and £100 on the day of the publication of the first
number.
‘It’s ‘ard for a poor working man to be kep’ out of his money like this,
sir,’ the landlord moaned.
‘Damn you!’ said Paul. ‘Listen to this.’ He read the letter, and with a
start reverted to the date: ‘September 27th, and this is October 27th!
I haven’t tasted food these three days, or had a pinch of tobacco, and
this has been waiting for me--this--this--for a whole month! Explain,
you execrable! or, as sure as the brother of the sun reigns over
the Heavenly Empire, I will brain you with the poker. Shell out, you
villain!--shell out, to your last halfpenny! ‘Ard for a poor working man
to be kep’ out of his money, is it? Somebody in this infernal house has
kept me waiting and half starving for a month, whilst I have two hundred
and fifty pounds to my credit. What are you worth, you hoary inebriate?
Speak, or die!’
‘Seven and eight,’ said the landlord, ‘and a bogus thrip-penny.’
‘Give me five shillings!’ cried Paul, snatching up the poker, and the
landlord pottered out the money.
Away tore Paul to the house round the corner. There were sausages there
frizzling in a metal-pan with a little row of blue gas-jets below it.
There was brandy there; there was beer. There was tobacco of a sort,
and there was an admirable whisky, not the diluted vitriol common to the
outlying London house before the passing of the Adulteration Act, but
honest whisky, mellow and old.
Paul, full of meat, and singing to himself behind his pipe, walked
homeward with a flask of that good liquor in his pocket, and there
behind was the landlord clinging to the railings at the bottom of the
area-steps and maundering to a policeman.
‘Five shillings--‘storted by threats. Tha’s the man,’ said the landlord.
‘Come in, officer, and have a drink,’ said Paul, and the officer, after
an upward and downward look along the street, marched into the house.
Paul gave him a drink instantly, and whilst the landlord hiccuped
‘’Started by threats ‘he explained the situation. ‘Of course, I made him
shell out,’ said Paul. ‘Wouldn’t you?
‘Well, I’m a guardian of the peace, myself, sir,’ said the officer; ‘but
it wouldn’t ha’ been more than five bob and costs if you’d ha’ dressed
him down. Speaking as a man of uniform, as I may say, I should ha’
thought that cheap at the money.’
‘’Storted by threats,’ said the landlord.
‘Take another,’ cried Paul, ‘and go to bed. You’ll be paid in the
morning, and you can stick up “To Let” as soon as you like. I’m off to
the Continent.’
There was still a cab fare in Paul’s pocket when he awoke and dressed in
the morning, and he booked away to the publisher’s office and received
his cheque. Then away to the bank, and away from the bank with
fifteen ten-pound notes of the Bank of England. Then a breakfast at
a restaurant, and a pint of champagne to drink his own health in--the
first wine tasted for nearly five years. Next to ‘my uncle’s’ to redeem
the dressing-bag and the dress-suit, and next home to stagger the
landlord with that pile of wealth. Then to pack, singing; to drive back
to town; to lunch late after the purchase of a suit of reach-me-downs,
new hat, boots, gloves, and paletot; and last, away to the Continental
train for a first look at Paris. And all the while it was richly comic
to himself to feel how he exulted, and to say within doors demurely
to the shopman, to the waiter, the ticket clerk, the porter: ‘I am an
author, sir, an accepted author, with the first fruits of my first book
in my pocket I am on the way to Paris and distinction.’ The four years
of lost prospect and horizon looked nothing, less than nothing. But the
Channel waters were rough, and he was chilled by the solemn gentlemen
who sat battened down with basins in their laps, turning green and
yellow in the sickly light; and the railway journey beyond was cold and
uncomfortable, and Paris in the gray fog of a late October morning
was less gay than he had expected. What little he knew of the language
seemed to be recognised by the natives of the land, but what they had to
say to him was as rapid as the clatter of a running boy’s hoop-stick on
a row of railings, and as intelligible. An English-speaking tout seized
him, and he was grateful to be decoyed into a dirty hotel on the other
side of the river, where people understood him more or less when he
asked a question. Here he entered himself in the guest-book, and under
the head of ‘Profession ‘wrote the world ‘Literature ‘with great pride.
He ate his cutlets and chipped potatoes at breakfast with an unwonted
relish, in spite of a revolting table-cloth, encrusted with mustard
and spilt sauces, and blue with wine-stains, over which salt had been
spilled to restore the whiteness of the fabric in case it should ever
have the good chance to be washed. The yard of bread was a novelty. The
distempered houses opposite--pink and green and blue--were novelties.
The jalousied windows gave the street a delicious foreign look. The
little cavalry officer who came clanking in with his baggy trousers
and his spurs and dangling sword, almost as long as its wearer, was a
delight. Paul went to the window to look at the middle-aged _bonne_ who
went by in her Alsatian cap and flying coloured ribbons.
At five-and-twenty a night of wearisome and broken sleep makes small
difference to the spirits, and when he had washed as well as he could
by the aid of a cream-jug full of water and a saucer, and a towel
handkerchief, and without the aid of soap, he dressed, and sallied
out with the intent to lose himself in Paris. There is nothing so
exhilarating as the first sight of a foreign city, and Paul wandered on
and on, past the Palace of Justice and over the bridge, and, turning to
the left, made along the Rue de Rivoli, passed the far-stretching façade
of the Louvre, and so went on till he reached the Place de la Concorde.
There, staring into the basin of one of the fountains, as if he had been
waiting for Paul to come to him, was Darco, fur-coated and silk-hatted
as of yore, and looking neither older nor younger by a day than when
they had parted.
‘Darco!’ said Paul, with his heart in his mouth. ‘How glad I am! You
dear old Darco!’
Darco stared a moment, for the young man’s beard and moustache were
fully grown, and they disguised him.
‘Oh!’ he said at last. ‘Id is Armstronk. How do you do?’ He held out
his hand somewhat laxly, but Paul took it in both his and wrung it
fervently.
‘I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. I can’t tell you how
bitterly sorry I’ve been for the brutal way in which I paid you for
all your kindness. Try and forgive me, old chap. Do now. It wasn’t
ingratitude, Darco, though it looked like it It was a boy’s infatuation
for a woman.’
‘I dold you,’ said Darco--’ I rememper as if it was yesterday. I said:
“You are a tarn fool, and you will be zorry.”’
‘I _have_ been sorry this five years or nearly,’ said Paul, still
clinging to his hand. ‘Make it up, old chap, and come and have lunch
somewhere.’
‘Zo pe id,’ said Darco, stolid as an ox. ‘Do you vant a virst-glass
restaurant, or a second-glass, or vat?’
‘The best in Paris!’ cried Paul gaily, though he had to blow his nose
and to cry ‘Hem!’ to clear his throat, the sight, of old Darco touched
his heart so.
‘Gome along, then,’ said Darco, and rolled off sturdily like a barrel on
barrels in the direction of the Boulevards. ‘Rue Gasdilione,’ he said,
playing guide as he walked along. ‘Blace Fendôme. Golumn Fendôme. Rue de
la Baix. You haf not been in Baris until now?
‘I got here this morning,’ Paul answered.
‘I am here four tays,’ said Darco. ‘I shall be here four tays longer. I
am puying a gomedy, ant a blay in five agds.’
‘Buying?’ said Paul ‘I thought the one recognised custom was to steal’
‘That’s a vool’s game,’ Darco declared. ‘If you sdeal, and if what you
sdeal is worth sdealing, anypoty can sdeal from you. If you burchase it,
it is yours, and nopoty can take it away. Honesty is the best policy.
And, pesides that, I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my way apout.’
Paul could have hugged him for sheer joy at hearing the familiar brag
again: ‘I am Cheorge Dargo.’ The old countersign was like music.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Paul.
‘Ve are koink,’ said Darco, ‘to the Hareng d’Or, where they haf a dry
champagne, and where they can give you such a preakfast as you cannot
get in the world. Ant I shall have a Cloria with a zeventy-year-old
Gogniag in it. Ant the Blat de chour is a Navarin de mouton. I saw that
as I passed the house two hours aco. I shall haf two boitions, mind
you.’
‘Twenty!’ cried Paul.
‘No,’ said Darco. ‘I could not ead twenty.’
They reached the restaurant, one of those jolly little houses which
are all down now--short as is the time since that in which they
flourished--where the host knew almost all his guests, and luxury went
hand in hand with a sort of camaraderie which cannot breathe in our new
palaces. The chef was a treasure, but as yet no American millionaires
strove to coax him across the Atlantic. There were no better wines in
the world, there was no better coffee, and, by way of a wonder, there
were no better cigars. Darco shook hands with the host, and broke out
at him in a brash of Alsatian French, which to Paul’s ears was like a
rolling of drums. He caught his own name in the torrent of noise, and
distinguished the words ‘un homme lidéraire, cheune, gomme fous foyez,
mais déjà pien tisdangué.’ The host bowed, and Paul bowed, and blushed
a little, and Darco ordered a déjeûner at the host’s discretion,
stipulating only for his own double portion of the Navarin de mouton. So
there came oysters, with a cobwebbed bottle of old hock in a cradle, and
an unknown delicate fish with burnt butter, and then the Navarin with
champagne in an ice-pail, and fruit, and delicate foreign cheeses, and
coffee which is a dream to the man whose unjaded palate first tries it
in perfection. The seventy-years-old cognac was there also, and Paul’s
head was humming ever so little before the feast was over.
‘And the dopacco?’ said Darco lazily--’ eh?’
‘The true believer smokes it in Paradise,’ said Paul; and Darco
translated the saying to the host, who bowed and smiled.
‘How did you know that I was _un homme littéraire?_’ asked Paul,
stumbling at the unaccustomed words.
‘I haf seen your name to half a tozen short stories,’ said Darco.
‘It was no mere gomparison of names to me. I know your sdyle. It has
changed. It has changed for the petter, but I know id. You gannot
deceive me apout a sdyle. I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my way anywhere.’
They smoked and sipped their coffee in a splendid contentment ‘Vat
prings you to Baris?’ Darco asked lazily.
‘I sold a book yesterday,’ said Paul--‘my first I had worked hard; I
thought I deserved a little holiday--I have got to learn my world. And I
was beastly hungry the day before yesterday.’
‘I have been there,’ returned Darco. ‘There was an English Duke--he is
dead now--I did a liddle service in Puda Besth. He vanted to bay me.
I said “I am Cheorge Dargo. I do not take money excebt in the way of
business.” Ven I was ruint in the United States I game back to England,
and I hat not one benny. I galled on the Duke. He was at bregfasd. He
got ub, ant he took me py the shoulders begause he was glad to see me,
and he said, “My tear Dargo, you are wet”; and I said: “You would be wet
if you had slept in the rain in St Chames’s Bank.”’
‘You’ve had hard times, old Darco?’
‘I have had a million dollars. I haf had nothings. Once I sdole a loaf.
I gave the paker ten dollars the week after and dold him vat I had
done.’ He puffed idly and sipped his Gloria. ‘I am Cheorge Dargo,’ he
murmured nosily. ‘There is nothings I haf not been. There is nothings I
have not seen.
There is nothings worth doing that I have not done.’ He smoked and
sipped again. ‘But I haf not got a liderary sdyle. You haf a liderary
sdyle. Come again with me to write blays. We will both great fortunes
make.’
‘Shake hands on that,’ said Paul vehemently; and Darco shook hands with
phlegm.
‘It is a pargain,’ he said. ‘See me in five hours’ time--Hotel Meurice,
Rue de Rivoli I will write it for you. And now I must go apout my work.
I am encaged in ten minutes.’
Paul paid the bill, slipped Darco’s address into his waistcoat pocket,
shook hands with him at the door, and walked away, unconscious, to his
life’s undoing.