The voice of the river spoke from the great gorge in accents of
exultation and despair, and the voice was a part of the primeval
silence, as it had been from the moment when the Solitary had first
listened to it. The impalpable, formless brown fog was about him Its
acrid scent of burning was in his nostrils. And, all the same, he was in
Paris, in the Rue de Quenailles, where he had lived so long, and where
he had begun the real troubles of his lifetime.
He saw and heard as if he had been there. The street was lined on either
side with picturesque houses of an ancient date, the fronts of which
were parcel-coloured, blue, pink, buff, white, green, all worn into a
varied grayish harmony by years of exposure to the weather. The cobbled
roadway was drenched in sunlight, and the green jalousies on the sunny
side of the street had their own effect on the physiognomy of the
thoroughfare.
Paul made his way towards his hotel, foreboding nothing, but full
of youth and high spirits, and somewhat unfairly inspired by wine,
considering the hour of the day. He was aware of this, and his one
desire was to reach his own cool and shadowed chamber, and there sleep
himself back into a sober possession of his faculties. Had any person
suggested to him that he was tipsy, he would have had a right to repel
the accusation with scorn. He walked without hesitation or uncertainty;
he saw quite clearly and thought quite clearly. He had taken a glass
more champagne than was entirely good for him, and that was all. Had the
thing happened after dinner, he would simply have put on the brake for
the rest of the evening, and would have carried his load with ease. As
it was, nothing but a nap was needed to bring him back to a comfortable
afternoon sensation. He told himself this as he strolled homeward,
tasting his cigar in an occasional whiff, but using it mainly as a sort
of fairy baton with which to beat time to the spirit ditties of no tune
which filled his harmless mind.
On the side of the street on which he walked he saw the figure of a
girl, but he took no especial notice of her until he was almost in the
act of passing. Then he noticed that she was tall and lithe, and that
she had fine brown eyes and hair. There was nothing in the slightest
degree compulsive or imperative about her. She was just a girl, and
there was an end of it He might have passed her a thousand times without
a second thought, or without a thought at all, but that unhappy extra
glass of wine was in his blood, and he must needs accost her--more,
perhaps, to show off his French than for any other reason. His attitude
towards women had hitherto been chivalrous and shy, and he was aware
of the overcoming of a difficulty which had frequently given him
some concern when he flourished off his hat and asked, with a smiling
insolence:
‘Why are you wandering here, I pray?’
The girl looked at him innocently enough, with a gaze quite free from
anger, coquetry, or embarrassment. It might have been a common thing in
her experience to be thus accosted by a stranger.
‘I am waiting for my sister,’ she responded simply.
Did she suppose she would have to wait long? asked Paul. The girl did
not know. Would she wait under shelter from the sun? She shrugged her
shoulders, and inclined her head on one shoulder with lifted eyebrows.
‘Come along,’ said the vacuous idiot ‘Let us have a glass of wine
together.’
The girl smiled sedately, and they went off together.
The extraordinary part of this business was not that a young man who had
lunched a little too freely should make a fool of himself, but that
the girl was a good girl, of average breeding, and, as Paul lived to
convince himself, in spite of all the unhappiness she brought him, had
never entered upon anything remotely resembling such an adventure as the
present in all her life. But the readiness of her acquiescence misled
him, and in the little hard-trodden wjne-garden in which they sipped
a sugary champagne together, in a trellised alcove like a relic of old
Vauxhall, he grew amorous, and told her that her eyes were like beryls,
and that their whites were like porcelain. The lonely man in the brown
smoke-fog, with the roar of the river in his ears, as unregarded as the
roar of traffic in a city, recalled it all, and laughed as he threw his
hands abroad, and fell into a frowning thoughtfulness as he allowed them
to drop laxly between his knees. The girl had eyes, to be sure--two
of them--and they were brown, with a touch of beryl in the brown, and,
conceivably, they had a soul behind them, of one sort or another, but
she had as much personality as a jelly-fish. She was neither pleased nor
affronted by the vacuous ass’s compliments, and when he praised her hair
and her complexion, she accepted it as placidly as if she had been a
waxen lady in a barber’s window.
It may have been that this very aloofness of stupidity appealed to him
as a thing to conquer, but, anyway, he got an arm about her waist,
and went on praising her with ridiculous emphasis. She allowed him to
squeeze, and she allowed him to praise, and when he pressed her glass
upon her she sipped at it with reasonable relish and set it down again.
When they had been sitting in the arbour for a quarter of an hour or
so she became loquacious. She said it was a fine day, but that she had
feared in the morning that it would rain. It was a much finer day
than the Thursday of last week had been, for then it had rained in the
afternoon, and since she had been beguiled from home by the treacherous
pretence of the day without an umbrella she had had a feather spoiled--a
feather ‘que m’a coûté cinq francs, m’sieu!’ Paul answered that she was
a little angel, and she told him a parcel of nothings which under fair
and reasonable conditions would have bored his head off. But it is
a notable thing that when a youth is beginning to learn a foreign
language--and Paul was only now entering upon a colloquial familiarity
with French--he has so much satisfaction in understanding what is said
to him that a very stupid conversation can interest him. It is not what
is said which pleases, but the fact that he can follow it, and this,
with a man who is not easily susceptible of boredom, will last him well
into the knowledge of a novel tongue. He gathered from the confidences
exchanged that the young lady lived at home with papa and mamma and her
sister; that papa was engaged in a big drapery establishment, and came
home late at night; that mamma was a suburban modiste, and was also away
from home all day; that her sister and herself did some kind of fancy
work at home--his French was not complete enough to enable him to
understand accurately what it was--and that she always made holiday on a
Thursday afternoon.
Now, Paul had never played the conquering dog until now. He had so far
been the victim of the sex, and in his own small way had suffered scorn
and beguilement enough. What with the luncheon and the sticky champagne,
he began to feel mighty and vainglorious, and he took the airs which
he supposed to be appropriate to the situation. He praised the lady,
therefore, with a humorous appreciation of the manner in which she
accepted flatteries which were passed, so to say, upon a shovel, and
he tasted with a gratified palate his own fine flavour as a man of the
world.
That was the silly beginning of it, and the lonely man, recalling it all
as if he had been back in the midst of it again, asked himself with that
tired scorn of his own career and nature which had become a part of him,
if any creature with as much brain as earwax had ever before been so
easily beckoned to the devil.
‘Millions, I suppose,’ he said half aloud, in answer to his own mental
query--‘millions.’
And so went on with his dream.
Of the variety of fools there is literally no end, but for the king of
fool who is predestined to come a cropper in the field of life, and
to spill other people in his own downfall, there is no rival for the
Quixote. The man who is over-anxious to pay in the market of morals
is the man who goes bankrupt You may be a good deal of a scoundrel and
retain your own esteem and that of the world, but you must not palter
with your own offences. The world resents a half-virtue, and the
world is right It is the half-virtue which breeds hypocrisy and
self-deception, and these are the most despicable of human vices.
Courage is at the root of manhood, and even the courage which dares
to do wrong and have done with it is better than the cowardice which
patches vice with virtue until it can no longer discern the colour of
either.
Here, for instance, began a liaison of the vulgarest and simplest kind,
for which a man of any wisdom would have repented in due course whilst
he would have compounded with it, and would have parted from it, and,
whilst counting it amongst the sins and follies of his youth, would have
left it behind him.
Paul and the girl parted innocently that night, but made an appointment
to meet again on the morrow. He had no stomach for the encounter, but
he would not break his word, and so, for the sake of a punctilio, he
wrecked himself. He and Annette went to the Mabille together, and in his
character of man of the world he made love to her with as fine a relish
as if he had sat down to bread-and-water after dinner; then, in order
not to be quite a blackguard, he met her again, and, to save himself
from his own conscience, again, and at last the compound of vanity,
weakness, and virtue landed him with her in London, where they set up
housekeeping together.
For a time this was great, with its twang of Rue Monsieur le Prince and
Murger and the old Bohemia, and Paul was convinced that he had done a
noble thing in not deserting the little woman. In a flaccid sort of a
way she seemed to love him, and in that respect, since his own mind was
by no means urgent, he was satisfied. He was faithful to the tie, and
flaunted his own magnanimity.
But his true mistress was his work, and this he loved with an increasing
ardour. How devotedly he laboured he never knew until long afterwards,
when what had once been a passion of delight and a necessity of nature
degenerated into a stale drudgery practised for the sake of mere money.
But, oh! the sweetness of brain-toil whilst the heart was fresh and
whilst it still seemed worth while to preach some kind of gospel to
mankind! To pace the streets and read the faces of people as they
went by, to weave a thousand stories in a day around the destinies of
strangers, to sit far into the night fed with rich and glowing fancies,
to express them with conscious power, to work with living vigour for the
love of work alone!
These were rich days, and if the domestic intercourse were
poverty-stricken there was the bachelor intercourse at the clubs to make
up for it, and even amongst his married friends Annette was an ignorable
quantity unless he took to waving her like a flag of virtue.
There was Fortescue, a man of medium fame, but of real genius, whose
delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all
about Paul’s eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her
day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of
the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and
she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool
he was, he had grown to an astonishing charm of manner. The lonely man
smoking his idle pipe at his tent door in the cañon looked back at him
across such a distance of time and fate that his inspection of the youth
was almost impersonal. The lad passed for a piece of naïve nature,
and not altogether unjustly. He was eager and ardent, and absurdly
tender-hearted. He loved all his friends, and he had a crowd of them.
‘Because,’ as Balzac says, ‘he had known a time when a sou’sworth of
fried potatoes would have been a luxury,’ he threw about his money with
a lordly liberality. A simple ballad, if sung with any approach to art,
would bring tears into his eyes. He had all the virtues which came easy
to him, and, leaving Annette out of question for the moment, he was
without vices. He had rubbed against the world long enough to have
grown polished. Nobody questioned his origin or upbringing. His talk was
brilliant, if it bore no searching analysis, and he had his circle of
listeners wherever he went. He was a born raconteur, and had proved
himself in that particular, and his increasing acquaintance with
the stage and the professors of its trifling art helped him in this
direction.
Fortescue’s house was his one haunt apart from the clubs, the one
civilized and civilizing home he knew with intimacy, and one night there
over a cigarette and a whisky-and-soda he turned his jejune philosophy
of life upon his host.
‘I confess,’ he said, ‘that I have no great opinion of the marriage
tie. Let there be a loyal association between man and woman, let each
recognise the responsibilities which belong to it, and where’s the fear
of any priestly ban or the need of any priestly blessing?’
‘My dear Armstrong,’ said Fortescue, who was very much his senior, and
a man of a rather starched propriety by nature, ‘I would beg you, if you
permit me, to avoid that theme. The marriage tie to me means a full half
of the whole sanctity of life. To my mind, the man who derides it is, so
far as his derision carries him, an ass.’
‘Oh,’ cried Paul, laughing, ‘I like a straight hitter.’
Fortescue shifted the theme with some adroitness, but the talk grew
stiff and formal. The younger man felt the disapproval of the elder, and
was ill at ease under it. He rather shied at the house from that
time forward, and, since an awkwardness of that kind grows easily and
rapidly, his visits dwindled into rarity, until they ceased by automatic
process.
It was years before he found a home again.
‘Along with many noble and admirable qualities the English people have
one defect, which is recognised in the satires of every neighbouring
nation, but is never acknowledged by themselves.’ Thus Paul Armstrong
at his tent door, with the voice of the torrent to emphasize the waste
silence of his dwelling-place, and the fog to clear his mental vision by
shutting out from his perception all extraneous things; not thinking in
these words, or thinking in words at all, but dunking thus: ‘Propriety
is a British legend and a British lie.’
He was back in the old chambers, which were in one of the smaller Inns
of Court, and was looking at the stale mirth and madness of the bygone
days. Eight out of ten of the men he remembered had settled down, and
two of the ten, to make an average, had gone to the devil The two
were mainly of the better sort--fellows who stuck to an absurd
responsibility, and let it ruin them. The eight were the good citizens
who had had the wit to cut responsibility adrift. That was life as he
knew it, as the boys of his day who studied divinity or medicine, or who
read for the Bar, or who worked in painting or at journalism or letters,
all knew it. Clerics, lawyers, painters, authors, men on ‘Change, all
married and settled and respected, admirable citizens by the dozen and
the score, and where are Lorna, and Clara, and Kate, and Caroline, and
Fanny? Heaven knows--possibly. The knack of prosperity, surely, is to
bury your indiscretions.
Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter to have loaded life with such a burden, not
to have had the courage of a hundred others, and to have left the poor
responsibility to sink or swim, to have compounded between vice or
virtue instead of making a clean bargain with one or the other like
the rest of the world, to have permitted a foolish pity to look like
a resolute manhood to his eyes, to have throttled his own soul for a
scruple!
He stages his own soul, and this is what he sees and hears and knows.
Annette is ailing, is seriously ill indeed, and he has taken her into
the country. He has rented a cottage, in the front of which there is
a great level common reaching for a mile or two on either side, and
covered with golden gorse. In front of the cottage and across the common
is a coppice, all browns and purples and yellows and siennas, and beyond
that, as seen from the upper windows of the cottage, the land fades into
misty autumnal blues, to join a whitened horizon which seems to shun
the meeting, until for very weariness it can postpone it no longer--a
bell-tent of sky, as it were, with a lifted edge, and beyond the skirts
of the nearer sky another. Annette is lying in bed, and Paul is looking
out of the window; he will see the landscape in that way always. He has
known it under broad summer sunshine, in springtide freshness, under
winter snow, obscured in sheeting rain, in moonlight, starlight, dawn,
sunset; but whenever his thoughts go backwards to the place he is
looking out of the window on that particular aspect of the scene, and
Annette is behind him, propped in her bed with pillows.
‘Paul!’ He turns.
‘Come to me a moment. Sit down beside me. Take my hand’
He lays down the empty pipe he has been twirling in his fingers, and
obeys her.
‘Paul!’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘I cannot talk much,’ she says, in her pretty foreign accent
It has been the one ambition of her mind during these three or four
years to speak English like an Englishwoman, and she has very nearly
succeeded, only there is still a rhythm left which is charming to hear.
‘I shall not be with you long.’
‘What?’ says Paul. ‘Nonsense, sweetheart! that’s a mere sick fancy. Chase
it away.’
‘It is no fancy,’ says Annette--‘no fancy at all. I heard the doctor this
morning. They did not think I could hear, and he was talking with the
housekeeper. He said he feared the worst. You know what that means,
Paul.’
What should he say? A man of ardent blood and active brain does not
live with a jelly-fish for sole home society for a year or two without
a certain weariness, yet his manhood scorned him for it, and even
if passion had never been alive at all there was tenderness and the
camaraderie which comes of close association. He kissed her, and he lied
in kissing her, but it was not a wicked or an evil lie.
‘My dear,’ he said, ‘this is all fancy. You will be well and strong
again in a month or two. I have talked to the doctor, and I can assure
you he has no sort of fear about you. Look here, now. Darco is coming
down to-morrow, and we shall revise our play. Within a week it shall be
finished, and then we will have you packed carefully in cotton-wool and
will carry you back to Paris. Or if you think it will be too cold in
Paris we will take train to Nice, and pass the winter there.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall spend my winter here, and it will be my last.’
Her eyebrows had a pathetic lift, and her gaze was on the sky, beyond
the curtains and the window-panes. ‘Paul! Paul dear! Do one thing for
me.’ She turned her frightened appealing brown eyes upon him, and stole
her hand softly and timidly into his.
‘Yes, dear,’ he answered. ‘Anything that is in my power--anything.’
She had never seemed so human.
‘I shall not live to plague you,’ said Annette. ‘You are strong and
brave and clever, and you have ambitions, you big boy, and I have been a
weight about your neck.’
‘No, no, no!’ he cried.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered mournfully. ‘I know it I have seen it all along.
But all that will soon be over. Only there is one thing, Paul.’
She stretched out her arms to him, and he bent his head so that she
might embrace him. He had always fought in his own heart for the fiction
that he loved her, and sometimes he had won in that difficult conflict;
now he was sure of it, and he put his arms about her. Was he to lose her
just as she revealed herself in this sweet way?
‘Paul,’ she asked him, ‘are you sorry that I am going? Shall you
grieve--a little?’
‘You mustn’t talk so, dear,’ said Paul; ‘you break my heart.’
He spoke with a genuine vehemence. He was astonished at the strength of
his own feeling.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘do this one little thing for me. Whisper. Let me
whisper. Can you hear me like that?
‘Yes, sweetheart, yes. What is it?’
‘Make me an honest woman before I die,’ said Annette, in a voice that
barely reached him. ‘I was brought up to be a good girl, and I have
suffered--oh Paul, dear, I have suffered! Promise me.’
Here were depths he had not looked for or suspected, and he thought
within himself how blind he had been; how much he had misread her;
how like a doll he had treated her. His whole heart smote him with
self-scorn, with pity, with remorse.
‘You are not dying, dear Annette,’ he said; ‘you will live, and we shall
love each other a thousand times better than we have ever done before,
because this fear of yours has broken the ice between us.’
‘No, Paul,’ she answered. Her arms fell languidly on the counterpane. ‘I
shall not live, but promise me that. Let me die happy. Tu sais, chéri,
que ma mère est morte. Je voudrais encontrer ma mère au ciel, comme
fille honnête, ne c’est pas? Ah! pour l’amour de Dieu, Paul!’
‘My darling,’ he answered, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll do anything. But don’t talk
nonsense about dying. We shall have many a happy year together yet.’
It was his facile, ardent way to think of himself as brokenhearted if
he lost her, and he had never seen her in such a mood as this before,
or anything approaching to it It was no pretence for the moment that he
loved her. He felt for the first time that their two hearts were near.
And though he had been loyal to her, and through times good, bad and
indifferent had brought her of his best, and had done what he could in a
cool, husbandly sort of way to make her happy, he knew his moral debt
to her, and was sore about it, and had been sore about it often. It had
never been in his mind for an instant to evade his burden, even when
he had felt the weight of it most heavily, and he was willing and even
eager to offer this small and laggard reparation.
‘We have lived here much more than the statutory time,’ he said. ‘I will
go and see the district registrar at once, and we will be married at the
earliest possible minute. That will only be a legal union, dear, but if
you care for anything further we can be married in a church when you get
strong enough.’
‘Thank you, Paul,’ she answered. ‘You _are_ good to me.’
‘Poor, sweet little woman!’ he answered, for now he was touched deeply
by his own remorse. ‘There, you are happy now?
‘So happy, Paul! So happy!’
He kissed her and left her there, and loading up his pipe, set out at a
brisk pace across the common in the direction of the little township
in which the registrar was to be found. Half an hour’s walk brought him
there, and the functionary was at home. Paul explained his errand and
its urgency. A special fee obviated publicity, and he paid it. Money
smoothes all kinds of roads, and in arrangements for marriage it will
almost abolish time.
Arrangements concluded, the coming bridegroom hastened home, his heart
warm with resolve and tender with a new-born affection. It was curious,
he thought, that he should so have misunderstood a woman with whom he
had been so long in the closest intercourse. That placid, yielding way
of hers, that habit of mind which he had regarded in his mannish
fashion as being altogether gelatinous and invertebrate--how ill he had
construed it all. What a depth of feeling lay concealed beneath it! ‘Je
voudrais encontrer ma mère au ciel, comme fille honnête.’ Ah! the poor
creature, who had yielded too easily to his embraces and his flatteries,
whom he had led astray with professions of love and admiration which
had never been real--what amends were too large to repay her? And the
promised amend seemed little enough, for he had not contemplated life
away from Annette. His association with her had isolated him in a
certain degree, but if good women were out of his life, and he missed
them sometimes rather sadly, good fellows were plentiful, married and
single, and the length of time for which his liaison had lasted had lent
it a kind of respectability. Possibly, after all, even if Annette
had not been about to release him, marriage would have been the best
solution of a difficulty. He wondered now why he had never thought of it
earlier. Simply because a trustful girl in her innocence and ignorance
had permitted herself to repose her whole future on one who might have
played the scoundrel with her, he had been content to forget his duty.
Well, he would atone.
The ceremony, when it came, was of the simplest, and had a bald and
business air about it which was discomfiting to a man who felt that he
was giving rein to a noble sentiment The registrar, as he pocketed his
fee, and shook hands in congratulation, assured him it was efficacious.
It took place, of course, in Annette’s bedroom, but it was done with so
much delicacy that not even the landlady suspected it. The registrar and
his assistant passed to her mind as medical men called to the bedside of
the patient.
Paul sat for half an hour after they had gone with Annette’s hand
in his, and then, seeing that she had fallen asleep, softly withdrew
himself. He strolled to the common, and there, wading through gorse, he
found the doctor who had attended her from the time of their arrival.
‘Well, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the medico cheerfully, ‘how’s the patient?’
‘Better, I think,’ said Paul. ‘But, doctor, tell me--what made you take
so gloomy a view a week ago? Don’t you think she’ll mend?’
‘Mend, my dear sir? said the doctor. ‘Of course she’ll mend. You’ll have
her on her feet again in a week or two. She’s never been in danger for a
moment.’
‘But didn’t you say a week ago----’
‘That she _was_ in danger?’
‘Yes. That she was in danger.’
‘I give you my word, Mr. Armstrong, that the idea never crossed my mind.
I’ve never had a touch of anxiety from the first. I’d like you to give
me a game at chess to-night, if you’re not otherwise engaged. I’m just
going across to have a look at Mrs. Armstrong now. But it’s a mere
matter of form, I assure you. Good morning.’
‘Why didn’t I ask that question earlier?’ said Paul to himself. But he
scarcely knew as yet in what direction his thoughts were pointing.