There were the usual legal delays, and public interest in the case would
have slumbered had it not been for the newspapers. But a steady-going
England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have
been prone to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and
more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and
there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches
so far and punches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal. The
press was in one of its occasional Jedburgh justice moods, and was ready
to afford impartial trial when it had hanged its victim, and not before.
Paul Armstrong was adjudged a Lothario of the wickeder sort, a purposed
betrayer of hearts and destinies. ‘If, as the complainant in this
melancholy case avers,’ or ‘If, as the depositions already filed would
appear to indicate,’ the defendant was an unlimited rascal; and if that
were so, he _was_ an unlimited rascal, and there an end. A thousand
men file past the bar of official and unofficial justice without much
comment They are branded, more or less justly, in accord with their
deserts, and having been first ignored, are altogether forgotten. But
every here and there, for some scarcely notable peculiarity, a man or
woman is fairly hunted down by the moral pack, mangled and branded,
as it were, on a noble moral speculation, and left to quiver for the
remnant of his lifetime.
In these days Paul Armstrong pondered much and often over the saying of
the man who had been his master in the arts of fiction and the drama:
‘Men reserve their bitterest repentances for their best actions.’ If
only he had played the man of the world towards Annette instead of
playing the Quixote, how different a position he would have held towards
the moral pack! To marry your mistress under no compulsion, but merely
in the desire to relieve the last sufferings of a parting soul, to
sacrifice a year or two of pulsing ambitions to this act of charity, had
not in itself appeared an act of wickedness. Nor had it seemed wholly
intolerable from his own point of view that, after a struggle
prolonged beyond the needs of decency, he should have run away from the
contaminations which belonged inevitably to a life spent in the society
of an incurable dipsomaniac. Nor could he as yet blame himself overmuch
if he had at last yielded to the claims of that domesticity which
offered him involuntary shelter: the invitations of a home of love and
confidence; an atmosphere in which no cloud hovered which could not be
puffed away in a cloud of tobacco smoke, or shattered into nothing by
the clear breath of a single friendly laugh. It was not quite an
honest view of the case--no man surveying his own circumstances is ever
entirely honest--but to himself the question was convincing, Who would
not have hastened from that hell to find this heaven?
Ralston at least stood undauntedly by him, and inveighed with anger
against what he proclaimed to be an unnatural law.
‘Do you know Constantinople?’ he asked one evening as the two sat
together.
‘Yes,’ Paul answered; ‘I know it tourist fashion. I stayed a week there
once.’
‘You remember the tribes of yellow dogs who make night hideous?’ Ralston
questioned. ‘They hunt in packs, and eat any raffle of the streets which
may be thrown to ‘em. I’ve seen ‘em wolfing cardboard boxes that have
been swept out of the drapers’ shops in the early morning, the poor
hungry devils! They’d fall across any intruder from another parish
and crunch him hide and bones. But they never attack one another, and
there’s no record of one yellow dog who tried to eat another yellow dog
who belonged to the same gang. There’s a mighty difference between the
canine and the human, eh? You’re one of our breed, Armstrong--yellow
dog of the yellow dog quill-driving tribe--and your comrades haven’t the
gentlemanly instinct of the Constantinople cur. They get round you and
worry you,’ he declaimed, rising, and striding about the room, with
an occasional double-handed clutch at the lapels of his coat, his one
gesture of rage--‘they worry you for their twopenny-halfpenny mouthful
of lineage, and they’d gnaw their own mothers out of their coffins for
the same reward.’
‘As bad as that?’ asked Paul, with a dreary little laugh.
‘As bad as that, sir!’ Ralston declared wrathfully, though he too
laughed a moment at his own vehemence.
But the fighting Ralston was on fire with his theme, and returned to it
often.
‘You had a namesake once,’ he said, ‘who was an Apostle. He talked with
a centurion, who told him, “With a great price I obtained this freedom.”
With a great price! I wonder if it were like the price we pay for what
we call the freedom of the press. I fought for that in my own day,
fought and suffered, and paid in coin and heart’s blood, and I have
asked myself since if I am glad or sorry that I won. Are we the better
for having bred this vulture crowd?’
The hot heart of the advocate warmed the cold heart of the sufferer from
time to time, but neither long nor often. The coals of anger will
not burn freely on any honest hearth when the conscience of the owner
compels him to turn down the damper every other minute.
The cause in the Law Courts lingered, and the seasons changed Paul’s
friendships stopped away--not by ones or twos, but in battalions. Poor
little Madge could go nowhere, and ceased to wish to go anywhere, to
find herself brushing against offended skirts whose owners drew them
away from pollution.
‘In all my foolish life,’ Paul told Ralston, ‘I have known one
thoroughly good woman.’
‘Lucky bargee!’ said Ralston. ‘Not one man in a million has your
chance.’
‘One woman,’ Paul went on, ‘as pure as a daisy, who could surrender her
whole life for the sake of love--a creature who never spoke an unkind
word or thought an unkind thought of any living sister, or dead one, for
that matter.’
He choked. He could go no further for the time.
‘I know her,’ said Ralston--‘I know her.’
‘And women,’ said Paul, ‘who are not worthy to unlace her shoes
cold-shoulder her, and look at her with contempt. I dare cry the history
of two or three on the housetops.’
‘And if you dared--what good?’ Ralston asked.
‘There is no God,’ cried Paul; ‘there is no justice in the world.’
‘There is a God,’ said Ralston, ‘and there is very little justice. Who
are we that we should cry out for justice? We are here to learn. And
look here, Paul Armstrong: the biggest and hardest lesson set us is to
learn long views.’
‘Long views?’ said Paul, staring at him.
‘Long views,’ Ralston repeated steadily. ‘I know what I’m talking about
We are learners, and learners in the lowest class. That’s nonsense,’ he
corrected himself, ‘and I hate exaggeration, though I am guilty of it a
hundred times a day. But we are learners, and, whether our class is high
or low makes little difference to the fact that there is much to learn.
The man who is the stronger and the better for his trouble is the
scholar who goes to the top of the class. Look ahead, man, and ask
whether Paul Armstrong is to be a firmer or a flabbier small element in
God’s great universe for what is now befalling him. Your own action has
chosen you to be a sort of martyr in a big cause. We are on the fringe
of the sex-fight, so far; but before our children are grown men and
women, the battle will be in full swing. We have got to settle this
question of the sanctity of marriage. What a certain kind of animal
calls “free love” is of the beast and bestial; but a reasoned and loyal
love between man and woman is a beautiful and noble thing, and it is not
the less beautiful and noble because it has not been sanctified by
the payment of seven-and-sixpence to the Inland Revenue. You have a
principle to fight for, and you have Madge to fight for. By the God I
worship,’ he cried, in sudden wrath, ‘I would fight for the principle
against death itself, and for a woman like Madge I would die at a slow
fire.’
‘But, Ralston,’ Paul besought him--‘Ralston, you don’t understand. You
find animation there; but it is there my weakness lies. Do you think I
care for myself?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Ralston. ‘If you hadn’t cared for yourself you
would never have brought a child like Madge into such an evil as this.’
‘That’s true enough,’ said Paul; ‘that’s truth itself.’
He laid his elbows on the table, and leaned his head disconsolately upon
his hands. His companion shook him by the shoulder in the rough amity
which men use with one another.
‘Look here, Armstrong: willy-nilly, you’re the champion of a great
cause, and you have the sweetest woman in the world to fight for. Don’t
flaunt the flag insolently--in the present temper of the public that
will never do--but stand by it all the same. So far as you’re concerned,
Armstrong, it’s a selfish accident that turns you Squire of Dames; but
you’re in the tourney now, and you’ve got to behave respectably.’
‘If you mean by behaving respectably that I’ve got to hold by Madge, and
live all this down if I can, and do my best to flutter through life on a
broken wing, I am with you.’
‘I mean that, and more than that,’ said Ralston. ‘Turn your next play on
this theme; turn your next book on it. Never mind the odium of seeming
to fight a selfish battle; you’re past that now. Your story is that
the man mires his feet in the ordinary manner, that he makes a fool of
himself in the usual fashion; that the saving woman comes to him pure
and clean, and does her healthful, beautiful work for him at such a
cost as you know of. Whether her life is tragedy modified or tragedy
unalloyed rests with the story-teller; but you’re there to champion that
innocence.’
‘You recoiled from a little tube of manuscript once,’ said Paul, ‘as if
it had held a poisonous explosive. Do you remember? Ralston laughed and
nodded. ‘If you’re bolder now, I’ll show you something.’
‘I am bolder now,’ said Ralston; and Paul, leaving him for a moment,
raced upstairs, and, having made a brief search in his study, returned
with a big sheaf of type-written matter in his hand.
‘There is my case,’ he said. ‘Old Darco calls it madness to challenge
such a truth in such a fashion. Weldon will take the piece and play it.
He will produce it anonymously by preference, but as I choose. I choose
to have my fling at the world, and to take it without disguise. Tell me
when you have read it.’
‘I am your man,’ cried Ralston, catching at the paper.
‘I don’t know whether I have done well or ill in doing it,’ said Paul. ‘I
suppose there never was a writer who didn’t hawk the secret of his soul
about the streets--if he had a secret and a soul.’
‘More of this hereafter,’ Ralston said, and bore away the manuscript
that night.
There had been little need to spur Paul to courage on this matter. The
wiser thing might have been to counsel him to moderation. He had set his
back to his corner already.
But just hereabouts a small thing happened which had, as small things
will, an undue influence upon his mind. There was loose on Fleet Street
at this time an extraordinary devil of a man of genius whose appropriate
real name was Wild-blood.
He had dropped that too characteristic patronymic, and had renamed
himself, with a touch of mocking cynicism which only those who knew
him understood, Wilder. What scholarship was possible for six- or
seven-and-twenty was his. That he was more or less crazed with much
learning and more drink was generally understood of him. Men of small
originality and some memory said of Wilder that he could knock a slang
song into Greek iambics in five minutes. His most fervent admirers were,
perhaps, poor judges of Greek iambics. Fleet Street may at one time have
been familiar with that kind of thing, but is not nowadays. But Wilder’s
reputation soared on higher voices than those of the journalistic
crowd, and he was, beyond dispute, a person of genius--one of those odd
distorted bundles of broken nerve who help to establish the theory that
fine thinking, a noble vocabulary, deep scholarship, and foolish living
are neighbours and hard to separate.
With this very queer fish Paul had established a certain intimacy. The
man, as a matter of course, was periodically hard up, and he had come
to the stage when it was here five shillings and there half a crown as
a charge for the charm of his society with the most casual of
acquaintances. He made his breakfast on a salt-spoonful of cayenne and a
glass of brandy, and he passed from intellectual godhood to a hiccuping
imbecility in a breath. At from four to five in the afternoon he carried
his lofty head and a prematurely pimpled countenance into some unwatched
obscurity. He habitually emerged from this hiding-place within an hour
of midnight, and thence his flight was an owl’s.
The social chill which surrounded Paul’s household had grown arctic, and
Madge, Mrs. Hampton, and Phyllis had all been bundled away to Ostend,
in a sunken identity. The house in which the cause of disturbance had
so long been unreasonably happy was closed. The servants had been
dismissed, and a commissionaire and his wife lived in the basement. Paul
had taken lodgings at a Fleet Street hostelry, and thither in the dead
of night came Wilder and other night-birds, to the much disturbance of
the porter at the grille. It chanced one night that Wilder came with
a declaration that he had found his soul’s salvation through beer. His
stream of life should flow, so he declared, through Burton-on-Trent. He
was done with noxious liquids, and proposed to bathe his spirit clear
in the vats of Bass and Allsopp. Wilder was-not outside the sphere of
reformation, and Guinness would share with the others the credit of his
uprising. He drank a tankard or two of each and either as an evidence of
good faith, and he left an hour after midnight, more sober than Paul had
ever known him at such a time. He had talked a heap of brilliant sense
and nonsense, and had borrowed two half crowns. Paul went to bed
almost regretting the loss of even this mad companionship, and tossed,
half-dozing, on a shifting sea of troubles. Suddenly, when he had lost
all consciousness of time and place, there came a thundering summons
at his door, and in answer to his startled call there came in a huge
policeman in a greatcoat and a helmet, and behind him a quaking waiter
with a candle in a glass funnel. The officer appealed to a piece of
paper he carried in his hand.
‘Paul Armstrong,’ he read, with a brogue as wide as the ocean. ‘Is that
you?’
‘That is my name,’ said Paul.
‘Then ye’re wanted,’ said the official.
‘Wanted? Where?’
‘At Bow Street,’ the official answered stolidly.
Paul rolled round to consult his watch. It indicated three o’clock
within a minute or so.
‘What on earth am I wanted at Bow Street for?’ he asked in great
bewilderment.
‘Party of the name of Wilder,’ said the officer, referring once more to
his paper. ‘Says you’re his first cousin, and that you’ll bail him out.’
‘Wilder? First cousin?’ His mind was fogged with broken sleep. ‘Oh, that
fellow! What has he been doing?’
The man in uniform consulted his paper again, and read out:
‘Dhrunk and dishortherly.’
‘And he had the cheek to send you here and to say that I’m his first
cousin?’
‘Yes, sorr.’
‘Well,’ said Paul, with a brief laugh, ‘I don’t know that I’ve anything
better to do. Wait downstairs whilst I dress, and have a cab ready if
you can find one. Give the officer a drink, waiter.’
In a weary fashion he was tickled by this incident; and when he had
made a hasty toilette he descended, and was driven to Bow Street, where,
after a spell of waiting, he was introduced to his ‘first cousin’ in a
corridor.
‘What’s all this, Wilder?’ he asked.
‘It’s this, me man,’ said Wilder. ‘I took a fancy to declaim a favourite
little bit of Euripides in Endell Street, and a uniformed ass came along
and ran me in. And being penniless as I am----’
‘Penniless!’ said Paul ‘You had five shillings to my certain knowledge.’
‘Oh, I had,’ said Wilder, ‘but I met some poor devil that was harder
up than I am--at least, he said so--and I bestowed it on him with my
blessing.’
‘We know your name, Mr. Armstrong,’ said the officer who had the man of
genius in his charge, ‘and if you’ll be surety that the gentleman will be
here at ten o’clock this morning, he can go.’
‘You want my word for that only?’
‘That will be enough, sir.’
‘Very well; he shall be here.’
‘He shall be here,’ said Wilder, ‘and the idiot who brought him here
shall have a lesson.’
‘You take my tip, sir,’ said the officer. ‘You was pretty fairly
full, and you was very noisy, and you cracked on pretty awful. Talk
of eloquence,’ said the officer, interrupting himself to turn to Paul.
‘I’ve heard a thing or two in my time--it comes here, you know, sir, in
the way of business--but I’ve never met anybody as could hold a candle
to this gentleman.’
Wilder smiled, and pulled up a dirty apology for a collar with an air of
self-applause.
‘But what I want to advise is this, sir,’ said the officer genially:
‘Say nothing, and it’s five bob and costs, and there’s an end of it;
make a song about it, and it’s forty shillings or a month, and it gets
into all the papers. For this is a shop, sir, where the more you say
the more you pay. And that’s the truth about justice in a general way
throughout the land, and so you’ll find, sir, if you’ll take the trouble
to look into it. The more you say the more you pay. That’s the fruit
of thirty years’ experience, sir, and you’ll find it pretty sound Say
nothing, and a little thing blows over. Make a talk about it, and it
lasts, as you might say, for ever. The more you say, the more you pay.’
Paul was not greatly inclined to idle superstition as a general thing,
but the thrice-repeated saying stuck to him. The fancy came into his
mind that he had been aroused thus oddly in the middle of the night on
purpose that he might hear it, and have it dinned into his mind by
force of repetition. There was no reason under heaven why he should
have attended the insolent call of Mr. Wilder, and he had not even
been conscious of a kindly impulse towards the man. There was a sort of
providential finger laid upon his own sense here. Of course, he denied
the belief, but it was active with him none the less. It was so active
that he resigned all the preparations he had contemplated for his own
defence, and absented himself from London.
During his absence the case of Armstrong against Armstrong was heard in
the Divorce Court. A Boanerges of a Queen’s Counsel was entrusted with
Annette’s side of it. He made a speech, and that speech was reported in
a hundred journals. Had it been true, the unlucky Paul would have been a
comrade for the devil, but there was no defence, and it passed as true.
Paul read the speech, and came tearing back express to London in a
tumult of rage and resentment. He was a day behind the fair, and could
do nothing. The world seemed to ring of him, and he had abandoned all
means of redress. He was publicly shunned, and shunned for ever.
So fruitful may be the smallest accident of life that this chance
episode with the drunken Wilder and the foolish resolve to which it led
seemed to have darkened Paul’s skies for good and all. He might have
beaten Boanerges on every point save one, and have come out of the fight
with but one wound in place of a hundred, and that very far from fatal
Now he felt stabbed to death, and seemed to bleed at every pore.
The manager who was under contract with him to produce the comedy the
first manuscript of which he had placed in Ralston’s hands, called to
see him, and advised strongly against production--at all events, for the
present The suffering fool was furious, and would listen to no reason.
‘I put three thousand pounds behind it,’ he cried. ‘I give you that as
a guarantee. The play is a good play, and the public will listen to it,
slander or no slander.’
Playgoers remember the first nightof ‘Myra’--the yells, howls, whistles,
cat-calls which made the whole three acts a pantomime in dumb show. The
moral tiger was awake.
The play ran in spite of all and everything, and ran at the author’s
cost It came to a sudden end in the middle of a week, when the author’s
last cheque was returned with an official ‘N. S.’ marked upon it The
lately prosperous dramatist was ruined.
Thus the man and his memories are growing nearer and nearer to each
other, and very soon they must meet. There is yet but a year to traverse
before the Dreamer and the Dream stand face to lace with actual Fact and
Time. It is a year of frustrated hope and barren effort, of surrenders
and shames. It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name
is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet
extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a
distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong’s latest expression
of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take
as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any
sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume
was gathered out of the desert of the writer’s soul. It served one
purpose, since it provided Madge with at least a staff of silver
with which to beat the wolf from the door. The wild beast bayed and
threatened, but it never actually crossed the threshold. The discredited
man kept himself alive by scraps of anonymous journalism, until a
half-chance suggestion of fortune bore him away to the United States as
a member of a theatrical company of no great merit, which clung together
through desperately failing fortunes for a month or two, and then,
dissolving, left him stranded.
He floated, a pseudonymous unit, acting, writing, lecturing. Somehow or
other the weekly two or three pounds reached Madge, and the wolf still
howled outside her door and found no entrance.
When the spiritual anatomy of a man is displaced and the gall-bladder
takes on the function of the heart, it is far from being well with him
at the moment, and in these days it was very far from being well with
Paul Armstrong. Yet the jaundiced fit served its turn, and even
whilst its anguish burned and nauseated, he began to ask one wholesome
question: ‘For whose shortcoming, for whose wrong-doing, for whose
virtues turned vicious, and whose vices tuned to airs of virtue, do I
thus suffer?’ The answer was at first confused and loud. Annette’s
name was noisy in it Claudia’s sounded there. So did Gertrude’s. And
of course the poor writhing worm must needs arraign Fate, Destiny,
the Maker of the Earth, whatever It or He might be. But these voices
stilled, because, when all was said and done, the man was not wholly
a fool, and out of his heart came the wounding answer to his question:
‘You, Paul Armstrong--you and none other! Neither this false friend,
nor that fraudulent lover, nor any Destiny whatsoever, but just Paul
Armstrong, to whom this bundle of sensibilities was entrusted for
safe-carriage, and who in bearing his parcel here and there has spilled
its contents with great recklessness, and with devilish consequence to
himself.’ And this voice grew into the tolling of a great Despair, for
there was nothing to be done with this Paul Armstrong in the way of
reparation or amendment, and there was no way of being rid of him save
by suicide, and a doubt of the efficacy of that cure was heavy on him.
To endure the unendurable, this was his burthen; to be yoked through
time with this dolt and fool. Wretchedest of miserable fates, to loathe
one’s own soul, to find the most despicable of creatures enclosed within
one’s own skin. To play Siamese twin to a pustulous convict were a
trifle beside this. To be your own black beast; to loathe your own soul;
with a full heart to despise your own understanding--this is to start
upon Despair’s Last Journey in one sense or another, to find either the
gulf or the gates of hope. For the alternative is eternal, and it will
yet be known to all men--if not here, then elsewhere--that the way to
the heights of spiritual wealth lies through the valley of spiritual
bankruptcy, and that a man’s follies are as contributory to his soul’s
salvation as his loftiest aspirations and his most ardent struggles.
Ralston spoke wisely when he said, ‘We lose to learn value.’ We shall
carry our cargo more carefully next time for having once shipwrecked it.
The gates of hope are a better goal to aim for than the gulf, because
the mariner saves time and suffering by passing through them, but the
lesson is that no shipwreck is final.
Was it, in truth, the father’s voice, the authentic voice of William
Armstrong, Paul’s physical begetter, which preached this gospel through
the lonely days and waking nights? The Exile could not tell, yet he
believed, and the faith grew within him, that God’s inexorable justice
and infinite mercy are one and the same, that the human spirit which has
not sinned knows no virtue, that the flower of the soul’s hope strikes
its root in the soil of the soul’s despair.
This learned, all is learned. The great trust and the great distrust
alike are mastered. Courage and Humbleness have kissed each other, and
the man steers between, safe in their companionship whatever seas may
roar.
The faith grew, but it was not clear, nor destined to be clear, until
the divine hour of its true dawning was appointed, and that hour was not
long delayed.
Paul Armstrong had tracked memory from its earliest dawn till now. The
pictured image of himself he had so long followed in fancy drew closer,
until he and it merged into each other, and the shade and he were one.
He had listened all day for the accustomed clangour of the trains, and
had heard nothing. The brown-red smoke-fog had grown denser and more
dense, and now it stung throat and eyes with its acrid and pungent
atoms. The air was thick and hot, and objects only a score of yards away
were but just visible. The runnel at the tent-door had barely a voice
of its own. Paul guessed rightly that its course lay through a tract of
forest fire, and that the greater part of its volume had evaporated in
the heat. The river in the gorge plunged and thundered. The night
came down, and a blind glare of dull red seemed to show itself above,
revealing nothing else. For the first time since the forest fires had
begun to smoulder, the dead air took a sense of motion. It stirred with
a long, sluggish heave, and brought with it a dreadful heat, and a noise
altogether disproportionate to the pace at which it moved--the sound of
a mighty tempest. It breathed fitfully, heavily, and as if with labour;
but at every breath it blew a fervent heat along, and at every breath
there rose the same threatening roar of sound. There was something
massive and ponderous in this strange noise. It was as if a sea in
unmeasured storm were billowing nearer and nearer. And surely that red
glow was brightening. The trunks of giant trees were silhouetted on it.
Then with one slow heave, beginning like a sigh, but gathering in pace,
the wind awoke, and in one minute it blew a hurricane. And with it came
a voice--the voice of league on league of smouldering forest leaping
into a roar of flame. The air burned with a sudden crimson. The
monstrous noise of the torrent was drowned, and went unheard. The wind,
with a sudden access of its force, was sucked along the valley by the
amazing indraught of the fire, and it raged past him with such violence
as to bring him to his knees. The smoke, which had hung without form
through so many days, was ripped and twisted and dragged and beaten into
a thousand writhing and tormented shapes. They went hurling down the
wind as if that unspeakable voice of the parent fire had called them,
and there were nothing for it but this mad answer to the appeal.
It seemed impossible that the roaring noise should augment itself, and
yet it grew and grew and grew--Niagara twenty-fold, Niagara fifty-fold,
Niagara a hundred-fold. The eye discerned more and more as the wind
cleared the air, and at last the panorama stood revealed in horrid
splendour. On either side the canon the lower hills were all aflame.
They tossed aloft pyramids of brightness; they burned dull-red in
sheltered hollows; they flared fantastically on open heights;
they brightened and darkened with mile-long undulations, and swift
shudderings from blind black to blinding white, and then from that
supreme of light to black again. These changes were wrought with
dazzling swiftness. A flame which writhed over many acres flapped like
the loosened end of a sail and vanished in the twinkling of an eye,
and before the watcher could have cried out that it was gone, flaunted
itself again at the sky, which overhung it like an inverted bowl of
red-hot copper.
The fire displayed a myriad inequalities in the landscape which were
unseen in open day. It scaled ridge after ridge, and each in turn stood
out against the blackness of the mountain on which an instant before it
had seemed to nestle closely. It charged each acclivity with appalling
strength, but there were times when the assaulting line wavered,-and
retired as if the walls of darkness held a living force which had
at times the power to beat it down. Then with a rush the height was
carried; hell’s victorious banner floated over one more conquered
citadel, and the roar of triumph deepened.
At times the fire seemed to carve the darkness like a knife wielded
swiftly by some invisible giant hand. At times, catching the face of
some lofty wooded cliff, it soared up like a rocket and left a trailing
line which faded wholly as if the night had been triumphant there and
had won back a portion of its invaded ground.
For hours there did not seem a moment at which the watcher’s life was
worth purchase at a pin’s fee, but the wind flawed madly here and there,
and as if by constantly recurring miracle he stood safe. Tarred on by
the wind, the fire climbed from sunset to near dawn. It climbed until it
reached the feet of the eternal snows. Then one insulted mountain loosed
an avalanche, and then another and another, until the incredible cones
of fire were ridged with black.
Paul Armstrong threw himself upon the ground and slept when the fires
were miles and miles away. He awoke after many hours with an aching
sense of light upon his eyes. The sun was high already, and the skies
were clear. The valley and the mountains lay before him bare and black,
with many spirals of dove-coloured smoke rising thinly here and there.
And the man thought within himself:
‘After great mischief, peace. In a single year the fire-weed will have
made this waste a fairy-land. The time will come when there will be left
no token of this desolation. Nature endures no lasting loss, and is the
soul less vital?’
And he believed the things it was ordained that he should believe, and
he bowed his head in prayer with tears of penitence and self-abasement.
‘What is left to me?’ he asked.
His father’s voice spoke inwardly in answer, apart from his will,
outside his will, as it had spoken from the first.
‘Duty!’ said the voice. ‘Bid the fire-flowers blossom in the wasted
spaces of your own soul.’
His tears gripped him at the throat with art almost intolerable anguish,
and with such a passion as no man can experience twice in life he
renounced his own despair.
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD
End of Project Gutenberg’s Despair’s Last Journey, by David Christie Murray