Paul knew that Madge and he were to have a travelling companion on the voyage, and that the companion was to be Madge’s sister, but he did not meet her until he stepped aboard the steamer bound for Tilbury Docks from Adelaide. Her name was Phyllis, but for some reason or no reason her own small world had elected to call her Bill, and to that name only she gave willing answer, unless she were flattered from the memory of short frocks by being addressed as Miss Hampton. She was a child of astonishing beauty, with eyes like stars and the face of a young angel, and people who did not know her received an impression of sanctity and innocence when they beheld her. A complete knowledge of her character revealed her as an incorrigible imp, utterly without a sense of danger under any circumstances her experience had so far led her to encounter, and, apart from that, a compound—a furious compound on either side—of jealousy and affection. It would, perhaps, be more just to say affection and jealousy, for Bill’s heart was hot with love for those for whom she cared at all, and her jealousy was but the natural product of her affection. It was not until the boat reached Colombo that Bill condescended to accept a solitary advance from Paul. Until then she resented every minute he spent in her sister’s society and every word he addressed to her, but once enlisted she became a sort of lovers’ watch-dog, and held all intruders at bay.
The steamer was lying for four-and-twenty hours in the harbour at Colombo, and everybody who was at liberty was delighted to snatch a day ashore. Paul and Madge and Bill made the customary globe-trotter’s round They lunched at the hotel at Point de Galles, saw the usual conjurers and snake-charmers, drove to the usual Buddhist temple, dined in town, and went aboard again. Bill, who had hitherto proved an unmitigated nuisance, behaved with a fine discretion throughout the day, and it was only half an hour after her appointed bedtime that she pointedly made Paul aware of her existence. He was lounging in a deck-chair and smoking a cigar when the young lady took a place at his side.
‘Look here,’ she said, with the boyish off-handedness which belonged to her. ‘I want you and me to be friends.’
‘Why not?’ said Paul. ‘I’m agreeable if you are.’
‘Have I been good to-day?’ the imp asked, laying her head upon his shoulder, and turning up those starlike, unfathomable eyes of hers.
‘You have behaved like an angel for temper,’ Paul responded, ‘and like an elderly diplomatist for discretion.’
‘You are satisfied?’ said Bill, rolling her golden curls in her Tam-o’-Shanter cap.
‘I am not merely satisfied, William,’ Paul responded. ‘Words fail me to express my gratitude.’
‘Don’t you begin to chaff me,’ said Bill. ‘If you do, I shan’t make the bargain I was going to.’
‘I assure you,’ said Paul, ‘that I was never more serious in my life. I swear it by the most sacred of man’s possessions—gold. This is an English sovereign.’
‘For me?’ asked Bill, her lambent eyes regarding him as if no thought of greed or bribery could touch the angel’s soul which shone through them.
‘For you,’ said Paul.
‘Right oh!’ Bill replied, biting at the coin with her milk-white teeth, and then bestowing it in her pocket. ‘Now, if you’ll promise never to leave Madge alone about one thing, I’ll be as good—as good—you can’t guess anything as good as I’ll be.’
‘There’s no such thing as a one-sided bargain,’ said Paul, ‘and you must let me know what you expect from me in answer to this astonishing confession.’
‘Don’t you chaff me,’ said Bill, still rolling her golden head upon his shoulder, and beaming on him with those eyes of innocence. ‘I might be having a sweetheart of my own one of these days. Don’t you think that’s likely?’
‘I don’t mind betting,’ Paul answered, ‘that you’ll have fifty—’
Bill sat up straight in her deck-chair, clasped her hands with a vivid gesture, and looked skyward with a glance pure as the heavens themselves.
‘What a lark!’ she breathed—’ oh, what a lark! Fifty? Do you think they’d all come together?’ she asked with a sudden eagerness, as if her life depended on the answer.
‘Say, five at a time,’ said Paul—‘ten per annum; that will give you five years to deal with them, beginning, we will say, about two years from now.’
‘But that’s where I want to come in,’ said Bill ‘I want to begin at once.’
‘There is no need to be in a hurry,’ Paul answered. ‘There is plenty of time before you.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Bill thoughtfully. ‘But, then, you see, I don’t want to waste any of it. Now, I just want to tell you what I want you to do for me. I want you to din it into Madge’s ears, morning, noon, and night, that it’s time that I should do my hair up and wear long frocks.’
‘And if I undertake that mission?’ Paul asked
‘We’re friends,’ cried Bill, rising and holding out her hand ‘You’ll see,’ she added, ‘I can be just as nice as I have been nasty.’
From this time forward the voyage was like a happy dream. Suez and Naples and Gibraltar were full of interest and wonder to the untravelled Madge, and the Mediterranean was smooth as a pond through all the lovely days and nights of the European spring. The Bay of Biscay so far belied its stormy reputation that there was scarcely a heave upon its surface, and at last the shores of England came in sight, sacred and beautiful to the eyes of a girl born and bred in the Colonies. Then came Tilbury, and at Tilbury brother George was waiting to bid his sisters welcome.
Paul was happy and content enough to be in the mood to like anybody and everybody, and an inward suggestion that he was not favourably impressed with brother George presented itself only to be discounted and ignominiously turned out of doors at once. As Tennyson has said, ‘It is not true that second thoughts are best, but first and third, which are a riper first.’ Brother George was undeniably good-looking after his fashion. He was well set up and a little over the middle height. He was very perfectly groomed, and had very fine, regular, white teeth which he was a little too fond of showing in a rather mechanical smile. His eyes were rather too closely set either for beauty or for character, and his manner was a trifle over-suave.
Bill, who had been promoted after her own desires, fell upon him like an avalanche, and being at first unrecognised in her aspect of grown-up young lady, embarrassed brother George considerably. But there was such a laugh at this as set all four in high spirits, and there were so many questions and answers that the time of waiting for the train passed in a flash.
The quartette lunched together at a restaurant in town, and brother George carried off his sisters to the apartments he had secured for them in the house in which he lodged. But before he went a little episode, which was afterwards renewed in various forms until it grew monotonous, occurred. Brother George naturally played the host at the restaurant, and spread a generous and delicate feast, but on the presentation of the bill was struck through with chagrin at the discovery that he had lost his purse. That he had brought it from home was beyond cavil in his mind, for had he not paid his cab-fare and the other expenses from it? It was an awkward beginning of an acquaintance, as he allowed with an embarrassed smile, but if Mr. Armstrong would be his banker for a day—— Mr. Armstrong was happy enough to be willing to be any man’s banker at that moment, and brother George borrowed a ten-pound note with many expressions of regret and obligation. He forgot this little transaction so completely, that it was not so much as mentioned for a year or two; but brother George gave clear proof later on that he was not the man to leave unworked any social patch which at the first stroke of the hoe would yield so promising a little harvest, and first and last quite a handsome income in a small way accrued to brother George at the expense of brother George’s sister’s lover.
It is not when a man is happy, and the errors of his life have not yet yielded their inevitable crop of suffering, that conscience bestirs itself. Things went smoothly with Paul Armstrong. His plays prospered and yielded rich returns. A volume of verses gave him something more than the reputation of the average minor poet There was no more popular man at his clubs than he, and, if he had cared for it, he might have been something of a social lion. As it was, he met many notable people on terms of intimacy, and reckoned himself as rich in friendships as any man alive; and, when the six months’ probation was over, he and Madge went quietly away together to spend in Paris a honeymoon which had not been consecrated by any rite of the Church, and entered upon a wedded life which was not even sanctioned by the registrar. Madge became informally Mrs. Paul Armstrong, and, under that style and title, was introduced to a dozen of Paul’s intimates who were in no doubt as to the facts of the case, and to hundreds of other people who accepted the pretence without a thought of inquiry. The whole family lived together—Madge and her mother, Bill and brother George—and things went smoothly for two or three prosperous and happy years. In mere prosperity and happiness there is little to record, but the heart of the Exile in the mountains yearned over that vanished time in a bitter and unavailing regret. How sweet it had been! With how tender a gradation the first passion of delight in possession had softened into friendship, and the calm love of happily wedded people, and the delicious intimate camaraderie which springs of the unbroken companionship of board and bed, and the sharing of every little confidence of life!
The past was obliterated; it was wiped out as cleanly as if it had been written on a slate, and a wet sponge had been passed over it. Practically it was forgotten, but the obliterated record sprang to light again with an unlooked-for, dreadful swiftness.
Bill by this time had developed into Miss Hampton, and was a grown-up young lady in real earnest, with lovers by the dozen. She and Paul were chums, and she had no secrets from him. Her face alone was bright enough to have made sunshine in any house; but it happened one day that Paul, returning from rehearsal, found it blank with astonishment and pain. She had evidently been waiting and listening for him; for at the instant at which his latch-key clicked in the lock, she threw the hall-door open, and, as he entered, closed it silently, almost stealthily, behind him. Then, with her hand upon his shoulder, she led him to his study—the plainly furnished little workshop which looked out on the trim suburban garden. This was the room in which he had spent the richest and most prosperous hours of the only tranquil years he had known, and it was here that he was fated to meet the death-blow to his happiness.
‘What is the matter?’ he asked—‘what has happened? Where is Madge?’
‘She is in her own room,’ Phyllis answered, her eyes wide with terror, and her pretty Australian roses all vanished from her cheeks. ‘Mother and she have locked themselves in together, and Madge is crying her heart out Oh, Paul, Paul,’ she cried, clasping her hands, ‘what have you done?’
With that she broke into sudden weeping, and Paul stood amazed, with a chill terror, as yet unrecognised, clutching at his heart.
‘What have I done?’ he echoed—’ whathaveI done, dear?’
‘Done!’ she flashed at him, drawing her hands away from her streaming eyes, and throwing them passionately apart ‘Oh, Paul, we have all loved you so, and honoured you so, and now——’
She cast herself into an arm-chair with a reckless abandonment, and cried bitterly. The chill hand at Paul’s heart grew icy, but even yet he did not recognise his fear.
‘For mercy’s sake, Bill, tell me!’
She flashed to her feet in a second, and looked at him from head to foot with a burning scorn.
‘Never call me by that name again,’ she said, through her clenched white teeth. ‘You ask me what you have done? You have ruined Madge’s life and broken her heart, and mine,’ she cried, striking her clenched hand upon her breast—‘and mine!’
She went raging up and down the room like a lovely fury, her hair disordered, her eyes flashing, and her cheeks new-crimsoned with anger.
‘Tell me—tell me,’ he besought her, ‘what has happened.’
‘This has happened,’ she answered, with a sudden tense quiet: ‘your wife has been here—your wife, an overdressed, painted French trull, so drunk that she could barely stand.’
‘Good God!’ said Paul. He laid his hand upon a bookshelf, and stood swaying there as if he were about to fall. ‘What brought her here?’ he gasped.
‘You don’t deny it?’ said the girl, speaking with the same tense quiet as before.
‘No, no,’ said Paul, ‘I don’t deny it What brought her here?’
‘She came to assert her rights,’ said Phyllis, with a biting indignation. ‘She came to warn us that she was setting the law in motion, and that she would drag Madge’s name—you hear? Madge’s name—through the mud of the Divorce Court; and only this morning I loved you, and respected you, and believed in you.’
‘I must see Madge,’ said Paul.
‘You shall not!’ she cried, flashing to the door, and setting her back against it.
But the door was opened from without, and Madge was here. Paul opened his arms to her, and she laid her pale face against his breast.
‘I have feared it always,’ she said, ‘and it has come at last. My poor, poor Paul ‘how you must have suffered!’
‘Your poor, poor Paul,’ said Phyllis, in a voice of bitterest disdain, ‘is a very fitting object for your pity. My personal recommendation is that your poor Paul should drown himself.’
‘You don’t understand, dear,’ Madge answered her—’ you don’t understand. Paul has done me no wrong. We did not take you into our confidence, because you were too young; but there has been no disguise among the rest of us. I knew of this before Paul and I resolved to spend our lives together. Mother knew it; George knew it; you know it now, dear. Will it part us, Bill?’
The girl’s face changed from angry scorn to pure bewilderment, and then again to pity.
‘Come here, Madge,’ she cried, opening her arms wide, and speaking with a sobbing voice; ‘come here.’
She hugged her sister fiercely, and cried over her.
‘I can understand,’ she said—‘I can understand.’ She repeated the words again and again. ‘It isn’t a pretty thing to have to face; but it’s your trouble, darling, and we must stick together. As for me,’ she added, with a new outbreak of tears, which a laugh made half hysteric, ‘I shall stick like wax.’
Annette’s threat was nobrutum fulmen, as the society newspapers soon began to show. Paragraphs appeared here and there indicating that the unprosperous matrimonial affairs of a popular playwright would shortly excite the interest of the public; and one day Paul, driving along the Strand, and finding his cab momentarily arrested by a block in the traffic, was frozen to the marrow by the sight of a newspaper placard which by way of sole contents bore the words, ‘Who is the real Mrs. Armstrong? Divorce proceedings instituted against a famous playwright.’
At first his thought was: ‘Some enemy has done this;’ but he knew the journal and most of the influential members of its staff, and he could not guess that he counted an enemy among them. He had dined with the editor a week before at the same club-table, and had found him not less cordial than he had ever been before.
‘I suppose the man is justified,’ Paul thought when the power of reflection returned to him. ‘The whole story is on its way to the public ears, and neither he nor any other man can stop it It’s his business to be first in the field with it if he can.’
He turned his cab homeward, for he had no heart to face the people he had meant to meet, and on his way, just to gratify the natural instinct of self-torture, he bought a copy of the journal, and read there that Messrs. Berry and Smythe, the well-known firm of solicitors in Lincoln’s Inn, had that day filed a petition for divorce against Mr. Paul Armstrong, the well-known dramatist, and that remarkable revelations were expected.
For these past few years home had seemed Paradise. He had never for any fraction of an instant wavered in his love, and use and wont had helped to set a seal of sanctity upon it With the passage of the months and years, with the growth of many intimate acquaintanceships, and not a few closer and dearer ties about him, home had grown to be as sacred to him as if the union on which it was founded had been blessed by all the priests of all the churches. No purer and more tranquil spirit of affectionate loyalty had breathed in any home in England, and now the balm of his soul was vitriol, and that which had been the bread of life to him was steeped in gall and wormwood. The very honest purpose of his life, his constant and sober pursuit of a worthy fame, recoiled upon him here as if it had been in itself a crime. Not to have striven, to have been content with a dull obscurity of fortune, to have wasted his days in idleness and his nights in foolish revel, would have seemed a happier course to him. And as it was the better part of life which chastised him most cruelly, so it was the best and worthiest affection he had ever known which turned upon him with a cup of poison in its hand and bade him drink it to the dregs. Life and the world are so made that only the most desolate can suffer by themselves. If by any trick of magic he could have borne his chastisement alone, he would have accepted it with something like a scorn of fate.
He had discharged his cab within a hundred yards of home, and had read the stinging paragraph beneath a lamp-post almost at his own doorstep. He entered the house noiselessly, and from Madge’s music-room there floated down to him the sound of Chopin’s great Funeral March. She played this and some other favourites of her own as few musicians play them, for music had been the one delight of her life, and but for the fleeting theatrical ambition, and for Paul, she might have become famous as an executant He stood in the hall to listen as the alternate wail and triumph filled and thrilled the air, and thinking that she was alone, he strolled silently to his dressing-room, and then in smoking-jacket and slippers went to join her. Except for the glow of the fire the room was in darkness, and a voice which came out of the darkness startled him.
‘I had prepared myself to wait for hours,’ said the voice; and Ralston emerged from a shadowed corner with an outstretched hand—Ralston, with his big sagacious head, all unexpectedly silver-white, and moustache and beard of snow, but with the same old hand-grip, and the same half-dictatorial, half-affectionate tone. Madge struck a resolving chord, rose, and with a kiss and a whispered ‘I know the news,’ slipped from the room before he could make an effort to detain her.
‘Can we have a light on things?’ said Ralston, in that hoarsely musical growl of his. He struck a match as he spoke, and lit the gas, and then marched sturdily to the door and closed it. ‘You know me—you, Paul Armstrong,’ he said, turning to face the master of the house. ‘I have spent a fighting life, but I have never known a downright murderous fit till now. Have you seen this?’
‘Yes,’ said Paul,’ I’ve seen it.’
The journal Ralston haled from his pocket and held towards him was a fellow to that he had just thrown away in the street.
‘The carrion-hunting hound!’ cried Ralston; ‘I read this, and I came straight here. I knew there was no hiding it from your wife. I say “your wife,” and I hold by the word until faith and friendship are as dead as last year’s leaves. She had to see it, Armstrong, and it was better that a friend should bring it to her. Now, mind you, we who know her rally round. We may be only two or three, but we are a fighting colony. I am by way of being a cleric, but I don’t always cut my linguistic coat to suit my cloth, and my word at this hour is, Damn the bestial ecclesiastical bigotry which seeks to tie the bodies of men and women together when their souls are sundered! Here is a man reported within this last fortnight as having been arrested the day after his marriage at a registrar’s office, and as having been since then condemned to penal servitude for life. Is that fact a relief to the woman who was his victim? Not a bit of it Let her contract a new marriage, and the law will indict her for bigamy. She must live in loneliness, or be classed with harlots. Here is a man I know, an outlying parishioner of mine, whose wife is hopelessly and incurably insane. Is there any release from the marriage-bond for him? Not a chance of it. There are a hundred thousand people of this country, men and women, so saturated and demoralized with drink that only an overwhelming Christian pity could bear to touch ‘em with a barge-pole—husbands intolerable to wives, wives intolerable to husbands, live corpses with corruption distilling at each pore—and this filthy marriage law, which is the last relic of Christianity’s worst barbarism, binds quick and wholesome flesh to stinking death, and bids them fester together in the legal pit. I set one honest man’s curse upon that shameless and abominable creed, and I would not take my hand away from my seal though I went to the stake for setting it there.’
He broke into a stormy laugh, and clapped Paul boisterously upon the shoulder.
‘And now,’ he said, with a sudden change of voice and manner, ‘that we have got rid of the froth of passion, let me offer you one cup of the sound wine of reason. Fight this business through, Paul Armstrong. Don’t give way by half a barleycorn. The story, as it tells against you, will be made known. The truth, as your friends know it, must come out as well. If I had time to read up for the bar, and pass my examinations, I would ask nothing better than to be your counsel. Face the music, Armstrong, and you may help the cause of justice. It is time that this union of quick and dead were done with, and that the ecclesiastic fetish rag which makes its wickedness respectable were burned.’
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, hewasan 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