Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘I’m five-and-twenty,’ said Paul, ‘and the world is at my feet’

But books are not to be written in a day, though they may be commissioned in an instant, and the financial stock was small, seeing how big an enterprise was to be started on it, and somehow the story would not form. What ghostly wrestling of the spirit with vague shadows which would take no shape! what sleepless tossings there were!—what fruitless rambles in the darkened streets! what hurried walks to Hampstead Heath! and what slow prowlings there amongst the gone! And, then, how the Concept came suddenly from nowhere, without a warning, without an effort, and stood up serene and strong, and bursting through and through with passion as if it had been alive and fully grown for years. Then to pen and ink and paper, not yet a weariness to soul and flesh! as they were to be in after days, the virgin page an invitation, the ink-pot a magic fountain, the very feel of the pen between thumb and finger a pleasure. There was no thought in those fresh days of stinting labour or of making rules for it—so many hours for work and so many hours for recreation, and such and such hours for meals. The book—the book was everything. He went to sleep with his people. He awoke to them. He lived all day with them. He found them more real than the living. Life was one vivid rage of emotion, of laughter, and of tears. His own pathetics and his own humours were the sweetest things he had ever known, and he cried at the one and laughed at the other more than the most sentimental of readers ever laughed and cried over any book that was ever written. And it was at this time that he wrote certain verses in which he set forth his beliefs in art. The lonely man in his eyrie in the Rockies, reviewing the bygone time, murmured what he could recall of these:

‘“A land of fire and a land of frost
Build!” said the Lord of the Soul;
“And lay me an ocean from coast to coast,
And let it be awful with many a ghost
Of galleons laden with gold, and lost
In the smothering surge’s roll.
‘“And make me a myriad rounded stars
To spangle my firmament,
Sweet like Hesper, glad with the balm
Of a ceaseless, passionless, changeless calm
And hot like Sirius, and red like Mars
With a god-like discontent.
‘“And frame in the land of fire,” he said,
“Frame me a soul like thine:
Swift as the snail’s soft horn to feel,
Yet hard and keen as the tempered steel,
And be there a fire in heart and head
Demoniac and divine.”’

The rest of the words had no duelling in his memory, though he was sure they had been made and written; but they were meant to say that all labour conceived and executed in a land of fire should be remodelled in the land of frost at the risk of being cast away in its passage from one to the other. This in plain English meant the union of hot zeal and cold diligence, which is a worthy recipe for any worker in any craft It served Paul’s turn for six prodigious weeks, from the rising of the sun until long after the going down of the same. The book was done in a quarter of the time he had apportioned to it. For six weeks the forces of every waking minute had strained fiercely forward to one purpose, and at seven o’clock on an autumn Friday he wrote the words ‘The End,’ and, looking up, saw the sunlight in dazzling strips between the green painted laths of the blind, and found that his lamp was pale. He drew up the blind and opened the window, and the sweet air bathed his head. There was a deep sadness in his heart, and when he arose and by chance saw his face in the glass it was the face of a ghost If the halest of young men will live in alternations of frost and fire for six weeks on end, he must expect to pay for it.

Paul paid dearly in lassitude, and broken sleep, and loss of appetite, and afterwards in six weeks of idle waiting in poverty, for there was no work or power of thought left in him for the time. He pawned the dressing-case old Darco had given him and the dress-suit which he had not worn for four years, and he had his meals, such as they were, at a cabman’s restaurant, and his last penny went, and tobacco famine set in; and his landlord, who was a maudlin man with a cultured turn for drink, would come in at night to his sitting-room and cry, and say that the water-rates were going to cut the supply; and the butcher had said, ‘No more credit after Saturday.’

And whilst he was thus agreeably engaged on one occasion a knock came to the door, and a slattern slavey came in with a plate in her hand, and on the plate a wet and flabby oblong something crusted with dirt and slime.

‘I can’t quite make it out, sir,’ said the slavey, ‘but I think as this is a letter, and it hasn’t been opened, sir, and I fancy it’s addressed to you.’

And within the slimy envelope was a soaked letter, in which the ink had so run as to leave it scarcely legible, and being diligently pored upon, the letter was found to indicate that the recipient of the story had read it with great charm and interest, and was willing to purchase the serial rights of the same for the sum of £250, £150 on the author’s signature to terms, and £100 on the day of the publication of the first number.

‘It’s ‘ard for a poor working man to be kep’ out of his money like this, sir,’ the landlord moaned.

‘Damn you!’ said Paul. ‘Listen to this.’ He read the letter, and with a start reverted to the date: ‘September 27th, and this is October 27th! I haven’t tasted food these three days, or had a pinch of tobacco, and this has been waiting for me—this—this—for a whole month! Explain, you execrable! or, as sure as the brother of the sun reigns over the Heavenly Empire, I will brain you with the poker. Shell out, you villain!—shell out, to your last halfpenny! ‘Ard for a poor working man to be kep’ out of his money, is it? Somebody in this infernal house has kept me waiting and half starving for a month, whilst I have two hundred and fifty pounds to my credit. What are you worth, you hoary inebriate? Speak, or die!’