Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘Seven and eight,’ said the landlord, ‘and a bogus thrip-penny.’

‘Give me five shillings!’ cried Paul, snatching up the poker, and the landlord pottered out the money.

Away tore Paul to the house round the corner. There were sausages there frizzling in a metal-pan with a little row of blue gas-jets below it. There was brandy there; there was beer. There was tobacco of a sort, and there was an admirable whisky, not the diluted vitriol common to the outlying London house before the passing of the Adulteration Act, but honest whisky, mellow and old.

Paul, full of meat, and singing to himself behind his pipe, walked homeward with a flask of that good liquor in his pocket, and there behind was the landlord clinging to the railings at the bottom of the area-steps and maundering to a policeman.

‘Five shillings—‘storted by threats. Tha’s the man,’ said the landlord.

‘Come in, officer, and have a drink,’ said Paul, and the officer, after an upward and downward look along the street, marched into the house. Paul gave him a drink instantly, and whilst the landlord hiccuped ‘’Started by threats ‘he explained the situation. ‘Of course, I made him shell out,’ said Paul. ‘Wouldn’t you?

‘Well, I’m a guardian of the peace, myself, sir,’ said the officer; ‘but it wouldn’t ha’ been more than five bob and costs if you’d ha’ dressed him down. Speaking as a man of uniform, as I may say, I should ha’ thought that cheap at the money.’

‘’Storted by threats,’ said the landlord.

‘Take another,’ cried Paul, ‘and go to bed. You’ll be paid in the morning, and you can stick up “To Let” as soon as you like. I’m off to the Continent.’

There was still a cab fare in Paul’s pocket when he awoke and dressed in the morning, and he booked away to the publisher’s office and received his cheque. Then away to the bank, and away from the bank with fifteen ten-pound notes of the Bank of England. Then a breakfast at a restaurant, and a pint of champagne to drink his own health in—the first wine tasted for nearly five years. Next to ‘my uncle’s’ to redeem the dressing-bag and the dress-suit, and next home to stagger the landlord with that pile of wealth. Then to pack, singing; to drive back to town; to lunch late after the purchase of a suit of reach-me-downs, new hat, boots, gloves, and paletot; and last, away to the Continental train for a first look at Paris. And all the while it was richly comic to himself to feel how he exulted, and to say within doors demurely to the shopman, to the waiter, the ticket clerk, the porter: ‘I am an author, sir, an accepted author, with the first fruits of my first book in my pocket I am on the way to Paris and distinction.’ The four years of lost prospect and horizon looked nothing, less than nothing. But the Channel waters were rough, and he was chilled by the solemn gentlemen who sat battened down with basins in their laps, turning green and yellow in the sickly light; and the railway journey beyond was cold and uncomfortable, and Paris in the gray fog of a late October morning was less gay than he had expected. What little he knew of the language seemed to be recognised by the natives of the land, but what they had to say to him was as rapid as the clatter of a running boy’s hoop-stick on a row of railings, and as intelligible. An English-speaking tout seized him, and he was grateful to be decoyed into a dirty hotel on the other side of the river, where people understood him more or less when he asked a question. Here he entered himself in the guest-book, and under the head of ‘Profession ‘wrote the world ‘Literature ‘with great pride. He ate his cutlets and chipped potatoes at breakfast with an unwonted relish, in spite of a revolting table-cloth, encrusted with mustard and spilt sauces, and blue with wine-stains, over which salt had been spilled to restore the whiteness of the fabric in case it should ever have the good chance to be washed. The yard of bread was a novelty. The distempered houses opposite—pink and green and blue—were novelties. The jalousied windows gave the street a delicious foreign look. The little cavalry officer who came clanking in with his baggy trousers and his spurs and dangling sword, almost as long as its wearer, was a delight. Paul went to the window to look at the middle-aged bonne who went by in her Alsatian cap and flying coloured ribbons.