Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘You asked me if I knew the Baron. What kind of man is he? A strange sort of fellow, rather—one-and-thirty—to be indifferent to such a woman: brilliant, amiable, charming.’

He spoke with no enthusiasm. He wanted to talk about Gertrude, but he did not mean to betray his own concerns.

‘The Baron’s a very decent fellow; but he has a rather muddy German accent, and he can’t understand the lady’s verses. There’s nothing worse than that in it. She elects to travel; he elects to stay at home. There’s no sort of scandal or impropriety. She’s a dear little woman, and a good little woman, and she has the French-American pschutt, as the idiot word goes now. She’s a bit of a sentimentalist, and an exquisite flirt, but the most genuine little creature, too. If she wouldn’t flirt, she’d be too good for this world.’

‘Flirt!’ cried Paul, in so much horror that Ralston laughed aloud.

‘I have taken advantage of my demi-semi-clerical dignity,’ he said, ‘to preach many sermons to her on that particular. Mind you, she’s a most estimable woman; and, as you said just now, brilliant and amiable and charming. But she flirts—she flirts with me; and, if I were not entrenched behind the fortress of threescore years, she’d enslave me as she enslaves everybody else. There’s an Isolation of the Soul which is very effective at short range. Do you happen to have met it yet?’

Was Ralston warning him of set purpose? Had he observed anything—any little subtle thing—which had told him how the land lay? Was he conceivably speaking as the husbands friend? Was his speech accidental or designed? Whatever it might be, and it was certainly enough to discomfit the listener greatly, it was not enough to shake his faith in Gertrude. When he found time to think about it, he marvelled that so shrewd a man as Ralston should have formed so mistaken an estimate of a character so sincere and transparent.

If ever a woman had laid the pure recesses of her heart and soul open to the inspection of a human eye, Gertrude had done so. He was confident that he knew her, and it seemed to him that no two hearts had ever lived together in an intimacy at once so chaste and fiery. Gertrude a flirt? The tenderness she had shown him that night a pretence? The thing was so incredible and ridiculous that it was not worth while to bother one’s brains with it for even the fraction of a minute. He had found his soul’s partner—the twin Half of the Pear—and he was more than content with his discovery.

Whether Ralston meant much or little, whether, indeed, he virtually meant nothing or anything, Paul could not guess; but he was uneasy beneath the humorous gravity of the elder’s eye, and he changed the theme. They had a good hour together, and shook hands and parted with a mutual liking, and at the instant at which he reached the street Paul was free to take up his station at his end of the telepathic wire and to call Gertrude to the other. He walked miles and miles whilst engaged in this wholesome and reasonable enterprise, and at length, without in the least knowing how he had got there, found himself, dog-tired, in a strange quarter of the city. He rambled on until he met a gendarme, who put him upon his way, and within ten minutes of this encounter he awoke with a start to the fact that he was pacing the pavement of the thoroughfare in which he had first seen Annette. The interregnum of fatigue which had come in between his passionate dreams and this reminder of the sordid realities of his lot went for nothing. The dream and the truth flashed together like the electric opposites in clouds and awoke a rare thunderstorm within doors. But by the time he had got to his hotel this was over, and he crawled wearily upstairs to a fireless room, the air of which struck chill and lonely. The apartment in itself was well enough, and not many years before he would have thought it palatial in its stateliness and luxury; but he would have given a thousand pounds at that instant if he could have translated himself to the old kitchen hearth at home and into the sight of the old familiar faces. He had taken a little champagne before dinner, a moderate allowance of wine in the course of the meal, and two rather liberal tumblers of whisky-and-soda with Ralston. This was not the direction in which he was accustomed to approach excess, but he remembered gladly that he had a carafe of brandy in the room. He was chill and tired, and in that contradictory condition of discomfort in which a man is at once painfully sleepy and distressfully wide awake. He poured a quantity of spirit into a tumbler, filled the glass to the brim with water, undressed, blew out his candles, and went to bed, and the demons of a sleepless night came to him and tormented him. The opening line of Tennyson’s ‘Love and Duty’ got into his brain and ticked there: ‘Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?’ It recurred with a damnable iteration. He tried all the devices for wooing slumber he had ever heard of. He assembled an innumerable flock of sheep, for he had the knack of making pictures in his mind, and he set them one by one to leap through a gap in a hedge, counting them as they went by. He had not counted a dozen when the words were back again: ‘Of love that never found its earthly close, what sequel?’

He repeated the experiment scores of times, but it was always interrupted by the same query. He set an unending line of soldiers on the march, all as like each other as peas in the same pod. He resolutely denuded his mind of thought; he repeated the multiplication table. It was all of no service; the question came back remorselessly, and at last he set himself to face it. It was dismal enough to look at To think of the world without Gertrude was to conceive a barren waste in which it was worth no man’s while to dwell. To anticipate a life-long continuance of the experiences and emotions of the past three months was scarcely to invite a more cheerful prospect To hint, even in his own thoughts, at any attempt to draw her from her own height of purity was a profanation. The quarters and the hours chimed, until the gray spring dawn crept through the interstices of the blinds, and fatigue grew more leaden than ever. But the devil of insomnia was unconquerable. He relit his candles, found a book, and tried to read; but that was as hopeless as the rest.

He had no claim to call upon Gertrude again until he learned that it was her goodwill and pleasure he should do so; but he was not forbidden to write, and there at least was an occupation to which he could bend his mind. He dressed and sat down, dull and haggard, to the task. He wrote page on page, feeling as though he dipped his pen in his own heart’s blood; but when he came to read what he had written, it was no more what he had meant it to be than a Hortus Siccus is a living garden, or a mummy a live Prometheus. He wrote at last: ‘I cannot bear this banishment in nearness, and if I am not to see you I must go away. I have had a night of fever, and have not slept I dare not trust myself to write, but for pity’s sake let me have an answer by the messenger who brings this.’