Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘It crumbles,’ wrote the critic, ‘at the very instant at which it should triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap, when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of well-worked marble. I do not know whether you are well or ill, whether you desire to continue the work or no. All of which I am certain is that the piece is wanted for March, and that we cannot work together at this distance. I will meet you where you like—Paris, Brussels, Vienna, London, Hong Kong. It is all one to me so long as I get you back to work in time. But, for whatever reason, this second act is so written that it will not do. And I cannot wait I am a poet, but I am a poet without a language. If you will not be my interpreter, I must find another. Is friendship friendship, or is business business? In the name of both I ask you to meet me and to work with me.’

Look at it how he would, and distort his own perspective as he might, Darco’s angry and outspoken appeal was larger than anything his duty to Gertrude might ask of him. But, to tell the whole truth, his sense of duty was his curse, because the sense itself had grown distorted. Because of some rooted infirmity of character, he must needs be true to the ideal which least merited truth. He saw this fact throughout his career. He had bowed at foolish shrines. Gertrude—oh yes, Gertrude was impeccable. But just as he was wasting the heart of ardent manhood now, he had wasted the heart of youth and the heart of boyhood The career was all of a piece. Born to be fooled, whether by a village coquette, or his own loftiest, or his own lowest, or by practised femme de feu and femme de glace in one—always born to be fooled, frustrated, enticed to the throwing away of real passion and of real power.

And over and above all these, arrange them in what imaginary perspective he might choose, the sordid side of things, the bills—bills from lodging-house keepers of the better sort, from hotels, from milliners, and from modistes—and the shrinking exchequer, which barely, when all claims were satisfied, would leave him so much as two hundred and fifty pounds.

What had his year and a half of dalliance brought him? A dream of pleasure, a desert ache of hunger, an occasional delirious spur to appetite. Now, what in the name of common-sense is the good of it all? And is Gertrude any better, after all, than an innocent Delilah, trapping no Samson, but a fool unmuscled, who has no strength to break the weakest of her withes? Innocent Delilah! He never profaned her in his thought.

But in this mood—with his conscience, literary-artistic and simply human, entirely endorsing old Darco’s reproof of his work and his evasions; with a financial crevasse at his feet, and Annette chopping away his standing-place, and his own extravagances melting his foothold like butter in the sun; with a barren future staring him in the face—he was disposed alike to remorse and penitence.

The city in which he rambled was strange to him, and, according to his fashion when absorbed in thought, he took any turning which suggested itself, and lost himself in a labyrinth of byways. He had done the same kind of thing in a hundred towns and cities without any result worth mentioning, but just for once he was destined to find a purpose wrapped up in the folds of this simple habit.

He was plodding along miserably enough, and did not know whether he were at Naples or the North Pole, when a familiar voice awoke him from his bitter reveries, and he looked about him to discover that he was between a high wall and & hedge of aloes on a strip of grass which had no pathway on it, and apparently led nowhere. He had a vague idea that he had set out in this direction upon a footpath more or less distinct, and making a volte-face, he saw that the path had come to a termination at a door in the high wall a wicket’s length behind him.

The voice he had heard was the voice of Gertrude, and the words it had spoken were: ‘Ah! but my dear friend, that inevitable, that unceasing isolation of the mind!’

A swift pang of jealousy ran through him, and he listened with an almost fierce anxiety. There was nothing in his nature to induce him to play the eavesdropper, but he could not have refrained from listening just then had it been to save his soul. Some deep undetermined murmur of a voice in answer seemed to reach his ears, but they were drumming so to the startled music of his heart that his sense failed to record it. He went back swiftly and stealthily to the spot at which the pathway terminated, and there he found an old green-painted door in a small archway in the wall. It half drooped upon its rusty hinges, and across the gap it left between its own rim and the postern, he had view enough to tell him whither his rambling footsteps had led him. He was looking at the terraced gardens in the rear of the Baroness’s hotel, and whilst he looked Gertrude herself floated into sight. Some trifle of a lace mantilla was thrown over her head, and in her right hand she balanced a parasol daintily between thumb and finger. Her companion was a man apparently of middle age, frock-coated, silk-hatted, booted and gloved as if for Rotten Row. He bore himself with an air of distinction, and the looker-on saw the gloved hand caress a big moustache of sweeping silver. The owner of the moustache was bending over the Baroness with an unmistakable air of gallant attention, and Paul’s blood boiled within him. He had no real sense of the impulse which moved him, and no calculation as to what might happen; but he pushed the door aside, and, entering the garden, walked along the gravelled main path which led to the hotel. He made a feint of holding his head straight, and of looking neither to left nor right, but he watched Gertrude and her companion with a keen sidelong glance. His brisk footstep set a pebble rolling in the pathway, and a second later he heard his own name called. A low-growing orange-tree, all lustrous with globes of green and gold and shiny leafage, had intercepted his view of the pair for just the instant which intervened between the sound and the call.

‘Mr. Armstrong,’ said Gertrude’s voice, ‘Mr. Armstrong!’ He turned in a pretence of amazement, and, hat in hand, crossed a small space of turf.