Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

Darco looked at him for a second or two, and began then to stump about the room.

‘Goot! he said suddenly; ‘let us go to work.’

To work they went. Whatever else might be said for Darco, it was at least impossible to brood in his society. The man’s tireless enthusiasm did one of two things for everybody with whom he encountered. It repelled either through terror or distaste, or it inspired a sentiment which corresponded with itself. He frightened timid people; he made the pugnacious angry and resentful. But here and there he kindled a fire.

Paul’s love for work had gone to sleep very soundly, but Darco’s storming awoke it, and in a day or two the new remedy had got hold of him, and he came back to a moderately healthy state of mind. He wrote to Gertrude, and she responded, and a peace was patched between them, but it was not easy on either side to climb back to the old existence of confidence, and Paul at least was shaken in allegiance. Nor was this all, for he had begun to have some apprehension of his own character, and to take soundings of those emotional shallows which had always seemed to him so profound. When a man has once learned to distrust his own raptures they do not rise easily.

He took up his quarters with Darco, and they worked all day together, and, on occasion, far into the night, for they were entered on a race against time, and an extended run of the piece which then held the stage at Darco’s theatre meant loss. Act by act was put in rehearsal as it left the writers’ hands, and the final scenes were written in the theatre itself, and the parts copied in one of the dressing-rooms. For the last fortnight of the work there was time to think of nothing else, and when the very tag was written there was labour enough left to satisfy even Darco.

No better medicine for Paul’s malady could have been prescribed than he found in this ceaseless mental occupation. It shook him out of his useless moonings, and brought his mind back to its old healthy elasticity, and when at last the decisive night came, and the play went with a roar from start to finish, he went to bed to sleep the clock round, and awoke to triumph.

Out of an idea which had cropped up in the course of work, and had been abandoned as being too heavy to be employed as a mere episode, the indefatigable Darco had already constructed a new plot, and was fain to begin at once upon its development. But Paul insisted upon at least a fortnight’s holiday, and carried his point. There was no further fear of financial embarrassment for many months to come. Annette’s liabilities were paid. A lawyer was engaged to make settled arrangements with her, and for awhile there was a clear prospect and free air to breathe. Then came the new work, carried on at a less fiery pressure than the old, but yet pursued with diligence. It lasted six months, and was not likely to be in demand for another half-year. Gertrude was back in Paris, and thither went Paul, prepared to study the platonic theory in a more philosophical spirit than he had hitherto displayed. She was charming. She could not easily cease to be charm ing, but she maddened no longer, and if she had had a heart at all, her lover’s extreme placidity might have piqued her into love. It could not do that, but it served to introduce upon the scene an episode of some humour.

Madame la Baronne de Wyeth could not exist without an adorer. It was an agreeable thing enough to have two at a time, and would have been agreeable to have had a dozen had the creatures been manageable. Mr. Ricardo P. Janes, of Boston, Massachusetts, was a young man of excellent family connections, and in enjoyment of liberal means. He was a very handsome boy of four- or five-and-twenty, and having a taste for art and the Muses in general, he was studying in the atelier of a famous French painter. He took life seriously, and wrote nice verses. He was simple and enthusiastic, pure-minded and romantic, and altogether eligible as a candidate for a place in the list of Gertrude’s soulful friends. When Paul reached Paris he had an immediate introduction to this young gentleman, and conceived a real liking for him. There was hardly an escape from the recognition of the fact that Mr. Janes, in his serious, romantic way, was in love with Gertrude, but it was evident that he had been held well in hand, and that with him the platonic path had strict barriers, beyond which he did not even aspire to pass. He made Paul his confidant when the two came to intimacy, as they very easily did; and from his simple talk the elder learned again a great deal of what he had learned already from Gertrude—how, for instance, there was a certain isolation of the soul from which it was impossible to escape even in the closest and most genuine friendship, and how the Individual was never truly apprehended by any other Individual, but was doomed to go its way in eternal solitude towards its goal. Mr. Janes, despite his romanticisms and enthusiasms, was in the main a sensible young man, and he would not have said these things had he known or guessed that their ground of inspiration would be recognised by his companion. But Gertrude’s ideas had seemed to him—they would appear to have seemed so to many for a time—to hold a most true and beautiful though sad philosophy, and he was of that time of life when such thoughts are full of serious interest and charm. Had Mr. Janes appeared nine months earlier under the same conditions, Paul would probably have conceived a fiery hatred for him, but now he felt a kind of superiority to him, which was in part cynical, and in part affectionate, and in part self-disdainful. He had gone thrilling at all this for years on end, because it came from the lips of a pretty and engaging woman, with whom it was no more than a canting shibboleth. Of course it helped to disillusionize him, and he began even to see that Gertrude was not as beautiful as he had once believed her to be. This is almost a fatal symptom in the history of love’s decay, unless the perception be attended, as it is in happy cases, by the perception of new beauties whose presence more than atones for the absence of the old. And Paul did not find new beauties. Gertrude was simply a pretty woman now, and a pretty woman is a very different creature from an angel whose effulgence so dazzles that it blinds the eyes. It was pleasant enough to philander with her, to touch the skirts of topics which had once been dangerous, but were dangerous no longer, but the glamour was gone, and young Mr. Janes had done as much to banish it in a single fortnight as Ralston and the bibulous explorer and the nine months of diligent labour all put together.

It happened that the Baroness herself planned a little pleasure trip, which resulted in the closing of this chapter of Paul Armstrong’s life. It placed him incidentally in a position of extreme awkwardness, and he was never able to decide whether he had acted well or ill in it. The point may be reckoned a fine one.

Gertrude had made accidental acquaintance with a charming old house in the neighbourhood of Fontainebleau, a country château of the old-world sort, which was for sale, with all its furniture, its plate and its pictures, and a rather exceptionally good library. Failing a sale, it was provisionally for hire, and she, having, always, practically unlimited funds at her disposal, was inclined to take it and to spend some half-year in retirement, within easy reach of the capital and her friends, whilst she added the last touches to a volume of poems on which she had been engaged from time to time for some three or four years past She was in negotiation for the place, and just by way of experiment she had thought it a charming idea to give a little—a very little—house-party there. There were to be only five people—Gertrude’s own Knickerbocker sheepdog, then one Comtesse de Cassault, Gertrude herself, and Mr. Janes and Paul. The servants of the departed family were available for a day; a chef and one or two kitchen assistants might be sent down from Paris. The party would assemble in time for luncheon, would spend the afternoon in a country excursion, would return to dinner, and so Pariswards by a special train. It was a pretty programme, and would cost M. le Baron de Wyeth a pretty penny, but the last consideration was Gertrude’s affair alone. The Comtesse de Cassault was a beautiful person, a flirt of the demurest kind. The Knickerbocker was virtually nobody. In effect it was a partie carrée and bade fair to be enjoyable.