Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘I am bolder now,’ said Ralston; and Paul, leaving him for a moment, raced upstairs, and, having made a brief search in his study, returned with a big sheaf of type-written matter in his hand.

‘There is my case,’ he said. ‘Old Darco calls it madness to challenge such a truth in such a fashion. Weldon will take the piece and play it. He will produce it anonymously by preference, but as I choose. I choose to have my fling at the world, and to take it without disguise. Tell me when you have read it.’

‘I am your man,’ cried Ralston, catching at the paper.

‘I don’t know whether I have done well or ill in doing it,’ said Paul. ‘I suppose there never was a writer who didn’t hawk the secret of his soul about the streets—if he had a secret and a soul.’

‘More of this hereafter,’ Ralston said, and bore away the manuscript that night.

There had been little need to spur Paul to courage on this matter. The wiser thing might have been to counsel him to moderation. He had set his back to his corner already.

But just hereabouts a small thing happened which had, as small things will, an undue influence upon his mind. There was loose on Fleet Street at this time an extraordinary devil of a man of genius whose appropriate real name was Wild-blood.

He had dropped that too characteristic patronymic, and had renamed himself, with a touch of mocking cynicism which only those who knew him understood, Wilder. What scholarship was possible for six- or seven-and-twenty was his. That he was more or less crazed with much learning and more drink was generally understood of him. Men of small originality and some memory said of Wilder that he could knock a slang song into Greek iambics in five minutes. His most fervent admirers were, perhaps, poor judges of Greek iambics. Fleet Street may at one time have been familiar with that kind of thing, but is not nowadays. But Wilder’s reputation soared on higher voices than those of the journalistic crowd, and he was, beyond dispute, a person of genius—one of those odd distorted bundles of broken nerve who help to establish the theory that fine thinking, a noble vocabulary, deep scholarship, and foolish living are neighbours and hard to separate.

With this very queer fish Paul had established a certain intimacy. The man, as a matter of course, was periodically hard up, and he had come to the stage when it was here five shillings and there half a crown as a charge for the charm of his society with the most casual of acquaintances. He made his breakfast on a salt-spoonful of cayenne and a glass of brandy, and he passed from intellectual godhood to a hiccuping imbecility in a breath. At from four to five in the afternoon he carried his lofty head and a prematurely pimpled countenance into some unwatched obscurity. He habitually emerged from this hiding-place within an hour of midnight, and thence his flight was an owl’s.

The social chill which surrounded Paul’s household had grown arctic, and Madge, Mrs. Hampton, and Phyllis had all been bundled away to Ostend, in a sunken identity. The house in which the cause of disturbance had so long been unreasonably happy was closed. The servants had been dismissed, and a commissionaire and his wife lived in the basement. Paul had taken lodgings at a Fleet Street hostelry, and thither in the dead of night came Wilder and other night-birds, to the much disturbance of the porter at the grille. It chanced one night that Wilder came with a declaration that he had found his soul’s salvation through beer. His stream of life should flow, so he declared, through Burton-on-Trent. He was done with noxious liquids, and proposed to bathe his spirit clear in the vats of Bass and Allsopp. Wilder was-not outside the sphere of reformation, and Guinness would share with the others the credit of his uprising. He drank a tankard or two of each and either as an evidence of good faith, and he left an hour after midnight, more sober than Paul had ever known him at such a time. He had talked a heap of brilliant sense and nonsense, and had borrowed two half crowns. Paul went to bed almost regretting the loss of even this mad companionship, and tossed, half-dozing, on a shifting sea of troubles. Suddenly, when he had lost all consciousness of time and place, there came a thundering summons at his door, and in answer to his startled call there came in a huge policeman in a greatcoat and a helmet, and behind him a quaking waiter with a candle in a glass funnel. The officer appealed to a piece of paper he carried in his hand.