Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

The manager who was under contract with him to produce the comedy the first manuscript of which he had placed in Ralston’s hands, called to see him, and advised strongly against production—at all events, for the present The suffering fool was furious, and would listen to no reason.

‘I put three thousand pounds behind it,’ he cried. ‘I give you that as a guarantee. The play is a good play, and the public will listen to it, slander or no slander.’

Playgoers remember the first nightof ‘Myra’—the yells, howls, whistles, cat-calls which made the whole three acts a pantomime in dumb show. The moral tiger was awake.

The play ran in spite of all and everything, and ran at the author’s cost It came to a sudden end in the middle of a week, when the author’s last cheque was returned with an official ‘N. S.’ marked upon it The lately prosperous dramatist was ruined.

Thus the man and his memories are growing nearer and nearer to each other, and very soon they must meet. There is yet but a year to traverse before the Dreamer and the Dream stand face to lace with actual Fact and Time. It is a year of frustrated hope and barren effort, of surrenders and shames. It is a year of anonymity for one thing, for his name is worse than worthless to him, and he hides it. There is a book yet extant, written in a black gall which is made fluent to the pen by a distillation of wormwood, and this is Paul Armstrong’s latest expression of his views of the world, which, if the book were true, one would take as a vast and daily injustice, in which there is no saving grace of any sort whatever. Ralston alone knew in what fiery haste this bitter volume was gathered out of the desert of the writer’s soul. It served one purpose, since it provided Madge with at least a staff of silver with which to beat the wolf from the door. The wild beast bayed and threatened, but it never actually crossed the threshold. The discredited man kept himself alive by scraps of anonymous journalism, until a half-chance suggestion of fortune bore him away to the United States as a member of a theatrical company of no great merit, which clung together through desperately failing fortunes for a month or two, and then, dissolving, left him stranded.

He floated, a pseudonymous unit, acting, writing, lecturing. Somehow or other the weekly two or three pounds reached Madge, and the wolf still howled outside her door and found no entrance.

When the spiritual anatomy of a man is displaced and the gall-bladder takes on the function of the heart, it is far from being well with him at the moment, and in these days it was very far from being well with Paul Armstrong. Yet the jaundiced fit served its turn, and even whilst its anguish burned and nauseated, he began to ask one wholesome question: ‘For whose shortcoming, for whose wrong-doing, for whose virtues turned vicious, and whose vices tuned to airs of virtue, do I thus suffer?’ The answer was at first confused and loud. Annette’s name was noisy in it Claudia’s sounded there. So did Gertrude’s. And of course the poor writhing worm must needs arraign Fate, Destiny, the Maker of the Earth, whatever It or He might be. But these voices stilled, because, when all was said and done, the man was not wholly a fool, and out of his heart came the wounding answer to his question: ‘You, Paul Armstrong—you and none other! Neither this false friend, nor that fraudulent lover, nor any Destiny whatsoever, but just Paul Armstrong, to whom this bundle of sensibilities was entrusted for safe-carriage, and who in bearing his parcel here and there has spilled its contents with great recklessness, and with devilish consequence to himself.’ And this voice grew into the tolling of a great Despair, for there was nothing to be done with this Paul Armstrong in the way of reparation or amendment, and there was no way of being rid of him save by suicide, and a doubt of the efficacy of that cure was heavy on him. To endure the unendurable, this was his burthen; to be yoked through time with this dolt and fool. Wretchedest of miserable fates, to loathe one’s own soul, to find the most despicable of creatures enclosed within one’s own skin. To play Siamese twin to a pustulous convict were a trifle beside this. To be your own black beast; to loathe your own soul; with a full heart to despise your own understanding—this is to start upon Despair’s Last Journey in one sense or another, to find either the gulf or the gates of hope. For the alternative is eternal, and it will yet be known to all men—if not here, then elsewhere—that the way to the heights of spiritual wealth lies through the valley of spiritual bankruptcy, and that a man’s follies are as contributory to his soul’s salvation as his loftiest aspirations and his most ardent struggles. Ralston spoke wisely when he said, ‘We lose to learn value.’ We shall carry our cargo more carefully next time for having once shipwrecked it. The gates of hope are a better goal to aim for than the gulf, because the mariner saves time and suffering by passing through them, but the lesson is that no shipwreck is final.

Was it, in truth, the father’s voice, the authentic voice of William Armstrong, Paul’s physical begetter, which preached this gospel through the lonely days and waking nights? The Exile could not tell, yet he believed, and the faith grew within him, that God’s inexorable justice and infinite mercy are one and the same, that the human spirit which has not sinned knows no virtue, that the flower of the soul’s hope strikes its root in the soil of the soul’s despair.

This learned, all is learned. The great trust and the great distrust alike are mastered. Courage and Humbleness have kissed each other, and the man steers between, safe in their companionship whatever seas may roar.

The faith grew, but it was not clear, nor destined to be clear, until the divine hour of its true dawning was appointed, and that hour was not long delayed.