‘You have been very kind, sir,’ said Paul when at last the dreaded bell rang and the distant engine screamed.
‘Have I?’ asked Ralston. ‘Remember it as a debt you’ll owe to some aspiring youngster thirty years hence.’
The train came up before anything further was said. They shook hands and parted.
Then for days and weeks Paul waited for a letter, waylaying the postman every morning at the door. The letter came at last, brief and to the point:
‘Have read your poem. A bright promise—not yet an achievement. Command of language more evident than individual thought. Be more yourself, but go on in hope. Let nothing discourage. Remember that personal character reveals itself in art Lofty conduct breeds the lofty ideal.’
The last phrase hit Paul hard. He was in search of the lofty ideal, and if lofty conduct would bring it, he meant to have it.
He was strolling on the next Saturday afternoon, with Ralston’s letter in his pocket Saturday was a half-holiday, and he was free to do with it what he pleased. His feet took him by an unfrequented way, and in the course of an hour’s devious ramble he found himself on the canal spoil-bank. The cutting was perhaps a hundred feet deep, and the artificial mounds were old enough to be covered by turf and gorse. They bore here and there a tree, and in any hollow of the hills, where the chimneys and furnace-fires were hidden, it needed no special gift of the imagination to make a rolling prairie of the scene, or at least a grouse-peopled moor.
Paul sat down in such a hollow and read Ralston’s letter for the thousandth time, and resolved anew on lofty conduct Suddenly he was aware of an approaching noise of voices, and in a little while a rabble of some twenty men and youths came charging down the slope to where he lounged in communion with his own fancies. The small crowd was noisy and excited, and Paul noticed some pallid, staring faces as it hurried by. The whole contingent, wrangling and cursing unintelligibly, came to a sudden halt in the bend of the hollow. Here a man in corduroys and a rabbit-skin waistcoat called in a stentorian voice for order, and the babel gradually died down.
‘These are the draws,’ said the man in the rabbit-skin waistcoat, waving a dirty scrap of paper in a dirtier hand—‘these are the draws for the first encounter.’
He began to read a list of names. The first was answered in a tone of bullying jocundity. The second and the third name each elicited a growl At the call of the fourth name there was no response.