Despair's Last Journey

by David Christie Murray

‘He’ll finish learning his business there,’ said Armstrong. ‘In two or three years’ time he ought to be able to come back and take charge of the place. There’s the nucleus of a good trade here, if it had energy and knowledge brought to bear on it.’

There was an end of spoken opposition, and the fact that Paul was going to London was accepted. A month went by, and all arrangements were made. The Rev. Roderic Murchison had left Barfield, and had accepted a call from some congregation in the outskirts of the great city. He held a salaried post as well as Metropolitan secretary to his sect, and had become a person of importance. He was in association with a firm of printers who worked mainly for the big Nonconformist bodies, and an odour of sanctity was supposed, by the Armstrong household at least, to rest upon the labours upon which Paul was about to enter in their office. Paul had examples of the office craftsmanship set before him. Technically they were excellent, but their literary form was not of the highest order. He learned that a hundred and odd workmen were engaged, and he pictured them as a set of square-toes whose talk would be guarded and pious and narrow, for in his innocence he imagined the men who translated good books into type were necessarily good, and the men who translated into type the goody-goody were of that spiritual complexion.

Paul and his father travelled up to London together on a Thursday. They found lodgings in Charterhouse Square at the house of a sprightly black-eyed lady, whose husband, long deceased, had been a Nonconformist minister. She was very smiling and gracious, and Paul thought her a charming woman, but he got out of her good books very early, and never knew how for years after.

‘Oh yes, Mr. Armstrong,’ she said at the Sunday dinner, ‘anybody would know you were from the country.’

‘How?’ Paul asked.

‘By your hair,’ said the lady.

‘Oh, well,’ said Paul, ‘I must get it cut London fashion.’

Mrs. Bryne bit her lips and flashed a look at him. The boarders tittered, but Paul sat unconscious. He knew that ignorant people misplaced their aspirates at times, but Mrs. Bryne was a lady, and wore silk dresses on week-days.

But he had sown a seed of misliking, and it had opportunity to ripen. Armstrong the elder, with that wholesale want of worldly wisdom which distinguished him, had arranged that Paul should have a room in Mrs. Bryne’s house, with breakfast and supper on week-days and whole board on Sundays, on terms which fitted accurately with his earnings. He gave Paul a pound for pocket-money, and went away without a thought as to what the lad was to do for his daily dinner. This admirable business arrangement bore fruit, of course.

At eight o’clock on a February morning Paul presented himself at the office. The day was foggy and bitter. The street-lamps were alight, and all the shops yet open were dull yellow with gas-lamps in the fog. He had to ask his way several times, and only one passenger in four or five took any notice of him, but he reached his destination as some neighbouring church clock boomed the hour out of the nowhere of the upper air. He announced himself by name to a man in a glass-case at the head of the stairs. The man gave him a surly side-way nod, and Paul, not understanding, waited for something more.