Despair's Last Journey Part 2

'Ghosts? No. Death is death, and there's an end of it. Ah!' He stood suddenly arrested. 'Six hours' difference between here and England. That explains it. His last wish was towards me. He loved n.o.body as he loved me, I think. Well, I shall vex him no more. His tribulation is over.

'Why cant a wrong-doer have a h.e.l.l of his own, and be saved from singeing innocent people? The smoke of my torment ascendeth, and even George goes coughing at the smell of brimstone. George would be much more comfortable if I had been virtuous--Madge would have more to lend him.

'Now, if I had a bottle of whisky here, I'd put an end to this for an hour or two. But I haven't, and I must do something. I must drug this down. Bodily labour.' He laid his open palm on the knotted rind of the big tree against which he had leaned his back whilst he read the first phrases of the letter. 'You'll do as well as anything. It took many a score of years to bring you here, but now you must come down. You'll sleep in the gorge before I have done with you, old piny monster, three hundred feet below your roots.'

He walked to the tent, and returning jacketless, axe in hand, fell upon the tree with a measured frenzy. The sun was still high, and before he had been at work ten minutes the sweat poured from his brow like rain.

He paused to breathe, and to survey the gash he had made in the side of the tree. Compared with the girth of the forest giant, it looked the merest trifle, but he nodded gaspingly.

'You'll sleep in the gorge before I have done with you, you old goliath of your tribe. I shall have you down.'

He laboured with dogged fury. His hands blistered at the unaccustomed task. The helve of the axe was stained with blood, and clung to his grasp as if his palms were glued. His blows grew altogether ineffectual The axe fell sideways often, and at such times the blow jarred him to the spine. 'You will come down,' he said, 'if I die for it' He went back to the tent, and casting himself on the turf before it, laved his hands in the ice-cold mountain-stream. In half an hour he returned to his task, and worked at it until he could no longer lift a hand. Even then, as he walked brokenly away, he turned with an angry murmur:

'I'll have you down!'

He built his fire, and brewed and sipped his tea and munched his rations in great weariness that night, and it was earlier than usual when he rolled himself in his blanket and lay down. But though he ached with fatigue from neck to heel, there was no sleep for him. He seemed to hang suspended over a great lake of slumber, and to hold, in spite of his own will, to a bar which magnetized his burning palms. He had but to release the bar to fall deep into oblivion, but his grasp was fixed, and he had no power to loose it. So, after many hours of tumbling this way and that, he arose, and fed his fire with dry chips until it flamed; and then, in alternate gushes of light and darkness, he read his father's letter.

'Hendricks has just left me, and I succeeded in getting from him at the last a plain statement of his opinion. I may last a month longer, but he thinks it unlikely. I may go in a week. A chill, or a shock, or any little trifle may precipitate the change, and make an end at any moment.

I can write for a few minutes at a time, and I am trying for Paul's sake to say one or two things which will make my future task more likely of success....

'I was fifty when my father died. I had been bred in the strictest Calvinistic school; but my heart had revolted against the creed, and from the time when I was five-and-twenty my mind had rejected it with equal decision and disdain. I looked for no other faith or form of faith. At the centre of the negation in which I lived there was this one thought: There may, for anything I can tell, be a great First Cause. I cannot know. I can neither affirm nor deny, for the whole question is beyond my understanding. But this at least seems clear: If there be a G.o.d at all, He is far away. He is great beyond our dreaming--distant beyond our dreaming. If there be a scheme in the universe, there is at least no care for the atoms which compose it. G.o.d sits far withdrawn, beyond our prayers, beyond our tears and fears. This fretful insect of an hour, who cannot even measure the terms he uses, speaks of the Eternal, the Immutable, and strives by his prayers to change Its purposes. I am writing now by lamplight, and the agonies of the singed moths whose little bodies encrust my lamp-gla.s.s do not move me from my purpose. I realize their anguish at this moment with a deep pity, but I do not stay to save them. My heavier purpose will not wait for them.

Thus I dreamed it was, likening smallest things to the greatest, with G.o.d.

'At my father's death a change began to work in my opinions. I had convinced myself that this life was all that man enjoyed or suffered, but I began to be conscious that I was under tutelage. I began--at first faintly and with much doubting--to think that my father's spirit and my own were in communion. I knew that he had loved me fondly, and to me he had always seemed a pattern of what is admirable in man. Now he seemed greater, wiser, milder. I grew to believe that he had survived the grave, and that he had found permission to be my guide and guardian. The creed which slowly grew up in my mind and heart, and is now fixed there, was simply this: that as a great Emperor rules his many provinces, G.o.d rules the universe, employing many officers--intelligences of loftiest estate, then intelligences less lofty; less lofty still beneath these, and at the last the humbler servants, who are still as G.o.ds to us, but within our reach, and His messengers and agents. Then G.o.d seemed no longer utterly remote and impossible to belief, and I believed. And whether this be true or false, I know one thing: this faith has made me a better man than I should have been without it My beloved father, wise and kind, has seemed to lead me by the hand. I have not dared in the knowledge of his sleepless love to do many things to which I have been tempted. I have learned from him to know--if I know anything--that life from its lowest form is a striving upward through uncounted and innumerable grades, and that in each grade something is learned that fits us for the next, or something lost which has to be won back again after a great purgation of pain and repentance.

'It is three days since I began to write, and I am so weak that I can barely hold the pen. Send this to Paul. He has gone far wrong. He will come back again to the right. I have asked that I may guide him, and my prayer has been granted. From the hour at which I quit this flesh until he joins me my work is appointed me, and I shall not leave him. Goodbye, dear child. Be at peace, for all will yet be well.

'When Paul sees these last words of mine, he will know that I am with him.'

The letter ended there, and the reader's dazzled eyes looked into the darkness. One flickering flame hovered above the embers of the fire and seemed to leave them and return, to die and break to life again. At last it fluttered upward and was gone.

The runnel, like the greater stream below, had many voices. It chattered light-hearted trifles, lamented child-like griefs, and sobbed itself to sleep over and over and over. In the black canon the river bellowed its rage and triumph and despair. The shadows of the night were deep, and silence brooded within them, and the ears thrilled and tingled to the monitions of its voiceless sea.

'Father!' he whispered.

The night gave no response, but the answer sounded in the lonely man's heart:

'I am here.'

III

In the broad daylight it was not easy to believe that the experience of the night-time was more than an excitement of the nerves. The tide of habitual conviction set strongly against a superst.i.tious fancy. None the less the Solitary spent many hours in tender and remorseful musings over the lost father, and all day long he wondered at the voice which had seemed to answer him.

'It would be well for me, perhaps,' he said, when he had spent two-thirds of the day under the spell of these clear recollections--'it would be well for me, perhaps, if I could think it true.'

An inward voice said, as if with deliberate emphasis, 'It is true.'

The words did not seem to be his own, and the thought was not his own, and he was startled, almost wildly. But he had been much given to introspection. He was accustomed to the study of his own mind's working, and the inward voice impressed him less than if he had been a man of simpler intellect. The intelligence of man plays many curious tricks upon itself, and he was ready with explanations. He pored upon these, turned them over, criticised them, sat secure in them.

The inward voice said 'Paul,' and nothing more. No call had sounded on the waking ear, and yet an echo seemed to live in the air, as if a real voice had spoken. His heart thrilled and his breast ached with a great longing. He subdued himself, sitting with bowed head and closed eyes, his chin sunk upon his folded hands. There was a bitter pain in his throat.

'No,' he said half aloud, as if he had need to form his thoughts in words; 'it is all at an end, dear old dad It was well for you that you died with that good hope in your mind It shed a ray of peace on your heart in the last dark hour. It would be well for me if I could think that you were here.. I could stand the pain of it I could bear, I think, to turn my whole life's stream back upon itself if that would bring you peace. I could bear to repent if my repentance could avail But you are gone into the great dark. You will be sad no more and glad no more. I broke your heart, and you tried to patch it with that futile hope. And you were not the man to ask me to be a coward, and a liar to my own soul. I will keep what little rag of manliness I have.'

The inward voice seemed to say 'Wait.'

'It would be easy to go mad,' he said, rising wearily. '"They rest from their labours, and their works do follow them."'

He had wandered a mile or two from his tent, along the track, and now turned his footsteps home again. The afternoon light was mellowing. A great range of hills, with a line of cloud s.h.i.+ning across the breast of it like a baldric of silver, lifted parcel-coloured ma.s.ses of white and violet into a rolling billowy glory of cloud which half obscured and half relieved them. The sky above was of an infinite purity. He stood and looked, until his heart yearned.

The yearning spoke itself in words which had been familiar since childhood:

'"Oh that I had wings like a dove, for then would I fly away and be at rest!"'

'Old earth,' he said, 'why is it? You seem to long for me. You seem to stretch out hands to me, as if you would say, "Sleep here!" We belong to one another, I suppose. This flesh and bone, this breathing, thinking apparatus, grew out of the slime of you, old world, and will go back to your dust and flourish in gra.s.s and flower, and float in cloud and fall in rain. You have hidden in your green breast all the millions who have gone before me. Fecund mother! kind grave! And you, too, for all so green and kisty as you look, you are dying. Your life is longer than mine, but you are no Immortal. Your hills roll down to your valleys.

Every stream that tumbles from their heights wears away a little. The light snow and lighter air are heavy on those heights of steel, and will make them into dust at last. Your inward fires will cool, and the air that clothes you like a delicate robe will shrink and vanish, and leave you naked to the sun. I shall come to your bosom and be quiet, and you will find the bourne of death likewise, and we shall swing together round and round And the fires of the sun will cool, and you will go spinning in blackness, and split in silent explosions of cold in the blind dark. Dying heart, beating strong in full manhood! dying earth, smiling and yearning there with pity and rest in your bosom! we are but creatures of a day--my day the briefer. And that would matter little if I had been worthy of my day. But I have played the fool with life, and have earned my own contempt and creep into my hiding-place with shame.'

He strolled back to the tent, and whether he would have it or no, and whether he would believe it or no, the inward voice spoke now and then.

Twice in the wide daylight he stood still, and his hair crisped and his blood tingled. The voice was there, and yet he could not guess what it had to say to him. It was as though it spoke in a language to which he had no key.

As he sat musing his eye fell upon the axe, and he started up and seized it as if suddenly reminded of some forgotten urgent duty. He fell to work at the big tree again, and laboured doggedly till nightfall.

Inexperienced as he was, he brought observation and intelligence to the task, and knew already the kind of stroke which told most with the least expenditure of effort. When he could see no longer, he leaned gasping on the axe, and gave a grim nod of the head. 'I shall have you down.'

He was at it again next morning light and early. He toiled all day.

The great pine leaned somewhat over the cliff, and though the angle was slight, it told as the gash deepened, and when the sun dipped over the top of the western mountain the huge doomed thing gave its first groan and hung a little towards its grave. At this sign the tired worker fell to with a freshened vigour. He was still striking when the royal head bowed, and then swept downward with a rush. He sprang to one side just in time to avoid the backward kick and the enormous flying splinters.

Ten feet from its base and a hundred from its lowest branch the trunk caught the edge of the rock. The leverage and the weight of the fall snapped the two or three square feet of stanch fibre the axe had spared.

That last strong anchorage broke, and the tree flashed into the rapids.

The churning, shooting waters made a plaything of it.

The next day he fell into deep ennui, and to beguile himself he rummaged out of the canvas bag an old note-book and a pencil, and began a clumsy and uninstructed effort to sketch the scene before him. The effort proving quite abortive, he began to scrawl beneath it, 'Paul Armstrong.'

'Yours very truly, Paul Armstrong.' 'Disrespectfully yours, Paul Armstrong.' 'Sacred to the memory of Paul Armstrong, who died of boredom in the Rocky Mountains.' 'Paul Armstrong: the Autobiography of an a.s.s.'

He was in the very act of throwing the book away from him when he felt suddenly arrested. Why not 'Paul Armstrong: an Autobiography? It would fill the time. But the idea was no sooner formed than it began to pain.

What sort of a record would it have to be if it were honest? What a confession of folly, of failure!

But as he sat his thoughts shaped themselves--

Thus.

THE STORY OF PAUL ARMSTRONG'S LIFE AND OF DESPAIR'S LAST JOURNEY