In a month’s time from this Paul’s soul sat chuckling all day long. He lived with the quaintest set he had ever conceived, and there was no page of ‘Nickleby’ which was fuller of comedy than a day of his own life. He met Crummies, and actually heard him wonder how those things got into the papers. He met the Infant Phenomenon. With his own hands he had helped to adjust the immortal real pump and tubs. He was still in the days when there was a farce in an evening’s performance to play the people in, and a solid five-act melodrama for the public’s solid fare, and a farce to play the people out.

Darco travelled with his own company, majestically Astrachan-furred and splendid, but rarely clean-shaven. Nine days in ten an aggressive stubble on cheek and chin seemed to sprout from an inward sense of his own glorious import.

‘I am Cheorge Dargo,’ he said unfailingly to every provincial stage-manager he met ‘I nefer sbeaks to beobles twice.’

His brutalities of demeanour earned for him the noisy hatred of scores of people. His hidden benefactions bought for him the silent blessings of some suffering unit in every town. He bullied by instinct in public. He blessed the suffering by instinct in private. He was cursed by ninety-nine in the hundred, and the odd man adored him. Paul’s heart fastened to the uncouth man, and he did him burningly eager service.

Paul was in clover, and had sense enough to know it.

‘I regognise the zymptoms,’ said Darco, when they had been on tour a week. ‘I am not going to haf my insbirations in the tay-dime any longer. All my crate iteas will gome to me now for some dime in the night. You haf got to be near me, young Armstrong. You must sday vith me in the zame lotchings.’

This meant that Darco paid his whole expenses, and that his salary came to him each week intact. He began to save money and to develop at the same time an inexpensive dandyism. He took to brown velveteen and to patent leather boots. He bought a secondhand watch at a pawnbroker’s, but disdained a chain. His father had inspired him with a horror of jewellery; for once, when he had spent the savings of a month upon a cheap scarf-pin, the elder Armstrong had wrathfully asked him what he meant by sticking that brass-headed nail in his chest, and had thrown the gewgaw into the fire. But the watch for the first week or two was a token of established manhood, and it was consulted a full hundred times a day, and was corrected by every public clock he passed.

His occupation was no sinecure, for Darco was running half-a-dozen companies, and kept up a fire of correspondence with each. He had dramas on the anvil, too, and dictated by the hour every day. Often he woke Paul in the dead of night, and routed him out of bed, and gave him notes of some prodigious idea which had just occurred to him.

Darco had an unfailing formula with his landladies: ‘Prek-fasd for three, lunge for three, tinner for three; petrooms and zidding-room for two,’ He worked for three and ate for two.

‘I am in many respegs,’ he told Paul, ‘a most remarkaple man. I am a boet, and a creat boet; but I haf no lankwage. My Vrench is Cherman, and my Cherman is Vrench, ant my Enklish is Alsatian. My normal demperadure is fever heat. I am a toctor; I am a zoldier. I haf peen a creat agdor in garagder bards—Alsatian garagder bards—in Vrance and in Chermany. I can write a blay, ant I can stage id, ant I can baint the scenery for id. I am Cheorge Dargo, ant vere I haf not been it is nod vorth vile to co; and vot I do not know apout a theatre it is not vorth vile to learn. Sdob vith me, and I will deach you your business.’

The company played a week within five miles of Castle Barfield, and Paul snatched an hour for home. There the brown velveteen and the patent leathers and the watch made a great impression, and the eight sovereigns Paul was able to jingle in his pockets and display to wondering eyes.

‘There’s danger in the life, lad,’ said Armstrong wistfully. ‘I know it, for I saw a heap of it in my youth. Keep a clean heart, Paul. High thinking goes with chaste and sober living. There’s nothing blurs faith like our own misdeeds.’

Paul was thankful for the dusk which hid his flaming cheeks at this moment. His mother had taken away the candle, and the old man had chosen the instant’s solitude for this one serious word.

‘I’m not denying,’ said Armstrong, ‘that it is a good worldly position for a lad of your years, but what’s it going to lead to, Paul, lad? What’s the direction, I’m asking?

‘I’m going to be a dramatist,’ said Paul.

‘A play-actor!’ cried the mother, who was back again.

‘A play-writer,’ Paul corrected. ‘I’ve got the best tutor in the world.’

‘Do you mean to tell me,’ his mother asked, ‘that you think o’ making that a trade for a lifetime?’

‘Why not? asked Pau.

‘Why not, indeed!’ she cried, with an angry click of her knitting-needle. ‘Writing a parcel o’ rubbidge for fools to speak, and other fools to laugh at.’

‘It was Shakespeare’s trade, Mary,’ said Armstrong.

‘It’s a pretty far cry from our Paul to Shakespeare, I reckon,’ said the mother with sudden dryness.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Paul, laughing; ‘but there are degrees in every calling. Wait a bit I don’t mean that you shall be ashamed of me.’

Paul had been away from home for half a year, and absence had altered many things. The High Street of the town had grown mean and sordid to the eye. Shops which had once been palatial had lost all the glamour which childhood had given them and custom had preserved. The dusty, untidy shop at home had shrunk to less than half its original dimensions. Armstrong seemed changed more than anything or anybody else. He looked suddenly small and old and gray. He was not much over five-and-sixty, but he had always seemed old to Paul, even from the earliest recollections of infancy. But his age had been the age of dignity and authority, and now it was age without disguise, white-haired and withered, and bowed in uncomplaining patience.

But Paul felt that there was no such change anywhere as in himself. A certain complacency had stolen across the horror which had shaken him at the first contemplation of his own fall. He had made a step towards manhood; he heard the talk of men—not the best, not the wisest, yet neither the worst nor the most stupid—and he knew now how lightly they valued that which he had once esteemed priceless. He had written in his note-book:

‘To forgive is godlike. Be as God unto thyself.’

He had made a step towards manhood. He had thought it a hideous, irremediable plunge to ruin, and yet somehow he seemed to stand the higher for it. The episode was to be hateful for ever in memory. But it was to cloud life no longer—only to stand as a sign of warning, a danger-signal. Surely the net is spread in vain in the sight of any bird. The burned child dreads the fire. He did not as yet reckon that man is a moral Salamander, and accommodates himself to all temperatures of heat and asceticism. How should a raw lad of less than nineteen think in such a fashion? But he knew what he had not known; he had passed through the fire, and the smell of burning had left his raiment.

The Midland mother gave him a cold cheek to kiss when he went away, but the Scottish father embraced him with a trembling arm.

‘Ye’ll be remembering Sir Walter’s last words to Lockhart,’ he said. ‘Be a good man, my dear.’

Paul pressed his smooth cheek against the soft white whiskers of his father’s face, and held his right hand hard. There was a lump in his throat, and his good-bye had a husk in it. He went back to the society of men who had never thought manly chastity a virtue or the unchastity of men a crime. He went back armed in steel, and the armour lasted a full fortnight in its perfection. Then here and there a rivet came out, and by-and-by the whole suit fell to pieces.

‘Id is gurious,’ said Darco, ‘that all the vunniest sdories in the vorlt should be vhat they gall imbrober. Look at Arisdophanes; look at Jaucer; look at the “Gontes Troladigues”; look at the “Tegameron.”’

‘Look at Pickwick,’ said Paul.

‘Vell!’ cried Darco, ‘look at Bigvig. Bigvig woult haf peen a creat teal vunnier if Tickens had lived at the dime of Zmollet.’

‘I don’t mind drinking out of a jug,’ said Paul, ‘but I like a clean jug. I’ve read Aristophanes—in translation. It’s like drinking wine out of a gold cup that has been washed in a sewer.’

‘Who says that?’ asked Darco.

‘I do,’ said Paul.

‘It is a ferry coot ebicram,’ said Darco. ‘I vill rememper id. But, mindt you, to be squeamish is not to be glean-minded.

If a sdory is vunny, I laugh. Vy not? If a man tells me a sdory that is only dirdy, I co someveres else. I am a goot man. For dwendy-three hours and fifty-eight minutes in a tay I am as bure-minded as a child; then, in the ott dwo minutes somepoty tells me a dirdy sdory. I laugh, and I go avay, and I think of my blays and my boedry and my pusiness. It is water on a duck’s pack.’

‘Dirty water,’ said Paul.

‘There is enough glean water in the tay’s rainfall to wash it off,’ Darco answered. ‘Did you efer read “The Orichinal”?

‘No,’ said Paul.

‘The man who wrote it vos so healthy that he nefer hat need to wash himself. His skin was too bure to hold dirt.’

‘Filthy beggar!’ said Paul.

‘I make it a baraple,’ Darco declared. ‘Id is true of the immordal soul. I am as bure-minded as a child, and I haf heardt den thousand fillainous sdories. Vot does it madder?’

The rivets of Paul’s armour rotted, as the rivets of most men’s armour rot, and he grew to tolerate what had been abominable. And that is the way of life, which is a series of declensions from high ideals, and is meant to be so because things must be lost before their worth can be known. The society in which he lived and moved was as rich as any in the world in the kind of narrative he had discussed with Darco. Little by little he got to take Darco’s view. It is the view of ninety per cent, of men of the world. A naturally pure mind never learns to love nastiness, but it learns to tolerate it, for the sake of the wit which sometimes lives with it.

Darco was a man whom nobody ever saw for an instant under the influence of liquor, but then it was impossible to make him drunk. It seemed to Paul as if it were just as unlikely for him to become intoxicated by drinking as for a decanter to grow tipsy by having liquor poured into it. If he ate—as he did—twice as much as the average keen-set sportsman, he drank as much as the average hopeless drunkard, and no man could have guessed from his speech, or acts, or aspect that he was not a total abstainer. Paul, too, began to discover that he had a cast-iron pot of a head, and took an infantile pride in the fact; but this kind of vanity was not often indulged in, and he had no physical predisposition to it.

Darco made money by the handful, and spent it with a lavish ostentation. Paul continued his habit of riding about in cabs and dining in hotels. It was a bad commercial training, but he was not at the time of life to think of that. The days and nights were full. There were both labour and enjoyment in them. Every week showed him a new town or city: classic Edinburgh, dirty Glasgow—cleaner nowadays—roaring Liverpool, rainy Manchester, smoke-clouded Birmingham and Sheffield, granite-built Aberdeen, jolly Dublin, with an unaccustomed twang in the whisky, after the Scottish progress; Belfast, Cork, Waterford. Everywhere character studies in shoals; dialect studies every day and all day long. Paul could train his tongue, before the twelve months’ tour was over, to the speech of Exeter, or Norwich, or Brighton, or Newcastle, or Berwick, or Aberdeen, or Cork, or the black North. He set himself to the task conscientiously, and with a rich enjoyment. What a Gargantuan table was the world!

How lovable, laughable, hateful were the men who sat at it! What a feast of feeling was spread daily!

The tour came near to its end, and Darco was arranging a new series for half a dozen companies, so that work grew furious. A man might have commanded an army or ruled a great department of State with less expenditure of energy. There was no advertising or consulting of agencies, but everything was done by personal letter. There were reams and reams of letters; there were scores and scores of contracts with managers, and actors, and actresses, and upholsterers, and scene-painters, and printers, and bill-posters, and Darco one organized mass of effort at the centre of all the business hurly-burly, doing three men’s work, and tearing into fibre the nerves of all men who came near him. He could be princely with it all in his own way.

‘You haf learned your pusiness, young Armstrong,’ he said to Paul when the rush was over. ‘I gan deach anypoty his pusiness if he is not a vool. I am Cheorge Dargo. You haf done your work gabidally, and you are vorth fife dimes vot I am baying you. But I alvays like the shady site of a pargain, and I shall only gif you four dimes.’

So at four times the original sum Paul’s salary was fixed, and he began to feel himself a man of consequence.

‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ he was told to say to people with whom he was empowered to deal. ‘I am entirely in Mr. Darco’s confidence, and you may deal with me exactly as if Mr. Darco were here.’

At the beginning of the second year the great provincial cities had begun to take advantage of the Public Libraries Act, and here was a new joy for Paul. The Free Library was the first place he asked for in any big town, and at every spare hour he stuck his nose into a book, and kept it there until duty called him away again. Something in ‘Gil Bias’ about poverty in observation struck his fancy, and he cast about in his own mind asking where he could observe, not knowing yet that he was observing all things. He hit upon the landlady. A man who has fifty-two landladies in a year has surely a fertile field. He sorted and classified in the light of experience: the honeyed, the acidulated, and bibulous-godly (mostly Scottish), the bibulous-ungodly (mostly English), the slut with a clean outside to things, the painstaking sloven, the peculative (here one majestic sample), the reduced in circumstances, the confidential, the reserved, the frisky, the motherly, the step-motherly—a most excellent assembly for mirth and pity.

Mrs. Brace came back again. How many years was it since the memory of Mrs. Brace had touched the Exile’s mind?

Darco did, in the main, his own marketing. He had sent home sausages for breakfast, seven in number. Six came to table.

‘Vere is my other zausage,’ cries Darco. ‘There vere zeven. Now there are six. Vere is my other zausage?’

‘Really you know, sir,’ says Mrs. Brace. ‘Sausages do shrink so in the cooking.’

Paul was under the table with a helpless yelp of pleasure, and Darco stormed like a beaten gong.

Come back again, in the brown sultry air, and the solitude, over that bridge of years departed, Mrs. Fuller. It was Mrs. Fuller’s plan to convey a portion of the guests’ clean linen from the chest of drawers into the hall, and to lay it on the table there pinned up in a neat newspaper parcel, and to say, ‘If you please, gentlemen, the rest of your linning have come home, and, if you please, it’s two and elevenpence halfpenny.’ Oh, the days—the days when a jest like this could shake the ribs with mirth!

And Mistress MacAlister, painfully intoxicated at the dinner hour of 2 p.m., and the uncooked leg of young pork in the larder.

‘D’ye thenk ah’m goin’ to cuik till ye on the Sabba’ Day? Ye’ll no be findin’ th’ irreligious sort o’ betches that’ll do that for ye in Dundee, ah’m thenkin’.’

And the little soft-spoken lady from New Orleans, whose husband had been a General—in Del Oro—and an old friend of Darco’s in his campaigning days. And the execution in the house. And Darco signing a cheque for twice the amount claimed, and blubbering like a great fat baby, and swearing to burn the cheque if she thanked him by another word. Old Darco, the nerve-tearer, the inordinate pyramid of vanity, the tender, the generous, the loyal. Sweetest fruit in sourest rind! Sleep on, old Darco. God makes none gentler in heart, though He makes many more beloved.

And how men do, on all hands, unconsciously lay themselves out to delight the budding genial satirist! Here is Darco, wealthy and prosperous as he has never been before, launching out fearlessly, and bearing with him the splendour of the stage—the great Montgomery Bassett. Darco, in consultation with the glorious creature, the question being in which of his unrivalled and majestic assumptions he shall first appear:

‘It doesn’t matter, dear boy,’ says Mr. Montgomery Bassett, in that noble voice, a voice rich as the king of all the wines of Burgundy—‘it doesn’t matter the toss up of a blind beggar’s farthing. The people don’t come to see the play, my boy; they come to see me. They’d come to see me if I played in Punch and Judy.’

And the late leading man, now dethroned, and put to second business:

‘Bassett! Montgomery Bassett! I could act his head off, dear boy. He is the rottenest stick that ever stalked upon a stage. He can’t get in front of that infernal Roman nose, sir. “Now,” says Bassett, “I’m going to be pathetic;” and the Roman nose says, “I’ll see you damned first.” “And now,” says Bassett, “we’ll have a bit of comedy.” “Oh no, you won’t,” says the nose. You might as well try to act behind a barn-door as to act behind that nose. Just fill me out a little tot of Scotch, darling laddie. I want to lose the taste of Bassett.’

And the leading lady and the ingÉnue who hung together like twin cherries on one stalk, bathed in soft dews of tenderness, until Bassett praised the one and not the other, and the leading lady called the ingÉnue ‘Chit’ and the ingÉnue retorted ‘Wrinkles!’ And the reconciliation at the champagne supper which Darco gave when Bassett went away, when the tears they shed must have tasted of the wine.

Oh, the days—the days, long years before he set out on his Journey of Despair, when mirth had no malice, and tears were tributaries to pity!

‘I have vound oudt,’ said Darco, one day, ‘that our paggage man is a pantit He is ropping eferypoty, and I have kiven him a fortnight’s vages, and the bag to carry. That is my liddle chockular vay to say he has got the zack. I haf dele-graphed for a new man, and he will come from Lonton by the seven-thirty train. His name is Warr, and you will know him by his nose, which is pigger than your fist, and as hot to look at as the powels of the Phalarian Pull. It ought to be an acony to garry it, but he laughs pehint it in the distance. But I nodice it always zeems to make his eyes vater.’

Paul went to meet this phenomenon, and from the train Mr. Warr of the Nonconformist printing-office stepped out, carrying the work of art before him like an oriflamme.

‘Mr. Warr, I believe?’ said Paul.

‘The same, sir,’ said Mr. Warr, with a spinal inclination.

Paul’s face was framed in a virginal fringe of brown beard, and he was dressed by a London theatrical tailor. Mr. Wan-had no memory of him.

‘I am Mr. Darco’s private secretary,’ said Paul. ‘That is the address of your lodgings, and when you have taken your traps there Mr. Darco will meet you at the theatre.’

‘I am at your disposal, sir,’ said Mr. Warr.

He gathered up two newspaper parcels, each of which leaked ragged hosiery and soiled linen at either end, and pottered along the platform at Paul’s side, subservient and timid. Paul spurted laughter and affected a cough to hide it.

‘Here is the refreshment-room, Mr. Warr,’ he said. ‘May I ask if you care at this moment to administer a coating of varnish to the work of art?’

‘Have I had the pleasure to encounter you before, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr, peering at him sideways across that astonishing nose, with a brown eye bright with moisture. It was like an old cat looking out from the side of a fireplace.

‘Come in and see,’ said Paul.

Mr. Warr went in, and being offered a choice in varnishes, selected cold gin.

‘My highly superior respects, sir. You either know me, or my fame has reached you.’ He smiled a propitiatory smile. ‘I do not recall you, sir.’

‘I have varnished the work of art before to-day,’ said Paul. ‘Do you remember Bucklersbury?’

‘I should do so,’ Mr. Warr returned. ‘I drudged there for eight long years, and had it not been for Mr. Darco’s kindly memories of an old associate, I might have drudged there still. But two and fifty shillings per week, sir, with freedom and travel thrown in, are highly superior to thirty-six, with slavery superadded. But I do not recall your face and figure, sir.’

‘My name is Armstrong,’ said Paul. ‘I worked beside you for a week or two.’

‘The friend of my youth,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘Permit me to shake hands. Rely upon me, Mr. Armstrong, not to be presumptuous. Rely upon me, sir. I shall respect bygones. Mr. Darco will tell you who I was and what I was when he first knew me. I was first low com., sir, at the Vic, upon my soul and honour, Mr. Armstrong. But the work of art, sir, so grew and prospered that at last the very gallery guyed me. I went for the varnish, Mr. Armstrong, in sheer despair. As God is my highly superior judge, sir, I never drank until I had a drunkard’s nose. Then I made a jest of a deformity, and the joke carried me too far. This infernal feature is an unnatural legacy. It is from my maternal grandfather, who once owned the town of Guildford. I have heard my mother say that his cellars covered a quarter of an acre, and held nothing but port and brandy—packed, sir, seven feet deep. To-morrow, in Mr. Darco’s presence, I sign the pledge till the end of the tour, as per our highly superior arrangement. I do not know, sir, whether behind that aspect of prosperity there lurks the probability of another fourpennyworth.’

‘You mustn’t get tipsy to meet Mr. Darco,’ said Paul.

‘There is no fear of that, sir,’ Mr. Warr answered. ‘That,’ pointing to the empty glass, ‘is my first to-day, and I as thirsty as I am hungry.’

‘Eat, man, eat,’ said Paul.

‘May I, sir?’ asked Mr. Warr.

‘Your fill,’ said Paul.

There were hard-boiled eggs and cold sausages on the marble-topped counter, and Mr. Warr fell to work among them, and mumbled gratitude with his mouth full. When he had half cleared the counter, Paul paid for the depredations, and Mr. Warr, who knew the town of old, picked up his leaking parcels and made off for the address given him.

‘Veil,’ said Darco when Paul got back to him, ‘you haf seen him? Had he any package and luckage?’ Paul described Mr. Warr’s kit. ‘You must puy for him a jeap, useful bordmandeau, and jarge id to me. I shall sdop it out of his wages,’ which of course he never did.

Mr. Warr presented himself at Darco’s lodging next morning wrapped in a perfume of gin and cloves. He laid upon the table a wordy document in foolscap with a receipt stamp in one corner, and read it aloud in his own breathless chuckle. It set forth that whereas he, the undersigned William Treherne Macfarvel Warr, of the one part, late of, et cetera, had entered into an engagement with George Darco, Esq., et cetera, et cetera, of the other part, to such and such an effect of polysyllabic rigmarole, he, the aforesaid and undersigned, did seriously and truly covenant with the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of et cetera, et cetera, all over again, not to drink or imbibe or partake of any form of alcoholic liquor, whether distilled or fermented, until such time as the agreement or engagement between the aforesaid and undersigned on the one part, and the aforesaid George Darco, Esq., of the other part, should end, cease, and determine. He signed this document with a great sprawling flourish, and Darco and Paul having appended their names to it also, Mr. Warr wrote the date of the transaction across the receipt stamp, and handed the paper to his employer with a solemn bow.

‘You haf peen zaying goot-bye to the dear greature,’ said Darco; ‘I can see that.’

‘In the words of Othello, sir,’ said Mr. Warr: ‘“I kissed her ere I killed her.”’ He smiled self-consciously, but instantly grew grave again. ‘You know me, Mr. Darco. You have my highly superior word. I never go back on it, sir.’

Mr. Warr kept his word, but he grew insufferably self-righteous, and preached total abstinence to everybody, from Darco to the call-boy. He atoned for this unconsciously by the longing calculations he made.

‘I have consulted the almanac,’ he confided to Paul; ‘it is two hundred and seventy-one days to my next drink.’

After this he offered a figure almost daily: ‘Two seventy. A dry journey, Mr. Armstrong.‘’Two fifty, sir, two fifty. The longest lane must turn, sir.’ Then, after a long spell of yearning: ‘Only two hundred now, sir. I should like to obliterate two hundred. But a Warr’s word is sacred.’

‘Now,’ said Paul one day, ‘why don’t you take advantage of this sober spell to cure yourself of the craving, in place of looking forward to the next outburst and counting the days between? Why don’t you make up your mind to have done with it altogether?

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Warr with intense solemnity, ‘if I thought I had tasted my last liquor, I’d cut my throat.’

‘If ever I find myself disposed to feel like that,’ Paul answered, ‘I will cut my own.’

‘Oh dear no, you won’t, sir,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘If ever you go that way at all, you’ll slide into it. You will always believe that you could drop it at any moment until you find you can’t. Then you’ll be reconciled, like the rest of us.’

Paul had little fear. His temptation, he told himself, did not lie in that direction.