Read Online The Romantic Adventures of Mr. Darby and of Sarah His Wife by Martin Armstrong - Free Book Online

any of the other wonders of the world, for that matter. There was Vesuvius, for instance, probably belching out clouds of smoke at this very moment, and he not there to see it. The thought was intolerable. When he was younger he had always taken it for granted that some day he would see everything, experience every adventure that life can offer, and tacitly, almost unconsciously, without making the smallest effort to bring it about, he had gone on believing it. It was this, really, which had kept him going: all his hopes,all his energies, had been blindly directed by this faith. It was only quite recently that he had begun sometimes to suspect that his faith was built upon sand, and it was only to-day, only now, that he had definitely faced the fact that the world, the real world, was beyond his reach, that he was middleaged and tied by the leg to Sarah and the office. It was all very well to think of taking the plunge, as he had done while standing yesterday evening in the doorway of Thirty Seven Ranger Street and surveying the world, but actually it would be impossible to do so. For if he did so his salary would stop: there would be nothing except Uncle Tom Darby’s hundred pounds which might cease at any time, for he must be a great age now; and he couldn’t clear out and leave Sarah penniless or almost penniless. Nor—he might as well admit it—could he himself get on without money. It was all very well to dream about signing-on or going as a stowaway. …
    The thought of ships recalled him to his surroundings. A ship, another cargo-boat, towered above the quay a few yards from him. His eye travelled up and down the masts, among the rigging, along the encumbered deck. Now honestly, could he see himself swarming up those masts, clinging like a spider among that tangle of rigging, running along those slippery decks? Or—he approached the ship more closely and gazed into an open hatch—or (even supposing he could get on board unnoticed, and drop himself neatly, as he had seen the crane drop that cargo just now down that dark hatchway) could he really face the stowaway method of travel? No. Mr. Darby, standing on the Quayside, solemnly assured himself of all these things, and his mind, the reasoning part of him, accepted them, admitted their truth. And yet—strange, inexplicable fact—these melancholy convictions made no difference whatever to his feelings. The depression, the despair that they ought to have produced, did not supervene. Mr. Darby still felt, as he had felt on leaving The Schooner, remarkably jolly. Was it that the heart cannot in a moment shake off a habit of forty years or so? Or was it simply that the Bass,—or, to be accurate, the Basses—and those excellent sandwiches had fortified Mr.Darby against the assaults of cold logic? It is probably truer, as it is certainly more in keeping with his character, to assume that it was a childlike faith—that purest form of faith which burns the more brightly when assailed by irrefutable logic—that kept Mr. Darby’s spirits up in this remarkable fashion. And, after all, if faith can move mountains, it might very well be that if Mr. Darby never got to Vesuvius, Vesuvius would come to him.
    Whatever the reason, Mr. Darby preserved his old enthusiasms. He gave a last look to the shipping, to the troubled steel-bright water seen between the hulls, to the white gulls wheeling stormily in the narrow trough of the valley between water and clouds; he took a long breath of sharp, watery, tarry, smoky air, and then turned inland, for it was half past one. Correct, bland, with features alert yet composed, he climbed the precipitous slope of Cliff Street, and no one could have suspected that the inner Mr. Darby was trolling with head thrown back and a fine, operatic abandon, a song that had been familiar in his youth:
    For I’m going far away
At the breaking of the day.
    The statement was obviously untrue, but the inner