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Paul's love for work had gone to sleep very soundly, but Darco's storming awoke it, and in a day or two the new remedy had got hold of him, and he came back to a moderately healthy state of mind.
That made him feel like a hound, for who had been so good to him as Darco? Who had taken him out of hunger and trouble but Darco? He recalled himself characterless, despairing; he contrasted his old lot with the present. The change was all of Darco's working, and he had grown to love the man, and the man on his side had given proofs enough of liking.
He was carrying away from Darco's service a far different kit to that he had brought into it. The three or four coarse homemade shirts, and the rough and scanty supply of underclothing, were exchanged for linen and silks and woollen stuffs of the finest.
The dove that cooed in his bosom was a live bird; but once under Darco's eyes, and it was a moulted rag a thing dead and despicable. He had to face Darco again, and he had little taste for the meeting. 'I haf found oudt vat you are coing to London for, said Darco. 'You are a tarn fool.
'Vod is the madder? Darco cried, rushing towards Paul, and leaning over him with instant solicitude. Darco's collaborateur was smitten with a sudden shame and repentance. 'A kind of spasm, he said breathlessly 'a pain just here. Darco helped him to his feet. 'You are too emotional, tear poy,'he said; 'you are too easily vorked upon.
But the comedy having been once rebegun on Darco's lines, was written to an accompaniment of fears and tremblings. It terrified the servants and the women-folk at large of every house the collaborateurs lodged in.
Paul paid the bill, slipped Darco's address into his waistcoat pocket, shook hands with him at the door, and walked away, unconscious, to his life's undoing. The voice of the river spoke from the great gorge in accents of exultation and despair, and the voice was a part of the primeval silence, as it had been from the moment when the Solitary had first listened to it.
Paul was too weak to wonder at anything, or he would have wondered at Darco's presence; but Nature was too wise to let him waste his forces on any such unprofitable exercise as thinking, and sent him to sleep again. When he awoke he was ravenously hungry, and in a day or two he began to abuse the nurse who tended him for stinting his victuals. But the nurse was a good-humoured old campaigner.
Paul took the proffered hand, and was nine-tenths inclined to beg himself back again into Darco's friendship; but he could not bring himself to speak, and in a second or two Darco was in the street, and the opportunity had gone.
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.
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