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Dayspassed ere Jimmy Dodson returned again to the little room. They were fraught with dire anxiety for the blind poet and the aged man, his father. In his heart the old man was filled with despair, and he knew not how to obtain the strength wholly to conceal his fears. What if he to whom they had entrusted their priceless treasure should never return to them again! He had neither the devotion nor the blind faith of the dying man.
“They are printing it, they are printing it!” the poet would exclaim many times in the day as he kept the chair beside the hearth.
“What if that strange street-person were never to return to us?” the old man was moved to ask in his despair on the evening of the sixth day.
“Ah, thou dost not know that brave and faithful one, my father,” said the dying poet. “He will overcome fire and the sword rather than his ministry should fail in these last hours of our necessity.”
And on the evening of the seventh day there came a gentle tapping upon the shutters of the shop. With a cry of eagerness the old man opened the door in response, and the forlorn figure of Dodson was seen upon the threshold, his face all drawn with suffering.
“Welcome, welcome,” cried the old man in tones that were thin and overwrought. “Have you brought back the printed book?”
Dodson recoiled from the old man in a kind of harsh rage. He laid one hand upon his coat, and said in a morose whisper, “You will have to know the truth!”
“The truth,” said the old man, with an unsuspectingness which seemed to exasperate the man from the street. “The truth! Why fear to tell it?”
“The truth is this,” said Dodson. “There is not a publisher in London who would print poor Luney’s poem.”
The old man fell back against the door of the shop with a little cry.
“But—but the first mind of the age lies at the point of dissolution!” he exclaimed. “They owe it to themselves that they cherish its fruits. Do they not know that death itself respects his labours, and awaits some token of homage from those for whom he wrought?”
“Yes, yes,” said Jimmy Dodson mournfully. “I know all that, my good old man; I have heard it all before; but you and I must not be high-flown. We must look the facts in the face. We must deal with things as they are. A week ago I carried it to Octavius—Octavius, you know, is the head of our firm, which is the chief, in fact theonlypublishing house in London, and therefore, you know, in the world. Well, as soon as Octavius saw the first page he said, ‘I am afraid, Mr. Dodson, this will never do,’ I am giving you the precise words he used; it is no use for you and me to deceive ourselves, is it?”
“Oh, oh,” said the old man incredulously. “But that is the verdict of only one man, a single street-person, an ignorant man who is neither gentle nor simple.”
“You may be right,” said Dodson, “and yet again you may be wrong. But I must tell you, old man, that the house of Crumpett and Hawker has nothing to learn. What they think to-day, the trade thinks to-morrow. What they don’t know isnot business. And you must understand that I did not rest content with the opinion of Octavius. I took it down-stairs and showed it to W. P. Walkinshaw, a highly cultivated man. And although he does sit down-stairs, he has had a large and varied experience. And as soon as I had told him what it was, he said, ‘Really, Dodson, one has no need to look. A poem in blank verse, three times the length ofParadise Lost—why, really, my good fellow, there is not a publishing house in this country who would take the string off the parcel.’”
“No, no, no,” said the old man, beating his fingers upon the counter of the shop. “These unbelievers must not be permitted to speak in ignorance. Is it possible that the human soul can remain insensible to the nobility of its god-like power?”
“Well, as it happens,” said Dodson mournfully, “I did ask Pa to be kind enough to pay particular attention to it. But as soon as Pa cast his eyes over it, he used the identical words that were used by Octavius. ‘I am afraid, Dodson,’ he said, ‘this will never do.’”
“Can it be possible,” cried the old man, “the noblest achievement of the modern world to be thus discarded!”
“And I didn’t stop at Octavius, and I didn’t stop at Pa,” said the mournful emissary. “I went up-stairs again to Robert Brigstock, who gives Octavius a hand with thebelles lettres, and who is on the staff of theJournal of Literature. And as soon as Robert Brigstock read that accursed first page, he said, ‘May I ask, Mr. Dodson, has the writer of this an established reputation?’ ‘Oh, no,’ I had to confess, ‘he is quite a young chap who has never published anything at all.’ ‘Well, then, Mr. Dodson,’ said Robert Brigstock, who as I say is on the staff of theJournal of Literature, ‘no one deprecates more firmly than I do the amazing presumption that is here revealed. The writer sets out to write a treatise on human life—a somewhat timeworntheme, Mr. Dodson—which is three times the length ofParadise Lost’—I am telling you word for word what Robert Brigstock said—‘and he does this in a metre which Homer and Virgil would certainly not have used had they had to deal with the English language. Can anything be more presumptuous, than that an unknown writer—who surely has been to neither of our universities, or most certainly he would never have proposed to perpetrate such a gratuitous piece of effrontery—that a man who has not received a regular education should attempt that which would give pause to all the foremost of our English poets, from Chaucer to the Poet Laureate, poets, Mr. Dodson, whose reputations have long been established beyond the range of controversy?’ And if you had seen Robert Brigstock, who as a rule is the mildest and most amiable and most polite of all fellows imaginable, who is a bit of a poet himself, begin to work himself up into a kind of frenzy over that first page, you would have understood, old man, far more clearly than I can hope to make you understand, how hopeless it is to get any publisher—I don’t care who—to undertake poor Luney’s effort on his own responsibility.”
The aged father of the dying poet gave a groan of despair. He lifted up his feeble arms, which seemed to be smitten with palsy, and uttered a high quavering cry of imprecation.
“Are these the tidings we must bear to the dying Achilles!” he cried. “Must we thus affront that mighty warrior who lies all spent and broken from his great labours!”
“Well, old man,” said Dodson, who could not forbear to pity such a distress as this, yet whose robust common-sense in the crisis they had reached had never been so valiant, “well, old man, there is only one thing we can do if we are to bring poor Luney’s poem to the public notice. We must print it and publish it at our own expense.”
“Yes, yes,” said the old man eagerly, “ofcourse we must do that. And we must do it immediately because the sands of life are running out.”
“Yes, I have thought of all that,” said Dodson, “and I have made some inquiries of the firm. But of course it is going to cost money.”
“Money!” said the old man.
“A lot of money. I have talked to Octavius about it. I am on very good terms with Octavius, and as a sort of special favour to me, Octavius says Crumpett and Hawker will break through their invariable rule of not publishing on commission; and they are prepared to place their imprint—their very valuable imprint—on poor Luney’s poem, providing it is written grammatically—you know Crumpett and Hawker would not publish the Laureate himself if he failed to write grammatically—and also, providing that its tendency is not too agnostic, that is to say, agnosticism impinging on paganism, that is to say that it contains a definite idea of God—these are Octavius’s own words I am using—and further that it is not open to the charge of immorality in any shape or form, in other words, as Octavius says, that it is the kind of thing that any young girl may place in the hands of her grandmother. Well, now, everything being all right, Crumpett and Hawker are prepared to put it in hand at once, and to print two hundred and fifty copies—they won’t do less—and to issue the poem in three volumes at one guinea net. The cost, however, will be two hundred pounds, which must be borne by the author. For this sum they will use good paper, clear type, and they will bind it in superior cloth, and they will send out fifty copies for review to the leading London and provincial journals; but Octavius assures me that Crumpett and Hawker will touch the book only on these terms, and on no other.”
The old man gave a gasp of consternation.
“Two hundred pounds,” he said weakly, “two hundred pounds!”
“Yes,” said Dodson, “two hundred pounds is a lot of money; but it will have to be found if poor Luney is to hold his book in his hands before he dies.”
“I have not a tithe of that great sum among the whole of my worldly possessions,” said the old man forlornly.
“Nor I,” said Dodson. “I have hardly a red cent. laid by, because you know I have now to support my people; but if I could lay my hands at this moment on two hundred pounds, poor Luney’s book should be through the press before he hears his name called.”
“Come into the shop,” said the old man feebly, “and tell me if you think some of the venerable tomes on the shelves might produce that—that large sum.”
Dodson entered the shop and the old man struck a match and lit the gas. A very brief examination of what Dodson conceived to be a useless mass of lumber, for all the volumes were very black, faded, dusty, and stained with time, sufficed to enable him to form a verdict.
“I don’t suppose,” said he with a candour which numbed the old man’s veins, “the whole lot together would fetch two hundred pence. I never saw such a collection—never!”
“I must pray for a miracle to happen again,” said the old man. “One happened to us on a day.”
“Did it indeed?” said Dodson.
“Yes,” said the old man. “The great Achilles was threatened with expulsion from his little room. Unless I, his custodian, could obtain the sum of twenty pounds by a certain day, it was ordained that he should be cast out into the streets of the great city. Yet on the eve of that day, when all hope had been abandoned, a man out of the street, a street-person, walked into this shop, looked upon all these shelves, and took down one after another of these venerable tomes, and paying over to methe sum of two hundred pounds, walked out of the shop with one of these old volumes in his care.”
“What was the old volume?” said Dodson, with an air of keen interest.
“A Shakespeare of the first folio,” said the old man.
Dodson gave a low whistle.
“Oh, was it?” he said. “Then I should think that that street-person was not such a bad judge after all.” James Dodson turned his attention again to the shelves, in which were many gaps, with a livelier curiosity. “There don’t appear to be many first-folio Shakespeares left now,” he said in a tone of keen disappointment. “But it is no good supposing that there would be; these things have been pretty well gone through. Some street-person has picked all the pearls these many years, I expect. All that is left is hardly worth carting away. As I say, all that remains on your shelves, old man, would barely fetch two hundred pence.”
“Can we do nothing to obtain the sum of two hundred pounds?” said the old man. “Surely in this extremity a miracle must happen to us again.”
“I am no believer in miracles myself,” said James Dodson. “I have no faith in ghosts, spiritualism and sea-serpents either. But it is clear to my mind that that two hundred pounds has got to be found somehow; yet it looks as though a miraclewillhave to happen before it turns up.”
“And the hours are so brief,” said the old man in his impotence. “Each day is beyond price; the great Achilles grows frail.”
For a space Dodson was plunged in deep thought. He was not of the mettle that yields lightly to despair.
“By the way,” he said, “what was that very funny-looking old volume I saw on the table in your little room—you know, the funny old volume that seemed to have its pages scrawled over in red ink? Well, now it has struck me that those pages—Ididn’t look at them carefully—were of the finest vellum of the sort they don’t make now-a-days. If that is the case a dealer might be willing to pay a good price for it, if the red scrawl was nicely cleaned off.”
At these words, uttered with singular carelessness, the old man staggered back against the counter of the shop. He trembled in every limb, his face was piteous to see.
“You mean the Book of the Ages,” he said. His voice seemed unrelated to anything in nature.
“I don’t know what you call it,” said Dodson, “but it looks very heavy and well-bound, and I dare say it is valuable in its way. Vellum of the old monastic sort fetches a rare good price now-a-days if you know where to take it. I shall send a chap with a handcart for it to-morrow, and he shall take it to Temple and Ward, the dealers in Bond Street, and we will see what can be raised.”
“The Book of the Ages!” said the old man hoarsely; “the Book of the Ages!”
“Yes,” said Dodson indifferently, “the Book of the Ages—rather a good name for it. If that vellum is as old as I think it is, and that red scrawl is nicely got off, and the edges are trimmed, and the surface is cleaned up a bit, there may be money in it. People do buy such rum things now-a-days by way of curios, and they don’t seem to mind paying fancy prices for them either.”
“The Book of the Ages!” the old man repeated. In his peering eyes were a horror and a consternation that were truly dreadful, yet they were totally unnoticed by his visitor.
“Of course, you know,” Dodson continued, pursuing this new idea, which, remote as it was, seemed to afford the only prospect of obtaining two hundred pounds, “I shall have to pitch a tale about it to the dealers. I must fix up some sort of a history, you know, about its being found in the tomb of the Pharaohs, or its being the very identical sheepskin upon which the Scriptures were written.But you must leave that to me. I shall go round and see Temple and Ward to-morrow, and you can lay to it, old man, that I shall have thought of something by then. But, in the meantime, if you really do believe that miracles happen—I wish I could believe it myself—you had better think about it, old man, as much as you possibly can, for I’ve read somewhere that when you do want a thing to happen, it is a good plan to keep your mind on it all the time.”
Before the old man could consent to a suggestion which he did not know how to derive the power to sanction, the voice of him who sat in the little room was heard to summon James Dodson.
“Why don’t you come to me?” said the voice from within. “I can hear the voice of my friend. Why don’t you come to me with the printed sheets?”
In some trepidation Dodson obeyed a summons, which sounded almost imperious upon the lips of him from whom it proceeded.
“The printed sheets,” said the dying poet, stretching out his hands. “Please place the printed sheets into my hands. I would have my father read what is printed there, because this little treatise must go forth without fault or sully.”
“They have not started to print it yet, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson dismally.
“Why—why is that?” cried the dying poet, with a consternation that was almost petulant. “Do they not know that a term has been placed to my days, that the sands of life are running out in the glass?”
“Yes, old boy, they know all about that,” said Jimmy Dodson; “they know all about that, and—and——”
“And—and!” said the stricken poet with an imperiousness that was regal. “Are these the words that are brought to me by one whom I love?” In a controlled excitement, that was almost stern, the stricken man raised himself in his chair.“Your arm, Jimmy,” he said, with a look of such authority that it filled the unhappy Dodson with dismay. “Lead me to the printers. I must speak to them myself.”
The poet sank back in his chair in the tender arms of his friend. The little strength that remained to him was no longer sufficient to bear his frame.
“Yes, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, “be quite calm, and sit there quietly. There is no need for you to excite yourself. I—I will go round to the printers early to-morrow and—and I—I will tell them just what you say. I will see that they hurry, although by nature, old boy, printers, as you know, are dreadfully slow.”
“So be it,” said the poet, with an expression of noble magnanimity upon his beautiful face; “do not think that I reproach you—it would break my heart.”
At these words Dodson, who, throughout his interview with the father, had remained so calm and self-secure, now turned away hastily from him who was sightless, with a half-strangled sob.
“You do not tell me in what manner Crumpett and Hawker received our little treatise,” said the poet.
Dodson found it a great matter to recover his wise self-possession, but by the time the poet had repeated the question he had regained it.
“Why—why, in what manner could they receive it, old boy?” said Jimmy Dodson. “Whatcouldthey say to it? What does a religious chap say to the Bible? What does a scholar say to Homer? What does everybody say to Shakespeare?”
“It is almost more than I can realize,” said the poet, with a look of rapture that seemed to sear the veins of his unhappy friend.