LIV
Everyevening thenceforward until the third volume had been set up in type, James Dodson would return to the little room with further instalments of the printed pages, newly from the press. And full many weary hours did the poet’s aged father labour through the day and night to compare the manuscript with the printed work. Weak and frail as the old man now was, half sightless as were his eyes, he yet addressed himself to this task with a joyful rapture. Sometimes, in the stress of the gladness that overcame him, he would read aloud to the poet in his thin, quavering tones, some of those passages whose quality he could not forbear to acclaim.
At these times the blind poet, ever sitting by the hearth, would listen, breathing deep, with head uplifted, and with strange emotions flitting across his inexpressibly beautiful face. And then when through sheer weariness the voice of the aged man had ceased to utter the wonderful music, he himself, in his rich and rare tones, would take up the theme; and he would speak the lines of ineffable majesty with a justice so delicate that his aged father needed no longer to look at the manuscript, but was able to verify the printed page by the poet’s voice.
Sometimes these labours would even be conducted in the presence of James Dodson. And although that robust denizen of the great world out of doors, whenever he found himself in hisnatural element, could never bring himself to believe that the labours he was undertaking with such an all-consuming zeal were being conducted in the cause of reason and sanity, no sooner did he enter the little room of an evening than his scepticism fell from him like an outer garment.
It was not for him to understand the words that the poet and his father recited with such a holy submission; they had no meanings for his unaccustomed ears; but the dominion of the poet’s presence, which sprang from that which was now upon his face, the wonderful serenity of that sightless aspect filled the young man with an awe and a credulity which he could not recognize as belonging to himself.
“I am going wrong,” he would say in his perplexity as he went his ways about the great city, “and, of course, they are as wrong as they can be—yet the marvellous thing is that they make you feel that all the world is wrong, and that they are the only reasonable people in it!”
One evening, after Jimmy Dodson had sat in a kind of entrancement for several hours while the poet had recited many passages, he was moved to ask with dry lips, “I say, old boy, Homer and Milton were blind, weren’t they?”
“Tradition has it so,” said the poet, and his sightless aspect was suffused with that secret and beautiful smile that had come to haunt poor Dodson in his dreams. “But what is ‘tradition’ but an adumbration of the light that never was?”
On the evening that the last line of the poem had been passed for the press with an astonishing thoroughness and celerity by the co-operation of two minds which had to be almost independent of the use of the eyes, the poet committed these final pages to the care of his faithful emissary with further injunctions for their prosperity in the great world out of doors.
“Let our little treatise have reticence, chastity, sobriety,” he said.
“I wish you could see the binding I have chosen,” said Jimmy Dodson. “Octavius calls it very chaste indeed—you can’t think what an interest Octavius is taking in the publication. Octavius made one error in his life, which we will not refer to now, but he has turned out trumps over this. He would give his ears to know the name of the author!”
“That is a secret you are pledged to respect,” said William Jordan in his voice of soft irony.
“You can be quite easy about that, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson. “Wild horses shall not drag it from me; and, of course, there is not a soul in the world who would ever suspect that the author is you.”
“I trust you,” said the poet simply. “And there is only one further charge with which I shall tax our friendship. I shall ask you to collect all the papers that bear the impress of my hand, and lodge them at the English Museum, in the custody of the English nation.”
James Dodson contrived to dissemble his bewildered surprise.
“Of course I will do so, old boy,” he said gravely and promptly. “I will make a parcel of the manuscript now. It is too late to take it round there to-night; but the first thing to-morrow I will take an hour off from the office, and I will carry it to the English Museum myself.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said the poet. “I thank you in the name of truth and of ages yet to be.”