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Theboy was visited by little sleep that night and for many nights to follow. The necessity of adventuring forth again into those streets, the recollection of which ever haunted him like a diabolical vision, was at first more than he could endure. Many were the attempts he made to fare forth yet again, but on every occasion he would turn back all stricken by distress after essaying less than a hundred yards. Yet at each failure the stern need of conquering this deplorable frailty would address him like a passion; and sometimes with a sense of dire humiliation he would be moved to take counsel of his father.
“How, my father, can I make myself obey myself?” was a question he asked many times.
It was not until his father had pondered deeply on this subject that he vouchsafed a reply. And then at last he said, “I fear, beloved, that in your present phase there is only one answer I can give to your question. I fear it will be necessary for you to obtain a little knowledge in the practical sciences before the power will be furnished for you to move out in courage and security into the streets of the great city. Beloved, we will devote a whole year to this study, and we will conduct it together.”
During that evening, to the boy’s astonishment, his father went out into the street and brought back a newspaper, an article the boy had never seen in his hand before.
“This is the Alpha and the Omega, beloved one, of that strange world whose mysteries you deem it to be your duty to penetrate,” said his father, with his secret and beautiful smile.
From that time forward the boy’s evenings were no longer given up to desultory readings in the ancient authors. He bestowed many painful and irksome hours upon the newspaper; and these would have been intolerable had not his labours had the sanction of his father’s patient exposition. Day by day its most obscure mysteries were unfolded to him. Yet the more knowledge he acquired the greater his repugnance became. “I hate it! I hate it!” he cried sometimes, with tears in his eyes.
There was another means also by which his father sought to increase his knowledge of the practical sciences. He would accompany him daily into the streets at all hours of the morning, afternoon and evening. He made him familiar with many labyrinths among the highways and byways of the great city. He gave him an insight into many obscure methods of acquiring pieces of silver. He would denote the character of individual persons as they passed by; and above all, he strove to make the boy familiar with the language that was in daily use about him, and with the plane of ideas of those who used it.
In the course of one of these daily lessons his father pointed out a boy kneeling at the edge of the pavement with a box before him, some brushes and a pot of blacking.
“That boy, beloved one,” said his father, “maintains his place in the scheme by removing the mud from the boots of the passers-by. Observe him now cleansing those of the man in the tall bright hat. For so doing he will be rewarded with asmall piece of silver, and with that piece of silver he will obtain food and a roof for his head.”
“I don’t understand, my father, I don’t understand,” said the boy in deep perplexity. “If the man in the tall bright hat gives away to others the pieces of silver he possesses because he is too proud to bear a little mud on his boots, how can he obtain food for himself, and how can he sustain the little room in which he dwells?”
“We will follow in the footsteps of that man,” said his father, “and seek to find out the means by which he gains his own pieces of silver in such profusion.”
For many weeks the boy’s education in the practical sciences was conducted in this fashion; and although at first he lived in a state of deep perplexity, and was often overcome by the feeling that he would never find a key to these bewildering enigmas that made up the life of the great world out of doors, which now for some inscrutable purpose he was called upon to enter, perseverance, study and devout patience furnished him at last with some kind of reward.
Not less than two years of concentrated effort was necessary ere the boy began to make real progress in the least subtle of the astonishing complexities of that potent civilization of the West as evolved in the latter days of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. But as one slight piece of knowledge after another rewarded his intense application, he seemed to derive some ground of certainty from his successes, so that by the time he was nearly eighteen years of age he had pieced together these hard-won fragments of experience in such numbers that they wove themselves into a kind of fabric of lucid ideas. Endowed with this basis upon which to stand, he felt the hour to be at hand when the courage and the capacity would be his to make some sort of an entrance into the life of men and things, in the actual and visible out-of-doors world.
One evening he said to his father with an almostproud air: “To-morrow, my father, I intend to put to the test all this knowledge that has come to me during my many days of study—that is, of course, my father, if you think I speak the language well enough.”
“Yes, beloved one,” said his father, with a mournfulness which was in strange contrast with the exaltation of his own mood. “I think by now you speak the language well enough to do so.”
“And I am growing very learned in the newspaper, am I not, my father?” he said almost joyfully, for although in his heart he still loathed the newspaper, the sense of achievement in being able to read and to understand the less inscrutable of its mysteries was very high.
“Yes, beloved one,” said his father, “I consider your progress is wonderful.”
“I observe, my father,” said the boy proudly, “that according to the newspaper we purchased this morning—no, no, that is not the true way of speaking—no, I meant merely to say that according to this morning’s paper, ‘a bright boy is wanted at No. 12, Webster’s Buildings in the City.’ It is my purpose, my father, to present myself at No. 12, Webster’s Buildings in the City to-morrow morning at the hour of nine.”
“This is indeed Achilles,” said his father. He peered wistfully at the wan cheeks now brilliant with the excitement of resolve.
“If you will embrace me, my father,” said the boy, “I will go now to my chamber all alone by myself. I am grown so powerful with the knowledge I have gained that I feel as if I may do almost anything.”
The white-haired man took the frail form into his embrace.
“I beseech you,” he said, as he held him in his arms, “not to demand too much of the strength that Nature has lent you. I would urge you not to go out among the life of the great city if you have a single misgiving.”
“I have not a single misgiving, my father,” said the boy. “I am able to read and to write and to speak the English tongue. I know how to ask the con—the conductor to stop the horses of the omnibus. I can do sums—compound fractions. I am acquainted with most of the streets in the great city. Have I not walked therein alone several times?”
“Well, well, Achilles,” said his father softly, “if you have really made up your mind!”
“You do speak the language beautifully, my father,” said the boy. “If you have really made up your mind! Why, those are the very words I heard a woman street-person use in Piccadilly yesterday.”
The boy took a lighted candle and went up the stairs. This was the first occasion on which he had ventured to do this unattended since the night he had passed in the cell at the police station. But now a new-born sense of power was upon him, the fruit of knowledge. Of late he had made an amazing advance in his studies. He was already beginning to move about the great world out of doors in freedom and security. He had even begun to carry his capacity in his bearing. Only that afternoon a small girl of ten with a basket on her arm had asked him to tell her the time, and also the nearest way to High Holborn. And the proud consciousness was his that he had performed both these offices with perfect satisfaction to them both.
He lay in his pillows that night with almost the sensations of a conqueror. Who among all the cruel and remorseless throng in the streets of the great city, who were yet so strong and capable and so wonderfully certain of themselves, could have done more? A year ago such an achievement as this would have been beyond his wildest ambitions. A month ago he could not have done it. A week ago it would have been barely possible. As he lay in this flush of valour it occurred to him suddenly that the light was burning at its fullest. There andthen he determined, for the first time in his life, to get out of bed and turn it out.
He jumped from the sheets with a bound, fearing to delay. With a touch of the finger the room was plunged in complete darkness. Like one possessed he darted back across the floor and found his way back into his bed. He buried his head deep down under the clothes. He lay there shuddering among nameless horrors, and shuddering fell asleep.
That night his father never sought his couch at all. He sat below in the little room until the daylight came, pondering the contents of the ancient tome. In the morning at seven o’clock when the boy came down-stairs again he found his father still in meditation.
“I have had such dreams, my father,” said the boy, and his face was still flushed with the excitement of the previous night. “Some of them were so hideous that they made me cry out, yet all the time I knew myself to be one of the great ones of the earth.”