XIX
Itis not to be surmised that William Jordan, Junior, was in any sensepersona gratissimain the distinguished society in which he was called upon to move between the hours of eight and seven. In the eyes of Mr. James Dodson, who, apparently, had annexed the entire zone of practical wisdom as his province—at least, his range of lore was amazing, his tactics on all occasions, in the office and out of it, were masterly in the extreme, while his consummate address and fertility of resource had long been the despair of all who had been admitted to the honour of his intercourse—in theeyes of this considerable scholar in the stern school of experience, William Jordan, Junior, was no more than an object of contemptuous compassion. At the hands of this austere master of “hard-shell” practicality he was the daily recipient of much profound advice which probed the depths of human wisdom, tempered by more or less severe personal chastisement to help him to assimilate it.
“They say Nature gives one talent to every cove gratis,” Mr. Dodson would say as he proceeded thoughtfully to administer reproof and correction, “but this talent of yours takes a deal of finding, my son.”
During the first weeks of the boy’s servitude he had much to endure. After the first flush of his triumph had faded, and it burnt itself out almost as soon as it was born, there was nothing but dogged patience and continual prayer to sustain him in the course of life which had been marked out as his own. All too soon the exaltation that attended the triumph over the apparently insurmountable was succeeded by a profound dejection. A new and very poignant terror was added to an existence which, from its first hour, had been over-freighted with suffering.
He gained surprisingly in the practical sciences in the course of those first weeks, as his father in the little room was forced to confess, yet at what an expenditure of spirit, none—not even himself—might estimate. And almost the first piece of vital knowledge that he acquired in regard to the relation of that profoundly surprising and deeply inscrutable enigma, William Jordan, Junior, to its own surroundings, was that William Jordan, Junior, had a total lack of the primary essential to a life in the great world out of doors. It was necessary to act, to do; and as he lay in his bed through the long watches of the night staining his pillow with a silent and bitter anguish, he had to make the confession to himself that the capacity for action was not his.
Sometimes when left quite alone, his hands and limbs and thoughts would obey the dictates of his will; but at the behest of the cruelly critical and unsympathetic street-persons, by whom he was encompassed, he was unable to command his faculties. The simplest acts, the mere carrying of a book from one desk to another, the addressing of an envelope, the counting of a pile of letters, all such elementary duties as these frequently lay beyond his power.
It was not that he did not strive to overcome his own contemptible shortcomings. Every hour he passed in the counting-house of Crumpett and Hawker he exerted his will to its fullest, yet the result only brought down an ampler meed of censure, ill-temper, stern reproaches, and what, as his knowledge increased and he came to understand it, hurt him the most cruelly, wounding satire upon him. After he had spent a fortnight at No. 24 Trafalgar Square, the long room with the clerks on their high stools, and the quiet, bald-headed gentleman at the low table in their midst, dominated his thoughts like a hideous dream. Sleeping and awake this dreadful place darkened his mind. He would lie all the night through living again all the tragic transactions of the past day, or foreshadowing in his intensely vivid imagination the doubtless more tragic transactions of the morrow.
As a rule, about an hour before it was imperative he should rise from his bed if he were to be at No. 24 Trafalgar Square as the clock struck eight, he would be worn out by sheer fatigue, and would fall into a light, fitful doze. Then as the hour for rising came, he would shudder with horror, although his brain was still half-dazed with the pangs of weariness it could not satisfy, and he would creep with his too-sensitive limbs from the grateful warmth of the blankets into the bitter inclemency of a new and dreadful day.
The unremitting diligence he was called uponto exercise every day of the week between the hours of eight and seven, to which was added a degree of mental travail which none of the remorseless task-masters about him could even suspect, began, ere the first month had run its course, to tell visibly upon his physical powers. As night after night he crept back silently into the little room, with his cheeks paler and more hollow, his forehead more scarred, his eyes more sunken, and at every one of these joyless returns a heavier hue of tragedy upon his face, a keener pang would be born in the heart of the aged man who was there to await him.
“You ask no questions now, beloved one,” his father would say mournfully. “And you read no longer in the ancient authors. Can it be, Achilles, that already you are well enough found in knowledge?”
“I begin to believe, my father,” said the boy, “that my knowledge is already too great.”
His tone was such that his father had never heard before from his lips.
“I seem to know already, my father, that I am not of the blood royal,” he said, with his speech falling thick; “I begin to feel that I shall never be admitted into that most high company that holds festival with Zeus. I am the craven-hearted one, my father; for such as me there is no place in the great world out of doors.”
The boy laid his tired eyes to the wood of the table with a gesture of despair.
“Courage, beloved one,” said his father, laying his hands about his shoulders with a woman’s tenderness. “Every strong soul now in Hades had its moment of repining. These mighty ones were often in tears.”
No words, however, would bring consolation to the boy.
“There is no place in the great world out of doors for the craven-hearted,” he would say continually at this time.
Upon the evening of the last day of the fourthweek his father proposed to him that he should spare a frame that by now seemed no more than a reed.
“I think I must tell you, Achilles,” he said, “that our little room is in no immediate danger of being taken from us. I have been thinking that perhaps it were better that you rested from your too-great labours for a while.”
“No, no, my father,” said the boy almost fiercely for one of such strange gentleness, “I was fearing that you would speak to me thus.”
“Other labours might be found for you,” said his father; “labours, my noble Achilles, more consonant to your quality.”
“No, no, my father,” said the boy, “I would not have you speak thus to a flesh that is frail with its weakness. And pray mock me with the name of Achilles no more.”
“Is it a mockery, beloved one, to call a hero by the name he has always borne?” said his father.
The boy rose from the table with haggard cheeks.
“I have no right to bear so great a name,” he said. “I usurped it upon no better pretext than a false and beguiling ignorance. I pray you, my father, do not mock me with that name. It is the badge of other clay than this. My valour is too little. I am the constant sport of the great world out of doors.”
“Art thou the first hero who has been despised, beloved one?” said his father.
“I can wear no proud name,” said the boy, refusing all consolation, “until I have won it at the point of the sword. In this little room of ours I am Achilles; but in the great world out of doors I am another, and him the great world out of doors accounts as less than nought.”
About the time the sixth week of his labours passed, he said one evening to his father, when overcome with despair, “I think, my father, I have learned too little or too much. I find that the great world out of doors is not at all as theancient authors have depicted it in their writings; yet I cannot believe that they would play me false. But it is all most strange. The world of men and things is not in the least as rendered to me by the books in the shop. I cannot comprehend it; and yet sometimes I seem to comprehend it beyond the measure of my strength.”
“I think, beloved one,” said his white-haired father softly, “the time is now at hand when you may be permitted to look into the volume yonder upon the shelf. Who knows that it may not melt a little of the darkness from your heart?”
Weak and spent as the boy now was, at these words his pulses thrilled with expectation. From his earliest childhood this high moment had been in his thoughts. And now it had come upon him suddenly in an hour when least anticipated, and when the least merited. It was the evening of Saturday of the sixth week, and it had seemed as he had crept over the threshold of the little room that any prolongation of the term through which he had passed would break him in pieces. To live through another week like the one from which he had just emerged would be beyond the strength of his frame.
But this proposal of his father’s, just as he felt his strength to be failing, had endowed his veins with new life. How many times had he feasted his imagination on that mysterious tome which was bound so massively, wherein his father read! Would it ever be his happiness to read in it too? And now the hour was at hand!
“Canst thou raise the volume from the shelf, Achilles?” his father asked.
“If Achilles cannot, my father,” said the boy, “he is fit neither to live nor to die.”
Yet the next moment, in dire anguish, he had made the discovery that his frame was so weak that it could not lift the massive volume from the shelf.
“It is as I feared,” he gasped; “I am fit neither to live nor to die.”
Three times he essayed to raise the mighty tome; three times he failed.
“I will raise it for thee, beloved one,” said his father.
“No, no, my father,” he cried wildly, “I am not fit to read in the book until I have the strength to bear it in my arms.”
Totally vanquished in mind and body, he crept up the dark stairs to his room. Without sufficient strength to remove his clothes he flung himself down, burying his eyes in the pillows of the bed; and the next day being Sunday, he slept deeply, dreamlessly, with entire abandonment until six o’clock in the evening. He was awakened by the metallic tinkling of bells.
When he awoke and walked down the stairs into the little room it seemed that a pall had been lifted from his spirit. He discovered his father to be reading in the mighty tome.
“First I will eat, my father,” he said, “and then I will try again.”
His father replaced the great book upon the shelf, and then set before him a basin of food he had prepared with his own hands.
“There is flesh in it,” said the boy, making a gesture of repugnance.
“It may enable you, Achilles, to raise the book from the shelf,” said his father.
It cost the boy infinite distress to swallow the gross food, but he did so at last. For now he felt strong in mind and body, owing to the wonderful refreshment of sleep. And having supped more resolutely than for many weeks past, he said, “And now, my father, if it is the will of the Most High I will bear the great volume in my hands.”
To his unspeakable joy the power was rendered to him to lift it from the shelf. He placed it upon the table, and unlocked it with a curious key his father gave him.
“Perhaps it were well to invoke the Most High,my father,” he said, “that my eyes may prove faithful unto me.”
They knelt together in the little room.
The boy opened the volume at the first page of vellum. He could scarcely breathe because of the beating of his heart. Yet the faded red characters, a thousand years old, proved beyond the power of his understanding. His learning was such that it could comprehend the curious words that they formed; it could surmount the antique spelling; but when with consummate skill he had rendered what was there written into strange phrases, they bodied forth no meaning.
“Oh, my father, what is this?” he cried in consternation. “I see, but I do not heed; I behold, but I do not understand.” The tragic hue of his countenance grew deeper. “I beseech thee, gentle-hearted One,” he cried aloud, “do not make me also the sport of the Most High!”
“Patience, Achilles,” said his father, with a smile of strange beauty.
His father himself turned over the crinkling parchments of the massive volume. He turned to a middle page in the strange old book, and ever smiling softly, placed his finger upon a particular passage.
“Look again, beloved one,” said his father.
The boy bore again his fearful eyes to the faded yellow page. Slowly he spelt out the words and represented them to his mind. Then he paused and gathered himself to his full height. His chin was upheld, his hands were clenched, his eyes were closed, his slow-drawn breaths were audible. Quite suddenly the ineffable look of his father’s appeared in his face.
“Yes, yes, yes, I understand, I understand!” he muttered to himself. “My father,” he broke out with a wild little cry, “these must be the words of the first author in the world!”
He flung his arms about his father’s neck.
“How shall I ever requite thee, my father,” hecried, “for teaching me to read in a book such as this!”
“Is it not meet, O Achilles,” said his father, “that thou shouldst read in the book that the ages have wrought for their child?”
Like those of one entranced, the eyes of the boy sought the yellow page again and again. He spelt out the antique words of all that was there written, and pondered them with his finger raised to his lips. He then saluted the parchment devoutly, and again he knelt.
“I am indeed Achilles,” he cried; “the magic page of the gods is spread before me!”
“Wilt thou forswear thy birthright again, O Achilles?” said his father, whose eyes were quick with many tender, yet grave, questionings.
“Never, never, O my father,” cried the boy, “lest it should not be given to me to read in the Book of the Ages again!”