XXXIX
WhenWilliam Jordan returned again to the little room his father greeted him in silence. The aged man whose hair was now snow-white, whose eyes were dim, whose limbs were enfeebled, looked upon the returned wayfarer without speech and without question.
“I observe, my father,” said the young man, peering into the failing eyes, “that you were of good faith.”
“I had your assurance, Achilles, that you would return,” said the aged man.
“You have no curiosity, my father,” said the young man. “You do not ask whether my journeyings, like those of Odysseus of old, were fraught with hazard and great vicissitude.”
“With that measure of sight that still remains to me, beloved one,” said his father, “I observe that to be the case.”
The young man smiled with a kind of submission.
“I am entered upon the third phase,” he said, “the third and the last. The time is brief. I hear already the first faint lappings of the waters of oblivion in my ears. But I have acquired a store of knowledge. I went out in anguish and bewilderment; I return in self-security. If only the strength be given to my right hand in these last days I shall commence author.”
“Will you write in the book, beloved one?” said the old man, whose enfeebled frame had now scarce the power to lift the great volume from the shelf.
The young man looked the pages through with a patient scrutiny.
“There are many blank pages,” he said. “There are many to be filled.”
“Their number is infinite,” said the old man. “As long as our dynasty continues there will always be a page to be filled.”
“Yet he who fails to write therein,” said the young man, “places a term to the dynasty, does he not, my father?”
“Verily, beloved,” said his father, “it is written so.”
“I must go out into the wilderness again, my father,” said the young man with the new glamour in his large bright eyes. “It may then be given to me to write in the book.”
From this day forth the young man spent his outdoor hours in many and strange places, without pain, without trepidation, without his previous hurry of the spirit. He walked fearlessly among the crowded streets, reading the faces of those he found therein. Sometimes he would go afield and enter the country lanes and the woodland places and read the face of Nature.
Under the cover of the darkness his friend Dodson would sometimes tap upon the shutters of the shop. The young man would immediately leave his books, for he had returned to those companions of his early days, and would go forth with his friend into the streets of the great city. On the side of each there was an odd fear: James Dodson would never venture abroad upon these excursions without turning up his coat collar and pulling down his hat over his eyes, and he earnestly besought William Jordan to follow his example.
“If it leaks out that we still walk out together,” said Jimmy Dodson, “I am done for socially, and I shall lose my three hundred a year.”
On the other hand William Jordan’s constant fear was lest his friend in a moment of unguarded impetuosity should pass through the shop and penetrate over the threshold of the little room.
“Jimmy,” he said, with that directness of speech which was his recent possession, “I would urge upon you never to pass beyond the threshold of thelittle room in which I and my father dwell, until that hour should come wherein you are told to enter.”
“I promise, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, assenting readily, “and I ask you not to breathe it to a living soul that we still walk out together. Really I don’t know why we do. I seem to be taking my life in my hand, yet I feel as though I haven’t the power to help myself. The fact is I can’t do without you, Luney.”
However, the time was at hand when these evening excursions were much curtailed. In the course of his daily wanderings abroad, the young man in his new and high courage, found himself on one occasion in a dreadful slum in the eastern part of the great city. Once before in the early days of his childhood when, holding the hand of his father, he was wont to go forth to seek knowledge, he had found himself in this dismal place. And such was the terror it aroused in him that his dreams were haunted for many nights. But this day he traversed these regions, which he had never thought to dare to enter again, calmly, fearlessly and alone.
And in the middle of the most noisome part of the slum, he observed a stalwart man in a shabby black coat, and a very old hat, and trousers frayed at the end, and ugly and misshapen shoes with their strings hanging loose, talking to two ragged and filthy urchins whose bare legs were plastered with mud, who were revelling in the gutter.
The young man stood a little apart watching these three until the boys went away, and then he approached the man and said as he took off his hat: “I beg your pardon, sir, but I would like to help you in your labours. I would like to instruct those children in reading and writing, and in other simple arts in which they seem to be deficient.”
The man was frankly pleased by this address.
“Come to-night to the mission at half-pasteight,” he said brusquely, “and we will find work for your hands. See, there is the mission.” He pointed across the street to a grimy building of mean exterior, with a lamp over the door.
Accompanied by James Dodson, who left him at the door, the young man came to the mission at half-past eight that evening. Thenceforward every night of the week, he came there at the same hour and in the same company. At the end of a month, the stalwart man, who was somewhat grim of aspect, and rather rough of manner, and who was spoken of as “The Boss,” said: “I don’t know whether you are aware of it, Jordan, but already you have made a difference to us. We other fellows will be getting jealous. You have something that has been given to none of us.”
“I think it is,” said William Jordan, “that I am come among my own people.” And he added wistfully, “I would that the time was not so brief.”
In the little room he was now saying to his father constantly, “My knowledge has such increase, my father, that now it begins to bear upon me. If only the strength were given to my right hand I would commence author immediately.” And sometimes he would add almost with petulance, “This delay begins to press upon me like a stone. The time is so brief.”
At this period he seemed to have journeyed far from the high-wrought excitement and terror which had made his early years so dark. As he said to his father one day: “I walk now upon the seas and the mountains. I live by the light of the sun.”
Yet now and again the excitements of his former days would return upon him, not perhaps in the same degree, but in such a manner as to shake and wear a frame which every day appeared to grow more frail.
One evening when he returned from the mission the fever of his youth seemed to be burning in hisveins. His pallor was intense; his eyes had never looked so eerie in their lustre.
“My father,” he said in a strange voice, and his gaunt form quivered like gossamer; “to-night I looked upon my mother’s face.”
His father peered at him with eyes of almost horrified perplexity.
“I saw,” said the young man, “a wretched unhappy woman, all bent and bedraggled, creep from a gutter, and pass through a narrow and filthy alley leading to the darkest of the slums.”
His father’s bewilderment changed to an expression of singular poignancy.
“Do you ask, Achilles, for the history of your birth?” he said.
“Yes, my father,” said the young man. “I will hear that wonderful story. Perchance it may help me to inscribe my page in the book.”
His father took the hands of the young man within his own.
“It happened, O Achilles,” said his father, “that I was sitting in this little room one bitterly inclement winter’s night, in which the rain and sleet came down in a flood, and I was reading that page in the book wherein it says we are to cherish the weak, when I heard a faint knocking upon the shutters of the shop. It was a very late hour, yet I went forth to open the door; and a poor ragged woman, all bedraggled and unkempt, and with great eyes haunted by fear, flung herself upon my kindness, crying that she was faint with hunger and that she had not known food and security all that day.
“I allowed her to enter the shop; but in a moment of unwariness, in the excitement that her strange coming had provoked in my veins, I turned and entered this little room to procure a box of matches to obtain a light, never dreaming that so poor a creature would have the temerity to follow upon my steps. But as I took the box of matches off the chimney-piece where, as you know, they are always kept, and as I turned again, I beheld to my horrorand consternation that the poor creature had entered the room.
“There was only one thing then that I could do, Achilles; it was to permit her to sit and eat and learn the warmth of this little hearth. And no sooner had she done this than she fell asleep, and leaned her youthful head upon this little table, which for so many years has supported the burden of the mighty book. And as she lay there, Achilles, sleeping the grateful sleep of weariness, her breathing presence appeared to expand the walls of this small apartment, and as I looked again into the book, full many a page which previously had had no purport, gave up its secret to my bewildered eyes.
“It was not until it was broad noon that the poor creature awoke, and she said in almost the voice of a small child, ‘I like this little room of yours; it is a sweet and pleasant room; I think I will stay in it for ever.’
“‘This room can have only one occupant,’ I said to the woman.
“‘It is so nice,’ she said, speaking in the strange tongue which you have heard in the streets of the great city, ‘it is so nice.’ Yet she shivered so dismally that I was driven again to the Book.
“And from one of the pages that had been newly revealed to me, I saw that he who would write in the book must first continue the dynasty; and he who would continue the dynasty must not live to himself.
“Now, Achilles, already the passion had been long in my veins to write in the book of my fathers, where all the primal wisdom of the ages had been garnered; and as it was revealed suddenly to my gaze in what manner I must equip myself for the task, I let the woman stay.
“For a whole year the delicate and youthful creature stayed in this little room; yet all through those wonderful months her great eyes were ever haunted by fear. Sometimes in the midnight hours she would listen there against the shutters, as so manytimes, Achilles, you have also listened, at the wind in the chimneys and the great roar of London, and she would say in a voice that thrilled with terror, yet half-choked by the beatings of her heart, ‘I am thinking of that night in which the streets of the great city will call to me. For I was born in the streets of the great city, and my blood must ever obey their cry.’
“To myself, Achilles, that year in which the woman remained with me in the little room was crowded with an experience that was rich and rare, which my mind, widely furnished as it was with the ancient and modern authors, and fortified also with the infinite wisdom of the Book of the Ages, had never known before. But as the months passed, and the delicate and frail creature grew beautiful in my sight—so beautiful that I would pray sometimes that I might die before her beauty faded—I began to understand that it was not in the power even of this little room of ours to retain the possession of a thing so exquisite.
“I would lie with her all night with her hand in mine, fearful lest all unknown to me she should hear the cry of the streets in the never-ceasing voice of the great city, and that I should awake in the morning and find her gone. And many times did I turn to the Book for solace and counsel; and the Book declared that he who would retain his treasure must first write his page therein.
“Now although I kept my knees unceasingly to the floor of this little room, polished smooth by many kneelings, it was not given to me to write in the Book. And the fear mounted in my heart that when the streets of the great city uttered their cry, this little room would not be able to resist it. And the frail and delicate creature knew it also; for she would sit there in that old chair in which you, my beloved Achilles, have been wont to sit so long at the ancient authors, and I have seen the grey tears course down her thin and pale cheeks. ‘The cry of the streets of the great city will soon be heardnow,’ she would say mournfully, ‘it may summon me at any moment now.’
“As her time came near, in my despair and my anguish I took a vainglorious vow. I swore upon the Book of the Ages that my child should be born here in this little room. Night and day I kept vigil over that frail and beautiful form, lest it should be spirited away with that cry which it could not resist. As each new day seemed about to herald the pangs of her labour, only to postpone them ere it was out, I sought by all the means in my power not to fail for a single instant in my vigil. I took potent drugs to banish sleep from my eyes. For I came to know that the instant sleep overpowered me, the streets of the great city would utter their cry.
“And so it was. For more than a week had I with my frantic vigilance kept my weariness at bay, when one night as I was still conning the Book for the sustenance in which I had never stood in such dire need, and the frail, unhappy creature sat there in the chair weeping softly, with her eyes haunted by an ever-deepening terror, she cried out despairingly, ‘Hark, I hear the voice of the streets rising above the roar of the great city. I must go, I must go; I can never bear a man-child in this little room of yours. It is written in my heart that I must bear it in the streets.’
“The wildly terrified creature rose from the chair. Her eyes were such that I dare not look upon.
“‘The streets are calling to me,’ she wailed piteously. ‘I must bear my man-child in the streets of the great city.’
“And as I rose to take her in my arms, and to withhold her by main force from her purpose, for her slender fingers were already upon the door, I was overcome by the decree of nature. Stupefied by the fatigues of many days, I sank back in my chair, with my head sunk upon the open pages of the Book, asleep.
“When I awoke the sun was high in the heavensof a bright and beautiful winter’s day. There was a thick mantle of snow on the tiles and the chimney-stacks, and the untrodden pavement of the little yard without the door. I found myself to be shivering in every limb; the fire had passed many hours from the grate in the little room; but the chill that was upon everything was as nought to that which bound the strings of my heart. For the unhappy creature had gone forth into the snow of the streets of the great city, so that her man-child might there be born.
“I never looked to see her again, for when I turned to the Book of the Ages I found it written therein that I should not do so. But further it exhorted me to be jealous of my man-child, for it was written therein that he would be one of the great ones of the earth.
“And so hour by hour I went out to search the streets of the great city for that which had been born to me, but for many days my labour was vain. Yet once, as I returned at midnight from my fruitless search, dejected in mind and weary in limb, my feet touched a soft bundle that had been deposited upon the threshold of the shop. You, Achilles, were that bundle, but it has never been given to me to look again upon her that bore you.”
The young man listened to the story of his birth with the calm passiveness which is the crown of great knowledge. He yielded to none of the emotions that so strange a recital was likely to arouse. When it was at an end he said softly, “I think you have done well, my father, to defer the recital of my birth until I have entered upon my third phase. Much that had otherwise been dark now stands revealed.”
“I would cherish the assurance from your lips,” said the white-haired man, with a look piteous to behold, “that I have done well to reveal this history unto you. Canst you forgive, my brave son, the frail and blind agent of Destiny?”
With a swiftness of answer that caused the eyes ofthe old man to brim with tears, the young man took him to his bosom.
“This is indeed Achilles,” said the aged man, “this is indeed Achilles. And yet—and yet, although this is he whom I begot, it has not been given to me to write my page in the Book.”
“And should you fail to write your page in the Book, my father,” said the young man, “is it not that our dynasty is at an end?”
“It is written so,” said his father.
The young man stood with bowed head and close lips.
“I read your thought, valiant one,” said the old man, with a dull anguish in his eyes.
“Perchance it is not my final thought,” said the young man. “I am not yet through the third phase.”