XXXVIII
Whenhe had ensconced William Jordan in the interior of the cab Mr. James Dodson before entering the vehicle himself turned to the man on the box.
“Cabby,” he said, “as it is a nice morning you can just throw back the flaps of your machine and take us for a drive round Brixton.”
The cabman interpreted these instructions by uncovering the roof of the vehicle, and by driving away from the penitentiary at a regulated pace.
Its two occupants were seated side by side.
“Why, Luney,” said Jimmy Dodson in a voice of bewilderment, “I hardly knew you.”
“Is it surprising?” said his companion.
“And your voice,” said Jimmy Dodson, “I hardly recognize your voice as belonging to you either. Something seems to have happened to you.”
“As you say,” said William Jordan softly, “something seems to have happened to me; but,” he added as he laid his delicate fingers upon those of his friend, “I can never forget those to whom I owe everything.”
Dodson already felt a curious susceptibility to the new and strange manner of his companion.
“But, you know, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson, whose joy in their meeting was suddenly tempered by the things that were, “all this must be kept from my people all the same. You see, my father—well, my father is in the Force, and—and, well naturally,it would not be professional. And of course you are done for socially—it is no use my disguising it, is it, old boy? It is only kindness to tell you. And I should be done for socially too if any of my set knew that I had taken up with you again. And I should get sacked from the office—my screw is now three hundred a year—and of course nobody would be to blame but myself. I suppose my taking up with you again is all very weak and wrong; yet if I must tell you the truth, Luney, I have come to feel that I would rather not go on living if I have to do without you.”
The last few sentences of Jimmy Dodson’s remarkable speech, the whole of which was uttered in a very rapid, mumbling, somewhat incoherent fashion, far other than the one he was wont to affect, caused a poignant expression to flit through the large and bright eyes of William Jordan.
“I have no counsel to give you, Jimmy,” he said. “I can only leave you to go out alone into the wilderness.”
Jimmy Dodson looked at his friend with wonder and bewilderment, taking a firmer hold upon him.
“Luney,” he said, “I can’t think what has happened to you. But somehow, as I say, you are not the same. Your looks are so different—you have no idea how wide and bright your eyes are. And your speech is different—it is so much clearer and stronger, and you don’t seem to stammer at all. But you were always beyond me, old boy, and now you seem to have got farther and farther away.”
“Yet never was I so near to you, Jimmy, as I am this day,” said William Jordan. “You are no longer a street-person, nor an Olympian, nor one of other race and texture. You are just yourself, your own baffled, bewildered, arrested self—my own half-developed younger brother who one day may come to flower.”
“I don’t understand you, Luney,” said his mentor; “you have altered so much that I don’tunderstand you at all. And yet, when I hear your voice and I look at your eyes, you make me feel somehow——”