Part 2

The boy, whose nature was like the strings of some miraculous instrument which are not only susceptible to the slightest human touch, but are also responsive to the delicate waves in the air, knew that some strange emotion was overwhelming his father, although none could have perceived it but himself.

“My dear old master,” said the boy’s father, with an indescribable melancholy, “it is the old voice--the old voice that we loved to hear. And it is the old courage--the old incomparable suit of mail.”

“A school-master’s courage should increase as he grows old, I think,” said the old man, whose voice was like a harp. “It is true his age is menaced by all the noble energies he has failed to mould; by all the expenditure of spirit, by all the devout patience he has lavished upon them, which have come to no harvest; but is it not by giving our all without hope of a requital that in the end teaches us to accept our destiny?”

The boy’s father stood like a statue before his old preceptor.

“Master, your voice overcomes me,” he said. “But it is just, it is perfectly just that I should live to hear it sound reproachful in my ears.”

“I do not reproach you, dear Isocrates,” said the old man, with the exquisite humility that is only begotten by wisdom. “Or if my words have chidden you it is that there is an echo in yourself. Isocrates was ever your name among us. We cannot order our destiny; we can only fulfil it.”

“I was one of great projects,” said the boy’s father.

“Him whom I recall had ambition burning in his veins like a chemical,” said the old man.

“Yes, master,” said the boy’s father, with a curious simplicity, “but on a day he tasted the poppy that perished the red blood in his veins. From that hour he could never be what he promised. The strength was taken from his right hand.”

An expression of pain escaped the lips of the aged school-master.

“I foresaw that peril,” he said. “I prayed for you continually, Isocrates; and I would have forewarned you had I not feared the catastrophe so much. It is the cardinal weakness of such as myself that we fear even to gaze upon the vulnerable heel whereby the poisoned arrow enters the powerful. False preceptor hast thou been, O Socrates, to the young Plato!”

The aged man seemed all broken by the sudden anguish that shook his feebleness. The boy’s father, in whose eyes the suffering of his former preceptor was reflected, raised the senile fingers to his lips with strange humility.

“All the devices of the pharmacopeia,” said the boy’s father, “could not have kept the poison out of these weak veins, dear master. It is one more act of wantonness that we must lay to the door of Nature. For the poison was first compounded by the fermentation of those many diverse and potent essences with which the blood was charged. It is the curse of the age, master. It is the deadly gas exuded by the putrefaction of what we have agreed to call ‘progress,’ which fuses the nerves and the tissues into the incandescent fervour by which they destroy themselves.”

“But only, Apollo, that there may be a nobler renascence.”

“We shall not heed it, master, when we lie with the worms.”

“Ah, no! Yet as we crouch by the fire on these cold winter evenings, is it not well to wrap ourselves in the vision of all the undeveloped glories in our midst? Is it not well for our minds to behold a William Jordan brooding in his garret among all these millions of people who will never learn his name? For thirty years have I been seeking that treatise by which he is to establish Reason on its only possible basis.”

“Ah, dear master, philosophy is an anodyne for subtle minds,” said the boy’s father.

“Were these your words, Isocrates, when you expounded to me that wonderful synopsis on your twentieth birthday?”

“Philosophy is a narcotic which in the end destroys the cells of the brain.”

“And poetry, my dear friend, what is poetry?”

“I have not the courage to define it, master.”

“Is this the language of despair, Isocrates?”

“It is the curse of the time, dear master,” said the boy’s father, with wan eyes. “This terrible electrical machinery of the age which grandiloquently we call Science, has ground our wits to a point so fine that they pierce through the brave old faiths that once made us happy. This William Jordan of whom you speak spent twenty years in his little room seeking to establish Reason on its only possible basis. He planned his ethic in I know not how many tomes. Each was to be a masterpiece of courage, truth, and vitality; each was to be wrought of the life-blood and fine flower of his manhood. He began his labour a powerful and imperious young man; he passed the all-too-rapid years in his profound speculations; and then he found himself inept and white-haired.”

“So then, after all, Isocrates, your ethic is embodied?” said the aged man with the eager devoutness of the disciple.

The joy in the face of the old man was that of one who has long dreamed of a treasure which at last is to be revealed to his gaze. His eyes were about to feast on its peerless splendour, yet of a sudden his hopes seemed to render him afraid. There might not be a sufficient heat left in his veins to yield those intolerable pangs of rapture which fuse with ecstasy the worship of the devotee.

“Let me see it,” he said. “The desires of my youth are returning upon me. I must look upon it; I must press it to my bosom. I yearn to see how my own strength in the heyday of its promise, in the passion of its development, yet condemned to walk in chains, has yet been able to vindicate the nobility of its inheritance. Show me your Ethic, beloved Isocrates. I yearn to feast my eyes upon this latest blow for freedom with the same intensity with which I fingered the yellow pages in which I first found wisdom hiding her maiden chastity.”

The boy’s father met this entreaty with a gesture that seemed to pierce the old man like a sword.

“Where is it?” he cried. “You will not deny one who is old the last of his hopes!”

The boy’s father had the mien of a corpse.

“It is unwritten, master,” he said, in a voice that seemed to be no louder than the croak of a frog. “When after twenty years of devout preparation I took up the pen, I found that Nature had denied the strength to my right hand.”

The old man recoiled from the gaze of the boy’s father with a cry of dismay.

“I should have known it,” he said; and then, with strange humility, “let us not reproach her, Isocrates; she, too, must obey the decree.”

“By which human sacrifice is offered on her altars,” said the boy’s father, with a gaunt gaze. “What new abortion shall she fashion with our blood and tears?”

“The issue of our loins,” said the aged man, with a kind of gentle passion.

“In order that our humiliation may re-enact itself,” said the boy’s father; “in order, dear master, that we may mock ourselves again.”

“Nay, Isocrates,” said the old man, “is it not written that if by our fortitude we sustain the Dynasty to its appointed hour, Nature will grant it a means to affirm itself?”

Speaking out of a simple faith the old man turned for the first time to the boy, who, throughout this interview, had stood timidly at his father’s side. The old faded eyes seemed to devour the delicate and shrinking face of the child with their surmise. Suddenly he took the boy by the hand.

“It is by this that the Dynasty will affirm itself,” said the old man, enfolding the frail form in a kind of prophetic exaltation.

The boy’s father seemed to cower at these words of his old preceptor.

“My prophetic soul!” he cried. Horror appeared to scarify the wasted features of the boy’s father.

The proud gladness of the well-remembered voice had seemed to break the boy’s father; for those ears it was charged with mockery.

The old school-master, still smiling in the expression of his simple faith, received his former pupil in his arms and took him to his bosom with the ineffable tenderness by which a matron consoles a young girl.

The boy could not understand this painful scene which had been enacted before him. He could form no conception of the manner in which two natures had been wrung by their first meeting after thirty years. He could only discern, and that very dimly, that this aged man bore a similar relation to his father that his father bore to himself. The voice, the look, the bearing of this old man, were precisely those with which he himself was succoured when he awoke shuddering and bathed in terror, and implored his father to strike a match to dispel the phantasies which peopled the darkness of the night.

III

Sunk in bewilderment that one so wise and powerful as his father should be so distressed, the boy seemed to lose the sense of what was taking place around him. But he was recalled to it with a start of dismay; his father was about to leave the room. Involuntarily he turned to the door also, and placed his hand on his father’s arm.

“Do you forget that you are now at school, Achilles?” said his father in a low voice.

The boy could not repress a little quiver of fear.

“You--you are not going to forsake me, my father!” he said.

“What of the resolve you took last night?” said his father. “By whose act is it, beloved one, that you have come to school?”

A vague sense of darkness seemed to close about the boy.

“But our little room,” he said, shivering. “Am I never to return to it, my father? Am I never to behold it again?”

“I make you my promise, beloved one,” said his father softly. “At dusk I will return to take you there.”

Furtively, mournfully the boy relaxed his grip of his father’s hand.

In the next instant he realized that his father was gone, and that he was alone with the dumb immensity of his despair. All about him was black and vague. Yet in the midst of the close-pressing stillness sat the school-master, a venerable and silent form, slowly ruling lines in a ciphering-book. How old, noble, and patient he looked!

Presently the aged master ceased from his labours. He gathered a pile of books, rose and placed them under his arm. He turned to the boy, who was weeping secretly, and said, “Dry your eyes and come with me.”

Filled with nameless misgivings, the boy followed the school-master out through the door, along a passage, and down a flight of stone stairs. At the bottom of these was another door. It opened into a large room, which was full of youthful street-persons, and a great clamour.

The master took his seat at a table apart. It was somewhat higher than the desks at which the youthful street-persons were seated. He told the boy, who followed very close upon his heels, to sit at his side.

The entrance of the aged master appeared to have an effect upon the behaviour of his scholars, or perhaps the appearance in his wake of a new companion had engaged their curiosity. But the boy, trembling in every limb, was far from returning their bold glances. He sat close by the master, mutely craving protection from the fierce horde that was all about him. Had he been led into a den of wild beasts, his fear could not have been more extreme.

The tasks of the day were begun by each of the boys reading aloud in his turn a brief portion of Holy Writ. To him, who heard their voices for the first time, they sounded harsh, strange, and uncouth. Most of them faltered and grew confused at the easiest words, in none were sincerity and coherence; and when the master, to sustain one who was baffled, recited a few verses, his tones, in their sweetness and dignity, sounded like music. Sometimes the master would remark upon the beauty and truth of that which was read, or he would pause to furnish a parallel out of common experience, in order to elucidate an incident as it was narrated.

The presence of this gentle and learned man, the continual sense that he was near, began to soothe the boy’s tremors. And the beautiful language seemed to gird him with the sense of a new and enkindling security. But his terror returned upon him with overmastering power when the moment came in which he was asked personally to continue the theme. The whole of it had long been so familiar to him that he carried every word in his heart, yet when the call was made upon him to recite that for which he required no book, he was so much oppressed with the nameless dread of his surroundings that he could only gasp and burst into tears.

After all the boys had done their tasks after their own private fashion, the master read to them a fable, which the boy recognized gratefully as an old friend out of the ancient authors; also a wonderful tale from similar sources, and a few passages from the life of a great national hero.

The boy was enchanted. The simplicity of the reading made him strangely happy; the themes addressed him with a ravishment he had never felt before. And the horde of fierce creatures all about him, indulging in grimaces and covert horseplay, seemed also to become amenable to this delight. At least their uneasy roughness grew less as the beautiful voice proceeded; and by the time these stories of wonder, wisdom and endeavour were at an end, even the rudest among them had wide eyes and open mouths.

Upon the conclusion of these tales the old school-master wrote a few cabalistic figures on a board, and then said to the boy, “Can you do sums?”

“I--I--I--I d-don’t t-think I--I k-know, sir,” said the boy, stammering timorously.

“Perhaps we will test your knowledge,” said the old man, and added as he smiled in a secret and beautiful manner, “there is one simple question in arithmetic that it is the custom to put to a new scholar on his first appearance among us. Can you tell us what two and two make?”

Now, although the boy was advanced in book-knowledge far beyond his years, he had hardly the rudiments of the practical sciences. Therefore at first he was unable to answer the most primitive of all questions therein, and his confusion was great. And the other boys who had heard this question, which was so simple as to seem ridiculous, observed his distress with a scorn that was far too lofty to conceal.

“What would you say that two and two make?” the school-master asked.

“I--I--I think, sir, they m-make five,” stammered the boy at last.

A shout of laughter arose from the other boys at this grotesque answer.

“He thinks two and two make five!” boy after boy could be heard repeating to his companions; “he thinks two and two make five!”

The aged school-master, however, derived neither amusement nor scorn from this answer. His look was one of high yet grave happiness as he said, “We give a special name to each of our boys, and I have been wondering what name to bestow upon you. The name of your father was Isocrates--one of great gifts, but timorous of disposition; but I think you must be known by the name of a universal hero. We will call you by the name of Achilles, who was the bravest among all the Greeks.”

At these words of the master looks of consternation clouded the faces of all the boys.

“Why, sir, he is a dunce,” expostulated a thoughtful and shrewd boy with piercing black eyes.

The aged master looked at this boy with a mild indulgence in his smile.

“Adamantus,” said the master, “that is a condition necessary to a universal hero in his youth.”

Adamantus, who was one of the first boys in the school, was far from a comprehension of this dark saying; yet he felt himself to be rebuked, without knowing to what extent or why he should be. But shortly afterwards, when the play-hour came, and they ran out to indulge in their games in the small London garden, some of the older and graver boys, of whom Adamantus was one of the chief, stood apart to discuss what they were bound to consider an act of notorious partiality on the part of the master. That a mere small boy, a weak and foolish boy should be decorated with a much-coveted name for returning a ridiculous answer was one of those frank injustices that they felt obliged to resent.

“Adamantus only means that I am a bit of a sticker at my books, which I don’t think I am really,” said the bearer of that name; “and who ever heard of Polycrates and Polydames?”

“Yes, it is not fair,” said the bearer of the last of these names; “but then, he is an old fool. He is just an old dodderer.”

When the boys had gone forth to the garden, the master said to his new pupil, “Will you not go out and make their acquaintance, Achilles?”

For answer the boy clasped his fingers about the master’s sleeve. He had grown dumb with terror.

“So be it,” said the old man, regarding him with pity and concealed tenderness.

A little while afterwards the boy rose suddenly of his own motion from the master’s table.

“Where are you going, Achilles?” said the master.

“I--I am g-going, s-sir, to the garden to the boys,” he stammered.

As he walked out through the door his gaunt cheeks were like death.

He crept into the garden with the greatest caution and secrecy. He hardly dared to breathe lest he should be heard, he feared to move lest he should be seen. Crouching against the wall, moving neither foot nor hand, he longed to stop the motions of his heart. They were so loud that he felt they were bound to be noticed.

His fears proved to be well founded. A tall, heavy, puffy boy with vivid red hair came near. He was trying to kick the cap of another boy, who was much smaller than himself, over the wall. By an odd misadventure one of these attempts landed it full in the face of the trembling intruder.

“Hullo, New Boy!” said the boy with red hair.

He gave the cap a final kick, which lifted it among the branches of the only tree the garden contained. He then turned his attention to his important discovery. He moistened his lips with his tongue, and gave an anticipatory leer to the figure that shrank away from him.

“New Boy,” he said, “what is your name?”

“I--I d-don’t t-think I know, sir,” the boy stammered.

“D-don’t t-think you know your name, New Boy,” said the boy with red hair, with polite deprecation. “How odd!”

Almost as quick as thought the boy with red hair took the boy’s arm in what seemed to be the grip of a giant and twisted it ferociously. The boy gave a little yelp of agony and stupefaction.

“D-doesn’t t-that help you to remember your name, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair persuasively. As he spoke he pressed his face so close to that of the quivering thing in his grasp that he almost rubbed the gaunt cheek with his blunt and freckled nose.

The boy hung mute and limp with terror.

“L-lost y-your tongue, New Boy?” said the boy with red hair. “Or perhaps you haven’t lost it really?”

The arm that was still in the grip of the giant received another such twist that a wild shriek was heard all over the garden.

The cry brought other boys crowding to the scene. They were of diverse ages and sizes, they were of various tempers and complexions, but one and all were animated by the same critical curiosity. Among them was a boy, who, although far more robust of physique, was slightly less in inches than he who cowered away from their eyes. He measured him carefully with his eye, and, seeming to derive an ampler power from such gross terror, turned to his companions with a swelling air, as if to enforce the fact that in stature he was somewhat the less of the two, and said, “I think I ought to be able to hit him.”

With chin borne loftily, with each step taken firmly yet delicately, and with an air of dauntlessness which affected not to be in the least conscious of the approval such a deed was bound to excite in the minds of the intelligent, this boy approached, and at his leisure struck the new boy in the face with his clenched fist as hard as he could.

A little afterwards the ringing of a bell summoned all the boys indoors to their books. The new boy crept back to his place at the master’s table in a kind of swoon. For the remainder of that day any command of the common faculties which, under happy conditions, he sometimes enjoyed, was destroyed. He could hardly see, he could affix no meaning to that which he heard; the functions of speech and memory were denied to him altogether. Whenever the school-master left the room he followed upon his heels from one place to another with the ridiculous docility of a dumb animal.

At noon the mid-day meal was taken. Many of the scholars then adjourned to a long table in another room, but as the master followed them the boy kept ever by his side. An old woman who cut the food, and who seemed to wield great authority, said to him in a harsh voice, which made him tremble, “You have no right to sit there. Down there at the bottom is the place for new boys.”

“No,” said the master, “let him sit with me.”

During the meal the boy ate no food. When, having declined to touch a robust helping of meat, he also rejected an even more liberal serving of pudding, the old woman said to him roughly, “You must have a proud stomach if it refuses good food.”

After the meal he followed in the steps of the master wherever he went, until the hour came to re-enter the school-room to renew the tasks of the day. Many were the fierce and scornful eyes that were directed upon him as again he took his seat at the master’s table; yet of these he was not conscious, for he had no knowledge of what was happening about him.

About the hour the shadows of the dismal November afternoon grew so oppressive that it became necessary to light the gas, he saw the form of his father in the door. He gave a little convulsed cry, threw his arms round his father’s neck, and buried his face in his coat. His father and the aged master looked at one another without saying anything.

The boy and his father journeyed home on the top of an omnibus. On another occasion such a proceeding would have filled him with a high sense of adventure, but now all the life seemed to have passed out of him. The horses and carts, their drivers, the shouting newsboys, the seething crowds on the pavements, the flaring lights of the shops had nothing to communicate. Yet, when he found himself again in the little room, which he had left only a few brief hours, the sudden joy in recovering that which he had felt to be lost for ever amounted almost to delirium. It soon passed. It was followed by deep dejection, and a sense of strange despair.

The hours of the long evening went very slowly. The ticking of the clock had never seemed so loud and so deliberate. A feeling of lassitude at last began to creep upon him, so that he leant his arms on the table, and pressed his closed eyes upon them. Yet he was not in the least weary, and felt no desire for sleep. His father asked no questions in regard to the doings of the day.

At eight o’clock his father put up the shutters of the shop. It was his habit to sit all day amid the books waiting for customers who seldom came. That day not one had crossed the threshold.

When the hour arrived at which it was usual for the boy to go to bed, he lighted his candle in a dull and mechanical way.

“I suppose, my father,” he said, “heroes do not crave for death?”

“Yes, Achilles,” said his father, “death is a guerdon they do not seek.”

His father accompanied him up the stairs as was his invariable custom during the winter evenings, for he had not the courage to enter a dark room alone. When the boy had sought sanctuary in his cold bed, his father left him with the light burning at its fullest.