Part 7

“Oh, d-do y-you?” said the young woman. “Go home and wash your neck and then go and drown yourself.”

The boy slunk out into the street as though she had hit him a blow in the face.

All through the afternoon he wandered up and down the crowded pavements of the great city. In the course of his weary pilgrimage he entered many shops and offices sickly yet doggedly; sickly yet doggedly he made the offer of his services. Some of the answers he met with were not intelligible; some of them were. Yet in spite of every rebuff, of every conspiracy on the part of fortune, of the increasing sense of bodily suffering, of the aches that stole over his limbs, of the faintness that crept over him owing to these long hours of unaccustomed physical and mental exertion and absence of food, he forced himself to go on. What were such sufferings, such journeyings, such adventures, such vicissitude in comparison with the ten long years in which his beloved Odysseus was banished from the shores of Ithaca! What clay was this that already it should begin to quail? How those great ones of old would have mocked him had he dared to confess to them that he felt distressed!

Yet he did feel distressed. It was almost useless to deny it. As for the tenth time that afternoon, he was told “To take himself off, and to look lively about it,” a formula which repetition had enabled him to recognize, and experience had indicated the only course to pursue, despair and humiliation, accompanied by terror, that most active of all his enemies, crept upon him, and as the clocks of the great city were striking five, tears sprang to his eyes. Almost in the same moment he had dashed them away, had proudly overcome them. What if the great Agamemnon could have seen him! How would he be able to meet those mighty ones, how would he be able to grasp their hands, to look into their faces, if this was the measure of his courage?

By this time he had come into Cannon Street, hard by to Saint Paul’s. On the left side of the street, along which he passed, were great blocks of gloomy warehouses. Flights of stone steps ran up to their entrances; and as he limped by one of these, involuntarily he sank down in sheer weariness upon a bottom step. He felt bitterly hungry, yet he had no means of satisfying his pangs, for there was not a penny in his pocket; and the only food he had had that day had been a little milk and bread at eight o’clock that morning. Yet he still fought with all the resolution of which he was capable against the physical weakness which now held him so inexorably in its clutch. Again he began to recite the Iliads under his breath, not now because the joy of battle was in his veins, but because he sought to derive sustenance from those high-hearted ones who looked on valour as their right.

As he sat on the bottom step of the warehouse, with his throbbing head pressed against the cold stone, he beheld a heavy railway car drawn by a mighty horse come up with a shattering rattle to the door of the great building. The man who was driving it cast the reins on the horse’s neck, and standing upon the dray shouted up into the second storey. Thereupon a door was opened in the wall of the warehouse, and a large box attached to the hook of a crane was swung outwards and downwards towards the dray. As the drayman proceeded to assist it on to the dray and to disengage it from the hook, the mighty horse grew impatient and began to prance.

“Whoa there, you ----!” called out the drayman to the horse.

Standing on the kerb at the opposite side of the street watching these proceedings was a small and pale urchin, whose clothes were in rags and whose toes were bursting through his shoes. Suddenly with amazing daring and rapidity he darted between a hansom, two omnibuses and a covered van, and peremptorily seized the head of the great horse.

“Nah then,” he said to the horse sharply, “worrer yer at? Kim up.”

He gave the great horse a blow on the neck and backed it a yard or two.

“Good kid,” said the drayman, unhooking another box from the crane, “hold him there a bit.”

The boy seated on the bottom step of the warehouse assimilated every detail of these proceedings. He pondered them deeply. And as he did so, quite suddenly a flash of meaning made his pulses quiver. Instantly he withdrew his throbbing head from the cold stone, and rose heavily. He approached the ragged urchin who was still holding the head of the great horse.

“I--I b-beg y-your p-pardon,” he said, addressing the urchin with immense politeness, “but I--I a-assume you will r-receive a p-piece of silver for this brave action?”

“Come again,” said the urchin, who was not accustomed to this mode of address.

The boy contrived to grasp that his meaning was not understood.

“The s-street-p-per--t-the m-man on the--on the c-car will give you a p-piece of s-silver because you make the great horse stand still,” he stammered, in order to make it clearer.

“Piece o’ silver!” said the urchin derisively. “More likely to gimme a thick ear. Lucky if I git the price of a fag.”

The boy retired to the bottom step of the warehouse with this mysterious piece of information. With infinite pains he had mastered, as far as he was aware, all the coins in the currency; he had come to believe that he knew the appearance and purchasing power of them all, from the farthing to the sovereign, from the halfpenny stamp to the five-pound note. But he had never encountered “a thick ear,” or “the price of a fag,” in all his researches.

Timidly, reluctantly he went back to the urchin.

“I--I beg y-your p-pardon,” he said as courteously as before, “but w-would you m-mind informing me what is the monetary value of the price of a fag?”

“A nickel, o’ course,” said the urchin in a tone that seemed to indicate that further intercourse was not desired. He was disposed to resent the intrusion of a busybody into his personal and private affairs.

“A n-nickel,” said the boy blankly. “W-would you mind in-informing me wh-what is a nickel?”

“A brown, o’ course,” said the urchin, eyeing him sternly.

“Oh yes,” said the boy, “one of those brown coins which are called p-pennies. I am much in-indebted to you for this in-information.”

With a grave smile of thanks the boy lifted his cap and returned again to the steps of the warehouse. After a moment, however, in which he stood in irresolution he limped away along the street. His progress was carefully noted by the urchin, who watched the frail figure solemnly as it proceeded along the crowded pavements of Cannon Street.

“Gawdstrewth!” he exclaimed, spitting with vehemence, and dealing the great horse a further admonitory blow on the neck.

The boy, however, as he limped with his hunger and weariness through the crowd of street-persons who were about him everywhere and who dealt him continual buffets, was under the dominion of an idea. He had gained yet another fragment of practical knowledge by the medium of first-hand experience. He must turn it to account at the first opportunity. He was hungry. That inexorable power in whose hands he was had inflicted that salutary condition upon him in order to make trial of his quality. And what an incomparable sense of power it would confer upon him to feed that hunger for the first time in his life by his own personal skill in the practical sciences!

A hundred yards along the street was another huge block of gloomy warehouses almost identical with the others. It also was furnished with a flight of stone steps and a crane dangling above a door in the second storey. Their similarity, even to the smallest details, enabled the boy to see in the appearance of this second warehouse this same indubitable hand. He sat down as before on the bottom step, and in simple faith proceeded to await the arrival of a second dray drawn by a great horse.

As thus he sat with an exalted patience for that which he knew must come to pass, yet with his limbs trembling so that he could not hold his knees from knocking together, the clock of the cathedral across the street boomed the hour of six. Its august echoes reverberated in his spirit; they filled it with awe; the sense of a remote yet noble kinship overwhelmed him as he sat. He looked across the street with dim eyes; the colossal spire was uplifted sheer, it was lost in the lowering darkness of the sky. The sombre and vast walls of the church seemed to proclaim themselves to his imagination like the voices of heroes upon which it fed. Their ghostliness, for already they were enveloped in the shadows of evening, set his lips again in motion. Involuntarily they began to move to the familiar lines of the Purgatorio:

Era gia l’ ora che volge il disio ai naviganti, e intenerisce il cuore lo di ch’ han detto ai dolci amici addio;

e che lo nuovo peregrin d’amore punge, se ode squilla di lontano, che paia il giorno pianger che si more;

quand’ io incominciai a render vano l’ udire ed a mirare una dell’ alme surta, che l’ ascoltar chiedea con mano.

The huge clock of the cathedral boomed again and yet again. His lips still moved softly to the music they emitted. No dray and no great horse had arrived. But his resolve was undaunted; his faith remained inviolate. His frame was growing numb and chill. The stone had grown very cold. The stealthy hues of the night were wrapping themselves about everything. The lamps were now lit in Saint Paul’s Churchyard. A serried bank of dark clouds was looming up out of the west. At his heart was a curious sinking; he seemed to feel a little faint.

It still wanted a few minutes to seven by the stolid face that peered at him from across the street, when his devout patience and his simple faith met with their reward. Just as he had foreseen, a heavy dray drawn by a great horse came rattling round the corner of the cathedral. As it neared the warehouse on the steps of which he sat, it began to slow up. Yes, never a doubt about it, it was coming to stand under the creaking piece of iron above his head, the crane dangling from the second storey.

This dray stopped precisely as the other one had done at the other warehouse. In a precisely similar fashion the drayman cast the reins loose on the great horse’s neck. Again the drayman stood up and called unintelligible words into the second storey. The door opened as before; the crane began to squeak and grunt; the box hung suspended in mid-air. Swinging and rotating it descended to the drayman’s arms. And then just as before the mighty animal began to prance.

With his heart beating as though it would break him in pieces the boy rose from the bottom step of the warehouse. He pressed his hands to his sides. “Courage, Achilles!” he muttered under his breath, “Courage, Achilles!”

The great horse still pranced. The man on the dray shouted a horrible oath. With flaming eyes and cheeks of death the boy dragged his faint limbs to the kerb. As he came near the great animal, and he beheld its scarlet nostrils and huge and wicked eyes, he knew it for a monster of fable that could turn him to stone with its glance. A chill stole through his veins. He extended his hands towards the great horse. His eyes were filled with a dreadful rushing darkness. He felt himself swaying with a kind of sick impotence; it was as though the hand of fate had maimed him.

“Lay ’old of his head, can’t yer?” the brutal voice of the man on the dray percolated to his ears. “What are yer lookin’ at ’im for?”

The great horse lifted its hoofs; the boy reeled back with the face of a corpse.

“Mind he don’t eat yer,” said a quiet voice at his side.

A second small and ragged urchin, far less in stature than himself and half his years, calmly took hold of the great horse by the near rein, shook it, struck the animal on the neck very boldly, and proceeded to back it just as the other urchin had done.

“Nah then, worrer yer mean by it?” he said, scolding it in a shrill voice like a woman would an infant.

The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour.

In a strange anguish of the spirit, which he had never felt before, the boy staggered away from the warehouse into the ever-gathering shadows of the great city. He did not know where he was. He did not know what he did. He was in the enfolding grasp of an unknown power; he was in the bosom of the gods.

Without apprehension, and without reason, he was borne through the maze of cabs, vans and omnibuses to the other side of the street. He clutched feebly at the chill iron railings that formed a girdle round the cathedral. A bell seemed to be tolling. It filled his heart with voices. An occult force, which had never grasped him till this hour, began to draw this broken wayfarer seeking for sanctuary towards the unknown.

He issued back to a frail sense of entity to find himself on the steps of the cathedral. He saw lights; he smelt warmth; he heard remote and strange music; he heard the hushed clamour of many voices. He was in a vast place echoing yet domeless. He was on his knees pressing his temples against the cold marble flags.

The deep voice of the organ filled the warmed air with a thousand vibrations. Afar off were bright-burning candles and solemn songs. He pressed his temples closer to the chill flags. He panted like a hunted deer.

Hours later, when he staggered out of the enervating warmth of the cathedral, the night was pitch dark. The chill airs of the evening made his jaws clap together. He did not know where he was. Moving with little tottering steps, his flesh as water, his eyes blind with night, he followed the line of railings that engirdled the cathedral. He clutched at them; he hugged them blindly to his bosom; he was like a mariner in uncharted seas who has lost his compass. He followed the course of the railings, dragging one foot after another almost as one who is bereft of the power of volition. It took him nearly an hour to complete the circuit of the railings, and then he found himself back again at the point whence he had started, the steps of the cathedral.

Still clinging to the railings he started to go round them again. Within him the instinct was paramount that if he did not keep his faint limbs in motion he was lost. He would perish in the streets of the great city. Passing each iron rail in its turn through his numb hands he went on and on, and in the process of time returned again whence he started to the steps of the cathedral.

For the third time he set out to traverse the line of the railings. He was very cold. Yet the flesh must continue to obey, or that nameless destination which he had ceased to remember would never be won. As before, railing by railing, he made the circuit, and for the third time returned whence he started. Without an instant’s tarrying he set out again. The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour of midnight. The dark heavens looked like Erebus. A sharp cold spray of rain was dashed suddenly upon his cheeks.

This blessed succour seemed to give him a flicker of power. “Courage, Achilles!” he muttered faintly. He could not feel his feet as they crept over the wet pavements; they seemed to be poised in the jaws of an abyss. His form seemed to be disembodied in the air of the night. But the flesh was still making its answer; the unending procession of the railings still continued to slide through his hands. Yet his fingers could feel nothing. How soft and vague everything was growing! A delicious softness had begun to creep out of the sharp airs of the night.

As his eyes were closing he grew conscious that a pair of arms were enfolding him.

“My father,” he muttered, “my father.”

He pressed his closed eyes against a garment which was wet yet protective. He was lying against his father’s bosom. His father had followed in his steps as he set out in the morning, and had never been more than fifty yards from him during the whole of the day.

XII

The next day the boy returned to the study of the practical sciences under his father’s guidance. The brief hour of self-reliance, of actual motive power, seemed to pass almost as suddenly as it had come. Yet although he had been ground down into the dust again, the sap and fibre had appeared to increase in his frame. He went alone no more into the streets of the great city in search of pieces of silver, but the need of obtaining them by his own address was never absent from his thoughts.

One sultry evening of midsummer, when he returned to the little room after a dusty and stifling pilgrimage about the streets in his father’s company in the pursuit of knowledge, he said with an air of mournful conviction, “Each day makes it more clear to me, my father, that if once our store of silver pieces should fail us, we shall lose this little room of ours. Every time I walk abroad in the great city I see numbers and numbers of these poor street-persons whose sad faces tell me that they have lost their little rooms.”

His father, although he would have sought to deny this assertion, was yet not able to do so.

Indoors and out of doors the boy pursued his studies with a most vigilant constancy. He read the newspaper daily, and committed portions of it to memory. And he accompanied his father all about the streets of the great city. He accompanied him into the most inaccessible places, using his ears and eyes faithfully. And at last, it occurred to him that if there was no place for him in the universal scheme in his capacity as a “bright boy,” a special dispensation might permit him to enter some other sphere of usefulness. For example, in one of the advertisement columns of the newspaper he had observed that in addition to cooks, clerks, office boys, coachmen, commercial travellers, hairdressers’ assistants, and laundryman’s apprentices, who were required by various people, there was also a handy youth wanted by Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square. Apply by Letter.

“Would you say, my father,” he inquired anxiously, “that I have credentials to fulfil the capacity of a handy youth? I am eighteen years and twelve days old; I can wash and scour the utensils in which we cook our food; I can make the fire and polish the hearthstone, and also the fire-grate; I can cleanse the bricks of the floor. And, my father, I can remove the dust from the chimney-piece; and I constantly dust and arrange the books in the shop. Would you say it would be presumptuous to offer myself in the capacity of a handy youth?”

“I think, beloved one, you are quite competent to take this course,” said his father sadly, “if you can find the courage.”

“I think I can find the courage, my father, if you will help me a little,” said the boy, with his bright eyes gleaming out of his gaunt cheeks.

They knelt together in the little room.

That evening the boy took pen, ink, note-paper and envelope, and with infinite pains composed his first letter. In a very dainty and delicately-written hand it ran as follows--

“To Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.

“GENTLEMEN,

“It is my aspiration to serve you in the capacity of a handy youth. Should you deem me worthy of your trust, it shall be my constant aim to render myself worthy of it.

“I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, your obedient and respectful servant,

“WILLIAM JORDAN (the younger).”

He showed this composition to his father, who approved it in silence. Then he stole out all alone into the darkness with an almost breathless secrecy and confided it to a letter-box in the street.

Such an adventure as this had the power to tantalize and excite him. When he sought the ancient authors as a refuge from the insurgency of his thoughts, his mind could no longer feel the spell of their magic pages.

“I pray that the postman will carry the letter to its true destination, my father,” he said anxiously.

“It is on the knees of the gods, Achilles,” said the white-haired man.

XIII

By an odd fatality the postman did carry the letter to its true destination, and on the evening of the following day his peculiar tap was heard at the letter-box on the door of the shop.

Pale with excitement, the boy rose from his book.

“A letter!” he cried. “There is something here in my heart, O my father, that tells me it is from Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.”

He groped his way through the darkness of the shop, and placed his hand in the letter-box on the outer door. Yes, there was a letter. As he bore it to the light of the little room, it seemed to sear his fingers. It was addressed to “Mr. William Jordan, Junior, 43 Milton Street, E.C.” On the back of the envelope was stamped “Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.”

He tore the letter out of its envelope. His heart seemed to stand still. The letter said--

“Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker will be obliged if William Jordan, Junior, will wait upon them to-morrow (Wednesday) morning at twelve o’clock.”

After pressing his lips to this typewritten communication he gave it to his father.

“There, my father,” he said, with a devout simplicity, “I knew it would be so; it was written in my destiny.”

His father read the letter, and handed it back to him. He could not find a word to speak; neither did he direct a glance at the exalted face.

Presently they knelt again together in the little room.

That night of all nights it was not to be expected that the boy would close his eyes. As he lay in his bed with his gaze ever reciprocating the curious brightness of the stars, he speculated at times on what the morrow would bring forth; at other times he reviewed the sum total of his knowledge in the practical sciences. He composed carefully, word by word, the phrases he must use on the morrow to Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker; he rehearsed in a soft voice, with his rapt eyes ever fixed on the fragment of the empyrean that shone through the curtainless window, in spite of the gables and chimney-stacks which tried so hard to shut it out, the manner in which these words must be spoken. In the middle of the night, as the clocks were chiming three, he rose from his bed, and walked about the darkness with bare feet and clad only in his night-gown, muttering in his gentle voice as he clenched his hands, “Courage, Achilles!”

At five o’clock he rose and put on his clothes. Descending the stairs he cleaned the fire-grate, made the fire, whitened the hearthstone, and scrubbed the floor of the little room. Then in a vain endeavour to allay his excitement he read some of the pages of the ancient authors that he cherished most. At the breakfast hour he refused a delicate piece of bread-and-butter that his father cut for him, but drank a copious draught of milk. At nine o’clock he requested his father to accompany him to have his hair cut.

No sooner, however, had they come to the end of the street than the boy suddenly stayed his steps.

“No, no, my father,” he said, with a look that was almost imperious. “I would have you return to the shop. This day I must walk alone.”

“As you will, Achilles,” said his father, turning upon his heel.

An instant later, however, the white-haired man had turned again to watch the frail figure cross the street and enter a hairdresser’s shop.

XIV

At eleven o’clock the boy set out for No. 24 Trafalgar Square. During the small hours of that morning his scheme of action had been planned to the most minute detail, but so weak is the human character even in the highest moments of its resolve, that on the very threshold of this enterprise, which the boy knew to be the foremost of his life, he departed in an almost wanton manner from this programme upon which he had spent all the powers of his mind.