It came near to being a sentiment. The possibility of such a thing rising from within him seemed impressive. He walked back to No. 4 thoughtfully, and thrust himself into a fight with Hamp Sharkey, in which it was proved that Hamp was the better man. Tommy regained his ordinary reckless cheerfulness. But when a man is in a state of mind that it needs a stand-up and knock-down fight to introduce cheerfulness, he cannot hope to conceal his state of mind.
Cripple Street drowsed in the sunshine one August afternoon. A small boy dug bricks out of the sidewalk with a stick. It seemed to emphasize the indifferent calm that no one took that interest in Cripple Street to come and stop him. The clangor of the fire-bells broke across the city. For a moment the silence in Cripple Street seemed more deathly than before. Then the doors of the tailors and bookbinders flew open. The Fire Company came with leap and roar, ladder, engine, and hose, rattle of wheels and thud of steam. Passing Mr. Barria's Durdo turned his head, saw Janey in the door, and beamed on her.
“Hooray,” he shouted.
“It's Tommy's girl,” thundered Hamp Sharkey, from the top of his jingling ladders. Fire Brigade No. 4 cheered, waved its helmet, wherever it had a hand free, and in a moment was gone, leaving the drift of its smoke in the air, the tremble of its passing, and Janey flushed and thrilled. Hook and ladder and all had hailed her with honor as Tommy's girl. A battalion of cavalry, with her lover at the head, dashing up to salute, say, her battlemented or rose-embowered window—both terms occur in the Annuals—and galloping away to the wars, might have been better theoretically, but Janey was satisfied. She had no defence against such battery. Power, daring, and danger were personified in Tommy. He had brought them all to her feet. This it was to live and be a woman. She turned back into the dim shop, her eyes shining. The backs of the dusty books seemed to quiver and glow, even those containing arithmetic, dead philosophies, and other cool abstractions, as if they forgot their figures and rounded periods, and thought of the men who wrote them, how these once were young.
Durdo found it possible, by spending his off hours in Mr. Barria's shop, to keep cheerful without fighting Hamp Sharkey. A row now and then with a smaller man than Hamp was enough to satisfy the growing mellowness of his soul. His off hours began at four. He passed them among the Annuals and old magazines in a state of puzzled and flattered bliss. He fell so far from nature as to read the Annuals where Janey directed, to conclude that what was popularly called “fun” was vanity and dust in the mouth; that from now on he would be decent, and that any corner or hole in the ground which contained Janey and Tommy would suit him forever. No doubt he was wrong there.
Mr. Barria's memories of all that had befallen him within or without, in the journey of this life, before his entry on the Path of Quietness, and his consciousness of all external objects and occurrences since, were clear enough, but only as little white clouds in the open sky are clear, whose business it is to be far away and trouble us with no insistent tempest. They never entered the inner circle of his meditation. They appeared to be distant things. He had no sense of contact with them. His abstractions had formed a series of concentric spheres about him. In some outer sphere lay a knowledge of the value of books as bought and sold, which enabled him to buy and sell them with indifferent profit, but it entered his central absorption no more than the putting on and off of his coat.
He was not absorbed in books. He did not seem to care for them, beyond the fourscore or more worn volumes that were piled about his table by the gray window, many of them in tattered paper covers bearing German imprints, some lately rebound by a Cripple Street bookbinder. He did not care for history or geography, not even his own. He did not care where he was born or when, where he was now, or how old.
Once—whether forty years gone or four hundred, would have seemed to him a question of the vaguest import—he had taught Arabic and Greek in a university town, which looks off to mountains that in their turn look off to the Adriatic Sea. There was a child, a smaller Julian Barria. Somewhere about this time and place he began explorations in more distant Eastern languages. The date was unnoted, obscure, traditional. The interest in language soon disappeared. It was a period of wonder and searching. After the moral fierceness of the Arab and Mohammedan, the Hindoo's and Buddhist's calm negations and wide mental spaces first interested him by contrast, then absorbed him. He began to practise the discipline, the intense and quiet centring on one point, till the sense of personality should slip away and he and that point be one. There was no conviction or conversion, for the question never seemed put to him, or to be of any value, whether one thing was true and another not true. But the interest gradually changed to a personal issue. All that he now heard and saw and spoke to, objects in rest or in motion, duties that called for his performance, became not so much vaguer in outline as more remote in position. In comparison with his other experiences they were touched with a faint sense of unreality. The faces of other men were changed in his eyes. He sometimes noticed and wondered, passingly, that they seemed to see no change in him, or if any change, it was one that drew them more than formerly to seek his sympathy. He observed himself listening to intimate confessions with a feeling of patient benevolence that cost him no effort, and seemed to him something not quite belonging to him as a personal virtue, but which apparently satisfied and quieted the troubled souls that sought him.
About this later time—a reference to the histories would fix the date at 1848—a civil war swept the land, and the University was closed. The younger Julian Barria was involved in the fall of the revolutionists and fled from the country. The late teacher of Greek and Arabic crossed the ocean with him. It was a matter of mild indifference. He gave his sympathy to all, gently and naturally, but felt no mental disturbance. Neither did the change of scene affect him. Everywhere were earth beneath and sky above, and if not it were no matter. Everywhere were men and women and children, busy with a multitude of little things, trembling, hurrying, crying out among anxieties. It was all one, clear enough, but remote, touched with the same sense of unreality, and like some sad old song familiar in childhood and still lingering in the memory.
The book-shop on Cripple Street at one time dealt also in newspapers and cigars. They were more to the younger Barria's talent, more to his taste the stirring talk of men who live in their own era and congregate wherever there are newspapers and tobacco. Afterward he went away into the West, seeking a larger field for his enterprise than Cripple Street, and the newspaper and cigar business declined and passed away. The show-case fell to other uses. The elder Barria sat by the square rear window, and the gray dust gathered and dimmed it. Ten years flowed like an unruffled stream; of their conventional divisions and succeeding events he seemed but superficially conscious. Letters came now and then from the West, announcing young Barria's journeys and schemes, his marriage in the course of enterprise, finally his death. The last was in a sprawling hand, and said: