William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“The confounded youth has arranged to go to a subscription ball on the same night,” said Mr. Dodson, with an aggrieved air. “Like his cheek when he knew that I was having a party. I don’t know what we shall do now, my son. We might have tried young Davis, only unfortunately in a weak moment I have asked him to come to the party.”

After a brief period of contemplation, in which Mr. Dodson thoughtfully reviewed the situation from every point of view, he said, “I am afraid, my son, there is only one thing to be done. You will have to get an evening suit of your own. It will be money well invested if you take to going out into society a great deal.”

That evening Mr. William Jordan received an introduction to the gentleman who had the felicity of providing Mr. Dodson with his own immaculate outfit.

“Something neat, you know, Mr. Mosenthal, but not gaudy,” said Mr. Dodson, as this artist approached his subject in his shirt sleeves, with a piece of chalk in his mouth and a tape measure in his long slender fingers. “You have got a difficult subject, Mr. Mosenthal, but with a bit of tact I expect you will be able to turn him out a gentleman.”

Mr. Mosenthal assured Mr. Dodson very earnestly that he had not the least doubt on that score. Armed with this assurance Mr. Dodson accompanied William Jordan into the shop of the haberdasher next door for the purpose of buying him a white evening tie.

“If you were left to yourself, my son, I would bet a penny,” said Mr. Dodson, “that you would buy one of those ties that are tied already; and if you did, my son, I don’t mind telling you that socially you would do for yourself at once.”

Having by the exercise of this highly commendable foresight delivered William Jordan, Junior, from the toils of this imminent and deadly peril, Mr. Dodson fortified this social neophyte with further sound advice in regard to his deportment on the devious and narrow path he was about to tread, and finally committed him to the care of his green ’bus in Ludgate Circus.

“It is a dangerous experiment,” mused Mr. Dodson, as the ’bus was lost amid the traffic; “but that young fellow wants bringing out badly. It will do him no end of good. But how it comes about that he can read Greek like a native beats me entirely.”

As the fateful twenty-first of February drew near, William Jordan’s agitation became so great that he would lie sleepless at night, imaging the ordeal that lay before him in the multiform shapes of a nightmare. During the last few months he had gained so much knowledge and hard-won experience that he was no longer so susceptible to the terrors which had seemed to render his childhood one long and intricate tissue of horrors. He had begun to understand that the hordes of “street-persons” were his fellow creatures. He had gained an insight into their ways, their speech, and even to some extent into their modes of thought. Such knowledge had rendered an incomparable service to his sense of security. He was even gaining a measure of self-confidence. He could even frame whole sentences of their language on the spur of the moment, and utter them in such a fashion that they were intelligible to those with whom he had to consort.

Yet his anticipation that he would be cast among a number of strange people in a strange place, all of whom would be engaged upon a business in which he also would have to engage without in the least comprehending its nature, re-summoned a good deal of his former state of mind. It was clear from his friend’s attitude towards it, that “a party” was an affair of some peculiar and special significance. He divined from his friend’s manner that this was something far removed from the routine of tying brown-paper parcels with double knots of string, pasting labels upon them, and dabbing them with splotches of coloured wax. No, the duties that would be exacted of him were evidently far other than these, in which he felt he had already attained to some measure of proficiency.