William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“May there not be one among all those millions,” said his father, “who knows that to be so, and shines out to comfort you? Let us look.”

With eager hands the boy helped his father to unfasten and cast back the shutters. Through heavy masses of walls and chimney-stacks a fragment of the void was to be seen. Across it the broken clouds were scudding, and a single star was visible. It emerged faint but keen and clear.

“It is Jupiter,” cried the boy in a voice of joy and excitement. “Hail, mighty prince of the heavens! Ave, ave, great lord of the air!”

The patient white-haired figure at the boy’s side was peering also towards the star. In his eyes shone the entrancement of many thoughts.

II

When at last the morning brought its grey light the boy set out with his father into the streets of the great city. Amid the dun-coloured wilderness through which he passed, amid the labyrinth of dread thoroughfares in which noise, dirt, and confusion seemed to contend, he grasped his father’s hand in the fear of his heart. The rattle of horses and carts, the mud-flinging hoofs and the cries of the drivers, the vigour and rudeness of the street-persons by whom he was hustled, filled him with a dire consternation. Yet beyond all that he suffered in this way, which was no more than a little personal inconvenience after all, was the fear, permanent, overmastering and intense, that never would his father and he be able to retrace their steps to that tiny refuge which they had left so lately, which now seemed so far away that they could never hope to win their way back. How could they hope to retrace their steps among that ever-surging sea of streets and houses and faces and vehicles? Once as he was submerged in a whirlpool that was formed by the meeting of four main arteries of traffic, and was compelled to wait until a strangely clad street-person, who wore a helmet like Minerva, stopped, by the magic process of holding up his hand, the unending procession of carts and horses to enable his father and himself and a swarm of street-persons, who pressed upon his heels and trod upon his toes, to pass to that debatable land across the way, which looked so full already that it could not yield space for another living soul, he held his father’s hand convulsively and said in a voice of despair: “I feel sure, my father, we shall never win our way back to our little room.”

In point of actual time this journey was not more than half-an-hour, yet it formed such a highly wrought experience, that to the boy it seemed to transcend and even to efface all that had previously happened in the placid term of his existence. At last it came to an end in a succession of quiet streets that led to a gloomy square, which, although very forbidding of aspect, was almost peaceful. The houses in it, tall and stately and austere, had a row of steep stone steps furnished with iron railings. It was one of these rows he ascended; and his father knocked with a boldness that seemed superhuman at a very stern-looking front door.

After a brief period of waiting in which it seemed to the boy that he must be choked by the violent beatings of his heart, the door was opened by an old woman, equally stern of aspect, who asked their business in a gruff voice. The boy’s father said something to her which the boy was too excited to comprehend, whereupon she conducted them into a dark passage filled with bad air, and left them there while she went to inquire if they would be received by him they sought. Presently she returned to lead them to his presence.

In a room at the end of the long passage, which seemed to grow darker and darker at every step they took, they found a very aged man. In appearance he was not unlike a faun. His eyes were sunken far in his cheeks, and they seemed to be faded like those of the blind. His features were so lean that they looked almost spectral; his tall frame and long limbs were warped with feebleness; and the boy noticed that his hands had red mittens to keep them warm. His head, which was of great nobility, was bald at the top, yet the lower part was covered by hair that was even whiter than that of the boy’s father, and so long that it came down upon his shoulders.

This venerable figure sat at a table before a fire in a dark and sombre room, which faced the north and smelt of ink. Maps were on the walls; here and there were scattered books; there was a globe on a tripod; while blackboards, charts and desks abounded in all the panoply of education. The old school-master was ruling lines in a ciphering-book with the gravest nicety; while at his back the fire was shedding its glow on a coat which use had rendered green, ragged and threadbare.