Having reviewed the situation with this wholly admirable breadth, the eminent philosopher dismissed the subject from his thoughts with a calm detachment that was not the least among his gifts.
Mr. James Dodson continued to extend his patronage and kindly interest to that hopeless neophyte in the ways of the world, Mr. William Jordan, Junior. On Easter Monday he took him to Margate, “to get a whiff of the sea.”
It was with indescribable sensations that the young man beheld, for the first time in his life, that free expanse, the eternal boundless theatre of wondrous adventure and high-hearted enterprise. As upon this historic day he came down to the seashore, swept by the shrewd winds, yet bathed in the noble sunlight, and he saw the highway of the gods that was spread before him like a waving plain of green jewels, he astonished his companions by breaking forth into a curious cry of rapture.
“What a lunatic he is!” they said, “to make all this fuss over the sight of the sea.”
“A bit loose in the flats,” said Mr. John Dobbs, of the Alcazar Theatre.
When his companions chartered a boat, and he came to entrust himself to it, he diverted them infinitely by the lively fear he displayed. Yet, once abroad on the great green bay, his misgivings left him. He plucked off his hat, that his temples might be bare to the shrewd salt airs and the yellow-shining light of the sun, and his eyes beholding nothing but the lapping waters and the wonderful sky which had never seemed so near, he forgot for one glorious hour that he was the inhabitant of cities, that an inexorable destiny had doomed him to be a street-person all his days.
“This is the life of Odysseus,” he muttered; “this is the life of Odysseus!”
As he dabbled his hands in the water his eyes were flooded suddenly with strange, stinging, indescribable tears. His lips moved to the best remembered passages in his favourite authors. His pulses throbbed with rebellious violence. Each of his wide-stretched senses began to exult as his eyes, his lips, his nostrils, and the dilated pores of his skin absorbed the pungent draughts of sunshine and air. Suddenly, without knowing what he did, he broke into a grotesque kind of song, which was born within him as he uttered it. The odd, thin, quavering treble rose above the lappings of the water against the sides of the boat.
“Well done, Luney, old boy,” cried his companions with their loud shouts of laughter; “well done, old man.”
Incited by his example, one of them produced a concertina. He proceeded to play a music-hall air. It was then that a strange incident occurred. To the profound astonishment of the others, William Jordan, who had been sitting in the prow, gazing out to sea, rose and came aft to one Benjamin Sparks, who was manipulating the concertina. Without a word he plucked that instrument out of his grasp and flung it away into the water.