William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

William Jordan gave this promise, and returned to the sea. For hours he walked up and down the shore, his eyes ever upon that wonderful, endless expanse. When at last he grew very weary, and his unaccustomed limbs began to fail, he offered an old fisherman some pieces of silver to row him again out to sea. Until the sun dipped behind the line of the coast, he sat at the helm of the boat drinking long and deep draughts of the free and noble life that lay all about him.

Men and cities were far from his thoughts during these enchanted hours. His mind became beautiful with fantasies and copious with ideas. As he reclined on the bosom of this great and mysterious wilderness, with the fowls of the air flapping over his head, the strange craft ever tossing from side to side, and a hungry waste all about him, capable of devouring him yet incomprehensibly refraining from so doing, his life acquired a texture which it had never had before. Even the ancient authors, with all the subtle aromas and the powerful essences their mighty imaginations had distilled through the ages, could not concentrate into their magic ink this relentless, yet elusive spaciousness which this dweller in cities now beheld.

The caged bird began again to croon its odd, wild, undeveloped melodies. Fragments of curious, haunted, half-remembered phrases came upon his lips. The stinging tears crept again to his eyes. Through the haze of their blindness the waters were no longer to be seen. But he could hear them gurgling against the sides of the boat. There was a boom of distant breakers, the creak of oars, the voices of the four winds and of the winged inhabitants of the air.

The mists of the evening slowly overspread the wilderness. Silently, stealthily, they came unperceived. They were all part of the Idea. He did not resent their appearance when he saw them there, veiling all things with their subtle presence. He was still crooning his queer songs. Men and cities, street-persons and pieces of silver had long vanished from his consciousness.

After a while, with an involuntary deference to the chill of the night, he lay down on the floor of the boat on the inhospitable rough boards, which yet were as soft as feathers. His hands were clasped about his head, as if to support the delicious fantasies that were in his brain. He seemed to swoon with the rapture of his new and brave identity.

“This is the life of heroes, O Achilles!” the familiar voices of the night and the sea were constantly murmuring.

Presently he seemed to waken to the fact that he was looking upwards far into the sky. Through the soft white mists he could discern a single speck of silver gleaming frostily. Suddenly, with a cold vibration in his veins, he recalled how in his tender infancy he had seen that particular orb shining above the shutters of the little room. In an instant the crooning song upon his lips had changed to a moan of anguish. Yet it passed immediately. Peering at the star he seemed to recognize it as the symbol of his kinship with this immensity; as the pledge of his correlation with the universal order. With a sense of exultation his thoughts reverted to that sanctuary from whose precincts he had beheld it first. It was with him still. And was not a benign spirit ever there to bestow consolation upon a hapless wayfarer whose journeyings were hopeless, endless, fruitless, fraught with cruel degradation?

He still lay in the boat, not feeling hunger nor susceptible to the cold of the night. Time and space had lost their significance. He would only ask to lie where he was, on the bosom of the waters, that he might croon his strange songs for ever. But as his gaze was still fixed on the only star that was abroad in all the vast canopy, the recollection of the little room and of him who dwelt there, shaped itself more definitely. He must return; he was being drawn thither by irresistible forces. His destiny must be fulfilled.

The keel of the boat began to grind on the sand. He listened to the melodious yet uncouth tones of the old boatman—the old ferryman, who had piloted him across the bosom of eternity.

“We’ve been out six hours,” said the old boatman. “It is nigh half-past eight.”