William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

Such words as these, however, were unintelligible to William Jordan. Who shall say to what magic clime his thoughts had been transported! It had been given to him to touch the hand of this divinity, to hear the words that fell from her lips. The subsequent clashings of the loud music, the feasts of garish colour, the undulations of the swaying forms, the bursts of applause, the laughter and gaiety, excited the young man to a fierce happiness that was almost intolerable.

He seemed to lie in a swoon of pleasure on the purple cushions in that vast music-hall. For one brief but enchanted hour he knew strange joys that he had not thought the great world out of doors could offer. There had been a time when he had almost ventured to despise the dreary existences these street-persons led, which he conceived to be so remote from the life of heroic freedom as depicted in the pages of the ancient authors. But how great had been his ignorance! These street-persons, who spoke such a curious language, who ate such queer foods, who performed such odd acts, how reticent they were in regard to those incomparable pleasures to which they could always turn, and how chastely they enjoyed them!

These street-persons, whom he had almost ventured to despise, could go to the sea in the course of an hour, that sea which in its noble reality so far transcended the most wonderful descriptions in the pages of the ancient authors. They had their exquisite landscapes, whose sweet yet accessible grandeur almost made Virgil seem harsh and lacking in dignity; they had their goddesses who walked their streets in a frank admission of their kinship, who rejoiced with them, who sat with them at meat. Yet all these things which were so much rarer, so much holier, so much more explicit than all the wonders the ancient authors could contrive, how calmly they took them! To them they seemed the commonplaces of every-day life.

He had never realized so clearly as now that he lay in these delectable cushions feasting his intense imagination on the peerless and chaste beauty that made his eyes grow dark, that these millions of street-persons, whom, in his incomprehensible blindness, he had come so nearly to despise, were the true Olympians. And he himself, he whom he had presumed to identify with the proudest name in Elysium, was the common and spurious clay who had walked the bountiful earth with a closed heart, a veritable groveller in the gross mud of the dreadful chimera-city, which was no more than the embodiment of his craven fears. He had not understood that the fair mountains, the multitudinous seas, the divine heroes, the ravishing goddesses were all about him; he had not understood that their presence was a fact so common to the experience of all these millions upon millions of true Olympians who were their peers, that they were received without comment and even made to serve their needs.

When the curtain descended again and the great audience began to disperse, and that incomparable hour of existence was at an end, he said as he moved through the doors with his mentor, “I—I am marvelling, Jimmy, how w-wonderfully you have kept the secret of my birth.”

“The secret of your birth, my son,” said Jimmy Dodson, “the secret of your birth! Why, you cuckoo, it is you, not I, who have kept the secret. You never told me, you know, although I think you ought, because my old aunt Tabitha is always questioning me about you every time I see her. The old girl declares you come of a county family.”

“No no, Jimmy,” said the young man, “you must have known from the first that I was not—not of the blood royal.”

“Not of the blood royal, my son!” said Mr. Dodson, with frank astonishment. “Not of the blood royal! Why, what will you be saying next? I don’t mind telling you I should have been mighty surprised had I known you were. I don’t think Octavius would have had you long on that stool, wielding that pot of paste. At the very least he would have had you under a glass case in his private room.”

“I mean, Jimmy,” said the young man, “of the same blood royal as yourself, and all these happy and vigorous and beautiful street-persons—I see now, Jimmy, that they are all beautiful—who are walking forth into their native air.”

“I give you up, my son,” said Mr. Dodson, with an indulgence born of three whiskies and sodas. “I can only say one thing, and that is that a mere vulgar commoner, like James Dodson, is simply incapable of following you at even a respectful distance.”