William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

XXIX

The reveller who crept back to 43 Milton Street, E.C., towards the hour of one was a dishevelled, bewildered human fragment in sore distress of mind and body. His head throbbed, and dreadful qualms oppressed him, but these were as nought in comparison with that which had already taken a sinister shape in his brain.

Fate had made him a mock. He, to whom life was a sacrament, was unworthy to participate in this full-blooded, heroic, many-sided existence that was all about him. To what monstrous perversion of the faculties had he been subjected? The sea, the sky, the birds, the green fields, the wisdom and poetry of past ages, the intercourse with heroes and goddesses, could cast spells upon him which not even prayer could appease. Yet, what was this exaltation by comparison with that lusty, high-hearted genius which accepted all these incomparable things as neither more nor less than an immemorial right; a native arrogance that could defile the bosom of the sea, mutilate the fairest landscapes, poison the sky with the smoke of cities, wantonly destroy the glorious life that enriched the very air it breathed.

He had been living his days in the midst of the true Olympians, and he had not known it. Well might they torment him in spirit and body. He was nought but the weakest of charlatans, who sought to dissemble the poverty of his nature with dreams of the life he was too puny to embrace. But this ignoble self-deception had been only too clear to others. From the first, those whom he called “street-persons” had seen him for what he was. And they had not failed to requite him with every indignity. Yet surely there was irony in the decree that withheld from him the true facts of the existence of which he was born to partake. He, the tired wayfarer who had strayed from Olympus, had conceived that on a day, after a sojourn upon the dark, inhospitable earth, he would be permitted to return to his immortal peers and companions. But how strangely had he deceived himself! He was no Olympian; he had no right to consort with the heroes and gods. For he was dwelling in Olympus now; the persons who thronged the streets of the great city were those shining ones of whom he constantly dreamed. And in their transcendent greatness they made a jest of their condition. And they amused themselves by tormenting this impostor who presumed to ruffle it among them: by perverting his ears, that their noble speech should appear uncouth; by perverting his eyes, that their sacred exercises should seem meaningless; by perverting his taste, so that it came to loathe the choice foods by which they were sustained!

“O my father,” he cried as he staggered into the little room with his throbbing brain, “I pray you show me that passage in the Book of the Ages in which the deluded earth-mortal, having presumed to consider himself of the kin of the gods, is borne to Olympus secretly, without his own knowledge; and its inhabitants, in order to mock him, force him to believe he is still on the earth.”

His father regarded him with a wistful patience.

“O why did you call me Achilles, my father? Why did you permit me to call myself by that proud name?” cried the young man. “I am one of other stature. I have deluded myself miserably; I am the sport of those with whom I would claim kin.”

“We are neither less nor more, O Achilles, than we deem ourselves to be,” said the white-haired man, peering towards the distressed wayfarer with an ineffable compassion in his eyes.

To this hard saying of his father’s the young man devoted many hours of scrutiny. He turned again and again to the pages of those ancient authors he had made his own. But even these in their wisdom could shed no light upon the dark path upon which he was now entered. When, having overcome his first dismay that these friends of his youth, having connived at his self-deception, should now play him false, and, pale with conflict, he turned sternly to confront the crisis of his fate, he strove to make himself familiar with the writings of the later schoolmen, those authors of modern growth at whom his instinct shuddered as abortions, or perverted births.

He burnt the midnight lamp full many nights. He attended the ignoble duties of the day as formerly, rendering his service scrupulously in return for the pieces of silver he received. But, in the little room, he spent the long watches of the night in profound intercourse with himself and with the modern spirit. Never before had he addressed himself to the study of natural objects in their relations to their surroundings. The wondrous subtleties of these modern authors repelled him constantly, for with all their faculties, which were trained to a perilous point, they were often inept, and inclined to be gross. Yet there were many things pertaining to his own condition which he was now beginning dimly to perceive, which they taught him how to appraise in the scales of his reason; but often in the midnight hours they caused him to shed tears.