William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

Through the brakes of the green woods through which he passed the notes of each bird as it sang were as familiar in his ears as the many and subtle voices of the wind. He could now read the face of the fruitful Earth, his mother, like an open page. All her sweet little mysteries he could decipher; he knew the shapes of her trees, the odours of her flowers, the habits and tracks of all her nimble wild creatures. Yet in his veins the passion was ever rising; he felt it was no longer meet for him to tarry. No more did it beseem him to while away the glad hours with this old gossip. Ere the winter came again he must return to the streets of the great city, and thence to the sanctuary in which he was wont to kneel; and to the white-haired man, his father; and to that other faithful friend who loved him tenderly.

In the gorgeous heat of the midsummer he found himself again upon the mountains of the west. But now the passion was mounting hourly in the veins of the wayfarer, and soon he was to know that it had claimed as its fuel a portion of his vital power. His frame had never been so dauntless and so full of a divine vigour; his brain was like a crystal; but he seemed to know that his power of sight was not what it was.

Upon these heights of the west he brought his power of vision to the proof. He found himself again in those altitudes, which previously he had trod when the hues of autumn were upon them. At that time he was able to discern clearly the adjacent peaks by which they were surrounded; yet on this day of midsummer, although the bright sky was like a mirror of opals, he knew not even their outlines. And he seemed to divine, by a clear foreknowledge, that all about him would soon be dark.

Without hurry, and without fear, although the passion was ever mounting in his veins, the wayfarer turned his eyes to the east, towards the little sanctuary within the heart of the streets of the great city. Mile by mile he retraced the well-remembered steps. Although he could not now discern all that lay about him, as when a twelvemonth since he trod these ways, for his eyes were no longer faithful to him; yet, as his unfaltering limbs overcame the brakes and the thickets, the downs and the pastures, the new and puissant sense of kinship with the Earth, his mother, endued his veins with the strength of heroes.

He could hardly see as he walked through the woodland places, but the joy and the music by which Nature celebrated her noble freedoms, the pæans of his ever-youthful mother filled his ears. The loud and deep voice, that was so clear and so heroical, made the wayfarer nod and smile at her as he took his way. Pressing ever on and on over hill and dale, through impenetrable fastnesses, by marsh and stream, he rejoiced aloud in her noble fecundity. “Sing, goddess, sing,” he chanted continually, “and I will sing to thee!”

The heart of the wayfarer was entranced with gladness as he begged his bread from door to door. And as he came nearer and nearer to the streets of the great city, he began to sing to the Earth, his mother, in a wonderful kind of speech which he knew was pleasant to her ear. And she requited him with her own resonant and golden music, those strange, rapt cadences of her own childlike voice; and these cradled him in sleep, and he dreamed by the wise and gracious light of the stars.

“Kiss me, ever young and gentle one,” he whispered to her, as one evening he lay down on the dry mosses of an autumnal wood. “I can scarce see thee now, my mother,” he said as he turned his eyes towards the bole of a great tree, under whose wide-spreading branches he lay; “but thy ample speech was never so great in my veins. To-night I shall dream of thee constantly, sweet and gentle virgin which hath had strange issue.”

As he lay that night asleep under the great tree, the voice of the Earth, his mother, breathed in his ears. “Return, O Achilles,” it said, “to the streets of the great city, without another instant of tarrying, for in my tenderness for thee, thou brave one, I have endowed thy right hand with strength.”

These words awoke the wayfarer. He arose and knelt before the gnarled trunk of the great tree which had been the pillow of his dreams. Pressing his eyes to the green moss over which the ages had passed, he said joyfully, “I heed thee, my mother. Thou who hast lain with the stars in their courses, I will bear myself as the fruit of thy caresses.”

The wayfarer drove the pains of sleep from his limbs, and turned his dim eyes towards the east.