William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“No, no,” said the poet almost sternly.

“It was only a suggestion, you know, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson with nervous humility. “You are not offended, old boy, are you?”

In answer the poet extended that weak left hand which he could hardly raise. Dodson’s first impulse was to clasp the fragile fingers in his own, which were of such power; but a glance at the countenance of the blind poet caused this impulse to yield to a finer instinct. Without in the least knowing why, Dodson sank to his knees and saluted the extended hand with a reverence he could not have exceeded had it been that of his sovereign.

LIV

Every evening thenceforward until the third volume had been set up in type, James Dodson would return to the little room with further instalments of the printed pages, newly from the press. And full many weary hours did the poet’s aged father labour through the day and night to compare the manuscript with the printed work. Weak and frail as the old man now was, half sightless as were his eyes, he yet addressed himself to this task with a joyful rapture. Sometimes, in the stress of the gladness that overcame him, he would read aloud to the poet in his thin, quavering tones, some of those passages whose quality he could not forbear to acclaim.

At these times the blind poet, ever sitting by the hearth, would listen, breathing deep, with head uplifted, and with strange emotions flitting across his inexpressibly beautiful face. And then when through sheer weariness the voice of the aged man had ceased to utter the wonderful music, he himself, in his rich and rare tones, would take up the theme; and he would speak the lines of ineffable majesty with a justice so delicate that his aged father needed no longer to look at the manuscript, but was able to verify the printed page by the poet’s voice.

Sometimes these labours would even be conducted in the presence of James Dodson. And although that robust denizen of the great world out of doors, whenever he found himself in his natural element, could never bring himself to believe that the labours he was undertaking with such an all-consuming zeal were being conducted in the cause of reason and sanity, no sooner did he enter the little room of an evening than his scepticism fell from him like an outer garment.

It was not for him to understand the words that the poet and his father recited with such a holy submission; they had no meanings for his unaccustomed ears; but the dominion of the poet’s presence, which sprang from that which was now upon his face, the wonderful serenity of that sightless aspect filled the young man with an awe and a credulity which he could not recognize as belonging to himself.

“I am going wrong,” he would say in his perplexity as he went his ways about the great city, “and, of course, they are as wrong as they can be—yet the marvellous thing is that they make you feel that all the world is wrong, and that they are the only reasonable people in it!”

One evening, after Jimmy Dodson had sat in a kind of entrancement for several hours while the poet had recited many passages, he was moved to ask with dry lips, “I say, old boy, Homer and Milton were blind, weren’t they?”