William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

The right hand he could not raise; and the left had no longer the power to support the weight of the three volumes of Reconciliation: A Poem. Therefore were they poised upon the poet’s knees, and his hands dangled upon their covers helplessly.

“This perfunctory clay has only one other duty to discharge,” he said, as a slow and calm radiance overspread his face, “ere it be released from its bonds. I must await the verdict of the street-persons upon my little treatise. I must stay yet awhile until some authentic voice among them has spoken in their name. By that means I shall know that my destiny is at last complete.”

His friend James Dodson assured him that that day copies of the poem had been sent to fifty of the foremost English journals.

“It may be a month, old boy, before we hear what they have got to say about it,” he said.

“A month,” said the poet with a slight shiver. “It is a long term. Yet shall it seem as but a day.”

“They are always slow at reviewing poetry, you know,” said Jimmy Dodson. “Perhaps they might even take longer than a month. You see, it is such a long poem that it will take a lot of reading; and then, of course, when they have read it, they will have to think about it before they can express their opinion. In fact, old boy, they are certain to have to think about it a good deal.”

“Truly,” said the poet, “they will have to think about it a good deal.”

From that time forth the days as they passed were fraught with inexpressible pain for James Dodson. Up till the time of the issue of this strange and bewildering poem in three volumes, which all the expert minds of his acquaintance had promptly and unsparingly condemned, he had sought to keep up his heart with the reflection, frail though it was, that they might be mistaken after all. For he gathered from the researches he had recently begun to conduct upon the subject that such things had happened before.

Yet how incomprehensible it was, in the teeth of all the uncompromising hostility that had been visited upon the manuscript itself, and the remarkable apathy of all who had been brought in contact with it—publishers, printers, proof-readers, the official at the English Museum—that the author himself, lying all broken in the clutch of death, should yet possess the occult and mysterious power to convince such a one as James Dodson against his judgment, his reason, his knowledge of the world, and all the standards by which he understood life, that his own extravagant estimate, his own ridiculous, preposterous, overweening estimate of the merits of his work should yet derive an ample sanction from the presence of him who proclaimed it.

“When I am away from that place I know the poor chap is hopelessly mad,” Jimmy Dodson would say to himself in his unhappy self-communion; “and I know his old father is hopelessly mad as well; it is proved by the judgment of others; yet as soon as I enter that accursed little room behind that accursed little shop they both seem to have such marvellous sanity that they make me ashamed of my own.”