William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

“You do speak the language beautifully, my father,” said the boy. “If you have really made up your mind! Why, those are the very words I heard a woman street-person use in Piccadilly yesterday.”

The boy took a lighted candle and went up the stairs. This was the first occasion on which he had ventured to do this unattended since the night he had passed in the cell at the police station. But now a new-born sense of power was upon him, the fruit of knowledge. Of late he had made an amazing advance in his studies. He was already beginning to move about the great world out of doors in freedom and security. He had even begun to carry his capacity in his bearing. Only that afternoon a small girl of ten with a basket on her arm had asked him to tell her the time, and also the nearest way to High Holborn. And the proud consciousness was his that he had performed both these offices with perfect satisfaction to them both.

He lay in his pillows that night with almost the sensations of a conqueror. Who among all the cruel and remorseless throng in the streets of the great city, who were yet so strong and capable and so wonderfully certain of themselves, could have done more? A year ago such an achievement as this would have been beyond his wildest ambitions. A month ago he could not have done it. A week ago it would have been barely possible. As he lay in this flush of valour it occurred to him suddenly that the light was burning at its fullest. There and then he determined, for the first time in his life, to get out of bed and turn it out.

He jumped from the sheets with a bound, fearing to delay. With a touch of the finger the room was plunged in complete darkness. Like one possessed he darted back across the floor and found his way back into his bed. He buried his head deep down under the clothes. He lay there shuddering among nameless horrors, and shuddering fell asleep.

That night his father never sought his couch at all. He sat below in the little room until the daylight came, pondering the contents of the ancient tome. In the morning at seven o’clock when the boy came down-stairs again he found his father still in meditation.

“I have had such dreams, my father,” said the boy, and his face was still flushed with the excitement of the previous night. “Some of them were so hideous that they made me cry out, yet all the time I knew myself to be one of the great ones of the earth.”

XI

At eight o’clock, after having made a delicate meal, the boy set out on his pilgrimage into the streets of the great city. It was a delicious morning of early spring. The sun stole through its white curtains, playing elvishly on the traffic. The sounds and cries which ascended from the purlieus of this vast open theatre seemed to be mellowed, and to merge themselves in the primal harmony of the unplumbed spaces overhead. Never before had the boy felt such an exhilaration as on this glorious day. He crossed from one pavement to another with wonderful valiancy, sometimes evading the heads of the horses with a feeling that was almost akin to unconcern. He took his way from street to street with the conviction ever re-affirming itself within him that he would find his way to No. 12, Webster’s Buildings in the City.

In the height of this new power, which for the first time in his life had rendered him fit to move in the great world out of doors, he gave expression to his sense of joy by breaking out suddenly into the reverberating, wavelike music of the Iliads. His lips moved to the measure of those mighty cadences; they rolled out of his mouth, and their song was louder than the thunder of the traffic. As he pressed ever onwards through the endless, elbowing throng, he knew himself as one with the son of Peleus.

Without once faltering, or one mistake in his course he found himself before the façade of Webster’s Buildings in the City as the clocks were striking nine. A moment’s reflection showed him which was No. 12. It comprised a suite of offices on the ground floor.