William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

All through the afternoon he wandered up and down the crowded pavements of the great city. In the course of his weary pilgrimage he entered many shops and offices sickly yet doggedly; sickly yet doggedly he made the offer of his services. Some of the answers he met with were not intelligible; some of them were. Yet in spite of every rebuff, of every conspiracy on the part of fortune, of the increasing sense of bodily suffering, of the aches that stole over his limbs, of the faintness that crept over him owing to these long hours of unaccustomed physical and mental exertion and absence of food, he forced himself to go on. What were such sufferings, such journeyings, such adventures, such vicissitude in comparison with the ten long years in which his beloved Odysseus was banished from the shores of Ithaca! What clay was this that already it should begin to quail? How those great ones of old would have mocked him had he dared to confess to them that he felt distressed!

Yet he did feel distressed. It was almost useless to deny it. As for the tenth time that afternoon, he was told “To take himself off, and to look lively about it,” a formula which repetition had enabled him to recognize, and experience had indicated the only course to pursue, despair and humiliation, accompanied by terror, that most active of all his enemies, crept upon him, and as the clocks of the great city were striking five, tears sprang to his eyes. Almost in the same moment he had dashed them away, had proudly overcome them. What if the great Agamemnon could have seen him! How would he be able to meet those mighty ones, how would he be able to grasp their hands, to look into their faces, if this was the measure of his courage?

By this time he had come into Cannon Street, hard by to Saint Paul’s. On the left side of the street, along which he passed, were great blocks of gloomy warehouses. Flights of stone steps ran up to their entrances; and as he limped by one of these, involuntarily he sank down in sheer weariness upon a bottom step. He felt bitterly hungry, yet he had no means of satisfying his pangs, for there was not a penny in his pocket; and the only food he had had that day had been a little milk and bread at eight o’clock that morning. Yet he still fought with all the resolution of which he was capable against the physical weakness which now held him so inexorably in its clutch. Again he began to recite the Iliads under his breath, not now because the joy of battle was in his veins, but because he sought to derive sustenance from those high-hearted ones who looked on valour as their right.

As he sat on the bottom step of the warehouse, with his throbbing head pressed against the cold stone, he beheld a heavy railway car drawn by a mighty horse come up with a shattering rattle to the door of the great building. The man who was driving it cast the reins on the horse’s neck, and standing upon the dray shouted up into the second storey. Thereupon a door was opened in the wall of the warehouse, and a large box attached to the hook of a crane was swung outwards and downwards towards the dray. As the drayman proceeded to assist it on to the dray and to disengage it from the hook, the mighty horse grew impatient and began to prance.

“Whoa there, you ——!” called out the drayman to the horse.

Standing on the kerb at the opposite side of the street watching these proceedings was a small and pale urchin, whose clothes were in rags and whose toes were bursting through his shoes. Suddenly with amazing daring and rapidity he darted between a hansom, two omnibuses and a covered van, and peremptorily seized the head of the great horse.

“Nah then,” he said to the horse sharply, “worrer yer at? Kim up.”

He gave the great horse a blow on the neck and backed it a yard or two.

“Good kid,” said the drayman, unhooking another box from the crane, “hold him there a bit.”

The boy seated on the bottom step of the warehouse assimilated every detail of these proceedings. He pondered them deeply. And as he did so, quite suddenly a flash of meaning made his pulses quiver. Instantly he withdrew his throbbing head from the cold stone, and rose heavily. He approached the ragged urchin who was still holding the head of the great horse.