Part 19

Fate had made him a mock. He, to whom life was a sacrament, was unworthy to participate in this full-blooded, heroic, many-sided existence that was all about him. To what monstrous perversion of the faculties had he been subjected? The sea, the sky, the birds, the green fields, the wisdom and poetry of past ages, the intercourse with heroes and goddesses, could cast spells upon him which not even prayer could appease. Yet, what was this exaltation by comparison with that lusty, high-hearted genius which accepted all these incomparable things as neither more nor less than an immemorial right; a native arrogance that could defile the bosom of the sea, mutilate the fairest landscapes, poison the sky with the smoke of cities, wantonly destroy the glorious life that enriched the very air it breathed.

He had been living his days in the midst of the true Olympians, and he had not known it. Well might they torment him in spirit and body. He was nought but the weakest of charlatans, who sought to dissemble the poverty of his nature with dreams of the life he was too puny to embrace. But this ignoble self-deception had been only too clear to others. From the first, those whom he called “street-persons” had seen him for what he was. And they had not failed to requite him with every indignity. Yet surely there was irony in the decree that withheld from him the true facts of the existence of which he was born to partake. He, the tired wayfarer who had strayed from Olympus, had conceived that on a day, after a sojourn upon the dark, inhospitable earth, he would be permitted to return to his immortal peers and companions. But how strangely had he deceived himself! He was no Olympian; he had no right to consort with the heroes and gods. For he was dwelling in Olympus now; the persons who thronged the streets of the great city were those shining ones of whom he constantly dreamed. And in their transcendent greatness they made a jest of their condition. And they amused themselves by tormenting this impostor who presumed to ruffle it among them: by perverting his ears, that their noble speech should appear uncouth; by perverting his eyes, that their sacred exercises should seem meaningless; by perverting his taste, so that it came to loathe the choice foods by which they were sustained!

“O my father,” he cried as he staggered into the little room with his throbbing brain, “I pray you show me that passage in the Book of the Ages in which the deluded earth-mortal, having presumed to consider himself of the kin of the gods, is borne to Olympus secretly, without his own knowledge; and its inhabitants, in order to mock him, force him to believe he is still on the earth.”

His father regarded him with a wistful patience.

“O why did you call me Achilles, my father? Why did you permit me to call myself by that proud name?” cried the young man. “I am one of other stature. I have deluded myself miserably; I am the sport of those with whom I would claim kin.”

“We are neither less nor more, O Achilles, than we deem ourselves to be,” said the white-haired man, peering towards the distressed wayfarer with an ineffable compassion in his eyes.

To this hard saying of his father’s the young man devoted many hours of scrutiny. He turned again and again to the pages of those ancient authors he had made his own. But even these in their wisdom could shed no light upon the dark path upon which he was now entered. When, having overcome his first dismay that these friends of his youth, having connived at his self-deception, should now play him false, and, pale with conflict, he turned sternly to confront the crisis of his fate, he strove to make himself familiar with the writings of the later schoolmen, those authors of modern growth at whom his instinct shuddered as abortions, or perverted births.

He burnt the midnight lamp full many nights. He attended the ignoble duties of the day as formerly, rendering his service scrupulously in return for the pieces of silver he received. But, in the little room, he spent the long watches of the night in profound intercourse with himself and with the modern spirit. Never before had he addressed himself to the study of natural objects in their relations to their surroundings. The wondrous subtleties of these modern authors repelled him constantly, for with all their faculties, which were trained to a perilous point, they were often inept, and inclined to be gross. Yet there were many things pertaining to his own condition which he was now beginning dimly to perceive, which they taught him how to appraise in the scales of his reason; but often in the midnight hours they caused him to shed tears.

“Dost thou forget the Book of the Ages, my beloved?” said his father one night, as he was immersed with a countenance of despair in these remorseless pages.

His father took down the massive tome from the shelf, and laid it open at a familiar passage, which his own eyes were never weary of conning.

“Let us not forget the rotations of the circle, beloved one,” said his father. “Must we not ever return by the path that we went upon?”

It brought unspeakable joy to the young man that, in spite of many months of intercourse with the modern authors, his father’s great tome still retained the power to afford him consolation.

“These dread speculations which come no-whence and return no-whither,” said the young man, “appear to cast a green haze, as of putrefying flesh, upon the minds of these modern authors, who strive to fill eternity itself with the laughter of Bedlam.”

* * * * *

One day of autumn the young man walked abroad with his father until they came to the woods. Here in a sombre and quiet glade, which the winds had already stripped, he gathered flowers.

“I think, my father,” he said as his slender fingers wove them together with a piece of grass, “I shall now have the courage to offer these beautiful creatures of the fields to that goddess who is always in my dreams.”

Upon the evening of the next day the young man discarded his books for the first time for many weeks. Hastening homewards from his daily toil, he arrayed himself in that uncomfortable garb in which he had been first privileged to behold the goddess, and betook himself, devout of heart, to the garish music-hall. He was able to make his way to the chair he had previously occupied, and here, waiting patiently, but this time alone, he again beheld the object of his worship. In all their sanctity the raptures of that former hour returned upon him. How chaste, yet how ravishing seemed this goddess in the shape of a human animal! How was it possible to doubt of her affinity with the immortals? One glance at her noble radiance sufficed to counteract the poison that was distilled by the pages of the modern authors.

They openly mocked at the incarnation of divinities. They even denied an existence to a higher state. They even declared that the very life in his veins was but the expression of a coarse jest, in questionable taste, on the part of One who was old enough to know better. And yet these modern authors knew how to clothe their levity with a witty and bitter shrewdness which could counterfeit universal truth. How he could recall the cynical language of one of the chief among them: “What a stupid and tasteless farce is this, my dear friends. Here are we pierrots and harlequins, we betasselled clowns and buffoons, with many a score of other harmless, mad fools, whose names I forget, yet all have the same meaning--here are we, I say, with our silly grimaces, which make us sweat blood mixed with salt tears, here are we ruffling it in cockades and gold lace, and orders and what not; strutting about like turkeys, so that we may delude ourselves into forgetting that the whole business in which we are engaged is a harlequinade of such vile grossness that only an unpardonable oversight of some obscure and malicious Authority obtained for it a licence to be performed publicly.”

With what diabolical cunning had this modern expressed himself! How true it was of that vapid farceur, William Jordan! For how many years had this poor dolt in the farce kept up his courage by pretending to kinship with the immortal ones? And here he sat to-night, poor, stupid charlatan! the derided of heaven, in his evening suit and excruciatingly tight shoes, cherishing the idea that he was about to bestow a votive offering upon one of the divinities. Yea, that master of mockery had caught the features of this William Jordan as neatly as though he alone were the archetype of poor deluded human nature! There he sat in his black coat and white tie, this stupid dolt in the farce, solemnly pretending to thoughts of goddesses. And yet this mocking modern assured him with a pretence of equal solemnity that even goddesses did not exist outside the portals of Bedlam.

At the conclusion of the performance the young man passed out with the careless throng of street-persons, those Olympian _blasés_ who were half-sick of goddesses, and yawned in their faces. Remembering his former pilgrimage, he betook himself, with the bunch of flowers in his hand, to the narrow alley leading to the stage-door. It seemed a miraculous coincidence that one of the mightiest of the earth-poets should have written in his book, “All the world’s a stage,” and that the word “Stage-door” should now loom before his eyes, above the magic portal out of which the divinity was to issue, clad in flesh and blood. And yet it seemed still more miraculous that these sovereign intelligences could bring themselves to utter such poor commonplaces as these, which must be so plain to the meanest minds that they did not call for expression!

He beheld the noble form of the goddess emerge from the stage-door. To-night she affected no humble straw hat and trailing, dusty skirt. She was attired as became her quality in a fine cloak and jewels. Her head was borne loftily, her eyes shone. This was the goddess, this was she. He clutched the bunch of flowers convulsively. Was such an offering meet for a goddess? Yes, they were creatures of the honest woodland pastures, even as herself. Even if she spurned them underfoot they should be offered to her.

Already he had his hat in his hand, that it might sweep the earth; already words of homage had formed upon his lips. She was almost touching him with her fine raiment, and he was beginning to speak, when a splendid, handsome street-person, clad in furs, strode between her and his offering. In an instant she had passed. Yet the goddess had seen the bunch of flowers, for as she went by she looked steadily into the eyes of him who had dared to proffer them. She gave a little laugh, which made him draw in his breath as though he experienced the stroke of a knife.

He went back into sanctuary to the little room, tormented into fever by a distress which he knew to be the measure of his weakness. Yet surely it was fitting that a goddess should despise him for having pretended to be what he was not.

From this tragic evening he was unable to kneel in the little room. Like a barque that the fierce tempest has cast from its moorings into the trough of the merciless waves, he was tossed hither and thither among the deep waters, so that he lost all faith in his own power.

Sometimes in his anguish he could not forbear to complain against Fate, as had so often been recorded of weak mortals in the pages of the ancient authors. Yet an act so ignoble was one proof the more of his inferiority. He heard the accent of earth’s lowliest in his own lament. He began to envy the persons in the streets of the great city, those thrice-blessed Olympians who were unvisited by doubt and by constant repining. These did not doubt of their own divinity. Even that clay which at first he had thought so common, that of his mentor James Dodson, who in his heart despised him utterly, but who in his contemptuous clemency forbore from rejecting him, even he made no secret of the fact that, had he not learned to experience a profound distrust of the female sex, he would have claimed the hand of the goddess in marriage. Yet one of the clay of William Jordan was not permitted to prostrate himself in the earth before her.

Research among the modern authors afforded him neither light nor healing; and in this dark hour he did not dare to carry his plaint to those of older growth. Indeed, his desertion of them for these lesser spirits had come to seem like an act of sedition. But soon a darker tragedy was to divert the channel of his thoughts.

XXX

One night, long after midnight had passed, the white-haired man, his father, said to him, “My beloved Achilles, hast thou the strength to contemplate a woeful calamity?”

The sound of the aged voice, as sorrowful as the autumn winds among the chimney-pots, caused the young man to lift his sunken eyes from the page upon which they lay.

“Is it, O my father,” he said, “that we are threatened with the most dire of all catastrophes?”

“Yes, my beloved,” said his father. “Indeed, the most dire of all catastrophes is consummated already. This is the morning of Monday. If--how shall I reveal it to thee, Achilles” (the anguish in the eyes of the old man was insupportable)--“if by Friday at noon we cannot obtain twenty pieces of gold for the price of our roof, we shall be driven forth of our little room, thou and I, beloved one, into the gross darkness of the streets of the great city.”

At first the young man’s mind was like a blank page, but all too soon it became susceptible to the words his father had uttered. “O my father!” he cried, “I have known these many days that Fate was devising some cruel and bloody trial for this craven’s heart.” And then, as a passionate horror swelled his veins, he cried, “This is the untold evil which all my life has lain upon my heart. I have such a bitter horror of the streets of the great city, my father, that I would prefer to embrace death.”

The face of the old man was like that of a corpse.

“Do I not know it, my beloved?” he said. “Was it not these loins that imbued this horror in thy tender veins? Yet Fate has spoken; only one thing remains unto us.”

“What is this thing, my father?”

“We can but pray for a miracle to happen.”

“Ah, my father,” said the young man in a hoarse, croaking whisper, “miracles do not happen.”

“The modern authors have declared it thus in their books,” said the white-haired man, his father, “but in the Book of the Ages is it not recorded otherwise?”

“Reveal to me the written words, my father, I beseech thee,” said the young man, with the eagerness of one who thirsts.

The aged man, his father, lifted the mighty tome from the shelf, and, opening it at a page that contained no writing, placed his finger thereupon.

“See, beloved one,” said the aged man, with a meek triumph in his faint eyes, “it is there written.”

The young man turned to the passage with the frenzy of one devoured by pangs.

“Why, my father,” he cried out, “there is nothing there. The page is empty. It is all dark to my gaze.”

“Nay, beloved one,” said his father. “It is written there in sober verity. I have conned the page a thousand times. Look again, beloved one, I beseech thee.”

Again the young man traversed the page with his gaunt eyes.

“Oh, gentle Zeus,” he cried in a terror that was piteous to behold, “the page is blank; it contains no writing. I am to be cast into the streets of the great city.”

The wretched young man sank to his knees in the little room, biting at his nails.

XXXI

Many hours passed ere the young man dared to meet this great horror that had come into his life. From the dawn of his earliest consciousness this dark shadow had lain in his thoughts. Yet never had they had the resolution to contemplate it. All his life he had seemed to know that such a contingency, should it ever befall, would be beyond his strength to endure.

As during this week of mental and moral eclipse he sought to prefigure what an existence upon the earth would mean without that sanctuary for the broken wayfarer, reason itself seemed to decline to accept the alternative. One night in the depths of his despair there crept into his brain a vision of the dark and mighty Thames, that noble symbol upon which he had so often gazed; and had the power of prayer remained to him, he would have sought the resolution to terminate within its cold bosom his vicissitudes upon the earth.

In the height, however, of this gross terror, his eyes beheld the aged man, his father, at the other side of the table, that guide and protector and strong hand in his youth. What was his own pass in comparison with that of one so frail and venerable? He himself, by virtue of the youth in his veins, was fitted to cope with the cruel and licentious hordes that thronged the streets of the great city; but this aged man, whose sap was dry, whose vigour had burnt itself out, in what manner could his white hairs accept the last stern decree of Fate?

He, too, throughout all his days had been sustained by that sanctuary. And now he was old he was to be cast into those remorseless streets which would deride his feebleness, assault his white hairs. The vision of his father, alone and without shelter in the streets of the great city, seemed to complete his own degradation. What manner of a man was he to give his thoughts to the river, when circumstance had made its first imperious call upon him? He who had lain under the protection of a father all his days, must, now that he had obtained the estate of manhood, become himself the protector of one who was old.

It was with the hurry of a great cowardice that he turned to the ancient authors to ask his course. Their reply was unanimous and uncompromising; yet to one of his cast of nature it was almost cynical. He must act. He who could hardly thread his way through the crowd of street-persons, whose lightest utterance, whose smallest resolve was a pretext for the mockery of all who pressed around him and trampled him with their feet, must gird his loins.

When he recalled what he had already endured in his strivings to fulfil the simplest offices, which his Olympian companions performed automatically, the blood within him flowed as water. Yet if he failed to procure twenty pieces of gold by next Friday at noon, his aged father would be cast to the mercy of the streets.

Every instant that he passed now seemed to increase his impotence. He should be doing, acting; yet he was pasting labels on parcels, or he was sitting in frantic self-communion in the little room. He was wasting hours of ineffable price. “Action, Action, Action!” cried the ancient authors eternally in his ears; “if you fail to act immediately, O Achilles, you will commit the most sacred and venerable form in the world to the pavements of the great city.” Yet there he still sat in the little room with the pall still upon his heart and his brain.

At the other side of the table sat the aged man, his father, ever reading in the Book of the Ages. With the childlike simplicity of his many years on the earth, he had sat him down to wait for a miracle to happen. What a heroic resolution and fortitude was required to do that! Yet those faint eyes could read all that was written in the Book of the Ages--perhaps as the reward of their heroic constancy, or perhaps as the cause of it.

Yet it was not for him to sit down in simple faith and wait for a miracle to happen, for the once potent belief of this craven’s heart had been plucked out ruthlessly. It was not for him to summon that ineffable courage, which, as the frail barque is engulfed in the waves, can regard the cold sea as though it were the dry land. During the phase upon which he was now entered he had no belief in himself. Formerly when he resolved to accomplish the most trivial tasks, yet failed lamentably to do so, he was ever Achilles. But now--what was he now? He was less than a worm writhing through mire.

No, miracles did not happen to those like himself. On the evening of the Wednesday in that fatal week he felt he could not return to the little room to stretch his faint resolution once more upon the rack. Therefore he wandered aimlessly up and down the streets of the great city. And in the course of his wanderings he came at last to the river. As he came to the quiet bridge on which the lamps were flickering through the chill, rainy darkness, the Thames at full tide gurgled beneath. Gazing down at these stealthy, all-effacing waters, an irresistible impulse overcame him. It became essential that one who was less than nothing should return to nothingness. By what right did such impotence breathe the noble mountain airs of Olympus? The sun, the rain, the sweet earth, the clement skies were for those who could outface the tempest. The dreadful dark water, which he feared so much, was drawing him. It was exercising an occult power upon him.

Almost involuntarily, almost without realizing his act, he began to climb out on to the parapet of the bridge. There was a faint vision of his aged father at the back of his thoughts, but now the rudderless vessel was caught by the forces of nature.

As with a mechanical reluctance his feet left the pavement of the bridge, the sight of the water caused him to shiver dismally. But the magnetism lurking in its dark, yet lustrous surface, was a hundred times more powerful than that will which was so inert in his flesh. It was ordained, however, that his feet should not descend to the parapet. For as they were still poised in mid-air, the first stroke of the hour came booming across the way from the cathedral.

It was a calm voice, before which even the darkness seemed to yield. In the same involuntary fashion in which he had climbed out on to the parapet, he returned to the security of the pavement. The sense of his destiny had been restored to him. He was again Achilles. Shuddering in every vein, he staggered through the mire of the roadway to the precincts of the national Valhalla, in which reposed the souls of heroes.