Part 8

It still wanted a few minutes to seven by the stolid face that peered at him from across the street, when his devout patience and his simple faith met with their reward. Just as he had foreseen, a heavy dray drawn by a great horse came rattling round the corner of the cathedral. As it neared the warehouse on the steps of which he sat, it began to slow up. Yes, never a doubt about it, it was coming to stand under the creaking piece of iron above his head, the crane dangling from the second storey.

This dray stopped precisely as the other one had done at the other warehouse. In a precisely similar fashion the drayman cast the reins loose on the great horse’s neck. Again the drayman stood up and called unintelligible words into the second storey. The door opened as before; the crane began to squeak and grunt; the box hung suspended in mid-air. Swinging and rotating it descended to the drayman’s arms. And then just as before the mighty animal began to prance.

With his heart beating as though it would break him in pieces the boy rose from the bottom step of the warehouse. He pressed his hands to his sides. “Courage, Achilles!” he muttered under his breath, “Courage, Achilles!”

The great horse still pranced. The man on the dray shouted a horrible oath. With flaming eyes and cheeks of death the boy dragged his faint limbs to the kerb. As he came near the great animal, and he beheld its scarlet nostrils and huge and wicked eyes, he knew it for a monster of fable that could turn him to stone with its glance. A chill stole through his veins. He extended his hands towards the great horse. His eyes were filled with a dreadful rushing darkness. He felt himself swaying with a kind of sick impotence; it was as though the hand of fate had maimed him.

“Lay ’old of his head, can’t yer?” the brutal voice of the man on the dray percolated to his ears. “What are yer lookin’ at ’im for?”

The great horse lifted its hoofs; the boy reeled back with the face of a corpse.

“Mind he don’t eat yer,” said a quiet voice at his side.

A second small and ragged urchin, far less in stature than himself and half his years, calmly took hold of the great horse by the near rein, shook it, struck the animal on the neck very boldly, and proceeded to back it just as the other urchin had done.

“Nah then, worrer yer mean by it?” he said, scolding it in a shrill voice like a woman would an infant.

The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour.

In a strange anguish of the spirit, which he had never felt before, the boy staggered away from the warehouse into the ever-gathering shadows of the great city. He did not know where he was. He did not know what he did. He was in the enfolding grasp of an unknown power; he was in the bosom of the gods.

Without apprehension, and without reason, he was borne through the maze of cabs, vans and omnibuses to the other side of the street. He clutched feebly at the chill iron railings that formed a girdle round the cathedral. A bell seemed to be tolling. It filled his heart with voices. An occult force, which had never grasped him till this hour, began to draw this broken wayfarer seeking for sanctuary towards the unknown.

He issued back to a frail sense of entity to find himself on the steps of the cathedral. He saw lights; he smelt warmth; he heard remote and strange music; he heard the hushed clamour of many voices. He was in a vast place echoing yet domeless. He was on his knees pressing his temples against the cold marble flags.

The deep voice of the organ filled the warmed air with a thousand vibrations. Afar off were bright-burning candles and solemn songs. He pressed his temples closer to the chill flags. He panted like a hunted deer.

Hours later, when he staggered out of the enervating warmth of the cathedral, the night was pitch dark. The chill airs of the evening made his jaws clap together. He did not know where he was. Moving with little tottering steps, his flesh as water, his eyes blind with night, he followed the line of railings that engirdled the cathedral. He clutched at them; he hugged them blindly to his bosom; he was like a mariner in uncharted seas who has lost his compass. He followed the course of the railings, dragging one foot after another almost as one who is bereft of the power of volition. It took him nearly an hour to complete the circuit of the railings, and then he found himself back again at the point whence he had started, the steps of the cathedral.

Still clinging to the railings he started to go round them again. Within him the instinct was paramount that if he did not keep his faint limbs in motion he was lost. He would perish in the streets of the great city. Passing each iron rail in its turn through his numb hands he went on and on, and in the process of time returned again whence he started to the steps of the cathedral.

For the third time he set out to traverse the line of the railings. He was very cold. Yet the flesh must continue to obey, or that nameless destination which he had ceased to remember would never be won. As before, railing by railing, he made the circuit, and for the third time returned whence he started. Without an instant’s tarrying he set out again. The impassive face upon the cathedral boomed the hour of midnight. The dark heavens looked like Erebus. A sharp cold spray of rain was dashed suddenly upon his cheeks.

This blessed succour seemed to give him a flicker of power. “Courage, Achilles!” he muttered faintly. He could not feel his feet as they crept over the wet pavements; they seemed to be poised in the jaws of an abyss. His form seemed to be disembodied in the air of the night. But the flesh was still making its answer; the unending procession of the railings still continued to slide through his hands. Yet his fingers could feel nothing. How soft and vague everything was growing! A delicious softness had begun to creep out of the sharp airs of the night.

As his eyes were closing he grew conscious that a pair of arms were enfolding him.

“My father,” he muttered, “my father.”

He pressed his closed eyes against a garment which was wet yet protective. He was lying against his father’s bosom. His father had followed in his steps as he set out in the morning, and had never been more than fifty yards from him during the whole of the day.

XII

The next day the boy returned to the study of the practical sciences under his father’s guidance. The brief hour of self-reliance, of actual motive power, seemed to pass almost as suddenly as it had come. Yet although he had been ground down into the dust again, the sap and fibre had appeared to increase in his frame. He went alone no more into the streets of the great city in search of pieces of silver, but the need of obtaining them by his own address was never absent from his thoughts.

One sultry evening of midsummer, when he returned to the little room after a dusty and stifling pilgrimage about the streets in his father’s company in the pursuit of knowledge, he said with an air of mournful conviction, “Each day makes it more clear to me, my father, that if once our store of silver pieces should fail us, we shall lose this little room of ours. Every time I walk abroad in the great city I see numbers and numbers of these poor street-persons whose sad faces tell me that they have lost their little rooms.”

His father, although he would have sought to deny this assertion, was yet not able to do so.

Indoors and out of doors the boy pursued his studies with a most vigilant constancy. He read the newspaper daily, and committed portions of it to memory. And he accompanied his father all about the streets of the great city. He accompanied him into the most inaccessible places, using his ears and eyes faithfully. And at last, it occurred to him that if there was no place for him in the universal scheme in his capacity as a “bright boy,” a special dispensation might permit him to enter some other sphere of usefulness. For example, in one of the advertisement columns of the newspaper he had observed that in addition to cooks, clerks, office boys, coachmen, commercial travellers, hairdressers’ assistants, and laundryman’s apprentices, who were required by various people, there was also a handy youth wanted by Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square. Apply by Letter.

“Would you say, my father,” he inquired anxiously, “that I have credentials to fulfil the capacity of a handy youth? I am eighteen years and twelve days old; I can wash and scour the utensils in which we cook our food; I can make the fire and polish the hearthstone, and also the fire-grate; I can cleanse the bricks of the floor. And, my father, I can remove the dust from the chimney-piece; and I constantly dust and arrange the books in the shop. Would you say it would be presumptuous to offer myself in the capacity of a handy youth?”

“I think, beloved one, you are quite competent to take this course,” said his father sadly, “if you can find the courage.”

“I think I can find the courage, my father, if you will help me a little,” said the boy, with his bright eyes gleaming out of his gaunt cheeks.

They knelt together in the little room.

That evening the boy took pen, ink, note-paper and envelope, and with infinite pains composed his first letter. In a very dainty and delicately-written hand it ran as follows--

“To Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.

“GENTLEMEN,

“It is my aspiration to serve you in the capacity of a handy youth. Should you deem me worthy of your trust, it shall be my constant aim to render myself worthy of it.

“I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, your obedient and respectful servant,

“WILLIAM JORDAN (the younger).”

He showed this composition to his father, who approved it in silence. Then he stole out all alone into the darkness with an almost breathless secrecy and confided it to a letter-box in the street.

Such an adventure as this had the power to tantalize and excite him. When he sought the ancient authors as a refuge from the insurgency of his thoughts, his mind could no longer feel the spell of their magic pages.

“I pray that the postman will carry the letter to its true destination, my father,” he said anxiously.

“It is on the knees of the gods, Achilles,” said the white-haired man.

XIII

By an odd fatality the postman did carry the letter to its true destination, and on the evening of the following day his peculiar tap was heard at the letter-box on the door of the shop.

Pale with excitement, the boy rose from his book.

“A letter!” he cried. “There is something here in my heart, O my father, that tells me it is from Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.”

He groped his way through the darkness of the shop, and placed his hand in the letter-box on the outer door. Yes, there was a letter. As he bore it to the light of the little room, it seemed to sear his fingers. It was addressed to “Mr. William Jordan, Junior, 43 Milton Street, E.C.” On the back of the envelope was stamped “Crumpett and Hawker, Publishers, 24 Trafalgar Square.”

He tore the letter out of its envelope. His heart seemed to stand still. The letter said--

“Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker will be obliged if William Jordan, Junior, will wait upon them to-morrow (Wednesday) morning at twelve o’clock.”

After pressing his lips to this typewritten communication he gave it to his father.

“There, my father,” he said, with a devout simplicity, “I knew it would be so; it was written in my destiny.”

His father read the letter, and handed it back to him. He could not find a word to speak; neither did he direct a glance at the exalted face.

Presently they knelt again together in the little room.

That night of all nights it was not to be expected that the boy would close his eyes. As he lay in his bed with his gaze ever reciprocating the curious brightness of the stars, he speculated at times on what the morrow would bring forth; at other times he reviewed the sum total of his knowledge in the practical sciences. He composed carefully, word by word, the phrases he must use on the morrow to Messrs. Crumpett and Hawker; he rehearsed in a soft voice, with his rapt eyes ever fixed on the fragment of the empyrean that shone through the curtainless window, in spite of the gables and chimney-stacks which tried so hard to shut it out, the manner in which these words must be spoken. In the middle of the night, as the clocks were chiming three, he rose from his bed, and walked about the darkness with bare feet and clad only in his night-gown, muttering in his gentle voice as he clenched his hands, “Courage, Achilles!”

At five o’clock he rose and put on his clothes. Descending the stairs he cleaned the fire-grate, made the fire, whitened the hearthstone, and scrubbed the floor of the little room. Then in a vain endeavour to allay his excitement he read some of the pages of the ancient authors that he cherished most. At the breakfast hour he refused a delicate piece of bread-and-butter that his father cut for him, but drank a copious draught of milk. At nine o’clock he requested his father to accompany him to have his hair cut.

No sooner, however, had they come to the end of the street than the boy suddenly stayed his steps.

“No, no, my father,” he said, with a look that was almost imperious. “I would have you return to the shop. This day I must walk alone.”

“As you will, Achilles,” said his father, turning upon his heel.

An instant later, however, the white-haired man had turned again to watch the frail figure cross the street and enter a hairdresser’s shop.

XIV

At eleven o’clock the boy set out for No. 24 Trafalgar Square. During the small hours of that morning his scheme of action had been planned to the most minute detail, but so weak is the human character even in the highest moments of its resolve, that on the very threshold of this enterprise, which the boy knew to be the foremost of his life, he departed in an almost wanton manner from this programme upon which he had spent all the powers of his mind.

His visit to the hairdresser; the triumphant effrontery with which he had asked for his locks to be shorn; the calm fortitude with which he had submitted to that searching and public operation; the self-contained manner in which he had given the hairdresser street-person a large piece of silver for his great kindness and courtesy, all these achievements had conspired to imbue him with a valour, which at the very outset of his venture was destined to lead him into an unwarrantable, an almost foolhardy course.

At the corner of Milton Street, at its juncture with an extremely busy thoroughfare which he would be compelled to traverse, there was a recognized halting place for those wonderful vehicles called omnibuses. At this corner it was their custom to discharge and to accept passengers.

As he came to the corner an omnibus, painted a bright yellow, chanced to be standing there. At the sight of it, inflamed with a valour that was almost insolent and without pausing to reflect upon what his act involved, he walked, almost with vainglory, straight into the ’bus. Never before had he dared to enter one alone; such a deed was far from being contemplated by that programme to which he was pledged to adhere; but he had cast the die before he had reflected upon his recklessness, and like an authentic hero in an entrancing tale he was being drawn by two stout, but comely horses to No. 24 Trafalgar Square.

When the conductor came round for the fares he said to him in a voice that was a little timid in spite of its boldness, “W-will y-you p-please stop the omnibus at No. 24 Trafalgar Square.”

“Don’t go to Trafalgar Square,” said the conductor curtly. “Charing Cross Station.”

This was dreadfully unexpected.

“W-would y-you m-mind asking the h-horses to stop, if y-you p-p-please,” he stammered.

“Can’t yer jump off?” said the conductor sharply.

“Oh n-n-no,” said the boy.

“S-s-stop where you are then,” said the conductor.

A girl seated opposite began to titter audibly. The other passengers were content with furtive smiles.

After the lapse of a few minutes, which seemed as long as eternity, the driver stopped the horses of his own accord. The boy jumped out of the ’bus. The conviction was upon him already that he would not be at Trafalgar Square by twelve o’clock. He looked wildly about the dense throng in which he found himself. Where was he? He had lost his bearings completely. If he were not at 24 Trafalgar Square by twelve o’clock his hopes would be shattered for ever. The thought of the little room rendered him desperate. Yet what could he do? He looked up at a clock over a jeweller’s shop. It was already twenty-five minutes past eleven. Only thirty-five minutes more and it would be all over. All his assurance was gone; and he did not know where he was. Yet before he started he had planned everything perfectly. He had looked out the way from Milton Street on a map of the great city; he had committed every street and turning of the route to memory.

However, the street in which he stood was not unfamiliar. Yes, he had been in it several times with his father. It was called--it was called the Strand. Yet he did not know what was its proximity to Trafalgar Square. He had now no knowledge of where it lay, now that by entering the omnibus he had wantonly forfeited all the sense of locality he had acquired. Yet he knew that Square so well. It was there that he had spent so many delectable hours lately in a noble building, gazing at the wonderful pictures of the ancient painters. He looked up at a street corner, and saw the name Craven Street, and then he looked again at the remorseless hands of the clock. How was it possible to get from Craven Street to Trafalgar Square in half-an-hour? What could he do? The road was a maze of obscurity. The programme had passed entirely out of his mind.

All at once, however, he was touched by inspiration. He knew all about cabs! And they were recalled to his mind by the sight of a number of these vehicles standing a few yards away in a row behind some railings. They were in a place where the traffic made a veritable whirlpool; and he remembered that he had noted that place before, and that his father had told him it was the entrance to Charing Cross railway station.

Yes, he knew all about cabs; his father with marvellous foresight had instructed him in that branch of education. And he had said to him, “Whenever you lose your way in the great city, be sure that you ask one of those cab-driver street-persons to take you to your destination.” There and then the boy felt in his pockets, because he knew that this hazardous but necessary undertaking could only be accomplished by the aid of pieces of silver.

Before he had set out on his great adventure, his father had given him ten pieces of silver. These he now produced and counted carefully. Then having assured himself that he was furnished with the necessary means, he set out to reach the row of cabs. With a supreme effort of the will he dismissed from his thoughts all the frightful risks that he incurred, and plunged recklessly into the mighty stream that had to be navigated ere he could reach the row of cabs. But dire necessity armed him with strange valour.

As he emerged from the whirlpool breathless, but still alive, into the presence of the row of cabs, he accosted with heart violently beating the foremost of the cab-driver street-persons, who stood at the door of his vehicle eating his mid-day meal out of a piece of newspaper.

“I-if y-you p-please, I w-will g-give you these t-ten p-pieces of s-silver--sh-shillings, you know,” he said, sick with anxiety, “if you will take me in your c-cab to No. 24 Trafalgar Square by t-twelve o’clock.”

With eyes of entreaty the boy held out his hand to the cab-driver street-person, and lying on its open palm were the ten pieces of silver.

The cab-driver street-person’s first act was to look very solemnly at the pieces of silver, and then at the boy with equal solemnity. Then with a solemnity which seemed to transcend either of these actions, he transferred each of the pieces of silver without undignified haste, nor yet with churlish reluctance, to his own somewhat grimy palm.

“C-can y-you do it?” said the boy hoarsely, “or are the minutes too few; is the time too little?”

By this, as if attracted by the mien of the cab-driver street-person, several of his companions had come about him.

“Can I do it, Captain?” said the cab-driver street-person slowly and more solemnly than ever as he looked at his companions, and balanced a large piece of cheese very thoughtfully on the end of a clasp-knife. “We’ll make no promises, Captain, but we’ll try.”

“Oh y-yes, p-please,” said the boy, “d-do t-try.”

“The old hoss don’t purtend to be a flyer, you know, Captain,” said the cab-driver street-person, as he wrapped up the remainder of his meal in the newspaper in a fashion so leisurely that the boy could hardly endure it; “at least not these days, although in his prime he ran second in the Cesarewitch, but there’s no saying what he can do when he tries.”

The cab-driver street-person climbed to his perch as the boy was assisted into the interior of the vehicle by two other cab-driver street-persons who ensconced him therein, and closed the door upon him as though he were a pearl of price. They then stood to await the fruit of their labours with an air of expectancy that was quite politely dissembled.

“I suppose, Joe,” said one of the driver’s confrères, with a solemnity that was in nowise inferior to that of the man on the box, “you’ll go by the Suez Canal and Himalayer Mountains route, what?”

“Yuss,” said the driver as the hansom moved off slowly, “if the old hoss will stand to the scenery. If he ain’t taking any it will have to be _viâ_ Mentone and the Lake o’ Geneva.”