II

When at last the morning brought its grey light the boy set out with

his father into the streets of the great city. Amid the dun-coloured

wilderness through which he passed, amid the labyrinth of dread

thoroughfares in which noise, dirt, and confusion seemed to contend,

he grasped his father’s hand in the fear of his heart. The rattle of

horses and carts, the mud-flinging hoofs and the cries of the drivers,

the vigour and rudeness of the street-persons by whom he was hustled,

filled him with a dire consternation. Yet beyond all that he suffered

in this way, which was no more than a little personal inconvenience

after all, was the fear, permanent, overmastering and intense, that

never would his father and he be able to retrace their steps to that

tiny refuge which they had left so lately, which now seemed so far

away that they could never hope to win their way back. How could they

hope to retrace their steps among that ever-surging sea of streets and

houses and faces and vehicles? Once as he was submerged in a whirlpool

that was formed by the meeting of four main arteries of traffic, and

was compelled to wait until a strangely clad street-person, who wore a

helmet like Minerva, stopped, by the magic process of holding up his

hand, the unending procession of carts and horses to enable his father

and himself and a swarm of street-persons, who pressed upon his heels

and trod upon his toes, to pass to that debatable land across the way,

which looked so full already that it could not yield space for another

living soul, he held his father’s hand convulsively and said in a voice

of despair: “I feel sure, my father, we shall never win our way back to

our little room.”

In point of actual time this journey was not more than half-an-hour,

yet it formed such a highly wrought experience, that to the boy it

seemed to transcend and even to efface all that had previously happened

in the placid term of his existence. At last it came to an end in

a succession of quiet streets that led to a gloomy square, which,

although very forbidding of aspect, was almost peaceful. The houses

in it, tall and stately and austere, had a row of steep stone steps

furnished with iron railings. It was one of these rows he ascended; and

his father knocked with a boldness that seemed superhuman at a very

stern-looking front door.

After a brief period of waiting in which it seemed to the boy that

he must be choked by the violent beatings of his heart, the door was

opened by an old woman, equally stern of aspect, who asked their

business in a gruff voice. The boy’s father said something to her which

the boy was too excited to comprehend, whereupon she conducted them

into a dark passage filled with bad air, and left them there while she

went to inquire if they would be received by him they sought. Presently

she returned to lead them to his presence.

In a room at the end of the long passage, which seemed to grow darker

and darker at every step they took, they found a very aged man. In

appearance he was not unlike a faun. His eyes were sunken far in his

cheeks, and they seemed to be faded like those of the blind. His

features were so lean that they looked almost spectral; his tall frame

and long limbs were warped with feebleness; and the boy noticed that

his hands had red mittens to keep them warm. His head, which was of

great nobility, was bald at the top, yet the lower part was covered by

hair that was even whiter than that of the boy’s father, and so long

that it came down upon his shoulders.

This venerable figure sat at a table before a fire in a dark and sombre

room, which faced the north and smelt of ink. Maps were on the walls;

here and there were scattered books; there was a globe on a tripod;

while blackboards, charts and desks abounded in all the panoply of

education. The old school-master was ruling lines in a ciphering-book

with the gravest nicety; while at his back the fire was shedding its

glow on a coat which use had rendered green, ragged and threadbare.

When the boy and his father came into his presence, the aged man,

although stricken with painful infirmity, rose to his feet and welcomed

them with a beautiful courtesy.

“I cannot expect you to remember me, sir,” said the boy’s father, with

a simplicity that was a little timorous.

The aged school-master approached quite close to the boy’s father; in

his faded eyes was a peering intentness.

“You must give me a minute to think, if you please,” he quavered in a

low voice, which in the ears of the boy had the effect of music. “Now

that I am old, my memory, of which I have always been vain, is the

first to desert me. If you are one of my scholars I shall recall you,

for it is my boast that each of my scholars has graven a line in the

tablets of my mind.”

Of a sudden the aged school-master gave a cry of joy.

“Why--why!” he exclaimed, “it must be William Jordan.”

He held out both his hands to the boy’s father with an eagerness that

was like a child’s, and the boy saw that his eyes, which a moment since

were destitute of meaning, had now the pregnant beauty of an ancient

masterpiece.

“O that the hour should be at hand,” said the old man, “when I should

cease to recall William Jordan!”

The old man seemed to avert his face from that of the boy’s father in a

kind of dismay; and his voice pierced the boy with an emotion that he

had never felt before.

“It is thirty years since you saw me last,” said the boy’s father.

“In the flesh as an eager-faced young man,” said the school-master.

“But every night as I sit by the fire, I summon William Jordan to

lead the pageant of my experience. When my spirit is like clay you

stand before it, the first among the valiant, so subtle yet so brave.

When this generation, which is so restless, so brilliant, so full of

vitality, seems to tell me that I am but a survival of a phase which

now is nought, I say to it, ‘So be it, my children, but where is the

William Jordan among you? I would have you show me his peer before I

yield.’”

The boy, whose nature was like the strings of some miraculous

instrument which are not only susceptible to the slightest human touch,

but are also responsive to the delicate waves in the air, knew that

some strange emotion was overwhelming his father, although none could

have perceived it but himself.

“My dear old master,” said the boy’s father, with an indescribable

melancholy, “it is the old voice--the old voice that we loved to hear.

And it is the old courage--the old incomparable suit of mail.”

“A school-master’s courage should increase as he grows old, I think,”

said the old man, whose voice was like a harp. “It is true his age is

menaced by all the noble energies he has failed to mould; by all the

expenditure of spirit, by all the devout patience he has lavished upon

them, which have come to no harvest; but is it not by giving our all

without hope of a requital that in the end teaches us to accept our

destiny?”

The boy’s father stood like a statue before his old preceptor.

“Master, your voice overcomes me,” he said. “But it is just, it is

perfectly just that I should live to hear it sound reproachful in my

ears.”

“I do not reproach you, dear Isocrates,” said the old man, with the

exquisite humility that is only begotten by wisdom. “Or if my words

have chidden you it is that there is an echo in yourself. Isocrates

was ever your name among us. We cannot order our destiny; we can only

fulfil it.”

“I was one of great projects,” said the boy’s father.

“Him whom I recall had ambition burning in his veins like a chemical,”

said the old man.

“Yes, master,” said the boy’s father, with a curious simplicity, “but

on a day he tasted the poppy that perished the red blood in his veins.

From that hour he could never be what he promised. The strength was

taken from his right hand.”

An expression of pain escaped the lips of the aged school-master.

“I foresaw that peril,” he said. “I prayed for you continually,

Isocrates; and I would have forewarned you had I not feared the

catastrophe so much. It is the cardinal weakness of such as myself that

we fear even to gaze upon the vulnerable heel whereby the poisoned

arrow enters the powerful. False preceptor hast thou been, O Socrates,

to the young Plato!”

The aged man seemed all broken by the sudden anguish that shook his

feebleness. The boy’s father, in whose eyes the suffering of his former

preceptor was reflected, raised the senile fingers to his lips with

strange humility.

“All the devices of the pharmacopeia,” said the boy’s father, “could

not have kept the poison out of these weak veins, dear master. It is

one more act of wantonness that we must lay to the door of Nature.

For the poison was first compounded by the fermentation of those many

diverse and potent essences with which the blood was charged. It is

the curse of the age, master. It is the deadly gas exuded by the

putrefaction of what we have agreed to call ‘progress,’ which fuses

the nerves and the tissues into the incandescent fervour by which they

destroy themselves.”

“But only, Apollo, that there may be a nobler renascence.”

“We shall not heed it, master, when we lie with the worms.”

“Ah, no! Yet as we crouch by the fire on these cold winter evenings,

is it not well to wrap ourselves in the vision of all the undeveloped

glories in our midst? Is it not well for our minds to behold a William

Jordan brooding in his garret among all these millions of people who

will never learn his name? For thirty years have I been seeking that

treatise by which he is to establish Reason on its only possible basis.”

“Ah, dear master, philosophy is an anodyne for subtle minds,” said the

boy’s father.

“Were these your words, Isocrates, when you expounded to me that

wonderful synopsis on your twentieth birthday?”

“Philosophy is a narcotic which in the end destroys the cells of the

brain.”

“And poetry, my dear friend, what is poetry?”

“I have not the courage to define it, master.”

“Is this the language of despair, Isocrates?”

“It is the curse of the time, dear master,” said the boy’s father,

with wan eyes. “This terrible electrical machinery of the age which

grandiloquently we call Science, has ground our wits to a point so fine

that they pierce through the brave old faiths that once made us happy.

This William Jordan of whom you speak spent twenty years in his little

room seeking to establish Reason on its only possible basis. He planned

his ethic in I know not how many tomes. Each was to be a masterpiece of

courage, truth, and vitality; each was to be wrought of the life-blood

and fine flower of his manhood. He began his labour a powerful and

imperious young man; he passed the all-too-rapid years in his profound

speculations; and then he found himself inept and white-haired.”

“So then, after all, Isocrates, your ethic is embodied?” said the aged

man with the eager devoutness of the disciple.

The joy in the face of the old man was that of one who has long dreamed

of a treasure which at last is to be revealed to his gaze. His eyes

were about to feast on its peerless splendour, yet of a sudden his

hopes seemed to render him afraid. There might not be a sufficient heat

left in his veins to yield those intolerable pangs of rapture which

fuse with ecstasy the worship of the devotee.

“Let me see it,” he said. “The desires of my youth are returning upon

me. I must look upon it; I must press it to my bosom. I yearn to see

how my own strength in the heyday of its promise, in the passion of

its development, yet condemned to walk in chains, has yet been able to

vindicate the nobility of its inheritance. Show me your Ethic, beloved

Isocrates. I yearn to feast my eyes upon this latest blow for freedom

with the same intensity with which I fingered the yellow pages in which

I first found wisdom hiding her maiden chastity.”

The boy’s father met this entreaty with a gesture that seemed to pierce

the old man like a sword.

“Where is it?” he cried. “You will not deny one who is old the last of

his hopes!”

The boy’s father had the mien of a corpse.

“It is unwritten, master,” he said, in a voice that seemed to be no

louder than the croak of a frog. “When after twenty years of devout

preparation I took up the pen, I found that Nature had denied the

strength to my right hand.”

The old man recoiled from the gaze of the boy’s father with a cry of

dismay.

“I should have known it,” he said; and then, with strange humility,

“let us not reproach her, Isocrates; she, too, must obey the decree.”

“By which human sacrifice is offered on her altars,” said the boy’s

father, with a gaunt gaze. “What new abortion shall she fashion with

our blood and tears?”

“The issue of our loins,” said the aged man, with a kind of gentle

passion.

“In order that our humiliation may re-enact itself,” said the boy’s

father; “in order, dear master, that we may mock ourselves again.”

“Nay, Isocrates,” said the old man, “is it not written that if by our

fortitude we sustain the Dynasty to its appointed hour, Nature will

grant it a means to affirm itself?”

Speaking out of a simple faith the old man turned for the first time

to the boy, who, throughout this interview, had stood timidly at his

father’s side. The old faded eyes seemed to devour the delicate and

shrinking face of the child with their surmise. Suddenly he took the

boy by the hand.

“It is by this that the Dynasty will affirm itself,” said the old man,

enfolding the frail form in a kind of prophetic exaltation.

The boy’s father seemed to cower at these words of his old preceptor.

“My prophetic soul!” he cried. Horror appeared to scarify the wasted

features of the boy’s father.

The proud gladness of the well-remembered voice had seemed to break the

boy’s father; for those ears it was charged with mockery.

The old school-master, still smiling in the expression of his simple

faith, received his former pupil in his arms and took him to his bosom

with the ineffable tenderness by which a matron consoles a young girl.

The boy could not understand this painful scene which had been enacted

before him. He could form no conception of the manner in which two

natures had been wrung by their first meeting after thirty years. He

could only discern, and that very dimly, that this aged man bore a

similar relation to his father that his father bore to himself. The

voice, the look, the bearing of this old man, were precisely those with

which he himself was succoured when he awoke shuddering and bathed

in terror, and implored his father to strike a match to dispel the

phantasies which peopled the darkness of the night.