One day the boy discovered that a small brown volume, the Phaedo of
Plato, had disappeared from one of the shelves in the shop.
“I bartered it yesterday, beloved one, in exchange for seven shillings
and sixpence in silver,” said his father in reply to his inquiries.
This unexpected and disconcerting answer made many anxious questions
necessary.
“Why, my father, for what reason?” said the boy.
“In order to provide the means of life, beloved one,” said his father.
“The means of life, my father?” said the boy.
“The food we eat,” said his father. “Our clothes, the roof that
protects us, the coals for the fire in the winter months.”
“Are all these things obtained with pieces of silver, my father?”
“Yes, beloved. We are called upon to pay in substance for all that we
enjoy.”
The boy grew profoundly silent for a while.
“Does that mean, my father,” he said at last, in a choking voice, “that
because we enjoy this little room of ours, we purchase the priceless
hours we spend in it by pieces of silver--you and me?”
“Truly,” said his father.
“And yet, my father,” said the boy, “I have no pieces of silver of
my own except those you used to give me when I went forth into the
streets of the great city to the school. Neither have I books of my
own to yield in exchange for pieces of silver. Can you tell me in what
manner I must gain these things? You know, my father,” he added very
anxiously, “it may befall that this little room might one day be taken
away from me, as it once was before, if I do not obtain some pieces of
silver of my own.”
“There is but one means of obtaining pieces of silver, beloved one,”
said his father mournfully, “and that is by going forth to seek them in
the streets of the great city.”
The boy was smitten with stupefaction by these words. They were charged
with an import that he did not know how to sustain. But at least they
caused a cloud to dissolve which had long pervaded his mind.
“I see, I see,” he said weakly; “now it is that I understand, my
father, what all these street-persons are doing when they walk so
furiously up and down the streets of the great city. They are seeking
for pieces of silver.”
“Yes, beloved,” said his father.
“And it is for that reason that they look so fierce and so cruel, my
father. They know that if they don’t find some pieces of silver their
little rooms will be taken away from them.”
“Yes, beloved one,” said his father.
“How unhappy they must be, my father, those persons in the streets of
the great city,” said the boy. “We ought to give them our pity instead
of our fear and our hatred. But”--his voice seemed to perish--“does it
not mean, my father, that I also must go forth once more into the great
city and become a person in the streets?”
As he framed this sinister question he peered into his father’s eyes
with a look of entreaty, as though he besought him not to answer in the
manner that he feared to be inevitable.
“You have spoken truly, Achilles,” said his father gently.
The words of his father seemed to embody a sentence of death. His
father perceived in what manner he was stricken.
“You see, beloved one,” he said, holding the slight frame against his
bosom, “nothing whatever can be obtained in this world which for a term
we are doomed to inhabit, except by the medium of pieces of silver.
The food that sustains us, the clothes that shield us, the roof that
defends us, can only be purchased by pieces of silver. Even these
heroes, whom you and I consider the first among created things, had to
collect many pieces of silver before they could acquire the materials,
and the leisure to perform their most signal acts.”
“And, my father,” said the boy, “had they not always to have their
little rooms in which to read the ancient authors and to seek their
knowledge?” He shuddered with a kind of passion. “Yes, indeed, I must
go out into the streets of the great city and find some pieces of
silver,” he said.
X
The boy was visited by little sleep that night and for many nights to
follow. The necessity of adventuring forth again into those streets,
the recollection of which ever haunted him like a diabolical vision,
was at first more than he could endure. Many were the attempts he made
to fare forth yet again, but on every occasion he would turn back all
stricken by distress after essaying less than a hundred yards. Yet
at each failure the stern need of conquering this deplorable frailty
would address him like a passion; and sometimes with a sense of dire
humiliation he would be moved to take counsel of his father.
“How, my father, can I make myself obey myself?” was a question he
asked many times.
It was not until his father had pondered deeply on this subject that
he vouchsafed a reply. And then at last he said, “I fear, beloved,
that in your present phase there is only one answer I can give to
your question. I fear it will be necessary for you to obtain a little
knowledge in the practical sciences before the power will be furnished
for you to move out in courage and security into the streets of the
great city. Beloved, we will devote a whole year to this study, and we
will conduct it together.”
During that evening, to the boy’s astonishment, his father went out
into the street and brought back a newspaper, an article the boy had
never seen in his hand before.
“This is the Alpha and the Omega, beloved one, of that strange world
whose mysteries you deem it to be your duty to penetrate,” said his
father, with his secret and beautiful smile.
From that time forward the boy’s evenings were no longer given up to
desultory readings in the ancient authors. He bestowed many painful and
irksome hours upon the newspaper; and these would have been intolerable
had not his labours had the sanction of his father’s patient
exposition. Day by day its most obscure mysteries were unfolded to him.
Yet the more knowledge he acquired the greater his repugnance became.
“I hate it! I hate it!” he cried sometimes, with tears in his eyes.
There was another means also by which his father sought to increase
his knowledge of the practical sciences. He would accompany him daily
into the streets at all hours of the morning, afternoon and evening. He
made him familiar with many labyrinths among the highways and byways
of the great city. He gave him an insight into many obscure methods of
acquiring pieces of silver. He would denote the character of individual
persons as they passed by; and above all, he strove to make the boy
familiar with the language that was in daily use about him, and with
the plane of ideas of those who used it.
In the course of one of these daily lessons his father pointed out a
boy kneeling at the edge of the pavement with a box before him, some
brushes and a pot of blacking.
“That boy, beloved one,” said his father, “maintains his place in the
scheme by removing the mud from the boots of the passers-by. Observe
him now cleansing those of the man in the tall bright hat. For so doing
he will be rewarded with a small piece of silver, and with that piece
of silver he will obtain food and a roof for his head.”
“I don’t understand, my father, I don’t understand,” said the boy in
deep perplexity. “If the man in the tall bright hat gives away to
others the pieces of silver he possesses because he is too proud to
bear a little mud on his boots, how can he obtain food for himself, and
how can he sustain the little room in which he dwells?”
“We will follow in the footsteps of that man,” said his father, “and
seek to find out the means by which he gains his own pieces of silver
in such profusion.”
For many weeks the boy’s education in the practical sciences was
conducted in this fashion; and although at first he lived in a state of
deep perplexity, and was often overcome by the feeling that he would
never find a key to these bewildering enigmas that made up the life of
the great world out of doors, which now for some inscrutable purpose
he was called upon to enter, perseverance, study and devout patience
furnished him at last with some kind of reward.
Not less than two years of concentrated effort was necessary ere the
boy began to make real progress in the least subtle of the astonishing
complexities of that potent civilization of the West as evolved in
the latter days of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. But
as one slight piece of knowledge after another rewarded his intense
application, he seemed to derive some ground of certainty from his
successes, so that by the time he was nearly eighteen years of age he
had pieced together these hard-won fragments of experience in such
numbers that they wove themselves into a kind of fabric of lucid ideas.
Endowed with this basis upon which to stand, he felt the hour to be
at hand when the courage and the capacity would be his to make some
sort of an entrance into the life of men and things, in the actual and
visible out-of-doors world.
One evening he said to his father with an almost proud air:
“To-morrow, my father, I intend to put to the test all this knowledge
that has come to me during my many days of study--that is, of course,
my father, if you think I speak the language well enough.”
“Yes, beloved one,” said his father, with a mournfulness which was in
strange contrast with the exaltation of his own mood. “I think by now
you speak the language well enough to do so.”
“And I am growing very learned in the newspaper, am I not, my father?”
he said almost joyfully, for although in his heart he still loathed
the newspaper, the sense of achievement in being able to read and to
understand the less inscrutable of its mysteries was very high.
“Yes, beloved one,” said his father, “I consider your progress is
wonderful.”
“I observe, my father,” said the boy proudly, “that according to the
newspaper we purchased this morning--no, no, that is not the true way
of speaking--no, I meant merely to say that according to this morning’s
paper, ‘a bright boy is wanted at No. 12, Webster’s Buildings in the
City.’ It is my purpose, my father, to present myself at No. 12,
Webster’s Buildings in the City to-morrow morning at the hour of nine.”
“This is indeed Achilles,” said his father. He peered wistfully at the
wan cheeks now brilliant with the excitement of resolve.
“If you will embrace me, my father,” said the boy, “I will go now to my
chamber all alone by myself. I am grown so powerful with the knowledge
I have gained that I feel as if I may do almost anything.”
The white-haired man took the frail form into his embrace.
“I beseech you,” he said, as he held him in his arms, “not to demand
too much of the strength that Nature has lent you. I would urge you
not to go out among the life of the great city if you have a single
misgiving.”
“I have not a single misgiving, my father,” said the boy. “I am able
to read and to write and to speak the English tongue. I know how to
ask the con--the conductor to stop the horses of the omnibus. I can do
sums--compound fractions. I am acquainted with most of the streets in
the great city. Have I not walked therein alone several times?”
“Well, well, Achilles,” said his father softly, “if you have really
made up your mind!”
“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.”