On the following day, during the luncheon hour, William Jordan, Junior,
was complimented upon his bearing at the party.
“I don’t mind telling you, Luney,” said Mr. Dodson, “that you were the
best-looking chap there. Young Davis thinks he was, but if he went to
the levée at Buckingham Palace he would think the same. No, Luney,
you were easily first; and if you could only get that mark off your
cheek you might marry money. And your behaviour was quite nice. If you
would only learn to hold your own a bit more, and not let chaps like
young Davis come it over you, you might do very well. You would never
be a shining light, you know; you haven’t got it in you; but you will
improve as you gain experience.”
Before that day was out, however, Mr. Dodson’s discourse was pitched
in another key. This occurred immediately after Mr. Dodson had paid a
visit to the refreshment buffet of the Brontë Hotel.
“What do you think, Luney?” said Mr. Dodson, with an air of whimsical
indignation which yet had a touch of the tragic; “Chrissie has taken
the hump. She says she regards it as a personal insult that my governor
should have sat down to supper in his uniform. She has broken it off.
She has returned this.”
“This” was a ring which Mr. Dodson exhibited with a countenance of
humorous rue. His mien was at once curiously enigmatic, yet quietly
comic. It seemed to imply that this true philosopher was not only
resigned to fate’s decree, but also, after the manner of the best
practitioners, he was prepared to derive profit and instruction
therefrom.
“I am in luck,” he said cheerfully; “it is a good and cheap get-out.
I ought to have known better, with all my experience. Yet I have got
a bit more, without having to pay for it either. Women are no good to
a rising man. I suppose young Davis will go in again now; I spoilt
his game, you know, my son. Well, he is welcome to her as far as I am
concerned. If he lands her he will have my sympathy.”
Having reviewed the situation with this wholly admirable breadth, the
eminent philosopher dismissed the subject from his thoughts with a calm
detachment that was not the least among his gifts.
Mr. James Dodson continued to extend his patronage and kindly interest
to that hopeless neophyte in the ways of the world, Mr. William Jordan,
Junior. On Easter Monday he took him to Margate, “to get a whiff of the
sea.”
It was with indescribable sensations that the young man beheld, for
the first time in his life, that free expanse, the eternal boundless
theatre of wondrous adventure and high-hearted enterprise. As upon
this historic day he came down to the seashore, swept by the shrewd
winds, yet bathed in the noble sunlight, and he saw the highway of the
gods that was spread before him like a waving plain of green jewels,
he astonished his companions by breaking forth into a curious cry of
rapture.
“What a lunatic he is!” they said, “to make all this fuss over the
sight of the sea.”
“A bit loose in the flats,” said Mr. John Dobbs, of the Alcazar Theatre.
When his companions chartered a boat, and he came to entrust himself to
it, he diverted them infinitely by the lively fear he displayed. Yet,
once abroad on the great green bay, his misgivings left him. He plucked
off his hat, that his temples might be bare to the shrewd salt airs
and the yellow-shining light of the sun, and his eyes beholding nothing
but the lapping waters and the wonderful sky which had never seemed so
near, he forgot for one glorious hour that he was the inhabitant of
cities, that an inexorable destiny had doomed him to be a street-person
all his days.
“This is the life of Odysseus,” he muttered; “this is the life of
Odysseus!”
As he dabbled his hands in the water his eyes were flooded suddenly
with strange, stinging, indescribable tears. His lips moved to the best
remembered passages in his favourite authors. His pulses throbbed with
rebellious violence. Each of his wide-stretched senses began to exult
as his eyes, his lips, his nostrils, and the dilated pores of his skin
absorbed the pungent draughts of sunshine and air. Suddenly, without
knowing what he did, he broke into a grotesque kind of song, which was
born within him as he uttered it. The odd, thin, quavering treble rose
above the lappings of the water against the sides of the boat.
“Well done, Luney, old boy,” cried his companions with their loud
shouts of laughter; “well done, old man.”
Incited by his example, one of them produced a concertina. He proceeded
to play a music-hall air. It was then that a strange incident occurred.
To the profound astonishment of the others, William Jordan, who had
been sitting in the prow, gazing out to sea, rose and came aft to one
Benjamin Sparks, who was manipulating the concertina. Without a word
he plucked that instrument out of his grasp and flung it away into the
water.
Mr. Benjamin Sparks vented his incredulous anger in a volley of oaths.
“There goes five quid,” he cried savagely. “I’ve a mind to chuck you in
after it, you blighted lunatic.”
Benjamin Sparks was a very powerfully-built young man, with red hair,
and uncompromising manners. In anger he was known to be formidable.
One and all awaited with a lively curiosity, not unmingled with
trepidation, the treatment that would be meted out to the aggressor.
“You puny, half-begotten rat!” roared Benjamin Sparks. “I’ve a good
mind to throw you into the sea.”
Yet the other occupants of the boat marvelled to observe that William
Jordan did not yield a step to so much power and truculence. The young
man stood bare-headed, with his white face uplifted. His hands and
teeth were clenched. He was deadly pale, but not a trace of excitement
was in his bearing.
“We will perish together,” he was heard to mutter.
Without waiting to be attacked, William Jordan uttered a cry like that
of a wild animal, and flung himself headlong upon his adversary. As
their clenched forms grappled to one another, and swayed from one side
of the boat to the other, shouts of anguish and terror rose from their
companions.
“They will have her over!” they cried wildly. “They will drown us all.”
In a moment they were stricken with panic. Helpless, yet half wild
with terror, they clutched the sides of the frail boat. It was by a
miracle that it regained an even keel. It was also due to a further
dispensation of an inscrutable providence that both combatants did not
find themselves in the water.
They put back to the shore with all speed. It was with true devoutness
of spirit that they found themselves once again on dry land.
“I shall never take you on the sea again, my son,” said Mr. Dodson,
with a very white face.
“He ought to be ducked,” was the opinion freely expressed by the others.
Mr. Benjamin Sparks took off his coat with a businesslike deliberation.
“Now then, you d----d lunatic,” he said, “we will have it out.”
“I--I d-don’t know how to fight,” stammered William Jordan, all of
whose spirit had fled, “but you can throw me into the sea if you w-want
to.”
“If we don’t get him away,” said the others apprehensively, “Ben Sparks
will murder him.”
Whereupon Mr. James Dodson linked his arm through that of his singular
companion.
“Come on, Luney,” he said, “I don’t want to have to give evidence
before a coroner’s jury. What a lunatic you are! Whatever possessed you
to do it? You have quite spoilt the day for everybody. I shall never
bring you to Margate again.”
William Jordan and his mentor walked in dead silence in the direction
of the town. But after they had gone some distance, William Jordan
stopped abruptly and said, “I--I must go back to the sea. I--I
cannot leave the sea. I--I will return to the railway station at a
quarter-past six.”
“Promise me,” said his mentor earnestly, “that you will be up to no new
mischief. I don’t know that you are fit to be left alone with the sea.
It seems to get into your brain.”
William Jordan gave this promise, and returned to the sea. For hours
he walked up and down the shore, his eyes ever upon that wonderful,
endless expanse. When at last he grew very weary, and his unaccustomed
limbs began to fail, he offered an old fisherman some pieces of silver
to row him again out to sea. Until the sun dipped behind the line
of the coast, he sat at the helm of the boat drinking long and deep
draughts of the free and noble life that lay all about him.
Men and cities were far from his thoughts during these enchanted hours.
His mind became beautiful with fantasies and copious with ideas. As
he reclined on the bosom of this great and mysterious wilderness,
with the fowls of the air flapping over his head, the strange craft
ever tossing from side to side, and a hungry waste all about him,
capable of devouring him yet incomprehensibly refraining from so
doing, his life acquired a texture which it had never had before.
Even the ancient authors, with all the subtle aromas and the powerful
essences their mighty imaginations had distilled through the ages,
could not concentrate into their magic ink this relentless, yet elusive
spaciousness which this dweller in cities now beheld.
The caged bird began again to croon its odd, wild, undeveloped
melodies. Fragments of curious, haunted, half-remembered phrases came
upon his lips. The stinging tears crept again to his eyes. Through the
haze of their blindness the waters were no longer to be seen. But he
could hear them gurgling against the sides of the boat. There was a
boom of distant breakers, the creak of oars, the voices of the four
winds and of the winged inhabitants of the air.
The mists of the evening slowly overspread the wilderness. Silently,
stealthily, they came unperceived. They were all part of the Idea. He
did not resent their appearance when he saw them there, veiling all
things with their subtle presence. He was still crooning his queer
songs. Men and cities, street-persons and pieces of silver had long
vanished from his consciousness.
After a while, with an involuntary deference to the chill of the night,
he lay down on the floor of the boat on the inhospitable rough boards,
which yet were as soft as feathers. His hands were clasped about his
head, as if to support the delicious fantasies that were in his brain.
He seemed to swoon with the rapture of his new and brave identity.
“This is the life of heroes, O Achilles!” the familiar voices of the
night and the sea were constantly murmuring.
Presently he seemed to waken to the fact that he was looking upwards
far into the sky. Through the soft white mists he could discern a
single speck of silver gleaming frostily. Suddenly, with a cold
vibration in his veins, he recalled how in his tender infancy he had
seen that particular orb shining above the shutters of the little room.
In an instant the crooning song upon his lips had changed to a moan of
anguish. Yet it passed immediately. Peering at the star he seemed to
recognize it as the symbol of his kinship with this immensity; as the
pledge of his correlation with the universal order. With a sense of
exultation his thoughts reverted to that sanctuary from whose precincts
he had beheld it first. It was with him still. And was not a benign
spirit ever there to bestow consolation upon a hapless wayfarer whose
journeyings were hopeless, endless, fruitless, fraught with cruel
degradation?
He still lay in the boat, not feeling hunger nor susceptible to the
cold of the night. Time and space had lost their significance. He would
only ask to lie where he was, on the bosom of the waters, that he might
croon his strange songs for ever. But as his gaze was still fixed on
the only star that was abroad in all the vast canopy, the recollection
of the little room and of him who dwelt there, shaped itself more
definitely. He must return; he was being drawn thither by irresistible
forces. His destiny must be fulfilled.
The keel of the boat began to grind on the sand. He listened to the
melodious yet uncouth tones of the old boatman--the old ferryman, who
had piloted him across the bosom of eternity.
“We’ve been out six hours,” said the old boatman. “It is nigh half-past
eight.”
The young man stepped ashore with cramped and stiff limbs.
“What is half-past eight, Father Charon?” he said, with a hoarse, happy
laugh.
Hardly had the returned voyager uttered these irrelevant words when a
voice of curious import came on his ears. He shuddered as though he had
felt the impact of a knife upon his flesh.
“Luney, Luney!” cried the voice, “I have been looking for you for
hours, all along the shore. You were not at the station, so I made sure
you had drowned yourself. What a madman you are; where do you suppose
you have been? As long as I live I will never bring you to Margate
again.”
“Oh yes,” said the returned voyager, with a weary shiver, “I know that
voice--that voice is as familiar to me as the stars of the night.”