The reveller who crept back to 43 Milton Street, E.C., towards the hour
of one was a dishevelled, bewildered human fragment in sore distress of
mind and body. His head throbbed, and dreadful qualms oppressed him,
but these were as nought in comparison with that which had already
taken a sinister shape in his brain.
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.