Every evening thenceforward until the third volume had been set up
in type, James Dodson would return to the little room with further
instalments of the printed pages, newly from the press. And full many
weary hours did the poet’s aged father labour through the day and night
to compare the manuscript with the printed work. Weak and frail as the
old man now was, half sightless as were his eyes, he yet addressed
himself to this task with a joyful rapture. Sometimes, in the stress of
the gladness that overcame him, he would read aloud to the poet in his
thin, quavering tones, some of those passages whose quality he could
not forbear to acclaim.
At these times the blind poet, ever sitting by the hearth, would
listen, breathing deep, with head uplifted, and with strange emotions
flitting across his inexpressibly beautiful face. And then when through
sheer weariness the voice of the aged man had ceased to utter the
wonderful music, he himself, in his rich and rare tones, would take up
the theme; and he would speak the lines of ineffable majesty with a
justice so delicate that his aged father needed no longer to look at
the manuscript, but was able to verify the printed page by the poet’s
voice.
Sometimes these labours would even be conducted in the presence of
James Dodson. And although that robust denizen of the great world out
of doors, whenever he found himself in his natural element, could
never bring himself to believe that the labours he was undertaking with
such an all-consuming zeal were being conducted in the cause of reason
and sanity, no sooner did he enter the little room of an evening than
his scepticism fell from him like an outer garment.
It was not for him to understand the words that the poet and his
father recited with such a holy submission; they had no meanings for
his unaccustomed ears; but the dominion of the poet’s presence, which
sprang from that which was now upon his face, the wonderful serenity of
that sightless aspect filled the young man with an awe and a credulity
which he could not recognize as belonging to himself.
“I am going wrong,” he would say in his perplexity as he went his ways
about the great city, “and, of course, they are as wrong as they can
be--yet the marvellous thing is that they make you feel that all the
world is wrong, and that they are the only reasonable people in it!”
One evening, after Jimmy Dodson had sat in a kind of entrancement for
several hours while the poet had recited many passages, he was moved
to ask with dry lips, “I say, old boy, Homer and Milton were blind,
weren’t they?”
“Tradition has it so,” said the poet, and his sightless aspect was
suffused with that secret and beautiful smile that had come to haunt
poor Dodson in his dreams. “But what is ‘tradition’ but an adumbration
of the light that never was?”
On the evening that the last line of the poem had been passed for the
press with an astonishing thoroughness and celerity by the co-operation
of two minds which had to be almost independent of the use of the
eyes, the poet committed these final pages to the care of his faithful
emissary with further injunctions for their prosperity in the great
world out of doors.
“Let our little treatise have reticence, chastity, sobriety,” he said.
“I wish you could see the binding I have chosen,” said Jimmy Dodson.
“Octavius calls it very chaste indeed--you can’t think what an interest
Octavius is taking in the publication. Octavius made one error in his
life, which we will not refer to now, but he has turned out trumps over
this. He would give his ears to know the name of the author!”
“That is a secret you are pledged to respect,” said William Jordan in
his voice of soft irony.
“You can be quite easy about that, old boy,” said Jimmy Dodson. “Wild
horses shall not drag it from me; and, of course, there is not a soul
in the world who would ever suspect that the author is you.”
“I trust you,” said the poet simply. “And there is only one further
charge with which I shall tax our friendship. I shall ask you to
collect all the papers that bear the impress of my hand, and lodge them
at the English Museum, in the custody of the English nation.”
James Dodson contrived to dissemble his bewildered surprise.
“Of course I will do so, old boy,” he said gravely and promptly. “I
will make a parcel of the manuscript now. It is too late to take it
round there to-night; but the first thing to-morrow I will take an hour
off from the office, and I will carry it to the English Museum myself.”
“Thank you, thank you,” said the poet. “I thank you in the name of
truth and of ages yet to be.”