JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 BY 
 
 W. J. DAWSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 H Street 
 
 I 
 
 HE was called Jim because his parents were 
 deficient in imagination. 
 
 " It's as good a name as any other for the little 
 beggar," said his father. " It's wot I'm called." 
 
 He then banged the door and went out. Jim's 
 mother lay quiet under the sloping ceiling of the 
 attic which she called home, and thought over 
 things. She had known a woman once who called 
 her child Gustavus, but it had proved a poor 
 speculation. Gustavus had been shortened to Gus, 
 and from that it had degenerated to Buster, by 
 which name " the Street " made up its mind to 
 know him. It was no use explaining matters to 
 the Street ; when the Street had made up its mind 
 it was irreconcilable. " Buster " tickled its fancy, 
 and punching Buster's head became a favourite 
 amusement. When Buster 'was run over by a 
 dray the gaiety of that particular section of the 
 nation was eclipsed. A distinct element of 
 
 3 , 
 
 20649**
 
 4 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 humour had passed out of its life, and the Street 
 sorrowed. 
 
 She had known a woman once who had eleven 
 children, and had found a Bible name for each of 
 them. That was a long while ago, however, when 
 she had lived in the country, where Bibles are 
 sometimes found. There were no Bibles in Para- 
 dise Street She closed her eyes and thought 
 quietly, and a surprising vision slid under the 
 closed eyelids. She saw cornfields, bordered by 
 hedges in which blackberries grew thick, and a 
 little river with brown pebbles, and tall elm-trees, 
 and cresting the hill, like plumes, a plantation of 
 tasselled larches. She heard a lark singing, and 
 the little river seemed to sing also as it flowed. 
 The sky was so big that it frightened her, and it 
 was so blue you seemed to look right into it, and 
 through it, and yet never came to the end. Then 
 she remembered the woman with the biblical chil- 
 dren again, and recollected that when the eleventh 
 was born it took a week to find a name, and folks 
 said they had given the boy a girl's name after 
 all. It was clear that the Bible was not much 
 good for naming children. 
 
 She felt very tired and weak, as well she might. 
 There had been very little work to be had lately, 
 and little work meant little food. She felt that 
 she ought to be up and about ; it was a dreadful 
 waste of time to be there doing nothing. But
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 5 
 
 when she tried to sit up her head fell back heavily, 
 and her hands trembled. Then she lay quite still 
 again, enjoying rather guiltily the sense of absolute 
 inactivity. The only time she had ever had any 
 rest in her life was when her children had been 
 born. She had had five, and they were all dead. 
 " Insufficient nourishment," the doctor said, which 
 was no doubt a very true remark, but not a helpful 
 one. That made her think of little Jim. She 
 unconsciously drew the small bundle of humanity 
 closer to her bosom, and the warmth of the 
 child's body soothed her, and sent a little pulse 
 of motherhood thrilling with a live joy through 
 her nerves. Then she thought again of the five 
 who had died of insufficient nourishment, and 
 she remembered that little Jim was a Mouth. If 
 children were self-supporting creatures, if, for ex- 
 ample, you could turn them out to browse at 
 once like new-born lambs, Paradise Street would 
 not have objected to their presence. That not 
 being the case, and there being nothing particular 
 to browse upon in Paradise Street, the accepted 
 doctrine was that children were calamities. In the 
 meantime the newly arrived calamity slept, with 
 little red fists doubled up pugnaciously, and as 
 his mother gathered her thin arms around him 
 she forgot he was a Mouth. 
 
 Toward evening something happened. Jim the 
 elder had been out several hours, but that was not
 
 6 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 unusual. When the darkness set in, and he had 
 not returned, however, his wife began to grow 
 uneasy, for he had promised to be back in an hour 
 or two. She had had nothing to eat since, the 
 early morning. She heard doors banging below, 
 and wheels in the street, and the shouts of the 
 costers, and she knew what hour it was by the 
 lighting of the street lamps. Suddenly she was 
 conscious of heavy feet upon the stairs, and loud 
 whisperings at the door. Then the door opened, 
 and she made out the figure of a man standing 
 sheepishly on the threshold. Two or three \vomen 
 stood behind him engaged in the task of pushing 
 him forward. 
 
 " Go on in, and get it done, Bill," murmured a 
 hoarse voice. 
 
 "You've got to say it, and wot is, is," was 
 the next remark, which was undoubtedly philo- 
 sophic. 
 
 " We've chose you, and you must," the voices 
 murmured in chorus. 
 
 Thus adjured, the man entered the room, and 
 stood within a yard of the bed. He had a greasy 
 cap in his hand, which appeared also to be soaked 
 with water. He held it out meditatively. 
 
 " I thought as 'ow you might like to 'ave this 
 'ere," he said huskily. "Just a relict, you know 
 a relict of your old man ! " 
 
 He had accomplished his task, and smiled to
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 7 
 
 himself at his success. He believed he had been 
 sympathetic. 
 
 " Wot ! " cried Jim's wife, as she sat up in the 
 bed. " Wot do you say ? " 
 
 " A relict just a relict, you know ; thought as 
 'ow you might like to 'ave it," repeated the man. 
 
 " Oh, get away, you fool, and leave her to 
 me ! " cried a woman's voice. " Your Jim's been 
 drownded, and that's his 'at That's wot it is, God 
 love ye ! " 
 
 " Fell inter the dock ! " cried the women in 
 chorus. 
 
 " They're a-grapplin' for 'im," they added by 
 way of imparting vividness to the picture. 
 
 " And this 'ere's 'is 'at," said the man again, 
 determined not to be left out. "Thought you 
 might like to 'ave it as a relict." 
 
 It was thus little Jim's mother knew that Jim 
 was all she had left to her in the world. 
 
 II 
 
 WHEN Jim began to grow up he found himself 
 very much alone. His mother went out to work 
 in the early morning, and usually did not come 
 home till late at night. When he was very little, 
 she used to put the fire out before she went, and 
 she left him to amuse himself as he could in the 
 lonely attic. His amusements were strictly limited.
 
 8 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 Sometimes he got a piece of lovely black coal and 
 played with it, asking it many questions, till he 
 grew angry because it would not keep up the 
 conversation, and then he threw it away. Some- 
 times he climbed up to the window and watched 
 for hours the smoke curling from an endless 
 wilderness of chimney-pots, and the dirty sparrows 
 twittering and jigging along the gutters of the roof. 
 He tried hard to get them to play with him, but 
 whenever he tapped the window-pane they winked 
 their little beady eyes at him, and hopped further 
 away, with an indignant shake of sooty feathers. 
 Sometimes, in the late winter afternoons, he saw 
 'certain small points of light like pinholes in the 
 smoke-haze overhead, but he did not know they 
 were stars. Once the full moon stopped and 
 looked into the window, and then he cried with 
 fright. It was like a great pale face, and, like 
 everything he knew, it was dumb. He liked the 
 gas-lamps better, for he knew that when they were 
 lit his mother would soon come. Thus he lived 
 the day out after his own fashion, and when he 
 was tired he crept into the bed and went to sleep. 
 His only wish was that he might sleep all the time. 
 When he was six years old he took up his abode 
 permanently in the streets. They were his nursery, 
 his restaurant, his church, his school, his university. 
 He graduated with honours. He was perfectly 
 happy, because he had no sense of sin or desire
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 9 
 
 for better things to trouble him. He was content 
 with the gutter. He would have enjoyed the 
 husks which the swine do eat, and have quarrelled 
 with the pigs for a larger share. There is very 
 little doubt that the pigs would have come off 
 second best in such a struggle. 
 
 Likewise he had never heard of God, though he 
 often heard of the devil. Of course he knew the 
 word God well enough, but his notions of its 
 meaning were hazy. The policeman served for a 
 convenient incarnation of both the good and evil 
 principles of the world. When he marched down 
 the street majestic in bright uniform, and was 
 good-humoured, Jim thought that he was God ; 
 when he was surly on wet days, and drove the 
 boys out of the gutter, Jim thought he was the 
 devil, and, indeed, told him so. It made no 
 difference to the policeman what Jim thought, 
 anyway. Their spheres were too far apart 
 
 Up to this time it is doubtful if Jim had a soul ; 
 at all events, he was not conscious of it. Then it 
 happened that he picked up one day a flower, and 
 the flower told him he had a soul. He was un- 
 wholesomely familiar with potato peelings, and 
 onion stalks, and cabbage leaves, picturesquely 
 arabesqued with mud spots and yellow splotches 
 of decay, but he had never seen a flower. The 
 flower he picked up was a white hyacinth. 
 
 The first thing that amazed him was its perfume.
 
 10 JIM AND HIS SQUL 
 
 The rich arrowy odour stole along his senses, and 
 pierced his brain, and caused a sort of stinging 
 delight within him. For the first time it occurred 
 to him that the gutter had a smell also, a smell 
 by no means hyacinthine. Then he noticed the 
 purity of the flower, and simultaneously he dis- 
 covered that he was dirty. The flower looked at 
 him reproachfully, and seemed to draw back from 
 him. He would have liked to kiss it, but he was 
 afraid. He did put it to his lips, but its coldness 
 repulsed him. He laid it down upon the steps of 
 the church where he happened to be sitting, and 
 looked at it a long while. Just then the bells 
 began to ring high up in the tower, and they too 
 seemed to have a voice that was reproachful. The 
 flower said, " There's a world you have never seen, 
 and that is where I belong a world that is always 
 fresh and odorous and beautiful." The bells said, 
 "There's a world up here too, right above the 
 smoke, where we live, and we are the voices which 
 inhabit it ; hear how happy are we ! " Then a 
 great longing began to grow in the heart cf little 
 Jim. He did not know what he wanted, but he 
 felt that it was something wonderful and beautiful, 
 and which he could never get. He took up the 
 hyacinth again, and the odour of it thrilled through 
 him, until something seemed to hurt him in his 
 side something that throbbed and made him sad, 
 and filled his eyes with tears, he knew not how nor
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL ti 
 
 why. He did not know, but that was the moment 
 when the Soul was born in him. It entered into 
 him with the fragrance of the hyacinth, and the 
 music of the bells, and the pain he felt was its 
 birth-throe. Jim got up solemnly, and took the 
 flower in his hand, and went home slowly, feeling 
 that something had happened to him. He marched 
 down the middle of the muddy street holding the 
 flower at arm's length before him, for fear it should 
 touch his dirty rags, and be angry with him. He 
 passed a whole bruised orange in the gutter, but 
 he did not even stop to look at it The flower 
 would not let him. 
 
 That night when Jim's mother came home she 
 found him fast asleep, with the flower carefully laid 
 out beside him on half of the front page of the 
 Police News. She filled a cracked jam-pot with 
 water and put the flower into it Then the flower 
 must have told her something also something 
 about the elm-trees, and the brook, and the old- 
 fashioned farm-garden where the nasturtiums 
 climbed when she was young ; for she sat very 
 silently before the fireless grate, and did nothing 
 for fully ten minutes. The flower had made her 
 think, and thinking had the curious effect of 
 making her apron travel to her eyes. 
 
 Ill 
 
 WHEN Jim's soul came into him several things
 
 12 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 happened. For one thing, all the glory of the 
 street had faded. The gutter was no longer a 
 place of delight. The making of mud-pies was 
 no more an amusement for the gods. Paradise 
 Street (why are all the worst streets called by the 
 loveliest names ?) had suddenly become squalid. 
 
 A spirit of adventure possessed Jim, and the 
 soul was the cause of it. He had never travelled 
 half a hundred yards from " the Street " in his life 
 He had a dim notion that there was a world not 
 far away, and he resolved to see it. Not Vasco di 
 Gama nor Columbus felt mere elated when they 
 drove their prows into the unknown waters, and 
 marked the flight of strange land-birds over the 
 foaming waste, than was Jim when he emerged 
 out of "the Street" into the Strand. The lights 
 dazzled him, and the throng of wheels frightened 
 him. When he got into Trafalgar Square he was 
 possessed of a great horror. He had never seen 
 an open space before, and it seemed terrible. But 
 when he reached St. James's Park an ecstasy 
 seized him ; for here were trees, here were green- 
 sward and water, and here were flowers. The 
 trees shook their boughs as though they were 
 living things that might pursue him, and the water 
 lay dark in the evening light, and the flowers 
 looked at him through the dusk, and sent him a 
 message in the only language they know the 
 language of fragrance. Jim stood silent, a pathetic
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 13 
 
 little figure, with hands clasped behind his back, 
 and ragged breast thrust well forward, and greasy 
 cap laid beside him on the path. It must have 
 been the soul that told him to take his cap off in 
 the presence of the flowers. He had never done 
 so before ; it was the first symptom of a prayer. 
 Then he ran home as fast as he could, for the trees 
 frightened him. 
 
 When the soul comes into even the dingiest 
 little body it makes itself felt by the desire to 
 know and to love. The School Board captured 
 Jim and taught him to know ; it was the same 
 blessed agency that gave him the chance of loving. 
 Jim was twelve years old when he began to love, 
 and this was how it happened. 
 
 There was a little girl who was captured by the 
 School Board about the same time as Jim, and 
 from the same neighbourhood. She was not 
 pretty, for prettiness is not frequent in the slums. 
 She was poorly clothed, of course, but she was 
 always neat. She sometimes had a ribbon round 
 her neck, which may have been the working of the 
 barbaric or the spiritual instinct, I can't say which. 
 She had fair hair and dark grey eyes, and she was 
 a cripple. Jim saw her limping home one cruel 
 day when the streets were slippery with frozen 
 mud, and the soul inside him told him to help her, 
 and he did it. From that he learned to accompany 
 her home every day. They shared their crusts
 
 14 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 together. When it was cold they took each other's 
 hands for warmth. They often sat down on a 
 doorstep and talked, their hands clasped all the 
 while. 
 
 "Jim," she said one day, " do you think it's any 
 good being born ? I don't" 
 
 " Don't know," said Jim, who had not travelled 
 quite so far in the realm of philosophic doubt. 
 
 " I don't," she answered, with conviction, " 'speci- 
 ally when you're a cripple. My father beat me 
 last night," she said. " He often beats mother. 
 I don't think I shall go home to-night" 
 
 That alarmed Jim, and also excited his curiosity 
 
 " What are ycr goin' to do, then ? " he asked. 
 
 " Drown myself," said the child solemnly. " Lots 
 of people does it, an' it doesn't hurt much." 
 
 " That yer ain't," said Jim. 
 
 " Why not ? " 
 
 " 'Cause I ain't a-goin* to let yer," he replied, 
 with masculine authority. 
 
 " I am," said the child. " An' I know a place, 
 too. It's awful deep. I'll show it yer, if yer like." 
 
 Jim ought then to have imposed his masculine 
 authority again, but he did not. His curiosity 
 overcame him. He thought there would be no 
 harm in looking at the place. 
 
 "Very well," said he, "let's look at it But 
 mind, I ain't a-goin 1 to let yer." 
 
 Across the Strand, no more a place of terror,
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 15 
 
 they passed, and round the corner of Charing 
 Cross, and down the historic way to Westminster. 
 They mutually agreed it would be best to go by 
 the best streets to "the place," anyway. There's 
 no use in going by the most unpleasant way to 
 the scaffold. A hundred years ago criminals 
 rather enjoyed riding to Tyburn on their coffins. 
 They probably felt the exhilaration of being part 
 of a procession. They are much less cheerful 
 nowadays, when the scaffold yawns at the end of 
 a whitewashed passage. 
 
 But when they reached Westminster, and were 
 crossing the broad road to the Embankment, 
 suddenly the fog thickened, and rolled down like 
 a sooty curtain. A hansom rushed past, with its 
 great flashing lamps like awful eyes turned upon 
 them. In the scuffle to get out of the way they 
 were separated, and the darkness rolled between 
 them. 
 
 " Where are yer ? " shouted Jim. " Annie, Annie, 
 Annie ! " At each cry his voice grew shriller, till 
 it was a shrielc. 
 
 " She's gone an' done it 1 " he cried. 
 
 He felt his way along the cold, slimy wall oi 
 the Embankment. He heard the dismal lap of 
 the tide far down on the other side. The lamp' 
 burned spectral ; the roar of the city, like thi 
 stifled anger of some great beast behind its bars, 
 reverberated dully through the blackness. An evil
 
 16 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 odour rose out of the river, a deathly smell from 
 the rancid mud which perhaps covered those who 
 had "done it." Jim's courage failed him. He 
 ran along by the wall till he came to a great 
 opening, which yawned like a monstrous mouth 
 before him. It seemed as though a bit of the 
 world had fallen out, and unfathomable space lay 
 below. His voice grew hoarse with shouting, and 
 the cold pricked his bones. 
 
 " It's no good ! " he sobbed at last " She's 
 done it ! I've lost *er." 
 
 Then through the fog he heard a footstep with 
 a limp in it. He rushed forward, and there was 
 Annie. He was going to be angry, which is the 
 natural masculine method of expressing love under 
 such circumstances. But the soul would not let 
 him. Instead of being angry, he did an altogether 
 extraordinary thing. He put his arms round the 
 little shivering cripple and kissed her. He had 
 never kissed any one but his mother in his life, 
 and that not often. And then there ran through 
 every nerve, tingling right down to his bare toes. 
 a delicious shock, a warmth and yearning, a satu- 
 rating, sufficing joy, which made it seem as though 
 the whole world had become sunlit, and as if 
 all the flowers of the world had suddenly flung 
 themselves in his face, drenching him with dew 
 and fragrance. 
 
 I don't suppose anybody will believe this, but
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 17 
 
 that doesn't matter. When a starved heart wakes 
 up prince and beggar feel much the same, but the 
 beggar has the best of it If Dante could have 
 kissed Beatrice thus at the corner of that lovely 
 old Ponte Vecchio in Florence, he would have felt 
 much the same as when poor Jim kissed the cripple 
 girl, and found out thereby how love tasted. 
 
 IV 
 
 IT was May morning on the Embankment The 
 long rows of plane-trees had a green film upon 
 them, and Spring ran light-footed from tree-top 
 to tree-top with a thrilling whisper about good 
 times coming, which she communicated to each 
 in turn. When the trees heard it they trembled 
 for joy, and the branches began to talk to each 
 other, and to say, " See how green we are getting ! " 
 A warm wind from the south blew over the river, 
 and a smooth white cloud lay along the southern 
 sky, on which the sun sparkled as though it were 
 snow. The dirty Thames had a holiday look, and 
 the muddy little waves had small sparkles of 
 occasional emerald on their crests. The dingy 
 sparrows knew that something was the matter ; 
 one or two were washing themselves in the little 
 pools left by the night's rain, and the rest were 
 darting about with such swiftness that they seemed 
 to turn somersaults as they went Down the river 
 a red-sailed barge moved slowly, with a dog bark- 
 
 2
 
 i8 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 ing joyously at her bows. The cabmen had 
 flowers in their coats, and occasionally a sprig of 
 green twisting in the corner of their mouths. 
 There was cheerfulness and vital joy in the air, 
 for London was shaking off the soot of winter, 
 and was getting ready for a more welcome 
 visitor. 
 
 At the Westminster Bridge corner of the Em- 
 bankment our two children stood, but children no 
 more. Jim was gay in uniform ; he was now a 
 telegraph messenger, and it was his proud task to 
 shout as he passed into his work every morning, 
 " 87 on Duty ! " It gave him an immense sense 
 of dignity to utter that formula. It was always 
 repeated with chest thrown forward, and head 
 thrown back, in right soldierly fashion. In such 
 moments he did not feel that he belonged to Her 
 Majesty's Postal Service ; he felt that it belonged 
 to him. 
 
 Every morning he met Annie at the corner of 
 the Bridge. She had now become a flower-seller, 
 and something of the sweetness of the flowers had 
 passed into her face. She was pale, and as she 
 had grown older had become fragile ; her grey 
 eyes had purple shadows under them, and her 
 mouth had a tenseness about its corners which 
 suggested suffering. Her lameness had become 
 more manifest. She used a crutch now, and had 
 a sensitive dread of having it noticed. Often and
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 19 
 
 often as she sat beside the Bridge, witching the 
 long stream of people passing and re-passing, she 
 imagined that every one looked at her crutch, and 
 not at her flowers. Thousands of eyes regarded 
 her, and every one seemed to burn like flame. 
 They instinctively sought the crutch, and she saw 
 the thought vibrate across each brain, " She's a 
 cripple, poor thing." But there was a quiet glow 
 always on her face in these early mornings. It 
 was her time of perfect happiness, for then Jim 
 was with her. Often, too, the mornings were 
 exquisite, and they alone might make a glory on 
 any face that watched them. For then the air 
 was often very still, and a fragrance of rain-washed 
 meadows penetrated it, and the clouds took strange 
 shapes and colours, and the gilded towers of West- 
 minster were touched with a fire of dawn which 
 added magic grace to their soaring symmetry. No 
 doubt Annie felt something of all this in a dumb 
 way, for the mornings inspired her with a sense 
 of unuttered friendliness and fascination ; but if 
 you had asked her, she would have said that Jim's 
 face was the real morning to her. 
 
 There was no one stirring, and they sat together 
 and talked in the old way, hand in hand 
 
 " I'm very tired sometimes," said the girl, " but 
 then I think of yer, Jim, an' know the next mornin* 
 ain't far off, an' I 'old up." 
 
 " I'm goin' to marry yer soon as I'm able," said
 
 20 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 Jim, " an' then yer sha'n't sell nothin' no more in 
 the streets, leastways in winter." 
 
 " Oh, but I like selling the flowers," said the girl. 
 " I've got to love 'em in a way. They make me 
 wonder all about wot it's like where they grows. 
 You' went there once, didn't you, Jim ? Tell's 
 about it again." 
 
 " Yer knows it all," said Jim ; but he brightened 
 all the same with eagerness to go back to such a 
 theme. It was the great event of his life. 
 
 "'Twas at a place they call Dorkin' I saw it I 
 was 'most frightened at first, like as 'ow when I 
 was a kid and first see'd the Park. There was no 
 end of fields, and yer could see where the sky and 
 the earth jined. They stretched right on and on, 
 and every hedge you see'd had white flowers on 
 'un, and some of the trees had flowers too. When 
 a cloud come over them yer didn't see nothin' but 
 somethin' whity and pinky, but when the cloud 
 rolled by then those flowers fairly danced, they 
 was so glad, and kinder sparkled one to 'nother. 
 There was a wood there too, an' I looked inter it. 
 Why, the floor of it was all blue an' yeller, like 
 as though a carpet were drawed over it. 'Twas 
 flowers everywhere ; 'twas burstin' with 'em. I 
 looked just to see if no one saw me, an' then I 
 went in, an* I rolled in 'em. There was so many 
 it didn't make no difference, my rollin'. I rolled 
 over and over, an' laughed till I cried, an' I 'urt
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL a> 
 
 my ead, but I didn't know it, I was that 'appy. I 
 think that wood knowed I was 'appy, for there 
 was birds singin' everywhere all the time I rolled. 
 'Twas the 'eavenliest roll I ever 'ad. I could 
 smell them flowers in my clothes for a week arter. 
 I'm goin* to save up, an' next Bank 'Oliday you 
 an' me '11 go there an' roll." 
 
 The girl had often heard the story, but she 
 never tired of it. She liked to think it over in the 
 dull moments of the day when she was selling 
 nothing. Then she used to take the delicate 
 jonquils and violets from her basket, and try to 
 imagine what sort of place it was they were born 
 in. When nobody was looking she used to place 
 them against her lips and whisper her wishes to 
 them, and their purity comforted and refreshed 
 her. 
 
 " Good-bye," said Jim ; "time's up I'm off." 
 
 " Good-bye," said the girl. 
 
 She took a yellow jonquil from her basket and 
 gave it him. It was like a visible kiss passed 
 between them. For a moment all London had 
 sunk away from them, and they were simply two 
 human souls conscious of each other. It lasted 
 only an instant, and the jonquil was its memorial. 
 
 THE Bank Holiday had come, and with it the 
 long-deferred joy for which Jim and Annie had
 
 22 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 hoped through many a blazing July day. The 
 frugal pennies had accumulated, and they had 
 been invested in two cheap tickets to the sea. 
 They had never seen the sea, and had no notion 
 what it meant. They sat together now on a little 
 knoll of the downs and gazed at it in speechless 
 wonder. 
 
 " I didn't never know there wor anythink in the 
 world as big as that," said Jim. " An' I never 
 knowed there was so much sky anywhere, 
 neither ! " 
 
 "That's 'cos you don't see it all together any- 
 where in Lunnon," said the girl philosophically. 
 " It's split up into little bits." 
 
 " It makes me frightened almost," continued the 
 girl. " It's so lovely. There's such a lot of it ! " 
 
 " I ain't frightened," said the boy, with a fine 
 sense of valour. " I should like to go on it, I 
 should!" 
 
 " Then yer won't," she said vehemently. " I 
 ain't a-going to let yer ! " 
 
 The boy for answer put his arm round her waist. 
 He had no fine language to express his love, but 
 he had a keen joy of proprietorship in the girl all 
 the same. She knew it, and shyly slipped her 
 hand into his. Then they sat quite silent, and 
 gazed upon the sparkling wonder of the sea again. 
 
 Far away into boundlessness spread the vast 
 level fields of azure, streaked here and there with
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 23 
 
 patches of green and purple, like a finely varie- 
 gated marble. The sun beat upon it, till it seemed 
 to give back from its depths an answering light. 
 Far to the southward lay a long range of clouds, 
 dark at the base, but piled up in white masses at 
 the summit, and over the snowy bosses of these 
 immaterial Alps grey stains of vapour slowly 
 floated, and seemed to hang in their cloven hollows. 
 The whole vast range moved nearer also by 
 slow degrees, and presently a gust of wind ran 
 across the downs, and shook the leaves of the 
 neighbouring hedges with a sigh. From the 
 moment that this first faint breath of wind began, 
 a rapid change passed over sea and sky. The sea 
 turned from azure to a livid grey, and the sky 
 bowed down to meet it Long thin scarves of 
 cloud travelled swiftly across the heavens, and the 
 sun disappeared behind them. Then a deep hollow 
 sound rolled up out of the sea, and fell upon the 
 ear in volleys, which every moment became clearer 
 and more rapid. There was a storm brewing, and 
 the clouds were labouring up with the stored 
 weight of thunder. The girl picked up the few 
 field-flowers that she had gathered in the lane 
 leading to the downs, just as the first warm drops 
 of rain began to fall. The town lay a mile away, 
 and the railway station half a mile beyond the 
 town. Long before they reached it the storm was 
 on them, and the rain came rushing down like a
 
 cataract In the station the people stood in a 
 dense crowd. Those who had got there first had 
 filled the waiting-rooms, and the late comers could 
 barely edge their way along the unsheltered plat- 
 form. Jim and Annie were among the latest, and 
 stood holding each other's hands on the very edge 
 of the platform. This strange anger of the heavens 
 frightened them, and the thunder shook their 
 hearts. 
 
 No one could tell how it happened, for it was 
 done in a moment. There was an ugly sway of 
 the crowd as the train came in, and Annie slipped, 
 and fell across the rails. In an instant Jim had 
 leaped to her rescue. He lifted her up, and a score 
 of hands were stretched out to pull her back to 
 the platform. But he was too late to save himself. 
 Before he could spring out of the way the engine 
 had struck him, and the great grinding wheels 
 passed over him. 
 
 They bore him away to the hospital, and Annie 
 went with him. 
 
 " He were a plucky one, were that ! " said the 
 porter, as he laid a sheet over the boy, "nd drew 
 his hand across his eyes. 
 
 "They come down together, they did," said a 
 rough fellow, eager to share in the notoriety of the 
 disaster. "'Twere 'is girl, I guess. I sat beside 
 'em in the carriage, I did." 
 
 The girl did not hear. She limped along the
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 25 
 
 street, with eyes that saw nothing but that dismal 
 stretcher and that which lay upon it. And when 
 they reached the hospital she passed in un- 
 questioned with the tragic burden. 
 
 VI 
 
 IT was very quiet in the little hospital, except in 
 the accident ward, where sounds of stertorous 
 breathing were heard, and now and again a low 
 stifled cry of pain from some sufferer whose endur- 
 ance had given way. The windows were open, 
 and the sweet air of the sea travelled through 
 them, and wandered softly up and down these 
 unfamiliar realms of suffering. Close beside the 
 hospital was a church, and on the still evening air 
 the music of its organ sounded, now loud, now 
 faintly, in the evensong. The nurses often 
 thanked God for that neighbouring music ; it 
 brought soothing and inspiration to their hearts, 
 tired with the burden of incessant service, strained 
 with the excess of hourly sympathy for forms of 
 pain which knew alleviation, but no remedy. It 
 was like a solemn assurance that all the harsh 
 discords of earth would be resolved at length into 
 some final harmony ; that when the long travail 
 of earth, of which they knew so much, reached 
 its close, some masterhand pressed upon the 
 organ-keys of the world would strike the chord
 
 26 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 of peace, perhaps of triumph. The church doors 
 were open, and through them floated the familiar 
 music of the evening hymn, sung by clear boys' 
 voices, that dominated the scattered voices of the 
 congregation, and gathered them into a harmonious 
 whole 
 
 " Glory to Thee, my God, this night, 
 For all the blessings of the light ; 
 Keep me, O keep me, King of Kings, 
 Beneath Thine own Almighty wings." 
 
 For some in that ward the blessings of the light 
 would return no more, and the wings that stooped 
 above them were the wings of death. 
 
 And of that number was Jim. Annie sat beside 
 the narrow white bed, and held his hand. She 
 had not relinquished the little bunch of field- 
 flowers she had fastened in her dress just before 
 the accident, and the poor withered daisies lay 
 upon the bed. The girl was lost to all conscious- 
 ness of her surroundings ; her face was pale, and 
 seemed narrowed, her form looked more fragile 
 than ever. She did not notice that at a sign 
 from the nurse a screen was being placed about 
 the bed. The nurse stooped and touched her on 
 the shoulder. She said softly 
 
 " Don't you think you had better go now ? " 
 
 But the girl did not move. The only sign she 
 gave of having heard the words was a quick, 
 nervous movement of the arm that lay across the
 
 JIM AND HIS SOUL 27 
 
 bed, and a tighter grasp upon the hand of the 
 dying boy. 
 
 The rays of the setting sun struck long shafts 
 across the top of the screen ; the music of the 
 hymn swelled louder 
 
 " Teach me to live that I may dread 
 The grave as little as my bed ; 
 Teach me to die that so I may 
 Rise glorious at the awful day." 
 
 Then it died away into the tenderness of that 
 touching prayer 
 
 " Oh may my soul on Thee repose, 
 And may sweet sleep my eyelids close." 
 
 Something stirred within the girl, some violent 
 reaction of feeling, and her quiet eyes had un- 
 accustomed fire in them. 
 
 " He ain't dyin', is he ? " she cried. " He can't 
 be dyin'!" 
 
 The nurse for answer passed her hand gently 
 over the girl's head. 
 
 " It's wicked to let 'im die ! " she cried. " I 
 ain't got no one else in the world. An' we was 
 goin' to be married!" 
 
 The organ swelled out clamorous and strident 
 with the Doxology and Amen, and the nurse was 
 glad for the first time in her life that the music 
 had ceased. She had never felt it inappropriate 
 before.
 
 28 JIM AND HIS SOUL 
 
 Perhaps it was the music roused the dying boy, 
 perhaps the shrill voice of the girl and her con- 
 vulsive grasp upon his hand. He slowly opened 
 his eyes. 
 
 " An' it were the 'eavenliest roll I ever 'ad," he 
 muttered. " There was flowers everywhere." 
 
 There was a pause. Then he said in a clear 
 voice, " No. 87 on Duty." His thoughts had 
 travelled back to his daily work, and he had 
 uttered the formula of which he had been so proud 
 in the days when he felt that Her Majesty's Tele- 
 graph Service owed everything to his punctuality 
 and diligence. And then his eyes closed for ever, 
 and in the same moment the sun left the ward, 
 and the twilight began. 
 
 The Soul of Jim had been freed and vindicated. 
 
 No. 87 had died on duty.
 
 THE CHILLED HEART
 
 The roar of the streets at their loudest 
 
 Rises and falls like a tune : 
 Midday in the heart of London, 
 
 Midway in the month of June. 
 Cod knows how I yearn for the mountains, 
 
 And the river that runs between ; 
 Ah, well! I can wait and the pastures 
 
 Of Heaven art always green.
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 WE all knew him in that crowded district of 
 small houses which lies on the eastmost 
 edge of Hoxton so urbane and gentle in his ways, 
 so dignified in his unacknowledged poverty. John 
 Paterson was a little man, grey and shrunk, who 
 would be quite unnoticeable in a crowd ; but 
 placed among half-a-dozen persons of the small 
 shopkeeper class, among whom his dignity would 
 have room to exert itself, he was very noticeable 
 indeed. The sort of man who reveals himself only 
 on occasion, and chooses his occasion with intuitive 
 penetration ; the sort of man who never finds 
 more than one or two friends in a long life, and 
 is thought unsocial because he cannot sacrifice on 
 every roadside altar chiefly, however, by those 
 persons who are content with the tepid familiari- 
 ties of acquaintanceship, and never know the 
 intimacies of a noble friendship. 
 
 How he ever came to be the minister of that 
 dismal little chapel in Dagnall Road was a mystery, 
 which, however, was not without solution, as we 
 shall see. For it was surely the poorest and 
 meanest place of its kind which was ever mis- 
 Si
 
 32 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 begotten of theologic separatism and sectarian 
 ambition. You approached it by a narrow aperture, 
 the walls of which were rubbed into a greasy 
 glaze by the passing of shoulders innumerable 
 shoulders of men who wore stout Nonconformist 
 broadcloth in the palmy days of Dagnall Road, 
 of matrons who wore stiff brocade or stout velvet 
 woven on the looms of Spitalfields ; long since, like 
 the looms of Spitalfields, covered with dust, and 
 given over to forgetfulness. No broadcloth or 
 velvet passed that way now ; fustian, on its way 
 to Dagnall's Rents, which yawned in permanent 
 dilapidation behind the chapel ; on Sundays, an 
 occasional tweed on the way to the high, bare 
 pews of Dagnall Chapel. There were tablets on 
 the walls of the chapel, sacred to the memory of 
 the broadcloth and velvet generation ; these alone 
 preserved the repute of the dismal and decayed 
 conventicle. There was a tradition that carriages 
 had been known to stop at the gloomy portico of 
 Dagnall's Rents ; but that was merely the rumour 
 of a prehistoric period. Within living memory 
 no carriage had ever been visible in Dagnall Road, 
 except, of course, the gloomy equipages of the 
 undertaker, round which ragged children gathered, 
 engaged in awestruck, but yet cheerful anticipa- 
 tions of the strange splendours which attended 
 even children when they were dead. The tide of 
 life which rolled down the Dagnall Road was
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 33 
 
 muddy, like the streets ; the chapel was merely a 
 battered hulk with memories of past triumphs 
 echoing in it, as the sea may be supposed to 
 vibrate still in the timbers of the vessel whose 
 voyages are done a hulk left to rot upon a 
 slimy bank, over which the living waters will flow 
 no more. 
 
 There were hours, occasional and brief, when 
 Dagnall Road took on an aspect of brightness 
 pathetic, as on spring mornings when its dinginess 
 indulged in a bath of sunshine ; hilarious, toward 
 eight o'clock and onward, on winter evenings, 
 when the naphtha lamps flared at the costers' stalls ; 
 washed with silver on rare nights when the moon 
 turned the gleaming tram-lines into a magic road, 
 leading to the infinite. But the general aspect was 
 grey, grey and sordid. Turbid, too ; a tumultuous 
 stream, heavy with the loam of humanity, beating 
 its way down the high-walled street, as a swollen 
 river in a narrow channel. Men shouted, hoarsely 
 competitive ; women shrieked, in shrill bargainings ; 
 children ran in and out among the' stalls, like 
 jmall gnomes, sedulous in theft and mischief ; 
 dogs barked, and the naphtha lamps hissed and 
 bubbled. Always, over all, there hung a weightier 
 sound a boom and roar as of the sea, the noise 
 of huge waves, resonant and clangorous. John 
 Paterson knew that roar well, and loved it. It 
 was to him the great orchestra of Time, setting the 
 
 3
 
 34 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 rhythm of his simple life. It was a large music, 
 which gave dignity to that which was naturally 
 sordid ; he was unconscious of poverty and a 
 narrow lot when that music filled his heart 
 
 It needed something of the kind, some sense of 
 the general vastness of human destiny, to redeem 
 such a life as John Paterson's from absolute stag- 
 nation. He had preached so often and so long, 
 with no result that was visible ; had poured out so 
 rich and fertilising a stream of sympathy on the 
 dull loam of Dagnall Street, with no sign of 
 quickening seed or answering harvest. A few 
 scant ears, blasted by the east wind that was all. 
 Old Thomas Huckle, the hoarse vendor of cheap 
 vegetables ; Jones, the quick-eyed cobbler, who 
 lived in two rooms at the entrance to the Rents, 
 and one or two bed-ridden pensioners, who shared 
 the small endowments of the chapel these loved 
 him. Huckle blessed him out of the back of his 
 ruined throat, and Jones had been even known to 
 stop work for a full ten minutes, for the mere 
 pleasure oflooking him in the face. There were 
 children, too, half a score of prematurely ripened 
 fruits of the gutter, sharp-featured and sharp- 
 flavoured with experience of the world ; these 
 grew human and almost simple of heart beneath 
 his touch. John Paterson came nearest td happi- 
 ness when he talked with these people. They 
 were his friends, his true flock. He had saved
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 35 
 
 Huckle and Jones from drunkenness by saving 
 them from the harsh monotony of life. The 
 children he had saved from worse evils, and all by 
 that jet of fertilising sympathy, or rather shall we 
 say ? that soft dew of kindness which he dropped 
 silently upon their sterile little hearts. In his best 
 moments John Paterson told himself that this was 
 worth living for, and he was content. 
 
 In the moments which were not his best, when 
 the grey cloud hung above his heart, he had his 
 resource in this ideal vastness of London, the sense 
 of immense destinies working themselves out 
 through the turbulence of the great unquiet city. 
 A strange resource ? But a real one. For he 
 could lose himself in these roaring multitudes, as 
 in a sea. Dagnall Chapel was then as some for- 
 gotten pool, tideless and reed-choked ; he was a 
 swimmer in the infinite, and an ocean throbbed 
 beneath him. When the melancholy fit came 
 upon him he knew what to do, and did it. He 
 sought the great thoroughfares, and let the tide of 
 life carry him whither it would ; stood now amid 
 the shipping of the Docks, and thought of the 
 strange sights which seamen had beheld from those 
 bare masts huddled in the opaque air ; now, perhaps, 
 on the pavement by the Bank, and thought of the 
 piles of gold that lay behind those grimy walls. 
 He wandered westward, keenly conscious of the 
 beauty of passing faces, the glitter of fine equipages,
 
 36 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 the rhythmic thud of horses' feet on the wooden 
 pavements, and sometimes on the kneaded gravel 
 of the " Row " ; sat in the Park, and felt the dignity 
 of those broad elms and wide, green spaces ; gal- 
 loped in thought with this or that rider, in whom 
 he recognised some peculiar grace or beauty, 
 inventing fine romances all the while, and dreams 
 of stately life, and satisfied and noble love and 
 for background of it all some fancy of lands which 
 he would never see, the olive-slopes of Bordi- 
 ghera, the ice pinnacles of Switzerland, the orange- 
 groves of Italy. 
 
 He imagined dramas as he walked, the history 
 of this or that man whose face arrested him ; or, 
 more frequently, of some woman, whose tired 
 eyes seemed seeking everywhere for something 
 never found ; fancied what he would say if she 
 spoke to him, whether, after all, he who talked 
 every Sunday of Divine secrets, knew the secret 
 himself whether there was any secret that any 
 man could know. All the while that deep sus- 
 pended thunder of the streets filled his heart, and 
 drowned the peevish clamour of personal com- 
 plaint. Nothing mattered in such hours as these. 
 He was nothing more than a single bead of foam 
 drifted on the wide ocean. The largeness of the 
 world moved his blood, the wonder and the mys- 
 tery of life entranced him. 
 
 Then, when the lamps were lit, new fancies
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 37 
 
 came, and a certain briskness of pleasure thrilled 
 his senses. All so glistening, so gay ; such wealth 
 carelessly displayed in shop windows ; such a blaze 
 of light, with here and there oases of reticent 
 gloom dim streets, like dark caverns, opening 
 behind great thoroughfares, where figures passed 
 at intervals, shrouded and unsubstantial, like 
 ghosts of the night, inarticulate at the doors of 
 fairy palaces how wonderful it all was, how 
 infinitely suggestive ! Sometimes he stood quite 
 still for a while, only watching ; sometimes moved 
 rapidly, alert with this strange life which London 
 puts into dull hearts. Then came the vision 
 of the light upon the clock -tower, the mass of 
 stately buildings by the river, the great figure of 
 Nelson crowned with stars, and thoughts of past 
 and present, rapid mind-pictures of Trafalgar, of 
 solemn men around a scaffold by the Banqueting 
 Hall, of Blake borne up the Thames amid the 
 cry of trumpets to his burial in Westminster 
 all the majesty and unexpectedness of history, the 
 sense of the meagreness of time, and the greatness 
 of the deeds which fill it. Late at night he would 
 get back to Dagnal 1 . Road, tired but elated. This 
 also, squalid Dagnall Road, with flaring naphtha 
 lamps and shouting costers, was part of this city 
 of infinite destinies. Into that vast tapestry of 
 life which is evermore patterned on the restless 
 loom of Time this scrap of grey was also being
 
 38 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 inwoven. Tired and elated, but once more con- 
 tent, as the swimmer is who at last touches land, 
 but feels all the salt stir and vibration of the sea 
 still beating in his blood. 
 
 He lived alone, and, as might be expected, with 
 extreme frugality. He had two small rooms, a 
 bedroom and a sitting-room, each of them full of 
 books. Any one who had carefully examined his 
 books would have found that many bore the crest 
 of a well-known college on their fly-leaves, for 
 John Paterson was college-bred. The books were 
 significant of the man ; they were mostly in good 
 editions of some twenty years ago a little out 
 of date now, but still serviceable. One would 
 have remarked also that there were few books 
 of any later date than those of twenty years ago. 
 At a glance the shrewd observer would have known 
 that John Paterson's life was cut in twain by 
 that date : before it, books such as a man of 
 scholarly and fastidious tastes rejoices in, in plenty ; 
 after that, no further purchases. One saw, too, 
 that they were not often read nowadays. Plato 
 was there, Dante and Goethe, but dust lay on the 
 edges. To me, who alone knew him with intimacy, 
 he never spoke of books or reading. An accent 
 of scholarship was in his speech, occasionally an 
 elusive reference to some immortal author but 
 that was all. He looked round upon his books 
 with obvious indifference, with even a touch of
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 39 
 
 impatience, as of a man who had discovered their 
 entire futility as warmth for a chilled heart. He 
 lived mostly an outdoor life, jostling in and out 
 among people to whom his scholarship could not 
 have been of the slightest service ; and one would 
 have said that he was anxious to forget both his 
 books and the life that lay behind them. They 
 were manifestly a bequest of brighter days a 
 bequest more painful by its memories than pleasur- 
 able by its gains. 
 
 For the extreme frugality of John Paterson's 
 life there were reasons obvious and ample. There 
 was a small endowment attached to the chapel of 
 some sixty pounds a year, of which he was the 
 recipient. The scanty free-will offerings of the 
 congregation added perhaps another forty pounds 
 to this sum certainly not more. Such was the 
 poverty of the congregation that this total sum 
 was esteemed affluence, and there were those who 
 wondered how John Paterson could spend so much. 
 It was a favourite topic of discussion between 
 Jane Slump the charwoman and Matilda Harris 
 the step-cleaner, each of whom had attended the 
 chapel since a remote youth, what the minister 
 did with so much money, and how very differently 
 they would administer it, if it were theirs. But 
 it was not John Paterson's way to let any one 
 know how he spent his income. There were half- 
 a-dozen poor bed-ridden creatures in Dagnall's
 
 40 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 Rents, half-a-dozen old men in the lanes and 
 alleys which ran off from Dagnall Road, who could 
 have told a great deal had they not been deeply 
 pledged to silence. John Paterson gave away at 
 least a fourth part of his income. He did it 
 quietly and secretly, asking no thanks, and rarely 
 getting them, desirous only that the recipients of 
 his bounty should keep the pledge of silence which 
 he imposed upon them. Many men have been 
 much less secretive in the commission of crimes 
 than he was in the commission of charities. He 
 smiled contentedly over the reputation of avarice 
 which had been diligently created for him by the 
 untiring tongues of Mrs. Slump and Matilda 
 Harris ; he preferred being suspected of meanness 
 to being detected in unjustified generosities. 
 
 In the beginning of his pastorate at Dagnall 
 Chapel it had been known that John Paterson had 
 a wife, but it was understood that as the income 
 was not sufficient for the support of both, it had 
 been mutually arranged that his wife should live 
 in the country with her friends, until such time 
 as things improved with " the cause." That was 
 ten years ago, when one or two persons of settled 
 income still belonged to the chapel, and some 
 sense of generosity was still alive among the 
 people. They admitted that it was hard to part 
 man and wife, and in these days Mrs. Slump 
 had vigorously denounced the arrangement as
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 41 
 
 " onnatural and hiniqtous." The people had even 
 arranged a Bazaar, the proceeds of which were 
 to be handed over to the new minister for the 
 purpose of giving a respectable matrimonial basis 
 to his pastorate. The Bazaar was a triumphant 
 success. Half-a-dozen ancient members, long since 
 removed to more respectable localities, had been 
 induced to attend, and had spent at least five 
 shillings each. A County Councillor, whose father's 
 name was inscribed on the memorial tablet near 
 the pulpit, had also been present, and had been 
 munificent enough to contribute ten pounds. The 
 sale by auction on the last day of the Bazaar had 
 entirely hit the temper of a neighbourhood where 
 everything was keenly bargained for, and had 
 been a time of wild excitement to Jane Slump 
 and Matilda Harris, each of whom had secured 
 elaborate antimacassars at a purely nominal rate. 
 But the professed purpose of the Bazaar was not 
 attained. The proceeds were forty pounds ; and 
 the possession of so much money at once debased 
 the rectitude of the ruling deacons. They re- 
 solved with reluctance, so they said that there 
 were other things more urgent than the readjust- 
 ment of Mr. Patcrson's matrimonial life. Paint 
 was needed for the doors, glass in the windows, 
 a stove against the cold of the winter months. 
 They argued that these improvements would 
 attract large crowds to the ministry of the Word,
 
 42 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 and as crowds meant money, all would come right 
 in the end for the minister. John Patcrson said 
 nothing whatever about this breach of trust. He 
 showed no anger, no disappointment. He never 
 by word or manner reminded his deacons of their 
 broken promise. The stove and the paint did not 
 bring the anticipated crowd. The congregation 
 settled down to its normal forty or fifty. If by 
 any chance a stranger appeared among them, 
 he came but once, and was never seen again. 
 Perhaps he found the paint inartistic, the stove 
 insufficient. In course of time the existence of 
 Mrs. Paterson was forgotten, ignored, put out of 
 mind, and it was generally assumed that John 
 Paterson preferred matters to remain as they were. 
 Perhaps he did ; and those who had seen Mrs. 
 Paterson on the one occasion when she visited 
 the chapel viz., the opening day of the Bazaar 
 might have been excused for such an inhumane 
 conclusion. She was a tall woman, with a low, 
 broad brow, dark eyes and hair, a scornful mouth, 
 a haughty carriage. She looked round the dingy 
 room, with its damp-stained walls only partially 
 disguised under draperies of red twill and paper 
 rosettes, with bold, resentful eyes. Her scorn 
 included the poverty of the people too ; to the 
 County Councillor only did she deign to speak. 
 Her attitude to her husband was curious. Of 
 obvious intention she avoided him, standing near
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 43 
 
 the door, aside from the stream of people, her 
 dark eyes very bright, her face pallid. When 
 her eyes met her husband's they shrank, and 
 her pallor deepened. When he spoke to her one 
 could see a shudder run through her, and could 
 mark her emotion in the quickened heave of her 
 bosom, the trembling of her lips. There was 
 supplication, too, in her manner, a sudden collapse 
 of hauteur into humility at the sound of his voice, 
 a flash of anger in the eyes as the lids dropped 
 over them, resentment and appeal mingled like 
 fire and tears something at once confusing, 
 pathetic, inexplicable. 
 
 The moment he left her her figure regained all 
 its pride of pose, its rigidity, its combative energy of 
 aspect ; as he reapproached her the proud shoulders 
 sunk, the proud face softer! ed. All that day, across the 
 babel of the room, the eyes of this separated man 
 and wife challenged each other, and the victory 
 was always with the man. When, at last, the 
 day was over, she departed, with a certain broken- 
 ness of aspect, as of one who had undergone a 
 bitter penance and survived it She went one 
 way, he another. It was the first and only time 
 that she was ever seen in Dagnall Chapel. 
 
 There it might have ended, and the existence 
 of a Mrs. Paterson have dropped wholly out of 
 mind, and the clue to John Paterson's life have 
 remained undiscovered, but for the circumstance
 
 44 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 which occasions the writing of this record. It 
 was in this tenth year of his residence in Dagnall 
 Road that all at once the clasped book of John 
 Paterson's life fell open, and I came to know his 
 secret. 
 
 For in this tenth year certain changes occurred 
 which greatly altered the prospects of the decayed 
 chapel. Leases fell in, by which the endowment 
 was trebled in amount ; the genius of street im- 
 provement invaded Dagnall Road, and houses 
 were pulled down, which gave the long obscure 
 chapel a frontage to the main thoroughfare. 
 There was no longer a grease-polished passage 
 as the one means of approach ; the sea had come 
 back to the stranded hulk, and the tide of men 
 poured along a broad pavement close to the doors. 
 John Paterson could safely count upon a modest 
 two hundred pounds a year, and had no further 
 need to live solitary and desolate in his two narrow 
 rooms. Those who remembered the one appear- 
 ance of Mrs. Paterson began to speculate eagerly 
 upon the hour of her new emergence from that 
 mysterious solitude, known by the generic term of 
 "the country." Jane Slump and Matilda Harris 
 eyed the minister curiously, watching for signs of 
 elation in his manner. Rumours began to spread 
 that Mrs. Paterson would arrive in October, that 
 the first Sunday of November was fixed for her 
 advent, that at latest she would appear at Christ-
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 45 
 
 mas. There was a peculiar appropriateness in 
 the selection of Christmas. This was, in fact, a 
 suggestion which could be traced to the sense of 
 poetic fitness which existed in the soul of Matilda 
 Harris, who meditated the subject with tears in 
 her eyes as she cleaned steps, and found it as 
 fascinating as the last story in the Fam : ly Herald. 
 But Christmas came, and the mysterious wife did 
 not appear. John Paterson went in and out 
 among his people and said nothing. Years had 
 graved stern lines about his mouth, and had 
 increased that subtle dignity which clothed him 
 like an armour turning the edge of all im- 
 pertinent curiosity and no one dared to question 
 him. Then, early in January, when the raw east 
 wind swept like a troop of swords across the 
 desolate land, he was absent from his work for a 
 fortnight. When he re-appeared, the lines around 
 his mouth were graved a shade deeper, and he 
 wore a wide band of black upon his hat. And 
 then the news spread that the strange woman, 
 with the proud, dark eyes and low brows, who 
 had only once in those ten years visited the scene 
 of her husband's work, was dead. 
 
 The news spread, as news does ; but it was not 
 helped by any single word from John Paterson. 
 All that his congregation knew of the matter was 
 derived from inference. They observed the black 
 band upon the hat, the worn face, the sombre
 
 46 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 glance ; the silent tragedy was as clear to them as 
 though the coffin and the face of the dead woman 
 were actually painted on the retina of his eyes. 
 Perhaps the eye is not wholly an organ of vision. 
 Who shall say that it is not also a mirror, in which 
 the great terrors and tragedies of life hang reflected, 
 until the hour when the wound in the heart heals 
 and the memory forgets them ? 
 
 They knew also in another way. On that 
 Sunday after his return there was a new note in John 
 Paterson's voice, a throb of feeling which com- 
 municated itself to his audience. He spoke of 
 kindness to the dead, and the lifelong sorrow of 
 him who knows that he has been less than kind 
 while time for love was his ; of the duty of forgiving 
 even to seventy times seven, since there is none 
 of us who does not need an infinite forgiveness 
 from God ; of life itself as too sad a thing to be 
 made sadder by the foolish bitterness of narrow 
 jealousies and irrational animosities. His voice 
 trembled, and that curious dignity of his seemed 
 transmuted into something higher still and rarer 
 the awfulness of the prophet. His pale face and 
 deep blue eyes seemed to glow; for the first time 
 it struck us that his grey hair was a contradiction, 
 and that he was a young man as years go a young 
 man, who had been aged by sorrow ; a man who 
 in his prime had been thrust by a violent fate into 
 the shadows of age. As he ceased speaking the
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 47 
 
 shadows of age came back again. The glow faded 
 from the tired face, his height seemed to contract, 
 his shoulders to bend forward ; he was once more 
 shrunk and grey, an unnoticeable man, cast by 
 Nature for an obscure part, and content with it. 
 
 The lights were out in the chapel, the people 
 had gone, when an afterthought took me to the 
 dingy room which was called the minister's vestry. 
 I knocked lightly at the door, and receiving no 
 reply opened it, and went in. The room was in 
 darkness, save for one small jet of gas, and there 
 at the table sat John Paterson, with his head bowed 
 upon his arms. His attitude was one of entire 
 prostration, and the shudder of the shoulders told 
 me that he was weeping. 
 
 As I was about to go, ashamed of having in- 
 truded on his sorrow, he motioned me to sit, 
 and then he told me his stoiy. 
 
 Yes, she was dead ; and he wept not so much for 
 her death as for the shame and remorse of that 
 inevitable thought which possessed him, that for 
 him her death was release from an intolerable 
 destiny. Let the truth be told at last ; she was a 
 drunkard. Twice, in that earlier period of his life 
 which was unknown to us, he had left a position 
 of high responsibility and success because the 
 shame of her weakness had overwhelmed him. As 
 long as she loved him he could bear it, he could 
 hope to save her ; but when at last her love died
 
 48 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 his hope died too. Once more he had resigned 
 his charge, and this time had buried himself in the 
 obscurity of Dagnall Road. His plans, his studies, 
 his ambitions, had all perished in that hour. He 
 was glad to be poor, for that removed from him 
 the temptation to summon back his wife to him. 
 and once more renew the struggle and defeat which 
 he had known before. He was glad also to be 
 among the poor ; for with them the demand for 
 kindness was incessant, and in such compassionate 
 activities he could forget his own smart. He had 
 brought her up to the Bazaar in the hope that 
 they might once more come together. She 
 absolutely refused to share so mean a life. Proud 
 and bitter of spirit, she had wholly despised him 
 for reconciling himself to such a lot. Yet there 
 were hours when all her past came back upon her, 
 and then she was softened, and wrote piteous letters 
 to him. Again and again after such a letter he 
 had gone to see her, hoping that at last the crisis 
 had come ; but she who could pour out her best 
 self on paper no sooner saw him than the old 
 unconquerable obduracy of heart came bick. He 
 thanked God that before she died the heart of the 
 child, of the lover, had been given her again. 
 For a week he held her hand in his, and she had 
 died with her mouth against his lips. He had 
 been to blame. Had he known better the secrets 
 of her nature he might perhaps have saved her.
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 49 
 
 Yes, he saw things now saw them as they were. 
 In those other years, when ambition burned hot 
 within him, he had been a student intent on 
 brilliant fame. He had passed his days, and had 
 worked far into the night, in scholarly pursuits. 
 He had not thought of her loneliness the lone- 
 liness of a woman in a house where her husband 
 sits behind a locked door, a woman who has no 
 child, no intellectual pursuits. What had he shared 
 with her? A mere fraction of his life. The things 
 on which his heart was set were hidden from her. 
 She felt the deprivation, was jealous of the pur- 
 poses which usurped her place in his heart. Yes, 
 he could dimly guess now how she felt, how the 
 loneliness deepened, until unnoticed the vice 
 sprang up which slew her. Was it her weakness ? 
 It was also his fault. Ah, if he could but have 
 seen it so from the first ! Sins all sins need two 
 hearts for their growth ; it needs the conspiracy of 
 two follies to make a sin. An intolerable destiny ! 
 So he had told himself, not having sense to see 
 that he had helped to shape it ; and even with it 
 all before him, with all the memorable outpourings 
 of that last fortnight, still the shameful thought 
 throbbed in his heart that her death had removed 
 an incubus from his life, and that it was best as 
 it was. 
 
 As he spoke, he still sat at the table, with his 
 hands covering his face. The words came slowly, 
 
 4
 
 50 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 as though wrung out of him. For some ten 
 minutes after he had spoken he sat silent, the tears 
 oozing between the locked fingers. Then he rose 
 quietly, and went out without a word. He seemed 
 altogether unconscious of my presence. 
 
 The next Sunday came, and with it all trace of 
 emotional crisis in John Paterson had disappeared. 
 His sermon was exactly the sort of sermon which he 
 had preached at any time during the last ten years 
 simple, plain, practical. That new note in his 
 voice the mellow vox-humana of the heart was 
 never heard again. That flame of intense feeling, 
 which had made his face glow, burned no more. 
 
 He took up his life again with stubborn re- 
 solution, stolid courage ; went in and out among 
 the byeways of Hoxton working good with auto- 
 matic diligence ; gave much, did much, saw strange 
 tragedies, helped sordid miseries, and became 
 better known than ever as a wise man in the 
 hour of difficulty, a kind man in the hour of 
 sorrow. His books stood dusty and unopened 
 as before ; his aversion from study was complete, 
 though no man was more deeply learned in the 
 book of human life. Perhaps it was because he 
 knew so much of life that he cared so little for 
 books. What had Goethe to tell him? Dante? 
 Plato? He moved amid the play of forces of 
 which they wrote, touched the living essences 
 which they described. His Inferno was in
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 51 
 
 Dagnall Road, his Faust was acted out in bar- 
 barous grossness round about him sometimes, 
 too, in subtler fashion in his own soul. He 
 had hopes that of his life, as of Faust's, the 
 final angelic verdict might be saved, but he was 
 not sure. He sometimes had visions of a better 
 Republic than Plato's, which was being slowly built 
 up out of the chaos of things ; but of this aho 
 he was not sure. He toiled amid the roar of 
 muddy tides at the foundations, and often had no 
 faith to see the finished pinnacles. Such thoughts 
 as he had on such subjects he kept to himself; 
 he knew them to be beyond the scope of the 
 depressed and draggled remnant who heard him 
 preach. Now and again they flashed like a throb 
 of flame through the monotony of his words, and 
 his poverty-stricken flock had the sense that there 
 was a man behind the mask of that grey, shrunk 
 figure in the pulpit, whom they did not know, and 
 who could not be known by them. What they 
 needed most was the applied compassion of 
 practical help ; and such help John Paterson gave 
 them lavishly. 
 
 When the burden became too heavy, he fell 
 back upon his former remedy ; he took refuge 
 in the elemental vastness of London. He walked 
 eastward, westward ; watched the unlading of 
 ocean steamers in the Docks, went up the river 
 on a penny boat, with eyes fixed upon the vast
 
 52 THE CHILLED HEART 
 
 curves of the shores ; imagined the hum of men in 
 those long lines of warehouses and factories to the 
 south, the throb of organs in St. Paul's and 
 Westminster on the other bank. He fancied him- 
 self with Wren upon the great dome, when the 
 last touch of gold was laid upon the cross, with 
 Burke when he came out of Westminster Hall, 
 after the triumph of his great speech for the 
 indictment of Warren Hastings. He said to 
 himself, as the boat hovered under St. Stephen's, 
 " Perhaps Gladstone is speaking now " ; as it beat 
 its way against the brown tide at Chelsea, " Ah, 
 there, somewhere, Carlyle's pen is creating some- 
 thing as enduring as the stones of Wren." In the 
 
 o o 
 
 grey afternoon he saw the dingy wharves and 
 warehouses dissolve in purple haze, becoming 
 dignified and lovely for a little space, like a vaster 
 Venice sprung suddenly from the churning waters, 
 and hanging unsubstantial as a dream upon the 
 formless skies. Through the opaque evening he 
 saw the bridges stretched like ropes of fire above 
 the water, and passing over them spectral forms, 
 hurrying illuminations, and the sinuous blaze 
 of lighted trains. Like an enormous instrument 
 of music London lay, with its streets stretched 
 from north to south, from east to west, as 
 vibrant wires, touched and swept by the hands of 
 giant destinies. That large music entered into his 
 soul, as it had always done, and composed its
 
 THE CHILLED HEART 53 
 
 discords. The very contact with such multitudi- 
 nous and various life infected him with vitality, and 
 instructed him in a certain spacious charity. 
 
 He learned at last the rare and difficult art of 
 being charitable to himself; of hoping that in 
 some way his own poor life fitted in with some 
 general and gracious purpose ; and that, therefore, 
 his own hopes and sorrows were of small account, 
 and not to be considered, in the evolution of 
 society. It was something, in so vast a scheme of 
 things, to have the smallest place, and Dagnall 
 Road grew tolerable, hospitable. It was some- 
 thing to take the humblest part in such a battle, 
 and he fought as one for whom the day is short, 
 the night imminent. Of that night he had many 
 thoughts, mostly hopeful, none fearful ; but the 
 dominant one was that when it came he would be 
 glad to rest. 
 
 Of that great sorrow of John Paterson's life 
 there was, however, one open record. Close to 
 the pulpit, and almost hidden from general sight, 
 he had a small white marble slab placed, which 
 bore two words only Peccavi t Miserere ! 
 
 He and I knew what they meant no one else. 
 He did not intend that any others should, and there- 
 fore he concealed his confession in the hospitable 
 obscurity of what is, and is likely to remain, in the 
 plainest sense, a language both dead and meaning- 
 less to the minds of Dagnall Road.
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 55
 
 Who, of knowledge, by hearsay, 
 Reports a man upstarted 
 Somewhere as a god, 
 Hordes grown European-hearted^ 
 Millions of the wild made tame 
 On a sudden at his fame ? 
 In Vishnu-land what Avatar?
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 I HAD picked him up the night before in the 
 neighbourhood of Leicester Square, and the 
 instinct of old friendship had asserted itself. For I 
 had known Jack Boynton in the old Balliol days, 
 when great things had been expected of him, and, 
 as 'Varsity estimates go, great things had really 
 been done by him. He had always exercised over 
 me a curious fascination. No finer picture of youth 
 could be conceived than Boynton as he then was, 
 for he had the head of a Greek god, compact and 
 yet massive, with close rings of bright-coloured hair, 
 a low, broad brow, eyes blue and deep, and of 
 singular brilliancy, and a frame which, in its close- 
 knit grace and virility, answered to the dignity and 
 charm of the face. How it was that he had fallen 
 out of the race no one knew. He was not very 
 careful about the moralities, it is true, but he had 
 never been involved in any sort of scandal. He 
 had even at one time seemed to have religious 
 tendencies, for he had ostentatiously mounted a 
 large ivory crucifix upon his mantel-shelf, which, 
 however, appeared ironically out of place between 
 
 37
 
 58 THE MVS7C OF THE GODS 
 
 two small bronzes of the Dancing Faun and a 
 naked Apollo. All at once he had disappeared 
 from the university, and left no trace. There were 
 rumours of foreign travel, and there was a general 
 belief among us that our " Waring " would turn up 
 some day in . some new effluence of genius and 
 glory. 
 
 "O, never star 
 Was lost here but it rose afar," 
 
 we said to one another when we named him. But 
 years had passed, no word had come, and he had 
 slowly slipped out of memory. Judge, then, the thrill 
 that shot through me when, on rounding the east- 
 most corner of Leicester Square on a hazy October 
 evening, I found myself face to face again with 
 Jack Boynton. 
 
 But it must be confessed that the thrill had more 
 of surprise in it than pleasure, for the merest glance 
 revealed strange changes in him. He wore a rough 
 blue cloth jacket, such as sailors wear, a woollen 
 collar, and a silk handkerchief loosely knotted 
 at his throat. His clothes were worn and stained, 
 and his hat was a rusty billycock. The intense 
 youthfulness of his face and the close rings of 
 bright hair remained, however, and his eyes had all 
 the old quick light, and were as bright as ever. At 
 first he seemed pleased to see me, then suddenly 
 he became apathetic. I could not do less than
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 59 
 
 ask him to dine with me the next night, and 
 he assented with some show of cordiality, which, 
 however, struck me as slightly overacted. He 
 insisted also on naming the place and hour. The 
 place was a little Italian restaurant of which I 
 had never heard, and the time was to be two 
 hours before midnight It seemed a curious whim, 
 but Boynton had never done anything after an 
 orthodox fashion, and rny desire to know more 
 about him made me jump to his humour without 
 a second thought. So here we found ourselves, 
 face to face at a little table in a long narrow 
 room, eating an excellent dinner at the unusual 
 hour of ten P.M. 
 
 The first part of the meal passed in unnoticeable 
 dulness, with few words, and those of the most 
 commonplace description. I had ample time to 
 observe the dingy room with its foreign aspect 
 and swart waiters, one of whom especially attracted 
 me by his Ligurian grace and suppleness. Now 
 and then among modern Italians one meets a man 
 of the pure antique mould, who bears upon him the 
 stamp of a vanished stateliness, and whom one could 
 easily conceive as having led a legion and marched 
 with Caesar. This man Antonio they called him 
 had such an air, and in the swift grace and dignity 
 of his movements resembled Boynton, though he 
 was of heavier build, and dark as Boynton was 
 fair. It was to Antonio that Boynton gave all his
 
 60 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 orders, and they were received with a curious excess 
 of deference, which amounted almost to reverence. 
 Toward the close of the meal Antonio appeared 
 with a small ill-shaped bottle of wine, unlike any- 
 thing which I had ever seen before. The bottle was 
 deeply crusted with a reddish substance, so that it 
 appeared to be fashioned of earthenware rather 
 than glass, and bulged at the base into a form 
 resembling a globe. The neck was long and thick, 
 and had scored upon it certain curved lines, which 
 had the appearance of a snake. As soon as 
 Antonio noticed my eyes upon the bottle he 
 hastily knotted a napkin round it, in so dexterous 
 a fashion that it was completely concealed. He 
 seemed agitated, and his hand shook as he poured 
 the wine, and in Boynton's eyes there was some 
 trace of the same agitation. 
 
 The wine itself was of the purest golden hue I 
 ever saw. It held the light in an extraordinary 
 fashion ; every drop, as it fell, was a topaz, and from 
 the glass, when it was filled, there seemed to be 
 emitted an actual radiance, a sunny effluence, which 
 appeared to cast shadows on the white napery of 
 the table. Boynton raised the precious liquor to 
 his lips slowly, and with a certain awe as it seemed 
 to me. What my own feelings were I can hardly 
 determine, but certainly no such divine flavour had 
 I ever felt upon the palate. It had the essence of 
 all the flowers of the world in it, and the warmth
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 61 
 
 of a thousand suns. Its subtle glow, passing along 
 nerve and vein, seemed to liberate every power of 
 thought and fancy, and to produce a delicious sense 
 of youth. On Boynton the effect was instanta- 
 neous. His face, with its pure Greek outlines, which 
 hitherto had been impassive and almost sullen, 
 began to glow as though it were illumined, and 
 each ring of his yellow hair seemed a curved flame, 
 soft and delicate, like the lambency of an aureole. I 
 am aware, even as I write the words, how incredible 
 and absurd they will appear ; but I can only set 
 down my impressions as they actually occurred to 
 me at the time, and I can find no better phrase 
 in which to record them. I do not know now, and 
 I shall never know, how these things happened, or 
 what miraculous liquor this was of which I drank ; 
 but I cannot be deceived as to its effects. 
 
 With the glow of the wine came the full tide 
 of speech, and in a few moments we were each 
 pouring out eager talk. Our thoughts ranged 
 hither and thither in fanciful inconsequence, glanc- 
 ing upon a score of subjects, with a sort of fugitive 
 brilliancy. Presently I found myself repeating the 
 lines of Browning which I had so often applied to 
 Boynton 
 
 " O, never star 
 Was lost here but it rose afar ! " 
 
 "Truer than you think," said Boynton gravely. 
 " The impermanence which poets attribute to man
 
 62 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 is a pious fiction. We are the only permanent and 
 immutable creatures on the earth. We sink here 
 we rise afar ; just so. That was no doubt what 
 Browning meant, though he did not express it 
 very clearly." 
 
 " Metempsychosis, I suppose you mean," said I. 
 " We have all been other people, and have lots of 
 new incarnations before us." 
 
 "No, not that," he replied. "That's a barren 
 notion. W'ho- wants to be anybody else ? I mean 
 that you and I have really existed for thousands 
 of years. I know I have, anyway. 
 
 4 "I have been many, yet inexorably 
 In each myself alone ; in ages gone 
 I marched with Xerxes, fell at Marathon, 
 Saw Carthage burn, and Alexander die,' * 
 
 he recited gravely. 
 
 We were silent for a moment ; then he said 
 with a sudden change of manner, " Now I know 
 very well what you are thinking about You 
 naturally want to know what I have been doing 
 with myself since the old Balliol days. Oh, don't 
 deprecate your curiosity ; it's a natural and whole- 
 some sort of inquisitiveness. Well, if you don't 
 mind listening, I'll take up the wondrous tale. 
 It's not likely we shall meet again for some years, 
 and you were always a good listener." 
 
 Then he began. 
 
 ***
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 63 
 
 "There are few persons who have not had on 
 rare occasions the curious sense of having been 
 in a place, or looked upon a scene before. It is 
 quite a common experience, though the impression 
 is usually so fugitive that it passes almost before 
 we are aware of it. In the case of a locality or 
 of scenery there is nothing astonishing in such 
 an impression. After all, places and scenes have 
 little to differentiate them : all towns are strongly 
 reminiscent of one another, and so is scenery. A 
 Scotch sea-loch and a Norwegian fiord are so much 
 alike that the dullest mind needs no jogging to 
 perceive the resemblance ; and so there are groups 
 of buildings in a town, or combinations of scenery 
 in a country, which so far follow a pattern that 
 one may readily fancy that he has actually been 
 in these places before. These things are arranged 
 in an endless series of replicas. It is by no means 
 wonderful that occasionally the replica suggests 
 the original, and is confused with it 
 
 " Now I only mention this because it is a con- 
 venient preface to my story, and, as you will see, 
 an apposite one. Have you ever had this same 
 curious sense of familiarity in reading a book ? I 
 don't mean that you think you have read it before, 
 but that something in it sets a fibre throbbing in 
 the imagination, and for a moment or two you 
 live in the scene it pictures. 
 
 " Well, this is what happened to me. It was a
 
 64 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 dreary November afternoon, and I was sitting in 
 my snug room at Balliol, reading in a desultory 
 fashion. I forget now entirely what it was I was 
 reading, but I have an impression it was Theocritus. 
 All at once a passage in the old poet arrested me. 
 The lines went ringing through my brain with an 
 extraordinary insistence, and in a moment I was 
 conscious of a change of atmosphere, as though I 
 had passed swiftly through a strong draught of 
 cold air, as a man might take a header into an 
 icy stream. The next moment I emerged into 
 another world. It was full of sunlight, and a 
 sound of flutes, faint in the distance, breathed upon 
 the warm air. There were hills of a soft bluish- 
 grey, and a wine-coloured sea ; a green plain with 
 oaks and laurels negligently grouped ; and close 
 at hand a small pillared temple, in a grove of 
 cypresses. In the dark heart of the cypresses 
 human voices seemed to be sighing, and a profound 
 sadness fell upon me. In the open air stood a low 
 altar, and on it lay a wolf, his bristling jaws red 
 with blood, and his gaunt flanks stiffened in death. 
 Garlands of flowers hung upon the altar, and a 
 wreath of laurel was fastened over the doorway 
 of the temple. While I looked, the sound of the 
 advancing flutes became clearer, and in an instant 
 a procession of white-robed youths and maidens 
 slowly defiled up the alley of the cypress-grove, 
 and approached the temple. Until that moment
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 65 
 
 I had been conscious of no change in myself; 
 now I was suddenly aware of a rough cloak or 
 toga of tawny skin which hung upon my shoulders, 
 and also that I wore sandals, and had a curiously 
 primitive stringed instrument in my hand. The 
 moment the procession saw me it halted ; a look 
 of awe and gladness was on each* face ; the sound 
 of the soft fluting ceased, and all knelt 
 
 " I began to touch the strings of my curious 
 lyre, and to sing some soft Greek words, the mellow 
 vowels of which alone made music, and a sort of 
 ecstasy seized me. I shuddered with a strange joy, 
 and the human voices in the cypresses ceased to 
 sigh, and went like a wind of sound in and out 
 among the strings of the lyre. Then suddenly 
 the whole scene grey hills, wine-coloured sea, 
 procession, and temple began to grow dim, as 
 though one passed a wash of grey over a water- 
 colour. I had again the sense of passing through 
 a great draught of cold air and there I sat in my 
 room at Balliol. I had not been asleep ; I knew 
 that because I still held the book in my hand, 
 within a foot and a half of my face. Had I slept 
 the relaxed muscles would have dropped it. So 
 far as I could judge, I had been unconscious about 
 a quarter of an hour. I was very cold, and it was 
 some time before the circulation fully revived. 
 Otherwise, I was none the worse ; indeed, upon 
 the whole, I was conscious of a sort of spiritual 
 
 5
 
 66 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 elation, a certain vital glow, and a sense of the 
 delightfulness of being alive. 
 
 " Of course it goes without saying that I was a 
 good deal impressed by this strange experience, 
 though, after a week or two, the impression began 
 to die away. I was inclined to think, upon reflection, 
 that the whole thing might be accounted for as 
 some subtle sort of epileptic seizure. I remembered 
 how Coleridge dreamed the poem of Kubla Khan. 
 I discerned the resemblance in my experience. I 
 even tried to repeat it. Half-a-dozen times I sat 
 in the dusk with one of the old Greek poets in my 
 hand, expecting this blissful france to overtake me, 
 but nothing happened. I noticed, however, one 
 curious difference in myself. I can describe it in 
 no better way than to say that a sort of aloofness 
 possessed me, a dislike of my fellows, a sense of 
 something alien in my environment. You re- 
 member young Stockley, no doubt, and the par- 
 ticular primness of his clothes? Well, one day I 
 met him coming out of Christ's, and a whole stream 
 of ludicrous thoughts rushed through my mind. I 
 found myself criticising his dress, as though I had 
 never seen the masculine garments of the nine- 
 teenth century before. I wondered what sort of 
 leg he had, and pictured what a sorry figure he 
 would cut in sandals and a toga. I examined him 
 carefully, with as disinterested a detachment of 
 thought as a savage might have when he sees for
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 67 
 
 the first time the civilised man. The grey build- 
 ings, the hurrying 'grads, a passing drayman with 
 his load of barrels, a young girl with slim shoulders, 
 a country woman, with shapeless figure muffled in 
 a coloured shawl each stood outlined with intense 
 distinctness before my mind, and the whole effect 
 was of something foreign and ludicrous. I laughed 
 uncontrollably, and it was the sound of my own 
 laughter that brought me back to common sense. 
 I found young Stockley looking at me with 
 surprise and buspicion written visibly upon his 
 stupid face. 
 
 " ' Oh, take it off, man, take it off, for God's sake, 
 I was saying. ' These things, too : and these,' 
 I laughed, pointing to his trousers and his waist- 
 coat. ' My little man, you're really too funny for 
 anything. Where have you lived ? What have 
 you done to be dressed like this ? What would 
 Daphne, and Coronis, and Clymene say if they 
 could see you ! ' 
 
 " Stockley turned very red, and said curtly, ' I 
 don't in the least know what you're talking about. 
 It's my conviction you're drunk.' And the little 
 man looked up into my face with the nastiest 
 scowl. 
 
 " At that moment I suppose I regained my 
 modern self. I saw Stockley striding off in a rage, 
 and the young girl looking at me with a blush 
 upon her face. Of course, it was only Stockley
 
 68 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 and this was Christ's, and what had I been saying 
 or doing ? I began to feel frightened about myself. 
 Was I going to be ill? I consoled myself with 
 a pull up to Ifflcy, and came back late in the 
 afternoon with so vibrant a sense of glowing 
 health, that 1 had no fear of illness, at any rate, 
 and was ready to forget all the curious sensations 
 of the morning. 
 
 " For the next four or five months I plunged 
 into hard reading, and if I thought of these things 
 at all it was only at long intervals, and with the 
 sort of shame a young man feels when he suspects 
 himself of some physical peculiarity or deficiency. 
 Nevertheless the sense of aloofness did not leave 
 me. I felt as though my whole nature were jarred 
 in some way ; I was not at ease in my environ- 
 ment, and I looked upon everything as from a 
 distance, as one sees the faint outlines of a city 
 and its moving crowds through a mist. However, 
 there could have been nothing outrt in my manner, 
 for at that time, I may say without exaggeration, 
 I was one of the most popular men in the 'Varsity. 
 Men sought my society, and seemed to recognise 
 me as a leader. Even the dear old Master had 
 a special liking for me, and occasionally dropped 
 his sententious irony, and talked Greek mysticism 
 and philosophy delightfully to me. Of course 
 the story about young Stockley had spread, but 
 it was generally treated as the best of jokes.
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 69 
 
 Stockley was a dandified idiot, and every one was 
 ready to laugh at him and applaud me. 
 
 " Well, as I have said, I read hard for four or 
 five months, and over and above my regular read- 
 ing I gave an hour or two a day to the Greek 
 poets out of pure pleasure in them. It was now 
 about April, and the first freshness of spring was 
 in the air. Between the shelter of the high hedges 
 there was a smell of violets ; the bulbous candel- 
 abra of the chestnut-trees already had a shiny 
 look ; the clouds were white and high, and day 
 followed day with sunshine and west wind. One 
 day the charm of the weather overcame me, and 
 I determined to take full advantage of it I took 
 train to Thame, and from there walked over the 
 lovely range of hills that runs behind Brill. You 
 know the country perhaps ? Well, it is exquisite, 
 and never more so than in early spring. The hills 
 break at regular intervals into deep hollows, full 
 of trees ; you look down into them, as into vast 
 rounded cups, overbrimming with green. Before 
 you spreads the wide plain, grading through a 
 hundred tints of sage-green and opal to the deep 
 blue of the horizon. Along the hills the air blows 
 fresh and pure, and on an April day there are a 
 hundred changes in an afternoon deep masses 
 of moving shadow and shifting lights, that make 
 the plain as elusive in its beauty as the sea, and to 
 my mind much lovelier.
 
 70 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 " I suppose I had walked as nearly on the top 
 of the ridge as I could for about an hour, when 
 I came to, one of these wooded fissures in the hills, 
 and was tempted by its beauty to explore it. 
 There was a steep path, which took me in a 
 hundred paces into the wood, where fir and beech 
 trees were mingled in about equal proportions. 
 After entering the wood the path began to widen, 
 until it was a broad turf road, soft and almost 
 soundless to the foot. Suddenly, as I walked, my 
 ear was arrested by the sound of flutes, a soft, 
 clear music, rising and falling with the soughing 
 of the wind in the trees. I held myself rigid at 
 once, remembering my former trance, and deter- 
 mining to resist any recurrence of it with all my 
 will-power. No doubt it was some country-boy 
 tootling his tin-whistle on the way home from 
 school, and the charm of distance did the rest. 
 But I had no sooner suggested such an explanation 
 to myself, than I repudiated it. For this music 
 was of an altogether peculiar softness and rhythm, 
 and was accompanied by a clear low chant well, 
 such as you might hear in a big scene at the 
 Lyceum, a music behind the stage, you know. 
 It hung in the air and seemed to pervade it, and 
 there was something in it that overcame my 
 rigidity. I became slowly conscious of a great 
 elation, my feet moved as though they were winged ; 
 I felt a mingled buoyancy and stateliness in my
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 71 
 
 walk. Now you may call this epilepsy or what 
 you will, but here is the plain truth. As I moved 
 down this broad green alley under the beech-trees, 
 this is what I saw. There was the little pillared 
 temple I had seen six months before in my vision ; 
 the low marble altar on which lay the dead wolf ; 
 the white procession of youths and maidens 
 defiling toward the temple, moving in smiling 
 gladness to that rhythmic thrill of soft pipes, and 
 chanting some rich deep-vowelled invocation as 
 they moved. As before, they knelt when they 
 saw me. Then I also began to sing, and they 
 stood silent and ecstatic, grouped in exquisite 
 attitudes under the broad-branched beeches. One 
 fair girl, with straight brows and violet eyes, 
 stepped forward and offered me flowers with timid 
 hands. An old man, with long white beard, then 
 poured some fragrant oil upon the altar, and a 
 thin flame arose. Through the trees there came 
 a rustling of leaves, and out of the shadows bright 
 eyes gleamed, innocent and fearless. Then the 
 pungent smoke from the altar began to draw a 
 faint blue veil across the scene, and the fluting, 
 which had commenced again, grew faint and fainter, 
 and was lost in distance. The air grew cold, and 
 I was alone. 
 
 " Now I warned you that what I had to tell you 
 would probably be incredible. Well, let that be 
 as it may, this is the sequel. It must have been
 
 72 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 about four o'clock when I entered the wood ; it 
 was seven when I left it. When I came to myself 
 to my modern self, let us say this was what I 
 saw. The moon was rising, and the sun had sunk 
 in a clear sky, so that it was not dark. Close to 
 me was a small stone building, with Greek pillars, 
 and a rounded roof probably a summer-house 
 built years ago by the owner of the land, and 
 apparently of very ancient date. A low marble seat 
 exactly faced the door of the building, at about 
 the distance of a dozen paces. There was nc 
 sign of man ; profound woods stretched on every 
 side for not less than two miles. The path by 
 which I entered the wood from the Brill hills I 
 could not find, and it was with difficulty I dis- 
 covered it a week later when I revisited the place. 
 I followed a broad glade, and came out ultimately 
 at a little village in the Aylesbury valley. I had 
 no sense of illness, or of shaken nerves ; on the 
 contrary, I felt full of the most joyous life. What- 
 ever had happened to me, it was nothing in the 
 nature of disease. My mind never felt so clear 
 and strong, and my success a few weeks later in 
 the exams, is the best evidence of my complete 
 sanity. n 
 
 Boynton stopped a moment in his narrative ; 
 his silence was an interrogation. 
 
 " Well, if you ask me to speak quite candidly," I 
 said, " I should say that there is nothing incredible
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 73 
 
 in your story, because it is capable of the most 
 natural of explanations. You over-read and excite 
 your brain. In such a state you take a walk too 
 long for you, and fall asleep. All the old Greek 
 pictures with which your imagination is saturated 
 weave themselves into a dream of peculiar vivid- 
 ness. True, you have dreamed it before, but what 
 of that ? It is by no means uncommon for a man 
 to dream the same dream over again at various 
 periods of his life. Some people dream the same 
 dream, or variations of it, whenever the brain is 
 over-excited, as you very well know." 
 
 " Precisely. That was what I thought at first. 
 But there are two curious facts which I have not 
 yet named." 
 
 "Well, what are they?" 
 
 " One is that after this second vision the altera- 
 tion in myself, which I had previously noticed, 
 became more marked. The sense of aloofness 
 grew upon me ; there seemed to be an actual 
 atmosphere between myself and my fellows, which 
 I could not pierce. I felt an irritation of the 
 bitterest kind in the very presence of modern life. 
 All seemed inexcusably colourless, stupid, detest- 
 able. And this feeling took a new and strange 
 form. You remember my room at Balliol ? Well, 
 if you do, you will recollect that on the mantel- 
 shelf I had a carved ivory crucifix, standing 
 between two bronzes, one of the Dancing Faun
 
 74 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 and the other of Apollo. Well, when I came back 
 from that walk over the Chilterns, the first things 
 that caught my eye were these three figures. I 
 looked at them with an intensity of attention 
 which was quite unaccountable, and it seemed to 
 me that the uplifted arm of the Apollo was pointed 
 scornfully at the Crucifix, and that in the attitude 
 of the Dancing Faun there was a very abandon- 
 ment of contempt for the still, sad Figure of sorrow, 
 the mournful effigy, that stood between these 
 incarnations of youth and joy. And I shared the 
 contempt. A bitter, unaccountable resentment 
 shook me, a sense of some intolerable indignity 
 and wrong inflicted on me by this figure of the 
 Crucified. I seized it with hasty hands, and broke 
 it into fragments, and danced upon it. Something 
 in that figure of the Faun seemed to breathe an 
 incitement to motion, a compulsion to revolt. 
 And suddenly, as I danced, I once more heard 
 that soft low throb of flutes, distinct and clear. 
 This was no dream, for I was wide awake, dancing 
 on the fragments of my poor crucifix, and I heard 
 that rhythmic flute-music as distinctly as I ever 
 heard anything ia my life." 
 
 " Nerves, my dear fellow, all nerves, I assure 
 you." 
 
 " But unfortunately for your theory I was in 
 glorious health. In fact, I had never felt such 
 a sense ot vitality. It was like a wine in
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 75 
 
 my veins. I slept well, ate well, worked hard, 
 pulled a fine stroke oar where does your theory 
 of nerves come in ? And besides, what should 
 produce this hatred of the crucifix? For, I may 
 as well say at once, that in that moment when I 
 smashed the crucifix I finally gave up Christianity. 
 I felt my whole mind revolt from it, once and for 
 ever. It seemed in its very essence alien to me ; 
 in myself I was aware of something that could 
 never be reconciled with it. Most men feel a 
 poignant regret in such a decision. I felt none. 
 I only felt that in some way I had followed the 
 true bias of my nature, that I had found myself. 
 I could trace at the time no sort of connection 
 between these visions of mine and such a decision ; 
 yet I felt that something had happened, or was 
 happening in me, which made such a renunciation 
 inevitable. It had to be. 
 
 " Well, let me pass on, and you will see how 
 one by one these events fell into place, and at last 
 explained themselves. 
 
 " I told you that a week after that strange ex- 
 perience in the woods I went back to the place. 
 I had some difficulty in finding the exact hollow, 
 for along these hills the wooded basins are much 
 alike, and I had taken no very careful notes of the 
 topography. At last, however, I found the path, 
 descended into the wood, and after half-an-hour's 
 walk came upon the spot
 
 76 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 " It was exactly as I had pictured it ; so fat 
 it was no dream. At the end of a long glade, 
 on either side of which rose tall beeches, branched 
 into an arch like the groined roof of a cathedral, 
 stood a curious stone building. It was round, like 
 the pictures you see of the temple of the Vestals 
 in the Forum at Rome ; its roof rested on fluted 
 pillars set at short intervals ; its doorway was open 
 to the winds. Outside, in the bright sunlight, 
 was the low marble seat or altar, precisely as I 
 have already described it, and I was certain, as 
 I examined it, that the surface was slightly 
 blackened as by fire. 
 
 "The place was absolutely solitary, and I had 
 plenty of time to examine it. Part of the building 
 seemed to be built of tolerably modern masonry, 
 but about half of the pillars were of fine marble, 
 and very old. A beautiful frieze ran under the 
 cornice, much broken, it is true, but still distinctly 
 beautiful in design and workmanship. Over the 
 doorway was what seemed to be a motto in Greek 
 characters, but it was sadly defaced, and quite 
 illegible. I took a rough sketch of the building, 
 and was coming away, when I heard a step in 
 the underwood, and an elderly gamekeeper came 
 into view. He told me, of course, that I was 
 trespassing, which no doubt was true ; but he was 
 a very decent fellow, although taciturn, as men 
 often are who spend their lives in the loneliness
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 77 
 
 of woods and moors. I gave him a cigar, and he 
 began to talk slowly, and with long pauses. 
 
 " I learned from him that the ground we stood 
 upon belonged to a certain Roger Cranbourne, and 
 that it was his grandfather who had erected the 
 temple. The Cranbournes had all been eccentric, 
 and the present Roger Cranbourne was no excep- 
 tion to the rule. When I asked why they were 
 considered eccentric the man pursed his lips, and 
 for a time said nothing. Then he seemed to think 
 better of his silence, and he told me bit by bit 
 a very curious family history. 
 
 " From what I could make out the first Roger 
 Cranbourne had flourished about the beginning 
 of the century. He had been a friend of Byron, 
 and was more or less identified with Byron's wild- 
 thinking and hard-living set. He travelled a good 
 deal, and was in Greece about 1815, not returning 
 to this country until after Byron's death in 1824. 
 When he came back to his estate, he was so 
 altered that no one recognised him. He built 
 this temple in the woods from fragments of the 
 marbles which he had brought home with him 
 from ' furren parts,' as my friend put it. He 
 lived the life of a recluse, never went to church, 
 had the very bells removed from the tower because 
 they angered him, and during the summer months 
 lived almost entirely in the woods. He died 
 suddenly, leaving an only son, who bore the family
 
 78 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 name of Roger. This son also went abroad as 
 soon as he was of age, and died in Athens. He 
 had married a Greek girl, who did not long sur- 
 vive him, and who had never visited England. 
 Again there was one son, who bore the name 
 of Roger, and who was supposed to be abroad 
 This son would now be about forty. The game- 
 keeper had not seen him since he was a youth 
 of twenty, when he spent a year on the estate 
 What was he like ? Well, he couldn't rightly 
 say. One thing he did know, that he was more 
 ' mazed ' than his father. He was always hanging 
 about this old summer-house, just like his grand- 
 father did. Yes ; come to think of it, he did 
 remember last time he saw 'un, and what he were 
 like. He were very straight, but not over tall ; 
 he had a lot of bright-coloured hair, and dark eyes, 
 and a straight nose. He used to walk about the 
 woods mostly in a velvet jacket, and without any 
 hat, with some old book or other in his hand. He 
 once asked him if he'd ever seed anything out of 
 ordinar' about this foolish old summer-house any 
 one coming out of it or going in, particular at 
 nights ? Of course he hadn't. If he had, should 
 soon ha' let them know what for. ' Oh/ said he, 
 kind o' solemn like, ' doan't ye disturb 'em ; let 
 'em come if they likes.' S'pose he meant gipsies 
 and suchlike, but there warn't likely to be any 
 such folk in such a place, anyway. That was
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 79 
 
 about all he could remember. His memory was 
 kind o' discollected about such things. However, 
 he didn't suppose he'd ever see his master agin, 
 now. Hadn't been there these twenty year, very 
 nigh, and no doubt 'ud die furren like his father 
 before 'im. 
 
 " That was the gist of the gamekeeper's story, 
 and a very curious story I took it to be. One 
 thing was clear : there was, at all events, a vital 
 connection between this solitary woodland glade 
 and Greece. The frieze of this lonely temple in 
 the woods might have been designed by Phidias, 
 the pillars might have seen the Greek armies 
 march to meet Darius more than two thousand 
 years ago. So far as one could judge, the Cran- 
 bournes had been mixed up with Greek life and 
 politics for generations. The marbles well, wasn't 
 it somev.'here between 1800 and 1815 that Lord 
 Elgin robbed the Acropolis, and annexed the frieze 
 of the Temple of Winged Victory, to the disgust 
 of Byron and a good many other people ? There 
 was no difficulty in accounting for this temple ; 
 no doubt the first Roger Cranbourne got some o f 
 the spoil and put it to this use. 
 
 " I sat a long time thinking it over after the 
 gamekeeper had left me. The place was very 
 silent, an almost religious awe possessed the woods. 
 A blackbird hopped silently, as with feet of velvet, 
 across the glade ; a squirrel ran along the cornice
 
 8o THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 of the deserted temple. What, after all, if there 
 should be some occult secret about the place 
 some undying magic of a world long since passed 
 away, which had found a final refuge in these 
 immemorial woods ? Why not the gods of Greece 
 in Oxfordshire as well as Thessaly? Once I 
 strained my ears eagerly at the sound of a move- 
 ment in the grass, and a clear flute-note in the dis- 
 tance ; but it was only a rabbit scurrying through 
 the withered bracken, and a blackbird adjusting 
 his mellow vox humana stop to the solemn hush 
 of evening. It was twilight when I turned home- 
 ward. I had learned nothing, it is true, that could 
 be said to have explained my own experiences 
 and sensations ; but I felt nevertheless that I was 
 a step nearer the solution of the mystery. 
 
 " I left Oxford shortly afterwards. You will 
 remember that I went away suddenly, and left 
 no clue to my whereabouts. My reasons lay 
 in the events I have already narrated. I felt a 
 growing and unconquerable distaste to university 
 life, a sense of the childishness of the whole busi- 
 ness. It was a lovely summer, and I spent nearly 
 the whole of it out of doors. I was at Pangbourne, 
 at Goring ; I explored the least known eyots of 
 the Thames, I walked a great deal through the 
 solitary beechwoods of Buckinghamshire, visited 
 Horton, where Milton wrote his Comus in the 
 freshness of his youth, and stayed in a little
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 81 
 
 cottage at Chalfont, near the still smaller cottage 
 where he wrote the Paradise Regained in his 
 austere old age. I read a great deal, but mostly 
 in the classics Ovid, Lucretius, Virgil. One book 
 which made a deep impression on me that summer 
 was old Apuleius you remember all about the 
 Golden Ass, and the air of marvel that clothes 
 the story, everything full of charm and freshness, 
 like a child's dream told to children in the dawn 
 of the world. My mind was full of energy, but my 
 thoughts were often of the strangest. I concerned 
 myself a good deal with the old mythologies 
 which lay behind the writings of all these old 
 poets. People had believed them once ; why were 
 they incredible now? They had been the faith of 
 a great people, perhaps the greatest. What had 
 happened to the world that the modern English 
 mind rejected as absurd what the Greek intellect 
 believed as sacred ? Besides, after all, they were 
 rational as well as charming. The gods were 
 delightful deifications of natural properties the 
 air, the sun, the woods, the waters. What better 
 gods did you want? And how easy to imagine 
 them ! From the rounded hollows of the sea-wave, 
 scooped out like a great purple shell silvered with 
 foam an Aphrodite from the tangled light and 
 shadow of the woods the dryades in the still depths 
 of unfrequented forests Pan and his joyous com- 
 pany I ... I walked through these great beech- 
 
 6
 
 82 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 \voods of Bucks with the constant sense of such 
 unseen comradeship as this. Often, also, my 
 thoughts went back to the Cranbournes and what 
 the old gamekeeper had told me of them. Were 
 they, too, touched with this divine distraction 
 which made modern life abhorrent to them ? Had 
 they, too, dreamed a dream which had opened 
 to them torturing visions of some fairy unattain- 
 able world, a dream handed on from father to son, 
 a quest taken up by each in turn, of which that 
 haunted temple in the woods was the type and 
 key ? Sometimes it seemed to me that I was 
 approximating to them. I, too, spent my days 
 in wandering through the woods, or floating on 
 the quiet waters of the upper Thames, hatless, and 
 with ' some old book or other ' in my hands, as 
 the gamekeeper had put it. And yet, remember, 
 I was not unhappy. It would be nearer the truth 
 to say I was ecstatic, for my exuberant sense of 
 youth was in itself a sort of ecstasy. 
 
 " And now for the sequel. Towards the end of 
 the year I went to London and took a couple of 
 rooms not far from Piccadilly. There was always 
 something in the roar and tumult of the great city 
 which fascinated me Some day, you know, a 
 great poet will take London for his theme, and he 
 will make of it the grandest poem in the world 
 Just as I had spent whole days in listening to the 
 wind-music in the woods, so now I drank in the
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 83 
 
 tumult of the highways, and rejoiced in it. I 
 heard in the infinite reverberations of the streets the 
 trampling of a great host, vaster far than was ever 
 led by Xerxes or Alexander, marching to a grim 
 battle that never had a truce. I watched the 
 battle, alien from it, but not indifferent to it. 
 This, at least, was life ; it was not playing at life, 
 which is the chief occupation of universities. I 
 was a mere spectator, but an eager one. I watched 
 the storm of action ; that was enough for me. 
 
 " One afternoon it happened that I was tempted 
 by the extreme mildness of the air to spend an 
 hour in St. James's Park. Usually I never entered 
 the parks ; they were too clumsy a plagiarism on 
 nature. But there was on this afternoon an almost 
 spring warmth in the air, and the grass had been 
 freshened by heavy rain, and the water sparkled. 
 I had been sitting some time, watching the nurse- 
 maids and the children, the hurrying clerks, and 
 the heavy-eyed out-o'-works, when my attention 
 was arrested by a man who was walking slowly 
 toward me. He carried his hat in his hand, and 
 wore a tarnished brown velvet jacket, out of the 
 pockets of which some leather-bound books bulged. 
 He had a quantity of fair hair, dark eyes, and a 
 face that was singularly worn and yet eager. As 
 he passed he looked at me with what seemed to 
 be surprised scrutiny ; then he turned back, and 
 took the unoccupied seat beside me. AH at once
 
 84 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 there flashed across my mind the old gamekeeper's 
 description of Roger Cranbourne. The fair hair, 
 the velvet jacket, the slim and ancient books 
 protruding from the pocket they entirely answered 
 to Roger Cranbourne. 
 
 " Before I could take any note of what led up to 
 it we were engaged in conversation. Somehow the 
 man had a look of Shelley about him : just that 
 delicacy and grace of complexion which you see 
 in portraits of Shelley, and something too of 
 Shelley's intensity of nature and boyish frankness 
 visible in his eyes. I think our talk began by some 
 mention of poetry, a line he quoted which was 
 familiar to me, and wonderfully apposite to the 
 scene before us. The moment I began to speak 
 his manner changed. He embarrassed me with 
 the closeness of his scrutiny. I fancied there was 
 something of deference which approached to fear 
 in his look. Then he suddenly laid his hand on 
 my arm and said, ' Don't you hear it ? Listen.' 
 
 " I heard the deep hum of London, the boom of 
 the great bell at Westminster striking four, the 
 shrill shouts of the children at play beside the 
 water. And something else, too. Once more there 
 fell upon my ear that soft throb of flutes which I 
 had heard three times before. It was clear, distinct, 
 unmistakable. The Park faded out like a stage 
 scene over which the curtain falls, and for a moment 
 the old spiritual elation thrilled through me, and
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 85 
 
 I saw distinctly a pillared temple rise in misty 
 outline from the sward of the Park, and a long 
 line of white-robed youths and maidens move to- 
 wards it. The vision lasted but an instant. I 
 turned slowly to him and said, ' You must be 
 Roger Cranbourne, I think?' He smiled, and said, 
 ' And you ? Ah, well, I needn't ask. You probably 
 don't know who you are.' 
 
 "This was sufficiently astonishing, but what he 
 went on to say was much more so. He assumed 
 that I knew his history ; he never inquired by 
 what means. 
 
 " ' You have been to that summer-house of mine 
 at Deepthorpe? I knew it You need not tell 
 me what you saw there ; I know already.' 
 
 " And then he began to unfold a story which 
 gave the clue to all that had happened to me. 
 He, and his father and grandfather before him, 
 had cherished a great secret, and had spent their 
 lives in striving to unravel it. The first Roger 
 Cranbourne had, as I supposed, obtained the 
 marbles for his summer-house by robbing an 
 obscure Greek temple, in the time when Lord 
 Elgin had made such forms of theft fashionable. 
 It was a temple small in size, but of exquisite 
 design, which stood among the solitary hills a 
 few miles from Athens. According to his own 
 account, as he was removing part of the frieze, 
 a terrible voice spoke out of the depth of the
 
 86 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 temple, and thunder began to roll among the hills 
 In the same instant he saw a youth of majestic 
 figure stand in the doorway of the temple, eyeing 
 him with contemptuous anger. 
 
 " ' Poor fool, who thinkest Apollo and the gods 
 dead,' said the voice. ' It shall be yours to seek 
 the gods for ever, and not find them ; yet at last 
 they shall be found by your children's children.' 
 
 " From that hour Roger Cranbourne was a 
 changed man. If a vision changed Saul of Tarsus, 
 why not Roger Cranbourne ? He was convinced 
 that the gods were not dead that the deities of 
 old Greece still lived in some seclusion of the world 
 remote from the ways of men. 
 
 " He spent his life in exploring the interior of 
 Greece, and searching for proofs of his theory. 
 He quarrelled violently with Byron for coming 
 to Missolonghi ; he wanted Greece left alone, 
 in possession of her ancient peace and deathless 
 memories. He wrote and left behind him, as a 
 heritage to his son, a detailed account of all that 
 he had done and seen. The son shared his passion 
 to the full. He lived in Athens, and died there, 
 having given all his life to the pursuit of proof of 
 his father's theory. And his son, the man who 
 sat beside me, had done the same. He was steeped 
 in Greek poetry, and knew more of Greek 
 mythology than any man alive. What had been 
 denied to his father had been given to him. He
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GOD3 87 
 
 had heard more than once, in the solitary nills of 
 Greece, during his explorations, this mystical music 
 of pipe and flute, slowly floating among the ruins 
 of marble temples, and lost in blue distances. He 
 had learned also that he was not alone in his belief 
 or in his quest. There were others who had 
 heard the music of the gods ; there was, in fact, a 
 club in London composed of those who practised 
 the old rites of Greek worship, and sought the 
 favour of Apollo. And, the long and short of it 
 was, that in me he had found the true Apollo, the 
 child of Jupiter and Latona, the immortal patron 
 of art, and music, and poetry, the inventor of the 
 lyre, the slayer of the python, the glorious sun- 
 child whose head was clothed with beams of light, 
 the deity of the spoliated temple, long banished 
 and ignoble, but still worshipped and waited for 
 by the elect souls of the world ! " 
 
 " All this in a London park, mind you, on 
 a December afternoon, with ' Favorite ' 'buses 
 rumbling in the distance down to Victoria, and 
 newsboys shouting a ' Spechul Hextra Hectto! " 
 
 Boynton rose, and waved his hand with an 
 angry gesture. He had read my incredulity on 
 my face. 
 
 " Not a word ! " he cried. " I no longer explain 
 myself I affirm myself." 
 
 " But," I began, " you surely cannot think " 
 
 w I have ceased to think," he said gravely. " I
 
 am the product of causes which defy thought. 
 Yet consider what I have told you. Take the 
 incidents one by one, and weigh their significance 
 First, this strange waking up in myself of sensations 
 which unlock the past ; then, the visions, always the 
 same, and explicable on no theory of disease ; the 
 curious hatred of Christianity, as of something 
 that excites in me fear and revulsion ; the basis 
 of real fact in all that relates to the Cranbournes, 
 and the temple in the woods. They all fit together, 
 they cohere, they explain each other. Man, I say, 
 they cohere ! " he ended passionately. 
 
 He stood flushed and silent, and I am free to 
 confess that a vague fear began to possess me. 
 There was something in his aspect which was 
 bright and terrible. The close rings of his hair 
 seemed more and more like delicate curved flames, 
 and his eyes were like wells of magnetic fire. 
 Writing in cool blood, now that years have passed, 
 it would be easy to say that he was insane ; but 
 no such thought crossed my mind at the time. 
 There was intellect stamped on every line of his 
 face ; his aspect was radiant, but with no baleful 
 fires of mental disorder rather with youth, beauty, 
 and truth. 
 
 The hour was late ; it was close on midnight. 
 
 " I do not expect that we shall ever meet again," 
 he said. " There can be no harm in letting you 
 see that at least I have not altogether dreamed a
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 89 
 
 dream. You modern men " I noticed the way in 
 which he unconsciously detached himself from me 
 and all my world "have much to learn. And 
 first of all you have to learn that there is nothing 
 so false as the obvious, and nothing so likely to 
 be true as the improbable." 
 
 He beckoned Antonio, and spoke a few words 
 to him in a language which was strange to me. 
 The man bowed very low, and in a moment or 
 two returned wearing a long black cloak. 
 
 " Come," said Boynton. 
 
 I rose and followed without a word. It did 
 not even occur to me to make the least resistance. 
 Whatever was the species of power or influence 
 which Boynton possessed, it controlled me like 
 magic. 
 
 We passed out into the rainy streets, and were 
 soon threading the tangled maze of Soho. I 
 recognised Wardour Street for a moment, but that 
 was all. We plunged into bye-paths and alleys, 
 crossed one or two broader thoroughfares, and 
 again were lost in the gloom of brick labyrinths, 
 rubbed our shoulders against slimy, dripping walls 
 at sharp corners, and stopped at last at a broad 
 doorway, framed in ancient wooden pilasters. 
 The door opened silently to the signal of Antonio, 
 and I found myself in a wide oak-panelled hall. 
 It was evidently one of those ancient houses still 
 to be found in Soho, once the town-houses of the
 
 90 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 great gentry, now hidden a\vay and forgotten in 
 the growth of modern London. A dim light 
 burned, a broad oak staircase rose before me, 
 losing itself in the upper darkness. Boynton and 
 Antonio had disappeared. 
 
 I had waited for perhaps ten minutes, when I 
 heard, far away in the upper stories, what seemed 
 like choral singing. A moment later a bright 
 light flooded the staircase, and Antonio came to 
 me. He was no longer dressed as modern men 
 are ; he wore a species of white garment, girded at 
 the waist, with open armholes, through which his 
 swarthy arms appeared. 
 
 " The Signer is ready ? " he said quietly. 
 
 I nodded assent. He began to ascend the broad 
 staircase, and I followed him, not knowing what to 
 expect. As we ascended higher the music became 
 more defined. It was peculiarly soft, slow, and 
 solemn, like nothing which I have heard before or 
 since. I could discern something like the mellow 
 note of the oboe, the thrill of a muted harp-string 
 that was all. Then, suddenly, broad folding- 
 doors at the top of the staircase were flung open f 
 and I saw the strangest scene. 
 
 The room was a large one, of noble proportions 
 probably the ancient ball-room or banqueting hall 
 of the mansion. There was a lofty painted ceiling, 
 half-a-dozen tall windows, and panelled walls. 
 There was no furniture. At one end of the room
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 91 
 
 deep curtains of ivory-white hung from cornice to 
 floor. A soft light fell apparently from the ceiling, 
 but it lit the room imperfectly, leaving deep 
 shadows. A peculiar pungency filled the air : 
 something reminiscent of incense, but it was 
 rather a pungency of flowers, a faint, intoxicating 
 odour, that seemed to come in gusts or waves, 
 making the air suave and languorous. There were 
 about thirty men present, all dressed like Antonio 
 in long, white garments ; they were all young, and 
 their faces had a curious pallor as of ecstasy. So 
 absorbed were they, so visibly caught in the strain 
 of some powerful emotion, that my entrance did 
 not excite the least attention. They were reciting 
 what seemed to be a litany, but in tones so low that 
 the words were indistinguishable. All the time 
 the music went on, subtly weaving itself into the 
 cadences of their voices, with now a low vibrating 
 note from some mellow wood-instrument, and now 
 the keen thrill of a harp-string. 
 
 All at once the light grew less, and finally went 
 out. We were left in total darkness. Still the 
 chant went on, growing louder and more impas- 
 sioned ; and now faint flute-notes began to dominate 
 the music. They grew clearer, louder ; and the 
 men's voices rose into splendid fulness of tone. 
 Then, all at once, the curtains at the end of the 
 room were drawn back, a soft light spread through 
 the room, and all the men fell upon their knees.
 
 92 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 Two men advanced through the folded curtains, 
 dressed as the others were in white, and in one 
 of them I thought I recognised Roger Cranbourne. 
 There was that unmistakable look oi Shelley of 
 which Boynton had spoken, the eager, hectic face, 
 the intense purity and youthfulness of aspect, the 
 ecstatic eye. The two men advanced slowly, 
 reciting in full, resonant voices the following lines 
 in Greek, which I afterwards discovered to be 
 sentences from Pindar, Sophocles, and Aristo- 
 phanes : 
 
 Blessed is he who has seen the gods before he goes 
 below ground. 
 
 Thrice happy they who have been initiated before 
 they die, for theirs is the lot of life, and evil is it with 
 the others. 
 
 We alone enjoy the holy light, we, who were in- 
 itiated, and led a. life of godliness toivard both 
 kin and stranger. 
 
 " lo Apollo!" cried the men in chorus, "/<? 
 Apollo!" 
 
 And then came the climax. The music sank 
 to a breath, the chorus of the prostrate men to 
 a whisper. A strange reverence seized me, and, 
 without any sense of volition, I found myself also 
 kneeling. "fo Apollo /" went on the awful whisper . 
 "/<? Apollo!" cried the two men in a voice of 
 triumph; and each knelt. And then, from between 
 the folded curtains, the soft light seeming to clothe
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 93 
 
 him, advanced a bright, majestic figure. He was 
 naked, save for the yellow skin of some animal, 
 which covered one shoulder, and fell to his knees. 
 His face was young and extremely beautiful, and 
 shone like a mask of alabaster behind which a 
 light burned ; the close rings of his hair were so 
 many curved flames. Nothing more godlike could 
 be imagined ; and yet I knew at a glance that 
 it was Boynton. He passed slowly down the 
 room, and the chant of "/<? Apollo!" rose to 
 ecstasy as he came nearer. The room seemed full 
 of the very essence of youth. I felt an inde- 
 scribable elation, as though I had been bathed in 
 some healing magnetic stream. Boynton stopped 
 a moment before me and held out his hand. I did 
 not respond. I could only stare blindly, conscious 
 of an awful presence, of a magic that thrilled, 
 and awed, and exhilarated me. 
 
 " Be not faithless, but believing," he said quietly, 
 "Io Apollo f" broke out the chorus once more, and 
 the music seemed melting into -infinite harmonies. 
 " Thrice happy they who have been initiated before 
 they die, for theirs is the lot of life, and evil is it 
 with the others" they all chanted in unison. 
 
 Suddenly all became dark. A few moments 
 later I stood once more in the broad hall, and 
 Antonio was with me. We passed out without a 
 word into the rainy streets. It was near two 
 o'clock, and London lay like a tired giant, dreaming
 
 94 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 
 
 the dreams of Mammon. We parted in Leicester 
 Square, and I found courage to say, "Where's 
 Boynton ? " But Antonio only frowned, and said, 
 " Ah, Signer, quietness is best." And with that 
 enigmatical sentence he disappeared, nor have I 
 seen him since. 
 
 Years have passed since these occurrences, but 
 the memory of them is as fresh and vivid with me 
 as though they had happened yesterday. Boynton 
 I have never seen again. But I never read Brown- 
 ing's poem without thinking of him, and often 
 on a sunny afternoon in Regent Street I have 
 found myself eagerly scanning the stream of faces, 
 in the vague hope of seeing his emerge, fresh and 
 young, from the confusion of tired and anxious 
 faces which compose a London crowd. 
 
 The other day, in turning over an old volume at 
 a bookstall, I came upon a passage which arrested 
 my interest, because it brought the problem of 
 Boynton back to me in a peculiarly distinct and 
 urgent fashion. The book was one of those 
 desultory and delightful volumes of essays, full 
 of fanciful conceits, which were common in the 
 seventeenth century, and the writer asks : 
 
 " Why should it not happen that beside immortal 
 waters the eyes of men should still behold the forms 
 of deities more immortal than the waters ; that, 
 where so many immemorial things exist, the immut- 
 able gods of woods and pastures should not still be
 
 THE MUSIC OF THE GODS 95 
 
 found unchanged : so that purged ears might still 
 hear, perchance, the pipes of Pan upon the air y and 
 purged eyes behold Apulh and his lyre ? " 
 
 I leave others, either more or less sceptical than 
 myself, to answer that question.
 
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