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Developing Large Web Applications Producing Code
That Can Grow and Thrive 1st Edition Kyle Loudon
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Kyle Loudon
ISBN(s): 9780596803025, 0596803028
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.46 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
Developing Large Web Applications
Developing Large Web Applications

Kyle Loudon
foreword by Nate Koechley

Beijing • Cambridge • Farnham • Köln • Sebastopol • Taipei • Tokyo

Developing Large Web Applications
by Kyle Loudon

Copyright © 2010 Yahoo!, Inc. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472.

O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions
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Editor: Andy Oram Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery

Production Editor: Sumita Mukherji Interior Designer: David Futato
Copyeditor: Amy Thomson Illustrator: Robert Romano
Production Services: Newgen North America, Inc.

Printing History:
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Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of
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tained herein.

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[M]

1267035305
 Table of Contents

Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi

Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

1. The Tenets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Managing Complexity 1
Modular Components 3
Achieving Modularity 3
Benefits of Modularity 4
Ten Tenets for Large Web Applications 4

2. Object Orientation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Fundamentals of OOP 8
Why Object Orientation? 9
UML Class Diagrams 9
Generalization 10
Association 10
Modeling a Web Page 11
Defining Page Types 11
Defining Module Types 11
Writing the Code 12
Achieving Modularity 14
Object-Oriented PHP 15
Classes and Interfaces 15
Inheritance in PHP 19
Object-Oriented JavaScript 22
Objects 22
Inheritance in JavaScript 25

3. Large-Scale HTML . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Modular HTML 28

v
 A Bad Example: Using a Table and Presentation Markup 28
A Better Example: Using CSS 30
The Best Example: Semantically Meaningful HTML 31
Benefits of Good HTML 35
HTML Tags 37
Bad HTML Tags 37
Good HTML Tags 38
IDs, Classes, and Names 40
Conventions for Naming 41
XHTML 41
Benefits of XHTML 41
XHTML Guidelines 42
RDFa 45
RDFa Triples 45
Applying RDFa 46
HTML 5 49

4. Large-Scale CSS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Modular CSS 52
Including CSS 52
Applying CSS 55
Specificity and Importance 57
Scoping with CSS 58
Standard Module Formats 63
Positioning Techniques 65
CSS Box Model 66
Document Flow 67
Relative Positioning 68
Absolute Positioning 68
Floating 70
Layouts and Containers 71
Example Layouts 72
Example Containers 80
Other Practices 82
Browser Reset CSS 83
Font Normalization 85

5. Large-Scale JavaScript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
Modular JavaScript 88
Including JavaScript 88
Scoping with JavaScript 90
Working with the DOM 92
Common DOM Methods 92

vi | Table of Contents
 Popular DOM Libraries 93
Working with Events 98
Event Handling Normalization 99
A Bad Example: Global Data in Event Handlers 99
A Good Example: Object Data in Event Handlers 100
Event-Driven Applications 101
Working with Animation 102
Motion Animation 102
Sizing Animation 103
Color Transition 104
An Example: Chained Selection Lists 105

6. Data Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

Dynamic Modules 116
Data Managers 117
Creating Data Managers 120
Extending Data Managers 121
Data Using SQL As a Source 123
An SQL Example 124
Data Using XML As a Source 127
An XML Example 127
Data from Web Services 131
Data in the JSON Format 132
Cookies and Forms 133
Managing Data in Cookies 133
Managing Data from Forms 134

7. Large-Scale PHP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Modular Web Pages 136
Generating Pages in PHP 136
Working with Pages 141
Public Interface for the Page Class 141
Abstract Interface for the Page Class 144
Implementation of the Page Class 147
Extending the Page Class 157
Working with Modules 162
Public Interface for the Module Class 162
Abstract Interface for the Module Class 163
Implementation of the Module Class 164
Extending the Module Class 165
An Example Module: Slideshow 165
Layouts and Containers 177
Special Considerations 180

Table of Contents | vii

 Handling Module Variations 180
Multiple Instances of a Module 181
Dynamic JavaScript and CSS 182
Implementing Nested Modules 182

8. Large-Scale Ajax . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

In the Browser 186
Managing Connections 186
Using Ajax Libraries 189
On the Server 194
Exchange Formats 194
Server Proxies 197
Modular Ajax 198
MVC and Ajax 200
Using Ajax with MVC 201
Public Interface for the Model Object 206
Implementation of the Model Object 207
Public Interface for the View Object 209
Abstract Interface for the View Object 209
View Object Implementation 210
Public Interface for the Connect Object 210
Abstract Interface for the Connect Object 211
Implementation of the Connect Object 212
Controllers 214
An Example of Ajax with MVC: Accordion Lists 215

9. Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
Caching Opportunities 222
Caching CSS and JavaScript 222
Caching Modules 227
Caching for Pages 231
Caching with Ajax 231
Using Expires Headers 233
Managing JavaScript 234
JavaScript Placement 234
JavaScript Minification 234
Removing Duplicates 235
Distribution of Assets 237
Content Delivery Networks 237
Minimizing DNS Lookups 237
Minimizing HTTP Requests 238
Control Over Site Metrics 241
Modular Testing 243

viii | Table of Contents

 Using Test Data 243
Creating Test Data 245

10. Application Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

Thinking Modularly 247
Organizing Components 248
Sitewide Architecture 248
Section Architecture 254
Architecture for Pages 256
Architecture and Maintenance 258
Reorganizing Module Uses 258
Adding Module Variations 261
Making Widespread Changes 263
Changes in Data Sources 266
Exposing Modules Externally 268

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

Table of Contents | ix
 Foreword

As a little kid, I wondered if I would be big and strong when I grew up. There were a
lot of aspects to growing well. Would I be healthy? Useful? Productive? Successful?
Websites start out small, too. But these humble sites share my childhood dreams. They
want to help more people in more ways; they want to be durable and reliable; they want
to be indispensable and to live forever. In short: they want to be large and successful.
But growing up is hard to do. Challenges accumulate and complexity snowballs.
Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
—C. Northcote Parkinson
I’ve seen it. The inevitable challenges of growth in websites—data management,
performance—become crippling if mishandled. Things you thought were straightfor-
ward, like HTML, start giving you headaches. From front to back, JavaScript to PHP,
harmony is displaced by dissonance.
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
—Alan Perlis
I’ve worked hand-in-hand with Kyle on some of the Web’s largest applications. I’ve
watched him craft CSS systems to make sprawling sites skinable and design Ajax ar-
chitectures that adapt to and enhance the sites. He emerges from the trenches on top
every time. He’s a perpetual teacher, and, like the best in any discipline, also a perpetual
student. We all benefit from his expertise.
Kyle shares his genius and hard-won expertise in this valuable book that will prepare
you and your application for scale and success. The book is well structured and read-
able, with memorable tenets supported by savvy insights, sound philosophy, and fully
functioning code examples. Complexity is inevitable, but success rewards the prepared.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems
that work.
—Kevin Kelly

xi
During this book’s deft tour of the complete web application stack, Kyle, the perfect
guide, converts lines of explanatory code from one context into insightful tips in
another. Build big by thinking small. Build new by thinking old. Manage scope. Boost
signal and reduce noise. Resist breakage...these things are easy to rattle off, but it takes
an author like Kyle, and a book like this, to make them practical and real.
If you’re ready to build a finely crafted large site, this is the book for you. Learn what
it takes, because today’s compromise is tomorrow’s constraint. Start today, because
the world is waiting for your application.
Grow large and prosper.
—Nate Koechley
San Francisco, January 2010

xii | Foreword
 Preface

It’s been a while since I first worked on a book with O’Reilly in 1997. That book was
a practical guide to data structures and algorithms, a subject that, for the most part,
had been defined many years before by some of the early giants of computer science
(Dijkstra, Hoare, Knuth, to name a few). By comparison, I’ve been able to witness the
rapid evolution of the subject of this book from the front lines, and I have had the good
fortune to help refine it myself while working as a web developer at one of the largest
web applications in the world, Yahoo!.
Web developers have a fascinating role. We work just as closely with user experience
designers as with engineers, and sometimes we’re the designers, too. In many ways, we
are guardians of the user experience as a web design goes from its mockup to its im-
plementation. But we also have to write exceptionally good code that performs well in
the challenging environment of web browsers. Today, more than ever, engineers rec-
ognize that web development must be carried out with the same rigor as other types of
software development.
This book presents a number of techniques for applying established practices of good
software engineering to web development—that is, development primarily using the
disparate technologies of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side scripting languages.
Whereas there are many books on how to use languages, how to use libraries, and how
to approach software engineering, this is the first book to codify many of the techniques
it presents. These techniques will make the components of your own web applications
more reusable, maintainable, and reliable.

Audience
The primary audience for this book is software developers and managers interested in
large web applications; however, you’ll find that the techniques in this book are equally
useful for web applications of any size. Although it’s especially important to follow
good development practices in large web applications, smaller web applications benefit
from many of the same techniques, too.

xiii
To get the most out of this book, you should already be very familiar with HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript; this book does not teach these languages, although it covers many
interesting aspects about them. This book uses PHP as the scripting language for server-
side examples. Many readers will have a good understanding of PHP as well, but even
those who don’t should find the examples easy to follow. PHP is known for its flexi-
bility, ubiquity, and ease of use, so it works well. Most examples can be translated to
other server-side scripting languages fairly easily, if you desire.

Organization of This Book

This book is organized into three types of material: background (e.g., Object Orienta-
tion in Chapter 2), techniques associated with specific languages (e.g., Large-Scale
HTML in Chapter 3, Large-Scale CSS in Chapter 4, Large-Scale JavaScript in Chap-
ter 5, and Large-Scale PHP in Chapter 7), and techniques related to other aspects of
development (e.g., Data Management in Chapter 6, Large-Scale Ajax in Chapter 8,
Performance in Chapter 9, and Application Architecture in Chapter 10). Each chapter
begins with a tenet presented from Chapter 1. These tenets act as assertions about the
topic for each chapter to provide a concisely articulated direction.
Throughout the book, there are numerous examples in real code to demonstrate many
of the techniques presented. Some of the numbered examples work together to create
larger, more complete examples that extend across multiple chapters. While the focus
of this book is not on teaching the specific languages addressed, the examples do dem-
onstrate a number of aspects of each language that will help make you more proficient
with each as you master them.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, filenames, and Unix utilities.
Constant width
Indicates command-line options, variables and other code elements, HTML tags,
the contents of files, and the output from commands.
Constant width bold
Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.
Constant width italic
Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values.

xiv | Preface
 This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

There are some other conventions to be aware of in this book:

...
Indicates something that is missing (for you to fill in) in a line of code or a path
(e.g., require_once(.../navbar.inc);).
<?php ... ?>
Wraps PHP examples that contain the complete code for a file. Most PHP examples
don’t have this, because they show only a code snippet.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, you may use the code in
this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for
permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example,
writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require
permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does
require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example
code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code
from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.
We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title,
author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Developing Large Web Applications, by
Kyle Loudon. Copyright Yahoo!, Inc., 978-0-596-80302-5.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given here,
feel free to contact us at [email protected].

We’d Like to Hear From You

Every example has in this book has been tested on various platforms, but occasionally
you may encounter problems. The information in this book has also been verified at
each step of the production process. However, mistakes and oversights can occur and
we will gratefully receive details of any you find, as well as any suggestions you would
like to make for future editions. You can contact the author and editors at:

Preface | xv
 O’Reilly Media, Inc.
1005 Gravenstein Highway North
Sebastopol, CA 95472
(800) 998-9938 (in the United States or Canada)
(707) 829-0515 (international or local)
(707) 829-0104 (fax)
We have a web page for this book, where we list errata, examples, and any additional
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You can find additional information about this book, including electronic versions of
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To comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to the following
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xvi | Preface
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of having worked with outstanding people both at O’Reilly and
in many projects leading up to the book. For this, I offer my heartfelt thanks.
First, I thank my editor at O’Reilly, Andy Oram. Andy and I worked together on my
first book with O’Reilly, and I had hoped for a long time that working on another book
together would not be a matter of if, but when. Having finished this book, I hope that
another book will be a matter of when again. Andy inspires me with his ability to always
find ways to make things better. His insights appear in one form or another on nearly
every page of this book. Andy also kept our project moving along while being patient
and understanding of the struggle that writers doing other jobs constantly face.
I also extend my sincere thanks to the entire production team at O’Reilly, who con-
stantly impress me with their ability to handle the numerous aspects of production so
smoothly. The ease with which it all seems to take place belies the work that it really
requires. I would also like to thank Amy Thomson, my copyeditor, for having worked
under such tight time constraints at the end of the book.
I send my heartfelt thanks to Nate Koechley for writing the foreword. Nate was one of
my earliest colleagues at Yahoo! to turn me on to the truly awesome potential of web
development. Much of what I’ve tried to capture in this book came from ideas that
Nate worked passionately to instill at Yahoo! and across the Web. I couldn’t have asked
for a more fitting person to write the foreword.
I am grateful to have had outstanding technical reviewers for this book as well.
Christoph Dorn, Steve Griffith, and Nate Koechley each provided an impressive level
of detail and thought in their reviews. The book benefited greatly from their comments.
I would also like to acknowledge the influence of my many colleagues at Yahoo! and
other projects before this. I especially thank Bryce Kujala and Vy Phan, who helped
refine many of the ideas in the book by putting them to the test in practice early on.
I’m also grateful to the exceptional user experience designers with whom I’ve had the
honor to work closest: Veronica Gaspari, Cathy Tiritoglu, and Sasha Verhage.
Finally, I thank Shala, my wife, for her encouragement on another book project; my
parents, Marc and Judy, for their support from afar; Shala’s parents, Elias and Maria,
for their frequent assistance at a moment’s notice; and Julian, who has been my late-
night companion—just too young to know it yet.

Preface | xvii
Other documents randomly have
different content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Julius

LeVallon: An Episode
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Julius LeVallon: An Episode

Author: Algernon Blackwood

Release date: October 1, 2015 [eBook #50107]

Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team

at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
images
generously made available by The Internet
Archive/American
Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JULIUS

LEVALLON: AN EPISODE ***
 Julius LeVallon

The cover has been created by the transcriber using

elements from the original publication and placed in the
public domain.
 Julius LeVallon
An Episode

By
Algernon Blackwood
Author of “The Centaur,” “John Silence,” “The Human Chord,” etc.

Cassell and Company, Ltd

London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First published 1916

TO
M. S-K.
(1906)
 Contents
PAGE

BOOK I
Schooldays 3

BOOK II
Edinburgh 77

BOOK III
The Châlet in the Jura Mountains 149

BOOK IV
The Attempted Restitution 267
 Book I

SCHOOLDAYS

“Dream faces bloom around your face

Like flowers upon one stem;
The heart of many a vanished race
Sighs as I look on them.”

A. E.
 Julius LeVallon

CHAPTER I

“Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance

when we regard it no longer as a single and unexplained
break in an unending life, but as part of the continually
recurring rhythm of progress—as inevitable, as natural, and
as benevolent as sleep.”—“Some Dogmas of Religion” (Prof.
J. M’Taggart).

I
T was one autumn in the late ’nineties that I found myself at
Bâle, awaiting letters. I was returning leisurely from the
Dolomites, where a climbing holiday had combined pleasantly
with an examination of the geologically interesting Monzoni Valley.
When the claims of the latter were exhausted, however, and I turned
my eyes towards the peaks, it happened that bad weather held
permanent possession of the great grey cliffs and towering
pinnacles, and climbing was out of the question altogether. A world
of savage desolation gloomed down upon me through impenetrable
mists; the scouts of winter’s advance had established themselves
upon all possible points of attack; and the whole tossed wilderness
of precipice and scree lay safe, from my assaults at least, behind a
frontier of furious autumn storms.

Having ample time before my winter’s work in London, I turned

my back upon the unconquered Marmolata and Cimon della Pala,
and made my way slowly, via Bozen and Innsbruck, to Bâle; and it
was in the latter place, where my English correspondence was kind
enough to overtake me, that I found one letter in particular that
interested me more than all the others put together. It bore a Swiss
stamp; and the handwriting caused me a thrill of anticipatory
excitement even before I had consciously recalled the name of the
writer. It was addressed before and behind till there was scarcely
room left for a postmark, and it had journeyed from my chambers to
my club, from my club to the university, and thence, by way of
various poste-restantes, from one hotel to another till, with good
luck little short of marvellous, it discovered me in my room of the
Trois Rois Hotel overlooking the Rhine.

The signature, to which I turned at once before reading the body

of the message, was Julius LeVallon; and as my eye noted the firm
and very individual writing, once of familiar and potent significance
in my life, I was conscious that emotions of twenty years ago woke
vigorously into being, releasing sensations and memories I had
thought buried beyond all effective resurrection. I knew myself
swept back to those hopes and fears that, all these years before,
had been—me. The letter was brief; it ran as follows:

Friend of a million years,—Should you remember your

promise, given to me at Edinburgh twenty years ago, I
write to tell you that I am ready. Yours, especially in
separation,
Julius LeVallon.

And then followed two lines of instructions how to reach him in

the isolated little valley of the Jura Mountains, on the frontier
between France and Switzerland, whence he wrote.

The wording startled me; but this surprise, not unmingled with
amusement, gave place immediately to emotions of a deeper and
much more complex order, as I drew an armchair to the window and
resigned myself, half pleasurably, half uneasily, to the flood of
memories that rose from the depths and besieged me with their
atmosphere of half-forgotten boyhood and of early youth.
Pleasurably, because my curiosity was aroused abruptly to a point
my dull tutorial existence now rarely, if ever, knew; uneasily, because
these early associations grouped themselves about the somewhat
unearthly figure of a man with whom once I had been closely
intimate, but who had since disappeared behind a veil of mystery to
follow pursuits where danger to body, mind and soul—it seemed to
me—must be his constant attendant.

For Julius LeVallon, or Julius, as he was known to me in our school

and university days, had been once a name to conjure with; a
personality who evoked for me a world more vast and splendid,
horizons wider, vistas of possibilities more dazzling, than any I have
since known—which have contracted, in fact, with my study of an
exact science to a dwindled universe of pettier scale and
measurement;—and wherein, formerly, with all the terror and delight
of vividly imagined adventure, we moved side by side among strange
experiences and fascinating speculations.

The name brings back the face and figure of as singular an

individual as I have ever known who, but for my saving streak of
common sense and inability to imagine beyond a certain point, might
well have swept me permanently into his own region of research and
curious experiment. As it was, up to the time when I felt obliged to
steer my course away from him, he found my nature of great
assistance in helping him to reconstruct his detailed mental pictures
of the past; we were both “in the same boat together,” as he
constantly assured me—this boat that travelled down the river of
innumerable consecutive lives; and there can be no doubt that my
cautious questionings—lack of perspective, he termed it—besides
checking certain aspects of his conception, saved us at the same
time from results that must have proved damaging to our
reputations, if not injurious actually to our persons, physically and
mentally. Yet that he captured me so completely at the time was due
to an innate sympathy I felt towards his theories, a sympathy that at
times amounted to complete acceptance. I freely admit this
sympathy. He used another word for it, however: he called it
Memory.

As a boy, Julius LeVallon was beyond question one of the

strangest beings that ever wore a mortar-board, or lent his soul and
body to the conventionalities of an English private school.

I recall, as of yesterday, my first sight of him, and the vivid

impression, startling as of shock, he then produced: the sensitive,
fine face, pallid as marble, the thatch of tumbling dark hair, and the
eyes of changing greeny blue that shone unlike any English eyes I
have ever looked upon before or since. “Giglamps” the other boys
called them, of course; but when you caught them through the black
hair that straggled over the high white forehead, they somehow
conveyed the impression of twin lanterns, now veiled, now clear,
seen through the tangled shadows of a twilight wood. Unlike the
eyes of most dreamers, they looked keenly within, rather than
vaguely beyond; and I recall to this day the sharp, half disquieting
effect produced upon my mind as a new boy the first instant I saw
them—that here was an individual who somehow stood aloof from
the mob of noisy, mischief-loving youngsters all about him, and had
little in common with the world in which this school was a bustling,
practical centre of educational energy.

Nor is it that I recall that first sight with the added judgment of
later years. I insist that this moment of his entrance into my life was
accompanied by an authentic thrill of wonder that announced his
presence to my nerves, or even deeper, to my very soul. My
sympathetic nervous system was instinctively aware of him. He came
upon me with a kind of rush for which the proper word is startling;
there was nothing gradual about it; its nature was electrifying; and
in some sense he certainly captivated me, for, immediately upon
knowing him, this opening wonder merged in a deep affection of a
kind so intimate, so fearless, so familiar, that it seemed to me that I
must, somewhere, somehow, have known him always. For years to
come it bound me to his side. To the end, moreover, I never quite
lost something of that curious first impression, that he moved,
namely, in an outer world that did not claim him; that those
luminous, inward-peering eyes saw but dimly the objects we call
real; that he saw them as counters in some trivial game he deemed
it not worth while to play; that while, perforce, he used them like the
rest of us, their face-value was as naught compared to what they
symbolised; that, in a word, he stood apart from the vulgar bustle of
ordinary ambitious life, and above it, in a region by himself where he
was forever questing issues of infinitely greater value.

For a boy of fifteen, as I then was, this seems much to have

discerned. At the time I certainly phrased it all less pompously in my
own small mind. But that first sense of shock remains: I yearned to
know him, to stand where he stood, to be exactly like him. And our
speedy acquaintance did not overwhelm me as it ought to have done
—for a singular reason; I felt oddly that somehow or other I had the
right to know him instantly.

Imagination, no doubt, was stronger in me at that time than it is

to-day; my mind more speculative, my soul, perhaps, more
sensitively receptive. At any rate the insignificant and very ordinary
personality I own at present has since largely recovered itself. If
Julius LeVallon was one in a million, I know that I can never expect
to be more than one of a million. And it is something in middle age
to discover that one can appreciate the exceptional in others without
repining at its absence in oneself.

Julius was two forms above me, and for a day or two after my
arrival at mid-term, it appears he was in the sick-room with one of
those strange nervous illnesses that came upon him through life at
intervals, puzzling the doctors and alarming those responsible for his
well-being; accompanied, too, by symptoms that to-day would be
recognised, I imagine, as evidence of a secondary personality. But
on the third or fourth day, just as afternoon “Preparation” was
beginning and we were all shuffling down upon our wooden desks
with a clatter of books and pens, the door beside the great
blackboard opened, and a figure stole into the room, tall, slender,
and unsubstantial as a shadow, yet intensely real.

“Hullo! Giglamps back again!” whispered the boy on my left, and

another behind me sniggered audibly “Jujubes”—thus Julius was
sometimes paraphrased—“tired of shamming at last!” Then Hurrish,
the master in charge, whose head had been hidden a moment
behind his desk, closed the lid and turned. He greeted the boy with
a few kind words of welcome which, of course, I have forgotten; yet,
so strange are the freaks of memory, and so instantaneous and
prophetic the first intuitions of sympathy or aversion, that I distinctly
recall that I liked Hurrish for his words, and was grateful to him for
his kindly attitude towards a boy whose very existence had hitherto
been unknown to me. Already, before I knew his name, Julius
LeVallon meant, at any rate, this to me.

But from that instant the shadow became most potently real
substance. The boy moved forward to his desk, looked about him as
though to miss no face, and almost immediately across that big
room full of heads and shoulders saw—myself.

That something of psychical import passed swiftly between us is

indubitable, for while Julius visibly started, pausing a moment in his
walk and staring as though he would swallow me with his eyes,
there flashed upon my own mind a thought so vivid, so precise, that
it took actual sentence form, and before I could possibly have
imagined or invented an idea so uncorrelated with a previous
experience of any kind at all, I heard myself murmuring: “He’s found
me...!”

It seemed audible, at least. I hid my face a second, thinking I had

spoken it aloud. No one looked at me, however; Hurrish made no
comment. My name did not sound terribly across the class-room.
The sentence, after all, had remained a thought. But that it leaped
into my mind at all seems to me now, as it did at the time,
significant.

His eyes rested for the fraction of a second on my face as he

crossed the floor, and I felt—but how describe it intelligibly?—as
though a wind had risen and caught me up into another place where
there was great light and an impression of vast distances. Hypnotic
we should call it to-day; hypnotic let it be. I can only affirm how,
with that single glance from a boy but slightly older than myself,
seen then for the first time, and with no word yet spoken, there
came back to me a larger sense of life, and of the meaning of life. I
became aware of an extended world, of wonder, movement,
adventure on a scale immensely grander than anything I found
about me among known external things. But I became aware
—“again.” In earlier childhood I had known this bigger world. It
suddenly flashed over me that time stretched behind me as well as
before—and that I stretched back with it. Something scared me, I
remember, with a faint stirring as of old pains and pleasures suffered
long ago. The face and eyes that called into being these fancies, so
oddly touched with alarm, were like those seen sometimes in dreams
that never venture into daily life—things of composite memory, no
doubt, that bring with them an atmosphere, and a range of query,
nothing in normal waking life can even suggest.

He passed to his place in front of Hurrish’s desk among the upper

forms, and a sea of tousled heads intervened to hide him from my
sight; but as he went the afternoon sunshine fell through the
unfrosted half of the window, and in later years—now, in fact, as I
hold his letter in my hand and re-collect these vanished memories—I
still see him coming into my life with the golden sunlight about his
head and his face wrapped in its halo. I see it reflected in the
lamping eyes, glistening on the mop of dark hair, shining on the
pallid face with its high expression of other-worldliness and yearning
remote from the chaos of modern life.... It was a long time before I
managed to bring myself down again to parse the verbs in that
passage of Hecuba, for, if anything, I have understated rather than
exaggerated the effect that this first sight of Julius LeVallon
produced upon my feelings and imagination. Some one, lost through
ages but ever seeking me, rose suddenly and spoke: “So here you
are, at last! I’ve found you. We’ve found each other again!”

To say more could only be to elaborate the memory with

knowledge that came later, and thus to distort the first simple and
profound impression. I merely wish to present, as it occurred, the
picture of this wizard face appearing suddenly above the horizon of
my small schoolboy world, staring with that deep suggestion of
having travelled down upon me from immense distances behind,
bringing fugitive and ghostly sensations of things known long ago,
and hinting very faintly, as I have tried to describe, of vanished pains
and alarms—yet of sufferings so ancient that to touch them even
with the tenderest of words is to make them crumble into dust and
disappear.
 CHAPTER II

“‘Body,’ observes Plotinus, ‘is the true river of Lethe.’ The

memory of definite events in former lives can hardly come
easily to a consciousness allied with brain.... Bearing in
mind also that even our ordinary definite memories slowly
become indefinite, and that most drop altogether out of
notice, we shall attach no importance to the naïve question,
‘Why does not Smith remember who he was before?’ It
would be an exceedingly strange fact if he did, a new Smith
being now in evidence along with a new brain and nerves.
Still, it is conceivable that such remembrances occasionally
arise. Cerebral process, conscious or subconscious, is
psychical.”—“Individual and Reality” (E. D. Fawcett).

Looking back upon this entrance, not from the present long interval
of twenty years, but from a point much nearer to it, and
consequently more sympathetically in touch with my own youth, I
must confess that his presence—his arrival, as it seemed—threw a
momentary clear light of electric sharpness upon certain “inner
scenery” that even at this period of my boyhood was already
beginning to fade away into dimness and “mere imagining.” Which
brings me to a reluctant confession I feel bound to make. I say
“reluctant,” because at the present time I feel intellectually
indisposed to regard that scenery as real. Its origin I know not; its
reality at the time I alone can vouch for. Many children have similar
experiences, I believe; with myself it was exceptionally vivid.

Ever since I could remember, my childhood days were charged

with it—haunting and stimulating recollections that were certainly
derived from nothing in this life, nor owed their bright reality to
anything seen or read or heard. They influenced all my early games,
my secret make-believe, my magical free hours after lessons. I
dreamed them, played them, lived them, and nothing delighted me
so much as to be alone on half-holidays in summer out of doors, or
on winter evenings in the empty schoolroom, so that I might
reconstruct for myself the gorgeous detail of their remote, elusive
splendour. For the presence of others, even of my favourite
playmates, ruined their reality with criticising questions, and a doubt
as to their genuineness was an intrusion upon their sacredness my
youthful heart desired to prevent by—killing it at once. Their nature
it would be wearisome to detail, but I may mention that their
grandeur was of somewhat mixed authority, and that if sometimes I
was a general like Gideon, against whom Amalekites and such like
were the merest insects, at others I was a High Priest in some huge,
dim-sculptured Temple whose magnificence threw Moses and the
Bible tabernacles into insignificance.

Yet it was upon these glories, and upon this sacred inner scenery,
that the arrival of Julius LeVallon threw a new daylight of stark
intensity. He made them live again. His coming made them awfully
real. They had been fading. Going to school was, it seemed, a
finishing touch of desolating destruction. I felt obliged to give them
up and be a man. Thus ignored, disowned, forgotten of set
deliberation, they sank out of sight and were prepared to disappear,
when suddenly his arrival drew the entire panorama delightfully into
the great light of day again. His presence re-touched, re-coloured
the entire series. He made them true.

It would take too long, besides inviting the risk of unconscious

invention, were I to attempt in detail the description of our growing
intimacy. Moreover, I believe it is true that the intimacy did not grow
at all, but suddenly, incomprehensibly was. At any rate, I remember
with distinctness our first conversation. The hour’s “prep.” was over,
and I was in the yard, lonely and disconsolate as a new boy,
watching the others playing tip-and-run against the high enclosing
wall, when Julius LeVallon came up suddenly behind me, and I
turned expectantly at the sound of his almost stealthy step. He came
softly. He was smiling. In the falling dusk he looked more shadow-
like than ever. He wore the school cap at the back of his head,
where it clung to his tumbling hair like some absurd disguise
circumstances forced him to adopt for the moment.

And my heart gave a bound of excitement at the sound of his

voice. In some strange way the whole thing seemed familiar. I had
expected this. It had happened before. And, very swiftly, a fragment
of that inner scenery, laid like a theatre-inset against the playground
of to-day, flashed through the depths of me, then vanished.

“What is your name?” he asked me, very gently.

“Mason,” I told him, conscious that I flushed and almost

stammered. “John Mason. I’m a new boy.” Then, although my
brother, formerly Head of the school, had already gone on to
Winchester, I added “Mason secundus.” My outer self felt shy, but
another, deeper self realised a sense of satisfaction that was
pleasure. I was aware of a desire to seize his hand and utter
something of this bigger, happier sensation. The strength of school
convention, however, prevented anything of the sort. I was at first
embarrassed by the attention of a bigger boy, and showed it.

He looked closely into my face a moment, as though searching for

something, but so penetratingly that I felt his eyes actually inside
me. The information I had given did not seem to interest him
particularly. At the same time I was conscious that his near presence
affected me in a curious way, for I lost the feeling that this attention
to a new boy was flattering and unusual, and became aware that
there was something of great importance he wished to say to me. It
was all right and natural. There was something he desired to find
out and know: it was not my name. A vague yet profound emotion
troubled me.
 He spoke then, slowly, earnestly; the voice gentle and restrained,
but the expression in the eyes and face so grave, almost so solemn,
that it seemed an old and experienced man who addressed me,
instead of a boy barely sixteen years of age.

“Have you then ... quite ... forgotten ... everything?” he asked,
making dramatic pauses thus between the words.

And, singular in its abruptness though the question was, there

flashed upon me even while he uttered it, a sensation, a mood, a
memory—I hardly know what to call it—that made the words
intelligible. It dawned upon me that I had “forgotten ... everything
... quite”: crowded, glorious, ancient things, that somehow or other I
ought to have remembered. A faint sense of guiltiness accompanied
the experience. I felt disconcerted, half ashamed.

“I’m afraid ... I have,” came my faltering reply. Though

bewildered, I raised my eyes to his. I looked straight at him. “I’m—
Mason secundus ... now....”

His eyes, I saw, came up, as it were, from their deep searching.
They rested quietly upon my own, with a reassuring smile that made
them kindly and understanding as those of my own father. He put
his hand on my shoulder in a protective fashion that gave me an
intense desire to remember all the things he wished me to
remember, and thus to prove myself worthy of his interest and
attention. The desire in me was ardent, serious. Its fervency,
moreover, seemed to produce an effect, for immediately there again
rose before my inner vision that flashing scenery I had “imagined” as
a child.

Possibly something in my face betrayed the change. His

expression, at any rate, altered instantly as though he recognised
what was happening.

“You’re Mason secundus now,” he said more quickly. “I know that.

But—can you remember nothing of the Other Places? Have you quite
forgotten when—we were together?”

He stopped abruptly, repeating the last three words almost

beneath his breath. His eyes rested on mine with such pleasure and
expectancy in them that for the moment the world I stood in melted
out, the playground faded, the shouts of cricket ceased, and I
seemed to forget entirely who or where I was. It was as though
other times, other feelings, other scenery battled against the actual
present, claiming me, sweeping me away, extending the sense of
personal identity towards a previous series. Seductive the sensation
was beyond belief, yet at the same time disturbing. I wholly ignored
the flattery of this kindness from an older boy. A series of vivid
pictures, more familiar than the nursery, more distant than a dream
of years ago, swam up from some inner region of my being like
memories of places, people, adventures I had actually lived and
seen. The near presence of Julius LeVallon drew them upwards in a
stream above the horizon of some temporarily veiled oblivion.

“... in the Other Places,” his voice continued with a droning sound
that was like the sea a long way off, or like wind among the
branches of a tree.

And something in me leaped automatically to acknowledge the

truth I suddenly realised.

“Yes, yes!” I cried, no shyness in me any more, and plunged into

myself to seize the flying pictures and arrest their sliding,
disappearing motion. “I remember, oh, I remember ... a whole lot of
... dreams ... or things like made-up adventures I once had ages and
ages ago ... with ...” I hesitated a second. A rising and inexplicable
excitement stopped my words. I was shaking all over. “... with you!”
I added boldly, or rather the words seemed to add themselves
inevitably. “It was with you, sir?”

He nodded his head slightly and smiled. I think the “sir,” sounding
so incongruous, caused the smile.
 “Yes,” he said in his soft, low voice, “it was with me. Only they
were not dreams. They were real. There’s no good denying what’s
real; it only prevents your remembering properly.”

The way he said it held conviction as of sunrise, but anyhow

denial in myself seemed equally to have disappeared. Deep within
me a sense of reality answered willingly to his own.

“And myself?” he went on gently yet eagerly at the same time, his
eyes searching my own. “Don’t you remember—me? Have I, too,
gone quite beyond recall?”

But with truth my answer came at once:

“Something ... perhaps ... comes back to me ... a little,” I

stammered. For while aware of a keen sensation that I talked with
someone I knew as well as I knew my own father, nothing at the
moment seemed wholly real to me except his sensitive, pale face
with the large and beautiful eyes so keenly peering, and the tangled
hair escaping under that ridiculous school cap. The pine trees in the
cricket-field rose into the fading sky behind him, and I remember
being puzzled to determine where his hair stopped and the feathery
branches began.

“... carrying the spears up the long stone steps in the sunshine,”
his voice murmured on with a sound like running water, “and the old
man in the robe of yellow standing at the top ... and orchards below,
all white and pink with blossoms dropping in the wind ... and miles
of plain in blue distances far away, the river winding ... and birds
fishing in the shallow places ...”

The picture flashed into my mind. I saw it. I remembered it in

detail as easily as any childhood scene of a few years ago, but yet
through a blur of summery haze and at the end of a stupendous
distance that reduced the scale to lilliputian proportions. I looked
down the wrong end of a telescope at it all. The appalling distance—
and something else as well I was at a loss to define—frightened me
a little.

“I ... my people, I mean ... live in Sussex,” I remember saying

irrelevantly in my bewilderment, “and my father’s a clergyman.” It
was the upper part of me that said it, no doubt anticipating the
usual question “What’s your father?” My voice had a lifeless,
automatic sound.

“That’s now,” LeVallon interrupted almost impatiently. “It’s thinking

of these things that hides the others.”

Then he smiled, leaning against the wall beside me while the

sunset flamed upon the clouds above us and the tide of noisy boys
broke, tumbling about our feet. I see those hurrying clouds, crimson
and gold, that scrimmage of boys in the school playground, and
Julius LeVallon gazing into my eyes, his expression rapt and eager—I
see it now across the years as plainly as I saw that flash of inner
scenery far, far away. I even hear his low voice speaking. The whole,
strange mood that rendered the conversation not too incredibly
fantastic at the time comes over me again as I think of it.

He went on in that murmuring tone, putting true words to the

pictures that rolled clearly through me:

“... and the burning sunlight on the white walls of the building ...
the cool deep shadows where we talked and slept ... the shouting of
the armies in the distance ... with the glistening of the spears and
shining shields ...”

Mixed curiously together, kaleidoscopic, running one into the other

without sharp outlines of beginning or end, the scenes fled past me
like the pages of a coloured picture-book. I saw figures plainly, more
plainly than the scenery beyond. The man in the yellow robe looked
close into my eyes, so close, indeed, I could almost hear him speak.
He vanished, and a woman took his place. Her back was to me. She
stood motionless, her hands upraised, and a gesture of passionate
entreaty about her plunged me suddenly into a sea of whirling,
poignant drama that had terror in it. The blood rushed to my head.
My heart beat violently. I knew a moment of icy horror—that she
would turn—and I should recognise her face—worse, that she would
recognise my own. I experienced actual fear, a shrinking dread of
something that was nameless. Escape was impossible, I could
neither move nor speak, nor alter any single detail in this picture
which—most terrifying of all—I knew contained somewhere too—
myself. But she did not turn; I did not see her face. She vanished
like the rest ... and I next saw quick, running figures with skins of
reddish brown, circlets of iron about their foreheads and red tassels
hanging from their loin cloths. The scene had shifted.

“... when we lit the signal fires upon the hills,” the voice of
LeVallon broke in softly, looking over his shoulder lest we be
disturbed, “and lay as sentinels all night beside the ashes ... till the
plain showed clearly in the sunrise with the encampments marked
over it like stones ...”

I saw the blue plain fading into distance, and across it a swiftly-
moving cloud of dust that was ominous in character, presaging
attack. Again the scene shifted noiselessly as a picture on a screen,
and a deserted village slid before me, with small houses built of
undressed stone, and roomy paddocks, abandoned to the wild deer
from the hills. I smelt the keen, fresh air and the scent of wild
flowers. A figure, carrying a small blue stick, passed with tearing
rapidity up the empty street.

“... when you were a Runner to the tribe,” the voice stepped
curiously in from a world outside it all, “carrying warnings to the
House of Messengers ... and I held the long night-watches upon the
passes, signalling with the flaming torches to those below ...”

“But so far away, so dim, so awfully small, that I can hardly——”

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