Part 4

“How, forsooth, Shall any man, by curses or by groans, Or by the laugh-jarred stillness of all hell, Be so drawn down to servitude again That on some backward level of lost laws And undivined relations, he may know No longer Love’s imperative resource, Firm once and his, well treasured then, but now Too fondly thrown away? And if there come But once on all his journey, singing down To find him, the gold-throated forward call, What way but one, what but the forward way, Shall after that call guide him? When his ears Have earned an inward skill to methodize The clash of all crossed voices and all noises, How shall he grope to be confused again, As he has been, by discord? When his eyes Have read the book of wisdom in the sun, And after dark deciphered it on earth, How shall he turn them back to scan some huge Blood-lettered protest of bewildered men That hunger while he feeds where they should starve And all absurdly perish?”

Killigrew Looked hard for a subtle object on the wall, And, having found it, sighed. The Captain paused: If he grew tedious, most assuredly Did he crave pardon of us; he had feared Beforehand that he might be wearisome, But there was not much more of it, he said,-- No more than just enough. And we rejoiced That he should look so kindly on us then. (“Commend me to a dying man’s grimace For absolute humor, always,” Killigrew Maintains; but I know better.)

“Work for them, You tell me? Work the folly out of them? Go back to them and teach them how to climb, While you teach caterpillars how to fly? You tell me that Alnaschar is a fool Because he dreams? And what is this you ask? I make him wise? I teach him to be still? While you go polishing the Pyramids, I hold Alnaschar’s feet? And while you have The ghost of Memnon’s image all day singing, I sit with aching arms and hardly catch A few spilled echoes of the song of songs-- The song that I should have as utterly For mine as any other man should have, The sweetest a glad shepherd ever trilled In Sharon, long ago? Is this the way For me to do good climbing any more Than Phaethon’s? Do you think the golden tone Of that far-singing call you all have heard Means any more for you than you should be Wise-heartedly, glad-heartedly yourselves? Do this, there is no more for you to do; And you have no dread left, no shame, no scorn. And while you have your wisdom and your gold, Songs calling, and the Princess in your arms, Remember, if you like, from time to time, Down yonder where the clouded millions go, Your bloody-knuckled scullions are not slaves, Your children of Alnaschar are not fools.

“Nor are they quite so foreign or far down As you may think to see them. What you take To be the cursedest mean thing that crawls On earth is nearer to you than you know: You may not ever crush him but you lose, You may not ever shield him but you gain-- As he, with all his crookedness, gains with you. Your preaching and your teaching, your achieving, Your lifting up and your discovering, Are more than often--more than you have dreamed-- The world-refracted evidence of what Your dream denies. You cannot hide yourselves In any multitude or solitude, Or mask yourselves in any studied guise Of hardness or of old humility, But soon by some discriminating man-- Some humorist at large, like Socrates-- You get yourselves found out.--Now I should be Found out without an effort. For example: When I go riding, trimmed and shaved again, Consistent, adequate, respectable,-- Some citizen, for curiosity, Will ask of a good neighbor, ‘What is this?’-- ‘It is the funeral of Captain Craig,’ Will be the neighbor’s word.--‘And who, good man, Was Captain Craig?’--‘He was an humorist; And we are told that there is nothing more For any man alive to say of him.’-- ‘There is nothing very strange in that,’ says A; ‘But the brass band? What has he done to be Blown through like this by cornets and trombones? And here you have this incompatible dirge-- Where are the jokes in that?’--Then B should say: ‘Maintained his humor: nothing more or less. The story goes that on the day before He died--some say a week, but that’s a trifle-- He said, with a subdued facetiousness, “Play Handel, not Chopin; assuredly not Chopin.”’--He was indeed an humorist.”

He made the paper fall down at arm’s length; And with a tension of half-quizzical Benignity that made it hard for us, He looked up--first at Morgan, then at me-- Almost, I thought, as if his eyes would ask If we were satisfied; and as he looked, The tremor of an old heart’s weariness Was on his mouth. He gazed at each of us, But spoke no further word that afternoon. He put away the paper, closed his eyes, And went to sleep with his lips flickering; And after that we left him.--At midnight Plunket and I looked in; but he still slept, And everything was going as it should. The watchman yawned, rattled his newspaper, And wondered what it was that ailed his lamp. He said it wheezed. He feared it might explode.

Next day we found the Captain wide awake, Propped up, and searching dimly with a spoon Through another dreary dish of chicken-broth, Which he raised up to me, at my approach, So fervently and so unconsciously, That one could only laugh. He looked again At each of us, and as he looked he frowned; And there was something in that frown of his That none of us had ever seen before. “Kind friends,” he said, “be sure that I rejoice To know that you have come to visit me; Be sure I speak with undisguised words And earnest, when I say that I rejoice.”-- “But what the devil!” whispered Killigrew. I kicked him, for I thought I understood.

The old man’s eyes had glimmered wearily At first, but now they glittered like to those Of a glad fish. “Beyond a doubt,” said he, “My dream this morning was more singular Than any other I have ever known. Give me that I might live ten thousand years, And all those years do nothing but have dreams, I doubt me much if any one of them Could be so quaint or so fantastical, So pregnant, as a dream of mine this morning. You may not think it any more than odd; You may not feel--you cannot wholly feel-- How droll it was:--I dreamed that I found Hamlet-- Found him at work, drenched with an angry sweat, Predestined, he declared with emphasis, To root out a large weed on Lethe wharf; And after I had watched him for some time, I laughed at him and told him that no root Would ever come the while he talked like that: The power was not in him, I explained, For such compound accomplishment. He glared At me, of course,--next moment laughed at me, And finally laughed with me. I was right, And we had eisel on the strength of it:-- ‘They tell me that this water is not good,’ Said Hamlet, and you should have seen him smile. Conceited? Pelion on Ossa?--pah!...

“But anon comes in a crocodile. We stepped Adroitly down upon the back of him, And away we went to an undiscovered country-- A fertile place, but in more ways than one So like the region we had started from, That Hamlet straightway found another weed And there began to tug. I laughed again, Till he cried out on me and on my mirth, Protesting all he knew: ‘The Fates,’ he said, ‘Have ordered it that I shall have these roots.’ But all at once a dreadful hunger seized him, And it was then we killed the crocodile-- Killed him and ate him. Washed with eisel down That luckless reptile was, to the last morsel; And there we were with flag-fens all around us,-- And there was Hamlet, at his task again, Ridiculous. And while I watched him work, The drollest of all changes came to pass:-- The weed had snapped off just above the root, Not warning him, and I was left alone. The bubbles rose, and I laughed heartily To think of him; I laughed when I woke up; And when my soup came in I laughed again; I think I may have laughed a little--no?-- Not when you came?... Why do you look like that? You don’t believe me? Crocodiles--why not? Who knows what he has eaten in his life? Who knows but I have eaten Atropos?... ‘Briar and oak for a soldier’s crown,’ you say? Provence? Oh, no.... Had I been Socrates, Count Pretzel would have been the King of Spain.”

Now of all casual things we might have said To make the matter smooth at such a time, There may have been a few that we had found Sufficient. Recollection fails, however, To say that we said anything. We looked. Had he been Carmichael, we might have stood Like faithful hypocrites and laughed at him; But the Captain was not Carmichael at all, For the Captain had no frogs: he had the sun. So there we waited, hungry for the word,-- Tormented, unsophisticated, stretched-- Till, with a drawl, to save us, Killigrew Good-humoredly spoke out. The Captain fixed His eyes on him with some severity.

“That was a funny dream, beyond a doubt,” Said Killigrew;--“too funny to be laughed at; Too humorous, we mean.”--“Too humorous?” The Captain answered; “I approve of that. Proceed.”--We were not glad for Killigrew.

“Well,” he went on, “’twas only this. You see My dream this morning was a droll one too: I dreamed that a sad man was in my room, Sitting, as I do now, beside the bed. I questioned him, but he made no reply,-- Said not a word, but sang.”--“Said not a word, But sang,” the Captain echoed. “Very good. Now tell me what it was the sad man sang.” “Now that,” said Killigrew, constrainedly, And with a laugh that might have been left out, “Is why I know it must have been a dream. But there he was, and I lay in the bed Like you; and I could see him just as well As you see my right hand. And for the songs He sang to me--there’s where the dream part comes.”

“You don’t remember them?” the Captain said, With a weary little chuckle; “very well, I might have guessed it. Never mind your dream, But let me go to sleep.”--For a moment then There was half a frown on Killigrew’s good face, But he turned it to a smile.--“Not quite,” said he; “The songs that he sang first were sorrowful, And they were stranger than the man himself-- And he was very strange; but I found out, Through all the gloom of him and of his music, That a kind of--well, say mystic cheerfulness, Or give it almost any trumped-up name, Pervaded him; for slowly, as he sang, There came a change, and I began to know The method of it all. Song after song Was ended; and when I had listened there For hours--I mean for dream-hours--hearing him, And always glad that I was hearing him, There came another change--a great one. Tears Rolled out at last like bullets from his eyes, And I could hear them fall down on the floor Like shoes; and they were always marking time For the song that he was singing. I have lost The greater number of his verses now, But there are some, like these, that I remember:

“_‘Ten men from Zanzibar, Black as iron hammers are, Riding on a cable-car Down to Crowley’s theatre.’_...”

“Ten men?” the Captain interrupted there-- “Ten men, my Euthyphron? That is beautiful. But never mind, I wish to go to sleep: Tell Cebes that I wish to go to sleep.... O ye of little faith, your golden plumes Are like to drag ... par-dee!”--We may have smiled In after days to think how Killigrew Had sacrificed himself to fight that silence, But we were grateful to him, none the less; And if we smiled, that may have been the reason. But the good Captain for a long time then Said nothing: he lay quiet--fast asleep, For all that we could see. We waited there Till each of us, I fancy, must have made The paper on the wall begin to squirm, And then got up to leave. My friends went out, And I was going, when the old man cried: “You leave me now--now it has come to this? What have I done to make you go? Come back! Come back!”

There was a quaver in his cry That we shall not forget--reproachful, kind, Indignant, piteous. It seemed as one Marooned on treacherous tide-feeding sand Were darkly calling over the still straits Between him and irrevocable shores Where now there was no lamp to fade for him, No call to give him answer. We were there Before him, but his eyes were not much turned On us; nor was it very much to us That he began to speak the broken words, The scattered words, that he had left in him.

“So it has come to this? And what is this? Death, do you call it? Death? And what is death? Why do you look like that at me again? Why do you shrink your brows and shut your lips? If it be fear, then I can do no more Than hope for all of you that you may find Your promise of the sun; if it be grief You feel, to think that this old face of mine May never look at you and laugh again, Then tell me why it is that you have gone So long with me, and followed me so far, And had me to believe you took my words For more than ever misers did their gold?”

He listened, but his eyes were far from us-- Too far to make us turn to Killigrew, Or search the futile shelves of our own thoughts For golden-labeled insincerities To make placebos of. The marrowy sense Of a slow November storm that splashed against The shingles and the glass reminded us That we had brought umbrellas. He continued:

“Oh, can it be that I, too credulous, Have made myself believe that you believe Yourselves to be the men that you are not? I prove and I prize well your friendliness, But I would have that your last look at me Be not like this; for I would scan to-day Strong thoughts on all your faces--no regret, No fine commiseration--oh, not that, Not that! Nor say of me, when I am gone, That I was cold and harsh, for I was warm To strangeness, and for you.... Say not like that Of me--nor think of me that I reproached The friends of my tight battles and hard years, But say that I did love them to the last And in my love reproved them for the grief They did not--for they dared not--throw away. Courage, my boys,--courage, is what you need: Courage that is not all flesh-recklessness, But earnest of the world and of the soul-- First of the soul; for a man may be as brave As Ajax in the fury of his arms, And in the midmost warfare of his thoughts Be frail as Paris.... For the love, therefore, That brothered us when we stood back that day From Delium--the love that holds us now More than it held us at Amphipolis-- Forget you not that he who in his work Would mount from these low roads of measured shame To tread the leagueless highway must fling first And fling forevermore beyond his reach The shackles of a slave who doubts the sun. There is no servitude so fraudulent As of a sun-shut mind; for ’tis the mind That makes you craven or invincible, Diseased or puissant. The mind will pay Ten thousand fold and be the richer then To grant new service; but the world pays hard And accurately sickens till in years The dole has eked its end and there is left What all of you are noting on all days In these Athenian streets, where squandered men Drag ruins of half-warriors to the grave-- Or to Hippocrates.”

His head fell back, And he lay still with wearied eyes half-closed. We waited, but a few faint words yet stayed: “Kind friends,” he said, “friends I have known so long, Though I have jested with you in time past, Though I have stung your pride with epithets Not all forbearing,--still, when I am gone, Say Socrates wrought always for the best And for the wisest end.... Give me the cup! The truth is yours, God’s universe is yours.... Good-by ... good citizens ... give me the cup”.... Again we waited; and this time we knew Those lips of his that would not flicker down Had yet some fettered message for us there. We waited, and we watched him. All at once, With a faint flash, the clouded eyes grew clear; And then we knew the man was coming back, And we knew that he would speak in the old way. We watched him, and I listened. The man smiled And looked about him--not regretfully, Not anxiously; and when at last he spoke, Before the long drowse came to give him peace, One word was all he said. “Trombones,” he said.

* * * * *

That evening, at “The Chrysalis” again, We smoked and looked at one another’s eyes, And we were glad. The world had scattered ways For us to take, we knew; but for the time That one snug room where the big beech logs roared smooth Defiance to the cold rough rain outside Sufficed. There were no scattered ways for us That we could see just then, and we were glad: We were glad to be on earth, and we rejoiced No less for Captain Craig that he was gone. We might, for his dead benefit, have run The gamut of all human weaknesses And uttered after-platitudes enough-- Wrecked on his own abstractions, and all such-- To drive away Gambrinus and the bead From Bernard’s ale; and I suppose we might Have praised, accordingly, the Lord of Hosts For making us to see that we were not (Like certain unapproved inferiors Whom we had known, and having known might name) Abominable flotsam. But the best And wisest occupation, we had learned,-- At work, at home, or at “The Chrysalis,” Companioned or unfriended, winged or chained,-- Was always to perpetuate the bead.

So Plunket, who had knowledge of all sorts, Yet hardly ever spoke, began to plink _O tu, Palermo!_--quaintly, with his nails,-- On Morgan’s fiddle, and at once got seized, As if he were some small thing, by the neck. Then the consummate Morgan, having told Explicitly what hardship might accrue To Plunket if he did that any more, Made roaring chords and acrobatic runs-- To charge his fingers and the strings, he said,-- And then, with his kind eyes on Killigrew, Struck up the schoolgirls’ march in _Lohengrin_, So Killigrew might smile and stretch himself And have to light his pipe. When that was done We knew that Morgan, by the looks of him, Was in the mood for almost anything From Bach to Offenbach;--and of all times That he has ever played, that one somehow-- That evening of the day the Captain died-- Stands out like one great verse of a good song, One strain that sings itself beyond the rest For the magic and a glamour that it has.

The ways have scattered for us, and all things Have changed; and we have wisdom, I doubt not, More fit for the world’s work than we had then; But neither parted roads nor cent per cent May starve quite out the child that lives in us-- The Child that is the Man, the Mystery, The Phœnix of the World. So, now and then, That evening of the day the Captain died Returns to us; and there comes always with it The storm, the warm restraint, the fellowship, The friendship and the firelight, and the fiddle. So too there comes a day that followed it-- A windy, dreary day with a cold white shine That only gummed the tumbled frozen ruts We tramped upon. The road was hard and long, But we had what we knew to comfort us, And we had the large humor of the thing To make it advantageous; for men stopped And eyed us on that road from time to time, And on that road the children followed us; And all along that road the Tilbury Band Blared indiscreetly the Dead March in Saul.

ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD

Isaac and Archibald were two old men. I knew them, and I may have laughed at them A little; but I must have honored them For they were old, and they were geniuses.

I do not think of either of them now Without remembering, infallibly, A journey that I made one afternoon With Isaac to find out what Archibald Was doing with his oats. It was high time Those oats were cut, said Isaac; and he feared That Archibald--well, he could never feel Quite sure of Archibald. Accordingly The good old man invited me--that is, Permitted me--to go along with him; And I, with a small boy’s adhesiveness To competent old age, got up and went. I do not know that I cared overmuch For Archibald’s or anybody’s oats, But Archibald was quite another thing, And Isaac yet another; and the world Was wide, and there was gladness everywhere. We walked together down the River Road With all the warmth and wonder of the land Around us, and the wayside flash of leaves,-- And Isaac said the day was glorious; But somewhere at the end of the first mile I found that I was figuring to find How long those ancient legs of his would keep The pace that he had set for them. The sun Was hot, and I was ready to sweat blood; But Isaac, for aught I could make of him, Was cool to his hat-band. So I said then With a dry gasp of affable despair, Something about the scorching days we have In August without knowing it sometimes; But Isaac said the day was like a dream, And praised the Lord, and talked about the breeze. I made a fair confession of the breeze, And crowded casually on his thought The nearness of a profitable nook That I could see. First I was half inclined To caution him that he was growing old, But something that was not compassion soon Made plain the folly of all subterfuge. Isaac was old, but not so old as that.