Part 3

Then Juniper thought that Watchnight Percy-- The one who spoke of the Lord's great mercy-- Though his heart was right, yet, on the whole, Was over-anxious for Jerry's soul. Was Jerry's chance, like that of the thief, Merely the miracle of belief, That in the final midnight hour Springs from the Lord Almighty's power And heavenly grace? Juniper could Not argue this point for want of light So left the question as it stood, To deal with the claim of Christopher Wright.

Much that was spoken by Christopher Had a measure of truth, said Juniper. It was true that Jerry, with his mind So bent on worldly things, might find Beyond those gates of pearl and gold, Within those heavenly pavilions, Where white-robed angels by the millions Bask in the glory of the fold, No angel who would undertake To wean his thoughts from earthly things, And fit him up with a pair of wings; Or--still more hopeless job--to make Him change his manners and his speech, So that those lordly potentates Might not be shocked, as Jerry's mates Were often shocked upon the beach. All this, he said, and more beside May yet be true of the man that died-- (Jerry, who swore when the mood was on. And worried the soul of Solomon; Jerry, the most consistent liar That ever told a fish-yarn when, On a wintry night, a crew of men Were gathered around a tamarack fire!) "I do not care," said Juniper, Looking direct at Christopher, "What Gabriel may think of Jerry, Or (turning around to stare at Joe) What the sins were that Doran might know: Or whether he laughed in his sleep and was merry In the hour of death, as Jake, his son, Who lay beside him in the bed Reported the news to Solomon Of what the dying man had said."

Thus Juniper spoke, his eyes a-glow, His bony fingers pointing at Rowe.

Then we felt a deep hush fall Upon the room, as Juniper Hall Spoke to the dead man under the sheet, Just as a common man might greet A living friend. "Well, Jerry, old mate, They may talk as they like--now that you're cold-- Of those who enter the Father's fold, Through mercy and grace. They may talk of the fate Of your soul. They may shake their heads and groan For fear God's mercy was not shown To you before you died. I know Nothing of what the angels do, Or where the souls of dead men go; But I'll take my chance in saying that you, Who always did your day's work well, Had far too good a soul for hell. I do not know the kind of luck That came to Christopher and Joe And saved from the fire the soul of Rowe, Nor how the balances are struck At death; but I'd like to state If things like contra accounts are stored On the shelves of the upper Courts of the Lord. Who judges the hearts of men, that your slate, Jerry, should tell by a clean score How you were head of a life-boat crew, With no one as good at the stern oar, And always on hand when a storm blew; And tell how you pulled young Davie Cole, (Who sits on that bench) out of a hole In the slob ice one bitter night In March when Davey was frozen through, And lugged him ashore with his face as white As the lip of a ghost, and brought him to, With no one around to lend you a hand. Yes, Jerry, old mate, if you never reach For want of faith the angels' land, Without a sea, without a beach, Maybe the Lord in His good grace, May find close to the boundary Of heaven and the outer place, A strip of shoreline by a sea, Where the winds blow and where you, As skipper of a life-boat crew, May throw a line across the deck Of many a crowded, foundering wreck. And on fine days when not aboard Your skiff, but lying up, the Lord May find odd jobs, perhaps a sail To mend, that in a Galilean gale Was torn, or one or two old punts That He and Simon Peter once Used on the lake; or say, 'Here's bark And oakum, oil and pitch, all that You need; go--caulk that leaky ark That went aground on Ararat.' And when you call your gang together, Some night in raw December weather (The gang made up of your lifeboat crew, And other spotted saints of God, Exiled to that shore with you Because, while on the earth, they trod On both the broad and narrow ways) To tell your yarns before a blaze Of balsam piled on tamarack-- That night, I swear, I will come back (As stoker from the outer land On special leave from Lucifer) To start your fire with my brand; I swear it now," said Juniper.

V.

THE HISTORY OF JOHN JONES

The sun never shone, The rain could not fall On a steadier man than John. A holy man was John, And honest withal. His mates had never heard Drop from his guarded lip An idle word, But twice--first, while on board his ship, When he had lost his pipe, he swore, Just a mild damn, and nothing more; And once he cursed The government; but then he reckoned The Lord forgave him for the first, And justified the second.

And he was temperate in all his ways, Was John; He never drank, but when Thanksgiving days Came on; Never in summer on a fishing trip Would he allow the smell on board his ship; Only in winter or in autumn, When a cramp or something caught him, Would he take it, for he prized it, Not for its depraved abuses, But for its discreeter uses, As his Church had authorized it.

The sun had never shone On a kinder man than John, Nor upon A better Christian than was John. He was good to his dog, he was good to his cat, And his love went out to his horse; He loved the Lord and his Church, of course, For righteous was he in thought and act; And his neighbors knew, in addition to that, He loved his wife, as a matter of fact.

Now, one fine day it occurred to John, That his last great cramp was on; For nothing that the doctor wrote Could stop that rattle in his throat. He had broken his back upon the oar, He had dried his last boat-load of cod, And nothing was left for John any more, But to drift in his boat to the port of God.

Creatures of Another Country

I

THE BIRD OF PARADISE

Answer my riddle, will you? Nay, Do not toss your head that way, With such a ruffle of passion. I merely asked you who was fleeced To pay the jeweller and modiste For this last word in fashion. I have a right, if you only knew, To put this delicate point to you-- Those sapphires dancing on your crest, That cluster of rubies on your breast, That necklace there, those pearls! The price? Who paid it? Bird of Paradise!

And the only kind of reply that came Out of that vision of tropical flame Was that little ruffle of passion. A tango of color from scarlet to green Evolved as I watched the beauty preen Her plumes in that maddening fashion. So I left the Bird of the Garden to call, This time, upon the Bird of the Hall; For my temples beat with the throb of fire, And I could not find in that land of Desire A cooling wind, or water, or ice To quench a fever in Paradise.

And the only answer I got in the Hall Was a glance of repulse from the belle of the Ball, With a little ruffle of passion; Though I had a right to ask, I am sure, Who sent that tiara for her coiffure, And that latest corsage of fashion. Not those the jewels I gave her to wear, Not those the drops that hung from her ear; And my fever burned like a thirst in Sahara, When that osprey swung above the tiara, And I knew no wind, nor water, nor ice Might cool this hell in Paradise.

II

THE EPIGRAPHER

His head was like his lore--antique, His face was thin and sallow-sick, With god-like accent he could speak Of Egypt's reeds or Babylon's brick Or sheep-skin codes in Arabic.

To justify the ways divine, He had travelled Southern Asia through-- Gezir down in Palestine, Lagash, Ur and Eridu, The banks of Nile and Tigris too.

And every occult Hebrew tale He could expound with learned ease, From Aaron's rod to Jonah's whale. He had held the skull of Rameses-- The one who died from boils and fleas.

Could tell how--saving Israel's peace-- The mighty Gabriel of the Lord Put sand within the axle-grease Of Pharaoh's chariots; and his horde O'erwhelmed with water, fire and sword.

And he had tried Behistun Rock, That Persian peak, and nearly clomb it; His head had suffered from the shock Of somersaulting from its summit-- Nor had he quite recovered from it.

From that time onward to the end, His mind had had a touch of gloom; His hours with jars and coins he'd spend, And ashes looted from a tomb,-- Within his spare and narrow room.

His day's work done, with the last rune Of a Hammurabi fragment read, He took some water spiced with prune And soda, which imbibed, he said A Syrian prayer, and went to bed.

* * * * * * * *

And thus he trod life's narrow way,-- His soul as peaceful as a river-- His understanding heart all day Kept faithful to a stagnant liver.

L'ENVOI.

When at last his stomach went by default, His graduate students bore him afar To the East where the Dead Sea waters are, And pickled his bones in Eternal Salt.

Ode to December, 1917

Was ever night so wild as this--this bleak December night! Veiled in the sombre shroud that sepulchred the day; Why thus bereft of heaven's beams, of moon and starry light, Are all its ancient charms in sorrow laid away?

The year dies out with drifted leaves, with winds and floods of rain, Companions of the tempest with its brood of fears; And voices far above us echo back the world's great pain, In tongueless language inarticulate through tears.

Why passed with such inevitable speed The eager splendor of the awakening spring? So little did it seem to know or heed Our outward cries, our hidden murmuring; It shone upon us shyly for some reason, Then flew into the summer's briefer season, And found, amidst its roses fully blown, A transient radiance fleeter than its own.

How sweet the flowers grew in the woods last May! The trillium, splashed by sunlight, jauntily Awoke to match the whiteness of its ray With white of blood-root and anemone. Within the stray leaves on the humid ground, Beside the fallen trunks of trees, were found Numerous hepaticas whose lilac hue Seemed woven of heaven's purple and its blue, And, near at hand, a running streamlet told Of treasure hidden in the marigold.

A little while they stayed; how short the space! We watched them as the hours went by, We looked again, and saw them die-- Thus did they pass away; but in their place, In meadow and in vale sprang up The daisy and the buttercup; Then on the creeping slopes of sunny hills, By winding dales and tortuous rills, Blue vervain rose to greet the sun, Ere half the summer's race was run; And in the fields and on the plains. By forest paths, by country lanes, By wayside and in garden plot, The bluebell and forget-me-not; And fair the bottle-gentian grew Beside the wintergreen and rue.

And everywhere around us from the throats Of joyous birds pealed forth ecstatic praise-- Glad hymns in which were heard no notes Of dim unrest and troubled lays. The heart had never taught them sorrows, Regretful yesterdays nor morrows; Each morning brought them its full boon of light, And in return they gave their gift of song-- Free utterance that had no tale of wrong Within the horizon of their life to right; And when the evening drew to twilight close, Fell the light mantle of their calm repose.

Fled are they all; The flowers and the birds, In vain we call, With cries too dumb for words. The fragrance and the music gone, The fire of sunset, flush of dawn, The waterlily in the lake, The robin's love-song in the brake; All these are fled and gone, And with us now the night, The wild December night.

Far, far away upon the seas The billows tell their agonies; The ocean in its frenzied roar Lashes the ramparts of the shore; The tempest with its shattering thunder Drives the iron bulwarks under; The furies, in their path advancing, Are seen around the breakers dancing; The sea-mews, blinded by the light Of mast-head signals, flaring bright, Are rent by blow of spar and sail Within the clutches of the gale, And sailors, drenched by salt and foam, Yearn for the fireside of their home.

And thus upon the land Earth's ravage is laid bare; Slapped by the storm's fierce hand, The wildcat and the bear Lie huddled in the sand That marks their common lair; The trees in angry lurch That grew beside each other-- The hemlock and the birch-- Now strive with one another, In strangely human mood, Born of unnatural feud.

Around the hoary mountain sides The storm hurls its impetuous shock, Is answered by the torrent's tides, The iron echoes of the rock. Gone are the woodland notes of spring, The airs of summer's short-lived breath, The autumn, too, has taken wing, The year has rushed into its death. Gone, like the memory of a dream, A rainbow hovering o'er a stream; And we, of nature's joys bereft, Are with her deepening shadows left, With grey upon the sea, And driftwood on the reef, With winter in the tree, And death within the leaf.

Far, far away, across the distant deep, Heaven's lightnings flash from out a darker scroll; Midnight and darkness in wild chaos keep A dawnless vigil, as slow thunders roll Over a world upon whose face the storm Breaks, and within the terrors of eclipse, Fall the swift strokes of Death, clothed in the form Of some dread angel of Apocalypse. There rides a tempest heedless of the check Of law, and with no mandate but its will, Whose function lies alone in power to wreck, That never hears the fiat, "Peace, be still!" There, through deep, winding valleys that had known The quiet haunts of peasants; through the green, Sweet-tufted verdure that the spring had sown; Through glens where only roe and fawn were seen In peace; through plains where once the sunset's brush Placed its soft crimson on the silent streams; There, through that land that often loved the hush Of evening and the tenderness of dreams, Rolls now the bugle with its alien blast, The cry of battle on the midnight air, The fiery summons to earth's legions massed Mid bayonets gleaming in the rocket's glare; And streams that to the North Sea once had brought The dawn's white silver and the sunset's gold, Now pour such tides as Nature never wrought. The ruddier treasures of a wealth untold.

O Nature! Thou that lovest life In herb and brute and feathered kind, Who leadest from the night's long strife The morn with rays of promise lined; Who bringest forth the vital glow To bathe the trees in glorious light, And bid the woodland flowers grow, Clothed spotless in their raiment bright; Who givest food to hart and hare Upon the snowy mountain's crest, And to the ravens everywhere, The storm-proof covert of their nest;-- Hast thou within thy bounteous plan, So rich and measureless and mild, No boon wherewith to succour man, Thy youngest, feeblest, blindest child? Prostrate upon a formless field, Bedewed with unavailing tears, While the slow hours, faltering, yield This nameless triad of the years; What balm shall touch his stricken eyes? What hand shall drive away his dead? What tones shall quieten his cries? What voice shall resurrect his dead?

O Winds; that sweep the surges from the bosom of the sea, Strong with a strength unmeasured, as the chainless lightnings--free; Ye nether rivals of the thunders, as their voice your own, Yet theirs excelling in your major harmonies of tone; Ye mighty arbiters of light and shade, of hope and gloom, Who fashion for the morn its cradle, for the eve its tomb, Who garrison the towers of God with clouds in dark array, Marshalling their watch and slumber till their hidden fires play; All day ye played upon the forest pines a mournful strain, As if the slowly ebbing year were laboring in its pain; Upon the land ye tossed the agéd leaves in aimless quest, And on the deep ye filled the sailor's heart with wild unrest.

O Winds! that stir the ashes of our altars while our cries From hearthstone and from chancel in our agony arise, That drive us in our frantic hours to prayer upon our knees, While those we love drift shelterless upon the homeless seas; O lift us once again to God! this time on kindlier wings-- So weary are we of the strife and fear the tempest brings; Give us the vision of His gardens under skies of blue, We have lived so long in shadow of the cypress and the yew; Sing through the swell that crowns the ocean when its rage has passed, Resign the terrors of the gale, the furies of the blast; Then through the vibrant music of the lyre of sea and land Which our storm-sated world first heard when from the Creator's hand It rose at the Great Dawn, breathe soon that sweet, untroubled peace, That vista of life's cravings reared on hopes that never cease; Blow out upon the raven plumes of this December night, The world's unresting miseries, her shadow and her blight; The story of her passions, and her dark, unfathomed sin, The outward blow that slaughters, and the guilt that slays within; And deep from out the storm's last throes, peal forth in life re-born, The blazon of the future with the heralds of the morn; The anthem of a world re-strung to human love and grace, The full-toned orchestration of the heart-throbs of the race.

Newfoundland

Here the tides flow, And here they ebb; Not with that dull, unsinewed tread of waters Held under bonds to move Around unpeopled shores-- Moon-driven through a timeless circuit Of invasion and retreat; But with a lusty stroke of life Pounding at stubborn gates, That they might run Within the sluices of men's hearts, Leap under throb of pulse and nerve, And teach the sea's strong voice To learn the harmonies of new floods, The peal of cataract, And the soft wash of currents Against resilient banks, Or the broken rhythms from old chords Along dark passages That once were pathways of authentic fires And swept by the wings of dream.

_Red is the sea-kelp on the beach, Red as the heart's blood, Nor is there power in tide or sun To bleach its stain. It lies there piled thick Above the gulch-line._

_It is rooted in the joints of rocks, It is tangled around a spar, It covers a broken rudder, It is red as the heart's blood, And salt as tears._

Here the winds blow, And here they die, Not with that wild, exotic rage That vainly sweeps untrodden shores, But with familiar breath Holding a partnership with life, Resonant with the hopes of spring, Pungent with the airs of harvest. They call with the silver fifes of the sea, They breathe with the lungs of men, They are one with the tides of the sea, They are one with the tides of the heart, They blow with the rising octaves of dawn. They die with the largo of dusk, Their hands are full to the overflow, In their right is the bread of life, In their left are the waters of death.

_Scattered on boom And rudder and weed Are tangles of shells; Some with backs of crusted bronze, And faces of porcelain blue, Some crushed by the beach stones To chips of jade; And some are spiral-cleft Spreading their tracery on the sand In the rich veining of an agate's heart; And others remain unscarred, To babble of the passing of the winds._

Here the crags Meet with winds and tides-- Not with that blind interchange Of blow for blow That spills the thunder of insentient seas; But with the mind that reads assault In crouch and leap and the quick stealth, Stiffening the muscles of the waves. Here they flank the harbors, Keeping watch On thresholds, altars and the fires of home, Or, like mastiffs, Over-zealous, Guard too well.

_Tide and wind and crag, Sea-weed and sea-shell And broken rudder-- And the story is told Of human veins and pulses, Of eternal pathways of fire, Of dreams that survive the night, Of doors held ajar in storms._

Flashlights and Echoes

From the Years of 1914 and 1915

I

A COAST

Scaling where a hundred crags Disclose their high, precipitous walls, Up hidden clefts and burnished jags, The shore-line like a python crawls. Along a league of ridges overspread With the dead trunks of pine and oak, it drags A roughening path; around the head Of the last bluff it climbs, then falls, Spilling its folds on spur and boulder, Down a deep gulch where it rears and sprawls Upon the Cape's lean shoulder.

Rolling dusks and vapors pour A turgid silence on the shore, Broken by a curlew screaming, And a low, regurgitant note Borne in from the laboring throat Of a wave along a line of basalt streaming; And, further off, where denser gloom The headland and a reef-curve hides, Falls the ground-swell's muttered boom From the belfries of the tides.

Under a tattered curtain of fog A flaw of wind makes the waters start; They drift and scud and whirl; And, held a moment near the heart Of the eddy, a waterspout,-- Or some wild thing with twisted shape, Compact of mist and wind and surge-- Hangs like a felon off the Cape.

II

LATER

(_A man speaks_)

Was that a cry you say you heard? Where? No. The winds would drown it quite. No sound would reach the shore to-night, Except the scream of some wild bird.

A flash, you say, that cut the rain Like a red knife? It could not be; There's nothing living in this sea. Don't look so frightened. What--again?

The lifeboat! They are hailing me. They need a man for the stern oar; The wind drives dead upon this shore, A rudder's helpless in this sea.

III

(_A woman speaks_).

No. That was not a scream I heard; One could not hear so far away. That flash was but the breakers' spray, That cry, the note of some wild bird.

IV

MORNING

I would not know him had I not Once marked for him that tattoo spot-- A ship with flying-jib and spanker, And underneath a chain and anchor.

Nor I, but for that reefer flap Of moleskin, and this oilskin cap I found a gunshot from the shore, I'd know it from a hundred more.

We cannot take him home this way. 'Twould kill the woman straight to lay The lad like this upon the bed, And fetch her in to see him dead.

There is a chance she might not know It was her son--he's battered so. She'd know him by some canny trace, Such as that birth-mark on his face, And, what would smite her like a brand, This stumped, third finger of his hand.

This coat and cap will tell her all; We'll get him buried by night-fall; There is no need to tell her more-- That we found the body on the shore.

V

GREAT TIDES

Great Tides! You filled the reaches Under the North's wild blow; Yet could not spare this smaller cup Its salter overflow.

Huge hands! You rear our bulwarks up With power to none akin; Yet cannot lift a door-latch up That a lad may enter in.

VI

THE AFTER-CALM

What is that color on the sea, Dotted by the white sails of ships? It is blue, you say. We know it not, and yet We know the blue of violet,

The hue of mid-day skies, And the sapphire of young children's eyes; But _that_ we do not know--unless it be The pallor of dead lips.