Chapter 4

Ferguson closed his eyes in resignation, While a dead sigh came out of him. "Good God!" He said, and said it only half aloud, As if he knew no longer now, nor cared, If one were there to listen: "Have I said nothing -- Nothing at all -- of Norcross? Do you mean To patronize him till his name becomes A toy made out of letters? If a name Is all you need, arrange an honest column Of all the people you have ever known That you have never liked. You'll have enough; And you'll have mine, moreover. No, not yet. If I assume too many privileges, I pay, and I alone, for their assumption; By which, if I assume a darker knowledge Of Norcross than another, let the weight Of my injustice aggravate the load That is not on your shoulders. When I came To know this fellow Norcross in his house, I found him as I found him in the street -- No more, no less; indifferent, but no better. `Worse' were not quite the word: he was not bad; He was not . . . well, he was not anything. Has your invention ever entertained The picture of a dusty worm so dry That even the early bird would shake his head And fly on farther for another breakfast?"

"But why forget the fortune of the worm," I said, "if in the dryness you deplore Salvation centred and endured? Your Norcross May have been one for many to have envied."

"Salvation? Fortune? Would the worm say that? He might; and therefore I dismiss the worm With all dry things but one. Figures away, Do you begin to see this man a little? Do you begin to see him in the air, With all the vacant horrors of his outline For you to fill with more than it will hold? If so, you needn't crown yourself at once With epic laurel if you seem to fill it. Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks Of a new hell -- if one were not enough -- I doubt if a new horror would have held him With a malignant ingenuity More to be feared than his before he died. You smile, as if in doubt. Well, smile again. Now come into his house, along with me: The four square sombre things that you see first Around you are four walls that go as high As to the ceiling. Norcross knew them well, And he knew others like them. Fasten to that With all the claws of your intelligence; And hold the man before you in his house As if he were a white rat in a box, And one that knew himself to be no other. I tell you twice that he knew all about it, That you may not forget the worst of all Our tragedies begin with what we know. Could Norcross only not have known, I wonder How many would have blessed and envied him! Could he have had the usual eye for spots On others, and for none upon himself, I smile to ponder on the carriages That might as well as not have clogged the town In honor of his end. For there was gold, You see, though all he needed was a little, And what he gave said nothing of who gave it. He would have given it all if in return There might have been a more sufficient face To greet him when he shaved. Though you insist It is the dower, and always, of our degree Not to be cursed with such invidious insight, Remember that you stand, you and your fancy, Now in his house; and since we are together, See for yourself and tell me what you see. Tell me the best you see. Make a slight noise Of recognition when you find a book That you would not as lief read upside down As otherwise, for example. If there you fail, Observe the walls and lead me to the place, Where you are led. If there you meet a picture That holds you near it for a longer time Than you are sorry, you may call it yours, And hang it in the dark of your remembrance, Where Norcross never sees. How can he see That has no eyes to see? And as for music, He paid with empty wonder for the pangs Of his infrequent forced endurance of it; And having had no pleasure, paid no more For needless immolation, or for the sight Of those who heard what he was never to hear. To see them listening was itself enough To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes, On other days, of strangers who forgot Their sorrows and their failures and themselves Before a few mysterious odds and ends Of marble carted from the Parthenon -- And all for seeing what he was never to see, Because it was alive and he was dead -- Here was a wonder that was more profound Than any that was in fiddles and brass horns.

"He knew, and in his knowledge there was death. He knew there was a region all around him That lay outside man's havoc and affairs, And yet was not all hostile to their tumult, Where poets would have served and honored him, And saved him, had there been anything to save. But there was nothing, and his tethered range Was only a small desert. Kings of song Are not for thrones in deserts. Towers of sound And flowers of sense are but a waste of heaven Where there is none to know them from the rocks And sand-grass of his own monotony That makes earth less than earth. He could see that, And he could see no more. The captured light That may have been or not, for all he cared, The song that is in sculpture was not his, But only, to his God-forgotten eyes, One more immortal nonsense in a world Where all was mortal, or had best be so, And so be done with. `Art,' he would have said, `Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;' And with a few profundities like that He would have controverted and dismissed The benefit of the Greeks. He had heard of them, As he had heard of his aspiring soul -- Never to the perceptible advantage, In his esteem, of either. `Faith,' he said, Or would have said if he had thought of it, `Lives in the same house with Philosophy, Where the two feed on scraps and are forlorn As orphans after war. He could see stars, On a clear night, but he had not an eye To see beyond them. He could hear spoken words, But had no ear for silence when alone. He could eat food of which he knew the savor, But had no palate for the Bread of Life, That human desperation, to his thinking, Made famous long ago, having no other. Now do you see? Do you begin to see?"

I told him that I did begin to see; And I was nearer than I should have been To laughing at his malign inclusiveness, When I considered that, with all our speed, We are not laughing yet at funerals. I see him now as I could see him then, And I see now that it was good for me, As it was good for him, that I was quiet; For Time's eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him, Or so I chose to fancy more than once Before he told of Norcross. When the word Of his release (he would have called it so) Made half an inch of news, there were no tears That are recorded. Women there may have been To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing, The few there were to mourn were not for love, And were not lovely. Nothing of them, at least, Was in the meagre legend that I gathered Years after, when a chance of travel took me So near the region of his nativity That a few miles of leisure brought me there; For there I found a friendly citizen Who led me to his house among the trees That were above a railroad and a river. Square as a box and chillier than a tomb It was indeed, to look at or to live in -- All which had I been told. "Ferguson died," The stranger said, "and then there was an auction. I live here, but I've never yet been warm. Remember him? Yes, I remember him. I knew him -- as a man may know a tree -- For twenty years. He may have held himself A little high when he was here, but now . . . Yes, I remember Ferguson. Oh, yes." Others, I found, remembered Ferguson, But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross.

A Song at Shannon's

Two men came out of Shannon's having known The faces of each other for as long As they had listened there to an old song, Sung thinly in a wastrel monotone By some unhappy night-bird, who had flown Too many times and with a wing too strong To save himself, and so done heavy wrong To more frail elements than his alone.

Slowly away they went, leaving behind More light than was before them. Neither met The other's eyes again or said a word. Each to his loneliness or to his kind, Went his own way, and with his own regret, Not knowing what the other may have heard.

Souvenir

A vanished house that for an hour I knew By some forgotten chance when I was young Had once a glimmering window overhung With honeysuckle wet with evening dew. Along the path tall dusky dahlias grew, And shadowy hydrangeas reached and swung Ferociously; and over me, among The moths and mysteries, a blurred bat flew.

Somewhere within there were dim presences Of days that hovered and of years gone by. I waited, and between their silences There was an evanescent faded noise; And though a child, I knew it was the voice Of one whose occupation was to die.

Discovery

We told of him as one who should have soared And seen for us the devastating light Whereof there is not either day or night, And shared with us the glamour of the Word That fell once upon Amos to record For men at ease in Zion, when the sight Of ills obscured aggrieved him and the might Of Hamath was a warning of the Lord.

Assured somehow that he would make us wise, Our pleasure was to wait; and our surprise Was hard when we confessed the dry return Of his regret. For we were still to learn That earth has not a school where we may go For wisdom, or for more than we may know.

Firelight

Ten years together without yet a cloud, They seek each other's eyes at intervals Of gratefulness to firelight and four walls For love's obliteration of the crowd. Serenely and perennially endowed And bowered as few may be, their joy recalls No snake, no sword; and over them there falls The blessing of what neither says aloud.

Wiser for silence, they were not so glad Were she to read the graven tale of lines On the wan face of one somewhere alone; Nor were they more content could he have had Her thoughts a moment since of one who shines Apart, and would be hers if he had known.

The New Tenants

The day was here when it was his to know How fared the barriers he had built between His triumph and his enemies unseen, For them to undermine and overthrow; And it was his no longer to forego The sight of them, insidious and serene, Where they were delving always and had been Left always to be vicious and to grow.

And there were the new tenants who had come, By doors that were left open unawares, Into his house, and were so much at home There now that he would hardly have to guess, By the slow guile of their vindictiveness, What ultimate insolence would soon be theirs.

Inferential

Although I saw before me there the face Of one whom I had honored among men The least, and on regarding him again Would not have had him in another place, He fitted with an unfamiliar grace The coffin where I could not see him then As I had seen him and appraised him when I deemed him unessential to the race.

For there was more of him than what I saw. And there was on me more than the old awe That is the common genius of the dead. I might as well have heard him: "Never mind; If some of us were not so far behind, The rest of us were not so far ahead."

The Rat

As often as he let himself be seen We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored The inscrutable profusion of the Lord Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean -- Who made him human when he might have been A rat, and so been wholly in accord With any other creature we abhorred As always useless and not always clean.

Now he is hiding all alone somewhere, And in a final hole not ready then; For now he is among those over there Who are not coming back to us again. And we who do the fiction of our share Say less of rats and rather more of men.

Rahel to Varnhagen

Note. -- Rahel Robert and Varnhagen von Ense were married, after many protestations on her part, in 1814. The marriage -- so far as he was concerned, at any rate -- appears to have been satisfactory.

Now you have read them all; or if not all, As many as in all conscience I should fancy To be enough. There are no more of them -- Or none to burn your sleep, or to bring dreams Of devils. If these are not sufficient, surely You are a strange young man. I might live on Alone, and for another forty years, Or not quite forty, -- are you happier now? -- Always to ask if there prevailed elsewhere Another like yourself that would have held These aged hands as long as you have held them, Not once observing, for all I can see, How they are like your mother's. Well, you have read His letters now, and you have heard me say That in them are the cinders of a passion That was my life; and you have not yet broken Your way out of my house, out of my sight, -- Into the street. You are a strange young man. I know as much as that of you, for certain; And I'm already praying, for your sake, That you be not too strange. Too much of that May lead you bye and bye through gloomy lanes To a sad wilderness, where one may grope Alone, and always, or until he feels Ferocious and invisible animals That wait for men and eat them in the dark. Why do you sit there on the floor so long, Smiling at me while I try to be solemn? Do you not hear it said for your salvation, When I say truth? Are you, at four and twenty, So little deceived in us that you interpret The humor of a woman to be noticed As her choice between you and Acheron? Are you so unscathed yet as to infer That if a woman worries when a man, Or a man-child, has wet shoes on his feet She may as well commemorate with ashes The last eclipse of her tranquillity? If you look up at me and blink again, I shall not have to make you tell me lies To know the letters you have not been reading. I see now that I may have had for nothing A most unpleasant shivering in my conscience When I laid open for your contemplation The wealth of my worn casket. If I did, The fault was not yours wholly. Search again This wreckage we may call for sport a face, And you may chance upon the price of havoc That I have paid for a few sorry stones That shine and have no light -- yet once were stars, And sparkled on a crown. Little and weak They seem; and they are cold, I fear, for you. But they that once were fire for me may not Be cold again for me until I die; And only God knows if they may be then. There is a love that ceases to be love In being ourselves. How, then, are we to lose it? You that are sure that you know everything There is to know of love, answer me that. Well? . . . You are not even interested.

Once on a far off time when I was young, I felt with your assurance, and all through me, That I had undergone the last and worst Of love's inventions. There was a boy who brought The sun with him and woke me up with it, And that was every morning; every night I tried to dream of him, but never could, More than I might have seen in Adam's eyes Their fond uncertainty when Eve began The play that all her tireless progeny Are not yet weary of. One scene of it Was brief, but was eternal while it lasted; And that was while I was the happiest Of an imaginary six or seven, Somewhere in history but not on earth, For whom the sky had shaken and let stars Rain down like diamonds. Then there were clouds, And a sad end of diamonds; whereupon Despair came, like a blast that would have brought Tears to the eyes of all the bears in Finland, And love was done. That was how much I knew. Poor little wretch! I wonder where he is This afternoon. Out of this rain, I hope.

At last, when I had seen so many days Dressed all alike, and in their marching order, Go by me that I would not always count them, One stopped -- shattering the whole file of Time, Or so it seemed; and when I looked again, There was a man. He struck once with his eyes, And then there was a woman. I, who had come To wisdom, or to vision, or what you like, By the old hidden road that has no name, -- I, who was used to seeing without flying So much that others fly from without seeing, Still looked, and was afraid, and looked again. And after that, when I had read the story Told in his eyes, and felt within my heart The bleeding wound of their necessity, I knew the fear was his. If I had failed him And flown away from him, I should have lost Ingloriously my wings in scrambling back, And found them arms again. If he had struck me Not only with his eyes but with his hands, I might have pitied him and hated love, And then gone mad. I, who have been so strong -- Why don't you laugh? -- might even have done all that. I, who have learned so much, and said so much, And had the commendations of the great For one who rules herself -- why don't you cry? -- And own a certain small authority Among the blind, who see no more than ever, But like my voice, -- I would have tossed it all To Tophet for one man; and he was jealous. I would have wound a snake around my neck And then have let it bite me till I died, If my so doing would have made me sure That one man might have lived; and he was jealous. I would have driven these hands into a cage That held a thousand scorpions, and crushed them, If only by so poisonous a trial I could have crushed his doubt. I would have wrung My living blood with mediaeval engines Out of my screaming flesh, if only that Would have made one man sure. I would have paid For him the tiresome price of body and soul, And let the lash of a tongue-weary town Fall as it might upon my blistered name; And while it fell I could have laughed at it, Knowing that he had found out finally Where the wrong was. But there was evil in him That would have made no more of his possession Than confirmation of another fault; And there was honor -- if you call it honor That hoods itself with doubt and wears a crown Of lead that might as well be gold and fire. Give it as heavy or as light a name As any there is that fits. I see myself Without the power to swear to this or that That I might be if he had been without it. Whatever I might have been that I was not, It only happened that it wasn't so. Meanwhile, you might seem to be listening: If you forget yourself and go to sleep, My treasure, I shall not say this again. Look up once more into my poor old face, Where you see beauty, or the Lord knows what, And say to me aloud what else there is Than ruins in it that you most admire.

No, there was never anything like that; Nature has never fastened such a mask Of radiant and impenetrable merit On any woman as you say there is On this one. Not a mask? I thank you, sir, But you see more with your determination, I fear, than with your prudence or your conscience; And you have never met me with my eyes In all the mirrors I've made faces at. No, I shall never call you strange again: You are the young and inconvincible Epitome of all blind men since Adam. May the blind lead the blind, if that be so? And we shall need no mirrors? You are saying What most I feared you might. But if the blind, Or one of them, be not so fortunate As to put out the eyes of recollection, She might at last, without her meaning it, Lead on the other, without his knowing it, Until the two of them should lose themselves Among dead craters in a lava-field As empty as a desert on the moon. I am not speaking in a theatre, But in a room so real and so familiar That sometimes I would wreck it. Then I pause, Remembering there is a King in Weimar -- A monarch, and a poet, and a shepherd Of all who are astray and are outside The realm where they should rule. I think of him, And save the furniture; I think of you, And am forlorn, finding in you the one To lavish aspirations and illusions Upon a faded and forsaken house Where love, being locked alone, was nigh to burning House and himself together. Yes, you are strange, To see in such an injured architecture Room for new love to live in. Are you laughing? No? Well, you are not crying, as you should be. Tears, even if they told only gratitude For your escape, and had no other story, Were surely more becoming than a smile For my unwomanly straightforwardness In seeing for you, through my close gate of years Your forty ways to freedom. Why do you smile? And while I'm trembling at my faith in you In giving you to read this book of danger That only one man living might have written -- These letters, which have been a part of me So long that you may read them all again As often as you look into my face, And hear them when I speak to you, and feel them Whenever you have to touch me with your hand, -- Why are you so unwilling to be spared? Why do you still believe in me? But no, I'll find another way to ask you that. I wonder if there is another way That says it better, and means anything. There is no other way that could be worse? I was not asking you; it was myself Alone that I was asking. Why do I dip For lies, when there is nothing in my well But shining truth, you say? How do you know? Truth has a lonely life down where she lives; And many a time, when she comes up to breathe, She sinks before we seize her, and makes ripples. Possibly you may know no more of me Than a few ripples; and they may soon be gone, Leaving you then with all my shining truth Drowned in a shining water; and when you look You may not see me there, but something else That never was a woman -- being yourself. You say to me my truth is past all drowning, And safe with you for ever? You know all that? How do you know all that, and who has told you? You know so much that I'm an atom frightened Because you know so little. And what is this? You know the luxury there is in haunting The blasted thoroughfares of disillusion -- If that's your name for them -- with only ghosts For company? You know that when a woman Is blessed, or cursed, with a divine impatience (Another name of yours for a bad temper) She must have one at hand on whom to wreak it (That's what you mean, whatever the turn you give it), Sure of a kindred sympathy, and thereby Effect a mutual calm? You know that wisdom, Given in vain to make a food for those Who are without it, will be seen at last, And even at last only by those who gave it, As one or more of the forgotten crumbs That others leave? You know that men's applause And women's envy savor so much of dust That I go hungry, having at home no fare But the same changeless bread that I may swallow Only with tears and prayers? Who told you that? You know that if I read, and read alone, Too many books that no men yet have written, I may go blind, or worse? You know yourself, Of all insistent and insidious creatures, To be the one to save me, and to guard For me their flaming language? And you know That if I give much headway to the whim That's in me never to be quite sure that even Through all those years of storm and fire I waited For this one rainy day, I may go on, And on, and on alone, through smoke and ashes, To a cold end? You know so dismal much As that about me? . . . Well, I believe you do.

Nimmo