CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 A Book of Poems 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 Boston and New York 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge 
 1903 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published October, igos 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CAPTAIN CRAIG I 
 
 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 85 
 
 THE RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL . . . .103 
 
 AUNT IMOGEN IO8 
 
 THE KLONDIKE 115 
 
 THE GROWTH OF " LORRAINE " 121 
 
 THE SAGE 123 
 
 ERASMUS 124 
 
 THE WOMAN AND THE WIFE 125 
 
 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 127 
 
 SAINTE-NITOUCHE 150 
 
 AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 159 
 
 THE CORRIDOR 163 
 
 CORTEGE 164 
 
 THE WIFE OF PALISSY 1 66 
 
 TWILIGHT SONG 169 
 
 281715 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 I DOUBT if ten men in all Tilbury Town 
 Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig, 
 Or called him by his name, or looked at him 
 So curiously, or so concernedly, 
 As they had looked at ashes; but a few 
 Say five or six of us had found somehow 
 The spark in him, and we had fanned it there, 
 Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ, 
 By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life, 
 And he had shared, with all of humankind, 
 Inveterate leave to fashion of himself, 
 By some resplendent metamorphosis, 
 Whatever he was not. And after time, 
 When it had come sufficiently to pass 
 That he was going patch-clad through the streets, 
 Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had 
 
 laid 
 
 Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve 
 And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence, 
 
2 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Just how it was : u My name is Captain Craig," 
 He said, " and I must eat." The sleeve moved 
 
 on, 
 
 And after it moved others one or two ; 
 For Captain Craig, before the day was done, 
 Got back to the scant refuge of his bed 
 And shivered into it without a curse 
 Without a murmur even. He was cold, 
 And old, and hungry ; but the worst of it 
 Was a forlorn familiar consciousness 
 That he had failed again. There was a time 
 When he had fancied, if worst came to worst, 
 And he could work no more, that he might beg 
 Nor be the less for it ; but when it came 
 To practice he found out that he had not 
 The genius. It was that, and that was all : 
 Experience had made him to detect 
 The blunder for his own, like all the rest 
 Of him. There were no other men to blame. 
 He was himself, and he had lost the speed 
 He started with, and he was left behind. 
 There was no mystery, no tragedy ; 
 And if they found him lying on his back 
 Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they 
 
 might, 
 
 Well, once upon a time there was a man 
 Es war elnmal em Konig, if it pleased him. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 3 
 
 And he was right : there were no men to blame : 
 There was just a false note in the Tilbury 
 
 tune 
 
 A note that able-bodied men might sound 
 Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet. 
 They might have made him sing by feeding him 
 Till he should work again, but probably 
 Such yielding would have jeopardized the 
 
 rhythm ; 
 
 They found it more melodious to shout 
 Right on, with unmolested adoration, 
 To keep the tune as it had always been, 
 To trust in God, and let the Captain starve. 
 
 He must have understood that afterwards 
 When we had laid some fuel to the spark 
 Of him, and oxidized it for he laughed 
 Out loud and long at us to feel it burn, 
 And then, for gratitude, made game of us : 
 u You are the resurrection and the life," 
 He said, u and I the hymn the Brahmin sings ; 
 O Fuscus ! and we 11 go no more a-roving." 
 
 We were not quite accoutred for a blast 
 Of any lettered nonchalance like that, 
 And some of us the five or six of us 
 Who found him out were singularly struck. 
 
4 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 But soon there came assurance of his lips, 
 
 Like phrases out of some sweet instrument 
 
 Man s hand had never fitted, that he felt 
 
 " No penitential shame for what had come, 
 
 No virtuous regret for what had been, 
 
 But rather a joy to find it in his life 
 
 To be an outcast usher of the soul 
 
 For such as had good courage of the Sun 
 
 To pattern Love." The Captain had one chair; 
 
 And on the bottom of it, like a king, 
 
 For longer time than I dare chronicle, 
 
 Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized 
 
 His opportunity. My friends got out, 
 
 Like brokers out of Arcady ; but I 
 
 May be for fascination of the thing, 
 
 Or may be for the larger humor of it 
 
 Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung. 
 
 When they were gone the Captain s tuneful ooze 
 
 Of rhetoric took on a change ; he smiled 
 
 At me and then continued, earnestly : 
 
 " Your friends have had enough of it ; but you, 
 
 For a motive hardly vindicated yet 
 
 By prudence or by conscience, have remained ; 
 
 And that is very good, for I have things 
 
 To tell you : things that are not words alone 
 
 Which are the ghosts of things but something 
 
 
 
 firmer. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 5 
 
 " First, would I have you know, for every gift 
 Or sacrifice, there are or there may be 
 Two kinds of gratitude : the sudden kind 
 We feel for what we take, the slower kind 
 We feel for what we give. Once we have 
 
 learned 
 
 As much as this, we know the truth has been 
 Told over to the world a thousand times ; 
 But we have had no ears to listen yet 
 For more than fragments of it : we have heard 
 A murmur now and then, an echo here 
 And there, and we have made great music of 
 
 its 
 
 And we have made innumerable books 
 To please the Unknown God. Time throws 
 
 away 
 
 Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows 
 No death denies not one : the books all count, 
 The songs all count ; and yet God s music has 
 No modes, his language has ncTadjectives." 
 
 " You may be right, you may be wrong," said I ; 
 " But what has all of this that you say now 
 This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk 
 To do with you and me ? " The Captain raised 
 His hand and held it westward, where a patched 
 And unwashed attic-window filtered in 
 
6 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 What barren light could reach us, and then said, 
 With a suave, complacent resonance : " There 
 
 shines 
 
 The sun. Behold it. We go round and round, 
 And wisdom comes to us with every whirl 
 We count throughout the circuit. We may say 
 The child is born, the boy becomes a man, 
 The man does this and that, and the mangoes, 
 But having said it we have not said much, 
 Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think, 
 That it will be the end of anything 
 When I am gone ? There was a soldier once 
 Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead. 
 Sad friends went after, and they brought him 
 
 home 
 
 And had a brass band at his funeral, 
 As you should have at mine ; and after that 
 A few remembered him. But he was dead, 
 They said, and they should have their friend no 
 
 more. 
 
 However, there was once a starveling child 
 A ragged-vested little incubus, 
 Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all 
 Capacity for childhood s happiness 
 Who started out one day, quite suddenly, 
 To drown himself. He ran away from home, 
 Across the clover-fields and through the woods, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 7 
 
 And waited on the rock above the stream, 
 
 Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived, 
 
 Or jumped, or he might not ; but anyhow, 
 
 There came along a man who looked at him 
 
 With such an unexpected friendliness, 
 
 And talked with him in such a common way, 
 
 That life grew marvelously different : 
 
 What he had lately known for sullen trunks 
 
 And branches, and a world of tedious leaves, 
 
 Was all transmuted ; a faint forest wind 
 
 That once had made the loneliest of all 
 
 Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music ; 
 
 And the water that had called him once to death 
 
 Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man, 
 
 Born to go down a soldier, did this thing. 
 
 Not much to do ? Not very much, I grant you : 
 
 Good occupation for a sonneteer, 
 
 Or for a clown, or for a clergyman, 
 
 But small work for a soldier. By the way, 
 
 When you are weary sometimes of your own 
 
 Utility, I wonder if you find 
 
 Occasional great comfort pondering 
 
 What power a man has in him to put forth ? 
 
 * Of all the many marvelous things that are, 
 
 Nothing is there more marvelous than man, 
 
 Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago; 
 
 4 And earth, unending ancient of the gods 
 
8 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 He furrows ; and the ploughs go back and forth, 
 Turning the broken mould, year after year. . . . 
 
 " I turned a little furrow of my own 
 
 Once on a time, and everybody laughed 
 
 As I laughed afterwards ; and I doubt not 
 
 The First Intelligence, which we have drawn 
 
 In our competitive humility 
 
 As if it went forever on two legs, 
 
 Had some diversion of it : I believe 
 
 God s humor is the music of the spheres 
 
 But even as we draft omnipotence 
 
 Itself to our own image, we pervert 
 
 The courage of an infinite ideal 
 
 To finite resignation. You have made 
 
 The cement of your churches out of tears 
 
 And ashes, and the fabric will not stand : 
 
 The shifted walls that you have coaxed and 
 
 shored 
 
 So long with unavailing compromise 
 Will crumble down to dust and blow away, 
 And younger dust will follow after them ; 
 Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled 
 First atom of the least that ever flew 
 Shall be by man defrauded of the touch 
 God thrilled it with to make a dream for man 
 When Science was unborn. And after time, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG .9 
 
 When we have earned our spiritual ears, 
 
 And art s commiseration of the truth 
 
 No longer glorifies the singing beast, 
 
 Or venerates the clinquant charlatan, , 
 
 Then shall at last come ringing through the sun, 
 
 Through time, through flesh, God s music of the 
 
 soul. 
 
 For wisdom is that music, and all joy 
 That wisdom : you may counterfeit, you think, 
 The burden of it in a thousand ways ; 
 But as the bitterness that loads your tears 
 Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom, 
 The penance, and the woeful pride you keep, 
 Make bitterness your buoyance of the world. 
 And at the fairest and the frenziedest 
 Alike of your God-fearing festivals, 
 You so compound the truth to pamper fear 
 That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith 
 You clamor for the food that shadows eat. 
 You call it rapture or deliverance, 
 Passion or exaltation, or what most 
 The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness 
 Lives in it yet : you quiver and you clutch 
 For something larger, something unfulfilled, 
 Some wiser kind of jov that vou shall have 
 
 . J J J 
 
 Never, until you learn to laugh with God." 
 
io CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 And with a calm Socratic patronage, 
 
 At once~KaIF sombre and half humorous, 
 
 The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs 
 
 And fixed his eyes on something far away ; 
 
 Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd, 
 
 And at the moment unendurable 
 
 For sheer beneficence, he looked at me. - 
 
 " But the brass band ? " I said, not quite at ease 
 
 With altruism yet. He made a kind 
 
 Of reminiscent little inward noise, 
 
 Midway between a chuckle and a laugh, 
 
 And that was all his answer : not a word 
 
 Of explanation or suggestion came 
 
 From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left, 
 
 I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow 
 
 And had the world-wide air to breathe again, 
 
 Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth 
 
 And honored the endurance of his hand 
 
 Whether or not, securely closeted 
 
 Up there in the stived haven of his den, 
 
 The man sat laughing at me ; and I felt 
 
 My teeth grind hard together with a quaint 
 
 Revulsion as I think back on it now 
 
 Not only for my Captain, but as well 
 
 For every smug-faced failure on God s earth 
 
 Albeit I could swear, at the same time, 
 
 That there were tears in the old fellow s eyes. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG n 
 
 I question if in tremors or in tears 
 
 There be more guidance to man s worthiness 
 
 Than well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes 
 
 It humors us to think that we possess 
 
 By some divine adjustment of our own 
 
 Particular shrewd cells, or something else, 
 
 What others, for untutored sympathy, 
 
 Go jpirit-fishing more than half their lives 
 
 To catch like cheerful sinners to catch faith ; 
 
 And I have not a doubt but I assumed 
 
 Some egotistic attribute like this 
 
 When, cautiously, next morning I reduced 
 
 The fretful qualms of my novitiate, 
 
 For most part, to an undigested pride. 
 
 Only, I live convinced that I regret 
 
 This enterprise no more than I regret 
 
 My life; and I am glad that I was born. 
 
 That evening, at " The Chrysalis," I found 
 
 The faces of my comrades all suffused 
 
 With what I chose then to denominate 
 
 Superfluous good feeling. In return, 
 
 They loaded me with titles of odd form 
 
 And unexemplified significance, 
 
 Like " Bellows-mender to Prince ./Eolus," 
 
 " Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast," 
 
 " Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing," with one more 
 
12 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 That I remember, and a dozen more 
 
 That I forget. I may have been disturbed, 
 
 I do not say that I was not annoyed, 
 
 But something of the same serenity 
 
 That fortified me later made me feel 
 
 For their skin-pricking arrows not so much 
 
 Of pain as of a vigorous defect 
 
 In this world s archery. I might have tried, 
 
 With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate 
 
 What they had only snapped at and thereby 
 
 Made out of my best evidence no more 
 
 Than comfortable food for their conceit ; 
 
 But patient wisdom frowned on argument, 
 
 With a side nod for silence, and I smoked 
 
 A series of incurable dry pipes 
 
 While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care, 
 
 Some things that I detested. Killigrew, 
 
 Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass, 
 
 Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made 
 
 Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks. 
 
 It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats 
 
 That night, but I have rather to believe 
 
 As I lay turning, twisting, listening, 
 
 And wondering, between great sleepless yawns, 
 
 What possible satisfaction those dead leaves 
 
 Could find in sending shadows to my room 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 13 
 
 And swinging them like black rags on a line, 
 
 That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness 
 
 Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned 
 
 In fearing to believe what I believed, 
 
 And I was paying for it. Whimsical,. 
 
 You think, factitious ; but " there is no luck, 
 
 No fate, no fortune for us, but the old 
 
 Unswerving and inviolable price 
 
 Gets paid : God sells himself eternally, 
 
 But never gives a crust," my friend had said; 
 
 And while I watched those leaves, and heard those 
 
 cats, 
 
 And with half mad minuteness analyzed 
 The Captain s attitude and then my own, 
 I felt at length as one who throws himself 
 Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark, 
 And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up 
 And opens them again, what seems at first 
 An unfamiliar sunlight in his room 
 And in his life as if the child in him 
 Had laughed and let him see ; and then I knew. 
 Some prowling superfluity of child 
 In me had found the child in Captain Craig 
 And had the sunlight reach him. While I slept, 
 That thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams, 
 And in the morning it was with me still. 
 
1 4 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Through March and shifting April to the time 
 When winter first becomes a memory 
 My friend the Captain to my other friend s 
 Incredulous regret that such as he 
 Should ever get the talons of his talk 
 So fixed in my unfledged credulity 
 Kept up the peroration of his life, 
 Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think, 
 /Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh 
 I Sometimes, and then again he made me weep 
 Almost ; for I had insufficiency 
 Enough in me to make me know the truth 
 Within the jest, and I could feel it there 
 As well as if it were the folded note 
 I felt between my fingers. I had said 
 Before that I should have to go away 
 And leave him for the season; and his eyes 
 Had shone with well-becoming interest 
 At that intelligence. There was no mist 
 In them that I remember ; but I marked 
 An unmistakable self-questioning 
 And a reticence of unassumed regret. 
 The two together made anxiety 
 Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see 
 No more of him for six or seven months, 
 And I was there to tell him as I might 
 What humorous provision we had made 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 15 
 
 For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town. 
 
 That finished with a few more commonplace 
 
 Prosaics on the certified event 
 
 Of my return to find him young again 
 
 I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us, 
 
 Nor very much at odds with destiny. 
 
 At any rate, save always for a look 
 
 That I had seen too often to mistake 
 
 Or to forget, he gave no other sign. 
 
 When I was in the street I heard him shout 
 Some anxious Latin down ; but a slow load 
 Of trailing rails absorbed it, and I lost 
 Whatever of good counsel or farewell 
 It may have had for me. I turned about 
 And having waved a somewhat indistinct 
 Acknowledgment, I walked along. The train 
 Was late and I was early, but the gap 
 Was filled and even crowded. Killigrew 
 Had left his pigeonholes to say good-by, 
 And he stood waiting by the ticket window 
 Like one grin-cursed of Orcus. "You have 
 
 heard ? " 
 Said he. " Heard what ? " said I. He ! he ! " 
 
 said he ; 
 
 ct Then your gray-headed beneficiary 
 Your paragon of abstract usefulness 
 
1 6 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Your philhellenic proletariat 
 
 He ! he ! " " But what the devil is it all 
 
 About ? " said I. " What has he done ? What 
 
 ails him ? " 
 " What has he done ? Ye gods ! What has he 
 
 done ? 
 
 Man, he s a tramp a Waggles a dead beat ! 
 I have a friend who knew him fifteen years 
 Ago, and I have his assurance now 
 That your sequestered parasite achieved 
 The same discreet collapse, at intervals, 
 Then as when first you found him. And you ask 
 What he has done ! Go find a looking-glass 
 And you may see some recent work of his 
 The most remunerative, and I think 
 The most unconscious." 
 
 With another man 
 
 I might have made of that last adjective 
 A stimulating text ; but Killigrew 
 Was not the one for me to stimulate 
 In five defective minutes, and I knew it. 
 So I offer no defense for keeping still 
 While he gave birth to phrases for my sake, 
 Nor more for staring at the changeless curve 
 Where river and railroad vanished, half a mile 
 Beyond us to the north. I gave him leave 
 To talk as long as he had words in him, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 17 
 
 And watched the track and waited for the train ; 
 And I remember, when the brakes had ceased 
 Their welcome wheezing and the place was rilled 
 With yells and shadows and official smash, 
 How he ground my patient ringers and said, 
 
 " Well, 
 
 Good-by, old man ! good-by ! And don t for 
 get : 
 
 Patrician, but all Waggles to the grave." 
 The grin became a smile soon after that, 
 And I knew that he had let the Captain go ; 
 And I could read, where once the jest had been, 
 The spirit of the friend who cared the most. 
 
 The train began to move ; and as it moved, 
 
 I felt a comfortable sudden change 
 
 All over and inside. Partly it seemed 
 
 As if the strings of me had all at once 
 
 Gone down a tone or two ; and even though 
 
 It made me scowl to think so trivial 
 
 A touch had owned the strength to tighten them, 
 
 It made me laugh to think that I was free. 
 
 But free from what when I began to turn 
 
 The question round was more than I could 
 
 say : 
 
 I was no longer vexed with Killigrew, 
 Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig ; 
 
1 8 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 But I was eased of some restraint, I thought, 
 
 Not qualified by those amenities, 
 
 And I should have to search the matter down -, 
 
 For I was young, and I was very keen. 
 
 So I began to smoke a bad cigar 
 
 That Plunket, in his love, had given me 
 
 The night before ; and as I smoked I watched 
 
 The flying mirrors for a mile or so, 
 
 Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now 
 
 faint, 
 
 They gave me of the woodland over west, 
 A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years 
 Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail, 
 With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky ; 
 But I soon yawned out of that and set myself 
 To face again the loud monotonous ride 
 That lay before me like a vista drawn 
 Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things. 
 
 II 
 
 Yet that ride had an end, as all rides have ; 
 And the days that followed after took the road 
 That all days take, though never one of them 
 Went by but I got some good thought of it 
 For Captain Craig. Not that I pitied him, 
 Or nursed a mordant hunger for his presence ; 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 19 
 
 But what I thought (what Killigrew still thinks) 
 An irremediable cheerfulness 
 Was in him and about the name of him, 
 And I fancy that it may be most of all 
 For the jokes he made that I have saved his letters. 
 I like to think of him, and how he looked 
 Or should have looked in his renewed estate, 
 Composing them. They may be dreariness 
 /Unspeakable to you that never saw 
 
 . The Captain ; but to five or six of us 
 Who knew him they are not so bad as that. 
 It may be we have smiled not always where 
 The text itself would seem to indicate 
 Responsive titillation on our part, 
 Yet having smiled at all we have done well, 
 For we know that we have touched the ghost of 
 
 him. 
 He tells me that he thinks of nothing now 
 
 \ That he would rather do than be himself, 
 Wisely alive. So let us heed this man : 
 
 " The world that has been old is young again, 
 The touch that faltered clings ; and this is May. 
 So think of your decrepit pensioner 
 As one who cherishes the living light, 
 Forgetful of dead shadows. He may gloat, 
 And he may not have power in his arms 
 
20 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 To make the young world move ; but he has eyes 
 And ears, and he can read the sun. Therefore 
 Think first of him as one who vegetates 
 In tune with all the children who laugh best 
 And longest through the sunshine, though far off 
 Their laughter, and unheard ; for t is the child, 
 O friend, that with his laugh redeems the man. 
 Time steals the infant, but the child he leaves ; 
 And we, we fighters over of old wars 
 We men, we shearers of the Golden Fleece 
 Were brutes without him, brutes to tear the 
 
 scars 
 
 Of one another s wounds and weep in them, 
 And then cry out on God that he should flaunt 
 For life such anguish and flesh-wretchedness. 
 But let the brute go roaring his own way : 
 We do not need him, and he loves us not. 
 Let music be for us the forward song, 
 And let us give the good world one more chance. 
 
 " I cannot think of anything to-day 
 That I would rather do than be myself, 
 Primevally alive, and have the sun 
 Shine into me ; for on a day like this, 
 When the chaff-parts of a man s adversities 
 Are blown by quick spring breezes out of him 
 When even a flicker of wind that wakes no more 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 21 
 
 Than a tuft of grass, or a few young yellow 
 
 leaves, 
 
 Comes like the falling of a prophet s breath 
 On altar-flames rekindled of crushed embers, 
 Then do I feel, now do I feel, within me 
 No dreariness, no grief, no discontent, 
 No twinge of human envy. But I beg 
 That you forego credentials of the past 
 For these illuminations of the present, 
 Or better still, to give the shadow justice, 
 You let me tell you something : I have yearned 
 In many another season for these days, 
 And having them with God s own pageantry 
 To make me glad for them, yes, I have cursed 
 The sunlight and the breezes and the leaves 
 To think of men on stretchers and on beds, 
 Or on foul floors, like starved outrageous lizards, 
 Made human with paralysis and rags ; 
 Or of some poor devil on a battle-field, 
 Left undiscovered and without the strength 
 To drag a maggot from his clotted mouth ; 
 Or of women working where a man would fall 
 Flat-breasted miracles of cheerfulness 
 Made neuter by the work that no man counts 
 Until it waits undone ; children thrown out 
 To feed their veins and souls with offal . . 
 
 Yes, 
 
22 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 I have had half a mind to blow my brains out 
 Sometimes ; and I have gone from door to door, 
 Ragged myself, trying to do something 
 Crazy, I hope. But what has this to do 
 With Spring ? Because one half of humankind 
 Lives here in hell, shall not the other half 
 Do any more than just for conscience sake 
 Be miserable ? Is this the way for us 
 To lead these creatures up to find the light, 
 Or the way to be drawn down to find the dark 
 Again ? What is it ? What does the child say ? 
 
 " But let us not make riot for the child 
 
 Untaught, nor let us hold that we may read 
 
 The sun but through the shadows ; nor, again, 
 
 Be we forgetful ever that we keep 
 
 The shadows on their side. For evidence, 
 
 I might go back a little to the days 
 
 When I had hounds and credit, and grave friends 
 
 To borrow my books and set wet glasses on 
 
 them, 
 
 And other friends of all sorts, grave and gay, 
 Of whom one woman and one man stand out 
 From all the rest, this morning. The man said 
 One day, as we were riding, c Now, you see, 
 ; Therej^oes a woman cursed with happiness : 
 Beauty and wealth, health, horses, everything 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 23 
 
 That she could ask, or we could ask, is hers, 
 
 Except an inward eye for the plain fact 
 
 Of what this damned world is. The cleverness 
 
 God gave her ^"or" the devil cautions her 
 
 That she must keep the china cup of life 
 
 Filled somehow, and she fills it runs it over 
 
 Claps her white hands while some one does the 
 
 sopping 
 With fingers made, she thinks, for just that 
 
 purpose, 
 
 Giggles and eats and reads and goes to church, 
 Makes pretty little penitential prayers, 
 And has an eighteen-carat crucifix 
 Wrapped up in chamois-skin. She gives enough, 
 You say; but what is giving like hers worth ? 
 What is a gift without the soul to guide it ? 
 " Poor dears, and they have cancers ? Oh ! " 
 
 she says ; 
 
 And away she works at that new altar-cloth 
 For the Reverend Hieronymus Mackintosh 
 Third person, Jerry. "Jerry," she says, "can 
 
 say 
 
 Such lovely things, and make life seem so sweet ! " 
 Jerry can drink, also. And there she goes, 
 Like a whirlwind through an orchard in the 
 
 springtime 
 Throwing herself away as if she thought 
 
 
24 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 The world and the whole planetary circus 
 Were a flourish of apple-blossoms. Look at her ! 
 Lilies and roses ! Butterflies ! Great Scott ! 
 And here is this infernal world of ours 
 And hers, if only she might find it out 
 Starving and shrieking, sickening, suppurating, 
 Whirling to God knows where . . . But look at 
 
 her! 
 
 Confucius, how she rides ! And by Saint Satan, 
 She s galloping over to talk with us, woman and 
 
 horse 
 All ours! But look just look at her! By 
 
 Jove ! . . , 
 
 " And after that it came about somehow, 
 Almost as if the Fates were killing time, 
 That she, the spendthrift of a thousand joys, 
 Rode in her turn with me, and in her turn 
 Made observations : Now there goes a man, 
 She said, c who feeds his very soul on poison : 
 No matter what he does, or where he looks, 
 He finds unhappiness ; or, if he fails 
 To find it, he creates it, and then hugs it : 
 Pygmalion again for all the world 
 Pygmalion gone wrong. You know I think 
 If when that precious animal was young, 
 His mother, or some watchful aunt of his, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 25 
 
 Had spanked him with Pendennis and Don Juan, 
 
 And given him the Lady of the Lake, 
 
 Or Cord and Creese, or almost anything, 
 
 There might have been a tonic for him ? Listen : 
 
 When he was possibly nineteen years old 
 
 He came to me and said, " I understand 
 
 You are in love " yes, that is what he said, 
 
 u But never mind, it won t last very long ; 
 
 It never does ; we all get over it. 
 
 We have this clinging nature, for you see 
 
 The Great Bear shook himself once on a time 
 
 And the world is one of many that let go." 
 
 But I let the creature live, and there you see 
 
 him ; 
 
 And he would have this life no fairer thing 
 Than a certain time for numerous marionettes 
 To do the Dance of Death. Give him a rose, 
 And he will tell you it is very sweet, 
 But only for a day. Most wonderful ! 
 Show him a child, or anything that laughs, 
 And he begins at once to crunch his worm 
 wood 
 
 And then runs on with his u realities." 
 What does he know about realities, 
 Who sees the truth of things almost as well 
 As Nero saw the Northern Lights ? Good gra 
 cious ! 
 
26 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Can t you do something with him ? Call him 
 
 something 
 
 Call him a type, and that will make him cry : 
 One of those not at all unusual, 
 Prophetic, would-be-Delphic manger-snappers 
 That always get replaced when they are gone ; 
 Or one of those impenetrable men, 
 Who seem to carry branded on their foreheads, 
 " We are abstruse, but not quite so abstruse 
 As we think the Lord intended we should be;" 
 One of those men who never quite confess 
 That Washington was great ; the kind of 
 
 man 
 
 That everybody knows and always will, 
 Shrewd, critical, facetious, insincere, 
 And for the most part harmless, I m afraid. 
 But even then, I truly think you ought 
 To tell him something. And I said I would. 
 
 " So in one afternoon you see we have 
 The child in absence or, to say the least, 
 In ominous defect, and in excess 
 Commensurate, likewise. Now the question is, 
 Not which was right and which was wrong, for 
 
 each, 
 
 By virtue of one-sidedness, was both ; 
 But rather to my mind, as heretofore 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 27 
 
 Is it better to be blinded by the lights, 
 
 J O 
 
 Or by the shadows ? By the lights, you say ? 
 
 The shadows are all devils, and the lights 
 
 Gleam guiding and eternal ? Very good ; 
 
 But while you say so do not quite forget 
 
 That sunshine has a devil of its own, 
 
 And one that we, for the great craft of him, 
 
 But vaguely recognize. The marvel is 
 
 That this persuasive and especial devil, 
 
 By grace of his extreme transparency, 
 
 Precludes all common vision of him ; yet 
 
 There is one way to glimpse him and a way, 
 
 As I believe, to test him, granted once 
 
 That we have ousted prejudice, which means 
 
 That we have made magnanimous advance 
 
 Through self-acquaintance. Not an easy thing 
 
 For some of us ; impossible, may be, 
 
 For all of us : the woman and the man 
 
 I cited, for example, would have wrought 
 
 The most intractable conglomerate 
 
 Of everything, if they had set themselves 
 
 To analyze themselves and not each other ; 
 
 If only for the sake of self-respect, 
 
 They would have come to no place but the same 
 
 Wherefrom they started ; one would have lived 
 
 awhile 
 In paradise without defending it, 
 
28 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 And one in hell without enjoying it ; 
 And each had been dissuaded neither more 
 Nor less thereafter. There are such on earth 
 As might have been composed primarily 
 For object-lessons : he was one of them, 
 And she the devil makes us hesitate : 
 T is easy to read words writ well with ink 
 That makes a good black mark on smooth white 
 
 paper ; 
 
 But words are done sometimes with other ink 
 Whereof the smooth white paper gives no sign 
 Till science brings it out ; and here we come 
 To knowledge, and the way to test a devil. 
 
 " To the greater number of us, you contend, 
 This demon of the sunlight is a stranger ; 
 But if you break the sunlight of yourself, 
 Project it, and observe the quaint shades of it, 
 I have a shrewd suspicion you may find 
 That even as a name lives un revealed 
 In ink that waits an agent, so it is 
 The devil or this devil hides himself 
 To all the diagnoses we have made 
 Save one, sincerity. The quest is hard 
 As hard as truth ; but once we seem to know 
 That his compound obsequiousness prevails 
 Unferreted within us, we may find 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 29 
 
 That sympathy, which aureoles itself 
 
 To superfluity from you and me, 
 
 May stand against the soul for five or six 
 
 Persistent and indubitable streaks 
 
 Of irritating brilliance, out of which 
 
 A man may read, if he have knowledge in him, 
 
 Proportionate attest of ignorance, 
 
 Hypocrisy, good-heartedness, conceit, 
 
 Indifference, with all of these out-hued 
 
 By the spiritual inactivity 
 
 Which more than often is identified 
 
 With individual intensity, 
 
 And is the parent of that selfishness 
 
 Whereof no end of lesser tlons and isms 
 
 Are querulously born. But there are things 
 
 To be considered here, or your machine 
 
 May never justify the purchase of it ; 
 
 For if you fail to gauge the difference 
 
 Between self-sacrifice and self-contempt, 
 
 Your light will be all devil and your faith 
 
 Diseased, whatever courage you have left : 
 
 Courage is not enough to make men glad 
 
 For laughter when that laughter is itself 
 
 The tribute of recriminating groans ; 
 
 Nor are the shapes of obsolescent creeds 
 
 Much longer to flit near enough to make 
 
 Men glad for living in a world like this; 
 
30 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 But wisdom, courage, knowledge, and the faith 
 
 Which has the soul and is the soul of reason 
 
 These are the world s achievers. And the child 
 
 The child that is the saviour of all ages, 
 The prophet and the poet, the crown-bearer, 
 Must yet with Love s unhonored fortitude, 
 Survive to cherish and attain for us 
 The candor and the generosity, 
 By leave of which we smile if we bring back 
 Some first ideal flash that wakened us 
 When wisdom like a shaft of dungeon-light 
 Came searching down to find us. 
 
 " Halfway back 
 
 I made a mild allusion to the Fates, 
 Not knowing then that ever I should have 
 Dream-visions of them, painted on the air, 
 Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. Faint-hued 
 They seem, but with a faintness never fading, 
 Unblurred by gloom, unshattered by the sun, 
 Still with eternal color, colorless, 
 They move and they remain. The while I write 
 These very words I see them, Atropos, 
 Lachesis, Clotho ; and the last is laughing : 
 When Clotho laughs, Atropos rattles her shears ; 
 But Clotho keeps on laughing just the same. 
 Some time when I have dreamed that Atropos 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 31 
 
 Has laughed, I 11 tell you how the colors 
 
 change 
 The colors that are changeless, colorless." 
 
 I fear I may have answered Captain Craig s 
 Epistle Number One with what he chose, 
 Good-humoredly but anxiously, to take 
 For something that was not all reverence ; 
 From the tone of Number Two it seemed almost 
 As if the flanges of the old man s faith 
 Had slipped the treacherous rails of my allegiance 
 And left him by the roadside, humorously 
 Upset, with nothing more convivial 
 To do than be facetious and austere : 
 
 " If you did not like Don Cesar de Bazan 
 There must be some imperfection in your vitals. 
 Flamboyant and old-fashioned ? Overdone ? 
 Romantico-robustious ? Dear young man, 
 There are fifteen thousand ways to be one-sided, 
 And I have indicated two of them 
 Already. Now you bait me with a third 
 As if it were a spider with nine legs ; 
 But what it is that you would have me do, 
 What fatherly wrath you most anticipate, 
 I lack the needed impulse to discern. 
 
32 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 If you did not like Don Cesar de Bazan, 
 
 However, there are comedies in reach 
 
 That have the fashion always. For example : 
 
 "At the time when there was not enough of 
 
 laurel 
 
 On Parnassus to feed quite the Boston market, 
 An admirable poet undertook 
 With earnest fingers to graft asphodels 
 And old world cypress-plumes on apple-boughs ; 
 And at the end of his experiments, 
 Like Johann Kepler, he brought forth a book. 
 The book was not sublime, but from its hard 
 And uncommutative perversity 
 Of words there came, like jewels out of sand, 
 Six measured songs too beautiful to die. 
 So I take that self-repudiating name 
 c Perversity and throw it like a spleen 
 To the last and farthest of Thalia s kennels 
 Though I who shape no songs of any sort, 
 I who have made no music, thrilled no canvas, 
 I who have added nothing to the world 
 The world would reckon save long-squandered 
 
 wit 
 
 Might with half-pardonable reverence 
 Beguile my faith, maybe, to the forlorn 
 Extent of some sequestered murmuring 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 33 
 
 Anent the vanities. No doubt I should, 
 If mine were the one life that I have lived ; 
 But with a few good glimpses I have had 
 Of heaven through the little holes in hell, 
 I do not any longer feel myself 
 To be ordained or even qualified 
 For criticising God to my advantage. 
 If you doubt the true humility of this, 
 You doubt the spectrum ; and if you doubt that, 
 You cannot understand what price it was 
 The poet paid, at one time and another, 
 For those indemnifying sonnet-songs 
 That are to be the kernel in what lives 
 To shrine him when the new-born men come 
 singing. 
 
 " Nor can you understand what I have read 
 
 From even the squeezed items of account 
 
 Which I have to my credit in that book 
 
 Whereof the leaves are ages and the text 
 
 Eternity. What do I care to-day 
 
 For the pages that have nothing? LJlSKeJiyed, 
 
 And I have died, and I have lived again ; 
 
 And I am very comfortable. Yes, 
 
 Though I look back through barren years enough 
 
 To make me seem as I transmute myself 
 
 In a downward retrospect from what I am 
 
34 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 As unproductive and as unconvinced 
 
 Of the living bread and the soul s eternal draught 
 
 As a frog on a Passover-cake in a streamless 
 
 desert, 
 
 Still do I trust the light that I have earned, 
 And having earned, received. You shake your 
 
 head, 
 But I do not know that you will shake it off. 
 
 " Meanwhile I have the flowers and the grass, 
 
 My brothers here the trees, and all July 
 
 To make me joyous. Why do you shake your 
 
 head ? 
 
 Why do you laugh ? because you are so young ? 
 Do you think if you laugh hard enough the truth 
 Will go to sleep ? Do you think of any couch 
 Made soft enough to put the truth to sleep ? 
 Do you think there are no proper comedies 
 But yours that have the fashion ? For example, 
 Do you think that I forget, or shall forget, 
 One friendless, fat, fantastic nondescript 
 Who knew the ways of laughter on low roads, 
 A vagabond, a drunkard, and a sponge, 
 But always a free creature with a soul ? 
 For a compliment to your intelligence 
 I bring him back, though not without misgivings, 
 And I caution you to damn him sparingly. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 35 
 
 " Count Pretzel von Wiirzburger, the Obscene 
 (The beggar may have had another name, 
 But no man to my knowledge ever knew it) 
 Was a poet and a skeptic and a critic. 
 And in his own mad manner a musician : 
 He had found an old piano in a bar-room, 
 And it was his career three nights a week, 
 From ten o clock till twelve to make it rattle; 
 And then, when I was just far down enough 
 To sit and watch him with his long straight 
 
 hair, 
 
 And pity him, and think he looked like Liszt, 
 I might have glorified a musical 
 Steam-engine, or a xylophone. The Count 
 Played half of everything and c improvised 
 The rest : he told me once that he was born 
 With a genius in him that prohibited 
 Complete fidelity, and that his art 
 c Confessed vagaries, therefore. But I made 
 Kind reckoning of his vagaries then : 
 I had the whole great pathos of the man 
 To purify me, and all sorts of music 
 To give me spiritual nourishment 
 And cerebral athletics ; for the Count 
 Played indiscriminately with an/J 
 And with incurable presto cradle-songs 
 And carnivals, spring-songs and funeral marches, 
 
36 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 The Marseillaise and Schubert s Serenade 
 
 And always in a way to make me think 
 
 Procrustes had the germ of music in him. 
 
 And when this interesting reprobate 
 
 Began to talk then there were more vagaries : 
 
 He made a reeking fetich of all filth, 
 
 Apparently ; but there was yet revealed 
 
 About him, through his words and on his flesh, 
 
 That ostracizing nimbus of a soul s 
 
 Abject, apologetic purity 
 
 That phosphorescence of sincerity 
 
 Which indicates the curse and the salvation 
 
 Of a life wherein starved art may never perish. 
 
 " One evening I remember clearliest 
 Of all that I passed with him. Having wrought, 
 With his nerve-ploughing ingenuity, 
 The Traumerei into a Titan s nightmare, 
 The man sat down across the table from me 
 And all at once was ominously decent. 
 "The more we measure what is ours to use," 3 
 He said then, wiping his froth-plastered mouth 
 With the inside of his hand, " thelesswe groan 
 For what the gods refuse." I ve hacT th"at sleeved 
 A decade for you. Now but one more stein, 
 And I shall be prevailed upon to read 
 The only sonnet I have ever made ; 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 37 
 
 And after that, if you propitiate 
 Gambrinus, I shall play you that Andante 
 As the world has never heard it played before. 
 So saying, he produced a piece of paper, 
 Unfolded it, and read, SONNET UNIQUE 
 DE PRETZEL VON WURZBURGER, DIT L Ofi- 
 SCENE : 
 
 " c Carmichael bad a kind of joke-disease, 
 And be bad queer tbings fastened on his wall. 
 There are three green china frogs that I recall 
 More potently than anything, for these 
 Three frogs have demonstrated, by degrees, 
 What curse was on the man to make him fall : 
 ^They are not ordinary frogs at all, 
 They are the Frogs of Aristophanes" 
 
 u God ! how he laughed whenever he said that ; 
 
 And how we caught from one another s eyes 
 
 The flash of what a tongue could never tell! 
 
 We always laughed at him, no matter what 
 
 The joke was worth. But when a man s brain dies, 
 
 We are not always glad . . . Poor Carmichael ! 9 
 
 " c I am a sowbug and a necrophile, 
 
 Said Pretzel, and the gods are growing old ; 
 
 The stars are singing Golden hair to gray, 
 
3 8 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Green leaf to yellow leaf, or chlorophyl 
 
 To xanthophyl, to be more scientific, 
 
 So speed me one more stein. You may believe 
 
 That I m a mendicant, but I am not : 
 
 For though it look to you that I go begging, 
 
 The truth is I go giving giving all 
 
 My strength and all my personality, 
 
 My wisdom and experience myself, 
 
 To make it final for your preservation ; 
 
 Though I be not the one thing or the other, 
 
 Though I strike between the sunset and the dawn, 
 
 Though I be clifF-rubbed wreckage on the shoals 
 
 Of Circumstance, doubt not that I comprise, 
 
 With all of my disintegrated zeal, 
 
 Far more than my appearance. Here he comes ; 
 
 Now drink to good old Pretzel ! Drink down 
 
 Pretzel ! 
 
 ghiousque tandem, Pretzel, and O Lord, 
 How long ! But let regret go hang : the good 
 Die first, and of the poor did many cease 
 To be. Beethoven after Wordsworth. Prosit ! 
 There were geniuses among the trilobites, 
 And I suspect that I was one of them. 
 
 u How much of him was earnest and how much 
 Fantastic, I know not ; nor do I need 
 Profounder knowledge to exonerate 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 39 
 
 The squalor or the folly of a man 
 
 Than a consciousness though even the crude 
 
 laugh 
 
 Of indigent Priapus follow it 
 That I get good of him. The poet made 
 Six golden sonnets. Well, Count Pretzel made 
 No golden sort of product I remember 
 Except a shield of wisdom for the mind 
 Of Captain Craig whatever you may think 
 Of him or of his armor. If you like him, 
 Then some time in the future, past a doubt, 
 You will have him in a book, make metres of 
 
 him, 
 
 To the great delight of Mr. Killigrew, 
 And the grief of all your kinsmen. Christian 
 
 shame 
 
 And self-confuted Orientalism 
 For the more sagacious of them ; vulture-tracks 
 Of my Promethean bile for the rest of them ; 
 And that will be a joke. There s nothing quite 
 So funny as a joke that s -lost -o earth 
 And laughed at by the gods. Your devil knows it. 
 
 " I come to like your Mr. Killigrew, 
 And I rejoice that you speak well of him. 
 The sprouts of human blossoming are in him, 
 And useful eyes if he will open them ; 
 
40 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 But one thing ails the man. He smiles too much. 
 He comes to see me once or twice a week, 
 And I must tell him that he smiles too much. 
 If I were Socrates, how I should do it ! " 
 
 Epistle Number Three was longer coming. 
 
 I waited for it, even worried for it 
 
 Though Killigrew, and of his own free will, 
 
 Had written reassuring little scraps 
 
 From time to time, and I had valued them 
 
 The more for being his. " The Sage," he said, 
 
 u From all that I can see, is doing well 
 
 I should say very well. Three meals a day, 
 
 Siestas, and innumerable pipes 
 
 Not to the tune of water on the stones, 
 
 But rather to the tune of his own Ego, 
 
 Which seems to be about the same as God. 
 
 But I was always weak in metaphysics, 
 
 And I pray therefore that you be lenient. 
 
 I m going to be married in December, 
 
 And I have made a poem that will scan 
 
 So Plunket says. You said the other would n t : 
 
 "Augustus Plunket, Ph. /)., 
 
 And oh, the Bishop s daughter ; 
 A very learned man was he 
 
 And in twelve weeks he got her ; 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 41 
 
 And oh, she was as fair to see 
 
 As pippins on the pippin tree . . . 
 
 7#, tui) tibi, te, chubs in the mill water. 
 
 " Connotative, succinct, and erudite ; 
 Three dots to boot. Now goodman Killigrew 
 May wind an epic one of these glad years, 
 And after that who knoweth but the Lord 
 The Lord of Hosts who is the King of Glory ? " 
 
 Still, when the Captain s own words were before 
 
 me, 
 
 I seemed to read from them, or into them, 
 The protest of a mortuary joy 
 Not all substantiating Killigrew s 
 Off-hand assurance. The man s face came back 
 The while I read them, and that look again, 
 Which I had seen so often, came back with it. 
 I do not know that I can say just why, 
 But I felt the feathery touch of something 
 
 wrong : 
 
 " Since last I wrote and I fear the weeks have 
 
 gone 
 Too long for me to leave my gratitude 
 
 Unuttered for its own acknowledgment 
 
 I have won, without the magic of Amphion 
 
42 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Without the songs of Orpheus or Apollo, 
 The frank regard and with it, if you like, 
 The fledged respect of three quick-footed 
 
 friends. 
 
 ( Nothing is there more marvelous than man/ 
 Said Sophocles ; and I say after him : 
 c He traps and captures, all-inventive one, 
 The light birds and the creatures of the wold, 
 And in his nets the fishes of the sea. ) 
 Once they were pictures, painted on the air, 
 Faint with eternal color, colorless, 
 But now they are not pictures, they are fowls. 
 
 "At first they stood aloof and cocked their small, 
 
 Smooth, prudent heads at me and made as if, 
 
 With a cryptic idiotic melancholy, 
 
 To look authoritative and sagacious ; 
 
 But when I tossed a piece of apple to them, 
 
 They scattered back with a discord of short 
 
 squawks 
 
 And then came forward with a craftiness 
 That made me think of Eden. Atropos 
 Came first, and having grabbed the morsel up, 
 Ran flapping far away and out of sight, 
 With Clotho and Lachesis hard after her; 
 But finally the three fared all alike, 
 And the next day I persuaded them with corn. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 43 
 
 In a week they came and had it from my fingers 
 And looked up at me while I pinched their bills 
 And made them sneeze. Count Pretzel s Carmi- 
 
 chael 
 
 Had said they were not ordinary Birds 
 At all, and they are not : they are the Fates, 
 Foredoomed of their own insufficiency 
 To be assimilated. Do not think, 
 Because in my contented isolation 
 It suits me at this time to be jocose, 
 That I am nailing reason to the cross, 
 Or that I set the bauble and the bells 
 Above the crucible ; for I do nought, 
 Say nought, but with an ancient levity 
 That is the forbear of all earnestness. 
 
 u The cross, I said. I had a dream last night : 
 
 A dream not like to any other dream 
 
 That I remember. I was all alone, 
 
 Sitting as I do now beneath a tree, 
 
 But looking not, as I am looking now, 
 
 Against the sunlight. There was neither sun 
 
 Nor moon, nor do I think of any stars ; 
 
 Yet there was light, and there were cedar trees, 
 
 And there were sycamores. I lay at rest, 
 
 Or should have seemed at rest, within a trough 
 
 Between two giant roots. A weariness 
 
44 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Was on me, and I would have gone to sleep, 
 
 But I had not the courage. If I slept, 
 
 I feared that I should never wake again ; 
 
 And if I did not sleep I should go mad, 
 
 And with my own dull tools, which I had used 
 
 With wretched skill so long, hack out my life. 
 
 And while I lay there, tortured out of death, 
 
 Great waves of cold, as if the dead were breathing, 
 
 Came over me and through me; and I felt 
 
 Quick fearful tears of anguish on my face 
 
 And in my throat. But soon, and in the distance, 
 
 Concealed, importunate, there was a sound 
 
 Of coming steps, and I was not afraid j 
 
 No, I was not afraid then, I was glad ; 
 
 For I could feel, with every thought, the Man, 
 
 The Mystery, the Child, a footfall nearer. 
 
 Then, when he stood before me, there was no 
 
 Surprise^ there was no questioning : I knew him, 
 
 As I had known him always ; and he smiled. 
 
 < Why are you here ? he asked ; and reaching 
 
 down, 
 
 He took up my dull blades and rubbed his thumb 
 Across the edges of them and then smiled 
 Once more. C I was a carpenter, I said, 
 c But there was nothing in the world to do. 
 1 Nothing ? said he. No, nothing, I replied. 
 But are you sure, he asked, c that you have skill ? 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 45 
 
 And are you sure that you have learned your trade ? 
 No, you are not/ -- He looked at me and laughed 
 As he said that ; but I did not laugh then, 
 Although I might have laughed. * They are 
 
 dull, said he; 
 
 They were not very sharp if they were ground ; 
 But they are what you have, and they will earn 
 What you have not. So take them as they are, 
 Grind them and clean them, put new handles to 
 
 them, 
 
 And then go learn your trade in Nazareth. 
 Only be sure that you find Nazareth. 
 * But if I starve what then ? said I. He 
 
 smiled. 
 
 " Now I call that as curious a dream 
 
 As ever Meleager s mother had, 
 
 jEneas, Alcibiades, or Jacob. 
 
 I 11 not except the scientist who dreamed 
 
 That he was Adam and that he was Eve 
 
 At the same time ; or yet that other man 
 
 Who dreamed that he was ./Eschylus, reborn 
 
 To clutch, combine, compensate, and adjust 
 
 The plunging and unfathomable chorus 
 
 Wherein we catch, like a bacchanale through 
 
 thunder, 
 The chanting of the new Eumenides, 
 
46 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Implacable, renascent, farcical, 
 Triumphant, and American. He did it, 
 
 ^.. i *" *"> " tf> 11 !, i i "i *" 
 
 But he did it in a dream. When he awoke 
 One phrase of it remained ; one verse of it 
 Went singing through the remnant of his life 
 Like a bag-pipe through a mad-house. He died 
 
 young, 
 
 And the more I ponder the small history 
 That I have gleaned of him by scattered roads, 
 The more do I rejoice that he died young. 
 That measure would have chased him all his days, 
 Defeated him, deposed him, wasted him, 
 And shrewdly ruined him though in that ruin 
 There would have lived, as always it has lived, 
 In ruin as in failure, the supreme 
 Fulfillment unexpressed, the rhythm of God 
 That beats unheard through songs of shattered 
 
 men 
 
 Who dream but cannot sound it. He declined, 
 From all that I have ever learned of him, 
 With absolute good-humor. No complaint, 
 No groaning at the burden which is light, 
 No brain-waste of impatience Never mind/ 
 He whispered, c for I might have written Odes/ 
 
 " Speaking of odes now makes me think of ballads. 
 Your admirable Mr. Killigrew 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 47 
 
 Has latterly committed what he calls 
 
 A Ballad of London London Town, of 
 
 course 
 
 And he has wished that I pass judgment on it. 
 He says there is a generosity 
 About it, and a c sympathetic insight ; 
 And there are strong lines in it, so he says. 
 But who am I that he should make of me 
 A judge ? You are his friend, and you know 
 
 best 
 
 The measure of his jingle. I am old, 
 And you are young. Be sure, I may go back 
 To squeak for you the tunes of yesterday 
 On my old fiddle or what s left of it 
 And give you as I m able a young sound ; 
 But all the while I do it I remain 
 One of Apollo s pensioners (and yours), 
 An usher in the Palace of the Sun, 
 A candidate for mattocks and trombones 
 (The brass-band will be indispensable), 
 Ajratrnn of ftigfr MffljpcCjJbut ^ -critic. 
 So I shall have to tell him, I suppose, 
 That I read nothing now but Wordsworth, Pope, 
 Lucretius, Robert Burns, and William Shake 
 speare. 
 Now this is Mr. Killigrew s performance : 
 
48 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 " c Say, do you go to London Town, 
 
 You with the golden feather ? 
 c And if I go to London Town 
 
 With my golden feather ? 
 4 These autumn roads are bright and brown, 
 The season wears a russet crown ; 
 And if you go to London Town, 
 We // go down together. 
 
 " I cannot say for certain, but I think 
 
 The brown bright nightingale was half assuaged 
 
 Before your Mr. Killigrew was born. 
 
 If I have erred in my chronology, 
 
 No matter, for the feathered man sings now : 
 
 " < Tes, I go to London Town 
 
 (Merrily waved the feather), 
 And if you go to London Town, 
 
 Tes, we II go together. 
 So in the autumn bright and brown. 
 Just as the year began to frown, 
 All the way to London Town 
 Rode the two together. 
 
 u c I go to marry a fair maid 
 
 (Lightly swung the feather) 
 c Par die, a true and loyal maid 
 (Oh, the swinging feather f) 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 49 
 
 c For us the wedding gold is weighed, 
 For us the feast will soon be laid ; 
 We II make a gallant show, he said, 
 * She and I together 
 
 " The feathered man will do a thousand things 
 And the world go smiling ; but the feathered man 
 May do too much. Now mark how he con 
 tinues : 
 
 u And you you go to London Town ? 
 
 (Breezes waved the feather) _, 
 Yes, I go to London Town. 9 
 
 (Ah, the stinging feather /) 
 c Why do you go, my merry blade ? 
 
 Like me, to marry a fair maid? 
 * Why do I go? . . . God knows, he said; 
 And on they rode together. 
 
 " Now you have read it through, and you know 
 
 best 
 
 What worth it has. We_Jellowj^^^ 
 Who march with sticks to music that is gray 
 Judge not your vanguard fifing. You are one 
 To judge ; and you will tell me what you think : 
 Barring the Town, the Fair Maid, and the Feather, 
 The dialogue and those parentheses, 
 
50 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 You cherish it, undoubtedly. Pardee ! 
 You call it, with a few conservative 
 Allowances, an excellent small thing 
 For patient inexperience to do : 
 Derivative, you say, still rather pretty. 
 But what is wrong with Mr. Killigrew ? 
 
 Is he in love, or has he read Rossetti ? 
 
 Forgive me ! I am old and doddering . . . 
 When are you coming back to Tilbury Town ? " 
 
 I could forgive the Captain soon enough, 
 
 But Killigrew there was a question there; 
 
 Nor was it answered-when the next week brought 
 
 A letter from him. After rocketing 
 
 For six or seven pages about love, 
 
 Truth, purity, the passion of the soul, 
 
 And other salutary attributes, 
 
 Discovered or miraculously born 
 
 Within six months, he said : " The Patriarch 
 
 Is not quite as he should be. There s a clutch 
 
 Of something on him that will not let go ; 
 
 And there are days together when his eyes 
 
 Are like two lamps in ashes. The gray look, 
 
 Which we thought once the glory and the crown 
 
 Of your too flexible determinist, 
 
 Has gone all over him. And when he laughs, 
 
 He waits as if to hear the angels weep : 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 51 
 
 It seems to make him sorry when he laughs, 
 
 And I know what it does to me. But here 
 
 As at the station I remember that 
 
 The quantitative bias of the boy 
 
 May slant me too much to the other side 
 
 And make me blind again. By Jove ! old 
 
 man, 
 
 If you could really know her as I do 
 T would be the revelation of your life : 
 You would see that there are women in the 
 
 world 
 Who are altogether different," etc. 
 
 There was more generosity in " women " 
 
 I thought than in the man without the feather. 
 
 Meanwhile I saw that Captain Craig was dying. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I found the old man sitting in his bed, 
 
 Propped up and uncomplaining. On a chair 
 
 Beside him was a dreary bowl of broth, 
 
 A magazine, some glasses, and a pipe. 
 
 " I do not light it nowadays," he said, 
 
 " But keep it for an antique influence 
 
 That it exerts, an aura that it sheds 
 
 Like hautboys, or Provence. You understand : 
 
52 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 The charred memorial defeats us yet, 
 
 But think you not for always. We are young, 
 
 And we are friends of time. Time that made 
 
 smoke 
 
 Will drive away the smoke, and we shall know 
 The work that we are doing. We shall build 
 With embers of all shrines one pyramid, 
 And we shall have the most resplendent flame 
 From earth to heaven, as the old words go, 
 And we shall need no smoke . . . Why don t 
 
 you laugh ? " 
 
 I gazed into those calm, half-lighted eyes 
 
 And smiled at them with grim obedience. 
 
 He told me that I did it very well, 
 
 But added that I should undoubtedly 
 
 Do better in the future : " There is nothing," 
 
 He said, " so beneficial in a sick-room 
 
 As a well-bred spontaneity of manner. 
 
 Your sympathetic scowl obtrudes itself, 
 
 And is indeed surprising. After death, 
 
 Were you to take it with you to your coffin 
 
 An unimaginative man might think 
 
 That you had lost your life in worrying 
 
 To find out what it was that worried you. 
 
 The ways of unimaginative men 
 
 Are singularly fierce . . . Why do you stand ? 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 53 
 
 Sit here and watch me while I take this soup. 
 The doctor likes it, therefore it is good. 
 
 " The man who wrote the decalogue," pursued 
 The Captain, having swallowed four or five 
 Heroic spoonfuls of his lukewarm broth, 
 " Forgot the doctors. And I think sometimes 
 The man of Galilee (or, if you choose, 
 The men who made the sayings of the man) 
 Like Buddha, and the others who have seen, 
 Was to men s loss the Poet though it be 
 The Poet only of him we revere, 
 The Poet we remember. We have put 
 The prose of him so far away from us, 
 The fear of him so crudely over us, 
 That I have wondered wondered." Cau 
 tiously, 
 
 But yet as one were cautious in a dream, 
 He set the bowl down on the chair again, 
 Crossed his thin fingers, looked me in the face, 
 And looking smiled a little. " Go away," 
 He said at last, " and let me go to sleep. 
 I told you I should eat, but I shall not. 
 To-morrow I shall eat ; and I shall read 
 Some clauses of a jocund instrument 
 That I have been preparing here of late 
 For you and for the rest, assuredly. 
 
54 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 * Attend the testament of Captain Craig : 
 Good citizens, good fathers and your sons, 
 Good mothers and your daughters. I should say 
 
 so. 
 
 Now go away and let me go to sleep." 
 
 I stood before him and held out my hand, 
 He took it, pressed it ; and I felt again 
 The sick soft closing on it. He would not 
 Let go, but lay there, looking up to me 
 With eyes that had a sheen of water on them 
 And a faint wet spark within them. So he clung, 
 Tenaciously, with fingers icy warm, 
 And eyes too full to keep the sheen unbroken. 
 I looked at him. The fingers closed hard once, 
 And then fell down. I should have left him 
 then. 
 
 But when we found him the next afternoon, 
 My first thought was that he had made his eyes 
 Miraculously smaller. They were sharp 
 And hard and dry, and the spark in them was 
 
 dry. 
 
 For a glance it all but seemed as if the man 
 Had artfully forsworn the brimming gaze 
 Of yesterday, and with a wizard strength 
 Inveigled in, reduced, and vitalized 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 55 
 
 The straw-shine of October ; and had that 
 Been truth, we should have humored him not 
 
 less, 
 
 Albeit he had fooled us, for he said 
 That we had made him glad by coming to him. 
 And he was glad : the manner of his words 
 Revealed the source of them ; and the gray smile 
 Which lingered like a twilight on his face 
 Told of its own slow fading that it held 
 The promise of the sun. Cadaverous, 
 God knows it was ; and we knew it was honest. 
 
 " So you have come to have the old man read 
 To you from his last will and testament : 
 Well, it will not be long not very long 
 So listen." He brought out from underneath 
 His pillow a new manuscript, and said, 
 u You are doing well to come and have me read 
 My testament. There are men in the world 
 Who say of me, if they remember me, 
 That I am poor ; and I believe the ways 
 Of certain men who never find things out 
 Are stranger than the way Lord Bacon wrote 
 Leviticus, and Faust" He fixed his eyes 
 Abstractedly on something far from us, 
 And with a look that I remembered well 
 Gazed hard the while we waited. But at length 
 
56 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 He found himself and soon began to chant, 
 With a fitful shift at thin sonorousness 
 The jocund instrument ; and had he been 
 Definitively parceling to us 
 All Kimberly and half of Ballarat, 
 The lordly quaver of his poor old words 
 Could not have been the more magniloquent. 
 No promise of dead carbon or of gold, 
 However, flashed in ambush to corrupt us : 
 
 / <c I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast, 
 Sage-errant, favored of the Cosmic Joke, 
 And self-reputed humorist at large, 
 Do now, confessed of my world-worshiping, 
 Time-questioning, sun-fearing, and heart-yielding, 
 Approve and unreservedly devise 
 To yon aqfl your assigns for evermore, 
 God s universe and yours. If I had won 
 What first I sought, I might have made you beam 
 By giving less ; but now I make you laugh 
 By giving more than what had made you beam, 
 And it is well. No man has ever done 
 The deed of humor that God promises, 
 But now and then we know tragedians 
 ; > Reform, and in denial too divine 
 
 Nf or sacrifice, too firm for ecstasy, 
 Record in jolly letters or in books 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 57 
 
 What fragment of God s laughter they have 
 
 caught, 
 
 What earnest of its rhythm ; and I believe 
 That I, in having somewhat recognized 
 The formal measure of it, have endured 
 The discord of infirmity not less 
 Through fortune than by failure. What men lose, 
 Man gains ; and what man gains reports itself 
 In losses we but vaguely deprecate, 
 So they be not for us ; and this is right, 
 Except that when the devil in the sun 
 Misguides us we go darkly where the shine 
 Misleads us, and we know not what we see : 
 We know not if we climb or if we fall ; 
 And if we fly, we know not where we fly. 
 
 " And here do I insert an urging clause 
 For climbers and up-fliers of all sorts, 
 ClifF-climbers and high-fliers : Phaethon, 
 Bellerophon, and Icarus did each 
 Go gloriously up, and each in turn 
 Did famously come down as you have read 
 In poems and elsewhere; but other men 
 Have mounted where no fame has followed them, 
 And we have had no sight, no news of them, 
 And we have heard no crash. The crash may 
 count, 
 
58 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 Undoubtedly, and earth be fairer for it j 
 Yet none save creatures out of harmony 
 Have ever, in their fealty to the flesh, 
 Made crashing an ideal. It is the flesh 
 X That ails us, for the spirit knows no qualm, 
 No failure, no down-falling : so climb high, 
 And having set your steps regard not much 
 The downward laughter clinging at your feet, 
 Nor overmuch the warning ; only know, 
 As well as you know dawn from lantern-light, 
 That far above you, for you, and within you, 
 There burns and shines and lives, unwavering 
 And always yours, the truth. Take on yourself 
 But your sincerity, and you take on 
 Good promise for all climbing : fly for truth, 
 And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight, 
 No laughter to vex down your loyalty. 
 
 " I think you may be smiling at me now 
 And if I make you smile, so much the better ; 
 For I would have you know that I rejoice 
 Always to see the thing that I would see 
 The righteous thing, the wise thing. I rejoice 
 Always to think that any thought of mine, 
 Or any word or any deed of mine, 
 May grant sufficient of what fortifies 
 Good feeling and the courage of calm joy 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 59 
 
 To make the joke worth while. Contrariwise, 
 
 When I review some faces I have known 
 
 Sad faces, hungry faces and reflect 
 
 On thoughts I might have moulded, human words 
 
 I might have said, straightway it saddens me 
 
 To feel perforce that had I not been mute 
 
 And actionless, I might have made them bright 
 
 Somehow, though only for the moment. Yes, 
 
 Howbeit I confess the vanities, 
 
 It saddens me ; and sadness, of all things 
 
 Miscounted wisdom, and the most of all 
 
 When warmed with old illusions and regrets, 
 
 I mark the selfishest, and on like lines 
 
 The shrewdest. For your sadness makes you 
 
 climb 
 With dragging footsteps, and it makes you 
 
 groan ; 
 
 It hinders you when most you would be free, 
 And there are many days it wearies you 
 Beyond the toil itself. And if the load 
 It lays on you may not be shaken off 
 Till you have known what now you do not 
 
 know -r- 
 Meanwhile you climb ; and he climbs best who 
 
 sees 
 
 Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels 
 Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall, 
 
60 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 One road remains and one firm guidance always; 
 One way that shall be taken, climb or fall. 
 
 " But * falling, falling, falling. There s your 
 
 song, 
 
 The cradle-song that sings you to the grave. 
 What is it your bewildered poet says ? 
 
 " l The toiling ocean thunders of unrest 
 
 And aching desolation ; the still sea 
 
 Paints but an outward calm that mocks itself 
 
 To the final and irrefragable sleep 
 
 That owns no shifting fury ; and the shoals 
 
 Of ages are but records of regret 
 
 Where Time, the sun s arch-phantom, writes on sand 
 
 The prelude of his ancient nothingness. 9 
 
 " T is easy to compound a dirge like that, 
 
 And it is easy too to be deceived 
 
 And alienated by the fleshless note 
 
 Of half-world yearning in it ; but the truth 
 
 To which we all are tending, charlatans 
 
 And architects alike, artificers 
 
 In tinsel as in gold, evangelists 
 
 Of ruin and redemption, all alike, 
 
 The truth we seek and equally the truth 
 
 We do not seek, but yet may not escape, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 61 
 
 Was never found alone through flesh contempt 
 Or through flesh reverence. Look east and 
 
 west 
 
 And we may read the story : where the light 
 Shone first the shade now darkens; where the 
 
 shade 
 Clung first, the light fights westward though 
 
 the shade 
 Still feeds, and there is yet the Orient. 
 
 " But there is this to be remembered always : 
 Whatever be the altitude you reach, 
 You do not rise alone ; nor do you fall 
 But you drag others down to more or less 
 Than your preferred abasement. God forbid 
 That ever I should preach, and in my zeal 
 Forget that I was born an humorist ; 
 But now, for once, before I go away, 
 I beg of you to be magnanimous 
 A moment, while I speak to please myself 
 The moment now for flowers; and your pa 
 tience : 
 
 " Though I have heard it variously sung 
 That even in the fury and the clash 
 Of battles, and the closer fights of men 
 When silence gives the knowing world no sign, 
 
62 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 One flower there is, though crushed and cursed 
 
 it be, 
 
 Keeps rooted through all tumult and all scorn, 
 Still do I find, when I look sharply down, 
 There s yet another flower that grows well 
 Arid has the most unconscionable roots 
 Of any weed on earth. Perennial 
 It grows, and has the name of Selfishness ; 
 No doubt you call it Love. In either case, 
 Tou propagate it with a diligence 
 That hardly were outmeasured had its leaf 
 The very juice in it of that famed herb 
 Which gave back breath to Glaucus ; and I know 
 That in the twilight, after the day s work, 
 You take your little children in your arms, 
 Or lead them by their credulous frail hands 
 Benignly out and through the garden-gate 
 And show them there the things that you have 
 
 raised ; 
 
 Not everything, perchance, but always one 
 Miraculously rooted flower plot 
 Which is your pride, their pattern. Socrates, 
 Could he be with you there at such a time, 
 Would have some unsolicited shrewd words 
 To say that you might hearken to ; but I 
 Say nothing, for I am not Socrates. 
 So much, good friends, for flowers; and I thank you. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 63 
 
 u There was a poet once who would have roared 
 
 Away the world and had an end of stars. 
 
 Where was he when I quoted him ? oh, yes : 
 
 T is easy for a man to link loud words 
 
 With woeful pomp and unschooled emphasis 
 
 And add one thundered contribution more 
 
 To the dirges of all-hollowness, I said ; 
 
 But here again I find the question set 
 
 Before me, after turning books on books 
 
 And looking soulward through man after man, 
 
 If there indeed be more determining 
 
 Play-service in remotely sounding down 
 
 The world s one-sidedness. If I judge right, 
 
 Your pounding protestations, echoing 
 
 Their burden of unfraught futility, 
 
 Surge back to mute forgetfulness at last 
 
 And have a kind of sunny, sullen end, 
 
 Like any cold north storm. But there are few 
 
 Still seas that have no life to profit them, 
 
 And even in such currents of the mind 
 
 As have no tide-rush to them, but are drowsed, 
 
 Crude thoughts may dart in armor and upspring 
 
 With a waking sound, when all is dim with peace, 
 
 Like sturgeons in the twilight out of Lethe ; 
 
 And though they be discordant, hard, grotesque, 
 
 And all unwelcome to the lethargy 
 
 That you think means repose, you know as well 
 
64 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 As if your names were shouted when they leap, 
 And when they leap you listen. Ah ! friends, 
 
 friends, 
 
 There are these things we do not like to know : 
 They trouble us, they make us hesitate, 
 They touch us, and we try to put them off. 
 We banish one another and then say 
 That we are left alone : the midnight leaf 
 That rattles when it hangs above the snow 
 Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn scarcely may seem 
 So cold in all its palsied loneliness 
 As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet 
 Profoundly and severely to find out 
 That there is more of unpermitted love 
 In most men s reticence than most men think. 
 
 " Once, when I made it out fond-headedness 
 
 To say that we should ever be apprised 
 
 Of our deserts and their emolument 
 
 At all but in the specious way of words, 
 
 The wisdom of a warm thought woke within me 
 
 And I could read the sun. Then did I turn 
 
 My long-defeated face full to the world, 
 
 And through the clouded warfare of it all 
 
 Discern the light. Through dusk that hindered 
 
 it, 
 I found the truth, and for the first whole time 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 65 
 
 Knew then that we were climbing. Not as one 
 
 Who mounts along with his experience 
 
 Bound on him like an Old Man of the Sea 
 
 Not as a moral pedant who drags chains 
 
 Of his unearned ideals after him 
 
 And always to the lead-like thud they make 
 
 Attunes a cold inhospitable chant 
 
 Of All Things Easy to the Non-Attached, 
 
 But as a man, a scarred man among men, 
 
 I knew it, and I felt the strings of thought 
 
 Between us to pull tight the while I strove ; 
 
 And if a curse came ringing now and then 
 
 To my defended ears, how could I know 
 
 The light that burned above me and within 
 
 me, 
 
 And at the same time put on cap-and-bells 
 For such as yet were groping ? " 
 
 Killigrew 
 
 Made there as if to stifle a small cough. 
 I might have kicked him, but regret forbade 
 The subtle admonition ; and indeed 
 When afterwards I reprimanded him, 
 The fellow never knew quite what I meant. 
 I may have been unjust. The Captain read 
 Right on, without a chuckle or a pause, 
 As if he had heard nothing : 
 
66 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 " 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 subtile object on the wall, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 67 
 
 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. 
 ( u 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 
 
68 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 achiev- 
 
 in g> 
 
 Your lifting up and your discovering, 
 Are more than often more than you have 
 
 dreamed 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 69 
 
 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.lQlcljJiatjJi^isu nothing more 
 F^SLl^JM 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: 
 fc Maintained his humor : nothing more or less. 
 
7 o CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 71 
 
 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 
 
72 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 ! . . . 
 
 tt 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. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 73 
 
 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 ? . . . 
 4 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, 
 
74 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 j 
 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, " t was 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." 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 75 
 
 " 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 
 
 " 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; 
 
 u 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, 
 
76 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 Crow ley 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 rea 
 son. 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 77 
 
 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 : 
 
 u 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 ? 
 
7 8 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 j 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 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 79 
 
 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 
 
8o CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 The shackles of a slave who doubts the sun. 
 
 There is no servitude so fraudulent 
 
 As of a sun-shut mind ; for t is 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" . . . 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 81 
 
 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 : 
 
82 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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 ta, 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, 
 
CAPTAIN CRAIG 83 
 
 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 Phoenix 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, 
 
84 CAPTAIN CRAIG 
 
 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. 
 
86 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 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. 
 
 So I proposed, without an overture, 
 That we be seated in the shade a while, 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 87 
 
 And Isaac made no murmur. Soon the talk 
 
 Was turned on Archibald, and I began 
 
 To feel some premonitions of a kind 
 
 That only childhood knows ; for the old man 
 
 Had looked at me and clutched me with his eye, 
 
 And asked if I had ever noticed things. 
 
 I told him that I could not think of them, 
 
 And I knew then, by the frown that left his face 
 
 Unsatisfied, that I had injured him. 
 
 <c My good young friend," he said, " you cannot 
 
 feel 
 
 What I have seen so long. You have the eyes 
 Oh, yes but you have not the other things : 
 The sight within that never will deceive, 
 You do not know you have no right to know ; 
 The twilight warning of experience, 
 The singular idea of loneliness, 
 These are not yours. But they have long been 
 
 mine, 
 
 And they have shown me now for seven years 
 That Archibald is changing. It is not 
 So much that he should come to his last hand, 
 And leave the game, and go the old way down j 
 But I have known him in and out so long, 
 And I have seen so much of good in him 
 That other men have shared and have not seen, 
 And I have gone so far through thick and thin, 
 
88 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 Through cold and fire with him, that it brings 
 To this old heart of mine an ache that you 
 Have not yet lived enough to know about. 
 But even unto you, with your boy s faith, 
 Your freedom, and your untried confidence, 
 A time will come to find out what it means 
 To know that you are losing what was yours, 
 To know that you are being left behind ; 
 And then the long contempt of innocence 
 God bless you, boy ! don t think the worse of 
 
 it 
 
 Because an old man chatters in the shade 
 Will all be like a story you have read 
 In childhood and remembered for the pictures. 
 And when the best friend of your life goes down, 
 When first you know in him the slackening 
 That comes, and coming always tells the end, 
 Now in a common word that would have passed 
 Uncaught from any other lips than his, 
 Now in some trivial act of every day, 
 Done as he might have done it all along 
 But for a twinging little difference 
 That bites you like a squirrel s teeth oh, yes, 
 Then you will understand it well enough. 
 But oftener it comes in other ways ; 
 It comes without your knowing when it comes ; 
 You know that he is changing, and you know 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 89 
 
 That he is going just as I know now 
 
 That Archibald is going and that I 
 
 Am staying. . . . Look at me, my boy, 
 
 And when the time shall come for you to see 
 
 That I must follow after him, try then 
 
 To think of me, to bring me back again, 
 
 Just as I was to-day. Think of the place 
 
 Where we are sitting now, and think of me 
 
 Think of old Isaac as you knew him then, 
 
 When you set out with him in August once 
 
 To see old Archibald." The words come back 
 
 Almost as Isaac must have uttered them, 
 
 And there comes with them a dry memory 
 
 Of something in my throat that would not move. 
 
 If you had asked me then to tell just why 
 
 I made so much of Isaac and the things 
 
 He said, I should have reached far for an answer ; 
 
 For I knew it was not sorrow that I felt, 
 
 Whatever I may have wished it, or tried then 
 
 To make myself believe. My mouth was full 
 
 Of words, and they would have been comforting 
 
 To Isaac, spite of my twelve years, I think ; 
 
 But there was not in me the willingness 
 
 To speak them out. Therefore I watched the 
 
 ground ; 
 And I was wondering what made the Lord 
 
90 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 Create a thing so nervous as an ant, 
 When Isaac, with commendable unrest, 
 Ordained that we should take the road again 
 For it was yet three miles to Archibald s, 
 And one to the first pump. I felt relieved 
 All over when the old man told me that ; 
 I felt that he had stilled a fear of mine 
 That those extremities of heat and cold 
 Which he had long gone through with Archibald 
 Had made the man impervious to both ; 
 But Isaac had a desert somewhere in him, 
 And at the pump he thanked God for all things 
 That he had put on earth for men to drink, 
 And he drank well, so well that I proposed 
 That we go slowly lest I learn too soon 
 The bitterness of being left behind, 
 And all those other things. That was a joke 
 To Isaac, and it pleased him very much ; 
 And that pleased me for I was twelve years 
 old. 
 
 At the end of an hour s walking after that 
 The cottage of old Archibald appeared. 
 Little and white and high on a smooth round hill 
 It stood, with hackmatacks and apple-trees 
 Before it, and a big barn-roof beyond ; 
 And over the place trees, houses, fields and 
 all 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 91 
 
 Hovered an air of still simplicity 
 And a fragrance of old summers the old style 
 That lives the while it passes. I dare say 
 That I was lightly conscious of all this 
 When Isaac, of a sudden, stopped himself, 
 And for the long first quarter of a minute 
 Gazed with incredulous eyes, forgetful quite 
 Of breezes and of me and of all else 
 Under the scorching sun but a smooth-cut field, 
 Faint yellow in the distance. I was young, 
 But there were a few things that I could see, 
 And this was one of them. " Well, well ! " said 
 
 he; 
 
 And " Archibald will be surprised, I think," 
 Said I. But all my childhood subtlety 
 Was lost on Isaac, for he strode along 
 Like something out of Homer powerful 
 And awful on the wayside, so I thought. 
 Also I thought how good it was to be 
 So near the end of my short-legged endeavor 
 To keep the pace with Isaac for five miles. 
 
 Hardly had we turned in from the main road 
 When Archibald, with one hand on his back 
 And the other clutching his huge-headed cane, 
 Came limping down to meet us. Well ! well ! 
 well ! " 
 
92 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 Said he ; and then he looked at my red face, 
 All streaked with dust and sweat, and shook my 
 
 hand, 
 
 And said it must have been a right smart walk 
 That we had had that day from Tilbury Town. 
 " Magnificent," said Isaac ; and he told 
 About the beautiful west wind there was 
 Which cooled and clarified the atmosphere. 
 " You must have made it with your legs, I guess," 
 Said Archibald ; and Isaac humored him 
 With one of those infrequent smiles of his 
 Which he kept in reserve, apparently, 
 For Archibald alone. " But why," said he, 
 u Should Providence have cider in the world 
 If not for such an afternoon as this ? " 
 And Archibald, with a soft light in his eyes, 
 Replied that if he chose to go down cellar, 
 There he would find eight barrels one of which 
 Was newly tapped, he said, and to his taste 
 An honor to the fruit. Isaac approved 
 Most heartily of that, and guided us 
 Forthwith, as if his venerable feet 
 Were measuring the turf in his own door-yard, 
 Straight to the open rollway. Down we went, 
 Out of the fiery sunshine to the gloom, 
 Grateful and half sepulchral, where we found 
 The barrels, like eight potent sentinels, 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 93 
 
 Close ranged along the wall. From one of them 
 A bright pine spile stuck out convincingly, 
 And on the black flat stone, just under it, 
 Glimmered a late-spilled proof that Archibald 
 Had spoken from unfeigned experience. 
 There was a fluted antique water-glass 
 Close by, and in it, prisoned, or at rest, 
 There was a cricket, of the brown soft sort 
 That feeds on darkness. Isaac turned him out, 
 And touched him with his thumb to make him 
 
 jump, 
 
 And then composedly pulled out the plug 
 With such a practiced hand that scarce a drop 
 Did even touch his ringers. Then he drank 
 And smacked his lips with a slow patronage 
 And looked along the line of barrels there 
 With a pride that may have been forgetfulness : 
 " I never twist a spigot nowadays," 
 He said, and raised the glass up to the light, 
 " But I thank God for orchards." And that glass 
 Was filled repeatedly for the same hand 
 Before I thought it worth while to discern 
 Again that I was young, and that old age, 
 With all his woes, had some advantages. 
 
 " Now, Archibald," said Isaac, when we stood 
 Outside again, " I have it in my mind 
 
94 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 That I shall take a sort of little walk 
 
 To stretch my legs and see what you are doing. 
 
 You stay and rest your back and tell the boy 
 
 A story : Tell him all about the time 
 
 In Stafford s cabin forty years ago, 
 
 When four of us were snowed up for ten days 
 
 With only one dried haddock. Tell him all 
 
 About it, and be wary of your back. 
 
 Now I will go along." I looked up then 
 
 At Archibald, and as I looked I saw 
 
 The way his nostrils widened once or twice 
 
 And then grew narrow. I can hear to-day 
 
 The way the old man chuckled to himself 
 
 Not wholesomely, not wholly to convince 
 
 Another of his mirth, as I can hear 
 
 The lonely sigh that followed. But at length 
 
 He said : " The orchard now s the place for us ; 
 
 We may find something like an apple there, 
 
 And we shall have the shade, at any rate." 
 
 So there we went and there we laid ourselves 
 
 Where the sunlight could not reach us ; and I 
 
 champed 
 
 A dozen of worm-blighted astrakhans 
 While Archibald said nothing merely told 
 The tale of Stafford s cabin, which was good, 
 Though u master chilly " after his own 
 
 phrase 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 95 
 
 Even for a day like that. But other thoughts 
 Were moving in his mind, imperative, 
 And writhing to be spoken : I could see 
 The glimmer of them in a glance or two, 
 Cautious, or else unconscious, that he gave 
 Over his shoulder : . . . " Stafford and the rest 
 Would have had no story of their own to tell ; 
 They would have left it all for others yes 
 But that s an old song now, and Archibald 
 And Isaac are old men. Remember, boy, 
 That we are old. Whatever we have gained, 
 Or lost, or thrown away, we are old men. 
 You look before you and we look behind, 
 And we are playing life out in the shadow 
 But that s not all of it. The sunshine lights 
 A good road yet before us if we look, 
 And we are doing that when least we know it ; 
 For both of us are children of the sun, 
 Like you, and like the weed there at your feet. 
 The shadow calls us, and it frightens us 
 We think ; but there s a light behind the stars 
 And we old fellows who have dared to live, 
 We see it and we see the other things, 
 The other things. . . . Yes, I have seen it come 
 These eight years, and these ten years, and I 
 
 know 
 Now that it cannot be for very long 
 
96 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 That Isaac will be Isaac. You have seen 
 Young as you are, you must have seen the 
 
 strange 
 
 Uncomfortable habit of the man ? 
 He 11 take my nerves and tie them in a knot 
 Sometimes, and that s not Isaac. I know that 
 And I know what it is : I get it here 
 A little, in my knees, and Isaac here." 
 The old man shook his head regretfully 
 And laid his knuckles three times on his fore 
 head. 
 
 " That s what it is : Isaac is not quite right. 
 You see it, but you don t know what it means : 
 The thousand little differences no, 
 You do not know them, and it s well you don t ; 
 You 11 know them soon enough God bless 
 
 you, boy ! 
 
 You 11 know them, but not all of them not all. 
 So think of them as little as you can : 
 There s nothing in them for you, or for me 
 But I am old and I must think of them j 
 I m in the shadow, but I don t forget 
 The light, my boy, the light behind the stars. 
 Remember that : remember that I said it ; 
 And when the time that you think far away 
 Shall come for you to say it say it, boy ; 
 Let there be no confusion or distrust 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 97 
 
 In you, no snarling of a life half lived, 
 Nor any cursing over broken things 
 That your complaint has been the ruin of. 
 Live to see clearly and the light will come 
 To you, and as you need it. But there, there, 
 I m going it again, as Isaac says, 
 And I 11 stop now before you go to sleep. 
 Only be sure that you growl cautiously, 
 And always where the shadow may not reach 
 you." 
 
 Never shall I forget, long as I live, 
 The quaint thin crack in Archibald s old voice, 
 The lonely twinkle in his little eyes, 
 Or the way it made me feel to be with him. 
 I know I lay and looked for a long time 
 Down through the orchard and across the road, 
 Across the river and the sun-scorched hills 
 That ceased in a blue forest, where the world 
 Ceased with it. Now and then my fancy caught 
 A flying glimpse of a good life beyond 
 Something of ships and sunlight, streets and sing 
 ing, 
 
 Troy falling, and the ages coming back, 
 And ages coming forward : Archibald 
 And Isaac were good fellows in old clothes 
 And Agamemnon was a friend of mine ; 
 
98 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 Ulysses coming home again to shoot 
 
 With bows and feathered arrows made another, 
 
 And all was as it should be. I was young. 
 
 So I lay dreaming of what things I would, 
 
 Calm and incorrigibly satisfied 
 
 With apples and romance and ignorance, 
 
 And the floating smoke from Archibald s clay 
 
 pipe. 
 
 There was a stillness over everything, 
 As if the spirit of heat had laid its hand 
 Upon the world and hushed it ; and I felt 
 Within the mightiness of the white sun 
 That smote the land around us and wrought out 
 A fragrance from the trees, a vital warmth 
 And fullness for the time that was to come, 
 And a glory for the world beyond the forest. 
 The present and the future and the past, 
 Isaac and Archibald, the burning bush, 
 The Trojans and the walls of Jericho, 
 Were beautifully fused ; and all went well 
 Till Archibald began to fret for Isaac 
 And said it was a master day for sunstroke. 
 That was enough to make a mummy smile, 
 I thought ; and I remained hilarious, 
 In face of all precedence and respect, 
 Till Isaac (who had come to us unheard) 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 99 
 
 Found he had no tobacco, looked at me 
 Peculiarly, and asked of Archibald 
 What ailed the boy to make him chirrup so. 
 From that he told us what a blessed world 
 The Lord had given us. " But, Archibald, 
 He added, with a sweet severity 
 That made me think of peach-skins and goose- 
 flesh, 
 
 " I m half afraid you cut those oats of yours 
 A day or two before they were well set." 
 " They were set well enough," said Archibald, 
 And I remarked the process of his nose 
 Before the words came out ; " but never mind 
 Your neighbor s oats : you stay here in the 
 
 shade 
 
 And rest yourself while I go find the cards. 
 We 11 have a little game of seven-up 
 And let the boy keep count." " We 11 have 
 
 the game, 
 
 Assuredly," said Isaac ; " and I think 
 That I will have a draught of cider, also." 
 They marched away together towards the house 
 And left me to my childish ruminations 
 Upon the ways of men. I followed them 
 Down cellar with my fancy, and then left them 
 For a fairer vision of all things at once 
 That was anon to be destroyed again 
 
ioo ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 By the sound of voices and of heavy feet 
 One of the sounds of life that I remember, 
 Though I forget so many that rang first 
 As if they were thrown down to me from 
 Sinai. 
 
 So I remember, even to this day, 
 Just how they sounded, how they placed them 
 selves, 
 
 And how the game went on while I made marks 
 And crossed them out, and meanwhile made some 
 
 Trojans. 
 
 Likewise I made Ulysses, after Isaac, 
 And a little after Flaxman. Archibald 
 Was wounded when he found himself left out, 
 But he had no heroics, and I said so : 
 I told him that his white beard was too long 
 And too straight down to be like things in 
 
 Homer. 
 
 " Quite so," said Isaac. "Low," said Archi 
 bald; 
 
 And he threw down a deuce with a deep grin 
 That showed his yellow teeth and made me 
 
 happy. 
 
 So they played on till a bell rang from the door, 
 And Archibald said, " Supper." After that 
 The old men smoked while I sat watching them 
 
ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 101 
 
 And wondered with all comfort what might come 
 To me, and what might never come to me ; 
 And when the time came for the long walk 
 
 home 
 
 With Isaac in the twilight, I could see 
 The forest and the sunset and the sky-line, 
 No matter where it was that I was looking : 
 The flame beyond the boundary, the music, 
 The foam and the white ships, and two old men 
 Were things that would not leave me. And 
 
 that night 
 There came to me a dream a shining one, 
 
 D 
 
 With two old angels in it. They had wings, 
 And they were sitting where a silver light 
 Suffused them, face to face. The wings of one 
 Began to palpitate as I approached, 
 But I was yet unseen when a dry voice 
 Cried thinly, with unpatronizing triumph, 
 " I ve got you, Isaac ; high, low, jack, and the 
 game." 
 
 Isaac and Archibald have gone their way 
 To the silence of the loved and well-forgotten. 
 I knew them, and I may have laughed at them ; 
 But there s a laughing that has honor in it, 
 And I have no regret, for light words now. 
 Rather I think sometimes they may have made 
 
102 ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 
 
 Their sport of me ; but they would not do 
 
 that, 
 They were too old for that. They were old 
 
 men, 
 And I may laugh at them because I knew them. 
 
THE RETURN OF MORGAN AND 
 FINGAL 
 
 AND there we were together again 
 
 Together again, we three : 
 Morgan, Fingal, fiddle, and all, 
 
 They had come for the night with me. 
 
 The spirit of joy was in Morgan s wrist, 
 There were songs in FingaPs throat ; 
 
 And secure outside, for the spray to drench, 
 Was a tossed and empty boat. 
 
 And there were the pipes, and there was the 
 punch, 
 
 And somewhere were twelve years ; 
 So it came, in the manner of things unsought, 
 
 That a quick knock vexed our ears. 
 
 The night wind hovered and shrieked and snarled, 
 
 And I heard Fingal swear ; 
 Then I opened the door but I found no more 
 
 Than a chalk-skinned woman there. 
 
104 RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 
 
 I looked, and at last, " What is it ? " I said 
 
 " What is it that we can do ? " 
 But never a word could I get from her 
 
 But " You you three it is you ! " 
 
 Now the sense of a crazy speech like that 
 Was more than a man could make ; 
 
 So I said, " But we we are what, we three ? " 
 And I saw the creature shake. 
 
 " Be quick ! " she cried, " for I left her dead 
 
 And I was afraid to come ; 
 But you, you three God made it be 
 
 Will ferry the dead girl home. 
 
 " Be quick ! be quick ! but listen to that 
 Who is it that makes it ? hark ! " 
 
 But I heard no more than a knocking splash 
 And a wind that shook the dark. 
 
 " It is only the wind that blows," I said, 
 " And the boat that rocks outside." 
 
 And I watched her there, and I pitied her there 
 " Be quick ! be quick ! " she cried. 
 
 She cried it so loud that her voice went in 
 To find where my two friends were ; 
 
RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 105 
 
 So Morgan came, and Fingal came, 
 And out we went with her. 
 
 T was a lonely way for a man to take 
 
 And a tedious way for three ; 
 And over the water, and all day long, 
 
 They had come for the night with me. 
 
 But the girl was dead, as the woman had said, 
 
 And the best we could see to do 
 Was to lay her aboard. The north wind roared, 
 
 And into the night we flew. 
 
 Four of us living and one for a ghost, 
 
 Furrowing crest and swell, 
 
 Through the surge and the dark, for that faint far 
 spark, 
 
 We ploughed with Azrael. 
 
 Three of us ruffled and one gone mad, 
 
 Crashing to south we went ; 
 And three of us there were too spattered to 
 care 
 
 What this late sailing meant. 
 
 So down we steered and along we tore 
 Through the flash of the midnight foam : 
 
io6 RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 
 
 Silent enough to be ghosts on guard, 
 We ferried the dead girl home. 
 
 We ferried her down to the voiceless wharf, 
 And we carried her up to the light ; 
 
 And we left the two to the father there, 
 Who counted the coals that night. 
 
 Then back we steered through the foam again, 
 But our thoughts were fast and few ; 
 
 And all we did was to crowd the surge 
 And to measure the life we knew ; 
 
 Till at last we came where a dancing gleam 
 
 Skipped out to us, we three, 
 And the dark wet mooring pointed home 
 
 Like a finger from the sea. 
 
 Then out we pushed the teetering skiff 
 
 And in we drew to the stairs ; 
 And up we went, each man content 
 
 With a life that fed no cares. 
 
 Fingers were cold and feet were cold, 
 
 And the tide was cold and rough ; 
 But the light was warm, and the room was warm, 
 
 And the world was good enough. 
 
RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 107 
 
 And there were the pipes, and there was the 
 punch, 
 
 More shrewd than Satan s tears : 
 Fingal had fashioned it, all by himself, 
 
 With a craft that comes of years. 
 
 And there we were together again 
 
 Together again, we three : 
 Morgan, Fingal, fiddle, and all, 
 
 They were there for the night with me. 
 
AUNT IMOGEN 
 
 AUNT IMOGEN was coming, and therefore 
 
 The children Jane, Sylvester, and Young 
 
 George 
 
 Were eyes and ears ; for there was only one 
 Aunt Imogen to them in the whole world, 
 And she was in it only for four weeks 
 In fifty-two. But those great bites of time 
 Made all September a Queen s Festival ; 
 And they would strive, informally, to make 
 The most of them. The mother understood, 
 And wisely stepped away. Aunt Imogen 
 Was there for only one month in the year, 
 While she, the mother, she was always there ; 
 And that was what made all the difference. 
 She knew it must be so, for Jane had once 
 Expounded it to her so learnedly 
 That she had looked away from the child s eyes 
 And thought ; and she had thought of many 
 
 things. 
 
 There was a demonstration every time 
 Aunt Imogen appeared, and there was more 
 
AUNT IMOGEN 109 
 
 Than one this time. And she was at a loss 
 
 Just how to name t*he meaning of it all : 
 
 It puzzled her to think that she could be 
 
 So much to any crazy things alive 
 
 Even to her sister s little savages 
 
 Who knew no better than to be themselves ; 
 
 But in the midst of her glad wonderment 
 
 She found herself besieged and overcome 
 
 By two tight arms and one tumultuous head, 
 
 And therewith half bewildered and half pained 
 
 By the joy she felt and by the sudden love 
 
 That proved itself in childhood s honest noise. 
 
 Jane, by the wings of sex, had reached her first ; 
 
 And while she strangled her, approvingly, 
 
 Sylvester thumped his drum and Young George 
 
 howled. 
 
 But finally, when all was rectified, 
 And she had stilled the clamor of Young George 
 By letting him go " pig-back " through the hall, 
 They went together into the old room 
 That looked across the fields ; and Imogen 
 Gazed out with a girl s gladness in her eyes, 
 Happy to know that she was back once more 
 Where there were those who knew her, and at 
 
 last 
 
 Had gloriously got away again 
 From cabs and clattered asphalt for a while ; 
 
no AUNT IMOGEN 
 
 And there she sat and talked and looked and 
 
 laughed 
 
 And made the mother and the children laugh. 
 Aunt Imogen made everybody laugh. 
 
 There was the feminine paradox that she 
 Who had so little sunshine for herself 
 Should have so much for others. How it was 
 That she could make, and feel for making it, 
 So much of joy for them, and all along 
 Be covering, like a scar, the while she smiled, 
 
 That hungering incompleteness and regret 
 
 That passionate ache for something of her own, 
 For something of herself she never knew. 
 She knew that she could seem to make them all 
 Believe there was no other part of her 
 Than her persistent happiness ; but the why 
 And how she did not know. Still none of them 
 
 Could have a thought that she was living down 
 
 Almost as if regret were criminal, 
 
 So proud it was and yet so profitless 
 
 The penance of a dream, and that was good : 
 
 Even her big bewhiskered brother Giles 
 
 Had called her in his letter, not long since, 
 
 A superannuated pretty girl ; 
 
 And she, to do the thing most adequate, 
 
 Had posted back sarcastic sheets enough 
 
AUNT IMOGEN m 
 
 To keep the beast in humor for a month. 
 But her sister Jane the mother of little Jane, 
 Sylvester, and Young George may, after all, 
 Have known; for she was well, she was a 
 woman. 
 
 Young George, however, did not yield himself 
 
 To nourish the false hunger of a ghost 
 
 That made no good return. He saw too much : 
 
 The accumulated wisdom of his years 
 
 Had so conclusively made plain to him 
 
 The permanent profusion of a world 
 
 Where everybody might have everything 
 
 To do, and almost everything to eat, 
 
 That he was jubilantly satisfied 
 
 And all unthwarted by adversity. 
 
 Young George knew things. The world, he had 
 
 found out, 
 
 Was a good place, and life was a good game 
 Particularly when Aunt Imogen 
 Was in it. And one day it came to pass 
 One rainy day when she was holding him 
 And rocking him that he, in his own right, 
 Took it upon himself to tell her so ; 
 
 And something in his way of telling it 
 
 The language, or the tone, or something else 
 Gripped like a baby s fingers on her throat, 
 
ii2 AUNT IMOGEN 
 
 And then went feeling through as if to make 
 
 A plaything of her heart. Such undeserved 
 
 And unsophisticated confidence 
 
 Went mercilessly home ; and had she sat 
 
 Before a looking glass, the deeps of it 
 
 Could not have shown more clearly to her then 
 
 Than one thought-mirrored little glimpse had 
 
 shown, 
 The pang that wrenched her face and filled her 
 
 eyes 
 
 With anguish and intolerable mist. 
 The blow that she had vaguely thrust aside 
 Like fright so many times had found her now : 
 Clean-thrust and final it had come to her 
 From a child s lips at last, as it had come 
 Never before, and as it might be felt 
 Never again. Some grief, like some delight, 
 Stings hard but once : to custom after that 
 The rapture or the pain submits itself, 
 And we are wiser than we were before. 
 And Imogen was wiser; though at first 
 Her dream-defeating wisdom was indeed 
 A thankless heritage : there was no sweet, 
 No bitter now ; nor was there anything 
 To make a daily meaning for her life 
 Till truth, like Harlequin, leapt out somehow 
 From ambush and threw sudden savor to it 
 
AUNT IMOGEN 113 
 
 But the blank taste of time. There were no 
 
 dreams, 
 
 No phantoms in her future any more : 
 One clinching revelation of what was, 
 One by-flash of irrevocable chance, 
 Had acridly but honestly foretold 
 The mystical fulfillment of a life 
 That might have once . . . But that was all 
 
 gone by : 
 
 There was no need of reaching back for that : 
 The triumph was not hers : there was no love 
 Save borrowed love : there was no might have 
 
 been. 
 
 But there was yet Young George and he had 
 
 gone 
 
 Conveniently to sleep, like a good boy ; 
 And there was yet Sylvester with his drum, 
 And there was frowzle-headed little Jane ; 
 And there was Jane the sister, and the mother, 
 Her sister, and the mother of them all. 
 They were not hers, not even one of them : 
 She was not born to be so much as that, 
 For she was born to be Aunt Imogen. 
 Now she could see the truth and look at it ; 
 Now she could make stars out where once had 
 
 palled 
 
n 4 AUNT IMOGEN 
 
 A future s emptiness ; now she could share 
 With others ah, the others ! to the end 
 The largess of a woman who could smile ; 
 Now it was hers to dance the folly down, 
 And all the murmuring ; now it was hers 
 To be Aunt Imogen. So, when Young George 
 Woke up and blinked at her with his big eyes, 
 And smiled to see the way she blinked at him, 
 T was only in old concord with the stars 
 That she took hold of him and held him close, 
 Close to herself, and crushed him till he laughed. 
 
THE KLONDIKE 
 
 NEVER mind the day we left, or the way the 
 women clung to us ; 
 
 All we need now is the last way they looked at 
 us. 
 
 Never mind the twelve men there amid the cheer 
 ing 
 
 Twelve men or one man, t will soon be all the 
 same ; 
 
 For this is what we know : we are five men to 
 gether, 
 
 Five left o twelve men to find the golden river. 
 
 Far we came to find it out, but the place was 
 
 here for all of us ; 
 Far, far we came, and here we have the last of 
 
 us. 
 We that were the front men, we that would be 
 
 early, 
 We that had the faith, and the triumph in our 
 
 eyes: 
 
n6 THE KLONDIKE 
 
 We that had the wrong road, twelve men to 
 gether, 
 
 Singing when the devil sang to find the golden 
 river. 
 
 Say the gleam was not for us, but never say we 
 doubted it ; 
 
 Say the wrong road was right before we followed 
 it. 
 
 We that were the front men, fit for all forage, 
 
 Say that while we dwindle we are front men 
 still ; 
 
 For this is what we know to-night : we re starv 
 ing here together 
 
 Starving on the wrong road to find the golden 
 river. 
 
 Wrong, we say, but wait a little : hear him in the 
 
 corner there ; 
 He knows more than we, and he 11 tell us if we 
 
 listen there 
 He that fought the snow-sleep less than all the 
 
 others 
 
 Stays awhile yet, and he knows where he stays : 
 Foot and hand a frozen clout, brain a freezing 
 
 feather, 
 Still he s here to talk with us and to the golden 
 
 river. 
 
THE KLONDIKE 117 
 
 <c Flow," he says, " and flow along, but you can 
 not flow away from us ; 
 
 All the world s ice will never keep you far from 
 us; 
 
 Every man that heeds your call takes the way 
 that leads him 
 
 The one way that s his way, and lives his own 
 life: 
 
 Starve or laugh, the game goes on, and on goes 
 the river ; 
 
 Gold or no, they go their way twelve men to 
 gether. 
 
 " Twelve," he says, " who sold their shame for a 
 
 lure you call too fair for them 
 You that laugh and flow to the same word that 
 
 urges them : 
 
 Twelve who left the old town shining in the sunset, 
 Left the weary street and the small safe days : 
 Twelve who knew but one way out, wide the 
 
 way or narrow : 
 Twelve who took the frozen chance and laid 
 
 their lives on yellow. 
 
 " Flow by night and flow by day, nor ever once 
 
 be seen by them ; 
 Flow, freeze, and flow, till time shall hide the 
 
 bones of them ; 
 
n8 THE KLONDIKE 
 
 Laugh and wash their names away, leave them 
 
 all forgotten, 
 
 Leave the old town to crumble where it sleeps ; 
 Leave it there as they have left it, shining in the 
 
 valley, 
 Leave the town to crumble down and let the 
 
 women marry. 
 
 u Twelve of us or five," he says, " we know the 
 night is on us now : 
 
 Five while we last, and we may as well be think 
 ing now : 
 
 Thinking each his own thought, knowing, when 
 the light comes, 
 
 Five left or none left, the game will not be lost. 
 
 Crouch or sleep, we go the way, the last way to 
 gether : 
 
 Five or none, the game goes on, and on goes the 
 river. 
 
 " For after all that we have done and all that we 
 
 have failed to do, 
 Life will be life and the world will have its work 
 
 to do : 
 Every man who follows us will heed in his own 
 
 fashion 
 The calling and the warning and the friends who 
 
 do not know : 
 
THE KLONDIKE 119 
 
 Each will hold an icy knife to punish his heart s 
 
 lover, 
 And each will go the frozen way to find the 
 
 golden river." 
 
 There you hear him, all he says, and the last 
 
 we 11 ever get from him. 
 Now he wants to sleep, and that will be the best 
 
 for him. 
 Let him have his own way no, you need n t 
 
 shake him 
 
 Your own turn will come, so let the man sleep. 
 For this is what we know : we are stalled here 
 
 together 
 Hands and feet and hearts of us, to find the 
 
 golden river. 
 
 And there s a quicker way than sleep ? . . 
 
 Never mind the looks of him : 
 All he needs now is a finger on the eyes of 
 
 him. 
 
 You there on the left hand, reach a little over 
 Shut the stars away, or he 11 see them all night : 
 He 11 see them all night and he 11 see them all 
 
 to-morrow, 
 Crawling down the frozen sky, cold and hard and 
 
 yellow. 
 
120 THE KLONDIKE 
 
 Won t you move an inch or two to keep the 
 
 stars away from him ? 
 No, he won t move, and there s no need of 
 
 asking him. 
 Never mind the twelve men, never mind the 
 
 women ; 
 
 Three while we last, we 11 let them all go ; 
 And we 11 hold our thoughts north while we 
 
 starve here together, 
 Looking each his own way to find the golden 
 
 river. 
 
THE GROWTH OF "LORRAINE" 
 
 WHILE I stood listening, discreetly dumb, 
 Lorraine was having the last word with me : 
 " I know," she said, " I know it, but you see 
 Some creatures are born fortunate, and some 
 Are born to be found out and overcome, 
 Born to be slaves, to let the rest go free ; 
 And if I m one of them (and I must be) 
 You may as well forget me and go home. 
 
 " You tell me not to say these things, I know, 
 But I should never try to be content : 
 I ve gone too far ; the life would be too slow. 
 Some could have done it some girls have the 
 
 stuff; 
 
 But I can t do it : I don t know enough. 
 I m going to the devil." And she went. 
 
 II 
 
 I did not half believe her when she said 
 That I should never hear from her again j 
 
122 THE GROWTH OF "LORRAINE" 
 
 Nor when I found a letter from Lorraine, 
 
 Was I surprised or grieved at what I read : 
 
 u Dear friend, when you find this, I shall be dead. 
 
 You are too far away to make me stop. 
 
 They say that one drop think of it, one 
 
 drop ! 
 Will be enough, but I 11 take five instead. 
 
 " You do not frown because I call you friend, 
 For I would have you glad that I still keep 
 Your memory, and even at the end 
 Impenitent, sick, shattered cannot curse 
 The love that flings, for better or for worse, 
 This worn-out, cast-out flesh of mine to sleep." 
 
THE SAGE 
 
 FOREGUARDED and unfevered and serene, 
 
 Back to the perilous gates of Truth he went 
 
 Back to fierce wisdom and the Orient, 
 
 To the Dawn that is, that shall be, and has been : 
 
 Previsioned of the madness and the mean 
 
 He stood where Asia, crowned with ravishment, 
 
 The curtain of Love s inner shrine had rent, 
 
 And after had gone scarred by the Unseen. 
 
 There at his touch there was a treasure chest, 
 
 And in it was a gleam, but not of gold ; 
 
 And on it, like a flame, these words were 
 
 scrolled : 
 
 u I keep the mintage of Eternity. 
 Who comes to take one coin may take the rest, 
 And all may come but not without the key." 
 
ERASMUS 
 
 WHEN he protested, not too solemnly, 
 
 That for a world s achieving maintenance 
 
 The crust of overdone divinity 
 
 Lacked aliment, they called it recreance ; 
 
 And when he chose through his own glass to scan 
 
 Sick Europe, and reduced, unyieldingly, 
 
 The monk within the cassock to the man 
 
 Within the monk, they called it heresy. 
 
 And when he made so perilously bold 
 As to be scattered forth in black and white, 
 Good fathers looked askance at him and rolled 
 Their inward eyes in anguish and affright ; 
 There were some of them did shake at what was 
 
 told, 
 And they shook best who knew that he was right. 
 
THE WOMAN AND THE WIFE 
 
 I THE EXPLANATION 
 
 " You thought we knew," she said, " but we were 
 
 wrong. 
 
 This we can say, the rest we do not say ; 
 Nor do I let you throw yourself away 
 Because you love me. Let us both be strong, 
 And we shall find in sorrow, before long, 
 Only the price Love ruled that we should pay : 
 The dark is at the end of every day, 
 And silence is the end of every song. 
 
 u You ask me for one proof that I speak right, 
 But I can answer only what I know ; 
 You look for just one lie to make black white, 
 But I can tell you only what is true 
 God never made me for the wife of you. 
 This we can say, believe me ! ... Tell me 
 so ! " 
 
 II THE ANNIVERSARY 
 
 " Give me the truth, whatever it may be. 
 
 You thought we knew, now tell me what you miss : 
 
iz6 THE WOMAN AND THE WIFE 
 
 You are the one to tell me what it is 
 You are a man, and you have married me. 
 What is it worth to-night that you can see 
 More marriage in the dream of one dead kiss 
 Than in a thousand years of life like this ? 
 Passion has turned the lock, Pride keeps the key. 
 
 " Whatever I have said or left unsaid, 
 
 Whatever I have done or left undone, 
 
 Tell me. Tell me the truth. . . . Are you 
 
 afraid ? 
 
 Do you think that Love was ever fed with lies 
 But hunger lived thereafter in his eyes? 
 Do you ask me to take moonlight for the sun ? " 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 PARTLY to think, more to be left alone, 
 
 George Annandale said something to his friends 
 
 A word or two, brusque, but yet smoothed 
 
 enough 
 
 To suit their funeral gaze and went upstairs ; 
 And there, in the one room that he could call 
 His own, he found a kind of meaningless 
 Annoyance in the mute familiar things 
 That filled it ; for the grate s monotonous gleam 
 Was not the gleam that he had known before, 
 The books were not the books that used to be, 
 The place was not the place. There was a lack 
 Of something ; and the certitude of death 
 Itself, as with a furtive questioning, 
 Hovered, and he could not yet understand. 
 He knew that she was gone there was no need 
 Of any argued proof to tell him that, 
 For they had buried her that afternoon, 
 Under the leaves and snow ; and still there was 
 A doubt, a pitiless doubt, a plunging doubt, 
 
iz8 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 That struck him, and upstartled when it struck, 
 The vision, the old thought in him. There was 
 A lack, and one that wrenched him ; but it was 
 Not that not that. There was a present sense 
 Of something indeterminably near 
 The soul-clutch of a prescient emptiness 
 That would not be foreboding. And if not, 
 What then ? or was it anything at all ? 
 Yes, it was something it was everything 
 But what was everything ? or anything ? 
 
 Tired of time, bewildered, he sat down ; 
 But in his chair he kept on wondering 
 That he should feel so desolately strange 
 And yet for all he knew that he had lost 
 More of the world than most men ever win 
 So curiously calm. And he was left 
 Unanswered and unsatisfied : there came 
 No clearer meaning to him than had come 
 Before ; the old abstraction was the best 
 That he could find, the farthest he could go ; 
 To that was no beginning and no end 
 No end that he could reach. So he must learn 
 To live the surest and the largest life 
 Attainable in him, would he divine 
 The meaning of the dream and of the words 
 That he had written, without knowing why, 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 129 
 
 On sheets that he had bound up like a book 
 And covered with red leather. There it was 
 There in his desk, the record he had made, 
 The spiritual plaything of his life : 
 There were the words no eyes had ever seen 
 Save his j there were the words that were not 
 
 made 
 
 For glory or for gold. The pretty wife 
 Whom he had loved and lost had not so much 
 As heard of them. They were not made for her. 
 His love had been so much the life of her, 
 And hers had been so much the life of him, 
 That any wayward phrasing on his part 
 Would have had no moment. Neither had lived 
 
 enough 
 
 To know the book, albeit one of them 
 Had grown enough to write it. There it was, 
 However, though he knew not why it was : 
 There was the book, but it was not for her, 
 For she was dead. And yet, there was the book. 
 
 Thus would his fancy circle out and out, 
 And out and in again, till he would make 
 As if with a large freedom to crush down 
 Those under - thoughts. He covered with his 
 
 hands 
 His tired eyes, and waited : he could hear 
 
1 3 o THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 Or partly feel and hear, mechanically 
 
 The sound of talk, with now and then the steps 
 
 And skirts of some one scudding on the stairs, 
 
 Forgetful of the nerveless funeral feet 
 
 That she had brought with her; and more than 
 
 once 
 
 There came to him a call as of a voice 
 A voice of love returning but not hers. 
 Whose he knew not, nor dreamed ; nor did he 
 
 know, 
 
 Nor did he dream, in his blurred loneliness 
 Of thought, what all the rest might think of him. 
 
 For it had come at last, and she was gone 
 With all the vanished women of old time, 
 And she was never coming back again. 
 Yes, they had buried her that afternoon, 
 Under the frozen leaves and the cold earth, 
 Under the leaves and snow. The flickering 
 
 week, 
 
 The sharp and certain day, and the long drowse 
 Were over, and the man was left alone. 
 He knew the loss Therefore it puzzled him 
 That he should sit so long there as he did, 
 And bring the whole thing back the love, the 
 
 trust, 
 The pallor, the poor face, and the faint way 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 131 
 
 She last had looked at him and yet not weep, 
 Or even choose to look about the room 
 To see how sad it was ; and once or twice 
 He winked and pinched his eyes against the flame 
 And hoped there might be tears. But hope was 
 
 all, 
 
 And all to him was nothing : he was lost. 
 And yet he was not lost : he was astray 
 Out of his life and in another life ; 
 And in the stillness of this other life 
 He wondered and he drowsed. He wondered 
 
 when 
 
 It was, and wondered if it ever was 
 On earth that he had known the other face 
 The searching face, the eloquent, strange face 
 That with a sightless beauty looked at him 
 And with a speechless promise uttered words 
 That were not the world s words, or any kind 
 That he had known before. What was it, then ? 
 What was it held him fascinated him ? 
 Why should he not be human ? He could sigh, 
 And he could even groan, but what of that ? 
 There was no grief left in him. Was he glad ? 
 
 Yet how could he be glad, or reconciled, 
 Or anything but wretched and undone ? 
 How could he be so frigid and inert 
 
132 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 So like a man with water in his veins 
 Where blood had been a little while before ? 
 How could he sit shut in there like a snail ? 
 What ailed him ? What was on him ? Was he 
 
 glad ? 
 
 Over and over again the question came, 
 Unanswered and unchanged, and there he was. 
 But what in heaven s name did it all mean ? 
 If he had lived as other men had lived, 
 If home had ever shown itself to be 
 The counterfeit that others had called home, 
 Then to this undivined resource of his 
 There were some key ; but now . . . Philo 
 sophy ? 
 
 Yes, he could reason in a kind of way 
 That he was glad for Miriam s release 
 Much as he might be glad to see his friends 
 Laid out around him with their grave-clothes on, 
 And this life done for them ; but something else 
 There was that foundered reason, overwhelmed 
 
 it, 
 
 And with a chilled, intuitive rebuff 
 Beat back the self-cajoling sophistries 
 That his half-tutored thought would half-project. 
 
 What was it, then ? Had he become transformed 
 And hardened through long watches and long 
 grief 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 133 
 
 Into a loveless, feelingless dead thing 
 That brooded like a man, breathed like a man, 
 Did everything but ache ? And was a day 
 To come some time when feeling should return 
 Forever to drive off that other face 
 The lineless, indistinguishable face 
 That once had thrilled itself between his own 
 And hers there on the pillow, and again 
 Between him and the coffin-lid had flashed 
 Like fate before it closed, and at the last 
 Had come, as it should seem, to stay with him, 
 Bidden or not ? He were a stranger then, 
 Foredrowsed awhile by some deceiving draught 
 Of poppied anguish, to the covert grief 
 And the stark loneliness that waited him, 
 And for the time were cursedly endowed 
 With a dull trust that shammed indifference 
 To knowing there would be no touch again 
 Of her small hand on his, no silencing 
 Of her quick lips on his, no feminine 
 Completeness and love-fragrance in the house, 
 No sound of some one singing any more, 
 No smoothing of slow fingers on his hair, 
 No shimmer of pink slippers on brown tiles. 
 
 But there was nothing, nothing, in all that : 
 He had not fooled himself so much as that ; 
 
i 3 4 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 He might be dreaming or he might be sick, 
 But not like that. There was no place for fear, 
 No reason for remorse. There was the book 
 That he had made, though. ... It might be the 
 
 book ; 
 
 Perhaps he might find something in the book ; 
 But no, there could be nothing there at all 
 He knew it word for word ; but what it meant - 
 He was not sure that he had written it 
 For what it meant ; and he was not quite sure 
 That he had written it ; more likely it 
 Was all a paper ghost. . . . But the dead wife 
 Was real : he knew that, for he had been 
 To see them bury her ; and he had seen 
 The flowers and the snow and the stripped limbs 
 Of trees ; and he had heard the preacher pray ; 
 And he was back again, and he was glad. 
 Was he a brute ? No, he was not a brute : 
 He was a man like any other man : 
 He had loved and married his wife Miriam, 
 They had lived a little while in paradise 
 And she was gone ; and that was all of it. 
 
 But no, not all of it not all of it : 
 
 There was the book again ; something in that 
 
 Pursued him, overpowered him, put out 
 
 The futile strength of all his whys and wheres, 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 135 
 
 And left him unintelligibly numb 
 
 Too numb to care for anything but rest. 
 
 It must have been a curious kind of book 
 
 That he had made : it was a drowsy book 
 
 At any rate. The very thought of it 
 
 Was like the taste of some impossible drink 
 
 A taste that had no taste, but for all that 
 
 Had mixed with it a strange thought-cordial, 
 
 So potent that it somehow killed in him 
 
 The ultimate need of doubting any more 
 
 Of asking any more. Did he but live 
 
 The life that he must live, there were no more 
 
 To seek. The rest of it was on the way. 
 
 Still there was nothing, nothing, in all this 
 Nothing that he cared now to reconcile 
 With reason or with sorrow. All he knew 
 For certain was that he was tired out : 
 His flesh was heavy and his blood beat small ; 
 Something supreme had been wrenched out of him 
 As if to make vague room for something else. 
 He had been through too much. Yes, he would 
 
 stay 
 There where he was and rest. And there he 
 
 stayed ; 
 
 The daylight became twilight, and he stayed 5 
 The flame and the face faded, and he slept. 
 
136 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 And they had buried her that afternoon, 
 Under the tight-screwed lid of a long box, 
 Under the earth, under the leaves and snow. 
 
 II DAMARIS 
 
 Look where she would, feed conscience how she 
 
 might, 
 
 There was but one way now for Damaris 
 One straight way that was hers, hers to defend, 
 At hand, imperious. But the nearness of it, 
 The flesh-bewildering simplicity, 
 And the plain strangeness of it, thrilled again 
 That wretched little quivering single string 
 Which yielded not, but held her to the place 
 Where now for five triumphant years had slept 
 The flameless dust of Argan. He was gone, 
 The good man she had married long ago ; 
 And she had lived, and living she had learned, 
 And surely there was nothing to regret : 
 Much happiness had been for each of them, 
 And they had been like lovers to the last : 
 And after that, and long, long after that, 
 Her tears had washed out more of widowed grief 
 Than smiles had ever told of other joy. 
 But could she, looking back, find anything 
 That should return to her in the new time, 
 And with relentless magic uncreate 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 137 
 
 This temple of new love where she had thrown 
 Dead sorrow on the altar of new life ? 
 Only one thing, only one thread was left ; 
 When she broke that, when reason snapped it 
 
 off, 
 
 And once for all, baffled, the grave let go 
 The trivial hideous hold it had on her, 
 Then she were free, free to be what she would, 
 Free to be what she was. And yet she stayed, 
 Leashed, as it were, and with a cobweb strand, 
 Close to a tombstone maybe to starve there. 
 
 But why to starve ? And why stay there at all ? 
 Why not make one good leap and then be done 
 Forever and at once with Argan s ghost 
 And all such outworn churchyard servitude ? 
 For it was Argan s ghost that held the string, 
 And her sick fancy that held Argan s ghost 
 Held it and pitied it. She laughed, almost, 
 There for the moment ; but her strained eyes 
 
 filled 
 
 With tears, and she was angry for those tears 
 Angry at first, then proud, then sorry for them. 
 So she grew calm ; and after a vain chase 
 For thoughts more vain, she questioned of her 
 self 
 What measure of primeval doubts and fears 
 
138 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 Were still to be gone through that she might win 
 Persuasion of her strength and of herself 
 To be what she could see that she must be, 
 No matter where the ghost was. And the 
 
 more 
 
 She lived, the more she came to recognize 
 That something out of her thrilled ignorance 
 Was luminously, proudly being born, 
 And thereby proving, thought by forward thought 
 The prowess of its image ; and she learned 
 At length to look right on to the long days 
 Before her without fearing. She could watch 
 The coming course of them as if they were 
 No more than birds, that slowly, silently, 
 And irretrievably should wing themselves 
 Uncounted out of sight. And when he came 
 Again she should be free she would be free. 
 Else, when he looked at her she must look down, 
 Defeated, and malignly dispossessed 
 Of what was hers to prove and in the proving 
 Wisely to consecrate. And if the plague 
 Of that perverse defeat should come to be 
 If at that sickening end she were to find 
 Herself to be the same poor prisoner 
 That he had found at first then she must lose 
 All sight and sound of him, she must abjure 
 All possible thought of him ; for he would go 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 139 
 
 So far and for so long from her that love 
 Even a love like his, exiled enough, 
 Might for another s touch be born again 
 Born to be lost and starved for and not found ; 
 Or, at the next, the second wretchedest, 
 It might go mutely flickering down and out, 
 And on some incomplete and piteous day, 
 Some perilous day to come, she might at last 
 Learn, with a noxious freedom, what it is 
 To be at peace with ghosts. Then were the blow 
 Thrice deadlier than any kind of death 
 Could ever be : to know that she had won 
 The truth too late there were the dregs in 
 deed 
 
 Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust 
 Unmerciful ; and there where now did lie 
 So plain before her the straight radiance 
 Of what was her appointed way to take, 
 Were only the bleak ruts of an old road 
 That stretched ahead and faded and lay far 
 Through deserts of unconscionable years. 
 
 But vampire thoughts like these confessed the 
 
 doubt 
 
 That love denied ; and once, if never again, 
 They should be turned away. They might 
 
 come back 
 
I 4 o THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 More craftily, perchance, they might come 
 
 back 
 
 And with a spirit-thirst insatiable 
 Finish the strength of her ; but now, to-day 
 She would have none of them. She knew that 
 
 love 
 
 Was true, that he was true, that she was true ; 
 And should a death-bed snare that she had made 
 So long ago be stretched inexorably 
 Through all her life, only to be unspun 
 With her last breathing ? And were bats and 
 
 threads, 
 
 Accursedly devised with watered gules, 
 To be Love s heraldry ? What were it worth 
 To live and to find out that life were life 
 But for an unrequited incubus 
 Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown 
 
 down 
 
 Till she had thrown down fear and overcome 
 The woman that was yet so much of her 
 That she might yet go mad ? What were it 
 
 worth 
 
 To live, to linger, and to be condemned 
 In her submission to a common thought 
 That clogged itself and made of its first faith 
 Its last impediment ? What augured it, 
 Now in this quick beginning of new life, 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 141 
 
 To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back, 
 Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness, 
 To touch, not knowing why, the vexed-up ghost 
 Of what was gone? 
 
 Yes, there was Argan s face, 
 Pallid and pinched and ruinously marked 
 With big pathetic bones; there were his eyes, 
 Quiet and large, fixed wistfully on hers ; 
 And there, close-pressed again within her own, 
 Quivered his cold thin fingers. And, ah ! yes, 
 There were the words, those dying words again, 
 And hers that answered when she promised him. 
 Promised him ? . . . yes. And had she known 
 
 the truth 
 
 Of what she felt that he should ask her that, 
 And had she known the love that was to be, 
 God knew that she could not have told him then. 
 But then she knew it not, nor thought of it ; 
 There was no need of it ; nor was there need 
 Of any problematical support 
 Whereto to cling while she convinced herself 
 That love s intuitive utility, 
 Inexorably merciful, had proved 
 That what was human was unpermanent 
 And what was flesh was ashes. She had told 
 Him then that she would love no other man, 
 
142 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 That there was not another man on earth 
 Whom she could ever love, or who could make 
 So much as a love thought go through her brain ; 
 And he had smiled. And just before he died 
 His lips had made as if to say something 
 Something that passed unwhispered with his 
 
 breath, 
 
 Out of her reach, out of all quest of it. 
 And then, could she have known enough to know 
 The meaning of her grief, the folly of it, 
 The faithlessness and the proud anguish of it, 
 There might be now no threads to punish her, 
 No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood, 
 The life, the very soul of her. 
 
 Yes, Yes, 
 They might come back. . . . But why should 
 
 they come back ? 
 
 Why was it she had suffered ? Why had she 
 Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate 
 That close without those hovering clouds of 
 
 gloom 
 
 And through them here and there forever gleamed 
 The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory, 
 Which was of its own radiance good proof 
 That all the rest was darkness and blind sight ? 
 And who was she ? The woman she had 
 
 known 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 143 
 
 The woman she had petted and called " I " 
 
 The woman she had pitied, and at last 
 
 Commiserated for the most abject 
 
 And persecuted of all womankind, 
 
 Could it be she that had sought out the way 
 
 To measure and thereby to quench in her 
 
 The woman s fear the fear of her not fearing ? 
 
 A nervous little laugh that lost itself, 
 
 Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts 
 
 An instant there that ever she should ask 
 
 What she might then have told so easily 
 
 So easily that Annandale had frowned, 
 Had he been given wholly to be told 
 The truth of what had never been before 
 So passionately, so inevitably 
 Confessed. 
 
 For she could see from where she sat 
 The sheets that he had bound up like a book 
 And covered with red leather ; and her eyes 
 Could see between the pages of the book, 
 Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And 
 
 she could read 
 As well as if she had them in her hand, 
 
 What he had written on them long ago, 
 
 Six years ago, when he was waiting for her. 
 She might as well have said that she could see 
 The man himself, as once he would have looked 
 
i 4 4 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 Had she been there to watch him while he wrote 
 Those words, and all for her. . . . For her 
 
 whose face 
 
 Had flashed itself, prophetic and unseen, 
 But not unspirited, between the life 
 That would have been without her and the life 
 That he had gathered up like frozen roots 
 Out of a grave-clod lying at his feet, 
 Unconsciously, and as unconsciously 
 Transplanted and revived. He did not know 
 The kind of life that he had found, nor did 
 He doubt, not knowing it ; but well he knew 
 That it was life new life, and that the old 
 Might then with unimprisoned wings go free, 
 Onward and all along to its own light, 
 Through the appointed shadow. 
 
 While she gazed 
 
 Upon it there she felt within herself 
 The growing of a newer consciousness 
 The pride of something fairer than her first 
 Outclamoring of interdicted thought 
 Had ever quite foretold ; and all at once 
 There quivered and requivered through her flesh, 
 Like music, like the sound of an old song, 
 Triumphant, love-remembered murmurings 
 Of what for passion s innocence had been 
 Too mightily, too perilously hers, 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 145 
 
 Ever to be reclaimed and realized 
 Until to-day. To-day she could throw off 
 The burden that had held her down so long, 
 And she could stand upright, and she could see 
 The way to take, with eyes that had in them 
 No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night, 
 No matter ; she could see what was to see 
 All that had been till now shut out from her, 
 The service, the fulfillment, and the truth, 
 And thus the cruel wiseness of it all. 
 
 So Damaris, more like than anything 
 To one long prisoned in a twilight cave 
 With hovering bats for all companionship, 
 And after time set free to fight the sun, 
 Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize 
 The test of what had been, through all her folly, 
 The courage of her conscience ; for she knew, 
 Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon 
 That else had been too bodeful of dead things 
 To be endured with aught but the same old 
 Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom 
 Which she had known so long, that she could 
 
 look 
 
 Right forward through the years, nor any more 
 Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold 
 The glitter of dead summer on the grass, 
 
1 46 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees 
 Across the intervale where flashed along, 
 Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found, 
 As if by some transcendent freakishness 
 Of reason, the glad life that she had sought 
 Where naught but obvious clouds could ever 
 
 be- 
 Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes, 
 And to put out the love-light from her soul. 
 But they were gone now they were all gone ; 
 And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist 
 Of grief that clings to new-found happiness 
 Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small 
 Defeated quest of them that brushed her sight 
 Like flying lint lint that had once been 
 
 thread. . . . 
 
 Yes, like an anodyne, the voice of him, 
 There were the words that he had made for her, 
 For her alone. The more she thought of them 
 The more she lived them, and the more she 
 
 knew 
 The life-grip and the pulse of warm strength in 
 
 them. 
 
 They were the first and last of words to her, 
 And there was in them a far questioning 
 That had for long been variously at work, 
 
THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 147 
 
 Divinely and elusively at work, 
 
 With her, and with the grave that had been 
 
 hers ; 
 
 They were eternal words, and they diffused 
 A flame of meaning that men s lexicons 
 Had never kindled ; they were choral words 
 That harmonized with love s enduring chords 
 Like wisdom with release ; triumphant words 
 That rang like elemental orisons 
 Through ages out of ages ; words that fed 
 Love s hunger in the spirit ; words that smote ; 
 Thrilled words that echoed, and barbed words 
 
 that clung ; 
 
 And every one of them was like a friend 
 Whose obstinate fidelity, well tried, 
 Had found at last and irresistibly 
 The way to her close conscience, and thereby 
 Revealed the unsubstantial Nemesis 
 That she had clutched and shuddered at so long; 
 And every one of them was like a real 
 And ringing voice, clear toned and absolute, 
 But of a love-subdued authority 
 That uttered thrice the plain significance 
 Of what had else been generously vague 
 And indolently true. It may have been 
 The triumph and the magic of the soul, 
 Unspeakably revealed, that finally 
 
148 THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 
 
 Had reconciled the grim probationing 
 
 Of wisdom with unalterable faith, 
 
 But she could feel not knowing what it was, 
 
 For the sheer freedom of it a new joy 
 
 That humanized the latent wizardry 
 
 Of his prophetic voice and put for it 
 
 The man within the music. 
 
 So it came 
 
 To pass, like many a long-compelled emprise 
 That with its first accomplishment almost 
 Annihilates its own severity, 
 That she could find, whenever she might look, 
 The certified achievement of a love 
 That had endured, self-guarded and supreme, 
 To the glad end of all that wavering ; 
 And she could see that now the flickering world 
 Of autumn was awake with sudden bloom, 
 New-born, perforce, of a slow bourgeoning. 
 And she had found what more than half had 
 
 been 
 
 The grave-deluded, flesh-bewildered fear 
 Which men and women struggle to call faith, 
 To be the paid progression to an end 
 Whereat she knew the foresight and the strength 
 To glorify the gift of what was hers, 
 To vindicate the truth of what she was. 
 
THE BOOK OF ANN AND ALE 149 
 
 And had it come to her so suddenly ? 
 
 There was a pity and a weariness 
 
 In asking that, and a great needlessness ; 
 
 For now there were no wretched quivering 
 
 strings 
 
 That held her to the churchyard any more : 
 There were no thoughts that flapped themselves 
 
 like bats 
 
 Around her any more. The shield of love 
 Was clean, and she had paid enough to learn 
 How it had always been so. And the truth, 
 Like silence after some far victory, 
 Had come to her, and she had found it out 
 As if it were a vision, a thing born 
 So suddenly ! just as a flower is born, 
 Or as a world is born so suddenly. 
 
SAINTE-NITOUCHE 
 
 THOUGH not for common praise of him, 
 
 Nor yet for pride or charity, 
 Still would I make to Vanderberg 
 
 One tribute for his memory : 
 
 One honest warrant of a friend 
 
 Who found with him that flesh was grass 
 Who neither blamed him in defect 
 
 Nor marveled how it came to pass ; 
 
 Or why it ever was that he 
 
 That Vanderberg, of all good men, 
 
 Should lose himself to find himself, 
 Straightway to lose himself again. 
 
 For we had buried Sainte-Nitouche, 
 And he had said to me that night : 
 
 " Yes, we have laid her in the earth, 
 
 But what of that ? " And he was right. 
 
 And he had said : u We have a wife, 
 We have a child, we have a church; 
 
S AINTE-NITOUCHE 1 5 1 
 
 *T would be a scurrilous way out 
 
 If we should leave them in the lurch. 
 
 " That s why I have you here with me 
 To-night : you know a talk may take 
 
 The place of bromide, cyanide, 
 Et cetera. For heaven s sake, 
 
 " Why do you look at me like that ? 
 
 What have I done to freeze you so ? 
 Dear man, you see where friendship means 
 
 A few things yet that you don t know ; 
 
 " And you see partly why it is 
 
 That I am glad for what is gone : 
 For Sainte-Nitouche and for the world 
 
 In me that followed. What lives on 
 
 " Well, here you have it : here at home 
 
 For even home will yet return. 
 You know the truth is on my side, 
 
 And that will make the embers burn. 
 
 " I see them brighten while I speak, 
 I see them flash, and they are mine ! 
 
 You do not know them, but I do : 
 I know the way they used to shine. 
 
1 52 SAINTE-NITOUCHE 
 
 " And I know more than I have told 
 
 Of other life that is to be : 
 I shall have earned it when it comes, 
 
 And when it comes I shall be free. 
 
 u Not as I was before she came 
 
 But farther on for having been 
 The servitor, the slave of her 
 
 The fool, you think. But there s your sin 
 
 <l Forgive me ! and your ignorance : 
 Could you but have the vision here 
 
 That I have, you would understand 
 As I do that all ways are clear 
 
 " For those who dare to follow them 
 With earnest eyes and honest feet. 
 
 But Sainte-Nitouche has made the way 
 For me, and I shall find it sweet. 
 
 " Sweet with a bitter sting left ? Yes, 
 Bitter enough, God knows, at first ; 
 
 But there are more steep ways than one 
 To make the best look like the worst ; 
 
 " And here is mine the dark and hard, 
 For me to follow, trust, and hold : 
 
SAINTE-NITOUCHE 1 53 
 
 And worship, so that I may leave 
 No broken story to be told. 
 
 " Therefore I welcome what may come, 
 Glad for the days, the nights, the years."- 
 
 An upward flash of ember-flame 
 Revealed the gladness in his tears. 
 
 " You see them, but you know," said he, 
 
 " Too much to be incredulous : 
 You know the day that makes us wise, 
 
 The moment that makes fools of us. 
 
 u So I shall follow from now on 
 
 The road that she has found for me : 
 
 The dark and starry way that leads 
 Right upward, and eternally. 
 
 " Stumble at first ? I may do that ; 
 
 And I may grope, and hate the night ; 
 But there s a guidance for the man 
 
 Who stumbles upward for the light, 
 
 u And I shall have it all from her, 
 The foam-born child of innocence. 
 
 I feel you smiling while I speak, 
 But that s of little consequence ; 
 
1 54 SAINTE-NITOUCHE 
 
 " For when we learn that we may find 
 The truth where others miss the mark, 
 
 What is it worth for us to know 
 
 That friends are smiling in the dark ? 
 
 " Could we but share the lonely pride 
 Of knowing, all would then be well ; 
 
 But knowledge often writes itself 
 In flaming words we cannot spell. 
 
 " And I, who have my work to do, 
 Look forward ; and I dare to see, 
 
 Far stretching and all mountainous, 
 
 God s pathway through the gloom for me. 
 
 I found so little to say then 
 
 That I said nothing. " Say good-night," 
 Said Vanderberg ; " and when we meet 
 
 To-morrow, tell me I was right. 
 
 u Forget the dozen other things 
 
 That you have not the faith to say; 
 
 For now I know as well as you 
 That you are glad to go away." 
 
 I could have blessed the man for that, 
 And he could read me with a smile : 
 
SAINTE-NITOUCHE 155 
 
 <c You doubt," said he, " but if we live 
 You 11 know me in a little while." 
 
 He lived ; and all as he foretold, 
 
 I knew him better than he thought : 
 
 My fancy did not wholly dig 
 
 The pit where I believed him caught. 
 
 But yet he lived and laughed, and preached, 
 And worked as only players can : 
 
 He scoured the shrine that once was home 
 And kept himself a clergyman. 
 
 The clockwork of his cold routine 
 
 Put friends far off that once were near ; 
 
 The five staccatos in his laugh 
 Were too defensive and too clear ; 
 
 The glacial sermons that he preached 
 
 Were longer than they should have been ; 
 
 And, like the man who fashioned them, 
 The best were too divinely thin. 
 
 But still he lived, and moved, and had 
 
 The sort of being that was his, 
 Till on a day the shrine of home 
 
 For him was in the Mysteries : 
 
1 56 SAINTE-NITOUCHE 
 
 " My friend, there s one thing yet," said he, 
 " And one that I have never shared 
 
 With any man that I have met ; 
 
 But you you know me." And he stared 
 
 For a slow moment at me then 
 
 With conscious eyes that had the gleam, 
 
 The shine, before the stroke : " You know 
 The ways of us, the way we dream : 
 
 u You know the glory we have won, 
 You know the glamour we have lost ; 
 
 You see me now, you look at me, 
 And yes, you pity me, almost ; 
 
 " But never mind the pity no, 
 
 Confess the faith you can t conceal ; 
 
 And if you frown, be not like one 
 Of those who frown before they feel. 
 
 " For there is truth, and half truth, yes, 
 And there s a quarter truth, no doubt ; 
 
 But mine was more than half. . . . You smile ? 
 You understand ? You bear me out ? 
 
 " You always knew that I was right 
 You are my friend and I have tried 
 
SAINTE-NITOUCHE 1 57 
 
 Your faith your love." The gleam grew 
 
 small, 
 The stroke was easy, and he died. 
 
 I saw the dim look change itself 
 
 To one that never will be dim ; 
 I saw the dead flesh to the grave, 
 
 But that was not the last of him. 
 
 For what was his to live lives yet : 
 
 Truth, quarter truth, death cannot reach ; 
 
 Nor is it always what we know 
 That we are fittest here to teach. 
 
 The fight goes on when fields are still, 
 The triumph clings when arms are down ; 
 
 The jewels of all coronets 
 
 Are pebbles of the unseen crown ; 
 
 The specious weight of loud reproof 
 Sinks where a still conviction floats ; 
 
 And on God s ocean after storm 
 
 Time s wreckage is half pilot-boats ; 
 
 And what wet faces wash to sight 
 
 Thereafter feed the common moan ; 
 
 But Vanderberg no pilot had, 
 
 Nor could have : he was all alone. 
 
1 5 8 SAINTE-NITOUCHE 
 
 Unchallenged by the larger light 
 The starry quest was his to make ; 
 
 And ot all ways that are for men, 
 The starry way was his to take. 
 
 We grant him idle names enough 
 To-day, but even while we frown 
 
 The fight goes on, the triumph clings, 
 And there is yet the unseen crown. 
 
 But was it his ? Did Vanderberg 
 Find half truth to be passion s thrall, 
 
 Or as we met him day by day, 
 Was love triumphant, after all ? 
 
 I do not know so much as that ; 
 
 I only know that he died right : 
 Saint Anthony nor Sainte-Nitouche 
 
 Had ever smiled as he did quite. 
 
AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 
 
 ALCESTIS 
 
 SHALL I never make him look at me again ? 
 I look at him, I look my life at him, 
 I tell him all I know the way to tell, 
 But there he stays the same. 
 
 Shall I never make him speak one word to me ? 
 Shall I never make him say enough to show 
 My heart if he be glad ? Be glad ? . . . ah ! 
 
 God, 
 Why did they bring me back ? 
 
 I wonder, if I go to him again, 
 If I take him by those two cold hands again, 
 Shall I get one look of him at last, or feel 
 One sign or anything ? 
 
 Or will he still sit there in the same way, 
 Without an answer for me from his lips, 
 Or from his eyes, or even with a touch 
 Of his hand on my hand ? . . . 
 
160 AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 
 
 " Will you look down this once look down at 
 
 me ? 
 
 Speak once and if you never speak again, 
 Tell me enough tell me enough to make 
 Me know that you are glad ! 
 
 " You are my King, and once my King would 
 
 speak : 
 
 You were Admetus once, you loved me once : 
 Life was a dream of heaven for us once 
 And has the dream gone by ? 
 
 " Do I cling to shadows when I call you Life ? 
 Do you love me still, or are the shadows all ? 
 Or is it I that love you in the grave, 
 And you that mourn for me ? 
 
 " If it be that, then do not mourn for me ; 
 Be glad that I have loved you, and be King. 
 But if it be not that if it be true . . . 
 Tell me if it be true ! " 
 
 Then with a choking answer the King spoke 5 
 But never touched his hand on hers, or fixed 
 His eyes on hers, or on the face of her : 
 " Yes, it is true," he said. 
 
AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 161 
 
 " You are ajive, and you are with me now 5 
 And you are reaching up to me that I 
 That I may take you I that am a King 
 I that was once a man." 
 
 So then she knew. She might have known before ; 
 Truly, she thought, she must have known it long 
 Before : she must have known it when she came 
 From that great sleep of hers. 
 
 She knew the truth, but not yet all of it : 
 He loved her, but he would not let his eyes 
 Prove that he loved her ; and he would not hold 
 His wife there in his arms. 
 
 So, like a slave, she waited at his knees, 
 And waited. She was not unhappy now. 
 She quivered, but she knew that he would speak 
 Again and he did speak. 
 
 And while she felt the tremor of his words, 
 He told her all there was for him to tell ; 
 And then he turned his face to meet her face, 
 That she might look at him. 
 
 She looked ; and all her trust was in that look, 
 And all her faith was in it, and her love ; 
 
1 62 AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 
 
 And when his answer to that look came back, 
 It flashed back through his tears. 
 
 So then she put her arms around his neck, 
 And kissed him on his forehead and his lips ; 
 And there she clung, fast in his arms again, 
 Triumphant, with closed eyes. 
 
 At last, half whispering, she spoke once more : 
 " Why was it that you suffered for so long ? 
 Why could you not believe me trust in me ? 
 Was I so strange as that ? 
 
 " We suffer when we do not understand ; 
 
 And you have suffered you that love me 
 
 now 
 
 Because you are a man. . . . There is one thing 
 No man can understand. 
 
 " I would have given everything ? gone down 
 
 To Tartarus to silence ? Was it that ? 
 
 I would have died ? I would have let you 
 
 live? 
 And was it very strange ? " 
 
(THE CORRIDORl 
 
 IT may have been the pride in me for aught 
 I know, or just a patronizing whim ; 
 But call it freak or fancy, or what not, 
 I cannot hide that hungry face of him. 
 
 I keep a scant half-dozen words he said, 
 And every now and then I lose his name; 
 He may be living or he may be dead, 
 But I must have him with me all the same. 
 
 I knew it, and I knew it all along, 
 And felt it once or twice, or thought I did ; 
 But only as a glad man feels a song 
 That sounds around a stranger s coffin lid. 
 
 I knew it, and he knew it, I believe, 
 But silence held us alien to the end ; 
 And I have now no magic to retrieve 
 That year, to stop that hunger for a friend. 
 
CORTEGE 
 
 FOUR o clock this afternoon, 
 Fifteen hundred miles away : 
 So it goes, the crazy tune, 
 So it pounds and hums all day. 
 
 Four o clock this afternoon, 
 Earth will hide them far away : 
 Best they go to go so soon, 
 Best for them the grave to-day. 
 
 Had she gone but half so soon, 
 Half the world had passed away. 
 Four o clock this afternoon, 
 Best for them they go to-day. 
 
 Four o clock this afternoon 
 Love will hide them deep, they say ; 
 Love that made the grave so soon, 
 Fifteen hundred miles away. 
 
 Four o clock this afternoon 
 Ah, but they go slow to-day : 
 

 CORTEGE 165 
 
 Slow to suit my crazy tune, 
 Past the need of all we say. 
 
 Best it came to come so soon, 
 Best for them they go to-day : 
 Four o clock this afternoon, 
 Fifteen hundred miles away. 
 
THE WIFE OF PALISSY 
 
 YES, you have it ; I can see. 
 Beautiful ? . . . Dear, look at me ! 
 Look and let my shame confess 
 Triumph after weariness. 
 Beautiful ? Ah, yes. 
 
 Lift it where the beams are bright ; 
 Hold it where the western light, 
 Shining in above my bed, 
 Throws a glory on your head, 
 Now it is all said. 
 
 All there was for me to say 
 From the first until to-day. 
 Long denied and long deferred, 
 Now I say it in one word 
 Now ; and you have heard. 
 
 Life would have its way with us, 
 And I ve called it glorious : 
 For I know the glory now 
 
THE WIFE OF PALISSY 167 
 
 And I read it on your brow. 
 You have shown me how. 
 
 I can feel your cheeks all wet, 
 But your eyes will not forget : 
 In the frown you cannot hide 
 I can read where faith and pride 
 Are not satisfied. 
 
 But the word was, two should live : 
 Two should suffer and forgive : 
 By the steep and weary way, 
 For the glory of the clay, 
 Two should have their day. 
 
 We have toiled and we have wept 
 For the gift the gods have kept : 
 Clashing and unreconciled 
 When we might as well have smiled, 
 We have played the child. 
 
 But the clashing is all past, 
 And the gift is yours at last. 
 Lift it hold it high again ! . . . 
 Did I doubt you now and then ? 
 Well, we are not men. 
 
1 68 THE WIFE OF PALISSY 
 
 Never mind ; we know the way, 
 And I do not need to stay. 
 Let us have it well confessed : 
 You to triumph, I to rest. 
 That will be the best. 
 
TWILIGHT SONG 
 
 THROUGH the shine, through the rain 
 We have shared the day s load; 
 To the old march again 
 We have tramped the long road ; 
 We have laughed, we have cried, 
 And we ve tossed the King s crown ; 
 We have fought, we have died, 
 And we ve trod the day down. 
 So it s lift the old song 
 Ere the night flies again, 
 Where the road leads along 
 Through the shine, through the rain. 
 
 Long ago, far away, 
 Came a sign from the skies ; 
 And we feared then to pray 
 For the new sun to rise : 
 With the King there at hand, 
 Not a child stepped or stirred 
 Where the light filled the land 
 
i;o TWILIGHT SONG 
 
 And the light brought the word ; 
 For we knew then the gleam 
 Though we feared then the day, 
 And the dawn smote the dream 
 Long ago, far away. 
 
 But the road leads us all, 
 For the King now is dead ; 
 And we know, stand or fall, 
 We have shared the day s bread. 
 We can laugh down the dream, 
 For the dream breaks and flies ; 
 And we trust now the gleam, 
 For the gleam never dies ; 
 So it s off now the load, 
 For we know the night s call, 
 And we know now the road 
 And the road leads us all. 
 
 Through the shine, through the rain, 
 We have wrought the day s quest ; 
 To the old march again 
 We have earned the day s rest ; 
 We have laughed, we have cried, 
 And we ve heard the King s groans ; 
 We have fought, we have died, 
 And we ve burned the King s bones, 
 
TWILIGHT SONG 171 
 
 And we lift the old song 
 Ere the night flies again, 
 Where the road leads along 
 Through the shine, through the rain. 
 
fctoetfibe 
 
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 Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 
 
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