Part 3

“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. 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 Carmichael 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.

“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 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; 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.--‘I was a carpenter,’ I said, ‘But there was nothing in the world to do.’ ‘Nothing?’ said he.--‘No, nothing,’ I replied.-- ‘But are you sure,’ he asked, ‘that you have skill? 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,-- Æneas, Alcibiades, or Jacob. I’ll 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 Æschylus, 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, Implacable, renascent, farcical, Triumphant, and American. He did it, 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, ‘for I might have written Odes.’

“Speaking of odes now makes me think of ballads. Your admirable Mr. Killigrew 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 ‘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), A patron of high science, but no critic. So I shall have to tell him, I suppose, That I read nothing now but Wordsworth, Pope, Lucretius, Robert Burns, and William Shakespeare. Now this is Mr. Killigrew’s performance:

“_‘Say, do you go to London Town, You with the golden feather?’-- ‘And if I go to London Town With my golden feather?’-- ‘These autumn roads are bright and brown, The season wears a russet crown; And if you go to London Town, We’ll 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:

“_‘Yes, I go to London Town’ (Merrily waved the feather), ‘And if you go to London Town, Yes, we’ll 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._

“_‘I go to marry a fair maid’ (Lightly swung the feather)-- ‘Pardie, a true and loyal maid’ (Oh, the swinging feather!)--_ _‘For us the wedding gold is weighed, For us the feast will soon be laid; We’ll 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 continues:

“_‘And you--you go to London Town?’ (Breezes waved the feather)-- ‘Yes, I go to London Town.’ (Ah, the stinging feather!)-- ‘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 fellows with gray hair 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, 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: 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 ’Twould 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.

III

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: 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? 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.”--Cautiously, 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. ‘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 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, “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 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:

“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 you and 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 For sacrifice, too firm for ecstasy, Record in jolly letters or in books 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, Undoubtedly, and earth be fairer for it; Yet none save creatures out of harmony Have ever, in their fealty to the flesh, Made crashing an ideal. It is the flesh 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 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-- Meanwhile you climb; and he climbs best who sees Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall, 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?--

“_‘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.’_

“’Tis 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, 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 patience: