Part 4

“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, 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 And 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, You 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. “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: ’Tis 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 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 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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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