Worthy of more detailed description, however, is the figure of an old,
old man I met about this time, a dignified, venerable and mysterious
being, man of the world, lawyer, musician, scholar, poet, but above
all, exile. Incidentally, he was madman too. What unkindly tricks fate
had played with his fine brain, I never learned with accuracy. It was
but the ruin of a great mind I knew. Pain and suffering of no unusual
order, as I soon discovered, had, at any rate, left his heart as wise
and sweet and gentle as any I have ever known. His voice, his eyes, his
smile, his very gestures, even, had in them all the misery and all the
goodness of the world. Our chance meeting deepened into a friendship,
the intimacy of which between Padre and Figlio--names he himself
assigned respectively--yet never permitted a full account of his own
mysterious past. The little I gathered of his personal history before
he died some dozen years later in England, came to me from patchwork
sources, but none of it from his own lips. What term the alienists
might use to describe the mental disorder of Alfred H. Louis I do not
know.
The first time I saw him he cut a sorry figure; an old fellow in far
worse plight and even worse down at heel than I was myself. It was in
an olive-oil warehouse, at No. 1, Water Street, on the river front.
McKay, the owner, whom I had met through some newspaper story or other,
had converted me to the wisdom of an occasional glass of olive oil. It
was healthful and delicious, but to me its chief value was as food. On
this day of broiling heat I had wandered in for a glass of oil, and,
while waiting a moment for the owner to appear, I noticed an old tramp
seated on a packing-case, gazing at me in penetrating fashion. He was a
Jew, he was very small, his feet were tiny, his hands, I took in, were
beautiful. I thought of Moses, of Abraham, some Biblical prophet come
to life, of some storied being like the Wandering Jew.
His atmosphere, that is, at once sent a message of something unusual
to my imagination. But it was when McKay came in and, to my surprise,
calmly introduced us as fellow Englishmen, that my mind was really
startled--not because the old tramp was English, but because when
he rose to shake my hand, it seemed to me that some great figure of
history rose to address, not me, but the nations of the world. He
reached barely to my shoulder, his face upturned to mine, yet the
feeling came that it was I who looked up into his eyes. The dignity and
power the frail outline conveyed were astonishing. He was a Presence.
And his voice the same instant--though in some commonplace about having
known Lord Dufferin--increased the air of greatness, almost I had said
of majesty, that he wore so naturally. It was not merely cultured,
deep and musical, it vibrated with a peculiar resonance that conveyed
authority beyond anything I have known in any other human voice.
We talked ... _he_ talked, rather ... hunger, thirst, the afflicting
moist heat of the day were all forgotten, New York City was forgotten
too. His words carried me beyond this world, his language in that
astonishing voice wore wings that brought escape. His long frock-coat,
green with age and dirt; his broken boots and frayed trousers; his
shapeless top hat, brushed the wrong way till it looked like a beehive
coated with rough plush; his grimy collar without a tie; the spots upon
his grease-stained waistcoat--all vanished completely. It was, above
all, I think, the poetry in his voice and words that brought the balm
and healing into my whole being. The way his hands moved too. We talked
for several hours, for it was McKay’s nasal interruption, saying he
must close the warehouse, that brought me back to--Water Street.
Recklessly, though with a diffidence as though I were with royalty, I
invited him to dine, but in the cheap Childs’ Eating House where we
“fed,” I soon perceived that I had no reason to feel embarrassed. A cup
of coffee and “sinkers” sufficed him, he took my shyness away, he won
my easy and full confidence; and afterwards--for he refused to let me
go--as we sat, that stifling night, on a bench in Battery Park, tramps
and Wearie Willies our neighbours, but the salt air from the sea in our
nostrils, he used a phrase that, giving me the calibre of his thought,
was too significant ever to be forgotten. I had spoken of my hatred of
the city and of my present circumstances in it. He peered into my face
a moment beneath his dreadful hat, then, raising a beautiful hand by
way of emphasis, his deep voice came to me like some music of the sea
itself:
“No man worth his spiritual salt,” he said with impressive gentleness,
“is ever entangled in locality.” He smiled, and the tenderness of the
voice was in the eyes as well....
The little park emptied gradually, the heated paving-stones lost
something of their furnace breath, the stars were visible overhead
beyond the great arc lights, the parched leaves rustled faintly, and
I spoke to him of poetry. He had lived with Longfellow, he had known
Browning. The poetry of the world was in his soul--Greek, Latin,
German, French, above all, Hebrew. I drank in his words, unaware of the
passing hours. To me it was like finding a well in the desert when I
was dying of thirst. Even the awful city he transfigured. Suddenly his
lean fingers touched my arm, his voice deepened and grew soft, he took
his hat off. “I will say my Night-Song to you now,” he said. “I can
only say it to very, very few. For years I have said it to--no one. But
_you_ shall hear it.”
If there was something in his voice and manner that thrilled me to
the core, the poem he then repeated on that bench in Battery Park at
midnight gave me indescribable sensations of beauty and delight. I
realized I listened to a personal confession that was a revelation of
the mysterious old heart beneath the green frock-coat. It seemed to me
that Night herself spoke through him:
Known only, only to God and the night, and the stars and me!
Prophetic, jubilant Song,
Smiting the rock-bound hours till the waters of life flow free;
And a Soul, on pinion strong,
Flieth afar, and hovers over the infinite sea
Of love and of melody:
_While the blind fates weave their nets
And the world in sleep forgets_.
Known only, only to me and the night, and the stars and God!
Song, from a burning breast,
Of a land of perfected delights which the foot of man ne’er trod,
Like a foaming wine expressed
From passionate fruits that glowed ’mid the boughs of the Eden lost,
Ere sin was born and frost;--
_Song wild with desires and regrets,
While the world in sleep forgets_.
Known only, only to me and God, and the night and the stars!
The beacon fire of song,
Flaming for guidance and hope while the storm-winds wage their wars;
Balm for the ancient wrong,
Dropping from healing wings on the wounds of the heart and brain,
Quenching their ancient pain:
Love-star that rises and sets,
_While the world in sleep forgets_.
Known only, only to God and me, and the stars and the night!
Dove that returns to my ark,
Murmuring of grief-floods falling, of light beyond all light:
Voice that cleaveth the dark,
Singing of earth growing heaven, of distant lands that bless,
Though they may not caress,
And, blessing, pay Love’s old debts,
_While the world in sleep forgets_.
Long before he ended the tears were coursing slowly down his withered
cheeks, and when the last word died away a long silence came between
us, for I could find no words to express the emotion in me. He took my
hand and held it a moment tightly, then presently got up, put on his
old hat again, with the remark that it was time for bed, and followed
me slowly to a Broadway cable car. His small, frail figure seemed to
have dwindled to a child’s shadow as he moved beside me; he had a way
of hunching his thin shoulders that still further dwarfed his height;
I felt myself a giant physically, but in my mind _his_ stature reached
the stars. We exchanged addresses. He lived in 8th Street, a miserable
attic, I learned later, though I never actually entered it. Of his
mental disorder no inkling had then reached me. I watched him melt
into the shadows of the side street with the feeling that I watched
some legendary figure, some ancient prophet, some mysterious priest.
He smiled at me; there was love and blessing in the brilliant eyes.
Then he was gone.... For me, at this time, to meet and talk with such
a man held something of the fabulous. He had set fire to a hundred new
thoughts and left them flaming in me.
It was in this way began a friendship that has always seemed to me
marvellous, and that lasted till his death in England some fifteen
years later. Sweet, patient, resigned and lovable to the end, he died
incurably insane, the charity in him never tainted, the tenderness
unstained, the passionate love of his kind, of beauty, of all that is
lovely and of good report, unspoilt. The grimmest pain had not soured
the natural sweetness in him, his gentle spirit knew no bitterness,
his megalomania, complicated, I believe, with other varieties of
disorder, was harmless and inoffensive. As Padre he still lives in my
memory; as The Old Man of Visions (“The Listener”), he still haunts my
imagination. “You have taken my name away,” he chided me with a smile,
when I published this picture of him. “I am now uncertain who I am.
That is well. I am Anybody I choose to be. I will be Everybody.” He had
rooms in Great Russell Street at the time. Though baptised by Charles
Kingsley into the English Church, he later became a Roman Catholic,
but, when the end came, he reverted to the blood and faith born in him.
He was buried, by his own wish, in a Hebrew cemetery. The epitaph he
so often told me with an ironic smile he had chosen for his own was
not, however, used. Talk, he always declared, vain, excessive talk, lay
at the bottom of every misunderstanding in the world. If people would
talk less, there would be less trouble in life. “Sorry I spoke,” was to
be cut upon one of his tombstones; “Sorry they spoke” upon the other.
A poem he wrote--published, like the Night Song, in _Harper’s
Magazine_--describing death, I have kept all these years. The strange
intensity of expression he put into the passage which begins: “The sand
of my Being is fused and runs ...” lives in my mind to this day. The
title of the poem was “The Final Word”:
Hence then at last! For the strife is past
Of the Birth and Death, of the Self and Soul;
The memory breaks, the breath forsakes,
The waves of the æther o’er me roll.
The pulses cease, and the Hours release
Their wearied school of the nerves and brain;
I fall on the Deep of the Mystic Sleep,
Where the Word that is Life can be heard again.
And the fires descend, and my fragments blend,
And the sand of my Being is fused and runs
To the mould of a glass for the rays to pass
Of the Sun of the centre that rules all suns.
But, or ever I rest, I take from my breast
My blood-drained heart for the tablet white
Of a gospel page to the far-off Age--
O Hand eternal!--Come forth--and write!