A skiff went prowling along the Avon River in the unhurried English
twilight that releases the sunset with reluctance and defers luxuriously
the roll call of the stars.
The skiff floated low, for the man alone in it was heavy and he was in
no greater haste than the northern night. Which was against the
traditions, for he was an American, an American business man.
He was making his way through the sky-hued water stealthily lest he
disturb the leisure of the swans, drowsy above their own images; lest he
discourage the nightingale trying a few low flute notes in the cathedral
tower of shadow that was a tree above the tomb of Shakespeare.
The American had never heard a nightingale and it was his first
pilgrimage to the shrine of the actor-manager whose productions
Americans curiously couple with the Bible as sacred lore.
During the day Joel Wixon had seen the sights of Stratford with the
others from his country and from England and the Continent. But now he
wanted to get close to Shakespeare. So he hired the skiff and declined
the services of the old boat lender.
And now he was stealing up into the rich gloom the church spread across
the river. He was pushing the stern of the boat foremost so that he
could feast his eyes. He was making so little speed that the only sounds
were the choked sob of the water where the boat cleaved it gently and
the tinkle of the drops that fell from the lazy oars with something of
the delicate music of the uncertain nightingale.
Being a successful business man, Wixon was a suffocated poet. The
imagination and the passion and the orderliness that brought him money
were the same energies that would have made him a success in verse. But
lines were not his line, and he was inarticulate and incoherent when
beauty overwhelmed him, as it did in nearly every form.
He shivered now before the immediate majesty of the scene, and the
historic meanings that enriched it as with an embroidered arras. Yet he
gave out no more words than an Æolian harp shuddering with ecstasy in a
wind too gentle to make it audible.
In such moods he hunted solitude, for he was ashamed to be seen, afraid
to be observed in the raptures that did not belong in the vocabulary of
a business man.
He had talked at noon about the fact that he and Shakespeare's father
were in wool, and he had annoyed a few modest Americans by comparing the
petty amount of the elder Shakespeare's trade with the vast total
pouring from his own innumerable looms driven with the electricity that
the Shakespeares had never dreamed of.
He had redeemed himself for his pretended brag by a meek admission:
"But I'm afraid my boy will never write another 'Hamlet.'"
Yet what could he know of his own son? How little Will Shakespeare's
father or his scandalized neighbors could have fancied that the
scapegrace good-for-naught who left the town for the town's good would
make it immortal; and, coming back to die and lie down forever beside
the Avon, would bring a world of pilgrims to a new Mecca, the shrine of
the supreme unique poet of all human time?
A young boy even now was sauntering the path along the other shore, so
lazily tossing pebbles into the stream that the swans hardly protested.
It came upon Wixon with a kind of silent lightning that Shakespeare had
once been such another boy skipping pebbles across the narrow river and
peering up into the trees to find out where the nightingale lurked.
Perhaps three hundred years from now some other shrine would claim the
pilgrims, the home perhaps of some American boy now groping through the
amber mists of adolescence or some man as little revered by his own
neighbors and rivals as the man Shakespeare was when he went back to
Avon to send back to London his two plays a year to the theatres.
Being a practical man, which is a man who strives to make his visions
palpable, Wixon thought of his own home town and the colony of boys that
prospered there in the Middle West.
He knew that no one would seek the town because of his birth there, for
he was but a buyer of fleeces, a carder of wools, a spinner of threads,
and a weaver of fabrics to keep folks' bodies warm. His weaves wore
well, but they wore out.
The weavers of words were the ones whose fabrics lasted beyond the power
of time and mocked the moths. Was there any such spinner in Carthage to
give the town eternal blazon to ears of flesh and blood? There was one
who might have been the man if----
Suddenly he felt himself again in Carthage. There was a river there too;
not a little bolt of chatoyant silk like the Avon, which they would have
called a "crick" back there. Before Carthage ran the incomprehensible
floods of old Mississippi himself, Father of Waters, deep and vast and
swift. They had lately swung a weir across it to make it work--a
concrete wall a mile wide and more, and its tumbling cascades spun no
little mill wheels, but swirled thundering turbines that lighted cities
and ran street cars a hundred miles away.
And yet it had no Shakespeare.