#By Luke Mellows#
Sometimes at night within a wooded park
Like an ocean cavern, fathoms deep in bloom,
Sweet scents, like hymns, from hidden flowers fume,
And make the wanderer happy, though the dark
Obscures their tint, their name, their shapely bloom.
So, in the thick-set chronicles of fame,
There hover deathless feats of souls unknown.
They linger like the fragrant smoke wreaths blown
From liberal sacrifice. Gone face and name;
The deeds, like homeless ghosts, live on alone.
Wixon, seated in the boat on Avon and lost in such dusk that he could
hardly see his hand upon the idle oar, recited the poem softly to
himself, intoning it in the deep voice one saves for poetry. It sounded
wonderful to him in the luxury of hearing his own voice upon the water
and indulging his own memory. The somber mood was perfect, in accord
with the realm of shadow and silence where everything beautiful and
living was cloaked in the general blur.
After he had heard his voice chanting the last long oh's of the final
verse, he was ashamed of his solemnity, and terrified lest some one
might have heard him and accounted him insane. He laughed at himself
for a sentimental fool.
He laughed too as he remembered what a letter of praise he had dictated
to his astonished stenographer and fired off at Luke Mellows; and at the
flippant letter he had in return.
Lay readers who send incandescent epistles to poets are apt to receive
answers in sardonic prose. The poet lies a little, perhaps, in a very
sane suspicion of his own transcendencies.
Luke Mellows had written:
"#Dear Old Joel#:
"I sure am much obliged for your mighty handsome letter. Coming to
one of the least successful wool-gatherers in the world from one of
the most successful wool distributors, it deserves to be highly
prized. And is. I will have it framed and handed down to my heirs,
of which there are more than there will ever be looms.
"You ask me to tell you all about myself. It won't take long. When
the Butterly Bottlery went bust, I had no job at all for six
months, so I got married to spite my father. And to please Kit,
whose poor mother ceased to suffer about the same time.
"The poor girl was so used to taking care of a poor old woman who
couldn't be left alone that I became her patient just to keep all
her talents from going to waste.
"The steady flow of children seems to upset the law of supply and
demand, for there is certainly no demand for more of my progeny and
there is no supply for them. But somehow they thrive.
"I am now running my father's store, as the old gentleman had a
stroke and then another. The business is going to pot as rapidly as
you would expect, but I haven't been able to kill it off quite yet.
"Thanks for advising me to go on writing immortal poetry. If I were
immortal, I might, but that fool thing was the result of about ten
years' hard labor. I tried to make a sonnet of it, but I gave up at
the end of the decade and called it whatever it is.
"Your father's paper published it free of charge, and so my income
from my poetry has been one-tenth of nothing per annum. Please
don't urge me to do any more. I really can't afford it.
"The poem was suggested to me by an ancient fit of blues over the
fact that Kit's once-so-beautiful voice would never be heard in
song, and by the fact that her infinite goodnesses will never meet
any recompense or even acknowledgment.
"I was bitter the first five years, but the last five years I began
to feel how rich this dark old world is in good, brave, sweet,
lovable, heartbreakingly beautiful deeds that simply cast a little
fragrance on the dark and are gone. They perfume the night and the
busy daylight dispels them like the morning mists that we used to
watch steaming and vanishing above the old river. The Mississippi
is still here, still rolling along its eternal multitudes of snows
and flowers and fruits and fish and snakes and dead men and boats
and trees.
"They go where they came from, I guess--in and out of nothing and
back again.
"It is a matter of glory to all of us that you are doing so nobly.
Keep it up and give us something to brag about in our obscurity.
Don't worry. We are happy enough in the dark. We have our batlike
sports and our owllike prides, and the full sun would blind us and
lose us our way.
"Kit sends you her love--and blushes as she says it. That is a very
daring word for such shy moles as we are, but I will echo it.
"Yours for old sake's sake. #Luke.#"
Vaguely remembering this letter now Joel inhaled a bit of the merciful
chloroform that deadens the pain of thwarted ambition.
The world was full of men and women like Luke and Kit. Some had given up
great hopes because they were too good to tread others down in their
quest. Some had quenched great talents because they were too fearsome or
too weak or too lazy to feed their lamps with oil and keep them trimmed
and alight. Some had stumbled through life darkly with no gifts of
talent, without even appreciation of the talents of others or of the
flowerlike beauties that star the meadows.
Those were the people he had known. And then there were the people he
had not known, the innumerable caravan that had passed across the earth
while he lived, the inconceivable hosts that had gone before, tribe
after tribe, generation upon generation, nation at the heels of nation,
cycle on era on age, and the backward perpetuity from everlasting unto
everlasting. People, people, peoples--poor souls, until the thronged
stars that make a dust of the Milky Way were a lesser mob.
Here in this graveyard at Stratford lay men who might have overtopped
Shakespeare's glory if they had but "had a mind to." Some of them had
been held in higher esteem in their town. But they were forgotten, their
names leveled with the surface of their fallen tombstones.
Had he not cried out in his own Hamlet: "O God, I could be bounded in a
nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams--which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very
substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream--and I hold
ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's
shadow."
After all, the greatest of men were granted but a lesser oblivion than
the least. And in that overpowering thought there was a strange comfort,
the comfort of misery finding itself in an infinite company.
The night was thick upon Avon. The swans had gone somewhere. The lights
in the houses had a sleepy look. It was time to go to bed.
Joel yawned with the luxury of having wearied his heart with emotion. He
had thought himself out for once. It was good to be tired. He put his
oars into the stream and, dipping up reflected stars, sent them swirling
in a doomsday chaos after him with the defiant revenge of a proud soul
who scorns the universe that grinds him to dust.
The old boatman was surly with waiting. He did not thank the foreigner
for his liberal largeness, and did not answer his good night.
As Wixon left the river and took the road for his hotel, the nightingale
(that forever anonymous nightingale, only one among the millions of
forgotten or throttled songsters) revolted for a moment or two against
the stifling doom and shattered it with a wordless sonnet of fierce and
beautiful protest--"The tawny-throated! What triumph! hark!--what pain!"
It was as if Luke Mellows had suddenly found expression in something
better than words, something that any ear could understand, an ache that
rang.
Wixon stopped, transfixed as by flaming arrows. He could not understand
what the bird meant or what he meant, nor could the bird. But as there
is no laughter that eases the heart like unpacking it of its woes in
something beyond wording, so there is nothing that brightens the eyes
like tears gushing without shame or restraint.
Joel Wixon felt that it was a good, sad, mad world, and that he had been
very close to Shakespeare--so close that he heard things nobody had ever
found the phrases for--things that cannot be said but only felt, and
transmitted rather by experience than by expression from one proud worm
in the mud to another.