On Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer, who had been trying a case in
Vermont, was standing on the siding at White River Junction when the
Canadian Express pulled by on its northward journey. As the day-coaches
at the rear end of the long train swept by him, the lawyer noticed at
one of the windows a man’s head, with thick rumpled hair. “Curious,” he
thought; “that looked like Alexander, but what would he be doing back
there in the daycoaches?”
It was, indeed, Alexander.
That morning a telegram from Moorlock had reached him, telling him that
there was serious trouble with the bridge and that he was needed there
at once, so he had caught the first train out of New York. He had taken
a seat in a day-coach to avoid the risk of meeting any one he knew, and
because he did not wish to be comfortable. When the telegram arrived,
Alexander was at his rooms on Tenth Street, packing his bag to go to
Boston. On Monday night he had written a long letter to his wife, but
when morning came he was afraid to send it, and the letter was still in
his pocket. Winifred was not a woman who could bear disappointment. She
demanded a great deal of herself and of the people she loved; and she
never failed herself. If he told her now, he knew, it would be
irretrievable. There would be no going back. He would lose the thing he
valued most in the world; he would be destroying himself and his own
happiness. There would be nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see
himself dragging out a restless existence on the Continent—Cannes,
Hyères, Algiers, Cairo—among smartly dressed, disabled men of every
nationality; forever going on journeys that led nowhere; hurrying to
catch trains that he might just as well miss; getting up in the morning
with a great bustle and splashing of water, to begin a day that had no
purpose and no meaning; dining late to shorten the night, sleeping late
to shorten the day.
And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade, a little thing that he
could not let go. _And he could even let it go_, he told himself. But
he had promised to be in London at mid-summer, and he knew that he
would go. . . . It was impossible to live like this any longer.
And this, then, was to be the disaster that his old professor had
foreseen for him: the crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust.
And he could not understand how it had come about. He felt that he
himself was unchanged, that he was still there, the same man he had
been five years ago, and that he was sitting stupidly by and letting
some resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for him. This new
force was not he, it was but a part of him. He would not even admit
that it was stronger than he; but it was more active. It was by its
energy that this new feeling got the better of him. His wife was the
woman who had made his life, gratified his pride, given direction to
his tastes and habits. The life they led together seemed to him
beautiful. Winifred still was, as she had always been, Romance for him,
and whenever he was deeply stirred he turned to her. When the grandeur
and beauty of the world challenged him—as it challenges even the most
self-absorbed people—he always answered with her name. That was his
reply to the question put by the mountains and the stars; to all the
spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling for his wife there was all
the tenderness, all the pride, all the devotion of which he was
capable. There was everything but energy; the energy of youth which
must register itself and cut its name before it passes. This new
feeling was so fresh, so unsatisfied and light of foot. It ran and was
not wearied, anticipated him everywhere. It put a girdle round the
earth while he was going from New York to Moorlock. At this moment, it
was tingling through him, exultant, and live as quicksilver,
whispering, “In July you will be in England.”
Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish
coast, the sluggish passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat train
through the summer country. He closed his eyes and gave himself up to
the feeling of rapid motion and to swift, terrifying thoughts. He was
sitting so, his face shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer saw him
from the siding at White River Junction.
When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to
sunset. The train was passing through a gray country and the sky
overhead was flushed with a wide flood of clear color. There was a
rose-colored light over the gray rocks and hills and meadows. Off to
the left, under the approach of a weather-stained wooden bridge, a
group of boys were sitting around a little fire. The smell of the wood
smoke blew in at the window. Except for an old farmer, jogging along
the highroad in his box-wagon, there was not another living creature to
be seen. Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the
edge of a little marsh, crouching under their shelter and looking
gravely at their fire. They took his mind back a long way, to a
campfire on a sandbar in a Western river, and he wished he could go
back and sit down with them. He could remember exactly how the world
had looked then.
It was quite dark and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when it
occurred to him that the train must be nearing Allway. In going to his
new bridge at Moorlock he had always to pass through Allway. The train
stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles up the river, and then
the hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first
bridge again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before,
and he was glad when he felt the beat of the wheels on the solid
roadbed again. He did not like coming and going across that bridge, or
remembering the man who built it. And was he, indeed, the same man who
used to walk that bridge at night, promising such things to himself and
to the stars? And yet, he could remember it all so well: the quiet
hills sleeping in the moonlight, the slender skeleton of the bridge
reaching out into the river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big
white house; upstairs, in Winifred’s window, the light that told him
she was still awake and still thinking of him. And after the light went
out he walked alone, taking the heavens into his confidence, unable to
tear himself away from the white magic of the night, unwilling to sleep
because longing was so sweet to him, and because, for the first time
since first the hills were hung with moonlight, there was a lover in
the world. And always there was the sound of the rushing water
underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death; the
wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which men
could direct but never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation
of love, more than ever it seemed to him to mean death, the only other
thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold, splendid
stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless; death and
love, the rushing river and his burning heart.
Alexander sat up and looked about him. The train was tearing on through
the darkness. All his companions in the day-coach were either dozing or
sleeping heavily, and the murky lamps were turned low. How came he here
among all these dirty people? Why was he going to London? What did it
mean—what was the answer? How could this happen to a man who had lived
through that magical spring and summer, and who had felt that the stars
themselves were but flaming particles in the far-away infinitudes of
his love?
What had he done to lose it? How could he endure the baseness of life
without it? And with every revolution of the wheels beneath him, the
unquiet quicksilver in his breast told him that at midsummer he would
be in London. He remembered his last night there: the red foggy
darkness, the hungry crowds before the theatres, the hand-organs, the
feverish rhythm of the blurred, crowded streets, and the feeling of
letting himself go with the crowd. He shuddered and looked about him at
the poor unconscious companions of his journey, unkempt and
travel-stained, now doubled in unlovely attitudes, who had come to
stand to him for the ugliness he had brought into the world.
And those boys back there, beginning it all just as he had begun it; he
wished he could promise them better luck. Ah, if one could promise any
one better luck, if one could assure a single human being of happiness!
He had thought he could do so, once; and it was thinking of that that
he at last fell asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to
work upon, his mind went back and tortured itself with something years
and years away, an old, long-forgotten sorrow of his childhood.
When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through
pale golden ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating
through the pine woods. The white birches, with their little unfolding
leaves, gleamed in the lowlands, and the marsh meadows were already
coming to life with their first green, a thin, bright color which had
run over them like fire. As the train rushed along the trestles,
thousands of wild birds rose screaming into the light. The sky was
already a pale blue and of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught up
his bag and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he found the
conductor. There was a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it and set
about changing his clothes. Last night he would not have believed that
anything could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over his head
and shoulders and the freshness of clean linen on his body.
After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at the window and drew into
his lungs deep breaths of the pine-scented air. He had awakened with
all his old sense of power. He could not believe that things were as
bad with him as they had seemed last night, that there was no way to
set them entirely right. Even if he went to London at midsummer, what
would that mean except that he was a fool? And he had been a fool
before. That was not the reality of his life. Yet he knew that he would
go to London.
Half an hour later the train stopped at Moorlock. Alexander sprang to
the platform and hurried up the siding, waving to Philip Horton, one of
his assistants, who was anxiously looking up at the windows of the
coaches. Bartley took his arm and they went together into the station
buffet.
“I’ll have my coffee first, Philip. Have you had yours? And now, what
seems to be the matter up here?”
The young man, in a hurried, nervous way, began his explanation.
But Alexander cut him short. “When did you stop work?” he asked
sharply.
The young engineer looked confused. “I haven’t stopped work yet, Mr.
Alexander. I didn’t feel that I could go so far without definite
authorization from you.”
“Then why didn’t you say in your telegram exactly what you thought, and
ask for your authorization? You’d have got it quick enough.”
“Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I couldn’t be absolutely sure, you know,
and I didn’t like to take the responsibility of making it public.”
Alexander pushed back his chair and rose. “Anything I do can be made
public, Phil. You say that you believe the lower chords are showing
strain, and that even the workmen have been talking about it, and yet
you’ve gone on adding weight.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had counted on your getting here
yesterday. My first telegram missed you somehow. I sent one Sunday
evening, to the same address, but it was returned to me.”
“Have you a carriage out there? I must stop to send a wire.”
Alexander went up to the telegraph-desk and penciled the following
message to his wife:—
I may have to be here for some time. Can you come up at once? Urgent.
BARTLEY.
The Moorlock Bridge lay three miles above the town. When they were
seated in the carriage, Alexander began to question his assistant
further. If it were true that the compression members showed strain,
with the bridge only two thirds done, then there was nothing to do but
pull the whole structure down and begin over again. Horton kept
repeating that he was sure there could be nothing wrong with the
estimates.
Alexander grew impatient. “That’s all true, Phil, but we never were
justified in assuming that a scale that was perfectly safe for an
ordinary bridge would work with anything of such length. It’s all very
well on paper, but it remains to be seen whether it can be done in
practice. I should have thrown up the job when they crowded me. It’s
all nonsense to try to do what other engineers are doing when you know
they’re not sound.”
“But just now, when there is such competition,” the younger man
demurred. “And certainly that’s the new line of development.”
Alexander shrugged his shoulders and made no reply.
When they reached the bridge works, Alexander began his examination
immediately. An hour later he sent for the superintendent. “I think you
had better stop work out there at once, Dan. I should say that the
lower chord here might buckle at any moment. I told the Commission that
we were using higher unit stresses than any practice has established,
and we’ve put the dead load at a low estimate. Theoretically it worked
out well enough, but it had never actually been tried.” Alexander put
on his overcoat and took the superintendent by the arm. “Don’t look so
chopfallen, Dan. It’s a jolt, but we’ve got to face it. It isn’t the
end of the world, you know. Now we’ll go out and call the men off
quietly. They’re already nervous, Horton tells me, and there’s no use
alarming them. I’ll go with you, and we’ll send the end riveters in
first.”
Alexander and the superintendent picked their way out slowly over the
long span. They went deliberately, stopping to see what each gang was
doing, as if they were on an ordinary round of inspection. When they
reached the end of the river span, Alexander nodded to the
superintendent, who quietly gave an order to the foreman. The men in
the end gang picked up their tools and, glancing curiously at each
other, started back across the bridge toward the river-bank. Alexander
himself remained standing where they had been working, looking about
him. It was hard to believe, as he looked back over it, that the whole
great span was incurably disabled, was already as good as condemned,
because something was out of line in the lower chord of the cantilever
arm.
The end riveters had reached the bank and were dispersing among the
tool-houses, and the second gang had picked up their tools and were
starting toward the shore. Alexander, still standing at the end of the
river span, saw the lower chord of the cantilever arm give a little,
like an elbow bending. He shouted and ran after the second gang, but by
this time every one knew that the big river span was slowly settling.
There was a burst of shouting that was immediately drowned by the
scream and cracking of tearing iron, as all the tension work began to
pull asunder. Once the chords began to buckle, there were thousands of
tons of ironwork, all riveted together and lying in midair without
support. It tore itself to pieces with roaring and grinding and noises
that were like the shrieks of a steam whistle. There was no shock of
any kind; the bridge had no impetus except from its own weight. It
lurched neither to right nor left, but sank almost in a vertical line,
snapping and breaking and tearing as it went, because no integral part
could bear for an instant the enormous strain loosed upon it. Some of
the men jumped and some ran, trying to make the shore.
At the first shriek of the tearing iron, Alexander jumped from the
downstream side of the bridge. He struck the water without injury and
disappeared. He was under the river a long time and had great
difficulty in holding his breath. When it seemed impossible, and his
chest was about to heave, he thought he heard his wife telling him that
he could hold out a little longer. An instant later his face cleared
the water. For a moment, in the depths of the river, he had realized
what it would mean to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead under the last
abandonment of her tenderness. But once in the light and air, he knew
he should live to tell her and to recover all he had lost. Now, at
last, he felt sure of himself. He was not startled. It seemed to him
that he had been through something of this sort before. There was
nothing horrible about it. This, too, was life, and life was activity,
just as it was in Boston or in London. He was himself, and there was
something to be done; everything seemed perfectly natural. Alexander
was a strong swimmer, but he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes when the
bridge itself, which had been settling faster and faster, crashed into
the water behind him. Immediately the river was full of drowning men. A
gang of French Canadians fell almost on top of him. He thought he had
cleared them, when they began coming up all around him, clutching at
him and at each other. Some of them could swim, but they were either
hurt or crazed with fright. Alexander tried to beat them off, but there
were too many of them. One caught him about the neck, another gripped
him about the middle, and they went down together. When he sank, his
wife seemed to be there in the water beside him, telling him to keep
his head, that if he could hold out the men would drown and release
him. There was something he wanted to tell his wife, but he could not
think clearly for the roaring in his ears. Suddenly he remembered what
it was. He caught his breath, and then she let him go.
The work of recovering the dead went on all day and all the following
night. By the next morning forty-eight bodies had been taken out of the
river, but there were still twenty missing. Many of the men had fallen
with the bridge and were held down under the debris. Early on the
morning of the second day a closed carriage was driven slowly along the
river-bank and stopped a little below the works, where the river boiled
and churned about the great iron carcass which lay in a straight line
two thirds across it. The carriage stood there hour after hour, and
word soon spread among the crowds on the shore that its occupant was
the wife of the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been found. The
widows of the lost workmen, moving up and down the bank with shawls
over their heads, some of them carrying babies, looked at the rusty
hired hack many times that morning. They drew near it and walked about
it, but none of them ventured to peer within. Even half-indifferent
sightseers dropped their voices as they told a newcomer: “You see that
carriage over there? That’s Mrs. Alexander. They haven’t found him yet.
She got off the train this morning. Horton met her. She heard it in
Boston yesterday—heard the newsboys crying it in the street.”
At noon Philip Horton made his way through the crowd with a tray and a
tin coffee-pot from the camp kitchen. When he reached the carriage he
found Mrs. Alexander just as he had left her in the early morning,
leaning forward a little, with her hand on the lowered window, looking
at the river. Hour after hour she had been watching the water, the
lonely, useless stone towers, and the convulsed mass of iron wreckage
over which the angry river continually spat up its yellow foam.
“Those poor women out there, do they blame him very much?” she asked,
as she handed the coffee-cup back to Horton.
“Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander. If any one is to blame, I’m afraid
it’s I. I should have stopped work before he came. He said so as soon
as I met him. I tried to get him here a day earlier, but my telegram
missed him, somehow. He didn’t have time really to explain to me. If
he’d got here Monday, he’d have had all the men off at once. But, you
see, Mrs. Alexander, such a thing never happened before. According to
all human calculations, it simply couldn’t happen.”
Horton leaned wearily against the front wheel of the cab. He had not
had his clothes off for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent
excitement was beginning to wear off.
“Don’t be afraid to tell me the worst, Mr. Horton. Don’t leave me to
the dread of finding out things that people may be saying. If he is
blamed, if he needs any one to speak for him,”—for the first time her
voice broke and a flush of life, tearful, painful, and confused, swept
over her rigid pallor,—“if he needs any one, tell me, show me what to
do.” She began to sob, and Horton hurried away.
When he came back at four o’clock in the afternoon he was carrying his
hat in his hand, and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him that they had
found Bartley. She opened the carriage door before he reached her and
stepped to the ground.
Horton put out his hand as if to hold her back and spoke pleadingly:
“Won’t you drive up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will take him up
there.”
“Take me to him now, please. I shall not make any trouble.”
The group of men down under the riverbank fell back when they saw a
woman coming, and one of them threw a tarpaulin over the stretcher.
They took off their hats and caps as Winifred approached, and although
she had pulled her veil down over her face they did not look up at her.
She was taller than Horton, and some of the men thought she was the
tallest woman they had ever seen. “As tall as himself,” some one
whispered. Horton motioned to the men, and six of them lifted the
stretcher and began to carry it up the embankment. Winifred followed
them the half-mile to Horton’s house. She walked quietly, without once
breaking or stumbling. When the bearers put the stretcher down in
Horton’s spare bedroom, she thanked them and gave her hand to each in
turn. The men went out of the house and through the yard with their
caps in their hands. They were too much confused to say anything as
they went down the hill.
Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. “Mamie,” he said to his
wife, when he came out of the spare room half an hour later, “will you
take Mrs. Alexander the things she needs? She is going to do everything
herself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go in if she wants
you.”
Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of
prescience under the river. With her own hands she washed him clean of
every mark of disaster. All night he was alone with her in the still
house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his
coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before
he left New York, water-soaked and illegible, but because of its
length, she knew it had been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled
upon him consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end. His
harshest critics did not doubt that, had he lived, he would have
retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this accident the
disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say
whether he did well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to
be. The mind that society had come to regard as a powerful and reliable
machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time have been sick
within itself and bent upon its own destruction.
EPILOGUE
Professor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was
just back from a visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his
return, he put on his frock-coat and drove in a hansom to pay a call
upon Hilda Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number, off Bedford
Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time. He
had first noticed her about the corridors of the British Museum, where
he read constantly. Her being there so often had made him feel that he
would like to know her, and as she was not an inaccessible person, an
introduction was not difficult. The preliminaries once over, they came
to depend a great deal upon each other, and Wilson, after his day’s
reading, often went round to Bedford Square for his tea. They had much
more in common than their memories of a common friend. Indeed, they
seldom spoke of him. They saved that for the deep moments which do not
come often, and then their talk of him was mostly silence. Wilson knew
that Hilda had loved him; more than this he had not tried to know.
It was late when Wilson reached Hilda’s apartment on this particular
December afternoon, and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and
made him comfortable, as she had such a knack of making people
comfortable.
“How good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded the
Holidays without you. You’ve helped me over a good many Christmases.”
She smiled at him gayly.
“As if you needed me for that! But, at any rate, I needed _you_. How
well you are looking, my dear, and how rested.”
He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long
fingers together in a judicial manner which had grown on him with
years.
Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his cream. “That means that I was
looking very seedy at the end of the season, doesn’t it? Well, we must
show wear at last, you know.”
Wilson took the cup gratefully. “Ah, no need to remind a man of
seventy, who has just been home to find that he has survived all his
contemporaries. I was most gently treated—as a sort of precious relic.
But, do you know, it made me feel awkward to be hanging about still.”
“Seventy? Never mention it to me.” Hilda looked appreciatively at the
Professor’s alert face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth and
so many quizzical ones about the eyes. “You’ve got to hang about for
me, you know. I can’t even let you go home again. You must stay put,
now that I have you back. You’re the realest thing I have.”
Wilson chuckled. “Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the
spoils of conquered cities! You’ve really missed me? Well, then, I
shall hang. Even if you have at last to put ME in the mummy-room with
the others. You’ll visit me often, won’t you?”
“Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer,
where you left them.” She struck a match and lit one for him. “But you
did, after all, enjoy being at home again?”
“Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a
thousand miles apart. But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the
place. It was in Boston I lingered longest.”
“Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?”
“Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, I
should think. Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I
found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if
Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his
heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be
up in his study.” The Professor looked reflectively into the grate. “I
should really have liked to go up there. That was where I had my last
long talk with him. But Mrs. Alexander never suggested it.”
“Why?”
Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and he turned his head so
quickly that his cuff-link caught the string of his nose-glasses and
pulled them awry. “Why? Why, dear me, I don’t know. She probably never
thought of it.”
Hilda bit her lip. “I don’t know what made me say that. I didn’t mean
to interrupt. Go on please, and tell me how it was.”
“Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he
really is there. She never lets him go. It’s the most beautiful and
dignified sorrow I’ve ever known. It’s so beautiful that it has its
compensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation.
It gives her a fixed star to steer by. She doesn’t drift. We sat there
evening after evening in the quiet of that magically haunted room, and
watched the sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt him with a
difference, of course.”
Hilda leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand.
“With a difference? Because of her, you mean?”
Wilson’s brow wrinkled. “Something like that, yes. Of course, as time
goes on, to her he becomes more and more their simple personal
relation.”
Hilda studied the droop of the Professor’s head intently. “You didn’t
altogether like that? You felt it wasn’t wholly fair to him?”
Wilson shook himself and readjusted his glasses. “Oh, fair enough. More
than fair. Of course, I always felt that my image of him was just a
little different from hers. No relation is so complete that it can hold
absolutely all of a person. And I liked him just as he was; his
deviations, too; the places where he didn’t square.”
Hilda considered vaguely. “Has she grown much older?” she asked at
last.
“Yes, and no. In a tragic way she is even handsomer. But colder. Cold
for everything but him. ‘Forget thyself to marble’; I kept thinking of
that. Her happiness was a happiness _à deux_, not apart from the world,
but actually against it. And now her grief is like that. She saves
herself for it and doesn’t even go through the form of seeing people
much. I’m sorry. It would be better for her, and might be so good for
them, if she could let other people in.”
“Perhaps she’s afraid of letting him out a little, of sharing him with
somebody.”
Wilson put down his cup and looked up with vague alarm. “Dear me, it
takes a woman to think of that, now! I don’t, you know, think we ought
to be hard on her. More, even, than the rest of us she didn’t choose
her destiny. She underwent it. And it has left her chilled. As to her
not wishing to take the world into her confidence—well, it is a pretty
brutal and stupid world, after all, you know.”
Hilda leaned forward. “Yes, I know, I know. Only I can’t help being
glad that there was something for him even in stupid and vulgar people.
My little Marie worshiped him. When she is dusting I always know when
she has come to his picture.”
Wilson nodded. “Oh, yes! He left an echo. The ripples go on in all of
us. He belonged to the people who make the play, and most of us are
only onlookers at the best. We shouldn’t wonder too much at Mrs.
Alexander. She must feel how useless it would be to stir about, that
she may as well sit still; that nothing can happen to her after
Bartley.”
“Yes,” said Hilda softly, “nothing can happen to one after Bartley.”
They both sat looking into the fire.
THE BARREL ORGAN by Alfred Noyes
There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And the music’s not immortal; but the world has made it sweet
And fulfilled it with the sunset glow;
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they’ve given it a glory and a part to play again
In the Symphony that rules the day and the night.
And now it’s marching onward through the realms of old romance,
And trolling out a fond familiar tune,
And now it’s roaring cannon down to fight the King of France,
And now it’s prattling softly to the moon,
And all around the organ there’s a sea without a shore
Of human joys and wonders and regrets;
To remember and to recompense the music evermore
For what the cold machinery forgets. . . .
Yes; as the music changes,
Like a prismatic glass,
It takes the light and ranges
Through all the moods that pass;
Dissects the common carnival
Of passions and regrets,
And gives the world a glimpse of all
The colors it forgets.
And there _La Traviata_ sights
Another sadder song;
And there _Il Trovatore_ cries
A tale of deeper wrong;
And bolder knights to battle go
With sword and shield and lance,
Than ever here on earth below
Have whirled into—_a dance!_—
Go down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
Go down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn’t far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Go down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn’t far from London!)
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and sweet perfume,
The cherry-trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!)
And there they say, when dawn is high and all the world’s a blaze of
sky
The cuckoo, though he’s very shy, will sing a song for London.
The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you’ll hear him there
At Kew, at Kew in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!)
The linnet and the throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo
And golden-eyed _tu-whit, tu whoo_ of owls that ogle London.
For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn’t heard
At Kew, at Kew in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!)
And when the rose begins to pout and all the chestnut spires are out
You’ll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London:—
_Come down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
Come down to Kew in lilac time;_ (_it isn’t far from London!_)
_And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Come down to Kew in lilac time;_ (_it isn’t far from London!_)
And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street,
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet
Marking time, sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat,
And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they’ll never meet,
Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat,
In the land where the dead dreams go.
Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote _Il Trovatore_ did you dream
Of the City when the sun sinks low
Of the organ and the monkey and the many-colored stream
On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem
To be litten for a moment with a wild Italian gleam
As _A che la morte_ parodies the world’s eternal theme
And pulses with the sunset glow?
There’s a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone
In the City as the sun sinks low;
There’s a portly man of business with a balance of his own,
There’s a clerk and there’s a butcher of a soft reposeful tone,
And they’re all them returning to the heavens they have known:
They are crammed and jammed in busses and—they’re each of them alone
In the land where the dead dreams go.
There’s a very modish woman and her smile is very bland
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And her hansom jingles onward, but her little jeweled hand
Is clenched a little tighter and she cannot understand
What she wants or why she wanders to that undiscovered land,
For the parties there are not at all the sort of thing she planned,
In the land where the dead dreams go.
There’s an Oxford man that listens and his heart is crying out
In the City as the sun sinks low;
For the barge the eight, the Isis, and the coach’s whoop and shout,
For the minute gun, the counting and the long disheveled rout,
For the howl along the tow-path and a fate that’s still in doubt,
For a roughened oar to handle and a race to think about
In the land where the dead dreams go.
There’s a laborer that listen to the voices of the dead
In the City as the sun sinks low;
And his hand begins to tremble and his face is rather red
As he sees a loafer watching him and—there he turns his head
And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled,
For he hears her softly singing and his lonely soul is led
Through the land where the dead dreams go.
There’s and old and hardened demi-rep, it’s ringing in her ears,
In the City as the sun sinks low;
With the wild and empty sorrow of the love that blights and sears,
Oh, and if she hurries onward, then be sure, be sure she hears,
Hears and bears the bitter burden of the unforgotten years,
And her laugh’s a little harsher and her eyes are brimmed with tears
For the land where the dead dreams go.
There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
In the City as the sun sinks low;
Though the music’s only Verdi there’s a world to make it sweet
Just as yonder yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet
Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred thousand feet
Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat
In the land where the dead dreams go.
So it’s Jeremiah, Jeremiah,
What have you to say
When you meet the garland girls
Tripping on their way?
All around my gala hat
I wear a wreath of roses
(A long and lonely year it is
I’ve waited for the May!)
If any one should ask you,
The reason why I wear it is,
My own love, my true love, is coming home to-day.
It’s buy a bunch of violets for the lady
(_It’s lilac time in London; it’s lilac time in London!_)
Buy a bunch of violets for the lady;
While the sky burns blue above:
On the other side of the street you’ll find it shady
(_It’s lilac time in London; it’s lilac time in London!_)
But buy a bunch of violets for the lady;
And tell her she’s your own true love.
There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street,
In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow;
And the music’s not immortal, but the world has made it sweet
And enriched it with the harmonies that make a song complete
In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet,
As it dies into the sunset glow;
And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain
That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light,
And they’ve given it a glory and a part of play again
In the Symphony that rules the day and night.
And there, as the music changes,
The song runs round again;
Once more it turns and ranges
Through all its joy and pain:
Dissects the common carnival
Of passions and regrets;
And the wheeling world remembers all
The wheeling song forgets.
Once more _La Traviata_ sighs
Another sadder song:
Once more _Il Trovatore_ cries
A tale of deeper wrong;
Once more the knights to battle go
With sword and shield and lance,
Till once, once more, the shattered foe
Has whirled into—_a dance!_—
_Come down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time;
Come down to Kew in lilac time;_ (_it isn’t far from London!_)
_And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer’s wonderland;
Come down to Kew in lilac time;_ (_it isn’t far from London!_)