Till, at the quiet whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
Those veils withdrew, and showed another scene.
I saw two dusty travellers, blithely walking
With staffs and knapsacks, on a straight white road
Lined with tall sentinel poplars as to await
A king’s return; but scarce a bird took heed
Of those two travel-stained wanderers—Jean Guettard
And Malesherbes, his old school-friend.
Larks might see
Two wingless dots that crept along the road.
The Duke rode by and saw two vagabonds
With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on
To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see,
Against the sky, that old square prison-tower,
The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs,
Thronging together behind its moated wall;
But not one eye in all that wide green land
Saw what those two could see; and not one soul
Espied the pilgrim thought upon its way
To change the world for man.
The pilgrim thought!
Say rather the swift hunter, tracking down
More subtly than an Indian the dark spoor
Of his gigantic prey.
I saw them halt
Where, at the white road’s edge, a milestone rose
Out of the long grass, like a strange black gnome,
A gnome that had been dragged from his dark cave
Under the mountains, and now stood there dumb,
Striving to speak. But what?
“There! There! Again!”
Cried Jean Guettard. They stood and stared at it,
But not to read as other travellers use
How far themselves must journey.
They knelt down
And looked at it, and felt it with their hands.
A farmer passed, and wondered were they mad.
For, when they hailed him, and his tongue prepared
To talk of that short cut across the fields
Beside the mill-stream, they desired to know
Whence the black milestone came. It was the fourth
That they had passed since noon.
He grinned at them.
“Black stones?” he said, “you’ll find them all the way
To Volvic now!”
“To Volvic,” cried Guettard,
“Volcani vicus!”
They seized their staffs again;
Halted at Moulins, only to break a crust
Of bread and cheese, and drink one bottle of wine,
Then hastened on, following the giant trail,
Milestone by milestone, till the scent grew hot;
For now they saw, in the wayside cottages,
The black stone under the jasmine’s clustering stars;
And children, at the half-doors, wondered why
Those two strange travellers pushed the leaves away
And tapped upon their walls.
At last they saw,
Black as a thundercloud anchored to its hill,
Above the golden orchards of Limagne,
The town of Riom. All its walls were black.
Its turreted heights with leering gargoyles crawled
Above them, like that fortress of old Night
To which Childe Roland came.
No slughorn’s note
Challenged it, and they set no lance in rest,
But dusty and lame, with strangely burning eyes,
Those footpads, quietly as the ancient Word,
Stole into that dark lair and sought their prey.
Surely, they thought, the secret must be known
To some that live, eat, sleep, in this grim den.
Have they not guessed what monster lurks behind
This blackness?
In the chattering streets they saw
The throng around the fruit-stalls, and the priest
Entering the Sainte Chapelle. With eyes of stone
The statue of that lover of liberty
The chancellor, L’Hôpital, from his great dark throne
Gazed, and saw less than the indifferent sparrow
That perched upon his hand. Barefooted boys
Ran shouting round the fountain in the square.
It was no dream. Along the cobbled street,
Clattering like ponies in their wooden shoes,
Three girls went by with baskets full of apples.
The princely butcher, standing at his door,
Rosily breathing sawdust and fresh blood,
Sleeked his moustache and rolled an amorous eye.
It was no dream. They lived their light-winged lives
In this prodigious fabric of black stone,
Slept between walls of lava, drank their wine
In taverns whose black walls had risen in fire;
Prayed on the slag of the furnace; roofed their tombs
With slabs of that slaked wrath; and saw no more
Than any flock of birds that nightly roost
On the still quivering Etna.
It was late,
Ere the two travellers found a wise old host
Who knew the quarries where that stone was hewn;
Too far for them that night. His inn could lodge them.
A young roast fowl? Also he had a wine,
The Duc de Berry, once.... Enough! they supped
And talked. Gods, how they talked and questioned him,—
The strangest guests his inn had ever seen.
They wished to know the shape of all the hills
Around those quarries. “There were many,” he said,
“Shaped at the top like this.” He lifted up
An old round-bellied wine-cup.
At the word
He wellnigh lost his guests. They leapt to their feet.
They wished to pay their quittance and press on
To see those hills. But, while they raved, the fowl
Was laid before them, luscious, fragrant, brown.
He pointed, speechless, to the gathering dusk,
And poured their wine, and conquered.
“The Bon Dieu
Who made the sensual part of man be praised,”
He said to his wife; “for if He had made a world
Of pure philosophers, every tavern in France
Might close its shutters, and take down its sign.”
So Jean Guettard and Malesherbes stayed and supped;
And, ere they slept, being restless, they went out
And rambled through the sombre streets again.
They passed that haunted palace of Auvergne,
Brooding on its wild memories and grim birth;
And from the Sainte Chapelle, uplifting all
That monstrous darkness in one lean black spire
To heaven, they heard an organ muttering low
As though the stones once more were stirred to life
By the deep soul within. Then, arched and tall,
In the sheer blackness of that lava, shone
One rich stained window, where the Mother stood,
In gold and blue and crimson, with the Child.
They looked at it as men who see the life
And light of heaven through the Plutonian walls
Of this material universe. They heard
The young-voiced choir, in silver-throated peals,
Filling the night with ecstasy. They stood
Bareheaded in the dark deserted street,
Outcasts from all that innocence within,
And silent; till the last celestial cry,
Like one great flight of angels, ebbed away.
III
THE SHADOW OF PASCAL
At daybreak they pressed on. Strange hills arose
Clustering before them, hills whose fragrant turf,
Softer than velvet, hid what savage hearts!
At noon they saw, beside the road, a gash
Rending the sunlit skin of that green peace;
An old abandoned quarry, half overgrown
With ferns, and masked by boughs.
They left the road
And looked at it. Volcanic rock! A flood
Of frozen lava!
They marked its glossy blackness, the rough cords
And wrinkles where, as the fiery waves congealed,
It had crept on a little; and strangely there
New beauty, like the smile on truth’s hard face,
Gleamed on them. Never did bracken and hart’s tongue ferns
Whisper a tale like those whose dauntless roots
Were creviced in that grim rock. They tracked it up
Through heather and thyme. They saw what human eyes
Had seen for ages, yet had never seen,—
The tall green hill, a great truncated cone,
Robed in wild summer and haunted by the bee,
But shaped like grey engravings that they knew
Of Etna and Vesuvius.
Near its crest
They saw the sunlight on a shepherd’s crook,
Bright as a star. A flock of nibbling sheep
Flowed round it like a cloud, a rambling cloud
With drifting edges that broke and formed again
Before one small black barking speck that flew
Swift as a bird about a cloud in heaven.
Thyme underfoot, wild honey in the thyme;
But, under the thyme and honey, if eyes could see,
In every runnel and crevice and slip and patch,
A powdery rubble of pumice, black and red,
Flakes of cooled lava and stones congealed from fire.
It was no dream. A butterfly spread its fans
White, veined with green, on a rock of sunlit slag,
Slag of the seething furnaces below.
They reached the summit; and, under them, beheld
The hollow cup, the crater, whence that flood
Out of the dreadful molten heart of the earth
Poured in red fury to create Auvergne.
But now, instead of smoke and fire, they saw
Red of the heather in that deep grassy hollow,
And heard, instead of the hissing of the abyss,
The small grey locust, stridulent in the sun.
They came to Clermont. All its dark old streets
Were built of lava. By the _Place de Jaude_,
O, strangely in their own swift race for truth,
They met the phantom of an earlier fire!
They found the house where Pascal first beheld
The sunlight, through a window in lava-stone;
And many a time had passed, a brooding child,
With all his deep celestial thoughts to come,
Through that volcanic porch, but never saw
The wonder of the walls wherein he slept.
They saw, through mists, as I through mists discerned
Their own strange drama, that scene within the scene.
They climbed the very hill that Pascal made
A beacon-height of truth—the Puy de Dôme,
Where Florin Périer, at his bidding, took
His tubes of soft quicksilver; and, at the base,
And, at the summit, tested, proved, and weighed
The pressure of that lovely body of light,
Our globe-engirdling air. On one swift hint,
One flash of truth that Torricelli caught
From Galileo, and Pascal caught in turn,
He weighed that glory.
Ever the drama grew.
The vital fire, in yet more intricate ways
(As life itself, enkindling point by point
In the dark formless embryo, grows to power),
Coursed on, from mind to mind, each working out
Its separate purpose, yet all linked in one.
For those two pilgrims, on the cone-shaped hill
That Pascal knew, and yet had never known,
Met his great spirit among the scoriac flakes,
And found themselves, in vision, on that pure height
Where all the paths to truth shall one day meet.
They met his brooding spirit as they climbed.
They passed the dead man’s words from mouth to mouth,
With new significance, deeper and more strange
Even than they knew. _“We are on fire to explore_
_The universe, and build our tower of truth_
_Into the Infinite. Then the firm earth laughs,_
_Opens, under its cracked walls, an abyss.”—_
_Lavoisier! Malesherbes! Friends of Jean Guettard._
_Was it only the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf that showed me_
_Gleams of the Terror approaching, a wild storm_
_Of fiercer, hell-hot lava, and that far sound_
_Of tumbrils.... The Republic has no need_
_Of savants!_
_This dream went by, with the dead man’s words._
They reached the highest crest. Before their eyes
The hill-scape opened like a mighty vision
That, quietly, has come true.
They stood there, dumb,
To see what they foresaw, the invisible thought
Grown firm as granite; for, as a man might die
In faith, yet wake amazed in his new world,
They saw those chains of dead volcanoes rise,
Cone behind cone, with green truncated crowns,
And smokeless craters, on the dazzling blue.
There, in the very sunlit heart of France,
They saw what human eyes had daily seen
Yet never seen till now. They stood and gazed,
More lonely in that loneliness of thought
Than wingèd men, alighting on the moon.
Old as the moon’s own craters were those hills;
And all their wrath had cooled so long ago
That as the explorers on their downward path
Passed by a cup-shaped crater, smooth and green,
Three hundred feet in depth and breadth, they saw,
Within it, an old shepherd and his flock
Quietly wandering over its gentle slopes
Of short sweet grass, through clumps of saffron broom.
They asked him by what name that hill was known.
He answered, _The Hen’s Nest_!
“Hen’s Nest,” cried Jean Guettard, “the good God grant
This fowl be not a phœnix and renew
Its feathers in Auvergne.”
They chuckled aloud,
And left the shepherd wondering, many a day,
What secret knowledge in the stranger’s eye
Cast that uncanny light upon the hill,
A moment, and no more; and yet enough
To make him feel, even when the north wind blew,
Less at his ease in that green windless cup;
And, once or twice, although he knew not why,
He turned, and drove his flock another way.
IV
AT PARIS
“Few know the name of Jean Guettard to-day,”
Said Shadow-of-a-Leaf; for now the mists concealed
All that clear vision. “I often visited him,
Between the lights, in after years. He lived
Alone at Paris then, in two lean rooms,
A sad old prisoner, at the Palais Royal;
And many a time, beside a dying fire,
We talked together. I was only a shadow,
A creature flickering on the fire-lit wall;
But, while he bowed his head upon his hands
And gazed into the flame with misted eyes,
I could steal nearer and whisper time away.
And sometimes he would breathe his thoughts aloud;
And when at night his faithful servant, Claire,
Stole into the room to lay his frugal meal,
She’d glance at him with big brown troubled eyes
To find him talking to himself alone.
And sometimes when the masters of the hour
Won easy victories in the light world’s fashion,
With fables, easily spun in light quick minds,
He’d leave the Academy thundering its applause,
And there, in his bare room, with none to see
But Shadow-of-a-Leaf, he would unfold again
—Smiling a little grimly to himself—
Those curious beautiful tinted maps he drew,
The very first that any man had made
To show, beneath the kingdoms made by man,
The truth, that hidden structure, ribbed with rock,
And track the vanished ages by the lives
And deaths imprinted there.
They had made him rich
In nothing but the truth.
He had mapped the rocks.
“The time is not yet come,” he used to say,
“When we can clothe them with a radiant Spring
Of happy meanings. I have never made
A theory. That’s for happier men to come;
It will be time to answer the great riddle
When we have read the question.
Here and there
Already, I note, they use this work of mine
And shuffle the old forerunner out of sight.
No matter. Let the truth live. I shall watch
Its progress, proudly, from the outer dark;
More happily, I believe, thus free from self,
Than if my soul went whoring after fame.
One thing alone I’ll claim. It is not good
To let all lies go dancing by on flowers.
This—what’s his name?—who claims to be the first
To find a dead volcano in Auvergne,
And sees, in that, only an easy road
To glory for himself, shall find, ere long,
One live volcano in old Jean Guettard.
The fool has forced me to it; for he thinks
That I’ll claim nothing. I prefer my peace;
But truth compels me here. I’ll set my heel
On him, at least. Malesherbes will bear me out.
As for the rest—no theory of the earth
Can live without these rock-ribbed facts of mine,
The facts that I first mapped, I claim no more.
These rocks, these bones, these fossil ferns and shells,
Of which the grinning moon-calf makes a jest,
A byword for all dotage and decay,
Shall yet be touched with beauty, and reveal
The secrets of the book of earth to man.”
“He made no theory,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
“And yet, I think, he looked on all these things
Devoutly; on a sea-shell turned to stone
As on a sacred relic, at whose touch
Time opened like a gate, and let him pass
Out of this mocking and ephemeral world
Through the eternal ages, home to God.
And so I watched him, growing old and grey,
In seeking truth; a man with enemies,
Ten enemies for every truth he told;
And friends that still, despite his caustic tongue,
Loved him for his true heart.
Yet even these
Never quite reached it; never quite discerned
That even his gruffest words were but the pledge
Of his own passionate truth; the harsh pained cry
For truth, for truth, of one who saw the throng
Bewildered and astray, the ways of love
Grown tortuous, and the path to heaven grown dim
Through man’s unheed for truth.
I saw him greet
Condorcet, at the Academy. “We have lost
Two members. I condole with you, my friend.
It is their last _éloges_ you’ll speak to-day!
How will you bury their false theories?
In irony, or in academic robes?
No matter. There’ll be only one or two
Who really know; and I shall not be there
To vex you, from my corner, with one smile.
Lord, what a pack of lies you’ll have to tell!
It is the custom. When my turn arrives—
’Twill not be long,—remember, please, I want
Truth, the whole truth, or nothing.”
I saw one night
A member walking home with him—to thank him
For his support that morning. Jean Guettard
Turned on his threshold, growling like a bear.
“You owe me nothing. I believed my vote
Was right, or else you never should have had it.
Pray do not think I liked you.”
A grim door
Opened and closed like iron in the face
Of his late friend and now indignant foe;
To whom no less, if he had needed it,
Guettard would still have given his own last sou.
He came into his lonely room that night,
And sat and stared into the fluttering fire.
I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf, was there; and I could see
More in his eyes than even Condorcet saw,
Condorcet, who of all his friends remained
Most faithful to the end.
But, at the hour
When Claire would lay his supper, a light hand tapped
Timidly on his door. He sat upright
And turned with startled eyes.
“Enter,” he called.
A wide-eyed, pale-faced child came creeping in.
“What! Little Claire!” he cried.
“Your mother is not better!”
She stood before him,
The fire-light faintly colouring her thin face,—
“M’sieur, she is very ill. You are a doctor.
Come, quickly.”
Through the narrow, ill-lighted streets
Old Jean Guettard went hobbling, a small hand
Clutching his own, and two small wooden shoes
Clattering beside him, till the child began
To droop. He lifted her gently in his arms
And hobbled on. The thin, white, tear-stained face,
Pressing against his old grey-bristled cheek,
Directed him, now to left and now to right.
“O, quick, M’sieur!” Then, into an alley, dark
As pitch, they plunged. The third door on the right!
Into the small sad house they went, and saw
By the faint guttering candle-light—the mother,
Shivering and burning on her tattered bed.
Two smaller children knelt on either side
Worn out with fear and weeping.
All that night
Guettard, of all true kings of science then,
Obscure, yet first in France and all the world,
Watched, laboured, bathed the brow and raised the head,
Moistened the thirsting lips, and knew it vain;
Knew, as I knew, that in a hundred years
Knowledge might conquer this; but he must fight
A losing battle, and fight it in the dark
No better armed than Galen.
He closed her eyes
At dawn. He took the children to his house;
Prayed with them; dried their tears; and, while they slept,
Shed tears himself, remembering—a green hill,
A Rock against the sky.
He cared for them, as though they were his own.
Guettard, the founder of two worlds of thought,
Taught them their letters. “None can tell,” he said,
“What harvests are enfolded for the world
In one small grain of this immortal wheat.
But I, who owe so much to little things
In childhood; and have seen, among the rocks,
What vast results may wait upon the path
Of one blind life, under a vanished sea,
Bow down in awe before this human life.”
V
THE RETURN
Ever, as he grew older, life became
More sacred to him.
“In a thousand years
Man will look back with horror on this world
Where men could babble about the Lamb of God,
Then turn and kill for food one living thing
That looks through two great eyes, so like their own.
I have had living creatures killed for me;
But I will have no more.”
“Though Nature laughed
His mood to scorn,” said Shadow-of-a-Leaf, “the day
Will come (I have seen it come a myriad times)
When, through one mood like this, Nature will climb
Out of its nature, and make all things new.
Who prophesied cities, when the first blind life
Crawled from the sea, to breathe that strange bright air,
And conquer its own past?”—
“I have no theory of this wild strange world,”
Said Jean Guettard,
“But, if the God that made it dies with us
Into immortal life....”
“There, there’s the meaning,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
“Could we but grasp it. There’s the harmony
Of life, and death, and all our mortal pain.”
I heard that old man whispering in the dark,
“O, little human life, so lost to sight
Among the eternal ages, I, at least,
Find in this very darkness the one Fact
That bows my soul before you.”
Once again
The mists began to roll away like smoke.
I saw a patch of vines upon the hill
Above Étampes; and through the mists I saw
Old Jean Guettard, with snowy wind-blown hair,
Nearing the shrouded summit. As he climbed,
Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
He lifted up his eyes to see the Rock.
The hill was bare. His facts were well confirmed.
Sun, wind, and rain, and the sharp chisels of frost
Had broken it down. The Rock was on its way
In brook and river, with all the drifting hills,
And all his life, to the remembering sea.
He looked around him, furtively. None was near.
Down, on his knees,
Among the weather-worn shards of his lost youth,
Dropt Jean Guettard.
The mist closed over him.
The world dissolved away. The vision died,
Leaving me only a voice within the heart,
Far off, yet near, the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf.
_The rain had beaten. The wind had blown._
_The hill was bare as the sky that day._
_Mother and Child from the height had gone._
_The wind and rain, said Jean Guettard,_
_Had crumbled even the Rock away._
VI—IN SWEDEN
LINNÆUS
It was his garden that began it all,
A magical garden for a changeling child.
“The garden has bewitched him!
Carl! Carl! O, Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding?”
It was the voice of Christina, wife of the Pastor,
Nils Linnæus, the Man of the Linden-tree.
Youthful and comely, she stood at her door in the twilight,
Calling her truant son.
Her flaxen hair
Kerchiefed with crisp white wings; her rose-coloured apron
And blue-grey gown, like a harebell, yielding a glimpse
Of the shapeliest ankle and snowiest stocking in Sweden;
She stood at her door, a picture breathed upon air.
She called yet again, and tilted her head to listen
As a faint, flushed, wild anemone turning aside
From a breeze out of elf-land, teasing her delicate petals,
The breeze of the warm, white, green-veined wings of her wooer;
And again, a little more troubled at heart, she called,
“Supper-time, Carl!”
But out of the fragrant pinewoods
Darkening round her, only the wood-pigeon cooed.
Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap
Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again.
Yet, he was there, she knew, though he did not answer.
The lad was at hand, she knew, though she could not see him.
Her elf-child, nine years old, was about and around her,
A queer little presence, invisible, everywhere, nowhere,
Hiding, intensely still....
She listened; the leaves
All whispered, “Hush!”
It was just as though Carl had whispered,
“Hush! I am watching.
“Hush! I am thinking.
“Hush! I am listening, too.”
She tiptoed through the garden, her fair head
Turning to left and right, with birdlike glances,
Peeping round lichened boulders and clumps of fern.
She passed by the little garden his father gave him,
Elfdom within an elfdom, where he had sown
Not only flowers that rightly grow in gardens,
The delicate aristocracies of bloom,
But hedgerow waifs and ragamuffin strays
That sprawled across his borders everywhere
And troubled even the queendom of the rose
With swarming insurrections.
At last she saw him,
His tousled head a little golden cloud
Among the dark green reeds at the edge of the lake,
Bending over the breathless water to watch—
What?
She tiptoed nearer, until she saw
The spell that bound him. Floating upon the lake,
A yard away, a water-lily closed
Its petals, as an elfin cygnet smooths
Its ruffled plumes, composing them for sleep.
He watched it, rapt, intent.
She watched her son,
Intent and rapt, with a stirring at her heart,
And beautiful shining wonder in her eyes,
Feeling a mystery near her.
Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Whispered. The garden died into the dark.
Mother and child had gone—I knew not whither.
It seemed as though the dark stream of the years
Flowed round me.
Then, as one that walks all night
Lifts up his head in the early light of dawn,
I found myself in a long deserted street
Of little wooden houses, with thatched roofs.
It was Uppsala.
Over the silent town
I heard a skylark quivering, up and up,
As though the very dew from its wild wings
Were shaken to silvery trills of elfin song.
_Tirile, tirile, tirile_, it arose,
Praising the Giver of one more shining day.
Then, with a clatter of doors and a yodelling call
Of young men’s voices, the Svartbäcken woke;
And down the ringing street the students came
In loose blue linen suits, knapsack on back
And sturdy stick in hand, to rouse old Carl
For their long ramble through the blossoming fields.
I saw them clustering round the Master’s door.
I heard their jolly song—_Papa Linnæus_:
Linnæus, Papa Linnæus,
He gave his pipe a rap.
He donned his gown of crimson.
He donned his green fur-cap.
He walked in a meadow at daybreak
To see what he might see;
And the linnet cried, “Linnæus!
O hide! Here comes Linnæus.
Beware of old Linnæus,
The Man of the Linden-tree.”
So beautiful, bright and early
He brushed away the dews,
He found the wicked wild-flowers
All courting there in twos;
And buzzing loud for pardon,
Sir Pandarus, the bee:
“Vincit Amor, Linnæus,
Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!”
O, ho, quoth old Linnæus,
The Man of the Linden-tree.
Quoth he, ’Tis my conviction
These innocents must be wed!
So he murmured a benediction,
And blessed their fragrant bed;
And the butterflies fanned their blushes
And the red-cap whistled in glee,
_They are married by old Linnæus,_
_Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!_
_Vivat, vivat Linnæus,_
_The Man of the Linden-tree_.