“_‘Yes, I go to London Town’

(Merrily waved the feather),

‘And if you go to London Town,

Yes, we’ll go together.’

So in the autumn bright and brown,

Just as the year began to frown,

All the way to London Town

Rode the two together._

“_‘I go to marry a fair maid’

(Lightly swung the feather)--

‘Pardie, a true and loyal maid’

(Oh, the swinging feather!)--_

_‘For us the wedding gold is weighed,

For us the feast will soon be laid;

We’ll make a gallant show,’ he said,--

‘She and I together.’_

“The feathered man will do a thousand things

And the world go smiling; but the feathered man

May do too much. Now mark how he continues:

“_‘And you--you go to London Town?’

(Breezes waved the feather)--

‘Yes, I go to London Town.’

(Ah, the stinging feather!)--

‘Why do you go, my merry blade?

Like me, to marry a fair maid?’--

‘Why do I go?... God knows,’ he said;

And on they rode together._

“Now you have read it through, and you know best

What worth it has. We fellows with gray hair

Who march with sticks to music that is gray

Judge not your vanguard fifing. You are one

To judge; and you will tell me what you think:--

Barring the Town, the Fair Maid, and the Feather,

The dialogue and those parentheses,

You cherish it, undoubtedly. Pardee!

You call it, with a few conservative

Allowances, an excellent small thing

For patient inexperience to do:

Derivative, you say,--still rather pretty.

But what is wrong with Mr. Killigrew?

Is he in love, or has he read Rossetti?--

Forgive me! I am old and doddering....

When are you coming back to Tilbury Town?”

I could forgive the Captain soon enough,

But Killigrew--there was a question there;

Nor was it answered when the next week brought

A letter from him. After rocketing

For six or seven pages about love,

Truth, purity, the passion of the soul,

And other salutary attributes,

Discovered or miraculously born

Within six months, he said: “The Patriarch

Is not quite as he should be. There’s a clutch

Of something on him that will not let go;

And there are days together when his eyes

Are like two lamps in ashes. The gray look,

Which we thought once the glory and the crown

Of your too flexible determinist,

Has gone all over him. And when he laughs,

He waits as if to hear the angels weep:

It seems to make him sorry when he laughs,

And I know what it does to me. But here

As at the station--I remember that--

The quantitative bias of the boy

May slant me too much to the other side

And make me blind again. By Jove! old man,

If you could really know her as I do

’Twould be the revelation of your life:

You would see that there are women in the world

Who are altogether different,” etc.

There was more generosity in “women”

I thought than in the man without the feather.--

Meanwhile I saw that Captain Craig was dying.

III

I found the old man sitting in his bed,

Propped up and uncomplaining. On a chair

Beside him was a dreary bowl of broth,

A magazine, some glasses, and a pipe.

“I do not light it nowadays,” he said,

“But keep it for an antique influence

That it exerts, an aura that it sheds--

Like hautboys, or Provence. You understand:

The charred memorial defeats us yet,

But think you not for always. We are young,

And we are friends of time. Time that made smoke

Will drive away the smoke, and we shall know

The work that we are doing. We shall build

With embers of all shrines one pyramid,

And we shall have the most resplendent flame

From earth to heaven, as the old words go,

And we shall need no smoke.... Why don’t you laugh?”

I gazed into those calm, half-lighted eyes

And smiled at them with grim obedience.

He told me that I did it very well,

But added that I should undoubtedly

Do better in the future: “There is nothing,”

He said, “so beneficial in a sick-room

As a well-bred spontaneity of manner.

Your sympathetic scowl obtrudes itself,

And is indeed surprising. After death,

Were you to take it with you to your coffin

An unimaginative man might think

That you had lost your life in worrying

To find out what it was that worried you.

The ways of unimaginative men

Are singularly fierce.... Why do you stand?

Sit here and watch me while I take this soup.

The doctor likes it, therefore it is good.

“The man who wrote the decalogue,” pursued

The Captain, having swallowed four or five

Heroic spoonfuls of his lukewarm broth,

“Forgot the doctors. And I think sometimes

The man of Galilee (or, if you choose,

The men who made the sayings of the man)

Like Buddha, and the others who have seen,

Was to men’s loss the Poet--though it be

The Poet only of him we revere,

The Poet we remember. We have put

The prose of him so far away from us,

The fear of him so crudely over us,

That I have wondered--wondered.”--Cautiously,

But yet as one were cautious in a dream,

He set the bowl down on the chair again,

Crossed his thin fingers, looked me in the face,

And looking smiled a little. “Go away,”

He said at last, “and let me go to sleep.

I told you I should eat, but I shall not.

To-morrow I shall eat; and I shall read

Some clauses of a jocund instrument

That I have been preparing here of late

For you and for the rest, assuredly.

‘Attend the testament of Captain Craig:

Good citizens, good fathers and your sons,

Good mothers and your daughters.’ I should say so.

Now go away and let me go to sleep.”

I stood before him and held out my hand,

He took it, pressed it; and I felt again

The sick soft closing on it. He would not

Let go, but lay there, looking up to me

With eyes that had a sheen of water on them

And a faint wet spark within them. So he clung,

Tenaciously, with fingers icy warm,

And eyes too full to keep the sheen unbroken.

I looked at him. The fingers closed hard once,

And then fell down.--I should have left him then.

But when we found him the next afternoon,

My first thought was that he had made his eyes

Miraculously smaller. They were sharp

And hard and dry, and the spark in them was dry.

For a glance it all but seemed as if the man

Had artfully forsworn the brimming gaze

Of yesterday, and with a wizard strength

Inveigled in, reduced, and vitalized

The straw-shine of October; and had that

Been truth, we should have humored him not less,

Albeit he had fooled us,--for he said

That we had made him glad by coming to him.

And he was glad: the manner of his words

Revealed the source of them; and the gray smile

Which lingered like a twilight on his face

Told of its own slow fading that it held

The promise of the sun. Cadaverous,

God knows it was; and we knew it was honest.

“So you have come to have the old man read

To you from his last will and testament:

Well, it will not be long--not very long--

So listen.” He brought out from underneath

His pillow a new manuscript, and said,

“You are doing well to come and have me read

My testament. There are men in the world

Who say of me, if they remember me,

That I am poor;--and I believe the ways

Of certain men who never find things out

Are stranger than the way Lord Bacon wrote

_Leviticus_, and _Faust_.” He fixed his eyes

Abstractedly on something far from us,

And with a look that I remembered well

Gazed hard the while we waited. But at length

He found himself and soon began to chant,

With a fitful shift at thin sonorousness

The jocund instrument; and had he been

Definitively parceling to us

All Kimberly and half of Ballarat,

The lordly quaver of his poor old words

Could not have been the more magniloquent.

No promise of dead carbon or of gold,

However, flashed in ambush to corrupt us:

“I, Captain Craig, abhorred iconoclast,

Sage-errant, favored of the Cosmic Joke,

And self-reputed humorist at large,

Do now, confessed of my world-worshiping,

Time-questioning, sun-fearing, and heart-yielding,

Approve and unreservedly devise

To you and your assigns for evermore,

God’s universe and yours. If I had won

What first I sought, I might have made you beam

By giving less; but now I make you laugh

By giving more than what had made you beam,

And it is well. No man has ever done

The deed of humor that God promises,

But now and then we know tragedians

Reform, and in denial too divine

For sacrifice, too firm for ecstasy,

Record in jolly letters or in books

What fragment of God’s laughter they have caught,

What earnest of its rhythm; and I believe

That I, in having somewhat recognized

The formal measure of it, have endured

The discord of infirmity not less

Through fortune than by failure. What men lose,

Man gains; and what man gains reports itself

In losses we but vaguely deprecate,

So they be not for us;--and this is right,

Except that when the devil in the sun

Misguides us we go darkly where the shine

Misleads us, and we know not what we see:

We know not if we climb or if we fall;

And if we fly, we know not where we fly.

“And here do I insert an urging clause

For climbers and up-fliers of all sorts,

Cliff-climbers and high-fliers: Phaethon,

Bellerophon, and Icarus did each

Go gloriously up, and each in turn

Did famously come down--as you have read

In poems and elsewhere; but other men

Have mounted where no fame has followed them,

And we have had no sight, no news of them,

And we have heard no crash. The crash may count,

Undoubtedly, and earth be fairer for it;

Yet none save creatures out of harmony

Have ever, in their fealty to the flesh,

Made crashing an ideal. It is the flesh

That ails us, for the spirit knows no qualm,

No failure, no down-falling: so climb high,

And having set your steps regard not much

The downward laughter clinging at your feet,

Nor overmuch the warning; only know,

As well as you know dawn from lantern-light,

That far above you, for you, and within you,

There burns and shines and lives, unwavering

And always yours, the truth. Take on yourself

But your sincerity, and you take on

Good promise for all climbing: fly for truth,

And hell shall have no storm to crush your flight,

No laughter to vex down your loyalty.

“I think you may be smiling at me now--

And if I make you smile, so much the better;

For I would have you know that I rejoice

Always to see the thing that I would see--

The righteous thing, the wise thing. I rejoice

Always to think that any thought of mine,

Or any word or any deed of mine,

May grant sufficient of what fortifies

Good feeling and the courage of calm joy

To make the joke worth while. Contrariwise,

When I review some faces I have known--

Sad faces, hungry faces--and reflect

On thoughts I might have moulded, human words

I might have said, straightway it saddens me

To feel perforce that had I not been mute

And actionless, I might have made them bright

Somehow, though only for the moment. Yes,

Howbeit I confess the vanities,

It saddens me;--and sadness, of all things

Miscounted wisdom, and the most of all

When warmed with old illusions and regrets,

I mark the selfishest, and on like lines

The shrewdest. For your sadness makes you climb

With dragging footsteps, and it makes you groan;

It hinders you when most you would be free,

And there are many days it wearies you

Beyond the toil itself. And if the load

It lays on you may not be shaken off

Till you have known what now you do not know--

Meanwhile you climb; and he climbs best who sees

Above him truth burn faithfulest, and feels

Within him truth burn purest. Climb or fall,

One road remains and one firm guidance always;

One way that shall be taken, climb or fall.

“But ‘falling, falling, falling.’ There’s your song,

The cradle-song that sings you to the grave.

What is it your bewildered poet says?--

“_‘The toiling ocean thunders of unrest

And aching desolation; the still sea

Paints but an outward calm that mocks itself

To the final and irrefragable sleep

That owns no shifting fury; and the shoals

Of ages are but records of regret

Where Time, the sun’s arch-phantom, writes on sand

The prelude of his ancient nothingness.’_

“’Tis easy to compound a dirge like that,

And it is easy too to be deceived

And alienated by the fleshless note

Of half-world yearning in it; but the truth

To which we all are tending,--charlatans

And architects alike, artificers

In tinsel as in gold, evangelists

Of ruin and redemption, all alike,--

The truth we seek and equally the truth

We do not seek, but yet may not escape,

Was never found alone through flesh contempt

Or through flesh reverence. Look east and west

And we may read the story: where the light

Shone first the shade now darkens; where the shade

Clung first, the light fights westward--though the shade

Still feeds, and there is yet the Orient.

“But there is this to be remembered always:

Whatever be the altitude you reach,

You do not rise alone; nor do you fall

But you drag others down to more or less

Than your preferred abasement. God forbid

That ever I should preach, and in my zeal

Forget that I was born an humorist;

But now, for once, before I go away,

I beg of you to be magnanimous

A moment, while I speak to please myself--

The moment now for flowers; and your patience:

“Though I have heard it variously sung

That even in the fury and the clash

Of battles, and the closer fights of men

When silence gives the knowing world no sign,

One flower there is, though crushed and cursed it be,

Keeps rooted through all tumult and all scorn,--

Still do I find, when I look sharply down,

There’s yet another flower that grows well

And has the most unconscionable roots

Of any weed on earth. Perennial

It grows, and has the name of Selfishness;

No doubt you call it Love. In either case,

You propagate it with a diligence

That hardly were outmeasured had its leaf

The very juice in it of that famed herb

Which gave back breath to Glaucus; and I know

That in the twilight, after the day’s work,

You take your little children in your arms,

Or lead them by their credulous frail hands

Benignly out and through the garden-gate

And show them there the things that you have raised;

Not everything, perchance, but always one

Miraculously rooted flower plot

Which is your pride, their pattern. Socrates,

Could he be with you there at such a time,

Would have some unsolicited shrewd words

To say that you might hearken to; but I

Say nothing, for I am not Socrates.--

So much, good friends, for flowers; and I thank you.

“There was a poet once who would have roared

Away the world and had an end of stars.

Where was he when I quoted him?--oh, yes:

’Tis easy for a man to link loud words

With woeful pomp and unschooled emphasis

And add one thundered contribution more

To the dirges of all-hollowness, I said;

But here again I find the question set

Before me, after turning books on books

And looking soulward through man after man,

If there indeed be more determining

Play-service in remotely sounding down

The world’s one-sidedness. If I judge right,

Your pounding protestations, echoing

Their burden of unfraught futility,

Surge back to mute forgetfulness at last

And have a kind of sunny, sullen end,

Like any cold north storm.--But there are few

Still seas that have no life to profit them,

And even in such currents of the mind

As have no tide-rush to them, but are drowsed,

Crude thoughts may dart in armor and upspring

With a waking sound, when all is dim with peace,

Like sturgeons in the twilight out of Lethe;

And though they be discordant, hard, grotesque,

And all unwelcome to the lethargy

That you think means repose, you know as well

As if your names were shouted when they leap,

And when they leap you listen.--Ah! friends, friends,

There are these things we do not like to know:

They trouble us, they make us hesitate,

They touch us, and we try to put them off.

We banish one another and then say

That we are left alone: the midnight leaf

That rattles when it hangs above the snow--

Gaunt, fluttering, forlorn--scarcely may seem

So cold in all its palsied loneliness

As we, we frozen brothers, who have yet

Profoundly and severely to find out

That there is more of unpermitted love

In most men’s reticence than most men think.

“Once, when I made it out fond-headedness

To say that we should ever be apprised;

Of our deserts and their emolument

At all but in the specious way of words,

The wisdom of a warm thought woke within me

And I could read the sun. Then did I turn

My long-defeated face full to the world,

And through the clouded warfare of it all

Discern the light. Through dusk that hindered it,

I found the truth, and for the first whole time

Knew then that we were climbing. Not as one

Who mounts along with his experience

Bound on him like an Old Man of the Sea--

Not as a moral pedant who drags chains

Of his unearned ideals after him

And always to the lead-like thud they make

Attunes a cold inhospitable chant

Of All Things Easy to the Non-Attached,--

But as a man, a scarred man among men,

I knew it, and I felt the strings of thought

Between us to pull tight the while I strove;

And if a curse came ringing now and then

To my defended ears, how could I know

The light that burned above me and within me,

And at the same time put on cap-and-bells

For such as yet were groping?”

Killigrew

Made there as if to stifle a small cough.

I might have kicked him, but regret forbade

The subtle admonition; and indeed

When afterwards I reprimanded him,

The fellow never knew quite what I meant.

I may have been unjust.--The Captain read

Right on, without a chuckle or a pause,

As if he had heard nothing:

“How, forsooth,

Shall any man, by curses or by groans,

Or by the laugh-jarred stillness of all hell,

Be so drawn down to servitude again

That on some backward level of lost laws

And undivined relations, he may know

No longer Love’s imperative resource,

Firm once and his, well treasured then, but now

Too fondly thrown away? And if there come

But once on all his journey, singing down

To find him, the gold-throated forward call,

What way but one, what but the forward way,

Shall after that call guide him? When his ears

Have earned an inward skill to methodize

The clash of all crossed voices and all noises,

How shall he grope to be confused again,

As he has been, by discord? When his eyes

Have read the book of wisdom in the sun,

And after dark deciphered it on earth,

How shall he turn them back to scan some huge

Blood-lettered protest of bewildered men

That hunger while he feeds where they should starve

And all absurdly perish?”

Killigrew

Looked hard for a subtle object on the wall,

And, having found it, sighed. The Captain paused:

If he grew tedious, most assuredly

Did he crave pardon of us; he had feared

Beforehand that he might be wearisome,

But there was not much more of it, he said,--

No more than just enough. And we rejoiced

That he should look so kindly on us then.

(“Commend me to a dying man’s grimace

For absolute humor, always,” Killigrew

Maintains; but I know better.)

“Work for them,

You tell me? Work the folly out of them?

Go back to them and teach them how to climb,

While you teach caterpillars how to fly?

You tell me that Alnaschar is a fool

Because he dreams? And what is this you ask?

I make him wise? I teach him to be still?

While you go polishing the Pyramids,

I hold Alnaschar’s feet? And while you have

The ghost of Memnon’s image all day singing,

I sit with aching arms and hardly catch

A few spilled echoes of the song of songs--

The song that I should have as utterly

For mine as any other man should have,

The sweetest a glad shepherd ever trilled

In Sharon, long ago? Is this the way

For me to do good climbing any more

Than Phaethon’s? Do you think the golden tone

Of that far-singing call you all have heard

Means any more for you than you should be

Wise-heartedly, glad-heartedly yourselves?

Do this, there is no more for you to do;

And you have no dread left, no shame, no scorn.

And while you have your wisdom and your gold,

Songs calling, and the Princess in your arms,

Remember, if you like, from time to time,

Down yonder where the clouded millions go,

Your bloody-knuckled scullions are not slaves,

Your children of Alnaschar are not fools.

“Nor are they quite so foreign or far down

As you may think to see them. What you take

To be the cursedest mean thing that crawls

On earth is nearer to you than you know:

You may not ever crush him but you lose,

You may not ever shield him but you gain--

As he, with all his crookedness, gains with you.

Your preaching and your teaching, your achieving,

Your lifting up and your discovering,

Are more than often--more than you have dreamed--

The world-refracted evidence of what

Your dream denies. You cannot hide yourselves

In any multitude or solitude,

Or mask yourselves in any studied guise

Of hardness or of old humility,

But soon by some discriminating man--

Some humorist at large, like Socrates--

You get yourselves found out.--Now I should be

Found out without an effort. For example:

When I go riding, trimmed and shaved again,

Consistent, adequate, respectable,--

Some citizen, for curiosity,

Will ask of a good neighbor, ‘What is this?’--

‘It is the funeral of Captain Craig,’

Will be the neighbor’s word.--‘And who, good man,

Was Captain Craig?’--‘He was an humorist;

And we are told that there is nothing more

For any man alive to say of him.’--

‘There is nothing very strange in that,’ says A;

‘But the brass band? What has he done to be

Blown through like this by cornets and trombones?

And here you have this incompatible dirge--

Where are the jokes in that?’--Then B should say:

‘Maintained his humor: nothing more or less.

The story goes that on the day before

He died--some say a week, but that’s a trifle--

He said, with a subdued facetiousness,

“Play Handel, not Chopin; assuredly not

Chopin.”’--He was indeed an humorist.”

He made the paper fall down at arm’s length;

And with a tension of half-quizzical

Benignity that made it hard for us,

He looked up--first at Morgan, then at me--

Almost, I thought, as if his eyes would ask

If we were satisfied; and as he looked,

The tremor of an old heart’s weariness

Was on his mouth. He gazed at each of us,

But spoke no further word that afternoon.

He put away the paper, closed his eyes,

And went to sleep with his lips flickering;

And after that we left him.--At midnight

Plunket and I looked in; but he still slept,

And everything was going as it should.

The watchman yawned, rattled his newspaper,

And wondered what it was that ailed his lamp.

He said it wheezed. He feared it might explode.

Next day we found the Captain wide awake,

Propped up, and searching dimly with a spoon

Through another dreary dish of chicken-broth,

Which he raised up to me, at my approach,

So fervently and so unconsciously,

That one could only laugh. He looked again

At each of us, and as he looked he frowned;

And there was something in that frown of his

That none of us had ever seen before.

“Kind friends,” he said, “be sure that I rejoice

To know that you have come to visit me;

Be sure I speak with undisguised words

And earnest, when I say that I rejoice.”--

“But what the devil!” whispered Killigrew.

I kicked him, for I thought I understood.

The old man’s eyes had glimmered wearily

At first, but now they glittered like to those

Of a glad fish. “Beyond a doubt,” said he,

“My dream this morning was more singular

Than any other I have ever known.

Give me that I might live ten thousand years,

And all those years do nothing but have dreams,

I doubt me much if any one of them

Could be so quaint or so fantastical,

So pregnant, as a dream of mine this morning.

You may not think it any more than odd;

You may not feel--you cannot wholly feel--

How droll it was:--I dreamed that I found Hamlet--

Found him at work, drenched with an angry sweat,

Predestined, he declared with emphasis,

To root out a large weed on Lethe wharf;

And after I had watched him for some time,

I laughed at him and told him that no root

Would ever come the while he talked like that:

The power was not in him, I explained,

For such compound accomplishment. He glared

At me, of course,--next moment laughed at me,

And finally laughed with me. I was right,

And we had eisel on the strength of it:--

‘They tell me that this water is not good,’

Said Hamlet, and you should have seen him smile.

Conceited? Pelion on Ossa?--pah!...