The Three Taverns Part 4

BURR

No matter where you are, one of these days I shall come back to you and tell you something.

This Demos, I have heard, has in his wrist A pulse that no two doctors have as yet Counted and found the same, and in his mouth A tongue that has the like alacrity For saying or not for saying what most it is That pullulates in his ign.o.ble mind.

One of these days I shall appear again, To tell you more of him and his opinions; I shall not be so long out of your sight, Or take myself so far, that I may not, Like Alcibiades, come back again.

He went away to Phrygia, and fared ill.

HAMILTON

There's an example in Themistocles: He went away to Persia, and fared well.

BURR

So? Must I go so far? And if so, why so?

I had not planned it so. Is this the road I take? If so, farewell.

HAMILTON

Quite so. Farewell.

John Brown

Though for your sake I would not have you now So near to me tonight as now you are, G.o.d knows how much a stranger to my heart Was any cold word that I may have written; And you, poor woman that I made my wife, You have had more of loneliness, I fear, Than I -- though I have been the most alone, Even when the most attended. So it was G.o.d set the mark of his inscrutable Necessity on one that was to grope, And serve, and suffer, and withal be glad For what was his, and is, and is to be, When his old bones, that are a burden now, Are saying what the man who carried them Had not the power to say. Bones in a grave, Cover them as they will with choking earth, May shout the truth to men who put them there, More than all orators. And so, my dear, Since you have cheated wisdom for the sake Of sorrow, let your sorrow be for you, This last of nights before the last of days, The lying ghost of what there is of me That is the most alive. There is no death For me in what they do. Their death it is They should heed most when the sun comes again To make them solemn. There are some I know Whose eyes will hardly see their occupation, For tears in them -- and all for one old man; For some of them will pity this old man, Who took upon himself the work of G.o.d Because he pitied millions. That will be For them, I fancy, their compa.s.sionate Best way of saying what is best in them To say; for they can say no more than that, And they can do no more than what the dawn Of one more day shall give them light enough To do. But there are many days to be, And there are many men to give their blood, As I gave mine for them. May they come soon!

May they come soon, I say. And when they come, May all that I have said unheard be heard, Proving at last, or maybe not -- no matter -- What sort of madness was the part of me That made me strike, whether I found the mark Or missed it. Meanwhile, I've a strange content, A patience, and a vast indifference To what men say of me and what men fear To say. There was a work to be begun, And when the Voice, that I have heard so long, Announced as in a thousand silences An end of preparation, I began The coming work of death which is to be, That life may be. There is no other way Than the old way of war for a new land That will not know itself and is tonight A stranger to itself, and to the world A more prodigious upstart among states Than I was among men, and so shall be Till they are told and told, and told again; For men are children, waiting to be told, And most of them are children all their lives.

The good G.o.d in his wisdom had them so, That now and then a madman or a seer May shake them out of their complacency And shame them into deeds. The major file See only what their fathers may have seen, Or may have said they saw when they saw nothing.

I do not say it matters what they saw.

Now and again to some lone soul or other G.o.d speaks, and there is hanging to be done, -- As once there was a burning of our bodies Alive, albeit our souls were sorry fuel.

But now the fires are few, and we are poised Accordingly, for the state's benefit, A few still minutes between heaven and earth.

The purpose is, when they have seen enough Of what it is that they are not to see, To pluck me as an unripe fruit of treason, And then to fling me back to the same earth Of which they are, as I suppose, the flower -- Not given to know the riper fruit that waits For a more comprehensive harvesting.

Yes, may they come, and soon. Again I say, May they come soon! -- before too many of them Shall be the b.l.o.o.d.y cost of our defection.

When h.e.l.l waits on the dawn of a new state, Better it were that h.e.l.l should not wait long, -- Or so it is I see it who should see As far or farther into time tonight Than they who talk and tremble for me now, Or wish me to those everlasting fires That are for me no fear. Too many fires Have sought me out and seared me to the bone -- Thereby, for all I know, to temper me For what was mine to do. If I did ill What I did well, let men say I was mad; Or let my name for ever be a question That will not sleep in history. What men say I was will cool no cannon, dull no sword, Invalidate no truth. Meanwhile, I was; And the long train is lighted that shall burn, Though floods of wrath may drench it, and hot feet May stamp it for a slight time into smoke That shall blaze up again with growing speed, Until at last a fiery crash will come To cleanse and shake a wounded hemisphere, And heal it of a long malignity That angry time discredits and disowns.

Tonight there are men saying many things; And some who see life in the last of me Will answer first the coming call to death; For death is what is coming, and then life.

I do not say again for the dull sake Of speech what you have heard me say before, But rather for the sake of all I am, And all G.o.d made of me. A man to die As I do must have done some other work Than man's alone. I was not after glory, But there was glory with me, like a friend, Throughout those crippling years when friends were few, And fearful to be known by their own names When mine was vilified for their approval.

Yet friends they are, and they did what was given Their will to do; they could have done no more.

I was the one man mad enough, it seems, To do my work; and now my work is over.

And you, my dear, are not to mourn for me, Or for your sons, more than a soul should mourn In Paradise, done with evil and with earth.

There is not much of earth in what remains For you; and what there may be left of it For your endurance you shall have at last In peace, without the twinge of any fear For my condition; for I shall be done With plans and actions that have heretofore Made your days long and your nights ominous With darkness and the many distances That were between us. When the silence comes, I shall in faith be nearer to you then Than I am now in fact. What you see now Is only the outside of an old man, Older than years have made him. Let him die, And let him be a thing for little grief.

There was a time for service, and he served; And there is no more time for anything But a short gratefulness to those who gave Their scared allegiance to an enterprise That has the name of treason -- which will serve As well as any other for the present.

There are some deeds of men that have no names, And mine may like as not be one of them.

I am not looking far for names tonight.

The King of Glory was without a name Until men gave him one; yet there He was, Before we found Him and affronted Him With numerous ingenuities of evil, Of which one, with His aid, is to be swept And washed out of the world with fire and blood.

Once I believed it might have come to pa.s.s With a small cost of blood; but I was dreaming -- Dreaming that I believed. The Voice I heard When I left you behind me in the north, -- To wait there and to wonder and grow old Of loneliness, -- told only what was best, And with a saving vagueness, I should know Till I knew more. And had I known even then -- After grim years of search and suffering, So many of them to end as they began -- After my sickening doubts and estimations Of plans abandoned and of new plans vain -- After a weary delving everywhere For men with every virtue but the Vision -- Could I have known, I say, before I left you That summer morning, all there was to know -- Even unto the last consuming word That would have blasted every mortal answer As lightning would annihilate a leaf, I might have trembled on that summer morning; I might have wavered; and I might have failed.

And there are many among men today To say of me that I had best have wavered.

So has it been, so shall it always be, For those of us who give ourselves to die Before we are so parcelled and approved As to be slaughtered by authority.

We do not make so much of what they say As they of what our folly says of us; They give us hardly time enough for that, And thereby we gain much by losing little.

Few are alive to-day with less to lose Than I who tell you this, or more to gain; And whether I speak as one to be destroyed For no good end outside his own destruction, Time shall have more to say than men shall hear Between now and the coming of that harvest Which is to come. Before it comes, I go -- By the short road that mystery makes long For man's endurance of accomplishment.

I shall have more to say when I am dead.

The False G.o.ds

"We are false and evanescent, and aware of our deceit, From the straw that is our vitals to the clay that is our feet.

You may serve us if you must, and you shall have your wage of ashes, -- Though arrears due thereafter may be hard for you to meet.

"You may swear that we are solid, you may say that we are strong, But we know that we are neither and we say that you are wrong; You may find an easy wors.h.i.+p in acclaiming our indulgence, But your large admiration of us now is not for long.

"If your doom is to adore us with a doubt that's never still, And you pray to see our faces -- pray in earnest, and you will.

You may gaze at us and live, and live a.s.sured of our confusion: For the False G.o.ds are mortal, and are made for you to kill.

"And you may as well observe, while apprehensively at ease With an Art that's inorganic and is anything you please, That anon your newest ruin may lie crumbling unregarded, Like an old shrine forgotten in a forest of new trees.

"Howsoever like no other be the mode you may employ, There's an order in the ages for the ages to enjoy; Though the temples you are shaping and the pa.s.sions you are singing Are a long way from Athens and a longer way from Troy.

"When we promise more than ever of what never shall arrive, And you seem a little more than ordinarily alive, Make a note that you are sure you understand our obligations -- For there's grief always auditing where two and two are five.

"There was this for us to say and there was this for you to know, Though it humbles and it hurts us when we have to tell you so.

If you doubt the only truth in all our perjured composition, May the True G.o.ds attend you and forget us when we go."

Archibald's Example

Old Archibald, in his eternal chair, Where trespa.s.sers, whatever their degree, Were soon frowned out again, was looking off Across the clover when he said to me:

"My green hill yonder, where the sun goes down Without a scratch, was once inhabited By trees that injured him -- an evil trash That made a cage, and held him while he bled.

"Gone fifty years, I see them as they were Before they fell. They were a crooked lot To spoil my sunset, and I saw no time In fifty years for crooked things to rot.

"Trees, yes; but not a service or a joy To G.o.d or man, for they were thieves of light.

So down they came. Nature and I looked on, And we were glad when they were out of sight.