University of Virginia Library

There was a wall of crimson all along
The river now; and Bartholow, gazing at it,
Knew in his heart it was for the last time
That he was seeing those trees, and the still water,
Which he had known from childhood. In his house,
Or one that all his life had been his house,
Nothing of his remained that would be there
To-morrow. In his heart nothing remained
But a recurrent ache when he remembered,
As now he must; for there would soon be sunset,
And he would soon be gone. He looked away
Over the falling lawn before him there
Where summer now lay buried and the first
Red leaves of autumn, flying silently,
Became a scattered silence on the grass.
He gazed, and saw the water through the rift
His axe had made that morning in the spring,
With Gabrielle watching him. That was long ago—
Too long, he told himself, to be seen there
Among so many pictures that were fading,
But were not yet invisible. No, not yet.
The frown of an unwelcome recollection
Wrinkled his face and changed it while he saw
The picture of a shipwreck on the air
Before him, and three faces. One was his,
That would be seen again; and one was hers,
That would not, surely, come back there again,
If even it might, to see or to be seen;
And there was one that he should see no more,
Living or dead, if life and death were kind.

Considering thus the scene that he had limned
Of cloudy and tempestuous memories,
He felt an echo sounding over floors
Of the old house—dismantled, empty, sold.
And waiting for new faces to come in
When he should go. “I shall be gone to-morrow,”
He thought; “and when this house where I was born
Has been here for another hundred years,
No doubt some unborn stranger will be gazing
As I am, at the river there below him,
With memories that may then be quite as cloudy
For him as mine have been for me to-day.
By then he may have lost as much as I
Lost once—or more, if there be more for one
To lose,—and he may then have found far less.
I wonder what a learned fisherman
Would say to that,” he asked, as Umfraville,
After an exploration, came outside.
Tramping the flags with hard and heavy feet
He came to Bartholow as an animal,
Quaintly arrayed as man, might have approached
A master that he knew was leaving him.
There was a melancholy questioning
About him, and almost a dignity.
“They have left nothing that was made for me,
And that's as well,” he said. “The books you sent
Will be enough, and I shall not forget
The man who sent them. That's my way of saying
All that I cannot say. And you said something?”

“I wondered if another hundred years
May find another tenant in this house
With memories that will be no merrier then
For him than mine are now for me. That's fancy,
As you would say. Too much in order, surely,
To be imagination, I should say.”

“Merry is not your word this afternoon—
That's more what I should say,” said Umfraville;
“Though I'll imagine a man somewhat merry,
Even in a tomb, alone there with his fathers,
If he be sure that one man, and one only,
Be not somewhere there with him. Your Penn-Raven,
Whether or not he's in your tomb, is not
Here in this house. At least, I didn't find him.
I'm wondering where three months have hidden him,
And how far off he is,—but I'm not asking.
If only we select our distances,
The world is of a comfortable size
For two to live in. What are you going to do,
If, as you may, sometime you come together,
And he weeps on your bosom for more gold?”

“We shall not come together,” Bartholow said,
Smiling impassively. “And if we should,
We shall agree upon our distances.
He has instructions, and he has a mind
That's apt and adequate for their absorption.
Yes, I believe him. Yes, and in his word.”

“He has a mind, and he has more than that,”
The scholar growled at length, unwillingly,
“If all you say is true; and your condition
Would argue rather more for you than lies.
He says you are yourself; and if your look
Be the certificate of your quality,
You are not far from where he says you are.
On your report he says enough to sink
A shipload of the uninitiated.
He says if in considering what we are
We ponder for a season on the many
Behind us who have made us what we are,
Our vanity will hardly have an eyelash
To cling with to the ridge of our achievement;
He tells you those who struggle with more knots
Than yours have ever been would be themselves
A commonwealth—and that's all true enough;
He tells you that some evils are themselves
Their proper remedies—and that may pass;
He says the fruit that he has given to you
Is one you may not share with other men—
Though you may give it, and those getting it
May thrive on it, not knowing the name of it,
Or whence it comes to them, or wherefore. Well,
I'm not so much at home there, but no matter.
He says that from now on you'll be alone,
Wherever you find yourself, and that you'll carry
Whatever it is you call it with you always,
Whether you will or not. He says, also,
There was a man, meaning himself—oh, damn him—
That was already on his way to save you,
Knowing no more, it seems, of your existence
Than you knew there was anywhere after you
A thing like him. And there you are. Joy! Joy!
If I were but a hand-step nearer bedlam,
I'd half believe the blackguard was half right.”
“I called him once a blackguard—to his face,”
Bartholow said, reflecting; “and I met
With no denial. Yet I could wonder now
Just what the silence he commanded then
Was made of. Partly sorrow, I am sure,—
And I forgive your smiling; partly pain;
Partly compassionate bewilderment—
And I forgive your laughing. I should laugh,
Undoubtedly, or wish to, in your place;
If I were in your place, I'd be as blind
As you are, and as much to be forgiven.
Excused, I mean. If we're too soft with nature
In our forgivings, nature may laugh at us
As you were laughing then, and fling them back
Like vitriol in our faces. I'll excuse
Your mirth, my learned friend, but don't do that;
For now, to make it worse, you are too solemn—
As if you feared that you had wounded me.
You have not wounded me. Do you remember
That morning when I knocked you out of bed
So early—when I told you it had happened
And went somewhat to pieces at the end?
There was a time when I too should have laughed
At the mere whispered probability
Of such a scene awaiting anyone
Assisting at my drama. But you waited,
And in your wisdom never said a word,
Or laughed. You might as well have laughed at that
As at compassionate bewilderment—
Or what it was Penn-Raven may have felt
For me when he was told he was a blackguard,
Which, in the compound of his opposites,
I'll say to you he was. Now you look better.
If you have not forgotten such a morning,
You may remember that I mentioned then
Some doors within us that may not be opened
Till one may come who has the key to them.
When he has opened them and has made free
The life within that was a prisoner there,
How is a man who has a door in him
Still closed, like yours, to say what else he was
Than blackguard? Even though I say my doors
Are open, I'm not saying what else he was,
Or why it is that nature baits for men,
Between them and the pit, so many traps
To save them with a poisoned obligation.
Nature has ways, you say, not reasons. Well,
They lead us, if we find and follow them,
Strangely away from death.”

“And into it—
As often, or as likely.” Umfraville
Stared with a brooding melancholy scowl
Over the flaming trees and into time
Behind him, but he found so little there
That he soon looked again at Bartholow,
And with constrained inquiry. “Quite as often,”
He said, “or quite as likely. And for that,
If you've an urging in you, going forward,
To stray back by the phantom-ridden ways
Of memory—tout' aniarotaton.
Your steps are elsewhere. Pindar said all that,
You may remember,—nessun maggior
Dolore—long before there was a Dante.
You find it also in Cimmerian,
If you look far enough. But what's it all
To me? I'm asking—what's it all to me?
I'm only a dry mummy among books,
Except when I'm a-fishing or I'm drinking.
For me there's nothing wholly bad that's old,
And nothing good that's new since Porson type.
While time has a digamma left in it
For bait, I'll set my trap and catch myself.
Your traps and ways are yours; though as for poison,
Leaving him out, I pray that by this time
You see at last where custom was at work
Before he came. You fancied once I told you
That you had killed her,—which was nothing more
Than a politeness to Melpomene
On your part, and a negligence on mine.
My fault again,” he added, having watched
A cloud across the face of Bartholow:
“I should have put more clothes upon my words;
“I should have said it without saying it;
I should have said, ‘For God's sake, my good friend,
Relinquish all such dutiful self-damnation
As that. There were you two in the dark together,
And there her story ends.’ The leaves you turn
Are blank; and where a story ends, it ends.
The author may have lost enthusiasm,
Or changed his mind, and so may write another—
But not upon those leaves. Books are my life,
And when there is no more of one, I know it.
‘Let me be worthy of your mysteries’—
Or, at the least, of this one. Say to custom
All I have said to you, and then forget.”

Bartholow, gazing at the open door,
Could half believe that he saw there the ghost
Of Gabrielle, going in and vanishing,
Slowly, as he had seen her when she left him,
That morning in the spring, when he had said
So much to her about a phantom house,
Which he knew as well then must always be
A phantom as he knew it was one now.
Before it was all gone the vision turned
Upon him the once unrevealing eyes
That now revealed so much; for he could see
All that he did not see when she was there,
A woman and alive. But he saw nothing
That would have been as happy in his house
Unbuilt as in her grave where she was lying.

He shook his head slowly at Umfraville.
“No, I shall not wear out the time that's left
In poring always over those blank leaves,”
He said; “and maybe they are not so blank
To me this afternoon as once they were.
There may be nothing on them for your eyes,
Which in their turn see much that might as well
Be blank for mine. I shall remember always
Your counsel, and should always value it,
Being yours, whether or not I followed it.
Your Custom, undeniably a giant,
Is not so monstrous that, if we had vision
To see ourselves before it was too late,
We might not overthrow him for another;
For we must have our giants, though the pride
Of our inferiority may insist
That we disguise them. There are more at work
On a forlorn disguise to fit the old
Than on a proper garment for the new.
New giants are at first intolerably
Not ours, and are uncoverably naked.”—
“If you can see all that,” said Umfraville,
“There are no pits of memory behind you
That you need waste a fear on, or a sigh.
Go out into your world and be a tailor,
But leave my world with me. I'll stay in it
With my familiar giants, who are dead,
And therefore do no harm.”

Bartholow smiled:
“About what time were they annihilated—
These harmless giants of yours? They are not dead,
My friend, though some of them are overthrown;
And even to-night, if you bestir yourself,
There may be time enough, and a way made,
For you to go with me—as far, at least,
As where your giants reigned.” He looked again,
Affectionately, at an asking face
That hardly was a face, and read upon it
A loneliness of long deformity
That was the lonelier somehow for its learning.
“An hour or two on the Acropolis
Would let you see how far they are from dead.”

The scholar shook his head: “They are not there;
And you are wronging them and wronging me,
Saying they are alive. They are all dead.
And I would have them so. No, I'll stay here.
Here I shall have my own Acropolis,
And have it as I will. If I were there,
All I should see would be the scraps and ashes
Of a lost world that I shall have intact,
And uninfested with modernities,
If I stay here. And if I went with you,
For God's sake what would you be doing with me?
Men would be saying soon to one another
That you were Satan, going to and fro
In the earth again and up and down in it,
With me along with you to scare away
The curious, who might otherwise be annoying.
No, no! There is a best place in the world
For me; and that's as far as possible
From your activities. You are going to live,
At last, that more may live. It is all true—
All as your prophet, damn him, said it was.
I see it now, but there was a long time
When I saw nothing but that meaty-faced,
Fanatic, esoteric head of his.
Nature, that has a deal to answer for,
Put something in him, inadvertently,
Prepared and graduated for the lymph
And essence of a worthier organism.
That's how it must have been. If you say not,
You say it on the same authority
That I say I'm a fairy of the hills.
No, no,—the place for me is over there
Across the river. There among my dead,
And only there, I'm properly alive.
So there I'll go, and with no more ado.
You dine to-night with friends who are concerned
That you have sold unwisely and too soon—
And then you go. You are the only friend
That I have left; and if that's not so bad
As a bad name to take away with you,
Shelve it among your memories. Good-bye!”

Bartholow pressed his hand and held it long
Before he let it go again. “Good-bye!”
He said. “We should have known each other better
If I had known myself. A word of yours
Will always find me—somewhere. You know best
Where you belong—whether among your dead,
Who are still with us, or among the living
Who are not yet alive.”

The man of books
Answered him only with a lonely smile;
And then, among the slowly falling leaves,
He walked away and vanished gradually,
Like one who had not been. Yet he had been
For Bartholow the man who knew him best,
And loved him best,—acknowledging always one
That had betrayed and saved him. He was gone,
Also, and there was no more to be said
Of him; and there was no more to be paid,
Apparently, on either side. The sum
Of all that each had ever owed the other
Was covered, sealed, and cancelled in a grave,
Where lay a woman doomed never to live—
That he who had adored her and outgrown her
Might yet achieve. He sighed, and saw the ivy
Glimmering on the wall of the old house
Like an old garment over covered years,
Till his imagination made of it
The cover and the integument itself
Of the unseen. The tangled roots of wrong
Were drawing always out of hidden soil
The weird existence of a tangled vine
Too vaguely intertwisted and involved
For sanguine gardeners, who might only prune
Or train a few new branches. “Well, that's something,”
Gabrielle might have answered then, he fancied;
And she might then have smiled as wearily
As on that unforgotten unreal evening
When she had touched his forehead with her lips
Before she had gone silently upstairs,
And silently away. ...

He locked the door,
Aware that even the key to the old house
That had so long been his was his no longer,
And in the twilight went away from there.
Over the footworn flagstones and the gravel,
Under the trees and over the long road
Between him and the gate, he walked away,
Knowing that he had seen for the last time
The changeless outline of those eastern hills,
And all those changing trees that flamed along
A river that should flow for him no more.