The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXIX, No. 1, 1923)

EUGENE A. DAVIDSON.

_Three Poems_

BENEDICTION

“_I know not how he chose you from the crowd, came to your door, and grasp your hand to ask his way._” --_Rabindranath Tagore._

You may not question why he chose you From so many more-- Why his tiny hands have fumbled At your door. To a land of fifty cross-roads He has come to-day, Placed his eager hands in yours, And asked his way.

He will follow where you lead him-- Bright and stormy skies; And at evening still beside you Close his eyes. Keep his trust, O You the Chosen-- Far shall be his way. Clasp him to your heart and bless him With all you may.

RECALL.

“_Come back, my darling; the world is asleep; and no one would know, if you came for a moment while stars are gazing at stars._” --_Rabindranath Tagore._

Dark was the hour you slipped away, Veiled in the shadowed light. Touched with a sleep the others lay Then as they do to-night. Come, my darling, oh, come to mother, Come for an hour and go; For the stars which gaze upon one another-- Only the stars shall know.

Fair was the spring you left behind, Born of a teeming womb; And now once more has a gentle wind Breathed, and the gardens bloom. Come, my darling, oh, come for an hour-- Quick e’er the night is done; And if you should ask for a single flower, How could they miss just one?

Those who played in the sun with you-- Sure, they are playing still; For Life is a spendthrift hand to woo, Led by a reckless will. Come, my darling, for treasured and deep Take of my love but this; And if once more to my arms you creep, Who would begrudge one kiss?

JUST TO-DAY

“_But just for to-day, tell me, Mother, where the desert ... in the fairy tale is._” --_Rabindranath Tagore._

I.

The shepherds slip into the fields Where Father’s gone himself. The books I should be studying Are still upon the shelf. O Mother, let me close my sleepy eyes, And tell me where the fairy desert lies.

II.

What makes you silent? Must you work Like Father every hour? Your hands are busy as two bees Which suck a honey flower. But, Mother, while the sunlight fills the skies, Tell me where the Tagra Desert lies.

III.

At curfew Father will return, And I shall lose you then. I promise some day I shall learn As much as other men. So, Mother, just before the daylight flies Tell me where the Tagra Desert lies.

WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR.

_To One Bereaved_

You welcomed me with such a joyous mask Across the silence of your hurt wide eyes, That I too forced banalities and lies And dared no comfort, though I came to ask The many little questions, long rehearsed, Which meant relief, and friendship. What we said So lightly, never touched upon the dead, Yet we both knew that when we laughed we cursed The bitter God who could make laughter too, Beside this sorrow. Strange, we did not stare Mute sympathy: I only smiling sought To show I knew how bitterly was bought Your cheerful beauty. But I turned my chair, Once, when you laughed----, and looked away from you.

D. G. CARTER.

_Lady of the Sea_

Night, and vessels softly lifting From the surges of the sea, Arms to breezes ever shifting As they whisper low to me.

Silhouetted masts are weaving Circles wavering to lean Nearer waves in slumber heaving Far below a cold moon’s sheen....

Clothed in glory, still and splendid, Starlight shimmers in her hair, And my lady’s form is blended With the shadows, waiting there.

As in silence we are taken In the evening’s soft embrace, Would I never could awaken From the wonder in her face.

R. P. CRENSHAW, JR.

_Coelum non animum mutant Qui trans mare currunt._ --_Horace._

Sail forth across the jade-green sea and view the glades our fathers trod, Their rolling lawns of deathless sod, their hoary castles dear to me.

Catch the pale vision of the past, the sound of stealthy slippered feet; Rest on the moss-grown garden seat and find a lover’s shadow cast.

Creep into Catherine cubicle and sense her icy presence there; Her figure bent and drawn with care as Alchemist o’er crucible.

Look down the waving lane of trees that lines the speckled road’s approach Where glides the flashing golden coach with gay plumes trembling in the breeze.

Gaze up at Longeais from the moat and feel the ages slip away Until its grey walls seem at bay before the host in armored coat.

Go to each ancient place above and bless it with your noiseless tread; Your presence there should stir the dead with tremulous warm thoughts of love.

Leave here for me your image fair, graven in crystal carved by time, Untarnished as a star sublime, unchanging as the love I bear.

God speed you under other skies, drink deep of Europe’s scented charm, But keep the gesture of your arm, the wistful wonder in your eyes.

MORRIS TYLER.

_Quatrains_

I. MORALITY

Behold these proper lovers, when they meet: Each longs for love’s caresses, but that heat Must be suppressed; it is the moral code. God made their passion.... Made he this deceit?

2. THE DYING THESPIAN

The theatre was my life, the very breath Of my existence, so what followeth Shall be in keeping. Tell the player-world I take my final rôle--the lead, in “Death”.

3. A MAIDEN LADY

In younger days, her virtue was a veil She planned to drop, when true love should assail. No lovers came. Perforce, her life was chaste. In age, she boasts her virtue’s iron mail!

4. FUTILITY

So many, ere they leave this little sphere Say thus and so observe my death; make cheer Or weep, in just this way. Well, as for me, Mourn me or not: I shall not pause to hear!

C. G. POORE.

_Lines_

The cold pale patina of sky, The brown upon the woodland leaf With all frail lovely things that die Blend in the autumn’s grief.

For in each withered autumn flower Is wonder where the dead may go, And we slight children of an hour May live and never know.

JOHN R. CHAMBERLAIN.

_The Great Pan Jandrum_

A beautiful tolerance of the various actions of all other people is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of the virtue we admired in him so zealously. An ingenuously boastful boy of twelve would find in him a ready admirer of his most cherished deeds, and he appeared to really appreciate the condescension of the youth of eighteen who saw fit to confide in him, and to take their opinionated selves with decent ceremony where others among their elders would have been merely annoyed or else distressingly amused. People you had always regarded as obviously undesirable, you found him praising--not in the manner of one who champions the weaker side on principle, but because he actually found strange things to like about them. But he was not one of the quiet, gentle, charitable type whose humanity seems the result almost of a want of character, and as such a questionable asset: he relished things with the eager tastes of a performer rather than an onlooker, being blessed also with a watchful and sometimes bursting sense of humor which was as his religion, making him deal with events in the guise of a priestly buffoon and people with a surgery as incisive as it was good-natured.

He was a connoisseur of people--a connoisseur of the happier type who does not simply make a few things his own and damn the unfortunate rest, but who finds that all food for the soul is good food, after all. Thus he used to pick up all sorts of people and become tremendously fond of them overnight. Any genuine person--whether a self-centered young man or a despicable old one, or his gardener’s wife--was of the greatest importance in his eyes. A trace of sentiment or pomposity in one of the subjects of his observations was to him an intellectual emetic as regards that person, but practically all other forms of human failing delighted him quite as much, if not more than the most inspiring strength. You felt that he, for one, had attained to a perfect freedom from himself, so that he could sit back, unlike the rest of us, and be entertained by the diverse abnormalities of his companions: that he found his own passions wholly in the understanding perusal of those of other people.

An Irish servant once said of him: “Sure, now, he does like to see the young people have a good time!” and it expressed brilliantly his attitude. For to his mind, apparently all people were young people whom he was watching at their diversions. In fact, if it had not been for his hilarious sharing of our pleasures, he would have been to us rather like a god: for he seemed older than we, as though he had known of old the great lives upon Olympus and were down here to gratify some fatherly instinct of sympathy for us. And when he sometimes left us, one sensed the withdrawal of considerably more than a presence. We were accustomed to him as one of the most active figures on the scene, but still, when he went away, it was as if a harmonious background had also been removed. In appearance he was fat. His head was large and his face grave, in repose, like that of a serious child.

There were stories, I was once shocked on finding out, about the Great Pan Jandrum’s youth--stories of a vagueness that implied things about him quite incongruous to the people who knew him now. Did he then have a common youth, with all its attendant distortions?--it seemed impossible. Evidently it had not been a romantic theatrical youth either, in spite of its present shaded character. One lady simply said he had been “nasty” and let it go at that. He seems to have been a commonplace person then--aggressively commonplace, with all the nauseating poses of his age strong in him, like diseases. Alcohol had played a part, it seems; and he was not one of those who were made genial or attractive by its use. One could have the heresy to make a decent guess, after all this, as to one origin of his widespread tolerance.

But the placidity of his middle years had been of an amplitude to swallow and almost entirely submerge these indefinite and hushed enormities. So if any dignity in him had given it a chance, the community, which was not large, would have looked upon him as a benevolent influence. At a feast, without his contagious humor, he would still have been a sort of golden aura to the occasion; to meet him was to come away eased of the life-long burden of yourself, having heard him laugh; and he had a gift for rendering people unable to look seriously in the face of a calamity. You were always trying, in spite of yourself, to worship him, he was so grand, and so you would have, except that he was too dynamic for a pedestal.

It almost made him, as a person, not ring true. His rôle was too exact. Occasionally one would find one’s-self looking intently at his serious, childish face--and wondering if there were not something behind it besides a fund of geniality. He was too much of a cheerful background; too understanding of the weaknesses of his neighbors; and in his humor far too thorough not to be sometimes suspected to unreality. But it was a passing doubt at best, and quite conceivably the product of our imaginations as we looked backward from a later date. At any rate, he was enjoyed and respected as a very rare personage indeed: a friend of everyone alike, though no one in particular. You might have described him to a perfect stranger as “a very amusing person”, but if he was mentioned you really did not feel that way yourself. You did not think of him as a person at all, in fact, but as the thing he was, or stood for, as though he were the representative of something.

But it seems that fate had written that the Pan Jandrum--the wise and genial Pan Jandrum--the Great Pan Jandrum himself, was riding, all this time, for a fall.

Fortunately, I was away when it happened, as I should not like to have seen it. For it is certain I should have shared the curiously intense feeling of revulsion--or rather simply depression that settled upon the community afterward. Several things contributed to the effect of the event, chief of which was, of course, its publicity. Had he not chosen the particular evening he did to cast aside every vestige of self-control, no one might have known. But Mrs. Joe-Billy happened, on that winter night, to be giving a dinner at her big house up on the hill to which the Great Pan Jandrum had been invited, and from which he stayed, for a time, conspicuously and unaccountably absent.

Whether he was accidentally started by some inadvertent friend, or whether he deliberately wished to enjoy himself, I do not know. Perhaps he was just tired of his heroic rôle: that is, of our ridiculous yet touching attitude toward him.

Those who saw him during the earlier part of the evening, at the club, never could be made to see the tragic side of the whole affair. Upon them he apparently made an ineffaceable impression and from what we others heard, it must have been a performance in the genuine grand manner. It was, in a way, the glorious apex of his unreal career among us. People who did not see him there were always very pitiless about the way he acted, pity not being reserved, I suppose, for the unpardonable failure of something as great as the Pan Jandrum. But I have seen no one who did see him there who could tell of any part of it without putting it on a lofty epic scale--even the saturnine barber whose pride in his control of the imagination was like a perpetual flower in his buttonhole. The quantity he had to drink was grown, by the time it reached my ears, to an heroic figure. The picture was of him seated in his shirt sleeves alone at a small table, immersed in bottles. The smoke-filled grill room was thronged with young men and dignitaries tip-toe on tables and chairs and chairs on tables in order to hear him and see his stupendous gestures. Nobody could ever remember anything, he said, but it was so impressive as to need but a day for it to acquire a legendary character. I know for a fact that one of the twelve old women of the village who lived a whole block away sent to find the cause of the noise, and that old Mr. Galhoolie roared with the best until it was too much for him and he was sick--in the English sense--all down his patriarchal white beard. I have found myself wishing I had been there, as I wish I had been at Camelot or at one of the receptions given the Greek of many devices on his wanderings.

But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there, they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent, breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled--hilarious, crude, outlandish--they didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.

If only it had been hilarity, or crudity, or wildness that greeted them! Their wait had been long enough and tense, with them talking in low voices--asking each other hesitating little questions about what they thought might happen. Suddenly some one started back with a gasp, and they all turned to find his serious child’s face outside the window, intently peering at them.

There is no need to describe his actions subsequent to his entering the house. He was not outlandish. He was merely quiet in voice and manner with an appalling drunkard’s dignity, and he was fully dressed. The cheer had all gone out of him. He talked for an hour without pause, first to one, then to another, entirely about himself and with horrible seriousness. Sententiousness and pomposity from the Great Pan Jandrum! His tone was threatening; almost challenging all the while, and there was that in his face which prevented any thought of stopping him. Intimate, personal, half-finished thoughts issued from him like loathsome abortions. He took the beautiful Mrs. Galhoolie’s hand in his and told her he reverenced and respected her so much that he could not ever love her as the others did. Everyone was left knowing in excessively sentimental terms just what he thought of them. Everything he uttered was an indecent exposure; every sentence tore away another portion of the disguise--as it looked--that he had been so long building. He was operating on himself in their presence, exposing the nauseating entrails of his mind--so comfortable from the outside--and forcing upon them the knowledge that he was as sordid and commonplace as they in their very worst moments. When they brought him home and left him they could hear him sobbing--great, deep-voiced, mountainous sobs that shook his bed.

But for me, the story of the evening gave the key to the man and made him interesting. You may admire a point of view and you may even bask in it, but you cannot make it your friend. It sounded precisely as though a pent-up flood of gnawing sentiment and egoism had been let loose in him. He must have had incurably Byronic tendencies which had at some time or other offended his critical sense, and you saw him now as a man despairingly and acutely aware of his vulgar heritage of ego who had with his almost passionate interest in the fortunes of other people built up the most powerful defense against himself that he could think of. And there always was, too, I reflected, something of the fanatic about his rôle of humorist.

I should have been disturbed on our first meeting soon after the performance, had it not come as a surprise. I was in Paris, and as I was leaving my hotel one night for some kind of a festivity he popped out of the darkness and shook me by the hand. We parted hastily, I having time for little greeting. “Have a good time, now!” he said as I left, and that old characteristic phrase of his rang in my ears as I walked off down the street. He had said it with his usual cheerful, interested smile and I looked in vain for a found-out expression I had expected to notice in his face. I wondered if he realized what his one false step had meant to our imaginations. For, as I afterwards observed, it was not a question of his brazening it out: he evidently had consigned it to the limbo of to-be-expected mistakes with a shrug of the shoulders and took it for granted that we had done the same. But, however this may be, I saw that he had already begun to build another structure of worship in my esteem at any rate. Already my newly discovered man was disappearing, engulfed as in a very splendid costume which he had removed for a minute. And when next I saw him at home I had again the ancient feeling of being bathed in a warm electric light--that unaccountably had sparks, as well.