Captain Craig

I

I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town  

Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig,  

Or called him by his name, or looked at him  

So curiously, or so concernedly,  

As they had looked at ashes; but a few—

Say five or six of us—had found somehow  

The spark in him, and we had fanned it there,  

Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ,  

By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life  

And in his way had shared, with all mankind,

Inveterate leave to fashion of himself,  

By some resplendent metamorphosis,  

Whatever he was not. And after time,  

When it had come sufficiently to pass  

That he was going patch-clad through the streets,

Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid  

Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve,  

And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence,  

Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,”  

He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on,

And after it moved others—one or two;  

For Captain Craig, before the day was done,  

Got back to the scant refuge of his bed  

And shivered into it without a curse—  

Without a murmur even. He was cold,

And old, and hungry; but the worst of it  

Was a forlorn familiar consciousness  

That he had failed again. There was a time  

When he had fancied, if worst came to worst,  

And he could do no more, that he might ask

Of whom he would. But once had been enough,  

And soon there would be nothing more to ask.  

He was himself, and he had lost the speed  

He started with, and he was left behind.  

There was no mystery, no tragedy;

And if they found him lying on his back  

Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,—  

Well, once upon a time there was a man—  

Es war einmal ein König, if it pleased him.  

And he was right: there were no men to blame:

There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune—  

A note that able-bodied men might sound  

Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet.  

They might have made him sing by feeding him  

Till he should march again, but probably

Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm;  

They found it more melodious to shout  

Right on, with unmolested adoration,  

To keep the tune as it had always been,  

To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.

He must have understood that afterwards—  

When we had laid some fuel to the spark  

Of him, and oxidized it—for he laughed  

Out loud and long at us to feel it burn,  

And then, for gratitude, made game of us:

“You are the resurrection and the life,”  

He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings;  

O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”  

We were not quite accoutred for a blast  

Of any lettered nonchalance like that,

And some of us—the five or six of us  

Who found him out—were singularly struck.  

But soon there came assurance of his lips,  

Like phrases out of some sweet instrument  

Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt

“No penitential shame for what had come,  

No virtuous regret for what had been,—  

But rather a joy to find it in his life  

To be an outcast usher of the soul  

For such as had good courage of the Sun

To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair;  

And on the bottom of it, like a king,  

For longer time than I dare chronicle,  

Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized  

His opportunity. My friends got out,

Like brokers out of Arcady; but I—  

May be for fascination of the thing,  

Or may be for the larger humor of it—  

Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung.  

When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze

Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled  

At me and then continued, earnestly:  

“Your friends have had enough of it; but you,  

For a motive hardly vindicated yet  

By prudence or by conscience, have remained;

And that is very good, for I have things  

To tell you: things that are not words alone—  

Which are the ghosts of things—but something firmer.  

“First, would I have you know, for every gift  

Or sacrifice, there are—or there may be—

Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind  

We feel for what we take, the larger kind  

We feel for what we give. Once we have learned  

As much as this, we know the truth has been  

Told over to the world a thousand times;—

But we have had no ears to listen yet  

For more than fragments of it: we have heard  

A murmur now and then, and echo here  

And there, and we have made great music of it;  

And we have made innumerable books

To please the Unknown God. Time throws away  

Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows  

No death denies not one: the books all count,  

The songs all count; and yet God’s music has  

No modes, his language has no adjectives.”

“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I;  

“But what has this that you are saying now—  

This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk—  

To do with you and me?” The Captain raised  

His hand and held it westward, where a patched

And unwashed attic-window filtered in  

What barren light could reach us, and then said,  

With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines  

The sun. Behold it. We go round and round,  

And wisdom comes to us with every whirl

We count throughout the circuit. We may say  

The child is born, the boy becomes a man,  

The man does this and that, and the man goes,—  

But having said it we have not said much,  

Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think,

That it will be the end of anything  

When I am gone? There was a soldier once  

Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead.  

Sad friends went after, and they brought him home  

And had a brass band at his funeral,

As you should have at mine; and after that  

A few remembered him. But he was dead,  

They said, and they should have their friend no more.—  

However, there was once a starveling child—  

A ragged-vested little incubus,

Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all  

Capacity for childhood’s happiness—  

Who started out one day, quite suddenly,  

To drown himself. He ran away from home,  

Across the clover-fields and through the woods,

And waited on a rock above a stream,  

Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived,  

Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow,  

There came along a man who looked at him  

With such an unexpected friendliness,

And talked with him in such a common way,  

That life grew marvelously different:  

What he had lately known for sullen trunks  

And branches, and a world of tedious leaves,  

Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind

That once had made the loneliest of all  

Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music;  

And water that had called him once to death  

Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man,  

Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.

Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you:  

Good occupation for a sonneteer,  

Or for a clown, or for a clergyman,  

But small work for a soldier. By the way,  

When you are weary sometimes of your own

Utility, I wonder if you find  

Occasional great comfort pondering  

What power a man has in him to put forth?  

‘Of all the many marvelous things that are,  

Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’

Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago;  

‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods  

He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth,  

Turning the broken mould, year after year.’…  

“I turned a little furrow of my own

Once on a time, and everybody laughed—  

As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not  

The First Intelligence, which we have drawn  

In our competitive humility  

As if it went forever on two legs,

Had some diversion of it: I believe  

God’s humor is the music of the spheres—  

But even as we draft omnipotence  

Itself to our own image, we pervert  

The courage of an infinite ideal

To finite resignation. You have made  

The cement of your churches out of tears  

And ashes, and the fabric will not stand:  

The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored  

So long with unavailing compromise

Will crumble down to dust and blow away,  

And younger dust will follow after them;  

Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled  

First atom of the least that ever flew  

Shall be by man defrauded of the touch

God thrilled it with to make a dream for man  

When Science was unborn. And after time,  

When we have earned our spiritual ears,  

And art’s commiseration of the truth  

No longer glorifies the singing beast,

Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,—  

Then shall at last come ringing through the sun,  

Through time, through flesh, a music that is true.  

For wisdom is that music, and all joy  

That wisdom:—you may counterfeit, you think,

The burden of it in a thousand ways;  

But as the bitterness that loads your tears  

Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom,  

The penance, and the woeful pride you keep,  

Make bitterness your buoyance of the world.

And at the fairest and the frenziedest  

Alike of your God-fearing festivals,  

You so compound the truth to pamper fear  

That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith  

You clamor for the food that shadows eat.

You call it rapture or deliverance,—  

Passion or exaltation, or what most  

The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness  

Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch  

For something larger, something unfulfilled,

Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have  

Never, until you learn to laugh with God.”  

And with a calm Socratic patronage,  

At once half sombre and half humorous,  

The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs

And fixed his eyes on something far away;  

Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd,  

And at the moment unendurable  

For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.  

“But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease

With altruism yet.—He made a sort  

Of reminiscent little inward noise,  

Midway between a chuckle and a laugh,  

And that was all his answer: not a word  

Of explanation or suggestion came

From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left,  

I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow  

And had the world-wide air to breathe again,—  

Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth  

And honored the endurance of his hand—

Whether or not, securely closeted  

Up there in the stived haven of his den,  

The man sat laughing at me; and I felt  

My teeth grind hard together with a quaint  

Revulsion—as I recognize it now—

Not only for my Captain, but as well  

For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth;  

Albeit I could swear, at the same time,  

That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes.  

I question if in tremors or in tears

There be more guidance to man’s worthiness  

Than—well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes  

It humors us to think that we possess  

By some divine adjustment of our own  

Particular shrewd cells, or something else,

What others, for untutored sympathy,  

Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives  

To catch—like cheerful sinners to catch faith;  

And I have not a doubt but I assumed  

Some egotistic attribute like this

When, cautiously, next morning I reduced  

The fretful qualms of my novitiate,  

For most part, to an undigested pride.  

Only, I live convinced that I regret  

This enterprise no more than I regret

My life; and I am glad that I was born.  

That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found  

The faces of my comrades all suffused  

With what I chose then to denominate  

Superfluous good feeling. In return,

They loaded me with titles of odd form  

And unexemplified significance,  

Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,”  

“Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,”  

“Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more

That I remember, and a dozen more  

That I forget. I may have been disturbed,  

I do not say that I was not annoyed,  

But something of the same serenity  

That fortified me later made me feel

For their skin-pricking arrows not so much  

Of pain as of a vigorous defect  

In this world’s archery. I might have tried,  

With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate  

What they had only snapped at and thereby

Made out of my best evidence no more  

Than comfortable food for their conceit;  

But patient wisdom frowned on argument,  

With a side nod for silence, and I smoked  

A series of incurable dry pipes

While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care,  

Things that I wished he wouldn’t. Killigrew,  

Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass,  

Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made  

Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.

It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats  

That night, but I have rather to believe  

As I lay turning, twisting, listening,  

And wondering, between great sleepless yawns,  

What possible satisfaction those dead leaves

Could find in sending shadows to my room  

And swinging them like black rags on a line,  

That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness  

Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned  

In fearing to believe what I believed,

And I was paying for it.—Whimsical,  

You think,—factitious; but “there is no luck,  

No fate, no fortune for us, but the old  

Unswerving and inviolable price  

Gets paid: God sells himself eternally,

But never gives a crust,” my friend had said;  

And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats,  

And with half mad minuteness analyzed  

The Captain’s attitude and then my own,  

I felt at length as one who throws himself

Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark,  

And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up  

And opens them again, what seems at first  

An unfamiliar sunlight in his room  

And in his life—as if the child in him

Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew  

Some prowling superfluity of child  

In me had found the child in Captain Craig  

And let the sunlight reach him. While I slept,  

My thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams,

And in the morning it was with me still.  

Through March and shifting April to the time  

When winter first becomes a memory  

My friend the Captain—to my other friend’s  

Incredulous regret that such as he

Should ever get the talons of his talk  

So fixed in my unfledged credulity—  

Kept up the peroration of his life,  

Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think,  

Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh

Sometimes, and then again he made me weep  

Almost; for I had insufficiency  

Enough in me to make me know the truth  

Within the jest, and I could feel it there  

As well as if it were the folded note

I felt between my fingers. I had said  

Before that I should have to go away  

And leave him for the season; and his eyes  

Had shone with well-becoming interest  

At that intelligence. There was no mist

In them that I remember; but I marked  

An unmistakable self-questioning  

And a reticence of unassumed regret.  

The two together made anxiety—  

Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see

No more of him for six or seven months,  

And I was there to tell him as I might  

What humorous provision we had made  

For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town.  

That finished—with a few more commonplace

Prosaics on the certified event  

Of my return to find him young again—  

I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us,  

Nor over much at odds with destiny.  

At any rate, save always for a look

That I had seen too often to mistake  

Or to forget, he gave no other sign.  

That train began to move; and as it moved,  

I felt a comfortable sudden change  

All over and inside. Partly it seemed

As if the strings of me had all at once  

Gone down a tone or two; and even though  

It made me scowl to think so trivial  

A touch had owned the strength to tighten them,  

It made me laugh to think that I was free.

But free from what—when I began to turn  

The question round—was more than I could say:  

I was no longer vexed with Killigrew,  

Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig;  

But I was eased of some restraint, I thought,

Not qualified by those amenities,  

And I should have to search the matter down;  

For I was young, and I was very keen.  

So I began to smoke a bad cigar  

That Plunket, in his love, had given me

The night before; and as I smoked I watched  

The flying mirrors for a mile or so,  

Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint,  

They gave me of the woodland over west,  

A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years

Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail,  

With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky;  

And yawning out of that I set myself  

To face again the loud monotonous ride  

That lay before me like a vista drawn

Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.