Time's Laughingstocks, and Other Verses Part 20

1906.

G.o.d'S EDUCATION

I saw him steal the light away That haunted in her eye: It went so gently none could say More than that it was there one day And missing by-and-by.

I watched her longer, and he stole Her lily tincts and rose; All her young sprightliness of soul Next fell beneath his cold control, And disappeared like those.

I asked: "Why do you serve her so?

Do you, for some glad day, h.o.a.rd these her sweets--?" He said, "O no, They charm not me; I bid Time throw Them carelessly away."

Said I: "We call that cruelty - We, your poor mortal kind."

He mused. "The thought is new to me.

Forsooth, though I men's master be, Theirs is the teaching mind!"

TO SINCERITY

O sweet sincerity! - Where modern methods be What scope for thine and thee?

Life may be sad past saying, Its greens for ever graying, Its faiths to dust decaying;

And youth may have foreknown it, And riper seasons shown it, But custom cries: "Disown it:

"Say ye rejoice, though grieving, Believe, while unbelieving, Behold, without perceiving!"

- Yet, would men look at true things, And unilluded view things, And count to bear undue things,

The real might mend the seeming, Facts better their foredeeming, And Life its disesteeming.

February 1899.

PANTHERA

(For other forms of this legend--first met with in the second century--see Origen contra Celsum; the Talmud; Sepher Toldoth Jeschu; quoted fragments of lost Apocryphal gospels; Strauss, Haeckel; etc.)

Yea, as I sit here, crutched, and cricked, and bent, I think of Panthera, who underwent Much from insidious aches in his decline; But his aches were not radical like mine; They were the twinges of old wounds--the feel Of the hand he had lost, shorn by barbarian steel, Which came back, so he said, at a change in the air, Fingers and all, as if it still were there.

My pains are otherwise: upclosing cramps And stiffened tendons from this country's damps, Where Panthera was never commandant. - The Fates sent him by way of the Levant.

He had been blithe in his young manhood's time, And as centurion carried well his prime.

In Ethiop, Araby, climes fair and fell, He had seen service and had borne him well.

Nought shook him then: he was serene as brave; Yet later knew some shocks, and would grow grave When pondering them; shocks less of corporal kind Than phantom-like, that disarranged his mind; And it was in the way of warning me (By much his junior) against levity That he recounted them; and one in chief Panthera loved to set in bold relief.

This was a tragedy of his Eastern days, Personal in touch--though I have sometimes thought That touch a possible delusion--wrought Of half-conviction carried to a craze - His mind at last being stressed by ails and age:- Yet his good faith thereon I well could wage.

I had said it long had been a wish with me That I might leave a scion--some small tree As channel for my sap, if not my name - Ay, offspring even of no legitimate claim, In whose advance I secretly could joy.

Thereat he warned.

"Cancel such wishes, boy!

A son may be a comfort or a curse, A seer, a doer, a coward, a fool; yea, worse - A criminal . . . That I could testify!"

"Panthera has no guilty son!" cried I All unbelieving. "Friend, you do not know,"

He darkly dropt: "True, I've none now to show, For THE LAW TOOK HIM. Ay, in sooth, Jove shaped it so!"

"This noon is not unlike," he again began, "The noon these p.r.i.c.king memories print on me - Yea, that day, when the sun grew copper-red, And I served in Judaea . . . 'Twas a date Of rest for arms. The Pax Romana ruled, To the chagrin of frontier legionaries!

Palestine was annexed--though sullen yet, - I, being in age some two-score years and ten And having the garrison in Jerusalem Part in my hands as acting officer Under the Governor. A tedious time I found it, of routine, amid a folk Restless, contentless, and irascible. - Quelling some riot, sentrying court and hall, Sending men forth on public meeting-days To maintain order, were my duties there.

"Then came a morn in spring, and the cheerful sun Whitened the city and the hills around, And every mountain-road that clambered them, Tincturing the greyness of the olives warm, And the rank cacti round the valley's sides.

The day was one whereon death-penalties Were put in force, and here and there were set The soldiery for order, as I said, Since one of the condemned had raised some heat, And crowds surged pa.s.sionately to see him slain.

I, mounted on a Cappadocian horse, With some half-company of auxiliaries, Had captained the procession through the streets When it came streaming from the judgment-hall After the verdicts of the Governor.

It drew to the great gate of the northern way That bears towards Damascus; and to a knoll Upon the common, just beyond the walls - Whence could be swept a wide horizon round Over the housetops to the remotest heights.

Here was the public execution-ground For city crimes, called then and doubtless now Golgotha, Kranion, or Calvaria.

"The usual dooms were duly meted out; Some three or four were stript, transfixed, and nailed, And no great stir occurred. A day of wont It was to me, so far, and would have slid Clean from my memory at its squalid close But for an incident that followed these.

"Among the tag-rag rabble of either s.e.x That hung around the wretches as they writhed, Till thrust back by our spears, one held my eye - A weeping woman, whose strained countenance, Sharpened against a looming livid cloud, Was mocked by the crude rays of afternoon - The mother of one of those who suffered there I had heard her called when spoken roughly to By my ranged men for pressing forward so.

It stole upon me hers was a face I knew; Yet when, or how, I had known it, for a while Eluded me. And then at once it came.

"Some thirty years or more before that noon I was sub-captain of a company Drawn from the legion of Calabria, That marched up from Judaea north to Tyre.

We had pierced the old flat country of Jezreel, The great Esdraelon Plain and fighting-floor Of Jew with Canaanite, and with the host Of Pharaoh-Necho, king of Egypt, met While crossing there to strike the a.s.syrian pride.

We left behind Gilboa; pa.s.sed by Nain; Till bulging Tabor rose, embossed to the top With arbute, terabinth, and locust growths.

"Enc.u.mbering me were sundry sick, so fallen Through drinking from a swamp beside the way; But we pressed on, till, bearing over a ridge, We dipt into a world of pleasantness - A vale, the fairest I had gazed upon - Which lapped a village on its furthest slopes Called Nazareth, brimmed round by uplands nigh.

In the midst thereof a fountain bubbled, where, Lime-dry from marching, our glad halt we made To rest our sick ones, and refresh us all.

"Here a day onward, towards the eventide, Our men were piping to a Pyrrhic dance Trod by their comrades, when the young women came To fill their pitchers, as their custom was.

I proffered help to one--a slim girl, coy Even as a fawn, meek, and as innocent.

Her long blue gown, the string of silver coins That hung down by her banded beautiful hair, Symboled in full immaculate modesty.

"Well, I was young, and hot, and readily stirred To quick desire. 'Twas tedious timing out The convalescence of the soldiery; And I beguiled the long and empty days By blissful yieldance to her sweet allure, Who had no arts, but what out-arted all, The tremulous tender charm of trustfulness.

We met, and met, and under the winking stars That pa.s.sed which peoples earth--true union, yea, To the pure eye of her simplicity.

"Meanwhile the sick found health; and we p.r.i.c.ked on.

I made her no rash promise of return, As some do use; I was sincere in that; I said we sundered never to meet again - And yet I spoke untruth unknowingly! - For meet again we did. Now, guess you aught?

The weeping mother on Calvaria Was she I had known--albeit that time and tears Had wasted rudely her once flowerlike form, And her soft eyes, now swollen with sorrowing.

"Though I betrayed some qualms, she marked me not; And I was scarce of mood to comrade her And close the silence of so wide a time To claim a malefactor as my son - (For so I guessed him). And inquiry made Brought rumour how at Nazareth long before An old man wedded her for pity's sake On finding she had grown pregnant, none knew how, Cared for her child, and loved her till he died.

"Well; there it ended; save that then I learnt That he--the man whose ardent blood was mine - Had waked sedition long among the Jews, And hurled insulting parlance at their G.o.d, Whose temple bulked upon the adjoining hill, Vowing that he would raze it, that himself Was G.o.d as great as he whom they adored, And by descent, moreover, was their king; With sundry other incitements to misrule.

"The impalements done, and done the soldiers' game Of raffling for the clothes, a legionary, Longinus, pierced the young man with his lance At signs from me, moved by his agonies Through naysaying the drug they had offered him.