Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 29
CHAPTER XXIX
Worthy of more detailed description, however, is the figure of an old, old man I met about this time, a dignified, venerable and mysterious being, man of the world, lawyer, musician, scholar, poet, but above all, exile. Incidentally, he was madman too. What unkindly tricks fate had played with his fine brain, I never learned with accuracy. It was but the ruin of a great mind I knew. Pain and suffering of no unusual order, as I soon discovered, had, at any rate, left his heart as wise and sweet and gentle as any I have ever known. His voice, his eyes, his smile, his very gestures, even, had in them all the misery and all the goodness of the world. Our chance meeting deepened into a friendship, the intimacy of which between Padre and Figlio—names he himself assigned respectively—yet never permitted a full account of his own mysterious past. The little I gathered of his personal history before he died some dozen years later in England, came to me from patchwork sources, but none of it from his own lips. What term the alienists might use to describe the mental disorder of Alfred H. Louis I do not know.
The first time I saw him he cut a sorry figure; an old fellow in far worse plight and even worse down at heel than I was myself. It was in an olive-oil warehouse, at No. 1, Water Street, on the river front. McKay, the owner, whom I had met through some newspaper story or other, had converted me to the wisdom of an occasional glass of olive oil. It was healthful and delicious, but to me its chief value was as food. On this day of broiling heat I had wandered in for a glass of oil, and, while waiting a moment for the owner to appear, I noticed an old tramp seated on a packing-case, gazing at me in penetrating fashion. He was a Jew, he was very small, his feet were tiny, his hands, I took in, were beautiful. I thought of Moses, of Abraham, some Biblical prophet come to life, of some storied being like the Wandering Jew.
His atmosphere, that is, at once sent a message of something unusual to my imagination. But it was when McKay came in and, to my surprise, calmly introduced us as fellow Englishmen, that my mind was really startled--not because the old tramp was English, but because when he rose to shake my hand, it seemed to me that some great figure of history rose to address, not me, but the nations of the world. He reached barely to my shoulder, his face upturned to mine, yet the feeling came that it was I who looked up into his eyes. The dignity and power the frail outline conveyed were astonishing. He was a Presence. And his voice the same instant--though in some commonplace about having known Lord Dufferin--increased the air of greatness, almost I had said of majesty, that he wore so naturally. It was not merely cultured, deep and musical, it vibrated with a peculiar resonance that conveyed authority beyond anything I have known in any other human voice.
We talked ... he talked, rather ... hunger, thirst, the afflicting moist heat of the day were all forgotten, New York City was forgotten too. His words carried me beyond this world, his language in that astonishing voice wore wings that brought escape. His long frock-coat, green with age and dirt; his broken boots and frayed trousers; his shapeless top hat, brushed the wrong way till it looked like a beehive coated with rough plush; his grimy collar without a tie; the spots upon his grease-stained waistcoat--all vanished completely. It was, above all, I think, the poetry in his voice and words that brought the balm and healing into my whole being. The way his hands moved too. We talked for several hours, for it was McKay's nasal interruption, saying he must close the warehouse, that brought me back to--Water Street.
Recklessly, though with a diffidence as though I were with royalty, I invited him to dine, but in the cheap Childs' Eating House where we "fed," I soon perceived that I had no reason to feel embarrassed. A cup of coffee and "sinkers" sufficed him, he took my shyness away, he won my easy and full confidence; and afterwards--for he refused to let me go--as we sat, that stifling night, on a bench in Battery Park, tramps and Wearie Willies our neighbours, but the salt air from the sea in our nostrils, he used a phrase that, giving me the calibre of his thought, was too significant ever to be forgotten. I had spoken of my hatred of the city and of my present circumstances in it. He peered into my face a moment beneath his dreadful hat, then, raising a beautiful hand by way of emphasis, his deep voice came to me like some music of the sea itself:
"No man worth his spiritual salt," he said with impressive gentleness, "is ever entangled in locality." He smiled, and the tenderness of the voice was in the eyes as well....
The little park emptied gradually, the heated paving-stones lost something of their furnace breath, the stars were visible overhead beyond the great arc lights, the parched leaves rustled faintly, and I spoke to him of poetry. He had lived with Longfellow, he had known Browning. The poetry of the world was in his soul--Greek, Latin, German, French, above all, Hebrew. I drank in his words, unaware of the passing hours. To me it was like finding a well in the desert when I was dying of thirst. Even the awful city he transfigured. Suddenly his lean fingers touched my arm, his voice deepened and grew soft, he took his hat off. "I will say my Night-Song to you now," he said. "I can only say it to very, very few. For years I have said it to--no one. But you shall hear it."
If there was something in his voice and manner that thrilled me to the core, the poem he then repeated on that bench in Battery Park at midnight gave me indescribable sensations of beauty and delight. I realized I listened to a personal confession that was a revelation of the mysterious old heart beneath the green frock-coat. It seemed to me that Night herself spoke through him:
Prophetic, jubilant Song,
Smiting the rock-bound hours till the waters of life flow free;
And a Soul, on pinion strong,
Flieth afar, and hovers over the infinite sea
Of love and of melody:
While the blind fates weave their nets
And the world in sleep forgets.
Song, from a burning breast,
Of a land of perfected delights which the foot of man ne'er trod,
Like a foaming wine expressed
From passionate fruits that glowed 'mid the boughs of the Eden lost,
Ere sin was born and frost;—
Song wild with desires and regrets,
While the world in sleep forgets.
The beacon fire of song,
Flaming for guidance and hope while the storm-winds wage their wars;
Balm for the ancient wrong,
Dropping from healing wings on the wounds of the heart and brain,
Quenching their ancient pain:
Love-star that rises and sets,
While the world in sleep forgets.
Dove that returns to my ark,
Murmuring of grief-floods falling, of light beyond all light:
Voice that cleaveth the dark,
Singing of earth growing heaven, of distant lands that bless,
Though they may not caress,
And, blessing, pay Love's old debts,
While the world in sleep forgets.
Long before he ended the tears were coursing slowly down his withered cheeks, and when the last word died away a long silence came between us, for I could find no words to express the emotion in me. He took my hand and held it a moment tightly, then presently got up, put on his old hat again, with the remark that it was time for bed, and followed me slowly to a Broadway cable car. His small, frail figure seemed to have dwindled to a child's shadow as he moved beside me; he had a way of hunching his thin shoulders that still further dwarfed his height; I felt myself a giant physically, but in my mind his stature reached the stars. We exchanged addresses. He lived in 8th Street, a miserable attic, I learned later, though I never actually entered it. Of his mental disorder no inkling had then reached me. I watched him melt into the shadows of the side street with the feeling that I watched some legendary figure, some ancient prophet, some mysterious priest. He smiled at me; there was love and blessing in the brilliant eyes. Then he was gone.... For me, at this time, to meet and talk with such a man held something of the fabulous. He had set fire to a hundred new thoughts and left them flaming in me.
It was in this way began a friendship that has always seemed to me marvellous, and that lasted till his death in England some fifteen years later. Sweet, patient, resigned and lovable to the end, he died incurably insane, the charity in him never tainted, the tenderness unstained, the passionate love of his kind, of beauty, of all that is lovely and of good report, unspoilt. The grimmest pain had not soured the natural sweetness in him, his gentle spirit knew no bitterness, his megalomania, complicated, I believe, with other varieties of disorder, was harmless and inoffensive. As Padre he still lives in my memory; as The Old Man of Visions ("The Listener"), he still haunts my imagination. "You have taken my name away," he chided me with a smile, when I published this picture of him. "I am now uncertain who I am. That is well. I am Anybody I choose to be. I will be Everybody." He had rooms in Great Russell Street at the time. Though baptised by Charles Kingsley into the English Church, he later became a Roman Catholic, but, when the end came, he reverted to the blood and faith born in him. He was buried, by his own wish, in a Hebrew cemetery. The epitaph he so often told me with an ironic smile he had chosen for his own was not, however, used. Talk, he always declared, vain, excessive talk, lay at the bottom of every misunderstanding in the world. If people would talk less, there would be less trouble in life. "Sorry I spoke," was to be cut upon one of his tombstones; "Sorry they spoke" upon the other.
A poem he wrote—published, like the Night Song, in Harper's Magazine—describing death, I have kept all these years. The strange intensity of expression he put into the passage which begins: "The sand of my Being is fused and runs . . . " lives in my mind to this day. The title of the poem was "The Final Word":
Of the Birth and Death, of the Self and Soul;
The memory breaks, the breath forsakes,
The waves of the æther o'er me roll.
The pulses cease, and the Hours release
Their wearied school of the nerves and brain;
I fall on the Deep of the Mystic Sleep,
Where the Word that is Life can be heard again.
And the fires descend, and my fragments blend,
And the sand of my Being is fused and runs
To the mould of a glass for the rays to pass
Of the Sun of the centre that rules all suns.
But, or ever I rest, I take from my breast
My blood-drained heart for the tablet white
Of a gospel page to the far-off Age—
O Hand eternal!--Come forth—and write!