The Man Who Made Poetry Hum

by Jennette Lee

The Man Who Made Poetry Hum

BY JENNETTE LEE

THE nurse moved noiselessly across the room and bent to the man and listened to his breathing. Her hand rested a minute on his pulse. Then she went quickly from the room. The man's heavy lids lifted an instant. The eyes looked out unseeing into the great chamber. A night-light burned by the bed. The shadows in the corners were untouched. Only in the obscurity was a sense of wealth and refinement. A woman glided into the room and came toward the bed.

"Are you comfortable, dear?"

"Yes, Mollie." It was little more than a whisper. The lips seemed to speak without volition. The eyes tried to focus and turned to her.

"I'm all right," he said thickly.

"Yes, don't try to talk!"

The lids fell again. She stood looking down at the granite face that was her world. The doctors had told her. And she was trying to be brave and understand. But a numbness was on her. She could not think without Grant, and he was dying. She sank down half-crouching by the bed and laid her cheek against the passive hand. It seemed to stir a little, as if his spirit groped to her from a great distance. Then it lay passive again.

The specialist who performed the operation had returned to New York two days ago. The physicians in attendance were in hourly communication with him. Two of them came twice a day, and after each visit there was a consultation of the leading physicians of the town.

The news crept through the town. Men stopped at street corners to repeat it to each other with saddened faces. Grant Healy was the life and brain of Camden, and now that he was stricken the town held its breath. All its thought suddenly centred in the darkened room where he lay.

Through the house servants and attendants moved noiselessly, gathering up and holding the myriad threads his hand had let fall. In the library Harold Fosdick, the secretary, untied parcels that had come in the late delivery. He made notes and filed away pamphlets and catalogues that would perhaps never be read now. Grant Healy was a ready buyer—a patron of the arts. Not an auction or sale took place anywhere in the world without due notice to him or to his agents.

The secretary opened a small parcel of books. He laid them on the table, making the edges even with his fingers. They were all of the same size and shape. He made a note of the receipt of the parcel. The details of life went on as smoothly as if the brain that conceived them were not already beyond the need to remember.

In the room up-stairs the sick man turned his head a little. The nurse had come back and the other woman yielded place to her and withdrew.

"What time is it?" asked the man slowly. The nurse glanced at the watch on her wrist.

"Eight-forty," she replied.

"And what day is it?"

"Wednesday. You'd better not talk. Drink this." She held the tube to his lips. There was silence in the room as she replaced the cup on the stand. The man's voice travelled slowly to her across it:

"The operation—was it—a success?"

"Fine!" She spoke encouragingly, as to a child. But he put it aside.

"Don't lie! Tell me the truth." The words stopped in his weakness. She bent over him with something more than professional care and sympathy.

"The doctor will tell you," she said. "He comes at nine o'clock."

"Yes. That's right." He seemed to slip back into unconsciousness. But the nurse noted as her finger rested on his pulse that it beat more evenly, as if the man's will remained on guard and steadied it.

Down-stairs the physicians were in consultation. The chart lay on the table between them. ... The patient had regained consciousness.

They looked at each other—a question. And then at the chart. If they gave him opiates, beginning now, he would not suffer. Without them he might live through days, weeks, perhaps, of excruciating pain.

The unspoken question asked whether they should give Grant Healy his choice. With an ordinary man they would not have hesitated. They would have taken for granted that it was their duty to save the patient from suffering so terrible. But something of the right of kings held in this case. The man whose brain watched over the welfare of a continent had the right to say whether his brain should be lulled to its long forgetfulness free from pain, or should remain on duty to the end. The older of the two physicians pushed the chart a little aside with his finger.

"He must decide for himself," he said. "We must tell him."

The other assented without enthusiasm. He was of a younger school and to him it seemed a little overpunctilious to give the patient a choice of suffering. To him pain was merely an accompaniment of disease, useful to the physician as a sign, but to be avoided whenever possible. In his mind he had little doubt that Grant Healy, who was a keen business man, would agree with him.

But when the older physician, bending over the patient, put the question gently there was only a little contraction of the wide brow.

"How long will it be?" he asked.

"We do not know. It is not necessary that you should suffer at all, you know."

"I understand. Thank you. I do not think I shall want it. ... If I find I cannot drink the last of the cup, I shall tell you."

The physician nodded gravely. He was not surprised at the answer. He had known the man lying in the great bed since boyhood, and he had never known him to shirk what was ahead. Sometimes it seemed to the physician he even went a little out of his way to take up a burden that another man might have failed to see—as when the younger brother, Rolland, ran through his share of the family fortune in a year and came to Grant for aid.

The physician had good reason to remember that year. Grant had been under his care with signs of incipient tuberculosis and he had ordered him to Colorado. When with the break in his brother's fortune he returned, the doctor had been thoroughly angry with him. He watched, almost cynically, while Grant tried to hold back the brother from dissipation of health and fortune, and the final plunge that swept away the remnant of fortune and ended with the suicide of Rolland Healy. The physician had known from the start that there was no use. He could have told Grant facts in the family history that made the fight as good as determined before it began. He did practically tell him. But Grant had refused to listen—or when he had listened to the doctor's veiled words he only smiled a little.

"I guess Rolland would stand by me if I needed him," he said. "I think I'll stand by a little longer." So he stood by till the end came. Then he had gathered up what remained of the family fortune and gone into business. And with it he had given up his dream of becoming a poet. The tuberculosis the physician feared had not developed. It was as if the energy he put forth for his brother had tapped some hidden source of power and called into existence forces that resisted the disease.

The great figure lying on the bed had seemed invulnerable, a man of steel, as he fought his way up in the business world from a mere stripling threatened by the gauzy film of his tenuous lungs to a man of iron power. ...

No—iron was not the word, the physician thought, looking down at him. Steel was more like it—and not even steel. ... Grant Healy was more alive than steel. He was a living flame, electric fire, in his resistless power. He did not override or crush men in business. He grappled with them fiercely. And out of each encounter life and prosperity seemed to flare about him—not for himself alone, but for his adversary and for every one.

His power had made the region prosperous and overflowed into the country and the world.

And now he lay helpless.

The physicians withdrew. The man on the bed watched them move from the room and disappear through the wide doorway.

His brain was clear now. He was remembering. ... The breath of a sigh escaped him. He had not thought it would be so soon. He was not regretting—but there were things to do. He must keep his mind clear. Other men's work must not be cut off. Then the force he always held at command obeyed the call on it and he fell into a deep sleep.

When he wakened in the morning before dawn the darkened room was full of shadowy light. The nurse behind the screen sat motionless. He was amazed at the clearness of his mind. It was as if the injunction laid upon it before he slept had gathered to him incalculable power. He lay thinking of the details of business—first all that touched his wife and children, then his associates and the employees who served him, and after them the needs of the town, and last of all his poets and artists—his spirit's children he called them—young men whom he was helping to achieve dreams of the beauty and wonder of life. ... The provisions of the Nobel Prize for aiding men of genius had never appealed to him so far as poets and artists were concerned. "You must first catch your poet," he said. "And who can do that for you?" Certainly not a board of directors!

So he had done his own selecting while he was still alive to pick out his geniuses and enjoy the risk of it. He had hoped to live years to see the fruits of the work—to know that he had guessed right. But the work must not stop. And for each one his thought registered provision before it passed on to the next. ... Binney, editor of the Searchlight, should have charge of a fund and administer it. He could be trusted to recognize genius—if any man could—and he was almost the only man alive whom Grant Healy would have trusted to do it.

He lay looking into the darkened room, going over the last details in his mind. ... Setting his house in order. One or two things that had always puzzled him, he saw suddenly were very simple. ... Give him a dozen years and he could rebuild the world—reshape this tangled scheme of things to plans of sanity!

The nurse behind her screen stirred slightly and looked out. She fancied she heard something—a sigh of pain, was it? But the face on the pillow was placid. Her patient was asleep among the shadows.

No, there was nothing to regret or change. Long since he had come to understand that his part was not in the dream-world but in the thick of events where dreams take shape. ... If he could have lived to be old—he had hoped there would be a time when he could stop and think things over a little. He had always looked forward to it—the time when he should be old and free to dwell on the spirit of life—to talk with God, he called it, about this creation of His. And now he was not to have the chance. He would never be old. He was to be thrust back again into chaos to start anew. The same struggle he had lived through as a boy—all the surging of life, the wonder of it, the poet's wings struggling for release. ... Those dreams he had—of being a poet! He, Grant Healy, was to carve his name high on the poet's ivory tower! Strange how God shapes one's life. ... But the longing to be a poet was still unquenched in him—to seize words and shape them to eternal beauty. ... No, he had not done it. He would never do it now. He would be remembered only as a great financier. ... Yet he might have been a poet—if Rolland, poor fellow, had not inherited the sins of the fathers—if—if—his lids fell wearily.

The nurse crossed the room and looked down. There was a straight line between the closed eyes.

"Are you in pain?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Shall I?——"

"No, I can stand it a while, I guess!"

There was something of the rough simplicity of a boy in the words. He seemed to be slipping out of his cocoon of high, position and formal wealth.

She moved to the windows and drew up the shades, letting in the fresh air and light, and her hand on a button turned out the dim glow of the night-lamp.

"It is going to be a pleasant day," she said.

The man's eyes gave assent, looking out through the open window. "It is the third of June, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"I want to see Fosdick," he said.

"I will call him now."

"No, wait till he has had breakfast. It will be a busy day for him."

II

When the secretary came he brought in his hand a small green volume.

"This came last night," he said casually. "I thought you might like to know it is out."

Grant Healy reached out a hand and there was a look of faint interest in his face.

Fosdick was pleased with himself. He had hesitated when he took up the little book. It seemed out of place to intrude poetry on Grant Healy now.

But the man's face showed that he retained interest in all the affairs of life. His fingers opened the pages slowly and tried to turn the leaves. The secretary was shocked at the feeble grasp of the fingers on the book, and he bent a little to help hold it.

"I hope you had a good night, sir."

"Yes, I had a good night." The book dropped to the coverlet.

"There are several things I want to do to-day," said the man.

Fosdick drew a pencil and pad from his pocket and seated himself close to the bed. The man began to speak in a low, monotonous voice, as if the thought shaped itself on his tongue, and Fosdick's pencil translated it into quick curves and lines. The details of the day were mapped out—a series of directions and appointments—all to be changed at a moment's notice if strength failed. ... The words went on in gasps, sometimes spoken, sometimes cut short by Fosdick's quick nod.

"I will attend to all that, sir." He had been with Grant Healy five years, and knew his mind and his wish—sometimes before it was spoken. Grant Healy always had men like this to serve him. Other men sometimes wondered where he found them. They did not suspect that he made them—often out of very common stuff.

The secretary finished the notes and got up. He reached to the little book on the coverlet. But the passive hand rested on it.

"I think I'll keep it by me— One thing that's finished at least!" Grant Healy smiled whimsically.

The secretary looked down at the book and then at the man. He seemed on the point of trying to say something. His face broke a little and he turned and went out.

All through the day the muffled bell rang from the chamber and men came and went, or sat patiently and waited their turn to be summoned to the presence of the man in the room above.

They entered with silent tread and sympathetic faces—only to gaze with startled look at the man raised high on his pillows. It was not easy to believe that Grant Healy was dying. He gave directions in his usual crisp, clear voice, and Fosdick, at his side, made notes or supplied papers as if the interview was only an interlude in the man's busy life. In the intervals when only the nurse remained with him, no one knew what went on in the richly furnished chamber.

But after each bout of pain and the stimulant that followed, when they were admitted to him again, the business of life proceeded as smoothly as if no shadow threatened its calm.

Late in the afternoon Fosdick came in alone.

"What else is there?" asked the man on the bed. There was a little glaze on the keen eyes and his voice was tired.

"No one but Binney, sir," replied the secretary. "Shall I tell him to come to-morrow?"

"No, I will see him now. I want him to administer the fund for genius that I gave you notes for. He is the best man I know for it. He can recognize genius when he sees it!" He smiled a little grimly. "Not many of us can—!" He lay for a few minutes silent. "I want to rest a little," he said. "I shall ring when I am ready."

The secretary withdrew and the man remained for a long minute quiet. Then he motioned to a phial on the stand.

The nurse reached out her hand. She shook her head.

"Do you think it is wise, sir?"

A smile touched the grim lips. "We're not doing what is wise to-day."

She poured a few drops of the liquid into a glass and held it to his lips. She was obeying the doctor's orders—to give him whatever he asked for. He drank it and lay quiet, musing on the irony of life, perhaps. ... He who was made to be a poet, filled with singing words and thoughts—spending his last faint pulse of life steadying stocks and bonds, easing the market to the shock of death! And he had hoped there would be time to talk with God a little—before he slipped out of the familiar clay and met Him face to face. ... Suppose before God's face he were only a child again, to start anew the cycle! And there were things he meant to say to Him in this life—as man to man! He smiled gently and a little grimly. ... Praises to sing to Him, perhaps, the very rhyme and phrase of poetry. ... Strange the mistakes God makes with men—shaping a poet and using him for a. broker! What was it the young poet said—in his book? ... His fingers groped for it—"a dish a child might take his porridge from."

"Did you want something, sir?" The nurse bent to him.

"I had—a book," responded the man.

"Was it this?" She lifted it— but the hand did not reach to take it. It lay passive. His eyes were looking before him. His lips moved a little. He seemed to be talking with some one in the room, unseen.

The nurse moved quietly aside.

III

In the library below a man was waiting with Fosdick. He wore a blond beard, and the full lips behind it had a look of placid content. Across his vest stretched a watch-chain of fine gold links. His plump hand toyed a little with the links as he waited.

He reached out and took a book from the table and turned the leaves. It was a volume of verse—a new English poet. He read a line here and there, glancing hastily. But it was evident his thought was in the chamber overhead. He laid down the book and looked at Fosdick.

"Healy is a man of rare discrimination!" He tapped the book a little with his finger.

The secretary waited. He seemed to be listening for some slightest sound. A sudden look of decision crossed his face. He turned to the other. He would save time—time and Grant Healy's strength—by telling him while they waited.

"That is the sort of thing he wants to talk with you about—when he sees you," he said quickly.

The man stared a question.

"About the recognition of genius," said Fosdick. "And a fund for it. He has always had an idea that some of the best material in the country is wasted on account of what he calls the adolescence of genius—its crucial time, when it ought to be tided over."

"Hum-m-m! Interesting theory! Just what does he mean by it, I wonder? " Mr. Binney was twirling his watch-chain slowly and gazing into the fire.

Fosdick hesitated. "I don't know that I can put it very clearly—though I've heard him talk about it often and he has dictated the details of the plan to me. ... He seems to think that the length of the period of adolescence is in direct ratio to the kind of power that is to follow it—and just as human beings, having higher power than animals, must have longer adolescence to prepare for it, so genius must have a longer period of adolescence than the ordinary man—time in which to find itself and prepare for its special function in the world.

"Just as a business asset, he says it is foolish to waste genius, and that these men ought to be sought out and tided over the crucial time. Otherwise they lose heart and become a drag on the community, or they overwork and die before their time."

The secretary paused. "I don't suppose I've said it very well. But it works! I've seen him keep poets on their feet—without pauperizing them." He laughed shortly. "He wants a man to administer the fund who knows a genius when he sees one."

The editor bowed slightly in appreciation. He leaned back and crossed his legs. His hand toyed with the wide chain.

"Healy had the makings of a poet in him," he said thoughtfully. "We used to think in our college days, you know, that he would be a poet!" He laughed out shortly at the incongruity. The secretary's face flushed a little but he did not speak.

The other was not looking at him. He sat toying with the chain, a little reminiscent smile on the full lips.

"It was nip and tuck between Healy and me for the class poem," he said. "I always thought Healy should have had it—but you know what boys are!" He moved a deprecating hand.

"They voted it on me! So I became a poet! ... And Healy—" He moved a vague hand toward the richly appointed room. The gesture placed Healy and dropped to the gold-linked chain.

"I've wondered a little sometimes how things would have turned out for me if Healy had won the class poem," he said thoughtfully.

Fosdick was looking down at the pad in his hand and making little meaningless marks on the edge. He did not speak. The man regarded him a minute.

"Life is full of strange accidents," he said expansively. "My father now wanted me to go into business with him. But after the class poem he agreed to give me an allowance—'the adolescence of genius'!" He laughed a little. "So I have published seven volumes of poetry and been editor of the Searchlight—all because of a class poem!" He seemed to muse on it.

"But it would have been the same, I imagine, in any case. I should never have done for a man of business." He spoke impartially. "And it is evident enough now that Healy was not cut out for a poet!"

"He cares more for poetry than any one in the world!" broke in the younger man.

"Cares for it, yes—patron of the arts and so on. ... I dedicated one of my own volumes to him—for old times' sake. I think it pleased him." He smiled gently at the reminiscence. ... "No, he has not lost touch with the finer things of life in spite of business——"

His eyes fell on the little pile of books on the table—all of the same size and kind, and he reached over and lifted the top one. ... A new poet evidently—another of Grant's geniuses! He smiled a little indulgently and opened it to the dedication page.

But it was not dedicated to Grant Healy, as he had expected. The dedication read:

"To the men who hear the singing of the sunrise
⁠On its way through all the night."

He turned the pages. A line seemed to catch his eye, and he paused and reread the poem. There was a glowing look in his face, changing its placid fatness to appreciation. He turned to the secretary:

"Listen to this!" He read the lines in a slow musical voice, tasting them. It was a short poem—the old, ever-youthful theme of the clay in the potter's hand. The clay shaping on the turning- wheel, almost sentiently—spinning toward a vase of rare and perfect shape, the hard paste capable of wonderful and enduring glaze and surface. ... Then a moment when the potter seems to stay his hand, as if the shape in his mind changed subtly. And the clay coming to its living shape finds itself a bowl-like cup. ... No museum piece of rare shape and design, but a dish for common use—such as a child might take its porridge from.

Binney, the critic and editor, read the poem and looked into the fire, a smile of content on his full lips.

"That is rare work!" he said slowly. "Who is the man?" He turned again to the title-page. But the title-page bore no name.

"He is a protégé of Mr. Healy's," said Fosdick. "We have been seeing the book through the press. I think Mr. Healy likes his poems especially."

The other did not respond. He was deep in the book.

"Wonderful!" he said under his breath. "Wonderful! The man is a genius! Where has he kept himself hidden—to write like this!"

Suddenly he started and his eye glanced quickly up. He reread a line and turned back a page, a puzzled frown on his face.

"Do you know the man?" he asked sharply. "Have you seen him?" He looked up.

Fosdick shook his head. "Mr. Healy gave me the manuscript to send to the printer. The only thing he ever told me about the author was that he was young—not more than twenty-three, I think he said."

Mr. Binney gave a short laugh. " 'Not more than twenty-three'!" He repeated it with satisfaction. "Quite right! And he wrote most of them before he was twenty!" His fingers were touching the pages softly.

"To write like that—not twenty-three! What might he not have done!" His voice had a little note of wonder and veneration. The secretary leaned forward.

"Do you know the man who wrote them, sir?"

The editor looked at him a minute.

"There is only one man in the world who could have written them," he said. "I did not recognize them at first. ... I was not looking so far back—thirty years ago, thirty at least, if not more," he said thoughtfully. "I was in college with the man who wrote them. But I did not guess that he was a genius—till too late."

"You mean—he is dead?" asked Fosdick quickly.

Binney the editor looked at him with long, slow gaze. Then he turned his head. The door had opened. The nurse entered the room. Her face was dull in its repressed sadness.

She glanced at the two men and bowed her head and turned away. She left the room.

Binney got slowly to his feet. "Too late!" he said. "I wish I could have seen Grant—only for a minute!"

He took up a book from the little pile on the table.

"I suppose I may take this?" He held it gently, turning the leaves a little.

"You were asking about the author—if he is dead?" He closed the book. "Yes, he is dead." He slipped the book into his pocket. I should like to write the notice of the poems myself. The writer was very gifted—how gifted we none of us knew then. ... And later he took up a different sort of work. I am glad to have the chance after all these years to pay a tribute to him."

So Binney the editor, once class poet, went out. And up-stairs the millionaire with a smile on his lips lay quiet. The smile was filled with peace and a little wonder and gentle exultation, as if at last Grant Healy found time to do the things the heart desired.