Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side....
Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side....
Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side....
The starlit murmur of the verse flowed on, muffled, insistent; my throat filled with it, my eyes grew dim. I said to myself, as my voice sank on the last line: “He’s reliving it all now, seeing it again—knowing for the first time that someone else saw it as he did.”
Delane stirred uneasily in his seat, and shifted his crossed legs one over the other. One hand absently stroked the fold of his carefully ironed trousers. His face was still a blank. The distance had not yetbeen bridged between “Gray’s Elegy” and this unintelligible harmony. But I was not discouraged. I ought not to have expected any of it to reach him—not just at first—except by way of the closest personal appeal. I turned from the “Lovely and Soothing Death,” at which I had re-opened the book, and looked for another page. My listener leaned back resignedly.
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,Straight and swift to my wounded I go....
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,Straight and swift to my wounded I go....
Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,Straight and swift to my wounded I go....
I read on to the end. Then I shut the book and looked up again. Delane sat silent, his great hands clasping the arms of his chair, his head slightly sunk on his breast. His lids were dropped, as I imagined reverentially. My own heart was beating with a religious emotion; I hadnever felt the oft-read lines as I felt them then.
A little timidly, he spoke at length. “Didhewrite that?”
“Yes; just about the time you were seeing him, probably.”
Delane still brooded; his expression grew more and more timid. “What do you ... er ... call it ... exactly?” he ventured.
I was puzzled for a moment; then: “Why, poetry ... rather a free form, of course.... You see, he was an originator of new verse-forms....”
“New verse-forms?” Delane echoed forlornly. He stood up in his heavy way, but did not offer to take the book from me again. I saw in his face the symptoms of approaching departure.
“Well, I’m glad to have seen his picture after all these years,” he said; and on thethreshold he paused to ask: “What was his name, by the way?”
When I told him he repeated it with a smile of slow relish. “Yes; that’s it. Old Walt—that was what all the fellows used to call him. He was a great chap: I’ll never forget him.—I rather wish, though,” he added, in his mildest tone of reproach, “you hadn’t told me that he wrote all that rubbish.”
THE END