Then to the third—a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man, I think I know you—I think this face of yours is the face of the Christ himself;
Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.
I laid the open book on my knee, and stole a glance at Delane. His face was a blank, still composed in the heavy folds of enforced attention. No spark had been struck from him. Evidently the distance was too great between the far-off point at which he and English poetry had parted company, and this new strange form it had put on. I must find something which would bring the matter closely enough home to surmount the unfamiliar medium.
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 yet been 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....
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 had never felt the oft-read lines as I felt them then.
A little timidly, he spoke at length. “Did he write 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.