“Oh, Luney, Luney!” he cried in a kind of wail as the truth revealed itself, “do not tell me that you have been blind all these days and that I have not known it!”
“A man’s blindness is no affliction,” said the dying poet, “if only he be secure in his friends. The sight of his eyes is as nothing in comparison with that which is given to his right hand. My great labours are near to their fruition, and I have a friend. And I am very happy, O my friend, and it is in this: the gentle and beneficent Earth, my mother, who has smitten her son with her caresses, bids me commit to your care the little treatise I have wrought on human life, on the life of man, on the life of the proudest of her children. Faithful friend and servant, I ask you to be the good angel of the public need. These eyes of mine are now void, as were those of my peers long ago; and the aged man, my father, is infirm and white-haired and unlearned in the ways of men—therefore, I confide to your care this which I have wrought. I ask you to take it away and print it immediately, and spread it broadcast among all the streets of the great city; and when all the street-persons have looked on what a lost soul in Hades has fashioned out of blood and tears, in order that they may find new sustenance, this weak and frail implement which has revealed the will of the Most High, shall return again to Earth, his mother, and weary with his great labours, she shall take him gently upon her breasts.”
The blind poet uttered these strange words with a noble simplicity which yet filled his friend with dismay. As the great bulk of writing was committed by the poet into the care of the unhappy Dodson, the young man, powerful and materialistic as he was, seemed almost to faint under their intolerable burden.
“Take it, friend,” said the dying poet. “Keep it jealously; it is a thing without price. And remember that I now count my days. And further remember my task is not accomplished until your own is fulfilled. Take this treatise straightway to that great house of publishers, which is the first of this country, wherein I, a slave, spent seven years of my existence upon the earth; and see that it is printed and bound with all the haste possible, and further that it is spread broadcast among all the persons in the streets of the great city, because until that is done, I cannot lie at peace.”
The unhappy Dodson stood as one all broken with pain.
“Y-yes,” he said feebly, “I will take them to the office to-morrow—and—and, old boy, I will tell them to set it up at once. I—I will tell them that the author is impatient—that he has not much time—that—that his time is nearly up—and—and that he wants to know that others know what he has done for them before he goes.”
With a sinking heart the unhappy Dodson made the great pile of manuscript into a parcel with the aid of brown paper and string, in precisely the fashion that in former days he had instructed his protégé. As suddenly he recalled his demeanour towards one who had now acquired a transcendent sanctity, his own eyes grew blind with their tears. Yet over and above his intolerable emotion, that which dominated his thoughts, was the knowledge that the mission to which he was pledged was foredoomed to fail.
“I don’t know much about literature—don’t pretend to,” said the unhappy young man, as he slipped the string round the parcel in a kind of dull anguish, “but it wouldn’t surprise me at all, old boy, if this doesn’t turn out to be the longest poem in the English language.”
“I believe it is a little less than three times the length of the Paradise Lost,” said the poet, with absolute composure, yet touched by that curious irony that his friend had never understood. “And I am reminded that I would have them print it with great clearness in three honest tomes. Each volume should coincide with a phase of the poem; you will observe that there are three phases to our little treatise, which correspond with those of human life—three phases through which the soul of man must pass in its terrestrial journeyings. On the first page, only the name of the poem must be set forth; the name of the poet must not appear. And further, good friend, I urge you to observe the profoundest secrecy as to the authorship of this treatise upon human life. The identity of the author must never be disclosed.”
“Why must the identity of the author never be disclosed, old boy?” asked Jimmy Dodson, whose bewilderment and consternation were ever increasing.