II
VIOLIN
One night on some light errand I sat beside
The cooking-stove in Johann’s sitting-room.
Within there was the cheer of lamp and fire,
The stove-draught yawning red and wide,
The table with its rosy cotton spread,
A blue chair-cover from a home-land loom,
A baby’s bed.
And in that odour of cleanliness and food
Johann, the labourer worthy of his hire
For seven days a week, twelve hours a day
At some vague toil “down in the yard.”
“Hard?
What o’ that? Look at the luck I’ve got to keep the place
And draw my pay.”
He had been strong
And still his body kept its ruggedness.
Yet he was old and stiffened and he moved
As one who is wrapped round in something thick.
But O, his face,
His face was like the faces that look out
From bark and hole of trees all marred and grooved,
All laid about
With old varieties of silence and of wrong.
Such faces are locked long
In men, in stones, in wood, in earth,
Awaiting birth.
And Johann’s face was less
Expectant than the happy dead awaiting to become the quick.
His wife said much about how hard she tried.
She chattered high and shrill
About the burden and the eating ill.
His mother, little, thin, half-blind and cross,
With scarlet flannel round her throat,
Put in her note,
Muttered about the cold, the draught, her side——
Small ineffectual chants of little loss,
With never a word
Of the great gossip which she had not heard:
That life had passed her by.
The little room beset me like the din
And prick of scourges. All
At once I looked upon the spattered wall
And saw a violin.
A hall
Vast, bright and breathing.
In the upper air
A chord, a flower of tone, a quiet wreathing
Along the lift and fall
Of some clear current in the blood
Now delicately understood,
Till all the hearing ones below
Are where
The voices call.
O now they know
What music is. It is that which they are
Themselves. Infinite bells,
Of silence in a little sheath. Deep wells
Of being in a little cup. Star upon star
Veiled save one reaching ray.
And see! The people turn
And for a breath they look
Out into one another’s eyes
And shine and burn
Wise, wise,
With ultimate knowledge of the good
That seeks one whole.
And how
Eternity begins
And ever is beginning now
A thousand hearts learn from the violins.
“My back ain’t right. My head ain’t right. I’m almost dead.
Fill the hot water bag. I’m goin’ to bed....”
“Ten pairs of socks I’ve darned to-night. I try
To do the best I can....”
I put the women by.
“Johann,” I said, “you play?” He shook his head.
“I lost it, loggin’——” he held up a stump of thumb.
“I took six lessons once,” he said.
I sat there, dumb.
From out the inner place of music there had come
Long long ago,
Some viewless one to tell him how to know
What waits upon the page
To beat the rhythm of the world. He heard; and tried
To stumble toward the door graciously wide
For other feet than his.
“I took six lessons once,” he said with pride.
This
Was all we gave him of his heritage.
III
NORTH STAR
His boy had stolen some money from a booth
At the County Fair. I found the father in his kitchen.
For years he had driven a dray and the heavy lifting
Had worn him down. So through his evenings
He slept by the kitchen stove as I found him.
The mother was crying and ironing.
I thought about the mother,
For she brought me a photograph
Taken at a street fair on her wedding day.
She was so trim and white and he so neat and alert
In the picture with their friends about them——
I saw that she wanted me to know their dignity from the first.
But afterward I thought more about the father.
For as he came with me to the door I could not forbear
To say how bright and near the stars seemed.
Then he leaned and peered from beneath his low roof,
And he said:
“There used to be a star called the Nord Star.”