Survival Till Seventeen

On any day but Saturday — and for our sakes not on Sunday — but with haunting regularity on five days of the week you could hear his call in our street. He was whiskered and hunchbacked and wore a long-tailed coat and an over-sized hat that slid over his ears. He drove a loose-wheeled wagon that seemed to be rolling all ways at once and was drawn by a horse that had not been currycombed for months. The horse looked more stuffed than real, and there were times when so did the driver. Taken together they seemed an epitome of lazy motion, yet they were models of persistence in faithfully returning for the errand which brought them to our street. The boys pelted the man with bad fruit and called him vile names. He never answered them, except to go on shouting in a monosyllable the purpose for which he had come.

I was eleven years old when there suddenly dawned on me the tragedy of this poor vagabond’s existence. True, I had never joined with the hoodlums in stoning or abusing him, but I had failed to appreciate the extent to which he was a victim rather than an enemy. When this realization came to me, I decided to let him know how I felt toward him by offering a few cheery words of sympathy. These he disdained as something suspicious. He merely rubbed his long beard and drove on. His refusal to be pitied made me all the more interested in his desolation, so I determined to follow him, discover his origins, find out where he lived. This I did during one of the summer holidays. I shadowed him for a whole day, even going without lunch at noon. I trailed him to the waterfront, and under the bridge, and down several side streets, and into a slum of sorts. I saw him unhitch his wagon and leave it standing in a yard. I saw him put his horse to feed in a shed, and then mop his brow wearily, and enter his house for supper. It was just at the hour of sunset. The insults of the day were over. He had a wife, so I discovered, and she was preparing his evening meal. And he had a daughter.

There she sat on the door-step, in the midst of her own, a dark Madonna of seventeen, waiting for the waters of Baptism to fulfill in her eyes the New Testament promised by the Old, and to which she had far more title than any of us Irish and Italian interlopers who mingle the Faith with fun.

She was reading a book when I first saw her. Eyes are never so lovely as when they are avoiding your own. Later I saw her rise and carry a basket on her head, and move among her kind as one destined for election and sacrifice. Her tribe sensed this in her, and that is why she dared not, save in ambush, talk to a Christian, even to a Christian child.

The incident left me speechless, and it was not until years later that I knew what I had wanted to say — not on my own account, for such loves are purely literary — but as hostage for someone who would be songless in her bereavement. Here is what I wrote, finally:

In your dark eyes I see is so,
Something I needed lots to know.

Something Isaiah said I find
Now makes a meaning in my mind.

What Judith, Ruth and Esther were,
For the first time I now infer.

Our Lady’s voice unto my ear
Becomes more definite and dear.

Rarest, the world is all awry,
But father, mother, you and I

Will quadrilaterally allied
Defeat the death we shall have died

When . . .

and I dared not add the last line, which would be prophetic of her destiny.

“But where shall I go?” she said after her Christening, which was undertaken at peril of her life, even over attempts to poison her food.

“For contemplation, warm countries are best,” she was told.

“Will South America do?”

“It will do.”

“Is it far enough?”

“Not quite far enough, but it will do.”

“And there can be no attachments?”

“In your case, none. For you the price of God is everything else. You must make a supernatural equivalent of what is native in you: ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. ’ ”

“What about my prayers?”

“It were better to be free even in your prayers. Let Christ choose your favorites. Remember, you are of His blood, even before it was poured on the Cross. There are cheap attachments one can make to creatures under guise of offering novenas in their behalf. Yours must be a sword renouncement, like Abraham’s with Isaac!”

“Can’t you put it more gently than that?”

“There is no way of putting it more gently than that.”

But there was, and I was determined to find it, even though it might take me years. For it is the business of the poets to be the servants of the mystics, to catch their cast-off thoughts, and to phrase their farewells. Even a martyrdom is softened when it is set forth in song. That a strong song was needed, I could clearly see, one equal to the mettle of the maid.

Because of the girl in the Gospel who lost her groat,
Because of the little boy by the fountain who lost his boat,
Because of the nervous piccolo player who lost his note —

Because there are partings on Earth too hard to be had:
The waving wench on the dock and the land-loosed lad,
The widow, the warden, the jail, and the son gone mad —

We two who were sentenced on Earth to be braver far
Than any except what Our Lord and Our Lady are,
Shall singly shine henceforth, as a star and a star;

And not interfere any more with each other’s light,
No matter how murky the mist, how dismal the night,
Or whether the clouds conceal or reveal us right.

Now, mind you, I do not want you even to pray for me.
Let our dismissal be done in a downright way for me,
And neither be sad about it, and neither be gay for me.

For nothing can grieve for nothing, is that not true?
And nothing plus nothing is nothing, not one nor two,
And you willed to know me as nothing, and I willed you.

And God will be pleased, if God can be pleased at all,
As we raise between us the sky and the high sea-wall,
So to slake our souls in the wastes where His pities fall.

She sailed to South America on a small boat. The boat weighed only five thousand tons. I
as on the dock, pretending to be one of the baggage boys, looking among the visitors forim who would miss her most. But I could find no one bidding her farewell.

I watched the ship till it reached the crest of the horizon, and sank in the far southeast.

Only two corollaries on this subject remain in my notes, a sestet and a double quatrain, on an identical theme. It is a difficult theme to handle, and I often laugh at my efforts, for they are perfectly contradictory.

The first:

I must regret my partings more,
Renounce, not just refuse,
And make a face, and pace the floor,
And burst into boo-hoos,
When someone ambles out the door,
I am so pleased to lose.

The last:

What soared into the sun
Will return one day,
Remolded and respun
In a rarer ray;

Identical, yet different,
Indeed, Divine;
And what was never, never meant
For me, will be mine!