Don Marquis

“ Loge writhed and twisted and lashed the deck with his legs and body for a moment, striving even against the bands of steel that bit into his wrists and ankles. And then he lay still with his face against the planks as if in a vast and overwhelming bitterness of despair.
It had been Cleggett's earlier thought to take the man alive, if possible, and turn him over to the authorities. But now that Loge was taken he burned with the wish for personal combat with him. He desired to be the agent of society, and put an end to Logan Black himself. ”

“ From this roughly triangular plaza leads Decatur Street, at one time notorious throughout the South for its negro dives and gambling-dens.
Now and then Carter could hear the crack of a pistol, close at hand or far away; and again some fleeing negro would start from a place of temporary concealment, at the approach of a mob that beat its way along a street, and make a wild dash for safety, as a rabbit startled from the sedge-grass scurries to the brush. There was not one mob, but several; the different bands united, split up, and reunited, as the shifting winds of madness blew. ”

“ But Cleggett was a man of iron. Although the tempest smote the hulk with blow after blow, although both earth and water seemed to lie prostrate and trampled beneath its unappeasable fury, Cleggett had no thought of yielding.
Unconsciously he drew himself up. It seemed to his crew that he actually gained in girth and height. The soul, in certain great moments, seems to have power to expand the body and inform it with the quality of immortality; Ajax, in his magnificent gesture of defiance, is all spirit. ”

“ Don't you just dote on romance? I do!
But, of course, there's no place for it in our hurried modern life, and I suppose we shouldn't regret it.
But now and then I sigh over it. Like dropping a tear, you know, in a dear old chest perfumed with lavender and old roses.
I always say that one can be advanced and in the van of modern progress, and still drop a tear, you know. ”

“ It is man to man and breast to breast and eye
to bloodshot eye
And the reach and twist of the thrusting wrist, as
it was in the days gone by!
Along the shaken hills the guns their drumming
thunder roll—
But the keen blades thrill with the lust to kill
that leaps from the slayer's soul!
For hand and heart and living steel, one pulse of
hate they feel.
Is your clan afraid of the naked blade? Does it
flinch from the bitter steel?
Perish your dreams of conquest then, your swollen
hopes and bold,
For empire dwells with the stabbing blade, as it
did in the days of old! ”

“ But I have never truly lived in this age. I have lived in the past; I have held to the dream; I have believed in the bright adventure; I have walked with the generous, chivalric spirits of the great ages; they have come to me out of my books and dwelt with me and been my companions, and the realities of time and place have been unreal in their presence. I see myself so walking always. It may be that I am a vain ass, but I cannot help it. It may be that I am a little mad; but I would rather be mad with a Don Quixote than sane with an Andrew Carnegie and pile up platitudes and dollars. ”

“ I used to be a grubworm, and now I'm a butterfly, praise heaven!
“Well, that's the guy I hold the grudge against, and that's why I'm fool enough to rush into every pleasure I can find. I don't know that I'll ever change. And as for the man, I don't ever want to see him. I don't know that I'd ever do anything to him if I did—beat him to death with a butterfly's wing, or blow him up with a soap bubble, as you suggested. Let him alone. He'll punish himself. He is punished by being what he is. I wouldn't put a breath into the scale one way or the other—not even a puff of cigarette smoke.” ”

“ For a long moment there was one continuous electric flash from horizon to horizon, and Cleggett saw her, with windblown hair and wide eyes and parted lips, standing poised with the red blade in her hand beneath the driving clouds, the figure of an antique goddess.
The next instant all was dark; her arms were around his neck in the rain. "Oh, Clement," she sobbed, "I've killed a man! I've killed a man!" ”

“ THE SEEKER THE creeds he wrought of dream and thought
Fall from him at the touch of life,
His old gods fail him in the strife—
Withdrawn, the heavens he sought!
Vanished, the miracles that led,
The cloud at noon, the flame at night;
The vision that he wing'd and sped
Falls backward, baffled, from the height;
Yet in the wreck of these he stands
Upheld by something grim and strong;
Some stubborn instinct lifts a song
And nerves him, heart and hands:
He does not dare to call it hope;—
It is not aught that seeks reward ”

“ But all the personality which his eyes should show, all the force which should dwell in his nose, all the temperamental qualities that should reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the genius which should illumine his brow—these dwell with his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his despairs, his defeats, his exaltations—all, all make themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions of that unusual Adam's apple. ”

“ A rain of spirit and a dew of song!
A MOOD OF PAVLOWA THE soul of the Spring through its body of earth
Bursts in a bloom of fire,
And the crocuses come in a rainbow riot of mirth....
They flutter, they burn, they take wing, they
aspire....
Wings, motion and music and flame,
Flower, woman and laughter, and all these the
same!
She is light and first love and the youth of the
world,
She is sandaled with joy ... ”

“ When you call a taxicab for me in a few moments, and I leave you, with Elmer and my boxes, I shall have no place to go."
"But, surely, madam——"
"Do not call me madam. Call me Lady Agatha. I am Lady Agatha Fairhaven. What is your name?"
Cleggett told her.
"You have heard of me?" asked Lady Agatha.
Cleggett was obliged to confess that he had not. He thought that a shade of disappointment passed over the lady's face, but in a moment she smiled and remarked:
"How relative a thing is fame! You have never heard of me! And yet I can assure you that I am well enough known in England. ”

“ I don't say it's good Christian doctrine not to forgive people. It isn't. But I've seen people put things across on you, Tommy, and seen you laugh it off and let 'em be friends with you again inside of six weeks. I couldn't do it, and nine-tenths of the fellows we know couldn't do it; and in the way you do it it shouldn't be done. You should at least remember, even if you do forgive; remember well enough not to get bit by the same dog again. With you, old kid, it's all a part of your being a butterfly and a bubble. It's no particular virtue in you. ”

“ Many moles have hairs in them; Pierre's mole had not merely half a dozen hairs, but a whole crop. They grew thick and long; and, with a perversion of vanity almost inconceivable in a sane person, Pierre had twisted these hairs together, as a man twists a mustache, and had trained them to grow obliquely across his cheek bone. He was a big fellow, for a Frenchman, and, as he walked towards Cleggett with a mincing elasticity of gait, he smirked and caressed this whimsical adornment. Cleggett, fascinated, stared at it as the fellow paused before him. ”

“ It was a tall man, thin and lank, clad only in a suit of silk pajamas of the color known as baby blue; he was barefoot, and Cleggett, with that lucid grasp of detail which comes to men oftener in nightmares than in real life, noticed that he had a bunion at the large joint of his right great toe.
If the man was startling, he was no less startled himself. Leaping from the struggling forms of Pierre and Loge, who defeated each other's frantic efforts to rise, he was across the barroom in three wild bounds, shrieking shrilly as he leaped ”

“ What is it that makes sinners, at provincial revival meetings, suddenly aware that the hours of dalliance are past and the great instant that shall send them to “the mourners' bench” is at hand? Somehow, they seem to know! And, somehow, Clarke felt an occult touch and knew that his time for action had arrived.
He did not care what came afterwards. Any jury in the world, so he told himself, ought to acquit him of his deed, when they once knew his story; when they once looked at the damning evidence of her guilt which she had hidden away for so long in the brass-bound box. ”

“ Say, what Apollos drive to-day adown the flaming
slopes of dawn?
Oh, does the blank past hide from view forgotten
Christs, to be reborn,
The future tremble where some new Messiah-Memnon
sings the morn?
Of all the worlds, say any earth, like dust
wind-harried to and fro,
Shall give the next Prometheus birth; but say—at
last—you do not know.
How should I know what dawn may gleam beyond
the gates of darkness there?—
Which god of all the gods men dream? Why
should I whip myself to care? ”

“ Cleggett entered the captain's mess room of the cabin, where the cloth was laid, and a moment later lady Agatha emerged from the state-room and gave him her hand with a smile.
If he had thought her beautiful before, when she wore her plain traveling suit, he thought her radiant now, in the true sense of that much abused word. For she flung forth her charm in vital radiations. If Cleggett had possessed a common mind he might have phrased it to himself that she hit a man squarely in the eyes. ”

“ Yet he jested; he laid his strong and devilish will across Cleggett's mentality; it was a duel in which the two minds met and tried each other like swords; the first break in intention, and one or the other was a dead man. Cleggett felt the weight of that powerful and evil soul upon his own almost as if it were a physical thing.
"You are not altogether safe yourself," said Cleggett grimly, with his eyes fixed on Pierre's and his pistol touching Loge's waistband. "If Pierre so much as winks an eye—if you move a hair's breadth—I'll put a stream of bullets through YOU. Understand?" ”

“ Verily, the minds of wicked men compass their own downfall, and retribution can sometimes be an artist.
But Cleggett, as he crawled forward through the darkness and the damp, thought little of these things that had so mystified him at the time. He was alert for what the immediate future might hold, not doubting that Loge had retreated to the tunnel. He had too strong a sense of the man's powerful and iniquitous personality to suppose that Loge would kill himself while one chance remained, however remote, of injuring his enemies. Loge was the kind of dog that dies biting. ”

“ The wraiths of vapor wing'd and fleet
That rise and run with eager feet
Forth from a myriad altar fires:
All these become a mist that fills
The vales and chasms nebular;
A shaping Soul that moves and thrills
The wastes between red star and star!
A SONG OF MEN OUT of the soil and the slime,
Reeking, they climb,
Out of the muck and the mire,
Rank, they aspire;
Filthy with murder and mud,
Black with shed blood,
Lust and passion and clay—
Dying, they slay;
Stirred by vague hints of a goal,
Seeking a soul!
Groping through terror and night
Up to the light ”

“ The circulation suffers. Nerves and muscles are no longer the perfect servants of the brain; for a fraction of a second the sword deviates from the proper line.
It was for this that Cleggett waited, pressing Loge closer and closer, alert for the instant when Loge would fence wide; waxing as the other waned; menacing eyes, throat, and heart with a point that leaped and dazzled; and at the same time inclosing himself within a rampart of steel which Loge found it more and more hopeless to attempt to penetrate. It was as if Cleggett's blade were an extension of his will ”

“ Shall build, with mingled truth and lies, new icons
from the world-old clods.
Through all the tangled creeds and dreams and
shifting shibboleths men hold
The false-and-true, inwoven, gleams: a matted
mass of dross and gold.
Prove, then, thy gods in thine own soul; all others'
gods, for thee, are vain;
Nor swerved be, struggling for the goal, by bribe
of joy nor threat of pain.
As skulls grow broader, so do faiths; as old tongues
die, old gods die, too,
And only ghosts of gods and wraiths may meet
the backward-gazer's view. ”

“ But the full-leaved, expanded and matured rose became the vivid epitome and illustration of the woman herself. A rope of pearls that hung down to her waist added the touch of soft luster essential to preserve the picture from the reproach of being too obvious an assault upon the senses; Cleggett reflected that another woman might have gone too far and spoiled it all by wearing diamonds. Lady Agatha always knew where to stop. ”

“ Cunning, and the vanity which destroys cunning, often exist side by side. The criminal of a certain type almost worships himself; he is profoundly impressed with his own cleverness. He is a braggart; he swaggers; he defeats himself. A strange idiocy mingles with his cleverness."
"Even people who are not criminals do just that sort of thing," said Lady Agatha. "Look at Samuel Pepys. He was one of the most timid of beings. And he valued his place in the world mightily. But he wrote down the story of his own disgrace in his diary—it had to come out of him! ”

“ The three detectives were pointing at the tunnel with plump forefingers and bland, triumphant smiles.
"Nothing is impossible, my dear Cleggett," said Barnstable. "The tunnel had to be there!"
"It explains everything," said Cleggett. "But a tunnel into my ship!"
And, in truth, for a moment he felt disappointed in the Jasper B. A tunnel is all very well leading from the basement of a house, or extending backward from a cave; but Cleggett felt that it was scarcely a dignified sort of arrangement, nautically speaking, for a ship to have leading from its hold. ”

“ The dust of forty centuries has buried Babylon,
And out of all her lovers dead rises only one;
Rises with a song to sing and laughter in his eyes,
The old song—the only song—for all the rest are lies!
For, oh, the world has just one dream, and it is very
old—
'Tis youth's dream—a silly dream—but it is flushed
with gold! ”

“ But it is in these seconds of pause and doubt that great commanders assert themselves; it is these electric seconds from which the hero gathers his vital lightning and forges his mordant bolt. Genius claims and rules these instants, and the gods are on the side of those who boldly grasp loose wisdom and bind it into sheaves of judgment. Cleggett (whom Homer would have loved) was the first to recover his poise. He came to his decision instantaneously. A lesser man might have lost all by rushing after his retreating enemies; a lesser man, carried away by excitement, would have pursued. ”

“ V Hath she too long dwelt dream-bound in the world
of love,
Unconscious of the sterner throes,
The more austere, impersonal, wide faith,
The urge that drives Christs to the cross
Not for the love of one beloved,
But for the love of all?
If so, she wakes!
Wakes and demands a share in all man's bolder
destinies,
The high, audacious ventures of the soul
That thinks to scale the bastioned slopes
And strike stark Chaos from his throne.
We still stand in the dawn of time. ”

“ Cleggett, not content, made his men go over the place again, even more thoroughly than before. But there was no one there, dead or wounded, unless he had succeeded in contracting himself to the dimensions of a rat.
"There is nothing," said Cleggett, standing by the ladder that led up to the deck. "Nothing," echoed George; and then as if with one impulse, and moved by the same eerie thought, these four men suddenly raised their lanterns head-high and gazed at one another. ”

“ Is far more futile than to fling your laughter in
the face of Death.
For writhe or whirl in dervish rout, they are not
flattered there on high,
Or sham belief to hide a doubt—no gods are mine
that love a lie!
Nor gods that beg belief on earth with portents
that some seer foretells—
Is life itself not wonder-worth that we must cry
for miracles?
Is it not strange enough we breathe? Does every-
thing not God reveal? ”

“ But the rest was lost in an incoherent babble, and with a deep sigh she fell lax into Cleggett's arms. The reaction from despair had been too much for her; it had come too suddenly; at the first word of reassurance, at the first ray of dawning hope, she had fainted. High-strung natures, intrepid in the face of danger, are apt to such collapses in the moment of deliverance; and, whatever the nature of the lady's trouble, Cleggett gained from her swoon a sharp sense of its intensity. ”

“ Deathless, though godheads be dying,
Surviving the creeds that expire,
Illogical, reason-defying,
Lives that passionate, primal desire;
Insistent, persistent, forever
Man cries to the silences, Never
Shall Death reign the lord of the soul,
Shall the dust be the ultimate goal—
I will storm the black bastions of Night!
I will tread where my vision has trod,
I will set in the darkness a light,
In the vastness, a god!"
As the forehead of Man grows broader, so do
his creeds;
And his gods they are shaped in his image, and
mirror his needs ”

“ Through the phosphorescent waters of a summer sea, reckless of cruising sharks, a sailor's clasp knife in his teeth, glided noiselessly a strong swimmer; he reached the side of a schooner yacht from which rose the wild cries of beauty in distress, swarmed aboard with a muttered prayer that was half a curse, swept the water from his eyes, and with pale, stern face went about the bloody business of a hero. ”

“ And every man grovels in error, yet every man
glimpses a truth.
For all of the creeds are false, and all of the creeds
are true;
And low at the shrines where my brothers bow,
there will I bow, too;
For no form of a god, and no fashion
Man has made in his desperate passion
But is worthy some worship of mine;—
Not too hot with a gross belief,
Nor yet too cold with pride,
I will bow me down where my brothers bow,
Humble—but open-eyed!
UNREST A FIERCE unrest seethes at the core
Of all existing things:
It was the eager wish to soar
That gave the gods their wings. ”

“ Barnstable fired, just as a whirl of smoke blew in front of Loge.
Cleggett thought the outlaw staggered, but he was not certain.
A moment later a portion of the roof fell; then the east wall crashed in. Morris's was a blazing ruin.
"He has perished in the flames," said Wilton Barnstable. "So ends Logan Black!"
"More like he's blowed his head off," said Cap'n Abernethy. "If you was to ask me, that's what I'd do."
"He has done neither!" cried Cleggett. "He has taken to the tunnel. That man will fight to the last breath." ”

“ ENVOI A LITTLE WHILE _A little while the tears and laughter,
The willow and the rose—
A little while, and what comes after
No man knows.
An hour to sing, to love and linger ...
Then lutanist and lute
Will fall on silence, song and singer
Both be mute.
Our gods from our desires we fashion....
Exalt our baffled lives,
And dream their vital bloom and passion
Still survives;
But when we're done with mirth and weeping,
With myrtle, rue, and rose,
Shall Death take Life into his keeping? ... ”

“ Teddy, the Pomeranian, was snuggled against Elmer's feet, but, as if a prey to frightful nightmares, the little dog twitched and whined in his sleep from time to time. These were the apparent facts, and these facts were set to a melancholy tune by the long-drawn, dismal snores of Cap'n Abernethy, which rose and fell, and rose and fell, and rose again like the sad and wailing song of some strange bird bereft of a beloved mate. They were the music for, and the commentary on, what Cleggett beheld ”