PAGE 7
The Namesake
by
‘Oh, say, can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?’
It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and rushed down into the garden.
“I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was then.
“As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in the perfumed darkness.
“I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much farther–seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end, when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.
“All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark–against a sky so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of something in soft, troubled motion.
“The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground.”
* * * * *
Hartwell drew a long breath that lifted his heavy shoulders, and then let them fall again. He shifted a little and faced more squarely the scattered, silent company before him. The darkness had made us almost invisible to each other, and, except for the occasional red circuit of a cigarette end traveling upward from the arm of a chair, he might have supposed us all asleep.
“And so,” Hartwell added thoughtfully, “I naturally feel an interest in fellows who are going home. It’s always an experience.”
No one said anything, and in a moment there was a loud rap at the door,–the concierge, come to take down Bentley’s luggage and to announce that the cab was below. Bentley got his hat and coat, enjoined Hartwell to take good care of his perroquets, gave each of us a grip of the hand, and went briskly down the long flights of stairs. We followed him into the street, calling our good wishes, and saw him start on his drive across the lighted city to the Gare St. Lazare.
McClure’s, March 1907