By SIR WALTER SCOTT
O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west,
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best;
And, save his good broadsword, he weapon had none,
He rode all unarmed, and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war,
There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
But, ere he alighted at Netherby gate,
The bride had consented, the gallant came late;
For a laggard in love, and a dastard in war,
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.
So boldly he entered the Netherby Hall,
Among bridesmen, and kinsmen, and brothers, and all.
Then spoke the bride’s father, his hand on his sword
(For the poor craven bridegroom said never a word),
“O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war,
Or to dance at our bridal, young Lord Lochinvar?”
“I long wooed your daughter, my suit you denied—
Love swells like the Solway, but ebbs like its tide—
And now I am come, with this lost love of mine,
To lead but one measure, drink one cup of wine.
There are maidens in Scotland more lovely by far,
That would gladly be bride to the young Lochinvar.”
The bride kissed the goblet; the knight took it up,
He quaffed off the wine, and threw down the cup.
She looked down to blush, and she looked up to sigh.
With a smile on her lips, and a tear in her eye.
He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar—
“Now tread we a measure,” said young Lochinvar.
So stately his form, and so lovely her face,
That never a hall such a galliard did grace;
While her mother did fret, and her father did fume,
And the bridegroom stood dangling his bonnet and plume . . .
One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,
When they reached the hall door, and the charger stood near;
So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,
So light to the saddle before he sprung;
“She is won! we are gone! Over bank, bush, and scaur;
They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.
There was mounting ’mong Graemes of the Netherby clan;
Forsters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran;
There was racing and chasing on Cannobie Lee,
But the lost bride of Netherby ne’er did they see.
So daring in love, and so dauntless in war,
Have ye e’er heard of gallant like young Lochinvar?
Curfew Must Not Ring To-night
By ROSE HARTWICK THORPE
“Sexton,” Bessie’s white lips faltered, pointing to the prison old,
With its turrets tall and gloomy, with its walls dark, damp, and cold,
“I’ve a lover in that prison, doomed this very night to die,
At the ringing of the Curfew, and no earthly help is nigh;
Cromwell will not come till sunset,” and her lips grew strangely white
As she breathed the husky whisper:—
“Curfew must not ring to-night.”
“Bessie,” calmly spoke the sexton—every word pierced her young heart
Like the piercing of an arrow, like a deadly poisoned dart—
“Long, long years I’ve rung the Curfew from that gloomy, shadowed tower;
Every evening, just at sunset, it has told the twilight hour;
I have done my duty ever, tried to do it just and right,
Now I’m old I will not falter—
Curfew, it must ring to-night.”
With quick step she bounded forward, sprang within the old church door,
Left the old man threading slowly paths so oft he’d trod before;
Not one moment paused the maiden, but with eye and cheek aglow
Mounted up the gloomy tower, where the bell swung to and fro:
As she climbed the dusty ladder, on which fell no ray of light,
Up and up—her white lips saying:—
“Curfew must not ring to-night.”
She has reached the topmost ladder; o’er her hangs the great dark bell;
Awful is the gloom beneath her, like the pathway down to hell.
Lo, the ponderous tongue is swinging—’tis the hour of Curfew now,
And the sight has chilled her bosom, stopped her breath, and paled her brow.
Shall she let it ring? No, never! flash her eyes with sudden light,
As she springs and grasps it firmly—
“Curfew shall not ring to-night!”
Out she swung—far out; the city seemed a speck of light below,
There ’twixt heaven and earth suspended as the bell swung to and fro,
And the sexton at the bell rope, old and deaf, heard not the bell,
Sadly thought, “That twilight Curfew rang young Basil’s funeral knell.”
Still the maiden clung more firmly and with trembling lips so white,
Said to hush her heart’s wild throbbing:—
“Curfew shall not ring to-night!”
O’er the distant hills came Cromwell; Bessie sees him, and her brow,
Lately white with fear and anguish, has no anxious traces now.
At his feet she tells her story, shows her hands all bruised and torn;
And her face so sweet and pleading, yet with sorrow pale and worn,
Touched his heart with sudden pity, lit his eyes with misty light:
“Go! your lover lives,” said Cromwell,
“Curfew shall not ring to-night.”
Wide they flung the massive portal; led the prisoner forth to die—
All his bright young life before him. ’Neath the darkening English sky
Bessie comes with flying footsteps, eyes aglow with love-light sweet;
Kneeling on the turf beside him, lays his pardon at his feet.
In his brave, strong arms he clasped her, kissed the face upturned and white,
Whispered, “Darling, you have saved me—
Curfew will not ring to-night.”
Barbara Frietchie
By JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
On the pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain wall;
Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town,
Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,
Flapped in the morning wind . . .
. . . the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.
Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;
Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.
Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
“Halt!”—the dust-brown ranks stood fast;
“Fire!”—out blazed the rifle-blast.
It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf
She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and
word;
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:
All day long that free flag tossed
Over the heads of the rebel host.
Ever its torn fold rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;
And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night . . .
FROM
MY WORLD—AND WELCOME TO IT
The Whip-Poor-Will
THE NIGHT had just begun to get pale around the edges when the whip-poor-will began. Kinstrey, who slept in a back room on the first floor, facing the meadow and the strip of woods beyond, heard a blind man tapping and a bugle calling and a woman screaming “Help! Police!” The sergeant in gray was cutting open envelopes with a sword. “Sit down there, sit down there, sit down there!” he chanted at Kinstrey. “Sit down there, cut your throat, cut your throat, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will!” And Kinstrey woke up.
He opened his eyes, but lay without moving for several minutes, separating the fantastic morning from the sounds and symbols of his dream. There was the palest wash of light in the room. Kinstrey scowled through tousled hair at his wristwatch and saw that it was ten minutes past four. “Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will!” The bird sounded very near—in the grass outside the window, perhaps. Kinstrey got up and went to the window in his bare feet and looked out. You couldn’t tell where the thing was. The sound was all around you, incredibly loud and compelling and penetrating. Kinstrey had never heard a whip-poor-will so near at hand before. He had heard them as a boy in Ohio in the country, but he remembered their call as faint and plaintive and faraway, dying before long somewhere between the hills and the horizon. You didn’t hear the bird often in Ohio, it came back to him, and it almost never ventured as close to a house or barn as this brazen-breasted bird murdering sleep out there along the fence line somewhere. “Whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will!” Kinstrey climbed back into bed and began to count; the bird did twenty-seven whips without pausing. His lungs must be built like a pelican’s pouch, or a puffin or a penguin or pemmican or a paladin. . . . It was bright daylight when Kinstrey fell asleep again.
At breakfast, Madge Kinstrey, looking cool and well rested in her white piqué house coat, poured the coffee with steady authority. She raised her eyebrows slightly in mild surprise when Kinstrey mentioned the whip-poor-will the second time (she had not listened the first time, for she was lost in exploring with long, sensitive finger an infinitesimal chip on the rim of her coffee cup).
“Whip-poor-will?” she said, finally. “No, I didn’t hear it. Of course, my room is on the front of the house. You must have been slept out and ready to wake up anyway, or you wouldn’t have heard it.”
“Ready to wake up?” said Kinstrey. “At four o’clock in the morning? I hadn’t slept three hours.”
“Well, I didn’t hear it,” said Mrs. Kinstrey. “I don’t listen for night noises; I don’t even hear the crickets or the frogs.”
“Neither do I,” said Kinstrey. “It’s not the same thing. This thing is loud as a fire bell. You can hear it for a mile.”
“I didn’t hear it,” she said, buttering a piece of thin toast.
Kinstrey gave it up and turned his scowling attention to the headlines in the Herald Tribune of the day before. The vision of his wife sleeping quietly in her canopied four-poster came between his eyes and the ominous headlines. Madge always slept quietly, almost without moving, her arms straight and still outside the covers, her fingers relaxed. She did not believe anyone had to toss and turn. “It’s a notion,” she would tell Kinstrey. “Don’t let your nerves get the best of you. Use your will power.”
“Um, hm,” said Kinstrey aloud, not meaning to.
“Yes, sir?” said Arthur, the Kinstrey’s colored butler, offering Kinstrey a plate of hot blueberry muffins.
“Nothing,” said Kinstrey, looking at his wife. “Did you hear the whip-poor-will, Arthur?”
“No, sir, I didn’t,” said Arthur.
“Did Margaret?”
“I don’t think she did, sir,” said Arthur. “She didn’t say anything about it.”
The next morning the whip-poor-will began again at the same hour, rolling out its loops and circles of sound across the new day. Kinstrey, in his dreams, was beset by trios of little bearded men rolling hoops at him. He tried to climb up onto a gigantic Ferris wheel whose swinging seats were rumpled beds. The round cop with wheels for feet rolled toward him shouting, “Will power will, will power will, whip-poor-will!”
Kinstrey opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling and began to count the whips. At one point the bird did fifty-three straight, without pausing. I suppose, like the drops of water or the bright light in the third degree, this could drive you nuts, Kinstrey thought. Or make you confess. He began to think of things he hadn’t thought of for years: the time he took the quarter from his mother’s pocketbook, the time he steamed open a letter addressed to his father; it was from his teacher in the eighth grade. Miss—let’s see—Miss Willpool, Miss Whippoor, Miss Will Power, Miss Wilmott—that was it.
He had reached the indiscretions of his middle twenties when the whip-poor-will suddenly stopped, on “poor,” not on “will.” Something must have frightened it. Kinstrey sat up on the edge of the bed and lighted a cigarette and listened. The bird was through calling, all right, but Kinstrey couldn’t go back to sleep. The day was as bright as a flag. He got up and dressed.
“I thought you weren’t going to smoke cigarettes before breakfast any more,” said Madge later. “I found four stubs in the ashtray in your bedroom.”
It was no use telling her he had smoked them before going to bed; you couldn’t fool Madge; she always knew. “That goddam bird woke me up again,” he said, “and this time I couldn’t get back to sleep.” He passed her his empty coffee cup. “It did fifty-three without stopping this morning,” he added. “I don’t know how the hell it breathes.”
His wife took his coffee cup and set it down firmly. “Not three cups,” she said. “Not with you sleeping so restlessly the way it is.”
“You didn’t hear it, I suppose?” he said.
She poured herself some more coffee. “No,” she said, “I didn’t hear it.”
Margaret hadn’t heard it, either, but Arthur had. Kinstrey talked to them in the kitchen while they were clearing up after breakfast. Arthur said that it “wuk” him but he went right back to sleep. He said he slept like a log—must be the air off the ocean. As for Margaret, she always slept like a log; only thing ever kept her awake was people a-hoopin’ and a-hollerin’. She was glad she didn’t hear the whip-poor-will. Down where she came from, she said, if you heard a whip-poor-will singing near the house, it meant there was going to be a death. Arthur said he had heard about that, too; must have been his grandma told him, or somebody.
If a whip-poor-will singing near the house meant death, Kinstrey told them, it wouldn’t really make any difference whether you heard it or not. “It doesn’t make any difference whether you see the ladder you’re walking under,” he said, lighting a cigarette and watching the effect of his words on Margaret. She turned from putting some plates away, and her eyes widened and rolled a little.
“Mr. Kinstrey is just teasin’ you, Mag,” said Arthur, who smiled and was not afraid. Thinks he’s pretty smart, Kinstrey thought. Just a little bit too smart, maybe. Kinstrey remembered Arthur’s way of smiling, almost imperceptibly, at things Mrs. Kinstrey sometimes said to her husband when Arthur was just coming into the room or just going out—little things that were none of his business to listen to. Like “Not three cups of coffee if a bird keeps you awake.” Wasn’t that what she had said?
“Is there any more coffee?” he asked, testily. “Or did you throw it out?” He knew they had thrown it out; breakfast had b
een over for almost an hour.
“We can make you some fresh,” said Arthur.
“Never mind,” said Kinstrey. “Just don’t be so sure of yourself. There’s nothing in life to be sure about.”
When, later in the morning, he started out the gate to walk down to the post office, Madge called to him from an upstairs window. “Where are you going?” she asked, amiably enough. He frowned up at her. “To the taxidermist’s,” he said, and went on.
He realized, as he walked along in the warm sunlight, that he had made something of a spectacle of himself. Just because he hadn’t had enough sleep—or enough coffee. It wasn’t his fault, though. It was that infernal bird. He discovered, after a quarter of a mile, that the imperative rhythm of the whip-poor-will’s call was running through his mind, but the words of the song were new: fatal bell, fatal bell, fa-tal bell. Now, where had that popped up from? It took him some time to place it; it was a fragment from “Macbeth.” There was something about the fatal bellman crying in the night. “The fatal bellman cried the livelong night”—something like that. It was an owl that cried the night Duncan was murdered. Funny thing to call up after all these years; he hadn’t read the play since college. It was that fool Margaret, talking about the whip-poor-will and the old superstition that if you hear the whip-poor-will singing near the house, it means there is going to be a death. Here it was 1942, and people still believed in stuff like that.
The next dawn the dream induced by the calling of the whip-poor-will was longer and more tortured—a nightmare filled with dark perils and heavy hopelessness. Kinstrey woke up trying to cry out. He lay there breathing hard and listening to the bird. He began to count: one, two, three, four, five . . .
Then, suddenly, he leaped out of bed and ran to the window and began yelling and pounding on the windowpane and running the blind up and down. He shouted and cursed until his voice got hoarse. The bird kept right on going. He slammed the window down and turned away from it, and there was Arthur in the doorway.
Writings and Drawings Page 33