Tasker Norcross

 “Whether all towns and all who live in them— 
So long as they be somewhere in this world 
That we in our complacency call ours— 
Are more or less the same, I leave to you.
 
I should say less.
 Whether or not, meanwhile,
We’ve all two legs—and as for that, we haven’t— 
There were three kinds of men where I was born: 
The good, the not so good, and Tasker Norcross.
 
Now there are two kinds.
” 

“Meaning, as I divine,
Your friend is dead,” I ventured.
 

Ferguson, 
Who talked himself at last out of the world 
He censured, and is therefore silent now, 
Agreed indifferently: “My friends are dead—
Or most of them.
” 

“Remember one that isn’t,” 
I said, protesting.
 “Honor him for his ears; 
Treasure him also for his understanding.
” 
Ferguson sighed, and then talked on again:
“You have an overgrown alacrity 
For saying nothing much and hearing less; 
And I’ve a thankless wonder, at the start, 
How much it is to you that I shall tell 
What I have now to say of Tasker Norcross,
And how much to the air that is around you.
 
But given a patience that is not averse 
To the slow tragedies of haunted men— 
Horrors, in fact, if you’ve a skilful eye 
To know them at their firesides, or out walking,—”

“Horrors,” I said, “are my necessity; 
And I would have them, for their best effect, 
Always out walking.
” 

Ferguson frowned at me: 
“The wisest of us are not those who laugh
Before they know.
 Most of us never know— 
Or the long toil of our mortality 
Would not be done.
 Most of us never know— 
And there you have a reason to believe 
In God, if you may have no other.
 Norcross,
Or so I gather of his infirmity, 
Was given to know more than he should have known, 
And only God knows why.
 See for yourself 
An old house full of ghosts of ancestors, 
Who did their best, or worst, and having done it,
Died honorably; and each with a distinction 
That hardly would have been for him that had it, 
Had honor failed him wholly as a friend.
 
Honor that is a friend begets a friend.
 
Whether or not we love him, still we have him;
And we must live somehow by what we have, 
Or then we die.
 If you say chemistry, 
Then you must have your molecules in motion, 
And in their right abundance.
 Failing either, 
You have not long to dance.
 Failing a friend,
A genius, or a madness, or a faith 
Larger than desperation, you are here 
For as much longer than you like as may be.
 
Imagining now, by way of an example, 
Myself a more or less remembered phantom—
Again, I should say less—how many times 
A day should I come back to you? No answer.
 
Forgive me when I seem a little careless, 
But we must have examples, or be lucid 
Without them; and I question your adherence
To such an undramatic narrative 
As this of mine, without the personal hook.
” 

“A time is given in Ecclesiastes 
For divers works,” I told him.
 “Is there one 
For saying nothing in return for nothing?
If not, there should be.
” I could feel his eyes, 
And they were like two cold inquiring points 
Of a sharp metal.
 When I looked again, 
To see them shine, the cold that I had felt 
Was gone to make way for a smouldering
Of lonely fire that I, as I knew then, 
Could never quench with kindness or with lies.
 
I should have done whatever there was to do 
For Ferguson, yet I could not have mourned 
In honesty for once around the clock
The loss of him, for my sake or for his, 
Try as I might; nor would his ghost approve, 
Had I the power and the unthinking will 
To make him tread again without an aim 
The road that was behind him—and without
The faith, or friend, or genius, or the madness 
That he contended was imperative.
 

After a silence that had been too long, 
“It may be quite as well we don’t,” he said; 
“As well, I mean, that we don’t always say it.

You know best what I mean, and I suppose 
You might have said it better.
 What was that? 
Incorrigible? Am I incorrigible? 
Well, it’s a word; and a word has its use, 
Or, like a man, it will soon have a grave.

It’s a good word enough.
 Incorrigible, 
May be, for all I know, the word for Norcross.
 
See for yourself that house of his again 
That he called home: An old house, painted white, 
Square as a box, and chillier than a tomb
To look at or to live in.
 There were trees— 
Too many of them, if such a thing may be— 
Before it and around it.
 Down in front 
There was a road, a railroad, and a river; 
Then there were hills behind it, and more trees.

The thing would fairly stare at you through trees, 
Like a pale inmate out of a barred window 
With a green shade half down; and I dare say 
People who passed have said: ‘There’s where he lives.
 
We know him, but we do not seem to know
That we remember any good of him, 
Or any evil that is interesting.
 
There you have all we know and all we care.
’ 
They might have said it in all sorts of ways; 
And then, if they perceived a cat, they might
Or might not have remembered what they said.
 
The cat might have a personality— 
And maybe the same one the Lord left out 
Of Tasker Norcross, who, for lack of it, 
Saw the same sun go down year after year;
All which at last was my discovery.
 
And only mine, so far as evidence 
Enlightens one more darkness.
 You have known 
All round you, all your days, men who are nothing— 
Nothing, I mean, so far as time tells yet
Of any other need it has of them 
Than to make sextons hardy—but no less 
Are to themselves incalculably something, 
And therefore to be cherished.
 God, you see, 
Being sorry for them in their fashioning,
Indemnified them with a quaint esteem 
Of self, and with illusions long as life.
 
You know them well, and you have smiled at them; 
And they, in their serenity, may have had 
Their time to smile at you.
 Blessed are they
That see themselves for what they never were 
Or were to be, and are, for their defect, 
At ease with mirrors and the dim remarks 
That pass their tranquil ears.
” 

“Come, come,” said I;
“There may be names in your compendium 
That we are not yet all on fire for shouting.
 
Skin most of us of our mediocrity, 
We should have nothing then that we could scratch.
 
The picture smarts.
 Cover it, if you please,
And do so rather gently.
 Now for Norcross.
” 

Ferguson closed his eyes in resignation, 
While a dead sigh came out of him.
 “Good God!” 
He said, and said it only half aloud, 
As if he knew no longer now, nor cared,
If one were there to listen: “Have I said nothing— 
Nothing at all—of Norcross? Do you mean 
To patronize him till his name becomes 
A toy made out of letters? If a name 
Is all you need, arrange an honest column
Of all the people you have ever known 
That you have never liked.
 You’ll have enough; 
And you’ll have mine, moreover.
 No, not yet.
 
If I assume too many privileges, 
I pay, and I alone, for their assumption;
By which, if I assume a darker knowledge 
Of Norcross than another, let the weight 
Of my injustice aggravate the load 
That is not on your shoulders.
 When I came 
To know this fellow Norcross in his house,
I found him as I found him in the street— 
No more, no less; indifferent, but no better.
 
‘Worse’ were not quite the word: he was not bad; 
He was not… well, he was not anything.
 
Has your invention ever entertained
The picture of a dusty worm so dry 
That even the early bird would shake his head 
And fly on farther for another breakfast?” 

“But why forget the fortune of the worm,” 
I said, “if in the dryness you deplore
Salvation centred and endured? Your Norcross 
May have been one for many to have envied.
” 

“Salvation? Fortune? Would the worm say that? 
He might; and therefore I dismiss the worm 
With all dry things but one.
 Figures away,
Do you begin to see this man a little? 
Do you begin to see him in the air, 
With all the vacant horrors of his outline 
For you to fill with more than it will hold? 
If so, you needn’t crown yourself at once
With epic laurel if you seem to fill it.
 
Horrors, I say, for in the fires and forks 
Of a new hell—if one were not enough— 
I doubt if a new horror would have held him 
With a malignant ingenuity
More to be feared than his before he died.
 
You smile, as if in doubt.
 Well, smile again.
 
Now come into his house, along with me: 
The four square sombre things that you see first 
Around you are four walls that go as high
As to the ceiling.
 Norcross knew them well, 
And he knew others like them.
 Fasten to that 
With all the claws of your intelligence; 
And hold the man before you in his house 
As if he were a white rat in a box,
And one that knew himself to be no other.
 
I tell you twice that he knew all about it, 
That you may not forget the worst of all 
Our tragedies begin with what we know.
 
Could Norcross only not have known, I wonder
How many would have blessed and envied him! 
Could he have had the usual eye for spots 
On others, and for none upon himself, 
I smile to ponder on the carriages 
That might as well as not have clogged the town
In honor of his end.
 For there was gold, 
You see, though all he needed was a little, 
And what he gave said nothing of who gave it.
 
He would have given it all if in return 
There might have been a more sufficient face
To greet him when he shaved.
 Though you insist 
It is the dower, and always, of our degree 
Not to be cursed with such invidious insight, 
Remember that you stand, you and your fancy, 
Now in his house; and since we are together,
See for yourself and tell me what you see.
 
Tell me the best you see.
 Make a slight noise 
Of recognition when you find a book 
That you would not as lief read upside down 
As otherwise, for example.
 If there you fail,
Observe the walls and lead me to the place, 
Where you are led.
 If there you meet a picture 
That holds you near it for a longer time 
Than you are sorry, you may call it yours, 
And hang it in the dark of your remembrance,
Where Norcross never sees.
 How can he see 
That has no eyes to see? And as for music, 
He paid with empty wonder for the pangs 
Of his infrequent forced endurance of it; 
And having had no pleasure, paid no more
For needless immolation, or for the sight 
Of those who heard what he was never to hear.
 
To see them listening was itself enough 
To make him suffer; and to watch worn eyes, 
On other days, of strangers who forgot
Their sorrows and their failures and themselves 
Before a few mysterious odds and ends 
Of marble carted from the Parthenon— 
And all for seeing what he was never to see, 
Because it was alive and he was dead—
Here was a wonder that was more profound 
Than any that was in fiddles and brass horns.
 

“He knew, and in his knowledge there was death.
 
He knew there was a region all around him 
That lay outside man’s havoc and affairs,
And yet was not all hostile to their tumult, 
Where poets would have served and honored him, 
And saved him, had there been anything to save.
 
But there was nothing, and his tethered range 
Was only a small desert.
 Kings of song
Are not for thrones in deserts.
 Towers of sound 
And flowers of sense are but a waste of heaven 
Where there is none to know them from the rocks 
And sand-grass of his own monotony 
That makes earth less than earth.
 He could see that,
And he could see no more.
 The captured light 
That may have been or not, for all he cared, 
The song that is in sculpture was not his, 
But only, to his God-forgotten eyes, 
One more immortal nonsense in a world
Where all was mortal, or had best be so, 
And so be done with.
 ‘Art,’ he would have said, 
‘Is not life, and must therefore be a lie;’ 
And with a few profundities like that 
He would have controverted and dismissed
The benefit of the Greeks.
 He had heard of them, 
As he had heard of his aspiring soul— 
Never to the perceptible advantage, 
In his esteem, of either.
 ‘Faith,’ he said, 
Or would have said if he had thought of it,
‘Lives in the same house with Philosophy, 
Where the two feed on scraps and are forlorn 
As orphans after war.
 He could see stars, 
On a clear night, but he had not an eye 
To see beyond them.
 He could hear spoken words,
But had no ear for silence when alone.
 
He could eat food of which he knew the savor, 
But had no palate for the Bread of Life, 
That human desperation, to his thinking, 
Made famous long ago, having no other.

Now do you see? Do you begin to see?” 
I told him that I did begin to see; 
And I was nearer than I should have been 
To laughing at his malign inclusiveness, 
When I considered that, with all our speed,
We are not laughing yet at funerals.
 
I see him now as I could see him then, 
And I see now that it was good for me, 
As it was good for him, that I was quiet; 
For Time’s eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft
Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him, 
Or so I chose to fancy more than once 
Before he told of Norcross.
 When the word 
Of his release (he would have called it so) 
Made half an inch of news, there were no tears
That are recorded.
 Women there may have been 
To wish him back, though I should say, not knowing, 
The few there were to mourn were not for love, 
And were not lovely.
 Nothing of them, at least, 
Was in the meagre legend that I gathered
Years after, when a chance of travel took me 
So near the region of his nativity 
That a few miles of leisure brought me there; 
For there I found a friendly citizen 
Who led me to his house among the trees
That were above a railroad and a river.
 
Square as a box and chillier than a tomb 
It was indeed, to look at or to live in— 
All which had I been told.
 “Ferguson died,” 
The stranger said, “and then there was an auction.

I live here, but I’ve never yet been warm.
 
Remember him? Yes, I remember him.
 
I knew him—as a man may know a tree— 
For twenty years.
 He may have held himself 
A little high when he was here, but now …
Yes, I remember Ferguson.
 Oh, yes.
” 
Others, I found, remembered Ferguson, 
But none of them had heard of Tasker Norcross.

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