| |
| WHEN Albert F. McComb | |
| Died in his native Dodgetown | |
| At the age of sixty-odd, | |
| People said—the few who said anything at all— | |
| That he had lived a futile life, | 5 |
| And that Europe was to blame: | |
| His continual hankering after the Old World | |
| Had made him a failure in the New. | |
| |
| At seventeen he was reading In Dickens-land, just out, | |
| And Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, | 10 |
| And Maudle’s Life of Raphael; | |
| And he was never the same afterward. | |
| He decided on romance. | |
| Romance, with Albert, was always a good bit back, | |
| And some distance away— | 15 |
| Least of all in booming Dodgetown, | |
| In the year of grace eighteen-seventy-three. | |
| There was Shelley poetizing in Pisa | |
| (Thirty-five years before Albert was born); | |
| And there was Byron with his countess | 20 |
| In that conspiratorial old palace at Ravenna | |
| (Four thousand wide miles from Main Street, | |
| Or more). Et cetera. | |
| |
| At twenty-one Albert “took a position”, | |
| But he never put his heart into the work. | 25 |
| At twenty-five he might have bought a share in the business; | |
| But, “No,” he said, “I may cross over soon; | |
| Let me be foot-free, and fancy-free—no entanglements here.” | |
| |
| When he was twenty-six | |
| Adelaide Waters, tired of waiting, | 30 |
| Married an ambitious young hardware-dealer, | |
| And on the whole did well. | |
| But Albert cared little: | |
| “She” was waiting on the other side. | |
| |
| Early he became a boarder, | 35 |
| And a boarder he continued to be. | |
| “Why tie myself up with property?” he asked; | |
| “The time will come, and I must be without constraint.” | |
| |
| Thus, without constraint, without career, without estate, | |
| Without home and family, | 40 |
| He waited for the great hour, | |
| Living on slick steel-engravings, | |
| And flushed, mendacious chromo-lithographs, | |
| And ecstatic travel-books penned by forlorn English spinsters. | |
| |
| In the new West others wooed Fortune and won her; | 45 |
| But Albert was spending fortune on fortune abroad | |
| Before he had fairly learned to pay his way at home. | |
| He lived in a palace on the Lung’ Arno: | |
| He saw the yellow river plainly enough | |
| From the back window of the two-story frame on Ninth Street. | 50 |
| He went to the office in a plum-colored coat, | |
| Of the cut of the early ’twenties, | |
| And a voluminous stock— | |
| Though others might see but “mixed goods” | |
| And a four-in-hand. | 55 |
| Some damsel, principessa or contadina, | |
| Hung on his lips, or carelessly betrayed his heart; | |
| And he, the young poet— | |
| Though he had never written a line | |
| (Such stuff as this having not yet been invented)— | 60 |
| Lay down in dreamless slumber beside Keats, | |
| Close to the walls of Rome. | |
| |
| Some years passed by, | |
| But Albert never budged from home. | |
| Savings grew slowly; no kindly patron appeared; no rich relation died. | 65 |
| But less and less did Albert live | |
| In terms of Dodgetown and of Caldwell County. | |
| It was all Lambeth and Lincoln’s Inn and Bridgewater House; | |
| The Schwarzwald and the Forest of Arden; | |
| The cypresses of Verona, the cascades of Tivoli, | 70 |
| And the Pincian Hill. | |
| |
| At forty Albert was getting a lukewarm salary for lukewarm work; | |
| And some small five-and-a-half per-cent investments | |
| Brought in three hundred and thirty dollars extra per annum. | |
| “In two or three years I shall risk going,” he would say; | 75 |
| “And then…!” | |
| |
| But if Albert stayed single, all his sisters did not; | |
| And if he himself kept on living, several of his adult relatives died; | |
| And when he was fifty-two a bunch of grand-nieces | |
| Asked him to help on their grocery bills, | 80 |
| And to see that their mortgage-interest got paid on time. | |
| Other things of like nature happened, | |
| And Albert presently perceived that not every single man | |
| Can escape the obligations and responsibilities of the married state. | |
| “Well, I must wait,” he said; | 85 |
| And he began to collect views of the Dolomites. | |
| |
| Albert prosed along past sixty, | |
| As our muse indicated at the start. | |
| His young relatives grew up, | |
| And some of them married; | 90 |
| And those who remained single | |
| Were cared for by their sisters’ husbands. | |
| And one day Albert got word | |
| That a wealthy cousin, twice removed, | |
| Who had made millions out of the Michigan forests, | 95 |
| And had multiplied them into tens of millions on the stock exchange, | |
| And whom he had not heard from for twenty years, | |
| Had “crossed,” as Albert liked to say, | |
| And had left him a fortune indeed. | |
| |
| Albert sent for steamship folders; | 100 |
| But a dubious July | |
| Was followed by a frenetic August. | |
| The ancient world, | |
| So grandiose and so romantic | |
| To Albert’s steadfast eyes, | 105 |
| Went mad. | |
| “‘Man marks the earth with ruin,’” he mused; | |
| “But ‘his control—Stops with the….’” | |
| Yet the sea itself was become a shambles, | |
| And the realm of faery, beyond, | 110 |
| A trampled mire of blood and wreckage. | |
| |
| Albert stood on the brink of things, as ever. | |
| But the earth heaved beneath his feet, | |
| And the fabric reared through forty years fell in ruin on his head. | |
| “There will be no peace in my time,” he murmured; | 115 |
| “Nor any salve in generations. | |
| For me there is no world at all— | |
| What is my million, here?” | |
| |
| Albert retired. | |
| He studied the stripes in the wall-paper | 120 |
| And considered his weak old hands on the counterpane. | |
| His eyes were become too dim to see the Here and Now, | |
| Or to divine the local glories Just About to Be. | |
| In a negative way he had been a good enough man; | |
| And, “Heaven will do,” he sighed; | 125 |
| “But—has it a Val d’Arno, a Villa d’Este, | |
| Or….” | |
| But you, kind friend and reader, | |
| Shall have the last word here; | |
| And mind you choose it well. | 130 |
| |
