Читать книгу Robert W. Service - Robert W. Service - Страница 11

A Rolling Stone

There’s sunshine in the heart of me,

My blood sings in the breeze;

The mountains are a part of me,

I’m fellow to the trees.

My golden youth I’m squandering,

Sun-libertine am I;

A-wandering, a-wandering,

Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,

And I roomed in the cool of a cave;

I have known, I will swear, in a new lifespan

The fret and the sweat of a slave:

For far over all that folks hold worth,

There lives and there leaps in me

A love of the lowly things of earth,

And a passion to be free.

To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,

To range and to change at will;

To mock at the mastership of man,

To seek Adventure’s thrill.

Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;

To go my own sweet way;

To reck not all what may befall,

But to live and to love each day.

To make my body a temple pure

Wherein I dwell serene;

To care for the things that shall endure,

The simple, sweet and clean.

To oust out envy and hate and rage,

To breathe with no alarm;

For Nature shall be my anchorage,

And none shall do me harm.

To shun all lures that debauch the soul,

The orgied rites of the rich;

To eat my crust as a rover must

With the rough-neck down in the ditch.

To trudge by his die whate’er betide;

To share his fire at night;

To call him friend to the long trail-end,

And to read his heart aright.

To scorn all strife, and to view all life

With the curious eyes of a child;

From the plangent sea to the prairie,

From the slum to the heart of the Wild.

From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,

From the vast to the greatly small;

For I know that the whole for good is planned,

And I want to see it all.

To see it all, the wide world-way,

From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;

With never a one to say me nay,

And none to cramp my soul.

In belly-pinch I will pay the price,

But God! let me be free;

For once I know in the long ago,

They made a slave of me.

In a flannel shirt from earth’s clean dirt,

Here, pal, is my calloused hand!

Oh, I love each day as a rover may,

Nor seek to understand.

To enjoy is good enough for me;

The gypsy of God am I;

Then here’s a hail to each flaring dawn!

And here’s a cheer to the night that’s gone!

And may I go a-roaming on

Until the day I die!

Then every star shall sing to me

Its song of liberty;

And every morn shall bring to me

Its mandate to be free.

In every throbbing vein of me

I’ll feel the vast Earth-call;

O body, heart and brain of me

Praise Him who made it all!

The Land of Beyond

Have ever you heard of the Land of Beyond,

That dreams at the gates of the day?

Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,

And ever so far away;

Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls,

And ye of the trail overfond,

With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,

Let’s go to the Land of Beyond!

Have ever you stood where the silence brood,

And vast the horizons begin,

At the dawn of the day to behold far away

The goal you would strive for and win?

Yet ah! in the night when you gain to the height,

With the vast pool of heaven star-spawned,

Afar and agleam, like a valley of dream,

Still mocks you a Land of Beyond.

Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond

For us who are true to the trail;

A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,

A fairness that never will fail;

A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,

A manhood that irks at a bond,

And try how we will, unattainable still,

Behold it, our Land of Beyond!

The Idealist

Oh you who have daring deeds to tell!

And you who have felt Ambition’s spell!

Have you heard of the louse who longed to dwell

In the golden hair of a queen?

He sighed all day and he sighed all night,

And no one could understand it quite,

For the head of a slut is a louse’s delight

But he pined for the head of a queen.

So he left his kinsfolk in merry play,

And off by his lonesome he stole away,

From the home of his youth so bright and gay,

And gloriously unclean.

And at last he came to the palace gate,

And he made his way in a manner straight

(For a louse may go where a man must wait)

To the tiring-room of the queen.

The queen she spake to her tiring-maid:

“There’s something the matter, I’m afraid.

Tonight ere for sleep my hair ye braid,

Just see what may be seen.”

And lo, when they combed that shining hair

They found him alone in his glory there,

And he cried: “I die, but I do not care,

For I’ve lived in the head of a queen!”

Barbwire Bill

At dawn of day the white land lay all gruesome-like and grim,

When Bill Mc’Gee he says to me: “We’ve got to do it, Jim

“We’ve got to make Fort Liard quick. I know the river’s bad,

“But, oh! the little woman’s sick … why! don’t you savvy, lad?”

And me! Well, yes, I must confess it wasn’t hard to see

Their little family group of two would soon be one of three.

And so I answered, careless-like: “Why Bill! you don’t suppose

“I’m scared of that there ‘babbling brook’? Whatever you say — goes.”

A real live man was Barbwire Bill, with insides copperlined,

For “barbwire” was the brand of “hooch” to which he most inclined.

They knew him far; his igloos are on Kittiegazuit strand

They knew him well, the tribes who dwell within the Barren Land.

From Koyokuk to Kuskoquim his fame was everywhere;

And he did love, all life above, that little Julie Claire,

The lithe, white slave-girl he had bought for seven hundred skins,

And taken to his wickiup to make his moccasins.

We crawled down to the river bank and feeble folk were we,

That Julie Claire from God-knows-where, and Barbwire Bill and me.

From shore to shore we heard the roar the heaving ice floes make,

And loud we laughed, and launched our raft, and followed in their wake.

The river swept and seethed and leapt, and caught us in its stride;

And on we hurled amid a world that crashed on every side.

With sullen din the banks caved in; the shore-ice lanced the stream;

The naked floes like spooks arose, all jiggling and agleam.

Black anchor-ice of strange device shot upward from its bed,

As night and day we cleft our way, and arrow-like we sped.

But “Faster still!” cried Barbwire Bill, and looked the live-long day

In dull despair at Julie Claire, as white like death she lay.

And sometimes he would seem to pray and sometimes seem to curse.

And bent above, with eyes of love, yet ever she grew worse.

And as we plunged and leapt and lunged, her face was plucked with pain,

And I could feel his nerves of steel a-quiver at the strain.

And in the night he gripped me tight as I lay fast asleep:

“The river’s kicking like a steer … run out the forward sweep!

“That’s Hell-gate Canyon right ahead; I know of old its roar,

“And … I’ll be damned! the ice is jammed! We’ve got to make the shore.”

With one wild leap I gripped the sweep. The night was black as sin.

The float-ice crashed and ripped and smashed, and stunned us with its din.

And near and near, and clear and clear I heard the canyon boom;

And swift and strong we swept along to meet our awful doom.

And as with dread I glimpsed ahead the death that waited there,

My only thought was of the girl, the little Julie Claire;

And so, like demon mad with fear, I panted at the oar,

And foot by foot, and inch by inch, we worked the raft ashore.

The bank was staked with grinding ice, and as we scraped and crashed,

I only knew one thing to do, and through my mind it flashed:

Yet while I groped to find the rope, I heard Bill’s savage cry:

“That’s my job, lad! It’s me that jumps. I’ll snub this raft or die!”

I saw him leap, I saw him creep, I saw him gain the land;

I saw him crawl, I saw him fall, then run with rope in hand.

And then the darkness gulped him up, and down we dashed once more,

And nearer, nearer drew the jam, and thunder-like its roar.

Oh God! all’s lost … from Julie Claire there came a wail of pain,

And then — the rope grew sudden taut, and quivered at the strain;

It slacked and slipped, it whined and gripped, and oh, I held my breath!

And there we hung and there we swung right in the jaws of death.

A little strand of hemp rope, and how I watched it there,

With all around a hell of sound, and darkness and despair;

A little strand of hempen rope, I watched it all alone,

And somewhere in the dark behind I heard a woman moan;

And somewhere in the dark ahead I heard a man cry out,

Then silence, silence, silence, fell, and mocked my hollow shout.

And yet once more from out the shore I heard that cry of pain,

A moan of mortal agony, then all was still again.

That night was hell with all the frills, and when the dawn broke dim,

I saw a lean and level hand, but never sign of him.

I saw a flat and frozen shore of hideous device,

I saw a long-drawn strand of rope that vanished through the ice.

And on that treeless, rockless shore I found my partner — dead.

No place was there to snub the raft, so — he had served instead;

And with the rope lashed round his waist, in last defiant fight,

He’d thrown himself beneath the ice, that closed and gripped him tight;

And there he’d held us back from death, as fast in death he lay.…

Say, boys! I’m not the pious brand, but — I just tried to pray.

And then I looked to Julie Claire, and sore abashed was I,

For from the robes that covered her, I — heard — a — baby — cry.…

Thus was Love conqueror of death, and life for life was given;

And though no saint on earth, d’ye think — Bill’s squared hisself with Heaven?

The Headliner and the Breadliner

Moko, the Educated Ape is here,

The pet of vaudeville, so the posters say,

And every night the gaping people pay

To see him in his panoply appear;

To see him pad his paunch with dainty cheer,

Puff his perfecto, swill champagne, and sway

Just like a gentleman, yet all in play,

Then bow himself off stage with brutish leer.

And as tonight, with noble knowledge crammed,

I ’mid this human compost take my place,

I, once a poet, now so dead and damned,

The woeful tears half freezing on my face:

“O God!” I cry, “let me but take his shape,

Moko’s, the Blest, the Educated Ape.”

The Squaw Man

The cow-moose comes to water, and the beaver’s overbold,

The net is in the eddy of the stream;

The teepee stars the vivid sward with russet, red and gold,

And in the velvet gloom the fire’s a-gleam.

The night is ripe with quiet, rich with incense of the pine;

From sanctuary lake I hear the loon;

The peaks are bright against the blue, and drenched with sunset wine,

And like a silver bubble is the moon.

Cloud-high I climbed but yesterday; a hundred miles around

I looked to see a rival fire a-gleam,

As in a crystal lens it lay, a land without a bound,

All lure, and virgin vastitude, and dream.

The great sky soared exultantly, the great earth bared its breast,

All river-veined and patterned with the pine;

The heedless hordes of caribou were streaming to the West,

A land of lustrous mystery — and mine.

Yea, mine to frame my Odyssey: Oh, little do they know

My conquest and the kingdom that I keep!

The meadows of the musk-ox, where the laughing grasses grow,

The rivers where the careless conies leap.

Beyond the silent Circle, where white men are fierce and few,

I lord it, and I mock at man-made law;

Like a flame upon the water is my little light canoe,

And yonder in the fireglow is my squaw.

A squaw man! yes, that’s what I am; sneer at me if you will.

I’ve gone the grilling pace that cannot last;

With bawdry, bridge and brandy — Oh, I’ve drunk enough to kill

A dozen such as you, but that is past.

I’ve swung round to my senses, found the place where I belong;

The City made a madman out of me;

But here beyond the Circle, where there’s neither right or wrong,

I leap from life’s straitjacket, and I’m free.

Yet ever in the far forlorn, by trails of lone desire;

Yet ever in the dawn’s white leer of hate;

Yet ever by the dripping kill, beside the drowsy fire,

There comes the fierce heart-hunger for a mate.

There comes the mad blood-clamour for a woman’s clinging hand,

Love-humid eyes, the velvet of a breast;

And so I sought the Bonnet-plumes, and chose from out the band

The girl I thought the sweetest and the best.

O wistful women I have loved before my dark disgrace!

O women fair and rare in my home land!

Dear ladies, if I saw you now I’d turn away my face,

Then crawl to kiss your footprints in the sand!

And yet — that day the rifle jammed — a wounded moose at bay —

A roar, a charge … I faced it with my knife:

A shot from out the willow-scrub, and there the monster lay.…

Yes, little Laughing Eyes, you saved my life.

The man must have the woman, and we’re all brutes more or less,

Since first the male ape shinned the family tree;

And yet I think I love her with a husband’s tenderness,

And yet I know that she would die for me.

Oh, if I left you, Laughing Eyes, and nevermore came back,

God help you, girl! I know what you would do.…

I see the lake wan in the moon, and from the shadow black,

There drifts a little, empty birch canoe.

We’re here beyond the Circle, where there’s never wrong nor right;

We aren’t spliced according to the law;

But by the gods I hail you on this hushed and holy night

As the mother of my children, and my squaw.

I see your little slender face set in the firelight glow;

I pray that I may never make it sad;

I hear you croon a baby song, all slumber-soft and low —

God bless you, little Laughing Eyes! I’m glad.

The Man Who Knew

The Dreamer visioned Life as it may be,

And from his dream forthright a picture grew,

A painting all the people thronged to see,

And joyed therein — till came the Man Who Knew,

Saying: “’Tis bad! Why do ye gape, ye fools!

He painteth not according to the schools.”

The Dreamer probed Life’s mystery of woe,

And in a book he sought to give the clue;

The people read, and saw that it was so,

And read again — then came the Man Who Knew,

Saying: “Ye witless ones! this book is vile:

It hath not got the rudiments of style.”

Love smote the Dreamer’s lips, and silver clear

He sang a song so sweet, so tender true,

That all the marketplace was thrilled to hear,

And listened rapt — till came the Man Who Knew,

Saying: “His technique’s wrong; he singeth ill.

Waste not your time.” The singer’s voice was still.

And then the people roused as if from sleep,

Crying: “What care we if it be not Art!

Hath he not charmed us, made us laugh and weep?

Come, let us crown him where he sits apart.”

Then, with his picture spurned, his book unread,

His song unsung, they found their Dreamer — dead.