The Dead Mens Song | Page 7

suit had to come to spoil an otherwise perfect
record. And of course it was political and sprang out of a red-hot state
campaign, while he was editor-in-chief of the _Herald_, in which his
pen went deep enough to enrage the adversary and force the libel case.
Like all political cases of this kind it was not a suit for damages, but an
indictment for criminal libel, found by a complaisant political grand
jury at the other end of the state--intended to cause the greatest amount
of annoyance and to die out slowly. By that means it costs the accused
both time and money while the state pays all expenses for the
prosecution.
Judge "Bill" Smith, one of the greatest of Kentucky lawyers on
constitutional points, or rather Judge William Smith of the Jefferson
Circuit Court--because he has passed over now, taking his kindly and
childlike, yet keen and resourceful personality out of life's war for good
and all--Judge Smith told me the story of that case one night after we
had discussed down to the water-marks in the paper, his treasured copy
of Burns. And at my very urgent solicitation he transcribed the salient
features, not in all the intimate details of the spoken words, but with
deep poetic feeling and rare conception of their human aspects. He
wrote:
There are three poets in Burns. One is the poet you read; the second is

the poet some mellow old Scot, with an edge on his tongue, recites to
you; the third and most wonderful is the Burns that somebody with
even a thin shred of a high voice sings to you. Burns is translated to the
fourth power by singing him--without accompaniment--just the
whinnying of a tenor or soprano voice, vibrant with feeling and pathos,
at the right time of the evening, or in some penumbrous atmosphere of
seclusion where memory can work its miracles.
I was defending Allison in that libel case and we started off on the
200-mile trip together. We had the smoker of the Pullman all to
ourselves, and after I had recited some furlongs of Burns to him, he
began to sing "Jockey's Ta'en the Parting Kiss" in a sort of thin and
whimpering quaver of a tenor that cut through the noise of the train like
a violin note through silence. I thought I knew the poem, but it seemed
to me I had never dreamed what was in it, with the wail of a Highland
woman pouring plaintive melody through the flood gates of her heart.
And he knew every one of them and sang them all with the tailing of
the bag-pipes in the sound.
I wasn't going down to practice law, but to practice patience and
politics. I had been on that circuit for years and knew the court and the
bar very well. So I said to Allison "Don't you sing one of those songs
again until I give the sign." And the first thing I did was to bring him
into touch with the circuit judge, who had the room adjoining mine at
the hotel. He was a Burns lover, too; and besides as I had brought
whiskey and as the town was prohibition, there was really nowhere else
for the judge to spend his evenings. Soon we were capping back and
forth, the judge and I, with Burns.
I don't remember now--nobody ever remembers, after a cold, snowy
night outside, between Burns quotations, hot whiskies, and
reminiscences, exactly how anything happens--but about 10 o'clock,
maybe, Allison was somewhere between "Jockey's Ta'en the Parting
Kiss," "Bonnie Doon," "Afton Water" and "Wert Thou in the Cauld
Blast," and the judge and I were looking deep into the coals of the grate
and crying softly and unconsciously together. You see it wasn't only the
songs. Every damned one of us was Scotch-Irish and we just sat there

and were transported back to the beginning of ourselves in the bare old
primitive homes of us in farm and village, saw the log and coal fires of
infancy blazing up again, and heard the voices of our mothers crooning
and caressing those marvelous lines, and behind them _their_ mothers
crooning and wailing the same back in the unbroken line to Ayrshire
and the Pentland Hills. And all life was just a look into yesterday and
the troubles and the struggles of manhood fell right off as garments and
left us boys again. That's what's in Burns, the singing poet. That is,
when anybody knows how to sing him--not concert singers with
artfulness, but just a singer with the right quaver and the whine of
catgut in the voice and the tailing of Scotch pipes for the swells. It was
perhaps two o'clock of the morning when we stood up, said "Little
Willie's Prayer" softly