The Pilgrims of Hope | Page 9

wont, alone as he always was; So I helped the dark old man to bring a chub to grass, And somehow he knew of my birth, and somehow we came to be friends, Till he got to telling me chapters of the tale that never ends; The battle of grief and hope with riches and folly and wrong. He told how the weak conspire, he told of the fear of the strong; He told of dreams grown deeds, deeds done ere time was ripe, Of hope that melted in air like the smoke of his evening pipe; Of the fight long after hope in the teeth of all despair; Of battle and prison and death, of life stripped naked and bare. But to me it all seemed happy, for I gilded all with the gold Of youth that believes not in death, nor knoweth of hope grown cold. I hearkened and learned, and longed with a longing that had no name, Till I went my ways to our village and again departure came.
Wide now the world was grown, and I saw things clear and grim, That awhile agone smiled on me from the dream-mist doubtful and dim. I knew that the poor were poor, and had no heart or hope; And I knew that I was nothing with the least of evils to cope; So I thought the thoughts of a man, and I fell into bitter mood, Wherein, except as a picture, there was nought on the earth that was good; Till I met the woman I love, and she asked, as folk ask of the wise, Of the root and meaning of things that she saw in the world of lies. I told her all I knew, and the tale told lifted the load That made me less than a man; and she set my feet on the road.
So we left our pleasure behind to seek for hope and for life, And to London we came, if perchance there smouldered the embers of strife Such as our Frenchman had told of; and I wrote to him to ask If he would be our master, and set the learners their task. But "dead" was the word on the letter when it came back to me, And all that we saw henceforward with our own eyes must we see. So we looked and wondered and sickened; not for ourselves indeed: My father by now had died, but he left enough for my need; And besides, away in our village the joiner's craft had I learned, And I worked as other men work, and money and wisdom I earned. Yet little from day to day in street or workshop I met To nourish the plant of hope that deep in my heart had been set. The life of the poor we learned, and to me there was nothing new In their day of little deeds that ever deathward drew. But new was the horror of London that went on all the while That rich men played at their ease for name and fame to beguile The days of their empty lives, and praised the deeds they did, As though they had fashioned the earth and found out the sun long hid; Though some of them busied themselves from hopeless day to day With the lives of the slaves of the rich and the hell wherein they lay. They wrought meseems as those who should make a bargain with hell, That it grow a little cooler, and thus for ever to dwell.
So passed the world on its ways, and weary with waiting we were. Men ate and drank and married; no wild cry smote the air, No great crowd ran together to greet the day of doom; And ever more and more seemed the town like a monstrous tomb To us, the Pilgrims of Hope, until to-night it came, And Hope on the stones of the street is written in letters of flame.
This is how it befel: a workmate of mine had heard Some bitter speech in my mouth, and he took me up at the word, And said: "Come over to-morrow to our Radical spouting-place; For there, if we hear nothing new, at least we shall see a new face; He is one of those Communist chaps, and 'tis like that you two may agree." So we went, and the street was as dull and as common as aught you could see; Dull and dirty the room. Just over the chairman's chair Was a bust, a Quaker's face with nose cocked up in the air; There were common prints on the wall of the heads of the party fray, And Mazzini dark and lean amidst them gone astray. Some thirty men we were of the kind that I knew full well,