"Don't stay too long. Good-night, my dear, good-night."
Archibald, watching the fog shut out the moonlight, had still upon him
that sense of revolt. Fame had never come to him, and love had come too
late.
Yet for Randy there was to be fulfillment--the wife of his heart, the
applause of the world. What did it all mean? Why should one man have
all, and the other--nothing?
Yet he had had his dreams. And the dreams of men lived. That which died
was the least of them. The great old gods of democracy--Washington,
Jefferson, Adams--had seen visions, and the visions had endured. Only
yesterday Roosevelt had proclaimed his gallant doctrines. He had died
proclaiming them, and the world held its head higher, because of his
belief in its essential rightness.
The mists enveloped Archibald in a sort of woolly dampness. He saw for a
moment a dim and distant moon. If he could have painted a moon like
that--with fingers of fog reaching up to it----!
His own dreams of beauty? What of them? His pictures would not live. He
knew that now. But he had given more than pictures to the world. He had
given himself in a crusade which had been born of high idealism and a
sense of brotherhood. Day after day, night after night, his plane had
hung, poised like an eagle, above the enemy. He had been one of the
young gods who had set their strength and courage against the greed and
grossness of gray-coated hordes.
And these dreams must live--the dreams of the young gods--as the dreams
of the old gods had endured. Because men had died to make others free,
freedom must be the song on the lips of all men.
He thought of Randy's story. The Trumpeter Swan was only a stuffed bird
in a glass case. But once he had spread his wings--flown high in the
upper air. There had been strength in his pinions--joy in his
heart--thrilling life in every feather of him. Some lovely lines drifted
through Archibald's consciousness--
"Upon the brimming water, among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion and conquest, wander where they will.
Attend upon them still----"
From the frozen north the swan had come to the sheltered bay and some
one had shot him. He had not been asked if he wanted to live; they had
taken his life, and had set him up there on the shelf--and that had been
the end of him.
But was it the end? Stuffed and quiet in his glass case, he had looked
down on a little boy. And the little boy had seen him not dead, but
sounding his trumpet. And now the whole world would hear of him. In
Randy's story, the Trumpeter would live again in the hearts of men.
The wind was rising--the fog blown back before it showed the golden
track of the sea--light stretching to infinity!
He rose and stood by the rail. Then suddenly he felt a hand upon his,
and looking down, he saw Becky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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