Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (888 page)

Who picks his farthings hot from danger.

You clank your guineas on the board;

Mine are with several bankers stored.

You reckon riches on your digits,

You dash in chase of Sals and Bridgets,

You drink and risk delirium tremens,

Your whole estate a common seaman’s!

Regard your friend and school companion,

Soon to be wed to Miss Trevanion

(Smooth, honourable, fat and flowery,

With Heaven knows how much land in dowry)

Look at me — am I in good case?

Look at my hands, look at my face;

Look at the cloth of my apparel;

Try me and test me, lock and barrel;And own, to give the devil his due,

I have made more of life than you.

Yet I nor sought nor risked a life;

I shudder at an open knife;

The perilous seas I still avoided

And stuck to land whate’er betided.

I had no gold, no marble quarry,

I was a poor apothecary,

Yet here I stand, at thirty-eight,

A man of an assured estate.’

‘Well,’ answered Robin — ’well, and how?’

The smiling chemist tapped his brow.

‘Rob,’ he replied,’this throbbing brain

Still worked and hankered after gain.

By day and night, to work my will,

It pounded like a powder mill;

And marking how the world went round

A theory of theft it found.

Here is the key to right and wrong:

Steal little but steal all day long;

And this invaluable plan

Marks what is called the Honest Man.

When first I served with Doctor Pill,

My hand was ever in the till.

Now that I am myself a master

My gains come softer still and faster.

As thus: on Wednesday, a maid

Came to me in the way of trade.Her mother, an old farmer’s wife,

Required a drug to save her life.

‘At once, my dear, at once,’ I said,

Patted the child upon the head,

Bade her be still a loving daughter,

And filled the bottle up with water.

‘Well, and the mother?’ Robin cried.

‘O she!’ said Ben, ‘I think she died.’

‘Battle and blood, death and disease,

Upon the tainted Tropic seas —

The attendant sharks that chew the cud —

The abhorred scuppers spouting blood —

The untended dead, the Tropic sun —

The thunder of the murderous gun —

The cut-throat crew — the Captain’s curse —

The tempest blustering worse and worse —

These have I known and these can stand,

But you, I settle out of hand!’

Out flashed the cutlass, down went

Dead and rotten, there and then.

 THE BUILDER’S DOOM

In eighteen twenty Deacon Thin

Feu’d the land and fenced it in,

And laid his broad foundations down

About a furlong out of town.

Early and late the work went on.

The c
arts were toiling ere the dawn;

The mason whistled, the hodman sang;

Early and late the trowels rang;

And Thin himself came day by day

To push the work in every way.

An artful builder, patent king

Of all the local building ring,

Who was there like him in the quarter

For mortifying brick and mortar,

Or pocketing the odd piastre

By substituting lath and plaster?

With plan and two-foot rule in hand,

He by the foreman took his stand,

With boisterous voice, with eagle glance

To stamp upon extravagance.

Far thrift of bricks and greed of guilders,

He was the Buonaparte of Builders.

The foreman, a desponding creature,

Demurred to here and there a feature:

‘For surely, sir — with your permeession —

Bricks here, sir, in the main parteetion...’

The builder goggled, gulped and stared,

The foreman’s services were spared.

Thin would not count among his minions

A man of Wesleyan opinions.

‘Money is money,’ so he said.

‘Crescents are crescents, trade is trade.

Pharaohs and emperors in their seasons

Built, I believe, for different reasons —

Charity, glory, piety, pride —

To pay the men, to please a bride,

To use their stone, to spite their neighbours,

Not for a profit on their labours.

They built to edify or bewilder;

I build because I am a builder.

Crescent and street and square I build,

Plaster and paint and carve and gild.

Around the city see them stand,

These triumphs of my shaping hand,

With bulging walls, with sinking floors,

With shut, impracticable doors,

Fickle and frail in every part,

And rotten to their inmost heart.

There shall the simple tenant find

Death in the falling window-blind,

Death in the pipe, death in the faucit,

Death in the deadly water-closet!

A day is set for all to die:

Caveat emptor! what care I?’

As to Amphion’s tuneful kit

Troy rose, with towers encircling it;

As to the Mage’s brandished wand

A spiry palace clove the sand;

To Thin’s indomitable financing,

That phantom crescent kept advancing.

When first the brazen bells of churches

Called clerk and parson to their perches,

The worshippers of every sect

Already viewed it with respect;

A second Sunday had not gone

Before the roof was rattled on:

And when the fourth was there, behold

The crescent finished, painted, sold!

The stars proceeded in their courses,

Nature with her subversive forces,

Time, too, the iron-toothed and sinewed;

And the edacious years continued.

Thrones rose and fell; and still the crescent,

Unsanative and now senescent,

A plastered skeleton of lath,

Looked forward to a day of wrath.

In the dead night, the groaning timber

Would jar upon the ear of slumber,

And, like Dodona’s talking oak,

Of oracles and judgments spoke.

When to the music fingered well

The feet of children lightly fell,

The sire, who dozed by the decanters,

Started, and dreamed of misadventures.

The rotten brick decayed to dust;

The iron was consumed by rust;

Each tabid and perverted mansion

Hung in the article of declension.

So forty, fifty, sixty passed;

Until, when seventy came at last,

The occupant of number three

Called friends to hold a jubilee.

Wild was the night; the charging rack

Had forced the moon upon her back;

The wind piped up a naval ditty;

And the lamps winked through all the city.

Before that house, where lights were shining,

Corpulent feeders, grossly dining,

And jolly clamour, hum and rattle,

Fairly outvoiced the tempest’s battle.

As still his moistened lip he fingered,

The envious policeman lingered;

While far the infernal tempest sped,

And shook the country folks in bed,

And tore the trees and tossed the ships,

He lingered and he licked his lips.

Lo, from within, a hush! the host

Briefly expressed the evening’s toast;

And lo, before the lips were dry,

The Deacon rising to reply!

‘Here in this house which once I built,

Papered and painted, carved and gilt,

And out of which, to my content,

I netted seventy-five per cent.;

Here at this board of jolly neighbours,

I reap the credit of my labours.

These were the days — I will say more —

These were the grand old days of yore!

The builder laboured day and night;

He watched that every brick was right;

The decent men their utmost did;

And the house rose — a pyramid!

These were the days, our provost knows,

When forty streets and crescents rose,

The fruits of my creative noddle,

All more or less upon a model,

Neat and commodious, cheap and dry,

A perfect pleasure to the eye!

I found this quite a country quarter;

I leave it solid lath and mortar.

In all, I was the single actor —

And am this city’s benefactor!

Since then, alas! both thing and name,

Shoddy across the ocean came —

Shoddy that can the eye bewilder

And makes me blush to meet a builder!

Had this good house, in frame or fixture,

Been tempered by the least admixture

Of that discreditable shoddy,

Should we to-day compound our toddy,

Or gaily marry song and laughter

Below its sempiternal rafter?

Not so!’ the Deacon cried.

The mansion

Had marked his fatuous expansion.

The years were full, the house was fated,

The rotten structure crepitated!

A moment, and the silent guests

Sat pallid as their dinner vests.

A moment more, and root and branch,

That mansion fell in avalanche,

Story on story, floor on floor,

Roof, wall and window, joist and door,

Dead weight of damnable disaster,

A cataclysm of lath and plaster.

Siloam did not choose a sinner —

All were not builders at the dinner.

LORD NELSON AND HIS TAR.

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