All honour unto Bangs, for ne’er did Jones thereafter
know
By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to
Mooltan
They know the worthy General as “that most immoral
man.”
Twelve hundred million men are spread
About this Earth, and I and You
Wonder, when You and I are dead,
“What will those luckless millions do?”
None whole or clean,” we cry, “or free
from stain
Of favour.” Wait awhile, till we attain
The Last Department where nor fraud nor
fools,
Nor grade nor greed, shall trouble us again.
Fear, Favour, or Affection—what are these
To the grim Head who claims our services?
I never knew a wife or interest yet
Delay that pukka step, miscalled “decease”;
When leave, long overdue, none can deny;
When idleness of all Eternity
Becomes our furlough, and the marigold
Our thriftless, bullion-minting Treasury
Transferred to the Eternal Settlement,
Each in his strait, wood-scantled office pent,
No longer Brown reverses Smith’s
appeals,
Or Jones records his Minute of Dissent.
And One, long since a pillar of the Court,
As mud between the beams thereof is wrought;
And One who wrote on phosphates for the
crops
Is subject-matter of his own Report.
These be the glorious ends whereto we pass—
Let Him who Is, go call on Him who Was;
And He shall see the mallie steals the
slab
For currie-grinder, and for goats the grass.
A breath of wind, a Border bullet’s flight,
A draught of water, or a horse’s fright—
The droning of the fat Sheristadar
Ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night
For you or Me. Do those who live decline
The step that offers, or their work resign?
Trust me, Today’s Most Indispensables,
Five hundred men can take your place or mine.
BALLADS
That night, when through the
mooring-chains
The wide-eyed corpse rolled free,
To blunder down by Garden Reach
And rot at Kedgeree,
The tale the Hughli told the shoal
The lean shoal told to me.
’T was Fultah Fisher’s boarding-house,
Where sailor-men reside,
And there were men of all the ports
From Mississip to Clyde,
And regally they spat and smoked,
And fearsomely they lied.
They lied about the purple Sea
That gave them scanty bread,
They lied about the Earth beneath,
The Heavens overhead,
For they had looked too often on
Black rum when that was red.
They told their tales of wreck and wrong,
Of shame and lust and fraud,
They backed their toughest statements with
The Brimstone of the Lord,
And crackling oaths went to and fro
Across the fist-banged board.
