A Young King

I

THERE is an old brick fort in my native harbor, one of the ancient landmarks of the bay, where (the legend runs) pirates were formerly hanged in chains as a warning to all sea rovers. This was apparently their second hanging. They were first strung up until they were dead in a spot more accessible to the admiring multitude — the old Execution Dock, a desolate place of marsh and mud at the edge of the town, ‘ within the Ebbing and Flowing of the Sea.’ There Captain Stede Bonnet and other less famous Gentlemen of Fortune trod a last measure not very gracefully in their big storm boots, trying hard to find footing in the empty air; and there, in the dusk of evening or early dawn, you may hear the voices of invisible water birds passing over the spot and recall a poetic fancy of the pirate epoch. For it is now well known that those wild lamentable cries, heard faintly in the gloom, are uttered not by birds but by the ghosts of high-born ladies who once were held captive by the buccaneers and were compelled at last by their fierce masters to walk the plank into the sea.

But theirs is another story; and it is another story, too, how Captain Stede Bonnet, so romantically debonair until he could almost smell the brimstone of the Pit, lost his courage as he waited in his dungeon and offered, in exchange for his life, to sever all his limbs from his body so that he could never wield cutlass again, ‘only reserving the use of my Tongue to call continually on the Lord, my God, and mourn all my days in Sackcloth and Ashes.’ They swung him anyhow, arms and legs still attached, at Execution Dock; and later, I suppose, they made a scarecrow of him by hanging his pitiful body in chains on the islet where the old brick fort now stands in the inner harbor.

The fort is a fort no longer. I don’t know what it is used for now, and that is not important. But a man lives there, — and a very good man, — and, w hether or not he has ever had the luck to see the ghost of Captain Bonnet, he has been the familiar of other and hardier pirates. A breeder of ducks, he is also a friend of eagles. For a long while a pair of white-headed eagles did him the honor to make use of his fort as an observation post. He treated them with due respect, and they, on their part, never abused his hospitality. But after a while the number of his ducks grew less, and he discovered presently that they were being carried off one by one by a young dark-headed eagle who came from the mainland woods across the bay and launched swift raids against the duck yard.

This bird was perhaps a son of the pair with whom the man was friendly, but that could not affect the practical economics of the situation. So, when the raider swooped upon another duck and bore it aloft in his talons, the man, regretfully but with a steady aim, shot him.

The staggering shock of the blow, the stabbing pain of the pellets embedded in his flesh, brought an interval of blackness. He lurched downward toward the water, and the duck dropped from his limp claws. But life is strong in these robust warriors; after a moment his great wings, powerfully flapping, checked his fall.

The friendly woods were far away across the harbor, but near at hand were the roofs and steeples of the city. Perhaps that was why he turned west instead of north, seeking the nearest landing place; or possibly, in the agony of his mangled breast, he was further confused by a spectacular fire just then raging on the water front. At any rate, early the next morning (it was the twenty-fifth of May) I looked out of my window in the heart of Charleston and saw him standing on a stout limb of a magnolia tree about twenty feet from the window and almost on a level with my eyes.

II

Whence or why he had come was unknown to me then; not until later did I learn of what had happened at the ancient fort where, if old tales are true, the dead pirates were suspended. But the why and wherefore did not matter. When the gods send their greatest gifts, the glory dazzles and bewilders; the mind is benumbed. Staring out of the window, I was in a ‘strance,’ as the plantation Negroes would say. I was like a poor peasant, sitting by his hearth, who looks up to see his king, robed in ermine and crowned with jewels, standing in the doorway.

Often and often I had seen these kings on their high thrones, wheeling above the forests of the main or soaring grandly over the beaches and marshes of Edisto, that sweet island of green and gold at the edge of the blue sea. But now the king had come to me! Here in the city, the abode of men, the abode of all tameness and all drabness, of little common everyday things, of shops and chimney pots! So my thoughts whirled, and in my dazed mind I misquoted Tennyson — ‘the splendor falls on city walls.’ For indeed there was a splendor now over that magnolia tree and that small city garden and the brick walls of the familiar houses, and nothing was as it had been, but all was lit with a strange bright glory.

This is n’t nonsense. If you think it is, eagles mean nothing to you. They mean to others something quite inexpressible: a kind of magic compounded partly of nature’s wildness and freedom, supremely embodied in the eagle, and partly of mind pictures out of the storied past; for the eagle was the great imperial bird of Ancient Persia, of the kings of Babylon, of Heliopolis, City of the Sun, of Ancient Rome and Charlemagne and Napoleon. Over the pictured pageantry of those resounding names he soars on immortal pinions, emblem of empire and demigod of nature, looking down upon ‘ dust of battle and deaths of kings,’ himself the incomparable king of all the heavens. (Thus always, when an eagle is sighted, my Pegasus takes the bit in his teeth.) Let such a being come to visit you in your own familiar town, presenting himself to your astounded gaze not twenty feet from your bedroom window, and, if nothing happens inside of you, have nothing to do with poets. Go in for politics instead; or else become a bricklayer.

Well, after a while, still standing beside my window, I emerged gradually from my ‘strance.’ This was no hallucination, I perceived. The big bird yonder was an eagle; a fine one, probably a male, and a young bird (though full-sized), since head and tail had not yet become white — a change which commonly begins about the end of the third year. But I saw at once that he was wounded. His dark mottled breast was turned toward me and there was a darker spot upon it which appeared to be wet. He had not moved a muscle or a feather until now; his head was lifted slightly and I saw that his gaze was fixed upon the sky. But now suddenly he lowered his head and looked long and gravely at the wound in his breast. He did not touch it with his hooked bill; after a little, he lifted his head again.

There was an indescribable dignity in the movement: this quiet unhurried contemplation of his wound, this calm resumption of his scrutiny of the sky. I thought that I had never seen anything more tragical. He has looked at death, I said — death in his breast; and now he waits. There came suddenly into my mind an old myth which persists among the dusky marshmen of Edisto.

They say that once in the lifetime of every male eagle he attempts a journey to heaven. This is not undertaken lightly, but only when his full strength has come to him and his courage is at its zenith. Then, in wide spiral sweeps, he goes up and up on his broad vans, day after day and night after night, until he sees near at hand the moon and the five-pointed numberless stars. These light him through the darkness, but by day he keeps far from the sun, so that his wings will not be singed by the awful heat of that fiery ball which, small as it appears to us, is really almost as large as Edisto Island. Sun, moon, and stars are left behind, but heaven is still far above; at last, if his strength and courage do not fail, he reaches the spot where an inhabitant of heaven awaits him, holding a stone. Hiding this stone under his feathers, the eagle returns to earth, places the stone in his nest, and guards it jealously.

John, son of Yorky, — a young marshboy then, — told me that tale one morning years ago as we watched a bald eagle soaring so high that it seemed he was bound for heaven. It was John’s opinion that if a man, even a poor colored boy like himself, could gain possession of the eagle-stone, he could by means of it open any money vault in the world and become rich enough to travel on a vestibule train almost to New York City; but why the eagle desired the stone John did not know. I thought I knew: it was his accolade, his certificate of knighthood, his Croix de Guerre; it was the crown and symbol of his kingship.

III

This while — and such thoughts can unfold almost in an instant — the wounded eagle in the magnolia outside my window had not moved a second time. His eyes were still fixed on the blue sky, and now I saw that he was watching two turkey vultures that were soaring high above the town. But suddenly it seemed to me that he was gazing far past the vultures into immeasurably lofty regions beyond the reach of my poor eyes; and I wondered what he was seeing there and what he was thinking, as he stood wounded and waiting, with death in his breast and the knowledge that he would never fly again nor ever make that great journey to the sky. But I brought myself out of this with a jerk (being much afraid of silly sentimentalities of all kinds), reminding myself that birds probably do not think, at least not as we think, and have no foreknowledge of death, and that, moreover, the tale of the eagle-stone was only a foolish myth.

Yet I could n’t help wondering how old this wounded eagle was. He was less than three years old certainly, since head and tail were still dark, and, but for that wound, he might have lived a century. But now death was in his breast. In his brief span, so pitifully brief, how much had he experienced of the grand life of eagles?

Not much, at best. This young wounded prince had scarcely yet come into his kingdom. Watching him through the window, I began to think of all that he would miss, for the life of eagles is surely the grandest life that is lived upon earth. But before these thoughts, or sentimentalities, had gone far, an interruption occurred. A mocking bird discovered the wounded eagle in the magnolia and, in amazed indignation, summoned other mocking birds to the number of ten or a dozen; while simultaneously, answering the alarm, a nonpareil arrived, then a gray squirrel, then a ruby-throated humming bird, then a pair of cardinals.

There was a noisy excitement in the magnolia tree, in which, however, the squirrel, the cardinals, and the nonpareil took no active part, merely looking on with lively interest. But the humming bird flashed here and there about the eagle or poised in the air in front of him, a midget challenging a giant but never actually attacking; while the slim indignant mocking birds darted in and out like swift swordsmen, striking the eagle repeatedly upon his broad back. Once one of them struck him so hard a blow that, either from weakness or from momentary loss of balance, he nearly fell from the tree.

Yet he never for a moment gave them the slightest attention. He look blow after blow; neither with bill nor with claw did he resent these insults. At first I was distressed by his passive acceptance of indignity; but soon I understood that for him this present had no importance, no reality. It was as nothing. His eyes remained fixed on the sky. Even when the impudent humming bird danced in front of him and there was a swarm of angry mockers about his head, he did not see them.

He saw only very far-off and lofty and splendid things. Some of these I know that he saw, for I, too, saw them from the window: the majesty of the vultures swinging round and round ‘in those blue tracts above the thunder’; the stately passage of an osprey at a great height above the city; the beautiful passage of two snowy egrets upon whose slowly beating wings the morning sun shone with a capricious artistry so that now they appeared a gleaming white and then a dazzling silver. But even when the sky was empty, he seemed, from the intentness of his gaze, to see something there; and if I, who knew so much less of the grand life of eagles, could see invisible things in that empty sky as I stood at my window, how can I say that this wounded eagle could not see them?

IV

At any rate, I believed then that it was so; he was looking upon the glory he would miss because death was in his breast — the heritage that would never be his. It did not seem to me sentimental to reflect about these matters, recalling sights that I had seen above the woods and marshes of Edisto, recalling especially the love-making of the eagles.

There can be no other love-making so magnificent as that of these mighty lords. Whitman has something of it: —

But it is finer than that, and I think the ‘rushing amorous contact’ is not often so close as in the poem. What I saw in my mind, standing beside the window, was another picture — a sight witnessed on a lonely coast one morning in autumn, the mating season of eagles, when a fine white-headed pair were circling above me and one of them, probably the male, spiraled up without a movement of his wings until he was far above his mate. Suddenly he tipped forward and came down headforemost, rocking from side to side, plunging straight for her; but when in another moment he would have struck her lifeless, his wings opened, his white tail spread like a fan, and he shot past her so close that she must have felt the wind of his singing pinions. Wheeling, he returned to her; then, swooping and swerving, with wild reiterated laughing cries, they played a mad passionate game of flight and chase amid the October clouds until presently they vanished in the distance.

A hundred years of that! A hundred love seasons in the high sweet air with her who is queen of the air even as he is king! But this wounded eagle in the magnolia free was young — too young, probably, to have had a mate. Call it sentiment if you choose (you who have never seen the love-making of eagles!), but I stood at the window and thought darkly of what can happen to young kings, how they can be cut off before they have entered their kingdom, how a load of shot from a gun can prohibit splendors and happinesses. Then someone called me and I had to go.

It was as well, perhaps. There is so much trouble in the world that it is foolish to be troubled over the wounding of a young eagle. I took a last look at him and I thought, from the poise of his head, that he was still looking upward; when, two hours later, I returned to the window, he had gone. The story would be better if I could say that I found him lying dead under the tree, but I did not find him or hear of him again. Evidently he was not yet too weak to leave that place; and possibly (almost anything is possible) he tried with the last of his strength to go where his gaze and surely his heart’s desire were fixed. But I looked up into that blue kingdom and did not see him. Only the vultures were circling there.