Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service (read after TXT) 📕

him. The Reckoning

It’s fine to have a blowout in a fancy restaurant,
With terrapin and canvasback and all the wine you want;
To enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass,
Smoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass;
It’s bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,
But it’s quite another matter when you
Pay the bill.

It’s great to go out every night on fun or pleasure bent,
To wear your glad rags always, and to never save a cent;
To drift along regardless, have a good time every trip;
To hit the high spots sometimes, and to let your chances slip;
To know you’re acting foolish, yet to go on fooling still,
Till Nature calls a showdown, and you
Pay the bill.

Time has got a little bill⁠—get wise while yet you may,
For the debit side’s increasing in a most alarming way;
The things you had no right to do, the things you should have done,
They’re all put down: it’s up to you to pay for every one.
So eat, drink, and be merry, have a good time if you will,
But God help you when the time comes, and you
Foot the bill.

Quatrains

One said: Thy life is thine to make or mar,
To flicker feebly, or to soar, a star;
It lies with thee⁠—the choice is thine, is thine,
To hit the ties or drive thy auto-car.

I answer Her: The choice is mine⁠—ah, no!
We all were made or marred long, long ago.
The parts are written: hear the super wail:
“Who is stage-managing this cosmic show?”

Blind fools of fate, and slaves of circumstance,
Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance.
From gloom where mocks that will-o’-wisp, Freewill,
I heard a voice cry: “Say, give us a chance.”

Chance! Oh, there is no chance. The scene is set.
Up with the curtain! Man, the marionette,
Resumes his part. The gods will work the wires.
They’ve got it all down fine, you bet, you bet!

It’s all decreed: the mighty earthquake crash;
The countless constellations’ wheel and flash;
The rise and fall of empires, war’s red tide,
The composition of your dinner hash.

There’s no haphazard in this world of ours:
Cause and effect are grim, relentless powers.
They rule the world. (A king was shot last night.
Last night I held the joker and both bowers.)

From out the mesh of fate our heads we thrust.
We can’t do what we would, but what we must.
Heredity has got us in a cinch.
(Consoling thought, when you’ve been on a “bust.”)

Hark to the song where spheral voices blend:
“There’s no beginning, never will be end.”
It makes us nutty; hang the astral chimes!
The table’s spread; come, let us dine, my friend.

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gipsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs,
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day with a hope that’s dead
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

Music in the Bush

O’er the dark pines she sees the silver moon,
And in the west, all tremulous, a star;
And soothing sweet she hears the mellow tune
Of cowbells jangled in the fields afar.

Quite listless, for her daily stent is done,
She stands, sad exile, at her rose-wreathed door,
And sends her love eternal with the sun
That goes to gild the land she’ll see no more.

The grave, gaunt pines imprison her sad gaze,
All still the sky and darkling drearily;
She feels the chilly breath of dear, dead days
Come sifting through the alders eerily.

Oh, how the roses riot in their bloom!
The curtains stir as with an ancient pain;
Her old piano gleams from out the gloom,
And waits and waits her tender touch in vain.

But now her hands like moonlight brush the keys
With velvet grace, melodious delight;
And now a sad refrain from overseas
Goes sobbing on the bosom of the night.

And now she sings. (O singer in the gloom,
Voicing a sorrow we can ne’er express,
Here in the Farness where we few have room
Unshamed to show our love and tenderness,

Our hearts will echo, till they beat no more,
That song of sadness and of motherland;
And stretched in deathless love to England’s shore,
Some day she’ll hearken and she’ll understand.)

A prima-donna in the shining past,
But now a mother growing old and grey,
She thinks of how she held a people fast
In thrall, and gleaned the triumphs of a day.

She sees a sea of faces like a dream;
She sees herself a queen of song once more;
She sees lips part in rapture, eyes agleam;
She sings as never once she sang before.

She sings a wild, sweet song that throbs with pain,
The added pain of life that transcends art,
A song of home, a deep, celestial strain,
The glorious swan-song of a dying heart.

A lame tramp comes along the railway track,
A grizzled dog whose day is