Part 8 (2/2)

De Lord argufied wid him but de crab wouldn' listen, en he say he gwine put hit on. So de Lord gin him his haid en 'course he put hit on back'ards. Den he went ter de Lord en ax' Him ter put hit straight, but de Lord wouldn' do hit, en He tole him he mus' go back'ards all his life fer his obstinacy. En so 'tis wid some people.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: FATHER RYAN From the portrait in Murphy's Hotel, Richmond, Virginia]

Father Ryan told me that one of the greatest obstacles with which he had to contend in his dealings with people was the lack of ethic sensitiveness which rendered them oblivious to the harm of deviations from principle which seemed not to result in great evil. People who would not steal articles of value did not hesitate to cheat in car-fare, taking the view that the company got enough out of the public without their small contribution. He said, ”They are like two very religious old ladies who, driving through a toll-gate, asked the keeper the rate. Being newly appointed, he looked into his book and read so much for a man and a horse. The woman who was driving whipped up the horse, calling out, 'G'lang, Sally, we goes free. We are two old maids and a mare.' On they went without paying.”

When Abram Ryan was seven years old the family moved to St. Louis, where the boy attended the schools of the Christian Brothers, in his twelfth year entering St. Mary's Seminary, in Perry County, Missouri.

He completed his preparation for the work to which his life was dedicated, in the Ecclesiastical Seminary at Niagara, New York. Upon ordination he was placed in charge of a parish in Missouri.

On a boat going down the ca.n.a.l from Lynchburg to Lexington, where he was a fellow-pa.s.senger with us, he met his old friend, John Wise, and entered into conversation with him, in the course of which he made the statement that he came from Missouri. ”All the way from Pike?” quoted Mr. Wise. ”No,” replied Father Ryan, ”my name is _not_ Joe Bowers, I have _no_ brother Ike,” whereupon he sang the old song, ”Joe Bowers,”

in a voice that would have lifted any song into the highest realms of music.

He recited his poem, ”In Memoriam,” written for his brother David, who was killed in battle, one stanza of which impressed me deeply because of the longing love in his voice when he spoke the lines:

Thou art sleeping, brother, sleeping In thy lonely battle grave; Shadows o'er the past are creeping, Death, the reaper, still is reaping, Years have swept and years are sweeping Many a memory from my keeping, But I'm waiting still and weeping For my beautiful and brave.

The readers of his poetry are touched by its pathetic beauty, but only they who have heard his verses in the tones of his deep, musical voice can know of the wondrous melody of his lines.

When I said to him that I wished he would write a poem on Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, he replied:

”It has been put into poetry. Every flower that blooms on that field is a poem far greater than I could write. There are some things too great for me to attempt. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg is one of them.”

A lady who chanced to be on the boat with us repeated Owen Meredith's poem of ”The Portrait.” At its close he said with sad earnestness, ”I am sorry to hear you recite that. Please never do it again. It is a libel on womanhood.”

It may be that he was thinking of ”Ethel,” the maiden whom, it is said, he loved in his youth, from whom he parted because Heaven had chosen them both for its own work, and his memories deepened the sacredness with which all women were enshrined in his thought. She was to be a nun and he a priest, and thus he tells of their parting:

One night in mid of May their faces met As pure as all the stars that gazed on them.

They met to part from themselves and the world; Their hearts just touched to separate and bleed; Their eyes were linked in look, while saddest tears Fell down, like rain, upon the cheeks of each: They were to meet no more.

The ”great brown, wond'ring eyes” of the girl went with him on his way through life, shadowed like the lights of a dim cathedral, but luminous with love and sacrifice. How much of the story he tells in pathetic verse was his very own perhaps no one may ever know, but the reader feels that it was Father Ryan himself who, after ”years and years and weary years,” walked alone in a place of graves and found ”in a lone corner of that resting-place” a solitary grave with its veil of ”long, sad gra.s.s” and, parting the ma.s.s of white roses that hid the stone, beheld the name he had given the girl from whom he had parted on that mid-May night.

”ULLAINEE.”

Those who were nearest him thought that the vein of sadness winding through his life and his poetry was in memory of the girl who loved and sacrificed and died. When they marvelled over the mournful minor tones in his melodious verse he made answer:

Go stand on the beach of the blue boundless deep, When the night stars are gleaming on high, And hear how the billows are moaning in sleep, On the low-lying strand by the surge-beaten steep, They're moaning forever wherever they sweep.

Ask them what ails them: they never reply; They moan on, so sadly, but will not tell you why!

Why does your poetry sound like a sigh?

The waves will not answer you; neither shall I.

At the beginning of the war Father Ryan was appointed a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia, but often served as a soldier. He was in New Orleans in 1862 when an epidemic broke out, and devoted himself to the care of the victims. Having been accused of refusing to bury a Federal he was escorted by a file of soldiers into the presence of General Butler, who accosted him with great sternness:

”I am told that you refused to bury a dead soldier because he was a Yankee.”

”Why,” answered Father Ryan in surprise, facing the hated general without a tremor, ”I was never asked to bury him and never refused.

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