love him as a woman should
Who makes a pact for life; her heart was set
For now upon her music, she was off
To France for study, wished him well, in truth—
Some woman waited him who was his mate....
So Merival read over many times
The letter, tried to find a secret hope
Lodged back of words—was this a woman’s way
To lure him further, win him to more depths?
He half resolved to follow her to France;
Then as he thought of what he was himself
In riches, breeding, place, and manliness
His egotism rose, fed by the hurt:
She might stay on in France for aught he cared!
What was she, anyway, that she could lose
Such happiness and love? for he had given
In a great passion out of a passionate heart
All that was in him—who was she to spurn
A gift like this? Yet always in his heart
Stirred something which by him was love and hate.
And when the word came she had died, the word
She loved a maestro, and the word like gas,
Which poisons, creeps and is not known, that death
Came to her somehow through a lawless love,
Or broken love, disaster of some sort,
His spirit withered with its bitterness.
And in the years to come he feared to give
With unreserve his heart, his leaves withheld
From possible frost, dreamed on and drifted on
Afraid to venture, having scarcely strength
To seek and try, endure defeat again.

Thus was his youth unsatisfied, and as hope
Of something yet to be to fill his hope
Died not, but with each dawn awoke to move
Its wings, his youth continued past his years.
The very cry of youth, which would not cease
Kept all the dreams and passions of his youth
Wakeful, expectant—kept his face and frame
Rosy and agile as he neared the mark
Of fifty years.

But every day he sat
As one who waited. What would come to him?
What soul would seek him in this room of books?
But yet no soul he found when he went forth,
Breaking his solitude, to towns.

What waste
Thought Merival, of spirit, but what waste
Of spirit in the lives he knew! What homes
Where children starve for bread, or starve for love,
Half satisfied, half-schooled are driven forth
With aspirations broken, or with hopes
Or talents bent or blasted! O, what wives
Drag through the cheerless days, what marriages
Cling and exhaust to death, and warp and stain
The children! If a business, like this farm,
Were run on like economy, a year
Would see its ruin! But he thought, at last,
Of spiritual economy, so to save
The lives of men and women, use their powers
To ends that suit.

And thus when on a time
A miner lost his life there at LeRoy,
And when the inquest found the man was killed
Through carelessness of self, while full of drink,
Merival, knowing that the drink was caused
By hopeless toil and by a bitter grief
Touching a daughter, who had strayed and died,
First wondered if in cases like to this
Good might result, if there was brought to light
All secret things; and in the course of time,
If many deaths were probed, a store of truth
Might not be gathered which some genius hand
Could use to work out laws, instructions, systems
For saving and for using wasting spirits,
So wasted in the chaos, in the senseless
Turmoil and madness of this reckless life,
Which treats the spirit as the cheapest thing,
Since it is so abundant.

Thoughts like these
Led Merival to run for coroner.
The people wondered why he sought the office.
But when they gave it to him, and he used
His private purse to seek for secret faults,
In lives grown insupportable, for causes
Which prompted suicide, the people wondered,
The people murmured sometimes, and his foes
Mocked or traduced his purpose.

Merival
The coroner is now two years in office
When Henry Murray’s daughter Elenor
Found by the river, gives him work to do
In searching out her life’s fate, cause of death,
How, in what manner, and by whom or what
Said Elenor’s dead body came to death;
And of all things which might concern the same,
With all the circumstances pertinent,
Material or in anywise related,
Or anywise connected with said death.
And as in other cases Merival
Construed the words of law, as written above:
All circumstances material or related,
Or anywise connected with said death,
To give him power as coroner to probe
To ultimate secrets, causes intimate
In birth, environment, crises of the soul,
Grief, disappointment, hopes deferred or ruined.
So now he exercised his power to strip
This woman’s life of vestments, to lay bare
Her soul, though other souls should run and rave
For nakedness and shame.

So Merival
Returning from the river with the body
Of Elenor Murray thought about the woman;
Recalled her school days in LeRoy—the night
When she was graduated at the High School; thought
About her father, mother, girlhood friends;
And stories of her youth came back to him.
The whispers of her leaving home, the trips
She took, her father’s loveless ways. And wonder
For what she did and made of self, possessed
His thinking; and the fancy grew in him
No chance for like appraisal had been his
Of human worth and waste, this man who knew
Both life and books. And lately he had read
The history of King William and his book.
And even the night before this Elenor’s body
Was found beside the river—this he read,
Perhaps, he thought, was reading it when Elenor
Was struck down or was choked. How strange the hour
Whose separate place finds Merival with a book,
And Elenor with death, brings them together,
And for result blends book and death!... He knew
By Domesday Book King William had a record
Of all the crown’s possessions, had the names
Of all land-holders, had the means of knowing
The kingdom’s strength for war; it gave the data
How to increase the kingdom’s revenue.
It was a record in a case of titles,
Disputed or at issue to appeal to.
So Merival could say: My inquests show
The country’s wealth or poverty in souls,
And what the country’s strength is, who by right
May claim his share-ship in the country’s life;
How to increase the country’s glory, power.
Why not a Domesday Book in which are shown
A certain country’s tenures spiritual?
And if great William held great council once
To make inquiry of the nation’s wealth,
Shall not I as a coroner in America,
Inquiring of a woman’s death, make record
Of lives which have touched hers, what lives she touched;
And how her death by surest logic touched
This life or that, was cause of causes, proved
The event that made events?

So Merival
Brought in a jury for the inquest work
As follows: Winthrop Marion, learned and mellow,
A journalist in Chicago, keeping still
His residence at LeRoy. And David Borrow,
A sunny pessimist of varied life,
Ingenious thought, a lawyer widely read.
And Samuel Ritter, owner of the bank,
A classmate of the coroner at Harvard.
Llewellyn George, but lately come from China,
A traveler,