Chapter I: Front Matter

WHO GOES THERE!

BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
A. I. KELLER

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
ROBERT W. CHAMBERS

Printed in the United States of America

_To_
_J. HAMBLEN SEARS_

_Joseph! I've known you now for many years;
You are the Hero of this pretty story;
In him your every virtue reappears
Lighting his way along the road to glory.

All you possess adorns this Hero gay,
Your fatal beauty, curly hair, and so forth;
Like you he's always ready, night or day,
To pack his doggy clothes and ties and go forth.

No winsome maid beneath a summer sky,
Innured to prudence, modesty, and duty
Would dare demur or hesitate to fly
With such a manly specimen of beauty.

Accept, my friend, this tribute to your worth
As publisher, explorer, lover, fighter,
For men like you were destined from their birth
To make a millionaire of any writer._

_R. W. C._

_WHO GOES THERE!_

_Not with indifferent or with flippant hand
Draw the curtain's corner to disclose
A rose, a leaf, a path through this sad land
Untrampled yet by foes.

Out of the Past--the Heart's last Hermitage--
A wistful Phantom glides to me again
Here where I pace that solitary cage
They call, The World of Men.
In vain she mirrors me the Golden Age;
Vain is her Voice of Spring in wood and glen;
The winter sunlight falls across my page
Gilding a broken pen.

Withered the magic gardens which were mine;
Eden, in embers, blackens in the sun;
Rooting amid crushed roses the Wild Swine
Still root, and spare not one.

Village and spire and scented forest path,
Pastures and brooks, meadows and hills and fens
Heard not the secret whispering in Gath
There where the Gray Boar dens,
Till burst his dreadful clamour on the Rhine
And all the World shrank deafened by the roar
Aghast before the out-rush of Wild Swine
Led by the great Gray Boar._

_Fallen the cloud-capped castles which were mine;
Cities in ashes whiten in the sun;
Rending the ruined shrines, the Rhenish Swine
Still rend, and spare not one._