would surprise you on all kinds of occasions. I shall never forget the
way in which he brought into a queer juxtaposition "the Day" that
Germany had been toasting for forty years and the final request for an
answer before midnight, which was embodied in the British ultimatum. He
would give you a patch of unexpected order in the chaos of politics, and
another in the chaos of the creeds--patches that made you feel a
maddening desire to widen them until they embraced the whole world. You
felt sure that he himself had done this, that he lived in a
re-integrated universe, and that--if only there were time enough--he
could give you the whole scheme. In short, he saw the whole universe as
a work of art; and he conceived it to be his business, in his own art,
to take this or that apparently isolated subject and show you just the
note it was meant to strike in the harmony of the whole. He was very
fond of quoting the great lines of Dante, where he describes the
function of the poet as that of one who goes through the world and where
he sees the work of Love, records it. But, please to remember, this did
not imply that the subject was necessarily a pleasant one. Beauty was
always there, but the beauty was one of relationships, not of the thing
itself. As he once said, "an old boot in the gutter will serve as a
subject if you can make it significant, if you can set it in relation to
the enduring things." It is necessary to make this tedious preface to
his odd letter, or the point of it may be lost.
"I want to tell you about the most haunting and dramatic episode I have
encountered during these years of war," he wrote. "It was a thing so
slight that I hardly know how to put it into words. It couldn't be
painted, because it includes two separate scenes, and also--in
paint--it would be impossible to avoid the merely sentimental effect.
"It happened in London, during the very early days of the struggle. One
afternoon, I was riding down Regent Street on the top of a bus. The
pavements were crowded with the usual throng. Women in furs were peering
into the windows of the shops. Newspaper boys were bawling the latest
lies. Once, I thought I saw a great scribble of the Hand that writes
history, where a theater poster, displaying a serpentine woman, a kind
of Aubrey-Beardsley vampire, was half obliterated by a strong diagonal
bar of red, bearing the words, '_Kitchener wants a hundred thousand
men_.' My mind was running on symbols that afternoon, and I wondered if
it did perhaps mean the regeneration of art and life in England at last.
"Then we overtook a strange figure, a blind man, tapping the edge of the
pavement with a rough stick, cut out of some country hedgerow. He was
carrying, in his left hand, a four-foot pole, at the top of which there
was nailed a board, banner-wise, about three feet long and two feet
wide. On the back of the board, as we overtook him, I read the French
text in big red letters: 'VENEZ A MOI, VOUS TOUS QUI ETES TRAVAILLÉS ET
CHARGÉS, ET JE VOUS SOULAGERAI.'
"On the other side of the board, as we halted by the curb a little in
front of him, there was the English version of the same text, in big
black letters: 'COME UNTO ME, ALL YE THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY-LADEN, AND
I WILL GIVE YOU REST.'
"The blind man was tall and lean-faced, and held himself very upright.
He was poorly dressed, but very clean and neat. The tap of his stick was
like the smart tap of a drum, and he marched more rapidly than any of
those who were going in the same direction.
"There were several things about him that puzzled me. There was no
advertisement of any sect, or any religious meeting, nothing but the two
texts on his placard. He went past us like a soldier, and he carried it
like the flag of his regiment. He did not look as if he were asking for
alms. The pride on his face forbade the suggestion; and he never
slackened his quick pace for a moment. He seemed entirely unrelated to
the world around him.
"Possibly, I thought, he was one of those pathetic beings whose emotions
had been so stirred by the international tragedy that, despite their
physical helplessness, they were forced to find some outlet. Perhaps he
was an old soldier, blinded in some earlier war. Perhaps he was merely a
religious fanatic. In any case, in the great web of the world's events,
he seemed to be a loose fantastic thread; and although he was carrying a
more important message than any one else, nobody paid any attention to
him.
"In a few moments, the bus had carried my thoughts and myself into other
regions, and, for the time, I forgot him. I occupied myself, as I often
do, in composing a bit of doggerel to the rhythm of the wheels. Here it
is. It is pretty bad, but the occasion may make it interesting:
_Once, as in London busses,
At dusk I used to ride,
The faces Hogarth painted
Would rock from side to side,
All gross and sallow and greasy,
And dull and leaden-eyed._
_They nodded there before me
In such fantastic shape,
The donkey and the gosling,
The sheep, the whiskered ape,
With so much empty chatter,
So many and foolish lies,
I lost the stars of heaven
Through looking in their eyes._
"Late in the afternoon, I was returning westward, along the Strand. I
remember walking slowly to look at the beauty of the sunset sky, against
which the Nelson column, in those first days of the fight, rose with a
more spiritual significance than ever before. The little Admiral stood
like a watchman, looking out to sea, from the main mast of our Ship of
State, against that dying glory. It was the symbol of the national soul,
high and steadfast over the great dark lions, round which so many
quarreling voices had risen, so many quarreling faces had surged and
drifted away like foam in the past. This was the monument of the
enduring spirit, a thing to still the heart and fill the eyes of all who
speak our tongue to-day.
"I was so absorbed in it that I did not notice the thick crowd, choking
the entrances to Charing Cross Station, until I was halted by it. But
this was a very different crowd from those of peace-time. They were all
very silent, and I did not understand what swarming instinct had drawn
them together. Nor did they understand it themselves--yet. 'I think they
are expecting something,' was the only reply I got to my inquiry.
"I made my way round to the front of the station, but the big iron gates
were closed and guarded by police. Nobody was allowed to enter the
station. Little groups of railway porters were clustered here and there,
talking in low voices. I asked one of these men what was happening.
"'They're expecting something, some train. But we don't know what it is
bringing.'
"As he spoke, there was a movement in the crowd. A compact body of about
forty ambulance men marched through, into the open space before the
station. Some of them were carrying stretchers. They looked grave and
anxious. Some of their faces were tense and white, as if they too were
expecting something, something they almost dreaded to see. This was very
early in the war, remember, before we knew what to expect from these
trains.
"The gates of the station swung open. The ambulance men marched in. A
stream of motor ambulances followed. Then the gates were closed again.
"I waited, with the waiting crowd, for half an hour. It was impossible
now to make one's way through the dense crush. From where I stood,
jammed back against the iron railings, in front of the station, I could
see that all the traffic in the Strand was blocked. The busses were
halted, and the passengers were standing up on the top, like spectators
in some enormous crowded theater. The police had more and more
difficulty in keeping the open space before the station. At last, the
gates were swung apart again, and the strangest procession that London
had ever seen began to come out.
"First, there were the sitting-up cases--four soldiers to a taxicab,
many of them still bandaged about the brows with the first blood-stained
field dressings. Most of them sat like princes, and many of them were
smiling; but all had a new look in their faces. Officers went by,
gray-faced; and the measure of their seriousness seemed to be the
measure of their intelligence, rather than that of their wounds. Without
the utterance of a word, the London crowd began to feel that here was a
new thing. The army of Britain was making its great fighting retreat,
before some gigantic force that had brought this new look into the faces
of the soldiers. It was our first real news from the front. From the
silent faces of these men who had met the first onset with their bodies,
we got our first authentic account of the new guns and the new shells,
and the new hell that had been loosed over Europe.
"But the crowd had not yet fully realized it. A lad in khaki came
capering out of the station, waving his hands to the throng and shouting
something that sounded like a music-hall jest. The crowd rose to what it
thought was the old familiar occasion.
"'Hello, Tommy! Good boy, Tommy! Shake hands, Tommy! Are we downhearted,
Tommy?' The old vacuous roar began and, though all the faces near me
seemed to have two eyes in them, every one began to look cheerful again.
"The capering soldier stopped and looked at them. Then he made a
grotesque face, and thrust his tongue out. He looked more like a
gargoyle than a man.
"The shouts of 'Tommy, Tommy,' still continued, though a few of the
shouters were evidently puzzled. Then a brother soldier, with his left
arm in the sling, took the arm of the comedian, and looked a little
contemptuously at the crowd.
"'Shell-shock,' he said quietly. And the crowd shouted no more that day.
It was not a pleasant mistake; and it was followed by a procession of
closed ambulances, containing the worst cases.
"Then came something newer even than wounded men, a motley stream of
civilians, the Belgian refugees. They came out of the station like a
flock of sheep, and the fear of the wolf was still in their eyes. The
London crowd was confronted by this other crowd, so like itself, a crowd
of men in bowler hats and black coats, of women with children clinging
to their skirts; and it was one of the most dramatic meetings in
history. The refugees were carrying their household goods with them, as
much as could be tied in a bundle or shut in a hand-bag. Some of the
women were weeping. One of them--I heard afterwards--had started with
four children but had been separated from the eldest in the confusion of
their flight. It was doubtful whether they would ever be re-united.
"Now, as this new crowd streamed out of the gates of the station towards
the vehicles that had been prepared for them, some of their faces lifted
a little, and a light came into them that was more than the last
radiance of the sunset. They looked as if they had seen a friend. It was
a look of recognition; and though it was only a momentary gleam, it had
a beauty so real and vivid that I turned my head to see what had caused
it.
"And there, over the sea of faces that reached now to the foot of the
Nelson column, I saw something that went through me like great music.
Facing the gates of the station, and lifting out of the midst of the
crowd like the banner of a mighty host, nay, like the banner of all
humanity, there was a placard on a pole. The sunset-light caught it and
made it blaze like a star. It bore, in blood-red letters, the solemn
inscription that I had seen in the earlier part of the day: 'VENEZ A
MOI, VOUS TOUS QUI ETES TRAVAILLÉS ET CHARGÉS, ET JE VOUS SOULAGERAI.'
"My blind man had found his niche in the universe. It was hardly
possible that he was even conscious of what he was doing; hardly
possible that he knew which side of his banner was turned towards the
refugees, whether it was the English, that would mean nothing to them,
or the French that would speak to them like a benediction. He had been
swung to his place and held in it by external forces, held there, as I
myself was jammed against the iron railings. But he had become, in one
moment, the spokesman of mankind; and if he had done nothing else in all
his life, it had been worth living for that one unconscious moment.
"You may be interested to hear the conclusion of the doggerel which came
into my head as I went home:
_Now, as I ride through London,
The long wet vistas shine,
Beneath the wheeling searchlights,
As they were washed with wine,
And every darkened window
Is holy as a shrine._
_The deep-eyed men and women
Are fair beyond belief,
Ennobled by compassion,
And exquisite with grief.
Along the streets of sorrow
A river of beauty rolls.
The faces in the darkness
Are like immortal souls._"
* * * * *
_WORKS BY ALFRED NOYES_
Collected Poems--_2 Vols._
The Lord of Misrule
A Belgian Christmas Eve (Rada)
The Wine-Press
Walking Shadows--_Prose_
Open Boats
Tales of the Mermaid Tavern
Sherwood
The Enchanted Island and Other Poems
Drake: An English Epic