I have sent my fires to cleanse
Away men’s dreams, to devour men’s
Poor dreams.
When I saw my fires, my proud
Fires lancing
A low gold cloud
I followed them, dancing.
For there is no threshold now.
No star-withstanding beams
Endure to force my pride to bow—
My pride to bow its head.
With a gold spear
I have pinned
My enemy stark
To the stars and the empty wind.
His light is dark.
His dreams are dead. His dear
And his dreams are dead.
Edward had long arranged to have a party next evening. The preparations
were very laborious and dull, like those for almost all parties given
by shy and homeless young men in conscientious return for accumulated
hospitalities. Everybody in Edward’s circle had been invited such a long
time ago that no excuses had been possible. Had Edward not reminded
his friends constantly of the impending event they would by now have
forgotten all about it.
In the morning at two o’clock Edward woke and realised with a sickening
explosion of the mind that his party was certain to be an absolute and
ridiculous failure. “Me, a host to twenty people? I can’t even take the
responsibility of being a good guest....” He had made a great resolve. “I
will invite Emily.”
He hoped that he would die before the party. As a solver of problems it
is a fact that death has been over-rated. Edward miserably survived. He
had spent three dollars out of his last few score on a room in a hotel
in one of the eastern bay cities. He had missed the last Ferry home the
night before. He took an unreasonably early Ferry back to San Francisco.
California mornings are very happy even if you are not in love. They
fill you with happiness even if you have been drinking too much the
night before. Tamalpais, San Francisco’s mountain, bore the sun full in
her face. Her shoulders were wrapped in a rising cloud, her mantle was
rose-gold and green and, in the folds of her mantle, she boasted a steel
embroidery of redwoods. The mists about the eastern hills were loosed
and were blowing towards the sea. The climbing suburb of Berkeley stood
clear, flushed with gardens. A glaze of golden poppies lay on the slopes
behind Berkeley. The scrub-oaks grew, close as shadows, in the little
canyons. There was the rare gold-green of willows against cloud-colored
masses of eucalyptus.
Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities
and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country
house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees
always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses
from country windows. This, however, for better or worse, seems to be
California’s ideal, and she will not rest till she has finished the task
of turning herself into one long and lovely Lower Tooting.
Edward stepped from the Ferry into the shrill bell-like clamor of
newspaper boys. He was always outrun on arriving in San Francisco by
the hard-shouldered and agile business men who efficiently caught trams
on the instant of disembarking from the Ferry. Edward ran among the
women and the aged and he thought, “Half of me is very nearly happy this
morning. Whatever the party’s like, Emily must be made to come to it. The
half of me that thinks of seeing her is happy. The half that thinks of
her seeing me is miserable. People are probably looking at me and saying,
‘There goes a man in love.’”
All the women’s stores on Geary Street were showing clothes that would
have looked exquisite on Emily.
Edward left the tame urban street-car and mounted one of the wild open
pulley-cars that soar up precipices to the crags where artists and
Italian delicatessen merchants build their nests.
Miss Romero, in a kimono perhaps expressive of her soul, was preparing
breakfast at an electric stove in the studio. Mr. Bird, in another kimono
which showed a battle of sparrows on his spine, was washing last night’s
glasses at the sink. Their cat lay on its side pressing its shoulder
blades against the sleeping Victrola. It was a parasite of a cat; it
prided itself on being a member of an ancient civilisation. It never
moved except to move away. It had never seen a mouse fired in anger.
“I want to ask you three questions, Rhoda,” said Edward, who was not slow
to notice that Miss Romero, after greeting him with automatic cordiality,
managed to suggest irritation by the set of her shoulders as she bent
over four nearly fried eggs.
“Surely, Edward,” agreed Miss Romero. “I’m good and busy, but go right
ahead. Put your questions snappily, though, A, B, and C.”
“A,” said Edward obediently, “I want to come with you to Yosemite. In
fact, Rhoda, please, I must come with you to Yosemite.”
“Dear Edward, why can’t you go when and where you’re wanted? Why do you
have to do things so damned intensely and unlike other folks?”
“I’m never wanted.”
“Shucks.”
“The Britisher,” said Mr. Bird, “always has to try and act unlike other
folks—that’s the only way he can remind us crude Colonials of his
superiority. The Britisher is like a bull moose in carpet slippers
sneezing at a poppy——”
“The American,” said Edward, mildly aroused, “takes a good deal of
trouble to be eccentric too. Look at all these Cults and what not....
As a Britisher I should say that eccentric Britishers are fantastic;
eccentric Americans are grotesque....”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, Edward Williams,” exclaimed Rhoda, “what’s
eating you? You didn’t invent that dope. You stole it some place. Who’s
been injecting aphorisms into you?”
“Emily,” replied Edward honestly. “She said it on the Ferry.”
This suggestion of criticism by two aliens at once caught Mr. Bird’s
attention. “The Britisher,” he said, “is the most complacent creature on
God’s earth——”
“Poor thing,” interrupted Rhoda, who, having been born in the United
States, was not obliged to be so ecstatically American as was Mr. Bird,
who originally came from Odessa. “In the presence of God’s own countrymen
he just has to keep his end up some way. Do you like your fried eggs
straight up or turned, British biped? Well, pass on to B.”
“B,” said Edward. “Will you let me off going to China?”
“But it’s all fixed up,” replied Rhoda. “And Melsie Stone Ponting wants
you to take her kiddie across to his father in Shanghai. The father was
awarded custody in the courts, but somehow she’s never gotten around to
sending the boy. He’s so full of pep she thinks he’ll fall into the ocean
or get knitted up with the engine the first day out.”
“I can’t go,” said Edward. “I’ve got a job.”
“You got a job between twelve and seven A. M.?” exclaimed Rhoda. “Well,
say, listen, aren’t you the bright lad? What captain of industry have you
picked up with in the small hours?”
“He’s picked up with Emily,” said Mr. Bird. Whenever he made a statement
you could see him trying to think of something smart and incomprehensible
to add to it. But this time he was interrupted.
“Now see here, Edward Williams,” said Miss Romero. “You can take it from
me right now that there isn’t a scrap of use in your starting to rush
Emily. Look at Emily.... Look at you.... Aw, shucks, Edward, you surely
are—discouraging.”
“I notice that myself,” admitted Edward, burying his face in his hands.
During the depressed silence that followed, Miss Romero swept on to a
divan some bananas which had been posing as still life on the table and
arranged instead a more formal group of fried eggs and hot biscuits.
They were half-way through breakfast before she said, in the voice of
one starting a new subject, “Well, say, listen, Edward, don’t you want
to come with Avery and Melsie Ponting and Banner Hope and me to Yosemite
tomorrow? I’m just crazy to know what your reaction is to some of our
National Parks.”
“I do want to,” said Edward.
“Melsie Ponting wants to have a talk with you about taking her little boy
to the Orient, so that’ll suit her fine.”
“Emily,” added Avery Bird, “is going with another party to another place.”
Rhoda Romero was a merciful woman and, though Edward’s face was so tragic
as to be ridiculous, she said, “Emily will meet us at Yosemite.”
“You haven’t treated us to C yet,” said Mr. Bird, going towards the
door to show how entirely devoid of interest he expected C to be. Avery
disliked most people, but he detested Edward. The view of Mr. Bird with
which poor Edward was most familiar was that of his back as he sauntered
away into another room. Whenever Edward noticed this he reminded himself
morbidly of his own unpopularity, but apart from this he much preferred
Mr. Bird’s absence to his savage tongue.
“Come out with me, Rhoda,” said Edward, “to one of those little
beaches.... I am so excited ... and unhappy. You are the only person in
the world crazy enough to be good to me.”
The little beaches line the southern shore of the Golden Gate. Great
rocks—dragon’s teeth—are sown in the sand there, and these, turned into
warriors, fight the storms. The sea beats against them and the sound of
it is sometimes like whips and sometimes like guns. Now a rock stood
between Edward and the sea. Each wave as it struck the rock threw up a
fist of spray which opened quietly like a hand in the air.
“This party,” began Edward. “Rhoda, I adore Emily. I want Emily to come
to my party and see me at the top of my hour. And yet how shall I make
it my hour? Rhoda, Rhoda, can’t you save me? What kind of an hour can I
have?”
“Why, Edward,” exclaimed Rhoda. “Believe me, folks are just the simplest
animals in the world. Nobody despises anyone without he despises himself,
and nobody despises a host who pays for good unpretentious eats and
drinks at any amusing dive. Why don’t you think out some cute little
notion to surprise us all. You’ve no idea how easy us folks are to amuse.”
Edward retired into the shadows of his agonised soul. He tried to imagine
himself introducing a cute little notion with a light roguish gesture.
“Now, folks, guess what’s going to happen next....” Could such words be
uttered in Edward’s husky and heavy voice? And then what would happen?
Something would try to happen and fail. Edward turned simultaneously
hot and cold as he imagined the scene. Avery would say something about
British humor. Rhoda would be noisy and helpful. Melsie Ponting would
pretend to faint on the nearest man’s shoulder. And Emily——
“For I must invite Emily,” he said aloud. “I won’t have a party without
Emily. Please, Rhoda, help me in this matter of Emily. Nobody helps me.
You don’t know how terrible it is being me. It seems as if everyone were
against me and as if I mattered to nobody. Yet I matter so dreadfully to
myself. If you could——”
“Aw shucks, Edward,” said Rhoda, not unkindly. “What’s eating you? It
seems like everything’s got to be agony to you. Agony’s your hobby, from
the way you act; and you’re welcome to it, for me. But you don’t stop at
that, you got to tell everybody how it is. Don’t we all feel blue now and
then without having to act a hundred and fifty per cent intense about it?
If you get any kick out of feeling that way about Emily, go ahead, go
right on feeling it. But have a heart and let up on agony for a while.”
“Nobody’s on my side.... Nobody’s on my side....” said Edward, standing
up and clenching his fists in half-conscious imitation of Emily’s
vehement manner. “I’m not pretending, Rhoda; it is that I really do feel
things a hundred and fifty per cent intense. Be gentle with me....”
“Gentle is my middle name,” said Rhoda, and she stood up and pressed
a hand on each of his shoulders. “What do you want me to do, you
pity-beggar?”
“Can’t you see how it is with me?” said Edward. “I’m not stupid. I’m not
even slow, though I’m deaf. If I’m alert and confident I’m not even very
deaf. But God is against me, and you are all against me, and nothing I do
or say can ever be successful because there is nobody on my side to lead
the applause. If I could even once come into a room and have people look
up and say ‘Hurrah, here he is at last ...’ I’d be a different man. I’ve
never heard that. I hardly dare to be alive against so much opposition.
My own voice is terrible to me because there is no-one who wants to hear
it. I am living on a giddy high peak of unhappiness. Once before I have
been a little bit in love. To my first love I never spoke—without being
interrupted by Jimmy saying something far more interesting. Or if I did
speak she never listened. For she was one of Jimmy’s loves—and he had a
dozen others in three years. I should think thirty women cried when he
was killed.... If things didn’t matter to me so—I could have anything in
the world I wanted. Rhoda, if I could be sure of myself for one minute—it
would be worth while to be alive....”
As he said this, Edward saw the inner side of a long cylinder wave as it
broke on a clear stretch of sand. It was the color of bright jade. The
nearest wave was jade-green, and the wave behind it was a dull gold, and
the wave behind that was a thick violet, and behind that ran waves of
endless shades of blue. And behind all the waves stood the rust-red and
amethyst hills.
“Worth while to be alive?” thought Edward. “What am I saying? I who can
see so clearly.... Eyes in the world must always be happy, whatever
hearts may be....”
His mind considered itself for a moment almost complacently. “In a way I
must be rather an interesting feller. Lots of fellers get no kick at all
out of impersonal things like colors and what not. I really get a certain
kick out of being so unhappy. It is like being drunk, it makes one see
more faerily....”
He looked at Rhoda again. She was smoking, leaning against a rock and
drawing with a stick on the sand. Rhoda’s strong short hair never blew
out of order. The tip of her nose was never shiny. Nothing undignified
ever dared to happen to Rhoda.
He donned again his extravagantly appealing look. “Rhoda, if you could
let me have an hour of my own. I have never had an hour of my own. Think
of all the hours you have possessed—and spare me one. Let me take command
to-night, let everybody see me in command ... let Emily see me....”
“Me—me ...” he thought. “What kind of a Me would Emily want to see?...
There isn’t any cute little notion that would delight Emily.... She would
be terribly stabbing and cold to a cute little notion....”
“Yet I will ride that hour,” he told himself in the street-car. “It must
be my hour....”
These were poor Edward’s accomplishments.
He could do two card tricks, but anyone smart could see through them.
He could sing in an unresonant voice a few of the old sea-chanteys with
which Jimmy used to inspire delighted applause.
He could make paper crabs. That was rather a cute notion. But not cute
enough to be the life and soul of a party. The crabs would do as a
side-line. This thought enlivened his wits a little.
He could write poetry. It was unhappy, offended poetry, but not always
very bad. He himself recited it at night to himself and thought it good,
but he was sure that nobody else in the world would understand it.
Edward had no capacity for being comfortable. He lived in a small
room in a cheap hotel in San Francisco, and in that room there was no
trace of Edward except Edward himself. The room was allowed to remain
an undisguised hotel room. A defaced card of advertisements and hotel
regulations was on the door, a green pottery spittoon on the floor,
a gaudy but not clean cotton padded quilt on the bed. Even the dirty
jokes which some predecessor had written on the wall were left, and on
the dressing-table was the Gideon Society’s Bible, the flyleaf of which
gave lists of texts to look up when business was bad or after making a
successful deal.
In this heartless room Edward lived, with a telephone for his only
companion. In this room that day he sat on the small stiff armless
rocking-chair until he had made a resolve and then he spent thirty-five
minutes at the telephone.
Nearly everybody in San Francisco writes poetry. Few San Franciscans
would admit this, but most of them would rather like to have their
productions accidentally discovered.
There was quite a decided rise in the stock of Edward’s party after he
had telephoned his confused instructions to his guests. Edward imagined
all his guests smiling tolerantly at their own folly and his. They
would hunt in the pigeon-holes of their bureaux and bring out secret
typescript. “Such nonsense,” they would say to themselves, reading their
work with avidity and pleasure. Each guest would innocently anticipate in
his heart the awed silence that would fall on the party as the last words
of his poem were read.
Edward thought that he would write a poem for his party that would make
everyone in the room pity him. He would make fun of death. Everyone would
think, “Ah, poor soul, he has so much to bear, he must have infinite
courage.” And they would think, “He has death in his eyes. Perhaps we
have not been fine enough to understand him.” Edward thought that they
would all feel a little inferior because their health was so good. He
would sit beside Emily looking pale and brave. His deafness would give
him an air of mystic withdrawal, not the usual air of stupidity. Nobody
could ever think him stupid again after his poem had been read. It would
be the first hour of his life, the first hour of a new life.
But in the end he could think of no really poignant rhyme to valley, so
he selected an old poem about death which he had written in the Tube in
London.
Most of the guests arrived early with their poems crackling in their
bosoms. Already when Edward reached the rather dirty little French
restaurant between two vacant lots above Chinatown there were two
motor-cars clinging precariously to the steep cobbled street outside.
Melsie Ponting and two friends were shooting craps in the low
mustard-colored basement room. Melsie greeted Edward by throwing her
arms round his instantly wooden form, pinioning him and making him look
ridiculous.
“I brought two boys to your party to jazz it up,” said Melsie. “Lon,
Pike, Edward, meet each other.”
Lon and Pike were already kindly pretending to be drunk in order to
enliven the party. Rhoda Romero was in the room and waved flippantly at
Edward. The person behind her was not Emily, it was only Avery Bird.
“I left a message for Emily. She wasn’t in,” shouted Rhoda. Then Edward
knew that Emily would not come.
All round the table were little paper crabs made by Edward in perspiring
haste that afternoon, inscribed on their backs with the names of the
guests, and brought down in a suitcase an hour before. Nobody noticed
them. Everyone sat down without consulting the crabs. Edward cursed the
crabs because they looked forlornly jocose and were not noticed.
There were several kind persons in the room who began to try and sit
beside Edward when they noticed him making his way to the isolated head
of the table. A thin yellow man with hair cut to resemble a wig began
describing to Edward a new mousetrap now on sale in the Oakland hardware
stores. Edward leaned forward and smiled numbly and thought that perhaps
he was looking like a real host.
Trays full of cocktails came in, borne by eager dirty shirtsleeved
waiters.
Emily came in behind the cocktails.
Edward pretended not to see her for a moment, having a vague idea that
this would make him more valuable to Emily. Emily took off her hat
with boy-like indifference and, before hanging it on a peg, waved it
intimately at Edward.
“Great Scott, look at these too darling crabs. Look, they’re supposed to
show us where to sit. Oh dear, we’ve all sat down wrong. My crab says I’m
supposed to be Mr. Herbert B. Undressed. No, as you were. It’s Herbert B.
Weinhard.”
A guest called Bossy was explaining to Edward across the bosoms of two
intervening ladies his misgivings about the future of the canning trade.
“Never mind,” continued Emily in a voice as clear as a flute. “I’m going
to make my crab look as if it was called Herbert Undressed.”
She was drawing faces on Edward’s crabs. They were no longer Edward’s
crabs. His cute notion was simply being made cuter by Emily.
“Make my crab look like me, Emily.”
“No, do mine first....”
“Make Edward’s look like Edward....”
There was a great deal of giggling. The air round Emily was full of
crumpled crabs. There was one in her hair. Everyone was talking now,
but Edward was still entangled in the future of the canning trade. His
only remark in the next fifteen minutes was, “Well, personally I never
met a canner....” He realised at last that Bossy and he were haunted by
the same fear—the fear of being left out. The canning trade was a bond
between them. “At least we look as if we were talking,” thought Edward.
Bossy was a university instructor with fair childlike hair contradicting
the severity of horn-rimmed spectacles and a little imperial. To share a
danger with him aroused in Edward no enthusiasm.
“My Lord!” he heard Melsie Ponting say. “I’m just sick of sitting next to
Lon. I’ll tell the world he’s no gentleman. He’s just said something that
I couldn’t possibly repeat in mixed company. Would anybody like me to?”
Emily shouted, “All right then, General Post!” Having arrived late she
was sitting between two elderly women.
There was a deafening snarling and roaring of chairs pushed back.
Everyone was changing seats. Edward sat still. It was a test of his hour,
he thought, “If it really is to be my hour Emily will come and sit by
me.” The two women on his left hand fled. Rhoda Romero on his right hand
smiled at him and moved away. Bossy moved up. Edward was suddenly filled
with panic because no-one was coming to sit on his right. Everyone would
laugh at him. No-one was on his side. Edward rapidly reminded himself of
the few persons in his experience who had professed to be fond of him.
Jimmy ... the landlady’s daughter in Putney ... his mother ... young
Henderson at school—but he had a clubfoot ... that amazing hatshop woman
in Regent Street—but Jimmy had taken her over.... Quite a lot of people,
Edward thought, trying to fight against his panic. “It doesn’t much
matter if nobody appreciates me here.”
The room was dusty and hot and there were flies. A most exasperating
fatigued fly could not muster energy to leave the neighborhood of
Edward’s lips. Dismissed, it let itself fall through the air for half an
inch and then settled languidly again on his face.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting ran up the room so that the floor shook. She sat with
a florid gesture in the chair on Edward’s right. She looked at him with
her head on one side, her manicured fingers fussily arranging the beads
on her breast.
“There there,” she said to Edward. “Was it lonesome?” She puckered her
strawberry-colored lips towards him. She dropped first her cigarette case
and then her vanity bag. Edward felt smiling and busy sitting beside
her. He was conscious of gratitude towards her.... The whole room was
splashing with a choppy flood of talk. Edward’s ears hummed; he was
drowning in noise.
“After all, I am host. It was because of me that they all came. It is
only that I haven’t pulled the reins yet.”
“Did you bring a poem for us to hear?” he asked Melsie. “If so, you must
hand it to me folded, so that I shall never know who it’s by.”
“My dear, you’ll kill me laughing.... Me, a highbrow? I’d swim across the
bay sooner. But lots of the folks have brought things to read and they’re
all handing them in to Rhoda Romero. I guess it’s that tin-trumpet voice
of hers that makes them all think she’s such a dandy reader.”
She asked for something. All the time she was asking for something.
She wanted a match. She wanted another plateful of the salad which had
just been taken out of the room. She wanted a big coffee now instead of
a little coffee later. She wanted champagne. She wanted advice about
putting electric light in her garage, about whether she ought to let her
little boy smoke cigars, about whether to send him to his father who had
recently divorced her.
Edward rarely found himself in the gratifying position of adviser. His
pleasure in the novelty, however, was partly the pleasure of revenge.
“When Emily looks up this way she will see me being monopolised by
another woman. Serve her right.” But Emily was perversely absorbed in Mr.
Banner Hope, who was singing in a half-whisper a song which he hoped was
coarse enough to bring him the reputation he desired. The uncertain way
in which he sang it, however, robbed the song of whatever sting it may
originally have possessed. Mr. Hope must often have wished that notoriety
did not need such artificial buttresses. If only some woman would commit
suicide for his sake he would be a made man, but you never can count on
women.
“Nobody asked Hope to sing,” grumbled Edward.
“They’re all treating you real mean, honey,” said Mrs. Ponting. “Anybody
would think it was that Emily’s party.”
“You’re not treating me mean,” said Edward gratefully. “Yet I don’t
know.... Why were you so keen to sit by me?”
“Because I wanted to ask you something,” whispered Mrs. Ponting. “Edward,
dear, I’m just crazy to find someone plumb reliable like you going
out to China who’d take my kiddie out to his dad in the Orient. For
I guess I’ve gotter let him go. Edward, you’d never guess what a big
mother-heart I’ve got back of all my nonsense. My kiddie’s just home to
me—all the home I’ve got, Edward. You’ve never seen him but I’d just love
you and him to get together—he’s just a sunny-haired, blue-eyed, little
honest-to-God American, tall for thirteen years—just as high as my heart,
I often tell him....”
It was impossible for Edward not to be moved by sentiment. He was
entirely uncynical. He was touched by vague reminders of motherhood and
home and chubby baby-fingers and other movie properties. Yet all the time
he knew that the thirteen-year-old sunbeam in question lived at a school
near Sacramento which “made arrangements for board during vacations,” and
that he had hardly ever since he was born had an opportunity to measure
himself against his mother’s heart.
“I know you must be damn fond of him and all that,” mumbled Edward. “It
must be beastly parting with him. But you can easily get Thomas Cook or
the captain of the ship to take charge of him. He’d be as safe as houses.”
“Cook me no Cooks,” said Melsie Ponting archly. “There’s nobody to equal
our Edward, don’t tell me. And Rhoda says you’re going to China anyway.”
“I’m not going to China.”
This announcement seemed to him to be fateful.
“Rhoda!” shouted Melsie in a quarrelsome voice. “You told me Edward was
going to China.”
“So he is,” replied Rhoda with cold determination. She was very tired of
Edward. He was a heavy friend, poor man.
“He says he’s not going now.”
“Aw, shucks.”
“Rhoda, read the poetry now,” called Emily. “I’m longing to hear
everybody admire mine.”
“In the darkness of my room
I sit alone.
I am hungry;
I am thirsty;
I have no fire to warm me.
Let the stars be my meat;
Let the moon be my goblet of wine;
Let the burning dark sky be my fire.”
Rhoda read it as though it were a good poem. She had a golden, careful
voice. When she had finished she said, “I seem to have heard that some
place before.”
Emily added, “I think a person called Smith must have written it.”
Most people were afraid that their immediate neighbors might have written
it. So only one other guest risked a comment, a man with a white excited
face who said, “It has no sense and nothing whatever to commend it. Speed
up.” His face was burning white with impatience; he was a fanatic of
speed. Edward, looking at him, pitied himself because friends were so
hard.
But really Edward was fortunate. About the table there were those whose
presence in the position of friends Edward had not deserved or earned.
No-one could think of San Francisco as it was in Edward’s time without
remembering certain faces.... Those faces were part of the essential
blessing of San Francisco.
The face of an old man in a radiance of long white hair and long white
beard, the face of a connoisseur of gentleness, a face that never smiled
without good cause, but in which no cause was good enough to kindle
irritation.
The square keen face of the only woman in the world who can be witty even
when she cries.
The face of a tyrant of benevolence; the only one of his many gifts that
you must always acknowledge is his mood—if you fail to catch his mood,
you offend—and perish in an avalanche of coals of fire.
Another face, sharp and changing, with the complexion of a child under
careless grey hair. The face of an eager pessimist whose imagination
peopled the worst of worlds with the best of men. He distrusted no man,
only all mankind.
Faces of friends from whom poor Edward was too poor to claim friendship.
Rhoda read in a changed voice, with obvious serene enjoyment:
“Curse the rain.
Oh hell.
Oh hell.
The rain is zippety-zipping against the window.
Blurch—Blurch—the big drops.
Ikkle-ikkle-ikkle the little drops.
Ashes blown out of a hell of water.
Like weasels the lightnings
Wriggle down a flat sky
After the squealing hunted wind
And the snarling thunder.
Blurch zippety ikkle ikkle ikkle.
The rain against the window
Oh hell.
I would rather wear a crown of golden thorns and find a pearl in
every oyster on a golden
Dish
Than
Be a wet rag in a hell of water.”
“That,” said Avery Bird quickly, anxious to make his voice heard in the
first silence, “is as full of meat as a unicorn’s belly in springtime.
That’s real stuff.”
Other people murmured, “Too wet.” “Not sanitary.”
The white-faced apostle shouted, “Oh, get on, get on. The next one can’t
be worse.”
“I can’t seem to get a hold on the rhythm,” said an innocent Canadian
broker. Edward and he had made friends because both were familiar with
the same supper places in the vicinity of Leicester Square. The broker
had brought his wife, a rough-hewn looking lady, whose very hat seemed to
be chipped out of marble and ornamented with a wooden feather.
“It is swollen with rhythm,” shouted Avery Bird. “It isn’t blatant
enough, of course, to allow you to hear it. It is all that rhythm can be
without being metronomic.”
Mr. Bird seemed so certain that nobody liked to contradict him. He leaned
forward tapping the table angrily and glaring first at one fellow-guest
and then at another.
“Speed up. Speed up.”
Rhoda read again:
“In a panic forlorn
I am haunting your corners.
I am dead without mourners,
I am dead yet unborn.
You will come to me later,
You will come very late.
Ah—must I wait,
Must I wait,
You unhurrying satyr?
My sisters shall make
Of their exquisite acres
Carved aisles for the breakers
Of sleep when they wake.
They are strung to an answer,
They are strung to a trance.
Ah, must they dance,
Must they dance,
You importunate dancer?”
“Negligible,” said Mr. Bird who had not yet recovered his temper.
Mr. Banner Hope added, “Woman’s stuff,” to show that he was a man.
Emily looked much disconcerted but she said, “I suppose it is a bit
trivial.”
“And foggy, too,” added an alarming University student. “It has no
message at all.”
“It is not worth writing or reading,” said the white critic in a final
voice.
“It’s a song,” objected Emily. “And songs needn’t be messengers surely.
Songs are for fancy to hear, not for brains to digest. Perhaps songs
shouldn’t try to have any meaning at all. They shouldn’t try really to
have even words. Or perhaps just beautiful words without sequence ...
silver and asphodel and Merrimac and darling and mariposa and meagre and
rusty....”
“Well, this song tries to have a meaning and fails,” said the student. He
was a dark, thick young man, and his complacency, very logically, was not
impaired at all by the poorness of his clothes or complexion. The fact
that his collar was very high and not at all clean seemed typical of him.
Edward’s heart turned cold when he thought of his poem at the mercy of
that young man. He said, “At least that last poem makes a picture behind
my eyes.”
“It doesn’t penetrate behind mine, I’m glad to say,” said Melsie Ponting
tartly, and many people laughed, supposing that she had said something
witty. A smart voice is a great asset.
Rhoda began reading again with an abruptness which left many dazed for a
few seconds.
“Damn it Jarge
You surely do get my billy
I asked for three silk ones
And all I can find in the package is some flannel pajamas and one of
your loveletters
By the way Harass
Has only one R.
Well the Lord goes on loving Barkeley
At least we suppose he does
We have no evidence to the contrary.
I have——”
Edward saw a young woman undergraduate’s pink face shining towards him
like a sun. Her eyes looked as though they were going to fall out. She
was waving to Edward. Edward reflected that there were many things in the
world that he did not understand. Why should a female undergraduate with
whom he was only very slightly acquainted wave and wink so earnestly at
him across a room? Was she feeling ill? Edward blamed himself for not
understanding. “Our hero lives as if in a dream,” he thought. “Probably
other men are quite used to this sort of thing. Perhaps she is making
advances to me in a way entirely recognized in certain circles.” With his
brooding eyes fixed upon the young woman, who was now pencilling a note,
Edward listened to the poem.
“I have had five proposals this semester
One from an assistant instructor.
Have you read Millie’s scream
In the Liberator for March?
Yours body and soul
You’d prefer body to soul I guess
Janks.”
The young woman, Edward noticed, was, by means of signs, causing her
note to be passed to Rhoda. “Notes for Rhoda but winks for me,” thought
Edward, wrestling mildly with the problem.
“That poet has courage,” said the high-collared student. “To dispense
wholly with form....”
“Yes, it needs courage to write that,” said Avery Bird, who was narrowing
his eyes and nodding his head slowly. “It is of course callow, but then
so are the chickens of ostriches. Query, does it dispense with form?
There is a sort of antiphony—pajamas and the Lord—the lovesick instructor
and the scream—like the leeward and windward sides of a wall....”
Rhoda announced, “Some nameless person has just passed me a note
apologising for the last poem. It was a letter really, which he or she
passed me by mistake in place of a poem.”
Rhoda’s voice brushed the incident aside and everyone tried to look
as wise as though nothing had happened. Mr. Bird, only slightly
disconcerted, began to point out to his neighbor how bright was the
promise of poetry in a land where even common correspondence had a rhythm
of its own.
Rhoda read,