“For me is such a table set?
Shall such a gate receive me?
For I am scarred and shamed, and yet
Nor scars nor shame can grieve me.
I come from a dear and desert shore
With dancing stars my feet before;
Shall these my friends forget me, or
Shall yours—believe me?
Yet I confess that, at your door,
My stars—did leave me.
Your gates are stark and beautiful
As are the brows of Mary.
Your golden bolt is light to pull
And yet my feet are wary.
Between a sword and another sword
I see the garden of the Lord
And young saints treading in accord
A path that may not vary.
A million saints in a marching horde
But never—a fairy.
There stand the trees defensive. There
Your cautious God encloses
In a siege of lancéd lavender
Dark fortresses of roses.
Your cautious God has paved his gate
With half a score of very strait
Expensive tablets, hewn in hate
And righteousness by Moses.
How decorus, how desolate,
The art—of Moses.”
As Rhoda drew breath for another verse, Edward noticed that his poem was
the next in her sheaf.
And in that second or two of silence there was heard a curious growing
clamor outside. It was like an impossibly metallic contact of wind
against the window. For a minute everyone in the listening room had the
insane feeling of experiencing something inexplicable. Then the leaping
bestial yell of a fire engine approaching explained everything.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting was a smart woman. She was at the door first and,
like drops from a rising mermaid, a trickle of small possessions was
shaken from her as she ran; cigarettes, a lipstick, a matchbox, money,
and the beads from a broken string.
“No hurry, no hurry...” shouted several men in laboriously indifferent
voices, as the scraping chairs with one impulse shot, like splashing
water, back from the central table. One man comforted many hearers by
shouting jocosely, “Aw Gee, have a heart, you’re on my best corn....”
Edward thought he would save Emily. “Our hero’s first thought in danger
was for his beloved....”
Emily was dancing about. “Oo, Edward, what a party!” She was sparkling
with the pride which one feels on finding oneself present at an event.
She was determined to save her hat and threw away blithely several hats
which had alighted upon it.
They all arrived on the street, ashamed to have been so tense in their
efforts to reach it.
The fire was in a house behind the restaurant. The fire engines were on
another street, but a few firemen were keeping a space clear of onlookers
on the vacant lots close by. The burning house had its back to them; it
was looking away from them towards the bay like one in agony turning
away to bite his lips. Like a tongue the smoke hung out of one window and
sparks streamed down the smoke. There was a shaking glow on the other
side of the house which lighted up the low bending sky. An inverted
cone of smoke spun on the roof like a top. Edward felt somehow that the
whole scene was upside down, that the sky was his vantage point, and
the blowing fire like a flower of the sky. The cold and usual lights of
fireless virgin cities round the bay looked incredibly stupid.
He could feel the cold and usual Edward inside him saying, “My party is
spoilt by this damned piece of sensationalism. My luck all over.” But,
“Oo, what a party,” was still in his ears, and his delighted eyes were
full of the fire. He was indifferent to the poems or the twenty-five
dollars owing for the futile supper.
The firemen had fat jaws and looked smugly efficient, but if one half
closed one’s eyes and looked at them one could imagine they looked like
heroes. Pursued by the dull, reluctant snakes of hose they entered the
restaurant in order to turn a fusillade of water upon the enemy from
an unexpected direction. Looking in through the steamy window of the
basement, the delighted guests could see the bright helmets of the heroes
going round the table about which so lately plates of commonplace pork
and beans had circulated.
“My poem will never be read now,” thought Edward. Heroes had devoured
the air in which his poem might have been read.
It was a very vulgar little fire after all. It would only have a line or
two in tomorrow’s _Examiner_. Quite soon it admitted itself beaten, and
the perforated house sat blanketed in smoke, looking very sheepish.
“Why, what d’you know about that,” said Mr. Hope, as the first
fire-engine negligently moved away with a mild howl.
“Well, Edward, it’s your party,” said Rhoda. “What shall we do about it.
I’ll say it’s late and not worth while to settle down again.”
“Don’t let’s read any more poems anyway,” said Edward.
Everyone began to say Good-bye in the street. All the automobiles of the
guests opened their bright eyes like sleepy servants pretending they had
never been asleep. To the loud snores of awaking engines Emily said to
Edward, “I wish the law didn’t hate fire so. It would be fun to have a
garden of fire and plant little seedling fires in the moonlight....”
“I don’t like fire. It makes a fool of one.”
Edward went into the restaurant to pay for the supper. The long hot room
looked tired and almost indecent. The poems were scattered about the
disordered table. A fallen bottle of wine had given up the ghost pillowed
on a sheaf of poems and paper crabs. Edward found his own poem—which had
been the leader of the sheaf—disgraced and brought very low. It was on
the floor, and stamped upon it was the wet imprint of a rubber heel. As
he picked it up he saw that Emily was waiting for him in the doorway. She
came along the room towards him.
“Edward....” she said in an impatient voice, and took his arm and shook
it. He could hardly hear what she said. She looked flushed and excited.
Did she say, “It makes my life so lovely—to be loved?...” Did she say
that?
Edward’s thoughts were in ashes. She was watching him so insolently. He
crumpled the muddy copy of the poem and put it into her hand. He felt
nothing but an angry anxiety that she should love his poem and that she
should see how it had been insulted.
They heard Rhoda’s voice outside, “Emily.... Emily....”