(From _The Junior League Bulletin_)
Snow was falling over London; a great blur of zig-zagging flakes; the
embankment was deserted; the streets half-filled; in the houses of
Parliament long windows etched themselves in light; Westminster Abbey
was almost obliterated by the downfall, its time-stained crevices had
filled, like cups, with drifts of snow.
Out of the obscurity and the snow a soldier approached Westminster.
He paused a moment on the opposite side of the street to peer at
the great pile before him, and in his eyes was the half-incredulous
amazement of one who finds himself at home again after strange,
unhappy wanderings.
For an instant the Abbey seemed subtly changed; vague, intangible,
unearthly. It was the drifting snow, of course, that obliterated the
stains of time in its multitudinous delicate crevices; the drifting
snow that was like a veil about his vision.
The zig-zagging flakes momentarily blinded the soldier, confused him
... for an instant in the falling snow, he saw the Abbey white and
stainless like a transcendent chalice lifted to the sky.
Then the soldier passed through the high-pointed portal. The padded
doors fell to behind him. Dim and quiet, the great nave stretched
away into the gloom.
After a moment the soldier raised his bared head; his eyes, grown
accustomed to the twilight, lifted to the rose window above the altar.
He had taken off the heavy coat he wore; shorn of its bulk, he seemed
extremely young, boyish, child-like even. There was something of
childhood in the hidden, secret happiness of his eyes; something of
childhood in the furtive way he fingered the column at whose base he
stood, then quickly withdrew his hand.
As one touches a flower, his gaze fondled the dim Abbey.
Presently he moved slowly down the splendid nave, pausing now and
then to drink in with thirsty eyes the beauty about him....
In a distant chapel, candles like captive fireflies were flickering
amid the gloom of drooping banners, and the furled flags of forgotten
wars....
The vastness of Westminster, the stateliness, lifted him as wings
lift.
It had always been so; throughout his childhood the Abbey had held
for him the beauty and romance that other boys find in sport, in
girls, in love.
He was remembering how often and often as a child he had brought
lunch with him and spent whole days exploring the Abbey--its great
naves and chapels, its crypts and tombs.
And it was still the same. War had not changed the Abbey.
The soldier now was standing before the chancel at the high altar,
his face lifted to the rose window that glowed above it. And
suddenly, like light, transcendent happiness was about him.
War had not changed him either!
The thought that was like light about him bore him in an ecstasy of
thanksgiving to his knees. His prayer was incoherent; a feeling of
infinite, lifted happiness: to have gone from college, physically
untrained for war, psychologically unprepared, to have spent three
years in the mud and blood,--and to have remained unchanged!
War had not changed him. War was an interruption, a suspension, a
holding of one’s breath ... the things for which he had lived--poetry
and beauty still were first.
Irrelevantly, and with an overwhelming longing, he remembered the
casual eyes of men who dwell in peace; he remembered English lanes
that call out to be trod; violets like music in the grass; the
cloistral quality of libraries; that first faint tremble in the
trees of spring; moonlight like snow upon the night....
And then, a tremendous symphony, the poems he had loved broke over
him. For an interval he was breathless, remembering the unbearable
beauty of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Chaucer, like a dayesie in the
grass; the music of Milton; Shelley’s “luminous wings”; Wordsworth,
“whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”
Poetry! English poetry! He felt abased and purified and lifted. In
a sudden flash he re-beheld his England as the land of poets. Not
of shopkeepers, sailors, empire-builders. But of poets--the winged
voices of the race!
There were Ireland, of course, and India, and Egypt, and opium;
dreadful ills! He shuddered imperceptibly. But these things, in the
final analysis, were not England. England was the poets whose voices
sing always of freedom; England was the barons at Runnymede; Magna
Carta; England was America, too; the pilgrims who planted a dream
upon the wilderness; and that still prophetic voice speaking today
above the roar and belch of war to the heart of the world. England
was Westminster: Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Wilson.
“Cloud-capped towers” ... “and visions splendid” ... “men too proud
to fight.”
Then the young soldier thought of his king; instinctively his eyes
lifted, his hand rose to the salute. Not as a kindly, middle-aged
man, slightly shrunken with mediocrity, did the young soldier think
of his king. To him, he was a knightly, shining figure, splendid with
romance. Medieval mysticism; crusaders faring forth to holy lands;
the glamour of Elizabeth’s bright reign; all the lesser poets like
fugitive and falling stars upon the night; these things were England
to the young soldier, were his king. King and Country! The phrase
lifted him again in exaltation. King and Country! It was for that
he was a warrior; it was for poetry and peace--tranquility like the
silence here in Westminster, where dreams unfold.
War was a cloud that would pass from before the shining beauty of
life. Others would know it again. _Others_....
Bitterness and grief for a moment assailed him. He had felt life
poignantly. A poet does; most poignantly, perhaps, the man not quite
a poet. Beauty had been so vividly acute; the laughter of forsythia
in the spring; summer’s perfumed, star-sown nights, the flaunting
flags of autumn, the thrill like military music on the wind. These
things to him were happiness as sharp as pain. And winter, too, with
its largo of snow.
It was winter now ... and snowing.
As the exaltation of his mood subsided, the soldier found his
down-cast gaze caught by an insignia on the overcoat that hung across
his arm; the number of a regiment, a division. The symbols seemed
to him suddenly utterly divorced from himself, alien. War was not
possible, _the war was not_. It could not be that yesterday he had been
in France; tomorrow he would be there again.
Incredulity swept him.
In the silence and the solitude and the twilight of Westminster, the
thing that he had left, the thing to which he must return, seemed
impossible, an unreality, delirium.
He thought suddenly of death ... it was the first time he had thought
of death since he had entered the Abbey. It seemed incredible that
men were dying at that instant, killing each other with terrible
guns, when the quiet here was so profound.
For an instant one of those moments of distorted sensation assailed
him, of familiarity with what occurs; the silence was acute with
soundless sounds; in the shadow about him crowded unseen presences;
the pounding of his heart was louder than a drum ... and suddenly he
knew that he had never been surprised, always the things that had
come to him he had foreseen. Suddenly he knew that he had always
known that this would happen to him; war and death. For an instant he
closed his eyes against memory, against war, presentiment.
Like terrible and bitter waters, despair engulfed him; he was
conscious of a fumbling, still-born gesture after the youth that he
had lost, the beauty forgotten, the poems he would not write.
_He had meant to be a poet._
Always, as a child, a youth, he had meant to be a poet, and write
phrases like the “vision splendid,” and sleep in Westminster with the
mighty dead.
A strangling agony was in his throat.... He felt betrayed. War had
betrayed him. Fate had. Now he would never be a poet and sleep in
Westminster. He was only a soldier, a warrior ... an unknown warrior.
The terrible and bitter waters, the strangling agony at length
subsided. He felt spent, exhausted, devoid of emotion.
And after a moment he rose from his knees; he was remembering why he
had come back to England on this strange leave; he was remembering he
must hurry if he were to stand again among the mighty dead.
The look of childhood, the look of hidden, secret happiness returned
to his face as he turned away from the high altar and traversed the
transept.
When at last he had come to the Poets’ Corner, he paused, he relaxed,
he drew a deep breath, as one who has indeed come home.
Above him in the stained glass windows myriad colors gleamed. It was
lighter there than any place in the Abbey, than any place in England,
the young soldier thought ... any place in the world.
England’s poets! He found himself again among them.
It was a tryst he kept!
As he stood there, the twilight, and the storm, and war, all the
weary weight he carried, vanished from about him. Like a rush of
purifying waters, poetry and beauty swept his soul.
It was for this he had come home!
Hot, unexpected tears in his eyes startled the young soldier.
Poetry! He had not until today really thought of poetry for three
hideous years of war. Poetry! The very word was the loveliest in the
language. Unexpectedly, he remembered his bookshelves, his volumes of
poems, certain pages--words themselves were before his eyes.
“Whither is fled the visionary gleam?”
“Where is it now, the glory and the dream?”
Like a deep-toned organ, the music of Wordsworth’s Ode was about him.
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”... The words suggested
phraseless things; they lifted him, he soared upon their beauty.
Suddenly illusion swept him....
Visions swirled upon the dark; about him the dim distances leaped
into light; the great Abbey was ablaze with candles; through its
windows gleamed the sun; a thronging multitude was gathered beneath
the drooping banners and the furled flags of forgotten wars; upon the
silence pulsed the slow beat of funeral music, as a vast procession
passed in insubstantial pageantry behind a flag-draped bier to where
the mighty dead of England sleep.
Illusion crowded upon the young soldier; blinded him; dazzled him....
Life had been too stabbing to last, poetry too poignant. And now it
did not matter; _his_ life, _his_ death, _his_ poetry.
“Another race hath been, and other palms are won.”
A flag-draped bier! Like great protecting wings about his soul
presentiment enfolded him.... Peace comes after war; death after
life; and always to the poet, come poetry and beauty. A shining
something, like light, was about him, was in his eyes and soul.
Unsung songs ... a voiceless poet ... a soldier, an unknown warrior
... _sleeping in Westminster with the mighty dead_!
The swirling visions vanished. Illusion fell away.
The young soldier sank to his knees; for an instant his head was
bowed in prayer ... “thoughts too deep for tears.”
The vision he had seen had blinded him, and humbled him and healed.
Gradually his eyes re-focused to the dark, but the shining something,
like light, remained in his soul.
In the stained glass window the colors had blurred together, but
still a lantern, in the hand of a figure grown shadowy and dull,
retained its fire; the soldier watched it fade.
And then he rose and moved away. Beyond a transparent dimming
window, he glimpsed a gargoyle vague with snow. The great nave as
he traversed it was a well of darkness. Out of the silence came the
muffled sound of a padded door.
In the vestibule, a ragged newsboy flitted past him like a bat; his
face and the papers under his arm made white blots in the gloom.
“’Ello! A soldier hin the Habbey!” The boy drew up at his side.
“Paper, sir? News from the front?”
The soldier looked about him tentatively, as one waking from a dream.
In the shadows the newsboy’s face was strangely white, and he had
eerie eyes. The man wondered what he was doing in the Abbey.
“Hit’s the quiet ’ere hafter the streets,” the boy volunteered, as if
in answer to the unspoken thought. His strangely white face and his
eyes fascinated the soldier, hypnotized him.
“Hit’s quiet ’ere too hafter the guns!” The boy was pirouetting from
one foot to another.
“Yes,” the soldier said. He wanted to tell the boy to come here
often. He wanted to tell the boy about poetry and beauty--the
Intimations of Immortality.
“Hi come to the big shows they pulls off ’ere, too,” the child said
unexpectedly.
For an instant his illusion recurred to the soldier; a vast crowd,
lights and banners--funeral music, a _flag-draped bier_!
“But Hi likes hit better when hit’s dark and quiet--like now!”
The newsboy’s eerie eyes re-focused to the soldier’s vision. It had
come to him that this boy, other boys, loved the Abbey as he had. For
an instant he realized the linked chain of life. He saw a passing
torch.
Then he got into his overcoat. Shrinking a little as one does who
leaves home for the darkness and the cold, the young soldier passed
out from Westminster.
Snow was falling over London; a great blur of zig-zagging flakes....
[5] Copyright, 1922, by _The Junior League Bulletin_.
Copyright, 1923, by Susan M. Boogher.