... O sweet beyond song is woman at her Spring! You are life, you are
the wrung essence of all life. For you I have made myself an ashen path
through the splendor of gardens. For you I have denied my soul all
their flung radiance. That I might drink you perfectly. And I am all
athirst. My ashen way has dried my mouth, and opened my desire. I am
all thirst for you. And I have lost you?
--Mildred, will you see this longing in my mouth, and go?
--Mildred, will you see this death in my eyes, and go?...
--You have gone already. And I am alone.
* * * * *
_I have told my story. And, reader, though it has no moral, and though
it may have brought you more bewilderment than joy, it has served its
primary purpose. It has enabled me once more to live among you. Take
the most anguished page, the blackest with my despair; it has been joy
for me to write that page, for in the writing I relived it. And where
I am, even the darkest human hour in memory is bright. If I suffered,
it was because I still could strive: if I despaired it was because I
still knew hope. Such are the jewels of man’s world. For man’s world is
a playground whither the drab cosmic angels come for holiday. Strife,
pain, suspense, anguish of heart and flesh, sacrifice and crime ...
these are the raiments of Love. These are the joyous motley of the
angels when they make feast on earth._
_... I see an evening earlier in my life. I had just returned from
my exhilarant years in Europe. It was June, and I was staying with a
friend who lived with his wife in the Berkshire Hills of New England.
They had been called to a nearby town: I declined their invitation to
go along with them. I supped alone in their house. There was cheese
redolent of meadows and manure; there was honey that smelt of clover;
there were vegetables lightly cooked so that the resilient air of April
and of May still lingered in their green._
_I sat on the porch alone, smoking my pipe, and watched the sun fall
through the scattered hedge of fir trees and dogwood, copper-beech and
locust. The air was alive with the acacia scent and with the song of
birds. Their voices swarmed the leafage: oriole and grackle, virio,
thrush and thrasher. Impudent red-breasts marched across the green: a
catbird with its stridence set in tune the melodious symphony of the
sweeter birds._
_The evening was alive. From the cropped grass of the lawn, the trees
rose sheer: the trunks were columns of the earth; the branches, whelmed
by leaf and shadow, made a firmament beneath the sky. I sat and was
happy in this singing dusk. The shadows and the dying sun, the pied
shrill chatter of the birds, came to me as a single happiness, ripe for
my mood._
_And then, in a flash, the veil had lifted, and I saw._
_This lovely scene that soothed my weariness and made me happy,
bringing to my lips soft sentimental phrases, was a shambles! In a
spruce that bowered from my porch, I watched a brown thrasher wheel
and screech about a branch in which an owl, ensconced, brooded over
its young. The little bird was delirious with fear. It threshed its
wings and screamed: it pecked at the robber owl and flew away. It
wheeled, screamed up its courage, shot in and pecked again. Robins were
devouring worms. A handsome woodpecker massacred wood-slugs on the boll
of a beech. No single creature in that gentle dusk, but was engaged in
bitter desperate war. And I sat, idle, burning my tobacco, slaying the
mosquito that dared to buzz within the reach of my majesty.... All the
world was murdering or murdered. Was it less fair for that?_
_My time was to come. And I, like these humbler creatures of the lawn,
knew my hours of crisis, knew the heartbreak of desire, the black
shrouds of failure. Was my time less fair for that?_
_O reader, if you must glean a moral from my story, let it be this! I
lean back over the Precipice of Time, and greedily relive those hours
which you call hours of anguish: relive those days of failure, since
they were living days. Was it not then that my heart beat highest, that
passion coursed most free, that I was most alive?_
_Out of the ash that you call history, rises the eternal flame of Love.
Warm yourselves there, my brothers and my sisters. For the time will
come when you will watch Love’s distant gleam, desperate and nostalgic
like a winter moth which beats on the frosted window trying to get in
where the light burns, which beats and beats until it falls emaciate in
the snow...._