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In spite of the moon in mid sky and the plaster of dully shining leaves
on the macadam and all the other signs of the approach of fine weather
there rang in his head: Such a cuddle muddle: Is that modern German
poetry? I never saw such a lot of things mixed together under one title.
These are modern times, Pa, airships and automobiles; you cover space--
And that's all right--
O America! Turn your head a little to the left please. So. Now are you
ready? Watch my hand. Now: _Lohengrin_ in ITALIAN, SUNG AT
MANHATTAN--San Carlo Company Revives Wagner Opera, with Anna Fitziu as
Elsa.
Sweet kisses that come in the night--O argyrol!
Rain, rain, for three days and three nights.
In the night a cesura. Suddenly the fire bell begins to ring. I wake
with a start and hear the small boy calling from the next room. Eight
thousand people wake and count the strokes of the black bells. It is not
our signal. Someone has been set afire. The engines pass with a crash
and roar of the exhausts. Their siren whistles shriek with a fortissimo
rise and fall. In a thousand beds men of forty, women of thirty eight,
girls in their teens, boys tired from football practice and little boys
and girls down to babyhood wake and think the same thoughts. They listen
and count the number of strokes, and sink back saying to themselves:
Fire! Presently all but the few who are immediately affected are again
asleep. The fire has burnt itself out. Slowly the sun has been crossing
Europe and will soon appear fresh from the sea with his benison. The tie
of that black thought in the night will be broken. The opportunity will
be lost forever. Each will rise and dress and go out into the rain on
whatever errand the day has chosen for him.
Rain all day long. The sun does not appear. The heat is suffocating. The
rattle of the torrent fills the ears. Water is everywhere.
In the night a wind wakens. It comes from the south-west about midnight
and takes the trees by their heavy leaves twisting them until they
crack. With a roar the wind batters at the houses, shaking them as if it
were a heavy hand. And again for the second night running eight thousand
men and women and boys and girls wake and listen or get up to close
windows and to look out at the trees leaning with snapping branches,
tossing and seething with a sound of escaping steam. It has grown cold.
Pull up the covers. It has grown cold. Sixteen thousand hands have drawn
the covers closer about the bodies. The wind is cold.
The sun has come back. The air is washed clean. Leaves lie plastered
upon the streets, against the tree trunks, upon the very house sides.
The bird bath is filled to overflowing. A lame man is hurrying for the
train.
They had talked for hours. The new project was beginning to take form.
It was the evening of the second day. There stood the train puffing out
great volumes of dense smoke which no sooner arose than it was caught in
the wind and sent flying out ahead of the train. I wish to God I were on
that train wherever it might be going. Oh well, remarked the younger man
and said good-bye, which is what it is to be a man.
He was too old, remarked the voice in the room next to the one in which
the woman was lying, he never should have gone out in that rain. Too
cold! At times it seems possible, even now. She took the hair between
her thumb and index finger of the right hand and using her left hand
swiftly stroked the little hair strands back toward the head to make it
stand out. Ratting it, I told her. It ruins the hair. Oh well I haven't
much left, it might as well be broken.
She wore blue stockings under a very quiet dress but the world has not
beheld a more maddening spectacle. Devoted to the art of writing, he
read with his mind watching her and his mind in the sky seeking, seeking
some earth to stand on when the boys were tearing up the soggy turf
with their cleats. What to do? There it is. The wind hesitated whether
or not to impregnate her. So many things were to be considered. In the
years since his passage over Ponce de Leon's soldiers on the beach--the
wind footloose, gnawing the leaves had witnessed flying footballs that
it had blown out of bounds. He had not a word to stand on, yet he stood,
not knowing why. Fear clutched his heart. Visions of uprooted trees
passed over his heart as he shook her heavy skirt about her knees. But
she, oblivious to it all, walked with downcast eyes--looking at her feet
or smiling pleasantly at one here and there in the crowd that was
shouting and pressing to see the players.
In the night all nature was asleep as she lay with her young cheek
pressed against her pillow and slept. The boys tossed and turned from
the stiffness in their joints and from the bruises received in the game.
But she lay quiet and asleep, the breath coming slowly in regular flow
from her hollow nostrils moving them slightly back and forth.
Under the covers her young form could be made out, the left shoulder,
the hips and the legs and feet, the left knee slightly bent and fallen
to the mattress before the other. Not a sound in the room for a million
years. Still she lay there asleep.--The wind has turned into hail.
Spring flowers are blossoming in the wind. There is the tulip, the
jonquil and the violet--for it is September and no man shall know his
defeat. So there are spring flowers that grew up through the ice that
will be present later. It is of ice that they have made the flowers.
Yet sometimes it seems that it would still be possible. And this is
romance: to believe that which is unbelievable. This is faith: to desire
that which is never to be obtained, to ride like a swallow on the
wind--apparently for the pleasure of flight.
The swallow's bill is constructed in such a way that in flying with his
mouth open tiny insects that enter are ensnared in hairlike gills so
that he is fed.
Here are a pretty pair of legs in blue stockings, feed. Yet without the
thought of a possible achievement that would make it possible to command
the achievement of certain--The boys kick the ball and pay no attention.
The boys kick the ball up into the wind and the wind hurriedly writes a
love note upon it: Meet me tonight. Say you are going to the Library and
I will have my car at the corner of Fern Street. I have something to
tell you. There is one word you must hear: YOU.
There is one word you must hear. It will come out at my lips and enter
in at your ears. It might be written with letters on white paper but it
is a word that I want you to have out of the lips into your ear. And she
answers: I will be there. So he does not keep his appointment. Off he
goes in search of a word.
But she goes home and weeps her eyes out. Her pillow is wet with her
tears--
What do you think! He has left his wife, and a child in the high school
has been ill a week, weeping her eyes out and murmuring his name. Is it
not terrible?
It is the wind! The wind is in the poplars twiddling the fading leaves
between his fingers idly and thinking, thinking of the words he will
make, new words to be written on white paper but never to be spoken by
the lips to pass into her ear.
Quietly he goes home to his wife and taking her by the shoulder wakes
her: Here I am.