A little door inside me opens to those Voices.
My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of
doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but
more--their far-off echoes.
They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold
innocence. The eyes of the children are clear--their impulses and
instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the
tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings.
So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless
as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or
weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant
common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and
farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long
worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings
and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort
and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless
social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms
of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults:
into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives
and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and
on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields,
round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in
dungeons:--there along fly their Voices.
It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it.
It is triumph.
The noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of
ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are
lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly
on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder,
floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men--wizards,
monks, artisans, thieves--echo no farther than their talking
conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance
something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices
of women--singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women--die with
their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow
with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices
as they go.
For the Sound of the child-Voices is more potent than wizards’--it is
not cramped into thought-forms: more devotional than monks’ because
super-conscious; more menacing than thieves’ because absolute. And
it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing,
rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long
dead-silenced: and after.
Music of the world.
This moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold
day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and
hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel
arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the
sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and
starting away. It wakes vision so that I see--quick, evil, terribly
human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors--all those Places where the
Voices go.
I go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the
high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the
streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where
their Echo goes.
--small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller
girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing
hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their
hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged
legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and
little young shoulders and knees and waistlines--restless and
kaleidoscopic--
--and confused boy-groups--little fellows in suits misnamed
Oliver-Twist, larger boys of serge-Norfolk persuasion, types of
the generic knickerbocker at once motley and monotonous--all with
the strong sturdy calves of their legs clad in a time-honored kind
of black ribbed stockings, all with the same breed of ties and
collars and short-cropped hair, all with the tacit air of confessing
themselves the most serenely cruel of all animals--
A careless conscienceless happy mob.
It is the Sound of their Voices that invests them with the terrifying
Power, the long world-sweeping Force as of spirit and matter merged,
the human radioactivity not evil and not good, stronger than all evil
and all good.
Those children I look at must cease to be children, and must lose
their Voices and grow into monks and thieves and singing women--must
turn into persons--‘Romans, countrymen and lovers.’
But will come after those another chorus: the same chorus: the same
Voices.
The brief yellow mellow minutes have passed and the last shout has
been silenced and the hundreds of children, Rainbow Hair-Ribbons and
Black Ribbed Legs, are again gathered into the McKinley School.
And my little door is shut again: that door opens but for those
Voices.
The Voices: their echo flying everywhere flies here into my
still room: and it stirs me, rouses me, speaks to me with the old
joyous woe.
Music of the world.
_My damns_