1
Mamselle Day, Mamselle Day, come back again! Slip your clothes off!—the
jingling of those little shell ornaments so deftly fastened—! The streets
are turning in their covers. They smile with shut eyes. I have been twice
to the moon since supper but she has nothing to tell me. Mamselle come
back! I will be wiser this time.
* * * * *
_That which is past is past forever and no power of the imagination can
bring it back again. Yet inasmuch as there are many lives being lived in
the world, by virtue of sadness and regret we are enabled to partake to
some small degree of those pleasures we have missed or lost but which
others more fortunate than we are in the act of enjoying._
If one should catch me in this state! —wings would go at a bargain. Ah
but to hold the world in the hand then— Here’s a brutal jumble. And if
you move the stones, see the ants scurry. But it’s queen’s eggs they take
first, tax their jaws most. Burrow, burrow, burrow! there’s sky that way
too if the pit’s deep enough—so the stars tell us.
* * * * *
_It is an obsession of the gifted that by direct onslaught or by some
back road of the intention they will win the recognition of the world.
Cezanne. And inasmuch as some men have had a bare recognition in their
lives the fiction is continued. But the sad truth is that since the
imagination is nothing, nothing will come of it. Thus those necessary
readjustments of sense which are the everyday affair of the mind are
distorted and intensified in these individuals so that they frequently
believe themselves to be the very helots of fortune, whereas nothing
could be more ridiculous than to suppose this. However their strength
will revive if it may be and finding a sweetness on the tongue of which
they had no foreknowledge they set to work again with renewed vigor._
2
How smoothly the car runs. And these rows of celery, how they bitter the
air—winter’s authentic foretaste. Here among these farms how the year
has aged, yet here’s last year and the year before and all years. One
might rest here time without end, watch out his stretch and see no other
bending than spring to autumn, winter to summer and earth turning into
leaves and leaves into earth and—how restful these long beet rows—the
caress of the low clouds—the river lapping at the reeds. Was it ever so
high as this, so full? How quickly we’ve come this far. Which way is
north now? North now? why that way I think. Ah there’s the house at last,
here’s April, but—the blinds are down! It’s all dark here. Scratch a
hurried note. Slip it over the sill. Well, some other time.
* * * * *
How smoothly the car runs. This must be the road. Queer how a road juts
in. How the dark catches among those trees! How the light clings to the
canal! Yes there’s one table taken, we’ll not be alone. This place has
possibilities. Will you bring _her_ here? Perhaps—and when we meet on the
stair, shall we speak, say it is some acquaintance—or pass silent? Well,
a jest’s a jest but how poor this tea is. Think of a life in this place,
here in these hills by these truck farms. Whose life? Why there, back
of you. If a woman laughs a little loudly one always thinks that way of
her. But how she bedizens the country-side. Quite an old world glamour.
If it were not for—but one cannot have everything. What poor tea it was.
How cold it’s grown. Cheering, a light is that way among the trees. That
heavy laugh! How it will rattle these branches in six weeks’ time.
3
The frontispiece is her portrait and further on—the obituary sermon: she
held the school upon her shoulders. Did she. Well—turn in here then:—we
found money in the blood and some in the room and on the stairs. My God
I never knew a man had so much blood in his head! —and thirteen empty
whisky bottles. I am sorry but those who come this way meet strange
company. This is you see death’s canticle.
_A young woman who had excelled at intellectual pursuits, a person of
great power in her sphere, died on the same night that a man was murdered
in the next street, a fellow of very gross behavior. The poet takes
advantage of this to send them on their way side by side without making
the usual unhappy moral distinctions._