Sollers:
O, close, I know, and viciously heading down.
Vine:
She was so silver! and the sun had left
A kind of tawny red, a dust of fine
Thin light upon the blue where she was lying,--
Just a curled paring of the moon, amid
The faint grey cloud that set the gleaming wheel
Around the tilted slip of shining silver.
O it did seem to me so safe and homely,
The moon quietly going about the earth;
It's a rare place we have to live in, here;
And life is such a comfortable thing--
And what's the sense of it all? Naught but to make
Cruel as may be the slaughtering of it.
[He breaks down again.]
Sollers:
It heats my mind!
[He begins to walk up and down desperately.]
Merrick:
'Twas bound to come sometime,
Bound to come, I suppose. 'Tis a poor thing
For us, to fall plumb in the chance of it;
But, now or another time, 'twas bound to be.--
I have been thinking back. When I was a lad
I was delighted with my life: there seemed
Naught but things to enjoy. Say we were bathing:
There'ld be the cool smell of the water, and cool
The splashing under the trees: but I did loathe
The sinking mud slithering round my feet,
And I did love to loathe it so! And then
We'ld troop to kill a wasp's nest; and for sure
I would be stung; and if I liked the dusk
And singing and the game of it all, I loved
The smart of the stings, and fleeing the buzzing furies.
And sometimes I'ld be looking at myself
Making so much of everything; there'ld seem
A part of me speaking about myself:
'You know, this is much more than being happy.
'Tis hunger of some power in you, that lives
On your heart's welcome for all sorts of luck,
But always looks beyond you for its meaning.'
And that's the way the world's kept going on,
I believe now. Misery and delight
Have both had liking welcome from it, both
Have made the world keen to be glad and sorry.
For why? It felt the living power thrive
The more it made everything, good and bad,
Its own belonging, forged to its own affair,--
The living power that would do wonders some day.
I don't know if you take me?
Sollers:
I do, fine;
I've felt the very thought go through my mind
When I was at my wains; though 'twas a thing
Of such a flight I could not read its colour.--
Why was I like a man sworn to a thing
Working to have my wains in every curve,
Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be?
Not for myself, not even for those wains:
But to keep in me living at its best
The skill that must go forward and shape the world,
Helping it on to make some masterpiece.
Merrick:
And never was there aught to come of it!
The world was always looking to use its life
In some great handsome way at last. And now--
We are just fooled. There never was any good
In the world going on or being at all.
The fine things life has plotted to do are worth
A rotten toadstool kickt to flying bits.
End of the World? Ay, and the end of a joke.
Vine:
Well, Huff's the man for this turn.
Merrick:
Ay, the good man!
He could but grunt when times were pleasant; now
There's misery enough to make him trumpet.
And yet, by God, he shan't come blowing his horn
Over my misery!
We are just fooled, did I say?--We fooled ourselves,
Looking for worth in what was still to come;
And now there's a stop to our innings. Well, that's fair:
I've been a living man, and might have been
Nothing at all! I've had the world about me,
And felt it as my own concern. What else
Should I be crying for? I've had my turn.
The world may be for the sake of naught at last,
But it has been for my sake: I've had that.
[He sits again, and broods.]
Sollers:
I can't stay here. I must be where my sight
May silence with its business all my thinking--
Though it will be the star plunged down so close
It puffs its flaming vengeance in my face.
[He goes.]
Vine:
I wish there were someone who had done me wrong,
Like Huff with his wife and Shale; I wish there were
Somebody I would like to see go crazed
With staring fright. I'ld have my pleasure then
Of living on into the End of the World.
But there is no one at all for me, no one
Now my poor wife is gone.
Merrick:
Why, what did she
To harm you?
Vine:
Didn't she marry me?--It's true
She made it come all right. She died at last.
Besides, it would be wasting wishes on her,
To be in hopes of her weeping at this.
She'ld have her hands on her hips and her tongue jumping
As nimble as a stoat, delighting round
The way the world's to be terrible and tormented.--
Ay, but I'll have a thing to tell her now
When she begins to ask the news! I'll say
'You've misst such a show as never was nor will be,
A roaring great affair of death and ruin;
And I was there--the world smasht to sparkles!'
O, I can see her vext at that!
[MERRICK has been sunk in thought during this, but VINE seems to
brighten at his notion, and speaks quite cheerfully to HUFF, who now
comes in, looking mopish, and sits down.]
Vine:
We've all been envying you, Huff. You're well off,
You with your goodness and your enemies
Showing you how to relish it with their terror.
When do you mean the gibing is to start?
Huff:
There's time enough.
Vine:
O, do they still hold out?
If they should be for spiting you to the last!
You'ld best keep on at them: think out a list
Of frantic things for them to do, when air
Is scorching smother and the sin they did
Frightens their hearts. You'll shout them into fear,
I undertake, if you find breath enough.
Huff:
You have the breath. What's all your pester for?
You leave me be.
Vine:
Why, you're to do for me
What I can't do myself.--And yet it's hard
To make out where Shale hurt you. What's the sum
Of all he did to you? Got you quit of marriage
Without the upset of a funeral.
Huff:
Why need you blurt your rambling mind at me?
Let me bide quiet in my thought awhile,
And it's a little while we have for thought.
Merrick:
I know your thought. Paddling round and around,
Like a squirrel working in a spinning cage
With his neck stretcht to have his chin poke up,
And silly feet busy and always going;
Paddling round the story of your good life,
Your small good life, and how the decent men
Have jeered at your wry antic.
Huff:
My good life!
And what good has my goodness been to me?
You show me that! Somebody show me that!
A caterpillar munching a cabbage-heart,
Always drudging further and further from
The sounds and lights of the world, never abroad
Nor flying free in warmth and air sweet-smelling:
A crawling caterpillar, eating his life
In a deaf dark--that's my gain of goodness!
And it's too late to hatch out now!--
I can but fancy what I might have been;
I scarce know how to sin!--But I believe
A long while back I did come near to it.
Merrick:
Well done!--O but I should have guesst all this!
Huff:
I was in Droitwich; and the sight of the place
Is where they cook the brine: a long dark shed,
Hot as an oven, full of a grey steam
And ruddy light that leaks out of the furnace;
And stirring the troughs, ladling the brine that boils
As thick as treacle, a double standing row,
Women--boldly talking in wicked jokes
All day long. I went to see 'em. It was
A wonderful rousing sight. Not one of them
Was really wearing clothes: half of a sack
Pinned in an apron was enough for most,
And here and there might be a petticoat;
But nothing in the way of bodices.--
O, they knew words to shame a carter's face!
Merrick:
This is the thought you would be quiet in!
Huff:
Where else can I be quiet? Now there's an end
Of daring, 'tis the one place my life has made
Where I may try to dare in thought. I mind,
When I stood in the midst of those bare women,
All at once, outburst with a rising buzz,
A mob of flying thoughts was wild in me:
Things I might do swarmed in my brain pell-mell,
Like a heap of flies kickt into humming cloud.
I beat them down; and now I cannot tell
For certain what they were. I can call up
Naught venturesome and darting like their style;
Very tame braveries now!--O Shale's the man
To smile upon the End of the World; 'tis Shale
Has lived the bold stiff fashion, and filled himself
With thinking pride in what a man may do.--
I wish I had seen those women more than once!
Vine:
Well, here's an upside down! This is old Huff!
What have you been in your heart all these years?
The man you were or the new man you are?
Huff:
Just a dead flesh!
Merrick:
Nay, Huff the good man at least
Was something alive, though snarling like trapt vermin.
But this? What's this for the figure of a man?
'Tis a boy's smutty picture on a wall.
Huff:
I was alive, was I? Like a blind bird
That flies and cannot see the flight it takes,
Feeling it with mere rowing of its wings.
But Shale--he's had a stirring sense of what he is.
[Shouting outside. Then SOLLERS walks in again, very quiet and steady.
He stands in the middle, looking down on the floor.]
Vine:
What do they holla for there?
Sollers:
The earth.
Merrick:
The earth?
Sollers:
The earth's afire.
Huff:
The earth blazing already?
[Shouts again.]
O, not so soon as this?
Vine:
What sort of a fire?
Sollers:
The earth has caught the heat of the star, you fool.
Merrick:
I know: there's come some dazzle in your eyes
From facing to the star; a lamp would do it.
Huff:
It will be that. Your sight, being so strained,
Is flashing of itself.
Sollers:
Say what you like.
There's a red flare out of the land beyond
Looking over the hills into our valley.
The thing's begun, 'tis certain. Go and see.
Vine: