He read it through: a pretty, clinquant thing,
Like bright spontaneous bird-song in the spring,
Instinct with instinct, full of dewy freshness.
Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;
If he chose to—but it was too much trouble,
And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,
Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned
In pleasant seas . . . to rise again and find
One o’clock struck and his unshaven face
Still like a record in a musical box,
And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury.
V
i.
THE Open Sesame of “Master John,”
And then the broad silk bosom of Aunt Loo.
“Dear John, this is a pleasure. How are you?”
“Well, thanks. Where’s Uncle Will?” “Your uncle’s gone
To Bath for his lumbago. He gets on
As well as anyone can hope to do
At his age—for you know he’s seventy-two;
But still, he does his bit. He sits upon
The local Tribunal at home, and takes
Parties of wounded soldiers out in brakes
To see the country. And three times a week
He still goes up to business in the City;
And then, sometimes, at night he has to speak
In Village Halls for the War Aims Committee.”
ii.
“Well, have you any news about the war?
What do they say in France?” “I daren’t repeat
The things they say.” “You see we’ve got some meat
For you, dear John. Really, I think before
To-day I’ve had no lamb this year. We score
By getting decent vegetables to eat,
Sent up from home. This is a good receipt:
The touch of garlic makes it. Have some more.
Poor Tom was wounded on the twenty-third;
Did you know that? And just to-day I heard
News from your uncle that his nephew James
Is dead—Matilda’s eldest boy.” “I knew
One of those boys, but I’m so bad at names.
Mine had red hair.” “Oh, now, that must be Hugh.”
iii.
“Colonel McGillicuddy came to dine
Quietly here, a night or two ago.
He’s on the Staff and very much in the know
About all sorts of things. His special line
Is Tanks. He says we’ve got a new design
Of super-Tank, with big guns, that can go
(I think he said) at thirty miles or so
An hour. That ought to make them whine
For peace. He also said, if I remember,
That the war couldn’t last beyond September,
Because the Germans’ trucks were wearing out
And couldn’t be replaced. I only hope
It’s true. You know your uncle has no doubt
That the whole thing was plotted by the Pope . . .”
“. . . Good-bye, dear John. We have had a nice talk.
You must soon come again. Good-bye, good-bye. . . .”
He tottered forth, full of the melancholy
That comes of surfeit, and began to walk
Slowly towards Oxford Street. The brazen sky
Burned overhead. Beneath his feet the stones
Were a grey incandescence, and his bones
Melted within him, and his bowels yearned.
VI
THE crowd, the crowd—oh, he could almost cry
To see those myriad faces hurrying by,
And each a strong tower rooted in the past
On dark unknown foundations, each made fast
With locks nobody knew the secret of,
No key could open: save that perhaps love
Might push the bars half back and just peep in—
And see strange sights, it may be. But for him
They were locked donjons, every window bright
With beckoning mystery; and then, Good Night!
The lamp was out, they were passed, they were gone
For ever . . . ever. And one might have been
The hero or the friend long sought, and one
Was the loveliest face his eyes had ever seen,
(Vanished as soon) and he went lonely on.
Then in a sudden fearful vision he saw
The whole world spread before him—a vast sphere
Of seething atoms moving to one law:
“Be individual. Approach, draw near,
Yes, even touch: but never join, never be
Other than your own selves eternally.”
And there are tangents, tangents of thought that aim
Out through the gaps between the patterned stars
At some fantastic dream without a name
That like the moon shining through prison bars,
Visits the mind with madness. So they fly,
Those soaring tangents, till the first jet tires,
Failing, faltering half-way up the sky,
And breaks—poor slender fountain that aspires
Against the whole strength of the heavy earth
Within whose womb, darkly, it took birth.
Oh, how remote he walked along the street,
Jostling with other lumps of human meat!
He was so tired. The café doors invite.
Caverned within them, still lingers the night
In shadowy coolness, soothing the seared sight.
He sat there smoking, soulless and wholly crass,
Sunk to the eyes in the warm sodden morass
Of his own guts, wearily, wearily
Ruminating visions of mortality—
Memento Moris from the pink alcove,
Nightmare oppressiveness of profane love.
Cesspool within, and without him he could see
Nothing but mounds of flesh and harlotry.
Like a half-pricked bubble pendulous in space,
The buttered leatheriness of a Jew’s face
Looms through cigar-smoke; red and ghastly white,
Death’s-head women fascinate the sight.
It was the nightmare of a corpse. Dead, dead . . .
Oh, to wake up, to live again! he fled
From that foul place and from himself.
VII
TWIN domes of the Alhambra,
Veiled tenderness of the sky above the Square:
He sat him down in the gardens, under the trees,
And in the dust, with the point of his umbrella,
Drew pictures of the crosses we have to bear.
The poor may starve, the sick have horrible pains—
But there are pale eyes even in the London planes.
Men may make war and money, mischief and love—
But about us are colours and the sky above.
Yes, here, where the golden domes ring clear,
And the planes patiently, hopefully renew
Their green refrain from year to year
To the dim spring burden of London’s husky blue,
Here he could see the folly of it. How?
Confine a boundless possible within
The prison of an ineluctable Now?
Go slave to pain, woo forth original sin
Out of her lair—and all by a foolish Act?
Madness! But now, Wordsworth of Leicester Square,
He’d learnt his lesson, learnt by the mere fact
Of the place existing, so finely unaware
Of syphilis and the restless in and out
Of public lavatories, and evening shout
Of winners and disasters, races and war.
Troubles come thick enough. Why call for more
By suiting action to the divine Word?
His spleen was chronic, true; but he preferred
Its subtle agony to the brute force
That tugged the barbs of deep-anchored remorse.
The sunlight wrapped folds of soft golden silk
About him, and the air was warm as milk
Against his skin. Long sitting still had made
Cramped soreness such a pleasure, he was afraid
To shift his tortured limbs, lest he should mar
Life’s evenness. London’s noise from afar
Smoothed out its harshness to soothe his thoughts asleep,
Sound that made silence much more calm and deep.
The domes of gold, the leaves, emerald bright,
Were intense, piercing arrows of delight.
He did not think; thought was a shallow thing
To his deep sense of life, of mere being.
He looked at his hand, lying there on his knee,
The blue veins branching, the tendons cunningly
Dancing like jacks in a piano if he shook
A knot-boned finger. Only to look and look,
Till he knew it, each hair and every pore—
It seemed enough: what need of anything more?
Thought, a blind alley; action, which at best
Is cudgelling water that goes back to rest
As soon as you give over your violences.
No, wisdom culls the flowers of the five senses,
Savouring the secret sweetness they afford:
Instead of which he had a Medical Board
Next week, and they would pass him fit. Good Lord!
Well, let all pass.
But one must outdo fate,
Wear clothes more modish than the fashion, run
Faster than time, not merely stand and wait;
Do in a flash what cannot be undone
Through ten eternities. Predestinate?
So would God be—that is, if there were one:
General epidemic which spoils nobody’s fun.
Action, action! Quickly rise and do
The most irreparable things; beget,
In one brief consummation of the will,
Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.
Action! This was no time for sitting still.
He crushed his hat down over his eyes
And walked with a stamp to symbolise
Action, action—left, right, left;
Planting his feet with a slabby beat,
Taking strange Procrustean steps,
Lengthened, shortened to avoid
Touching the lines between the stones—
A thing which makes God so annoyed.
Action, action! First of all
He spent three pounds he couldn’t afford
In buying a book he didn’t want,
For the mere sake of having been
Irrevocably extravagant.
Then feeling very bold, he pressed
The bell of a chance house; it might
Disclose some New Arabian Night
Behind its grimy husk, who knows?
The seconds passed; all was dead.
Arrogantly he rang once more.
His heart thumped on sheer silence; but at last
There was a shuffling; something behind the door
Became approaching panic, and he fled.
VIII
“MISERY,” he said, “to have no chin,
Nothing but brains and sex and taste:
Only omissively to sin,
Weakly kind and cowardly chaste.
But when the war is over,
I will go to the East and plant
Tea and rubber, and make much money.
I will eat the black sweat of niggers
And flagellate them with whips.
I shall be enormously myself,
Incarnate Chin.”
The anguish of thinking ill of oneself
(St. Paul’s religion, poignant beyond words)
Turns ere you know it to faint minor thirds
Before the ritualistic pomps of the world—
The glass-grey silver of rivers, silken skies unfurled,
Urim and Thummim of dawn and sun-setting,
And the lawn sleeves of a great episcopal cloud,
Matins of song and vesperal murmuring,
Incense of night-long flowers and earth new-ploughed;
All beauties of sweetness and all that shine or sing.
Conscience is smoothed by beauty’s subtle fingers
Into voluptuousness, where nothing lingers
Of bitterness, saving a sorrow that is
Rather a languor than a sense of pain.
So, from the tunnel of St. Martin’s Lane
Sailing into the open Square, he felt
His self-reproach, his good resolutions melt
Into an ecstasy, gentle as balm,
Before the spire, etched black and white on the calm
Of a pale windless sky, St. Martin’s spire,
And the shadows sleeping beneath the portico
And the crowd hurrying, ceaselessly, to and fro.
Alas, the bleached and slender tower that aches
Upon the gauzy sky, where blueness breaks
Into sweet hoarseness, veiled with love and tender
As the dove’s voice alone in the woods: too slender,
Too finely pencilled—black and bleaching white
On smoky mist, too clear in the keen light
Of utmost summer: and oh! the lives that pass
In one swift stream of colour, too, too bright,
Too swift—and all the lives unknown,
Alone.
Alas.
