 Part 1. The Farmer's Bride. Three summers since I chose a maid, too young, maybe, but more's to do at harvest time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid of love and me and all things human, like the shut of a winter's day. Her smile went out, and twasn't a woman, more like a little frightened fey. One night, in the fall, she run away. Out among the sheep her be, they said. Should properly have been a bed. But sure enough she wasn't there, lying awake with her wide brown stare. So over seven-acre field and up along across the down, we chased her, flying like a hare before our lanterns. To church-town all in a shiver and a scare we caught her, fetched her home at last, and turned the key upon her, fast. She does the work about the house as well as most, but like a mouse, happy enough to chat and play with birds and rabbits and such as they, so long as menfolk keep away. Not near, not near, her eyes beseech when one of us comes within reach. The women say that beasts in stall look round like children at her call. I've hardly heard her speak at all. Shy as a leveret, swift as he, straight and slight as a young large tree, sweet as the first wild violets she, to her wild self. But what to me? The short days shorten, and the oaks are brown. The blue smoke rises to the low gray sky. One leaf in the still air falls slowly down. A magpie's spotted feathers lie on the black earth's spread white with rhyme. The berries redden up to Christmas time. What's Christmas time without there be some other in the house than we? She sleeps up in the attic there, alone, poor maid. Tis but a stare betwixt us. Oh, my God! The down, the soft, young down of her, the brown, the brown of her, her eyes, her hair, her hair. Fame! Sometimes, in the overheated house, but not for long, smirking and speaking rather loud, I see myself among the crowd, where no one fits the singer to his song, or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces of the people who are always on my stare. They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places. But could I spare, in the blind earth's great silences and spaces, the din, the scuffle, the long stare, if I went back, and it was not there? Back to the old known things that are the new, the folded glory of the gorse, the sweet, briar air, to the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do, and the divine, wise trees that do not care yet to leave fame, still with such eyes, and that bright hair. God, if I might, and before I go hence, take in her stead to our tossed bed one little dream, no matter how small, how wild! Just now, I think I found it in a field under a fence, a frail, dead, newborn lamb, ghostly, and pitiful, and white, a blot upon the night, the moon's dropped child. The narrow door The narrow door, the narrow door, on the three steps of which the cafe children play, mostly at shop with pebbles from the shore, it is always shut, this narrow door, but open for a little while to-day. And round it, each with pebbles in his hand, a silenced crowd, the cafe children stand, to see the long box jerking down the bend of twisted stare, then set on end, quite filling up the narrow door, till it comes out, and does not go in any more. Along the key you see it wind, the slow, black line, some one pulls up the blind of the small window just above the narrow door, tiens, que veux-tu acheter? Renée cries. Mais pour quatre sues des oignons, Jean replies, and one pays down with pebbles from the shore. The Fet. Tonight, again, the moon's white mat stretches across the dormitory floor, while outside, like an evil cat, the peon prowls down the dark corridor, planning, I know, to pounce on me, in spite for getting leave to sleep in town last night. But it was none of us who made that noise. Only the old brown owl that hoots and flies out of the ivy, he will say it was us boys, Signeur Mondieux, the sacrous soul of spies, he would like to catch each dream that lies hidden behind our sleepy eyes. Their dream, but mine, it is the moon and the wood that sees, all my long life how I shall hate the trees. In the plos-dharm, the dusty plains, all summer through, dozed with the market women in the sun, and scarcely stirred to see the quiet things that crossed the square, a tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird, the hump-backed barber, Celestin Le Maire, old Madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair, and filing past to vespers, two and two, the demoiselle of the pensionant, toad like a ship through the harbour-bar, safe into port. Where le petit-jésus, perhaps, makes nothing of the look they shot at you. Si c'est défendu, mais que voulez-vous? It was the sun. The sunshine weaves a pattern on dull stones. The sunshine leaves the portraiture of dreams upon the eyes before it dies, all summer through, the dust hung white upon the drowsy plains, till suddenly they woke with the autumn rains. It is not only the little boys who have hardly got away from toys, but I, who am seventeen next year, some nights in bed have grown cold to hear that lonely passion of the rain which makes you think of being dead, and of somewhere living to lay your head, as if you were a child again, crying for one thing, known and near, your empty heart, to still the hunger and the fear that pelts and beats with it against the pain. But I remember smiling, too, at all the sun's soft tricks, and those autumn dreads in winter time, when the grey light broke slowly through the frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds, and when at dusk the singing wind swung down straight from the stars to the dark country roads beyond the twinkling town, striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by, like some poor stray dog by the wayside lying dead. We left behind us the old world of dread, eye and the wind as we strode whistling on under the winter sky. And then, in spring, for three days came the fair, just as the plains were starting into bud above the caravans, you saw the dancing bear pass on his chain, and heard the jingle and the thud. Only four days ago, they let you out of this dull show, to slither down the montagne-rousse and chaff the man à la tête de vos, hit, slick, the bullseye at the tear, spin round and round till your head went queer, on the porc-roulant, oh lala, la fête, va pour du vin et la tête-à-tête, with the girl who sugars the coffre, pauvrette, how thin she was. But she smiled, you bet, as she took your tip. One does not forget the good days, monsieur, said with a grace, but sacre bleu. What a ghost of a face! And no fun, too, for the demoiselles of the pensionants, who were hurried past with their— Oh, could say beau, ah, quelle belle!—a lap-dog's life from first to last. The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good days for dreaming in, and at the end in the big circus-tent, we sat and shook and stewed like sin. Some children there had got—but where?—scent from the south, perhaps. A red bouquet of roses, sweetening the fetid air with scent from gardens by some faraway blue bay. They threw one at the dancing bear. The white clown caught it. From San Remise Tower the deep, slow bell told out the hour. The black clown, with his dirty grin, lay sprawling in the dust, as she rode in. She stood on a white horse, and suddenly you saw the bend of a far-off road at dawn, with nights riding by, a field of spears, and then the gallant day go out and storm with ragged clouds low down, sullen and gray against red heavens, wild and awful, such a sky as witnesses against you at the end of a great battle, bugles blowing, blood and dust, the old mort-darture fight you must—it died in anger. But it was not death that had you by the throat, stopping your breath. She looked like victory. She rode my way. She laughed at the black clown, and then she flew a bird above us, on the wing of her white arms, and you saw through a rent in the old tent a patch of sky with one dim star. She flew, but not so high. And then she did not fly. She stood in the bright moonlight at the door of a strange room. She threw her slippers on the floor. Again, again you heard the patter of the rain, the starving rain. It was this thing—summer was this—the gold mist in your eyes. Oh, God! It dies. But after death—tonight the splendour and the sting blows back and catches at your breath—the smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world, the sea, the spring, the beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the enchanted thing. At first you scarcely saw her face. You knew the maddening feet were there. What called was that half-hidden, white unrest, to which now and then she pressed her fingertips. But as she slackened pace and turned and looked at you, it grew quite bare. There was not anything you did not dare, like trumpeters the hours passed until the last day of the fair. In the plough-storm all afternoon the building birds had sung, soon, soon—the shuttered streets slept sound that night. It was full moon. The path into the wood was almost white. The trees were very still and seemed to stare. Not far before your soul the dream flits on. But when you touch it, it is gone. And quite alone your soul stands there. Mother of Christ, no one has seen your eyes. How can men pray even unto you? There were only wolves' eyes in the wood. My mother is a woman too. Nothing is true that is not good. With that quick smile of hers I have heard her say, I wish I had gone back home to-day. I should have watched the light that so gently dies from our high window in the Paris skies. The long straight chain of lamps hung out along the Seine. I would have turned to her and let the rain beat on her breast as it does against the pain. Nothing will be the same again. There is something strange in my little mother's eyes. There is something new in the old heavenly air of spring. The smell of beasts. The smell of dust. The enchanted thing. For all my life long I shall see moonlight on the fern and the black trunks of trees. Only the hair of any woman can belong to God. The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod. There had been violets there. I shall not care as I used to do when I see the bracken burn. Beside the bed Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded, the wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast. So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be questioned or scolded. But for you, not one of us believes that this is rest. Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden the blue beyond, or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath. Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your grey lips, like dawn, would quiver and redden, breaking into the old odd smile at this fraud of death. Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken, it is time for you to wake. Your dreams were never very deep. I, for one, have seen the thin, bright, twisted threads of them dimmed subtly and broken. This is only a most piteous pretense of sleep. In Nun Hedge Cemetery. It is the clay that makes the earth stick to his spade. He fills in holes like this year after year. The others have gone. They were tired and half afraid. But I would rather be standing here. There is nowhere else to go. I have seen this place from the windows of the train that's going past against the sky. This is rain on my face. It was raining here when I saw it last. There is something horrible about a flower. This, broken in my hand, is one of those he threw in just now. It will not live another hour. There are thousands more. You do not miss a rose. One of the children hanging about pointed at the whole dreadful heap and smiled this morning after that was carried out. There is something terrible about a child. We were like children last week in the Strand. That was the day you laughed at me because I tried to make you understand the cheap, stale chap I used to be before I saw the things you made me see. This is not a real place. Perhaps by and by I shall wake. I am getting drenched with all this rain. Tomorrow I will tell you about the eyes of the Crystal Palace train looking down on us, and you will laugh, and I shall see what you see again. Not here. Not now. We said, not yet, across our low stone parapet, will the quick shadows of the sparrows fall. But still it was a lovely thing, through the grey months, to wait for spring, with the birds that go a gypsying in the parks till the blue seas call. And next to these you used to care for the lions in Trafalgar Square, who will stand and speak for London when her bell of judgment tolls, and the gulls at Westminster that were the old sea-captain's souls. Today again the brown tide splashes, step by step, the river stare, and the gulls are there. By a month we have missed our day, the children would have hung about round the carriage and over the way as you and I came out. We should have stood on the gulls' black cliffs and heard the sea, and seen the moon's white track. I would have called. You would have come to me, and kissed me back. You have never done that. I do not know why I stood staring at your bed and heard you, though you spoke so low, but could not reach your hands, your little head. There was nothing we could not do, you said. And you went, and I let you go. Now I will burn you back, I will burn you through, though I am damned for it. We too will lie and burn, here where the starlings fly to these white stones from the wet sky. Dear, you will say this is not I. It would not be you. It would not be you. If for only a little while you will think of it, you will understand, if you will touch my sleeve and smile as you did that morning in the Strand, I can wait quietly with you, or go away if you want me to. God! What is God? But your face has gone, and your hand. Let me stay here, too. When I was quite a little lad, at Christmas time we went half mad for joy of all the toys we had. And then we used to sing about the sheep the shepherds watched by night. We used to pray to Christ to keep our small souls safe till morning light. I am scared. I am staying with you tonight. Put me to sleep. I shall stay here. Here you can see the sky. The houses in the street are much too high. There is no one left to speak to there. Here they are everywhere. And just above them fields and fields of roses lie. If he would dig it all up again, they would not die. The peddler. Lend me a little while the key that locks your heavy heart, and I'll give you back, rarer than books and ribbons and beads bright to see, this little key of dreams out of my pack. The road, the road, beyond men's bolted doors, there shall I walk and you go free of me, for yours lies north across the moors, and mine south. To what sea? How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by, while my gay ghost caught and kissed yours as ghosts don't do, and by the wayside this forgotten you and I sat, and were twenty-two? Give me the key that locks your tired eyes, and I will lend you this one from my pack. Brighter than coloured beads and painted books that make men wise, take it. No. Give it back. Pecheress. Down the long key the slow boats glide, while here and there a house looms white against the gloom of the water-side, and some high window throws a light as they sail out into the night. At dawn they will bring in again to women knitting on the key, who wait for him, their man of men. I stand with them and watch the sea, which may have taken mine from me. Just so the long days come and go. The nights, madway, the nights are cold. Our lady's heart is as frozen snow, since this one sin I have not told, and I shall die, or perhaps grow old before he comes. The foreign ships bring many a one of face and name as strange as his, to buy your lips a gold piece for a scarlet shame like mine. But mine was not the same. One night was ours, one short grey day of sudden sin, unshrived, untold. He found me, and I lost the way to paradise for him. I sold my soul for love, and not for gold. He bought my soul. But even so, my face is all that he has seen, his is the only face I know, and in the dark church, like a screen, it shuts God out, it comes between, while in some narrow foreign street, or loitering on the crowded key, who knows what others he may meet to turn his eyes away from me. Many are fair to such as he. There is but one for such as I, to love, to hate, to hunger for. I shall perhaps grow old and die, with one short day to spend and store, one night in all my life, no more. Just so the long days come and go. Yet this one sin I will not tell, though Mary's heart is as frozen snow, and all nights are cold for one warmed too well. But oh, madway, the nights of hell! THE CHANGELING One day last summer, far and away I heard the sweet tweet-tweet of a strange newcomer. The dearest, clearest call of a bird, it lived down there in the deep green hollow, my own old home. And the fairies say the word of a bird is a thing to follow, so I was away a night and a day. One evening, too, by the nursery fire, we snuggled close and sat round so still, when suddenly as the wind blew higher something scratched on the windowsill. A pinched, brown face peered in. I shivered. No one listened or seemed to see. The arms of it waved and the wings of it quivered. Who! I knew it had come for me. Some are as bad as bad can be. All night long they danced in the rain, round and round in a dripping chain, through their caps at the window-pane, tried to make me scream and shout and fling the bed-clothes all about. I meant to stay in bed that night, and if only you had left a light they would never have got me out. Sometimes I wouldn't speak, you see, or answer when you spoke to me. Because in the long still dusks of spring you can hear the whole world whispering. The shy, green grasses making love, the feathers grow on the deer-grade dove, the tiny heart of the red-start beet, the patter of the squirrel's feet, the pebbles pushing in the silver streams, the rushes talking in their dreams, the swish-swish of the bat's black wings, the wildwood bluebell's sweet ting-tings, humming and hammering at your ear, everything there is to hear in the heart of hidden things, but not in the midst of the nursery riot. That's why I wanted to be quiet. Couldn't do my sums, or sing, or settle down to anything. And when for that I was sent upstairs I did kneel down to say my prayers, but the king who sits on your high church steeple has nothing to do with us fairy people. Times I pleased you, dear father, dear mother, learned all my lessons and liked to play, and dearly I loved the little pale brother whom some other bird must have called away. Why did they bring me here to make me not quite bad and not quite good? Why, unless they're wicked, do they want in spite to take me back to their wet, wild wood? Now every night I shall see the windows shining, the gold lamps glow and the fires red gleam, while the best of us are twining twigs and the rest of us are whining in the hollow by the stream. Black and chill are their nights on the wall, and they live so long, and they feel no pain. I shall grow up, but never grow old. I shall always, always be very cold. I shall never come back again. Ken. The town is old and very steep, a place of bells and cloisters and grey towers, and black clad people walking in their sleep. A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers to her new grave, and watched from end to end by the great church above through the still hours. But in the morning and the early dark the children wake to dart from doors and call down the wide crooked street, where at the bend before it climbs up to the park. Ken's is the gabled house facing the castle wall. When first I came upon him there, suddenly on the half-lit stair, I think I hardly found a trace of likeness to a human face in his. And I said then, if in his image God made men, some other must have made poor Ken. But for his eyes which looked at you as two red-wounded stars might do. He scarcely spoke. You scarcely heard. His voice broke off in little jars to tears sometimes. An uncouth bird he seemed as he plowed up the street, groping with gnarred, high-lifted feet, and arms thrust out as if to beat always against a threat of bars. And oftener than not there'd be a child just higher than his knee trotting beside him. Through his dim, long twilight this had least shown clear that all the children and the deer whom every day he went to see out in the park belonged to him. God help the folk that next to him sits. He fidgets so with his poor wits, the neighbours said on Sunday nights, when he would go to church to see the lights. Although for these he used to fix his eyes upon a crucifix, in a dark corner, staring on till everybody else had gone, and sometimes, in his evil fit, you could not move him from his chair. You did not look at him as he sat there, biting his rosary to bits, while pointing to the Christ he tried to say, take it away. Nothing was dead. He said, a bird, if he picked up a broken wing, a perished leaf or any such thing was just a rose. And once when I had said he must not stand and knock there any more, he left a twig on the mat outside my door. Not long ago the last thrush stiffened in the snow, while black against a sullen sky the sighing pine stood by. But now the wind has left our rattled pain to flutter the hedge sparrows' wing. The birches in the wood are red again, and only yesterday the larks went up a little way to sing. What lovers say, who loiter in the lanes to-day, the buds begin to talk of May, with learned rooks on city trees, and if God please with all of these, we too shall see another spring. But in that red brick barn upon the hill, I wonder, can one own the deer, and does one walk with children still as one did here? Do roses grow beneath those twenty windows in a row? And if some night, when you have not seen any light, they cannot move you from your chair, what happens there? I do not know. So, when they took Ken to that place, I did not look after he called and turned on me his eyes. These I shall see. AQUA-BONDIR Seventeen years ago you said something that sounded like goodbye, and everybody thinks that you were dead, but I. So I, as I grow stiff and cold to this and that, say goodbye too, and everybody sees that I am old, but you. And one fine morning in a sunny lane, some boy and girl will meet and kiss and swear that nobody can love their way again. While over there you will have smiled, I shall have tossed your hair. THE QUIET HOUSE When we were children, old nurse used to say the house was like an auction or a fair until the lot of us were safe in bed. It has been quiet as the countryside since Ted and Janey, and then mother died, and Tom crossed father and was sent away. After the lawsuit he could not hold up his head, poor father, and he does not care for people here or to go anywhere. To get away to aunts for that weekend was hard enough. Since then a year ago he scarcely lets me slip out of his sight. At first I did not like my cousin's friend. I did not think I should remember him. His voice is gone. His face is growing dim. And if I like him now I do not know. He frightened me before he smiled. He did not ask me if he might. He said that he would come one Sunday night. He spoke to me as if I were a child. No year has been like this that has just gone by. It may be that what father says is true. If things are so it does not matter why. But everything has burned and not quite through. The colours of the world have turned to flame, the blue, the gold has burned in what used to be such a leaddened sky. When you are burned quite through, you die. Red is the strangest pain to bear. In spring the leaves on the budding trees. In summer the roses are worse than these. More terrible than they are sweet. A rose can stab you across the street deeper than any knife. And the crimson haunts you everywhere. Thin shafts of sunlight, like the ghosts of reddened swords have struck our stair, as if coming down you had spilt your life. I think that my soul is red, like the soul of a sword or a scarlet flower. But when these are dead they have had their hour. I shall have had mine too, for from head to feet I am burned and stabbed half through, and the pain is deadly sweet. The things that kill us seem blind to the death they give. It is only in our dream the things that kill us live. The room is shut where mother died. The other rooms are as they were. The world goes on the same outside. The sparrows fly across the square. The children play as we forwarded there. The trees grow green and brown and bare. The sun shines on the dead church-spire. And nothing lives here but the fire. While father watches from his chair, day follows day, the same or now and then a different gray, till like his hair, which mother said was wavy once and bright, they will all turn white. Tonight I heard a bell again. Outside it was the same mist of fine rain. The lamps just lighted down the long, dim street. No one for me. I think it is myself I go to meet. I do not care. Someday I shall not think, I shall not be. On the Asylum Road The more hen stepping from her reeds with dainty feet, the hair-bell bowing on his stem, danced not with us. Their pulses beat to fainter music, nor do we to them make their life sweet. The gayest crowd that they will ever pass are we to brother shadows in the lane. Our windows, too, are clouded glass. To them, yes, every pain. Jour des morts, c'est me tièr mon panace. Sweetheart, is this the last of all our posies, and little festivals, my flowers, are they but white and wistful ghosts of gayer roses shut with you in this grim garden? Not to-day. Ah, no! Come out with me before the grey gate closes. It is your fete, and here is your bouquet. End of Part 1 Part 2 of The Farmer's Bride This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Elizabeth Klett The Farmer's Bride by Charlotte Mew Part 2 The Forest Road The forest road, the infinite straight road stretching away, world without end, the breathless road between the walls of the black listening trees, the hushed grey road beyond the window that you shut to-night, crying that you would look at it by day. There is a shadow there that sings and calls, but not for you. Oh, hidden eyes that plead in sleep against the lonely dark, if I could touch the fear and leave it kissed away on quiet lids. If I could hush these hands that are half awake, groping for me in sleep, I could go free. I wish that God would take them out of mine, and fold them like the wings of frightened birds shot cruelly down, but fluttering into quietness so soon, broken, forgotten things. There is no grief for them in the green spring when the new birds fly back to the old trees. But it shall not be so with you. I will look back. I wish I knew that God would stand smiling and looking down on you in morning comes, to hold you when you wake, closer than I, so gently though, and not with famished lips or hungry arms. He does not hurt the frailest, dearest things as we do in the dark. See, dear, your hair! I must unloose this hair that sleeps and dreams about my face, and clings like the brown weed to drown delivered things, tossed by the tired sea back to the beaches. Oh! your hair! If you had lain a long time dead on the rough, glistening ledge of some black cliff, forgotten by the tide, the raving winds would tear, the dripping brine would rust away, fold after fold of all the loveliness that wraps you round, and makes you lying here, the passionate fragrance that the roses are. But death would spare the glory of your head, in the long sweetness of the hair that does not die. The spray would leap to it in every storm, the scent of the unsilenced sea would linger on in these dark waves, and round the silence that was you, only the nesting gulls would hear. But there would still be whispers in your hair. Keep them for me. Keep them for me. What is this singing on the road that makes all other music like the music in a dream, dumb to the dancing and the marching feet? You know in dreams you see old pipers playing that you cannot hear, and ghostly drums that only seem to beat. This seems to climb. Is it the music of a larger place? It makes our room too small. It is like a stare, a calling stare that climbs up to a smile you scarcely see, dim but so waited for. And you know what a smile is, how it calls, how if I smiled you always ran to me. Now you must sleep forgetfully, as children do. There is a spirit sits by us and sleep, nearer than those who walk with us in the bright day. I think he has a tranquil, saving face. I think he came straight from the hills. He may have suffered there in time gone by, and once from those forsaken heights looked down, lonely himself on all the lonely sorrows of the earth. It is his kingdom sleep. If I could leave you there. If without waking you I could get up and reach the door. We used to go together. Shut, scared eyes. Poor, desolate, desperate hands. It is not I who thrust you off. No, take your hands away. I cannot strike your lonely hands. Yes, I have struck your heart. It did not come so near. Then lie you there, dear and wild heart, behind this quivering snow, with two red stains on it, and I will strike and tear mine out and scatter it to yours. Oh, throbbing dust! You that were life, our little wind-blown hearts! The road! The road! There is a shadow there. I see my soul. I hear my soul singing among the trees. Madeline in church. Here in the darkness, where this plaster saint stands nearer than God stands to our distress, and one small candle shines, but not so faint as the far lights of everlastingness, I'd rather kneel then over there in open day where Christ is hanging, rather pray to something more like my own clay, not too divine. For once, perhaps, my little saint, before he got his niche and crown, had one short stroll about the town. It brings him closer. Just that taint, and any one can wash the paint off our poor faces, his and mine. Is that why I see Monty now? Equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold, but still with just the proper trace of earthliness on his shining wedding face. And then, gone suddenly blank and old, the hateful day of the divorce. Stuart got his hands down, of course, crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse, but Monty took it hard. All said and done, I liked him best. He was the first. He stands out clearer than the rest. It seems too funny all we other rips should have immortal souls. Monty and Reg quite damnably keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships. It's funny, too, how easily we sink. One might put up a monument, I think, to half the world and cut across it, lost at sea. I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night. No, it's no use this penny-light, or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown. The trees of Calvary are where they were, when we are sure that we can spare the tallest, let us go and strike it down, and leave the other two still standing there. I, too, would ask him to remember me, if there were any paradise beyond this earth that I could see. Oh, quiet Christ, who never knew the poisonous fangs that bite us through, and make us do the things we do. See how we suffer, and fight, and die. How helpless and how low we lie. God holds you, and you hang so high, though no one looking long at you can think you do not suffer, too. But up there, from your still-star-lighted tree, what can you know? What can you really see of this dark ditch, the soul of me? We are what we are. When I was half a child I could not sit watching black shadows on green lawns, and red carnations burning in the sun, without paying so heavily for it. That joy and pain like any mother and her unborn child were almost one. I could hardly bear the dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk, the thick, close voice of musk, the jessamine music on the thin-knight air, or sometimes my own hands about me, anywhere. The sight of my own face, for it was lovely then. Even the scent of my own hair. Oh, there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat my soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street. I think my body was my soul. And when we are made thus, who shall control our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet? Who shall teach us to thrust the world out of our heart? To say, till perhaps in death when the races run, and it is forced from us with our last breath, thy will be done. If it is your will that we should be content with the tame bloodless things, as pale as angels smirking by with folded wings. Oh, I know virtue, and the peace it brings. The temperate, well-worn smile the one man gives you when you are evermore his own. And afterwards the child's, for a little while, with its unknowing and all-seeing eyes so soon to change, and make you feel how quick the clock goes round. If one had learned the trick, how does one, though? Quite early on, of long, green pastures under placid skies, one might be walking now with patient truth. What did we ever care for it to have asked for youth, when, oh, my God, this is going, or has gone? There is a portrait of my mother at nineteen, with the black spaniel standing by the garden-seat, the dainty head held high against the painted green, and throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half-hottie and half-sweet. Her picture, then, but simply youth, or simply spring to me to-day, a radiance on the wall, so exquisite, so heartbreaking a thing beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small, sapless and lined like a dead leaf, all that was left of, oh, the loveliest face by time and grief. And in the glass last night I saw a ghost behind my chair. Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay? Or could, with any one of the old crew? But, oh, these boys, the solemn way they take you, and the things they say, this, I have only as long as you. When you remind them that you are not precisely twenty-two, although at heart, perhaps, God, if it were only the face, only the hair, if Jim had written to me as he did to-day, a year ago, and now it leaves me cold, I know what this means, old, old, old. Et avec ça, mais on avait su, tout supe. But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see how it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity. If there were fifty heavens, God could not give us back the child who went or never came. Here on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day, not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year's May, no shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday, for every hour they slant across the hedge a different way, the shadows are never the same. Find rest in him. One knows the parson's tags, back to the fold, across the evening fields like any flock of buying sheep. Yes, it may be, when he has shorn led us to slaughter torn the bleeding soul in us to rags, for so he giveth his beloved sleep. Oh, he will take us stripped and done, driven into his heart. So we are one. Then safe, safe are we, in the shelter of his everlasting wings. I do not envy him his victories, his arms are full of broken things. But I shall not be in them. Let him take the finer ones, the easier to break. And they are not gone, yet for me the lights, the colours, the perfumes, though now they speak rather insumptuous rooms, in silks and in gem-like wines. Here, even in this corner where my little candle shines, and overhead the lancet window glows with golds and crimsons, you could almost drink. To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think, there was the scent in every red and yellow rose of all the sunsets. But this place is gray and much too quiet. No one here. Why, this is awful. This is fear. Nothing to see, no face, nothing to hear except your heart beating in space as if the world was ended. Dead at last. Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast. These to go on with and alone to the slow end. No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend. Out of the long procession, black or white or red, not one left now to say, Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head. Only the doll's house looking on the park. Tonight, all nights, I know when the man puts the light out, very dark. With upstairs in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maid's footsteps overhead, then utter silence and the empty world, the room, the bed, the corpse. No, not quite dead while this cries out in me, but nearly, very soon to be a handful of forgotten dust. There must be someone, Christ, there must tell me there will be someone. Who, if there were no one else, could it be you? How old was Mary out of whom you cast so many devils? Was she young? Or perhaps for years she had sat staring with dry eyes at this and that man going past, till suddenly she saw you on the steps of Simon's house, and stood and looked at you through tears? I think she must have known by those the thing for what it was that had come to her. For some of us there is a passion, I suppose so far from earthly cares and earthly fears, that in its stillness you can hardly stir, or in its nearness lift your hand, so great that you have simply got to stand, looking at it through tears, through tears. Then straight from these there broke the kiss. I think you must have known by this, the thing for what it was that had come to you. She did not love you like the rest. It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best, she gave you something altogether new. And through it all, from her no word, she scarcely saw you scarcely heard. Surely you knew when she so touched you with her hair, or by the wet cheek lying there, and while her perfume clung to you from head to feet all through the day, that you can change the things for which we care, but even you, unless you kill us, not the way. This, then, was peace for her, but passion, too. I wonder, was it like a kiss that once I knew, the only one that I would care to take into the grave with me, to which, if there were afterwards, to wake. Almost as happy as the carven dead in some dim chancel lying head by head, we slept with it, but face to face the whole night through, one breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life, lost as I woke to hear in the strange earthly dawn his, Are you there? and lie still, listening to the wind outside among the furs. So Mary chose the dream of him for what was left to her of night and day. It is the only truth. It is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away. But if she had not touched him in the doorway of the dream, could she have cared so much? She was a sinner. We are what we are. The spirit afterwards. But first, the touch. And he has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears, and the happier guests who would not see, or if they did remember these, though they lived their thousand years. Outside, too gravely looking at me, he seems to stand. And looking at him, if my forgotten spirit came unwillingly back, what could it claim of those calm eyes, that quiet speech, breaking like a slow tide upon the beach, the scarred, not quite human hand? Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings, when it has learned so long not to think, not to be, again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things that I shall not see. I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head, when I was small and ever quite believed that he was dead, and at the convent school I used to lie awake in bed, thinking about his hands. It did not matter what they said. He was alive to me, so hurt, so hurt. And most of all in holy week when there was no one else to see, I used to think it would not hurt me, too, so terribly, if he had ever seemed to notice me, or if, for once, he would only speak. Expecto! Resurrectionem. O king, who hast the key of that dark room, the last which prisons us, but held not thee, thou knowest its gloom. Does thou a little love this one shut in to-night, young and so piteously alone, cold, out of sight? Thou knowest how hard and bare the pillow of that new-made narrow bed, then leave not there so dear ahead. On the road to the sea. We passed each other, turned and stopped for half an hour, then went our way. I, who make other women smile, did not make you. But no man can move mountains in a day, so this hard thing is yet to do. But first I want your life. Before I die I want to see the world that lies behind the strangeness of your eyes. There is nothing gay or green there for my gathering. It may be, yet on brown fields there lies a haunting purple bloom. Is there not something in grey skies and in grey sea? I want what world there is behind your eyes. I want your life, and you will not give it me. Now, if I look, I see you walking down the years, young and through august fields, a face, a thought, a swinging dream perched on a style. I would have liked, so vile we are, to have taught you tears, but most to have made you smile. Today is not enough, or yesterday. God sees it all. Your length on sunny lawns, the wakeful rainy nights. Tell me how vain to ask. But it is not a question, just a call. Show me then only your notched inches climbing up the garden wall. I like you best when you were small. Is this a stupid thing to say, not having spent with you one day? No matter. I shall never touch your hair, or hear the little tick behind your breast. Still it is there, and as a flying bird brushes the branches where it may not rest, I have brushed your hand and heard the child in you. I like that best. So small, so dark, so sweet. And were you also then too grave and wise? Always, I think. Then put your far-off little hand in mine, or let it rest. I will not stare into the early world beyond the opening eyes, or vex or scare what I love best. But I want your life before mine bleeds away. Here, not in heavenly hereafters. Soon, I want your smile this very afternoon. The last of all my vices, pleasant people used to say, I wanted, and I sometimes got, the moon. You know at dusk the last birds cry, and round the house the flap of the bat's low flight, trees that go black against the sky, and then, how soon the night. No shadow of you on any bright road again, and at the darkening end of this, what voice, whose kiss, as if you'd say. It is not I who have walked with you. It will not be I who take away peace, peace, my little handful of the gleener's grain from your reaped fields at the shut of day. Peace! Would you not rather die reeling with all the cannons at your ear? So at least would I, and I may not be here to-night, to-morrow morning, or next year. Still, I will let you keep your life a little while. See, dear? I have made you smile. The sunlit house. White through the gate it gleamed and slept in shuttered sunshine. The parched garden flowers, their fallen petals from the beds unswept, like children unloved and ill-kept, dreamed through the hours. Two blue hydranges by the blistered door, burned brown, watched there, and no one in the town cared to go past it night or day, though why this was, they wouldn't say. But I, the stranger, knew that I must stay, pace up the weed-grown paths and down, till one afternoon, there is just a doubt. But I fancy I heard a tiny shout from an upper window a bird flew out, and I went my way. The shade-catchers. I think they were about as high as hay-cocks are. They went running by, catching bits of shade in the sunny street. I've got one, cried sister to brother. I've got two. Now I've got another. But scutting away on their little bare feet, they left the shade in the sunny street. Le Sacre-Cœur, Montmartre. It is dark up here on the heights. Between the dome and the stars it is quiet too. While down there under the crowded lights flares the important face of you. Dear Paris of the hot white hands, the scarlet lips, the scented hair, une jolie fille à vendre, très chère. A thing of gaiety, a thing of sorrow, bought to-night, possessed, and tossed back to the mart again to-morrow, worth and over what you cost, while half your charm is that you are with all, like some un-purchasable star, so old, so young and infinite, and lost. It is dark on the dome-capped hill, serenely dark, divinely still. Yet here is the man who bought you first, dying of his immortal smart, your lover, the king with a broken heart, who, while you feasting, drink your fill, pass round the cup, not looking up, calls down to you, I thirst. A king with a broken heart. Mon Dieu, one breaks so many, cela peut se croire, to remember all c'est la mer à boire, and the first may come sa vieux. Perhaps there is still some keepsake, or one has possibly sold it for song. On ne peut pas toujours pleurer les morts. And this one, he has been dead so long. Song Love. Love to-day, my dear. Love is not always here. Wise maid know how soon grows seer the greenest leaf of spring. But no man knoweth whether it goeth when the wind bloweth so frail a thing. Love. Love, my dear, to-day. If the ship's in the bay, if the bird has come your way, that sings on summer trees, when his song felleth, and the ship saileth. No voice availeth to call back these. Saturday Market Bury your heart in some deep green hollow, or hide it up in a kind old tree. Better still give it the swallow when she goes over the sea. In Saturday Market there's eggs aplenty, and dead alive ducks with their legs tied down. Grey old gaffers and boys of twenty, girls and the women of the town. Pitchers and sugar-sticks, ribbons and laces, posies and whips and dickie-bird seed. Silver pieces and smiling faces. In Saturday Market they've all they need. What were you showing in Saturday Market that set it grinning from end to end? Girls and gaffers and boys of twenty. Cover it close with your shawl, my friend. Hasten you home with the laugh behind you. Over the down, out of sight. Fasten your door, though no one will find you. No one will look on a market night. See, you the shawl is wet, take out from under the red dead thing. In the white of the moon on the flags does it stir again. Well, and no wonder. Best make an end of it, bury it soon. If there is blood on the hearth, who will know it? Or blood on the stairs when a murder is over and done, why show it? In Saturday Market nobody cares. Then lie you straight on your bed for a short, short weeping, and still for a long, long rest. There's never a one in the town so sure of sleeping as you, in the house on the down, with a hole in your breast. Think no more of the swallow. Forget you, the sea. Never again remember the deep green hollow, or the top of the kind old tree. Arocombe Wood Some said, because he wouldn't spake, any words to women but yes and no, nor put out his hand for parson to shake, he must be bird-witted. But I do go by the lie of the barley that he did so, and I wish no better thing than to hold a rake like Dave in his time or to see him mow. Put up in churchyard a month ago, a bitter old soul they said, but it wasn't so. His heart were in Arocombe Wood, where he'd used to go to sit and talk with his shatter till sun went low. Though what it was all about, us all never know, and there ain't no memory in the place of the old man's footmark nor his face, Arocombe Wood do think more of a crow. Would be violets there in spring, in summer time the spiders lace, and come the fall the whizzle and race of the dry dead leaves when the wind gives chase, and on the eve of Christmas fall and snow. Sea Love Tied be run in the great world over, it was only last June month I mined that we was thinking the toss and the call in the breast of the lover so ever last in as the sea. Here's the same little fishes that sputter and swim with the moon's old glim on the grey wet sand, and him no more to me nor me to him than the wind going over my hand. The Road to Charity Do you remember the two old people we passed on the road to Charity, resting their sack on the stones by the drenched wayside, looking at us with their lightless eyes through the driving rain, and then out again to the rocks and the long white line of the tide? Frozen ghosts that were children once, husband and wife, father and mother, looking at us with those frozen eyes, have you ever seen anything quite so chilled or so old? But we, with our arms about each other, we did not feel the cold. I have been through the gates. His heart to me was a place of palaces and pinnacles and shining towers. I saw it then as we see things in dreams. I do not remember how long I slept. I remember the trees, and the high white walls, and how the sun was always on the towers. The walls are standing to-day, and the gates. I have been through the gates. I have groped. I have crept back, back. There is dust in the streets, and blood. They are empty. Darkness is over them. His heart is a place with the lights gone out, forsaken by great winds and the heavenly rain, unclean and unswept, like the heart of the holy city, old, blind, beautiful Jerusalem, over which Christ wept. The Cenotaph Not yet will those measureless fields be green again, where only yesterday the wild, sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed. There is a grave whose earth must hold too long, too deep a stain, though forever over it we may speak as proudly as we may tread. But here, where the waters by lonely hearths from the thrust of an inward sword have more slowly bled, we shall build the Cenotaph. Victory winged with peace winged, too, at the column's head, and over the stairway at the foot. Oh, here leave desolate, passionate hands to spread violets, roses and laurel, with the small, sweet, twinkling country things, speaking so wistfully of other springs, from the little gardens of little places where sun or sweetheart was born and bred. In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers, two lovers, two mothers, here, too, lies he. Under the purple, the green, the red, it is all young life. It must break some women's hearts to see such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed, only when all is done and said, God is not mocked, and neither are the dead. For this will stand in our marketplace. Who'll sell? Who'll buy? Will you or I lie each to each with the better grace, while looking into every busy whores and hucksters face as they drive their bargains, is the face of God and some young, piteous, murdered face.