I have sent my fires to cleanse
Away men’s dreams, to devour men’s
Poor dreams.
When I saw my fires, my proud
Fires lancing
A low gold cloud
I followed them, dancing.
For there is no threshold now.
No star-withstanding beams
Endure to force my pride to bow—
My pride to bow its head.
With a gold spear
I have pinned
My enemy stark
To the stars and the empty wind.
His light is dark.
His dreams are dead. His dear
And his dreams are dead.
Edward had long arranged to have a party next evening. The preparations were very laborious and dull, like those for almost all parties given by shy and homeless young men in conscientious return for accumulated hospitalities. Everybody in Edward’s circle had been invited such a long time ago that no excuses had been possible. Had Edward not reminded his friends constantly of the impending event they would by now have forgotten all about it.
In the morning at two o’clock Edward woke and realised with a sickening explosion of the mind that his party was certain to be an absolute and ridiculous failure. “Me, a host to twenty people? I can’t even take the responsibility of being a good guest....” He had made a great resolve. “I will invite Emily.”
He hoped that he would die before the party. As a solver of problems it is a fact that death has been over-rated. Edward miserably survived. He had spent three dollars out of his last few score on a room in a hotel in one of the eastern bay cities. He had missed the last Ferry home the night before. He took an unreasonably early Ferry back to San Francisco.
California mornings are very happy even if you are not in love. They fill you with happiness even if you have been drinking too much the night before. Tamalpais, San Francisco’s mountain, bore the sun full in her face. Her shoulders were wrapped in a rising cloud, her mantle was rose-gold and green and, in the folds of her mantle, she boasted a steel embroidery of redwoods. The mists about the eastern hills were loosed and were blowing towards the sea. The climbing suburb of Berkeley stood clear, flushed with gardens. A glaze of golden poppies lay on the slopes behind Berkeley. The scrub-oaks grew, close as shadows, in the little canyons. There was the rare gold-green of willows against cloud-colored masses of eucalyptus.
Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows. This, however, for better or worse, seems to be California’s ideal, and she will not rest till she has finished the task of turning herself into one long and lovely Lower Tooting.
Edward stepped from the Ferry into the shrill bell-like clamor of newspaper boys. He was always outrun on arriving in San Francisco by the hard-shouldered and agile business men who efficiently caught trams on the instant of disembarking from the Ferry. Edward ran among the women and the aged and he thought, “Half of me is very nearly happy this morning. Whatever the party’s like, Emily must be made to come to it. The half of me that thinks of seeing her is happy. The half that thinks of her seeing me is miserable. People are probably looking at me and saying, ‘There goes a man in love.’”
All the women’s stores on Geary Street were showing clothes that would have looked exquisite on Emily.
Edward left the tame urban street-car and mounted one of the wild open pulley-cars that soar up precipices to the crags where artists and Italian delicatessen merchants build their nests.
Miss Romero, in a kimono perhaps expressive of her soul, was preparing breakfast at an electric stove in the studio. Mr. Bird, in another kimono which showed a battle of sparrows on his spine, was washing last night’s glasses at the sink. Their cat lay on its side pressing its shoulder blades against the sleeping Victrola. It was a parasite of a cat; it prided itself on being a member of an ancient civilisation. It never moved except to move away. It had never seen a mouse fired in anger.
“I want to ask you three questions, Rhoda,” said Edward, who was not slow to notice that Miss Romero, after greeting him with automatic cordiality, managed to suggest irritation by the set of her shoulders as she bent over four nearly fried eggs.
“Surely, Edward,” agreed Miss Romero. “I’m good and busy, but go right ahead. Put your questions snappily, though, A, B, and C.”
“A,” said Edward obediently, “I want to come with you to Yosemite. In fact, Rhoda, please, I must come with you to Yosemite.”
“Dear Edward, why can’t you go when and where you’re wanted? Why do you have to do things so damned intensely and unlike other folks?”
“I’m never wanted.”
“Shucks.”
“The Britisher,” said Mr. Bird, “always has to try and act unlike other folks—that’s the only way he can remind us crude Colonials of his superiority. The Britisher is like a bull moose in carpet slippers sneezing at a poppy——”
“The American,” said Edward, mildly aroused, “takes a good deal of trouble to be eccentric too. Look at all these Cults and what not.... As a Britisher I should say that eccentric Britishers are fantastic; eccentric Americans are grotesque....”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, Edward Williams,” exclaimed Rhoda, “what’s eating you? You didn’t invent that dope. You stole it some place. Who’s been injecting aphorisms into you?”
“Emily,” replied Edward honestly. “She said it on the Ferry.”
This suggestion of criticism by two aliens at once caught Mr. Bird’s attention. “The Britisher,” he said, “is the most complacent creature on God’s earth——”
“Poor thing,” interrupted Rhoda, who, having been born in the United States, was not obliged to be so ecstatically American as was Mr. Bird, who originally came from Odessa. “In the presence of God’s own countrymen he just has to keep his end up some way. Do you like your fried eggs straight up or turned, British biped? Well, pass on to B.”
“B,” said Edward. “Will you let me off going to China?”
“But it’s all fixed up,” replied Rhoda. “And Melsie Stone Ponting wants you to take her kiddie across to his father in Shanghai. The father was awarded custody in the courts, but somehow she’s never gotten around to sending the boy. He’s so full of pep she thinks he’ll fall into the ocean or get knitted up with the engine the first day out.”
“I can’t go,” said Edward. “I’ve got a job.”
“You got a job between twelve and seven A. M.?” exclaimed Rhoda. “Well, say, listen, aren’t you the bright lad? What captain of industry have you picked up with in the small hours?”
“He’s picked up with Emily,” said Mr. Bird. Whenever he made a statement you could see him trying to think of something smart and incomprehensible to add to it. But this time he was interrupted.
“Now see here, Edward Williams,” said Miss Romero. “You can take it from me right now that there isn’t a scrap of use in your starting to rush Emily. Look at Emily.... Look at you.... Aw, shucks, Edward, you surely are—discouraging.”
“I notice that myself,” admitted Edward, burying his face in his hands.
During the depressed silence that followed, Miss Romero swept on to a divan some bananas which had been posing as still life on the table and arranged instead a more formal group of fried eggs and hot biscuits. They were half-way through breakfast before she said, in the voice of one starting a new subject, “Well, say, listen, Edward, don’t you want to come with Avery and Melsie Ponting and Banner Hope and me to Yosemite tomorrow? I’m just crazy to know what your reaction is to some of our National Parks.”
“I do want to,” said Edward.
“Melsie Ponting wants to have a talk with you about taking her little boy to the Orient, so that’ll suit her fine.”
“Emily,” added Avery Bird, “is going with another party to another place.”
Rhoda Romero was a merciful woman and, though Edward’s face was so tragic as to be ridiculous, she said, “Emily will meet us at Yosemite.”
“You haven’t treated us to C yet,” said Mr. Bird, going towards the door to show how entirely devoid of interest he expected C to be. Avery disliked most people, but he detested Edward. The view of Mr. Bird with which poor Edward was most familiar was that of his back as he sauntered away into another room. Whenever Edward noticed this he reminded himself morbidly of his own unpopularity, but apart from this he much preferred Mr. Bird’s absence to his savage tongue.
“Come out with me, Rhoda,” said Edward, “to one of those little beaches.... I am so excited ... and unhappy. You are the only person in the world crazy enough to be good to me.”
The little beaches line the southern shore of the Golden Gate. Great rocks—dragon’s teeth—are sown in the sand there, and these, turned into warriors, fight the storms. The sea beats against them and the sound of it is sometimes like whips and sometimes like guns. Now a rock stood between Edward and the sea. Each wave as it struck the rock threw up a fist of spray which opened quietly like a hand in the air.
“This party,” began Edward. “Rhoda, I adore Emily. I want Emily to come to my party and see me at the top of my hour. And yet how shall I make it my hour? Rhoda, Rhoda, can’t you save me? What kind of an hour can I have?”
“Why, Edward,” exclaimed Rhoda. “Believe me, folks are just the simplest animals in the world. Nobody despises anyone without he despises himself, and nobody despises a host who pays for good unpretentious eats and drinks at any amusing dive. Why don’t you think out some cute little notion to surprise us all. You’ve no idea how easy us folks are to amuse.”
Edward retired into the shadows of his agonised soul. He tried to imagine himself introducing a cute little notion with a light roguish gesture. “Now, folks, guess what’s going to happen next....” Could such words be uttered in Edward’s husky and heavy voice? And then what would happen? Something would try to happen and fail. Edward turned simultaneously hot and cold as he imagined the scene. Avery would say something about British humor. Rhoda would be noisy and helpful. Melsie Ponting would pretend to faint on the nearest man’s shoulder. And Emily——
“For I must invite Emily,” he said aloud. “I won’t have a party without Emily. Please, Rhoda, help me in this matter of Emily. Nobody helps me. You don’t know how terrible it is being me. It seems as if everyone were against me and as if I mattered to nobody. Yet I matter so dreadfully to myself. If you could——”
“Aw shucks, Edward,” said Rhoda, not unkindly. “What’s eating you? It seems like everything’s got to be agony to you. Agony’s your hobby, from the way you act; and you’re welcome to it, for me. But you don’t stop at that, you got to tell everybody how it is. Don’t we all feel blue now and then without having to act a hundred and fifty per cent intense about it? If you get any kick out of feeling that way about Emily, go ahead, go right on feeling it. But have a heart and let up on agony for a while.”
“Nobody’s on my side.... Nobody’s on my side....” said Edward, standing up and clenching his fists in half-conscious imitation of Emily’s vehement manner. “I’m not pretending, Rhoda; it is that I really do feel things a hundred and fifty per cent intense. Be gentle with me....”
“Gentle is my middle name,” said Rhoda, and she stood up and pressed a hand on each of his shoulders. “What do you want me to do, you pity-beggar?”
“Can’t you see how it is with me?” said Edward. “I’m not stupid. I’m not even slow, though I’m deaf. If I’m alert and confident I’m not even very deaf. But God is against me, and you are all against me, and nothing I do or say can ever be successful because there is nobody on my side to lead the applause. If I could even once come into a room and have people look up and say ‘Hurrah, here he is at last ...’ I’d be a different man. I’ve never heard that. I hardly dare to be alive against so much opposition. My own voice is terrible to me because there is no-one who wants to hear it. I am living on a giddy high peak of unhappiness. Once before I have been a little bit in love. To my first love I never spoke—without being interrupted by Jimmy saying something far more interesting. Or if I did speak she never listened. For she was one of Jimmy’s loves—and he had a dozen others in three years. I should think thirty women cried when he was killed.... If things didn’t matter to me so—I could have anything in the world I wanted. Rhoda, if I could be sure of myself for one minute—it would be worth while to be alive....”
As he said this, Edward saw the inner side of a long cylinder wave as it broke on a clear stretch of sand. It was the color of bright jade. The nearest wave was jade-green, and the wave behind it was a dull gold, and the wave behind that was a thick violet, and behind that ran waves of endless shades of blue. And behind all the waves stood the rust-red and amethyst hills.
“Worth while to be alive?” thought Edward. “What am I saying? I who can see so clearly.... Eyes in the world must always be happy, whatever hearts may be....”
His mind considered itself for a moment almost complacently. “In a way I must be rather an interesting feller. Lots of fellers get no kick at all out of impersonal things like colors and what not. I really get a certain kick out of being so unhappy. It is like being drunk, it makes one see more faerily....”
He looked at Rhoda again. She was smoking, leaning against a rock and drawing with a stick on the sand. Rhoda’s strong short hair never blew out of order. The tip of her nose was never shiny. Nothing undignified ever dared to happen to Rhoda.
He donned again his extravagantly appealing look. “Rhoda, if you could let me have an hour of my own. I have never had an hour of my own. Think of all the hours you have possessed—and spare me one. Let me take command to-night, let everybody see me in command ... let Emily see me....”
“Me—me ...” he thought. “What kind of a Me would Emily want to see?... There isn’t any cute little notion that would delight Emily.... She would be terribly stabbing and cold to a cute little notion....”
“Yet I will ride that hour,” he told himself in the street-car. “It must be my hour....”
These were poor Edward’s accomplishments.
He could do two card tricks, but anyone smart could see through them.
He could sing in an unresonant voice a few of the old sea-chanteys with which Jimmy used to inspire delighted applause.
He could make paper crabs. That was rather a cute notion. But not cute enough to be the life and soul of a party. The crabs would do as a side-line. This thought enlivened his wits a little.
He could write poetry. It was unhappy, offended poetry, but not always very bad. He himself recited it at night to himself and thought it good, but he was sure that nobody else in the world would understand it.
Edward had no capacity for being comfortable. He lived in a small room in a cheap hotel in San Francisco, and in that room there was no trace of Edward except Edward himself. The room was allowed to remain an undisguised hotel room. A defaced card of advertisements and hotel regulations was on the door, a green pottery spittoon on the floor, a gaudy but not clean cotton padded quilt on the bed. Even the dirty jokes which some predecessor had written on the wall were left, and on the dressing-table was the Gideon Society’s Bible, the flyleaf of which gave lists of texts to look up when business was bad or after making a successful deal.
In this heartless room Edward lived, with a telephone for his only companion. In this room that day he sat on the small stiff armless rocking-chair until he had made a resolve and then he spent thirty-five minutes at the telephone.
Nearly everybody in San Francisco writes poetry. Few San Franciscans would admit this, but most of them would rather like to have their productions accidentally discovered.
There was quite a decided rise in the stock of Edward’s party after he had telephoned his confused instructions to his guests. Edward imagined all his guests smiling tolerantly at their own folly and his. They would hunt in the pigeon-holes of their bureaux and bring out secret typescript. “Such nonsense,” they would say to themselves, reading their work with avidity and pleasure. Each guest would innocently anticipate in his heart the awed silence that would fall on the party as the last words of his poem were read.
Edward thought that he would write a poem for his party that would make everyone in the room pity him. He would make fun of death. Everyone would think, “Ah, poor soul, he has so much to bear, he must have infinite courage.” And they would think, “He has death in his eyes. Perhaps we have not been fine enough to understand him.” Edward thought that they would all feel a little inferior because their health was so good. He would sit beside Emily looking pale and brave. His deafness would give him an air of mystic withdrawal, not the usual air of stupidity. Nobody could ever think him stupid again after his poem had been read. It would be the first hour of his life, the first hour of a new life.
But in the end he could think of no really poignant rhyme to valley, so he selected an old poem about death which he had written in the Tube in London.
Most of the guests arrived early with their poems crackling in their bosoms. Already when Edward reached the rather dirty little French restaurant between two vacant lots above Chinatown there were two motor-cars clinging precariously to the steep cobbled street outside.
Melsie Ponting and two friends were shooting craps in the low mustard-colored basement room. Melsie greeted Edward by throwing her arms round his instantly wooden form, pinioning him and making him look ridiculous.
“I brought two boys to your party to jazz it up,” said Melsie. “Lon, Pike, Edward, meet each other.”
Lon and Pike were already kindly pretending to be drunk in order to enliven the party. Rhoda Romero was in the room and waved flippantly at Edward. The person behind her was not Emily, it was only Avery Bird.
“I left a message for Emily. She wasn’t in,” shouted Rhoda. Then Edward knew that Emily would not come.
All round the table were little paper crabs made by Edward in perspiring haste that afternoon, inscribed on their backs with the names of the guests, and brought down in a suitcase an hour before. Nobody noticed them. Everyone sat down without consulting the crabs. Edward cursed the crabs because they looked forlornly jocose and were not noticed.
There were several kind persons in the room who began to try and sit beside Edward when they noticed him making his way to the isolated head of the table. A thin yellow man with hair cut to resemble a wig began describing to Edward a new mousetrap now on sale in the Oakland hardware stores. Edward leaned forward and smiled numbly and thought that perhaps he was looking like a real host.
Trays full of cocktails came in, borne by eager dirty shirtsleeved waiters.
Emily came in behind the cocktails.
Edward pretended not to see her for a moment, having a vague idea that this would make him more valuable to Emily. Emily took off her hat with boy-like indifference and, before hanging it on a peg, waved it intimately at Edward.
“Great Scott, look at these too darling crabs. Look, they’re supposed to show us where to sit. Oh dear, we’ve all sat down wrong. My crab says I’m supposed to be Mr. Herbert B. Undressed. No, as you were. It’s Herbert B. Weinhard.”
A guest called Bossy was explaining to Edward across the bosoms of two intervening ladies his misgivings about the future of the canning trade.
“Never mind,” continued Emily in a voice as clear as a flute. “I’m going to make my crab look as if it was called Herbert Undressed.”
She was drawing faces on Edward’s crabs. They were no longer Edward’s crabs. His cute notion was simply being made cuter by Emily.
“Make my crab look like me, Emily.”
“No, do mine first....”
“Make Edward’s look like Edward....”
There was a great deal of giggling. The air round Emily was full of crumpled crabs. There was one in her hair. Everyone was talking now, but Edward was still entangled in the future of the canning trade. His only remark in the next fifteen minutes was, “Well, personally I never met a canner....” He realised at last that Bossy and he were haunted by the same fear—the fear of being left out. The canning trade was a bond between them. “At least we look as if we were talking,” thought Edward. Bossy was a university instructor with fair childlike hair contradicting the severity of horn-rimmed spectacles and a little imperial. To share a danger with him aroused in Edward no enthusiasm.
“My Lord!” he heard Melsie Ponting say. “I’m just sick of sitting next to Lon. I’ll tell the world he’s no gentleman. He’s just said something that I couldn’t possibly repeat in mixed company. Would anybody like me to?”
Emily shouted, “All right then, General Post!” Having arrived late she was sitting between two elderly women.
There was a deafening snarling and roaring of chairs pushed back. Everyone was changing seats. Edward sat still. It was a test of his hour, he thought, “If it really is to be my hour Emily will come and sit by me.” The two women on his left hand fled. Rhoda Romero on his right hand smiled at him and moved away. Bossy moved up. Edward was suddenly filled with panic because no-one was coming to sit on his right. Everyone would laugh at him. No-one was on his side. Edward rapidly reminded himself of the few persons in his experience who had professed to be fond of him. Jimmy ... the landlady’s daughter in Putney ... his mother ... young Henderson at school—but he had a clubfoot ... that amazing hatshop woman in Regent Street—but Jimmy had taken her over.... Quite a lot of people, Edward thought, trying to fight against his panic. “It doesn’t much matter if nobody appreciates me here.”
The room was dusty and hot and there were flies. A most exasperating fatigued fly could not muster energy to leave the neighborhood of Edward’s lips. Dismissed, it let itself fall through the air for half an inch and then settled languidly again on his face.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting ran up the room so that the floor shook. She sat with a florid gesture in the chair on Edward’s right. She looked at him with her head on one side, her manicured fingers fussily arranging the beads on her breast.
“There there,” she said to Edward. “Was it lonesome?” She puckered her strawberry-colored lips towards him. She dropped first her cigarette case and then her vanity bag. Edward felt smiling and busy sitting beside her. He was conscious of gratitude towards her.... The whole room was splashing with a choppy flood of talk. Edward’s ears hummed; he was drowning in noise.
“After all, I am host. It was because of me that they all came. It is only that I haven’t pulled the reins yet.”
“Did you bring a poem for us to hear?” he asked Melsie. “If so, you must hand it to me folded, so that I shall never know who it’s by.”
“My dear, you’ll kill me laughing.... Me, a highbrow? I’d swim across the bay sooner. But lots of the folks have brought things to read and they’re all handing them in to Rhoda Romero. I guess it’s that tin-trumpet voice of hers that makes them all think she’s such a dandy reader.”
She asked for something. All the time she was asking for something. She wanted a match. She wanted another plateful of the salad which had just been taken out of the room. She wanted a big coffee now instead of a little coffee later. She wanted champagne. She wanted advice about putting electric light in her garage, about whether she ought to let her little boy smoke cigars, about whether to send him to his father who had recently divorced her.
Edward rarely found himself in the gratifying position of adviser. His pleasure in the novelty, however, was partly the pleasure of revenge. “When Emily looks up this way she will see me being monopolised by another woman. Serve her right.” But Emily was perversely absorbed in Mr. Banner Hope, who was singing in a half-whisper a song which he hoped was coarse enough to bring him the reputation he desired. The uncertain way in which he sang it, however, robbed the song of whatever sting it may originally have possessed. Mr. Hope must often have wished that notoriety did not need such artificial buttresses. If only some woman would commit suicide for his sake he would be a made man, but you never can count on women.
“Nobody asked Hope to sing,” grumbled Edward.
“They’re all treating you real mean, honey,” said Mrs. Ponting. “Anybody would think it was that Emily’s party.”
“You’re not treating me mean,” said Edward gratefully. “Yet I don’t know.... Why were you so keen to sit by me?”
“Because I wanted to ask you something,” whispered Mrs. Ponting. “Edward, dear, I’m just crazy to find someone plumb reliable like you going out to China who’d take my kiddie out to his dad in the Orient. For I guess I’ve gotter let him go. Edward, you’d never guess what a big mother-heart I’ve got back of all my nonsense. My kiddie’s just home to me—all the home I’ve got, Edward. You’ve never seen him but I’d just love you and him to get together—he’s just a sunny-haired, blue-eyed, little honest-to-God American, tall for thirteen years—just as high as my heart, I often tell him....”
It was impossible for Edward not to be moved by sentiment. He was entirely uncynical. He was touched by vague reminders of motherhood and home and chubby baby-fingers and other movie properties. Yet all the time he knew that the thirteen-year-old sunbeam in question lived at a school near Sacramento which “made arrangements for board during vacations,” and that he had hardly ever since he was born had an opportunity to measure himself against his mother’s heart.
“I know you must be damn fond of him and all that,” mumbled Edward. “It must be beastly parting with him. But you can easily get Thomas Cook or the captain of the ship to take charge of him. He’d be as safe as houses.”
“Cook me no Cooks,” said Melsie Ponting archly. “There’s nobody to equal our Edward, don’t tell me. And Rhoda says you’re going to China anyway.”
“I’m not going to China.”
This announcement seemed to him to be fateful.
“Rhoda!” shouted Melsie in a quarrelsome voice. “You told me Edward was going to China.”
“So he is,” replied Rhoda with cold determination. She was very tired of Edward. He was a heavy friend, poor man.
“He says he’s not going now.”
“Aw, shucks.”
“Rhoda, read the poetry now,” called Emily. “I’m longing to hear everybody admire mine.”
“In the darkness of my room
I sit alone.
I am hungry;
I am thirsty;
I have no fire to warm me.
Let the stars be my meat;
Let the moon be my goblet of wine;
Let the burning dark sky be my fire.”
Rhoda read it as though it were a good poem. She had a golden, careful voice. When she had finished she said, “I seem to have heard that some place before.”
Emily added, “I think a person called Smith must have written it.”
Most people were afraid that their immediate neighbors might have written it. So only one other guest risked a comment, a man with a white excited face who said, “It has no sense and nothing whatever to commend it. Speed up.” His face was burning white with impatience; he was a fanatic of speed. Edward, looking at him, pitied himself because friends were so hard.
But really Edward was fortunate. About the table there were those whose presence in the position of friends Edward had not deserved or earned. No-one could think of San Francisco as it was in Edward’s time without remembering certain faces.... Those faces were part of the essential blessing of San Francisco.
The face of an old man in a radiance of long white hair and long white beard, the face of a connoisseur of gentleness, a face that never smiled without good cause, but in which no cause was good enough to kindle irritation.
The square keen face of the only woman in the world who can be witty even when she cries.
The face of a tyrant of benevolence; the only one of his many gifts that you must always acknowledge is his mood—if you fail to catch his mood, you offend—and perish in an avalanche of coals of fire.
Another face, sharp and changing, with the complexion of a child under careless grey hair. The face of an eager pessimist whose imagination peopled the worst of worlds with the best of men. He distrusted no man, only all mankind.
Faces of friends from whom poor Edward was too poor to claim friendship.
Rhoda read in a changed voice, with obvious serene enjoyment:
“Curse the rain.
Oh hell.
Oh hell.
The rain is zippety-zipping against the window.
Blurch—Blurch—the big drops.
Ikkle-ikkle-ikkle the little drops.
Ashes blown out of a hell of water.
Wriggle down a flat sky
After the squealing hunted wind
And the snarling thunder.
Blurch zippety ikkle ikkle ikkle.
The rain against the window
Oh hell.
I would rather wear a crown of golden thorns and find a pearl in every oyster on a golden
Dish
Than
Be a wet rag in a hell of water.”
“That,” said Avery Bird quickly, anxious to make his voice heard in the first silence, “is as full of meat as a unicorn’s belly in springtime. That’s real stuff.”
Other people murmured, “Too wet.” “Not sanitary.”
The white-faced apostle shouted, “Oh, get on, get on. The next one can’t be worse.”
“I can’t seem to get a hold on the rhythm,” said an innocent Canadian broker. Edward and he had made friends because both were familiar with the same supper places in the vicinity of Leicester Square. The broker had brought his wife, a rough-hewn looking lady, whose very hat seemed to be chipped out of marble and ornamented with a wooden feather.
“It is swollen with rhythm,” shouted Avery Bird. “It isn’t blatant enough, of course, to allow you to hear it. It is all that rhythm can be without being metronomic.”
Mr. Bird seemed so certain that nobody liked to contradict him. He leaned forward tapping the table angrily and glaring first at one fellow-guest and then at another.
“Speed up. Speed up.”
Rhoda read again:
“In a panic forlorn
I am haunting your corners.
I am dead without mourners,
I am dead yet unborn.
You will come to me later,
You will come very late.
Ah—must I wait,
Must I wait,
You unhurrying satyr?
My sisters shall make
Of their exquisite acres
Carved aisles for the breakers
Of sleep when they wake.
They are strung to an answer,
They are strung to a trance.
Ah, must they dance,
Must they dance,
You importunate dancer?”
“Negligible,” said Mr. Bird who had not yet recovered his temper.
Mr. Banner Hope added, “Woman’s stuff,” to show that he was a man.
Emily looked much disconcerted but she said, “I suppose it is a bit trivial.”
“And foggy, too,” added an alarming University student. “It has no message at all.”
“It is not worth writing or reading,” said the white critic in a final voice.
“It’s a song,” objected Emily. “And songs needn’t be messengers surely. Songs are for fancy to hear, not for brains to digest. Perhaps songs shouldn’t try to have any meaning at all. They shouldn’t try really to have even words. Or perhaps just beautiful words without sequence ... silver and asphodel and Merrimac and darling and mariposa and meagre and rusty....”
“Well, this song tries to have a meaning and fails,” said the student. He was a dark, thick young man, and his complacency, very logically, was not impaired at all by the poorness of his clothes or complexion. The fact that his collar was very high and not at all clean seemed typical of him.
Edward’s heart turned cold when he thought of his poem at the mercy of that young man. He said, “At least that last poem makes a picture behind my eyes.”
“It doesn’t penetrate behind mine, I’m glad to say,” said Melsie Ponting tartly, and many people laughed, supposing that she had said something witty. A smart voice is a great asset.
Rhoda began reading again with an abruptness which left many dazed for a few seconds.
“Damn it Jarge
You surely do get my billy
I asked for three silk ones
And all I can find in the package is some flannel pajamas and one of your loveletters
By the way Harass
Has only one R.
Well the Lord goes on loving Barkeley
At least we suppose he does
We have no evidence to the contrary.
I have——”
Edward saw a young woman undergraduate’s pink face shining towards him like a sun. Her eyes looked as though they were going to fall out. She was waving to Edward. Edward reflected that there were many things in the world that he did not understand. Why should a female undergraduate with whom he was only very slightly acquainted wave and wink so earnestly at him across a room? Was she feeling ill? Edward blamed himself for not understanding. “Our hero lives as if in a dream,” he thought. “Probably other men are quite used to this sort of thing. Perhaps she is making advances to me in a way entirely recognized in certain circles.” With his brooding eyes fixed upon the young woman, who was now pencilling a note, Edward listened to the poem.
“I have had five proposals this semester
One from an assistant instructor.
Have you read Millie’s scream
In the Liberator for March?
Yours body and soul
You’d prefer body to soul I guess
Janks.”
The young woman, Edward noticed, was, by means of signs, causing her note to be passed to Rhoda. “Notes for Rhoda but winks for me,” thought Edward, wrestling mildly with the problem.
“That poet has courage,” said the high-collared student. “To dispense wholly with form....”
“Yes, it needs courage to write that,” said Avery Bird, who was narrowing his eyes and nodding his head slowly. “It is of course callow, but then so are the chickens of ostriches. Query, does it dispense with form? There is a sort of antiphony—pajamas and the Lord—the lovesick instructor and the scream—like the leeward and windward sides of a wall....”
Rhoda announced, “Some nameless person has just passed me a note apologising for the last poem. It was a letter really, which he or she passed me by mistake in place of a poem.”
Rhoda’s voice brushed the incident aside and everyone tried to look as wise as though nothing had happened. Mr. Bird, only slightly disconcerted, began to point out to his neighbor how bright was the promise of poetry in a land where even common correspondence had a rhythm of its own.
Rhoda read,
Answer to a Friend’s Letter
“For me is such a table set?
Shall such a gate receive me?
For I am scarred and shamed, and yet
Nor scars nor shame can grieve me.
I come from a dear and desert shore
With dancing stars my feet before;
Shall these my friends forget me, or
Shall yours—believe me?
Yet I confess that, at your door,
My stars—did leave me.
Your gates are stark and beautiful
As are the brows of Mary.
Your golden bolt is light to pull
And yet my feet are wary.
Between a sword and another sword
I see the garden of the Lord
And young saints treading in accord
A path that may not vary.
A million saints in a marching horde
But never—a fairy.
There stand the trees defensive. There
Your cautious God encloses
In a siege of lancéd lavender
Dark fortresses of roses.
Your cautious God has paved his gate
With half a score of very strait
Expensive tablets, hewn in hate
And righteousness by Moses.
How decorus, how desolate,
The art—of Moses.”
As Rhoda drew breath for another verse, Edward noticed that his poem was the next in her sheaf.
And in that second or two of silence there was heard a curious growing clamor outside. It was like an impossibly metallic contact of wind against the window. For a minute everyone in the listening room had the insane feeling of experiencing something inexplicable. Then the leaping bestial yell of a fire engine approaching explained everything.
Mrs. Melsie Ponting was a smart woman. She was at the door first and, like drops from a rising mermaid, a trickle of small possessions was shaken from her as she ran; cigarettes, a lipstick, a matchbox, money, and the beads from a broken string.
“No hurry, no hurry...” shouted several men in laboriously indifferent voices, as the scraping chairs with one impulse shot, like splashing water, back from the central table. One man comforted many hearers by shouting jocosely, “Aw Gee, have a heart, you’re on my best corn....”
Edward thought he would save Emily. “Our hero’s first thought in danger was for his beloved....”
Emily was dancing about. “Oo, Edward, what a party!” She was sparkling with the pride which one feels on finding oneself present at an event. She was determined to save her hat and threw away blithely several hats which had alighted upon it.
They all arrived on the street, ashamed to have been so tense in their efforts to reach it.
The fire was in a house behind the restaurant. The fire engines were on another street, but a few firemen were keeping a space clear of onlookers on the vacant lots close by. The burning house had its back to them; it was looking away from them towards the bay like one in agony turning away to bite his lips. Like a tongue the smoke hung out of one window and sparks streamed down the smoke. There was a shaking glow on the other side of the house which lighted up the low bending sky. An inverted cone of smoke spun on the roof like a top. Edward felt somehow that the whole scene was upside down, that the sky was his vantage point, and the blowing fire like a flower of the sky. The cold and usual lights of fireless virgin cities round the bay looked incredibly stupid.
He could feel the cold and usual Edward inside him saying, “My party is spoilt by this damned piece of sensationalism. My luck all over.” But, “Oo, what a party,” was still in his ears, and his delighted eyes were full of the fire. He was indifferent to the poems or the twenty-five dollars owing for the futile supper.
The firemen had fat jaws and looked smugly efficient, but if one half closed one’s eyes and looked at them one could imagine they looked like heroes. Pursued by the dull, reluctant snakes of hose they entered the restaurant in order to turn a fusillade of water upon the enemy from an unexpected direction. Looking in through the steamy window of the basement, the delighted guests could see the bright helmets of the heroes going round the table about which so lately plates of commonplace pork and beans had circulated.
“My poem will never be read now,” thought Edward. Heroes had devoured the air in which his poem might have been read.
It was a very vulgar little fire after all. It would only have a line or two in tomorrow’s Examiner. Quite soon it admitted itself beaten, and the perforated house sat blanketed in smoke, looking very sheepish.
“Why, what d’you know about that,” said Mr. Hope, as the first fire-engine negligently moved away with a mild howl.
“Well, Edward, it’s your party,” said Rhoda. “What shall we do about it. I’ll say it’s late and not worth while to settle down again.”
“Don’t let’s read any more poems anyway,” said Edward.
Everyone began to say Good-bye in the street. All the automobiles of the guests opened their bright eyes like sleepy servants pretending they had never been asleep. To the loud snores of awaking engines Emily said to Edward, “I wish the law didn’t hate fire so. It would be fun to have a garden of fire and plant little seedling fires in the moonlight....”
“I don’t like fire. It makes a fool of one.”
Edward went into the restaurant to pay for the supper. The long hot room looked tired and almost indecent. The poems were scattered about the disordered table. A fallen bottle of wine had given up the ghost pillowed on a sheaf of poems and paper crabs. Edward found his own poem—which had been the leader of the sheaf—disgraced and brought very low. It was on the floor, and stamped upon it was the wet imprint of a rubber heel. As he picked it up he saw that Emily was waiting for him in the doorway. She came along the room towards him.
“Edward....” she said in an impatient voice, and took his arm and shook it. He could hardly hear what she said. She looked flushed and excited. Did she say, “It makes my life so lovely—to be loved?...” Did she say that?
Edward’s thoughts were in ashes. She was watching him so insolently. He crumpled the muddy copy of the poem and put it into her hand. He felt nothing but an angry anxiety that she should love his poem and that she should see how it had been insulted.
They heard Rhoda’s voice outside, “Emily.... Emily....”