Part 3
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
2
For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at the toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year’s-master’s-daughter’s two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust loose!
3
Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest doorknobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming doorknobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in pocket leaning upon my lamppost—why—I bring curses to a hag’s lips and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you—best to blush and out with it than back beaten after.
* * * * *
_In Holland at daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one sees the housemaids beating rugs before the small houses of such a city as Amsterdam, sweeping, scrubbing the low entry steps and polishing doorbells and doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman with a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a deserted canal to some late loiterer trudging aimlessly on beneath the gas lamps._
II.
1
Why go further? One might conceivably rectify the rhythm, study all out and arrive at the perfection of a tiger lily or a china doorknob. One might lift all out of the ruck, be a worthy successor to—the man in the moon. Instead of breaking the back of a willing phrase why not try to follow the wheel through—approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery. There’s as much reason one way as the other and then—one never knows—perhaps we’ll bring back Euridice—this time!
* * * * *
_Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest. And so it may be that once upon the way the end drives back upon the beginning and a stoppage will occur. At such a time the poet shrinks from the doom that is calling him forgetting the delicate rhythms of perfect beauty, preferring in his mind the gross buffetings of good and evil fortune._
2
_Ay dio!_ I could say so much were it not for the tunes changing, changing, darting so many ways. One step and the cart’s left you sprawling. Here’s the way! and—you’re hip bogged. And there’s blame of the light too: when eyes are humming birds who’ll tie them with a lead string? But it’s the tunes they want most,—send them skipping out at the tree tops. Whistle then! who’ld stop the leaves swarming; curving down the east in their braided jackets? Well enough—but there’s small comfort in naked branches when the heart’s not set that way.
* * * * *
_A man’s desire is to win his way to some hilltop. But against him seem to swarm a hundred jumping devils. These are his constant companions, these are the friendly images which he has invented out of his mind and which are inviting him to rest and to disport himself according to hidden reasons. The man being half a poet is cost down and longs to rid himself of his torment and his tormentors._
3
When you hang your clothes on the line you do not expect to see the line broken and them trailing in the mud. Nor would you expect to keep your hands clean by putting them in a dirty pocket. However and of course if you are a market man, fish, cheeses and the like going under your fingers every minute in the hour you would not leave off the business and expect to handle a basket of fine laces without at least mopping yourself on a towel, soiled as it may be. Then how will you expect a fine trickle of words to follow you through the intimacies of this dance without—oh, come let us walk together into the air awhile first. One must be watchman to much secret arrogance before his ways are tuned to these measures. You see there is a dip of the ground between us. You think you can leap up from your gross caresses of these creatures and at a gesture fling it all off and step out in silver to my finger tips. Ah, it is not that I do not wait for you, always! But my sweet fellow—you have broken yourself without purpose, you are—Hark! it is the music! Whence does it come? What! Out of the ground? Is it this that you have been preparing for me? Ha, goodbye, I have a rendez vous in the tips of three birch sisters. _Encouragé vos musiciens!_ Ask them to play faster. I will return—later. Ah you are kind. —and I? must dance with the wind, make my own snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fuge! Huzza then, this is the dance of the blue moss bank! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.
III.
1
So far away August green as it yet is. They say the sun still comes up o’mornings and it’s harvest moon now. Always one leaf at the peak twig swirling, swirling and apples rotting in the ditch.
2
My wife’s uncle went to school with Amundsen. After he, Amundsen, returned from the south pole there was a Scandinavian dinner, which bored Amundsen like a boyhood friend. There was a young woman at his table, silent and aloof from the rest. She left early and he restless at some impalpable delay apologized suddenly and went off with two friends, his great, lean bulk twitching agilely. One knew why the poles attracted him. Then my wife’s mother told me the same old thing, how a girl in their village jilted him years back. But the girl at the supper! Ah—that comes later when we are wiser and older.
3
What can it mean to you that a child wears pretty clothes and speaks three languages or that its mother goes to the best shops? It means: July has good need of his blazing sun. But if you pick one berry from the ash tree I’d not know it again for the same no matter how the rain washed. Make my bed of witchhazel twigs, said the old man, since they bloom on the brink of winter.
* * * * *
_There is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will. Of the air of the coldest room it will seem to build the hottest passions. Mozart would dance with his wife, whistling his own tune to keep the cold away and Villon ceased to write upon his Petit Testament only when the ink was frozen. But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with other matter._
IV.
1
Mamselle Day, Mamselle Day, come back again! Slip your clothes off!—the jingling of those little shell ornaments so deftly fastened—! The streets are turning in their covers. They smile with shut eyes. I have been twice to the moon since supper but she has nothing to tell me. Mamselle come back! I will be wiser this time.
* * * * *
_That which is past is past forever and no power of the imagination can bring it back again. Yet inasmuch as there are many lives being lived in the world, by virtue of sadness and regret we are enabled to partake to some small degree of those pleasures we have missed or lost but which others more fortunate than we are in the act of enjoying._
If one should catch me in this state! —wings would go at a bargain. Ah but to hold the world in the hand then— Here’s a brutal jumble. And if you move the stones, see the ants scurry. But it’s queen’s eggs they take first, tax their jaws most. Burrow, burrow, burrow! there’s sky that way too if the pit’s deep enough—so the stars tell us.
* * * * *
_It is an obsession of the gifted that by direct onslaught or by some back road of the intention they will win the recognition of the world. Cezanne. And inasmuch as some men have had a bare recognition in their lives the fiction is continued. But the sad truth is that since the imagination is nothing, nothing will come of it. Thus those necessary readjustments of sense which are the everyday affair of the mind are distorted and intensified in these individuals so that they frequently believe themselves to be the very helots of fortune, whereas nothing could be more ridiculous than to suppose this. However their strength will revive if it may be and finding a sweetness on the tongue of which they had no foreknowledge they set to work again with renewed vigor._
2
How smoothly the car runs. And these rows of celery, how they bitter the air—winter’s authentic foretaste. Here among these farms how the year has aged, yet here’s last year and the year before and all years. One might rest here time without end, watch out his stretch and see no other bending than spring to autumn, winter to summer and earth turning into leaves and leaves into earth and—how restful these long beet rows—the caress of the low clouds—the river lapping at the reeds. Was it ever so high as this, so full? How quickly we’ve come this far. Which way is north now? North now? why that way I think. Ah there’s the house at last, here’s April, but—the blinds are down! It’s all dark here. Scratch a hurried note. Slip it over the sill. Well, some other time.
* * * * *
How smoothly the car runs. This must be the road. Queer how a road juts in. How the dark catches among those trees! How the light clings to the canal! Yes there’s one table taken, we’ll not be alone. This place has possibilities. Will you bring _her_ here? Perhaps—and when we meet on the stair, shall we speak, say it is some acquaintance—or pass silent? Well, a jest’s a jest but how poor this tea is. Think of a life in this place, here in these hills by these truck farms. Whose life? Why there, back of you. If a woman laughs a little loudly one always thinks that way of her. But how she bedizens the country-side. Quite an old world glamour. If it were not for—but one cannot have everything. What poor tea it was. How cold it’s grown. Cheering, a light is that way among the trees. That heavy laugh! How it will rattle these branches in six weeks’ time.
3
The frontispiece is her portrait and further on—the obituary sermon: she held the school upon her shoulders. Did she. Well—turn in here then:—we found money in the blood and some in the room and on the stairs. My God I never knew a man had so much blood in his head! —and thirteen empty whisky bottles. I am sorry but those who come this way meet strange company. This is you see death’s canticle.
_A young woman who had excelled at intellectual pursuits, a person of great power in her sphere, died on the same night that a man was murdered in the next street, a fellow of very gross behavior. The poet takes advantage of this to send them on their way side by side without making the usual unhappy moral distinctions._
V.
1
Beautiful white corpse of night actually! So the north-west winds of death are mountain sweet after all! All the troubled stars are put to bed now: three bullets from wife’s hand none kindlier: in the crown, in the nape and one lower: three starlike holes among a million pocky pores and the moon of your mouth: Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and all stars melted forthwith into this one good white light over the inquest table,—the traditional moth beating its wings against it—except there are two here. But sweetest are the caresses of the county physician, a little clumsy perhaps—_mais_—! and the Prosecuting Attorney, Peter Valuzzi and the others, waving green arms of maples to the tinkling of the earliest ragpicker’s bells. Otherwise—: kindly stupid hands, kindly coarse voices, infinitely soothing, infinitely detached, infinitely beside the question, restfully babbling of how, where, why and night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.
* * * * *
_Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it as a criticism of conduct. So to accept it is to attempt to fit the emotions of a certain state to a preceding state to which they are in no way related. Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses._
2
It is the water we drink. It bubbles under every hill. How? Agh, you stop short of the root. Why, caught and the town goes mad. The haggard husband pirouettes in tights. The wolf-lean wife is rolling butter pats: it’s a clock striking the hour. Pshaw, they do things better in Bangkok,—here too, if there’s heads together. But up and leap at her throat! Bed’s at fault! Yet—I’ve seen three women prostrate, hands twisted in each other’s hair, teeth buried where the hold offered,—not a movement, not a cry more than a low meowling. Oh call me a lady and think you’ve caged me. Hell’s loose every minute, you hear? And the truth is there’s not an eye clapped to either way but someone comes off the dirtier for it. Who am I to wash hands and stand near the wall? I confess freely there’s not a bitch littered in the pound but my skin grows ruddier. Ask me and I’ll say: curfew for the ladies. Bah, two in the grass is the answer to that gesture. Here’s a text for you: Many daughters have done virtuously but thou excellest them all! And so you do, if the manner of a walk means anything. You walk in a different air from the others,—though your husband’s the better man and the charm won’t last a fortnight: the street’s kiss parried again. But give thought to your daughters’ food at mating time, you good men. Send them to hunt spring beauties beneath the sod this winter,—otherwise: hats off to the lady! One can afford to smile.
3
Marry in middle life and take the young thing home. Later in the year let the worst out. It’s odd how little the tune changes. Do worse—till your mind’s turning, then rush into repentence and the lady grown a hero while the clock strikes.
Here the harps have a short cadenza. It’s sunset back of the new cathedral and the purple river scum has set seaward. The car’s at the door. I’d not like to go alone tonight. I’ll pay you well. It’s the kings-evil. Speed! Speed! The sun’s self’s a chancre low in the west. Ha, how the great houses shine—for old time’s sake! For sale! For sale! The town’s gone another way. But I’m not fooled that easily. _Fort sale! Fort sale!_ if you read it aright. And Beauty’s own head on the pillow, _à la Muja Desnuda_! _O Contessa de Alba! Contessa de Alba!_ Never was there such a lewd wonder in the streets of Newark! Open the windows—but all’s boarded up here. Out with you, you sleepy doctors and lawyers you,—the sky’s afire and Calvary Church with its snail’s horns up, sniffing the dawn—o’ the wrong side! Let the trumpets blare! _Tutti i instrumenti!_ The world’s bound homeward.
* * * * *
_A man whose brain is slowly curdling due to a syphilitic infection acquired in early life calls on a friend to go with him on a journey to the city. The friend out of compassion goes, and, thinking of the condition of his unhappy companion, falls to pondering on the sights he sees as he is driven up one street and down another. It being evening he witnesses a dawn of great beauty striking backward upon the world in a reverse direction to the sun’s course and not knowing of what else to think discovers it to be the same power which has led his companion to destruction. At this he is inclined to scoff derisively at the city’s prone stupidity and to make light indeed of his friend’s misfortune._
VI.
1
Of course history is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game’s up. But—though killies have green backs and white bellies, _zut!_ for the bass and hawks! When we’ve tired of swimming we’ll go climb in the ledgy forest. Confute the sages.
2
Quarrel with a purple hanging because it’s no column from the Parthenon. Here’s splotchy velvet set to hide a door in the wall and there—there’s the man himself praying! Oh quarrel whether ’twas Pope Clement raped Persephone or—did the devil wear a mitre in that year? Come, there’s much use in being thin on a windy day if the cloth’s cut well. And oak leaves will not come on maples, nor birch trees either—that is provided—, but pass it over, pass it over.
* * * * *
_A woman of good figure, if she be young and gay, welcomes the wind that presses tight upon her from forehead to ankles revealing the impatient mountains and valleys of her secret desire. The wind brings release to her. But the wind is no blessing to all women. At the same time it is idle to quarrel over the relative merits of one thing and another, oak leaves will not come on maples. But there is a deeper folly yet in such quarreling: the perfections revealed by a Rembrandt are equal whether it be question of a laughing Saskia or an old woman cleaning her nails._
3
Think of some lady better than Rackham draws them: mere fairy stuff—some face that would be your face, were you of the right sex, some twenty years back of a still morning, some Lucretia out of the Vatican turned Carmelite, some double image cast over a Titian Venus by two eyes quicker than Titian’s hands were, some strange daughter of an inn-keeper,—some.… Call it a net to catch love’s twin doves and I’ll say to you: Look! and there’ll be the sky there and you’ll say the sky’s blue. Whisk the thing away now? What’s the sky now?
* * * * *
_By virtue of works of art the beauty of woman is released to flow whither it will up and down the years. The imagination transcends the thing itself. Kaffirs admire what they term beauty in their women but which is in official parlance a deformity. A Kaffir poet to be a good poet would praise that which is to him praiseworthy and we should be scandalized._
VII.
1
It is still warm enough to slip from the weeds into the lake’s edge, your clothes blushing in the grass and three small boys grinning behind the derelict hearth’s side. But summer is up among the huckleberries near the path’s end and snakes’ eggs lie curling in the sun on the lonely summit. But—well—let’s wish it were higher after all these years staring at it deplore the paunched clouds glimpse the sky’s thin counter-crest and plunge into the gulch. Sticky cobwebs tell of feverish midnights. Crack a rock (what’s a thousand years!) and send it crashing among the oaks! Wind a pine tree in a grey-worm’s net and play it for a trout; oh—but it’s the moon does that! No, summer has gone down the other side of the mountain. Carry home what we can. What have you brought off? Ah here are thimble-berries.
* * * * *
_In middle life the mind passes to a variegated October. This is the time youth in its faulty aspirations has set for the achievement of great summits. But having attained the mountain top one is not snatched into a cloud but the descent proffers its blandishments quite as a matter of course. At this the fellow is cast into a great confusion and rather plaintively looks about to see if any has fared better than he._
2
The little Polish Father of Kingsland does not understand, he cannot understand. These are exquisite differences never to be resolved. He comes at midnight through mid-winter slush to baptise a dying newborn; he smiles suavely and shruggs his shoulders: a clear middle A touched by a master—but he cannot understand. And Benny, Sharon, Henrietta, and Josephine, what is it to them? Yet jointly they come more into the way of the music. And white haired Miss Ball! The empty school is humming to her little melody played with one finger at the noon hour but it is beyond them all. There is much heavy breathing, many tight shut lips, a smothered laugh whiles, two laughs cracking together, three together sometimes and then a burst of wind lifting the dust again.
* * * * *
_Living with and upon and among the poor, those that gather in a few rooms, sometimes very clean, sometimes full of vermine, there are certain pestilential individuals, priests, school teachers, doctors, commercial agents of one sort or another who though they themselves are full of graceful perfections nevertheless contrive to be so complacent of their lot, floating as they are with the depth of a sea beneath them, as to be worthy only of amused contempt. Yet even to these sometimes there rises that which they think in their ignorance is a confused babble of aspiring voices not knowing what ancient harmonies these are to which they are so faultily listening._
3
What I like best’s the long unbroken line of the hills there. Yes, it’s a good view. Come, let’s visit the orchard. Here’s peaches twenty years on the branch. Not ripe yet!? Why—! Those hills! Those hills! But you’ld be young again! Well, fourteen’s a hard year for boy or girl, let alone one older driving the pricks in, but though there’s more in a song than the notes of it and a smile’s a pretty baby when you’ve none other—let’s not turn backward. Mumble the words, you understand, call them four brothers, strain to catch the sense but have to admit it’s in a language they’ve not taught you, a flaw somewhere,—and for answer: well, that long unbroken line of the hills there.
* * * * *
_Two people, an old man and a woman in early middle life, are talking together upon a small farm at which the woman has just arrived on a visit. They have walked to an orchard on the slope of a hill from which a distant range of mountains can be clearly made out. A third man, piecing together certain knowledge he has of the woman with what is being said before him is prompted to give rein to his imagination. This he does and hears many oblique sentences which escape the others._
_Coda._
Squalor and filth with a sweet cur nestling in the grimy blankets of your bed and on better roads striplings dreaming of wealth and happiness. Country life in America! The cackling grackle that dartled at the hill’s bottom have joined their flock and swing with the rest over a broken roof toward Dixie.
VIII.
1
Some fifteen years we’ll say I served this friend, was his valet, nurse, physician, fool and master: nothing too menial, to say the least. Enough of that: so.
* * * * *
Stand aside while they pass. This is what they found in the rock when it was cracked open: this fingernail. Hide your face among the lower leaves, here’s a meeting should have led to better things but—it is only one branch out of the forest and night pressing you for an answer! Velvet night weighing upon your eye-balls with gentle insistence; calling you away: Come with me, now, tonight! Come with me! now tonight.…
* * * * *