Where there is luck only in three-leaf clover.
THOUSAND-AND-FIRST SHIP
In the fall of sixteen
In the cool of the afternoon
I saw Helena
Under a white moon—
I heard Helena
In a haunted doze
Say: “I know a gay place
Nobody knows.”
Her voice promised
She’d live with me there,
She’d bring everything—
I needn’t care:
Patches to mend my clothes
When they were torn,
Sunshine from Maryland,
Where I was born.
My kind of weather,
As wild as wild,
And a funny book
I wanted as a child;
Sugar and, you know,
Reason and Rhyme,
And water like water
I had one time.
There’d be an orchestra
Bingo! Bango!
Playing for us
To dance the tango,
And people would clap
When we arose,
At her sweet face
And my new clothes.
But more than all this
Was the promise she made
That nothing, nothing,
Ever would fade—
Nothing would fade
Winter or fall,
Nothing would fade,
Practically nothing at all.
Helena went off
And married another,
She may be dead
Or some man’s mother.
I have no grief left
But I’d like to know
If she took him
Where she promised we’d go.
CLAY FEET
Clear in the morning I can see them sometimes:
Men, gods and ghosts, slim girls and graces—
Then the light grows, noon burns, and soon there come times
When I see but the pale and ravaged places
Their glory long ago adorned.—And seeing
My whole soul falters as an invalid
Too often cheered. Did something in their being
Of worth go from them when my ideal did?
Men, gods and ghosts, cast down by that young damning,
You have no answer; I but heard you say,
“Why, we are weak. We failed a bit in shamming.”
—So I am free! Will freedom always weigh
So much around my heart? For your defection,
Break! You who had me in your keeping, break! Fall
From that great height to this great imperfection!
Yet I must weep.—Yet can I hate you all?
FIRST LOVE*
All my ways she wove of light,
Wove them all alive,
Made them warm and beauty bright. . .
So the trembling ambient air
Clothes the golden waters where
The pearl fishers dive.
When she wept and begged a kiss
Very close I’d hold her,
And I know so well in this
Fine fierce joy of memory
She was very young like me
Though half an aeon older.
Once she kissed me very long,
Tiptoed out the door,
Left me, took her light along,
Faded as a music fades. . .
Then I saw the changing shades,
Color-blind no more.
THE POPE AT CONFESSION
The gorgeous Vatican was steeped in night,
The organs trembled on my heart no more,
But with a blend of colors on my sight
I loitered through a somber corridor;
When suddenly I heard behind a screen
The faintest whisper as from one in prayer;
I glanced about, then passed, for I had seen
A hushed, dim-lighted room—and two were there.
A ragged friar, half in dream’s embrace,
Leaned sideways, soul intent, as if to seize
The last grey ice of sin that ached to melt
And faltered from the lips of him who knelt,
A little bent old man upon his knees
With pain and sorrow in his holy face.
MARCHING STREETS
Death shrouds the moon and the long dark deepens,
Hastens to the city, to the great stone heaps,
Blinds all eyes and lingers on the corners,
Whispers on the corners that the last soul sleeps.
Gay grow the streets now, torched by yellow lamp-light,
March all directions with a staid, slow tread;
East West they wander through the sodden city,
Rattle on the windows like the wan-faced dead.
Ears full of throbbing, a babe awakens startled,
Lends a tiny whimper to the still, dark doom;
Arms of the mother tighten round it gently,
Deaf to the marching in the far-flung gloom.
Old streets hoary with dead men’s footsteps,
Scarred with the coach-wheels of a gold old age;
Young streets, sand-white, fresh-jcemented, soulless,
Virgin with the pallor of the fresh-cut page.
Black mews and alleys, stealthy-eyed and tearless,
Shoes patched and coats torn, torn and dirty old;
Mire-stained and winding, poor streets and weary,
Trudge along with curses, harsh as icy cold.
White lanes and pink lanes, strung with purple roses,
Dancing from a meadow, weaving from a hill,
Beckoning the boy streets with stray smiles wanton,
Strung with purple roses that the dawn must chill.
Soon will they meet, tiptoe on the corners,
Kiss behind the foliage of the leaf-filled dark.
Avenues and highroads, bridlepaths and parkways,
All must trace the pattern that the street-lamps mark.
Steps stop sharp! A clamor and a running!
Light upon the corner spills the milk of dawn.
Now the lamps are fading and a blue-winged silence
Settles like a swallow on a dew-drenched lawn.
LAMP IN THE WINDOW*
Do you remember, before keys turned in the locks,
When life was a close-up, and not an occasional letter,
That I hated to swim naked from the rocks
While you liked absolutely nothing better?
Do you remember many hotel bureaus that had
Only three drawers? But the only bother
Was that each of us got holy, then got mad
Trying to give the third one to the other.
East, west, the little car turned, often wrong
Up an erroneous Alp, an unmapped Savoy river.
We blamed each other, wild were our words and strong,
And, in an hour, laughed and called it liver.
And, though the end was desolate and unkind:
To turn the calendar at June and find December
On the next leaf; still, stupid-got with grief, I find
These are the only quarrels that I can remember.
SAD CATASTROPHE
We don’t want visitors, we said:
They come and sit for hours and hours;
They come when we have gone to bed;
They are imprisoned here by showers;
They come when they are low and bored—
Drink from the bottle of your heart.
Once it is emptied, the gay horde,
Shouting the Rubaiyat, depart.
I balked: I was at work, I cried;
Appeared unshaven or not at all;
Was out of gin; the cook had died
Of small-pox—and more tales as tall.
On boor and friend I turned the same
Dull eye, the same impatient tone—
The ones with beauty,
sense and fame
Perceived we wished to be alone.
But dull folk, dreary ones and rude—
Long talker, lonely soul and quack—
Who hereto hadn’t dare intrude,
Found us alone, swarmed to attack,
Thought silence was attention; rage
An echo of their own home’s war—
Glad we had ceased to “be upstage.”
—But the nice people came no more.
OUR APRIL LETTER
This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly down the street.
Your voice far away on the phone.
Once I would have jumped like a clown through a hoop—but.
“Then the area of infection has increased? . . . Oh . . . What can I expect after all—I’ve had worse shocks, anyhow, I know and that’s something.” (Like hell it is, but it’s what you say to an X-ray doctor.)
Then the past whispering faint now on another phone:
“Is there any change?”
“Little or no change.”
“I see.”
The roller skates rain down the streets,
The black cars shine between the leaves,
Your voice far away:
“I am going with my daughter to the country. My husband left today. . . No he knows nothing.”
“Good.”
I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.
Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in.
Hold on, there’s a drop left there . . . No, it was just the way the light fell.
But your voice on the telephone. If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories . . .
April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint-box.
FRAGMENT
Every time I blow my nose I think of you
And the mellow noise it makes
Says I’ll be true—
With beers and wines
With Gertrude Steins,
With all of that
I’m through—
’Cause every time I blow my no-o-ose
I—think—of—you.
K
KARACTERS
A Portrait: She will never be able to build a house. She hops herself up on crazy arrogance at intervals and wanders around in the woods chopping down everything that looks like a tree {vide: sixteen or twenty short stories in the last year, all of them about as interesting as the average high-school product and yet all of them “talented”). When she comes near to making a clearing, it looks too much to her like all the other clearings she’s ever seen, so she fills it up with rubbish and debris and is ashamed even to speak of it afterwards. Driven, ordered, organized from without, she is a very useful individual—but her dominant idea and goal is freedom without responsibility, which is like gold without metal, spring without winter, youth without age, one of those maddening, coo-coo mirages of wild riches which make her a typical product of our generation. She is by no means lazy, yet when she chops down a tree she calls it work—whether it is in the clearing or not. She makes no distinction between work and mere sweat—less in the last few years since she has had arbitrarily to be led or driven.
Someone who was as if heart and brain had been removed and were kept in a canopic vase.
Lonsdale: “You don’t want to drink so much because you’ll make a lot of mistakes and develop sensibility and that’s a bad trait for business men.”
He had once been a pederast and he had perfected a trick of writing about all his affairs as if his boy friends had been girls, thus achieving feminine types of a certain spurious originality.
A dignity that would have been heavy save that behind it and carefully overlaid with gentleness, something bitter and bored showed through.
There was, for instance, Mr. Percy Wrackham, the branch manager, who spent his time making lists of the Princeton football team, and of the second team and the third team; one busy morning he made a list of all the quarterbacks at Princeton for thirty years. He was utterly unable to concentrate. His drawer was always full of such lists.
He abandoned the younger generation which had treated him so shabbily, and, using the connections he had made, blossomed out as a man of the world. His apprenticeship had been hard, but he had served it faithfully, and now he walked surefooted through the dangerous labyrinths of snobbery. People abruptly forgot everything about him except that they liked him and that he was usually around; so, as it frequently happens, he attained his position less through his positive virtues than through his ability to take it on the chin.
He was a warrior; for him, peace was only the interval between wars, and peace was destroying him.
“Against my better judgment,” he would say, having no judgment, and “obviously” and “precisely.”
From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.
A young lady “in pictures” who once, in the boom days of 1919, had been almost a star. It had been announced in the movie magazines that she was to “have her own company,” but the company had never materialized. The second girl did interviews with “cinema personalities”—interviews which began, “When one thinks of Lottie Jarvis, one pictures a voluptuous tigress of a woman.”
He has a dark future. He hates everything.
But if they haven’t, it all comes out the same. Only if they control themselves, they forget their emotion, and so they think they haven’t missed anything.
“Don’t get the idea that Seth doesn’t ask anything. He’s lived all his life off better minds than his own.”
Nicole’s attitude toward sickness was either a sympathy toward a tired or convalescent relation who didn’t need it— a sympathy which therefore was mere sentimentality, or else a fear when they were absolutely threatened with death. Toward real sickness—dirty, boring, unsympathetic—she could control no attitude—she had been brought up selfish in that regard. Often this was a source of anger and contempt to Dick.
Idea about Nicole [that she] can do everything, extroverts toward everything save people. So earth, flowers, pictures, voices, comparisons. [She] seems to writhe—no rest wherever she turns, like a tom-tom beat. Escapes over the line, where in fantasy alone she finds rest.
No first old man in an amateur production of a Victorian comedy was ever more pricked and prodded by the daily phenomena of life than was—
Mrs. Rogers’ voice drifted off on an indefinite note. She had never in her life compassed a generality until it had fallen familiarly on her ear from constant repetition.
Instinct of Peggy Joyce collecting jewelry instead of bonds.
List of Troubles:
Heart burn
Eczema
Piles
Flu
Night Sweats
Alcoholism
Infected Nose
Insomnia
Ruined Nerves
Chronic Cough
Aching Teeth
Shortness of Breath
Falling Hair
Cramps in Feet
Tingling Feet
Constipation
Cirrhosis of the Liver
Stomach Ulcers
Depression and Melancholia
He was wearing old white duck trousers with a Spanish flare and a few strange coins nodding at their seams, and a striped Riviera sweater, and straw shoes from the Bahamas, and an ancient Mexican hat. It was, for him, a typical costume, Diana thought. Always at Christmas she arranged to get him some odd foreign importation from parts
as far away as possible from Loudoun County.
When I like men I want to be like them—I want to lose the outer qualities that give me my individuality and be like them. I don’t want the man; I want to absorb into myself all the qualities that make him attractive and leave him out. I cling to my own innards. When I like women I want to own them, to dominate them, to have them admire me.
Like so many “men’s women,” she hid behind girls when available, as if challenging a man to break through and rescue her. Any group she was with became automatically a little club, protected by her frail, almost ethereal strength—tensile strength of thin fine wires.
The old woman afraid of aeroplanes.
When he was despised, it was rather more than usually annoying,—the last stages of throwing him over, I mean. For he knew it as soon as, if not sooner, than you, and seemed to hang about analyzing your actual method of accomplishing the business.
Fatality of Beauty: Man who instinctively with people he liked turned the left side of face, the ugly half, had corresponding reaction on brain, spinal chord, etc., and had charm.
Contrariwise, right side of face exact opposite. Perfect— made him self-conscious, paralyzed mental and nervous etc.
To be worked out.
The nervous quarrel between husband and wife, which had already caused sensitive passengers to have their tables changed in the dining salon.
He had a knowledge of the interior of Skull and Bones.
“You were so brave about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there, not able to move either way.”
Addresses in his pocket—mostly bootleggers and psychiatrists.
Inescapable racial childishness. In the act of enjoying anything, wanted to tell. Sandy, Annabel, etc., trying to get everything out of first meeting.
He seldom exuded liquor because now he had tuberculosis and couldn’t breathe very freely.
Just when somebody’s taken him up and making a big fuss over him, he pours the soup down his hostess’ back, kisses the serving maid and passes out in the dog kennel. But he’s done it too often. He’s run through about everybody, until there’s no one left
“You mustn’t do that, Abe,” protested Mary. “Abe spends half his time living up to engagements he makes when he’s tight. This spring in Paris he used to take dozens of cards and scraps of paper out of his pockets every morning, all scrawled with dates and obligations. He’d sit and brood over them for an hour before he dared tell me who was coming to lunch.”
The Crack-Up Page 15