Complete Novels of E Nesbit

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by Edith Nesbit


  The sobs of our starving children, the tears of our heart-sick mothers,

  The moan of your murdered manhood crushed out by their wanton pressure,

  The wail of the life-long anguish that paid the price of their pleasure,

  These will make funeral music to speed the lost souls of them, brothers!

  ‘Shoulder to shoulder we march, and for those who go down mid the fighting

  With rifles in hand and pikes, and the red flag over them flying,

  Glad shall our hearts be for them — who die when our sun is lighting

  The warm, wide heavens, and sheds its lovely light on their dying.

  Fight, though we lose our dearest — fight, though the battle rages

  Fiercer and hotter than ever was fight in the world before:

  We must fight — how can men do less? If we die, what can men do more?

  And the sun of Freedom shall shine across our graves to the ages!’

  VIES MANQUÉES

  A YEAR ago we walked the wood —

  A year ago to-day;

  A blackbird fluttered round her brood

  Deep in the white-flowered may.

  We trod the happy woodland ways,

  Where sunset streamed between

  The hazel stems in long dusk rays,

  And turned to gold the green.

  A thrush sang where the ferns uncurled,

  And clouds of wind-flowers grew:

  I missed the meaning of the world

  From lack of love for you.

  You missed the beauty of the year,

  And failed its self to see,

  Through too much doubt and too much fear,

  And too much love of me.

  This year we hear the birds’ glad strain,

  Again the sunset glows,

  We walk the wild wet woods again,

  Again the wind-flower blows.

  In cloudy white the falling may

  Drifts down the scented wind,

  And so the secret drifts away

  Which we shall never find.

  Our drifted spirits are not free

  Spring’s secret springs to touch,

  For now you do not care for me,

  And I love you too much.

  A LAST APPEAL

  KNOWING our needs, hardly knowing our powers,

  Hear how we cry to you, brothers of ours! —

  Brothers in nature, pulse, passions, and pains,

  Our sins in you, and your blood in our veins.

  First in your palace, or last in our den,

  Basest or best, we are all of us men!

  Justice eternal cries out in our name,

  What is the least common manhood can claim?

  ‘Food that we make for you,

  Money we earn:

  Give us our share of them —

  Give us our turn.’

  Landowners, bankers, and merchants, we make

  Out of our lives this new wealth that you take.

  Have we earned only such pitiful dole

  As just holds worn body to desolate soul?

  When that soul is bewildered each day and perplext

  With the problem of how to get bread for the next,

  Is it better to end it, as some of us do,

  Or to fight it out bravely, still calling to you —

  ‘Food that we make for you,

  Money we earn:

  Give us our share of them —

  Give us our turn’?

  Ever more passionate grows our demand —

  Give us our share of our food and our land:

  Give us our rights, make us equal and free —

  Let us be all we are not, but might be.

  Our sons would be honest, our daughters be pure,

  If our wage were more certain, your vices less sure —

  Oh, you who are forging the fetters we feel,

  Hear our wild protest, our maddened appeal —

  ‘Food that we make for you,

  Money we earn:

  Give us our share of them —

  Give us our turn.’

  Hear us, and answer, while Time is your friend,

  Lest we be answered by God in the end;

  Lest, when the flame of His patience burns low,

  We be the weapon He shapes for His blow —

  Lest with His foot on your necks He shall stand,

  And appeal that you spurned be new-born as command,

  And thunder your doom, as you die by the rod

  Of the vengeance of man through the justice of God.

  ‘Food that we make for you,

  Money we earn:

  Give us our share of them —

  Give us our turn.’

  OVER AND DONE

  WE might have held back from Love’s draught divine

  For many a wistful sad-and-happy day,

  Tasting the voluntary sweet delay

  Of lips that at the cup’s edge touch the wine,

  Yet will not drink, knowing that when the fine

  Eagerly tasted thirst grows pain, they may

  Drink deep. We might have missed Love’s only way,

  And thou and I been never mine and thine.

  Instead, we sprang straight to the hidden shrine,

  Nor lingered in the temple’s outer part;

  We plucked our rose to die upon our heart,

  Nor left it on its tree to slowly pine:

  It dies more quickly, for our heart is hot;

  But, oh, if we had seen, yet plucked it not!

  OVER AND UNDONE

  IF one might hope that when we say farewell

  To life, we two might but be one at last!

  But we look back on a divided past,

  And a divided future must foretell.

  Apart we sowed the seed that flowers in hell,

  The seed that blooms in heaven apart we cast:

  See what remembrances my heart holds fast —

  Ask your own heart what deeds you deem done well!

  The memory I find my heaven in

  Is that one hand-touch you regret as sin;

  Your goodness, dear, that stood between us two

  And made my hell, may make a heaven for you;

  So evermore must lie our souls between

  The kiss unkissed, the infinite might-have-been!

  CHRISTMAS

  WITH garlands to grace it, with laughter to greet it,

  Christmas is here, holly-red and snow-white,

  Hung round with quaint legends, and old-as-life stories

  Of mystical beauty and lifelong delight;

  With dreams of the Christ-child, with Santa Claus fables,

  Without doubts to trouble or questions to break

  The absolute faith in the triumph of goodness,

  In God and in nature on guard for its sake;

  Without fear of death, with no memories of grief,

  Believing life clear as our cloudless belief;

  What wonder if rose-coloured Christmas appear

  As the happiest day of our happy child year?

  With the swiftness of thought, with the spring’s incompleteness,

  Childhood has passed, and its place is filled up;

  Hope suns our youth into midsummer sweetness,

  And the roses of love wreathe our life’s golden cup.

  We shall do — we shall dare — and our faith has no limit,

  Wrong must go down ‘neath the sword of the right

  And life is so joyous, and may be so glorious,

  And day looks so long, and so distant the night.

  We love — there are chances — and if we should meet

  The woman who holds all our heart at her feet

  At Christmas — would that not make Christmas more dear

  Than all other days of our love-lightened year?

  With the sadness of tears, with the speed of the swallow,

  Youth has gone by, and its hope and its faith;

&nb
sp; Love has grown into grief, and remembrance is anguish,

  And down the dim years sound the footsteps of death.

  There sit at our feast (for we still hold our revels)

  The phantom of hope and the spectre of truth.

  This life we believed in — how has it rewarded

  The passionate faith of our long-ago youth?

  Our hearth is deserted — our Christmas Day seems

  But the ghost of a day from a lifetime of dreams.

  Oh, lost voices that call us — we hear you — we hear!

  Oh, most desolate day of our desolate year!

  NEW YEAR SONG

  WE climb the hill; the mist conceals

  That valley where we could not stay;

  Surely this hill’s crest, gained, reveals

  The glory of the sunlit day.

  The hill is climbed. Still shadow-land —

  Still darkling looms another hill.

  Oh, weary feet! — climb that to find

  A new ascent, ‘mid shadows still!

  We dare not stop or think of rest,

  This one hill may be all that lies

  Between us and our souls’ desire —

  The splendour of the eastern skies.

  Through long long lives we till and tend,

  Sow, weed, and water, all in vain;

  Without the flower we looked to find,

  Each year springs blooms and dies again.

  Bowed down with our unanswered prayers,

  Our face averted from our past,

  We watch each year grow green, and cry,

  ‘Surely this brings our flower at last!’

  Failure on failure! What! tired out?

  Too tired to live? Heart, dare you die

  When this new year may bud and bear

  Your longed-for flower of Liberty?

  THE SINGING OF THE MAGNIFICAT

  A LEGEND

  IN midst of wide green pasture-lands, cut through

  By lines of alders bordering deep-banked streams,

  Where bulrushes and yellow iris grew,

  And rest and peace, and all the flowers of dreams,

  The Abbey stood — so still, it seemed a part

  Of the marsh-country’s almost pulseless heart.

  Where grey-green willows fringed the stream and pool,

  The lazy meek-faced cattle strayed to graze,

  Sheep in the meadows cropped the grasses cool,

  And silver fish shone through the watery ways,

  And many a load of fruit and load of corn

  Into the Abbey storehouses was borne.

  Yet though so much they had of life’s good things,

  The monks but held them as a sacred trust,

  Lent from the storehouse of the King of kings

  Till they, His stewards, should crumble back to dust.

  ‘Not as our own,’ they said, ‘but as the Lord’s,

  All that the stream yields, or the land affords.’

  And all the villages and hamlets near

  Knew the monks’ wealth, and how their wealth was spent.

  In tribulation, sickness, want, or fear,

  First to the Abbey all the peasants went,

  Certain to find a welcome, and to be

  Helped in the hour of their extremity.

  When plague or sickness smote the people sore,

  The Brothers prayed beside the dying bed,

  And nursed the sick back into health once more,

  And through the horror and the danger said:

  ‘How good is God, Who has such love for us,

  He lets us tend His suffering children thus!’

  They in their simple ways and works were glad:

  Yet all men must have sorrows of their own.

  And so a bitter grief the Brothers had,

  Nor mourned for others’ heaviness alone.

  This was the secret of their sorrowing,

  That not a monk in all the house could sing!

  Was it the damp air from the lovely marsh,

  Or strain of scarcely intermitted prayer,

  That made their voices, when they sang, as harsh

  As any frog’s that croaks in evening air —

  That made less music in their hymns to lie

  Than in the hoarsest wild-fowl’s hoarsest cry?

  If love could sweeten voice to sing a song,

  Theirs had been sweetest song was ever sung:

  But their hearts’ music reached their lips all wrong,

  The soul’s intent foiled by the traitorous tongue

  That marred the chapel’s peace, and seemed to scare

  The rapt devotion lingering in the air.

  The birds that in the chapel built their nests,

  And in the stone-work found their small lives fair,

  Flew thence with hurled wings and fluttering breasts

  When rang the bell to call the monks to prayer.

  ‘Why will they sing,’ they twittered, ‘why at all?

  In heaven their silence must be festival!’

  The brothers prayed with penance and with tears

  That God would let them give some little part

  Out for the solace of their own sad ears

  Of all the music crowded in their heart.

  Their nature and the marsh-air had their way,

  And still they sang more vilely every day.

  And all their prayers and fasts availing not

  To give them voices sweet, their souls’ desire,

  The Abbot said, ‘Gifts He did not allot

  God at our hands will not again require;

  The love He gives us He will ask again

  In love to Him and to our fellow-men.

  ‘Praise Him we must, and since we cannot praise

  As we would choose, we praise Him as we can.

  In heaven we shall be taught the angels’ ways

  Of singing — we afford to wait a span.

  In singing, as in toil, do ye your best;

  God will adjust the balance — do the rest!’

  But one good Brother, anxious to remove

  This, the reproach now laid on them so long,

  Rejected counsel, and for very love

  Besought a Brother, skilled in art of song,

  To come to them — his cloister far to leave —

  And sing Magnificat on Christmas Eve.

  So when each brown monk duly sought his place,

  By two and two, slow pacing to the choir,

  Shrined in his dark oak stall, the strange monk’s face

  Shone with a light as of devotion’s fire,

  Good, young and fair, his seemed a form wherein

  Pure beauty left no room at all for sin.

  And when the time for singing it had come,

  ‘Magnificat,’ face raised, and voice, he sang:

  Each in his stall the monks stood glad and dumb,

  As through the chancel’s dusk his voice outrang,

  Pure, clear, and perfect — as the thrushes sing

  Their first impulsive welcome of the spring.

  At the first notes the Abbot’s heart spoke low:

  ‘Oh God, accept this singing, seeing we,

  Had we the power, would ever praise Thee so —

  Would ever, Lord, Thou know’st, sing thus for Thee;

  Thus in our hearts Thy hymns are ever sung,

  As he Thou blessest sings them with his tongue.’

  But as the voice rose higher, and more sweet,

  The Abbot’s heart said, ‘Thou hast heard us grieve,

  And sent an angel from beside Thy feet,

  To sing Magnificat on Christmas Eve;

  To ease our ache of soul, and let us see

  How we some day in heaven shall sing to Thee.’

  Through the cold Christmas night the hymn rang out,

  In perfect cadence, clear as sunlit rain —

  Such heavenly music that the birds without

  Beat
their warm wings against the window pane,

  Scattering the frosted crystal snow outspread

  Upon the stone-lace and the window-lead.

  The white moon through the window seemed to gaze

  On the pure face and eyes the singer raised;

  The storm-wind hushed the clamour of its ways,

  God seemed to stoop to hear Himself thus praised,

  And breathless all the Brothers stood, and still

  Reached longing souls out to the music’s thrill.

  Old years came back, and half-remembered hours,

  Dreams of delight that never was to be,

  Mothers’ remembered kiss, the funeral flowers

  Laid on the grave of life’s felicity;

  An infinite dear passion of regret

  Swept through their hearts, and left their eyelids wet.

  The birds beat ever at the window, till

  They broke the pane, and so could entrance win;

  Their slender feet clung to the window-sill,

  And though with them the bitter air came in,

  The monks were glad that the birds too should hear,

  Since to God’s creatures all, His praise is dear.

  The lovely music waxed and waned, and sank,

  And brought less conscious sadness in its train,

  Unrecognised despair that thinks to thank

  God for a joy renounced, a chosen pain —

  And deems that peace which is but stifled life

  Dulled by a too-prolonged unfruitful strife.

  When, service done, the Brothers gathered round

  To thank the singer — modest-eyed, said he:

  ‘Not mine the grace, if grace indeed abound;

  God gave the power, if any power there be;

  If I in hymn or psalm clear voice can raise,

  As His the gift, so His be all the praise!’

  That night — the Abbot lying on his bed —

  A sudden flood of radiance on him fell,

  Poured from the crucifix above his head,

  And cast a stream of light across his cell —

  And in the fullest fervour of the light

  An Angel stood, glittering, and great, and white.

  His wings of thousand rainbow clouds seemed made,

  A thousand lamps of love shone in his eyes,

  The light of dawn upon his brows was laid,

  Odours of thousand flowers of Paradise

  Filled all the cell, and through the heart there stirred

  A sense of music that could not be heard.

  The Angel spoke — his voice was low and sweet

  As the sea’s murmur on low-lying shore —

  Or whisper of the wind in ripened wheat:

  ‘Brother,’ he said, ‘the God we both adore

 

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