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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d7b82bc --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,4 @@ +*.txt text eol=lf +*.htm text eol=lf +*.html text eol=lf +*.md text eol=lf diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..038029b --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #53756 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/53756) diff --git a/old/53756-0.txt b/old/53756-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 4aa7e3d..0000000 --- a/old/53756-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,1928 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Judgement of Valhalla, by Gilbert Frankau - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most -other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions -whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: The Judgement of Valhalla - -Author: Gilbert Frankau - -Release Date: December 17, 2016 [EBook #53756] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGEMENT OF VALHALLA *** - - - - -Produced by Cindy Horton, Brian Coe, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -book was produced from images made available by the -HathiTrust Digital Library.) - - - - - - - - - - THE JUDGEMENT - OF VALHALLA - - - BY - GILBERT FRANKAU - - - NEW YORK - FEDERAL PRINTING COMPANY - 1918 - - - - - Copyright, 1918 - GILBERT FRANKAU - - _All rights reserved_ - - - - -The Judgement of Valhalla - -BY GILBERT FRANKAU - - - - -_THE DESERTER_ - - - “I’m sorry I done it, Major.” - We bandaged the livid face; - And led him out, ere the wan sun rose, - To die his death of disgrace. - - The bolt-heads locked to the cartridge; - The rifles steadied to rest, - As cold stock nestled at colder cheek - And foresight lined on the breast. - - “_Fire!_” called the Sergeant-Major. - The muzzles flamed as he spoke: - And the shameless soul of a nameless man - Went up in the cordite-smoke. - - - - -_THE EYE AND THE TRUTH_ - - - Up from the fret of the earth-world, through the Seven Circles of - Flame, - With the seven holes in Its tunic for sign of the death-in-shame, - To the little gate of Valhalla the coward-spirit came. - - Cold, It crouched in the man-strong wind that sweeps Valhalla’s - floor; - Weak, It pawed and scratched on the wood; and howled, like a dog, - at the Door - Which is shut to the souls who are sped in shame, for ever and - evermore: - - For It snuffed the Meat of the Banquet-boards where the Threefold - Killers sit, - Where the Free Beer foams to the tankard-rim, and the Endless Smokes - are lit.... - And It saw the Nakéd Eye come out above the lintel-slit. - - And now It quailed at Nakéd Eye which judges the naked dead; - And now It snarled at Nakéd Truth that broodeth overhead; - And now It looked to the earth below where the gun-flames flickered - red. - - It muttered words It had learned on earth, the words of a black-coat - priest - Who had bade It pray to a pulpit god--but ever Eye’s Wrath - increased; - And It knew that Its words were empty words, and It whined like a - homeless beast: - - Till, black above the lintel-slit, the Nakéd Eye went out; - Till, loud across the Killer-Feasts, It heard the Killer-Shout-- - The three-fold song of them that slew, and died ... and had no - doubt. - - - - -_THE SONG OF THE RED-EDGED STEEL_ - - - _Below your black priest’s heaven, - Above his tinselled hell, - Beyond the Circles Seven, - The Red-Steel Killers dwell-- - The men who drave, to blade-ring home, behind the marching shell._ - - We knew not good nor evil, - Save only right of blade; - Yet neither god nor devil - Could hold us from our trade, - When once we watched the barrage lift, and splendidly afraid - - Came scrambling out of cover, - And staggered up the hill.... - The bullets whistled over; - Our sudden dead lay still; - And the mad machine-gun chatter drove us fighting-wild to kill. - - Then the death-light lit our faces, - And the death-mist floated red - O’er the crimson cratered places - Where his outposts crouched in dread.... - And we stabbed or clubbed them as they crouched; and shot them as - they fled; - - And floundered, torn and bleeding, - Over trenches, through the wire, - With the shrapnel-barrage leading - To the prey of our desire-- - To the men who rose to meet us from the blood-soaked battle-mire; - - Met them; gave and asked no quarter; - But, where we saw the Gray, - Plunged the edged steel of slaughter, - Stabbed home, and wrenched away.... - Till red wrists tired of killing-work, and none were left to slay. - - Now--while his fresh battalions - Moved up to the attack-- - Screaming like angry stallions, - His shells came charging back, - And stamped the ground with thunder-hooves and pawed it - spouting-black - - And breathed down poison-stenches - Upon us, leaping past.... - Panting, we turned his trenches; - And heard--each time we cast - From parapet to parados--the scything bullet-blast. - - Till the whistle told his coming; - Till we flung away the pick, - Heard our Lewis guns’ crazed drumming, - Grabbed our rifles, sighted quick, - Fired ... and watched his wounded writhing back from where his dead - lay thick. - - So we laboured--while we lasted: - Soaked in rain or parched in sun; - Bullet-riddled; fire-blasted; - Poisoned: fodder for the gun: - So we perished, and our bodies rotted in the ground they won. - - It heard the song of the First of the Dead, as It couched by the - lintel-post; - And the coward-soul would have given Its soul to be back with the - Red-Steel host.... - But Eye peered down; and It quailed at the Eye; and Nakéd Truth - said: “Lost.” - - And Eye went out. But It might not move; for, droned in the dark, It - heard - The Second Song of the Killer-men--word upon awful word - Cleaving the void with a shrill, keen sound like the wings of a - pouncing bird. - - - - -_THE SONG OF THE CRASHING WING_ - - - _Higher than tinselled heaven, - Lower than angels dare, - Loop to the fray, swoop on their prey, - The Killers of the Air._ - - We scorned the Galilean, - We mocked at Kingdom-Come: - The old gods knew our pæan-- - Our dawn-loud engine-hum: - - The old red gods of slaughter, - The gods before the Jew! - We heard their cruel laughter, - Shrill round us, as we flew: - - When, deaf to earth and pity, - Blind to the guns beneath, - We loosed upon the city - Our downward-plunging death. - - The Sun-God watched our flighting; - No Christian priest could tame - Our deathly stuttered fighting:-- - The whirled drum, spitting flame; - - The roar, of blades behind her; - The banking plane up-tossed; - The swerve that sought to blind her; - Masked faces, glimpsed and lost; - - The joy-stick wrenched to guide her; - The swift and saving zoom, - What time the shape beside her - Went spinning to its doom. - - No angel-wings might follow - Where, poised behind the fray, - We spied our Lord Apollo - Stoop down to mark his prey-- - - The hidden counter-forces; - The guns upon the road; - The tethered transport-horses, - Stampeding, as we showed-- - - Dun hawks of death, loud-roaring-- - A moment to their eyes: - And slew; and passed far-soaring; - And dwindled up the skies. - - But e’en Apollo’s pinions - Had faltered where we ran, - Low through his veiled dominions, - To lead the charging van! - - The tree-tops slathered under; - The Red-Steel Killers knew, - Hard overhead, the thunder - And backwash of her screw; - - The blurred clouds raced above her; - The blurred fields streaked below, - Where waited, crouched to cover, - The foremost of our foe; - - Banking, we saw his furrows - Leap at us, open wide: - Hell-raked the man-packed burrows; - And crashed--and crashing, died. - - It heard the song of the Dead in Air, as It huddled against the - gate; - And once again the Eye peered down--red-rimmed with scorn and hate - For the shameless soul of the nameless one who had neither foe nor - mate. - - And Eye was shut. But Nakéd Truth bent down to mock the Thing:-- - “Thou hast heard the Song of the Red-edged Steel, and the Song of - the Crashing Wing: - Shall the word of a black-coat priest avail at Valhalla’s - harvesting? - - Shalt _thou_ pass free to the Seven Halls--whose life in shame was - sped?” - And Truth was dumb. But the brooding word still echoed overhead, - As roaring down the void outburst the last loud song of the dead. - - - - -_THE SONG OF THE GUNNER-DEAD_ - - - _In Thor’s own red Valhalla, - Which priest may not unbar; - But only Nakéd Truth and Eye, - Last arbiters of War; - Feast, by stark right of courage, - The Killers from Afar._ - - We put no trust in heaven, - We had no fear of hell; - But lined, and ranged, and timed to clock, - Our barrage-curtains fell, - When guns gave tongue and breech-blocks swung - And palms rammed home the shell. - - The Red-Steel ranks edged forward, - And vanished in our smoke; - Back from his churning craters, - The Gray Man reeled and broke; - While, fast as sweat could lay and set, - Our rocking muzzles spoke. - - We blew him from the village; - We chased him through the wood: - Till, tiny on the crest-line - Where once his trenches stood, - We watched the wag of sending flag - That told our work was good: - - Till, red behind the branches, - The death-sun sank to blood; - And the Red-Steel Killers rested.... - But we, by swamp and flood, - Through mirk and night--his shells for light-- - Blaspheming, choked with mud, - - Roped to the tilting axles, - Man-handled up the crest; - And wrenched our plunging gun-teams - Foam-flecked from jowl to breast, - Downwards, and on, where trench-lights shone-- - For _we_, we might not rest! - - Shell-deafened; soaked and sleepless; - Short-handed; under fire; - Days upon nights unending, - We wrought, and dared not tire-- - With whip and bit from dump to pit, - From pit to trench with wire. - - The Killers in the Open, - The Killers down the Wind, - They saw the Gray Man eye to eye-- - But _we_, we fought him blind, - Nor knew whence came the screaming flame - That killed us, miles behind. - - Yet, when the triple rockets - Flew skyward, blazed and paled, - For sign the lines were broken; - When the Red Steel naught availed; - When, through the smoke, on shield and spoke - His rifle bullets hailed; - - When we waited, dazed and hopeless, - Till the layer’s eye could trace - Helmets, bobbing just above us - Like mad jockeys in a race.... - Then--loaded, laid, and unafraid, - We met him face to face; - - Jerked the trigger; felt the trunnions - Rock and quiver; saw the flail - Of our zero-fuses blast him; - Saw his gapping ranks turn tail; - Heard the charging-cheer behind us ... - And dropped dead across the trail. - - - - -_VALHALLA’S VERDICT_ - - - It heard the Song of the Gunner-Dead die out to a sullen roar: - But Nakéd Truth said never a word; and Eye peered down no more. - For Eye had seen; and Truth had judged ... and It might not pass - the Door! - - And now, like a dog in the dark, It shrank from the voice of a man - It knew:-- - “There are empty seats at the Banquet-board, but there’s never a - seat for you; - For they will not drink with a coward soul, the stark red men who - slew. - - There’s meat and to spare, at the Killer-Feasts where Thor’s swung - hammer twirls; - There’s beer and enough, in the Free Canteen where the Endless Smoke - upcurls; - There are lips and lips, for the Killer-Men, in the Hall of the - Dancing-Girls. - - There’s a place for any that passes clean--but for you there’s never - a place: - The Endless Smoke would blacken your lips, and the Girls would spit - in your face; - And the Beer and the Meat go sour on your guts--for you died the - death of disgrace. - - We were pals on earth: but by God’s brave Son and the bomb that I - reached too late, - I damn the day and I blast the hour when first I called you mate; - And I’d sell my soul for one of my feet, to hack you from the gate-- - - To hack you hence to the lukewarm hells that the priest-made ovens - heat, - Or the faked-pearl heaven of pulpit gods, where the sheep-faced - angels bleat - And the halo’s rim is as hard to the head as the gilded floor to - the feet.” - - * * * * * - - It heard the stumps of Its one-time mate go waddling back to the - Feast. - And, once and again, It whined for the Meat; ere It slunk, like a - tongue-lashed beast, - To the tinselled heaven of pulpit gods and the tinselled hell of - their priest. - - - - -Aimée - - - - -_WIFE AND COUNTRY_ - - - Dear, let me thank you for this: - That you made me remember, in fight, - England--all mine at your kiss, - At the touch of your hands in the night: - England--your giving’s delight. - - - - -_MOTHER AND MATE_ - - - Lightly she slept, that splendid mother mine - Who faced death, undismayed, two hopeless years.... - (“Think of me sometimes, son, but not with tears - Lest my soul grieve,” she writes. Oh, this divine - Unselfishness!) ... - Her favourite print smiled down-- - The stippled Cupid, Bartolozzi-brown-- - Upon my sorrow. Fire-gleams, fitful, played - Among her playthings--Toby mugs and jade.... - - And then I dreamed that--suddenly, strangely clear-- - A voice I knew not, faltered at my ear: - “Courage!” ... Your own dear voice, loved since, and known! - - And now that she sleeps well, come times _her_ voice - Whispers in day-dreams: “Courage, son! Rejoice - That, leaving you, I left you not alone.” - - - - -_MEETING_ - - - I came from the City of Fear, - From the scarred brown land of pain, - Back into life again ... - And I thought, as the leave-boat rolled - Under the veering stars-- - Wind a-shriek in her spars-- - Shivering there, and cold, - Of music, of warmth, and of wine-- - To be mine - For a whole short week ... - And I thought, adrowse in the train, - Of London, suddenly near; - And of how--small doubt--I should find - There, as of old, - Some woman--foolishly kind: - Fingers to hold, - A cheek, - A mouth to kiss--and forget, - Forget in a little while, - Forget - When I came again - To the scarred brown land of pain, - To the sodden things and the vile, - And the tedious battle-fret. - - My dear, - I cannot forget! - Not even here - In this City of Fear. - - I remember the poise of your head, - And your look, and the words you said - When we met, - And the waxen bloom at your breast, - And the sable fur that caressed - Your smooth white wrists, and your hands ... - Remember them yet, - Here - In the desolate lands; - Remember your shy - Strange air, - And growing aware-- - I, - Who had reckoned love - Man’s toy for an hour-- - Of love’s hidden power: - A thrill - That moved me to touch and adore - Some intimate thing that you wore-- - A glove, - Or the flower - A-glow at your breast, - The frill - Of fur that circled your wrist ... - These, had my hands caressed; - These, not you, had I kissed-- - I, - Who had thought love’s fires - Only desires. - - Dear, - That hidden power thrills in me yet. - There is never one hour-- - Not even here - In this City of Fear-- - When I quite forget. - - - - -_MUSIC AND WINE_ - - - When the ink has dried on the pen, - When the sword returns to its sheath; - When the world of women and men, - And the waters around and beneath, - Char and shrivel and burn-- - What will God give in return?... - Has He better to offer in heaven above - Than wine and music, laughter and love? - - Laughter, music and wine, - The promise of love in your eyes ... - Sleeping, I dream them mine; - Waking, my spirit cries-- - Here in the mud and the rain-- - “God, give me London again! - I would lose all earth and the heavens above - For just one banquet of laughter and love.” - - When my flesh returns to its earth, - When my pen is dust as my sword; - If one thing I wrought find worth - In the eyes of our kindly Lord, - I will only ask of His grace - That He grant us a lowly place - Where his warriors toast Him, in heaven above, - With wine and music, laughter and love. - - - - -_THE GAMBLE_ - - - If man backs horses, plays cards or dice, - Or bets on an ivory ball, - He knows the rules, and he reckons the price-- - Be it one half-crown, or his all. - (And it isn’t sense, and it isn’t pluck, - To double the stakes when you’re out of luck!) - - If he plays--with his life for a limit--here, - It’s an even-money game: - He can lay on the Red--which is Conquered Fear, - Or the Black--which is Utter Shame. - (And there isn’t much choice between Reds and Blacks, - For Death throws “zero” whichever he backs.) - - So that whether man plays for the red gold’s wealth - Where the little ball clicks and spins, - Or hazards his life in the black night’s stealth - When machine-gun fire begins-- - It’s a limited gamble; and each of us knows - What he stands to lose ere the tables close. - - But woman’s gamble--(there’s only one: - And it takes some pluck to play, - When the rules are broke ere the game’s begun; - When, lose _or_ win, you must pay!)-- - Is a double wager on human kind, - A limitless risk--and she goes it blind. - - For she stakes, at love, on a single throw, - Pride, Honour, Scruples and Fears, - And dreams no lover can hope to know, - And the gold of the after-years. - (And all for a man; and there’s no man lives - Who is worth the odds that a woman gives.) - - So that since you hazarded this for me - On the day love’s die was cast, - I’ll love you--gambler!--while “fours” beat three; - And I’ll lay on our love to last, - So long as a man will wager a price - On a horse or a card or the ball or the dice. - - - - -_NINON AND ROSES_ - - - Here, in a land where hardly a rose is, - Silkiest blossoms of broidered flowers - Brush my cheek as each tired eye closes, - Haunt my sleep through the desolate hours. - - Roses never of nature’s making, - Roses loved for a rose-red night, - Roses visioned at dawn-light’s breaking - Veiling a bosom as roses white! - - Why does the ghost of you linger and stay with me-- - Ghost of the rose-buds that perfumed our bed, - Ghost of a rose-girl who blossomed to play with me-- - Here in a land where the roses are dead? - - Day-time and night-time the death-flower blazes, - Saffron at gun-lip and orange and red, - Here where June’s rose-tree lies shattered as May’s is, - Here where I dream of the nights that are dead-- - - Nights that were sweet with the scent and the touch of you, - Rose-girl in ninon with buds at your breast, - Rose-girl who promised and granted so much of you, - All that was tender and all that was best. - - Growl of the guns cannot shatter the dream of you, - Banish the thought of one exquisite hour, - Or the scent of your hair in the dawn, or the gleam of you - White as white roses through roses a-flower. - - - - -_PARTING_ - - - Times more than once, all ways about the world, - Have I clasped hands; waved sorrowful good-bye; - Watched far cliffs fading, till my sea-wake swirled - To mingle bluely with a landless sky: - Then--even as the sea-drowned cliffs behind-- - Felt sorrow drowning into memory; - And heard, in every thrill of every wind, - New voices welcoming across the sea. - - Until it seemed nor land nor love had power - To hold my heart in any firm duress: - Grieving, I sorrowed but a little hour; - Loving, I knew desire’s sure faithfulness: - Until, by many a love dissatisfied, - Of each mistrustful and to each untrue, - I found--as one who, having long denied, - Finds faith at last--this greater Love, in you. - - Parting? We are not parted, woman mine! - Though hands have clasped, though lips have kissed good-bye; - Though towns glide past, and fields, and fields of brine-- - My body takes the warrior-way, not I. - I am still with you; you, with me; one heart; - One equal union, soul to certain soul: - Time cannot sever us, nor sorrow part, - Nor any sea, who keep our vision whole. - - How can I grieve, who know your spirit near; - Who watch with newly understanding eyes - This England of your giving, newly dear, - Sink where my sea-wake swirls to darkling skies? - Lilac, her cliffs have faded into mist.... - Yet still I hold them white in memory, - Feeling, against these lips your lips have kissed, - The home-wind thrilling down an English sea. - - - - -The Other Side - - - - -_THE OTHER SIDE_ - - - Just got your letter and the poems. Thanks. - You always were a brainy sort of chap: - Though pretty useless as a subaltern-- - Too much imagination, not enough - Of that rare quality, sound commonsense - And so you’ve managed to get on the Staff: - Influence, I suppose: a Captain, too! - How do tabs suit you? Are they blue or green? - - About your book. I’ve read it carefully, - So has Macfaddyen (you remember him, - The light-haired chap who joined us after Loos?); - And candidly, we don’t think much of it. - The piece about the horses isn’t bad; - But all the rest, excuse the word, are tripe-- - The same old tripe we’ve read a thousand times. - - My grief, but we’re fed up to the back-teeth - With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff - That seems to please the idiots at home. - You know the kind of thing, or used to know: - “Heroes who laugh while Fritz is strafing them”-- - (I don’t remember that _you_ found it fun, - The day they shelled us out of Blouwpoort Farm!) - “After the fight. Our cheery wounded. Note - The smile of victory: it won’t come off”-- - (Of course they smile; so’d you, if you’d escaped, - And saw three months of hospital ahead.... - They don’t smile, much, when they’re shipped back to France!) - “Out for the Great Adventure”--(twenty-five - Fat, smirking wasters in some O.T.C., - Who just avoided the Conscription Act!) - “A strenuous woman-worker for the Cause”-- - (Miss Trixie Toogood of the Gaiety, - Who helped to pauperize a few Belgiques - In the great cause of self-advertisement!) ... - - Lord knows, the newspapers are bad enough; - But they’ve got some excuse--the censorship-- - Helping to keep their readers’ spirits up-- - Giving the public what it wants: (besides, - One mustn’t blame the press, the press has done - More than its share to help us win this war-- - More than some other people I could name): - But what’s the good of war-books, if they fail - To give civilian-readers an idea - Of what life _is_ like in the firing-line?... - - You might have done that much; from you, at least, - I thought we’d get an inkling of the truth. - But no; you rant and rattle, beat your drum, - And blow your two-penny trumpet like the rest: - “Red battle’s glory,” “honour’s utmost task,” - “Gay jesting faces of undaunted boys,” ... - The same old Boys’-Own-Paper balderdash! - - Mind you, I don’t deny that they exist, - These abstract virtues which you gas about-- - (_We shouldn’t stop out here long, otherwise!_)-- - Honour and humour, and that sort of thing; - (Though heaven knows where you found the glory-touch, - Unless you picked it up at G.H.Q.); - But if you’d commonsense, you’d understand - That humour’s just the Saxon cloak for fear, - Our English substitute for “_Vive la France_,” - Or else a trick to keep the folk at home - From being scared to death--as we are scared; - That honour ... damn it, honour’s the one thing - No soldier yaps about, except of course - A soldier-_poet_--three-and-sixpence net. - - Honest to God, it makes me sick and tired - To think that you, who lived a year with us, - Should be content to write such tommy-rot. - I feel as though I’d sent a runner back - With news that we were being strafed like Hell ... - And he’d reported: “Everything O. K.” - Something’s the matter: either you can’t _see_, - Or else you see, and cannot write--that’s worse. - - Hang it, you can’t have clean forgotten things - You went to bed with, woke with, smelt and felt, - All those long months of boredom streaked with fear: - Mud, cold, fatigue, sweat, nerve-strain, sleeplessness, - And men’s excreta viscid in the rain, - And stiff-legged horses lying by the road, - Their bloated bellies shimmering, green with flies.... - - _Have_ you forgotten? you who dine to-night - In comfort at the Carlton or Savoy. - (Lord, but I’d like a dart at that myself-- - Oysters, _crême_ something, sole _vin blanc_, a bird, - And one cold bottle of the very best-- - A girl to share it: afterwards, a show-- - Lee White and Alfred Lester, Nelson Keys; - Supper to follow. - - ... Our Brigade’s in rest-- - The usual farm. I’ve got the only bed. - The men are fairly comfy--three good barns. - Thank God, they didn’t have to bivouac - After this last month in the Salient.) ... - - You _have_ forgotten; or you couldn’t write - This sort of stuff--all cant, no guts in it, - Hardly a single picture true to life. - - Well, here’s a picture for you: Montauban-- - Last year--the flattened village on our left-- - On our right flank, the razed Briqueterie, - Their five-nines pounding bits to dustier bits-- - Behind, a cratered slope, with batteries - Crashing and flashing, violet in the dusk, - And prematuring every now and then-- - In front, the ragged Bois de Bernafay, - Bosche whizz-bangs bursting white among its trees. - - You had been doing F.O.O. that day; - (The Staff knows why we had an F.O.O.: - One couldn’t flag-wag through Trônes Wood; the wires - Went down as fast as one could put them up; - And messages by runner took three hours.) - I got the wind up rather: you were late, - And they’d been shelling like the very deuce. - However, back you came. I see you now, - Staggering into “mess”--a broken trench, - Two chalk-walls roofed with corrugated iron, - And, round the traverse, Driver Noakes’s stove - Stinking and smoking while we ate our grub. - Your face was blue-white, streaked with dirt; your eyes - Had shrunk into your head, as though afraid - To watch more horrors; you were sodden-wet - With greasy coal-black mud--and other things. - Sweating and shivering, speechless, there you stood. - I gave you whisky, made you talk. You said: - “Major, another signaller’s been killed.” - “Who?” - “Gunner Andrews, blast them. O my Christ! - His head--split open--when his brains oozed out, - They looked like bloody sweetbreads, in the muck.” - - And you’re the chap who writes this claptrap verse! - - Lord, if I’d half _your_ brains, I’d write a book: - None of your sentimental platitudes, - But something real, vital; that should strip - The glamour from this outrage we call war, - Shewing it naked, hideous, stupid, vile-- - One vast abomination. So that they - Who, coming after, till the ransomed fields - Where our lean corpses rotted in the ooze, - Reading my written words, should understand - This stark stupendous horror, visualize - The unutterable foulness of it all.... - I’d shew them, not your glamourous “glorious game,” - Which men play “jesting” “for their honour’s sake”-- - (A kind of Military Tournament, - With just a hint of danger--bound in cloth!)-- - But War,--as war is now, and always was: - A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job:-- - Men, lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid, - Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime - That wrenches gum-boot down from bleeding heel - And cakes in itching arm-pits, navel, ears: - Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering: - Men driving men to death and worse than death: - Men maimed and blinded: men against machines-- - Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame and wire: - Men choking out their souls in poison-gas: - Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet: - Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away, - Cursing, with their last breath, the living God - Because he made them, in His image, men.... - So--were your talent mine--I’d write of war - For those who, coming after, know it not. - - And if posterity should ask of me - What high, what base emotions keyed weak flesh - To face such torments, I would answer: “_You!_ - Not for themselves, O daughters, grandsons, sons, - Your tortured forebears wrought this miracle; - Not for themselves, _accomplished utterly_ - This loathliest task of murderous servitude; - But just because they realized that thus, - _And only thus_, by sacrifice, might they - Secure a world worth living in--_for you_.” ... - - Good-night, my soldier-poet. _Dormez bien!_ - - - - -“One of Them” - -_Being in Some Respects a Sequel to “One of Us”_ - - -I. - - _Wherein the bard--released from War’s confusions-- - Preludes with egotistical allusions._ - - Six years ago--or is it six-and-twenty? - (How vast the gulf from those ecstatic days!)-- - When the whole earth snored on in slothful plenty - (Tho’ poets cashed small pittance for their lays); - When war appeared less real than G. A. Henty, - And Oxo’s snaky signs were yet ablaze; - When all seemed peaceful as the press of Cadbury, - And no one dreamed of bombs, or bet a Bradbury; - - Or e’er stern Mars had roped us in his tether, - Ere British guns had thundered at Le Câteau: - We fitted out--my Muse and I together-- - And launched adown the galley-slips of Chatto - A barque of verse, full-rigged for halcyon weather, - Which many a critic judged to take the _gâteau_: - (Though some there were, high pundits of disparity, - Who wept at our unscholarly vulgarity). - - We have sailed far since then; crossed our horizon; - Published our loves and travels in a novel - (A tale, men say, that Peckham’s flapper cries on, - So that both Boots and Smith’s before us grovel); - And eaten ration bully-beef--with flies on; - And sheltered gratefully in many a hovel, - What time we sang of guns and gore and trenches-- - Instead of oysters, tango-teas and wenches. - - For times have changed since we wrote “One of Us”: - _Et nos mutamus_--more or less--_in illis_. - Muse finds herself _in urbe_ somewhat _rus_; - And I--if I disport with Amaryllis-- - Where once my motor flashed, prefer a ’bus; - And shuddering note how vast the supper-bill is; - And signing, sigh in secret for the calm, - Chaste, cheap seclusion of my Chiltern farm. - - Yes, Muse and I are tired, and super-serious: - Her damask cheek is lined a bit, and wrinkled. - We are grown old, and London’s late nights weary us: - While the gold wine that erst in ice-pail tinkled, - Her doctor finds extremely deleterious; - And mine forbids me red lips, passion-crinkled: - So now we cultivate domestic habits - Amongst our pigs, our poultry, and our rabbits. - - Yet sometimes, as we trench our stubborn soil, - Or feed our sows, or strow the peat-moss litter, - Or set the morrow’s chicken-mash to boil, - Or wander out where our young turkeys twitter, - Or read by mellow candle-light--since oil - Is dear and scarce; or talk--a little bitter - Because we find that Food Control Committees - Are all composed of men brought up in cities; - - Sometimes, in this five-acre paradise - Whither my nerve-racked spirit fled the battle - Deferring to sound Harley Street advice-- - A silver badge its only martial chattel, - I hear a voice, loud as the market price - That butchers bid for Rhondda’s missing cattle, - Voice of my Muse, still vibrant with old passion, - Telling how poetry is now the fashion. - - “Look you,” she cries, “the Wheels are turning, turning. - Though Pegasus long since wore out his pinions, - Somehow his shod hooves keep the bread-mills churning. - Shrill, night and day, sing Marsh Georgian minions: - Each sinking sun sets some new Noyes a-burning, - Each rising moon reveals fresh hordes of Binyons; - Who batten fat on unsuspecting editors, - And--unlike you--contrive to pay their creditors. - - “Poet, forsooth! You agricultural brute! - Have you no soul above the weight of porkers? - Was it for this I hearkened to your suit, - Gave you my metres and my rhymes--some, corkers? - Up, Gilbert! rummage out your rusty lute: - Polish it blacker than your black Minorcas: - And let its notes once more, in refluent stanzas, - Dower the Income-tax with glad Bonanzas.” - - So she; and--since I loathe to disappoint - The least illusion of the equal sex-- - Let Byron’s oil once more these locks anoint, - Once more let honour meet these Cox-drawn cheques ... - Though well I know that times are spare of joint, - And satire’s song less like to please than vex; - Now small beer, Smallwood, raids and strikes and rations, - Have near eclipsed the gaiety of nations: - - Still, let me sing. Yet not as once I sung: - Love, fear, and death have chastened, sobered, saddened, - One who knew life’s full burden-time too young; - Whom never youth’s unhampered freedom gladdened, - But only envy and ambition stung, - And fickle passions--in love’s semblance maddened; - So that he needs must tumble now, poor clown, - On this Pindaric stage for half-a-crown: - - Yet one who, ’spite a past that shocked St. Tony - And paid recording angels overtime, - Still holds his own at sonnet or _canzone_. - As some shall know who follow this, my rhyme-- - Some few: for gladly would I lay a pony, - Or larger sum, against a ten-cent dime, - That most of those who read this metred tract’ll - Not know a spondee from a pterodactyl. - - -II. - - _Explains--a task few modern penmen shirk-- - The sociology of this great work._ - - God bless Democracy, George Bernard Shaw, - And William Dunn, our sanest, saintliest hatter! - God bless that great anomaly, the Law; - Aye, may our knights on hoarded tea wax fatter! - God bless Sir Arthur Yapp’s unfailing jaw, - Lord Lansdowne’s pen, and brave Horatio’s chatter! - And--lest in England Bolos quite prevail-- - God bless King Northcliffe and his “Daily Mail!” - - Long live the old Press--“Times,” “D. T.,” “Spectator”! - Long live the New--“Age,” “Europe,” “Statesman,” “Witness”! - Long live each _acti temporis laudator_! - Long live Lloyd George in unmolested Pitt-ness! - Long live “The Nation,” facile demonstrator - Of everybody’s--save its own--unfitness! - Long live Valera, Carson, Devlin, Plunkett! - Long live the lads who fight, the cads who funk it! - - Long live our German banks, _sub duce_ Plender! - Long may our railways rule our bounding sea! - Long may impatient Cuthberts paw their fender, - What time their patient Phyllis pours their tea! - Long life to each investor and each spender! - Long live the Staff! Long live the A.S.E.! - So long as England’s in the melting-pot, - A prudent bard must sing, “Long live the lot!” - - For who shall say--at close of Armageddon, - When the world’s finished beggaring its neighbour, - When the last shell’s been fired, the last pig fed on-- - If we’ll be ruled by Capital or Labour: - If a Welsh harp shall twang part-songs of Seddon, - While Simon pipes a compromising tabor: - Or whether every stalwart War-Loan-lender’s son - Will find his Empire dividends signed “Henson”? - - Not I: not all the better men who fought - While dilutees preserved their precious skin: - Not those great early dead, whose single thought - Ran--“England: Germany: we’ve got to _win_.” - Poor simple souls, of H. G. Wells untaught, - They never realized their next-of-kin - Would read how they had died to make life cheerier - For the dear blacks in Briningized Nigeria. - - Public, forgive your fool; if now and then-- - Black bubbles on the verse’s stream--appear - Thoughts of our worn, unlettered fighting-men; - If sometimes, through the grease-paint’s gay veneer, - Truth shews--a wrinkled hag. The traitor pen - Forgets how blood is cheap and paper dear: - And I’m no more the blithe, nut-loving squirrel - Who frisked it in the consulship of Birrell. - - Which is, perchance, the reason why my mind - Turns oft to those dear days, now dead as mutton; - When Haldane’s soul with Bethmann-Hollweg dined; - And no one ploughed up golf-greens, sown by Sutton, - To bed the humble tuber’s sprouting rind; - Or dashed off shorthand _billets-doux_ in Dutton, - Or changed a blear-eyed pauper to a swell man - In six short weeks of concentrated Pelman: - - Why now--sad minstrel in un-Sandoned sack-cloth-- - I sing the twilight of the times I knew. - No more our glaring footlights blurr a back-cloth - Woven of misery and hung askew; - For Time, stern judge of Us, has donned his black cloth, - And to the Mob delivered up the Few ... - Unless, of course, the Mob’s but swapped its Peers - For a worse dynasty--of profiteers. - - God knows, _we_ had our faults--greed, blindness, pride. - God also knows we had a dashed good time. - Were they the worse for that--our boys who died, - By earth and air and sea in every clime? - God knows! But if ghost-feet still strut and side - About their clubs, if ghost-eyes read this rhyme, - I think they’d like their vanished epoch’s swan-song - To be a merry tune, and not a wan song. - - So clear the stage, and ring the curtain up! - Once more--ere Empires yield to Leagues of Nations, - And bayonets to Socialistic gup-- - Let Beauty, in diaphanous creations, - Ogle the stalls, and subsequently sup - Off iced champagne and ortolan collations.... - Whereafter, if my pen won’t bring me pelf, - Damned if I don’t turn Socialist myself! - - -III. - - _Sets forth, despite the Law’s dull interference, - A lady’s birth, age, family, and appearance._ - - Arms have I sung full oft, both steel and white ones; - Guns have I sung till I can sing no more; - Men have I sung, both common and polite ones: - Yet never sang _one_ heroine before. - Come, then, my ghost-girls, dark, fair, plump, and slight ones, - Come in the finest, flimsiest frocks ye wore.... - Alas, not one of you quite fills the bill-- - A life-size model for my Lady Jill. - - Pardon, then, Magda, Gladys, Nancy, Florence, - Doris, Patricia, Mollie, Celandine, - Nor hold your erstwhile suitor in abhorrence - Because, from one, he takes eyes subtly green; - From other, hands a Sargent or a Lawrence - Had envied for his canvas; here, the sheen - Of gold hair, auburn-shot, in whose abundance, - What time Jill dreamed, young Cupids watched the sun dance; - - There a smooth throat, an arched, attractive ankle, - Soft cheek, curved back in bloom to close-set ear, - Red mouth full-lipped, a voice whose love-tones rankle - Still in this heart of mine,--a voice so dear - That ... But no more! In fear this rhyming prank’ll - Offend some damozel whom I revere, - I state: Jill’s just an ordinary blonde, - Fair, frail, flirtatious, rather fast than fond. - - You know the type--aristo-plutocratic, - Out of blue blood by hard North Country cash; - A self-assertive sire; a dam, lymphatic - (Since rarely strawberry leaves and sovereigns clash); - Their sole son, daring in the diplomatic - (Thumping his Underwood while kingdoms crash); - Their daughter ... Is there a man alive can swear - Exactly what she did or did not dare? - - For Jill was one of those astounding females, - Born in a chaster, pre-Edwardian day; - When lone Lucindas dared not dine nor tea males - For dread lest scandal dub them “_coryphée_”; - When none drank deep of D’Abernonian dream-ales, - But quietly our Empire went its way, - Nor realised that subalterns on horses - Monopolized the brain-power of its Forces: - - One who was yet a span from flapperhood, - Still puzzling o’er the simplest of equations; - What time in robe of saffron Phoebus stood, - And all our Lanes were gay with green carnations, - And private hansoms sought the Johnian Wood, - And the shrill cycle-bell’s first tintillations - Resounded from the dawning to the dark - In a Rolls-Royceless, Peter Panless Park: - - One who attained the pig-tail’s ribboned dowry, - And helped to pass a Kipling tambourine, - When first from lands of wattle, maple, Maori, - Men came at summons of a dying Queen: - One who, at Auteuil, Dresden, and Rathgowrie, - Acquired that polish reft of which, I ween, - It is not possible for our Dianas - To emulate a modern _grande dame’s_ manners: - - One on whose head the ostrich-feathers nodded - In Alexandrine courts--and _chez_ Bassano; - In whose young ears, song’s angels disembodied. - Rang the last notes of Melbourne’s own soprano; - Whose lithe feet, Moykoff-shod, the grouse-moors plodded, - Or danced the new Machiché Brasiliano, - In times before, unchaperoned of skinny ma, - Suburbia’s daughters sought the darkling kinema: - - To put the matter briefly--One of Them. - Bear witness, Muses Nine, how most unworthy - Is my gold nib to touch their garment’s hem. - Say, Byron (for as bard I still prefer thee - To all whose pallid minor stars be-gem - These Gotha nights) would not such task deter thee - From the rhymed octave--sometime known as Whistlecraft-- - In which, poor ass, I ply this weekly thistlecraft? - - Οίμοι! that I can never be a poet - Modelled on spoon-fed college Adonäises, - Whose metres reek of Porson, Jebb, and Jowett, - Whose very thoughts derive from donnish däises. - Alas! for us who, writing life, must know it-- - Its sights, its scents, its ladies, lords, and Läises. - Alas! for my refusal to disseminate-- - Even in verse--the scholarly-effeminate. - - And oh! ten thousand times alas, should Jill - Be recognised in these Parnassian pages. - Woe for the libel action, and the bill - Which he must face who in the law engages. - And ah! thank Heaven for a metric skill - That shields this head from Justice Darling’s rages ... - Safeguarded by thy last experience, G. Moore, - I maiden-name my lady--Lewis-Seymour. - - -IV. - - _In which the author, contrary to custom, - Goes for the gloves--as Sohrab went for Rustum._ - - I have discovered, after much perusal - Of Cannan, George Mackenzie, Walpole, Bennett, - A Law whose discipline brooks no refusal,-- - A neo-rheo-literary tenet - Which runs: “In art, forbear to pick and choose. All - That happens, happens. Wherefore, up and pen it! - Let the scribe’s tale be casual and cursory; - End where you like--but start us in the nursery.” - - And so I fain had traced, through many a canto, - My heroine; all dimples in her cot; - Bored with her lessons; laughing at the panto.; - Immersed in “Fauntleroy” or Walter Scott: - But, since green herbs from memory’s _campo santo_ - Provide no flavouring for satire’s pot, - For seething, bubbling cauldron such as this is, - I’ll skip the skipping-rope and jump to kisses. - - * * * * * - - ’Tis such a night as only London knew - In the full seasons of our heart’s content-- - When, like some fairy pageant in review, - Love, Pleasure, Luxury together blent, - Made life not all too boring for the Few; - And Unemployment, fix’t at ten per cent., - Furnished--by all means of charity bazaars-- - Right many a dame with perquisites and “pars.” - - London, in London’s June! Above, the starshine: - Below, against the rails of Berkeley Square, - The patient lights of brougham, or rarer car, shine-- - Waiting stiff-shirted squires and ladies fair: - Music, from high French windows that afar shine, - Thrills, till a dancer well might curse and swear, - And call himself a “dashed unlucky fella” - To miss the Lewis-Seymour’s Cinderella. - - Within those halls, where plush-breeched flunkeys stand, - What sounds, what scents, what visions of delight! - How--to the bluest Blue Hungarian band-- - Youth whirls away the unreturning night! - How--perfumed as the blooms of Samarcand-- - The dying flow’rets whisper, “Carlton White!” - But, oh! to weary war-time ration-hunters, - How like a dream, this stand-up supper--Gunter’s! - - For here, in reach of every slender hand which is - Scarce languidly outstretched to porcelain plate, - Are dainties drawn from each vale, stream, or strand which is - Most famed for fruit or fish or fowl or cate: - Creamed strawberries; thin, lavish-buttered sandwiches - Of livered geese (that now squawk Hymns of Hate), - Of priceless hams and tongues and caviar; ices; - And sugared sweets in myriad strange devices.... - - Yet sweeter far than all these sweet things, Jill is: - Queen of my verse and this “Young People’s Dance”: - Fairer than fairest of Mayfairy fillies! - Sweet, is the smile that lights a countenance - Bright as moon-dappled, pink-tipped lotus-lilies; - Sweet, are her jade-green eyes that gleam and glance-- - And give no hint of yester-tea-time’s flare-up - When stern mamma forbade her bind her hair up. - - Jill’s hair! How beautiful it is; the tresses - Warm-golden, soft as cygnet’s earliest downing. - Jill’s foot! How slim the arch the flounce caresses. - Jill’s brow! How pure; how yet uncreased in frowning. - (My Muse! How easily the jade impresses - On this base coin a stamp of pseudo-Browning.) - Jill’s youth! Jill’s dreams! These luxuries that lap her!... - Don’t they present a most alluring flapper? - - So thinks, at least, this lad in evening raiment-- - Shoes, shirt-front, collar, waistcoat-buttons, glowing; - This sub. of other days--when soldier’s payment - Scarcely sufficed each monthly mess-bill’s owing, - And triple stars full fifteen years delay meant; - He, who presents the goblet, over-flowing - With icy rubies to its crinkled brim, - And asks if Jill won’t “sit this out” with him.... - - And there it hangs, word-carven, my last image. - (Browning again! now Keats!) O hapless pair, - Loth lover and bold maiden of a dim age-- - Lost to us now, and dead, but still most fair. - O Attic shapes! Arcadian girlhood’s slim age, - And silken youth with brilliantined hair! - What climaxes must I not sacrifice, - Who write this epic at a weekly price? - - For--as long melodies are sweet, but sweeter - Poems in short instalments, such as mine-- - Seven full days, teased puppet of this metre, - Must thy parched tongue await that roseate wine; - Seven full nights, fond boy, must thou entreat her; - Whilst mantle to her cheeks, incarnadine, - Youth’s beauty, beauty’s youth--and readers vex’t - Know, need know, nothing more till Tuesday next. - - -V. - - _Brings life to week-old statues; makes them prance - To love’s light tune--and ends the Seymours’ dance._ - - Pale shapes I locked in memory’s studio, - Your draperies stir. From vein to marble vein - The life-blood leaps. Eyes gleam, and pulses glow. - Once more my octaves rap their old refrain - To re-create the weekly puppet-show. - Fond boy, to work! My Jill’s herself again, - And answers your entreaty--sideways glancing-- - “Perhaps I will. It’s jolly hot for dancing.” - - So they twain pass--smart sub. and flapper stately-- - From the high halls of Gunter’s prank’t refection. - And out across the waxèd boards, where lately - Twirled the swift waltz to _La Poupée’s_ “Selection.” - And on, past couples gossiping sedately; - And on, past couples screened against detection; - To a dim-shaded, fairy-lighted alcove, - Fit haunt for single maid and single tall cove:-- - - Such as--in land of Taj Mahal and mugger, - Where girls book weeks ahead their supper dances-- - Screens some pale flirt, some lad who yearns to hug her, - From the brown _khitmatghar’s_ averted glances. - (Who knows thy secrets, darkling _Kala-juggah_-- - The orbs downcast, the fingers’ coy advances, - The swiftly stifled sob that hooks the stripling-- - Save I, Victoria Cross, and Rudyard Kipling!) - - And there, beneath the new-sponged potted palm-tree, - That mid-day brought and morning shall remove-- - Mayfair’s own wind-unruffled, ever-calm tree, - Whose drooping branches shield Mayfairies’ love-- - She lisps of Waller parts, and thy dead charm, Tree - (Twin stars now shining in the “flies” above!); - While he admits he has or hasn’t seen them ... - Till a shy sudden silence falls between them, - A cloud across the sun of lightling banter. - - O Jill, my gold-spoon cake-and-Moët miss! - Hast thou not dreamed, since thy first tam-o’-shanter, - Of soldier boy, of dance-night such as this? - Faintly they catch the polka’s throb, the canter - Of homing hansom-cab where lovers kiss: - And “Oh,” thinks he, “what eyes, what lips, what hair, too!” - And “Oh,” thinks she “the ninny doesn’t dare to.” - - Voiceless, they sit: but now her eyes, upturning, - Seek his: and now, beneath the lashes’ veil, - Leaps a quick flame to set youth’s pulses burning; - And now she feels her resolution fail: - And now gains strength anew the curious yearning - For love’s adventure: now, her fingers frail - Tighten about the kerchief’s lacy tissue: - And now, at last, he says, “Jill, I _must_ kiss you.” - - “Bobbie, you mustn’t.” “Jill--just one.” Her shoulder - Stiffens; resists the half-encircling arm. - Hands fend away the hand that seeks to hold her. - Lips murmur. Lashes flutter in alarm. - “No, Bobbie. No.” My foolish boy, be bolder; - The moment’s fear is half the moment’s charm.... - Alas! His missed and amateurish peck - Grazes the ear-lobe; lands upon the neck. - - Readers, both kissed and kissless, chide not; pity - These withered fruits from Jill’s dead seas of dreaming. - Think--or in France, or in this barraged city, - How many a dear one owes his brass hat’s gleaming, - How many a husband thanks his safe Committee, - To some fond woman’s sound strategic scheming! - Ponder--can crafts which men from want to plenty ship, - Be steered without an arduous apprenticeship? - - Ponder! Nor blame my Jill if she disguises - Love’s disappointment in disapprobation. - If, Artemis in judgment now, she rises-- - The outraged goddess, armed for flagellation-- - And, with a voice whose every note comprises - Disgust, revolt, pain, virtue, indignation, - Drives from her father’s chaste, offended portals - The meekest of apologising mortals. - - And blame not me, her bard--whose verses weave her - This coronal of memory’s budding-hours, - Who loved her long ago, yet now must leave her - Lorn ’mid the dance’s _débris_, and the flowers - Which fade as day-dreams of that first deceiver-- - Because, while War yet ravens and devours, - While still the blind guns thunder out in Flanders, - I sing the type which cozens and philanders. - - For, young as Spring and old as Cleopatra, - Certain as Nature’s self, this type endureth: - On Skindles’ lawn, in jungles of Sumatra, - She blooms--a wax-white weed that no rake cureth: - From Westminster to _wats_ of Pura Chatra, - Her false lips smile, her gladsome optic lureth: - WAAC’s may be WREN’s; wars, peace; to-day’s full Colonel, - To-morrow’s clerk ... but Jill is sempiternal. - - -VI. - - _Continues--symptomatically terse-- - This first of serials in doggerel verse._ - - O Jill, my peerless, perfumed, powdered darling; - Quintessence of all fairies I’ve adored - In London’s lanes, by Devon Budleigh’s farling, - At Berkeley’s, Kettner’s, Ritz’s, Carlton’s board; - Jill whose white hands ne’er knew roughhouse-work’s gnarling; - Whose clothes not twenty Coxes could afford! - How shall man sing the seasoned cee-sprung carriage - In which you rolled from that first kiss to marriage? - - What days they were! What noon-times and what twilights! - The whole wide earth seemed fashioned for your pleasure; - Its very heavens, gold-and-crystal skylights - Whereunder you picked orchid blooms at leisure. - For others, shadowed gloom; for you, the high lights-- - The pomp, the pride, the dance’s twanging measure ... - And if one begged: “Take coin,” you’d say, “and toss it her. - Poor thing! That skirt was never cut by Rossiter.” - - Dear, _rotten_ days! And yet, a Jack grows wistful - At thoughts of all the Jills whom he remembers, - In times when he had boodle by the fist-full - And fires of youth--where now are only embers. - - Jack’s Jills! Why, Muse possesses quite a list full, - May’s Jill, and June’s Jill, August’s, and September’s ... - Yet dares no more than skim each light adventure - Which followed on flirtationship’s indenture. - - For there’s a tide in the affairs of flappers, - Of those, at least, that West End mothers breed-- - (Your Wapping matron’s more inclined to slap _hers_: - A vulgar trick--yet one which serves some need!)-- - A spring-time blood-tide, mounting to young nappers, - Heady as wine, a mischief-making mead, - Which--though a man find every known excuse for ’em-- - To put it mildly, does the very deuce for ’em. - - And shall my sweetest Muse, than whom none chaster - E’er fluttered to console the middle-age-time - Of any neurasthenic poetaster, - Ope her full throat to sing Jill’s ’prentice rage-time?-- - The unnerving doubts, the certainties which braced her, - The follied moments and the ensuing sage time, - The major and the minor bards who sung to her, - The men who knelt, the “little friends” who clung to her; - - The last strange morning-dreams, the tea-tray’s rattle, - The letters--opened, skimmed, and tossed aside; - The leisured getting-up, the breakfast-prattle, - The summoning ’phone-bell and the mid-day ride; - The lunch; the afternoons of tittle-tattle-- - Town’s latest scandal, dance, divorce or bride; - The “dear boys,” climbers, _partis_, portion-stalkers; - The furtive teas at Charbonnel and Walker’s; - - The Morny-scented bath before the dinner; - The deft maid’s fingers in the unruly hair; - The _risqué_ talk of some sweet social sinner, - Half-heard across the table’s candle-glare; - The Bridge, so much too high for a beginner; - The Ball; the moment’s whisper on the stair: - The thousand faces, phases, thoughts, books, travellings, - Which whirl youth’s silk cocoon in its unravellings. - - Ah no! not ours with huckstering pen to retail - How slumb’rous beauties wake from girl-time’s dozing. - Let Hubert Wales and D. H. Lawrence detail - The purfled passion-blossom’s slow unclosing. - No rainbow’s purple e’er shall tinge our she-tale, - No censor’s yoke restrain its swift composing. - Moreover--quite apart from Muse’s purity-- - There’s nothing half so dull as immaturity. - - So please imagine--(though I know it’s risky - To trust in Britons for imagination, - Save those rare few whom peace-time’s hoarded whisky - Still fires to spiritual exaltation, - Or such as stand, when questioning House grows frisky, - Pat on their first inspired asseveration)-- - Jill as she was in times of sugared plenty: - The Bond Street goddess, _ætat_ three-and-twenty. - - Goddess, indeed! These meagre days that skimp us, - Poor mortals, bullied, badged, and bombed and rationed, - Scarce knows that breed which once on high Olympus - Flaunted in radiant raiment, Poiret-fashioned. - Goddess indeed! A self-sure, jade-eyed, slim puss-- - Of life’s each latest luxury impassioned; - Sleek; mateless; restless; rampant; supple-sinewed; - Sharp-clawed; capricious; and ... _to be continued_. - - - - - * * * * * - -Transcriber’s Notes - -The following apparent typographical errors were corrected. - -Page 15, “enver” changed to “never.” (but for you there’s never a place) - -Page 43, "cazone" changed to "canzone." (Still holds his own at sonnet -or _canzone_) - -Page 63, “mornnig” changed to “morning.” (That mid-day brought and -morning shall remove) - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Judgement of Valhalla, by Gilbert Frankau - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGEMENT OF VALHALLA *** - -***** This file should be named 53756-0.txt or 53756-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/7/5/53756/ - -Produced by Cindy Horton, Brian Coe, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -book was produced from images made available by the -HathiTrust Digital Library.) - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of -the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at -www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: The Judgement of Valhalla - -Author: Gilbert Frankau - -Release Date: December 17, 2016 [EBook #53756] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGEMENT OF VALHALLA *** - - - - -Produced by Cindy Horton, Brian Coe, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -book was produced from images made available by the -HathiTrust Digital Library.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - -<div class="figcenter"> -<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover" /> -</div> - -<div id="title-page"> -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[1]</a></p> - -<h1>THE JUDGEMENT<br /> -OF VALHALLA</h1> - -<p class="ph3 p4">BY</p> - -<p class="ph2">GILBERT FRANKAU</p> - -<p class="ph2 p4">NEW YORK<br /> -FEDERAL PRINTING COMPANY<br /> -1918</p> - -</div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</a></p> - -<p class="ph3">Copyright, 1918<br /> -<span class="smcap">Gilbert Frankau</span></p> - -<hr class="r10" /> - -<p class="ph3"><i>All rights reserved</i></p> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></p> - -<p class="ph1">The Judgement of Valhalla</p> - -<p class="ph3"><span class="smcap">By GILBERT FRANKAU</span></p> - -<hr class="r5" /> - -<h2><i>THE DESERTER</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>“I’m sorry I done it, Major.”</p> -<p>We bandaged the livid face;</p> -<p>And led him out, ere the wan sun rose,</p> -<p>To die his death of disgrace.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>The bolt-heads locked to the cartridge;</p> -<p>The rifles steadied to rest,</p> -<p>As cold stock nestled at colder cheek</p> -<p>And foresight lined on the breast.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>“<em>Fire!</em>” called the Sergeant-Major.</p> -<p>The muzzles flamed as he spoke:</p> -<p>And the shameless soul of a nameless man</p> -<p>Went up in the cordite-smoke.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></p> - -<h2><i>THE EYE AND THE TRUTH</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Up from the fret of the earth-world, through the Seven Circles of Flame,</p> -<p>With the seven holes in Its tunic for sign of the death-in-shame,</p> -<p>To the little gate of Valhalla the coward-spirit came.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Cold, It crouched in the man-strong wind that sweeps Valhalla’s floor;</p> -<p>Weak, It pawed and scratched on the wood; and howled, like a dog, at the Door</p> -<p>Which is shut to the souls who are sped in shame, for ever and evermore:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>For It snuffed the Meat of the Banquet-boards where the Threefold Killers sit,</p> -<p>Where the Free Beer foams to the tankard-rim, and the Endless Smokes are lit....</p> -<p>And It saw the Nakéd Eye come out above the lintel-slit.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And now It quailed at Nakéd Eye which judges the naked dead;</p> -<p>And now It snarled at Nakéd Truth that broodeth overhead;</p> -<p>And now It looked to the earth below where the gun-flames flickered red.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>It muttered words It had learned on earth, the words of a black-coat priest</p> -<p>Who had bade It pray to a pulpit god—but ever Eye’s Wrath increased;</p> -<p>And It knew that Its words were empty words, and It whined like a homeless beast:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Till, black above the lintel-slit, the Nakéd Eye went out;</p> -<p>Till, loud across the Killer-Feasts, It heard the Killer-Shout—</p> -<p>The three-fold song of them that slew, and died ... and had no doubt.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></p> - -<h2><i>THE SONG OF THE RED-EDGED STEEL</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Below your black priest’s heaven,</i></p> -<p class="i4"><i>Above his tinselled hell,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Beyond the Circles Seven,</i></p> -<p class="i4"><i>The Red-Steel Killers dwell—</i></p> -<p><i>The men who drave, to blade-ring home, behind the marching shell.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">We knew not good nor evil,</p> -<p class="i4">Save only right of blade;</p> -<p class="i2">Yet neither god nor devil</p> -<p class="i4">Could hold us from our trade,</p> -<p>When once we watched the barrage lift, and splendidly afraid</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Came scrambling out of cover,</p> -<p class="i4">And staggered up the hill....</p> -<p class="i2">The bullets whistled over;</p> -<p class="i4">Our sudden dead lay still;</p> -<p>And the mad machine-gun chatter drove us fighting-wild to kill.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Then the death-light lit our faces,</p> -<p class="i4">And the death-mist floated red</p> -<p class="i2">O’er the crimson cratered places</p> -<p class="i4">Where his outposts crouched in dread....</p> -<p>And we stabbed or clubbed them as they crouched; and shot them as they fled;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And floundered, torn and bleeding,</p> -<p class="i4">Over trenches, through the wire,</p> -<p class="i2">With the shrapnel-barrage leading</p> -<p class="i4">To the prey of our desire—</p> -<p>To the men who rose to meet us from the blood-soaked battle-mire;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Met them; gave and asked no quarter;</p> -<p class="i4">But, where we saw the Gray,</p> -<p class="i2">Plunged the edged steel of slaughter,</p> -<p class="i4">Stabbed home, and wrenched away....</p> -<p>Till red wrists tired of killing-work, and none were left to slay.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Now—while his fresh battalions</p> -<p class="i4">Moved up to the attack—</p> -<p class="i2">Screaming like angry stallions,</p> -<p class="i4">His shells came charging back,</p> -<p>And stamped the ground with thunder-hooves and pawed it spouting-black</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And breathed down poison-stenches</p> -<p class="i4">Upon us, leaping past....</p> -<p class="i2">Panting, we turned his trenches;</p> -<p class="i4">And heard—each time we cast</p> -<p>From parapet to parados—the scything bullet-blast.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Till the whistle told his coming;</p> -<p class="i4">Till we flung away the pick,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Heard our Lewis guns’ crazed drumming,</p> -<p class="i4">Grabbed our rifles, sighted quick,</p> -<p>Fired ... and watched his wounded writhing back from where his dead lay thick.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So we laboured—while we lasted:</p> -<p class="i4">Soaked in rain or parched in sun;</p> -<p class="i2">Bullet-riddled; fire-blasted;</p> -<p class="i4">Poisoned: fodder for the gun:</p> -<p>So we perished, and our bodies rotted in the ground they won.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>It heard the song of the First of the Dead, as It couched by the lintel-post;</p> -<p>And the coward-soul would have given Its soul to be back with the Red-Steel host....</p> -<p>But Eye peered down; and It quailed at the Eye; and Nakéd Truth said: “Lost.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And Eye went out. But It might not move; for, droned in the dark, It heard</p> -<p>The Second Song of the Killer-men—word upon awful word</p> -<p>Cleaving the void with a shrill, keen sound like the wings of a pouncing bird.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></p> - -<h2><i>THE SONG OF THE CRASHING WING</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Higher than tinselled heaven,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Lower than angels dare,</i></p> -<p><i>Loop to the fray, swoop on their prey,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>The Killers of the Air.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">We scorned the Galilean,</p> -<p class="i2">We mocked at Kingdom-Come:</p> -<p>The old gods knew our pæan—</p> -<p class="i2">Our dawn-loud engine-hum:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The old red gods of slaughter,</p> -<p class="i2">The gods before the Jew!</p> -<p>We heard their cruel laughter,</p> -<p class="i2">Shrill round us, as we flew:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">When, deaf to earth and pity,</p> -<p class="i2">Blind to the guns beneath,</p> -<p>We loosed upon the city</p> -<p class="i2">Our downward-plunging death.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The Sun-God watched our flighting;</p> -<p class="i2">No Christian priest could tame</p> -<p>Our deathly stuttered fighting:—</p> -<p class="i2">The whirled drum, spitting flame;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The roar, of blades behind her;</p> -<p class="i2">The banking plane up-tossed;</p> -<p>The swerve that sought to blind her;</p> -<p class="i2">Masked faces, glimpsed and lost;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The joy-stick wrenched to guide her;</p> -<p class="i2">The swift and saving zoom,</p> -<p>What time the shape beside her</p> -<p class="i2">Went spinning to its doom.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">No angel-wings might follow</p> -<p class="i2">Where, poised behind the fray,</p> -<p>We spied our Lord Apollo</p> -<p class="i2">Stoop down to mark his prey—</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The hidden counter-forces;</p> -<p class="i2">The guns upon the road;</p> -<p>The tethered transport-horses,</p> -<p class="i2">Stampeding, as we showed—</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Dun hawks of death, loud-roaring—</p> -<p class="i2">A moment to their eyes:</p> -<p>And slew; and passed far-soaring;</p> -<p class="i2">And dwindled up the skies.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">But e’en Apollo’s pinions</p> -<p class="i2">Had faltered where we ran,</p> -<p>Low through his veiled dominions,</p> -<p class="i2">To lead the charging van!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The tree-tops slathered under;</p> -<p class="i2">The Red-Steel Killers knew,</p> -<p>Hard overhead, the thunder</p> -<p class="i2">And backwash of her screw;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The blurred clouds raced above her;</p> -<p class="i2">The blurred fields streaked below,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Where waited, crouched to cover,</p> -<p class="i4">The foremost of our foe;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i4">Banking, we saw his furrows</p> -<p class="i4">Leap at us, open wide:</p> -<p class="i2">Hell-raked the man-packed burrows;</p> -<p class="i4">And crashed—and crashing, died.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>It heard the song of the Dead in Air, as It huddled against the gate;</p> -<p>And once again the Eye peered down—red-rimmed with scorn and hate</p> -<p>For the shameless soul of the nameless one who had neither foe nor mate.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And Eye was shut. But Nakéd Truth bent down to mock the Thing:—</p> -<p>“Thou hast heard the Song of the Red-edged Steel, and the Song of the Crashing Wing:</p> -<p>Shall the word of a black-coat priest avail at Valhalla’s harvesting?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Shalt <em>thou</em> pass free to the Seven Halls—whose life in shame was sped?”</p> -<p>And Truth was dumb. But the brooding word still echoed overhead,</p> -<p>As roaring down the void outburst the last loud song of the dead.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></p> - -<h2><i>THE SONG OF THE GUNNER-DEAD</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>In Thor’s own red Valhalla,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Which priest may not unbar;</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>But only Nakéd Truth and Eye,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Last arbiters of War;</i></p> -<p><i>Feast, by stark right of courage,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>The Killers from Afar.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">We put no trust in heaven,</p> -<p class="i2">We had no fear of hell;</p> -<p>But lined, and ranged, and timed to clock,</p> -<p class="i2">Our barrage-curtains fell,</p> -<p class="i2">When guns gave tongue and breech-blocks swung</p> -<p class="i2">And palms rammed home the shell.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The Red-Steel ranks edged forward,</p> -<p class="i2">And vanished in our smoke;</p> -<p class="i2">Back from his churning craters,</p> -<p class="i2">The Gray Man reeled and broke;</p> -<p>While, fast as sweat could lay and set,</p> -<p class="i2">Our rocking muzzles spoke.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">We blew him from the village;</p> -<p class="i2">We chased him through the wood:</p> -<p>Till, tiny on the crest-line</p> -<p class="i2">Where once his trenches stood,</p> -<p class="i2">We watched the wag of sending flag</p> -<p>That told our work was good:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Till, red behind the branches,</p> -<p class="i2">The death-sun sank to blood;</p> -<p class="i2">And the Red-Steel Killers rested....</p> -<p>But we, by swamp and flood,</p> -<p class="i2">Through mirk and night—his shells for light—</p> -<p class="i2">Blaspheming, choked with mud,</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Roped to the tilting axles,</p> -<p class="i2">Man-handled up the crest;</p> -<p class="i2">And wrenched our plunging gun-teams</p> -<p class="i2">Foam-flecked from jowl to breast,</p> -<p class="i2">Downwards, and on, where trench-lights shone—</p> -<p>For <em>we</em>, we might not rest!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Shell-deafened; soaked and sleepless;</p> -<p class="i2">Short-handed; under fire;</p> -<p class="i2">Days upon nights unending,</p> -<p class="i2">We wrought, and dared not tire—</p> -<p class="i2">With whip and bit from dump to pit,</p> -<p class="i2">From pit to trench with wire.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The Killers in the Open,</p> -<p class="i2">The Killers down the Wind,</p> -<p>They saw the Gray Man eye to eye—</p> -<p>But <em>we</em>, we fought him blind,</p> -<p class="i2">Nor knew whence came the screaming flame</p> -<p class="i2">That killed us, miles behind.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Yet, when the triple rockets</p> -<p class="i2">Flew skyward, blazed and paled,</p> -<p class="i2">For sign the lines were broken;</p> -<p>When the Red Steel naught availed;</p> -<p class="i2">When, through the smoke, on shield and spoke</p> -<p class="i2">His rifle bullets hailed;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>When we waited, dazed and hopeless,</p> -<p class="i2">Till the layer’s eye could trace</p> -<p class="i2">Helmets, bobbing just above us</p> -<p class="i2">Like mad jockeys in a race....</p> -<p>Then—loaded, laid, and unafraid,</p> -<p class="i2">We met him face to face;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Jerked the trigger; felt the trunnions</p> -<p>Rock and quiver; saw the flail</p> -<p class="i2">Of our zero-fuses blast him;</p> -<p>Saw his gapping ranks turn tail;</p> -<p class="i2">Heard the charging-cheer behind us ...</p> -<p>And dropped dead across the trail.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></p> - -<h2><i>VALHALLA’S VERDICT</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>It heard the Song of the Gunner-Dead die out to a sullen roar:</p> -<p>But Nakéd Truth said never a word; and Eye peered down no more.</p> -<p>For Eye had seen; and Truth had judged ... and It might not pass the Door!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And now, like a dog in the dark, It shrank from the voice of a man It knew:—</p> -<p>“There are empty seats at the Banquet-board, but there’s never a seat for you;</p> -<p>For they will not drink with a coward soul, the stark red men who slew.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>There’s meat and to spare, at the Killer-Feasts where Thor’s swung hammer twirls;</p> -<p>There’s beer and enough, in the Free Canteen where the Endless Smoke upcurls;</p> -<p>There are lips and lips, for the Killer-Men, in the Hall of the Dancing-Girls.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>There’s a place for any that passes clean—but for you there’s never a place:</p> -<p>The Endless Smoke would blacken your lips, and the Girls would spit in your face;</p> -<p>And the Beer and the Meat go sour on your guts—for you died the death of disgrace.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>We were pals on earth: but by God’s brave Son and the bomb that I reached too late,</p> -<p>I damn the day and I blast the hour when first I called you mate;</p> -<p>And I’d sell my soul for one of my feet, to hack you from the gate—</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>To hack you hence to the lukewarm hells that the priest-made ovens heat,</p> -<p>Or the faked-pearl heaven of pulpit gods, where the sheep-faced angels bleat</p> -<p>And the halo’s rim is as hard to the head as the gilded floor to the feet.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>It heard the stumps of Its one-time mate go waddling back to the Feast.</p> -<p>And, once and again, It whined for the Meat; ere It slunk, like a tongue-lashed beast,</p> -<p>To the tinselled heaven of pulpit gods and the tinselled hell of their priest.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></p> - -<h2 class="larger">Aimée</h2> - -<hr class="r5" /> - -<h2><i>WIFE AND COUNTRY</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Dear, let me thank you for this:</p> -<p class="i2">That you made me remember, in fight,</p> -<p>England—all mine at your kiss,</p> -<p class="i2">At the touch of your hands in the night:</p> -<p class="i2">England—your giving’s delight.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></p> - -<h2><i>MOTHER AND MATE</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Lightly she slept, that splendid mother mine</p> -<p>Who faced death, undismayed, two hopeless years....</p> -<p>(“Think of me sometimes, son, but not with tears</p> -<p>Lest my soul grieve,” she writes. Oh, this divine</p> -<p>Unselfishness!) ...</p> -<p class="i10">Her favourite print smiled down—</p> -<p>The stippled Cupid, Bartolozzi-brown—</p> -<p>Upon my sorrow. Fire-gleams, fitful, played</p> -<p>Among her playthings—Toby mugs and jade....</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And then I dreamed that—suddenly, strangely clear—</p> -<p>A voice I knew not, faltered at my ear:</p> -<p>“Courage!” ... Your own dear voice, loved since, and known!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And now that she sleeps well, come times <em>her</em> voice</p> -<p>Whispers in day-dreams: “Courage, son! Rejoice</p> -<p>That, leaving you, I left you not alone.”</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></p> - -<h2><i>MEETING</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>I came from the City of Fear,</p> -<p>From the scarred brown land of pain,</p> -<p>Back into life again ...</p> -<p>And I thought, as the leave-boat rolled</p> -<p>Under the veering stars—</p> -<p>Wind a-shriek in her spars—</p> -<p>Shivering there, and cold,</p> -<p>Of music, of warmth, and of wine—</p> -<p>To be mine</p> -<p>For a whole short week ...</p> -<p>And I thought, adrowse in the train,</p> -<p>Of London, suddenly near;</p> -<p>And of how—small doubt—I should find</p> -<p>There, as of old,</p> -<p>Some woman—foolishly kind:</p> -<p>Fingers to hold,</p> -<p>A cheek,</p> -<p>A mouth to kiss—and forget,</p> -<p>Forget in a little while,</p> -<p>Forget</p> -<p>When I came again</p> -<p>To the scarred brown land of pain,</p> -<p>To the sodden things and the vile,</p> -<p>And the tedious battle-fret.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>My dear,</p> -<p>I cannot forget!</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></p> -<p>Not even here</p> -<p>In this City of Fear.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>I remember the poise of your head,</p> -<p>And your look, and the words you said</p> -<p>When we met,</p> -<p>And the waxen bloom at your breast,</p> -<p>And the sable fur that caressed</p> -<p>Your smooth white wrists, and your hands ...</p> -<p>Remember them yet,</p> -<p>Here</p> -<p>In the desolate lands;</p> -<p>Remember your shy</p> -<p>Strange air,</p> -<p>And growing aware—</p> -<p>I,</p> -<p>Who had reckoned love</p> -<p>Man’s toy for an hour—</p> -<p>Of love’s hidden power:</p> -<p>A thrill</p> -<p>That moved me to touch and adore</p> -<p>Some intimate thing that you wore—</p> -<p>A glove,</p> -<p>Or the flower</p> -<p>A-glow at your breast,</p> -<p>The frill</p> -<p>Of fur that circled your wrist ...</p> -<p>These, had my hands caressed;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></p> -<p>These, not you, had I kissed—</p> -<p>I,</p> -<p>Who had thought love’s fires</p> -<p>Only desires.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Dear,</p> -<p>That hidden power thrills in me yet.</p> -<p>There is never one hour—</p> -<p>Not even here</p> -<p>In this City of Fear—</p> -<p>When I quite forget.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></p> - -<h2><i>MUSIC AND WINE</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">When the ink has dried on the pen,</p> -<p class="i2">When the sword returns to its sheath;</p> -<p class="i2">When the world of women and men,</p> -<p class="i2">And the waters around and beneath,</p> -<p class="i2">Char and shrivel and burn—</p> -<p class="i2">What will God give in return?...</p> -<p>Has He better to offer in heaven above</p> -<p>Than wine and music, laughter and love?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Laughter, music and wine,</p> -<p class="i2">The promise of love in your eyes ...</p> -<p class="i2">Sleeping, I dream them mine;</p> -<p class="i2">Waking, my spirit cries—</p> -<p class="i2">Here in the mud and the rain—</p> -<p class="i2">“God, give me London again!</p> -<p>I would lose all earth and the heavens above</p> -<p>For just one banquet of laughter and love.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">When my flesh returns to its earth,</p> -<p class="i2">When my pen is dust as my sword;</p> -<p class="i2">If one thing I wrought find worth</p> -<p class="i2">In the eyes of our kindly Lord,</p> -<p class="i2">I will only ask of His grace</p> -<p class="i2">That He grant us a lowly place</p> -<p>Where his warriors toast Him, in heaven above,</p> -<p>With wine and music, laughter and love.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></p> - -<h2><i>THE GAMBLE</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>If man backs horses, plays cards or dice,</p> -<p class="i2">Or bets on an ivory ball,</p> -<p>He knows the rules, and he reckons the price—</p> -<p class="i2">Be it one half-crown, or his all.</p> -<p>(And it isn’t sense, and it isn’t pluck,</p> -<p>To double the stakes when you’re out of luck!)</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>If he plays—with his life for a limit—here,</p> -<p class="i2">It’s an even-money game:</p> -<p>He can lay on the Red—which is Conquered Fear,</p> -<p class="i2">Or the Black—which is Utter Shame.</p> -<p>(And there isn’t much choice between Reds and Blacks,</p> -<p>For Death throws “zero” whichever he backs.)</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>So that whether man plays for the red gold’s wealth</p> -<p class="i2">Where the little ball clicks and spins,</p> -<p>Or hazards his life in the black night’s stealth</p> -<p class="i2">When machine-gun fire begins—</p> -<p>It’s a limited gamble; and each of us knows</p> -<p>What he stands to lose ere the tables close.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>But woman’s gamble—(there’s only one:</p> -<p class="i2">And it takes some pluck to play,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></p> -<p>When the rules are broke ere the game’s begun;</p> -<p class="i2">When, lose <em>or</em> win, you must pay!)—</p> -<p>Is a double wager on human kind,</p> -<p>A limitless risk—and she goes it blind.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>For she stakes, at love, on a single throw,</p> -<p class="i2">Pride, Honour, Scruples and Fears,</p> -<p>And dreams no lover can hope to know,</p> -<p class="i2">And the gold of the after-years.</p> -<p>(And all for a man; and there’s no man lives</p> -<p>Who is worth the odds that a woman gives.)</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>So that since you hazarded this for me</p> -<p class="i2">On the day love’s die was cast,</p> -<p>I’ll love you—gambler!—while “fours” beat three;</p> -<p class="i2">And I’ll lay on our love to last,</p> -<p>So long as a man will wager a price</p> -<p>On a horse or a card or the ball or the dice.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></p> - -<h2><i>NINON AND ROSES</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Here, in a land where hardly a rose is,</p> -<p class="i2">Silkiest blossoms of broidered flowers</p> -<p>Brush my cheek as each tired eye closes,</p> -<p class="i2">Haunt my sleep through the desolate hours.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Roses never of nature’s making,</p> -<p class="i2">Roses loved for a rose-red night,</p> -<p>Roses visioned at dawn-light’s breaking</p> -<p class="i2">Veiling a bosom as roses white!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Why does the ghost of you linger and stay with me—</p> -<p class="i2">Ghost of the rose-buds that perfumed our bed,</p> -<p>Ghost of a rose-girl who blossomed to play with me—</p> -<p class="i2">Here in a land where the roses are dead?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Day-time and night-time the death-flower blazes,</p> -<p class="i2">Saffron at gun-lip and orange and red,</p> -<p>Here where June’s rose-tree lies shattered as May’s is,</p> -<p class="i2">Here where I dream of the nights that are dead—</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Nights that were sweet with the scent and the touch of you,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Rose-girl in ninon with buds at your breast,</p> -<p>Rose-girl who promised and granted so much of you,</p> -<p class="i2">All that was tender and all that was best.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Growl of the guns cannot shatter the dream of you,</p> -<p class="i2">Banish the thought of one exquisite hour,</p> -<p>Or the scent of your hair in the dawn, or the gleam of you</p> -<p class="i2">White as white roses through roses a-flower.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></p> - -<h2><i>PARTING</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Times more than once, all ways about the world,</p> -<p class="i2">Have I clasped hands; waved sorrowful good-bye;</p> -<p>Watched far cliffs fading, till my sea-wake swirled</p> -<p class="i2">To mingle bluely with a landless sky:</p> -<p>Then—even as the sea-drowned cliffs behind—</p> -<p class="i2">Felt sorrow drowning into memory;</p> -<p>And heard, in every thrill of every wind,</p> -<p class="i2">New voices welcoming across the sea.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Until it seemed nor land nor love had power</p> -<p class="i2">To hold my heart in any firm duress:</p> -<p>Grieving, I sorrowed but a little hour;</p> -<p class="i2">Loving, I knew desire’s sure faithfulness:</p> -<p>Until, by many a love dissatisfied,</p> -<p class="i2">Of each mistrustful and to each untrue,</p> -<p>I found—as one who, having long denied,</p> -<p class="i2">Finds faith at last—this greater Love, in you.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Parting? We are not parted, woman mine!</p> -<p class="i2">Though hands have clasped, though lips have kissed good-bye;</p> -<p>Though towns glide past, and fields, and fields of brine—</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></p> -<p class="i2">My body takes the warrior-way, not I.</p> -<p>I am still with you; you, with me; one heart;</p> -<p class="i2">One equal union, soul to certain soul:</p> -<p>Time cannot sever us, nor sorrow part,</p> -<p class="i2">Nor any sea, who keep our vision whole.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>How can I grieve, who know your spirit near;</p> -<p class="i2">Who watch with newly understanding eyes</p> -<p>This England of your giving, newly dear,</p> -<p class="i2">Sink where my sea-wake swirls to darkling skies?</p> -<p>Lilac, her cliffs have faded into mist....</p> -<p class="i2">Yet still I hold them white in memory,</p> -<p>Feeling, against these lips your lips have kissed,</p> -<p class="i2">The home-wind thrilling down an English sea.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></p> - -<h2 class="larger">The Other Side</h2> - -<hr class="r5" /> - -<h2><i>THE OTHER SIDE</i></h2> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Just got your letter and the poems. Thanks.</p> -<p>You always were a brainy sort of chap:</p> -<p>Though pretty useless as a subaltern—</p> -<p>Too much imagination, not enough</p> -<p>Of that rare quality, sound commonsense</p> -<p>And so you’ve managed to get on the Staff:</p> -<p>Influence, I suppose: a Captain, too!</p> -<p>How do tabs suit you? Are they blue or green?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>About your book. I’ve read it carefully,</p> -<p>So has Macfaddyen (you remember him,</p> -<p>The light-haired chap who joined us after Loos?);</p> -<p>And candidly, we don’t think much of it.</p> -<p>The piece about the horses isn’t bad;</p> -<p>But all the rest, excuse the word, are tripe—</p> -<p>The same old tripe we’ve read a thousand times.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>My grief, but we’re fed up to the back-teeth</p> -<p>With war-books, war-verse, all the eye-wash stuff</p> -<p>That seems to please the idiots at home.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></p> -<p>You know the kind of thing, or used to know:</p> -<p>“Heroes who laugh while Fritz is strafing them”—</p> -<p>(I don’t remember that <em>you</em> found it fun,</p> -<p>The day they shelled us out of Blouwpoort Farm!)</p> -<p>“After the fight. Our cheery wounded. Note</p> -<p>The smile of victory: it won’t come off”—</p> -<p>(Of course they smile; so’d you, if you’d escaped,</p> -<p>And saw three months of hospital ahead....</p> -<p>They don’t smile, much, when they’re shipped back to France!)</p> -<p>“Out for the Great Adventure”—(twenty-five</p> -<p>Fat, smirking wasters in some O.T.C.,</p> -<p>Who just avoided the Conscription Act!)</p> -<p>“A strenuous woman-worker for the Cause”—</p> -<p>(Miss Trixie Toogood of the Gaiety,</p> -<p>Who helped to pauperize a few Belgiques</p> -<p>In the great cause of self-advertisement!) ...</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Lord knows, the newspapers are bad enough;</p> -<p>But they’ve got some excuse—the censorship—</p> -<p>Helping to keep their readers’ spirits up—</p> -<p>Giving the public what it wants: (besides,</p> -<p>One mustn’t blame the press, the press has done</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></p> -<p>More than its share to help us win this war—</p> -<p>More than some other people I could name):</p> -<p>But what’s the good of war-books, if they fail</p> -<p>To give civilian-readers an idea</p> -<p>Of what life <em>is</em> like in the firing-line?...</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>You might have done that much; from you, at least,</p> -<p>I thought we’d get an inkling of the truth.</p> -<p>But no; you rant and rattle, beat your drum,</p> -<p>And blow your two-penny trumpet like the rest:</p> -<p>“Red battle’s glory,” “honour’s utmost task,”</p> -<p>“Gay jesting faces of undaunted boys,” ...</p> -<p>The same old Boys’-Own-Paper balderdash!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Mind you, I don’t deny that they exist,</p> -<p>These abstract virtues which you gas about—</p> -<p>(<em>We shouldn’t stop out here long, otherwise!</em>)—</p> -<p>Honour and humour, and that sort of thing;</p> -<p>(Though heaven knows where you found the glory-touch,</p> -<p>Unless you picked it up at G.H.Q.);</p> -<p>But if you’d commonsense, you’d understand</p> -<p>That humour’s just the Saxon cloak for fear,</p> -<p>Our English substitute for “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Vive la France</i>,”</p> -<p>Or else a trick to keep the folk at home</p> -<p>From being scared to death—as we are scared;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></p> -<p>That honour ... damn it, honour’s the one thing</p> -<p>No soldier yaps about, except of course</p> -<p>A soldier-<em>poet</em>—three-and-sixpence net.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Honest to God, it makes me sick and tired</p> -<p>To think that you, who lived a year with us,</p> -<p>Should be content to write such tommy-rot.</p> -<p>I feel as though I’d sent a runner back</p> -<p>With news that we were being strafed like Hell ...</p> -<p>And he’d reported: “Everything O. K.”</p> -<p>Something’s the matter: either you can’t <em>see</em>,</p> -<p>Or else you see, and cannot write—that’s worse.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Hang it, you can’t have clean forgotten things</p> -<p>You went to bed with, woke with, smelt and felt,</p> -<p>All those long months of boredom streaked with fear:</p> -<p>Mud, cold, fatigue, sweat, nerve-strain, sleeplessness,</p> -<p>And men’s excreta viscid in the rain,</p> -<p>And stiff-legged horses lying by the road,</p> -<p>Their bloated bellies shimmering, green with flies....</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p><em>Have</em> you forgotten? you who dine to-night</p> -<p>In comfort at the Carlton or Savoy.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></p> -<p>(Lord, but I’d like a dart at that myself—</p> -<p>Oysters, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">crême</i> something, sole <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">vin blanc</i>, a bird,</p> -<p>And one cold bottle of the very best—</p> -<p>A girl to share it: afterwards, a show—</p> -<p>Lee White and Alfred Lester, Nelson Keys;</p> -<p>Supper to follow.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i12">... Our Brigade’s in rest—</p> -<p>The usual farm. I’ve got the only bed.</p> -<p>The men are fairly comfy—three good barns.</p> -<p>Thank God, they didn’t have to bivouac</p> -<p>After this last month in the Salient.) ...</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>You <em>have</em> forgotten; or you couldn’t write</p> -<p>This sort of stuff—all cant, no guts in it,</p> -<p>Hardly a single picture true to life.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Well, here’s a picture for you: Montauban—</p> -<p>Last year—the flattened village on our left—</p> -<p>On our right flank, the razed Briqueterie,</p> -<p>Their five-nines pounding bits to dustier bits—</p> -<p>Behind, a cratered slope, with batteries</p> -<p>Crashing and flashing, violet in the dusk,</p> -<p>And prematuring every now and then—</p> -<p>In front, the ragged Bois de Bernafay,</p> -<p>Bosche whizz-bangs bursting white among its trees.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>You had been doing F.O.O. that day;</p> -<p>(The Staff knows why we had an F.O.O.:</p> -<p>One couldn’t flag-wag through Trônes Wood; the wires</p> -<p>Went down as fast as one could put them up;</p> -<p>And messages by runner took three hours.)</p> -<p>I got the wind up rather: you were late,</p> -<p>And they’d been shelling like the very deuce.</p> -<p>However, back you came. I see you now,</p> -<p>Staggering into “mess”—a broken trench,</p> -<p>Two chalk-walls roofed with corrugated iron,</p> -<p>And, round the traverse, Driver Noakes’s stove</p> -<p>Stinking and smoking while we ate our grub.</p> -<p>Your face was blue-white, streaked with dirt; your eyes</p> -<p>Had shrunk into your head, as though afraid</p> -<p>To watch more horrors; you were sodden-wet</p> -<p>With greasy coal-black mud—and other things.</p> -<p>Sweating and shivering, speechless, there you stood.</p> -<p>I gave you whisky, made you talk. You said:</p> -<p>“Major, another signaller’s been killed.”</p> -<p>“Who?”</p> -<p class="i6">“Gunner Andrews, blast them. O my Christ!</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></p> -<p>His head—split open—when his brains oozed out,</p> -<p>They looked like bloody sweetbreads, in the muck.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And you’re the chap who writes this claptrap verse!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Lord, if I’d half <em>your</em> brains, I’d write a book:</p> -<p>None of your sentimental platitudes,</p> -<p>But something real, vital; that should strip</p> -<p>The glamour from this outrage we call war,</p> -<p>Shewing it naked, hideous, stupid, vile—</p> -<p>One vast abomination. So that they</p> -<p>Who, coming after, till the ransomed fields</p> -<p>Where our lean corpses rotted in the ooze,</p> -<p>Reading my written words, should understand</p> -<p>This stark stupendous horror, visualize</p> -<p>The unutterable foulness of it all....</p> -<p>I’d shew them, not your glamourous “glorious game,”</p> -<p>Which men play “jesting” “for their honour’s sake”—</p> -<p>(A kind of Military Tournament,</p> -<p>With just a hint of danger—bound in cloth!)—</p> -<p>But War,—as war is now, and always was:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></p> -<p>A dirty, loathsome, servile murder-job:—</p> -<p>Men, lousy, sleepless, ulcerous, afraid,</p> -<p>Toiling their hearts out in the pulling slime</p> -<p>That wrenches gum-boot down from bleeding heel</p> -<p>And cakes in itching arm-pits, navel, ears:</p> -<p>Men stunned to brainlessness, and gibbering:</p> -<p>Men driving men to death and worse than death:</p> -<p>Men maimed and blinded: men against machines—</p> -<p>Flesh versus iron, concrete, flame and wire:</p> -<p>Men choking out their souls in poison-gas:</p> -<p>Men squelched into the slime by trampling feet:</p> -<p>Men, disembowelled by guns five miles away,</p> -<p>Cursing, with their last breath, the living God</p> -<p>Because he made them, in His image, men....</p> -<p>So—were your talent mine—I’d write of war</p> -<p>For those who, coming after, know it not.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>And if posterity should ask of me</p> -<p>What high, what base emotions keyed weak flesh</p> -<p>To face such torments, I would answer: “<em>You!</em></p> -<p>Not for themselves, O daughters, grandsons, sons,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></p> -<p>Your tortured forebears wrought this miracle;</p> -<p>Not for themselves, <em>accomplished utterly</em></p> -<p>This loathliest task of murderous servitude;</p> -<p>But just because they realized that thus,</p> -<p><em>And only thus</em>, by sacrifice, might they</p> -<p>Secure a world worth living in—<em>for you</em>.” ...</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p>Good-night, my soldier-poet. <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">Dormez bien!</i></p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="chapter"></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></p> - -<h2 class="larger">“One of Them”</h2> - -<p class="center"><i>Being in Some Respects a Sequel to “One of Us”</i></p> - -<h3>I.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Wherein the bard—released from War’s confusions—</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Preludes with egotistical allusions.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Six years ago—or is it six-and-twenty?</p> -<p class="i4">(How vast the gulf from those ecstatic days!)—</p> -<p class="i2">When the whole earth snored on in slothful plenty</p> -<p class="i4">(Tho’ poets cashed small pittance for their lays);</p> -<p class="i2">When war appeared less real than G. A. Henty,</p> -<p class="i4">And Oxo’s snaky signs were yet ablaze;</p> -<p>When all seemed peaceful as the press of Cadbury,</p> -<p>And no one dreamed of bombs, or bet a Bradbury;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Or e’er stern Mars had roped us in his tether,</p> -<p class="i4">Ere British guns had thundered at Le Câteau:</p> -<p class="i2">We fitted out—my Muse and I together—</p> -<p class="i4">And launched adown the galley-slips of Chatto</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></p> -<p class="i2">A barque of verse, full-rigged for halcyon weather,</p> -<p class="i4">Which many a critic judged to take the <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">gâteau</i>:</p> -<p>(Though some there were, high pundits of disparity,</p> -<p>Who wept at our unscholarly vulgarity).</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">We have sailed far since then; crossed our horizon;</p> -<p class="i4">Published our loves and travels in a novel</p> -<p class="i2">(A tale, men say, that Peckham’s flapper cries on,</p> -<p class="i4">So that both Boots and Smith’s before us grovel);</p> -<p class="i2">And eaten ration bully-beef—with flies on;</p> -<p class="i4">And sheltered gratefully in many a hovel,</p> -<p>What time we sang of guns and gore and trenches—</p> -<p>Instead of oysters, tango-teas and wenches.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For times have changed since we wrote “One of Us”:</p> -<p class="i4"><i lang="la" xml:lang="la">Et nos mutamus</i>—more or less—<i lang="la" xml:lang="la">in illis</i>.</p> -<p class="i2">Muse finds herself <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">in urbe</i> somewhat <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">rus</i>;</p> -<p class="i4">And I—if I disport with Amaryllis—</p> -<p class="i2">Where once my motor flashed, prefer a ’bus;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></p> -<p class="i4">And shuddering note how vast the supper-bill is;</p> -<p>And signing, sigh in secret for the calm,</p> -<p>Chaste, cheap seclusion of my Chiltern farm.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Yes, Muse and I are tired, and super-serious:</p> -<p class="i4">Her damask cheek is lined a bit, and wrinkled.</p> -<p class="i2">We are grown old, and London’s late nights weary us:</p> -<p class="i4">While the gold wine that erst in ice-pail tinkled,</p> -<p class="i2">Her doctor finds extremely deleterious;</p> -<p class="i4">And mine forbids me red lips, passion-crinkled:</p> -<p>So now we cultivate domestic habits</p> -<p>Amongst our pigs, our poultry, and our rabbits.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Yet sometimes, as we trench our stubborn soil,</p> -<p class="i4">Or feed our sows, or strow the peat-moss litter,</p> -<p class="i2">Or set the morrow’s chicken-mash to boil,</p> -<p class="i4">Or wander out where our young turkeys twitter,</p> -<p class="i2">Or read by mellow candle-light—since oil</p> -<p class="i4">Is dear and scarce; or talk—a little bitter</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></p> -<p>Because we find that Food Control Committees</p> -<p>Are all composed of men brought up in cities;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Sometimes, in this five-acre paradise</p> -<p class="i4">Whither my nerve-racked spirit fled the battle</p> -<p class="i2">Deferring to sound Harley Street advice—</p> -<p class="i4">A silver badge its only martial chattel,</p> -<p class="i2">I hear a voice, loud as the market price</p> -<p class="i4">That butchers bid for Rhondda’s missing cattle,</p> -<p>Voice of my Muse, still vibrant with old passion,</p> -<p>Telling how poetry is now the fashion.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">“Look you,” she cries, “the Wheels are turning, turning.</p> -<p class="i4">Though Pegasus long since wore out his pinions,</p> -<p class="i2">Somehow his shod hooves keep the bread-mills churning.</p> -<p class="i4">Shrill, night and day, sing Marsh Georgian minions:</p> -<p class="i2">Each sinking sun sets some new Noyes a-burning,</p> -<p class="i4">Each rising moon reveals fresh hordes of Binyons;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></p> -<p>Who batten fat on unsuspecting editors,</p> -<p>And—unlike you—contrive to pay their creditors.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">“Poet, forsooth! You agricultural brute!</p> -<p class="i4">Have you no soul above the weight of porkers?</p> -<p class="i2">Was it for this I hearkened to your suit,</p> -<p class="i4">Gave you my metres and my rhymes—some, corkers?</p> -<p class="i2">Up, Gilbert! rummage out your rusty lute:</p> -<p class="i4">Polish it blacker than your black Minorcas:</p> -<p>And let its notes once more, in refluent stanzas,</p> -<p>Dower the Income-tax with glad Bonanzas.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So she; and—since I loathe to disappoint</p> -<p class="i4">The least illusion of the equal sex—</p> -<p class="i2">Let Byron’s oil once more these locks anoint,</p> -<p class="i4">Once more let honour meet these Cox-drawn cheques ...</p> -<p class="i2">Though well I know that times are spare of joint,</p> -<p class="i4">And satire’s song less like to please than vex;</p> -<p>Now small beer, Smallwood, raids and strikes and rations,</p> -<p>Have near eclipsed the gaiety of nations:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Still, let me sing. Yet not as once I sung:</p> -<p class="i4">Love, fear, and death have chastened, sobered, saddened,</p> -<p class="i2">One who knew life’s full burden-time too young;</p> -<p class="i4">Whom never youth’s unhampered freedom gladdened,</p> -<p class="i2">But only envy and ambition stung,</p> -<p class="i4">And fickle passions—in love’s semblance maddened;</p> -<p>So that he needs must tumble now, poor clown,</p> -<p>On this Pindaric stage for half-a-crown:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Yet one who, ’spite a past that shocked St. Tony</p> -<p class="i4">And paid recording angels overtime,</p> -<p class="i2">Still holds his own at sonnet or <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">canzone</i>.</p> -<p class="i4">As some shall know who follow this, my rhyme—</p> -<p class="i2">Some few: for gladly would I lay a pony,</p> -<p class="i4">Or larger sum, against a ten-cent dime,</p> -<p>That most of those who read this metred tract’ll</p> -<p>Not know a spondee from a pterodactyl.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></p> - -<h3 class="new">II.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Explains—a task few modern penmen shirk—</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>The sociology of this great work.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">God bless Democracy, George Bernard Shaw,</p> -<p class="i4">And William Dunn, our sanest, saintliest hatter!</p> -<p class="i2">God bless that great anomaly, the Law;</p> -<p class="i4">Aye, may our knights on hoarded tea wax fatter!</p> -<p class="i2">God bless Sir Arthur Yapp’s unfailing jaw,</p> -<p class="i4">Lord Lansdowne’s pen, and brave Horatio’s chatter!</p> -<p>And—lest in England Bolos quite prevail—</p> -<p>God bless King Northcliffe and his “Daily Mail!”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Long live the old Press—“Times,” “D. T.,” “Spectator”!</p> -<p class="i4">Long live the New—“Age,” “Europe,” “Statesman,” “Witness”!</p> -<p class="i2">Long live each <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">acti temporis laudator</i>!</p> -<p class="i4">Long live Lloyd George in unmolested Pitt-ness!</p> -<p class="i2">Long live “The Nation,” facile demonstrator</p> -<p class="i4">Of everybody’s—save its own—unfitness!</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></p> -<p>Long live Valera, Carson, Devlin, Plunkett!</p> -<p>Long live the lads who fight, the cads who funk it!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Long live our German banks, <i lang="it" xml:lang="it">sub duce</i> Plender!</p> -<p class="i4">Long may our railways rule our bounding sea!</p> -<p class="i2">Long may impatient Cuthberts paw their fender,</p> -<p class="i4">What time their patient Phyllis pours their tea!</p> -<p class="i2">Long life to each investor and each spender!</p> -<p class="i4">Long live the Staff! Long live the A.S.E.!</p> -<p>So long as England’s in the melting-pot,</p> -<p>A prudent bard must sing, “Long live the lot!”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For who shall say—at close of Armageddon,</p> -<p class="i4">When the world’s finished beggaring its neighbour,</p> -<p class="i2">When the last shell’s been fired, the last pig fed on—</p> -<p class="i4">If we’ll be ruled by Capital or Labour:</p> -<p class="i2">If a Welsh harp shall twang part-songs of Seddon,</p> -<p class="i4">While Simon pipes a compromising tabor:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></p> -<p>Or whether every stalwart War-Loan-lender’s son</p> -<p>Will find his Empire dividends signed “Henson”?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Not I: not all the better men who fought</p> -<p class="i4">While dilutees preserved their precious skin:</p> -<p class="i2">Not those great early dead, whose single thought</p> -<p class="i4">Ran—“England: Germany: we’ve got to <em>win</em>.”</p> -<p class="i2">Poor simple souls, of H. G. Wells untaught,</p> -<p class="i4">They never realized their next-of-kin</p> -<p>Would read how they had died to make life cheerier</p> -<p>For the dear blacks in Briningized Nigeria.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Public, forgive your fool; if now and then—</p> -<p class="i4">Black bubbles on the verse’s stream—appear</p> -<p class="i2">Thoughts of our worn, unlettered fighting-men;</p> -<p class="i4">If sometimes, through the grease-paint’s gay veneer,</p> -<p class="i2">Truth shews—a wrinkled hag. The traitor pen</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Forgets how blood is cheap and paper dear:</p> -<p>And I’m no more the blithe, nut-loving squirrel</p> -<p>Who frisked it in the consulship of Birrell.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Which is, perchance, the reason why my mind</p> -<p class="i4">Turns oft to those dear days, now dead as mutton;</p> -<p class="i2">When Haldane’s soul with Bethmann-Hollweg dined;</p> -<p class="i4">And no one ploughed up golf-greens, sown by Sutton,</p> -<p class="i2">To bed the humble tuber’s sprouting rind;</p> -<p class="i4">Or dashed off shorthand <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">billets-doux</i> in Dutton,</p> -<p>Or changed a blear-eyed pauper to a swell man</p> -<p>In six short weeks of concentrated Pelman:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Why now—sad minstrel in un-Sandoned sack-cloth—</p> -<p class="i4">I sing the twilight of the times I knew.</p> -<p class="i2">No more our glaring footlights blurr a back-cloth</p> -<p class="i4">Woven of misery and hung askew;</p> -<p class="i2">For Time, stern judge of Us, has donned his black cloth,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></p> -<p class="i4">And to the Mob delivered up the Few ...</p> -<p>Unless, of course, the Mob’s but swapped its Peers</p> -<p>For a worse dynasty—of profiteers.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">God knows, <em>we</em> had our faults—greed, blindness, pride.</p> -<p class="i4">God also knows we had a dashed good time.</p> -<p class="i2">Were they the worse for that—our boys who died,</p> -<p class="i4">By earth and air and sea in every clime?</p> -<p class="i2">God knows! But if ghost-feet still strut and side</p> -<p class="i4">About their clubs, if ghost-eyes read this rhyme,</p> -<p>I think they’d like their vanished epoch’s swan-song</p> -<p>To be a merry tune, and not a wan song.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So clear the stage, and ring the curtain up!</p> -<p class="i4">Once more—ere Empires yield to Leagues of Nations,</p> -<p class="i2">And bayonets to Socialistic gup—</p> -<p class="i4">Let Beauty, in diaphanous creations,</p> -<p class="i2">Ogle the stalls, and subsequently sup</p> -<p class="i4">Off iced champagne and ortolan collations....</p> -<p>Whereafter, if my pen won’t bring me pelf,</p> -<p>Damned if I don’t turn Socialist myself!</p> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></p> - -<h3 class="new">III.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Sets forth, despite the Law’s dull interference,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>A lady’s birth, age, family, and appearance.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Arms have I sung full oft, both steel and white ones;</p> -<p class="i4">Guns have I sung till I can sing no more;</p> -<p class="i2">Men have I sung, both common and polite ones:</p> -<p class="i4">Yet never sang <em>one</em> heroine before.</p> -<p class="i2">Come, then, my ghost-girls, dark, fair, plump, and slight ones,</p> -<p class="i4">Come in the finest, flimsiest frocks ye wore....</p> -<p>Alas, not one of you quite fills the bill—</p> -<p>A life-size model for my Lady Jill.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Pardon, then, Magda, Gladys, Nancy, Florence,</p> -<p class="i4">Doris, Patricia, Mollie, Celandine,</p> -<p class="i2">Nor hold your erstwhile suitor in abhorrence</p> -<p class="i4">Because, from one, he takes eyes subtly green;</p> -<p class="i2">From other, hands a Sargent or a Lawrence</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Had envied for his canvas; here, the sheen</p> -<p>Of gold hair, auburn-shot, in whose abundance,</p> -<p>What time Jill dreamed, young Cupids watched the sun dance;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">There a smooth throat, an arched, attractive ankle,</p> -<p class="i4">Soft cheek, curved back in bloom to close-set ear,</p> -<p class="i2">Red mouth full-lipped, a voice whose love-tones rankle</p> -<p class="i4">Still in this heart of mine,—a voice so dear</p> -<p class="i2">That ... But no more! In fear this rhyming prank’ll</p> -<p class="i4">Offend some damozel whom I revere,</p> -<p>I state: Jill’s just an ordinary blonde,</p> -<p>Fair, frail, flirtatious, rather fast than fond.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">You know the type—aristo-plutocratic,</p> -<p class="i4">Out of blue blood by hard North Country cash;</p> -<p class="i2">A self-assertive sire; a dam, lymphatic</p> -<p class="i4">(Since rarely strawberry leaves and sovereigns clash);</p> -<p class="i2">Their sole son, daring in the diplomatic</p> -<p class="i4">(Thumping his Underwood while kingdoms crash);</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></p> -<p>Their daughter ... Is there a man alive can swear</p> -<p>Exactly what she did or did not dare?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For Jill was one of those astounding females,</p> -<p class="i4">Born in a chaster, pre-Edwardian day;</p> -<p class="i2">When lone Lucindas dared not dine nor tea males</p> -<p class="i4">For dread lest scandal dub them “<i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">coryphée</i>”;</p> -<p class="i2">When none drank deep of D’Abernonian dream-ales,</p> -<p class="i4">But quietly our Empire went its way,</p> -<p>Nor realised that subalterns on horses</p> -<p>Monopolized the brain-power of its Forces:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">One who was yet a span from flapperhood,</p> -<p class="i4">Still puzzling o’er the simplest of equations;</p> -<p class="i2">What time in robe of saffron Phoebus stood,</p> -<p class="i4">And all our Lanes were gay with green carnations,</p> -<p class="i2">And private hansoms sought the Johnian Wood,</p> -<p class="i4">And the shrill cycle-bell’s first tintillations</p> -<p>Resounded from the dawning to the dark</p> -<p>In a Rolls-Royceless, Peter Panless Park:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">One who attained the pig-tail’s ribboned dowry,</p> -<p class="i4">And helped to pass a Kipling tambourine,</p> -<p class="i2">When first from lands of wattle, maple, Maori,</p> -<p class="i4">Men came at summons of a dying Queen:</p> -<p class="i2">One who, at Auteuil, Dresden, and Rathgowrie,</p> -<p class="i4">Acquired that polish reft of which, I ween,</p> -<p>It is not possible for our Dianas</p> -<p>To emulate a modern <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">grande dame’s</i> manners:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">One on whose head the ostrich-feathers nodded</p> -<p class="i4">In Alexandrine courts—and <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">chez</i> Bassano;</p> -<p class="i2">In whose young ears, song’s angels disembodied.</p> -<p class="i4">Rang the last notes of Melbourne’s own soprano;</p> -<p class="i2">Whose lithe feet, Moykoff-shod, the grouse-moors plodded,</p> -<p class="i4">Or danced the new Machiché Brasiliano,</p> -<p>In times before, unchaperoned of skinny ma,</p> -<p>Suburbia’s daughters sought the darkling kinema:</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">To put the matter briefly—One of Them.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Bear witness, Muses Nine, how most unworthy</p> -<p class="i2">Is my gold nib to touch their garment’s hem.</p> -<p class="i4">Say, Byron (for as bard I still prefer thee</p> -<p class="i2">To all whose pallid minor stars be-gem</p> -<p class="i4">These Gotha nights) would not such task deter thee</p> -<p>From the rhymed octave—sometime known as Whistlecraft—</p> -<p>In which, poor ass, I ply this weekly thistlecraft?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Οίμοι! that I can never be a poet</p> -<p class="i4">Modelled on spoon-fed college Adonäises,</p> -<p class="i2">Whose metres reek of Porson, Jebb, and Jowett,</p> -<p class="i4">Whose very thoughts derive from donnish däises.</p> -<p class="i2">Alas! for us who, writing life, must know it—</p> -<p class="i4">Its sights, its scents, its ladies, lords, and Läises.</p> -<p>Alas! for my refusal to disseminate—</p> -<p>Even in verse—the scholarly-effeminate.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And oh! ten thousand times alas, should Jill</p> -<p class="i4">Be recognised in these Parnassian pages.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Woe for the libel action, and the bill</p> -<p class="i4">Which he must face who in the law engages.</p> -<p class="i2">And ah! thank Heaven for a metric skill</p> -<p class="i4">That shields this head from Justice Darling’s rages ...</p> -<p>Safeguarded by thy last experience, G. Moore,</p> -<p>I maiden-name my lady—Lewis-Seymour.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></p> - -<h3 class="new">IV.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>In which the author, contrary to custom,</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>Goes for the gloves—as Sohrab went for Rustum.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">I have discovered, after much perusal</p> -<p class="i4">Of Cannan, George Mackenzie, Walpole, Bennett,</p> -<p class="i2">A Law whose discipline brooks no refusal,—</p> -<p class="i4">A neo-rheo-literary tenet</p> -<p class="i2">Which runs: “In art, forbear to pick and choose. All</p> -<p class="i4">That happens, happens. Wherefore, up and pen it!</p> -<p>Let the scribe’s tale be casual and cursory;</p> -<p>End where you like—but start us in the nursery.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And so I fain had traced, through many a canto,</p> -<p class="i4">My heroine; all dimples in her cot;</p> -<p class="i2">Bored with her lessons; laughing at the panto.;</p> -<p class="i4">Immersed in “Fauntleroy” or Walter Scott:</p> -<p class="i2">But, since green herbs from memory’s <i lang="es" xml:lang="es">campo santo</i></p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Provide no flavouring for satire’s pot,</p> -<p>For seething, bubbling cauldron such as this is,</p> -<p>I’ll skip the skipping-rope and jump to kisses.</p> -</div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">’Tis such a night as only London knew</p> -<p class="i4">In the full seasons of our heart’s content—</p> -<p class="i2">When, like some fairy pageant in review,</p> -<p class="i4">Love, Pleasure, Luxury together blent,</p> -<p class="i2">Made life not all too boring for the Few;</p> -<p class="i4">And Unemployment, fix’t at ten per cent.,</p> -<p>Furnished—by all means of charity bazaars—</p> -<p>Right many a dame with perquisites and “pars.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">London, in London’s June! Above, the starshine:</p> -<p class="i4">Below, against the rails of Berkeley Square,</p> -<p class="i2">The patient lights of brougham, or rarer car, shine—</p> -<p class="i4">Waiting stiff-shirted squires and ladies fair:</p> -<p>Music, from high French windows that afar shine,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Thrills, till a dancer well might curse and swear,</p> -<p>And call himself a “dashed unlucky fella”</p> -<p>To miss the Lewis-Seymour’s Cinderella.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Within those halls, where plush-breeched flunkeys stand,</p> -<p class="i4">What sounds, what scents, what visions of delight!</p> -<p class="i2">How—to the bluest Blue Hungarian band—</p> -<p class="i4">Youth whirls away the unreturning night!</p> -<p class="i2">How—perfumed as the blooms of Samarcand—</p> -<p class="i4">The dying flow’rets whisper, “Carlton White!”</p> -<p>But, oh! to weary war-time ration-hunters,</p> -<p>How like a dream, this stand-up supper—Gunter’s!</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For here, in reach of every slender hand which is</p> -<p class="i4">Scarce languidly outstretched to porcelain plate,</p> -<p class="i2">Are dainties drawn from each vale, stream, or strand which is</p> -<p class="i4">Most famed for fruit or fish or fowl or cate:</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Creamed strawberries; thin, lavish-buttered sandwiches</p> -<p class="i4">Of livered geese (that now squawk Hymns of Hate),</p> -<p>Of priceless hams and tongues and caviar; ices;</p> -<p>And sugared sweets in myriad strange devices....</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Yet sweeter far than all these sweet things, Jill is:</p> -<p class="i4">Queen of my verse and this “Young People’s Dance”:</p> -<p class="i2">Fairer than fairest of Mayfairy fillies!</p> -<p class="i4">Sweet, is the smile that lights a countenance</p> -<p class="i2">Bright as moon-dappled, pink-tipped lotus-lilies;</p> -<p class="i4">Sweet, are her jade-green eyes that gleam and glance—</p> -<p>And give no hint of yester-tea-time’s flare-up</p> -<p>When stern mamma forbade her bind her hair up.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Jill’s hair! How beautiful it is; the tresses</p> -<p class="i4">Warm-golden, soft as cygnet’s earliest downing.</p> -<p class="i2">Jill’s foot! How slim the arch the flounce caresses.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Jill’s brow! How pure; how yet uncreased in frowning.</p> -<p class="i2">(My Muse! How easily the jade impresses</p> -<p class="i4">On this base coin a stamp of pseudo-Browning.)</p> -<p>Jill’s youth! Jill’s dreams! These luxuries that lap her!...</p> -<p>Don’t they present a most alluring flapper?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So thinks, at least, this lad in evening raiment—</p> -<p class="i4">Shoes, shirt-front, collar, waistcoat-buttons, glowing;</p> -<p class="i2">This sub. of other days—when soldier’s payment</p> -<p class="i4">Scarcely sufficed each monthly mess-bill’s owing,</p> -<p class="i2">And triple stars full fifteen years delay meant;</p> -<p class="i4">He, who presents the goblet, over-flowing</p> -<p>With icy rubies to its crinkled brim,</p> -<p>And asks if Jill won’t “sit this out” with him....</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And there it hangs, word-carven, my last image.</p> -<p class="i4">(Browning again! now Keats!) O hapless pair,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></p> -<p class="i2">Loth lover and bold maiden of a dim age—</p> -<p class="i4">Lost to us now, and dead, but still most fair.</p> -<p class="i2">O Attic shapes! Arcadian girlhood’s slim age,</p> -<p class="i4">And silken youth with brilliantined hair!</p> -<p>What climaxes must I not sacrifice,</p> -<p>Who write this epic at a weekly price?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For—as long melodies are sweet, but sweeter</p> -<p class="i4">Poems in short instalments, such as mine—</p> -<p class="i2">Seven full days, teased puppet of this metre,</p> -<p class="i4">Must thy parched tongue await that roseate wine;</p> -<p class="i2">Seven full nights, fond boy, must thou entreat her;</p> -<p class="i4">Whilst mantle to her cheeks, incarnadine,</p> -<p>Youth’s beauty, beauty’s youth—and readers vex’t</p> -<p>Know, need know, nothing more till Tuesday next.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></p> - -<h3 class="new">V.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Brings life to week-old statues; makes them prance</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>To love’s light tune—and ends the Seymours’ dance.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Pale shapes I locked in memory’s studio,</p> -<p class="i4">Your draperies stir. From vein to marble vein</p> -<p class="i2">The life-blood leaps. Eyes gleam, and pulses glow.</p> -<p class="i4">Once more my octaves rap their old refrain</p> -<p class="i2">To re-create the weekly puppet-show.</p> -<p class="i4">Fond boy, to work! My Jill’s herself again,</p> -<p>And answers your entreaty—sideways glancing—</p> -<p>“Perhaps I will. It’s jolly hot for dancing.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So they twain pass—smart sub. and flapper stately—</p> -<p class="i4">From the high halls of Gunter’s prank’t refection.</p> -<p class="i2">And out across the waxèd boards, where lately</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Twirled the swift waltz to <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">La Poupée’s</i> “Selection.”</p> -<p class="i2">And on, past couples gossiping sedately;</p> -<p class="i4">And on, past couples screened against detection;</p> -<p>To a dim-shaded, fairy-lighted alcove,</p> -<p>Fit haunt for single maid and single tall cove:—</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Such as—in land of Taj Mahal and mugger,</p> -<p class="i4">Where girls book weeks ahead their supper dances—</p> -<p class="i2">Screens some pale flirt, some lad who yearns to hug her,</p> -<p class="i4">From the brown <i lang="hi" xml:lang="hi">khitmatghar’s</i> averted glances.</p> -<p class="i2">(Who knows thy secrets, darkling <i lang="hi" xml:lang="hi">Kala-juggah</i>—</p> -<p class="i4">The orbs downcast, the fingers’ coy advances,</p> -<p>The swiftly stifled sob that hooks the stripling—</p> -<p>Save I, Victoria Cross, and Rudyard Kipling!)</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And there, beneath the new-sponged potted palm-tree,</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></p> -<p class="i4">That mid-day brought and morning shall remove—</p> -<p class="i2">Mayfair’s own wind-unruffled, ever-calm tree,</p> -<p class="i4">Whose drooping branches shield Mayfairies’ love—</p> -<p class="i2">She lisps of Waller parts, and thy dead charm, Tree</p> -<p class="i4">(Twin stars now shining in the “flies” above!);</p> -<p>While he admits he has or hasn’t seen them ...</p> -<p>Till a shy sudden silence falls between them,</p> -<p class="i2">A cloud across the sun of lightling banter.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i4">O Jill, my gold-spoon cake-and-Moët miss!</p> -<p class="i2">Hast thou not dreamed, since thy first tam-o’-shanter,</p> -<p class="i4">Of soldier boy, of dance-night such as this?</p> -<p class="i2">Faintly they catch the polka’s throb, the canter</p> -<p class="i4">Of homing hansom-cab where lovers kiss:</p> -<p>And “Oh,” thinks he, “what eyes, what lips, what hair, too!”</p> -<p>And “Oh,” thinks she “the ninny doesn’t dare to.”</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Voiceless, they sit: but now her eyes, upturning,</p> -<p class="i4">Seek his: and now, beneath the lashes’ veil,</p> -<p class="i2">Leaps a quick flame to set youth’s pulses burning;</p> -<p class="i4">And now she feels her resolution fail:</p> -<p class="i2">And now gains strength anew the curious yearning</p> -<p class="i4">For love’s adventure: now, her fingers frail</p> -<p>Tighten about the kerchief’s lacy tissue:</p> -<p>And now, at last, he says, “Jill, I <em>must</em> kiss you.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">“Bobbie, you mustn’t.” “Jill—just one.” Her shoulder</p> -<p class="i4">Stiffens; resists the half-encircling arm.</p> -<p class="i2">Hands fend away the hand that seeks to hold her.</p> -<p class="i4">Lips murmur. Lashes flutter in alarm.</p> -<p class="i2">“No, Bobbie. No.” My foolish boy, be bolder;</p> -<p class="i4">The moment’s fear is half the moment’s charm....</p> -<p>Alas! His missed and amateurish peck</p> -<p>Grazes the ear-lobe; lands upon the neck.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Readers, both kissed and kissless, chide not; pity</p> -<p class="i4">These withered fruits from Jill’s dead seas of dreaming.</p> -<p class="i2">Think—or in France, or in this barraged city,</p> -<p class="i4">How many a dear one owes his brass hat’s gleaming,</p> -<p class="i2">How many a husband thanks his safe Committee,</p> -<p class="i4">To some fond woman’s sound strategic scheming!</p> -<p>Ponder—can crafts which men from want to plenty ship,</p> -<p>Be steered without an arduous apprenticeship?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Ponder! Nor blame my Jill if she disguises</p> -<p class="i4">Love’s disappointment in disapprobation.</p> -<p class="i2">If, Artemis in judgment now, she rises—</p> -<p class="i4">The outraged goddess, armed for flagellation—</p> -<p class="i2">And, with a voice whose every note comprises</p> -<p class="i4">Disgust, revolt, pain, virtue, indignation,</p> -<p>Drives from her father’s chaste, offended portals</p> -<p>The meekest of apologising mortals.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And blame not me, her bard—whose verses weave her</p> -<p class="i4">This coronal of memory’s budding-hours,</p> -<p class="i2">Who loved her long ago, yet now must leave her</p> -<p class="i4">Lorn ’mid the dance’s <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">débris</i>, and the flowers</p> -<p class="i2">Which fade as day-dreams of that first deceiver—</p> -<p class="i4">Because, while War yet ravens and devours,</p> -<p>While still the blind guns thunder out in Flanders,</p> -<p>I sing the type which cozens and philanders.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For, young as Spring and old as Cleopatra,</p> -<p class="i4">Certain as Nature’s self, this type endureth:</p> -<p class="i2">On Skindles’ lawn, in jungles of Sumatra,</p> -<p class="i4">She blooms—a wax-white weed that no rake cureth:</p> -<p class="i2">From Westminster to <i lang="hi" xml:lang="hi">wats</i> of Pura Chatra,</p> -<p class="i4">Her false lips smile, her gladsome optic lureth:</p> -<p>WAAC’s may be WREN’s; wars, peace; to-day’s full Colonel,</p> -<p>To-morrow’s clerk ... but Jill is sempiternal.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></p> - -<h3 class="new">VI.</h3> - -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="poem"> -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2"><i>Continues—symptomatically terse—</i></p> -<p class="i2"><i>This first of serials in doggerel verse.</i></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">O Jill, my peerless, perfumed, powdered darling;</p> -<p class="i4">Quintessence of all fairies I’ve adored</p> -<p class="i2">In London’s lanes, by Devon Budleigh’s farling,</p> -<p class="i4">At Berkeley’s, Kettner’s, Ritz’s, Carlton’s board;</p> -<p class="i2">Jill whose white hands ne’er knew roughhouse-work’s gnarling;</p> -<p class="i4">Whose clothes not twenty Coxes could afford!</p> -<p>How shall man sing the seasoned cee-sprung carriage</p> -<p>In which you rolled from that first kiss to marriage?</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">What days they were! What noon-times and what twilights!</p> -<p class="i4">The whole wide earth seemed fashioned for your pleasure;</p> -<p class="i2">Its very heavens, gold-and-crystal skylights</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></p> -<p class="i4">Whereunder you picked orchid blooms at leisure.</p> -<p class="i2">For others, shadowed gloom; for you, the high lights—</p> -<p class="i4">The pomp, the pride, the dance’s twanging measure ...</p> -<p>And if one begged: “Take coin,” you’d say, “and toss it her.</p> -<p>Poor thing! That skirt was never cut by Rossiter.”</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Dear, <em>rotten</em> days! And yet, a Jack grows wistful</p> -<p class="i4">At thoughts of all the Jills whom he remembers,</p> -<p class="i2">In times when he had boodle by the fist-full</p> -<p class="i4">And fires of youth—where now are only embers.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Jack’s Jills! Why, Muse possesses quite a list full,</p> -<p class="i4">May’s Jill, and June’s Jill, August’s, and September’s ...</p> -<p>Yet dares no more than skim each light adventure</p> -<p>Which followed on flirtationship’s indenture.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">For there’s a tide in the affairs of flappers,</p> -<p class="i4">Of those, at least, that West End mothers breed—</p> -<p class="i2">(Your Wapping matron’s more inclined to slap <em>hers</em>:</p> -<p class="i4">A vulgar trick—yet one which serves some need!)—</p> -<p class="i2">A spring-time blood-tide, mounting to young nappers,</p> -<p class="i4">Heady as wine, a mischief-making mead,</p> -<p>Which—though a man find every known excuse for ’em—</p> -<p>To put it mildly, does the very deuce for ’em.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">And shall my sweetest Muse, than whom none chaster</p> -<p class="i4">E’er fluttered to console the middle-age-time</p> -<p class="i2">Of any neurasthenic poetaster,</p> -<p class="i4">Ope her full throat to sing Jill’s ’prentice rage-time?—</p> -<p class="i2">The unnerving doubts, the certainties which braced her,</p> -<p class="i4">The follied moments and the ensuing sage time,</p> -<p>The major and the minor bards who sung to her,</p> -<p>The men who knelt, the “little friends” who clung to her;</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The last strange morning-dreams, the tea-tray’s rattle,</p> -<p class="i4">The letters—opened, skimmed, and tossed aside;</p> -<p class="i2">The leisured getting-up, the breakfast-prattle,</p> -<p class="i4">The summoning ’phone-bell and the mid-day ride;</p> -<p class="i2">The lunch; the afternoons of tittle-tattle—</p> -<p class="i4">Town’s latest scandal, dance, divorce or bride;</p> -<p>The “dear boys,” climbers, <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">partis</i>, portion-stalkers;</p> -<p>The furtive teas at Charbonnel and Walker’s;</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">The Morny-scented bath before the dinner;</p> -<p class="i4">The deft maid’s fingers in the unruly hair;</p> -<p class="i2">The <i lang="fr" xml:lang="fr">risqué</i> talk of some sweet social sinner,</p> -<p class="i4">Half-heard across the table’s candle-glare;</p> -<p class="i2">The Bridge, so much too high for a beginner;</p> -<p class="i4">The Ball; the moment’s whisper on the stair:</p> -<p>The thousand faces, phases, thoughts, books, travellings,</p> -<p>Which whirl youth’s silk cocoon in its unravellings.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Ah no! not ours with huckstering pen to retail</p> -<p class="i4">How slumb’rous beauties wake from girl-time’s dozing.</p> -<p class="i2">Let Hubert Wales and D. H. Lawrence detail</p> -<p class="i4">The purfled passion-blossom’s slow unclosing.</p> -<p class="i2">No rainbow’s purple e’er shall tinge our she-tale,</p> -<p class="i4">No censor’s yoke restrain its swift composing.</p> -<p>Moreover—quite apart from Muse’s purity—</p> -<p>There’s nothing half so dull as immaturity.</p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">So please imagine—(though I know it’s risky</p> -<p class="i4">To trust in Britons for imagination,</p> -<p class="i2">Save those rare few whom peace-time’s hoarded whisky</p> -<p class="i4">Still fires to spiritual exaltation,</p> -<p class="i2">Or such as stand, when questioning House grows frisky,</p> -<p class="i4">Pat on their first inspired asseveration)—</p> -<p>Jill as she was in times of sugared plenty:</p> -<p>The Bond Street goddess, <i lang="la" xml:lang="la">ætat</i> three-and-twenty.</p><p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></p> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<p class="i2">Goddess, indeed! These meagre days that skimp us,</p> -<p class="i4">Poor mortals, bullied, badged, and bombed and rationed,</p> -<p class="i2">Scarce knows that breed which once on high Olympus</p> -<p class="i4">Flaunted in radiant raiment, Poiret-fashioned.</p> -<p class="i2">Goddess indeed! A self-sure, jade-eyed, slim puss—</p> -<p class="i4">Of life’s each latest luxury impassioned;</p> -<p>Sleek; mateless; restless; rampant; supple-sinewed;</p> -<p>Sharp-clawed; capricious; and ... <i>to be continued</i>.</p> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="tnotes"> - -<p>Transcriber’s Notes</p> - -<p>The following apparent typographical errors were corrected.</p> - -<p>Page <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, “enver” changed to -“never.” (but for you there’s never a place)</p> - -<p>Page <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, "cazone" changed to "canzone." -(Still holds his own at sonnet or <i>canzone</i>)</p> - -<p>Page <a href="#Page_63">63</a>, “mornnig” changed -to “morning.” (That mid-day brought and morning shall -remove)</p> - -</div> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of Project Gutenberg's The Judgement of Valhalla, by Gilbert Frankau - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUDGEMENT OF VALHALLA *** - -***** This file should be named 53756-h.htm or 53756-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/3/7/5/53756/ - -Produced by Cindy Horton, Brian Coe, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -book was produced from images made available by the -HathiTrust Digital Library.) - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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