Chapter III

Grey day-break and the silence of the cell: The dull, numb pain of waking, Stillness ... Fear clutching oblivion; And then to hear The brazen, blasphemous tolling of the bell, A crash of doors, Loud-clanging tins, The swell of brutal voices nearer and more near, Bursts at the last about you. Clangour. Queer delight of movement. Then ... the door shuts. Hell darkens about you with the turning key, The silence burns and sears you like a flame; It battens as the worm that never dies; Crawls back from distant noises; palpably Lurks through the rhythm of the feet of shame, Watching and watching out of hooded eyes.

THE SIXTH DAY

"And God said 'Let us make man in our image and let him have dominion'...."

God made you in His image, yet I saw You stoop and seize a blind mole from the snare. Blind. Blind with terror ... Blind Your teeth gleamed bare behind the taut, white lips. The trapper's law knows neither hate nor love. You watched it paw, Frantic with lust of life, the yielding air And were amused. God's Image! Did you care, pitying one moment, see the swift hands claw For life and darkness, know and hate your trap? I saw your knuckles gleam, your hand swing free; A cry; The blind face crashed against the wall. Then death and stillness and---- You grinned. Mayhap, Snaring the blind mole of humanity, God made you in His image after all.

* * * * *

EDITH SITWELL

EVENTAIL

Lovely Semiramis Closes her slanting eyes: Dead is she long ago, From her fan sliding slow Parrot-bright fire's feathers Gilded as June weathers, Plumes like the greenest grass Twinkle down; as they pass Through the green glooms in Hell, Fruits with a tuneful smell-- Grapes like an emerald rain Where the full moon has lain, Greengages bright as grass, Melons as cold as glass Piled on each gilded booth Feel their cheeks growing smooth; Apes in plumed head-dresses Whence the bright heat hisses, Nubian faces sly, Pursing mouth, slanting eye, Feel the Arabian Winds floating from that fan: See how each gilded face Paler grows, nods apace: "Oh, the fan's blowing Cold winds.... It is snowing!"

THE LADY WITH THE SEWING-MACHINE

Across the fields as green as spinach, Cropped as close as Time to Greenwich,

Stands a high house; if at all, Spring comes like a Paisley shawl--

Patternings meticulous And youthfully ridiculous.

In each room the yellow sun Shakes like a canary, run

On run, roulade, and watery trill-- Yellow, meaningless, and shrill.

Face as white as any clock's, Cased in parsley-dark curled locks--

All day long you sit and sew, Stitch life down for fear it grow,

Stitch life down for fear we guess At the hidden ugliness.

Dusty voice that throbs with heat, Hoping with your steel-thin beat

To put stitches in my mind, Make it tidy, make it kind,

You shall not: I'll keep it free Though you turn earth, sky and sea

To a patchwork quilt to keep Your mind snug and warm in sleep!

PORTRAIT OF A BARMAID

Metallic waves of people jar Through crackling green toward the bar

Where on the tables chattering-white The sharp drinks quarrel with the light.

Those coloured muslin blinds the smiles, Shroud wooden faces in their wiles--

Sometimes they splash like water (you Yourself reflected in their hue).

The conversation loud and bright Seems spinal bars of shunting light

In firework-spurting greenery. O complicate machinery

For building Babel, iron crane Beneath your hair, that blue-ribbed mane

In noise and murder like the sea Without its mutability!

Outside the bar where jangling heat Seems out of tune and off the beat--

A concertina's glycerine Exudes, and mirrors in the green

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints Of tentative and half-soiled tints.

SOLO FOR EAR-TRUMPET

The carriage brushes through the bright Leaves (violent jets from life to light); Strong polished speed is plunging, heaves Between the showers of bright hot leaves The window-glasses glaze our faces And jar them to the very basis-- But they could never put a polish Upon my manners or abolish My most distinct disinclination For calling on a rich relation! In her house--(bulwark built between The life man lives and visions seen)-- The sunlight hiccups white as chalk, Grown drunk with emptiness of talk, And silence hisses like a snake-- Invertebrate and rattling ache.... Then suddenly Eternity Drowns all the houses like a sea And down the street the Trump of Doom Blares madly--shakes the drawing-room Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn As dank dark nettles. Down the horn Of her ear-trumpet I convey The news that "It is Judgment Day!" "Speak louder: I don't catch, my dear." I roared: "_It is the Trump we hear!_" "The _What?_" "_THE TRUMP!_" "I shall complain! .... the boy-scouts practising again."

* * * * *

MURIEL STUART

THE FATHER

The evening found us whom the day had fled, Once more in bitter anger, you and I, Over some small, some foolish, trivial thing Our anger would not decently let die, But dragged between us, shamed and shivering Until each other's taunts we scarcely heard, Until we lost the sense of all we said, And knew not who first spoke the fatal word. It seemed that even every kiss we wrung We killed at birth with shuddering and hate, As if we feared a thing too passionate. However close we clung One hour the next hour found us separate, Estranged, and Love most bitter on our tongue.

To-night we quarrelled over one small head, Our fruit of last year's maying, the white bud Blown from our stormy kisses and the dead First rapture of our wild, estranging blood. You clutched him: there was panther in your eyes, We breathed like beasts in thickets, on the wall Our shadows in huge challenge seemed to rise, The room grew dark with anger. Yet through all The shame and hurt and pity of it you were Still strangely and imperishably dear, As one who loves the wild day none the less That breaks in bitter hands the buds of Spring, Whose cold hand stops the breath of loveliness, And drives the wailing ghost of beauty past, Making the rose,--even the rose, a thing For pain to be remembered by at last.

I said: "My son shall wear his father's sword." You said: "Shall hands once blossoms at my breast Be stained with blood?" I answered with a word More bitter, and your own, the bitterest Stung me to sullen anger, and I said: "My son shall be no coward of his line Because his mother choose"; you turned your head And your eyes grew implacable in mine. And like a trodden snake you turned to meet The foe with sudden hissing ... then you smiled, And broke our life in pieces at my feet, "Your child?" you said: "_Your_ child?"

THE SHORE

The low bay melts into a ring of silver, And slips it on the shore's reluctant finger Though in an hour the tide will turn, will tremble, Forsaking her because the moon persuades him. But the black wood that leans and sighs above her No tide can turn, no moon can slave nor summon. Then comes the dark: on sleepy, shell-strewn beaches, O'er long pale leagues of sand and cold, clear water She hears the tide go out towards the moonlight. The wood still leans ... weeping she turns to seek him, And his black hair all night is on her bosom.

THELUS WOOD

I came by night to Thelus wood, And though in dark and desperate places Stubborned with wire and brown with blood Undaunted April crept and sewed Her violets in dead men's faces, And in a soft and snowy shroud Drew the scarred fields with gentle stitch; Though in the valley where the ditch Was hoarse with nettles, blind with mud, She stroked the golden-headed bud, And loosed the fern, she dared not here To touch nor tend this murdered thing; The wind went wide of it, the year Upon this breast stopped short of Spring: Beauty turned back from Thelus Wood.

From broken brows the dim eyes stared, Blistered and maimed the wide stumps grinned From the black mouth of Thelus bared In laughter at some monstrous jest. No creature moved there, weed nor wind. Huge arms, half-torn from savage breast, Hung wide, and tangled limbs and faces Lay, as if giants blind and stark With violent, with perverse embraces Groped for each other in the dark. A moaning rose--not of the wind, --There was no wind, but hollowly From its dim bed of mud each tree Gave forth a sound, till trees and mud Seemed but a single, sighing mouth, A wound that spoke with lips uncouth, And cried to me from Thelus Wood.

I heard one tree say: "This was I Who drew great clouds across the sky To weep against me." This one said: "I made a gloom where love might lie All day and dream it night, a bed Secret and soft, the birds' song had A twilight sound the whole day there." One said: "Last night I shook my hair Before the mirror of the moon." "I saw a corpse to-day," said one "That was but buried yester-year." And one, the smallest, sweetest thing-- A fair child-tree made never stir, Dead before God had tended her In the green nurseries of Spring. She lay, the loveliest, loneliest, Among the old and ruined trees, And at each small and broken wrist The white flowers grew like bandages.

Then from the ruined churchyard where Old vaults and graves lay turned and tossed And earth from earth was shaken bare, Came murmurings of a tongueless host That to each ghastly brother said: "Who raised us from our sleep? Is this The resurrection of the dead? Upon our bodies no flesh grows, No bright blood through our temples springs, No glory spreads, no trumpet blows, The air is not white and blind with wings. And yet dragged up before us lie The woods of Thelus at our feet, And strange hills sentinel the sky, And where the road went yawns a pit. The world is finished: let us sleep. God has forgotten: we shall keep Here a sweet, safe Eternity. There is no other end than this, And this is death, and that is peace." But even as they ceased the stones Were loosed, the earth shook where I stood, And from far off the crouching guns Swung slowly round on Thelus Wood.

THE THIEF OF BEAUTY