Chapter IV: Part 4

Down the street came a young girl wheeling a baby's cab. The girl was but just past childhood, and she had been a homely child. But of late she had bloomed as mysteriously and almost as quickly as the plum-trees. She wore a light summer dress with a leaf-brown design upon it, in which her girlish form still half-confessed the child. Her complexion was clear and bright, the cheeks flushed; and the strongly-marked features seemed ready to melt and fuse to a softer mould. Her brown eyes had grown wistful and winning.

As they advanced, Margaret ran down the rickety wooden walk.

"Oh, is that the new baby?" she cried delightedly. "May I look?"

The girl smiled assent.

Softly Margaret drew back the woolly carriage robe and gazed adoringly. The baby was about six weeks old. Its tiny face was translucent, pinky white, the closed eyelids with their fringe of fine lashes inconceivably delicate. Its wee hands cuddled about its head; the curled, pink fingers, each tipped with its infinitesimal, dainty nail, were perfection in miniature. The formless mouth, pinker than the rest of the face, moved in sleep, betraying the one dream the baby knew.

Margaret drew a long, still breath of rapture, hanging over the little pink pearl of humanity.

"Will he wake if I kiss him?" she pleaded.

The girl smiled doubtfully. "Maybe," she said.

She was equally indifferent to the baby and to Margaret. Her wistful eyes wandered eagerly down the street, watching each sidewalk, and the glow in her cheeks and eyes seemed to kindle and waver momently.

Margaret did not kiss the baby. She only bent her head close over his, close enough to feel his warm, quick breathing, to catch the rhythm of his palpitating little life.

When she came back to her porch, after the girl had gone on, Margaret saw that Jean's caller had come.

The young man sat beside Jean. His head was bare, his black hair brushed stiffly up from his forehead pompadour-fashion, his new spring suit palpably in its original creases. He and Jean talked eagerly, sometimes with shouts of young laughter, at which Margaret smiled sympathetically; sometimes with swift, earnest interchange; sometimes with lazy, contented intervals of silence. Occasionally he put out his hand to pat or tease the kitten which lay in Jean's lap. She defended it. Whenever their fingers chanced to touch they started consciously apart--covertly to tempt the chance again.

Two little girls came skipping down the street, their white dresses tossed about their knees. Their loose hair, of the dusky fairness of brunette children, tossed about their shoulders and an immense white ribbon bow quivered on the top of each little bare head. Their dress and their dancing run gave them the look and the wavering allure of butterflies.

They were on Jean's side of the street. They fluttered past the house unnoticed by the two on the porch, who were in the midst of an especially interesting quarrel about the kitten. The little girls passed over the crossing with traces of conscientious care for their white slippers, and came up on Margaret's side. Opposite her they paused in consultation.

"Won't you come in," she called to them, "and talk to me a minute?"

The two advanced hesitatingly and stood before her at a little distance on the young grass in attitudes clearly tentative. They were shy little misses, and had not lived long on that street.

"Someone told me," said Margaret, "that your names were Enid and Elaine. Which is which?"

The taller one pointed first to her embroidered bosom, then to her sister.

"I'm Enid; she's Elaine."

"I've read about you in a book of poetry," observed Margaret--"it must have been you! I suppose if you had a little sister her name would be Guinevere?"

The large dark eyes of the two exchanged glances of denial. The small Elaine shook her head decidedly.

"We _got_ a little sister!" announced Enid, "but her name ain't that; it's Katherine."

They were both pretty with the adorable prettiness of small girls, half baby's beauty, and half woman's. But Enid's good looks would always depend more or less upon happy accident--her time of life, her flow of spirits, her fortune in costume. Her face was rather long, with chin and forehead a trifle too pronounced. But the little Elaine was nature's darling. Her softly rounded person and countenance were instinct with charm. Even her little brown hands had delicacy and character. Her white-stockinged legs, from the fine ankles to the rounded knees at her skirt's edge, were turned to a sculptor's desire. Beside them, Enid's merely serviceable legs looked like sticks. The white bows in their hair shared the ensemble effect of each: Enid's perched precisely in the middle, its loops and ends vibrantly and decisively erect; Elaine's drooped a little at one side, its crispness at once confessing and defying evanescence and fragility.

Margaret thrilled with the child's loveliness, but for some subtle reason she smiled chiefly on Enid.

That little lady concluded she must be a person worthy of confidence.

"My doll's name is Clara," she imparted. "An' hers is Isabel, only she calls it 'Ithabel'!"

The color deepened in Elaine's dainty cheek. She was stung to protest; which she did with all the grace in the world, hanging her head at one side and speaking low.

"I don't either!" she murmured. "I thay Ithabel!"

"Either way is very nice," Margaret hastened to say.

"We've been to Miss Eaton's Sunday school children's party," Enid informed her. "These are our best dresses, and our white kid slippers. Don't you think they're pretty? Mine tie with ribbons, but hers only button like a baby's."

Elaine looked down grievingly at the offensively infantile slippers, turning her exquisite little foot.

"I'm going to speak a piece for Easter," Enid pursued, "all alone by myself; and she's going to speak one in concert with a class."

"Oh, I hope you will come and speak them for me some time," Margaret invited; "and bring Clara and Isabel."

"Maybe we will," answered Enid. "We must go now. Come on, Elaine."

Margaret watched them until they stopped beside a flowerbed along the sidewalk where the first tulips of the season were unfolding. Elaine bent over to examine them. Margaret reproached herself that, though Elaine had spoken but once, it was her image that lingered uppermost. Why should she add even the weight of her preference to that child in whose favor the dice were already so heavily loaded? For in Margaret's eyes, beauty was always the chief gift of the gods.

As she resumed her sewing, a sudden, fantastic fear shot across her thoughts--the fear that Elaine would die. She recognized it, in a moment, for the heart's old, sad prevision of impermanence in beauty, its rooted unbelief in fortune's constancy.

A quick glance up the street showed Elaine still stooping over the tulip bed, her stiff little skirts sticking out straight behind her. The grotesqueness was somehow reassuring. Margaret smiled, half at the absurd little figure, half at her own absurdly tragic fancy.

On the other porch Frank was taking his leave--a process of some duration. First he stood on the lower steps talking at length with Jean who stood on the top step. Then he raised his cap and started away, only to remember something before he reached the corner and to run back across the lawn. There he stood talking while Jean sat on the porch railing, suggesting a faint Romeo and Juliet effect. The next time, Jean called him back. They met halfway down the cement walk and conversed earnestly and lengthily.

With an exquisite sympathy Margaret watched these maneuvers from under discreet eyelids. She was glad for them both, with a clear-souled, generous joy. And yet she felt a sensitive pleasure that walked on the edge of pain. In the young man especially she took a quick delight--in his supple length of limb, the spread of his shoulders, his close-cropped black hair, his new clothes, the way he thrust his hands deep in his trousers' pockets while he swung on the balls of his feet, the attentive bend of his head toward Jean; she reveled in all his elastic, masculine youth which she knew for the garb of a straight, strong, kindly, honorable soul. But out of the revel grew a trouble, as if some strange spirit prisoned in her own struggled to tear itself free, to fling itself, wailing, in the dust.

"Egotism!" said Margaret to herself, curling her lip, sewing very fast. The fluttering spirit lay tombed and still.

When Frank was finally gone, Jean sauntered across the street to Margaret's porch. She perched on the rail and pulled at the leafless vine-stems beside her, talking idly and desultorily of things she was not interested in.

She was an attractive girl, more wholesome than beautiful. Her bronze-brown hair coiled stylishly about her head, gleamed in the late sun. There were some tiny freckles across her nose. She wore a pale blue summer-dress with short sleeves out of which her young arms emerged, fresh and tender from their winter seclusion.

The two maidens circled warily about the topic they were both longing to talk of. Margaret noted in Jean a new aloofness. Every time she threw Frank's name temptingly into the open Jean purposely let it lie.

At last, with a little gasp of laughter, looking straight before her, Jean exclaimed: "I guess I'm sort of scared!"

"What I like about Frank," said Margaret, "is that he's so true and reliable. He's a fellow you can trust!"

"Yes," assented Jean. "Don't you think he looks--nice in that new suit?"

"Splendid! Frank's a handsome boy."

"Isn't he?" sighed Jean.

"He'll always be constant to anyone he cares for. And, I think--he does care for someone."

"What makes _you_ think so?" demanded Jean, her blue eyes suddenly intent on Margaret.

"What makes you think so?" Margaret parried.

Jean sat up instantly very straight and stiff.

"Who said I thought anything?"

"Oh, no, no!" Margaret disclaimed hastily. "I didn't mean that. I meant anyone would think so!"

Jean lapsed into a placated limpness, resting her lithe young figure in its summer blue against the dingy house-wall.

"Isn't it funny," she mused, "how you can resolve you won't think, and keep yourself from thinking, and really not think, because you've made up your mind you wouldn't--and all the time you _know_!"

Margaret was searching in her mind for some tenderest phrase of warning when Jean anticipated her.

"Well, it's a good thing I don't care!--I thought at first I didn't like his hair that way, but I do now--better than the other way. He was telling about college."

"He finishes this year, doesn't he?"

"Yes. He's going in with his father next year--unless he makes up his mind to go to Yale. But he doesn't think he will. His father wants him here; and he's about decided that's best."

"Marg'ret," called a thin, querulous, broken voice from within the house; "ain't it time you was gettin' supper?"

Margaret opened the door to call back in a loud, clear voice: "Not yet, Mother."

Jean slipped off the railing. "I must go."

"It really isn't time yet. Mother gets nervous, sitting all day. And she doesn't care to read any more. Stay a little longer."

These snatches of Jean's confidence were delicious to her.

"Oh, I've got to go."

Jean suddenly put both arms around Margaret's waist and clasped her in a swift embrace.

"I wish," she said, "some awfully nice old widower or bachelor would come along and marry you!"

As Jean crossed the street with the lowering sun making a nimbus in her chestnut-golden hair, she began to sing. The words sprang joyous and clear as a bobolink's note--

"What's this dull town to me?
Robin's not here!"

But a sudden waft of consciousness smote them to a vague humming that passed swiftly into--

"My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream;
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream."

In the scented dark of the spring evening, Margaret came to the porch again. A little curved moon sailed the sky--less a light-giver than a shining ornament on the breast of night. A while before children's laughter and skurrying footfalls had echoed down the sidewalks. Boys had played ball in the middle of the street, with running and violent contortions, and shouts and calls rejoicing in the release of their animal energies. But these sounds had ceded to silence as the soft darkness fell. Then young strollers, two and two, had passed; but these also were gone. A gentle wind rustled very softly in the dead vine-stalks. The world was alone with the fragrant wind and the dreaming dusk and the little silver scimitar of moon.

The house opposite was all dark, except for a line of lamplight beside the drawn blind of a side window. Earlier, Jean had turned on the porch lights and sat under them in the most graceful of the wicker chairs, reading, or affecting to read, and Frank, coming down the street, had seen her in all that glow. Then they had turned off the lights and gone away together, and the house had sunk into shadowy repose. Vague lines of wanness betrayed the place of the cement walks. The fruit-trees were dim, withdrawn, half-hinted shapes of whiteness, but their perfume, grown bolder in darkness, wandered the winds with poignant, sweet desire.

Margaret leaned against the weather-worn corner-post of the porch; her hand passed over its cracked, paint-blistered surface with, a soft, absent touch. She felt to her finger-tips the wooing lure of the night. In the spring of her pulses she was aware of Frank and Jean somewhere together in the dusky, fragrant, crescent-clasped folds of it. She seemed to draw in with her breath and gather subtly through the pores of her flesh all the shy, sweet, youthful yearning of the world--and, behind that, wordlessly she knew the driven sap, the life-call, the procreant urge. She sighed and stirred restlessly. The strand of pain that runs in the pleasure of such moods began to ache gently like an old wound touched with foreknowledge of evil weather. She shared the pang that lies at the heart of spring.

Words of poetry pressed into her mind, voices of the great interpreters. She was not a cultivated woman, hardly to be called educated; her horizon, even of books, was chance-formed and narrow; but what circumstance had given her she remembered well. The groping, vain longing that stirred in her fell on speech, and moved among the haunted echoes of the world.

"Bloomy the world, yet a blank all the same--
Framework that waits for a picture to frame."

And then, sudden as a cry:

"Never the time and the place,
And the loved one all together!"

She drew a long, shivering sigh, and deliberately thrust the lines out of her mind. Best not to remember them--on such a night! Their edges cut like young grass drawn through careless fingers.

The little new moon was rising higher in the deep, soft blue-darkness of the sky. Margaret looked up at its gleaming curve, and other words of poetry came to her, words she had read once in an old magazine--translated from the Persian:

"Quaffing Hadji-Kivam's wine-cup, there I saw by grace of him,
On the green sea of the night, the new moon's silver shallop
swim!"

They swung on, like a familiar, wistful, passionate tune:

"Oh, my heart is like a tulip, closing up in time of cold!
When, at length, shy Bird of Fortune, shall my snare thy
wings enfold?"

Footsteps sounded along the walk, the linked steps of two, lingering, yet with the springing fall of youth; then a murmur of voices, girl's and boy's interchanging, lingering, too, and low, weighted, like the footsteps, with the burden of their hour. Margaret drew back a little behind the sapless vine-stems. She knew that she could not be seen in the shadow of the porch, even by a passer far less absorbed than the two who drifted by. She had recognized Frank and Jean at once, and thrilled intimately at the quality of their voices. Both were changed from the careless tones of every day, Frank's husky and strained, Jean's vibrant and tremulous. What they said was quite inaudible--only that betraying _timbre_, conscious and unconscious, hung on the scented air. A single word in the girl's thrilled voice--a sharpened, quivering note of life at high tension--pierced the shadows of the porch:

"---- you ----"

"'You!'" Margaret leaned forward among her shadows, thrusting her clenched hands downward, then pressed them tight upon her heart. "You!" That little key unlocked the flood-gates. The barriers went down, and the tide of passionate loneliness swept her soul.

"You!" she whispered to the fragrant, shimmering, vitalizing night; and the word mocked her, and returned unto her void. She leaned her bosom against the angled surface of the porch-post; she pressed her face among the dry, unbudded vines. The cry went out from her into the empty spaces of the world--a voiceless, hopeless call: "You! you! you! Oh, you who never came to me!"

Her soul was ravaged by that mocking bitterness of loss which comes only to those who have not possessed. She, crying for a lover in the night, she who had never been sought! If ever her shy and homely girlhood might have attracted a youth, poor Margaret's love of poetry would have frightened him away. If the burdened poverty of her maturity might have admitted a suitor, her acquaintance numbered no man who would not have shunned an earnest-minded old maid. And she knew this utterly. A thousand old aches were in the sudden rush of anguish, and shame fought among them. She was shocked and startled at the drip of salt tears down her cheeks, at the heaving of her shaken breast.

She struggled to rebuild her old barriers against the woe--pride, and dignity, and the decent acceptance of one's lot. But those were for the eyes of men and women; and here were no eyes, only night, and the risen sap and the wild heart in her breast. Duty? She had never swerved in doing it, but she thrust the thought by with passionate rebellion at the waste of her in dull service to the outworn lives which neither asked nor could take from her anything but the daily drudgery. She groped for the old humble consolations, tender appreciations, generous friendships, the joy in others' joy. But there the wall had broken through. "I am nothing to them!" thought Margaret bitterly. "Jean will not care to talk to me after to-night. And I can't always kiss other people's babies! I want one of my own!"

The gauzy veil of dream that wrapped her often had fallen from before her eyes. Rent by the piercing beauty of the night, and soaked in her tears, that fragile fabric of vision served no more. Imagined blisses had betrayed her, naked and tender, to the unpitying lash of truth. The remote, the universal, mocked her sore longing for something near and real, of earth and flesh--oh, as welcome in sorrow as in joy!--to be imperiously her own! The river of life dashed by and would not fill her empty cup. The love she loved so had passed her by.

She faced the hollowest desolation known to humanity. She had committed no sin; she had been true and tender and faithful; she had not failed in the least and humblest dues of love: yet, now she stood wrapped in torment, and saw, across a great gulf fixed, the joys of love's elect. She stood utterly frustrate and alone--a shared frustration were happiness! Her mental life had been so intensely uncompanioned that she was tortured with doubts of her own reality. What warrant of Being had that soul which could not touch in all the blank, black spaces of the void another soul to give it assurance of itself? What if the aching throat and riven breast were but the phantom anguish of a dream Thing, unpurposed, unjustified, a Thing of ashes and emptiness!

There remained God--perhaps! Was God a dream too? Was there any _You_ in all the empty worlds?

She stood quite still, questing the universe for God. She thought of her father's God--the savage Hebrew deity he thought he worshiped, the harsh Puritan formalist who ruled his creed, the hysterical, illogical sentimentalist who swayed his heart. She dropped them all out of her mind. God was not, for her, in the ancient earthquake or fire or whirlwind. But--perhaps--somewhere!

She sank to her knees in the darkness, and, laying her head upon her arms on the railing, sought in her soul for God.

"You are Love," she said. "They say it, but they do not believe it; but _I_ believe it. You are Love that creates, and makes glad--and wounds. You are Love that rises in all creatures in spring, and would make all things beautiful and kind. You are Love that gives--and gives itself. You made me to love love and love's uses, and nothing else in the world! You made my life loveless. Why?"

She waited a moment, then, with a sobbing breath of remembrance, "Oh, one spring they nailed you on a cross because you loved too much!"

After that she was very still, her head bent upon her arms, her heart quiet, waiting for the still, small voice, the answer of God.

It came presently, and she knew it was the answer. She accepted it with comfort, and sad pride, and submission, and a slow, strange, white happiness of consecration. The answer came without any words. If there had been words, they might have been, perhaps, like these:

"Bear the pain patiently, my daughter, for life is wrought in pain, and there is no child born without sharp pangs. I have not shut thee out from my festival of spring. Thy part is thy pang. I have given thee a coronal of pain and made thee rich with loss and desire. I have made thee one of my vestals who guard perpetually the hearth-fire which shall not be lit for them. I have denied thee love that love shall be manifest in thee. Wherever love fails in my world, there shalt thou re-create it in beauty and kindness. The vision thou hast, and the passion, are of me, and I charge thee find some fair and sweet way that they perish not in thee. All ways are mine. Be thou in peace."

Margaret rose at length. The moon was gone from the sky, but out of its deep, tender darkness shone the far, dim light of stars. A cool wind touched her cheek, bearing a faint, ethereal odor of blossoms as from a great distance. And upon her face, if one might have seen for the darkness, shone a fine, ethereal beauty far-brought from that great distance which is nearer than hands and feet.

Against the shadowy front of the house opposite, two figures were vaguely discernible, the taller a little darker than the encompassing space, the other a little lighter. As Margaret looked, they melted together, and were no longer two but one.

She smiled in the darkness, very sweetly, and, holding her head high, turned and went quietly into the dark little house.

Work Is a Blessing

_By Lafayette Young_

Work is a blessing to the human race.

If this had remained a workless world, it would have been a homeless world. The progress of the human race began when work began. When work began, men began to wear clothes; thus progress commenced.

Industry and happiness go hand in hand.

Men who feel that they are doomed to daily toil, and that there is no so-called emancipation from the daily routine, imagine that happiness would be theirs if they did not have to work. The man whose employment compels him to get up at six o'clock in the morning imagines if he could just get out of that slavery he would ask for no greater happiness. But if he ever does reach that condition he will find out what true misery is.

Some years ago the warden of the Iowa penitentiary told me that he had a prisoner serving a long term, who begged a day off. He wanted to stop the regular routine. He wanted to be set free in the courtyard for one day. He wanted to look straight up at the sky, and to breathe the air of the outdoors. I was at the penitentiary the day the prisoner's request was granted, and at ten o'clock the prisoner had grown tired of idleness. The sky had lost its attraction. There was something missing. And he got word to the warden that he wished to be returned to labor.

There are millions of men toiling in factories and in mines, laying brick on tall buildings, swinging cranes in the great iron mills, tending the machines in cotton or woolen mills, who think that they would be perfectly happy if they were once perfectly idle. But their experience would be like that of the prisoner's.

What a wretched world this would be without work! How many things we have which are indispensable, that we would not have but for somebody's work. Work has built every great bridge, every great cathedral, every home, large or small. It has made every invention. Work found man in a cave, and put him into a good home. Work has made man decent and self-respecting.

The great nations are the working nations; the great peoples are the working peoples. Nations, like individuals, date their prosperity and happiness from the beginning of work. The start was made when man gave attention to the primal curse of the race recorded in the book of Genesis: "By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, until thou return to the ground." This mandate has never been repealed. Lazy men in all parts of the world have undertaken to nullify it. The ambition for idleness fills jails and penitentiaries. It causes man to commit forgeries and murders. Every man slugged in a dark alley is put out of the way by some other man desiring money without working for it.

There has been a foolish notion in many countries in regard to labor. They do not consider it dignified. In some countries, missionary families learn that they cannot cook their own victuals without losing caste. In other countries a certain number of servants must be kept if the family would be respected. In our own country there is a false pride in regard to labor. Young men avoid the learning of trades because they do not wish to soil their hands. Laboring men themselves have been guilty of not sufficiently estimating their own callings. They demand the rights of their class, but fail to respect it themselves. This causes many young men to seek some employment which will not soil their hands. Many thousands of young men make the mistake of not having some regular calling, some work which they can do better than anybody else. The man who has a regular trade is never found walking the streets looking for a job. Even when he is called old, he can secure employment.

Industry is indispensable to happiness. Idleness destroys the souls of more young men, and leads to more forms of dissipation, than any other influence.

The experienced mechanic knows how rapidly and joyfully time passes when he is interested in his work. He never watches the clock; to him quitting time comes all too soon.

Labor can be made a joy if man wills it so.

An appreciation of what a man earns and the thought that he can do something with his money, ought to be a part of the happiness of labor. Work develops the man. It develops his appreciation of others. He is likely to be unhappy if he works solely for himself. The Indian hunter, returning from the chase, lays the evidence of his prowess at the feet of his squaw. He is glad that he has accomplished something, and in her eyes he is a hero.

Once I was driving in the Allegheny Mountains in the early summer. Unexpectedly I came to a little cottage almost covered with flowers and vines. A brown-faced woman with pruning shears was at her work. Around her bees were humming, and birds were twittering. I sought to buy some flowers. She said she never had sold a flower in her life. I asked her what induced her to work early and late, cultivating, planting and pruning. She said, "I do this work because I enjoy it, and because my husband and two sons will enjoy these flowers when they come home at night." This woman had the whole philosophy of human happiness. If there are women in heaven she will be there.

Work came as a blessing. It remains as a blessing. It makes us tired so that we can enjoy sleep. We awaken in the morning refreshed for a new day. When kings and queens shall be no more, when autocracy shall end, when the voices of intelligent men and women shall govern, then if work shall be universal, thus satisfying the energy, and giving direction to the ambitions of men, there will be no more wars.

To make work enjoyable, men and women must be proud of it; must not pretend that they are above it; must not apologize for it. Once I was in Holland. I saw women with a peculiar headdress as if they belonged to some lodge. They wore smiling faces. I inquired what their regalia meant, and was told that they were working women of the peasant or some other humble class. They were proud of their position. They were content, with plenty to do. They enjoyed the society of their families and friends. But their happiness consisted in being proud of, and satisfied with, the things they were doing. Who can say that they have not chosen the better part?

September

_By Esse V. Hathaway_

Blaze on blaze of scarlet sumach,
Roadsides lined with radiant gold,
Purple ironweed, regal, slender,
Rasping locust, shrill and bold.

Dusty smell in field and upland,
Sky of copper mixed with blue,
Life intense as is the weather--
Let's away, just me and you!

"I say, old top, I wish you wouldn't be continually
kissing the wife. I think once when you come and once
when you go quite sufficient."

"But, my dear man, I can't wear myself out coming and
going all the time just to please you."

_--From "Judge." Copyright by Leslie-Judge Co._]

The Poet of the Future

_By Tacitus Hussey_

Oh, the poet of the future. Will he come to us as comes
The beauty of the bugle's voice above the roar of drums--
The beauty of the bugle's voice above the roar and din
Of battle drums that pulse the time the victor marches in?

--_James Whitcomb Riley._

"Oh, the poet of the future!" Can anybody guess
Whether he'll sound his bugle, or she'll wear them on her
dress;
An' will they kinder get their themes from nature, second
hand,
An' dish 'em up in language that plain folks can't
understand?

There's a sight of this 'ere po'try stuff, each year, that
goes to waste,
Jest a-waitin' fer a poet who has the time and taste
To tackle it just as it is, an' weave it into rhyme,
With warp and woof of hope and love, in life's swift loom
of time.

An' mebbe the future poet, if he understands the thing,
Won't start the summer katydids to singin' in the spring,
Jest like the croakin' frog; but let the critter wait at
most,
To announce to timid farmers that "it's jest six weeks till
frost."

The katydid and goldenrod are partners in this way:
They sing and bloom where'er there's room, along life's
sunny way;
So I warn you, future poet, jest let 'em bloom an' lilt
Together--don't divorce 'em. That's jest the way they're
built.

In order to be perfect, the future poet should
Know every sound of nature, of river, lake an' wood,
Should know each whispered note and every answerin' call--
He should never set cock-pheasants to drummin' in the fall.

"Under the golden maples!" Not havin' voice to sing
They flap their love out on a log quite early in the spring;
For burnin' love will allus find expression in some way--
That's the style that _they've_ adopted--don't change
their natures, pray.

I cannot guess just what the future poet's themes may be;
Reckon they'll be pretty lofty, fer, as anyone can see,
The world of poetry's lookin' up an' poets climbin' higher;
With divine afflatus boostin' them, of course they must
aspire.

The poets of the good old times were cruder with the pen;
Their idees weren't the same as ours--these good
old-fashioned men--
Bet old Homer never writ, even in his palmiest day,
Such a soul-upliftin' poem as "Hosses Chawin' Hay."

"Hosses" don't know any better out in the Hawkeye State--
Down to Boston now, I reckon, they jest simply masticate.
The poet of the future'll blow a bugle, like as not--
Most all us modern poets had to blow fer what we've got.

To keep the pot a-b'ilin' we all have to raise a din
To make the public look our way--an' pass the shekels in.
The scarcity of bugles seems now the greatest lack
Though some of us keep blowin' 'thout a bugle to our back.

The poet of the future! When once he takes his theme
His pen will slip as smoothly as a canoe glides down stream.
He'll sing from overflowin' heart--his music will be free--
Would you take up a subscription fer a robin in a tree?

He'll never try to drive the Muse, if he doesn't want to go,
But will promptly take the harness off--er drive keerfully
an' slow--
When po'try's forced, like winter pinks, the people's apt to
know it
An' labor with it jest about as hard as did the poet.

Putting the Stars with the Bars

_By Verne Marshall_

Midnight beneath a low-hanging strip of amber-hued moon. Smoke in one's eyes and sulphur in his nostrils; the pounding of cannon in his ears and a hatred of war and its sponsors in his soul. A supply wagon piled high with dead men on one side of the road and a little ambulance waiting for its bruised load to emerge from the mouth of the communicating trench near by. Sharp tongues of fire darting into the night on every side as the guns of the French barked their challenge at the Crown Prince on the other bank of the Meuse. A lurid glare over there to the left where the smoke hung thickest under drifting yellow illuminating bombs and red and blue signal bombs that added their touch to the weird fantasy that wasn't a fantasy at all, but a hill in whose spelling men had changed one letter and turned it into hell.

It was Dead Man's Hill at Verdun--Le Cote Mort Homme. And Dead Man's Hill it truly was, for among the barbed wire entanglements and in some of the shell craters in No Man's Land there still lay the skeletons of Frenchmen and Germans who had been killed there months before and whose bodies it had been impossible to recover because the trenches had not changed positions and to venture out between them was to shake hands with Death.

Dead Man's Hill at Verdun--where ten thousand men have fought for a few feet of blood-soaked ground in vain effort to satiate the battle-thirst of a monarch and his son! The countryside for miles around is laid waste. Villages lie in tumbled masses, trees are uprooted or broken off, demolished wagons and motors litter the roads and fields, and dead horses, legs stiff in the air, dot the jagged landscape. Not a moving object is seen there by day except the crows that flutter above the uptorn ground and the aeroplanes that soar thousands of feet above. But, with the coming of night, long columns of men wind along the treacherous roads on their way to or from the trenches, hundreds of supply wagons lumber across the shell holes to the stations near the line, ammunition trains travel up to the lines and back and the ambulances ply their routes to dressing stations. Everything must be done under night's partially protecting cloak, for the German gunners seldom miss when daylight aids their vision.

A tiny American ambulance--a jitney--threads its way down from the Dead Man to ----, carrying a boy through whose breast a dum-dum bullet had torn its beastly way. Three hours before, the driver of that ambulance had talked with the boy who now lay behind him on a stretcher. Then the young Frenchman had been looking forward to the wondrous day when the war would end. He had planned to come to America to live, just as soon as he could get back to Paris and say good-bye to the mother from whom he had received a letter that very day.

"I will be lucky!" he had exclaimed to the American. "I will not be killed. I will not even be wounded. Ah, but won't I be glad when the war is over!"

But his life was slipping away, faster than the Red Cross car could carry him to aid. The checking station reached, two orderlies pulled the stretcher from the ambulance. There was a choking sound in the wounded soldier's throat and the driver, thinking to ease his breathing, lifted his head. The closed eyes fluttered open, the indescribable smile of the dying lighted his face and with his last faint breath he murmured those words that always still war momentarily--

"Ah, _mere_! _Ma mere!_"

"Oh, mother! My mother!"--and he was dead.

Just one little incident of war, just a single glimpse at the accomplishments of monarchial militarism.

That French boy has not come to America, but America has gone to him. He died for a flag that is red, white and blue--for the tricolor of France. And we have gone across the sea to place the stars of our flag with the bars of his. His fight was our fight and our fight is his. Together we fight against those who menace civilization in both old world and new. We fight against the army that outraged Belgium and devastated France, against the militaristic clique that sanctioned the slaughtering and crippling of little children, the maiming of women, against that order of militarists who decorated the commander of the submarine that sank the Lusitania with her babies and their mothers.

We are at war and we are Americans.... Enough.

Verne Marshall was the driver of that ambulance. Three months of
his service were spent at Verdun.

The Kings of Saranazett

_By Lewis Worthington Smith_

A SCENE FROM THE FIRST ACT

A drama of the awakening of the nearer Orient. In this scene
Nasrulla appears as the royal lover of the fig merchant's
daughter, Nourmahal. She has learned something of the ways of
the West, where even kings have but one acknowledged consort,
and she is not willing to be merely one of a number of queens.

Before the wall and gate enclosing Nourmahal's Garden. It is early
morning, just before dawn. Above the gleaming white of the wall's
sun-baked clay there is the deep green of the trees--the plane,
the poplar, the acacia, and, beyond the garden, mountains are
visible through the purple mist of the hour that waits for dawn,
slowly turning to rose as the rising sun warms their snowy
heights. At the left the wall extends out of sight behind a clump
of trees, but at the right it ends in a tower topped by a turret
with a rounded dome passing into a point. The space under the dome
is open, except for a railing, and is large enough for one or more
persons. It may be entered from the broad top of the wall through
a break in the railing. At the left, out from the trees and in
front of the wall, there is a well marked out with roughly piled
stones.

At the right, out of sight behind the trees that come almost to
the tower at the corner of the wall, a man's voice is heard
singing Shelley's "Indian Serenade."

"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright;
I arise from dreams of thee,
And a something in my feet
Hath led me--who knows how?
To thy chamber window, Sweet!

"The wandering airs they faint
On the dark, the silent stream--
The Champak odors fail
Like sweet thoughts in a dream;
The nightingale's complaint,
It dies upon her heart;--
As I must die on thine,
O! beloved as thou art!

"Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;--
Oh! press it to thine own again,
Where it will break at last."

During the singing Nourmahal has come slowly out from the left,
walking along the broad top of the wall until, coming to the tower,
she drops down on the floor by the railing of the turret and
listens, her veil falling from before her face. When the song has
ended, Nasrulla comes forward and approaches the little tower. He
leads a horse, a white horse with its tail dyed red in the Persian
fashion.

_Nourmahal._ You turn the gray of the poplars in the darkness into the silver of running water.

_King Nasrulla._ The dawn is waiting under your veil. I see now only the morning star.

_Nourmahal._ I am but the moon, and I must not be seen when My Lord the Sun comes.

_King Nasrulla._ The Lord of the Sky rises to look on the gardens where the nightingales have been singing.

_Nourmahal._ But when he finds that the nightingales are silent, he passes to other gardens.

_King Nasrulla._ Following the song, as I follow the lisp of spring in your voice, the flutter of the wings of birds in the branches when buds are swelling.

_Nourmahal._ It is the flutter of wings and the song that you care for; it is not the bird.

_King Nasrulla._ It is the song of the bird that tells me where I shall find the bird herself. It is the oasis lifted up into the sky that guides the thirsty traveler across the desert.

_Nourmahal (rising in agitation)._ When I am your queen, will you follow the voices of other nightingales?

_King Nasrulla._ You will be my first queen.

_Nourmahal._ I must be your only queen.

_King Nasrulla._ Always my first queen, and in your garden the fountains shall murmur day and night with a fuller flow of water than any others. The flowers there shall be more beautiful than anywhere else in all the world, and a hundred maidens shall serve you.

_Nourmahal._ And I shall not be your only queen?

_King Nasrulla._ It is not the way of the world.

_Nourmahal._ I have heard stories of places where the king has only one queen.

_King Nasrulla._ It has never been so in Saranazett.

_Nourmahal._ It has not been so in Saranazett, but does nothing change?

_King Nasrulla._ I must be king in the way of my ancestors.

_Nourmahal (dropping down by the railing again)._ And we must live in the way of our ancestors, over and over again, sunrise and noon-glare and star-shine, as it was before our stars rose in the heavens, as it always will be?

_King Nasrulla._ Our ancestors have taught us that a king should not live too meanly.

_Nourmahal._ We cannot appeal to our ancestors. We cannot appeal to anything, and nothing can be undone. As the Persian poet says, "The moving finger writes," and what is written must be.

_King Nasrulla._ And if what is written is beautiful, and if you are to be a king's throne-mate, if all the treasures of all the world are to be sought out for you----

_Nourmahal._ It is nothing, nothing, if you must have another wife, if you must have two other wives, three.

_King Nasrulla._ My prime minister will choose the others. I choose you.

_Nourmahal (passionately)._ But what shall we ever choose again--and get what we choose? Have not the hours been counted out for us from the beginning of the world? Can we stop the grains of sand in the hour-glass?

_King Nasrulla._ Each one will make a new pleasure as it falls.

_Nourmahal._ Yes, but it falls. We do not gather it up. It falls out of the heavens as the rain comes. We cannot make it rain.

_King Nasrulla._ But the drops are always pleasant.

_Nourmahal._ Yes, like a cup of water to a prisoner who dies of thirst and cannot know when his jailer comes. If we could bring the clouds up over the sun when the hot dust is flying, it would be really pleasant, but

"That inverted Bowl we call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die,
Lift not your hands to _It_ for help--for It
As impotently moves as you or I."

You are my sky, and the old poet is right, if you must have four wives because your father had four wives, and his father.

_King Nasrulla._ They are but symbols of kingliness, and they shall bow in the dust before you, whom my heart chooses, as weeds by the roadside bow when you pass in your tahktiravan and the air follows its flying curtains.

_Nourmahal._ Why should anyone bow to me? Why should I care for bowing? It would make me a slave to the custom of bowing. Are you a king and must you be a slave too? Impotence is the name of such kingship, and why should I care to be a queen when my king cannot make me queenly?

_King Nasrulla (advancing to the tower and leaving his horse standing)._ Come! The stars are paling, and there is only the light of your eyes to lift me out of the dust. Come!

In the side of the wall by the tower a sloping series of stout pegs
has been driven, descending to the ground at short intervals.
Nourmahal comes out of the tower, puts her foot on the highest of
these pegs, takes Nasrulla's hand, and, with his help, comes slowly
down the pegs, as if they were a flight of stairs, to the ground.

_Nourmahal._ How I love a horse! It is Samarcand and Delhi and Bokhara and Paris, even Paris.

_King Nasrulla._ Paris! What is Paris?

_Nourmahal (standing in front of the horse and caressing its head)._ I don't know. I have never been there, but a horse makes me think of Paris. I don't know London, but a horse makes me think of London too. A horse could take me there. I could ride and ride, and every day there would be something new and something wonderful. There are cities beyond the water, too, marvelous cities, full of things more than we dream of here. A horse is swift, and the tapping of his feet on the stones is distance. When he lifts his head, when he curves his neck, already in his heart he is going on and on.

_King Nasrulla._ And these are the stories that you have heard, stories about Paris and London and the cities across the water?

_Nourmahal._ Stories? Perhaps not stories. Dreams, I think, imaginings dropped from the wings of falcons flying out of the west.

_King Nasrulla._ You shall sit on the horse, and you can seem to be riding. Then as your dreams come true, you can tell them to me. Let the horse be Paris in my fancies too, and London and the cities across the water.

The horse is still standing where he stopped when Nasrulla led him
out from behind the trees with him. He faces toward the left, and
Nasrulla is back of him. Nourmahal puts her foot into Nasrulla's
hand, and he lifts her into the saddle. When she is comfortably
seated, he stands beside her and in front of her, back of the
horse, leaning against the horse's neck and caressing his shoulder.

_King Nasrulla._ Now we are on the road, and all the world is moving across the horizon. If it is all a dream, let me be in the dream.

_Nourmahal (looking out and away from him and pausing a moment)._ Stories! Dreams!--What I have heard is only a whisper, but it seems so true and so beautiful. Somewhere a man loves one woman always and no other. Somewhere a king is not a manikin stalking through ceremonies. Somewhere he lives humanly as other men. Somewhere to-day is not like yesterday, and man has learned to break the cycle of what has been forever, of what seems dead and yet out of death comes back again and again. I have not seen it, but I know it. Somewhere you and I could be happy without being king or queen. Somewhere a woman thinks her own thoughts, and not the thoughts of her lord only. Somewhere men are not bound to a king, and somewhere kings are not bound to the words of their fathers' fathers.

_King Nasrulla (slowly, after a pause)._ It is the way of the world, Nourmahal. What the world is, it is, and that is forever and ever, unless it should be the will of God to make a new world.

_Nourmahal._ A new world! (_She pauses dreamily._) Yes, that is what I want, a new world. That is what men are making somewhere, I know it. That is what is in my heart, and the same thing must be in the hearts of other men and women. A new world! What would it be to wake up every morning with a fresh wonder, not knowing what the day would bring? What would it be every morning to take the saddle and follow a new road ahead of the sun?

_King Nasrulla._ If I could go with you----

_Nourmahal._ You have horses.

_King Nasrulla._ It is not so decreed. My place is here.

_Nourmahal._ Your place is here, and it is your place to have three or four queens as your ministers decide for you. One queen is to keep peace with the King of the South, another is to keep peace with the King of the West, and the third is to keep peace with the King of the East. The fourth queen you may choose for yourself from your own people--if you choose before some other king offers a daughter. You may make slaves of your queens so that your neighbor kings may make a slave of you.

_King Nasrulla._ Yes, if I would be king--and you would be queen.

_Nourmahal._ Queen!--in a world where the flowers that bloom to-day died centuries ago! Queen--in a world where queens may look out of grated windows and never walk the streets! Queen--in a world where My Lord the King may not come to my door too often lest the daughter of the King of the South put poison in the nectar that her slaves offer him to-morrow!

_King Nasrulla._ The world is the world, and its enduring is forever and ever. We are but shadows that change and break on the surface of running water. We may stand for a moment in the sun, but we cannot stop the rain that fills the stream. We cannot fix our images for a moment on the drops that are rushing out to the sea.

_Nourmahal (looking away from him dreamily)._ "Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things Entire, Would we not shatter it to bits--and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's desire?"

He looks at her steadily, but she does not turn her head, and,
while they are so silent a woman comes from the left with a water
jar, fills it from the well, puts it on her head, and passes off
again. The sun is now warming the tops of the mountains to a soft
pink.

_King Nasrulla._ We must find the water where it flows--or go thirsty.

_Nourmahal (more passionately)._ But somewhere the women do not carry water. The poet only thought of doing what somewhere men have done. Here a thousand years are but as yesterday and ten thousand as a watch in the night. I am not I, but an echo of the mad desires of dead men whose dust has been blown across the desert for countless centuries. Why should I not think of my own desires before my dust, too, flies forgotten before the passing caravans?

_King Nasrulla._ But you are to be my queen. Nothing more can anyone give you in Saranazett.

_Nourmahal._ And to-morrow or next week your ambassador to the King of the East comes back with letters and pledges of friendship. Perhaps he brings with him the King's daughter.

_King Nasrulla._ But she is only the official seal of a bond, only a hostage. She is not the rose that I pin over my heart. She is not the nightingale that I love to hear singing in my garden. She is not the face behind the lattice that draws my eager feet. She is not the fountain that will make me drink and drink again.