F. S. FLINT

EASTER

Friend we will take the path that leads down from the flagstaff by the pond through the gorse thickets; see, the golden spikes have thrust their points through, and last year's bracken lies yellow-brown and trampled. The sapling birch-groves have shown no leaf, and the wistarias on the desolate pergola are shorn and ashen. We lurch on, and, stumbling, touch each other. You do not shrink, friend. There you, and I here, side by side, we go, jesting. We do not seek, we do not avoid, contact.

Here is the road, with the budding elm-trees lining it, and there the low gate in the wall; on the other side, the people. Are they not aliens? You and I for a moment see them shabby of limb and soul, patched up to make shift. We laugh and strengthen each other; But the evil is done.

Is not the whole park made for them, and the bushes and plants and trees and grasses, have they not grown to their standard? The paths are worn to the gravel with their feet; the green moss will not carpet them. The flags of the stone steps are hollowed; and you and I must strive to remain two and not to merge in the multitude. It impinges on us; it separates us; we shrink from it; we brave through it; we laugh; we jest; we jeer; and we save the fragments of our souls.

Between two clipped privet hedges now; we will close our eyes for life's sake to life's patches. Here, maybe, there is quiet; pass first under the bare branches, beyond is a pool flanked with sedge, and a swan among water-lilies. But here too is a group of men and women and children; and the swan has forgotten its pride; it thrusts its white neck among them, and gobbles at nothing; then tires of the cheat and sails off; but its breast urges before it a sheet of sodden newspaper that, drifting away, reveals beneath the immaculate white splendour of its neck and wings a breast black with scum.

Friend, we are beaten.

OGRE

Through the open window can be seen the poplars at the end of the garden shaking in the wind, a wall of green leaves so high that the sky is shut off.

On the white table-cloth a rose in a vase —centre of a sphere of odour— contemplates the crumbs and crusts left from a meal: cups, saucers, plates lie here and there.

And a sparrow flies by the open window, stops for a moment, flutters his wings rapidly, and climbs an aerial ladder with his claws that work close in to his soft, brown-grey belly.

But behind the table is the face of a man.

The bird flies off.

CONES

The blue mist of after-rain fills all the trees;

the sunlight gilds the tops of the poplar spires, far off, behind the houses.

Here a branch sways

and there

a sparrow twitters.

The curtain's hem, rose-embroidered, flutters, and half reveals a burnt-red chimney pot.

The quiet in the room bears patiently a footfall on the street.

GLOOM

I sat there in the dark of the room and of my mind thinking of men's treasons and bad faith, sinking into the pit of my own weakness before their strength of cunning. Out over the gardens came the sound of some one playing five-finger exercises on the piano.

Then I gathered up within me all my powers until outside of me was nothing: I was all— all stubborn, fighting sadness and revulsion.

And one came from the garden quietly, and stood beside me. She laid her hand on my hair; she laid her cheek on my forehead,— and caressed me with it; but all my being rose to my forehead to fight against this outside thing. Something in me became angry; withstood like a wall, and would allow no entrance; I hated her.

“What is the matter with you, dear?” she said. “Nothing,” I answered, “I am thinking.” She stroked my hair and went away; and I was still gloomy, angry, stubborn.

Then I thought: she has gone away; she is hurt; she does not know what poison has been working in me.

Then I thought: upstairs, her child is sleeping; and I felt the presence of the fields we had walked over, the roads we had followed, the flowers we had watched together, before it came.

She had touched my hair, and only then did I feel it; And I loved her once again.

And I came away, full of the sweet and bitter juices of life; and I lit the lamp in my room, and made this poem.

TERROR

Eyes are tired; the lamp burns, and in its circle of light papers and books lie where chance and life have placed them.

Silence sings all around me; my head is bound with a band; outside in the street a few footsteps; a clock strikes the hour.

I gaze, and my eyes close, slowly:

I doze; but the moment before sleep, a voice calls my name in my ear, and the shock jolts my heart: but when I open my eyes, and look, first left, and then right ...

no one is there.

CHALFONT SAINT GILES

The low graves are all grown over with forget-me-not, and a rich-green grass links each with each. Old family vaults, some within railings, stand here and there, crumbling, moss-eaten, with the ivy growing up them and diagonally across the top projecting slab. And over the vaults lean the great lilac bushes with their heart-shaped leaves and their purple and white blossom. A wall of ivy shuts off the darkness of the elm-wood and the larches.

Walk quietly along the mossy paths; the stones of the humble dead are hidden behind the blue mantle of their forget-me-nots; and before one grave so hidden a widow kneels, with head bowed, and the crape falling over her shoulders.

The bells for evening church are ringing, and the people come gravely and with red, sun-burnt faces through the gates in the wall.

Pass on; this is the church-porch, and within the bell-ringers, men of the village in their Sunday clothes, pull their bob-major on the red and white grip of the bell-ropes, that fly up, and then fall snakily. They stand there given wholly to the rhythm and swing of their traditional movements.

And the people pass between them into the church; but we are too sad and too reverent to enter.

WAR-TIME

If I go out of the door, it will not be to take the road to the left that leads past the bovine quiet of houses brooding over the cud of their daily content, even though the tranquillity of their gardens is a lure that once was stronger; even though from privet hedge and mottled laurel the young green peeps, and the daffodils and the yellow and white and purple crocuses laugh from the smooth mould of the garden beds to the upright golden buds of the chestnut trees. I shall not see the almond blossom shaming the soot-black boughs.

But to the right the road will lead me to greater and greater disquiet; into the swift rattling noise of the motor-'busses, and the dust, the tattered paper— the detritus of a city— that swirls in the air behind them. I will pass the shops where the prices are judged day by day by the people, and come to the place where five roads meet with five tram-routes, and where amid the din of the vans, the lorries, the motor-'busses, the clangorous tram-cars, the news is shouted, and soldiers gather, off-duty.

Here I can feel the heat of Europe's fever; and I can make, as each man makes the beauty of the woman he loves, no spring and no woman's beauty, while that is burning.