F. S. FLINT

There has been no sound of guns, no roar of exploding bombs; but the darkness has an edge that grits the nerves of the sleeper. He awakens; nothing disturbs the stillness, save perhaps the light, slow flap, once only, of the curtain dim in the darkness. Yet there is something else that drags him from his bed; and he stands in the darkness with his feet cold against the floor and the cold air round his ankles. He does not know why, but he goes to the window and sees a beam of light, miles high, dividing the night into two before him, still, stark and throbbing. The houses and gardens beneath lie under the snow quiet and tinged with purple. There has been no sound of guns, no roar of exploding bombs; only that watchfulness hidden among the snow-covered houses, and that great beam thrusting back into heaven the light taken from it.

The bedroom is darkness. A dim cloud in one direction is the window with its curtains; the leaves of the trees outside rustle on one another. I fall to sleep.

How long have I slept? A voice calls, a bell rings; the clamour and the ringing lengthen; I turn; it continues; not mine the name I hear, and yet there is alarm in it that concerns me? Am I awake? Over my nightdress I huddle my clothes; thrust my bare feet into slippers; and run down the stairs.

From a blur of female faces distraught eyes stand out, and a woman’s voice cries: “The Zeppelins—they are attacking us; Avenue Road[A] is alight, High Mydelton[A] is burning. Did you not hear the guns? Oh, what shall we do?”

We make jokes to reassure them. I shiver: chill? excitement? fear?

Am I awake? My mind has been washed by sleep and left limp. The trees in the gardens opposite stand out behind the houses, a dark fretwork against the sky; and everywhere is stillness.

Yet something slinks overhead through the sky; men will say that they saw it pass, and then a flash, a thud,— a house has been cleft through three stories, and burns; and children burn in their beds, and men are burned rescuing them, an old man and woman are burned to death because the staircase has been smashed away.

But we do not know this yet; we have only heard explosions, and have seen the glow of fires in the sky, quickly gone.

We climb upstairs to the top story,— to see! There is nothing to see ... But the silence and stillness are sinister. What has been taken away, what added? Brick and stone have become unreal, and only the primæval trees remain, with the primæval fear behind them and among them....

What is that behind the trees?— A flame-coloured circle of light that glows and grows brighter and dimmer by turns. Is it an airship on fire? It burns on, and moves nearer, slowly; it swings clear of the trees— the moon!

The little Heddon roars over its stones towards its mouth between two cliffs mounting up, one with the grey-brown haze of the budding oakwoods and the line of the path athwart them, as though cut with a knife; and the other grey with loose shale, and here and there the gorse in bloom over the dead, brown bracken, that springs again, green once more, from its death. The little Heddon roars over its stones between its violets, primroses, and celandines to the sea. And, friends, what am I doing here beside you and the Heddon? Why did I come to you with my heart-ache and my cares, falsely to brighten your life with the foil of my darkness? Why did I come to your pinewoods? The little Heddon roars over its stones to the sea. My life grated on in its groove, and that groove Brought me to you, but see! the little Heddon roared over my brain, and for a day washed the mist from it, cleared the clog of it, and the groove is no longer there. Yet I shall leave you; I shall take back my groove, with a keener edge to my heart-ache and a different tune: the little Heddon roaring over my brain to the sea!

Brother, I saw you on a muddy road in France pass by with your battalion, rifle at the slope, full marching order, arm swinging; and I stood at ease, folding my hands over my rifle, with my battalion. You passed me by, and our eyes met. We had not seen each other since the days we climbed the Devon hills together: our eyes met, startled; and, because the order was Silence, we dared not speak. O face of my friend, alone distinct of all that company, you went on, you went on, into the darkness; and I sit here at my table, holding back my tears, with my jaw set and my teeth clenched, knowing I shall not be even so near you as I saw you in my dream.

Here where the brown leaves fall from elm and chestnut and plane-tree; here where the brown leaves drift along the paths to the lake where the waterfowl breast the waves that are ridged by the wind,— you spoke of your art and life, of men you had known who betrayed you, men who fell short of friendship and women who fell short of love; but, abiding beyond them, your art held you to life, transformed it, became it, and so you were free. And I told you of all my weakness,— my growing strength to resist the appeal to my heart and eyes of sorrowful, beautiful things; and the strength of this outer husk I had permitted to grow and protect me was its pitiful measure. You said: There are cracks in the husk. It grew to your measure perhaps once; but you are now breaking through it, and soon it will fall apart and away from you. Like a tree content with its fate, you would not have known it was there if it had grown to remain. The cold wind blew the brown leaves on to the lovers beneath, who crept closer together for warmth and closer still for love. The peacocks perched in the branches hawked their harsh cry at the golden round moon that loomed over the tree-tops. And the sound of our feet on the gravel for a time was answer enough to the broken mesh of our thoughts. I said: I have wife and children, a girl and a boy: I love them; the gold of their hair is all the gold of my thoughts; the blue of their eyes is all the purity of my vision; the rhythm of their life is more to be watched than the cadences of my poems. And you asked me: Have you taken refuge behind them? Do you not fear to lose your life in saving it for them? Be brave! Be brave! The waters are deep, the waves run high; but you are a swimmer: strike out! The cold wind blew the brown leaves deeper and deeper into the dusk; the peacocks had hushed their cries; the moon had turned her gold into silver, and between the black lace of two trees one star shone clearly. O night! have I deserved your beauty?