The Great Valley

by Edgar Lee Masters

And when the opera came she was the queen,
At least a queen whose sovereignty withstood
Encroaching claims to ripen into rights.
But then if all were lost where not a million
People lived as yet, and where, oh well
Packers and others threw their heavier gold
In what was once a scale of primogeniture,
Rome stood and London stood and Paris.
Have your own way at home, the mood began,
I am off here where you can scarcely come.
The next place is the best, a far off place
Has teasing witcheries to those at home.
Her husband now was dead some years, the children
Grown up, or off to school, a daughter married
To an Italian count kept state in Florence
Where Browning came, with whom our queen would fence
In spiritual dialectics. In her travels
She had known Ibsen, Patti and George Eliot,
Sat as a dinner guest by Beaconsfield,
And taken tea upon Hawarden’s lawn.
And so in escritoires and cabinets
She kept mementoes of her days abroad:
Like letters from George Eliot,
“Ferishtah’s Fancies” inscribed by Robert.
And in the course of time this three-floored house
Was filled with treasures, tapestries,
Etruscan things, and faience peacock blue;
And oriental jade with letters of gold.
And there she reigned, but lived alone
The house kept by French maids
And impeccable butlers.
And so the years went, and she saw at last
The city start to slip away from her
And make her royal isolation
An ignorant solitude!

Yet she was beautiful at forty years,
Some years a widow then and very rich.
She was most fresh and matronly at fifty.
At fifty-five and sixty she could charm
A man of any age. And master-men
Paid suit to her and gained
The stimulating richness of her mind.
Some said they did not want her, others said
Her wisdom and self-mastery froze their hearts.
But when she spoke she said she could not change
The name she loved, or change her place in life
To forced forgetfulness of that English face,
Who lifted up her life from some obscurity
And made it flower.
At any rate she lived for forty years
With only maids and butlers in a house
Round which the warring city crept,
Until at last the street with lowered pulse
Saw vacant mansions, as the mob psychology,
Which sways in fashion, brought an exodus.
But she knew no temptation to depart.
This was her house, her center of the world.
And when the Countess left the Count she came
To ease her mother’s loneliness—oh yes!
Six months of loneliness was quite enough.
And then in spite of everything she left,
Returned to Florence and her rascal count,
Because she could not stand the loneliness,
And saw ahead long years of loneliness
In some bay window—no, it could not be!
And so she left her mother sitting there
Now sixty-eight or so,
Who watched the city pass,
All now the swallow-gleam of limousines,
And all around her now the boarding house,
Or institutes for drunkards, hideous blocks
Of offices and warehouses.

And all her neighbors lying up in Rose Hill.
Perhaps a few remaining who remembered
All that she was, could only say to those
Who had heard of her as she was in the eighties,
And in the nineties:
“She was a great woman, I can scarce explain.
It was this way: Chicago then was young.
Chicago in ten years is changed all through.
You see it was this way: But then you see
This great two million thing has slipped away
From all our hands.”

And then perhaps
A limousine would pass with reckless pridelings
Coming from tea or dancing at the Blackstone,
And find their laughter shortened by her face
At this bay-window
Would say: “Who’s that old woman at the window?
She always has a book, or has a fan.”

MAN OF OUR STREET

This Man’s life had four stages as I hear.
The first stage took him through the days of school
And fastened on his name a prophecy
That he would win success. The second stage
Took him to thirty years while he was fumbling
The strings to find the key and play in key.
The third stage marked discouragement, departure
To speculations and to reconcilement
That he was born no lawyer. And the fourth
Was one of quietude and trivial days.
I knew him in this fourth stage as a man
Emerging from a house across the street
On Sunday mornings in silk hat, long coat
And bamboo cane. When summer came he donned
A flannel suit of gray, a panama
And gloves of tan. When winter came he wore
A double-breasted coat with lamb’s fur collar.
He had no friends, so far as one could see,
No membership in clubs, was never seen
Where men meet, or society is gathered.
Sometimes he stopped to tell a passer-by
The day is fine, it’s very fine, you’re right,
In voice complaisant. The neighbors knew
He lived upon a little purse he made
In compromise of some preposterous wrong.
And people wondered how the purse was lasting,
And wondered how much longer he could loaf,
How many seasons more he could appear
So seasonably attired and walk the streets
In such velleity, with such vacuous light
Grown steady in his eyes.

I love to watch
The chickens in a barn-yard. Nothing else
Is quite so near the human brood. You’ll see
Invariably a rooster stalk about
In aimless fashion, moving here and there,
Picking at times with dull inappetence
At grains or grit, or standing for a time
In listless revery. I never saw
A man with such resemblance to this rooster
As this man was.

At last we had not seen
Our man upon the street for several days.
And some one said he had been very ill.
His wife had fears and wept and said ’twas hard
Just on the eve of great success to die.
He had thought out a plan, she said, to win
Great trade in South America for us.
Our State Department thought it excellent.
And then one day four doctors passed his door
For consultation, and the word went round
Our man rebelled most piteously and said
He could not die until he had worked out
His dream of South America. He knew
His danger, had the doctors called to check
The inroads of the peril, though the purse
Was growing slim, as we discovered later.

One noon-time as I came along the street
Where twenty children laughed and followed me,
Half playing at their game, half following
My banterings and idle talk, and asking
About the bundle underneath my arm.
“It’s nothing but a chicken, go away,”
I said to them.

And there across the street
Was crape upon the door—our man was dead,
And I was carrying chicken home to boil.