But he gave me no answer. It was too dark now to see any face; and I had only the feeling of passing between presences as I went along, without getting to any turning out of that endless street. Presently, in desperation, I doubled in my tracks.
A lamplighter must have been following me, for every lamp was lighted, giving a faint flickering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung out in the dark. The hungry, phantom-like young men had all vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone, when I saw—some distance ahead—a sort of grayish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those flickering marsh-light looking lamps. A noise was coming from that swirl, which seemed to be raised above the ground—a ghostly swishing, as of feet among dry leaves, broken by the gruntings of some deep sense gratified. I went on till I could see that it was formed of human figures slowly whirling round the lamp. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure was a skeleton, and between danced a young girl in white—the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and gray-white girls. Creeping a little nearer still, I could tell that these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, having the same look of awful hunger on their faces. And the girls who danced between them had a wan, wistful beauty, turning their eyes to their partners whose bony hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to the flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic revel. And then I saw what it was they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there, never still, like a joint of meat roasting before a fire—the clothed body of an elderly man. The greenish lamp-light glinted on his gray hair, and on his features, every time the face came athwart the light. He swung slowly from right to left, and the dancers whirled from left to right, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean—these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the lamp’s ghostly phosphorescence? More haunting even than those hungry skeletons and wan gray girls, more haunting and gruesome, was that dead face up there with the impress still on it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its pale, fishy eyes, and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit, to the sound of that weird swishing of dead leaves, and those grunting sighs! Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds? This gibbeted figure, which yet had a look of cold and fattened power—what awful crime towards these skeleton youths and bereaved gray-wan maidens could it be expiating?
Then with a shudder I seemed to recognize that grisly thing—suddenly I knew: I was watching the execution of the Past! There it swung! Gibbeted by the Future, whom, through its manifold lusts it had done to death! And seized with panic I ran forward through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me. . . .
HARVEST
(From the Book of the Homeless, 1916.)
The sky to-night looks as if a million bright angels were passing—a gleaming cloud-mesh drawn across the heaven. One star, very clear, shines beside a full moon white as the globe-campion flower. The hills and valleys, the corn-stooks, casting each its shadow, the grey boles of the beeches—all have the remoteness of an ineffable peace. And the past day was so soft, so glamorous; such a hum, such brightness, and the harvest going on. . . .
These last years millions have died with energy but one third spent; millions more unripe for death will yet herald us into the long shades before these shambles cease—boys born just to be the meat of war, spitted on each other’s reddened bayonets, without inkling of guilt or knowledge. To what shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this green, unripe corn, field on field, being scythed by Death for none to eat? There is no solace in the thought that death is nothing!—save for those who still believe they go straight to Paradise. To us who dare not know the workings of the Unknowable, and in our heart of hearts cannot tell what, if anything, becomes of us—to us, the great majority of the modern world—life is valuable, good, a thing worth living out for its natural span. For, if it were not, long ere this we should have sat with folded arms, lifting no hand till the last sighing breath of the human race had whispered itself out into the wind, and a final darkness come; sat, like the Hindu Yogi, watching the sun and moon a little, and expired. The moon would be as white, and the sun as golden, if we were gone, the hills and valleys as mysterious, the beech-trees just as they are, only the stooks of corn would vanish with those who garner them. If life were not good we should make of ourselves dust indifferently—we human beings; quietly, peacefully; not in murderous horror reaped by the curving volleys, mown off by rains of shrapnel, and the long yellow scythe of the foul gases. But life is good, and no living thing wishes to die; even they who kill themselves, despairing, resign out of sheer love of life, out of craving for what they have found too mutilated and starved, out of yearning for their meed of joy cruelly frustrated. And they who die that others may live are but those in whom the life-flame burns so hot and bright that they can feel the life and the longing to live in others as if it were their own—more than their own. Yes, life carries with it a very passion for existence.
To what, then, shall we turn that we may keep sane, watching this harvest of too young deaths, the harvest of the brave, whose stooks are raised before us, casting each its shadow in the ironic moonlight? Green corn!
If, having watched those unripe blades reaped off and stacked so pitifully, watched the great dark Wagoner clear those unmellowed fields, we let their sacrifice be vain; if we sow not, hereafter, in a peaceful Earth that which shall become harvest more golden than the world has seen—then Shame on us, unending, in whatever land we dwell. . . .
This harvest night is still. And yet, up there, the bright angels are passing. One Star!