So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults: into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields, round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in dungeons:—there along fly their Voices.
It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it.
It is triumph.
The noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder, floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men—wizards, monks, artisans, thieves—echo no farther than their talking conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices of women—singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women—die with their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices as they go.
For the Sound of the child-Voices is more potent than wizards’—it is not cramped into thought-forms: more devotional than monks’ because super-conscious; more menacing than thieves’ because absolute. And it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing, rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long dead-silenced: and after.
Music of the world.
This moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and starting away. It wakes vision so that I see—quick, evil, terribly human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors—all those Places where the Voices go.
I go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where their Echo goes.
—small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and little young shoulders and knees and waistlines—restless and kaleidoscopic—
—and confused boy-groups—little fellows in suits misnamed Oliver-Twist, larger boys of serge-Norfolk persuasion, types of the generic knickerbocker at once motley and monotonous—all with the strong sturdy calves of their legs clad in a time-honored kind of black ribbed stockings, all with the same breed of ties and collars and short-cropped hair, all with the tacit air of confessing themselves the most serenely cruel of all animals—