The evening was alive. From the cropped grass of the lawn, the trees rose sheer: the trunks were columns of the earth; the branches, whelmed by leaf and shadow, made a firmament beneath the sky. I sat and was happy in this singing dusk. The shadows and the dying sun, the pied shrill chatter of the birds, came to me as a single happiness, ripe for my mood.
And then, in a flash, the veil had lifted, and I saw.
This lovely scene that soothed my weariness and made me happy, bringing to my lips soft sentimental phrases, was a shambles! In a spruce that bowered from my porch, I watched a brown thrasher wheel and screech about a branch in which an owl, ensconced, brooded over its young. The little bird was delirious with fear. It threshed its wings and screamed: it pecked at the robber owl and flew away. It wheeled, screamed up its courage, shot in and pecked again. Robins were devouring worms. A handsome woodpecker massacred wood-slugs on the boll of a beech. No single creature in that gentle dusk, but was engaged in bitter desperate war. And I sat, idle, burning my tobacco, slaying the mosquito that dared to buzz within the reach of my majesty.... All the world was murdering or murdered. Was it less fair for that?
My time was to come. And I, like these humbler creatures of the lawn, knew my hours of crisis, knew the heartbreak of desire, the black shrouds of failure. Was my time less fair for that?
O reader, if you must glean a moral from my story, let it be this! I lean back over the Precipice of Time, and greedily relive those hours which you call hours of anguish: relive those days of failure, since they were living days. Was it not then that my heart beat highest, that passion coursed most free, that I was most alive?
Out of the ash that you call history, rises the eternal flame of Love. Warm yourselves there, my brothers and my sisters. For the time will come when you will watch Love’s distant gleam, desperate and nostalgic like a winter moth which beats on the frosted window trying to get in where the light burns, which beats and beats until it falls emaciate in the snow....
THE END
1923-1924
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.