The House of Dust; a symphony Part 14

VI. CINEMA

As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving, Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.

How shall we live to-night, where shall we turn?

To what new light or darkness yearn?

A thousand winding stairs lead down before us; And one by one in myriads we descend By lamplit flowered walls, long bal.u.s.trades, Through half-lit halls which reach no end. . . .

Take my arm, then, you or you or you, And let us walk abroad on the solid air: Look how the organist's head, in silhouette, Leans to the lamplit music's orange square! . . .

The dim-globed lamps illumine rows of faces, Rows of hands and arms and hungry eyes, They have hurried down from a myriad secret places, From windy chambers next to the skies. . . .

The music comes upon us. . . . it shakes the darkness, It shakes the darkness in our minds. . . .

And brilliant figures suddenly fill the darkness, Down the white shaft of light they run through darkness, And in our hearts a dazzling dream unwinds . . .

Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea Down miles on miles of glistening mirrorlike sand,-- Take my hand And walk with me once more by crumbling walls; Up mouldering stairs where grey-stemmed ivy clings, To hear forgotten bells, as evening falls, Rippling above us invisibly their slowly widening rings. . . .

Did you once love me? Did you bear a name?

Did you once stand before me without shame? . . .

Take my hand: your face is one I know, I loved you, long ago: You are like music, long forgotten, suddenly come to mind; You are like spring returned through snow.

Once, I know, I walked with you in starlight, And many nights I slept and dreamed of you; Come, let us climb once more these stairs of starlight, This midnight stream of cloud-flung blue! . . .

Music murmurs beneath us like a sea, And faints to a ghostly whisper . . . Come with me.

Are you still doubtful of me--hesitant still, Fearful, perhaps, that I may yet remember What you would gladly, if you could, forget?

You were unfaithful once, you met your lover; Still in your heart you bear that red-eyed ember; And I was silent,--you remember my silence yet . . .

You knew, as well as I, I could not kill him, Nor touch him with hot hands, nor yet with hate.

No, and it was not you I saw with anger.

Instead, I rose and beat at steel-walled fate, Cried till I lay exhausted, sick, unfriended, That life, so seeming sure, and love, so certain, Should loose such tricks, be so abruptly ended, Ring down so suddenly an unlooked-for curtain.

How could I find it in my heart to hurt you, You, whom this love could hurt much more than I?

No, you were pitiful, and I gave you pity; And only hated you when I saw you cry.

We were two dupes; if I could give forgiveness,-- Had I the right,--I should forgive you now . . .

We were two dupes . . . Come, let us walk in starlight, And feed our griefs: we do not break, but bow.

Take my hand, then, come with me By the white shadowy crashings of a sea . . .

Look how the long volutes of foam unfold To spread their mottled shimmer along the sand! . . .

Take my hand, Do not remember how these depths are cold, Nor how, when you are dead, Green leagues of sea will glimmer above your head.

You lean your face upon your hands and cry, The blown sand whispers about your feet, Terrible seems it now to die,-- Terrible now, with life so incomplete, To turn away from the balconies and the music, The sunlit afternoons, To hear behind you there a far-off laughter Lost in a stirring of sand among dry dunes . . .

Die not sadly, you whom life has beaten!

Lift your face up, laughing, die like a queen!

Take cold flowers of foam in your warm white fingers!

Death's but a change of sky from blue to green . . .

As evening falls, The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls Tremble and glow . . . the music breathes upon us, The rayed white shaft plays over our heads like magic, And to and fro we move and lean and change . . .

You, in a world grown strange, Laugh at a darkness, clench your hands despairing, Smash your gla.s.s on a floor, no longer caring, Sink suddenly down and cry . . .

You hear the applause that greets your latest rival, You are forgotten: your rival--who knows?--is I . . .

I laugh in the warm bright light of answering laughter, I am inspired and young . . . and though I see You sitting alone there, dark, with shut eyes crying, I bask in the light, and in your hate of me . . .

Failure . . . well, the time comes soon or later . . .

The night must come . . . and I'll be one who clings, Desperately, to hold the applause, one instant,-- To keep some youngster waiting in the wings.

The music changes tone . . . a room is darkened, Someone is moving . . . the crack of white light widens, And all is dark again; till suddenly falls A wandering disk of light on floor and walls, Winks out, returns again, climbs and descends, Gleams on a clock, a gla.s.s, shrinks back to darkness; And then at last, in the chaos of that place, Dazzles like frozen fire on your clear face.

Well, I have found you. We have met at last.

Now you shall not escape me: in your eyes I see the horrible huddlings of your past,-- All you remember blackens, utters cries, Reaches far hands and faint. I hold the light Close to your cheek, watch the pained pupils shrink,-- Watch the vile ghosts of all you vilely think . . .

Now all the hatreds of my life have met To hold high carnival . . . we do not speak, My fingers find the well-loved throat they seek, And press, and fling you down . . . and then forget.

Who plays for me? What sudden drums keep time To the ecstatic rhythm of my crime?

What flute shrills out as moonlight strikes the floor? . .

What violin so faintly cries Seeing how strangely in the moon he lies? . . .

The room grows dark once more, The crack of white light narrows around the door, And all is silent, except a slow complaining Of flutes and violins, like music waning.

Take my hand, then, walk with me By the slow soundless crashings of a sea . . .

Look, how white these sh.e.l.ls are, on this sand!

Take my hand, And watch the waves run inward from the sky Line upon foaming line to plunge and die.

The music that bound our lives is lost behind us, Paltry it seems . . . here in this wind-swung place Motionless under the sky's vast vault of azure We stand in a terror of beauty, face to face.

The dry gra.s.s creaks in the wind, the blown sand whispers,

The soft sand seethes on the dunes, the clear grains glisten, Once they were rock . . . a chaos of golden boulders . . .

Now they are blown by the wind . . . we stand and listen To the sliding of grain upon timeless grain And feel our lives go past like a whisper of pain.

Have I not seen you, have we not met before Here on this sun-and-sea-wrecked sh.o.r.e?

You shade your sea-gray eyes with a sunlit hand And peer at me . . . far sea-gulls, in your eyes, Flash in the sun, go down . . . I hear slow sand, And shrink to nothing beneath blue brilliant skies . . .

The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry To go our devious secret ways, forgetting Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed, We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.

The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.

Whose body have I found beside dark waters, The cold white body, garlanded with sea-weed?

Staring with wide eyes at the sky?

I bent my head above it, and cried in silence.

Only the things I dreamed of heard my cry.

Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened.

Again I loved, and love itself was darkened.

Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days.

The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent.

The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.

VII.

The sun goes down in a cold pale flare of light.

The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east: And lights wink out through the windows, one by one.

A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night.

Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from the sunken sun.

And the wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams, The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street, And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.

The purple lights leap down the hill before him.

The gorgeous night has begun again.

'I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams, I will hold my light above them and seek their faces, I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins. . . . '

The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness, Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest, Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

We hear him and take him among us like a wind of music, Like the ghost of a music we have somewhere heard; We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight, We pour in a sinister ma.s.s, we ascend a stair, With laughter and cry, with word upon murmured word, We flow, we descend, we turn. . . . and the eternal dreamer Moves on among us like light, like evening air . . .