Part 6 (1/2)

Then I thought: she has gone away; she is hurt; she does not know what poison has been working in me.

Then I thought: upstairs, her child is sleeping; and I felt the presence of the fields we had walked over, the roads we had followed, the flowers we had watched together, before it came.

She had touched my hair, and only then did I feel it; And I loved her once again.

And I came away, full of the sweet and bitter juices of life; and I lit the lamp in my room, and made this poem.

TERROR

Eyes are tired; the lamp burns, and in its circle of light papers and books lie where chance and life have placed them.

Silence sings all around me; my head is bound with a band; outside in the street a few footsteps; a clock strikes the hour.

I gaze, and my eyes close, slowly:

I doze; but the moment before sleep, a voice calls my name in my ear, and the shock jolts my heart: but when I open my eyes, and look, first left, and then right ...

no one is there.

CHALFONT SAINT GILES

The low graves are all grown over with forget-me-not, and a rich-green gra.s.s links each with each.

Old family vaults, some within railings, stand here and there, crumbling, moss-eaten, with the ivy growing up them and diagonally across the top projecting slab.

And over the vaults lean the great lilac bushes with their heart-shaped leaves and their purple and white blossom.

A wall of ivy shuts off the darkness of the elm-wood and the larches.

Walk quietly along the mossy paths; the stones of the humble dead are hidden behind the blue mantle of their forget-me-nots; and before one grave so hidden a widow kneels, with head bowed, and the c.r.a.pe falling over her shoulders.

The bells for evening church are ringing, and the people come gravely and with red, sun-burnt faces through the gates in the wall.

Pa.s.s on; this is the church-porch, and within the bell-ringers, men of the village in their Sunday clothes, pull their bob-major on the red and white grip of the bell-ropes, that fly up, and then fall snakily.

They stand there given wholly to the rhythm and swing of their traditional movements.

And the people pa.s.s between them into the church; but we are too sad and too reverent to enter.

WAR-TIME

If I go out of the door, it will not be to take the road to the left that leads past the bovine quiet of houses brooding over the cud of their daily content, even though the tranquillity of their gardens is a lure that once was stronger; even though from privet hedge and mottled laurel the young green peeps, and the daffodils and the yellow and white and purple crocuses laugh from the smooth mould of the garden beds to the upright golden buds of the chestnut trees.

I shall not see the almond blossom shaming the soot-black boughs.

But to the right the road will lead me to greater and greater disquiet; into the swift rattling noise of the motor-'busses, and the dust, the tattered paper-- the detritus of a city-- that swirls in the air behind them.