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SOME RECENT 
 BORZOI BOOKS 
 
 FRIDAY NIGHTS 
 Edward Gamett 
 
 STREAKS O? LIFE 
 Ethel M. Smyth 
 
 THE RED GARDEN 
 Henning Kihltr 
 
 S0NG3 OF YOUTH 
 Mary Dixon Thayer 
 
 TERTIUM ORGANUM 
 P, D. Ouspensky 
 
 THE EIGHTEEN-NINETIES 
 Bolhrook Jackson 
 
 WAITING FOR DAYLIGHT 
 fl. A/. Tomlinson 
 
 FRONTIERS OF THE AFTER LIFE 
 
 Edward C. Randall 
 
THE 
 
 JOH^Ni, Te<^J[ie "BISHOT 
 
 'Decordtiens by 'Btn's ^Artzybasbiff 
 
 ^hCCMXXII 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc. 
 
 Published, September, 1922 
 
 .0^ 
 
 -^^^v 
 
 ^'^\<^1^'^ 
 
 Set up. electrotvped, and printed bv the Vail-Ballou Co.. Binghamton, Jf. T. 
 
 Paper furnished bt/ W. F. Ether iiigton d Co., New York, N. Y. 
 
 Bound by the H. Wolff Ettate. New York. N. Y. 
 
 MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 OCT 11*22 
 
 ©C1AG86224 
 
The authors are indebted to the editors The 
 Liberator, Vanity Fair and The Bookman for 
 permission to reprint certain of the pieces in 
 this book. 
 
Tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire, 
 
 Mortu2 quoi vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti? 
 
 LUCRETIUS, III. 
 
 Fitti nel limo, dicon : "Tristi fummo 
 
 Nell'aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra, 
 Portando dentro accidioso fummo: 
 
 Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra." 
 
 DANTE, INF., III. 
 
 Where do we go from here? 
 
 ATTRIBUTED TO THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER. 
 
By Mr. Bishop : Lucifer, The Fun- 
 eral of Mary Magdalene, The 
 Death of a Dandy, The Funeral 
 of an Undertaker, The Mad- 
 man's Funeral, The Death of 
 God, and Resurrection. 
 
 By Mr. Wilson: The Preface, The 
 Death of the Last Centaur, The 
 Funeral of a Romantic Poet, The 
 Death of an Efficiency Expert, 
 The Death of a Soldier, Emily in 
 Hades, and the Epilogue. 
 
Preface ^3 
 
 Prologue: Lucifer 25 
 
 I. The Death of the Last Centaur 27 
 
 IL The Funeral of St. Mary Magda- 
 lene 39 
 
 in. The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 54 
 
 IV. The Death of a Dandy 59 
 
 V. The Death of an Efficiency Expert 68 
 
 VL The Funeral of an Undertaker 91 
 
 VII. The Death of a Soldier 99 
 
 VIII. The Madman's Funeral 123 
 
 IX. Emily in Hades 129 
 
 X. The Death of God 164 
 
 XL Resurrection ^7^ 
 
 Epilogue: Apollo 19^ 
 
PREFACE 
 
 We have often been asked what determined us to 
 write a book about death. It has been pointed out 
 that we were very younjjj and ordinarily in the best 
 of health and that everybody at our ajj;e was sup- 
 posed to be bursting with life. We were fretjuently 
 reminded that Sir 'f'homas Browne had been lifty- 
 three when he wrote his Urn Burial and that even 
 Jeremy Taylor was thirty-eight when he published 
 Holy Dying. Indeed, when our purpose became 
 generally known, a certain alarm was manifested, — 
 for the belief in the immortality of the soul is still 
 held in some quarters, so that there are still a num- 
 ber of })eople who stand in the utmost terror of 
 death. When we assured the world that we were 
 treatinjTj the subject from a merely artistic point of 
 view and that, with the best will in the world, we 
 could give no guarantees of immortality, because we 
 neither of us believed that any Ciod in his senses 
 would be willing to provide eternal life for such 
 feeble virtues as our own, we were warned that, in 
 dealing thus with death, we were attempting a very 
 dangerous experiment and probably jeopardizing in- 
 valuable souls by a wanton act of impiety. Certain 
 individuals high in the Church even wrote us 
 threatening letters. 
 
 But, on the whole, in the America of today im- 
 
 13 
 
14 Preface 
 
 mortality is a dead issue. With the preoccupation 
 with material things, with prosperity and produc- 
 tion, the New Jerusalem has faded. Or rather it 
 has been brought to earth. For, whereas the bour- 
 geoisie are comfortable and consequently do not need 
 consolation for the miseries of this life in the prizes 
 of the next, those members of the proletariat who 
 are not eager to become bourgeois themselves have 
 attempted to render life endurable, not by the Para- 
 dise of the early Christians, but simply by imagining 
 a future earth transformed by justice and plenty. 
 In all cases, it is earth, not Heaven, that the people 
 are counting on; the interest in Paradise has 
 cooled greatly since the Middle Ages. 
 
 We have therefore really been troubled very little 
 by complaints at our lack of faith. It is rather the 
 gloominess of our theme which has provoked the 
 most objection; for, in America, the gloomier as- 
 pects of life have till lately been banned from lit- 
 erature. To refer to them had constituted a sin 
 against our conception of ourselves, against the 
 illusion that life in America leaves nothing to be 
 desired. To admit the possibility of pain has 
 amounted to an unpatriotic act. So that, even 
 though death is a disaster as common in America as 
 elsewhere, it has never been as popular a subject 
 among us as it has for example in Italy. We have, in 
 fact, been warned many times that we were de- 
 liberately making our book unpopular and that we 
 should never be able to sell it. 
 
Preface 15 
 
 Why, however, in spite of this discouragement, 
 we have persisted in our project to the end will, we 
 hope, be more easily understood when our careers 
 have been considered a little and the influences to 
 which we have been subjected have been studied in 
 relation to our work. 
 
 Wc were both educated at Princeton University 
 just before the United States entered the war. In 
 that most carefree of all the colleges, where Apollo 
 lies slumbrous and lazy, we occasionally caught 
 from the lips of the god an oracle muttered in sleep 
 and though we conducted ourselves in such a way 
 as not to be publicly stoned by our fellows, we really 
 succeeded, none the less, in breathing with a certain 
 freedom. It was only after we left Princeton that 
 our thoughts were turned away from life. It was 
 when the old base-ball fields were transformed into 
 drill-grounds, and the class-rooms where we had 
 learned French and Greek were abandoned to artil- 
 lery courses. It was when we both found ourselves 
 in the army and were sent to France. 
 
 But, reader, do not be alarmed! You will find 
 no tales of heroism here. We were neither of us 
 ever in much danger of getting killed ourselves. 
 But to any one not elevated in a pulpit or barricaded 
 behind an editorial desk the overpowering presence 
 of death, that stood darkly in every heart, seemed 
 to rob the very sun of its splendor and make the 
 stars stab him like knives. No matter how rich 
 men's minds had been or how full of joy and life, 
 
l6 Preface 
 
 they were all turned now without release to the busi- 
 ness of bringing death. The very quartermaster who 
 matched suits was preparing shrouds for men to die 
 in; the very worker in the hospital who patched up 
 the gas and shell wounds was only getting men in 
 shape to die and to inflict death. The air of the 
 whole world seemed poisoned with decay; one could 
 escape it nowhere; one choked in the very autumn 
 clearness and the winds of spring, which were 
 tainted now with the foulness of those seven million 
 dead. 
 
 All Europe reached a point at last where It could 
 think of nothing but death. It could no longer be- 
 muse itself with rhetoric into forgetting the reali- 
 ties of the front nor ignore the collapse of six great 
 nations in the unchanged routine of home. If it 
 continued to Indulge in death, it would certainly die 
 of its vice. For the victor, scarcely less than for 
 the vanquished, there could be nothing but starva- 
 tion and despair. Hungry, without heart and help- 
 less, they could not even put a bold face on their 
 work; they could hardly keep themselves alive any 
 longer for the purpose of being killed. 
 
 And then the war came to a close (after twenty- 
 four hours' delay) and Marshal Foch entered Metz 
 on the back of a white horse. But it was too late 
 for people to enjoy this triumph as perhaps they 
 should have done. In Its overwhelming weakness 
 and exhaustion, which had stultified sorrow Itself, 
 Europe could hardly raise a paean of victory or 
 
Preface 17 
 
 utter a cry of relief. The people could only strike 
 dully against the oppression of their own States; 
 they could no longer thinlc much beyond their sacri- 
 fices to the cause in which they had been made nor 
 feel much more anger against an enemy as miserable 
 as themselves. The newspapers were still grieving, 
 to be sure, that the official killing was done, for, 
 though prodigious enthusiasts for death, they were 
 more interested in the slaughter at the front than in 
 the slaughter of the new generation which was just 
 being born at home. But people began to wonder 
 whether the real conflict was the one which had 
 come to an end with the white horse of Marshal 
 Foch and the occupation of Metz; and the men who 
 had been fighting side by side for going on five years, 
 now that they found themselves at home, turned 
 their machine guns on each other. 
 
 The spring came to France like a benediction, with 
 spaciousness and calm, yet from every quarter one 
 heard nothing but the harsh cries of death — of 
 boundary and civil war, of massacre and assassina- 
 tion. It appeared that the human race was com- 
 posed exclusively of enemies who were intent on 
 making use of any pretext to achieve their neigh- 
 bour's extinction, even at the cost of their own. One 
 wondered in dismay if there were any concessions 
 (even of the sacred principle of property) too great 
 to be made for the purpose of balking the contagion 
 of death and restoring to that agonized continent the 
 freedom of life again. When the time came for us 
 
1 8 Preface 
 
 to leave Europe we departed with relief — ^with the 
 vision of returning to a land of prosperity and good 
 feeling. 
 
 But it was not the Statue of Liberty — for which 
 the soldiers had longed — that first met our eyes as 
 the symbol of the country to which we were return- 
 ing: it was the black chimneys of factories that 
 soiled the very summer dawn, shedding darkness 
 from their upthrust arms as the Statue could never 
 shed light. 
 
 For hitherto we had seen very little of our native 
 civilization. In F'rance we had thought confidently 
 of America as a place where life still ran high; but in 
 America we found that life itself had become a sort 
 of death, and we longed for the Sorbonne hill where 
 even Dante had once come and where the humanities 
 still kept their freshness in the dustiest of the book- 
 shops, and for the amorous evenings of May, full of 
 soft and merry voices, that lie lightly over Paris. 
 
 At home, the humanities had little chance against 
 the Anti-Vice Society and the commercialism and in- 
 dustrialism which had caught up the very professors 
 from the great universities; and as for poor volupte, 
 she had died in the blank grey streets: for New 
 York was no more fitted for love than it was de- 
 signed for art. Our country^vomen seemed strange 
 creatures after the kind witty smiles of the French 
 and at first we could hardly tell them from the men 
 except by the fact that they were duller. 
 
 No: even in the America of peace-time we looked 
 
Preface 19 
 
 for life in vain. Our cries "for madder music and 
 for stronger wine" met with absolutely no response, 
 and we were informed that any attempt to get the 
 latter would be considered a criminal offence. For 
 money, it appeared, was the thing to get, not music 
 nor wine. Men denied themselves music and wine, 
 and everything else that makes life amiable; they 
 gave themselves up to incessant labours, with aus- 
 terity, with consecration. They secluded them- 
 selves in bleak offices, like anchorites in cells: their 
 relations with their associates became more frigid 
 than those of the strictest religious order and their 
 very correspondence was dictated in a bare and 
 graceless style, more barbarous than the poorest 
 Latin of a mediaeval monk. 
 
 But it was not for the same reasons as the saints 
 that men had renounced the colours of life. The 
 great ascetics had mortified the flesh that they might 
 live more intensely in the spirit. But the business 
 man despised the spirit even more than he despised 
 the flesh. His purpose in his barren existence of 
 severity and application, in ignoring alike the ques- 
 tioning mind and the flaming imagination, was sim- 
 ply to make something cheap and to sell it to some- 
 body dear — a pasteboard suit-case, an alfalfa cig- 
 arette, a paraffin chocolate bar. And to this end he 
 set thousands of his fellows to the most monotonous 
 and exhausting labour — a labour which reduced 
 young men and women to such a dreary stultification 
 that they hardly knew how to enjoy themselves when 
 
20 Preface 
 
 they came blinking from their confinement into the 
 sour air of the city and the hardness of the streets — 
 a labour which reduced human hands (that had 
 made so many fine things) to the offices of levers and 
 shafts and demanded of the human mind (which had 
 spun so many myths) that it confine its entire atten- 
 tion to a single mechanical act, performed again and 
 again — a labour, in short, which took the manufac- 
 ture of conveniences and of luxuries and of nuisances 
 for the end of life itself, and compelled mankind to 
 make itself miserable in the production of comfort. 
 
 And as a result of this system we found civil war 
 in America scarcely less acute than that of Europe. 
 We were confronted with a colossal strike in which 
 citizens were terrorised and murdered for believing 
 that twelve hours a day was too long to work In a 
 blast-furnace. A revolt against the intolerable life 
 of the steel mills and the mines was punished with 
 a repression and a blackguardism which we thought 
 had been exorcised forever when the Czar's knout 
 was broken. And it was not only among labourers 
 that free speech and free assemblage were done 
 laway with: so panic-stricken had the employers be- 
 come for fear they should be made to lose money 
 that they arrested citizens without warrant, de- 
 ported aliens without trial and were finally able to 
 revoke elections to one of the state assemblies by 
 refusing to admit the representatives whom the 
 people had legally chosen. 
 
 This should, of course, have meant a vindication 
 
Preface 21 
 
 by the people of their rights, but public opinion was 
 dead; it was left entirely to the newspapers. The 
 citizens of the Republic did not know that they had 
 any rights. At a time when it was possible for a 
 Socialist to be elected Prime Minister of monarchic 
 Sweden, it was impossible for Socialist representa- 
 tives to keep their seats In an American assembly; 
 the people remained completely indifferent to a pro- 
 vocation more politically vital than that which had 
 thrown all Paris into turmoil at the time of the 
 Dreyfus case. The Americans would let the rich 
 employers do anything to them they pleased because 
 they all hoped enthusiastically to become rich em- 
 ployers themselves. 
 
 Not, however, that the employers derived much 
 life from the death they inflicted on others. As re- 
 pressed and exhausted as their employees and driven 
 by a fiercer strain, they not infrequently broke down 
 when they had arrived at middle age and the 
 many nerve sanitariums were full of bewildered 
 millionaires who had found time at last to wonder 
 where they had been going so fast. Their children, 
 grown up in a world of bourgeois ideals, where the 
 emphasis which their grandfathers had placed on 
 religion had been shifted to respectability, learned 
 no aristocratic freedom with the freedom which 
 money gave them. Too often they docilely acceded 
 to the office chairs of their fathers and, if they had 
 latent superior qualities of imagination or intelli- 
 gence, would be distracted at their desks by unin- 
 
22 Preface 
 
 telligiblc longings for another manner of life of 
 which they had never been told. So they carried 
 on their fathers' work by upholding as their moral 
 philosophy the commandments of sobriety and effi- 
 ciency which they religiously taught their employees 
 and to which they themselves were slaves. 
 
 Can you wonder that we thought much of death? 
 that It finally became an obsession with us? The 
 city streets where we walked were as deep and as 
 dark as graves; the great buildings seemed to us 
 like tombs where the dead lay tier on tier. Wher- 
 ever the characteristic activity of our time had 
 passed, the earth appeared charred and sterile, lit- 
 tered with rubbish and bones. We found our 
 hymns to beauty and to love all turning into funeral 
 dirges and, instead of our old witty trifles, we fell 
 to writing epitaphs. In a word, our environment 
 and age have at last proved too strong for us, and, 
 in a spirit which we honestly hope is one of loyal 
 Americanism, we have decided that we shall best 
 interpret our country in a book devoted to death. 
 
 We do not, however, for a moment, claim to be 
 original In this. We know well that the plan of our 
 work Is anything but novel. In the first quarter of 
 the XVth century, when France seemed scarcely to 
 live, impoverished, devastated and anarchic with 
 confused and terrible wars, there was current a 
 form of public entertainment called the Dance 
 of Death. Torture and assassination and famine 
 and plague, as well as the foreign and civil wars 
 
Preface 23 
 
 that swept back and forth across the country, had 
 made the people of the XVth century as familiar 
 with death and the dead as the people of our own 
 time were to become five hundred years later. But 
 they dramatized the horror of their lives in a kind 
 of comic morality, which was still popular as a sub- 
 ject for artists as late as the great Holbein. In 
 these pictures one sees a sprightly skeleton either 
 dancing at the head of a procession or coming 
 separately and unexpectedly to each one of his vic- 
 tims in turn: he breaks the armour of the Knight, 
 speeds the Ploughman on his last furrow and diverts 
 the Astrologer from his globe by thrusting a skull 
 under his nose; in the guise of a peasant, he fells the 
 Count with his own heavy 'scutcheon and slips a 
 necklace of dead men's bones about the Countess's 
 neck; he breaks the Judge's staff and poisons the 
 King's wine; he tears the Abbess from her convent 
 and the hat from the Cardinal's head; and he finally 
 carries off the Pope himself in the act of crowning 
 somebody king. 
 
 Yes: at the darkest point of the Middle Ages 
 people made a farce of death. To the people of 
 the XVth century death itself had more life in it than 
 life has today. 
 
Lucifer 
 
 I plodded homeward throiujh the snoiv and stubble, 
 
 A wallet heavy with junk upon my back. 
 And saw the sun, a fire-distended bubble. 
 
 Sway over the stiff trees grown flat and black. 
 And as the sun, perceptibly descended. 
 
 Tumbled a cloud of carmine to the snow, 
 A god came striding through the tree boles, splendid 
 
 In pride of youth, naked, bearing a bow. 
 I dropped my pack and raced across the hollow. 
 
 Stumbled, and sank knee-deep in drifts, and cried: 
 "God of the sik'cr bow, divine Apollo, 
 
 It is not true that you with Hellas died!" 
 JVith the profound tenderness of a sage or brother. 
 
 The god turned, and tremendous thunder flamed: 
 "Apollo died long ago. I am that other 
 
 Who sang. For me the morning star was named." 
 
 25 
 
The Death of the Last Centaur 
 
 oli'o^ Koi KivravpoVy ayaKKvrov EupvTicDVO, 
 aaa' ivl fieydput fityaOvfiov UetpiOoOLOy 
 €s AairiOas IXOovO^ • o 8 eVet <f>pti'a>; uacrti' oli'^y 
 fiaLvofieyo<: kuk' Ipt^f. Sofi-ov Kara lleLpdkxno' 
 TJp<i)a<: 8 a\o<; eiAe, Suk TrpoOvpov 8e 6vpat,t 
 f.\.KOV dvai^avre?, 'air' ovaTa it;Aci xoAkw 
 ptm« t' a/i^o-ai'Tcs' o Se (fypimv jjiuv aaaOu^ 
 rytev 7)1' urryj' o;(ewj' atan^povL Ov/xm 
 
 Odyssey, XXI 
 
 Tilt' Scfue is Greenwich Filiate. 
 
 It is time lor nie to die : I h:i\'e no place 
 
 Among you save this coKl ami fetid stall, 
 Where clotted cohwebs make a dliiji;y lace 
 
 Iu)r dusty windows and against the wall 
 Hangs rotting harness from some vanished hack. 
 
 Soon there will be no stables left at all 
 In towns like this! — since now, it seems, you lack 
 
 Not only men, but horses e\'cn, Jiere 
 Where men are moved along a metal track. 
 
 In such a world my bones will have no bier: 
 You will bray my bones to tiust, to scatter tine 
 
 Among your crops; you will sell my carcass dear 
 For potted meat; you will sell these hoofs of mine — 
 
 These hoofs that first brought fue from Pelion. 
 
 27 
 
28 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 I shall have no burial — I, who am half divine I . . . 
 
 Ixion was my father, Ares' son; 
 My mother was a cloud ; and I was born 
 
 In that lost world that, waking to the sun, 
 By the clear light of an untarnished morn, 
 
 Beheld in every form that moved and shone 
 The candid nobleness and beauty worn 
 
 By children and by gods. — But I, alone, 
 Surviving all my kind, beheld the dawn 
 
 Fade like a flower's freshness that, full-blown, 
 Is over-blown and, with loose lips a-yawn. 
 
 Scatters petals and rank fragrance, till, at last, 
 
 When all the heroes and the gods were gone, 
 
 Hearing tales of how the giant race had passed 
 Beyond the sea, where, ploughing a fresh ground. 
 
 They fashioned palaces superb and vast, 
 I sailed to this new continent and found 
 
 Great buildings and great labours, but, here, too. 
 For all the monstrous bulk and terrible sound. 
 
 No heroes and no gods. — Nay, even you 
 Who would buy Beauty back at bitter cost — 
 
 A thing your fathers' fathers never knew — 
 Would lose your selves here where the streets are 
 lost, 
 
 Here where the moaning boats bring peace a 
 space. 
 With news of oceans you have never crossed; 
 
 Who gape about me for an ancient grace 
 Falling palely now, as from November sky 
 
The Death of the Last Centaur 31 
 
 The last cold light — you arc not of my race 1 . . . 
 Hear then and wonder of what race am I. 
 
 iFrom clouds that were our kindred; 
 
 From forests wild and wet; 
 From meadows drowzy with dull gold, 
 
 That kept the bright day yet — 
 Wc came, like thunder from the hills, 
 
 Before the sun was set. 
 
 The summer air that slept so still, 
 
 A tidelcss pond of gold, 
 Cut past the bent bows of our breasts 
 
 Like rapids, swift and cold; 
 And shepherds, when they heard our hoofs, 
 
 Drove in their flocks to fold. 
 
 We leapt, with brief and brutal shouts 
 
 0( hunt and feast and war; 
 We ground the thickets low like grass 
 
 Nor felt what flesh they tore; 
 Till, wildly clamouring, we stamped 
 
 Before the bridegroom's door. 
 
 Our kinsmen crowded to the sill 
 
 To welcome us inside — 
 Our kinsmen, strong as we; yet men 
 
 They were and by our side 
 Their strength was dwarfed, as men who walk 
 
 Are dwarfed by men who ride. 
 
32 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 They lifted silver basins up 
 To rinse our fingers clean; 
 
 They brought us wine in bowls of gold 
 To honour their new queen — 
 
 A wine as black as mountain pools, 
 Where Hecate is seen — 
 
 A wine that opens wide the heart; 
 
 A rude tremendous blast 
 That bids the fettered soul stand free, 
 
 Gay, arrogant and vast — 
 The prisoned master of the man 
 
 Become true lord at last. 
 
 Twelve bowls I drank of that great wine 
 
 And stood a god revealed 1 
 And I was Heracles, whose hand 
 
 Had made the hydra yield — 
 Who bore the monstrous carcass home 
 
 As soldiers bear a shield! 
 
 I watched the bride, an eager flame 
 
 Of saffron and of red; 
 I longed to crush her breasts, to bite 
 
 Her lips until they bled; 
 I laughed at such a hoofless whelp 
 
 Lord of the bridal bed. 
 
 I laughed and, bellowing with desire, 
 With furious hoofs that spurned 
 
The Death of the Last Centaur 33 
 
 Great bodies stretched in drunkenness, 
 
 Great tables overturned, 
 I plunged against the heavy air 
 
 And snatched her where she burned. 
 
 And roof and hills and heaven itself 
 
 Crashed down about my ears! 
 Unleashed, they slit my nose with knives; 
 
 They ripped my side with spears; 
 Their torches bit my very bone ! 
 
 My eyes were black with tears ! 
 
 But still I bore the bride aloft, 
 
 Through all the blows and cries, 
 Till, biting the muscles of my arms, 
 
 Spitting blood in my eyes. 
 She writhed away with sinewy limbs 
 
 The mountains had made wise. 
 
 But I, all blind and hacked and mad, 
 
 Drawing now at last my sword. 
 Struck out the door and charged the night, 
 
 That like a river roared, 
 Till, stumbling in a stream, I stopped, 
 
 Stood sweating in the ford. 
 
 Then first I knew that morning was at hand. 
 For the air was clear and gray and I could see 
 
 My bosom foul with blood and the cruel brand; 
 And while I flung chill water about me, 
 
34 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 That bit my flesh more fiercely than the bride 
 
 With those fox's teeth of hers — then suddenly 
 The windows of the East were opened wide, 
 
 Letting through the skies of day, the summer 
 skies, 
 Above the shadowy mountains. But I sighed 
 
 And, turning in weariness my aching eyes 
 From the blinding wind of silver Phoebus shakes 
 
 From limbs of fire, I climbed a little rise 
 To a wet green wood all strewn with silver flakes 
 
 Of shattered light. It was quiet there. I stood 
 And heard the first birds stirring in the brakes 
 
 And thought how all my load of wine and blood 
 Would be loosed by gentle sleep; and a strange awe 
 
 Came on me, a strange awe that stilled the wood, 
 As if for a god's presence and I saw 
 
 Of a sudden, beneath a dark laurel, noble and 
 grave, 
 An ancient centaur, moveless as the law 
 
 Whereto the mightiest god is but a slave, 
 That not the wisest god may understand — 
 
 Who watched me with eyes clear green like a 
 summer wave 
 That comes to hush its roaring on the sand 
 
 And hard as pebbles, smoothed and smoothed 
 anew. 
 It laps in ebbing home — so straight and grand 
 
 His gaze, I trembled terribly, for I knew 
 That this was Cheiron, subtle Cronos' son. 
 
 The subtlest among mortals, and gods, too. 
 
The Death of the Last Centaur 35 
 
 > 
 
 Who had reared great lords and kings, yet flattered 
 inone, 
 
 Whose tongue knew neither insolence nor fear. 
 And I heard his steady voice: "Eurytion! 
 
 What false and violent deed has brought you here 
 To blink at morning?" Then, as I stood ashamed: 
 
 "You have no need to tell me with what spear 
 Your side is torn nor with what wine enflamed 
 
 You have done us this dishonour: well I know, 
 Knowing all, how — brutal, childish and untamed — 
 
 You have wronged our hosts and kinsmen, turned 
 to foe 
 By the folly of a boyl And I forsee 
 
 The hatred and the labour and the woe 
 That must waste our years in conflict, till we flee 
 
 From Pelion, lost and broken. — Ah, insane! 
 Ah, wretched race, that never will be free 1 
 
 What peace can ever win you from your pain? 
 What life can ever lure you from your death? 
 
 Twelve ages have I reared to fight and reign 
 Your very heroes — teaching them the faith 
 
 In strength and skill and honour, and to dare 
 To follow even beyond the world the breath 
 
 Of unknown seas ; and strength and skill were fair, 
 But honour they forgot. — For Jason, at last 
 
 Forgetting Colchis and the long despair. 
 Forgetting that strange love that, in a blast, 
 
 Blazed down and burnt him up, one breathless 
 night 
 Between two days of terror, came to cast 
 
36 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 ■ — 4 
 
 Medea and her children from his sight; 
 And Achilles, when his enemy lay slain, 
 
 Befouled and broke his limbs in savage spite — 
 A better man than he. — but direr stain 
 
 Is yet to be — for Heracles, the blind. 
 Made drunk with stolen wine, became immane, 
 
 Shall slay his master, Cheiron, from behind — 
 And all my close-kept memories and all 
 
 The calm and noble music of my mind 
 Shall be lost for a jar of wine and a drunken 
 brawl!" 
 
 He ceased, and I faltered plteously, in shame: 
 "You blame me justly, master, for our fall — " 
 
 "I never blamed you! I find none to blame!" 
 He cried. "It was not you who made your soul 
 
 Seek greatness In wine nor set your flesh aflame 
 For a bright-eyed woman in a saffron stole. — 
 
 Not even myself I blame, who cannot right 
 So many wrongs: It was not I who stole 
 
 Man's godlike heart away with greed and fright! 
 It was not I who made a jest of It — 
 
 And Heracles a fool, for all his might. 
 And Odysseus a knave, for all his wit! 
 
 I did not work to drive with cruel whips 
 Orestes to his crime nor, mad, admit 
 
 One like a lover to his mother's lips 
 Who, blameless, paid in anguish that poor joy I 
 
The Death of the Last Centaur 37 
 
 It was not I who sped the Grecian ships 
 And brought the years of darkness against Troy, 
 
 Because a fair kind girl had been so quick 
 To yield her body to an eager boy, 
 
 When kisses had grown long! Nay, I am sick 
 Of blame and blaming! I shall stand and wait 
 
 For death to take my light by that base trick — 
 In silence, under a laurel, gazing straight. 
 
 Not wild with tears nor loud with anger now 
 For that which once had burst me with their spate 
 
 And made my boy's blood thunder at my brow : 
 The rivers robbed of song; the darkened sun; 
 
 Love balked of love and both alike brought low; 
 The fading smoke of Troy her victors won ; 
 
 The proudest honour pledged to serve a lie. . . . 
 My works are all dishonoured and undone; 
 
 I stand among ruins; naught but this have I: 
 To hold, without hope or armies, my hard post 
 
 Against Fate and the Furies, under the sky." 
 
 Say, you who boldly of your wisest boast 
 
 They know more than their fathers, have they 
 told 
 Their scholars more than Chciron knew? — at most, 
 Do you heed them more than I heeded him of 
 old?— 
 jFor, when he had dressed my wounds and I had 
 slept, 
 I woke to a world of black and broken gold 
 
38 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 And, forgetting all his words, 1 rose and leapt 
 Like a foal and drank the wind, the sea-sharp 
 wind 
 
 That blows from the Aegean — and I swept 
 The savage hills, with nothing in my mind 
 
 But pealing hoofs and forests black and green 
 And great revenge to take and loot to find 
 
 And lust and battle and far sights unseen! 
 
THE FUNERAL OF ST. MARY MAGDALENE 
 
 A street in the poorer quarter of Jerusalem. 
 Since the houses of the poor have changed but little 
 in two thousand years, they need no description. 
 Under the houses are shops, and the merchants of 
 fruit, lentils, oil, wine, cheese and fowls stand be- 
 fore the money tables prepared to bargain. Inci- 
 dentally they add considerably to the stench of the 
 street, which is already redolent wath the refuse of 
 dead summers. 
 
 The house in the center is noteworthy as being 
 slightly more prosperous and certainly cleaner than 
 the rest. The inhabitants evidently have some 
 other place to throw their garbage than the street. 
 The awnings at the windows are a bit frayed and 
 faded it is true, but remember the former brilliance 
 of their dyes. 
 
 The people in the scene are divided into two 
 groups, symbolizing, it would seem, the last judg- 
 ment. On the right are the Christian folk, who 
 combine the poverty of St. Francis, the filth of St. 
 Anthony, and the boils of St. Simeon Stylites, while 
 antedating these holy men by some centuries. 
 Those on the left have either bathed recently or 
 perfumed themselves — which comes to the same 
 
 39 
 
40 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 I. ■ I 
 
 tli'uKj. Till- mm arc nrlxuw, aloof; the ivomcn 
 (jraccfiilly familiar, cither too well or too little 
 dressed. In other ivords they represent respectively 
 the Roman quarter and the Latin quarter of Jeru- 
 salem. 
 
 The time is early in the reign of Nero. 
 SlMDN — {a Christian ivell-diyyer zuho resemhlcs an 
 eagle groivn old, flabby pouches about the eyes, 
 yellow at the beak) The Lord hath given and 
 the Lord hath taken away. 
 All riiK Ciikisiians — {ivith more than necessary 
 feeling) Blessed he the name of the Lord! 
 Ju.NIUS Fabullus — {a young Roman of equestrian 
 family who is learning to govern the world by 
 observing the routine at the procurator's of- 
 fice) What is tliis Christianity anyhow? 
 Calvus Vatinius RuiH) — {a flaneur at the upper 
 edge of youth, of an ancient and now rich pleb- 
 eian family) It's a kind of poverty cult. The 
 Christians affect to despise the world. 
 Fahullus — So should 1 if I lived here! 
 Vatinius — Those who die in their superstition are 
 to live again, in a new Jerusalem, where they 
 will sit at long tables and be served pomegran- 
 ates, white bread and honeyed wine to the per- 
 petual playing of harps. 
 Fabullus — It sounds like the summer I spent in 
 
 Corinth. 
 Vatiniits — It's (Mily those who have had nothing In 
 this world who want everything in the next. 
 
Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 41 
 
 Miriam — (a young Christian woman with wide 
 grey eyes and large hips) What arc all these 
 hussies doing here? 
 
 Sappiiira — {a matron with large overhanging teeth 
 ti>ho has espoused Christianity along with her 
 husband) They are old friends of our dear 
 departed sister. 
 
 Young Ciirishan Woman — These painteil, 
 frizzled — women? 'J'hey smell like the public 
 baths. How did poor, dear Mary Maji^dalene 
 ever come to know these queans? 
 
 Christian Matron — She was one of them my 
 dear. 
 
 iYoung Ciiristia.n Woman — One of these 1 Tiiat 
 holy woman? Why Brother Jehosophat says 
 that just before she died, there was the faintest 
 flicker of an aureole about her head. 
 
 Christian Matron — Yes, he'd probably say her 
 fingers were red from sewing, when they were 
 stained with henna. And did you never notice 
 how often she bathed? She called it keeping 
 her body ready for the Lord. But it was sim- 
 ply that she couldn't shake off her old habits. 
 
 Judith — {a harlot) It's a terrible thing to diel 
 To be hidden in the deep earth and never see 
 the trees with fresh green on them in the spring 
 or the blue skies over them in the summer. 
 
 Chrysis — (another harlot) There's a charm for 
 every kind of disease. If you could only get 
 them all, you would never die. 1 have charms 
 
42 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 for twenty-seven diseases. My sailor friends 
 bring them to me. I have a charm for boils 
 from Aleppo and an amulet for fever from 
 Messala. 
 
 First Harlot — Did you know this Magdalene? 
 
 Second Harlot — My first lover was a young 
 Roman she had tired of. He had a scar on 
 his left shoulder and used to snore. 
 
 Simon — {half chanting) Now this body of cor- 
 ruption has taken on incorruptibility. The 
 carnal body has perished, but the soul is im- 
 perishable. 
 
 Calliochus — {a philosopher of Ephesus, bald- 
 headed, his red heard cut in imitation of the 
 busts of Socrates) The soul is triangular. 
 Its three sides are feeling, perception and will. 
 Had the soul been circular it would have en- 
 dured forever. 
 
 Tertullius — {a young Roman poet) Did you 
 ever know this Magdalene? 
 
 The Philosopher — I cannot say. No one, as the 
 vulgar say, can escape Venus, the mother of the 
 Gods. But when her fever is upon me I seek 
 the ugliest slut I can find, so that afterwards 
 I may have as long repose as possible. 
 
 The Poet — You never knew her. Even without 
 love she had been beautiful. She was my first 
 mistress. Not all my later loves, not even 
 death itself, can take her image from my eyes. 
 
Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 45 
 
 The Piiilosopiikr — You're a poet, Tertulllus, and 
 poetry arises from some drunkenness of the 
 soul. Poetry's older than philosophy, but it's 
 not so worthy. 
 
 The Poet — But it is not only through sober reason- 
 ing that wisdom comes. The poet in his imag- 
 ination, the lover in his ecstasy, arrive perhaps 
 at a truth beyond wise men. 
 
 The Philosopher — So do women, but that does 
 not make them the equal of philosophers. 
 
 Christian Matron — Fd like to pull those false 
 frizzles off. To come here among respectable 
 people like this ! 
 
 Young Christian Woman — And at such a time! 
 They might show a little decency! 
 
 Christian Matron — I hope no one will think they 
 are friends of mine! 
 
 Fabullus — But the effect of this Christianity on the 
 populace — 
 
 Vatinius — Is excellent! I have a slave who lays 
 out my robes and sandals in the morning. He 
 is now a Christian. I find he shaves me much 
 better since his conversion. Fie seems better 
 satisfied with his condition. He does, I believe, 
 go out at dawn to sing hymns or something, but 
 as I never rise before noon, I do not find it 
 inconvenient. 
 
 Fabullus — They have no rites then which inter- 
 fere with the Roman Laws? 
 
46 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Vatinius — They have only a sort of sacramental 
 supper. My servant has every Thursday eve- 
 ning out in order to attend it. 
 
 First Harlot — I knew her when she was a little 
 girl. We played together in the fields and 
 waded in the noisy brooks. One day she came 
 to mc, her two chubby hands behind her back, 
 and said, "Which will you have, beauty or 
 gold?" I did not know which to take and stood 
 hesitating. Then she laughed and gave me 
 with one hand a mite of copper, and with the 
 other a wisp of plucked poppies. "There," 
 she said, "you shall have both. But I don't 
 want cither. I want to be loved." And she 
 kissed me on the cheeks. 
 
 Second Harlot — My dear, your hair is getting thin 
 around the temples. I have the loveliest oint- 
 ment to keep the hair from falling. You take 
 a live bat that's been found sleeping at mid- 
 night in a tomb, and crush his wing with a mix- 
 ture of honey, goose-grease and the ashes of a 
 dormouse. Then you heat it in a brazier and 
 add a sprinkling of cinnamon, saffron, and the 
 dust of last year's roses. Just try a little each 
 night before going to bed. 
 
 Simon — They that are after the flesh do mind the 
 things of the flesh, but they that are after the 
 spirit, the things of the spirit. They that are 
 in the flesh cannot please God, but I am in the 
 spirit. 
 
Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 47 
 
 >^— ^—^— »————— ^-—^^■^—^—^^^— »»— ^— « 
 
 The Poet — In the flesh beauty crumbles, fades and 
 is lost, but in the mind beauty is immortal. 
 Magdalene is dead; but my verses survive. 
 
 Christian Matron — Sister Martha says that as 
 soon as sister Mary was dead she rummaged 
 through her things. What do you think she 
 found? 
 
 Young Christian Woman — Some relic of our 
 Lord, no doubt. 
 
 Christian Matron — Relic 1 She found a box full 
 of fine ointment, and a package of spices for 
 mixing with wine. 
 
 Fabullus — My suspicions of Christianity are pure- 
 ly political. Being a Roman gentleman, I en- 
 tertain an open mind toward all the ideas of 
 my age. But as for the Christians — they refuse 
 to recognize the Roman gods. 
 
 Vatinius — But you yourself — do not take the gods 
 seriously, I hope? 
 
 Fabullus — I am a Roman. I believe in the Rom- 
 an gods, whether they exist or not. It is their 
 worship which has brought us our present pros- 
 perity. 
 
 Vatinius — But what has Rome to fear from a lot 
 of hungry slaves? 
 
 Fabullus — ^AU revolutions begin in the belly and 
 mount to the brain. 
 
 Vatinius — When that happens, Christianity will 
 have become a fashionable cult at Rome. Once 
 let the Pontifex Maximus turn Christian, or 
 
48 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 better still, the Emperor, and all danger from 
 the Christians is over. They will beome the 
 chief conservers of the existing order. 
 
 Simon — The body which was conceived in iniquity 
 is dead, but through faith the just live again. 
 
 First Harlot — There's nothing you can do for the 
 dead. 
 
 Second Harlot — I thought I was going to die 
 once, but I prayed to Diana and was well in 
 three days. I have a little shrine to her in my 
 bed-chamber. A silversmith from Ephesus 
 gave it to me. They are very generous, the 
 Ephesians. I like generous men. 
 
 First Harlot — I have brought these flowers, la- 
 burnum and yellow lilies, which grow by the 
 cool well-side, and roses, such as the young 
 women beyond Jordan put in their hair. I think 
 she would have liked my bringing these flowers. 
 
 Second Harlot — I like flowers. They make a 
 room smell fresh and cool. 
 
 First Harlot — Do you think they'd mind if I 
 went in and put them at the foot of her bed? 
 
 Second Harlot — Who cares about these Chris- 
 tians? They never bring us anything. I had 
 an old Christian come up and take his son 
 away from me last Friday. Right in the wine 
 shop too, before all the people. 
 
 Christian Matron — I believe one of those hus- 
 sies is going into the house. 
 
 Young Christian Woman — She's looking toward 
 
Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 49 
 
 the door. A woman like that in an honest 
 Christian's homel And poor sister Magda- 
 lene lying there, too! 
 
 Christian Matron — Don't speak that way about 
 sister Magdalene. She's gone to her reward. 
 At least I hope so, though there have been 
 times I've doubted very much if the Lord had 
 anything to do with the likes of her. 
 
 Fabullus — You are dining then at Sulpicia's? 
 
 Vatinius — No. With Publius Rufus. 
 
 Fabullus — Until tomorrow, then. Farewell. 
 {He passes down the street to the left.) 
 
 You.ng Christian Woman — She's starting up the 
 steps. 
 
 Christian Matron — She'll get there over my 
 dead body. {She runs quickly up the steps and 
 stands, arms akimbo, in front of the door. 
 Judith, the first harlot, stands hesitating at the 
 foot of the steps.) 
 
 Christian Matron — Take those filthy weeds away 
 from herel You can't carry your abomina- 
 tions into this house. 
 
 Simon — Soft words, sister. 
 
 Second Harlot — {walks deliberately up the steps, 
 and stares into the matron's face.) You will 
 call us names, will you? Take thatl {She 
 gives her a shove 'which sends her sprawling 
 down the steps.) And that! {Follows after 
 her and kicks her.) 
 
 Christian Matron — {scrambling to her feet) 
 
50 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 - 
 
 You painted Babylonian I I'll show you! You 
 with that dead hair frizzled on your head! 
 {She grabs the curls which fall over the harlot's 
 ears in her strong hands, and shakes her head 
 violently hack and forth as a puppy would a 
 rat, while the courtesan retorts with unaimed 
 kicks at her shins.) 
 
 The Poet — We can't let this go on I It's neither 
 dignified nor sensible. 
 
 The Philosopher — But no one expects a woman to 
 be either. {Chrysis, the harlot, manages to ex- 
 tricate herself from the matron's grasp, rushes 
 at her headlong, and again bowls her over, 
 straddles her prostrate body and attempts to 
 pinion the matron's arms with one hand.) 
 
 Simon — Though they beat the breath out of your 
 body and hack you with two-edged swords, re- 
 gard them not, for so did they to the prophets 
 before you. 
 
 Second Harlot — You will scratch my eyes out, 
 will you? 
 
 Christian Matron — Get off me. You're mauling 
 the life out of me. {The harlot for the mo- 
 ment has one arm free, which she uses with 
 good effect.) 
 
 Simon — Though they saw you with swords and com- 
 mit all manner of evil unto you, rejoice and be 
 exceeding glad, for great is the reward In 
 heaven. {Vatinius lifts Chrysis by her 
 shoulders, holds her arms as in a vice.) 
 
Funeral of St. Mary Magdalene 51 
 
 Vatinius — You can't do this sort of thing. You'll 
 get into trouble with the police. You know 
 how disastrous that would be for you. 
 {The Christian regains her feet and begins 
 pummelling the harlot's breast.) 
 
 Christian Matron — I'll show you how to treat an 
 honest woman I 
 
 Simon — (steps between the two, and receives a few 
 belated blows himself.) Be long suffering, sis- 
 ter, patient to them that mistreat you, showing 
 loving kindness to them that hate you. 
 
 Second Harlot — (accustomed though she is to 
 the vulgar indignities of the crowd, struggles 
 with rage against the matron.Q Virago! 
 
 Christian Matron — (Unable to dodge between 
 the old well-digger and the harlot, thrusts her 
 head forward impotently.) The slut! 
 
 Simon — The other cheek, sister. 
 
 Vatinus — (to Chrysis, the harlot) — You've made 
 enough of a scene for one day. You'd better 
 go back to the city. (Judith, unnoticed, picks 
 up the flowers and sits on the steps, weeping 
 softly.) 
 
 Second Harlot — (to the matron) You fat lump I 
 (Vatinius leads her away to the left.) 
 
 Christian Matron — (toward the retreating 
 pair) You painted baggage 1 You lilac-nosed, 
 loose-livered, light-fingered wench 1 You 
 daughter of a mangy dog! You — you — you 
 
52 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 The Poet — A peroration in 'yous'. 
 
 The Philosopher — Could you lend me the price 
 of drunkenness? I can hear the stars falling. 
 {He takes several coins from the poet and fol- 
 lows after the harlot.) 
 
 Simon — {goes up the steps and listens at the door 
 of the house.) Not a sound! 
 
 Christian Matron — ^After the way I've been 
 treated, you can't expect me to stay here. It 
 all comes of letting such women leave their 
 own quarter. 
 
 Young Christian Woman — But Sister Mary — ? 
 
 Christian Matron — After the way I've been 
 treated! With a face like mine! {She moves 
 her hand over her bleeding cheeks.) Funeral 
 or no funeral — {She and Miriam go out at the 
 right.) 
 
 Simon — {comes down the steps and stands holding 
 his paunch with a deprecating gesture.) The 
 burial of the dead is delayed. This flesh — 
 which God knows I annihilate every day — must 
 have its due. Let us go and break our mid- 
 day bread. {He leaves the scene, and the re- 
 maining Christians follow sheepishly. There 
 are now left but TertuUius, the poet, and 
 Judith, the first harlot. There is a pause. 
 Then he goes quietly to the steps and lifts her 
 up. She is still zveeping softly.) 
 
 Judith — You do not know how I loved her. 
 
 Tertullius — I, too, loved her. iWe two — 
 
Funeral of St. Mar y Magdalene 53 
 
 ( The door opens and an aged elder appears.) 
 The Elder — The peace of the Lord be upon you. 
 {He descends the steps. Borne by six men, 
 the bier of Mary Magdalene, who in her life 
 had been beloved by the poet, the harlot and 
 one other, appears in the doorway.) 
 Judith — There's nothing to say now, except fare- 
 well. 
 Tertullius — She can but fare as the dead fare, 
 which is not well. For all we have known 
 and loved was nourished by the light, and 
 where the dead are is no light, not even a vain 
 desire for splendour stirring in the startled east 
 nor diminished light of quiet stars. {The 
 last procession of the Christian saint passes 
 down the steps and from the scene. At 
 a little distance there follows, out of all that 
 had so lately been there, the poet and the 
 harlot, leaning on the poet's arm.) 
 
THE FUNERAL OF A ROMANTIC POET 
 
 Paris: circa 1840. 
 A friend speaks: 
 
 It should have been a day of storm and cloud 
 
 And thunderous winds, of autumn's banners hurled 
 In flaming shreds to fashion earth a shroud — 
 
 Superb despair of some defeated world! 
 It should have been the hour when evening's hand 
 
 Her tragic mantle for the hills has brought 
 And turned the trees to presences that stand 
 
 As proud and sombre as a poet's thought! 
 
 By some wild cairn they should have buried him, 
 Where earth, upstarting, clenches stony fists; 
 
 Where birds that swim the bleak abysses scream — 
 Cry out in lonely pain among the mists 1 
 
 A cousin speaks: 
 
 But here the garish August sun betrays 
 
 A vulgar earth of drowziness and dust, 
 Of trees like giant weeds and turbid haze 
 
 And roads that tarnish mourning with their rust; 
 
 54 
 
The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 55 
 
 A teeming earth, contented and immune, 
 
 Who knows no sound of sympathy to make, 
 
 But slumbers through the summer afternoon, 
 Too gross and sluggard ever to awake. 
 
 He lies among the common swarm she breeds, 
 The gaudy wreaths that every peasant craves. 
 
 The black and purple crosses, decked with beads, 
 That make men foolish even in their graves. 
 
 He lies with neither cypresses nor yews 
 
 To dignify this dismallest of things: 
 That one short fever should have slain his muse 
 
 And made him fold his many-coloured 
 wings. . . . 
 
 I tell you that these poets are all mad I — 
 
 And worse when half the world is at their heel, 
 
 When men forget they must be fed and clad 
 
 To» follow the vain grails their dreams reveal. 
 
 Through all the anarchy of forty years, 
 
 I've watched them at the wicket of my bank — 
 
 Deceitful, stupid, impotent with fears. 
 
 Wise only when they think to hoard a franc; 
 
 When they were told revolt would make them free 
 By rhapsodists and dreamers like our friend. 
 
 They rose and drowned the city, like a sea. 
 And left us only coins we couldn't spend; 
 
56 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Until another dreaming lord of men 
 
 Deceived them with another dream awhile 
 
 And made them rob their treasuries again 
 
 To strew their bones from Moscow to the Nile. 
 
 Then, not content to drive their fellows mad, 
 
 They needs must bring the Heavens to their side, 
 
 Must hear the waves lament when they are sad. 
 Must make the Pyrenees proclaim their pride; 
 
 And there was one who would not be consoled 
 But, with his heart, must hear the boulders 
 break — 
 
 Though words could never leave the winds less cold 
 Nor sighing stir a ripple from the lake — 
 
 The friend interrupts: 
 
 ♦The Lake"? The Lake forgets? While 
 
 mortal kind 
 Keep close the songs where Beauty's hand is set — 
 Ah, night with words of sorrow in the wind 1 
 Ah, rocks that speak! — the Lake shall not forget I 
 
 For here a lover once wept lost delight, 
 For here a lover wept that love was gone 
 
 Who filled his arms with splendour in the night, 
 Yet left him empty-handed with the dawn. 
 
 Ah, you who, shrinking earthward, dare to mock 
 The winds that sweep your counting-house away, 
 
The Funeral of a Romantic Poet 57 
 
 Who labour to exclude with cunning lock 
 The gods whose shadows make your door- 
 step grey! 
 
 Think you the years that rob you while they run 
 Shall let your children's children, gazing back, 
 
 Behold the tawdry graves, the blowzy sun. 
 The banker cousin in his proper black? 
 
 I know what they must see! — an empty room, 
 Close-smelling, exquisite and chilling cold. 
 
 Where taper flames are trebled through the gloom 
 By mirrors wreathed with little gods of gold; 
 
 A handsome portrait, cynically bland; 
 
 A dainty silken fan; a broidered glove; 
 Cards fallen loosely from a listless hand; 
 
 Fine volumes that speak wittily of love. 
 
 Then slowly the low windows cloud with light; 
 
 The candles show for paste; there stirs about 
 A little wind from gardens wet with night 
 
 That sets them fluttering and puffs them out; 
 
 And white-foot morning breaks her cobwebs grey 
 To walk the close-walled alley-ways alone, 
 
 To thrill with light, in gardens fresh from May, 
 The very frozen goddesses of stone; 
 
 She trolls a song that girls unwedded sing 
 Who wash their linen, singing, in Lorraine; 
 
58 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 And men look out of window, wondering, 
 And suddenly behold the hills again ! — 
 
 The hills where wildness lifts the heart like wine; 
 
 The lake thick-misted still with lovers' tears; 
 Dim streams where men may drink the peace divine 
 
 That broods in coolness by forgotten weirs. 
 
 Like hearts that scorn the littleness of life, 
 Companions to the mountains and the sea, 
 
 Their hearts, pierced through with beauty like 
 a knife, 
 Cry out in tears and anger to go free ! 
 
 A storm breaks, monstrous, blackening the air, 
 In fury against Life, the base, the blind. 
 
 Who brings the noblest passion to despair. 
 
 Who slays the bravest swordsman from behind! 
 
 I tell you that your summer makes too bold 
 To mock men's eyes with earth's eternal 
 norm — 
 
 These only shall our children's eyes behold: 
 
 The mountains and the morning and the storm I 
 
The Death of a Dandy 
 
 Le Dandy doit aspirer a etre sublime, 
 sans interruption. II doit vivre et 
 dormir devant un iniroir. 
 
 — Charles Baudelaire 
 
 The exquisite banality of rose and ivory: 
 
 Shadows of ivory carved into panels, stained 
 
 And decayed in the moulding; rose-colour looped 
 
 Casting a shadow of mauve; blown cherubs 
 
 Bulging in silver, 
 
 Lift six tapers to the lighted mirror. 
 
 A dusk, deep as the under side of a rose, 
 Is curtained under the old bed-dome. 
 Contracting the coverlet, a shape lies 
 Which may or may not be a man. 
 
 What thoughts should an old man have 
 
 In the London autumn 
 
 Between dusk and darkness? 
 
 Behind the shrunken eyelids, what apparitions? 
 
 What pebbles rattle in a dry stream? 
 
 A boy with a pale, lovely, dissolute face 
 Sprawled on the green baize, among the cards, 
 
 59 
 
6o The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 A Spanish pistol dropped from one hand — 
 
 Seen from the glazed squares of the club, a street 
 
 Cobbled with faces, bundles of rags and lice, 
 
 A yellow dwarf rising with protruding face — 
 
 Gilded Indian gamecocks clawing blood 
 
 Amid the clapping of pale hairless hands — 
 
 Lady Barfinger, masked in satin, disclosing her 
 
 gums. 
 Laboured graces of a cracked coquette — 
 A Jew that came on sliding haunches, 
 iCrouched, and with distended palms 
 Whined for his pledges — Alvanley, 
 Embroidered in silver foil, poised at the Court, 
 The ball a mirror of silvery Alvanleys. 
 
 Phantoms under a cloudy ceiling, uneasy images, 
 
 Sentences that never come to a period. 
 
 Thoughts of an old dandy shrunk to a nightgown. 
 
 The chamfered fall of silken rose — 
 
 Muffling London and the autumn rain — 
 
 Lifts and recurves, 
 
 A beautiful young man, 
 
 Naked, but for a superb white tiewig, 
 
 Moves in with slow pacings of a cardinal 
 
 Dreaming on his cane. 
 
 The firelight blushes on the suave 
 Thighs of the young man, as he glides 
 From his calm with an inessential gesture 
 
The Death of a Dandy 6i 
 
 To brush his tiewig. Palm upon knuckles, 
 
 iFingers over the cane head, he regards 
 
 Amusedly his own face in the crystal. 
 
 "Without my powdered curled peruke 
 
 I were but a man; so, I am a dandy. 
 
 For what was there to do, being no god 
 
 Burnished and strong, amorous of immortals, 
 
 But to escape this disappointing body 
 
 Punily erect, patched with scant hair. 
 
 Rank in its smell too. 
 
 By hiding it in silk and civet — adding to silver hair, 
 
 Pomp of vermilion heels? 
 
 What else, indeed, unless to drown 
 
 All naked, to drown all sense in wine. 
 
 *'They thought my wit was all in waistcoats. 
 
 My epigrams pointed but with dainty tassels. 
 
 When every ribbon that my fingers tied 
 
 Protested with a fragile indolent disdain 
 
 A world exquisitely old and dull and vain. 
 
 So I gave them my jest — 
 
 Walking stark naked to the gaming room 
 
 Where the preened dandies leaned across their cards 
 
 Their pale long fingers spread among the cards. 
 
 They laughed: I did not laugh: so old 
 So pitiful, so brutal and so dark 
 The buffoonery. But the body's the jest of An- 
 other — 
 I make my obeisance. 
 
62 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Young Coatsworth has become 
 
 A naked glimmer on the lighted glass, 
 
 Fainter than the shimmer among rainy bees. 
 
 An old man lies propped on a bed. 
 Counting the candles of the empty glass — 
 An old man who has seen 
 His own youth walking in the room. 
 
 The window silk puffs with a winter gust, 
 
 And Coatsworth, aetatis suae XXV, 
 
 Flapped in gold braid crinkled in air-blue, 
 
 With inscrutable precision 
 
 Bows in a lady. 
 
 Who repeats the scene with graces of a marionette. 
 
 "Madam," he says, addressing her panniers, 
 
 "Your bodice is miraculously a double moonrise, 
 
 Your throat the traditional swan's white — 
 
 But fuller. Your lips an exciting cochineal. 
 
 But in truth, love Is at best 
 
 A fashionable intrigue, an accompliced secret, 
 
 Unendurable without grated orris root. 
 
 Love remains to the proud mind 
 
 A ladder loosened from the brazen tower, 
 
 A furtive flight from the sentineled domain 
 
 Where self is utterly contained in self. 
 
 Though you ordered the death of a thousand roses, 
 
 I've caught the breath of a garden, where 
 
 No man has ever been, and the ripe fruit 
 
The Death of a Dandy 63 
 
 > ■ 
 
 Drops through the tarnished air 
 Unheeded, and yew trees are made peacocks. 
 I thank you for your horrible favours. 
 Adieu—" 
 
 The lady unravels to a ragged smoke : 
 Coatsworth darkens with blood like a satyr, 
 Blushes in a burnish on the mirror, 
 Burns and is gone. 
 
 The dry skull stretches regretful claws 
 
 And the points of the tapers twist and bend — 
 
 Sallow fingers of Jewish usurers. 
 
 A rapier flicks through the curtains 
 Like a needle of sunlight splintered on the sea. 
 Coatsworth presses before him, 
 Back to the fireplace, a panting stripling. 
 A jet of wet red spurts from the shirt front; 
 The youth sinks and dribbles in blood through the 
 carpet. 
 
 *'The end of such upstart heralds 
 
 As would bar my shield to the sinister." 
 
 The reflected visage is rigid, 
 
 Puckered thinly with wrinkles. 
 
 "What if I got my finger's trick, 
 
 Whether with rapiers or a pufling neck-cloth. 
 
 From a confectioner of Bath 
 
 Whose fastidious years were spent 
 
64 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Tracing on cakes sweet labyrinths of ice, 
 Squeezing pink fondant into petallcd buds? 
 What that, overnight, through an open window, 
 He got me because a crooked pear tree 
 CHmbed to the window ledge? 
 No man's to call me bastard. 
 And what's a murder more or less 
 Amid the inane fecundity of blood and sweat. 
 A barmaid and a groom repair the loss." 
 
 The dead youth has subsided in blood 
 Leaving the floor unsoiled. 
 
 Coatsworth has leapt through the silvered glass 
 Leaving its flames unspoiled. 
 
 His pallor stained by the rose-dimmed dusk, 
 An old man lies on a curtained bed, 
 Whimpering like a beggar in a wet loft 
 When the wind's found the cracks and the straw 
 is cold. 
 
 Coatsworth, now old, steps from the window folds 
 
 With a gesture consciously tragic; 
 
 Stands for a moment 
 
 Half Don Juan, half Childe Harold; 
 
 Then stalks, a magpie motley 
 
 Black, buff and silver, up to the mirror. 
 
 He regards the vain, brave fall 
 
 Of the surtout, the triple tied neck-cloth, 
 
 The bronze hair brushed as in busts of Nero — 
 
The Death of a Dandy 65 
 
 Then with a posture almost Byronic 
 Confides in silence. 
 
 "Amid the bumpers, the scaffoldings, the ilex cones, 
 
 I have ever worn the scorn of death 
 
 With the careless grace of a boutonniere. 
 
 But let me be buried with a fiery choir; 
 
 A scarlet and lace processional of boys, 
 
 And priests too old to lift their stiffened folds 
 
 Too wise to hold their clouded incense as a prayer. 
 
 Tie up my chin lest I should smile. 
 
 And press into my hand my laurel cane 
 
 Where Daphne with blown crinkled hair 
 
 Feels the hard wood invade her silver thighs; 
 
 Leave me my snuff box for its musty yawn 
 
 And for its intricate cool ivory 
 
 Showing an April faun at his desires; 
 
 Probate my will, offer my house for rent. 
 
 "I had thought to find a languor, to attain 
 
 A gallant erudition in the snuff box and the cane ; 
 
 To restore a tarnished splendour 
 
 Ceremonious as a stole. 
 
 Gorgeous like a vestment — yet urbane; 
 
 Between the opening and the closing of the doors 
 
 To have stood between the sconces, ripe in silk. 
 
 Ancestral laces falling to the sword; 
 
 Reflected In the parquetry, to dream 
 
 Of Giorgione in a tricorn, and high wigs 
 
 Powdered with palest silver, piled like* clouds; 
 
66 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Of odorous mummied roses, grown dusty with a 
 
 queen 
 Tender and slight and proud. 
 
 "But I have stood so long 
 Before so many mirrors, I'm afraid, 
 Afraid at last that I may be 
 
 A shadow of masks and rapiers between the giran- 
 doles 
 A satin phantom, gone when the wax is down." 
 
 He becomes a toothless grimace 
 
 Between the moveless cherubs, silver blown. 
 
 Under the lustered bed-dome, in the curtained dusk, 
 A throat moans — the sudden and lonely 
 Cry of one ridden by a nightmare, 
 Who wakes and finds it is no dream. 
 
 Old Coatsworth unravels from the bed clothes — 
 
 As ghost unwinding its buried linen. 
 
 And stands, toes clutched and indrawn, 
 
 Ridiculously muffled in linen ruffles; 
 
 Totters slowly to the glass 
 
 To find therein, grinning wide with terror, 
 
 The toothless mist of the last apparition. 
 
 Shrieking, he plucks a candle from its socket 
 
 And drives the double flame into the darkness. 
 
 Another, another, another, 
 
 iFour tapers extinguish their windy stains 
 
The Death of a Dandy 67 
 
 In a smear of wax on the mirror. 
 
 Another flame drops from a bony claw. 
 
 Like the drums of a defeat, a heart sounds. 
 
 And he peers at the dwindling face in the mirror — 
 
 The face of a dandy brought to a shroud. 
 
 Clutching the last tremulous candle 
 
 The old dandy sways, 
 
 Clings to the air, 
 
 And sinks in a slow movement of exhausted mirth. 
 
 The mirror is heavy with shadows 
 And a white candle spreads a film on the hearth- 
 stone. 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 
 
 Edgar's grandfather had studied Latin and Greek 
 
 And his father had studied Latin, 
 
 But Edgar studied only Spanish, 
 
 For commercial purposes — 
 
 Because he had been told that it was very valuable 
 
 In connection with South America. 
 
 Edgar did exceedingly well at college: 
 He won a ^BK 
 
 And was active in Y. M. C. A. work. 
 One day, however, a devil tempted him. 
 It was as the time of a big religious revival: 
 Mr. Guthrie, the well-known evangelist, 
 Had }ust spent a week at the college 
 And set all the more callow of the students 
 To praying and repenting their sins; 
 Religion spread like a rash 
 Till the classes had to be suspended. 
 There had been nothing like it for an orgy 
 Since the club election parties. 
 At the final meeting of the week, 
 Mr. Guthrie made a gripping speech: 
 He told the young men, with tears in his eyes, that 
 there was nothing like confession 
 68 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 69 
 
 To purge away the dross of the soul and let Jesus 
 
 into the heart 
 And that they would all feel better men for it, 
 If they would get up right there and confess. 
 He said that the more people heard you confess, 
 The more effective your confession was. 
 
 So one freshman confessed to playing craps 
 
 And another to having drunk a cocktail, 
 
 And then a child-like football-playe.r. 
 
 With a manly but unsteady voice, 
 
 Announced that he had spent the night with a girl 
 
 On the boat coming down from Albany, 
 
 When he was on his way home from Northfield, 
 
 From the big religious conference. 
 
 There was something in the reduction 
 
 Of this honest and enormous fellow 
 
 To the level of a frightened child 
 
 That affected Edgar unpleasantly, 
 
 Though he tried to struggle against it; 
 
 And then suddenly the devil appeared to him 
 
 In the form of a well dressed s.fudent 
 
 Whom he had never seen before. 
 
 "This makes me sick!" said the- devil. 
 
 "If the godhoppers had their way. 
 
 They'd have us all like that." 
 
 And he turned. and went away, 
 
 Leaving Edgar strangely uneasy. 
 
 He had at first intended to confess 
 
 That he had once neglected his Physics 
 
70 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 To go to see Douglas Fairbanks, just before an ex- 
 amination; 
 
 But he didn't get around to It, sfomehow. 
 
 He convinced himself., however, 
 
 When the meeting was over, 
 
 That, disgusting as these things might seem, 
 
 They were really of a surgical cleanness. 
 
 Because a fine clean man like Mr. Guthrie, 
 
 With a blue suit and gold watch-chain and every- 
 thing. 
 
 Dignified them by his straight-forward manliness 
 
 And his stern anxiety for s-avlng 
 
 The meanest of human souls. 
 
 But, In spite of his Interest In the Y. M. C. A., 
 He did not go to China for mission work, 
 After his graduation from college; 
 Nor did he even go to South America, 
 In spite of having studied Spanish. 
 He obtained a position In a candy factory 
 At Newark, New Jersey — 
 
 A position In what was known as the Welfare De- 
 partment. 
 As he first approached Newark on the train, 
 He was thrilled at the prospect of his work; 
 When he saw the huge dark-bulking factories, 
 That lay like great ships in the marsh 
 And seemed to dominate the world 
 With their implacable austerity, 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 71 
 
 He exulted at the thought of Industry, 
 
 So swollen and rapid a tide, 
 
 Sweeping the country along to Prosperity 
 
 On its mighty flood of Production; 
 
 And he felt some of the outwardly grim, but in- 
 wardly gay self-importance 
 
 Of the young Second Lieutenant who has just re- 
 ceived his commission, 
 
 As he reflected that he now belonged 
 
 To the class who were chosen to direct it — 
 
 To speed up its processes by efficiency, 
 
 To marshal and control its workers. 
 
 Now, at the time when Edgar arrived to take up 
 
 welfare work 
 In the Hutchins & Blotto Hygienic Candy Kitchens, 
 It happened that the whole works 
 Was undergoing reorganization, 
 On account of the Schlegemann-Applegate Electric 
 
 Filler and Slicer, 
 Which had just been installed there. 
 Hitherto, the work of the Candy Kitchens 
 Had been largely done by hand: 
 One girl, for example, 
 Would cut off lengths of taffy, 
 While another dipped them in chocolate, 
 Thus producing caramels; 
 
 But, under the new system, practically everything 
 Was accomplished by machinery: 
 
72 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 In the making of chocolate bars, for instance, 
 
 A large vat would be filled with paraffin, 
 
 Into which some chocolate and sugar 
 
 Would be automatically fed, 
 
 As well as a pint of formaldehyde 
 
 And a bushel of almond shells; 
 
 Then, when the ingredients in the vat 
 
 Had been boiled for a certain length of time, 
 
 It would be automatically tipped up 
 
 And the contents poured into little troughs, 
 
 Where they were hardened by a special cold-air 
 process 
 
 And finally run through a guillotine, 
 
 Which chopped them into equal lengths and stamped 
 them in enormous letters 
 
 With the legend HUTCHINS & BLOTTO. 
 
 This process was a great improvement 
 
 On any ever used before; 
 
 It more than quadrupled production. 
 
 All the operatives had to do was to watch the ma- 
 chine : 
 
 One girl would devote herself exclusively 
 
 To feeding the hoppers of the vat; 
 
 She was no longer obliged to trouble 
 
 About getting the proportions right: 
 
 The machine did all that for her; 
 
 Another simply watched the guillotine 
 
 To see that it was working accurately; 
 
 While a third checked up the finished products 
 
 And sorted out defective ones. 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 73 
 
 Edgar entered heart and soul, at once, 
 
 Into the spirit of this invention 
 
 And he assisted the efficiency expert 
 
 In organizing the works 
 
 So that half as many operatives as before 
 
 Could produce four times as much candy. 
 
 This was done by timing the fastest worker 
 
 And making all the rest live up to him; 
 
 Or, in some departments of the factory. 
 
 By the institution of piece-work. 
 
 Which, the welfare workers pointed out, 
 
 Enabled the employees to earn more: 
 
 Because, by this system, each one was paid for the 
 
 individual amount of candy 
 He was able to make in a day 
 And was thus, as can readily be seen, 
 Kept enthusiastically at it 
 Pushing the work along. 
 
 There were many other measures taken, also, 
 For the welfare of the employees. 
 There was a special trained nurse, for example, 
 Who was sent to the homes of the workers 
 Who had failed to turn up for work 
 And alleged that they were sick; 
 She would visit such people at once 
 And, if they were really sick, 
 She would go away and leave them in peace; 
 And, if anybody were dying, 
 With an admirable delicacy. 
 She would take pains not to annoy him; 
 
74 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 But il ;inyh()tly said he was sick 
 And then turned out not to be sick, 
 She took such oftence at his tleceit 
 And his hick of loyalty to his employer 
 That she always went straight away 
 And informed the company. 
 
 But the welfare worker's chief task 
 
 Was to promote an <'.v/>/// dc corps: 
 
 He pubhshed a well-printed httle paper 
 
 Devoted to the interests of the workers, 
 
 Which came out very strongly from the first 
 
 For loyalty to American institutions — 
 
 And, in case some of the ignorant foreigners 
 
 Might not understand these institutions, 
 
 It took pains to explain quite simply 
 
 That the chief of them was the time-clock; 
 
 And it made it quite clear that striking 
 
 Was a treasonable act. 
 
 There were also jolly picnics 
 
 In the bracing New Jersey marshes; 
 
 They were run off according to schedule 
 
 By the Welfare Department, 
 
 Who furnished the picnickers with little lists 
 
 Of the things they must not do — 
 
 Such as wandering too far away 
 
 Or leaving egg-shells on the grass. 
 
 And young Edgar, as I have said, 
 Entered heartily into the work: 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 75 
 
 Just as at college he had taken up the cause 
 
 Of the Y. M. C. A., 
 
 And had preached the battle against vice and the 
 
 life of service for Christ, 
 So now he put an earnest enthusiasm 
 Into the industrial religion 
 And devoted all his spiritual force 
 To the preaching, by precept and example, 
 Of the following admirable commandments: 
 Be sober, in order that your employer may have an 
 
 efficient servant; 
 Be thrifty, in order that your employer may not 
 
 have to pay you higher wages; 
 Be honest, in order that your employer may not lose 
 
 money by you; 
 Be industrious, in order that your employer may 
 
 become as rich as possible; 
 And, finally, be religious — 
 Be optimistic and pious, 
 So that, well satisfied with this life and hoping for 
 
 a bonus in Heaven, 
 You may never be tempted to complain 
 Or to question economic arrangements. 
 
 But one day another devil 
 
 Appeared to Julgar, 
 
 Wearing respectable ready-made clothes 
 
 And a clean white collar, 
 
 So that Edgar should not suspect him. 
 
 "Would you be interested," inquired the devil. 
 
76 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "In beholding the naked human soul, 
 
 In examining with your own eyes its every hidden 
 
 mystery, 
 In reading its every thought as easily as you can 
 
 read an electric sign?" 
 (He spoke like an advertisement. 
 Because he was a crafty devil 
 And knew that this would be the surest way 
 Of winning Edgar's respect.) 
 But Edgar only took him for a book-agent 
 And tried to shut him off; 
 So the devil attacked him again with an even subtler 
 
 cunning: 
 "You must not suppose that I am mad, 
 Or even a crank," he continued. 
 "I can actually do what I say I can, 
 By scientific methods. 
 It is all Science!" 
 
 And when Edgar heard that it was all Science, 
 He went with the devil at once. 
 
 "Let us begin with a simple type of soul," said the 
 
 devil, 
 "A type you can easily understand. 
 Let us take one of the young girls 
 Who works in the Candy Kitchens here" ; 
 And he led Edgar casually to the operative 
 Who sorted out the defective chocolate bars. 
 "Put this little lens into your eye 
 And then watch her back," he said. 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 77 
 
 So Edgar did as he was told 
 
 And fixed his eye on the girl's back 
 
 And he found that, instead of a gingham dress, 
 
 He was gazing at a sort of grey pool — 
 
 Something between a tank at the aquarium 
 
 And a picture by Mr. Arthur Davies, 
 
 But it was greyer and more indeterminate 
 
 Than even Mr. Davies usually Is — 
 
 Though there were some curious dark shapes, 
 
 Not unlike fish and sea-weed, 
 
 Or drifting disembodied spirits. 
 
 "Here, you see," began the devil, 
 
 In the respectable voice of a lecturer: 
 
 "Here, you see, we have the woman's soul: 
 
 There Is very little colour in It: 
 
 It is fed for ten hours a day 
 
 By nothing but the room in which we find ourselves 
 
 And the employment of picking out chocolate bars 
 
 That are longer than the rest, 
 
 Outside of that, it Is fed 
 
 By the Newark houses and streets." 
 
 "But surely," Edgar exclaimed, 
 
 "This Is not the woman's whole soul! 
 
 Does she never have any amusements? 
 
 Has she never known a pure and selfless Love? 
 
 And has she no Religion?" 
 
 "That thing like a muddy purple pin-wheel," 
 
 The devil explained politely, 
 
 "Is her passion for the movies. 
 
 But her chief amusement is to be seen 
 
78 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 In that dark growth at the bottom, 
 
 Which will presently swell and burst 
 
 And change all the grey to black; 
 
 It is her festering hatred and anger 
 
 Against whatever it is 
 
 That keeps her inside this room 
 
 For ten hours a day. 
 
 After so many days of grey, 
 
 Even black is a desirable colour; 
 
 After so many chocolate bars, 
 
 A strike amounts to a lark. 
 
 And as for Love, you will find it 
 
 In those foul and murky patches 
 
 Which here thicken the grey; 
 
 You will find its freest expression 
 
 In the aphorisms, poems and sketches 
 
 Which appear in such profusion 
 
 On the walls of the women's lavatory. 
 
 But as for Religion," he concluded, 
 
 "You will look for it in vain." 
 
 "Scoundrel!" cried Edgar. "Liar! 
 
 You are defaming American womanhood! 
 
 Tar and feathering is too easy 
 
 For a traitor who talks like you! 
 
 You would make me believe that our honest girls, 
 
 As pure as any women in the world. 
 
 Are poisoned with filthy desires and contaminated 
 
 thoughts ! — 
 And with our up-to-date Welfare Department 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 79 
 
 Doing everything in its power 
 
 To shield the good girls from corruption 
 
 And save the bad ones from themselves I 
 
 Furthermore, you are a Bolshevik, 
 
 An alien agitator! — 
 
 I can tell from your dark complexion. 
 
 You are preaching organization and treason; 
 
 You arc probably a walking delegate ! 
 
 You want to take the free and contented employees 
 
 And set them against their masters! 
 
 I shall have you deported to Russia 
 
 Or knocked on the head in the street!" 
 
 But the devil only disappeared, 
 
 With a harsh and metallic laugh, 
 
 In a puff of chlorine gas. 
 
 Edgar thought the whole incident a delusion 
 
 Brought on by overwork; 
 
 But the memory of it troubled him. 
 
 He felt that a kind of spell 
 
 Had been laid upon his eyes. 
 
 So that nothing seemed natural to him. 
 
 He grew to detest his office 
 
 And the very sight of the factories 
 
 And he avoided the eye of the employees 
 
 When he met them around the place. 
 
 One day as he came down to Newark 
 
 A strange depression possessed him; 
 
 The familiar landscape of the marshes, 
 
 Which had formerly thrilled him so splendidly 
 
8o The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Witli its inonuincnts to licroic enterprise 
 
 And unshakable prosperity, 
 
 Filled hini now with an aching doubt 
 
 And a terrible foreboding. 
 
 He saw a country for ever tarnished with a dingy 
 haze of dampness and smoke; 
 
 The swamp-grass was bleached by the autumn to an 
 almost colourless yellow, with patches still 
 feebly verdant and with stagnant pools cor- 
 rupted to a vivider green; 
 
 And the whole of the vast dead meadow was strung 
 with telephone wires, scarred across by muddy 
 and fouiulering roads; 
 
 The one touch o( colour and life was the series of 
 huge boanl signs which atlvertised hotels and 
 theatres; underclotlies, bacon aiul ketchup; 
 phonographs, fountain-pens, cigarettes, ami 
 safety-razors; typewriters, letter-openers, um- 
 brellas and licorice drops; and, not least, the 
 Toothsome Chocolate Bars of I lutchins & 
 Blotto, proclaimed with the face of an enor- 
 mous girl, smiling like a shark. 
 
 Then came the world of the factories, like prodigi- 
 ous and sinister war-ships; 
 
 The excoriation of the rail-roail tracks, bristling 
 with cranes; 
 
 Low bare brick plants encased in tight bare walls 
 of brick. 
 
 Above a straight black iron river where the ripples 
 looked like Haws ; 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 8i 
 
 Yards cluttered witli metallic refuse: exact piles of 
 rusty pipe; congeries of iron octopus-trunks and 
 nondescript lopped-ofl tentacles. 
 
 And there were human habitations, like a flimsier 
 sort of debris : 
 
 Feeble-lookinj^ houses, unpaintcd and grey, which, 
 but for ragged lines of clothes, that (lung their 
 poor reds and whites to dry in the tainted air, 
 would have seemed the sea-faded wrecks of a 
 faded monotonous sea ; 
 
 And at last a broad body of water, his familiar 
 Newark Bay, perfectly black and still, shiny 
 and corrupt with oil, 
 
 IWhcre the hulk of a horrible old steam-boat, as 
 black as the water itself, had been slowly rot- 
 ting and sinking through the stagnancy of years 
 and now showed only its warped upper deck 
 and its rickety blackened wheel. 
 
 There were more factories here, jammed stillingly 
 together: 
 
 Small factories and machine-shops pressed close on 
 either side, seemed to shut him in like a prison, 
 crowd blankly against his view, seemed to 
 sterilize his soul with their barrenness and op- 
 press it with their bulk: 
 
 Pattern-makers and clectroplaters, manufacturers of 
 castings and blow-pipes, of paints and mat- 
 tresses and chemicals. 
 
 There was business going on everywhere; he knew 
 how much work was being done; he recognized 
 
82 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 the prosperity represented by the cheap shops 
 and solid buildings; 
 
 But in the dirtiness of the streets, the dull colours of 
 the city, the harshness of human works indif- 
 ferent to cleanness and brightness, the over- 
 whelming impression of life grown heavy and 
 sordid and empty behind grudging dusty win- 
 dows, in thousands of brick-walled rooms. 
 
 He felt, for the first time, that Death 
 
 Was blackening and rotting the city. 
 
 As it had done to that wretched old steam-boat, 
 which no one had thought to save. 
 
 At the dingy brick Newark station. 
 
 He descended in painful reflection 
 
 And began to walk to his office 
 
 Through hard, blank-sided streets; 
 
 But devils pressed thick about him, 
 
 Waylaying him as he walked. 
 
 One came in the guise of the girl 
 
 Of whose soul he had seen an X-ray; 
 
 But now she froze his blood 
 
 With green phosphorescent eyes. 
 
 "Ah, hypocrite and fool!" she cried. 
 
 "Will you never find yourself out? 
 
 Will you never cease to harass and drive us 
 
 And to tell us you are trying to benefit us? — 
 
 To pretend that you are doing on our account 
 
 What is really done on your account? 
 
 Do you suppose we have ever been fooled 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 83 
 
 Or done anything but hate you for it? 
 All the gaudy words that you give us 
 With your picnics and papers and nurses 
 Can never deceive our muscles, 
 Which you have turned into silly machines, 
 Nor our racked and exhausted nerves 
 Nor our offended human souls!" 
 
 And a second devil appeared 
 
 In the semblance of a savant. 
 
 He looked a little like Mr. liertrand Russell, 
 
 Whom Edgar had once heard lecture on politics, 
 
 Having gone under the impression 
 
 That Mr. Russell was going to speak 
 
 On the relation of philosophy to the calculus of 
 
 propositions. 
 The figure was surrounded with a radiance 
 Which filled Edgar with a strange awe: 
 It was white and steady and calm and extraordi- 
 narily limpid. 
 And made the black street look as black 
 As if he had brought Hell with him, 
 And, as he spoke, it seemed to Edgar 
 That he was speaking with as much detachment 
 As if he were describing the causes for the decay 
 
 of the Roman Empire. 
 "The capitalist state," he began, 
 As if he were reading from a book 
 "Cannot last for the following reason: 
 The issue involved is not really one of shorter 
 
84 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 hours and higher pay: it is a democratic issue 
 similar to the one on which feudalism split at 
 the end of the XVIIIth century. The em- 
 ployers may carry paternalism to its furthest 
 possible limit, but they will never in this way 
 be able to cure the grievance which their em- 
 ployees have against them; for no amount of 
 welfare work or of sliding scales can ever, in- 
 the long run, convince the employees that they 
 are not being exploited. And from what wc 
 know of humanity, we cannot expect of men 
 in power that they should willingly do any- 
 thing else but exploit their kind. 
 
 The democratic claim of the workers to control the 
 conditions of their work will inevitably re- 
 sult in some form of industrial democracy. 
 This may, of course, prove a disappointment, 
 like republican democracy; but at least the 
 bourgeois republic had this advantage over 
 the monarchy: it meant that the people gained 
 certain safeguards which they had not had be- 
 fore : they were able to impeach the President 
 or, at least, refuse to re-elect him, where they 
 could not have rid themselves of a king by 
 anything short of violence. 
 
 We need precisely similar safeguards in the indus- 
 trialism which has swallowed up the old 
 Republic: the employee cannot rid himself of 
 his boss by anything short of a bomb. Under 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 85 
 
 ;i system of Guild Socialism or whatever ar- 
 rangement is adoptecl, it is, of course, conceiv- 
 able that tlie employee iiiight he as badly fleeced 
 as before, but, at least, like (he voter in the 
 republic, he would think that he controlled his 
 destiny and be comfortable in the assurance 
 that he was represented in the management. 
 
 For these reasons, it is evident that, unless the em- 
 ployers show more foresight than they seem 
 capable of doing, the struggle between capital- 
 ist and worker is certain to become more and 
 more acute and, as, in this country particularly, 
 it is neglected by professional politics, it will 
 probably end in a revolution of more or less 
 violence. After all, we cannot expect the capi- 
 talists to dispossess themselves; they will hang 
 on to the last moment; while the liberal propa- 
 ganda of people like myself will probably turn 
 out to be as powerless to prevent the disaster 
 as the propaganda of Voltaire and the states- 
 manship of Turgot were to forestall the 
 French Revolution. IVople like me will prob- 
 ably, in fact, be huntetl down as reactionaries, 
 as Condorcet was by the Terror. The bitter- 
 ness of the oppressed may prove as cruel as 
 the brutality of the oppressors. 
 
 I am, therefore, I may say frankly, not enthusias- 
 tic about the j)rospcct, but I don't know who 
 is going to change it: there is a democratic is- 
 
86 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 sue at stake which makes Industrial peace im- 
 possible and which renders, I may perhaps add, 
 your welfare work ridiculous." 
 And he disappeared in a glow, like a clear dawn 
 In March. 
 
 And as Edgar stood chilled to the bone. 
 
 Unable to lift a foot, 
 
 A third apparition appeared — 
 
 A Parisian pastry-cook — 
 
 And there shone about him the gentle air of the 
 
 Ile-de-France. 
 "I sell pastry every spring," he anrkounced, 
 "At a shop on the Boulevard. 
 I open a booth on the street 
 So that it Is easy to buy as you pass. 
 It Is impossible to keep from buying, 
 Once you have beheld these cakes. 
 That embody so much fancy 
 And so much taste : 
 The Napoleons are fragile and crisp; 
 The eclairs arc filled with cool cream; 
 There are cream-puffs studded with cherries and 
 
 containing delightful surprises. 
 To eat them is to love life better 
 And to honour the human spirit, 
 Which Is seen no less In these cakes 
 Than in the panes of the Salnte-Chappelle. 
 Have you created anything comparable to them? 
 You have nothing but chocolate bars, 
 
The Death of an Efficiency Expert 87 
 
 Which soften and j^rovv horribly soggy on the 
 
 station stands in summer, 
 Which you arc obliged to disfigure public places 
 
 and even the freshness of your country-side 
 With garish and abominable signs 
 In order to sell at all! 
 And yet these little cakes of mine 
 Are all made with my hands 
 And I can perform every phase of the process 
 From the first mixing of the dough, 
 Instead of knowing only one detail 
 Beyond which I am helpless!" 
 And he vanished like a meringue 
 That seems to melt on the tongue. 
 
 But Edgar stood long in dumbness, 
 
 Bewildered and terrified, 
 
 And then, at last, cried out 
 
 In horror and in pain: 
 
 "Oh, what have I done that my soul 
 
 Should thus be clouded and torn? 
 
 Why, O devils, do you torment me? 
 
 Why do you seek to destroy me? 
 
 All my life I have tried to behave 
 
 Like a good American and a Christian. 
 
 I have never spared myself 
 
 In the accomplishment of good works. 
 
 I have always done as well as I could 
 
 What I believed to be most worth doing." 
 
 And then a voice replied 
 
88 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Which excited him, yet filled him with fear: 
 
 "Have you ever really believed? 
 
 Was it devils who suggested your doubts? 
 
 They were sent to rescue your soul and not to 
 
 destroy it — 
 For they are the servants of Lucifer, 
 Who has taken over Apollo's job!" 
 
 A frenzy seized upon Edgar — 
 A frenzy of knowledge and despair: 
 He saw about him the walls of jails, 
 Where men were being wasted and racked; 
 Their hardness pressed flat on his heart; 
 Their edges ground grooves in his brain — 
 And over everything thickened the darkness 
 That made him know he was in Hell. 
 
 He rushed headlong towards his Plant 
 
 In a panic to escape that prison; 
 
 The fagade of the Candy Kitchens 
 
 Ate him up and left no trace. 
 
 Once within, like a dazed self-immolant at the altar 
 
 of some savage god. 
 He cast himself into the Schlegemann-Applegate 
 
 Electric Filler and Slicer — 
 Which made him into chocolate bars 
 With an admirable precision. 
 
The Funeral of an Undertaker 
 
 Shrunken by life to a hard grin, 
 Alone upon an unkempt bed, 
 The man whose labouring years had been 
 A watch with death himself lay dead. 
 
 His eyes stared at the ceiling; the chin 
 Had fallen; one sleeveless arm was thrown 
 Limply across the bed, the skin 
 Pulled thin to fit each finger bone. 
 
 Though all men knew that he was dead 
 No waxlight burned beside his bed. 
 
 And no one from the village came 
 With black boards for a coffin frame. 
 
 No housewife came to bind his mouth 
 With a smooth strip of linen cloth. 
 
 No prayer was said, and no one swung 
 The bell rope where the church bell hung. 
 
 II 
 
 Year after year the villagers had watched 
 
 91 
 
92 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 The gutters lose their evening stains, 
 
 The skies descend and the grey dusk 
 
 Hang cobwebs on the window panes, 
 
 And by a yellowing street lamp seen 
 
 A hurrying coat of blistered green 
 
 Clutched by one hand, meagre and blotched 
 
 With colourless spots like a bad husk, 
 
 A shabby hat crushed low as if 
 
 To mask the eye they had not seen — 
 
 And pressed upon the sill and said: 
 
 "So the old buzzard's got a whiff. 
 
 He'll soon be pecking at the dead." 
 
 And some of them there were that leaned 
 
 Hard on the window panes and turned 
 
 Sallow as though he were the fiend 
 
 And they were souls which he had earned. 
 
 None knew how long since he began — 
 
 How many nights since first he held 
 
 A dripping candle to lidless eyes 
 
 And peering let the hot wax fall 
 
 On lips composed for burial. 
 
 None knew how long since he began 
 
 To probe the dust heaps of the spirit 
 
 And finger dusty histories; 
 
 But slowly this washer of the dead discerned 
 
 What droll, half-earnest clowns inherit 
 
 The masked and tragic role of man. 
 
 Not even the child who heard his tread 
 
 Scuffling the autumn leaves and rain 
 
 Could guess what unpersuadable pities 
 
The Funeral of an Undertaker 93 
 
 Drove him forth to walk the rain, 
 
 Or how this lonely washer of the dead 
 
 Was by his own deep passion comforted, 
 
 Until he had grown old as ancient cities 
 
 That have looked so many times upon their slain. 
 
 Keeping no thought of slackened blood, 
 Less vigorous bone or tardy mind, 
 He watched a vain and dwarfish brood 
 Chatter at tasks which chance assigned. 
 Seeking in toil what poets scarcely find 
 Among the shadows of the immortal wood. 
 And always at the one moment when 
 His despised craft had power on men 
 He sought with patient pitiless care, 
 With visible wit, to make aware 
 What puffed, unprofitable things had borne 
 His bitter and compassionate scorn. 
 
 With starved horse and bare hearse he gave 
 
 The poor in spirit to the grave; 
 
 And nailed the comfortably good 
 
 In coffins of worm-eaten wood; 
 
 He showed the niggardly and mean 
 
 By hiding under ropes of green. 
 
 Small gaudy flowers and bits of vine 
 
 Their yellow coffins of cheap pine. 
 
 With hearse and hack on polished h'ck. 
 
 Tacky with trappings of crimped black, 
 
 He set the opulent and loud 
 
94 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Before the dumb, lip-fallen crowd. 
 
 But those who'd looked in bewilderment on 
 
 The unintelligible sun, 
 
 Who might have leapt with a cry and bled 
 
 Their youth out on a barricade; 
 
 All those whose frustrate hearts had cried 
 
 For braver beauty, and so died. 
 
 Crumpled and dry, broken like a clod 
 
 Too many heels have trod, — 
 
 To these a slow processional 
 
 Was given, — a silver drooping pall, 
 
 Falling in sheeny folds which shifted 
 
 Stiffly as violent horses lifted 
 
 Black crests of thick plumes and drew 
 
 The dim pomp to the grave. 
 
 But few 
 He found among his kith and neighbours 
 Who earned such honour of his labours: 
 Some nine there were and of these five 
 He'd known but slightly when alive. 
 
 So he had lived, tormented, proud 
 
 As a poet, hated by the crowd 
 
 That paunched and bred and plied a trade, 
 
 Kept small accounts and sometimes prayed 
 
 To an old god with untrimmed beard 
 
 Who kept accounts and slily peered 
 
 Into the things too slily done; 
 
 Who made the moon and trimmed the sun. 
 
The Funeral of an Undertaker 95 
 
 And all these when they heard him dead, 
 Shrugged their bones and sniffed and said, 
 "Good riddance to the village, then; 
 He was a pest to honest men." 
 
 So now he lay, a poor, untended 
 Wrack of shrunk skin and jointless bone, 
 The man whose endless task was ended. 
 Whose anguish stifled like a groan. 
 
 All day a small insistent clock 
 Ticked and slid to the hours' mark 
 And rattling to a rusty shock 
 Hour by hour brought on the dark. 
 
 And with the dark a rat came out 
 And snuffed among stale bacon rinds 
 And chunks of bread; a leaking spout 
 Trickled; a gust flopped in the blinds. 
 
 And in the dark the dead man sprawled 
 Like one who'd stretched a bloody reign 
 And in his violent hour had called 
 Upon the household guards in vain. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The night is thin. The air is crisp, 
 For the spring is scarcely felt at night. 
 The air is still with a windy lisp 
 
96 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Where the first leaves In the thicket are. 
 The moon Is misty as a star, 
 But the rounded stones arc washed with white 
 And a chance spade glints with steely light. 
 
 There is no sound at the graveyard's edge 
 Save for the rustling hornbeam hedge; 
 But something shivers beneath the soil 
 As when a mole Is at his toil; 
 Something struggles under the ground, 
 Thrusts the earth to a gritty mound, 
 Squirms and flutters, and suddenly there 
 Is a frail wisp upon the air. 
 Like the blue smoke of sodden leaves 
 Which children burn on autumn eves; 
 It writhes and gathers, shifts and breaks, 
 Thickens with colour, waves and takes 
 The semblance of a man long buried, 
 Old before death, his gaunt cheeks serried 
 With furrows where the rain has lain. 
 Another mound of grave-loam stirred; 
 A second gathered shape; a third. 
 Then five dead men, and one dead woman, 
 Cracking the ground at an unheard summon, 
 Out of the shapeless air unravel. 
 They glide without feet along the gravel 
 Between black borders of clipped box, 
 Brush through the wicket's spikes and locks, 
 Glide to the church, where no one tolls 
 Except for pay for dead men's souls; 
 
The Funeral of an Undertaker 97 
 
 Past the church and through the streets 
 
 Where smug wives snore between clean sheets . 
 
 With every window shut and barred 
 
 And a restless watchdog in the yard. 
 
 Then at a word no lip had uttered 
 
 Into the dead man's house they fluttered 
 
 And there for a waiting moment stood 
 
 Like panting things of bone and blood, 
 
 And stared at the blind shape which there 
 
 Cluttered the green distorted square 
 
 The late moon in the window made. 
 
 For these of all whom he had laid 
 In the obscure and level earth, 
 These only he had thought of worth. 
 These alone had sought to enmesh 
 Ecstasy in the unholding flesh, 
 Or with stretched throats had stood 
 While drums and scarlet in the blood 
 Arrayed a triumph for the mind, 
 When raggedness or cold assigned 
 Their aching arms to swinging slops 
 To pigs or storing a farmer's crops; 
 And waking to the white rain 
 Pecking at the shingle roof had lain 
 Alone and awake, while with young breath 
 Through love of life they cried for death. 
 And these now from the grave were come, 
 In dumb and yearning shapes were come 
 To bear the dead man to his grave. 
 
98 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Four abrupt white tapers wave 
 
 At the four corners of the bed. 
 
 A sudden spectral gesture moulds 
 
 The hands to quiet, the feet to stone; 
 
 And circling shadows compose the dead 
 
 On a low bier of forgotten boards; 
 
 The moonlight through the bleared panes sifted 
 
 Falls on a pall of rigid folds 
 
 And tassels threaded with tarnished cords. 
 
 Then with a light of tapers lifted, 
 
 Shuffling as if to a monotone, 
 
 Out of the room, the narrow door — 
 
 Nodding beneath the lintel's beam — 
 
 The dumb, black-leaning phantoms bore 
 
 Their burden; and, as if seen through a stream, 
 
 Went wavering over the pavement stones, 
 
 Rocking as if their shoulders shook 
 
 Under the confused weight of bones. 
 
 No shutter's chink widened to look 
 
 With a quickened eye where in the drowned 
 
 Colour and glimmer of thin moonshine 
 
 The corpse-bearers shuddered without sound. 
 
 No window gaped for the watchdog's whine 
 
 As with its load the processional 
 
 Flickered by silent door and wall, 
 
 House by house, to the street's verge, 
 
 Where from a shadow against a light 
 
 Tt dwindled to shadow and merged 
 
 Into the phantasmal night. 
 
The Death of a Soldier 
 
 Henry had a magnificent thrill at the Havre rest- 
 camp. The dirty chicken-wire bunks of the French 
 barracks were the first authentic sign he had seen 
 of the squalour of the war. Everything in America 
 had been adequate and new, but here the grasp had 
 sHppcd; the war was gaining on them. The filthi- 
 ness of these old sheds, where for three years sol- 
 diers had been coming and going, gave him a ghastly 
 sinking of the heart, to which lurid rumours added. 
 It seemed that things were very desperate and they 
 were going straight to the front; it seemed that they 
 were going to be brigaded with the French. These 
 wholly unfounded statements, born of the excite- 
 ment of the moment, had at once been accepted as 
 well-established fact and everybody was telling 
 everybody else about them with a grimness not 
 devoid of gusto. 
 
 But when he went out of doors', he was exhil- 
 arated by the November sunshine, which brought 
 out the reds and blues and khakis of the passing 
 uniforms and lent splendour even to the barracks. 
 He watched the strange crowd with wonder. The 
 English officers stalked along in glittering smart- 
 ness; they did not regard the rest of the world and 
 
 99 
 
100 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 hardly spoke to each other. The French poiliis 
 seemed tired and untidy and ridiculousy small. 
 Here and there one saw an American officer, very 
 solemn and a little self-conscious of the freshness 
 of his uniform. He would have thought it all 
 rather gay if he had not been in the Army and 
 felt always the oppression of being handled like 
 a thing without will. They could do absolutely 
 anything they liked with him; he had felt that in 
 the barracks as he had never felt it before. They 
 could tell him to go to more horrible places than 
 barracks and he would have to go and stay there. 
 And he was dismayed to find how much the edge 
 was taken off his enjoyment by the iron unshak- 
 able sense that he was not his own master. Still, 
 he felt keen pride at being there. This was the 
 World War ! These were the things you saw 
 pictures of in the American Sunday papers! — And 
 how much he had grown up since he first went to 
 camp in June ! 
 
 He had enlisted at eighteen on his graduation 
 from High School. "The young men and women 
 who go out into the world this spring," the Super- 
 intendent had said in his Commencement address, 
 "have an opportunity for glory such as no other 
 class has had. It has fallen to their lot — it be- 
 comes their inestimable privilege — to vindicate be- 
 fore the world the fair name of America ! Nothing 
 grieves me more at this moment than the fact that 
 I am not young enough to bear arms myself and 
 
riie Death of a Soldier loi 
 
 I envy you young men with all my heart for the 
 Great Adventure that is before you." The Minis- 
 ter had said in church: "Take up the sword for 
 Christ! The German Antichrist — the Ambassa- 
 dor of Hell — has ravished France and Belgium 
 and, unless we smite it first, will hold bleeding in 
 its talons our own dear land! The Hun must 
 be made to drink the blood he has ruthlessly spilled ! 
 He must suffer every torture and privation he has in- 
 flicted on the innocent! We are fighting not only 
 for Democracy but for Christianity! 'Vengeance 
 is mine!' saith the Lord!" And Henry, walking 
 alone in scented dusks of June, had decided that 
 even his uncle's real estate business in New Bedford 
 was far too flat a way to begin the world. 
 
 The first weeks of his training had disappointed 
 him a little. After the sober piety of his home, 
 the life of the barracks shocked him. Not even 
 when he went to High School had he heard such 
 language as that; but, since that was the language of 
 the Army, he would of course have to learn it and 
 he had soon mastered a vocabulary that clashed 
 with his innocent eyes. In a month he had learned 
 all the other things, too, that are fundamental for 
 a soldier: the habit of not making plans and sur- 
 rendering the direction of his life; the right formula 
 in morose complaining when he was given anything 
 to do; how to produce the impression of working 
 when he was not working, but, when he did work, 
 how to work harmoniously with anybody; self-re- 
 
102 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 pression in the presence of officers and the acceptance 
 of a lower valuation of himself as a Private in the 
 Army than as a student at High School and the son 
 of a respectable farmer; ability to enjoy and get on 
 with any sort of man and inability to consider any 
 woman except in one simple relation. 
 
 Now, he felt, he was really almost a man. He 
 had discovered with excitement that the taboos of 
 home need not be binding. You could curse like 
 a baggage-man if you wanted to, without its doing 
 any harm; and the men who swore and drank most 
 he found the most amusing of all: they seemed to 
 have more fun In them, more imagination than the 
 others, and they had had more adventures. As 
 long as he had been encamped near home, to be 
 sure, he had left the whores alone, but when he 
 should get to France — well, everybody knew what 
 France was! And you didn't take much risk be- 
 cause the Government would disinfect you after- 
 wards. — In the States he hadn't been able to drink 
 except furtively an-d It was with a thrill of adven- 
 ture and freedom that he went into the English 
 Y. M. C. A. and had beer among the absurd voices 
 of the English soldiers. If only he could get rid of 
 that damn cold that he had caught on the ship and 
 from sleeping on the ground at Southhampton, he 
 would be pretty well satisfied, he thought. . . . 
 
 That night he was horribly tired and had a sore 
 throat and a headache and he tried to get to sleep 
 early In the barracks; but there were a lot of people 
 
The Death of a Soldier 103 
 
 »— — ^— ^— — ' 
 
 drunk who kept yelling and singing till midnight. 
 And after they had subsided, everybody began to 
 cough; it was like the barking and roaring of a me- 
 nagerie. "Sounds like a goddam T. B. ward!" said 
 somebody. Then all the lights were suddenly turned 
 on and raucous voices shouted: "All outl" It was 
 an artillery company that was leaving at four in the 
 morning. They swore sullen oaths like heavy 
 blows. Then some one began to sing an endless ob- 
 scene song, which afforded them some relief by al- 
 lowing them to join in the chorus. When they had 
 finally gone and the lights were out again, the No- 
 vember fog leaked in through the paneless windows 
 and felt for his legs through the blankets with chill 
 fingers. He was thankful for the chicken-wire, any- 
 way, he told himself, because, even though it was 
 dirty and no warmer than sleeping on the wind, it 
 was luxurious after the wet ground he had had in 
 England. And at the rest-camp he had met men 
 who had told him about sleeping in stables on dung- 
 heaps. Well, that was what he'd soon be doing, 
 too I He wondered where he would be at this time 
 next week. . . . 
 
 The next day, it was their turn to leave* at four 
 in the morning. He could hardly go to' sleep for 
 thinking how he would have to jump up quickly 
 and get into his pack; he kept waking up and think- 
 ing the Sergeant had called and when the Sergeant 
 did call, it found him nervously awake. He tore 
 himself out of his blankets, buttoned his breeches 
 
104 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 hurriedly and put on his blouse and coat, then 
 spread out the blankets on the muddy floor where 
 the men had been spitting all night. He struggled 
 into his pack, fumbling in desperate haste — you 
 were always afraid the command would come 
 before you were ready — and, holding his rifle and 
 leaning against the wall, fell into a sort of doze. 
 His throat was so sore that when he swallowed it 
 seemed to have a sharp knife in it. 
 
 "All out! Fall inl" bawled the sergeant. 
 
 They stumbled out into the night and presently 
 found themselves in formation. An officer ap- 
 peared and made them stand at attention, then 
 disappeared and left them there. After they had 
 stood at attention for fifteen minutes, the Sergeant 
 gave them "At ease." — "What the hell does he 
 care?" said somebody. "He* sleeps warm, with 
 comforters and everything. I seen their billets yes- 
 terday." At the end of an hour, the officer reap- 
 peared and gave them the command to march. 
 
 When they had left the camp, they found them- 
 selves confronted with a blank darkness thickened 
 by the fog. Only here and there, as they proceeded, 
 was the road illumined by a ghastly greenish light 
 from a feeble street-lamp with a blackened top. 
 
 At last, they arrived at a railway track where a 
 pygmy unlighted train was puffing under its breath. 
 When they had stood there half an hour, they were 
 ordered to get into the box-cars. The Captain, made 
 a little self-conscious by knowing the command 
 
The Death of a Soldier 105 
 
 K i 
 
 would be a shock, delivered it with extra harshness. 
 They clambered up in deadly silence. Then some 
 one had the courage to begin cursing: "Just like a 
 lotta goddam cows!" he muttered and the car was 
 filled with bitter growls. 
 
 They found by falling over them that there were 
 four benches in the car, two at each end and parallel 
 with the sides, leaving a clear space in the middle 
 from one side-door to the other. They threw down 
 their packs' in a heap in this central space and ranged 
 themselves on- the benches, which proved to be so 
 narrow that they could neither sit nor lie on them 
 without a constant effort of bracing. Everybody 
 felt angry and ill and they began to quarrel among 
 themselves. Some one had made out and explained 
 the sign on the outside: "Hommes 40 Chevaux 
 (en long) 8." It was the final wound to self-respect, 
 the last indignity of the Army, which, although the 
 fact was plain enough, had never before confessed 
 that it put American soldiers on a level with animals ! 
 A universal complaint arose. "Aw, this ain't 
 nothin' !" said a voice. "Wait till yuh get to the 
 trenches. Then you'll wish you could set down in a 
 box-car, what / mean!" 
 
 The train waited there* till dawn, shifting back- 
 ward and forward now and then, with much bump- 
 ing and creaking. Everybody cursed the French 
 railroads: "Hell, they ain't got no real railroads 
 in this goddam country!'* Then they seemed to be 
 starting and got as far as a station, but only to back 
 
io6 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 up again and wait for another hour. At last the 
 train seemed to pull itself together and set out half- 
 heartedly, as if willing at any moment to abandon 
 the struggle. France revealed itself as a grey and 
 desolate country where everything was either marsh 
 or mud. The towns were all miserable-looking and 
 exactly alike: dull red roofs and yellow walls with 
 washed-out streets between. The country consisted 
 mostly of barren fields and dismal woods, inhabited 
 by unfamiliar birds, and there were endless lines of 
 poplar skeletons in whose fishbone-like branches the 
 mistletoe clumps were lodged like enormous nests. 
 And everything was wet, saturated with fog and 
 rain. The men themselves were wet. It had been 
 at least a week since they had been really dry. — So 
 this was Europe I 
 
 As the morning wore on they began to get hungry, 
 but the supplies were in the last car and they had 
 not been provided with emergency rations. When 
 the train would falter to a stop in the midst of some 
 rain-soaked wilderness the whole company would yell 
 for food^ — "When do we EAT?" — but no food ever 
 came. 
 
 "Say, you're sick, aincha?" said a man next to 
 Henry. "You better lay down." 
 
 "There ain't any place," he answered; the central 
 space was already full. 
 
 "Why didun yuh go to Sick-Call at Hayver?" 
 "I did, but he only gave me a CC pill." 
 "Goddam ol' horse-doctor! These here Army 
 
The Death of a Soldier 107 
 
 doctors dono nothin'. Here, you better take the 
 corner seat so's you can lay up against the wall." 
 
 Henry changed places with him and was very 
 grateful for the corner. He tried to relax as much 
 as he could without slipping off the seat. He shut 
 his eyes and tried to forget the acute oppression of 
 his headache and the inescapable cold in his legs. 
 The jouncing of the train was like crockery broken 
 on his head; the oaths and coarse words, senselessly, 
 endlessly repeated, like something less than human 
 speech, pounded dully against his brain like the 
 regular blows of a hammer. He took refuge in- 
 finitely far inside him, putting himself back home. 
 
 The images were diminished in size and concen- 
 trated in intensity, like something sharply focussed 
 through a telescope; the wood-fire in the sitting- 
 room gave him sharp satisfaction; the pitcher of 
 water in the dining-room was too delicious to be 
 believed — he felt that he could drink it with 
 fierce passion. He put himself in bed on a Sunday 
 morning under warm blankets and a "goose-chase" 
 quilt; the gay patches of the quilt had a familiar se- 
 curity; he could remember that when he was little he 
 had thought of them as alive. The square-paned 
 window was up and he could see the great smooth 
 contours of the hill-side gleaming with snow, the ho- 
 rizon as clear and bare as the room in which he had 
 slept. In a minute or two his mother would come 
 and call him curtly; then he would have to get up 
 and dress right away; because no extra allowances 
 
io8 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 were made for Sunday morning breakfast. He 
 would dread setting his bare feet on the cold uncar- 
 peted floor and would lie staring at the flowered 
 wash-stand set and the signing of the Declaration in 
 a splotched print above it. But oh! how warm it 
 was with your feet and legs in bed! . . . Presently 
 he fell asleep, but only to jerk himself into wakeful- 
 ness when he began to lose his purchase on the seat. 
 
 They stopped at a red-tile-roofed station late in 
 the afternoon and everybody was allowed to get out. 
 Having had no food for twenty-four hours, they 
 fell upon the buffet and cleaned it up. Everybody 
 got wine, which, tart and clear, brought deliciously 
 to the bewildered men their first real taste of the 
 country. Everybody was laughing and joking; a 
 faint sun had appeared. One of the young Lieu- 
 tenants offered to supply anybody who needed it 
 with money to buy wine and had dispensed a great 
 quantity of francs when the Commanding Ofiicer, a 
 conscientious Regular Army man who was zealous to 
 forestall "unsoldierly conduct," put a brusque stop 
 to the charity by ordering that no more wine should 
 be bought. 
 
 When the train jolted on again, morale had enor- 
 mously risen. With the wine aboard it became pos- 
 sible to enjoy the thing as a lark. If the French 
 built toy railroads that "didn't go no faster'n a 
 horse an' buggy," was that any reason why they 
 should forget that they were the American Expedi- 
 tionary Force, come over to kill the Kaiser? — 
 
The Death of a Soldier 109 
 
 Everybody fell over Henry, who had taken the time 
 when the car was empty to construct a bed of packs; 
 but the wine made him feel better and he minded 
 things less. 
 
 "Shut that goddam door ! It's cold !" 
 
 "Aw, get away from it if yuh don't like it. We 
 wanta see the world! 'Join the Army and See the 
 World!' Christ, I could see more than this on the 
 old Pontiac trolley-line!" 
 
 "Jesus Christ! I can't say much for this wine. 
 Jest like a lotta goddam sour grape-juice!" 
 
 "Why, Christ, didunja get any brandy? They 
 had brandy there, too. . . . Why, you bas- 
 tard! of course they had brandy! Don't try to tell 
 me they didun have no brandy! Didun Dicky get 
 some?" 
 
 "Why Chur-rist! If I'da known that, I would- 
 una bought all this here goddam red ink! It ain't 
 no good to drink!" 
 
 "Why, I find it very stimulating," chirped a pro- 
 fessional male nurse of the Sanitary Detachment, a 
 bland, bald-headed man with the voice and manners 
 of a shop-girl. He had had two bottles of his own 
 wine and as much as he could get of other people's 
 and was now softly singing My Old Kentucky Home 
 over and over to himself. 
 
 "Say, look here ! I can't supply the whole god- 
 dam company with brandy!" said the man who had 
 some. 
 
 "Who's askin' yuh tuh sply the whole goddam 
 
no The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 compny with brandy? I only ast yuh fer a dropl" 
 demanded one of the messmen, who was getting 
 more and more quarrelsome. 
 
 "Now, I'm all set," said the man who had just 
 got the brandy. "All I want's a woman." 
 
 "It's too goddam bad we coulduna had some 
 wild -women along. That's what I come to France 
 for." 
 
 "One good old night in the Arcade, eh?" sug- 
 gested a middle-aged man, who claimed to be a law- 
 yer in civil life. 
 
 "I wouldun give a good goddam fer the Arcade !" 
 shouted the messman so loud that he could be heard 
 abov^e the hideous rattle of the cars and the uproar 
 of everybody talking at once. ("Sit down, you big 
 bastard!" "Lay down and go to sleep!") 
 
 "I tell you," continued the lawyer, "in the good 
 old days when I was at Law School we used to set 
 out on the front stoop and hail 'em in from the 
 street. We used to ask 'em just to come in for a 
 minute, but it was very seldom they ever got out 
 again that night, what / mean!" 
 
 "Say, this guy's sick," said a man near Henry. 
 "Why doncha move over and lettum lay out?" 
 
 "What did you say?" inquired the nurse. 
 
 "Aw, Jesus Christ! how many times do yuh want 
 me to say it? Get over and let this guy lay down!" 
 
 "I can't move over any further. There's no 
 more room. He oughtn't to lay right next to the 
 open door, anyway! I think it's perfectly terrible I 
 
The Death of a Soldier iii 
 
 The idea of letting a poor boy lay around like this 
 when he's sickl" 
 
 "Well, that night," continued the lawyer with 
 unflagging zest, (Henry could not escape that per- 
 sistent voice; the others could be forgotten as dull 
 amorphous sounds, but this one was so distinct and 
 near that it would not blur) "we had so much to 
 start with that Jack he just passes out before din- 
 ner's over and Flo says she's going out to look after- 
 um. And that left me and Genevieve all alone. 
 By and by she gets pale and pitches forward on the 
 table and breaks a couple of glasses and I had just 
 about time to get her to the couch when Jesus 
 Christ ! I loses my own lunch right in the cracked-ice 
 pail. I didn't come to till about six the next morn- 
 ing and then I looks over at Genevieve and she was 
 just the colour of a bum oyster. 'Well, Genevieve,' 
 I says, *I guess we don't want to do anything now, 
 do we?' And she rolls her eyes over at me and 
 says: "No I I guess we don't 1" 
 
 Twilight had erased the faded countryside and 
 the damp autumn air had become sharp. The train 
 kept slowing up and stopping as if it had lost its 
 way. The open sides of the car brought the coun- 
 try all too close to them; they might almost as well 
 have been down among those wet thickets and those 
 cold little streams. The sight-seers were finally 
 prevailed upon to close the doors. But Henry did 
 not feel the cold so much now and was no longer 
 conscious of the delay; the only things he wanted 
 
112 The llntlcrtnkcr's Carlnnd 
 
 were water ami to be able to breathe more easily. 
 1 le had eiiiptieil his own canteen aiul then had chs- 
 likeil to ask lor too much from his neij^hbours', but 
 now he hail reacluil a point where thirst had 
 o\ercome reluctance and he was willing to take all 
 tiiey would ^ive him. I lis heail thumped like a 
 d)iiamo \\ith a hot jionderous throbbinj}[. His 
 breath came terribly hanl and hail begun to make 
 a hoarse rasping sound. . . . 
 
 There was a da //ling light in his face; he tin-ned 
 his head i{) a\()id it. I'hen somebody was shaking 
 iiim out ot iiis stupor. Distant voices: "What's 
 the matter with yuh ? — What's the matter with 
 him?" "1 think he's got a le\er, sir. If there was 
 an extra place in one ol the regular cars — " 
 •'What's the matter with yuh? Cantcha hear I'm 
 talkin' to yuh .'^" 
 
 "Got a cold," murmured I lenry, 
 
 "Let me see your tongue. Say 'Ah.' Bowels all 
 right ?" 
 
 "If there was room in owe o{ the regular cars, 
 sir — " the Sergeant suggested again. 
 
 "Well, there isn't!" the Lieutenant cut him short. 
 A former physician at Police I leadquarters, he had 
 learned that "all two-thirds of 'em need is a good 
 swift kick." 
 
 He shook the mcssman, who was the nearest hu- 
 man item in the confused mound of packs and human 
 boilies and commanded him to get up. Some ol the 
 men prodded him and helped him, swearing, to his 
 
The Death of a Soldier 113 
 
 feet vvliilc ollicis utidid ;i hhiiikcl-roll and jriadc a 
 sort (){ l)cd oil the floor. 
 
 "Jiisl keep liirn warm," said the IJeuteiiant, when 
 he liad finished scolding the messrnaii for disiespec f . 
 "I'll ^ive iiuii soniclliin)'; when we j^et there." lie 
 jumped down and (he traui started. 
 
 "Aw, I het tlierc's lolsa room up there," said 
 somehody. "I hey've f^ol all tlie room tliey want, 
 with plusfi scuts and everything!" 
 
 "It's different with a well ^uy, hut when a ^(uy's 
 sick like that, why jesus C hrist I they mij^lit show a 
 little consideralion." 
 
 And the Serj^eant added : "I le's just as kind and 
 gentle as a crocodile, that hird is I" 
 
 "I never heard of suefi a tiling!" eorni)Iame(l the 
 nurse, who had not said a word when the doctor 
 was tfiere and wlio had more room now that I lenry 
 Was moved. "I've had profcssicjnal experience, hut 
 they won't listen to me." 
 
 "Now, where am I j^onta lay?" roared the mess- 
 man. "Sweet jesus 1 Do yuh tliink I'm ^.^jnta 
 stand up all ni^dit ?" 
 
 "You can lay alon^^ the rocjf," su^p^ested some- 
 hody. 
 
 "Well, d'ye know what ycnj can do?" hawled the 
 other and told him what he cciuld do. 
 
 ".Sliut up, Striker, and }.'_o to sleep! Cantcha see 
 the ^uy's sick .''" 
 
 "Well, Jesus Christ! lie don't hafta he sick, docs 
 he?" 
 
114 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "Well, he's sick?" 
 
 "Well, he don't hafta be sick, does he?" 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 "Well, he's outa luck!" 
 
 "Now, look here, fellows 1" began a young man, 
 seizing upon the opportunity to indulge a taste for 
 eloquence. "There's a man sick in this car and we 
 ought to try to make it comfortable for him, just 
 like what we'd do if it was ourselves that was sick. 
 My opinion is that if we haven't got enough con- 
 sideration to give him a place to lay down in we 
 don't deserve to bear the name of American sol- 
 diers — " 
 
 "Aw, what the hell yuh talkin' about?" bellowed 
 Striker. "He's got a place to lay down in, ain't he? 
 If a man's sick I'll get up and give him a place to 
 lay down in, but what I can't stand Is this here god- 
 dam High School stuff!" 
 
 "Shut up, yuh big bastard!" "Shut up, both of 
 yuh!" "Speech! Speech!" "Give us a recita- 
 tion, Shorty!" — And Shorty, already on his feet, 
 gave them Barbara Frietchie, The Face Upon the 
 Barroom Floor, The Cremation of Sam M'Gee, a 
 series of ribald limericks and finally Crossing the 
 Bar, described as "the dying words of Lord Tenny- 
 son." Then they all became hilarious and sang 
 Where do we go from here? and The Bastard King 
 of England. And when the singing was over and 
 drowziness had made them quiet, the enthusiastic 
 lawyer, who had never halted his narrative, was 
 
The Death of a Soldier 115 
 
 heard proceeding to a climax: "But finally 1 de- 
 cided that I'd had enough of that and I thought I'd 
 get me a nice girl to go with all the time. So I did 
 — a waitress in Schwartz's she was — and I went 
 with her regular, going kinda easy at first — I 
 thought she was all right, see? — and then, goddam 
 it! what did she do but hand me the prettiest little 
 package I ever had In my life 1" 
 
 The train stopped at a large station and nearly 
 every one got out to warm himself by walking up 
 and down and drinking the coffee and cognac which 
 some genial chirping French soldiers were ladling 
 out from a pail. 
 
 "We've got a sick man in our car, sir," said the 
 Sergeant to a mild little Lieutenant of the Medical 
 Corps, who had asked him how they were making 
 out. 
 
 "Let me see him," suggested the Lieutenant. 
 
 "He's pretty sick, I'm afraid," he said when he 
 had examined Henry. "He oughtn't to be here at 
 all. I wonder if we couldn't put him in one of those 
 ambulances and have him sent to a hospital. I'll 
 see what I can do." 
 
 He found his Commanding Officer scowling at 
 the smiling and unconscious French soldiers who 
 were dispensing bitter coffee to the eager Americans. 
 The Major had tasted the cognac and was standing 
 stiffly with the cup in his hand, mute with moral 
 indignation. 
 
 In civilian life, this Lieutenant was a bacteriol- 
 
Ii6 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 ogist, who pursued his work with a high enthusiasm, 
 scientific and humanitarian, and he therefore rarely 
 felt at home in the company of doctors; he was a 
 gentleman, besides, and had never got used to mili- 
 tary manners. When the Major eyed him in si- 
 lence, he began to sound apologetic, and the Major 
 was not impressed. "They've all got colds," he 
 said and threw out the tainted coffee in his cup with 
 a gesture of contempt "Lieutenant Forbes has 
 seen him. That's all that can be done." 
 
 "It's pneumonia, I'm quite sure." 
 
 "Well, we ought to be in tomorrow. He can be 
 attended to then. I shouldn't like to let a man go 
 like this unless it were absolutely necessary. I 
 should like to arrive there with every man, if pos- 
 sible." 
 
 "But would you mind looking at him yourself?" 
 He began to feel helpless; the Major thought him 
 unmilitary. 
 
 Just then the train tooted and began to back a 
 httle. "Well, it's too late now," said the Major. 
 "We must get aboard. I'll see about it at the next 
 stop." 
 
 They reached the next stop at about three in the 
 morning and the Major was persuaded to look at 
 Henry and send him off in an ambulance; it seemed 
 that there was a Base Hospital nearby. 
 
 "Now please be sure to drive very slowly, won't 
 you?" begged the Lieutenant of the ambulance dri- 
 ver; (he had never been able to give a command 
 
The Death of a Soldier 117 
 
 properly.) "It may make a great deal of differ- 
 ence, you know, because he's got pneumonia and the 
 jolting might make him worse." 
 
 "Yes, sir," promised the driver; but as soon as 
 he got beyond the town he began winding up the 
 smooth straight road like a spool of tape. It had 
 been announced that the train of wounded he had 
 been waiting for would not arrive till morning and 
 his mind was full of the plump charms of a certain 
 cafe patronne, whose husband had just left for the 
 front. — The rush of the car drowned out Henry's 
 no less harsh and mechanical breathing. . . . 
 
 There was a little piece of cotton in his throat; 
 he thought if he could only get that out he would be 
 all right. He coughed and coughed and coughed 
 but he couldn't dislodge it. He remarked on this 
 fact to the Sergeant and later to his sister, who, it 
 seemed, were both there. Then he found that he 
 was being horribly shaken up. "This is the dam- 
 nedest straw-ride I was ever on," he said. "I don't 
 call this no fun. Straw-ride without any straw 1". . . 
 But the train was slowing down; they would have 
 to get out and march; it was eight miles to the 
 camp. He must be able to put his hand on his pack 
 and rifle in an instant. He supposed that he'd be 
 able to get into his pack all right, though he didn't 
 feel very well. That first moment when you heaved 
 it up and wrenched it on to your shoulders was 
 agonizingly hard, but after that no doubt he would 
 find that he could get around. They would all fall 
 
Ii8 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 in and right-dress, jostling each other in the dark. 
 . . . Ah, the train was going to stop. He reached 
 for his rifle. Where the hell was it? "Are you 
 going to stop here. Sergeant?" . . . Evidently not. 
 The train was going faster again. They ought to 
 get there in no time, at this rate ! . . . "We used to 
 sit out on the front stoop," he said, "and hail 'em 
 in from the street. And I bet very few of 'cm ever 
 got out, either !" . . . Then it seemed he was in bed 
 and it was harder than ever to breathe. Still, it 
 was evidently morning and they would have to leave 
 the barracks any minute. Could it be that he had 
 overslept? "Is it time to go yet, Sergeant?" He 
 got out of bed to see. "Here ! what do you want?" 
 exclaimed somebody in a severe voice of alarm. 
 "I want my shoes," said Henry. "Where's my 
 gun? — " . . . "All right. We'll get them for you. 
 Now, you just lie still and keep covered up." 
 Somebody tucked him in. "Have you got a glass 
 of water, please?" he inquired weakly. . . . Then 
 things became more and more obscure. He was 
 aware of the presence of a man, evidently his 
 father. . . . No: it was the Sergeant at last, 
 summoning him to go. He made a wild effort to 
 get out of bed, but they held him down, and he col- 
 lapsed on his back exhausted, panting faster than 
 ever. . . . 
 
 The doctor and nurse were watching him at noon. 
 His breath had become as rapid as the ticking of a 
 
The Death of a Soldier 119 
 
 small clock; his lids were already half-closed over 
 his eyes, his unshaved cheeks dirtily livid and his 
 gaping lips sticky and discoloured in an obscene in- 
 human mask; his head was strained desperately 
 back, as if some enemy had him by the throat. The 
 panting became fainter; the clock was running down. 
 His lungs were full and he was drowning. Then 
 he had caught breath and struggled on again till he 
 could get no further. Three times they saw him 
 strain to the surface, only to go down. Henry was 
 nothing but a thread of breath forcing its way 
 through thickening channels. Then he was noth- 
 ing. . . . 
 
 "He put up a pretty good fight there at the last," 
 remarked the doctor, noting the death in a register. 
 "If this keeps up we'll have to have a special floor 
 for pneumonia. — I should suggest the second floor." 
 He smiled. "Then we'll have nothing but indiges- 
 tion up here. Give 'em something to do down- 
 stairs. — But seriously, they ought to isolate these 
 cases. It begins to look like an infection." 
 
 "I should think so," said the nurse. "And when 
 you consider that the Army's hardly over here 
 yet—" 
 
 "Now, be sure all his personal belongings get to 
 the right place. They've -been making a fuss about 
 that lately." 
 
 The orderly assembled in a khaki handkerchief 
 all the things in the pockets of the uniform. There 
 
120 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 were a pipe, a crushed bag of tobacco, photographs 
 of Henry's mother and sister, half-a-dozen obscene 
 post-cards bought from a man who had been to 
 Paris and a little brown leather pocket-book stained 
 dark with sweat. 
 
The Madfnan's Funeral 
 
 "Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe!' 
 
 The wind was bitter as a curse 
 Above the little pavement where 
 The mourners waited with the hearse 
 To bear the madman to his crypt; 
 There was no colour in the air; 
 The very trees stood lank and stripped. 
 
 Somewhere behind the listening doors 
 The living lifted up the dead. 
 We heard the creaking of the floors; 
 We heard their slow unheeding tread; 
 Dimly we saw six shadows — then 
 Six shadows stiffened into men. 
 
 And all at once there rose a squeal 
 And a startled devil leapt and slid 
 Along the madman's cofiin lid, 
 A runty devil white and plump 
 As mushrooms by a rotten stump; 
 His eyes were sharp as pins of steel. 
 
 And swooping after swift as flame 
 And dark as blood that's partly dried, 
 
 On tilted feet a second came; 
 
 123 
 
124 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Who sliding from the coffin rim 
 
 Hopped to the hearse and climbed inside, 
 
 Pulling the other after him. 
 
 And there behind the polished glass 
 They grinned like monkeys in a cage. 
 Four demons paced with studied pomp 
 Down the slow steps, rump bruising rump, 
 Moaning as if in feeble rage. 
 And last one visaged like an ass 
 
 Flicked his hoofs to a two-heeled trot, 
 Scraping a rusty violin, 
 Held between nose and hairy hand; 
 He tripped behind the impious band 
 And to the tune of an old gavotte 
 Wheezed a low catch called "Love's a Sin." 
 
 The crowd gave way; the living bore 
 The dead man to the hearse's floor. 
 The demons gaped like routed whores, 
 Baying a dirge profane and loud; 
 While those within sat on the corse 
 And thumbed their noses at the crowd. 
 
 Then with a shout they broke and ran 
 To find them each a cushioned seat; 
 One goatish, hairy and unclean 
 Beside the clergyman was seen, 
 
The Madman's Funeral 125 
 
 And whispering to that holy man 
 
 Rode smirking through the village street. 
 
 The one whose shape was like an ass 
 Moved sidling to the hearse's wheel, 
 And seeing where the coachman was, 
 And a bare space beside him there, 
 Leapt through the intervening air 
 With a click of heel on horny heel. 
 
 Amid the hearse's decent plumes 
 
 Strange music sagged from strings and bone; 
 
 And one whose eyes were fierce with pride 
 
 Sought out the place I kept alone. 
 
 I smelt the smell of opened tombs 
 
 When he had climbed inside. 
 
 Silk violet gloves episcopal 
 
 Made suave the talons of his claws; 
 
 His paunch let yellow foldings fall 
 
 Upon the shrunken thighs; he smiled, 
 
 Clasping a gesture of applause. 
 
 A whip cracked out; drab hackneys filed. 
 
 I saw the people left and right 
 Stare fearfully before a sight 
 So solemn, fat and atheous. 
 "Alas for us!" the demon said, 
 "God is a dolt to use us thus; 
 Where shall we rest now he is dead? 
 
126 TIic Uiukitakcr's (larlaiul 
 
 "But, ohl what sport vvc li;ul ol hiiii! 
 Not s'mcc the ^rcat Kin^ Solomon 
 Lost liis riti^ at the world's rlin 
 Aiul all the (lemons iituler sea 
 Strcteheil (heir win^s aiul soiij^ht (he sun 
 1 las any known sueh jolh(y." 
 
 Through enils o( slree(s (he eortej^e wouiul 
 
 ( )n ei(her suU- (he houses s(ooil, 
 
 1 luiMled, uneaieil lor, skulls ol wooil, 
 
 lUaek wnulous soeketeil with eyes. 
 
 The ilemon's (hroa( JL^rew (hiek wi(h sound: 
 
 "The mailman otue was odierwisc. 
 
 "Joy was his in (he elear lijj;ht 
 And in (he colours ol (he air, 
 In rooms where skdiul \iolins 
 Keneweil his adolescent sins; 
 I-ove was his, and in his sijj;ht 
 One lair woman seemetl moie lair. 
 
 *'We crept on him vvidi swayinj^; (reatl; 
 Through slec\es atul lingers u hisperinjj^, 
 Sha|)ed worils so lewd and hlasphenK>us 
 I lia( lo\'e became a leprous (hin^. 
 We lauj^hed each nij.;ht besiile his bed 
 Till (ioil's own lauj^hter answereil us. 
 
 "Ami still we whispcreil, 'l.ove is lust, 
 J'hc blue but grey, a broken tune 
 
The Madman's l^incral 127 
 
 Outtops (he- inoutli of melody.' 
 Wc tiiriud (lie cMitli to sliiikiiijT tlust, 
 Wc climmtd (he sun ami left the moon 
 A twisted penny in the sky. 
 
 "We siuked his pores with pallid lips, 
 We mirkeii the hlood within his heart, 
 We drove him forth with iron whips, 
 We seouri^ed him hack with bloody rods ; 
 I hen drew him to a place apart 
 To intimate this work was (iod's." 
 
 Tlie carrlap;cs he^an to wind 
 
 Into a place of mounds and stones, 
 
 1 ledj^es of hron/e-jj;reen box and yews 
 
 (jireen-black and clipped (o curious cones. 
 
 "^riie fiend resumed : " lOni^ht I choose 
 
 Another nicely fashioned mind." 
 
 The carriage stopped. The corpse went by 
 
 Ami sliadows in still folds of black. 
 
 1 looked into (he demon's eye 
 
 And saw therein, circled with fire. 
 
 My own eyes starinp^. 1 left the hack, 
 
 And with the fiend plashed throujj;h the mire. 
 
 We reached the jjjrave. I looked and j)cered. 
 Nor saw a devil anywhere; 
 Hut straijj;ht the coachman seized a fife 
 And played an old and ribald air ; 
 
128 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 And through the prayers the parson leered 
 With hot eyes at the sexton's wife. 
 
 Behind the fir tree of his aunt's 
 
 Ungainly tomb, the grocer found 
 
 A fiery flask; a crape veil shrieked 
 
 And passed into a rigid trance; 
 
 And a boy laughed. The grave ropes creaked, 
 
 The coffin sank into the ground. 
 
 Earth, falling stone and gritty clay 
 Resounded from the coffin lid; 
 Spades crunched on earth and scraped on stone; 
 Earth fell; at last a low mound hid 
 The place where the madman's body lay. 
 The crowd dispersed. I stood alone. 
 
 I dared not move. A sudden dread 
 Was on me lest I turn my head 
 And see naught but the frozen sod 
 And the stiff trees which twilight blurred; 
 For in my thought I shaped a word 
 Cruel and meaningless as God. 
 
Emily in Hades 
 
 Emily had died of influenza in the stiff and rather 
 barren bed-room which no longer than a year be- 
 fore she had fitted up with wedding presents. Her 
 husband sat dry-eyed and dazed, aghast before the 
 prospect of his future; it was not that a great pas- 
 sion had united them; it was not that the contrast 
 was so great between Emily lying beside him living 
 and Emily lying beside him dead; but he had really 
 been fond of Emily and had grown completely ac- 
 customed to her, and, having worked very hard to 
 support her in the bondselling business, now found 
 himself at a ghastly loss as to why he should go on 
 selling bonds. He had thought he had his life so 
 securely arranged, with everything provided for, 
 and now what he had supposed the safest of his in- 
 vestments had completely failed. He ought to 
 have prevented it somehow, his well-trained con- 
 science told him; he had been found wanting in ef- 
 ficiency. If he had only been firmer about over- 
 shoes, she would never have caught that cold. 
 
 But Emily herself only knew that she was no 
 longer being smothered: the pillows had suddenly 
 dissolved from her chest and the pain been snuffed 
 out in her throat. She was standing in a kind of 
 
 129 
 
130 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 I — —4 
 
 dark mist, which she thought at first was the night. 
 Yet it was not quite like the night nor even quite like 
 the twilight. It was more like the hour before 
 dawn when even the stars are blotted out. It was 
 all so strange that she forgot to feel relief at being 
 a real person again. It was like waking up from a 
 fainting fit: you could hardly recognize yourself. 
 
 When she did come to think about herself, she 
 wondered if she zvere a real person. She was con- 
 scious of nothing but her thoughts and of the grey 
 dimness that surrounded her. She could neither 
 smell nor taste the mist nor feel whether it were 
 warm or cold. She must be in a dream, she thought; 
 one didn't taste or feel in dreams. But her situa- 
 tion seemed natural and fixed, as it never did in 
 dreams. She tried to remember what had hap- 
 pened to her; she had been very sick in bed (she 
 could see it all objectively now) ; she had become 
 more and more uncomfortable, so uncomfortable 
 that she could not stand it; she had thought she 
 was going to die. — Then, definitely, in a flash, she 
 realized that she had died. 
 
 But she did not at first feel distress at having left 
 her husband and the world; she was filled with 
 the buoyancy of freedom and thrilled with ad- 
 venture like a child. So you came out all right 
 on the other side and you were still you ! She 
 laughed in her joy of release; she was all alive 
 with expectancy. Perhaps, she thought with ex- 
 
Emily in Hades 131 
 
 citcmcnt, she was at last goiii^ to listen to the 
 music she had been waiting for all her life 1 
 
 When she had grown accustomed to the (jueer 
 darkness, siie saw that she was on the edge of 
 something: tiiere was a great slate-grey floor in 
 front of her stretching off into misty remoteness and 
 along it lay a rough rock-like strip with blackish 
 cracks and streaks; beyond this and behind her 
 rose a thick and j)rofound darkness, like a bot- 
 tom-less black sea. And then she saw that 
 the strip was a beacli, a beach without sand or 
 seaweed, as bare as a belt of lava. 
 
 Scrutinizing this strange shore, she made out a 
 shape like a boat that seemed to be lying beached, 
 not far away on her left. She started toward it, 
 noticing as she went that she could not feel the 
 the ground beneath her feet. When she had come 
 nearer, she found that it was a big unpainted flat- 
 bottomed barge, with an oltl rnan sitting in the prow. 
 As she stopped and stood in doubt a few yards 
 away, he turned and regarded her without interest 
 from dim and lifeless eyes, and she suddenly be- 
 came aware that she had nothing on but a night- 
 gown and that her hair was down her back. 
 
 "(let in," said the old man. 
 
 "Why?" asked I'lmily. "Where will you take 
 me?" 
 
 "Over to Hades," he replied. 
 
 "But I'm not dressed I" she protested. 
 
132 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "It doesn't matter," he said. 
 
 He spoke so much as if everything were a mat- 
 ter of course and seemed to take so little interest 
 in the conversation that, after hesitating a mo- 
 ment, she climbed into the boat, because it seemed 
 to present itself as the only thing to do. And, as 
 soon as she had taken her place on a plain plank 
 seat in the stern, the old man came down to the 
 centre, pushed the boat off from the shore, and fitting 
 great clumsy oars to the locks, began to row silently 
 away. As he sat facing Emily, she observed him 
 as well as she could in the strange atmosphere, which 
 made everything shadowy and uncertain, like things 
 seen in moving pictures, or rather, she presently 
 amended, like things thought and not seen — as if 
 there were no real substance which the senses could 
 touch or smell, but only shapes seen and heard as 
 one sees and hears in one's mind. He was dressed 
 in old and weatherworn clothes, as colourless as 
 the barge, and bent above his monstrous oars with 
 infinite weariness and indifference. The lumbering 
 boat seemed scarcely to disturb the leaden surface 
 of the water. 
 
 "You say that you are taking me to Hades?" 
 she at length took courage to inquire. "Isn't there 
 any Heaven then?" 
 
 "No," he answered, "There's no Heaven." 
 
 "But what about God?" she asked. 
 
 "God is dead," he replied. 
 
 "But I thought that God was immortal." 
 
Emily in Hades 133 
 
 "How could man, who lives so short a time, hope 
 to make a God who would be deathless?" 
 
 It seemed to her that he answered her questions 
 as part of a monotonous routine. Everybody who 
 came, she supposed, must ply him with the same 
 questions. And the thought of the innumerable 
 millions of souls whom he must have ferried across 
 and the innumerable millions more who were still 
 to get into his boat and ask about Heaven and God 
 and receive disappointing answers appalled her and 
 dulled her hope at the very beginning of the jour- 
 ney. After all, it appeared that Hades was a 
 dreary sort of place. She would have thought 
 it might at least have been horrible or in some 
 other way exciting. If Charon had only been 
 kindly, or hateful, or grand, instead of being simply 
 indifferent and stultified by his work! Her thrill 
 of adventure faltered; was death going to be just 
 like life? — She did not often indulge in thrills, hav- 
 ing learned that nothing ever happens. If you 
 thrilled in anticipation, you were sure to be disap- 
 pointed. So Emily had found life and probably 
 death was no different. . . . 
 
 But presently she spoke again: "Isn't there any 
 music in Hades?" 
 
 "No," he answered, "No music." 
 
 After a moment's pause, she went on: "Tell 
 me," she said, "how shall I ever find the people 
 I know, when 1 arrive over there?" 
 
 "I shall land you where you belong." 
 
134 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "Is every one who ever died in Hades?" 
 
 "Vcs," he replied. 
 
 "But aren't they all mixed up together? — I mean, 
 the countries and the periods." 
 
 "No: not much." 
 
 "But why aren't they?" 
 
 "Because people don't feel at home down here in 
 other countries and ages than their own any more 
 than they do on earth." 
 
 "But 1 should think the chances to meet people 
 would be so terribly interesting — with everybody 
 who has ever died from the beginning of the world to 
 choose from." 
 
 "They don't like anybody who has lived any dif- 
 ferently from themselves. I'hey keep to the same 
 little groups. It is just the same as on earth." 
 
 They were nearing the shore now; it lay like a 
 grey line on the water. She strained her eyes, in 
 the dimness, to make out what it was like; as the 
 boat came closer and closer it resembled more and 
 more exactly the shore they had just left behind. 
 She thought, in a gust of impatience, what was the 
 use of having two shores, if they were both going to 
 be just alike? She tried to tell herself again that 
 everything was just like that in life, but she couldn't, 
 for all her resignation, keep from feeling a little 
 forlorn. She was going to see people, that was 
 true — all sorts of people, perhaps: for she swore 
 that, now she was dead, she was going to know more 
 of the world; no little groups for her! — but the in- 
 
Emily In Fladcs 135 
 
 dlliercncc of the old man, the greyness and vague- 
 ness of the atmosphere, the Impression of nothing 
 ever happening, of nothing ever expected to happen, 
 chilled her heart with an apprehension of some 
 ghastly disappointment. 
 
 Still, she told herself as they arrived, It couldn't 
 really be so bad; It must at least be very different 
 and strange. . . . 
 
 Charon pushed the boat with his oar till it stuck 
 In the shallow water. "You can get out here," he 
 said. 
 
 "But I'll get my feet wet!" she protested. 
 "Can't you push it up where It's dry?" 
 
 "It doesn't matter," he replied. "You'll find 
 that you can't feel the water." 
 
 So she got out and stood on the beach and found 
 that what he said was true; just as she could not 
 feel the firmness of the ground, so she could not 
 feel the coldness of the water that wavered about 
 her bare feet. 
 
 Then, as the old man said nothing more, but 
 rested listlessly on his oars, she remembered some- 
 thing she had heard about paying Charon with an 
 obol. 
 
 "I'm sorry I have no money," she explained. 
 "Perhaps I can borrow some." 
 
 "It doesn't matter," he replied. "There's no 
 need for money here." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "There's nothing to buy." 
 
136 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "People don't eat here, I suppose." 
 "No," he answered, "people don't eat." 
 She turned and walked up the shore. There was 
 no wall of darkness here; only a kind of flat wide 
 plain with a misty uncertain horizon. She felt 
 timid about going further; it was Impossible to see 
 straight before you; the air was mysterious with 
 shadows and there was no telling what was behind 
 them. And then, she was almost undressed; she did 
 not want to go among people; she would feel un- 
 dignified and ridiculous — at a terrible disadvant- 
 age. — But then, on the other hand, she could hardly 
 stay on the shore. So she walked up among the 
 shadows. 
 
 She found it was rather like a fog; you could see 
 Immediately around you, but you could not, except 
 by glimpses, see anything very far away. Once she 
 thought she caught a human shape that passed ob- 
 scurely at a distance and she hurried on in terror. 
 Then, right upon her, two shapes seemed to come 
 around a shadowy corner and passed quite close at 
 her side; and, staring fearfully in their faces, she 
 recognized them as people she had known In the 
 town where she had been born. They were an el- 
 derly married couple, who had used to come to din- 
 ner sometimes. The man was still wearing the 
 suit he had had on when he was killed In a motor 
 accident, on an election night celebration; and he 
 was still displaying in his lapel an enormous cellu- 
 loid button with the legend: "Vote for Taft." 
 
Emily in Hades 137 
 
 But the woman, she was glad to note, wore a night- 
 gown like her own, having died respectably in bed. 
 They had never been happy together, but they now 
 walked side by side, as if from sheer force of habit. 
 Neither turned to Emily nor spoke; she could not 
 even tell whether they had seen her. They passed 
 on and dissolved in the shadows, two lifeless, colour- 
 less beings, wandering slowly and in silence, with- 
 out interest or aim. 
 
 Then other shapes commenced to appear, moving 
 singly or in groups; they were evidently all people 
 from the place which had once been her home. 
 They kept still to the same companions, she ob- 
 served, as when they had actually lived there; the 
 lawyer walked beside the doctor, the barber beside 
 the tobacconist, and families who had hated each 
 other but had continued to live together were by no 
 means divided in death. And none of them noticed 
 Emily any more than they noticed each other. It 
 wounded her that people she had known, who, she 
 had once supposed, had been fond of her, should 
 not trouble to welcome her among them or be sorry 
 she had died so young. As she walked on and on 
 in the dusk and never heard a human voice, she 
 decided at last that she must be brave and try speak- 
 ing first to somebody. 
 
 She was walking in what seemed to be a wide 
 clearing in the shadows, rather like a large open 
 field, and at the end of it she saw pacing slowly 
 back and forth across its width the thin figure of a 
 
138 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 woman, with her licad bent toward the ^roiiiul. 
 This was an opportunity, thought Mmily; slie would 
 rather approach one pcrsori than a group and a 
 woman, she somehow felt, would be better than a 
 man. So she advanced shyly across the field and 
 cut off the woman in her walk. 
 
 "1 beg your pardon," she said, "but could you 
 give mc some information?" 
 
 The woman stopped abruptly in her steady and 
 monotonous pacing and looked up with something 
 of the uncertainty and apprehension of an old 
 woman — though l^'mily could see that, when she 
 died, she could not have been much above fifty. 
 
 "What is it you want to know?" she asked, in a 
 slightly petulant tone. 
 
 "I'm trying to find my mother," explained Emily. 
 "Her name is Mrs. Julius Allen." 
 
 rhc woman scrutinized her a moment. "Aren't 
 you Mmily Allen?" she asked. 
 
 It was the Head Mistress of the boarding school 
 to which iMnily had been sent in her teens; but she 
 seemed to I'^mily much changed from the last time 
 she had seen her. Her face, which had once been 
 so severe, with so firm a mouth, seemed flaccid and 
 distressful now, shaken and vexed by pain. 
 
 ""^'ou startled me," the woman went on. "I 
 came back in here purposely so that I shouldn't be 
 always pestered with the questions of newcomers. 
 I advise you to do the same thing. You'll find it 
 will save you a lot of bother." 
 
Emily in Hades 139 
 
 She was no longer ii mistress and queen giving 
 lofty warnings and commands to a miserable little 
 girl, who stood terrified in her presence. With her 
 first words the old relation of mistress and pupil 
 was abandoned and she seemed to take it for 
 granted that they were both poor creatures to- 
 gether, with no further need for appearances on 
 either side and no interest other than the avoidance 
 of being disturbed, as if they had been "set" old 
 bachelors or nervously peevish invalids. 
 
 And Emily was profoundly shocked at her old 
 superior's abjectness; she felt as if she had gone be- 
 hind the scenes of a play, a play in which she had 
 believed, and had seen the backs of the canvas trees 
 and the actors washing off their paint. But her 
 first dismay was succeeded by a swift and eager re- 
 sentment. Why should she, a strong young girl, 
 be classed with a peevish old woman? What did 
 the teacher mean by speaking as if they were both 
 convicts in a jail, old women in a poor-house? She, 
 Emily, had been married, anyway. She was not a 
 sallow sterile spinster. And, as she stood before 
 that flat-chested figure in its shapeless undress of a 
 kimono, she was proudly conscious of the little 
 breasts that lifted her own girl's nightgown. 
 
 And she fed this new resentment with all her old 
 grievances against her. How many lies this woman 
 had told her! What a lot of cant she had talked! 
 How she had repressed and imprisoned her stu- 
 dents and kept them from seeing young men, till 
 
140 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 they had been ready to fall In love with the doctor at 
 the school or the man who brought papers in the 
 morning! She had lectured them on purity and re- 
 serve and their mission of inspiring their knights; 
 they were to perform a function almost religious, 
 to embody Tennysonian ideals. She had painted a 
 figure in gleaming white with a worshipper kissing 
 its hem. And she had somehow made them feel 
 that love was something impious and unclean; she 
 had infected Emily with a fear and distaste she had 
 never quite got over, though it had greatly per- 
 plexed and distressed her to guess that her husband 
 should find her cold. He enjoyed love more than 
 she did, she was sure of that, and she sometimes 
 wondered if other women enjoyed love more than 
 she. ... In any case, she was angry with the peo- 
 ple at her old school, who had misrepresented love 
 and left her to be harrowed by shocks more painful 
 than any she could have had from the truth. 
 
 She had stood silent for a moment, thrown off 
 by the fatuous advice, but at last she suddenly burst 
 out, with unaccustomed boldness and authority: 
 "Let me ask you something," she demanded, "why 
 did you never tell me anything?" 
 
 The other seemed to wince a little, 
 
 "Because I knew nothing myself," she said. 
 
 "But I suffered for believing your lies," the girl 
 cruelly went on. "You did us all a great injury. 
 After all, we were all young girls. You should 
 have taught us something about love along with the 
 
Emily in Hades 141 
 
 trigonometry. That was going to be the business 
 of most of us!" 
 
 "Ah, why do you tell me all this?" cried the 
 woman, appealing to Emily with eyes full of bitter- 
 ness and grief. "I hav^e suffered much worse than 
 you, because I have lived much longer, and because 
 I lived all that time by the light of my own teach- 
 ing. I could not throw it off as easily as you could 
 when you left me. It was like an armour about me ; 
 I carried it all my life. You see, I believed in reli- 
 gion. I thought I was serving God. I believed 
 that everything I sacrificed would be made up to me 
 after I died. And now it seems that, after all, re- 
 ligion wasn't really true and there's nothing but this 
 pagan Hell. How could I have known that?" 
 
 "Oh, forgive me, forgive me!" begged Emily. 
 "I'm terribly sorry!" And in shame and distress 
 at having scolded this anguished and defeated crea- 
 ture, she tried to take her by the hand and kiss her 
 on the cheek, but the hand was not warm in her own 
 and her lips felt nothing against them. "I'm sorry, 
 I'm sorry," she repeated. 
 
 "It doesn't matter," said the teacher. "Nothing 
 really matters here." And at this Emily felt un- 
 comfortable, as she had at old Charon's indifference, 
 and a chill, almost of resentment, made her almost 
 cold again. But she still protested: "I'm sorry! 
 I shouldn't ever have blamed you." 
 
 "I don't know v/ho's to blame," said the other. 
 "I believed in the best ideals I could find. It seems 
 
142 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 unfair that they should have won me nothing and 
 that, instead of helping other people, they should 
 actually have done them harm." 
 
 "But at least they won you security. They won 
 you time for study and work." 
 
 "Oh, security!" sighed the woman. "I have 
 plenty of security here!" 
 
 And again the girl felt -uneasy. She changed the 
 subject abruptly: "I don't suppose you can tell me 
 how to find my mother." 
 
 "I'm afraid not," said the teacher. "You'll just 
 have to wander around. But I shouldn't worry 
 about it. . . . You have all eternity before you," 
 she ended, with a sad smile. 
 
 So Emily set out again in that faded unreal world. 
 She asked almost everybody she met if he knew 
 where her mother was. Most of them simply shook 
 their heads and did not even stop to talk to her; a 
 few of them remembered having seen her mother, 
 but could not tell how long ago, because there was 
 no day or night in Hades and consequently no way 
 to tell time; it was equally impossible to give direc- 
 tions for reaching any particular place, because the 
 ground was perfectly bare and there was nothing 
 above it but the shadows, which kept imperceptibly 
 shifting and melting into one another. 
 
 But at last she came upon a group of women sit- 
 ting in a sort of circle. She recognized her mother 
 at once, though she was approaching her from be- 
 hind, by the little hard knob of black hair which she 
 
Emily in Hades 143 
 
 wore at the back of her head. She had always felt 
 that this knob was depressingly old-fashioned and 
 had often wondered why her mother had imitated 
 her grandmother in this, brushing her thin hair 
 straight back and parting it in the middle. 
 
 The other women, she now saw, were her grand- 
 mother and her aunts. She stood on the edge of the 
 circle and sent them an eager "Hello!" 
 
 "Why, if It isn't Emily!" said Aunt Mollie, with 
 a benign and fatuous smile. "I always said Emily 
 would come. — All things come to him who waits !" 
 she added with another smile. 
 
 Her mother raised solemnly upon Emily her large 
 and gentle eyes, in which was neither happiness nor 
 sorrow, but only a prosaic seriousness and a mild 
 sort of wonder. Her long preoccupation in life 
 with kitchens and house-work and furniture and the 
 more physical aspects of the care of her husband and 
 children had invested her with the soulless dignity of 
 a plain mahogany bed; and, now that she had come 
 to Hades, where there was nothing more for her to 
 do, she seemed ready to sit through eternity, as if 
 she were a chest of drawers, content in the convic- 
 tion of her usefulness and the sense of her duties 
 discharged. 
 
 "Why, Emily!" she exclaimed. "I didn't expect 
 you so soon." 
 
 "Well, here I am," said Emily. 
 
 "What did you die of, dear?" 
 
 "Influenza." 
 
144 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "What a pity!" sighed Emily's mother. "And 
 you married so well, too." 
 
 People felt no grief, it seemed, in Hades, that 
 other people should be dead; they merely took it 
 for granted; every one died sooner or later. Even 
 her mother, whose expression of regret was the first 
 she had heard, seemed to take her daughter's early 
 death with a disconcerting calmness. 
 
 "How is Fred?" her mother went on. 
 
 "Very well, the last I heard." 
 
 "How is the baby?" 
 
 "All right." 
 
 "You haven't had a baby yourself, have you, 
 Emily?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Is Marjorie all right?" 
 
 "Yes: I think so." 
 
 "Well," her mother concluded, "It's nice to have 
 you here. You can just sit around with us here and 
 after awhile the others will be along and then we'll 
 all be together." 
 
 "But what should I do here?" demanded Emily, 
 flashing with resentment again. "I don't see that 
 there's anything very interesting about what you're 
 doing!" 
 
 "It's a nice long rest," said her mother. 
 
 "Nothing's very interesting down here," put in 
 her Aunt Elmira. 
 
 "I don't care," observed Aunt MoUie. "What I 
 
Emily in Hades 145 
 
 always say is they can say what they please, but / 
 believe there's a God. It'll all come out all right 
 in the end; now you wait and see if it doesn't." 
 
 "But I don't want to stay with you here 1" cried 
 Emily, who had never liked Aunt Mollie. "You 
 kept me with you all my life. You tried to make 
 me think that our little family was the whole world. 
 — I never went anywhere and I never found out any- 
 thing. You made me believe that all I had to do 
 to be desirable for some one to marry was not to do 
 certain things — not to be 'unladylike.' I remember 
 that, when I was a little girl, you warned me just as 
 impressively as if it had been one of the Command- 
 ments that I must never look into a barber shop 
 when I was passing by in the street. You never let 
 me know what marriage was and let me get married 
 without knowing. You only wept at the wedding 
 and told me it was all very solemn — till I felt as if 
 getting married must be some kind of catastrophe !" 
 
 "Why, Emily," answered her mother, "how can 
 you talk like that? If you had been brought up the 
 way I was, you wouldn't think I was so strict. 
 Why, my father wouldn't let us read the newspapers 
 or play games on Sunday or anything. And he 
 wouldn't let us go to dances, because he thought 
 dancing was wicked. In West Beachley there 
 weren't any of those Saturday night parties that last 
 till Sunday morning. We had to toe the mark, I 
 can tell you, in my day. — Why, at Norwood, I used 
 
146 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 to let you children do practically anything you 
 wanted to — anything decent and respectable, that 
 is." 
 
 And Emily realized fully for the first time in her 
 life that to her mother the change from West Beach- 
 ley to Norwood had been as much a rise and libera- 
 tion as the change from Norwood to New York had 
 been to Emily herself. When her mother had mar- 
 ried the General Manager of the Norwood Woolen 
 Mills, she had found herself in a world so much 
 richer and freer than the one she had left behind 
 that she had never thought to look further, but, in 
 satisfaction and assurance, had lived and died among 
 its standards. 
 
 "I'm sorry, mother," said Emily. "Never mind. 
 I shouldn't have tried to blame you. But I'm afraid 
 I can't stay with you here. I want to look up some 
 other people in a minute. — I'll be back to see you 
 later." And, after talking with them a little — 
 in order not to seem too abrupt — she left them with 
 phantom kisses and lost herself again in the grey. 
 
 "Oh, I wish I could find some one young," she 
 thought, "some one I really like !" 
 
 Then suddenly, a moment afterwards, like a god 
 appearing in a mist, a naked young man came to- 
 wards her, who looked in her face and cried out, in a 
 voice that sounded almost alive: "Why, Emily! 
 What are you doing here?" 
 
 "Oh, I'm so glad to see you !" she exclaimed. "I 
 just died." 
 
Emily in Hades 147 
 
 "You've come to a pretty sad place," he replied, 
 with a sorrowful smile. 
 
 "Is it so depressing then?" 
 
 "There isn't very much doing. You get kind of 
 stale after while." 
 
 She hesitated a moment. "Isn't there any music 
 here?" 
 
 "I haven't heard any," he replied. 
 
 In a second, she had changed the subject: "It 
 was terrible about your death. I cried about it for 
 days." 
 
 "Well, It was darn nice of you to be sorry," he 
 said, "but you shouldn't have let it worry you. I 
 guess it really doesn't make much difference." 
 
 "We were all so proud, though, that you were 
 killed at St. Mihiel!" 
 
 "Well, I don't know what the death notice said, 
 but I was 'way behind the lines. I was an M. P. 
 and had to go around and drive 'em out of the cafes 
 at half past nine; and one night some dirty wop hid 
 up an alley and shot me." 
 
 "Oh, how dreadful !" she cried. 
 
 As he spoke, he had tapped his left breast, where 
 she saw a black bullet wound. — And she also saw 
 what she had hardly dared to let herself notice be- 
 fore : that, in his nakedness, he was very hand- 
 some. As she had known him in life, his clothes 
 had not been particularly neat and she was surprised 
 now at the clear outline and ordered economy of his 
 body. Instead of being like her husband, with most 
 
148 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 ■ ^—^^—i ^^^ 
 
 of his muscles invisible, she could see them move, 
 smoothly and easily, as he shifted his position. 
 Though she had always been attracted by him in 
 life and tremendously excited when he had called 
 upon her, she found it almost incredible now that 
 anybody so beautiful could have lived in a city like 
 Norwood and gone about its commonplace business. 
 And she observed that even his feet, instead of be- 
 ing great slabs of flesh, were high-arched and square- 
 toed and no longer or wider than they should be. 
 
 He was not embarrassed by his nakedness and 
 made no comment upon it — though she herself had 
 been abashed at meeting him without his clothes — 
 but stood with an unperturbed dignity and a cool 
 unconscious grace, moving his arms occasionally as 
 he talked, in the artless and homely gestures of the 
 undistinguished American, 
 
 "Tell me," she went on, playing the game of mak- 
 ing conversation, as she had always done with him in 
 life, "what do the soldiers who are dead think about 
 the war, now that it's over? Do they think it was 
 all worth while or do they think they 'died in vain'? 
 Some people are saying one thing and some people 
 the other." 
 
 "They never think about it at all. It was all so 
 bum, why should they? You see, about the only 
 thing you can do to amuse yourself in Hades is to 
 remember the pleasant things that happened to you 
 when you were alive. So they have practically for- 
 gotten the war. ... I know how I felt about it 
 
Emily in Hades 149 
 
 when I first arrived down here: I ripped my darn 
 uniform off and pitched it in the lake." 
 
 "But doesn't anybody object to your not wearing 
 any clothes?" she asked, with a smile which she felt 
 was daring. 
 
 "No: nobody objects to anything down here." 
 And he added, after a pause : "Why don't you take 
 your nightgown off? Nobody cares." 
 
 It was her turn to pause now. "I suppose I 
 might," she said at last. "This isn't much of a 
 thing to go around in, is it?" And she took the 
 nightgown off self-consciously, pulling it over her 
 head, and stood before him in her slender beauty, 
 with her thin boy-like thighs and her breasts that 
 hung like rain-drops on a pane, and the low-swelling 
 rondure between them that had never borne a child. 
 
 "You certainly are pretty!" he said, as she stood 
 not quite knowing what to do, and then came over 
 to her and first took her hands in his and then put 
 his arms around her and kissed her on the mouth. 
 
 But she could not feel his body against hers nor 
 the pressure of his lips; she did not grow hot nor 
 tremble at the touch of his lover's hands. When 
 she shut her eyes beneath his kiss, it was as if there 
 were no one there, and she had to open them upon 
 him to take pleasure in his presence. 
 
 And presently he relinquished his embrace and 
 stood awkwardly, in silence, keeping only her hands. 
 "It's too bad," he said at length, "that I never made 
 love to you. in life." 
 
150 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "Why didn't you?" she asked. "You should 
 have. I wanted you to." 
 
 "Did you really?" he replied, and stood staring 
 at the ground a moment. "I was too chivalrous," 
 he went on. "I was idealistic about things like that. 
 I couldn't have married you then and I thought I 
 oughtn't to make love to you. I thought you 
 wouldn't want me to, if I didn't ask you to marry 
 me; and that, even if you were willing to let m'e, it 
 wouldn't be exactly honourable. But I know now 
 I made a mistake. That kind of chivalry's all 
 bunk: I -found that out in France." 
 
 "Did you ever think of me in France?" she asked, 
 and he answered: "Yes, I surely did" — but w^ith 
 so little of the lover's enthusiasm that she felt quite 
 sure the French women must have driven her out 
 of his head. 
 
 "I thought of you, too," she said. "I missed you 
 a lot." 
 
 "It's too bad," he protested again. "It's too 
 bad." Then, "Let's sit down here together," he 
 invited. "There's no place to go." 
 
 So they sat down together on the ground and he 
 put his arm about her body. But she was thinking 
 how vivacious and attractive the French women must 
 be. She felt charmless and pale, as she imagined 
 them, and it filled her with a strange distress. She 
 would like so much to be like them, if she only had 
 the chance ! 
 
 And then she realized suddenly that she would 
 
Emily in Hades 151 
 
 never have the chance — that she was nothing but 
 a poor ghost, a bodiless, passionless shadow! She 
 had told herself up to now that the languid people 
 she had met were all old and stupid people, who 
 were dead things before they died. But, in the pres- 
 ence of this young man, who might once have 
 thrilled her with his touch, but who stirred her less 
 now than a lover she might merely have imagined 
 when alive, she knew with sickening despair and sud- 
 den terrible grief, that she was only a shadow her- 
 self, that her flesh would never live again, that she 
 must walk among indifferent wraiths till she became 
 as indifferent as they — a wisp of spirit lost for ever 
 in a world of twilight and mists. 
 
 They sat on together in silence; their love scene 
 seemed to go blank. A listlessness had absorbed 
 him and he sat staring blindly at her hand, which he 
 could not press with his own. A fear and a shame 
 possessed her and an anger which wept without 
 tears. She must be alone, she felt; she must rouse 
 herself and escape. 
 
 She brusquely got to her feet. "I want to go 
 on," she said. "I'll see you again very soon." 
 
 "Hey, don't go, Emily!" he cried. — But, for 
 dread of having him tell her it was useless, she 
 broke away and plunged among the shadows. 
 
 His numbness seemed still to hold him, for he 
 had not risen from the* ground. . . . 
 
 She came at last to the shore, which seemed al- 
 most picturesque now, after the grey monotony of 
 
152 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 ^^^^ 
 
 the interior. Not far away, she saw Charon un- 
 loading another newcomer, a tall rather fine-looking 
 man with a clerical collar, who gazed about him in 
 a puzzled way and then came up the beach. 
 
 "I beg your pardon," he said, "but can you tell 
 me whether this is Heaven or Hell?" 
 
 "It's neither," she replied. It's what they call 
 Hades." 
 
 "That is strange," he remarked thoughtfully, 
 bending troubled brows a moment. "This must be 
 a dream." 
 
 "Oh, no! It's not a dream," she said bitterly. 
 "You're really dead." 
 
 "And what does one do here?" he inquired, rais- 
 ing shy and honest eyes to hers. 
 
 "Not much of anything, as far as I can see!" she 
 answered in her anger and chagrin, and then, as she 
 saw that he was hurt by this harsh and abrupt dis- 
 illusionment, she was sorry for him and added, to 
 soften the shock a little: "If you go further back 
 from the shore, you'll find the people you know." 
 
 "Thank you very much," he replied, and walked 
 slowly up toward the shadows. 
 
 Terror shrouded her heart; she was sickened by 
 the realization that the answer she had just given 
 the clergyman was horribly like the answers she had 
 received when she first arrived in Hades. She 
 had come just like that poor man, with hopes and 
 interests and desires; and now, in so short a time, her 
 attitude toward him was exactly like theirs toward 
 
Emily in Hades 153 
 
 her: morose, indifferent to others, unwilling to be 
 questioned at all — because it reminded one too 
 sharply of one's own first blank failures and wounds. 
 
 She suddenly ran down to Charon, who was just 
 pulling off from the shore. 
 
 "Oh, won't you take me away from here, please ?" 
 she cried. "Take me to some other country — 
 somewhere where the people are different! I want 
 to see people entirely different from these people 
 here ! There must be millions of people more in- 
 teresting than these — people who lived in Europe 
 hundreds of years ago." (She was thinking of the 
 picturesque figures in historical romances.) "I've 
 never been to Europe in my life. Won't you take 
 me where the Europeans are?" 
 
 "All right. Get in," assented Charon. "But 
 you'll find it doesn't make much difference in the 
 long run." 
 
 She stretched herself on her back, to think, at 
 the bottom of the boat, and stared up at the desert of 
 sky, which was everywhere the same. There was no 
 play of shadows here, but a topless height of space. 
 It must be infinity, she thought. One looked up and 
 lost oneself in deep unvaulted distances, where there 
 were no sun and no stars for the homeless eye to 
 cling to and for the imagination to accept as a sort of 
 ceiling for the world. And there was no air to col- 
 our space with comfortable layers of blue; the abyss 
 was perfectly colourless, at once limpid and dim. It 
 was infinity, it was nothing; it affronted and terri- 
 
154 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 fied the soul. One was drowned in it as one looked ; 
 one was choked, like a fish out of the water, filled 
 to bursting with that vast negation, which one could 
 neither breathe nor feel. 
 
 She turned away swimming eyes and watched the 
 passing of the shore. So exactly alike was every part 
 to every other part that she would not have known 
 they were moving at all, if it had not been for the 
 furrows which streaked the dim water faintly in 
 lines that flickered a little. And as she watched for 
 uncounted hours the interminable ribbon of the land 
 lying low and narrow and dark beneath its burden of 
 shadows, the passionate impulse to revolt, the fierce 
 demand for life and colour, all the shuddering intol- 
 erable anguish of her baffled and breaking heart 
 seemed to melt away in the air, as if it were ab- 
 sorbed by space, seemed to fade and dull and go to 
 sleep, leaving listless vacuity behind them, like high 
 resolutions forgotten in the heat of a summer 
 day. . . . 
 
 At last, they turned in toward the shore. She 
 gazed languidly before her. What she saw did not 
 differ at all from the shore they had just left be- 
 hind and she contemplated it without thought, un- 
 mindful of what she had come for. . . . 
 
 Charon roused her when they were beached. 
 "You can get out now," he said. 
 
 She summoned her attention with an effort and 
 climbed down out of the boat. A little of her hope 
 returned; she felt a faint echo of excitement. 
 
Emily in Hades 155 
 
 "Are the people really different here?" 
 
 "Yes: they're different," said the old man; and 
 he put out to sea again. 
 
 And again she confronted the barren shore, with 
 its blurred forest of shadows. . . . 
 
 A figure stood before her, a figure in a long gown. 
 She could not tell at first whether it was a woman or 
 a man, but, when she had come quite close, she saw 
 that it was a man, who wore his hair rather long 
 and dressed in high stockings, like tights. His com- 
 plexion was very dark and his eyes were so large and 
 black that, with no light to make them shine, they 
 looked like great oval pits sunk deep beneath his 
 brows. 
 
 "I beg your pardon," she said, "but can you tell 
 me where I am?" 
 
 "This is Greece," the man replied, — "Greece of 
 the Vllth century before Christ." He spoke with 
 a curious accent. 
 
 "And are you a Greek?" she inquired. 
 
 "No: I am an Italian," he answered, " — an Ital- 
 ian of the XVIth century. I am a stranger here 
 like yourself." He smiled a little as he spoke and 
 she felt that she was going to like him. He had not 
 the hangdog look of the Americans she had met, 
 but held himself even in Hades with a certain dig- 
 nity and pride. 
 
 "I am an American," she explained, "but I don't 
 want to stay with the Americans." 
 
 "What is it you want?" he asked. 
 
156 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 "Oh, I don't know!" she repHed. "More life, 
 I suppose." 
 
 "Don't you know there is no life here?" he said 
 gently. "You must not look for life here." 
 
 "I want a different kind of people then," she got 
 out, feeling helpless and foolish. 
 
 "I know," he answered, "I know ... I wanted a 
 different kind of people, too, when I first came down 
 to Hades. I had fallen in love with the Greece 
 that was dead and I thought my own time a bar- 
 barous one. Now, the people of your age, I am 
 told, think my own century very beautiful." 
 
 "And is that the reason you came here?" 
 
 "That was a part of the reason. But it was not 
 only Greece I loved." 
 
 "Oh, tell me what love was like," she begged, 
 "when you were alive. That's what I want to hear 
 so much. Please tell me what love was like then !" 
 
 He smiled again. "Did you think that love was 
 more perfect then than now? Did you think I 
 should tell you some wonderful tale of desire ful- 
 filled and still kept? Ah, never since Daphne 
 turned to laurel was desire so little satisfied as mine. 
 F'or even the nuns who espouse Jesus Christ have 
 their husband after a fashion; and even Dante pos- 
 sessed Beatrice by believing it was her spirit he wor- 
 shipped and by recreating that spirit himself more 
 noble than it ever really was. But for me there 
 was no mystic union and no high exaltation of the 
 
Emily in Hades 157 
 
 soul. I had nothing but torture and burning thirst 
 and intolerable longing! 
 
 "I was a poet and scholar on earth — a scholar 
 who knew Greek. That was a rare thing in my 
 time, because Greek had been buried for centuries. 
 When we first read Plato and Homer, our minds 
 seemed flooded with the sun. We rode through the 
 country to rescue Greek from the ignorance of the 
 monasteries, as our ancestors had ridden to save Pal- 
 estine from the hands of the unbeliever. I rode in 
 the service of Apollo; but Apollo destroys his ser- 
 vants. For one day I found the poems of Sappho in 
 the filthy refectory of a monastery. It was a greasy 
 and worm-eaten volume wounded with great holes 
 and stains, and scrawled by the swinish monks with 
 caricatures and accounts. But to me it was as if a 
 goddess had been lifted again from the earth, 
 not merely in the coldness of marble, dull and silent 
 and stiff, but moving in divine beauty, with divine 
 music on her lips. For we had thought Sappho 
 lost forever, when our barbarous ancestors burned 
 her poems. 
 
 "With the scholar's jealous greed, I told no one 
 v/hat I had found. There were better scholars than 
 I; I could not have borne to have them read it 
 sooner. With the little Greek that I knew and the 
 strangeness of the dialect, (though it seemed to me 
 that the ^Eolian forms did but make them darker 
 and richer), it was more than two years before the 
 
158 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 poems had dropped their masks for my eyes. But 
 when I had forced the forest of the text, all bristling 
 and tangled to the eye, to give up the beauty It con- 
 cealed, I was straightway an adorer and slave ! — It 
 was a woman shaken by passion, yet with the cold 
 intelligence of a man, an artist controlling her ter- 
 rible cries with the subtle conscience of a critic. 
 Who ever heard of such a woman? — a woman with 
 passion and reason, and a supreme poet as well ! I 
 loved her as I had never loved any real living 
 woman, yet she troubled and tortured my soul. 
 Not only was I troubled as all men are troubled by 
 women who choose women for lovers, but I was 
 driven mad to realize that no lover, either woman 
 or man, could ever quench her fierce longing or cure 
 her noble chagrin. — Here was a woman whom no 
 lover could satisfy, who could never find love final. 
 She gave herself up to beauty with a passion that 
 never scrupled; but at the end there was always bit- 
 terness : love lasted such a little while ; it was not she 
 who did not want to keep it. It was not she who 
 slew It so soon; she grieved its death as much as any. 
 
 The cadence "Hpa/xav fJ.ev eyw (TtOtv^ "AtOl^ TTciAat Trora 
 
 — 'Once did I love thee, Atthls, long ago' — de- 
 stroyed my soul with its beauty and Its cruel definlte- 
 ness. — I shuddered with the fear that, even had I 
 lived in Lesbos, I could never really have possessed 
 her. 
 
 "I shut myself up from the common world. I no 
 longer cared for my friends: however brilliant they 
 
Emily in Hades 159 
 
 might be, they had not Sappho's passion; and still 
 less could I bear common women : however beautiful 
 or eager, they appeared to me now in my madness 
 like gross, less than human creatures; beside this 
 half-male woman, they were hardly women at all; 
 the smoothness and roundness of their bodies, which 
 had once consumed me with delight, had now no 
 more magic for me than the smoothness and round- 
 ness of worms. — At last, I could neither sleep nor 
 work. I could think of nothing but Sappho. All 
 day and all night the music of her poems sounded 
 exquisitely through my mind and every lift and fall 
 of its beauty gave me exquisite pain. I stumbled 
 about my business, leaving everything unfinished; I 
 would suddenly stop, like a madman, in the midst 
 of what I was doing, and stand dazed and unseeing 
 for hours, crucified by that strange jealousy. Till, 
 at last one day, insane, in a rage against the cruel 
 beauty which had robbed me of my own life and for- 
 bidden me to live in hers, I burned all my copies of 
 the poems, that men might never suffer by them, and 
 then, taking ship for the East, threw my body into 
 the sea — and desire ceased with my breath.". . . 
 But to Emily the story seemed fantastic and un- 
 intelligible. He was interested in his life, it was 
 true; which none of the Americans had been; though 
 he had been dead for hundreds of years before they 
 were born. But all this passion about a book ! She 
 thought that he must be mad; he had said some- 
 thing about madness in his story. — And, besides, her 
 
i6o The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 attention had flagged; she was deadened by languor 
 again; and the passionate language he spoke 
 was one she had never learned. . . . 
 
 "Did you come here to see Sappho?" she asked. 
 
 "Yes. I have been here ever since I died." 
 
 "I should like to see her, too," she said, though, 
 now that she was back in history, she found that it 
 interested her less than she had thought it would. 
 
 "You must let me take you to her," he answered, 
 and led her up towards the shadows. 
 
 "But how can I talk to her?" asked Emily. "She 
 can't understand English, can she?" 
 
 "Oh, yes," said the scholar, "she has learned it." 
 
 "But do people learn things down here? The 
 Americans I saw back there weren't learning or do- 
 ing anything." 
 
 "It depends on one's interest in life," he explained. 
 
 "If one's love for it is strong enough, one goes on 
 being interested for a while; but in the end one's in- 
 terest always flags and finally dissolves altogether. 
 When I first came to Hades, for example, I was 
 eager to learn Greek from the Greeks and I studied 
 it here for a while; but now I do not trouble any 
 longer. Even Sappho, whose thirsty mind went on 
 drinking knowledge for ages, has ceased to be thirsty 
 at last." 
 
 "And does everything fade then? Does nothing 
 remain in Hades?" 
 
 "Only beauty," he replied, "the memory of 
 beauty.". . . 
 
Emily in Hades i6i 
 
 But she did not understand. Walking passively 
 at his side, she felt that historical people were liter- 
 ary and dull. No doubt Sappho was a "highbrow," 
 too. . , . 
 
 And at last they came to a woman sitting naked 
 on the ground. She was not beautiful with the 
 classic exactness which Emily had seen in pictures 
 of her. Indeed, her features in themselves were 
 plain — except for the large dark eyes; the nose 
 was much too prominent, with nostrils very large, 
 and the mouth was wide, like a man's. But her 
 proud body was so beautiful that it terrified Emily 
 a little; the breasts were neither flabby nor flat, like 
 the breasts of many women she had seen, and she 
 bore them with the same dignity and grace as she 
 held her alert little head; and the legs, which were 
 folded beneath her, were very smooth and strong. 
 And, though now but the surface of a shadow, with- 
 out blood or freshness or light, her dark skin seemed 
 even in Hades to glow with a kind of lustre, that 
 showed sharply against the dimness, almost with the 
 brightness of flesh. 
 
 As she gazed at this figure — as little self-con- 
 scious, as little soft as a man's — Emily felt herself 
 terribly ashamed of her own meagre body and 
 wished that she had not left her night-gown. How 
 thin, how wretched she appeared! What a bony 
 little scarecrow of a creature! She wished she had 
 never come; it was scarcely worth the discomfort. 
 She wanted now only to get away, to be somewhere 
 
1 62 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 by herself, where she could forget all these ghastly 
 meetings, where she would never have to think about 
 anything! Everything in life was like that; she de- 
 sired now only to resign herself. 
 
 But the woman looked up in her face with a quick 
 and inquiring Interest. Emily had seen nothing so 
 vivid in Hades. 
 
 "This is a little Amerian girl who has come a long 
 way to see you," the scholar began to explain. 
 
 Something In that strange plain face, so dark- 
 ened with a knowledge and passion which were un- 
 familiar to Emily and which troubled and frightened 
 her a little, but so beautiful even in its phantom 
 from the hot Intensity of the spirit, which still 
 smouldered and brooded In Hades, like an Inextin- 
 guishable flame, moved Emily to burst out abruptly, 
 In a violent unsteady voice, with all that was left of 
 her rebellion and her desperate chagrin: 
 
 "Oh, you have known love," she cried. "Tell me : 
 why have I never known love? All my life I have 
 waited for it, but It was never love that came to me. 
 Must I wait forever down here, without even the 
 hope of knowing It? Am I Incapable of love? 
 Who Is it who has robbed me of It? Did people live 
 so very differently, then, when you were on earth? 
 Were there young girls then as free and brave and 
 as beautiful as you? Tell me, tell me ! What must 
 I do to become as you were then? What dreams 
 did you let yourselves dream? What thoughts of 
 men did you think? Was there once another sort 
 
Emily in Hades 163 
 
 of lov^e less clumsy and unkind than now? Is love 
 cooling off like the sun? Did it die with the an- 
 cient world?" 
 
 The woman's face seemed to darken, almost as 
 if it were flushing. But she did not speak for a 
 moment. And Emily, abashed at her speech, 
 dropped piteous eyes to the ground; they fell upon 
 a kind of harp, with graceful lines like a vase. 
 For a moment, a spring of hope and relief was 
 opened in her heart, as it occurred to her that here 
 at last she was perhaps going to listen to the music 
 she had waited for all her life. 
 
 "Do you play on this?" she asked shyly. 
 
 "No," said Sappho, "my lyre is broken." 
 
 And then Emily noticed that, indeed, the strings 
 were twisted like tendrils on the shafts of the nar- 
 row frame. 
 
 She looked up in disappointment and saw that the 
 woman was weeping. 
 
 "Oh, don't cry on my account!" she exclaimed, "I 
 really don't mind being dead!" 
 
 "It is not because you are dead that I am weep- 
 ing," she replied, and then drew Emily down with 
 beautiful shadowy arms whose embrace she could 
 not feel. "Sit down beside me here," she said. "I 
 wish that I could help you, my poor child. But I 
 cannot help you now!" 
 
The Death of God 
 
 My spirit is a bow unstrung, 
 My strength is as a twisted pod, 
 Yet I remember, once, a young 
 Exultant, wind-flushed, passionate god — 
 Who fled down the green colourless wave, 
 Burning the silence with a glittering scale. 
 Yet found no coral and no sea's floor; 
 Who plunged and soared and poised, but gave 
 Care to no thought but that his flail 
 Threshed a gold sheaf on an idle floor; 
 Who knew not whence he came, nor cared 
 While there remained that opening door 
 And a cloudy flight of palaces, staired 
 With mirrors, fragments of a separate sun. 
 Ages were woven and woven, unspun. 
 Before the delight of winnowed hair. 
 Of diving sheer from the whirlwind's brim, 
 Of feeling the runnels of space on bare 
 Unwearied limbs could weary him. 
 But slowly a questionless vast despair 
 Hooded his brain; on his heart an ache 
 Knocked like a sword against the thigh. 
 The winds were no longer stiff to slake 
 The thirst I had — for the god was 1 1 
 Centuries circled past with a cry 
 
 164 
 
The Death of God 165 
 
 Like baying hounds. At last I arose 
 And plunged into the burning gyres 
 Where the intensest sun-slag glows, 
 And churned the spindrift till it whirled 
 Rocketing colours, metallic fires, 
 Vermilion, cobalt, frost and black-rose. 
 Urged by a blind, dark, sultry lust 
 I trampled the blazoned clouds of dust 
 Like a wild stallion in a pound — 
 Fire upon dust, dust upon spark — 
 Till a huge uncouth unthought of world 
 Went toppling blindly down the dark 
 With a hot unwieldy sound: 
 And wonder was then like a sudden wound! 
 
 Ages and ages were smuggled away 
 
 While I shaped with slowly subtle hand 
 
 A universe I had not planned: 
 
 Suns of inviolate sapphire burning 
 
 With stars to circle upon their light. 
 
 Choruses to one high voice returning; 
 
 Suns of amber and bluish light. 
 
 Shaken like dew on the boughs of night; 
 
 Comets with fluttering fetlocks and long tossing 
 
 manes, 
 Plunging in triumph against their stiff reins. 
 Thudding a dust of white fire from their hoofs; 
 And the stars that have stars for company 
 When they sit at feast under heaven's roofs 
 And utter a sweet articulate cry. 
 
i66 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Then out of a white wind wandering came 
 
 Lovely spirits nimbed in flame 
 
 Even against that illumined air; 
 
 Stripling they moved, 
 
 Bending each on each a remote stare 
 
 From arrogant eyes that were wise in love, 
 
 Dripping a sun's rain from smooth thighs 
 
 As they moved. 
 
 And some of them had strength enough 
 
 To have followed with speed, unsandalled, un- 
 
 mewed. 
 The galloping thunders of the sun; 
 And some wore pointed wings upon 
 Poised and tremulous heels, subdued — 
 With a thin crescent of lifted wings, 
 Ivory-rich misted with silver — the flame 
 Which dawned a rose ardour from bright hair 
 Kindled and unbound by the great pair 
 Which from their shoulders beat or fluttered. 
 But all were courteous in their pride 
 Save one, lucescent as his name. 
 Who, when he would have spoken, uttered 
 A thin cry, dropped to his knees, and gazed 
 Down where the stars were, intricately mazed 
 As gleams of green phosphorus in the tide; 
 Crouched in a glare like one who has sent 
 Thick bloodhounds on his own son's scent 
 And looks into a network of winds. 
 Then gathering to his feet 
 He made as if his hands would beat 
 
The De ath of God 167 
 
 A dancing measure; and a song 
 Demon-sweet and wild and strong 
 Made his face strange — a song of light 
 And colours wheeling in the light, 
 Vermilion, saffron, blue-green and blue, 
 And the blind and unimaginable hue 
 Which trembles beyond the terror of white; 
 All things that were and things unknown : 
 Blindness of suns and staggering stars. 
 The red-brass pomp of battle cars, 
 The scraping of spears against a throne. 
 And all that high unsorrowing throng 
 Were hid from each other by their tears, 
 And pressed white brows, because of the song 
 Which Lucifer made among his peers. 
 And I too, sitting among them there. 
 Knew beauty's intimate despair. 
 And dreamed of a green, wide-islanded star 
 With one white moon to follow her, 
 A place where immortal beauty should sit 
 With mortal eyes to ponder it. 
 
 And afterwards I remember, remember, 
 
 We sat like stars in the sun's feast chamber, 
 
 And I shared with them my mind; 
 
 And brooding upon their litheness assigned 
 
 Each a rollicking planet to ride, 
 
 A moon to tame, or to sit upon 
 
 A huge, unruly, turbulent sun. 
 
 I taught them all my wit had learned. 
 
i68 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 How starry speed was qualified 
 
 By bulk and distance; why this one burned 
 
 And that rolled darkling: all that I knew 
 
 And all I guessed might well be true. 
 
 They leapt and clashed their ivory spears, 
 
 And shouted; and down through the regions of 
 
 night and morn 
 Fled like partridges frightened from corn. 
 I turned that none might see my tears. 
 
 And after, long after, I shaped a star 
 
 With one white moon to follow her. 
 
 A place where immortal beauty should sit 
 
 With mortal eyes to ponder it. 
 
 There out of odour, sound and colour 
 
 I made those shapes which seemed to wear 
 
 In the bronze lustre of that undimmed air 
 
 A beauty elaborate and austere, 
 
 Which now is shadowed, or grown duller 
 
 Than an old man's wit to a young man's ear. 
 
 I made all forms of greenery 
 Under the air or beneath the sea: 
 The tree that like a fountain soars. 
 The tree that like a cloud downpours 
 In a rustling rain of silver leaves; 
 The tree whose petals are gold at noon 
 And moonlight coloured in the moon; 
 And every sort of tree that weaves 
 
The Death of God 169 
 
 A net of leaves from limb to limb. 
 
 I made green beetles smouldering dim 
 
 And pheasants fanned to a golden glare 
 
 In the white furnace of the air: 
 
 And the many strange sea-breathing things 
 
 Which sprawl in jellies and coil in rings, 
 
 Dripping slow slime from viscous eyes 
 
 Amid the deep sea's forestries. 
 
 I made the spider obese and hairy 
 
 And taught him to spin and thread an airy 
 
 Web of colourless polygons, 
 
 And shook against the twisted skein 
 
 Cool bubbles of translucent dew, 
 
 Violet-gold, and Irised rain 
 
 The first windy light comes through 
 
 When hills are lowered before the dawn. 
 
 And still I might feel my breath indrawn 
 
 Could I but see that murderous seine 
 
 Dredging fat flies from the streams of air 
 
 And ugliness dragging up unaware 
 
 The careless iridescent dawn. 
 
 I made when I had learned to smile 
 The knobbed and scaly crocodile, 
 Blue-buttocked, feathery-whiskered apes, 
 And monkeys with brown tendril shapes; 
 I made when I had learned to laugh 
 The painted ludicrous giraffe. 
 The sluggish hippopotamus, 
 
170 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Leathery, lewd, preposterous: 
 
 The dwarfed and bulked grotesquery 
 
 Under the winds and beneath the sea. 
 
 But beauty alone had terror 
 
 To lay delight on my youth, so that I shook 
 
 As when the first of morning ripples to clearer 
 
 Green the swift lustres of a brook. 
 
 And a naked bather wades and is chill. 
 
 Yet never was I so seamed with pain, 
 
 And for her sake, that not one vein 
 
 Was quiet, and carved in wind I ran, 
 
 As when the hour was come to fulfil 
 
 The breathing body of man. 
 
 Lying unstirred, one knee upturned, 
 
 Through ruddy loose hair and the broad 
 
 Sloped shoulders, down to the noble thigh, there 
 
 burned 
 The gracious indolent ardour and 
 Cloudy repose of a god. 
 I breathed on his face, and my breath 
 Went sharp through his side; stretched out my 
 
 hand — 
 A shudder of light tumbled his hair. 
 And he turned his sleep to a stare, aware 
 Of beauty and aware of death. 
 And something came back to my blood, I recalled 
 Lucifer's face, and the circled crowd — 
 Dim crescents of wings, flushed faces enthralled. 
 And the lifted throat despair had made proud ! 
 
The Death of God 171 
 
 It is long since I have done aught but look. 
 
 Through blinkered eyes at images 
 
 Which once had halted my heart's blood, 
 
 As an old man shrunk to a hood 
 
 Sits quiet, pondering a book, 
 
 For which in his youth he had foregone ease, 
 
 Or the mouth of a girl, or gold. 
 
 Crouched over my bones and old, 
 
 I have long leaned chin upon wrist 
 
 And let my thought twist and untwist 
 
 Like a black weed dragged in a stream, 
 
 And wondered indeed if I exist, 
 
 Or am but the end of a dream. 
 
 Ah, why must all things come upon trouble 
 
 And all that sultry passion seem 
 
 A rustle of wind in the dry stubble — 
 
 Unless from the first I failed in thought? 
 
 The wheels of the chariots were wrought 
 Of purest bronze, but with a broken rim; 
 The unshod chargers fell in the long wars. 
 For all their silver ribaldry the stars 
 Go mad in their courses, a dry skull 
 Rots where the moon was beautiful; 
 The suns were pocked at birth with scars. 
 
 Oh, violent and young, distraught 
 And exulted with undrunk wine, I brought 
 Vast splendours from the earlier night. 
 Yet failed because I held in despite 
 The labour and repose of thought. 
 
172 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Is this shrunk star the flaming dream 
 
 Which came with islands and bright-scaled water, 
 
 Wheeling a dark and radiant rim 
 
 As near and away from the sun it sped? 
 
 Was it for this I sought or 
 
 Sat in labour? for this that Lucifer 
 
 Sang, the unshadowable light-bearer? 
 
 And of man, of man, what shall be said? 
 
 I would my heart were piteous 
 
 That I might pity him! He lifts his head 
 
 So bravely to the sun, is amorous 
 
 Of beauty, conquest and delight; 
 
 Spends blood upon banners; drums the earth 
 
 With adventurous tramplings; shrills the air 
 
 With the insolent envy of his mirth. 
 
 What have I made of him? What — to requite 
 
 A love more desperate than despair? 
 
 A poor creature smeared with his own dung, 
 
 Who struts a little being young 
 
 And has scarcely sounded his own distress 
 
 Before he has crumbled to rottenness. 
 
 Distinguished on a gilded couch 
 
 He mutters under his dying breath 
 
 Of some old plan of lust or wrath, 
 
 Unaccomplished, beyond his touch. 
 
 Or left beneath a broken rafter 
 
 Crouched on a straw heap, unwarmed, alone, 
 
 A stench of frayed flesh about a bone, 
 
 He counts that best which never was. 
 
 Remembering how the wise drew laughter, 
 
The Death of God 173 
 
 And dead madmen were accounted wise; 
 How lovers had but their blinded eyes 
 And Caesar's armies a tune of brass. 
 
 Has the sun no molten core where I may be hid 
 Is there no penitential fire to shrive me? 
 O, man, man, man, forgive me, 
 I wrought, not knowing what I did ! 
 
 I will start up, dragging these bones 
 
 Knee after knee, — if it must be, 
 
 Drag this loose strength, knee after knee, 
 
 And come at last on the shaken thrones 
 
 Of the last golden dynasties 
 
 Of time; startle the suns, and leave their skies 
 
 A smouldering heap of palace stones 
 
 Set in the flaring dusk of a city 
 
 Where none is loud for pain or for pity. 
 
 I will loose the stars from their high stud 
 
 And lash their heavy-hooved stampede 
 
 Till foundering they darken, broken with speed; 
 
 Dabble the moon's face with earth's blood, 
 
 That not one man shall be left at length 
 
 To taunt me with enduring youth. 
 
 I have forgot — I have no strength! 
 
 I am gnawn clean by a ravening tooth. 
 
 The blood in my wrist is so sucked and thinned 
 
 I cannot drag my beard from the wind 
 
 Where its ravelled cords are tossed and lying. 
 
 It is not man but god who is dying! 
 
174 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 But how had I known that a god should grow old 
 And his bright hair thin to a streaked whiteness, 
 His beard fall long and clotted with mould 
 Whose heart had been as the dawn for lightness? 
 How had I dreamt that at last I should look 
 On the stars in their tumult, and find such pain 
 In a world I had thought to have made without stain 
 That my head would sink in my elbow's crook, 
 My throat give sobs in the place of breath, 
 My mouth ask easily after death? 
 
 My face is turned toward death, and yet, 
 
 Weak, bewildered and blind, I grope 
 
 Still for the unappeasable hope 
 
 That sleep, not death, shall touch my brain. 
 
 And touch my eyelids, and restore 
 
 Youth and all youth lacked before. 
 
 It may be I shall start up again 
 
 And put on strength like golden greaves 
 
 To the oily shins of a young man set, 
 
 And shake the stars till they fall like leaves 
 
 In an autumn drift along the air; 
 
 Know tumult again and wisdom, and tear 
 
 In the delighted lust of my heart 
 
 The broad beams of the world apart, 
 
 To build again, in another kind, 
 
 The orbs and whirlwinds of my mind. 
 
Resurrection 
 
 Archer sat in his tent where the air was a shadow 
 cast by stained canvas walls. A mist of tobacco, 
 blue as evening, drifted from his fingers. His mind, 
 restive with idleness, fidgeted with objects, like the 
 hands of a sick child: a cross-legged wooden cot 
 padded with olive blankets, a painted locker trunk, 
 a chair of unplaned wood, a makeshift table holding 
 an empty, brazen shell crammed with branches of 
 dark fragrant green. 
 
 He crushed out the fire of his cigarette and tossed 
 it to the ground. The burnished shell had a 
 sombre glint of green where the dark leaves 
 shadowed it, the green linden leaves and the dan- 
 gling greenish-white clusters, spreading heavily over 
 the rounded brass. He plucked at the threaded 
 flowers, cloying the air with a sweetish smell, dust- 
 ing his hands with sulphur-pale pollen. And the 
 smell brought back to him a scene out of his child- 
 hood in Maryland: a frail, white boy of ten lying 
 between cool sheets on a sunlit bed, begging his 
 mother to bring him an armful of linden, green 
 leaves and the heavy sweet bloom. He remembered 
 the silvery dark trunks of the linden trees which had 
 stood in a curved line on the drive to the house, the 
 
 175 
 
176 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 shaded road and the white stones at the border. 
 How strange it was that this boy of a forgotten 
 May twelve years ago, delicate, with inquisitive 
 grey eyes and hair blond as linden pollen, should be 
 sitting here on this alien field, under Montfaucon, 
 a first lieutenant of Infantry in command of a com- 
 pany of American soldiers, guarding a half thou- 
 sand German prisoners of war. He had thought 
 of many things for that boy, but never, for all the 
 absurdity of his imaginings, of this plain over which 
 the autumn before his own countrymen had fought 
 so long and so hard, over which now the spring 
 wandered like a vagabond, in a discoloured ragged- 
 ness, more desolate than any autumn, 
 
 A week had passed since he had come here, hot 
 without rain. Always it seemed, the sky hung over 
 this difficult land an arid blue, heavy with heat, 
 cloudless. Each morning the German prisoners 
 marched out In a long unwieldy column, with a tithe 
 of guards, to repair the roads broken by shellfire. 
 After them, as soon as the roads were made pass- 
 able, came the trucks, to tear open the ground and 
 recover the scattered slain, to collect these Isolated 
 blanketed dead, box them, and carry them to the 
 slopes of Romagne, there to be relnterred, ranked 
 again In precise lines, with identical white crosses 
 set above them, stained with a name or nameless. 
 Twice daily the trucks went out from the town of 
 Romagne, negro workmen and white non-coms 
 perched on their sides. Twice each day, at noon 
 
Resurrection 177 
 
 _._ ' 
 
 and late in the afternoon, they passed his camp, 
 lumbering heavily, leaving on the air a slow defunc- 
 tive odour, the unmistakable, unforgettable odour 
 of human decay. 
 
 Idle and unutterably lonely, he almost wished that 
 Bleeker were here, Bleeker his second lieutenant 
 whom he had come to hate with all the hatred of 
 exacerbated nerves. Bleeker would come in pres- 
 ently, two days late from his leave in Paris, twist- 
 ing a grin under that absurdly long nose of his. 
 "Lootnant," he would say, "I know I'm overstayed, 
 but I just naturally couldn't get away from the ma- 
 demoselles." He would let his musette bag slide 
 to the ground by drooping one shoulder. . . . Yet 
 it would be a relief of a sort to have Bleeker here 
 again. 
 
 A shadow darkened the sun-stained flap of the 
 tent, and Archer tossed the fragrant twig on the 
 littered table. 
 
 "Come in!" he shouted. 
 
 A soldier drew back the loose flaps and bending 
 came into the tent. 
 
 "Lieutenant, sir, there's a Q. M. lieutenant here 
 from Romagne says you sent for him to take up 
 this grave out'n the stockade." 
 
 The soldier v/as a bulky Georgian who spoke in a 
 plaintive drawl. The cheeks puffed under his pale 
 eyes were glazed with red; his hair was the rainy 
 yellow of hayricks exposed to the wetness of au- 
 tumn. Always ill at ease with oflicers, he stooped 
 
178 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 uncomfortably under the sloping tent to keep his 
 distance. 
 
 "All right, Waters, tell the sergeant I'll be right 
 there." 
 
 "Yes sir." The soldier backed out of the tent. 
 Archer followed him. 
 
 Outside in the dusty sunlight stood a truck ob- 
 structing the roadway, chortling under its long 
 heavy body. Beneath the driver's hood a negro 
 sprawled, his loose forearms hanging over the 
 wheel. Two negro soldiers clothed in blue denim 
 leaped from the board of the truck, dragging after 
 them picks and spades and coils of wire. They 
 moved slowly, grudgingly, like tame crows from 
 their food. 
 
 Across the road the tents of the Americans 
 marched in motionless precision, a double file of 
 ochreous-brown pyramids. To their left, still bor- 
 dering the road, was the stockade, a platoon of can- 
 vas pyramids, rigidly ranked, enclosed by a high 
 fence of weathered posts and the steely glint of 
 barbed wire. From each post arms bent inward 
 hanging a curtain of wire. The sky was a monot- 
 onous haze of dull blue thinning whitely toward the 
 high sun. 
 
 Archer entered the stockade. At the entrance 
 a palish boy presented arms, turning on him the wist- 
 ful eyes of a tired child. Across the stockade fol- 
 lowing the interminable strands of rain-bright wire, 
 another sentry, with drooping head and sagging 
 
Resurrection 179 
 
 bayoneted rifle, paced drowzlly. Before the first 
 tent, the prisoner sergeant major, a small wiry 
 Prussian clad in rusty green, crouched over a wicker 
 basket in which he had imprisoned a magpie. At 
 Archer's approach, he stiffened tautly and clashed 
 his brodequins, his reddish mustaches protruding 
 bushily toward his unseeing eyes, the varnished visor 
 of his cap making a black crescent of light as he 
 moved. Archer saw that a small group of Ameri- 
 cans had collected about the grave. The white 
 cruciform stake was down; a pine box, newly planed 
 and lidless, the length of a man, lay at one side. 
 Over the grave with feet wide apart stood an officer 
 impatient for the negroes to begin. 
 
 "Hullo, Lieutenant. I got your notice, but this 
 is the first chance I've had to get here. We're 
 pretty busy up there at Romagne now — runnin' 'em 
 in at the rate of three hunderd a day now. All 
 right you men, le's go." 
 
 He was an unkempt little man, who, when he 
 talked, jerked his head like a bird, and the wax- 
 like blue film on his eyes made them like a bird's 
 eyes. 
 
 Sullenly the negroes began to dig. The starvel' 
 ing sod, rusty with sorrel, gaped under the strokes 
 of the pick and spat out pebbles and thick clots of 
 clay. The point of the pick overturned clumps of 
 grass, the clinging earth threaded with tiny fila- 
 ments, white as nerves. The first negro tore the 
 sod from the grave and stood back leaning on his 
 
i8o The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 pickhandle, turning his humid brown eyes and 
 stained eyeballs on his companion, who took his 
 place on the grave shovelling away the loose peb- 
 bles and grass, laying bare a level of naked clay. 
 
 The negroes worked alternately, rhythmically, as 
 though to the unheard sound of an obscene savage 
 incantation, marking time with the dull thud of the 
 pick and the steely scraping of the spade against 
 stone. The air, heavy with heat, brought slow 
 drops of sweat from the black, dusted foreheads of 
 the negroes. Sullenly, half timorously, they deep- 
 ened the pit, grunting as they dug. 
 
 The soldiers had at first watched in silence, but 
 it was not in their nature to be long awed by any- 
 thing, and presently they began to bicker among 
 themselves. . . . 
 
 "They could take me out an' shoot me fore I'd 
 touch one of them goddam stiffs." 
 
 "The hell you would too. You'd goddam do 
 what you're told in this army." Archer recognized 
 the voice of the company clerk above the blur of 
 words. 
 
 "Well, you c'n let me chase prisoners, corp." 
 
 "Say, Lieutenant," a sergeant drawled, "Yuh 
 don't hafta put your bans on 'em do yuh?" 
 
 The officer looked up, and Archer noticed that his 
 belt sagged below the waist and that his puttees 
 were dull and clogged with clay. 
 
 "Sure. I go through their pockets and every- 
 thing — you've got rubber gloves on. At first feel- 
 
Resurrection i8i 
 
 ing around for their identification tags gets you a 
 little, but you soon get so's you don't .mind any of 
 it." 
 
 "Yuh don't hafta feel for they tags, do yuh?" 
 
 "You gotta find out if you've got the right man, 
 haven't you? Lots of 'em don't have the same 
 name on their crosses. But we've got pretty nearly 
 all of 'em right now I guess." 
 
 "There ain't nothin' to it." It was the company 
 clerk again, a swarthy youth of twenty with black 
 eyes set wide apart like a Mongolian's and a nose 
 that looked as though it had been broken in child- 
 hood. "My father's an undertaker. He's got the 
 largest undertakin' establishment in Tipville, Indi- 
 ana, and when I was a kid he always wanted me to 
 be an undertaker too. So one night he shut me in 
 a room with a dead corpse and locked the door and 
 kept me there all night so's I wouldn't be afraid no 
 more." 
 
 The officer hovered at the edge of the pit, look- 
 ing, with his crooked nose and blue-filmed eyes like 
 a chicken, like an old cock moulting his dusty and 
 bedraggled plumage. He took the pick from one 
 of the negroes and dug vigorously for a minute. 
 
 "There, that's more like it. Up this way a little. 
 We'll have him out before you know it." 
 
 Maladroitly, stubbornly, the negro placed him- 
 self in the shallow pit to dig again. Already this 
 cleft in the earth was two feet deep and these men 
 were buried, each close to the spot where he had 
 
1 82 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 been killed, with only so much earth as would cover 
 their putrescence. Archer dreaded the moment 
 when the first flesh would be exposed. 
 
 The earth in the hole became cooler and more 
 moist. The negroes no longer dared thrust their 
 heavy feet into the pit, but leaned from the edge, 
 digging slowly and cautiously, pecking at the earth 
 with the steel point, scraping the earth away as 
 soon as it was loosened. Something damp and 
 woolly appeared — a mouldy patch of blanket. The 
 ofl^cer took the pick and straddling the pit deepened 
 the sides, deftly loosening the remaining earth. An 
 equivocal mass, bundled in olive drab wool bulked 
 under the sticky clay. Once where the pit had torn 
 the rotted blanket, it crumbled and pushed out a 
 lichen green grit. 
 
 "Now give me the wire — we'll drag this one out 
 by the shoulders." 
 
 Archer turned away, looking out over that hard 
 arid plain to which the freshness and green of May 
 could bring no relief, nor the sun which elsewhere 
 gilded the earth any colour. The uneven ground 
 was still, after a winter of rain, littered with the re- 
 fuse of battle, knapsacks, pack-carriers, bits of clo- 
 thing, shoes, rifles — everything that could be thrown 
 away in the hurry and despair of fight. Pitted, bro- 
 ken by depressions, the greenish drab soil dragged 
 slowly toward the hills at the sky's edge, the once 
 contented hills, rounded with thickets, their slopes 
 open and fox-red where six months before hollow 
 
Resurrection 183 
 
 shelters had been scooped out by bayonets. In the 
 dizzy blue distance, overtopping the nearer trees, 
 shone the heights of the Argonne ragged with gay 
 green forests. Over them the sky drew thin 
 streamers of hazy white. 
 
 Then he thought: "This is too soft. I'm a 
 damn weak-wad if I can't stand looking at it." 
 And he walked back, keeping close to the barbed 
 wire. 
 
 The soldiers were silent and constrained. The 
 negroes crouched sullenly, blue denim figures bent 
 at the side of the grave, the sweat curdling the dust 
 on their idle black hands. The officer, one foot 
 thrust forward, the other crooked under his weight, 
 tugged at the wire, which held under its lower loops 
 an amorphous mass, caught beneath the armpits. 
 Archer saw first a knitted sweater, still intact but 
 soppy from the putrefaction beneath it. A clayey 
 brown rag was over the face. The taut wire pulled 
 again, sharply; something broke near the throat and 
 a greenish blue substance, like a fowl's ordure, 
 crumbled and fell over the sweater. 
 
 "What the hell ! Give me that pick." 
 
 An arm was embedded in the earth at one side. 
 The pick tore into the soft flesh and the aperture 
 showed a horrid pink; something was left behind 
 in the hard clay. The cadaver began to lift itself 
 from the grave. The jointless head fell back, 
 thickening the greenish ooze on the neck; the un- 
 even arms spread out with each jerk of the wire, 
 
184 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 hunching their slimy sleeves. In the space where 
 the thighs divide a glinting puddle of muck had 
 seeped through the breeches cloth. The legs 
 trailed woodenly. 
 
 The cadaver bent backward over the brink of the 
 pit and dragged heavily on the ground. 
 
 "There 1 he didn't come so badly at that. A lot 
 better'n some of 'em. Now roll him over on the 
 blanket." 
 
 The negroes pushed the lifeless man over the sod 
 and turned his bulk face up on a clean blanket. The 
 officer began palping the dead flesh, searching for 
 the metal disc at the neck. 
 
 Disgust clutched at Archer's sides. It was hor- 
 rible that this putrescent thing sprawling on the 
 ground should have been a few months before a 
 boy, fine with youth, warm and strong. He had 
 thought of death in battle as something clean and 
 swift in its anguish. He had thought it a desirable 
 thing that life should go out violently when the 
 blood was at its full and the body unspent. He 
 had never dreaded death, only manglement and dis- 
 ease and the slow dissolution of time. But here 
 the body was not utterly dead; it had acquired a 
 new life in its very putrefaction. It would go on 
 for a long time yet, still younger than the earth in 
 which it was hidden, not utterly dead as the dust 
 and stones are dead. 
 
 He stared down into the violated pit. The clay 
 
Resurrection 185 
 
 looked mildewed. Black flies were dangled in the 
 air. Hands were fumbling at a green discoloured 
 throat. Wires were wheeling in circles of steel 
 with tiny prickles of light. His stomach was turn- 
 ing with the wires. His eyes were being jabbed by 
 the steel barbs. That was why he was so hot. He 
 must get away ... to his tent ... it was 
 cool there with linden boughs and shadowy and 
 sweet. 
 
 Behind him walked the southern sergeant and the 
 company clerk. 
 
 "I bet them black bastards thinks about ghosts 
 the rest of their life." 
 
 "Well, that's all they're fit for, ain't they? 
 Every time they put 'em in to fight they run — right 
 over in these woods here — the black sons o' bitches 
 ain't fit for gun fodder!" 
 
 He walked back to the road, dragging a shadow 
 not cast by the sun. The rumbling of trucks bump- 
 ing all day long over the roads, with jangling chains 
 and strident gears, trailing the same pervasive odour 
 of decay; the blanketed mass he had just seen, with 
 its poor upturned face, had broken down within him 
 some last wall of resisting flesh. Even the air 
 seemed to belong to the dead, and this plain, lying 
 as it did midway between the Argonne Hills and 
 the Meuse, had, perhaps because he was an Ameri- 
 can, become to him the centre of all the rotting des- 
 olation which filled the world. 
 
1 86 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 ' — — t 
 
 On one side of the road, rising behind his own 
 tent, was a green slope, topped with thickets, where 
 the spring renewed itself remorselessly. And on 
 one side was that desolate plain where so many of 
 the young had died. He stared at the dessicated 
 grass and the dun weeds, the earth pocked and fe- 
 ver skinned, made sterile by long pain. His 
 squeamishness gave way to pity, pity for himself and 
 the others. After all, it would have been better he 
 thought, better than this, to have gone in the carn- 
 age and assault of war — not to feel the pain of de- 
 sire any more, to have the rain run through his body 
 as once the blood had run, to have his bones grow 
 old under earth, not to be, or to be only as those 
 others were, to share the dark, vindictive life of the 
 earth, and not to know. 
 
 Some one was talking in his tent; Bleeker must 
 have come back. He felt at that moment too utterly 
 exposed to bear the level look of Bleeker's indecent 
 eyes, and stood, nerveless and cold, outside the tent, 
 turning his face toward the blue, brutal glare of 
 noon. The negroes returned to the truck, carrying 
 picks and spades. The smoke from the mess shack 
 thickened darkly against the sun; under their shed 
 the cooks moved between the tables and the fires like 
 ruddy shadows. After all he was but a man among 
 others. Lifting the flap he went into the tent. 
 
 Bleeker was standing in the centre of the tent, his 
 cap set jauntily on one side, talking to his orderly. 
 
 "Hello Lootnant! I'm back at last, and boy, I 
 
Resurrection 187 
 
 want to tell you I've drunk so much champagne in 
 the last five days, I'm just naturally breathing bub- 
 bles." 
 
 Archer sat down on his cot. The orderly left 
 the tent. 
 
 "r was all set to come back night 'fore last, and 
 then I thought I'll just go down to the Olympia and 
 have one more look at* the mademoselles 'fore I 
 came back. Well I was standin' there at the bar 
 downstairs, with my foot cocked on the rail. And 
 there was one of these tousled blonds sittin' on one 
 of those high stools, you know, and I was kiddin' 
 her along — she wasn't a bit bad — she didn't have 
 no stockings on, just bare legs the whole way, and 
 high heel slippers — when in comes my old captain 
 out of the Thirty-eighth, with two of the best look- 
 in' janes you ever saw. And, boy, I was lost right 
 there. I just said, 'Good-bye, Montfaucon!' I 
 just couldn't get away till this, morning." 
 
 "It's all right. There wasn't much of anything 
 to do." 
 
 "I didn't think there would be, and anyhow this 
 was somethin' too good to pass up. 
 
 "You don't have to check out no more with the 
 M. P.'s. You know how they used to be in Paris. 
 But I was kinda skittish, so I eased down to the sta- 
 tion this morning about five o'clock. And the first 
 goddam thing I saw when I got there was an M. P. 
 I kept one eye slanted on him and started beatin' it 
 for the train, when up he comes, and salutes just as 
 
1 88 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 nice as you please, and says, 'Can I show the Lieu- 
 tenant where to get his ticket?' and 'Where's the 
 Lieutenant goin' ?' and 'That's your track, sir.' 
 Boy, you could've knocked me down with a feather. 
 By the way, I got some good cognac here — five star 
 stuff. How 'bout a drink before mess?" 
 
 "Well . . . yes, give me a drink." 
 
 Archer tipped the bottle to his mouth, scraping 
 his throat with the raw liquor, warming and com- 
 forting his stomach. 
 
 Bleeker slung his musette bag over his shoulder. 
 "I think I'll take a look in at my tent, and dump this 
 junk before mess," he said, "Take another drink." 
 
 Archer stared for a moment at the young officer 
 in front of him with his hard assertive air and the 
 voice that seemed to start from too far down in 
 his throat. It did not much matter that he had 
 come back. 
 
 "Here's yesterday's paper, if you want to see It," 
 Bleeker turned and, stooping, went out of the tent. 
 
 Archer picked up the paper, the Paris edition of 
 an American journal. Fashionable people were ar- 
 riving at fashionable hotels, dining in company, be- 
 ing entertained by Napoleonic princesses. The 
 Peace Conference had met in the Hall of Mirrors 
 in the Palace of Versailles. The German emissary 
 had, with characteristic arrogance, remained stand- 
 ing while addressing the elderly and elegant Allied 
 politicians. There had been a loud outcry. The 
 Y. M. C. A. was holding boxing bouts at the Palais 
 
Resurrection 189 
 
 de Glace, to provide the American soldiers on leave 
 with wholesome and moral amusement. 
 
 Staring distractedly at the obscure print, he 
 thought of all these impotent fastidious people in 
 Paris who, whatever they touched of civilized 
 thought and grace, left it inane; he saw that they 
 represented a desolation no less complete than the 
 abrupt height of Montfaucon, and the hillside under 
 it pitted with open graves, empty now as tombs of 
 the resurrection. For the rest there was Bleeker, 
 with thick reddish skin and hard mouth, standing 
 with legs apart loosening a bawdy tale. And he 
 hated Bleeker. 
 
 He flung himself on the canvas cot and lay there 
 with arms distended, his face rubbing against the 
 soiled pillow, his thoughts wheeling confusedly as 
 bubbles in an uneven stream. He resented fiercely 
 being held here, trapped and held in this charnel 
 place, away from the dizzy green and gay abandon 
 of cities, the sidewalks fragrant and rustling with 
 silk. What wild joy it would be but to stretch his 
 legs under the tables in painted cafes, and to drink, 
 to drink long. 
 
 Anywhere would be better than here, where the 
 water was tainted and the soil dead, and even the 
 air came unclean. In Paris whatever was left of 
 life ran at the full. The sunlight came to the streets 
 strained through a green net of leaves, and the 
 night would be filled with lights and amorous voices, 
 and women were there who could be bought for a 
 
190 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 night and forgotten in the morning. Nothing was 
 left but the fine vigour of his body, still young, and 
 beginning to stir with heat from the liquor he had 
 drunk. He lay on his cot stretched with resentment 
 and sultry desires until aflame through his whole 
 length with youth and loneliness. 
 
 Bleeker thrust his ruddy face between the flaps of 
 the tent. 
 
 "What t' hell's the matter, Lootnant! Mess is 
 ready, let's go. I'm as hungry as a hound dog. I 
 didn't have nothin' this morning but some bread and 
 coffee. And last night was a hard night too, I'm 
 tellin' you." 
 
 "All right. I'm not very hungry, but I guess 
 there's nothing else to do." Then he said, "I might 
 go to Paris myself if I can get a leave through." 
 
 Outside, he stooped for a moment to twist and 
 fasten the loose ribbon of his spiral puttee. 
 Bleeker glanced across the road. 
 
 "You've had that grave taken up out of the 
 stockade, I see," he said, "haven't you?" 
 
 "Yes," said Archer, "They came for him this 
 morning." And straightening his body he felt the 
 sun warm on his face and hands, and the light of 
 May burnished his uncovered hair. 
 
Epilogue 
 
 Nay, Pluto/ I have dwelt with death too long! 
 
 My spirit chafes; the darkness cannot hold me. 
 These lips were shaped to frame a freer song 
 
 Before the strengthless shadows shall enfold me/ 
 Apollo, Phoebus/ hear me while I pray: 
 
 Consume the tears, the bitterness, the wrath! 
 
 thou who didst the Pythian serpent slay, 
 
 Slay thou the Furies who make black my path/ 
 
 Well do I know how, terrible and clear. 
 
 Thou cam'st to Krissa with a blaze so white 
 The women trembled and cried out for fear 
 
 And veiled their dazzled faces from the sight; 
 Well do I know how, speeding with the ships. 
 
 To Sirmio from Lesbos, a fierce ray. 
 Thy word was borne to light on Sirmian lips 
 
 The fire that burns the centuries away. 
 
 Apollo, Phcebus/ thou who dwell'st in fire. 
 
 Breathing no life save where thou dost destroy. 
 
 Who leav'st thy lovers wounded with desire. 
 Distraught with passion, shuddering with joy; 
 
 1 would be borne by fire, as by a wind, 
 
 I would make dumb all voices with a note 
 That stops mens hearts — until mine eyes be blind 
 With splendour and till singing burst my throat/- 
 
 igi 
 
192 The Undertaker's Garland 
 
 Till those who cried in terror and in hate 
 Against the flame that brands my brow — at last. 
 
 Finding my flesh so charred^ so Utile great, 
 
 Shall hush to know that here a god has passed! 
 
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