Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (622 page)

TO ALL THE DEA
D

I

A CHINESE Queen on a lacquered throne
With a dragon as big as the side of a house,
All golden, and silent and sitting alone
In an empty house.
With the shadows above and the shadows behind,
And the Queen with a paper white, rice white face,
As still as a partridge, as still as a mouse,
With slanting eyes you would say were blind —
In a dead white face.

And what does she think, and what does she see,
With her face as still as a frozen pool is,
And her air as old as the oldest sea,
Where the oldest ice of the frozen Pole is?

She should have been dead nine thousand year...
But there come in three score and sixty coolies
With a veil of lawn as large as a lake,
And the veil blows here and shimmers there
In the unseen winds of the shadowy house.
And dragons flew in the shadowy air,
And there were chrysanthemums everywhere,
And butterflies and a coral snake
All round the margin of the lake.

For the Prince has come to court the Queen
Still sitting on high on her lacquered throne
With the golden dragon: and all the sheen
And shimmer and shine of a thousand wantons
In silken stuffs, with ivory lutes
And slanting eyes and furred blue boots
That moved in the light of a thousand lanthorns...

It all dies down, and the Queen sits there,
She should have been dead nine thousand year.

II

Now it happened that in the course of to-day
(The Queen was last night) in the rue de la Paix
In a room that was old and darkish and musty,
For most of the rooms are quaintly cranky
In the rue de la Paix,
For when it was new the Grande Armée
Tramped all its legions down this way.

But I sat there, and a friendly Yankee
Was lecturing me on the nature of things
(It’s a way Americans have!) He was cranky,
Just as much as his rooms and his chairs and his tables.
But the window stood open and over the way
I saw that the house with the modernest facings
Had an old tiled roof with mansards and gables.
It housed a jeweller, two modistes,
A vendor of fans; and the topmost sign
Announced in a golden double line
A salon of Chinese chiropodists.

And that is Paris from heel to crown
Plate-glass in the street and jewels and lacings
And cranky rooms on the upper floors
With rusty locks and creaking doors

But of what my American friend was saying
I haven’t a thought — there was too much noise
Through the open windows — the motors braying,
The clatter of hoofs in a steady stream,
And a scream
Unceasing from twenty paper boys,
With twenty versions to take your choice,
In styles courageous or gay or rococo,
Of clamorous news about Morocco...

III

And suddenly he said: “Sandusky!”
Now what was he talking of there in his musky,
Worm-eaten rooms of the rue de la Paix?
 
— Of his youth of jack rabbits and peanuts and snakes
When all was silent about the Lakes.
Now what is the name of them? Lake Ladoga?
No, no, that’s in Russia. It’s Ticonderoga,
Ontario, Champlin, each with their woods,
And never a house for miles and miles
And the boys in their boats floated on by the piles
Of old wigwams where shreds of blankets dangled.
And they caught their jack rabbits, lit bonfires and angled
In shallows for catfish. That’s it, in Sandusky!
The Bay of Sandusky.

And then I remembered with grey, clear precision,
And I saw — yes I saw — looking over the way
Two Chinese chiropodists, villainous fellows,
With faces of sulphur — and lemon — yellows,
Gaze with that gaze that’s half fanatic,
Part atrocious and partly sweet,
Each from a window of his own attic
At a mannequin on my side of the street,
And each grinned and girned in his Manchester blue,
And smirked with his eyes and his pig-tail too.
And somehow they made me feel sick; but I lost them
At the word “Sandusky.” A landscape crossed them;
A scene no more nor less than a vision,
All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

It must have been seven years ago,
I was out on a river whose name I’ve forgotten;
The Hudson perhaps or the Kotohotten.
It doesn’t much matter. Do you know the Hudson?
A sort of a Moselle with New York duds on,
There are crags and castles, a distance all grey,
Rocks, forests and elbows. But castles of Jay
And William H. Post and Mrs Poughkeepsie —
Imagine a Moselle that’s thoroughly tipsy,
A nightmare of ninety American castles
With English servants trained up like vassals,
Of Hiram P. Ouese who’s a fortune from pills for the liver.

Anyhow, I’ve forgotten the name of the river.

And the steamer steamed upwards between the hills
And passed through the rapids they called the
Narrows
‘Twixt the high grey banks where the firs grow jagged,
And the castles ceased and the forest grew ragged,
And the steamer belched forth sparks and stayed
At a wooden village, then grunted and swayed
Out to midstream and round a reach
Where the river widened and swirled about,
And we slowed in the current where black snags stuck out,
And suddenly we saw a beach —

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds
That seemed to silence the steamer’s sounds;
So still and old and grey and ragged.
For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows,
The Indian graves —

IV

And it wasn’t so much the wampumed Braves,
Eagle feathers, jade axes and totems and arrows
That I thought about, for ten minutes later
I was up and away from the Rue de la Paix
In a train for Treves.
But the word “Sandusky” still hung in my brain
As we went through greeny grey Lorraine
In a jolting train,
And then bargained for rooms with a German waiter.
Or it wasn’t even in great concern
For the fate of “Sandusky Bay.” — My friend
Pictured it thronged with American villas,
Dutch Porticos and Ionic pillars.
So that no boy’s boat can land on the shores,
For the high-bred owners of dry goods stores
Forbid the practice. The villa lawns,
Pitch-pine canoes with America’s daughters
In a sort of a daily Henley regatta
And the bright parasols of Japanese paper
Keep up a ceaseless, endless chatter,
In the endless, ceaseless girl graduate story
Where once there were silence, jack-rabbits and snakes,
And o’er all the gay clatter there floats old Glory —
The flag of the States, from a calico shop.
But stop!
I am not lamenting about the Lakes.

For, as grey dawns roll on to grey dawns,
Some things must surely come to an end,
Even old silences over old waters
Even here in Trêves the Porta Nigra
That isn’t so much a gaunt black ruin,
As a great black whole — a Roman gate-way,
As high as a mountain, as black as a jail —
Even here, even here, America’s daughters,
Long toothed old maids with a camera
(For even they must know decay,
And the passage of time, hasting, hasting away!)
And the charm of the past grows meagre and meagrer.
Though through it all the Porta Nigra
Keeps its black, hard and grim completeness,
As if no fleet minutes with all their fleetness
Could rub down its surface.
But we’ve walled it in in a manner of speaking
With electric trams that go sparking and streaking
And filling the night with squeals and jangles
As iron wheels grind on iron angles —
And nobody cares and nobody grieves
And all the spires and towers of Treves
Shade upwards into the sooty skies,
And you dig up here a sword or a chalice,
Some bones, some teeth and some golden bangles
And several bricks from the Caesar’s Palace.

V

And so I come back to this funny old town
Where professors argue each other down
And every one is in seven movements
For every kind of Modern Improvements;
And there isn’t a moment of real ease,
But students come from the seven seas
And we boast a professor of Neo-Chinese —
A thing to astonish the upland heather —
And more than the universities
Of all High Germany put together
Can show the like of.
The upland heather
It stretches for miles and miles and miles
Wine-purple and brooding and ancient and blasted,
An endless trackless, heather forest,
And so, between whiles,
When my mind’s all reeling with Modern Movements
And my eyes are weary, my head at its sorest
And the best of beer has lost its zest,
I go up there to get a rest
And think of the dead —
For it’s nothing but dead and dead and dying
Dead faiths, dead loves, lost friends and the flying,
Fleet minutes that change and ruin our shows,
And the dead leaves flitter and autumn goes,
And the dead leaves flitter down thick to the ground,
And pomps go down and queens go down
And time flows on, and flows and flows.
But don’t mistake me, the leaves are wet
And most of their copper splendour is rotten
Like most of the dead — and still and forgotten,
And I don’t feel a spark of regret
Not a spark —

I am sitting up here on a sort of a mound
And the dull red sun has just done sinking
And it’s grown by this woodside fully dark
And I’m just thinking...
And the valley lands and the forests and tillage
Are wrapped in mist. There’s the lights of a village,
Of one — of three — of four! —
Four I can count from this high old mound...
In Tilly’s time you could count eighteen...
You know of Tilly? A general
Who ravaged this land. There was Prince Eugene,
And Marshal Saxe and Wallenstein,
And God knows who... They are dead men all
With tombs in cathedrals here and there,
Just food for tourists. It’s rather funny,
They ravaged these cornfields and burned the hamlets,
They drove off the cattle and took the honey,
And clocks and coin and chests and camlets:
Reduced the numbers to four from eighteen;
You can see four glimmers of light thro’ the gloom.
But as for Marshal Wallenstein,
No doubt he’s somewhere in some old tomb
With a marble pillow beneath his head.
He was shot. Or he wasn’t. Anyhow he’s dead!
And I’m sitting here on an old, smashed mound.
And the wood-leaves are flittering down to the ground.
And I’m sitting here and just thinking and wondering,
Clear thoughts and pictures, dull thoughts and blundering.
It’s all one. But I wonder... I wonder...

And under
The earth of the barrow there’s something moving
Or no — not moving. Yes, shoving, shoving,
Through the thick, dark earth — a fox or a mole.
Phui!
But it’s dark! I can’t grasp the whole
Of my argument — No. I’m not dropping to sleep!
(I can hear the leaves in the dark, cold wood!
That’s a boar by his rustling!)
“From good to good,
And good to better you say we go.”
(There’s an owl overhead.) “
You say that’s so?”
My American friend of the rue de la Paix?
“
Grow better and better from day to day.”
Well, well I had a friend that’s not a friend to-day;
Well, well, I had a love who’s resting in the clay
Of a suburban cemetery. “
Friend
,
My Yankeefriend
.” (He’s mighty heavy and tusky,
Judged by his rustlings, that old boar in the wood)
“From good to good!
Have you found a better bay than old Sandusky?
Or I a betterfriend than the one that’s left vie?”
“No Argument
? —
Well I’m not arguing
I came out here to think
” —
Now what’s that thing
That’s coursing o’er dead leaves. It’s not a boar!
Some sort of woman! A Geheimrath’s cook
Come out to meet her lover of the Ninth —
An Uhlan Regiment! You know the Uhlans,
Who charged at Mars La Tour; that’s on their colours.

But that little wretch.
Whoever heard such kissing! Sighs now! Groans!
In the copper darkness of these wet, high forests.
Well, well, that’s no affair of mine to-night.
I came out here though, yes, I’d an engagement
With Major Hahn to give him his revenge —
What was it? At roulette? But I’d a headache!
I came out here to think about that Queen!
The Chinese one — the one I saw in Paris.
To-night’s the thirtieth... the thirty-first.
Why, yes, it’s All Souls’ Eve. That’s why I’m morbid
With thoughts of All the Dead... That Chinese Queen
She never kissed her lover. But a queer,
A queer, queer look came out on her rice white face!
I never knew such longing was in the world,
Though not a feature stirred in her! No kisses!
But there she wavered just behind his back
With her slanting eyes. No moth about a flame,
No seabird in the storm round a lighthouse glare
Was e’er so lured to the ruin and wreck of love.
And he knelt there with such a queer, queer face
A queer, queer smile, and his uplifted hands
He prayed as we pray to a Queen in dragon silk;
His hands rubbed palm on palm. And so she swayed
And swayed just like a purple butterfly
Above the open jaws of a coral snake.