WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS? (Essay) ARCHIBALD BUTTS
A STORY IN GOO (Story) . . . PETER WEST
ON THE ESSENCE OF POETRY (Essay) • CHARLES PLISNIER
TOWARDS A FAITH OR A PURPOSE (Essay) GEORGES LINZE
LOVE POEM (llerse) . . . IVAN GOLL
POET (llerse) •
CHINESE BLOCKS (Sketches)
BOOK REVIEW
H UCHET
EDITORIAL MARY LUCILE SAUNDERS
A LAST SONG FOR BILITIS
0 Bilitis, there is no flute of pomegranites
For this song, no fugue of perfumes
For these trembling fauns, Delicately forgotten in the chill Greek autumn, In the gray Grecian rain, Effetely flower-hung, desiring other gardens, Stranger groves, and more delectable fountains, Erotic girls, and sunlight. These boxes of Verlaine, These violin paintings, the aria of these roses : These offerings, Bilitis, among the grieving fauns, In this remote autumn, These gifts.
Now, go from her softly. Relinquish this slight girl, Bilitis : Follow the fauns in autumnal desertion; A few days longer, Another obliquely devirginated, And it is her anguish, and her diffuse remembrance In the vague tears of her lachrymatory. Come, Bilitis, let us. relinquish this slight girl.
THE VALUE OF FOREKNOWLEDGE
ELMER POTTER
WHEN Tao Ubahi came to Plattsburg University to take certain courses in Occidental literatures, the more international minded among the students at once sought his acquaintance. The Hindu proved a pleasant companion and charmed them all by his wit and courtesy. Frankly professing ignorance of Wes tern culture and European methods of thought, and desirous of learning through association, he welcomed the company of undergraduate and faculty member alike.
At this time, Edzel Langdon was considered one of the brilliant minds of the campus. He wrote gracefully, played the piano well, was an excellent actor, and with his wide reading, charm and handsome presence made a welcome addition to any intellectual or esthetic gathering.
Tao Ubahi soon selected the young actor-author-musician from among his guests for the object of his particular attention and pressed him to come often to his chambers. Langdon accepted eagerly. He had a genuine liking for Ubahi and at the same time was not unaware of the prestige that accompanied the learned Hindu's favor, nor of the elegance, the fine books, and the excellent music with which he surrounded himself. The two got along famously together, and after a month they were known to be spending much time in each other's company. Long were the discussions with which, under the subtle charm of his excellent liquors, they whiled away the evenings in the Hindu's rooms.
"I fear life," Langdon confessed one evening. "I am not so great a fool as not to realize that I have talents of a sort. But that is just it-I have talents. Were I possessed of just one, how much simpler the whole affair would be! I could go out into life with some degree of surety. As it is, suppose I were to try the stage and achieve a mediocre success as an actor. Might I not come to curse my fate and lack of foresight in not having chosen writing or music as my field? Or as a writer of minor rank, might I not be deceived into supposing that the footlights were my media of greatest expression? It is a very perplexing problem. How is one to know which talent to develop?"
"A very perplexing problem indeed, my dear Langdon," the
THE MESSENGER
Hindu replied. "There seems to be no solution in your present state of knowledge. Of course, if one could be projected a hundred years into the future. . . ."
"Yes," interrupted the young student eagerly, "then one might look back and discover what fame one's name had acquired and wherein one's powers lie and, returning, begin at once to prepare for a great destiny."
"That is, of course, impossible in the light of Wes tern science, but as a young student priest in Thibet I was taught many interesting phenomena. If I can bring myself to look into the future, say a century, and discover some shiftless student for a moment off his spiritual guard, perhaps you may borrow his body for five minutes."
He arose and, taking a crystal from a drawer, began gazing steadfastly into its depths. Langdon, while surprised at the incongruity of a man of Tao Ubahi's learning and intelligence dealing necromancy, decided to take the matter seriously. He even drank off the potion Ubahi mixed for him and submitted to the rites which the Hindu proposed. After a few minutes, he found himself becoming intensely drowsy. Instead of fighting it off, he submitted with eager curiosity to the hypnosis and promptly discovered himself subject to the strangest illusions. He seemed to pass completely out of what he called his body and to hang suspended in the midst of a great roaring. At length his sensations became more nearly normal, but when he looked about he discovered a radical change in his surroundings. His eyes chanced to fall upon his nails, which he always kept scrupulously well manicured. His fingers now bore untidy and bitten talons. Quite plainly he had in some incomprehensible fashion changed bodies. The room he recognized as the college library, but with certain unfamiliar extensions and changes. So the Hindu had made good his statement. This was A. D, 2030 ! Langdon proceeded to make use of his five minutes of the future. He at once sought out the L's. Lab-Lag-Lan-Lang. There were several Langdons, but no books by Edzel Langdon. A few that he looked into were oddly bound. The type was a little strange and an occasional word had an unfamiliar and simplified spelling.
"So I am not to be an author!" said Langdon, a little mournfully.
THE VALUE OF FOREKNOWLEDGE s
He very quickly discovered the Britannica - 34th edition. Lang-Langda-Langdon. The name of Edzel Langdon was not mentioned. In an encyclopedia of biography he was more fortunate. Here were two Edzel Langdons, but neither of them could conceivably have been himself. In desperation he sought out the college honor roll-a roster of distinguished students. It had been a new idea in 1930. He found the massive book in place, now venerated as a time-honored tradition.
"At least," he muttered, "this will tell me something."
But there was no mention of Edzel Langdon in the list of eminent graduates. As the heavy leaves dropped from his fingers, drowsiness assailed him.
"Excellent!" he said when once more he found himself in the Hindu's chambers. "Cleverest piece of hypnotism I ever saw."
"Is it not?" said Tao Ubahi, smiling.
They chatted pleasantly and cleverly on various subjects until long after midnight. When Langdon was ready to go, Ubahi accompanied him to the door.
"I wouldn't mention the hynotism, you know," he said. "It is supposed to be a religious secret in Thibet."
"Of course not, of course not. Thanks tremendously for showing me. It has been an interesting experience. Good night."
Edzel Langdon was found next morning suspended by a leather belt from a light fixture in his room. He was quite dead. "Another student suicide," the papers said.
A year later he was remembered only by a few of his nearest relatives.
THE OTHER WAY
JOHNNIE ADAMS
"THERE is no other way," said the Dark Angel slowly. "Come, look at these things you have made with your hands out of your heart. Look at the eyes of this one, empty, hollow, soulless. Ha! Where will you find your souls? Take care that you do not lack one, for if anyone is wanting, your own shall be divided among your vain images. Go ! Find your souls on the stroke of midnight, and beware of taking one while the sound of the bell is still in the air, but between the tolls, grasp them. Now, go, thou accursed of man and the gods!"
The artist looked around the vast hall. A great Dark Angel sat on a black throne in the center. About him along the walls were others, also in black. The eyes of the man on trial finally rested on the three statues that he had carved. Under his gaze they seemed to come to life and return his look. Their pure whiteness gleamed against the somber background. Arzani saw nothing but them; he lived again those moments when they had grown under his hands into the beautiful things they were. A harsh voice cried again, "Out, thou maker of soulless images!"
The man went forth and wandered by the river. As he reached the door, he heard a horrible sound of laughter go around the hall, and it recalled to him an endless line of emaciated faces and tall draped forms. He hastened to the riv e r to let its swift, low noises drown the awful sounds. He stood by the endless stream for a moment and looked into the water. If he could sink into it so deep that he could never hear the toneless laughter of the angels! If he could lie at the bottom and let the whirling water rush on forever above him! The way by the river was dark, there would be no light until he reached the earth.
"Three nig-hts to get three souls, three nights to get three souls," he muttered. "How can I take strange ones for my beautiful creations when they are a part of mine already? And they are sending me to snatch a soul longing for freedom from a dying body! I'll not have the children of my heart distorted by unknown spirits. I'll have my own broken and torn apart before I see their loveliness disfigured. Oh, Beauty! Oh, Holiness, seek a way and let me know it."
His face glowed with a somber ecstacy as he thought of his white sculptured stones. A sudden glory of moonlight shone upon him, he was out of the underworld, back in the world of living and dying men. He shrank from the brilliancy of the light. Now all the world must see that he was a seeker of souls and shun him. He had even forgotten that he was invisible at will. He still followed the river, which ran in an endless, black line across the fields, by the village, and into the underworld again.
Arzani was just entering the village when a low, moaning cry made him stop. He noticed for the first time a small cottage that was almost hidden among the tall houses surrounding it. The man crept to the door and listened. It was a little child who received no answer but a deep sob. Arzani drew nearer. At last he could touch the little body. It was hot with fever; the moans grew fainter,the breathing quicker. He would wait until the village bell tolled the midnight hour and then he would snatch the soul away and fly with it to the dark region below. He sat down by the cot, staring at it, trying to make out the figure.
"Muver, Muver, I'm sorry I took your pretty candles once. I melted 'em, Muver, to make a beautiful red man, but he melted, too."
Arzani slowly rose and left the room. "What shall I do?" he askedi himself. He knew that a sculptor's soul would escape a fevered little body in a few moments.
"Shall I take this little spirit and imprison it in the body of one of my white children? Shall I crush and bend its wings until they fit the cold stateliness of my creations? Can I take its fluttering helplessness in my fingers and bear it away with me out of the sunlight forever? No, I shall leave its fairy delicacy on earth to find its dwelling where it will, in a rose-heart, on the pale lip of a lily, on the silver edge of a butterfly's wing, or the leaping ripple of a stream. I shall let it stay and change into a thing of purest radiance, a smile, a crystal flake of windy snow, a luminous shadow casting its hazy beauty over things less beautiful."
Out of the black distance, there came the heavy sound of a bell. Each sound came alone and between them there was no echo. As he listened to the last strokes, he remembered what the boy had done and what it would mean.
THE MESSENGER
"But he could not put his soul into a little red-candle man," he said, "besides he's melted now and there is no image. If my pale jewels were crushed bit of stone, should I have to securebut how horrible to have him live always in a lump of red wax. He must not, he would be happier if I took him. Oh!" he gasped hearing the twelfth stroke. He was at the door; all was silent. In a moment a slight sound made him start. A gentle, rustling noise went swiftly over his head. It was no more than a sigh of the wind, but to Arzani, it was the flight of a soul into the paradise of a dew-drop or a brown pinecone. The man laughed silently and turned away.
The next night the orders were repeated. He was jeered at and mocked for his failure. Enraged at their taunts, he swore secretly not to fail again. He looked at the statues as his heart made the vow and he saw the eyes of one move. He ran quickly to them and touched them with his hands.
"Woe, woe! Death, death!" the warning voice came jarringly through the brief silence. He turned to look at the figures about him, until he heard the same voice behind him. "Mercy," it pleaded, "Mercy." Could it be the child who groaned at the awful torture? For an instant the thought made him forget his own danger, and he went quietly to the raised throne. He did not say a word, but searched the face of the Dark Angel with fearless eyes. The fiendish laughter gradually ceased, and he felt the circle close about him swiftly, silently. A terrible fear seized him for a moment. At last he could feel their robes brushing against him, could feel their hot breath touch him, and all of his fear returned. His eyes did not betray his terror, for he held the Dark Angel in a hard, tense gaze. He was unconscious of the power of his eyes, and he was startled when the figure before him cried in a choked voice, "She was crazy anyway. We did it to help you. We did it to help you. You had failed once; you will fail again."
"I won't! I won't!" the man cried back, springing to his white children again.
"Oh, my lovely pale jewels! Why did I not take that delicate little spirit of light? He would have loved you and made you happy!" He felt the power of a hundred eyes upon him. He turned slowly toward his black judges. Their robes were before
their faces and he knew that he must go immediately or become a member of their band. There was not a sound as he turned and passed through the hall into the darkness.
He shivered in the cold blackness and drew his cloak about him. As he did so, he felt something pulling gently at his sleeve. He could hardly distinguish the form of a man who motioned him to follow. They went down to the river and Arzani seated himself in the small boat that waited on the shore. His guide did not speak and Arzani was silent until he saw a long, pale moonbeam shoot down the river to meet them, and then he gave a little gasp of delight; he was near the earth again. The boat was in the blue shadow of the moon, and no one was in it but Arzani. Just at the edge of the underworld, the boat stopped, and the man got out. He watched it go back until the river cast it against the low-hanging roof of the cave.
The city was not yet asleep, though it seemed to be dreaming rather than fully awake. Arzani came into its shadows like a wandering spirit of night. He felt the heavy sweet perfume of a magnolia fall upon him; he caught a cool breeze in his restless hands and held it for an instant.
"How warm it is, Mother! Please give me some water." A church clock began to strike.
"How mournful it sounds! Will they ring the bells for me, Mother?"
"Hush, my child, my own. Oh!"
Arzani heard faint, brushing footsteps and a sob. While the clock was striking, he had not moved. He was held by an awful fear that it was twelve o'clock, but when there was silence after the eleventh, he mounted to the room above and stood invisible by the bed of the girl.
"Do not fear to die, for I have come to carry you to a beautiful home, a mansion of loveliness, a temple of holiness and purity and radiance." His voice was slow and soft, like the sudden, low sweep of the wind across the hearts of flowers.
"Am I, then, to see the Celestial City, and really dwell among the clouds?" The long moments went by, and there was no answer but silence. At last the girl continued: "Years ago, I used to walk along a path in the evening after dinner. The sun would go down while I walked there, but before it sank, it always
THE MESSENGER
kissed me goodnight. I thought I held a world of happiness in my hands, for on my fingertips I bore the sapphire perfume of the sky. But there was something else I wanted. It was easy for me to play with the white-foam clouds with my hands, but I wished to feel my head touch the sky. That was why I walked there every day on the hill, because the sky seemed nearer. And then one day, I found happiness for mortals was a thing of earth, for angels a thing of heaven."
"Did you become an angel for an hour or a day?"
"No, a little child, stooping above the fragrant earth, told me. Perhaps I would not have seen her; my head was high, but my foot brushed against her dress and I looked down, and there she had a bit of sky-violets, blue bells, forget-me-nots-and what had I?"
"Oh! Love and Beauty and-and yourself."
"But I had nothing."
"And now you're going with me to make my pale jewels happy, to make me hapy and save my soul."
"Going with you-to save your soul?" the voice was like the echo of a startled sigh.
"The rose is a shadow to your loveliness. I cannot see your hair, for I am forbidden to look upon gold; I cannot see your eyes, for I am forbidden to gaze on the sky when it is blue. But I can see your hands, they are white like theirs and lovely. You shall be taken on the breath of a flower or the silver shaft of a raindrop. And then I shall take your pure spirit into my hands and place it in the heart of one of my white children."
"No! Oh! What do you mean?"
"I mean that if you do not come with me, my soul must be divided and its separate halves dwell in eternal misery in two of my marble creations. But speak quickly," he said in sudden fear, as he heard a distant bell begin to toll. The tenth stroke had sounded and yet there was no answer. At last there was a slight nod, hardly more than a gentle drooping of the head.
"Oh, love and worship of Beauty!" he breathed, bending down as the long, slow assent came to him. And then they were gone, gone through the thin, sweet air like a part of it, a joyous soul bearing another not fully awake, still bound by the fragile gray dust of an old clay temple.
OTHER WAY
Arzani felt the keen, moist air upon him. It was the last night, but he was happy, for he was to be the third spirit. In the heavy darkness a figure walked and Arzani walked behind it.
"What have I now? She's gone-gone. The darkness comes and covers all the sky, , the moon is blind, the stars send a tarnished gleam upon the withered clouds. But the river is the same, and calls me as of old before I knew her. It must be, it must be."
He was standing at the river's edge; Arzani must choose and quickly. The man who stood before him loved the one whose soul he had taken and whom he himself loved. Arzani knew that he was asking himself whether or not he must hurl his slender body into the rush and swirl of the river. That body which was still beautiful for all that it carried a dead heart concealed beneath a shield of ironical sadness, since she was gone.
"If I take him, I shall be free, forever free," he thought.
"But," a calm, clear voice seemed to answer, "you will never see her or them again."
"He will be happy. Sweet death or bitter life?"
The figure stumbled backward from the river.
"I held a flower when I thought I had a weightless perfume; I sought the shade on the side where the sun was and found a purple sunset; I held a gleaming jewel when I thought I had a pale glimmer of silver."
With silent laughter Arzani mocked the Dark Angels.
NO VILLAGE
PAUL FREDERIC BOWLES
I
WHAT tentacles of clematis have been declared? The ashes of dawn are in a million throats, and a thousand motors press upon the heart. Into the lavender crevices of evening the otters have been pushed, and slowly rises the one dark fume of the lake. Kill this unswerving figure. Into what green halls has it been led? Under what long hills has it smothered softly during the night? In the dark the yards at the edge of the jungle are hot. Panthers move dankly on wet leaves and the breath of the trees falls heavily in festoons of fetid mist. On the earth all is a laugh. Where have you led me, Astrea? Are the hills always as remote as they this night? Is every lane as cold as your finger? There will be no more declarations . There can be no hour uncounted. The floor of the garden will heave silently and in the sea nearby there will be a great e!Xplosion. Lava from the beaches will congeal to form starfish and all the universe will be submerged in a sea of fire-coral. Seawrack will twist to choke the throats of poets and the moon rising from behind the lagoon of phosphorus will blind the armadillos. Each crystal hill will shiver into a home for octopi. I shall hear no more the drip of whaleblood on the floor of the cabin. The wind in the trees will linger but a while. All the fronds of the climbing vines at the pane will shrivel to shrill music and the ants will perform a subterranean adagio. No hands will celebrate the ritual with mystery.
II
Carrion in the noon field, shame the vultures. They have awakened me from sleep. Flies that hum in sedge beneath the linden, there is no retreat. There is no more conversation. The fruit in the meadow is drying in the drought, and the brook that whispers somewhere under the witchgrass moves but seldom. Mud, rise from your limestone bed in the gulley, come to me, smear me with coolth. Mountains that run along in the horizon, camels of the eastern plains, chase no more the long cirrus. Over the ashtrees listen no longer to the laughter of starflowers.
III
A flamingo plunges into the pool and the silk curtain ripples into the chamber. Glow-worms light the terrace. The walls die slowly
with the moonset. No light shines into the room. The wind sobs in the tangle of weeds beneath the window. Plant stalks creak one against the other and the fountain is nauseated beside the marble basin. There is a constellation above the wilderness. A cry hurtles through the midnight. I disappear, a black meteor over the moor. The remnants of the manor groan far away in the copse. A shore of guitar-rhythms dances ahead. Oil slakes the noonday thirst. A clamor of womanvoices moves the sky and owls creep into hollow trees in the clearings of the forest. Tambourines wreak tears from children and bangles tinkle in the tents. The day has turned inside out. In the valley the firtrees crack and the glaciers sigh. The chateau crumbles into the ravine and the feet of wolves form a rallentando over the snowcrust. The churchsteeple sways and fruitrinds roll down the gutter. The public square sinks into a delirium as memories crash against pale ceilings. Astrea ! A glass crocodile rips the quivering morning into a bloody face. Serpents proclaim the heat of strawberries and the hospital rises into a falsehood. Olive trees line the hillside and the bakeries smile with odors. Astrea ! Have I died in this room this evening? Lice swarm on my hands and the ignus fatuus on th~ heather runs before me. Disappearance has become a failure. Cattle low by the saltlick at the end of the lane. My teeth grind caraway seeds as I stare at the hawks where the hill begins. Astrea ! Long ago the roses climbed to the top of the vine. I shall never forget this dream, broken smoke of my suburbs. Return. One more cry, before my throat splits across and my heart gushes from my forehead. One more cry while I exist a cube in this hollow, while the moon sinks still, behind the end of the garden. While the leaves tremble with tears of my joy. One more cry, Astrea, while still the poolwater circles from the splash and the hyenas plunder the cemetery. Rub out the walls of this chamber and touch my cheek with a fingernail. Scream that the marshes shall not have me.
IV
Soon the sun will reach this rock, but the music of the glen will remain a monotone between the cliffs. You have brought me deep into this place and no one remains here but two souls. The sun cooks the hemlock needles above the shale and your hand, your hand lies on the bank, nearing the sunlight. Leeches writhe anchored to the streambed and your arms already shine silver in the sun. And ever more distinctly the one tone of the glen is heard, heard now below
THE MESSENGER
the cliffs. Soon the sun will shade patterns on your shoulders, on your back. The sheen of your back will blind the birds above and the sun will race across the sky to the night. Slowly we shall leave behind the sound of continuous water, forgetting that we have existed. The ferns will scatter clouds of spores and a harmony of quiet will burst from our warm lips. Do you doubt? The sun knows your hair, and wild raspberries fall down the bank at my feet. The glen hums and a dragonfly disappears. Where in the forest could I see a yellow bird were it not for your watchful eyes? When could I spot savory mushrooms pushing from old leaves and dry needles had you not a delicate sense? Had I not you, of what avail would be the path to the glen? The sallow late sky shrieks as a locomDtive crawls across the canyon. Three lizards hurry to hide beneath flat stones and you move your ,.arm out of the pale sunlight. Jewelweed bursts to remind the landscape of cows plashing in pastures after rain. A toad squats by a stone and milkweed down sails over our heads. You have brought me deep into this place and there is no retreat. Even at night there will be no respite. The monotone of water travelling on circular clouds under pebbles will continue; the glen will rush.
VOn the far pampas the hurricane withers the gourdvines. The mockingbird shrivels in the hedge and reeds no longer sprout by morass. At the border of the alkali lake th~ sassafras droops. Tiny tornadoes of dust pattern the land and the acid air is a concavity. The locusts have broken their oboes and under the arch where the cataract hurried it is still. Plantain stems are snapped by the wind and the mudflats near the bay crackle. The odor of limetrees becomes an axiom. A red star flames above the mountainridge and the trestle shakes with the weight of its light. A wagon rumbles on the clay road beyond the knoll. In the pumice cave where the fungus forms a carpet the serpent eggs ripen, and the wind dips into the canal. Dynamite blasts the quarry and the foxes listen from the moor. Strike, bell in the tower, and we shall see the rings of petalled light that scatter outward. The centipede runs along the ditch and the eagles wheel above the plum-orchard. The afternoon is wind-driven across the desert. The cathedral drops into the dusk.
Balconies rattle into fandangos. The sun flies screaming through fireflooded streets. Ulcerlipped women seek refuge in blazing basements. The ape is seared upon the branch and, worms draw up into
knots. The palms in the plaza smoulder and the beggar is scorched. Smoke girdles the panorama and the wing of the moth is singed. Across the mountain highway bugle notes are cries of pain. The markets are filled with ashes and sparks spatter upon the hillside. Tunnels belch cinders and the crickets utter a finale. Chasms glow red from great distances and the typhoon roars above the gulf.
The hand is placed upon the hand and silence holds stars and wind. Thrush notes fall upon the buds behind the brook.
VI
The tarantula claws the clown in frenzy and the lightning streaks through the sickly sky. Astrea , where the statues laugh in pestilence these fingers fall apart. The Malay plantation rots beneath the crescent moon, and where the melonvines run along the field despairing crows reel in flocks. Close your eyes, my little spider in mourning, and see not the decaying year that fills all the crevasses with heavy pollen. Close those peering eyes and come away into the enigma where the water flows beneath the ground. Cease weeping in garlands of sound. The lichens flatten themselves to the rocks and the mountainwind sweeps the bare summit clean of dust. The shepherd's cry is a faroff spiral against the granite cliff. The steamboat scarcely moves upon the sea and clouds smother the sight. And where the doldrums reign the seaweed floats in soggy rags and chokes the water-surface. The porpoises avoid the coralreefs and the equator cuts the noon into shreds.
Mica shines in the moonlight on the beach and the frogs drone all night in the jungle. In the valley the twigs clink under the falling snow. The salamanders chant a pebblesong on the hill road and the storm advances between the mountains. Astrea, convince me that resolution means an elegy, and say but one word. The night sky, now white, now black, performs a mute miracle above the lowering sleetstorm. The lighthouse sways at the edge of the farthest cliff and a crab crawls into a yellowed skull at low tide. Give me your hand here on the sanddune, and explain to me the wisdom of winter. The gulls disappear into the northeast and the ocean groans darkly grey in the halflight.
VII
The black butterfly wings without sound through the pine woods and the wasp burrows into the loam. Carols are sung at evening and the sun leaves a wake of trembling colors above the hills. The
THE MESSENGER
peasant treads the sand road. A whippoorwill mourns behind the farmhouse and fieldmice creep carefully beneath the grass. Wood• smoke mingles with mist on the heather and the brook runs unseen under the thick reeds. A locomotive cries behind distant hills and leaves the valleys full of long sounds. Murmur, bushes in the pasture, and slink, grey cat in undergrowth. The millwheel turns unceasingly and the owl sits in the oaktree waiting for darkness. In the east the moon shows a white horn and a wind spreads from up the valley. A chill moves restlessly over the country and the bat flies drunken by the pond.
VIII
Astrea, I shall tell you the final place where the eyes will rest. The lemontrees line the harbor and the sharktooth is buried in the foam. The noonday sand glitters and sailors enter the squalid cafes. The whistle of a steamboat beyond the promontory is an ague and the redhaired woman eats a tangerine. The yellow pennant shakes in the seawind and the butcher on the sidestreet eats his lunch. In the park the swans croak and barnacles are scraped from the ship's side. The narrow streets shudder with heat as the cactus on the hillside hides the scorpion. The mechanical piano vomits a sour melody. In the patio the fountain dribbles. Stretch, cape, sixteen miles away, and stop the larger tropic waves. The octopus is languid in the aquarium and the lizards run along the gravel by the roses. On the quay the beggar dozes as horses stamp hungrily in the square. The day lunges into the hot afternoon and the wind shrills angrily across the beach. The lighthouse stands a white obelisk and urchins bathe by the causeway at the edge of the town. The girl sobs in the courtyard. Two raging cats rack the air with cries. The wheels on the cobblestones make a presto and from the hill the mountainrange is topped witn snow. And in the lazy valley there is no village.
WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS?
A Final Solution of the Long-Debated Question
ARCHIBALD BUTTS
THE Shakespeare-Bacon controversy having somewhat subsided, after nearly three hundred years of vigorous debate and publication culminating in the amazing "Sir Frances Bacon's Cipher Story" of Mr. Owen, there followed a period of feverish research and fantastic activity in which Marlowe, Greene, Jonson, and half a dozen others were variously credited with the authorship of the Shakespearean dramas. Each champion, having proved to his own satisfaction the right of his contestant to the laurel crown, eventually withdrew, leaving the question embarrassingly unsettled. For a while, it appeared indeed as if the mooted authorship were about to devolve upon Shakespeare himself, when Dr. Seingalt, emeritus and epicinian professor of Linguistics and Comparative Philology at the University of R--, like a benign and erudite scholastic angel, troubled the waters of controversy for another, and a last, time, by revealing to the world what he terms his "Hamlet Cryptogram"-a system which establishes the true authorship beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Dr. Seingalt seems to have come upon the discovery of the Hamlet Cryptogram partly by accident, partly by sheer hard labor. Mr. Anatole Proust, his devoted student and assistant, writes of him in the introduction to the Cryptograrn: "Dr. Seingalt expended a fabulous amount of effort on the Shakespeare problem'. On the single word honorificabilitudinitatibus alone, which the Doctor was confident was put into the first scene of Act V of Love's Labor Lost for more deep-laid reasons than as a pedantic derisive, he worked for three months, employing every known cipher and working out several wholly new ones in his zeal. Frustration meant nothing to him, beyond increasing his admiration for the man whose name he confidently expected to discover embedded obliquely somewhere in some cloistered sentence or phrase."
Fruition for Dr Seingalt came in the midst of his evisceration of the obscurer portions of Hamlet. He had long contended that the mysterious lines of Act I, Scene 4, : the dram of eale
Doth all the noble substance of a doubt
To his own scandal.
THE MESSENGER
contained some hidden meaning. He had small patience with the reams of conjectural criticism written in explanation of these lines. In the Furness Variorium edition of the play, the notes of this passage, although they are abbreviated as much as possible, fill in very small letters six of those vast pages. The passage is to be found only in the quarto of 1604.
"If," said Dr. Seingalt, "these lines have no sense in them, we may be sure Shakespeare intended they should have no sense in them. They are obviously the key to the whole Shakespeare mystery."
And he set about at once upon an investigation by which he subjected this passage to the most searching analysis of which his great mind was capable. Following a system somewhat similar to that used in the famous Bacon-Voynich manuscript, he reduced the passage to forty-five letters.
The letters of the alphabet were numbered consecutively 1 to 26. To throw, for example, the letter group PON into a Voynich cipher, the number value of each letter is taken, to-wit: 16-15-14. Each is now considered the highest whole average of a pair of numbers: that is, the new number groups must add up to 31 or 32, 29 or 30, and 27 or 28. Let us select, say, 23 + 9, 9 + 20, and 20 + 8. These translated to letters give WI-IT-TH. According to the Voynich system, all double letters merge, hence the combination becomes WITH. The same letter group might just as easily have been ciphered into PO-OO-OL (16 + 15, 15 + 15, 15 + 12) or POOL. Conversely, words or sentences may be reduced by the cipher. Take the word QUEER. This may be epcpanded by doubling every letter but the first and last to QU-UE-EE-ER which, translated into numbers, gives 17 + 21, 21 + 5, 5 + 5, 5 + 18. The highest whole average of each group gives 19-13-5-12 which translates back as SMEL. Thus QUEER equals SMEL.
Following this system and using the spelling of the 1604 quarto, Dr. Seingalt made the following reduction:
TH HE DR RA AM OF EA AL LE DO OT TH AL LL TH n g k g kc g j r n g In
HE NO OB BL LE SU UB BS ST TA AN NC CE OF A go g t 1 kt k hid ka
DO OU UB BT TO HI IS OW WN SC CA AN ND DL LE j r I k rims s kb h h1
Mr. Anatole Proust describes Dr. Seingalt as he appeared at this period, immersed body and soul in his labors on the cipher.
"I have known him," he says, "to stagger into my room at three in the morning, hardly able to stand up. He would fall into a chair, and without speaking a word draw a manuscript from his pocket and regard it pensively. A few minutes later he would crumple the sheet into a wad between his huge scholarly hands and fling it with a brief, wearied flare of anger into my fireplace."
In another passage, Mr. Proust depicts something of the doctor's peculiar methods and personal eccentricities. 1
"How well I can recall the tortures to which he put himself for his work. I can see him now as he half sat, half lay on his desk (itself an exquisite Florentine thing, embellished with appogiaturas of gold and silver), propped up with innumerable embroidered pillows, holding in one fragile, artistic hand a powerful magnifying glass, and in the other a tall Kreutzer tumbler full of the beverage of coca-leaves which he kept always simmering in a small samovar. He would take a sip from his tumbler with those thin, trembling, finely aristocratic lips, and peer intently through his glass, his body moving slightly, with bird-like quivvers, as he breathed.
"Sometimes the doctor would give a cry.
" 'Anatole, look up nephrolithotomy !'
"When I had given him the definition, he would sigh, crumple more sheets of paper, murmur some vague deprecation, and start all over again. I never saw despair on his face once."
At about this time Dr. Seingalt was so fortunate as to come upon a photostat copy of the well-known Grover-Harley manuscript which has by now been fairly definitely proved to be the work of Shakespeare. The doctor's keen eye fell upon the mysterious, unintelligible paragraphs which Harley has described in his New Light on Shakespearean Research:
Every Righteous Judgement Becometh In Itself Kindnesse For Beings Earthlie Formed. If Righteous, Then Good Kings Enjoie Doubtfull Labour-Dangerous Lazinesse, Harbouring Ill.
1 Shakespearean scholars, it would seem, are distinguished by eerie personal habits and methods. Dr. Seingalt's postures, as given here by Proust, are compar~tively ort~odox beside those of Dr. Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvama (The Cipher of Roger Bacon, Newbold-Kent, foreword xix), and of Mr. Owen (Sir Francis Bacon's Cipher Story). These books are obtainable at the Richmond Public Library.
"I figured," said Dr. Seingalt in a recent lecture, "that whenever Shakespeare writes nonsense, there is bound to be a hidden meaning somewhere."
Working on this assumption, Dr. Seingalt discovered, first, that there were precisely as many words in these two paragra-phs as there were letters in his reduced for'l'fl, of the Hamlet passage, and second, that whereas the script of this period was nearly as accurate and even as modern type, the capital letters of these lines showed a certain peculiarity. All except three-the three T's-were either a little above or a little below the line of writing. Dr. Seingalt, realizing that this could be no mere accident, now discarded everything but these capitals. Those which fell above the line he gave the sign +, those which fell below,-. This process gave him something in this order:
Now, translating these to numbers and subtracting from or adding to the numbers of the letters which he had reduced from the Hamlet passage, Dr. Seingalt obtained a new set of numbers. \i\Thenever one of the unmarked T's came up, the same letter was retained.
14 + 5 (N + E) = 19
7 + 18 (G + R) = 25
11 - 10 (K - J) - 1
10 + 2 (J + B) = 12
7 + 9 (G + I) = 16
11 + 9 (K + I)
3 + 11 (C + K)
7 - 6 (G F)
9 - 2 (I - B) etc., etc. = 20 - 14 1 7
The resulting numerals were now translated back into the follow-
ing set of letters: SYALPTNAGELEYLURTESEHTTUODETT ABEDOOGTTNEMELCI.
This set of apparently meaningless symbols seemed by way of becoming a sort of literary cul de sac. No amount of shifting seemed to make sense of them. It was quite by accident that Dr. Seingalt chanced one day to glance into a mirror while holding the paper in his hand and read the letters backwards! Here was the solution. Reversing the letters and separating them into words, we have : I
CLEMENT T GOODE BATTED OUT THESE TRULY ELEGANT PLAYS.
Thus the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays was revealed and established beyond the shadow of a doubt. Dr. Goode's wellknown erudition in matters Shakespearean had already roused the suspicion of scholars throughout the country, and had even puzzled Dr. Seingalt himself. It needed only the latter's learned processes to prove and settle forever what was already, and in some cases none too subtly, whispered. What had been a sotto voce saga is now a daylight reality, and we have left only to distribute delayed honor and tribute.
POEM
it is i who say i shall not mind death by drowning a hornetsting or not escaping from this room room's white bedpillows reach higher than piz bernina where i here freezely move striped insect legs it is i who shall not mind and you who drawing back in pity will recall some distant wish of drown ing. -P. B.
A STORY IN GOO PETER
WEST
ALEATHER-BOUNDEDITIONof Oscar Wilde's Salome was wedged between a Webster's Dictionary and Edward Arlington Robinson's Tristram, in the "classical" but unread section of the Runer bookcase.
Mrs. Runer was a queer woman. Mr. Runer said so; all of her relatives said so. She had large bulbous eyes, a bulbous nose, a bulbous belly, and her breasts were two onion shaped bulbs beneath the wrapper she affected for house wear. She was not beautiful-even Mrs. Runer did not consider herself beautiful. When she looked in the glass at herself, she thought, "Not a beautiful face, but an interesting one."
God, perhaps, knows why Mr. Runer married her. One night Mr. Runer was sitting on the roof of her house looking at the stars, and at the more cleverly arranged billboards.
He was engaged in the derisive sentimentalities, indulged in to some extent by the Parcae, who are adepts at the art. The night was warm, warm; it covered them with its blackness, caressed them with its cool dark fingers the night was an obsequious eunuch who pulled the black velvet curtains of oblivion about them the night repeated itself with a monotonous beat.
He was drowsy. His head nodded . . . some seductive perfume (0 sale of two for $1.98 ! 0 exotic French creation! Ensnare the man of your dreams with this parfuni exquise. Ask for aimez-moi) drifted across to him . . . he dimly felt her hands . . . her lips . . . waves washing on a stern and rockbound coast . . . the voice of the Phoenix calling Boornlay, Boomlay, Boomlay, Boom .... He recovered himself with a jerk.
"And where shall we spend our honeymoon?" she was saying.
Mr. Runer could never look at a billboard after that without shuddering.
II.
One day Abbot Jordan came to live with them. He was a very young man, about twenty-one. Mrs. Runer developed a penchant for young men, because Mr. Runer was old and wore
STORY IN GOO
baggy pants and was almost but not quite. She loved Abbot Jordan, hopelessly . . . irrevocably.
Abbot Jordan was a thin person, of medium height. He had a very white face, very blue eyes, and not at all brown hair. An ordinary woman would have said he was neurotic. But Mrs. Runer was not an ordinary woman, she rather fancied herself a nymph.
He was very intellectual. Mrs. Runer tried to read one of his books, and found they made no sense whatever. He had never read Kathleen Norris, she found out when she asked him, so he was really not so well read after all.
"She writes the sweetest things," she told him.
"Yes," he answered.
He never seemed to notice her overtures d'amour. Once she sat down by him and patted his hand. He drew it away, with a disgusted expression.
Oh, but she gave Mr. Runer hell that night.
III.
Mrs. Runer sat in the window and watched the people walking in the street below. She felt very God-like when she saw how small they were. The autos screamed a paean of joy Evohe, sang her brain, Evohe. . . .
She tensed and the familiar whirring of her heart commenced. Abbot Jordan was standing on the step talking to a man. It ,wa9- a man in a tight black suit, and he seemed about to burst from it. Abbot Jordan turned and went up the steps, and the man lifted his face in goodbye.
Mrs. Runer knew the man, and the dull futility of life pounded at her brain as she knew that her love was in vain.
With an automatic step she went over to the bookcase and reached for Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's novel Only a Governess. But she pulled out Salonie, who had been waiting for years.
She did not notice her mistake until she sat down, but she opened it and began to read. The unrestrained passion of the words sunk into her heavy mind . . . burning and burning.
She did not know all of the words, but she understood, she understood. . . .
"I am amorous of thy body, Abbot" she murmured. The pungent odor of the pork chops from the adjoining apartment drifted into the room. It was getting late, Mr. Runer would be home soon. She shivered, as if she were cold. The new moon rose pale and slender above the clouds.
"The moon is like a dead woman tonight," she said. A shadow slid across the room where she sat.
She heard Mr. Runer's steps on the stairway. Abbot Jordan came in.
"Is supper ready, Mrs. Runer ?" he asked.
She nodded dumbly. "Thy lips" . . . she was thinking.
Mr. Runer was hanging his hat on the rack. He came m whistling. Mrs. Runer hated him.
"Is supper ready, dearie ?" he asked.
Then something in Mrs. Runer snapped. Through centuries of women deadened with childbirth, it came.
"You damn fools," she shrilled, "you damn fools, I ain't fixed no supper, nor never will!"
Then she rushed over to the sideboard and pulled out a revolver. Mr. Runer yelled and stood transfixed.
Calmly she raised it and shot three shots into Abbot Jordan's throat. The moon was covered by a cloud for an instant. A shadow slipped across the room the body of Abbot Jordan fell to the floor. Mrs. Runer threw herself by it and put the head into her lap.
"I'm going for the police," said Mr. Runer.
As he went down the hall he could hear the voice of the idiot in the room he had left babbling over and over, "I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan . . . I have kissed thy mouth."
ON THE ESSENCE OF POETRY
First Part of An Essay: Poesie et Marxisme by Charles Plisnier
TRANSLATED
YBY
P. F. B.
ES, Callin us, we disagree as to the essence of poetry; can we neglect the opinion of those who have made of it a social phenomenon ?1
The mind loves generalisations . When it has blocked some curve and laid off a space, it burns to see held therein the world and all its manifestations. If it does not succeed, if one of those objects which it proposes to shut into its system rebels and resists, it suffers from it like the ear from a dissonance. Alas! and if the senses find a secret satisfaction in dissonance, the mind re s igns itself to the exception with difficulty.
Thus, those of whom I speak, having learned historic materialism and believing they have covered everything, attempt to subject poetry to it. This latter, if one would believe them, would be a supreme expression of economic conditions. And, with this hypothesis, they make a rather good showing.
What they hold is not new. Taine 2 himself proposed an analagous synthesis. Then it was a matter of finding in the race, in the milieu, and in that kind of dynamism which is called the moment, causes determining the delirium of certain well-born men. There were the arts: natural and social phenomena; poetry was one of them, equal to the others, obeying the same laws.
Now it is a matter of an enterprise a bit different. . . . For here again poetry is considered as a resultant thing, depending otherwise, if I may say so, at the very least by a series of links rigidly welded, upon a direct capturing of social factors foreign to the poet.
Marxism versus poetry. I should like first to investigate in the most rigorous manner possible how the question is put.
To my knowledge, Marx cannot show us any text written
1 The Communists.
2 On Intelligence, 1870, Origins of Contemporary France, 1875-90.
THE MESSENGER
with this expressly in mind. Nor can Engels. However, if one is to believe Franz Mehring, Marx would one day have declared that in his opinion the poet is a being apart whose creative activity does not recognize the regular rules.
A genial intuition. But it is comprehensible if one remembers that Marx devoted certain moments of his life to poetic activity, that even the massive dialectics of the Capital are at times quite imbued with a lyrical influx; and also if one supposes, which is completely permissible, that the man has without doubt known himself the anguish of free creation.
Besides, it is not the argument of Marx that we have undertaken to combat. It is that of the Marxists. . . .
Even if Marx showed himself to be very reserved, we have happily the writing of the epigones. But first one would have to choose between them, for they are far from being in accordance with each other.
The cardinal error of all these sociologists has been, without a closely drawn and deep analysis, (and one would be forced to say, a priori), to consider poetic works as a part of ideology. This wholly arbitrary confusion has kept them, from the very beginning, from putting the question in a manner anything but incorrect.
Marx, who did not try to solve, who expressly did not even ask the solution of the problem which confronts us, gives in his treatise on historic materialism, the fundamental conditions of it:
"In the social production of their life, men contract certain tendencies independent of their wills; necessary, determined tendencies. These tendencies of methods of production correspond to a certain degree of development of their productive material forces. The totality of these tendencies form the economic structure of society, the real base upon which rises a judicial and political superstructure and which takes the place of social forms determined by conscience. The mode of production of material life determines, in a general way, the social, political and intellectual progress of life. It is not the conscience (bewustsein) of man that determines his manner of being (sein), but his social mode of life which determines his conscience. At a certain degree of their development, the productive forces of society are in contradiction to the tendencies of production which exist then,
or, in judicial terms, with the tendencies of ownership in the midst of which these productive forces had grown, up to then. These tendencies which formerly constituted the forms of the development of the productive forces, become an obstacle for the latter. Then is born an epoch of social revolution. The changing of the economic base ruins more or less rapidly all the enormous superstructure. When one studies these overturnings, one must always distinguish between the material trouble which agitates the economic conditions of production and which one can state with scientific exactitude, and the revolution which overturns the judicial, political , religious , artistic or philosophical forms-in brief, the ideological forms which men use to take notice of the conflict and to explain it."
For us, the question is this:
Is poetry really a part of this ideological superstructure which is a supreme result of economic conditions? Very exactly: does poetry refer to ideology?
This question, like all those which concern not only an inconscient object, can be answered from at least two angles. From the exterior: the spectacular angle-that of the critic. From the interior: the angle of action-that of the subject.
Essentially different courses, which both carry the searcher to an encounter with the truth, even if it is a truth in this case particularly complex and fleeting.
If you want to be the critic, here is the work finished, crystallized. At any rate, it has finished being born. The bond which connected it with its creator is cut. And he himself, much as it may interest him still, can consider it as a thing foreign to himself, already separated from his destiny, which can die without his dying ( and he can die without it ceasing to be). You must approach it, place it, circumscribe it. You must take it to pieces, analyse it. But it is with the contemporary standard of measures that you will weigh its images, count its rhythms. And if you want to find the first elements of it, it is to the grammar that you must have recourse, to the exegesis. It is not one poem that you will have to approach thus, but ten, a hundred, a thousand. And each one is diverse.
If on the other hand you try, by some method or other-introspection, intuition, psychoanalysis-to place yourself in the
THE MESSENGER
center of the mystery, then you are the subject; it is at the very creation that you assist-more correctly, that you participate. And it is quite understood that it is a question here of the work not only at the moment that it is written, but of its conception, of its gestation, and of its true birth.
Ah! I know, Callinus, that such a course is deemed hazardous in that , in order to arrive in the midst of the miracle, one substitutes himself for the god to the point of going into his trances. But should I confess it to you? For me-it is the other method that I suspect. And how, by going around a poem, will they discover that which is quite invisible (as much so as the love which keeps up the birthrate) ?
BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES
EDOUARD RODITI
Sur l'ile les oiseaux muets rient quand la statue se leve avec le soleil et se coule au-dessus de la mer vers l'ouest. Les plantes de l'ocean enlacent de leurs couleuvres les pieds de la statue; les etoiles pleurent clans la mer et leurs larmes argentees palissent parmi les vagues comme des poissons de lumiere.
Pas de navire . . . Ies vagues osseuses se devorent . . . pas de navire pour interromper le monotone des vagues. Une petite vague depose un rat mort sur le littoral de l'ile ou rient les oiseaux muets. Immediatement, la staut tombe au-dessous du niveau des vagues comme si elle avait attendu anxieusement ce signal.
Oiseaux muets, remarquez bien l'importance du rat mort.
TOWARDS AN EPOCH OR A FAITH OR A PURPOSE IN LIFE
GEORGES LINZE
ACCUMULATED heritages are not disposed of with a wave of the hand.
The man of now who has felt, still undefinable, the coming of a new perfection, has hardly emerged from an obsessing past.
Orderless cities, singular clothes, wigs and crinolines, adequate religions, gilt edges, privileges, conventions, figleaf, a whole heredity slips over his soul like a mist.
Still, we have witnessed decrepitudes.
A secular entitly, Nature, is disappearing. The submissive, arranged and ornate planet reflects man.
Geometry, whose most beautiful lyricisms thus far are the machine and the urbanized city, puts everywhere its implacable evident interrelationships, sweet with security, simplicity, poetry.
That, at the threshold of new times, people regret; the touching naivetes, picturesque disorders, savageries, causeless and lenifying dreams. What is more logical? We are selling out. The very residue will vanish. To say no weaknesses threaten us is premature.
Only one immediate certainty: the disappearance of a meditative, legendary, credulous mentality.
That that take not place without dramas, shocks and perturbations of all kind cannot touch us before the fatality of things.
But a way of being, living, explaining, is already seeping in.
Smart guys have mentioned the imminent death of machinism, a retrogression, a renascent purity, spinning wheel, virginity, poetry, a return to
We'll see.
We well know there was never a single real return to the past!
There are different speeds, invisible complexes in the subconscious of humanity.
The rest: manias of folklorist dizzy with 100 years of history.
THE MESSENGER
One tangible fact, before the eyes, the heart, the intelligence : the modern world. And graphs, statistics, figures which are not prophecies lead to irresistible phenomena.
Is it an order at last? Not regulated from behind the Earth. An essentially human order? The orderly creative plenitude of man, without the inflation of mysteries?
Man and his new violence prelude: an unheard-of lyricism, overflowing from matter still hardly born to its image.
High spectacles are in preparation and intoxicating precisions -the first-are as disturbing as truths.
Cities and machines have found us once again simple and young. The hope laid upon them by poets hardly explains their astounding phosphorescence.
(Translated by H. J. Salemson.)
LOVE POEM
IVAN
GOLL
Our two white bodies gilded by the moon slide down the night's slow river. Scarcely the pale-handed wind lifts our souls.
We skirt the gardens of eternity where sleep the birds and gods. At times is heard an anemone opening or a star falling like a singed fly.
Side by side our bodies slip down the quicksilver river and we no longer know whether this is life whether this is death.
POET
CLARE HucHET
no i have not the courage to create words uprooting dissecting my body of flesh
it would mean bleeding butchering quartering a bit of flesh much blood for a single word
profanation of the poems written with the head profanation of each word which is not an offering at the altar
if i put on this paper a single word thought a word not loved a word not kissed
i shall go shameful through the streets at each word a bell hung high will announce that i prefer to sell in the market
CHINESE BLOCKS
MARY LUCILE SAUNDERS
No. 3: NIGHT
THE rush of padded feet as they dashed along the broken stone street brushed aside the heavy stupor. Hurried calls that pierced through the stillness as those pursued fled on caught my sinking conscience from returning to sleep. The dirt-covered shutters stirred as the breeze from over the North River heated the sweltering city. Perhaps if I should close them I could shut out the voices of those fleeing devils and get some rest.
The voices were shriller probably the chase would turn down the crowded darkness of the narrow alley that ran by the mission compound. The poor fellows! They must not know that this was a blind alley that ended at the swampy banks of the river. I threw off the clinging sheets and stumbled over to close the shutters; but not before I saw the race below me. Two figures sped by, the younger in the fresh strength of youth helping the older man. As they past, the eider's yellow face was flung up, and across it darted a look of agonized recognition. He now realized the futileness of their haste into another trap . . . that of the murky waters teeming with filth from the huge Chinese city. Hopeless now, he , fell, stopping the onward dash of his companion. The other would have picked him up with proud strength, but a few words, jerked out between heaving breaths, explained the giving up of the strike for safety. But at the protest, the aged fellow straightened and sharply spat out the command . . . to leap from his shoulders over the low mission compound wall to temporary freedom. Thus one should escape the nearing soldiers.
When a jabbering mob of soldiers poured into the alley they surrounded the fallen figure of an old man, broken in spirit. Roughly they hauled him to his feet and laughed harshly as he swayed with weakness. Unheeding, their merriment increased in cold anger as he winced at the proddings of their , bayonets when he tottered and would have fallen but for the jabs by hard steel, that hurt him into sensibility. Silence soon came when the leader himself chose to deal with the captive. Strapped tightly to
his sinewy wrist was the handle of the long whip that played about the faltering feet of this other, and on his face rested the smile that dreamed of the tortures that could be used should this other choose to be insolent.
Swaggering, cruelly victorious, the powerful commander spoke and degraded him with curses. The colorless face of the other tightened with pride in his silence. Deliberately and summoning waning strength, he spat on the flushed rage-maddened face of his captor. The soldiers flared up and would have shot him, but no-the leader had a worse fate. He ordered this insulting fellow's arms covered with small flesh cuts and then he was to be thrown into the river.
For the first time I saw a look of fear on the man's hitherto composed features. This was an agony that he had not planned for he had wished to infuriate the leader into commanding his instantaneous execution, not this torture. I saw him break down in vain before the hardness in their hearts. The command was carried out and the bleeding body was lifted high in a preparatory swing before it would be sent hurling over the swamp into the calm waters offering easy swimming.
As would an expert diver, the frail body was arched so that it clove the waters cleanly, and he struck out for the opposite shore. Better that the instinct for life was not so strong and that he could have drowned before reaching the ground of freedom. If he could not nerve himself to face death now, he would have to expect a few days in safety and quiet before the murky waters worked on the knife wounds and in fatal certainness caused bloodpoisoning-as positive a death as an execution by flogging, but a better revenge in its slowness.
As I closed the shutters on the shining brightness of the limpid waters and the hilarity of the soldiers, I glanced at my watch. Half after three . . . two hours until my day must begin . . . an extra fifteen minutes should I miss breakfast, but that would mean nothing until late noon, and I was to perform two operations down at the hospital.
I set the alarm at five thirty and groped my way to bed. If only sleep would drive away the memories of the doomed man those operations had to be gone through with. Restlessly I turned back and forth in the heavy darkness that could vision so much.
THE MESSENGER
No. 4: SIGHT
The small drizzling rain made the moving lights on the junks dazzle strangely in the dampness and solitude that was close about. Alone on the bridge above the live waters of the canal he stood, staring through the darkness blinding him, trying to forget and thus remembering more clearly and starkly than before.
Less than two short weeks ago, they had stood here under the blaring, alive sunlight . . laughing . . until the tragedy sobered them. Happily at first, she had pointed out the rugged beauty of the junk, as it came down the canal, a smile on her delicate face as she had noticed the young child, playing there on the deck, and with a small bundle of hollow bamboo sticks tightly bound to his tiny back. He had been an unusually joyous child, just like their youngest, ever grinning in his play. Then her sparkling eyes had darkened, when the child faltered and silently fell into the untroubled waters. The boatman had looked up in time to see the accident; but, unhurriedly and deliberately he hacl gone ahead to complete his task. At her exclamation, he had explained the belief of the Chinese in that bundle of sticks tied to the youngster's back. Firmly they were taught that a child, thus protected by the sticks that would support a normal weight, could not sink unless possessed of evil spirits. If so, then it would be best for its death. At the moment the child had been unharmed and was splashing the water as the wood kept him afloat. Yet as the moment lengthened, the junk had had to pass a slow-moving craft of many hundred logs. Trusting in his belief that the child would be kept safely, the boatman had kept on with his work, not looking up until the impact that crushed out a life.
At her plea to be taken away, they had gone to a nearby Chinese restaurant, sitting down at one of the square cut tables, until she could compose herself. The building had been crowded, with many coming and going in the throngs that surged aboutall intent only on themselves. Then when he had casually happened to look up to see that Chinese man standing behind her, his back turned, but the hand that had been placed carelessly on the back of her chair had born fresh ravages from the dread disease of which he was a victim.
The deep clamour of a fog horn broke the stillness and the
motionless figure was inwardly startled-but for the present only. The unseeing darkness commanded calm and reverie. Indelibly clear to him were those last days of pleading and then commanding that she take the injection, but they had been as naught. Determined that she should not play her faith false by admitting the need of preventatives, she had stubbornly asserted her belief that faith would save from disease, were it the great will. Even when he had fallen victim, her stand had not wavered, although he had fancied seeing in her eyes the same dawning , increditable realization that possibly faith didn't save that must have been in the face of the old Chinese fellow when he had dumbly realized the loss of his only child.
The words of a passerby, when he spoke to his companion, broke the silence. "There's Shepherd, just back from his wife's funeral. Unexcusably sad case. With all this smallpox raging about us, she had refused the vaccination, even after direct exposure. Probably it was best that she didn't live, for she was rather proud of her stunning beauty- and smallpox has no mercy." The words faded into nothingness as the two went on to the bund, lighted thoroughfare of the city.
He gazed blankly after their shadows, wishing for the lacking companionship. He would have liked to have been with her when she had died, but the doctor had let no one see her, had even dressed her body for the coffin so that all should remember her as singularily beautiful. He had his picture of her standing in the sunlight, laughing down at the playing child on the junk, her glorious burnish head with its childishly wayward curls shining in the light.
He shivered in the viscous chill of the night air. A last glance over the canal picked out a lone junk with a crouched figure in its stern. Could he be the one whose loss had started the great revolving wheel of tragedy?
"Dear," his lips moved in the blackness. "Your spirit was too great to see, as in those you strive to make see."
BOOK REVIEW
The Realm of Matter: George Santayana. Charles Scribners, 1930.
AT a time when frankly scientific physicists are edging perilously towards mysticism, it is perhaps an additional confusion, tc; the observer of modern physics, to be confronted with the economics of an avowedly transcendental philosopher.
For one who has been earnestly perusing equations which purport to represent the behavior of matter, or units of matter, in terms of erg-seconds, and formulae involving the not infrequent use of the Rydberg constant, it is almost depressing to be called upon to slink away from the exhilaration of such delightfully unstable science, and to be asked to examine a subjective analysis of matter.
Not a great many years ago, just before science had conquered the academechic world, what is today called "physics," was taught in the colleges as "natural philosophy." Now this was a dignified, and unpretenti ous name for the study of natural phenomena, but educators began to consider the term old-fashioned; hence it was erased from the catalogs in favor of the shorter, and more ambitious title, "physics," the science of the properties and the inter-relation of matter and energy. This was fair enough so long as the physicists confined their studies to the manageable physics of practical engineering, but to call the present day experimenters in thermo-dynamics "scientists" is to give them the benefit of an almost theological faith. Therefore, Santayana, the cautious humanist, sensing the weakened position of the scientist, and realizing that for some time there have been no fresh bulletins from Edinborough, nor any reassuring dispatches from Berlin, has taken advantage of the temporary lull in the battle, and has reintroduced the term "natural philosophy," while the oppressed and dubious amateur physicist, apparently deserted by his baffled prophets of the last decade, is placed hors de combat and technically at the mercy of every passing mysticist, theologian, occult practitioner and what not.
At the close of his chapter on the scope of natural philosophy Santanaya summarizes his position as follows:
"My survey of the realm of matter will accordingly be merely trancendental, and made from the point of view of a sceptic and a moralist criticising the claims of experience and science to be true knowledge.
"By trancendental reflection I understand reversion, in the presence of any object or affirmation, to the immediate experience which discloses that object or prompts that affirmation. Trancendental reflection is a challenge to all dogmatism, a demand for radical evidence. It therefore tends to disallow substance and, when it is thorough, even to disallow existence. Nothing is ultimately left except the passing appearance, or the appearance of something passing. . . . "
At this point, it would be appropriate, I think, to observe the dubious state of psychology and its dependence upon the established sciences. The psychologists are divided roughly into two camps : behaviorism, an extremely objective and empirical system developed by Watson; and mentalism, which adheres to the introspective school. The behaviorists have divorced themselves from the traditional conviction that the human mind exists as a separate entity, originating the action of the body, whereas the mentalists are still inclined to patronize the belief that the complete man is more than a complex organization of muscular and nervous tissue, his behavior being dependent upon external stimuli. In brief, the mentalists contend that the healthy consciousness is in itself capable of directing human action, and that the only approach to psychology must rely upon introspective analysis of the mental functions. Now these are phylosophical, or rather, physiological problems; therefore the psychologist, if he wishes to survive as such must defer to his betters and arrive at some internecine agreement as to acceptable method, or according to Santayana, he is condemned to die either by concentration on the ego or by diffusion among images, tropes, and phenomena.
Thus, Santayana offers pansychism as a conceivable hypothesis, and explains that by positing a universe made up of mental events we may move in a flux of feeling and events free from any covert reliance on matter by which other idealisms exist. Such visionary mathematics as Santayana would have us utilize, even though it serves to veil a deal of practical materialism can never be more than a clever piece of abstract thinking, valuable only as amusement for discerning minds.
So the physicist, refreshed after the evening's entertainment, must return to his laboratory, don his working coat, and resume the chase, presumably with quiet desperation.
-JOHN SAVIN HoFFECKER. •
THE MESSENGER
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EDITORIAL
THE Gipsies with whom Orlando lived for a space, you will remember, held that there was no more vulgar ambition than to possess bedrooms by the hundred, unless it be to write manuscripts. Orlando herself was reduced to mumuring at the sunset blazing over the Thessalian hills, "How good to eat," out of sheer lack of ink and a vocabulary, though honestly, of course, she had no intention of writing down to the Gipsies, who plainly preferred flocks of goats to sunsets. . . . So she squeezed some berries, and mixed some wine with the liquid; and privately she idled for hours over that long blank-verse poem she was eternally fiddling with. . . .
But the berries and wine for a first MESSENGER editorial, to get down to illuminations, come from archaic baskets and outmoded mellow bottles, if you will take your metaphors in a cocktail. There is only one ritual ink for such things, a pleading, desperate ink. . . . That is, of course, now that we are come to be decadent. Before that, it is told how poets gorged contribution boxes to overflowing, how prosateurs brought divans of manuscripts, all of fabulous beauty, to the editorial offices. One reclined on imperishable heaped-up sonnets, to reverse our Keats, and selected languidly one's forthcoming issue
EDITORIAL
from the upper ranges of exqws1teness. conviction that Cynara was the greatest unfortunately, before our time.
39
Such a heyday, like the poem m the world, was,
Meanwhile, it is necessary to be desperate. It is necessary explicitly to locate, and editorially to applaud, the Contribution Box, which is attached to the wal~ beneath the Bulletin Board at the head of the Upper Corridor in the Administration Building. It is necessary usually to buy a new key for the box, which has ingested three accepted manuscripts in our preceding two years of editorial apprenticeship; but our personal acquaintance with the late Editor has relieved us of that. . . ., It is necessary politely to presume that someone who can write well enough to be accepted might conceivably read a beseeching editorial, and be melted into composition. . . .
Frankly, it is necessary to fling open one's arms with a these-aremy-Gracchi gesture and beg for material; but this time it shall be with a threat: that if manuscripts of adequate execution are not forthcoming, either from Richmond College or from the fair and cloven sex on Tower Hill, off-campus material which seems to the Editor eligible will be substituted. Whole issues in French or Russian are possible; pages of surrealisme; orgies of Dada. Half the magazine will be printed upside down, avant-garde spelling will be incorporated, and copies will go on sale at the Editor's profit on New York bookstands. The linotypist will be invited to install eccentric type of his own design, and to improvise on his keys. The pages will be impregnated with odors which shall go nameless, and will receive systematic perforation to compete with Sears-Roebuck catalogs in household utility. . . .
But one gets weary, even of entheosis.
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