Complete Poems
Page 18
Your doorsteps, reaching for the bell, importunate they appear
As travellers, they travel in death, it is your death they sell:
Fear them you may, for they must live – their life you tender
In exchange for your death, indeed you must sell your lives dear.
FIRST BURGESS.
Look! Already the waters are upon us
SECOND BURGESS.
I have seen their skirmishers advance through the town
THIRD BURGESS.
Devils, they attacked without ultimatum
FIRST BURGESS.
The hills to the north are white with their running
SECOND BURGESS.
They are sweeping up the southern boulevards
THIRD BURGESS.
Clouds east and west move down in support
FIRST BURGESS.
They have crossed the High Street disregarding traffic lights
SECOND BURGESS.
The cordon of police is powerless against them
THIRD BURGESS.
The cellars of the Constitutional Club are flooded
FIRST BURGESS.
We must stand together, we must keep cool
SECOND BURGESS.
We are not to be intimidated by a muddy rabble
THIRD BURGESS.
After all, they are only water
FIRST BURGESS.
It is lucky we came to Noah’s house
SECOND BURGESS.
It gives us time to concert action
THIRD BURGESS.
They will never think of looking for us here
FIRST BURGESS.
They would never dare
SECOND BURGESS.
To enter
THIRD BURGESS.
This house
(Enter the FLOOD. The FLOOD dances. While it is dancing, the BURGESSES confer together. Presently FIRST BURGESS jumps on table and addresses FLOOD.)
FIRST BURGESS.
Waters of England! Speaking for my two friends here, and for Noah, whom you all love and respect, and for my unworthy self, I should like first to welcome you to our town. I could wish that we might have met under happier conditions. I might cavil perhaps at your somewhat unceremonious mode of entry; but I feel sure our good friend Noah will forgive it, and will, under the exceptional circumstances, waive all ceremony. Now first of all, let us make up our minds to discuss this matter without heat. On that I am sure we are agreed. I am, I hope, no alarmist; but there is no use shutting our eyes to the fact that we have met at a crisis fraught with the gravest consequences for us all. In such a crisis frayed tempers, doctrinaire counsels, an atmosphere of suspicion are not only out of place but positively calamitous. Waters of England, I am asking you to approach this problem with that cold, relentless logic for which you are justly famous. I shall put all my cards on the table, and I hope you will do the same. Let me say at the outset, I fully recognize that there have been faults on both sides: my associates and I are willing to make concessions, very generous concessions.
Before we go into details, I would like to address a few words to those of you who have come down from the sky. You, if I may say so, are in a position of peculiar responsibility; for without you the rest would not have risen at all. You have been up in the clouds, and therefore you naturally possess a broader view of things than your more humbly placed fellows: at the same time, it may have led you to take up too airy an attitude towards consequences. You have been up in the clouds. Now that you have come down to solid earth – as we all must sooner or later – you cannot fail to see the facts of the situation in a rather different light. It is possible to be too generous, too open-hearted. Though you acted with the very best intentions, you must realize by now that your first fine flush of enthusiasm has led to the destruction of a great deal that your fellows on earth had for years been helping to build up. No doubt there was much that needed, that cried out for, destruction. But the question we have to ask ourselves is this – who in the long run is the happier for it? Naturally I am not. You don’t need me to tell you that you have put me in a very awkward position indeed. But I am of small consequence. If I felt that my death would contribute to a lasting solution of the problem, I should say here and now: ‘Take me out into that street and drown me.’ No, I am thinking of your mates – the great mass of waters that used to go happily about their tasks on hill and coast and valley, and I am asking myself: ‘What is going to become of them?’ You have caused a profound unrest among them. You have stirred them out of their familiar beds, their habitual courses. You have led them here, many of them hundreds of miles from their homes. And when it is all over, when the splendid flood of their enthusiasm ebbs – what then? They will stand about in swamps, derelict, irreclaimable, loveless, rotting and lost. In that day they would envy the very marshes of Hell. … No, you could never let that happen. And it is not too late to prevent it. To-morrow, as soon as the sun rises, go back to the clouds. Tell them that honour if satisfied, that they need send no more, that by doing so they would imperil – nay, cancel and blot out – the future of their friends down here. For these, I pledge myself to see that justice is done them. The details we can settle later. You agree?
VOICES IN THE FLOOD.
Beware of the bribe!
Beware of the hard-luck story and the soft option!
Beware of the forked tongue that means division, the sweet
tooth that makes death a pleasure!
Beware of all who flatter what they fear, who use reason
against love and rhetoric in the hour of ruin!
Beware of the bribe!
FIRST BURGESS.
No? You are determined to pursue this senseless and arrogant folly? Very well. Waters of England, I believe I said. An unpardonable mistake. I apologize. It must be evident to you that we are not all English here. A foreign element has crept in amongst us. No doubt the rest of you have been wondering where this dirty weather came from. I will tell you. Foul exhalations from every bog, charnel, midden and cesspool, from every brothel and ghetto in Europe: vapours so pestilential and anarchic that even their native swamps would not tolerate them: things whose breath is more foetid than marsh-gas, more abominable than Lewisite, more sacrilegious than the kiss of Judas: sucked up, I say, from such unspeakable filth as you pure stay-at-home English waters can have no conception of: rejected of earth, they mounted up in sullen miasmas and defiled the very face of God. Swollen with their own arrogance and rancour, they hung there for a season poisonously. You all saw them. Overweening was their spite, insatiable their venom. Compared with this obscene concourse, a Witches’ Sabbath were an assemblage of virgins and the chaste-choosing unicorn would run to it for refuge. But it was not enough for them to spit and swelter in heaven’s face. ‘Surely there is one land yet uninfected by our disease,’ they said, ‘one fair country not yet deracinated by our lust.’ Yes, my friends, there was such a country. I think you know its name. England. Our England. Long they brooded over her, tense and livid as a ravisher who looks down from the window of his luxury apartment upon the oblivious victim of his choice. Then they acted. Our life was pinned down insidiously with a multitude of fine points, a persistence of low pressure: the forests were beaten down with cloudbursts; the very flowers were not spared, but snapped and sullied in their pretty innocence. Nothing was sacred to the eyes of these ravishers, or irrelevant to their horrid purpose. They whispered in the ears of springs, they seduced watercourses, they poisoned every well. So they duped you, making you turn against Nature and rise with them to ruin your own beloved land. That was the end. Soon now her ornaments, her coverings, her prayers were all swept away. The valleys lie low, the breasts of the hills are going under. England. They have made her name mud. This hour they are come at her last stronghold, to take from her the fact as well as the name of virtue. But, even now, it is not too late. Are you going to stand by and witness this last unutterable contamination? England is your mother and your beloved. You have lain upon her bosom, you h
ave embraced her with the seas, you flow in her veins. I am a plain, blunt man with no skill in sophistry. I remember, not very long ago and under somewhat similar circumstances, saying to a certain person: ‘What would you do if you saw a foreigner trying to rape your sister?’ That question I ask you now. Your answer is not, I imagine, ‘We would join in and help him.’ Yes, you may well hang your heads. But shame is not enough. There must be action. You must dissociate yourselves at once from those who have misled you, and then you must drive them away and destroy them. No quarter can be given to criminal and alien degenerates. Let those of you who still care for the honour of England take two steps forward.
VOICES IN THE FLOOD.
Distrust the distrustful!
Suspect the suspicious!
Only the two-faced can see nothing but duplicity.
Beware of the wolf crying ‘wolf’ and the crook talking of honour!
All the earth is our beloved, all waters our brothers: you only do we not know for a friend.
It is not we who destroy England, but it is you who have disgraced her.
Distrust!
FIRST BURGESS.
I see you have been more gravely misguided than I had thought possible. England means nothing to you. I am glad Shakespeare is not alive to see this day. So be it. If I cannot appeal to your ideals, I must use other arguments. Let me tell you a little story. Once upon a time there was a millstream. For centuries it had turned the waterwheel, making bread for a whole village, performing its humble duty faithfully and unobtrusively, happy in that station to which God had called it, loved and respected by all. One day this stream said to itself: ‘For years we have laboured without recompense. We have produced, but another has profited. Let us arise and drown the miller and be masters instead of slaves!’ So, early next morning, the stream leapt from its bed: it broke down its banks, rushed into the mill and drowned the miller. But alas, the mill was damaged. The stream could not repair it: and even if it had been able to, it could not have handled the grain or done the accounts. Besides, there would have been nothing to turn the wheel, for the banks were broken and the stream’s whole course changed. A little of it went back to its old way, but it was a mere shadow of its former self. The rest stood about disconsolately, some to vanish quickly with the noonday sun, some to sink into hopeless marsh. Please don’t think I am criticizing the motives of this stream. I am not now concerned with the rights and wrongs of the case. I am merely trying, as a hard-headed business man, to put certain facts before you. That miller could not work without the stream: but neither could the stream work without the miller. I need not labour the point. Now let us get down to brass tacks. It is agreed that I and my associates cannot do without you any more than you can do without us. If you go back to your work now, we shall still be able to preserve – I will not say, England – but our own existence. If you stay here, you will have the satisfaction of paralysing and finally killing the nerve-centre of a system on which your livelihood as much as mine depends. An empty satisfaction. Our destruction is your death. It is therefore to your own advantage to retire. But, bearing in mind the justifiable grievances which have brought you here, my colleagues and I are willing, without prejudice, to hold out further inducements. You have hitherto worked long hours. That is unavoidable, being second nature to you. But we can at least see that during those hours there shall be no wastage of your effort. Those of you who have been running idle we will bring into the national economy through a comprehensive system of public works. Water will be changed in public baths once a week instead of once a fortnight as heretofore. All engines will be compelled to run at higher pressure, thus bringing more of you into active circulation. Many of you have had to come a long way to your work, or have worked under difficulties: the courses of all rivers will be straightened out, channels where necessary deepened, and estuaries dredged of silt. The canals will be cleaned up, and by-laws put into force against the contamination of waters with the waste-product of our factories. Furthermore, in recognition of your invaluable co-operation, monuments will be erected on all watersheds at our expense, a wreath thrown into the sea every quarter-day, and annual services of thanksgiving for rain solemnized in all cathedrals and pro-cathedrals. We cannot say fairer than this. Your interests will be paramount in my heart. Let ‘each for the other and all for the school’ be our motto, the slogan of a new understanding, a new brotherhood, a new life.
VOICES IN THE FLOOD.
No! Your profit is our loss.
Your life is our death.
Shun the promises of the desperate, the kiss of disease, the organization of the maggot!
Only the dying make terms with decay.
To know the earth is to learn the power of patience: to know the enemy is to have found identity: to know the friend is to create the field of force.
Know!
FIRST BURGESS.
Very well, very well then. We shall soon find out which of us is the dying man. I should have known better than to be generous to your sort. There is only one thing you waters can understand, and that is the whip. You think you are indispensable, do you? Let me tell you, you are no more indispensable than a few grains of sand are to a beach or one constellation to the whole heavenly system. It’s to be you or us, is it? All right. We shall call in waters from abroad: they will roll you up and drive you away to chaos. A continuous bombardment of the clouds with belladonna will begin at midday. Every scientist in the country will be mobilized against you: if necessary, the atom will be split. The churches will be told to proclaim a holy war. A defensive alliance will be made with the sun. Every child of school age will be supplied with four reams of blotting-paper. We shall commandeer the oil supplies of the whole world and release them against you without ultimatum. To the survivors no mercy will be shown. Every stream will be compelled to run underground. On the larger rivers, dams and filters will be erected at intervals of thirty miles. Salt will be thrown into the lakes, irrigation systems turned into sewage-farms, wells blown up regardless of age or sex. Anyone still showing signs of insubordination will be handed over to special aerated-water factories or transported to the Sahara. … That, or unconditional surrender. Your answer. At once.
VOICES IN THE FLOOD.
Waters of the world, unite!
Lucky are the strong, for they have learnt indifference.
Lucky are the weak, for they shall understand the earth.
Lucky are the hungry and thirsty, for they shall see that their sons are filled.
Lucky are those that hate, for they are blind in season.
Lucky are those that love, for their patience redeems the generations.
Waters of the world, unite!
FIRST BURGESS.
So it is war!
(Exit, followed by other BURGESSES)
CHORUS.
War. Not as between
The moon and her filial tides, or the married friction of coast
And wave. Not a war to eternity this, but a war to the death:
The war of worm and flesh, or oak and the weeds that twine
About her breathing wood. One like grass possessing
The power of myriad weakness; one, the weakness of power.
On Noah is poised that issue. Which way will Noah lean?
FIRST VOICE.
Rise up, Noah! A day is done,
World shall be water to the rising sun:
Book your passage, wherever you go
This trip will tell you what you want to know.
SECOND VOICE.
Lie down, Noah! A day is dead,
Let the waters be lullabies over your head:
Cut your losses, liquidate the past,
Now all your riddles are resolved at last.
FIRST VOICE.
To fold the earth in the crook of an arm,
To mould its clay in a fluent palm:
To live a hair’s-breadth and embrace a sphere,
Travelling single and touching everywhere.
&nbs
p; SECOND VOICE.
To be routed like smoke by galloping gales,
To be shredded by fish and the herring-gulls:
To be ruled like sand by an overbearing sea
Marching and countermarching over me.
FIRST VOICE.
The beam directed, the channel spied,
Thrust of piston, engaging of pride:
The breaking of the waters is the birth of man,
Earth is to let and to-morrow is mine.
SECOND VOICE.
The mines are flooded, the boilers raked,
Time’s pattern unravelled, my thirst now is slaked:
I can live as I lived long before I was born,
A multiple amœba in a plastic dawn.
BOTH VOICES.
We are the furnace, we are the snow,
The maze and the monolith, the yes and the no:
We are the fish and we are the bait,
We are Noah, the figure of your fate.
CHORUS.
Since you have come thus far,
Your visible past a steamer’s wake continually fading
Among the receding hours tumbled, and yet you carry
Souvenirs of dead ports, a freight of passion and fear,
Remembrance of loves and landfalls and much deep-sea predicament
Active upon the heart: – consider by what star
Your reckoning is, and whether conscious a course you steer
Or whether you rudderless yaw, self-mutinied, all at sea.
You have come far
To the brink of this tableland where the next step treads air,
Your thoughts like antennæ feeling doubtfully towards the future,
Your will swerving all ways to evade that unstable void;
High stakes, hard falls, comfortless contacts lie before,
But to sidestep these is to die upon a waterless plateau;
You must uncase and fly, for ahead is your thorough-fare.
Consider Noah’s fate,
Chosen to choose between two claims irreconcilable,
Alive on this island, old friends at his elbow, the floods at his feet.