The Fête

To-night again the moon’s white matStretches across the dormitory floorWhile outside, like an evil catThe pion prowls down the dark corridor,Planning, I know, to pounce on me, in spiteFor getting leave to sleep in town last night.But it was none of us who made that noise,Only the old brown owl that hoots and fliesOut of the ivy--he will say it was us boys--Seigneur mon Dieu! the sacré soul of spies!He would like to catch each dream that liesHidden behind our sleepy eyes:Their dream? But mine--it is the moon and the wood that sees;All my long life how I shall hate the trees!

In the Place d’Armes, the dusty planes, all Summer throughDozed with the market women in the sun and scarcely stirredTo see the quiet things that crossed the Square--,A tiny funeral, the flying shadow of a bird,The hump-backed barber Célestin Lemaire,Old madame Michel in her three-wheeled chair,And filing past to Vespers, two and two,The demoiselles of the pensionnat.Towed like a ship through the harbour bar,Safe into port, where le petit JésusPerhaps makes nothing of the look they shot at you:Si, c’est défendu, mais que voulez-vous?It was the sun. The sunshine weavesA pattern on dull stones: the sunshine leavesThe portraiture of dreams upon the eyesBefore it dies:All Summer throughThe dust hung white upon the drowsy planesTill suddenly they woke with the Autumn rains.It is not only the little boysWho have hardly got away from toys,But I, who am seventeen next year,Some nights, in bed, have grown cold to hearThat lonely passion of the rainWhich makes you think of being dead,And of somewhere living to lay your headAs if you were a child again,Crying for one thing, known and nearYour empty heart, to still the hunger and the fearThat pelts and beats with it against the pane.

But I remember smiling tooAt all the sun’s soft tricks and those Autumn dreadsIn winter time, when the grey light broke slowly throughThe frosted window-lace to drag us shivering from our beds.And when at dusk the singing wind swung downStraight from the stars to the dark country roadsBeyond the twinkling town,Striking the leafless poplar boughs as he went by,Like some poor, stray dog by the wayside lying dead,We left behind us the old world of dread,I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky.

And then in Spring for three days came the FairJust as the planes were starting into budAbove the caravans: you saw the dancing bearPass on his chain; and heard the jingle and the thud.Only four days agoThey let you out of this dull showTo slither down the montagne russe and chaff the man à latête de veau--Hit, slick, the bull’s eye at the tir,Spin round and round till your head went queerOn the porcs-roulants. Oh! là là! la fête!Va pour du vin, et le tête-a-têteWith the girl who sugars the quafres! Pauvrette,How thin she was; but she smiled, you bet,As she took your tip--“One does not forgetThe good days, Monsieur.” Said with a grace,But sacrébleu! what a ghost of a face!And no fun too for the demoisellesOf the pensionnat, who were hurried past,With their “Oh, que c’est beau--Ah, qu’elle est belle!”A lap-dog’s life from first to last!The good nights are not made for sleep, nor the good daysfor dreaming in,And at the end in the big Circus tent we sat and shookand stewed like sin!

Some children there had got--but where?Sent from the south, perhaps--a red bouquetOf roses, sweetening the fetid airWith scent from gardens by some far away blue bay.They threw one at the dancing bear;The white clown caught it. From St. Rémy’s towerThe deep, slow bell tolled out the hour;The black clown, with his dirty grinLay, sprawling in the dust, as She rode in.

She stood on a white horse--and suddenly you saw the bendOf a far-off road at dawn, with knights riding by,A field of spears--and then the gallant dayGo out in storm, with ragged clouds low down, sullen and greyAgainst red heavens: wild and awful, such a skyAs witnesses against you at the endOf a great battle; bugles blowing, blood and dust--The old Morte d’Arthur, fight you must--.It died in anger. But it was not deathThat had you by the throat, stopping your breath.She looked like Victory. She rode my way.

She laughed at the black clown and then she flewA bird above us, on the wingOf her white arms; and you saw throughA rent in the old tent, a patch of skyWith one dim star. She flew, but not so high--And then she did not fly;She stood in the bright moonlight at the doorOf a strange room, she threw her slippers on the floor--Again, againYou heard the patter of the rain,The starving rain--it was this Thing,Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes;--Oh God! it dies,But after death--,To-night the splendour and the stingBlows back and catches at your breath,The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all theroses in the world, the sea, the Spring,The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream,the dream, the Enchanted Thing!

At first you scarcely saw her face,You knew the maddening feet were there,What called was that half-hidden, white unrestTo which now and then she pressedHer finger tips; but as she slackened paceAnd turned and looked at you it grew quite bare:There was not anything you did not dare:--Like trumpeters the hours passed until the last day of the Fair.

In the Place d’Armes all afternoonThe building birds had sung “Soon, soon,”The shuttered streets slept sound that night,It was full moon:The path into the wood was almost white,The trees were very still and seemed to stare:Not far before your soul the Dream flits on,But when you touch it, it is goneAnd quite alone your soul stands there.

Mother of Christ, no one has seen your eyes: how can men prayEven unto you?There were only wolves’ eyes in the wood--My Mother is a woman too:Nothing is true that is not good,With that quick smile of hers, I have heard her say;--I wish I had gone back home to-day;I should have watched the light that so gently diesFrom our high window, in the Paris skies,The long, straight chainOf lamps hung out along the Seine:I would have turned to her and let the rainBeat on her breast as it does against the pane;--Nothing will be the same again;--There is something strange in my little Mother’s eyes,There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring--The smell of beasts, the smell of dust--The Enchanted Thing!

All my life long I shall see moonlight on the fernAnd the black trunks of trees. Only the hairOf any woman can belong to God.The stalks are cruelly broken where we trod,There had been violets there,I shall not careAs I used to do when I see the bracken burn.