Читать книгу Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure - Ball Eustace Hale - Страница 1

"What has man done here? How atone,

Great God, for this which man has done?

And for the body and soul which by

Man's pitiless doom must now comply

With lifelong hell, what lullaby

Of sweet forgetful second birth

Remains? All dark. No sign on earth

What measure of God's rest endows

The Many mansions of His house.

"If but a woman's heart might see

Such erring heart unerringly

For once! But that can never be.

"Like a rose shut in a book

In which pure women may not look,

For its base pages claim control

To crush the flower within the soul;

Where through each dead roseleaf that clings,

Pale as transparent psyche-wings,

To the vile text, are traced such things

As might make lady's cheek indeed

More than a living rose to read;

So nought save foolish foulness may

Watch with hard eyes the sure decay;

And so the lifeblood of this rose,

Puddled with shameful knowledge flows

Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose;

Yet still it keeps such faded show

Of when 'twas gathered long ago,

That the crushed petals' lovely grain,

The sweetness of the sanguine stain,

Seen of a woman's eyes must make

Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache,

Love roses better for its sake: —

Only that this can never be: —

Even so unto her sex is she!

"Yet, Jenny, looking long at you,

The woman almost fades from view.

A cipher of man's changeless sum

Of lust, past, present, and to come,

Is left. A riddle that one shrinks

To challenge from the scornful sphinx.

"Like a toad within a stone

Seated while Time crumbles on;

Which sits there since the earth was curs'd

For Man's transgression at the first;

Which, living through all centuries,

Not once has seen the sun arise;

Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,

The earth's whole summers have not warmed;

Which always – whitherso the stone

Be flung – sits there, deaf, blind, alone; —

Aye, and shall not be driven out

'Till that which shuts him round about

Break at the very Master's stroke,

And the dust thereof vanished as smoke,

And the seed of Man vanished as dust: —

Even so within this world is Lust!"