Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DALLOW'S BLUFF, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DALLOW'S BLUFF, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: An autumn pall of heat hung sultrily over
Last Line: And time swept on and dallow's landing forgot.
Subject(s): Autumn; Love; Marriage; Prostitution; Seasons; Fall; Weddings; Husbands; Wives; Harlots; Whores; Brothels


I

An autumn pall of heat hung sultrily over
The thousand-rivered flow of the Mississippi,
And over the wooded hill-banks of oak and cypress,
The day the Steamer Belle exploded and caught fire,
Just as her bow, swan-beautiful, swung around
the point of Dallow's Bend to Dallow's Landing.
The fiery blast that tore her iron entrails out
Was a sharp bright relief for a livid moment
To eyes that watched her there against the twilight --
As if lightning and thunder had cracked the autumn drouth.
Then horror filled all hearts as crying calamity
Cluttered the bloody water, arms and faces struggling
Amid eddies of debris that went under
To come up free of wild hands that had seized it.
Twenty oars put out among the living
Who drifted past clinging to larger wreckage
Of deck and rail that chance had swirled by them;
And twenty put back laden with tragic freight.
But after the wounded had been tenderly lifted and borne
To homes where gentle sympathy and pitying skill
Would salve their pain, Una Dallow, who had beheld all
And hurried down to the levee from the old house
Of the Dallows on Dallow's Bluff, heard a voice asking,
Behind shadowy piles of baled cotton
Destined to cities with strange singing names:
"Who from Dallow's was lost upon her, any one?"
And the answer man-toned and man-indifferent,
"Only the whore, Lily Clay; drowned, I reckon.
Hadn't been here for twenty years, they say."

II

A word begins a new world for the young
Or sends a sick sense of the old's vileness
So sharply through them sometimes that life seems
But a breeding-place of dark inherited evils.
The flush of shame that burned the body of Una Dallow
As she heard that stript syllable whose nakedness
She had only looked at on the Bible's pages
Shrinkingly and as if at her own flesh,
Angered her as a desecrating hand might.
She took her way home through the tepid twilight
That flitting bats shuttled across jaggedly
To the old house's pillared porch, upon which stood
Her father, Julian Dallow, leaning jaundiced
And fretful against a pillar. A drug addict,
So set apart by soul-gulfs from all around him,
He haunted the place querulously between withdrawals
To the opiate rites that secretly enslaved him.
Complaint was all that was left him of authority;
So now to Una mounting the steps he quavered weakly,
"You shouldn't be out so late, Una, it's past dark;
You could have seen enough here, from the Bluff.
Your mother must have known something was going to happen;
She has lain all day in one of her spells of premonition
Unable to speak... Who from Dallow's was lost?"
Una thought, "It sickens me when he asks that way
With his morphia-mind; he doesn't care." But she answered him:
"A woman," and then quietly hurried past him
Through the tall door's dark shadow and up to her chamber.
She had wanted to add bitterly, turning there,
"The whore, Lily Clay!" making a lash of the words
To cut him with, but her tongue stalled in shame,
And she only whipped the door to sharply behind her.
Undoing her hair she shook its glinting darkness out
As if to rid herself of the fever under it.
At eight, Stephen Archer -- son of a gambling father
Who flouted the boy's passion for books and music
As a reproach to his own law-contemptuous youth
Of dice and dissipation -- was coming to see her.
Intending betrothal to him, Una had chosen a gown
Of dream-thin whiteness, which in the hushed moonlight
Of the willow arbor where their love had come to bloom
Would swathe her body as softly and alluringly
As night-mist a hill-breast in spring.
Instead she took a black lace and slipped into it,
Feeling the threads net over her soft flesh
With a little shudder as if they were tangling her life,
Yet glancing around at her mirror saw her bosom under it
So beautifully rounded that a blush of triumph
Swept through her in a voluptuous wave -- until she remembered
Her invalid mother stretched there in the next room,
A victim to that strange trance of speechlessness
Whenever time was about to give black birth
To some misfortune: and who now was suffering maybe
The mute pains that followed it. Going in to her,
Lying so on a canopied bed, ghost-frail,
In catafalque-like pallor, Una, driven by thoughts
That quickly forgot pity, because begotten
By new and troubling presciences, turbidly asked:
"Mother, is the trance over yet? ... are you better? ...
Why are you still speechless, what is it makes you so
When such things are going to happen? ... Listen, Mother,
Did you have a vision, and see all that would happen in it,
Everything as it was? ... Did the trance show you
A woman drowning, a bad woman, Lily Clay? ...
What was she like, Mother? ... did she have hair
As dark as mine? Was she as tall and slender? ...
Did you ever fear, Mother, when you were young and lovely
To look at your own body when thinking of her sort? ...
A man down on the levee said, 'The whore, Lily Clay,
Was drowned,' and I shuddered as if my own limbs
Were rolling out there under the sandy current."
As only rippling shudders slipped serpent-swift
Down the white form under this flood of questioning,
And as the tranced eye-lids did not flutter,
Una turned away, her thoughts circling back
From flighty rangings around the drowned woman
To her expected lover. Firmly down the stairs
She went, feeling spent and suddenly hungry.
Julian Dallow sat at the glossy table,
A sallow spirit dulling the palate like a nausea.
Never hungry, for morphia fed his flesh falsely,
Yet never forgetting that food once had excited him,
He tasted and complained, his mind moving
Morbidly over the day's unsated cravings
Like a weak soul in a fleshless purgatory
Remembering flesh. Now he was prompted evilly
Back to the question Una had only half answered
And said aggrieved, "You didn't tell me, Una,
The name of the drowned woman, the one from Dallow's;
Was it anybody we knew?" At which Una felt
The health of her young body push as never before
Away from the decay and fetid caviling of him.
But she checked herself with remorse, thinking, "It's no use;
Whatever he is he is now in spite of himself.
God could prevent such wrecks and won't -- or He cannot:
Those are the two stones of the mill between which
They are ground... it doesn't matter which does the grinding."
Patiently then and evenly she answered him,
"The woman was Lily Clay, Father, a prostitute."
Then found herself suddenly spurred to add scornfully,
As if the drowned woman and seized her lips,
"But what of the men whose lust made one of her!"
Words that had strong talon and beak, it seemed,
To tear the heart of Julian from its torpor,
For knife and fork clattered out of his hands --
Causing the four candle flames on the white linen
To shake, then stand tall and still as awed spirits.
Una seeing his mouth fall open strickenly
Surmised at once, "So he too knew her bed!"
And then, for more than this was needed to make clear
The thought racking him, asked herself, "But why should she
After so long a time raise such ghosts in him,
And why does he seem now so furtively eager
To push them back in the grave before I see them?"
But rising she only said, "Stephen is coming.
He wants me to marry him, and I may... I don't know.
Nothing seems decent. Send him out to the arbor, please,
I'll wait for him there. The air here is stifling."
And turning without a look she left the huddled shape
Twitching there in the candle-light speechlessly.

III

September takes her dead leaves lightly ever,
They drop in the moonlight with no sound of death;
Nor did Una, though her bosom swelled troubledly
Toward the globed moon as the tide does,
Trample them with a sense of summer gone.
Dark, except for silver thwarts the moon-rays
Were thrusting over, the river flowed invisibly.
But staring to where the dim current lost itself
In shadow that only imagining could solve,
Una asked, in the arbor overhanging the Bluff,
"Where is she now, that poor drowned woman, Lily Clay?"
And again over her body seemed to feel
The sandy flow of the Great Father of Waters
Rushing below to the Gulf. And when, after a space,
She heard the hurried steps of her lover coming behind her,
She did not move. "Una," Stephen Archer's lips
Breathed on her hand, that fluttered like a timid bird
In his as he dropped down beside her and caught its whiteness,
"Why have you come out here? The river tonight
Will cast a spell of sadness over the promise
I know you mean to give me. Yet, beloved,
Even the pitiful death-cry of the drowning,
When the blast tore the twilight, hardly reached me,
Because my heart, shut all day in a dream, was saying,
Tonight Una will twine my life with love.
But Una, drawing her hand away from passion that seemed
Only to root deeper dreads and doubts in her,
Said, "Wait, Stephen, and don't kiss me ... not yet.
I fear there is more trouble; my mother has lain
In a trance that has often proved to be of omen.
And Stephen -- my father knew the drowned woman out there.
You heard her name, Lily Clay? You know about her?
Stephen, are that kind different -- are they so different
To other women? ... No, don't answer me if you have ever..."
"I haven't, Una, I haven't," Stephen broke in
As a wind-breath lifted the arbor's willow leaves
And blew a stray wisp of cloud from the moon's face.
"But, Una, it's strange: my father knew the woman too.
He thinks I'm a degenerate, a mere art-weakling,
Because I keep no mistress, and derides me for it,
Especially since my mother's death. Tonight at supper
Hearing of Lily Clay he said, 'The Lily, eh?'
Then, looking at me with memories of lust in his eyes,
'A damn fine piece of flesh before she slipped too far
And took the town's trade down in New Orleans.
You might have been her son; I had a brat by her,
Or so she swore, before she left Dallow's
In -- what year was it, nineteen one?' ... Una, I wonder..."
But Una had risen. A gnawing intimation in her
Had stirred and now was beginning to say to her,
"So; his father too? ... before she went away!"
And then, numbly, "They do have children, her sort?"
After which it began to stumble on doubts and fears,
Like poison weeds growing up darkly in her, and whisper,
"There's something I cannot see. What is it? what is it?
It frightens me... I mustn't let Stephen touch me,
He mustn't touch me, nobody must touch me
Ever, ever, unless... When did his father say
She left Dallow's, the drowned woman, Lily Clay?
I'm twenty-one and this is... Stephen," she stammered, aloud,
As if this swarm of fears were violating her,
And pushing her arms out against the night-heat
Whose clasp, even, seemed to be loathsome to her,
"Stephen, we can't marry. You must go away.
And go now, won't you? I told you the Dallow blood
Had madness in it and seeds of misery
Ready to spring up always... O my dear, my dear,
I mustn't see you again... I love you too much.
And something tells me I shouldn't. We mustn't meet again."
At which Stephen, hurt, cried, "Go away?"
The universe seemed to have struck him without hands.
But Una, trembling: "I can't say why, I don't know.
I don't, I don't... There isn't a reason -- a clear one,
Or if there is it would be cruel to seek it,
To pry into it... Stephen, do you suppose
They'll ever find her body... the drowned woman's?
O Stephen, if they do I must see it." -- "Una," he answered,
And spoke as if a fatal undertow of evil
Were sweeping her out and drawing her away from him,
"You have seen too much and heard too much already today:
The only madness now, would be to leave you.
My father's soul is cards and dice, and your father's
Is morphia-rotted; but that is nothing to us.
Why should we wait longer? Let us marry at once
Before another day like this shall come to breed
Futile reasons against it. Una, I need you,
The great thoughts and the great songs of men
With you to share them will make a world for me,
A world fit to live in. Your mother's habit
Of trance and premonition is but a disease:
I won't let you contract it." But Una was saying
Through his importunity as through a strong wind,
"No, Stephen, no... No, you must go away.
I don't know why. I know you must. Don't kiss me: go" --
Until his arms fell slowly from around her, offended,
And left her standing free. Then as if
That undertow utterly swept her backward from him
She dimly swayed out of the arbor's door,
While overhead the dark watery sighing
Of willow boughs in the wind washed over the roof eaves.

IV

Up in her chamber Una sank by the window.
Her shaken heart seemed to be sending spasms of pain
Out of her body into impassive space.
Leaves fell, but as if apathetic of death,
So long had they been dying. Within the house
Were the two her questions gathered around; for fancies
Drowned long in her underself came floating up now
With black swollen meanings. She felt through the walls
The tranced woman she called mother in the tall bed
In the next room, and down below between shelved books
That other she called father, preparing narcotic rites
With the small crystal cylinder whose piston would drive
A few drugged hours of peace into his veins.
She sat long, then heard herself say to herself,
Though neither seemed herself any longer, but only two dreads
Of what she might find herself to be, "He'll lie:
Morphia makes him: but I must learn what years
Lily Clay was his mistress. Something will tell me.
I'll go and learn whose daughter I am, whatever he says."
She went down the unlighted stairs; and her stark face
Might well have told another than Julian Dallow
That an old sin may become a new fate
After it has been dust in the heart twenty years.
A light streamed out into the hall from the lone room
Where the habit-wreck sat, waiting for soft stupor
To swathe in quietness his raw nerve-edges.
He barely stared. Lily Clay was forgotten doubtless
And the stricken memory of her he had betrayed.
"Stephen has gone," Una began, "I didn't promise
To marry him." Then she paused for his gaze to become
Sight of her, not that hazed narcotic glimmer.
"He told me -- things of his father." The words crawled,
As she could see, very slowly into his brain,
Worm-slowly until they found him. Then he answered,
"It's always so: Dallows and Archers never marry.
The breeds have always stood apart, hating each other,
Except you and this one. Have you told your mother?
It may be she had premonition of this too.
You never know; she won't say anything afterwards.
She leant to Stephen... But young girls do as they like now:
Their parents are nobody." His melancholy
Hung on the air morbidly after his voice stopped.
But Una had not heard his lean complaining,
Her mind was a fire burning on toward a dread
Invisible and yet unnamed before her.
"He told Stephen the drowned woman, Lily Clay,
Was his mistress also," she said mordantly,
And her eyes lit like hawks upon the cadaverous face,
To gather the full meaning of the startled change
And angry terror that shot through it.
"He lies, then,"
The thin twitching lips cried; then added tortuously,
"A daughter shouldn't be talking about such things
With a father. Lily Clay wasn't bad then."
Una looking beyond him through the open window
At the still trees knew that his words were no more
Than dead leaves falling, -- sap of faith was not in them.
She went on, though dread sucked with ceaseless lips
At the inmost sources of peace still left in her:
"He told Stephen he had a child by her
Before she left Dallow's -- many years ago."
Her words were sheathed in steel and they went through him
As swords through a ghost -- he being hardly more
Than a ghost confined to a corpse and facing torture
Of things supposedly forgotten beyond all hate or fear.
He stiffened and then crumpled, but a dry whisper
Crackled out of his lips: "He never had her.
Nobody had her; nobody had her but me then;
And least of all that money-fingered Archer."
Una looking out past him again for a space
And past the moon-gray trees to the darkened river,
Was driven by his faltering to a deeper dread
That dread had hidden from her: she said firmly,
"The child, then, was your child, and not another's?
You are my father? Stephen is not blood-brother to me?"
His large-pupiled eyes met hers like caged things
Cowering in their sockets. The hands fluttered
And then by habit remembered the small cylinder
That had so often saved him from devouring terror.
He felt for it in his pocket and held fast to it.
"I didn't say," he whined hard from the cage he crouched in,
"There was a child. I didn't say it." But Una, paler:
"Am I that child? The drowned woman was my mother?"
His whine became a snarl, for her eyes lit on him
Again with haunted need of plucking the truth out:
"Yes; she was. I don't care now if you do know it.
There was another child, born the day you were,
Up stairs. It lies unnamed in Dallow Graveyard.
Its mother up there took you instead, without question,
And gave you the place that would have been her own baby's.
Now you have all. Lily Clay didn't want you."
Una swayed. The sudden polluting certainty
Had come, to taint every cell and fibre of her.
The fire in her veins turned to fever. She went to the window.
Lily Clay was out there drifting -- or maybe her throat
Was caught in the fork of a dead snag and held horribly
As now her own seemed to be on a prong of pity.
Hot hysteria flooded up to her lips
Then hotter tears to her eyes. With fierce loathing she turned,
And "Oh, you beast! Oh!" she cried tossing her hands
And almost ready to strike the ghastly face there;
But instead she dashed the tears from her eyes wildly
With upward strokes and staggered out of the room
And out of the house, weeping, moaning, and crying, "Oh!"
She was not aware, hurried along, where she was going,
Until, set on a knoll beside the road, she saw
The moon-misted house of the Archers with one window
Watchfully lit below; then like a moth she knew
She must flutter to it and finish the night's misery.
She did not knock but entered straight, appearing wildly
In the door-glow like a wraith of retribution.
The father of Stephen Archer with suave fingers
Was laying card-offerings down, knaves and kings and queens,
To his gods of chance on the green baize before him.
To Stephen pale across the room he was saying,
"If she was Dallow's mistress too, she tricked me,
And got good pennies for it. As for you and the girl --"
He saw Una and stopped half ready to fancy
His words by some diablery had conjured her up.
But Una brushing the dark shade of her hair back
From her wet, stained cheeks, hardly beheld him.
"Stephen," she said, "Whatever has happened or shall,
Will you want to marry me when I tell you I am the daughter
Of Lily Clay, the prostitute, who drowned today?"
Father and son stared at her, and then the elder
Swallowing down a startled lump, that seemed to fall
Leaden upon his heart, exclaimed, "By God, it's true.
The same eyes and brow and mouth; the same body."
But Stephen only let her name fall from him
With dazed motionless anguish; until, more pitiful:
"I am Lily Clay's daughter," she said, "Does it matter to you?
Would you marry me now? Would any man want to marry me?"
Again she brushed the fallen shade of her hair back,
Wildly confused, and waited, until he faltered out,
"Una, you know I've loved you. What is the matter?"
Una shrank back seeing her image wither swiftly
In his heart as a flower under polluted air.
A cold trembling gripped her. "It's just as well," she said;
"It couldn't have been, for I don't know who my father was.
I only know that men make ruins of women
And outcasts of the daughters they have had by them:
And so it seems that love is the one desecration
That cannot be forgiven; and now I loathe my flesh
For ever having felt love... Oh, my poor mother!"
A storm of tears, a strong heave of hysteria
Broke from her after her words' lightning and drove her out
Of the room and out of doors again into the night.
A cloud risen out of the west had wrecked the moon
And sunk it; the wind, too, with invisible flail
Was threshing dead leaves from the limbs; they fell about her.
Blinded by tears and by the wind and the blowing darkness
She stumbled along, missing the road and finding another
That led sheer to the Bluff's edge above the river.
She was moaning now, "I have men, I hate men;
I'll go away where I shall never see another.
I'll take the veil. Love is loathsome, loathsome."
And not until, suddenly, she had stepped over
The Bluff's brink and fallen a space and struck the water
Did she know where she was or what had happened to her.
The cold current chilled and strangled her speech back
As with vain hands untaught to swim she beat it;
But when again the flow caught and swept her downward,
She thought, "It is my mother's hands dragging me under."
And then in the ringing of her ears heard all the sins
Of desire her heart had ever secretly listened to --
Following the bitter shame of which came darkness.

V

At Dallow House, the tranced woman awoke then
And called weakly. Julian Dallow prowling lean
And sleepless from room to porch, from porch to hall, heard her
And went to her chamber. "Where is Una?" she asked.
"Out somewhere," he answered her eyes, that did not move
From the pale fixed stare upward. "She came and told me
She doesn't mean to marry young Archer after all."
The fixed still stare grew stiller as if the canopy
Were a death-crystal into which they were gazing deeply.
"No," she said, "No; she will not marry him --
Not him nor anybody; and it is better so."
She said no more. He went away. The river swept on...
And time swept on and Dallow's Landing forgot.





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