Phantoms All

LATE that evening I sat by the Library window, gazing out at the phantoms of ourselves — the faint projection straight out into space of the busy tables of our crowded room. Some trick of the lights within and the snowfilled streets without had thrust our image across the street — not dominant over the world outside, but resting lightly upon it in transparent mirage. The effect was a curious blending of two worlds, as if a strong film were seen moving crudely behind the dim outlines of a weaker print.

And in our unconsciousness I seemed to read our condemnation, the proof of the unreality of our world.

Down out of the void sifted the snow, alike on the imaged clerk with the Saturday Evening Post, and the unconcerned schoolboy munching peanuts behind his Popular Mechanics. Here and there across our cluttered tables, and down our polished floor, shone pools on wet macadam. Suddenly, through the forehead of our chimney piece, jerked the beam of a movingpicture palace; it winked malignly out like a perverse star in Eden, but never an Eve has raised her head from Vogue. Out of the night hurtles a mad clown of an automobile, balancing a cone of whirling flakes by the nose; through our carved tables he rams it, but no dreamer awakes. Another and another follow, driving ironically through the outing-shoes of the tall stenographer bending over Field and Stream, the absurd heels of the High School freshman sitting with moist lips over Munsey’s. Yet neither girl draws aside her skirts. It is the world, but it touches not us.

Uncannily, out of the very centre of our white-columned fireplace, comes a procession of figures far more real than we — master cartoons of misery, lean faces chalked out for a moment under a street-lamp outside. A girl of twelve, just stretching up and out of last year’s sheath, all her new growth of soul and body shivering. A man cursing, tense with the demon of the I.W.W. Four street lads, monkey-bright. Two scrubwomen, with strident eyes. Tragically they turn and look at us, one and all flash-lighted under the edge of our lives in their separate despairs. But what is that to us? Not one of us has ever lifted the head.

For it is the snow of life that rains stinging down upon them; but only the ghost of snow sifts down that comfortable shadow-corridor over us — shadows all, reading the simulacra of books in a phantom library with the tranced shades that are our untried souls.

Even so, untouched, we dream over ‘Our Responsibility to Belgium,’ ‘Lost Poland,’ ‘Ruined Servia.’ Warmly we dream in our Library, safely housed from the stricken pageant of the world.