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WEST AFRICAN MELODIES

BY AQUAH LALUAH

NATIVITY

WITHIN a native hut, ere stirred the dawn,

Unto the Pure one was an Infant born;
Wrapped in blue lappah that His mother dyed,
Laid on His father's home-tanned deerskin hide,
The Babe still slept, by all things glorified.
Spirits of black bards burst their bonds and sang
'Peace upon earth' until the heavens rang.

All the black babies who from earth had fled

Peeped through the clouds - then gathered round His head. Telling of things a baby needs to do,

When first he opes his eyes on wonders new;

Telling Him that to sleep was sweetest rest,

All comfort came from His black mother's breast.
Their gift was Love, caught from the springing sod,
Whilst tears and laughter were the gifts of God.
Then all the Wise Men of the past stood forth,
Filling the air East, West, and South and North;
And told Him of the joy that wisdom brings

To mortals in their earthly wanderings.

The children of the past shook down each bough,
Wreathed frangipani blossoms for His brow;

They put pink lilies in His mother's hand,

And heaped for both the first fruits of the land.
His father cut some palm fronds, that the air
Be coaxed to zephyrs while He rested there.

Birds trilled their hallelujahs; all the dew
Trembled with laughter, till the Babe laughed too.
All the black women brought their love so wise,
And kissed their motherhood into His mother's eyes.

THE SERVING GIRL

THE calabash wherein she served my food

Was as smooth and polished as sandalwood;

Fish, as white as foam from the sea,

Peppered, and golden fried for me;

She brought palm wine, that carelessly slips
From the sleeping palm tree's honeyed lips.
But who can guess, or even surmise,

Of the countless things she served with her eyes?

THE SOULS OF BLACK AND WHITE

THE Souls of black and white were made
By the selfsame God of the selfsame shade.

God made both pure, and He left one white;
God laughed o'er the other, and wrapped it in night.

Said He, 'I've a flower, and none can unfold it;

I've a breath of great mystery, nothing can hold it. Spirit so illusive the wind cannot sway it,

A force of such might even death cannot slay it.'

But so that He might conceal its glow

He wrapped it in darkness, that men might not know.

Oh, the wonderful souls of both black and white

Were made by one God, of one sod, on one night.

THE RED-HAIRED CITY

BY MARY AGNES HAMILTON

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In one of those old fairy books that belong to the vivid actualities of childhood is a story which recounts how a girl found herself, to her bitter chagrin, without the easy power to attract that so many of her sisters possessed a power she had grown up to regard as her feminine birthright. Though neither ill-favored nor ill-natured, she was insignificant, apt to be left out; had on social occasions to play the part of wallflower, and did not like it. Desperate, she sought the aid of an Enchanter. The Enchanter, as happens in such tales, had a curious passion for collecting souls. What he did with them no one knew; there, after all, he was like other collectors then and since. As the price of giving the girl power over the eyes and hearts of men he demanded her soul. She hesitated. He told her he would make her beautiful and at the same time different, so that even among beautiful women she would possess something they had not, which would exercise an instant and irresistible fascination. As to the thing she was to part with in exchange, that, he assured her, would never be noticed. He offered to give her red hair - hair that in its brightness held the lustre of the sun, and in its darkness the sombre glow of bronze, shot with mysterious gleams of purple. In a glass he held the image she might see every day and show to others. Finally she agreed to his bargain. She got her red hair, and paid the price put upon it.

I

This was at one time a parable but now the time gives it proof. Is not red hair, in a beautiful woman, the final touch of wonder? Does it not lift its possessor up and out above her rivals, render her visibly sister and daughter of the sun? Does it not make even the moderately pretty in form and feature pass as lovely, and to the generously gifted add wonder and excitement? Socially, does it not spell success without effort? Display is superfluous; the red-haired woman has only to be there to be seen. Fashion may change and veer, but red hair is independent of it. Its appeal must tell so long as color continues to move us. When a man says he dislikes it, he is but paying inverted tribute to something primitive in himself which at once thrills him and makes him afraid. When a woman says the same, no one believes her, and rightly not. And yet, behind the fear of the one and the envy of the other, there lurks something deeper, to which neither may be able or willing to give tongue. In some way the red-haired woman is different, and the difference goes deeper than the pigmentation of her hair.

That it is not only the color can easily be proved. No one has ever felt either mystery or attraction in red hair in men. Red-headed boys are described as 'carroty'; red-headed men cut their hair exceptionally short, as if in the hope of concealing it. Judas is supposed to have had it, and

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perhaps for that reason the heroes of sentimental novels are sometimes thus disguised, under a misleading veil of ugliness subsequently withdrawn to reveal more fully the white light of a pure soul. But even then the red hair is not enough in itself; in a man it has no distinct significance-none of the significance it has in a woman.

In her we all know it means something. As to what it means there is, no doubt, little agreement. But I believe that if the red-haired women one knows are submitted to an impartial comparative scrutiny it will be found that there is something, difficult to define, impossible not to feel, which all of them lack. It is the harder to distinguish in that few of them are destitute of attraction; yet the ruthless analysis of close contact will, in nine cases out of ten, bring the attracted up against some ultimate blind spot, some chord that does not sound, some insensitiveness that cannot be moved. Until one gets near, probes deep, cares much, one may not discover it; but as one does one will. There is something inaccessible, something that does not respond, something, above all, that rejects responsibility.

There is a word for this thing the red-haired woman has not got, though it is one that has gone out of fashion and will probably be hailed with contempt. A soul. The red-haired woman has no soul.

Much as we delight to mention the unmentionable and touch the untouchable, we have got frightened of some of the words our ancestors used with a cruel candor. Especially is this the case with the words that indicate, without pretending to analyze or exhaust, spiritual facts and forces. So the word 'soul,' though it still figures, for want of a better, in our vocabularies, makes us shy. We say we do not know what it means. And yet, for all our

cleverness and our superconsciousness, we have evolved no other word that does its work. Sentimentalism may mask realities from us, but there is a thing behind it, nevertheless, which it caricatures, whose absence can be felt, though its outline is hard to draw. Being soulful is not the same thing as having a soul; being selfish is not the same thing as being without one. There are men and women who have souls; there are men and women who have not; and we know them when we meet them. Red-haired women belong to the latter class; and there is no other form of words which will cover their peculiarities except that which declares that they have no souls.

Puzzling things, if they have enough charm to keep us intrigued by the riddle they set us, are still likened to women. It is so with ships, engines, nations, cities. But we have passed away from the days when it could be imagined that to describe a city or anything else as a woman is to tell one much about it. Women are as various as men, and no one has yet succeeded in laying his finger on any single quality common to all women as women, and thereby distinguishing them from men. True things may be said of certain kinds of women as of certain kinds of men not of women as such. Or of cities as such. They are not all charming, any more than are women. Some are, however; and among them none is more richly endowed with both charm and wonder, with that quality which sets one puzzling and keeps one so, than New York. It makes one want to talk; one can no more be restrained from talking about it by one's ignorance than about a beautiful woman, of whose fascination one is afraid, in whose past may be hid some revealing secret. New York need have no fear of its past; its secrets, whether fearful or beautiful, or both, are in the future;

and in talking of it one is constantly impelled to be looking there.

II

As happens when one meets a lovely red-haired woman, fear and admiration mingle in the mind; more than a touch of envy, and, behind that, a hesitating doubt. New York has so much that one boggles at saying that anything is missing; and yet this sense of something missing will persist. Behind wonder, admiration, envy, dread, the mind fumbles for the clue that may relate them, and can neither find it nor cease from searching.

More than any other city in the world, New York is an embodied question mark. The approach from overseas presents this aspect vividly. No other thrusts itself, with such arrogant and challenging beauty, right upon one. To others one comes gradually, out of stations, through tunnels, across country, from amid a bewilderment of docks and wharves. Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Budapest, have aspects as remarkable, which can be found. In each case, however, they need finding. New York is there. One comes upon a thing defined, rounded off, from the start. What one sees across the water is not an aspect; it is the city as it remains. Looking expectantly over the bay, one watches the great buildings rising, high enough, assured enough in outline, arresting enough in design and combination, to tell even against its superb sweep. There, facing one, is an image that persists and is genuinely symbolic of what is to come. On the very threshold one is confronted by a picture composed, not by the accidental beauties of situation and atmosphere, but by the resolute will of man, of which it is the expression. The situation, of course, is always there, but on nine days out of ten there is, in

our European sense, little or no atmosphere. The lines are etched on an air of crystalline clearness, blue and white. Unveiled, the city looks at one.

Before it one shrinks, dwindles, quails. One grows smaller and smaller as it looms up before one. Questions, thoughts, preconceptions, are overpowered; judgment is dominated; standards are pushed aside. Here is the not-self multiplied and aggrandized to the point of terror; here is something one could not have imagined and does not understand. It is not only that one sinks and shrinks under sheer size, height, mass, and solidity of specification, though that plays its part; the element of fear is driven home by the awful authority of rectilinear pattern and perpetual right angles. Evasion is impossible. The fluid mind is seized and held in the clamp of geometric design. Things rise up, before one, around one, above one; they are there

more than one is one's self. One is a mere rounded bundle of softness; they have risen out of the water, out of the earth, in a form that asserts, at every turn, an alien dominance. The ordinary subterfuges of dismissal and equivocation fail. Even the æsthetic canon betrays, for, with a final turn of the screw, the beauty of these strange structures overwhelms, and a perverse delight is mingled with one's terror. For they have beauty, a new beauty, fearsome as that of the Pyramids, because, like theirs, it seems to be at once the supreme expression and the supreme denial of human will.

Nature, time, the slow accumulating pressure of event and experience, have made the capitals of Europe. New York has made itself. Under one's eyes it is remaking itself. Buildings here do not change or decay. Overnight they are torn down; next morning new erections are rising in their places, 'pinnacled dim in the intense inane.'

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