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[Page 13]
March 27
would be a world of pain in their slow clanging.
12.
Mail, a letter from Mother, no date, but of January, a cheery letter of the facinating "little news".
13.
A reading by the fire of two of the tales of "Limehouse Nights". "The Paw" that opens with a full page exquisite writing of spring –
"Beyond London, amid the spray of meadow and orchard, bird and bee were making carnival, but here (Pennyfields) one still gambled and waited to find a boat…. Lusty spring may rustle in the hedgerows; golden-tasselled summer may move in the meadows. In Limehouse there are only more seamen or less seamen. Summer is a spell of stickiness, and winter a time of fog."
Some may perhaps desire to escape from the "who long .. to kiss their faces to the grass, to lose their tired souls in tangles of green shade…"
So to the telling of .."the most shuddering tale that the Chinese quarter can tell". It is a tale of full of horror, only de Vere Stacpoole's grotesqueing in "The Pools of Silence" can approach to it: Poe is out-Poed. Burke exquisitively tells of horror.
From "The Paw" to "The Bird" a,
"Tale they tell softly in Pennyfields, when the curtains are drawn, and the shapes of the night shut out."
March 27, 28
"Gina of Chinatown" opens exquisitively,
"Memory is a delicate instrument. Like an old musical box, it will be silent for long years; then a mere nothing, a jerk, a tremor, will start the spring, and from beneath its decent covering of dust it will talk to us of forgotten passion and desire."
So to the tale of Gina of Chinatown, a Reminiscence of a dirty theatre near Blackwall, and the inspiration of Burke's second novel, "Twinkletoes".
Burke has the loveliness in his prose of Materlinck and of Pater, the realism of Ghorki and Artzebashof [Artsybashev].
14.
There's rumouring of Amiens being shelled, of the Boche strong to get there. Then there's the danger the Cathedral shrine of the loveliest windows of the world, the rose windows of Christian saints, Paganly magnificent, falling by the bloody beastliness of a country without a soul.
March 28
15.
11 a.m. Rumour is trend: the Boche are past Albert by three miles. Henencourt of our last summer's spell is theirs.
Rumours dying telling is of Kitchener travelling from the East leading 3 million Japs. How is the Boche bringing up his heavy artillery? Perhaps he's using ours as its captured.
Posting away books, it'll be travelling light for La Somme shortly.