Part 7

But why to starve? And why stay there at all? Why not make one good leap and then be done Forever and at once with Argan’s ghost And all such outworn churchyard servitude? For it was Argan’s ghost that held the string, And her sick fancy that held Argan’s ghost-- Held it and pitied it. She laughed, almost, There for the moment; but her strained eyes filled With tears, and she was angry for those tears-- Angry at first, then proud, then sorry for them. So she grew calm; and after a vain chase For thoughts more vain, she questioned of herself What measure of primeval doubts and fears Were still to be gone through that she might win Persuasion of her strength and of herself To be what she could see that she must be, No matter where the ghost was.--And the more She lived, the more she came to recognize That something out of her thrilled ignorance Was luminously, proudly being born, And thereby proving, thought by forward thought The prowess of its image; and she learned At length to look right on to the long days Before her without fearing. She could watch The coming course of them as if they were No more than birds, that slowly, silently, And irretrievably should wing themselves Uncounted out of sight. And when he came Again she should be free--she would be free. Else, when he looked at her she must look down, Defeated, and malignly dispossessed Of what was hers to prove and in the proving Wisely to consecrate. And if the plague Of that perverse defeat should come to be-- If at that sickening end she were to find Herself to be the same poor prisoner That he had found at first--then she must lose All sight and sound of him, she must abjure All possible thought of him; for he would go So far and for so long from her that love-- Even a love like his, exiled enough, Might for another’s touch be born again-- Born to be lost and starved for and not found; Or, at the next, the second wretchedest, It might go mutely flickering down and out, And on some incomplete and piteous day, Some perilous day to come, she might at last Learn, with a noxious freedom, what it is To be at peace with ghosts. Then were the blow Thrice deadlier than any kind of death Could ever be: to know that she had won The truth too late--there were the dregs indeed Of wisdom, and of love the final thrust Unmerciful; and there where now did lie So plain before her the straight radiance Of what was her appointed way to take, Were only the bleak ruts of an old road That stretched ahead and faded and lay far Through deserts of unconscionable years.

But vampire thoughts like these confessed the doubt That love denied; and once, if never again, They should be turned away. They might come back-- More craftily, perchance, they might come back-- And with a spirit-thirst insatiable Finish the strength of her; but now, to-day She would have none of them. She knew that love Was true, that he was true, that she was true; And should a death-bed snare that she had made So long ago be stretched inexorably Through all her life, only to be unspun With her last breathing? And were bats and threads, Accursedly devised with watered gules, To be Love’s heraldry? What were it worth To live and to find out that life were life But for an unrequited incubus Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down Till she had thrown down fear and overcome The woman that was yet so much of her That she might yet go mad? What were it worth To live, to linger, and to be condemned In her submission to a common thought That clogged itself and made of its first faith Its last impediment? What augured it, Now in this quick beginning of new life, To clutch the sunlight and be feeling back, Back with a scared fantastic fearfulness, To touch, not knowing why, the vexed-up ghost Of what was gone?

Yes, there was Argan’s face, Pallid and pinched and ruinously marked With big pathetic bones; there were his eyes, Quiet and large, fixed wistfully on hers; And there, close-pressed again within her own, Quivered his cold thin fingers. And, ah! yes, There were the words, those dying words again, And hers that answered when she promised him. Promised him? ... yes. And had she known the truth Of what she felt that he should ask her that, And had she known the love that was to be, God knew that she could not have told him then. But then she knew it not, nor thought of it; There was no need of it; nor was there need Of any problematical support Whereto to cling while she convinced herself That love’s intuitive utility, Inexorably merciful, had proved That what was human was unpermanent And what was flesh was ashes. She had told Him then that she would love no other man, That there was not another man on earth Whom she could ever love, or who could make So much as a love thought go through her brain; And he had smiled. And just before he died His lips had made as if to say something-- Something that passed unwhispered with his breath, Out of her reach, out of all quest of it. And then, could she have known enough to know The meaning of her grief, the folly of it, The faithlessness and the proud anguish of it, There might be now no threads to punish her, No vampire thoughts to suck the coward blood, The life, the very soul of her.

Yes, Yes, They might come back.... But why should they come back? Why was it she had suffered? Why had she Struggled and grown these years to demonstrate That close without those hovering clouds of gloom And through them here and there forever gleamed The Light itself, the life, the love, the glory, Which was of its own radiance good proof That all the rest was darkness and blind sight? And who was _she_? The woman she had known-- The woman she had petted and called “I”-- The woman she had pitied, and at last Commiserated for the most abject And persecuted of all womankind,-- Could it be she that had sought out the way To measure and thereby to quench in her The woman’s fear--the fear of her not fearing? A nervous little laugh that lost itself, Like logic in a dream, fluttered her thoughts An instant there that ever she should ask What she might then have told so easily-- So easily that Annandale had frowned, Had he been given wholly to be told The truth of what had never been before So passionately, so inevitably Confessed. For she could see from where she sat The sheets that he had bound up like a book And covered with red leather; and her eyes Could see between the pages of the book, Though her eyes, like them, were closed. And she could read As well as if she had them in her hand, What he had written on them long ago,-- Six years ago, when he was waiting for her. She might as well have said that she could see The man himself, as once he would have looked Had she been there to watch him while he wrote Those words, and all for her.... For her whose face Had flashed itself, prophetic and unseen, But not unspirited, between the life That would have been without her and the life That he had gathered up like frozen roots Out of a grave-clod lying at his feet, Unconsciously, and as unconsciously Transplanted and revived. He did not know The kind of life that he had found, nor did He doubt, not knowing it; but well he knew That it was life--new life, and that the old Might then with unimprisoned wings go free, Onward and all along to its own light, Through the appointed shadow. While she gazed Upon it there she felt within herself The growing of a newer consciousness-- The pride of something fairer than her first Outclamoring of interdicted thought Had ever quite foretold; and all at once There quivered and requivered through her flesh, Like music, like the sound of an old song, Triumphant, love-remembered murmurings Of what for passion’s innocence had been Too mightily, too perilously hers, Ever to be reclaimed and realized Until to-day. To-day she could throw off The burden that had held her down so long, And she could stand upright, and she could see The way to take, with eyes that had in them No gleam but of the spirit. Day or night, No matter; she could see what was to see-- All that had been till now shut out from her, The service, the fulfillment, and the truth, And thus the cruel wiseness of it all.

So Damaris, more like than anything To one long prisoned in a twilight cave With hovering bats for all companionship, And after time set free to fight the sun, Laughed out, so glad she was to recognize The test of what had been, through all her folly, The courage of her conscience; for she knew, Now on a late-flushed autumn afternoon That else had been too bodeful of dead things To be endured with aught but the same old Inert, self-contradicted martyrdom Which she had known so long, that she could look Right forward through the years, nor any more Shrink with a cringing prescience to behold The glitter of dead summer on the grass, Or the brown-glimmered crimson of still trees Across the intervale where flashed along, Black-silvered, the cold river. She had found, As if by some transcendent freakishness Of reason, the glad life that she had sought Where naught but obvious clouds could ever be-- Clouds to put out the sunlight from her eyes, And to put out the love-light from her soul. But they were gone--now they were all gone; And with a whimsied pathos, like the mist Of grief that clings to new-found happiness Hard wrought, she might have pity for the small Defeated quest of them that brushed her sight Like flying lint--lint that had once been thread....

Yes, like an anodyne, the voice of him, There were the words that he had made for her, For her alone. The more she thought of them The more she lived them, and the more she knew The life-grip and the pulse of warm strength in them. They were the first and last of words to her, And there was in them a far questioning That had for long been variously at work, Divinely and elusively at work, With her, and with the grave that had been hers; They were eternal words, and they diffused A flame of meaning that men’s lexicons Had never kindled; they were choral words That harmonized with love’s enduring chords Like wisdom with release; triumphant words That rang like elemental orisons Through ages out of ages; words that fed Love’s hunger in the spirit; words that smote; Thrilled words that echoed, and barbed words that clung;-- And every one of them was like a friend Whose obstinate fidelity, well tried, Had found at last and irresistibly The way to her close conscience, and thereby Revealed the unsubstantial Nemesis That she had clutched and shuddered at so long; And every one of them was like a real And ringing voice, clear toned and absolute, But of a love-subdued authority That uttered thrice the plain significance Of what had else been generously vague And indolently true. It may have been The triumph and the magic of the soul, Unspeakably revealed, that finally Had reconciled the grim probationing Of wisdom with unalterable faith, But she could feel--not knowing what it was, For the sheer freedom of it--a new joy That humanized the latent wizardry Of his prophetic voice and put for it The man within the music.

So it came To pass, like many a long-compelled emprise That with its first accomplishment almost Annihilates its own severity, That she could find, whenever she might look, The certified achievement of a love That had endured, self-guarded and supreme, To the glad end of all that wavering; And she could see that now the flickering world Of autumn was awake with sudden bloom, New-born, perforce, of a slow bourgeoning. And she had found what more than half had been The grave-deluded, flesh-bewildered fear Which men and women struggle to call faith, To be the paid progression to an end Whereat she knew the foresight and the strength To glorify the gift of what was hers, To vindicate the truth of what she was. And had it come to her so suddenly? There was a pity and a weariness In asking that, and a great needlessness; For now there were no wretched quivering strings That held her to the churchyard any more: There were no thoughts that flapped themselves like bats Around her any more. The shield of love Was clean, and she had paid enough to learn How it had always been so. And the truth, Like silence after some far victory, Had come to her, and she had found it out As if it were a vision, a thing born So suddenly!--just as a flower is born, Or as a world is born--so suddenly.

SAINTE-NITOUCHE

Though not for common praise of him, Nor yet for pride or charity, Still would I make to Vanderberg One tribute for his memory:

One honest warrant of a friend Who found with him that flesh was grass-- Who neither blamed him in defect Nor marveled how it came to pass;

Or why it ever was that he-- That Vanderberg, of all good men, Should lose himself to find himself, Straightway to lose himself again.

For we had buried Sainte-Nitouche, And he had said to me that night: “Yes, we have laid her in the earth, But what of that?” And he was right.

And he had said: “We have a wife, We have a child, we have a church; ’Twould be a scurrilous way out If we should leave them in the lurch.

“That’s why I have you here with me To-night: you know a talk may take The place of bromide, cyanide, _Et cetera_. For heaven’s sake,

“Why do you look at me like that? What have I done to freeze you so? Dear man, you see where friendship means A few things yet that you don’t know;

“And you see partly why it is That I am glad for what is gone: For Sainte-Nitouche and for the world In me that followed. What lives on--

“Well, here you have it: here at home-- For even home will yet return. You know the truth is on my side, And that will make the embers burn.

“I see them brighten while I speak, I see them flash,--and they are mine! You do not know them, but I do: I know the way they used to shine.

“And I know more than I have told Of other life that is to be: I shall have earned it when it comes, And when it comes I shall be free.

“Not as I was before she came But farther on for having been The servitor, the slave of her-- The fool, you think. But there’s your sin--

“Forgive me!--and your ignorance: Could you but have the vision here That I have, you would understand As I do that all ways are clear

“For those who dare to follow them With earnest eyes and honest feet. But Sainte-Nitouche has made the way For me, and I shall find it sweet.

“Sweet with a bitter sting left?--Yes, Bitter enough, God knows, at first; But there are more steep ways than one To make the best look like the worst;

“And here is mine--the dark and hard, For me to follow, trust, and hold: And worship, so that I may leave No broken story to be told.

“Therefore I welcome what may come, Glad for the days, the nights, the years.”-- An upward flash of ember-flame Revealed the gladness in his tears.

“You see them, but you know,” said he, “Too much to be incredulous: You know the day that makes us wise, The moment that makes fools of us.

“So I shall follow from now on The road that she has found for me: The dark and starry way that leads Right upward, and eternally.

“Stumble at first? I may do that; And I may grope, and hate the night; But there’s a guidance for the man Who stumbles upward for the light,

“And I shall have it all from her, The foam-born child of innocence. I feel you smiling while I speak, But that’s of little consequence;

“For when we learn that we may find The truth where others miss the mark, What is it worth for us to know That friends are smiling in the dark?

“Could we but share the lonely pride Of knowing, all would then be well; But knowledge often writes itself In flaming words we cannot spell.

“And I, who have my work to do, Look forward; and I dare to see, Far stretching and all mountainous, God’s pathway through the gloom for me.”

I found so little to say then That I said nothing.--“Say good-night,” Said Vanderberg; “and when we meet To-morrow, tell me I was right.

“Forget the dozen other things That you have not the faith to say; For now I know as well as you That you are glad to go away.”

I could have blessed the man for that, And he could read me with a smile: “You doubt,” said he, “but if we live You’ll know me in a little while.”

He lived; and all as he foretold, I knew him--better than he thought: My fancy did not wholly dig The pit where I believed him caught.

But yet he lived and laughed, and preached, And worked--as only players can: He scoured the shrine that once was home And kept himself a clergyman.

The clockwork of his cold routine Put friends far off that once were near; The five staccatos in his laugh Were too defensive and too clear;

The glacial sermons that he preached Were longer than they should have been; And, like the man who fashioned them, The best were too divinely thin.

But still he lived, and moved, and had The sort of being that was his, Till on a day the shrine of home For him was in the Mysteries:--

“My friend, there’s one thing yet,” said he, “And one that I have never shared With any man that I have met; But you--you know me.” And he stared

For a slow moment at me then With conscious eyes that had the gleam, The shine, before the stroke:--“You know The ways of us, the way we dream:

“You know the glory we have won, You know the glamour we have lost; You see me now, you look at me,-- And yes, you pity me, almost;

“But never mind the pity--no, Confess the faith you can’t conceal; And if you frown, be not like one Of those who frown before they feel.

“For there is truth, and half truth,--yes, And there’s a quarter truth, no doubt; But mine was more than half.... You smile? You understand? You bear me out?

“You always knew that I was right-- You are my friend--and I have tried Your faith--your love.”--The gleam grew small, The stroke was easy, and he died.

I saw the dim look change itself To one that never will be dim; I saw the dead flesh to the grave, But that was not the last of him.

For what was his to live lives yet: Truth, quarter truth, death cannot reach; Nor is it always what we know That we are fittest here to teach.

The fight goes on when fields are still, The triumph clings when arms are down; The jewels of all coronets Are pebbles of the unseen crown;

The specious weight of loud reproof Sinks where a still conviction floats; And on God’s ocean after storm Time’s wreckage is half pilot-boats;

And what wet faces wash to sight Thereafter feed the common moan;-- But Vanderberg no pilot had, Nor could have: he was all alone.

Unchallenged by the larger light The starry quest was his to make; And of all ways that are for men, The starry way was his to take.

We grant him idle names enough To-day, but even while we frown The fight goes on, the triumph clings, And there is yet the unseen crown.

But was it his? Did Vanderberg Find half truth to be passion’s thrall, Or as we met him day by day, Was love triumphant, after all?

I do not know so much as that; I only know that he died right: Saint Anthony nor Sainte-Nitouche Had ever smiled as he did--quite.

AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT

ALCESTIS

Shall I never make him look at me again? I look at him, I look my life at him, I tell him all I know the way to tell, But there he stays the same.

Shall I never make him speak one word to me? Shall I never make him say enough to show My heart if he be glad? Be glad? ... ah! God, Why did they bring me back?

I wonder, if I go to him again, If I take him by those two cold hands again, Shall I get one look of him at last, or feel One sign--or anything?

Or will he still sit there in the same way, Without an answer for me from his lips, Or from his eyes,--or even with a touch Of his hand on my hand?...

“Will you look down this once--look down at me? Speak once--and if you never speak again, Tell me enough--tell me enough to make Me know that you are glad!

“You are my King, and once my King would speak: You were Admetus once, you loved me once: Life was a dream of heaven for us once-- And has the dream gone by?

“Do I cling to shadows when I call you Life? Do you love me still, or are the shadows all? Or is it I that love you in the grave, And you that mourn for me?

“If it be that, then do not mourn for me; Be glad that I have loved you, and be King. But if it be not that--if it be true.... Tell me if it be true!”

Then with a choking answer the King spoke; But never touched his hand on hers, or fixed His eyes on hers, or on the face of her: “Yes, it is true,” he said.

“You are alive, and you are with me now; And you are reaching up to me that I-- That I may take you--I that am a King-- I that was once a man.”

So then she knew. She might have known before; Truly, she thought, she must have known it long Before: she must have known it when she came From that great sleep of hers.

She knew the truth, but not yet all of it: He loved her, but he would not let his eyes Prove that he loved her; and he would not hold His wife there in his arms.

So, like a slave, she waited at his knees, And waited. She was not unhappy now. She quivered, but she knew that he would speak Again--and he did speak.

And while she felt the tremor of his words, He told her all there was for him to tell; And then he turned his face to meet her face, That she might look at him.

She looked; and all her trust was in that look, And all her faith was in it, and her love; And when his answer to that look came back, It flashed back through his tears.

So then she put her arms around his neck, And kissed him on his forehead and his lips; And there she clung, fast in his arms again, Triumphant, with closed eyes.

At last, half whispering, she spoke once more: “Why was it that you suffered for so long? Why could you not believe me--trust in me? Was I so strange as that?

“We suffer when we do not understand; And you have suffered--you that love me now-- Because you are a man.... There is one thing No man can understand.

“I would have given everything?--gone down To Tartarus--to silence? Was it that? I would have died? I would have let you live?-- And was it very strange?”

THE CORRIDOR

It may have been the pride in me for aught I know, or just a patronizing whim; But call it freak or fancy, or what not, I cannot hide that hungry face of him.

I keep a scant half-dozen words he said, And every now and then I lose his name; He may be living or he may be dead, But I must have him with me all the same.

I knew it, and I knew it all along,-- And felt it once or twice, or thought I did; But only as a glad man feels a song That sounds around a stranger’s coffin lid.