Part 3

He did not say that he was glad or sorry; For suddenly came flashing into vision A thing that was a manor and a palace, With walls and roofs that had a flaming sky Behind them, like a sky that he remembered, And one that had from his rock-sheltered haunt Above the roofs of his forsaken city Made flame as if all Camelot were on fire. The glow brought with it a brief memory Of Arthur as he left him, and the pain That fought in Arthur's eyes for losing him, And must have overflowed when he had vanished. But now the eyes that looked hard into his Were Vivian's, not the King's; and he could see, Or so he thought, a shade of sorrow in them. She took his two hands: "You are sad," she said.-- He smiled: "Your western lights bring memories Of Camelot. We all have memories-- Prophets, and women who are like slim cedars; But you are wrong to say that I am sad."-- "Would you go back to Camelot?" she asked, Her fingers tightening. Merlin shook his head. "Then listen while I tell you that I'm glad," She purred, as if assured that he would listen: "At your first warning, much too long ago, Of this quaint pilgrimage of yours to see 'The fairest and most orgulous of ladies'-- No language for a prophet, I am sure-- Said I, 'When this great Merlin comes to me, My task and avocation for some time Will be to make him willing, if I can, To teach and feed me with an ounce of wisdom.' For I have eaten to an empty shell, After a weary feast of observation Among the glories of a tinsel world That had for me no glory till you came, A life that is no life. Would you go back To Camelot?"--Merlin shook his head again, And the two smiled together in the sunset.

They moved along in silence to the door, Where Merlin said: "Of your three hundred here There is but one I know, and him I favor; I mean the stately one who shakes the keys Of that most evil sounding gate of yours, Which has a clang as if it shut forever."-- "If there be need, I'll shut the gate myself," She said. "And you like Blaise? Then you shall have him. He was not born to serve, but serve he must, It seems, and be enamoured of my shadow. He cherishes the taint of some high folly That haunts him with a name he cannot know, And I could fear his wits are paying for it. Forgive his tongue, and humor it a little."-- "I knew another one whose name was Blaise," He said; and she said lightly, "Well, what of it?"-- "And he was nigh the learnedest of hermits; His home was far away from everywhere, And he was all alone there when he died."-- "Now be a pleasant Merlin," Vivian said, Patting his arm, "and have no more of that; For I'll not hear of dead men far away, Or dead men anywhere this afternoon. There'll be a trifle in the way of supper This evening, but the dead shall not have any. Blaise and this man will tell you all there is For you to know. Then you'll know everything." She laughed, and vanished like a humming-bird.

V

The sun went down, and the dark after it Starred Merlin's new abode with many a sconced And many a moving candle, in whose light The prisoned wizard, mirrored in amazement, Saw fronting him a stranger, falcon-eyed, Firm-featured, of a negligible age, And fair enough to look upon, he fancied, Though not a warrior born, nor more a courtier. A native humor resting in his long And solemn jaws now stirred, and Merlin smiled To see himself in purple, touched with gold, And fledged with snowy lace.--The careful Blaise, Having drawn some time before from Merlin's wallet The sable raiment of a royal scholar, Had eyed it with a long mistrust and said: "The lady Vivian would be vexed, I fear, To meet you vested in these learned weeds Of gravity and death; for she abhors Mortality in all its hues and emblems-- Black wear, long argument, and all the cold And solemn things that appertain to graves."-- And Merlin, listening, to himself had said, "This fellow has a freedom, yet I like him;" And then aloud: "I trust you. Deck me out, However, with a temperate regard For what your candid eye may find in me Of inward coloring. Let them reap my beard, Moreover, with a sort of reverence, For I shall never look on it again. And though your lady frown her face away To think of me in black, for God's indulgence, Array me not in scarlet or in yellow."-- And so it came to pass that Merlin sat At ease in purple, even though his chin Reproached him as he pinched it, and seemed yet A little fearful of its nakedness. He might have sat and scanned himself for ever Had not the careful Blaise, regarding him, Remarked again that in his proper judgment, And on the valid word of his attendants, No more was to be done. "Then do no more," Said Merlin, with a last look at his chin; "Never do more when there's no more to do, And you may shun thereby the bitter taste Of many disillusions and regrets. God's pity on us that our words have wings And leave our deeds to crawl so far below them; For we have all two heights, we men who dream, Whether we lead or follow, rule or serve."-- "God's pity on us anyhow," Blaise answered, "Or most of us. Meanwhile, I have to say, As long as you are here, and I'm alive, Your summons will assure the loyalty Of all my diligence and expedition. The gong that you hear singing in the distance Was rung for your attention and your presence."-- "I wonder at this fellow, yet I like him," Said Merlin; and he rose to follow him.

The lady Vivian in a fragile sheath Of crimson, dimmed and veiled ineffably By the flame-shaken gloom wherein she sat, And twinkled if she moved, heard Merlin coming, And smiled as if to make herself believe Her joy was all a triumph; yet her blood Confessed a tingling of more wonderment Than all her five and twenty worldly years Of waiting for this triumph could remember; And when she knew and felt the slower tread Of his unseen advance among the shadows To the small haven of uncertain light That held her in it as a torch-lit shoal Might hold a smooth red fish, her listening skin Responded with a creeping underneath it, And a crinkling that was incident alike To darkness, love, and mice. When he was there, She looked up at him in a whirl of mirth And wonder, as in childhood she had gazed Wide-eyed on royal mountebanks who made So brief a shift of the impossible That kings and queens would laugh and shake themselves; Then rising slowly on her little feet, Like a slim creature lifted, she thrust out Her two small hands as if to push him back-- Whereon he seized them. "Go away," she said; "I never saw you in my life before."-- "You say the truth," he answered; "when I met Myself an hour ago, my words were yours. God made the man you see for you to like, If possible. If otherwise, turn down These two prodigious and remorseless thumbs And leave your lions to annihilate him."--

"I have no other lion than yourself," She said; "and since you cannot eat yourself, Pray do a lonely woman, who is, you say, More like a tree than any other thing In your discrimination, the large honor Of sharing with her a small kind of supper."-- "Yes, you are like a tree,--or like a flower; More like a flower to-night." He bowed his head And kissed the ten small fingers he was holding, As calmly as if each had been a son; Although his heart was leaping and his eyes Had sight for nothing save a swimming crimson Between two glimmering arms. "More like a flower To-night," he said, as now he scanned again The immemorial meaning of her face And drew it nearer to his eyes. It seemed A flower of wonder with a crimson stem Came leaning slowly and regretfully To meet his will--a flower of change and peril That had a clinging blossom of warm olive Half stifled with a tyranny of black, And held the wayward fragrance of a rose Made woman by delirious alchemy. She raised her face and yoked his willing neck With half her weight; and with hot lips that left The world with only philosophy For Merlin or for Anaxagoras, Called his to meet them and in one long hush Of capture to surrender and make hers The last of anything that might remain Of what were now their beardless wizardry. Then slowly she began to push herself Away, and slowly Merlin let her go As far from him as his outreaching hands Could hold her fingers while his eyes had all The beauty of the woodland and the world Before him in the firelight, like a nymph Of cities, or a queen a little weary Of inland stillness and immortal trees. "Are you to let me go again sometime," She said,--"before I starve to death, I wonder? If not, I'll have to bite the lion's paws, And make him roar. He cannot shake his mane, For now the lion has no mane to shake; The lion hardly knows himself without it, And thinks he has no face, but there's a lady Who says he had no face until he lost it. So there we are. And there's a flute somewhere, Playing a strange old tune. You know the words: 'The Lion and the Lady are both hungry.'"

Fatigue and hunger--tempered leisurely With food that some devout magician's oven Might after many failures have delivered, And wine that had for decades in the dark Of Merlin's grave been slowly quickening, And with half-heard, dream-weaving interludes Of distant flutes and viols, made yet more distant By far, nostalgic hautboys blown from nowhere,-- Were tempered not so leisurely, may be, With Vivian's inextinguishable eyes Between two shining silver candlesticks That lifted each a trembling flame to make The rest of her a dusky loveliness Against a bank of shadow. Merlin made, As well as he was able while he ate, A fair division of the fealty due To food and beauty, albeit more times than one Was he at odds with his urbanity In honoring too long the grosser viand. "The best invention in Broceliande Has not been over-taxed in vain, I see," She told him, with her chin propped on her fingers And her eyes flashing blindness into his: "I put myself out cruelly to please you, And you, for that, forget almost at once The name and image of me altogether. You needn't, for when all is analyzed, It's only a bird-pie that you are eating."

"I know not what you call it," Merlin said; "Nor more do I forget your name and image, Though I do eat; and if I did not eat, Your sending out of ships and caravans To get whatever 'tis that's in this thing Would be a sorrow for you all your days; And my great love, which you have seen by now, Might look to you a lie; and like as not You'd actuate some sinewed mercenary To carry me away to God knows where And seal me in a fearsome hole to starve, Because I made of this insidious picking An idle circumstance. My dear fair lady-- And there is not another under heaven So fair as you are as I see you now-- I cannot look at you too much and eat; And I must eat, or be untimely ashes, Whereon the light of your celestial gaze Would fall, I fear me, for no longer time Than on the solemn dust of Jeremiah-- Whose beard you likened once, in heathen jest, To mine that now is no man's."

"Are you sorry?" Said Vivian, filling Merlin's empty goblet; "If you are sorry for the loss of it, Drink more of this and you may tell me lies Enough to make me sure that you are glad; But if your love is what you say it is, Be never sorry that my love took off That horrid hair to make your face at last A human fact. Since I have had your name To dream of and say over to myself, The visitations of that awful beard Have been a terror for my nights and days-- For twenty years. I've seen it like an ocean, Blown seven ways at once and wrecking ships, With men and women screaming for their lives; I've seen it woven into shining ladders That ran up out of sight and so to heaven, All covered with white ghosts with hanging robes Like folded wings,--and there were millions of them, Climbing, climbing, climbing, all the time; And all the time that I was watching them I thought how far above me Merlin was, And wondered always what his face was like. But even then, as a child, I knew the day Would come some time when I should see his face, And hear his voice, and have him in my house Till he should care no more to stay in it, And go away to found another kingdom."-- "Not that," he said; and, sighing, drank more wine; "One kingdom for one Merlin is enough."-- "One Merlin for one Vivian is enough," She said. "If you care much, remember that; But the Lord knows how many Vivians One Merlin's entertaining eye might favor, Indifferently well and all at once, If they were all at hand. Praise heaven they're not."

"If they were in the world--praise heaven they're not-- And if one Merlin's entertaining eye Saw two of them, there might be left him then The sight of no eye to see anything-- Not even the Vivian who is everything, She being Beauty, Beauty being She, She being Vivian, and so forever."-- "I'm glad you don't see two of me," she said; "For there's a whole world yet for you to eat And drink and say to me before I know The kind of creature that you see in me. I'm withering for a little more attention, But, being woman, I can wait. These cups That you see coming are for the last there is Of what my father gave to kings alone, And far from always. You are more than kings To me; therefore I give it all to you, Imploring you to spare no more of it Than what a cockle-shell would hold for me To pledge your love and mine in. Take the rest, That I may see tonight the end of it; I'll have no living remnant of the dead Annoying me until it fades and sours Of too long cherishing; for Time enjoys The look that's on our faces when we scowl On unexpected ruins, and thrift itself May be a kind of slow unwholesome fire That eats away to dust the life that feeds it. You smile, I see, but I said what I said. One hardly has to live a thousand years To contemplate a lost economy; So let us drink it while it's yet alive And you and I are not untimely ashes. My last words are your own, and I don't like 'em."-- A sudden laughter scattered from her eyes A threatening wisdom. He smiled and let her laugh, Then looked into the dark where there was nothing: "There's more in this than I have seen," he thought, "Though I shall see it."--"Drink," she said again; "There's only this much in the world of it, And I am near to giving all to you Because you are so great and I so little."

With a long-kindling gaze that caught from hers A laughing flame, and with a hand that shook Like Arthur's kingdom, Merlin slowly raised A golden cup that for a golden moment Was twinned in air with hers; and Vivian, Who smiled at him across their gleaming rims, From eyes that made a fuel of the night Surrounding her, shot glory over gold At Merlin, while their cups touched and his trembled. He drank, not knowing what, nor caring much For kings who might have cared less for themselves, He thought, had all the darkness and wild light That fell together to make Vivian Been there before them then to flower anew Through sheathing crimson into candle-light With each new leer of their loose, liquorish eyes. Again he drank, and he cursed every king Who might have touched her even in her cradle; For what were kings to such as he, who made them And saw them totter--for the world to see, And heed, if the world would? He drank again, And yet again--to make himself assured No manner of king should have the last of it-- The cup that Vivian filled unfailingly Until she poured for nothing. "At the end Of this incomparable flowing gold," She prattled on to Merlin, who observed Her solemnly, "I fear there may be specks."-- He sighed aloud, whereat she laughed at him And pushed the golden cup a little nearer. He scanned it with a sad anxiety, And then her face likewise, and shook his head As if at her concern for such a matter: "Specks? What are specks? Are you afraid of them?" He murmured slowly, with a drowsy tongue; "There are specks everywhere. I fear them not. If I were king in Camelot, I might Fear more than specks. But now I fear them not. You are too strange a lady to fear specks."

He stared a long time at the cup of gold Before him but he drank no more. There came Between him and the world a crumbling sky Of black and crimson, with a crimson cloud That held a far off town of many towers, All swayed and shaken, till at last they fell, And there was nothing but a crimson cloud That crumbled into nothing, like the sky That vanished with it, carrying away The world, the woman, and all memory of them, Until a slow light of another sky Made gray an open casement, showing him Faint shapes of an exotic furniture That glimmered with a dim magnificence, And letting in the sound of many birds That were, as he lay there remembering, The only occupation of his ears Until it seemed they shared a fainter sound, As if a sleeping child with a black head Beside him drew the breath of innocence.

One shining afternoon around the fountain, As on the shining day of his arrival, The sunlight was alive with flying silver That had for Merlin a more dazzling flash Than jewels rained in dreams, and a richer sound Than harps, and all the morning stars together,-- When jewels and harps and stars and everything That flashed and sang and was not Vivian, Seemed less than echoes of her least of words-- For she was coming. Suddenly, somewhere Behind him, she was coming; that was all He knew until she came and took his hand And held it while she talked about the fishes. When she looked up he thought a softer light Was in her eyes than once he had found there; And had there been left yet for dusky women A beauty that was heretofore not hers, He told himself he must have seen it then Before him in the face at which he smiled And trembled. "Many men have called me wise," He said, "but you are wiser than all wisdom If you know what you are."--"I don't," she said; "I know that you and I are here together; I know that I have known for twenty years That life would be almost a constant yawning Until you came; and now that you are here, I know that you are not to go away Until you tell me that I'm hideous; I know that I like fishes, ferns, and snakes,-- Maybe because I liked them when the world Was young and you and I were salamanders; I know, too, a cool place not far from here, Where there are ferns that are like marching men Who never march away. Come now and see them, And do as they do--never march away. When they are gone, some others, crisp and green, Will have their place, but never march away."-- He smoothed her silky fingers, one by one: "Some other Merlin, also, do you think, Will have his place--and never march away?"-- Then Vivian laid a finger on his lips And shook her head at him before she laughed: "There is no other Merlin than yourself, And you are never going to be old." Oblivious of a world that made of him A jest, a legend, and a long regret, And with a more commanding wizardry Than his to rule a kingdom where the king Was Love and the queen Vivian, Merlin found His queen without the blemish of a word That was more rough than honey from her lips, Or the first adumbration of a frown To cloud the night-wild fire that in her eyes Had yet a smoky friendliness of home, And a foreknowing care for mighty trifles. "There are miles and miles for you to wander in," She told him once: "Your prison yard is large, And I would rather take my two ears off And feed them to the fishes in the fountain Than buzz like an incorrigible bee For always around yours, and have you hate The sound of me; for some day then, for certain, Your philosophic rage would see in me A bee in earnest, and your hand would smite My life away. And what would you do then? I know: for years and years you'd sit alone Upon my grave, and be the grieving image Of lean remorse, and suffer miserably; And often, all day long, you'd only shake Your celebrated head and all it holds, Or beat it with your fist the while you groaned Aloud and went on saying to yourself: 'Never should I have killed her, or believed She was a bee that buzzed herself to death, First having made me crazy, had there been Judicious distance and wise absences To keep the two of us inquisitive.'"-- "I fear you bow your unoffending head Before a load that should be mine," said he; "If so, you led me on by listening. You should have shrieked and jumped, and then fled yelling; That's the best way when a man talks too long. God's pity on me if I love your feet More now than I could ever love the face Of any one of all those Vivians You summoned out of nothing on the night When I saw towers. I'll wander and amend."-- At that she flung the noose of her soft arms Around his neck and kissed him instantly: "You are the wisest man that ever was, And I've a prayer to make: May all you say To Vivian be a part of what you knew Before the curse of her unquiet head Was on your shoulder, as you have it now, To punish you for knowing beyond knowledge. You are the only one who sees enough To make me see how far away I am From all that I have seen and have not been; You are the only thing there is alive Between me as I am and as I was When Merlin was a dream. You are to listen When I say now to you that I'm alone. Like you, I saw too much; and unlike you I made no kingdom out of what I saw-- Or none save this one here that you must rule, Believing you are ruled. I see too far To rule myself. Time's way with you and me Is our way, in that we are out of Time And out of tune with Time. We have this place, And you must hold us in it or we die. Look at me now and say if what I say Be folly or not; for my unquiet head Is no conceit of mine. I had it first When I was born; and I shall have it with me Till my unquiet soul is on its way To be, I hope, where souls are quieter. So let the first and last activity Of what you say so often is your love Be always to remember that our lyres Are not strung for Today. On you it falls To keep them in accord here with each other, For you have wisdom, I have only sight For distant things--and you. And you are Merlin. Poor wizard! Vivian is your punishment For making kings of men who are not kings; And you are mine, by the same reasoning, For living out of Time and out of tune With anything but you. No other man Could make me say so much of what I know As I say now to you. And you are Merlin!"