Chapter III: Part 3

I answered mild but earnest. ‘I believe
In no one’s honour which another keeps,
Nor man’s nor woman’s. As I keep, myself,
My truth and my religion, I depute
No father, though I had one this side death,
Nor brother, though I had twenty, much less you,
Though twice my cousin, and once Romney Leigh,
To keep my honour pure. You face, to-day,
A man who wants instruction, mark me, not
A woman who wants protection. As to a man,
Show manhood, speak out plainly, be precise
With facts and dates. My aunt inherited
This sum, you say—’
‘I said she died possessed
Of this, dear cousin.’
‘Not by heritage.
Thank you: we’re getting to the facts at last.
Perhaps she played at commerce with a ship
Which came in heavy with Australian gold?
Or touched a lottery with her finger-end,
Which tumbled on a sudden into her lap
Some old Rhine tower or principality?
Perhaps she had to do with a marine
Sub-transatlantic railroad, which pre-pays
As well as pre-supposes? or perhaps
Some stale ancestral debt was after-paid
By a hundred years, and took her by surprise?—
You shake your head my cousin; I guess ill.’

‘You need not guess, Aurora, nor deride,—
The truth is not afraid of hurting you.
You’ll find no cause, in all your scruples, why
Your aunt should cavil at a deed of gift
’Twixt her and me.’
‘I thought so—ah! a gift.’

‘You naturally thought so,’ he resumed.
‘A very natural gift.’
‘A gift, a gift!
Her individual life being stranded high
Above all want, approaching opulence,
Too haughty was she to accept a gift
Without some ultimate aim: ah, ah, I see,—
A gift intended plainly for her heirs,
And so accepted ... if accepted ... ah,
Indeed that might be; I am snared perhaps,
Just so. But, cousin, shall I pardon you,
If thus you have caught me with a cruel springe?’

He answered gently, ‘Need you tremble and pant
Like a netted lioness? is’t my fault, mine,
That you’re a grand wild creature of the woods,
And hate the stall built for you? Any way,
Though triply netted, need you glare at me?
I do not hold the cords of such a net;
You’re free from me, Aurora!’
‘Now may God
Deliver me from this strait! This gift of yours
Was tendered ... when? accepted ... when?’ I asked.
‘A month ... a fortnight since? Six weeks ago
It was not tendered. By a word she dropped,
I know it was not tendered nor received.
When was it? bring your dates.’
‘What matters when?
A half-hour ere she died, or a half-year,
Secured the gift, maintains the heritage
Inviolable with law. As easy pluck
The golden stars from heaven’s embroidered stole,
To pin them on the grey side of this earth,
As make you poor again, thank God.’
‘Not poor
Nor clean again from henceforth, you thank God?
Well, sir—I ask you ... I insist at need, ...
Vouchsafe the special date, the special date.’

‘The day before her death-day,’ he replied,
‘The gift was in her hands. We’ll find that deed,
And certify that date to you.’
As one
Who has climbed a mountain-height and carried up
His own heart climbing, panting in his throat
With the toil of the ascent, takes breath at last,
Looks back in triumph—so I stood and looked:
‘Dear cousin Romney, we have reached the top
Of this steep question, and may rest, I think.
But first,—I pray you pardon, that the shock
And surge of natural feeling and event
Had made me oblivious of acquainting you
That this, this letter ... unread, mark,—still sealed,
Was found enfolded in the poor dead hand:
That spirit of hers had gone beyond the address,
Which could not find her though you wrote it clear,—
I know your writing, Romney,—recognise
The open-hearted _A_, the liberal sweep
Of the _G_. Now listen,—let us understand;
You will not find that famous deed of gift,
Unless you find it in the letter here,
Which, not being mine, I give you back.—Refuse
To take the letter? well then—you and I,
As writer and as heiress, open it
Together, by your leave.—Exactly so:
The words in which the noble offering’s made,
Are nobler still, my cousin; and, I own,
The proudest and most delicate heart alive,
Distracted from the measure of the gift
By such a grace in giving, might accept
Your largesse without thinking any more
Of the burthen of it, than King Solomon
Considered, when he wore his holy ring
Charáctered over with the ineffable spell,
How many carats of fine gold made up
Its money-value. So, Leigh gives to Leigh—
Or rather, might have given, observe!—for that’s
The point we come to. Here’s a proof of gift,
But here’s no proof, sir, of acceptancy,
But rather, disproof. Death’s black dust, being blown,
Infiltrated through every secret fold
Of this sealed letter by a puff of fate,
Dried up for ever the fresh-written ink,
Annulled the gift, disutilised the grace,
And left these fragments.’
As I spoke, I tore
The paper up and down, and down and up
And crosswise, till it fluttered from my hands,
As forest-leaves, stripped suddenly and rapt
By a whirlwind on Valdarno, drop again,
Drop slow, and strew the melancholy ground
Before the amazèd hills ... why, so, indeed,
I’m writing like a poet, somewhat large
In the type of the image,—and exaggerate
A small thing with a great thing, topping it!—
But then I’m thinking how his eyes looked ... his,
With what despondent and surprised reproach!
I think the tears were in them, as he looked—
I think the manly mouth just trembled. Then
He broke the silence.
‘I may ask, perhaps,
Although no stranger ... only Romney Leigh,
Which means still less ... than Vincent Carrington ...
Your plans in going hence, and where you go.
This cannot be a secret.’
‘All my life
Is open to you, cousin. I go hence
To London, to the gathering-place of souls,
To live mine straight out, vocally, in books;
Harmoniously for others, if indeed
A woman’s soul, like man’s, be wide enough
To carry the whole octave (that’s to prove)
Or, if I fail, still, purely for myself.
Pray God be with me, Romney.’
‘Ah, poor child,
Who fight against the mother’s ‘tiring hand,
And choose the headsman’s! May God change his world
For your sake, sweet, and make it mild as heaven,
And juster than I have found you!’
But I paused.
‘And you, my cousin?’—
‘I,’ he said,—‘you ask?
You care to ask? Well, girls have curious minds,
And fain would know the end of everything,
Of cousins, therefore, with the rest. For me,
Aurora, I’ve my work; you know my work;
And, having missed this year some personal hope,
I must beware the rather that I miss
No reasonable duty. While you sing
Your happy pastorals of the meads and trees,
Bethink you that I go to impress and prove
On stifled brains and deafened ears, stunned deaf,
Crushed dull with grief, that nature sings itself,
And needs no mediate poet, lute or voice,
To make it vocal. While you ask of men
Your audience, I may get their leave perhaps
For hungry orphans to say audibly
‘We’re hungry, see,’—for beaten and bullied wives
To hold their unweaned babies up in sight,
Whom orphanage would better; and for all
To speak and claim their portion ... by no means
Of the soil, ... but of the sweat in tilling it,—
Since this is now-a-days turned privilege,
To have only God’s curse on us, and not man’s.
Such work I have for doing, elbow-deep
In social problems,—as you tie your rhymes,
To draw my uses to cohere with needs,
And bring the uneven world back to its round;
Or, failing so much, fill up, bridge at least
To smoother issues, some abysmal cracks
And feuds of earth, intestine heats have made
To keep men separate,—using sorry shifts
Of hospitals, almshouses, infant schools,
And other practical stuff of partial good,
You lovers of the beautiful and whole,
Despise by system.’
‘_I_ despise? The scorn
Is yours, my cousin. Poets become such,
Through scorning nothing. You decry them for
The good of beauty, sung and taught by them,
While they respect your practical partial good
As being a part of beauty’s self. Adieu!
When God helps all the workers for his world,
The singers shall have help of Him, not last.’

He smiled as men smile when they will not speak
Because of something bitter in the thought;
And still I feel his melancholy eyes
Look judgment on me. It is seven years since:
I know not if ’twas pity or ’twas scorn
Has made them so far-reaching: judge it ye
Who have had to do with pity more than love.
And scorn than hatred. I am used, since then,
To other ways, from equal men. But so,
Even so, we let go hands, my cousin and I,
And, in between us, rushed the torrent-world
To blanch our faces like divided rocks,
And bar for ever mutual sight and touch
Except through swirl of spray and all that roar.

THIRD BOOK.

‘TO-DAY thou girdest up thy loins thyself,
And goest where thou wouldest: presently
Others shall gird thee,’ said the Lord, ‘to go
Where thou would’st not.’ He spoke to Peter thus,
To signify the death which he should die
When crucified head downwards.
If He spoke
To Peter then, He speaks to us the same;
The word suits many different martyrdoms,
And signifies a multiform of death,
Although we scarcely die apostles, we,
And have mislaid the keys of heaven and earth.

For ’tis not in mere death that men die most;
And, after our first girding of the loins
In youth’s fine linen and fair broidery,
To run up hill and meet the rising sun,
We are apt to sit tired, patient as a fool,
While others gird us with the violent bands
Of social figments, feints, and formalisms,
Reversing our straight nature, lifting up
Our base needs, keeping down our lofty thoughts,
Head downward on the cross-sticks of the world.

Yet He can pluck us from that shameful cross.
God, set our feet low and our forehead high,
And show us how a man was made to walk!

Leave the lamp, Susan, and go up to bed.
The room does very well; I have to write
Beyond the stroke of midnight. Get away;
Your steps, for ever buzzing in the room,
Tease me like gnats. Ah, letters! throw them down
At once, as I must have them, to be sure,
Whether I bid you never bring me such
At such an hour, or bid you. No excuse.
You choose to bring them, as I choose perhaps
To throw them in the fire. Now, get to bed,
And dream, if possible, I am not cross.

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,—
A mere, mere woman,—a mere flaccid nerve,—
A kerchief left out all night in the rain,
Turned soft so,—overtasked and overstrained
And overlived in this close London life!
And yet I should be stronger.
Never burn
Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare
With red seals from the table, saying each,
‘Here’s something that you know not.’ Out alas,
’Tis scarcely that the world’s more good and wise
Or even straighter and more consequent
Since yesterday at this time—yet, again,
If but one angel spoke from Ararat,
I should be very sorry not to hear:
So open all the letters! let me read.
Blanche Ord, the writer in the ‘Lady’s Fan,’
Requests my judgment on ... that, afterwards.
Kate Ward desires the model of my cloak,
And signs, ‘Elisha to you.’ Pringle Sharpe
Presents his work on ‘Social Conduct,’ ... craves
A little money for his pressing debts ...
From me, who scarce have money for my needs,—
Art’s fiery chariot which we journey in
Being apt to singe our singing-robes to holes,
Although you ask me for my cloak, Kate Ward!
Here’s Rudgely knows it,—editor and scribe—
He’s ‘forced to marry where his heart is not,
Because the purse lacks where he lost his heart.’
Ah,—— lost it because no one picked it up!
That’s really loss! (and passable impudence.)
My critic Hammond flatters prettily,
And wants another volume like the last.
My critic Belfair wants another book
Entirely different, which will sell, (and live?)
A striking book, yet not a startling book,
The public blames originalities,
(You must not pump spring-water unawares
Upon a gracious public, full of nerves—)
Good things, not subtle, new yet orthodox,
As easy reading as the dog-eared page
That’s fingered by said public, fifty years,
Since first taught spelling by its grandmother,
And yet a revelation in some sort:
That’s hard, my critic Belfair! So—what next?
My critic Stokes objects to abstract thoughts;
‘Call a man, John, a woman, Joan,’ says he,
‘And do not prate so of humanities:’
Whereat I call my critic, simply Stokes.
My critic Jobson recommends more mirth,
Because a cheerful genius suits the times,
And all true poets laugh unquenchably
Like Shakspeare and the gods. That’s very hard.
The gods may laugh, and Shakspeare; Dante smiled
With such a needy heart on two pale lips,
We cry, ‘Weep rather, Dante.’ Poems are
Men, if true poems: and who dares exclaim
At any man’s door, ’Here, ’tis probable
The thunder fell last week, and killed a wife,
And scared a sickly husband—what of that?
Get up, be merry, shout, and clap your hands,
Because a cheerful genius suits the times—’?
None says so to the man,—and why indeed
Should any to the poem? A ninth seal;
The apocalypse is drawing to a close.
Ha,—this from Vincent Carrington,—‘Dear friend,
I want good counsel. Will you lend me wings
To raise me to the subject, in a sketch
I’ll bring to-morrow—may I? at eleven?
A poet’s only born to turn to use;
So save you! for the world ... and Carrington.’
‘(Writ after.) Have you heard of Romney Leigh,
Beyond what’s said of him in newspapers,
His phalansteries there, his speeches here,
His pamphlets, pleas, and statements, everywhere?
He dropped _me_ long ago; but no one drops
A golden apple—though indeed, one day,
You hinted that, but jested. Well, at least,
You know Lord Howe, who sees him ... whom he sees,
And _you_ see, and I hate to see,—for Howe
Stands high upon the brink of theories,
Observes the swimmers, and cries ‘Very fine,’
But keeps dry linen equally,—unlike
That gallant breaster, Romney. Strange it is,
Such sudden madness seizing a young man,
To make earth over again,—while I’m content
To make the pictures. Let me bring the sketch.
A tiptoe Danae, overbold and hot;
Both arms a-flame to meet her wishing Jove
Halfway, and burn him faster down; the face
And breasts upturned and straining, the loose locks
All glowing with the anticipated gold.
Or here’s another on the self-same theme.
She lies here—flat upon her prison-floor,
The long hair swathed about her to the heel,
Like wet sea-weed. You dimly see her through
The glittering haze of that prodigious rain,
Half blotted out of nature by a love
As heavy as fate. I’ll bring you either sketch.
I think, myself, the second indicates
More passion.’
Surely. Self is put away,
And calm with abdication. She is Jove,
And no more Danae—greater thus. Perhaps
The painter symbolises unawares
Two states of the recipient artist-soul;
One, forward, personal, wanting reverence,
Because aspiring only. We’ll be calm,
And know that, when indeed our Joves come down,
We all turn stiller than we have ever been.

Kind Vincent Carrington. I’ll let him come.
He talks of Florence,—and may say a word
Of something as it chanced seven years ago,—
A hedgehog in the path, or a lame bird,
In those green country walks, in that good time,
When certainly I was so miserable ...
I seem to have missed a blessing ever since.

The music soars within the little lark,
And the lark soars. It is not thus with men.
We do not make our places with our strains,—
Content, while they rise, to remain behind,
Alone on earth instead of so in heaven.
No matter—I bear on my broken tale.

When Romney Leigh and I had parted thus,
I took a chamber up three flights of stairs
Not far from being as steep as some larks climb,
And, in a certain house in Kensington,
Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work
In this world,—’tis the best you get at all;
For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts
Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat
For foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,—
Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel
Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work;
Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude,
I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun
On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons,
Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass,
With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat,
In which the blood of wretches pent inside
Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,—
Push out through fog with his dilated disk,
And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots
With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw
Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog,
Involve the passive city, strangle it
Alive, and draw it off into the void,
Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a spunge
Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night
Had clapped together and utterly struck out
The intermediate time, undoing themselves
In the act. Your city poets see such things,
Not despicable. Mountains of the south,
When, drunk and mad with elemental wines,
They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,
Make fewer singers, haply. No one sings,
Descending Sinai: on Parnassus mount,
You take a mule to climb, and not a muse,
Except in fable and figure: forests chant
Their anthems to themselves, and leave you dumb.
But sit in London, at the day’s decline,
And view the city perish in the mist
Like Pharaoh’s armaments in the deep Red Sea,—
The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host,
Sucked down and choked to silence—then, surprised
By a sudden sense of vision and of tune,
You feel as conquerors though you did not fight,
And you and Israel’s other singing girls,
Ay, Miriam with them, sing the song you choose.

I worked with patience which means almost power.
I did some excellent things indifferently,
Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,
The latter loudest. And by such a time
That I myself had set them down as sins
Scarce worth the price of sackcloth, week by week,
Arrived some letter through the sedulous post,
Like these I’ve read, and yet dissimilar,
With pretty maiden seals,—initials twined
Of lilies, or a heart marked _Emily_,
(Convicting Emily of being all heart);
Or rarer tokens from young bachelors,
Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,
Suppose, they had just been plucked of) and a snatch
From Horace, ‘Collegisse juvat,’ set
Upon the first page. Many a letter signed
Or unsigned, showing the writers at eighteen
Had lived too long, though every muse should help
The daylight, holding candles,—compliments,
To smile or sigh at. Such could pass with me
No more than coins from Moscow circulate
At Paris. Would ten roubles buy a tag
Of ribbon on the boulevard, worth a sou?
I smiled that all this youth should love me,—sighed
That such a love could scarcely raise them up
To love what was more worthy than myself;
Then sighed again, again, less generously,
To think the very love they lavished so,
Proved me inferior. The strong loved me not,
And he ... my cousin Romney ... did not write.
I felt the silent finger of his scorn
Prick every bubble of my frivolous fame
As my breath blew it, and resolve it back
To the air it came from. Oh, I justified
The measure he had taken of my height:
The thing was plain—he was not wrong a line;
I played at art, made thrusts with a toy-sword,
Amused the lads and maidens.
Came a sigh
Deep, hoarse with resolution,—I would work
To better ends, or play in earnest. ‘Heavens,
I think I should be almost popular
If this went on!’—I ripped my verses up,
And found no blood upon the rapier’s point;
The heart in them was just an embryo’s heart,
Which never yet had beat, that it should die;
Just gasps of make-believe galvanic life;
Mere tones, inorganised to any tune.

And yet I felt it in me where it burnt,
Like those hot fire-seeds of creation held
In Jove’s clenched palm before the worlds were sown,—
But I—I was not Juno even! my hand
Was shut in weak convulsion, woman’s ill,
And when I yearned to loose a finger—lo,
The nerve revolted. ’Tis the same even now:
This hand may never, haply, open large,
Before the spark is quenched, or the palm charred,
To prove the power not else than by the pain.

It burns, it burnt—my whole life burnt with it,
And light, not sunlight and not torchlight, flashed
My steps out through the slow and difficult road.
I had grown distrustful of too forward Springs,
The season’s books in drear significance
Of morals, dropping round me. Lively books?
The ash has livelier verdure than the yew;
And yet the yew’s green longer, and alone
Found worthy of the holy Christmas time.
We’ll plant more yews if possible, albeit
We plant the graveyards with them.
Day and night
I worked my rhythmic thought, and furrowed up
Both watch and slumber with long lines of life
Which did not suit their season. The rose fell
From either cheek, my eyes globed luminous
Through orbits of blue shadow, and my pulse
Would shudder along the purple-veined wrist
Like a shot bird. Youth’s stern, set face to face
With youth’s ideal: and when people came
And said, ‘You work too much, you are looking ill,’
I smiled for pity of them who pitied me,
And thought I should be better soon perhaps
For those ill looks. Observe—‘I,’ means in youth
Just _I_ ... the conscious and eternal soul
With all its ends,—and not the outside life,
The parcel-man, the doublet of the flesh,
The so much liver, lung, integument,
Which make the sum of ‘I’ hereafter, when
World-talkers talk of doing well or ill.
_I_ prosper, if I gain a step, although
A nail then pierced my foot: although my brain
Embracing any truth, froze paralysed,
_I_ prosper. I but change my instrument;
I break the spade off, digging deep for gold,
And catch the mattock up.
I worked on, on.
Through all the bristling fence of nights and days
Which hedges time in from the eternities,
I struggled, ... never stopped to note the stakes
Which hurt me in my course. The midnight oil
Would stink sometimes; there came some vulgar needs:
I had to live, that therefore I might work,
And, being but poor, I was constrained, for life,
To work with one hand for the booksellers,
While working with the other for myself
And art. You swim with feet as well as hands,
Or make small way. I apprehended this,—
In England, no one lives by verse that lives;
And, apprehending, I resolved by prose
To make a space to sphere my living verse.
I wrote for cyclopædias, magazines,
And weekly papers, holding up my name
To keep it from the mud. I learnt the use
Of the editorial ‘we’ in a review,
As courtly ladies the fine trick of trains,
And swept it grandly through the open doors
As if one could not pass through doors at all
Save so encumbered. I wrote tales beside,
Carved many an article on cherry-stones
To suit light readers,—something in the lines
Revealing, it was said, the mallet-hand,
But that, I’ll never vouch for. What you do
For bread, will taste of common grain, not grapes,
Although you have a vineyard in Champagne,—
Much less in Nephelococcygia,
As mine was, peradventure.
Having bread
For just so many days, just breathing room
For body and verse, I stood up straight and worked
My veritable work. And as the soul
Which grows within a child, makes the child grow,—
Or as the fiery sap, the touch from God,
Careering through a tree, dilates the bark,
And roughs with scale and knob, before it strikes
The summer foliage out in a green flame—
So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the work I did. Indeed,
The academic law convinced of sin;
The critics cried out on the falling off,
Regretting the first manner. But I felt
My heart’s life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also—certes incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its very tumours, warts, and wens,
Still organised by, and implying life.

A lady called upon me on such a day.
She had the low voice of your English dames,
Unused, it seems, to need rise half a note
To catch attention,—and their quiet mood,
As if they lived too high above the earth
For that to put them out in anything:
So gentle, because verily so proud;
So wary and afeared of hurting you,
By no means that you are not really vile,
But that they would not touch you with their foot
To push you to your place; so self-possessed
Yet gracious and conciliating, it takes
An effort in their presence to speak truth:
You know the sort of woman,—brilliant stuff,
And out of nature. ‘Lady Waldemar,’
She said her name quite simply, as if it meant
Not much indeed, but something,—took my hands,
And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,
And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.
‘Is this,’ she said, ‘the Muse?’
‘No sybil even,’
I answered, ‘since she fails to guess the cause
Which taxed you with this visit, madam.’
‘Good,’
She said, ‘I like to be sincere at once;
Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,
The visit might have taxed me. As it is,
You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,
My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,
It comforts me entirely for your fame,
As well as for the trouble of my ascent
To this Olympus.’
There, a silver laugh
Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths
The steep stair somewhat justified.
‘But still
Your ladyship has left me curious why
You dared the risk of finding the said Muse?’

‘Ah,—keep me, notwithstanding, to the point,
Like any pedant. Is the blue in eyes
As awful as in stockings, after all,
I wonder, that you’d have my business out
Before I breathe—exact the epic plunge
In spite of gasps? Well, naturally you think
I’ve come here, as the lion-hunters go
To deserts, to secure you, with a trap,
For exhibition in my drawing-rooms
On zoologic soirées? Not in the least.
Roar softly at me; I am frivolous,
I dare say; I have played at lions, too,
Like other women of my class,—but now
I meet my lion simply as Androcles
Met his ... when at his mercy.’
So, she bent
Her head, as queens may mock,—then lifting up
Her eyelids with a real grave queenly look,
Which ruled, and would not spare, not even herself,—
‘I think you have a cousin:—Romney Leigh.’

‘You bring a word from _him_?’—my eyes leapt up
To the very height of hers,—‘a word from _him_?’

‘I bring a word about him, actually.
But first,’—she pressed me with her urgent eyes—
‘You do not love him,—you?’
‘You’re frank at least
In putting questions, madam,’ I replied.
‘I love my cousin cousinly—no more.’

‘I guessed as much. I’m ready to be frank
In answering also, if you’ll question me,
Or even with something less. You stand outside,
You artist women, of the common sex;
You share not with us, and exceed us so
Perhaps by what you’re mulcted in, your hearts
Being starved to make your heads: so run the old
Traditions of you. I can therefore speak,
Without the natural shame which creatures feel
When speaking on their level, to their like.
There’s many a papist she, would rather die
Than own to her maid she put a ribbon on
To catch the indifferent eye of such a man,—
Who yet would count adulteries on her beads
At holy Mary’s shrine, and never blush;
Because the saints are so far off, we lose
All modesty before them. Thus, today.
’Tis _I_, love Romney Leigh.’
‘Forbear,’ I cried.
‘If here’s no Muse, still less is any saint;
Nor even a friend, that Lady Waldemar
Should make confessions’....
‘That’s unkindly said.
If no friend, what forbids to make a friend
To join to our confession ere we have done?
I love your cousin. If it seems unwise
To say so, it’s still foolisher (we’re frank)
To feel so. My first husband left me young,
And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,
To keep my booth in May-fair with the rest
To happy issues. There are marquises
Would serve seven years to call me wife, I know:
And, after seven, I might consider it,
For there’s some comfort in a marquisate
When all’s said,—yes, but after the seven years;
I, now, love Romney. You put up your lip,
So like a Leigh! so like him!—Pardon me,
I am well aware I do not derogate
In loving Romney Leigh. The name is good,
The means are excellent; but the man, the man—
Heaven help us both,—I am near as mad as he,
In loving such an one.’
She slowly swung
Her heavy ringlets till they touched her smile,
As reasonably sorry for herself;
And thus continued,—
‘Of a truth, Miss Leigh,
I have not, without struggle, come to this.
I took a master in the German tongue,
I gamed a little, went to Paris twice;
But, after all, this love!... you eat of love,
And do as vile a thing as if you ate
Of garlic—which, whatever else you eat,
Tastes uniformly acrid, till your peach
Reminds you of your onion. Am I coarse?
Well, love’s coarse, nature’s coarse—ah, there’s the rub!
We fair fine ladies, who park out our lives
From common sheep-paths, cannot help the crows
From flying over,—we’re as natural still
As Blowsalinda. Drape us perfectly
In Lyons’ velvet,—we are not, for that,
Lay-figures, look you! we have hearts within,
Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts,
As ready for distracted ends and acts
As any distressed sempstress of them all
That Romney groans and toils for. We catch love
And other fevers, in the vulgar way.
Love will not be outwitted by our wit,
Nor outrun by our equipages:—mine
Persisted, spite of efforts. All my cards
Turned up but Romney Leigh; my German stopped
At germane Wertherism; my Paris rounds
Returned me from the Champs Elysées just
A ghost, and sighing like Dido’s. I came home
Uncured,—convicted rather to myself
Of being in love ... in love! That’s coarse you’ll say.
I’m talking garlic.’
Coldly I replied.
‘Apologise for atheism, not love!
For me, I do believe in love, and God.
I know my cousin: Lady Waldemar
I know not: yet I say as much as this—
Whoever loves him, let her not excuse
But cleanse herself, that, loving such a man,
She may not do it with such unworthy love
He cannot stoop and take it.’
‘That is said
Austerely, like a youthful prophetess,
Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes
To keep them back from following the grey flight
Of doves between the temple-columns. Dear,
Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.
I’m a mere woman,—the more weak perhaps
Through being so proud; you’re better; as for him,
He’s best. Indeed he builds his goodness up
So high, it topples down to the other side,
And makes a sort of badness; there’s the worst
I have to say against your cousin’s best!
And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,
For his sake, if not mine.’
‘I own myself
Incredulous of confidence like this
Availing him or you.’
‘I, worthy of him?
In your sense I am not so—let it pass.
And yet I save him if I marry him;
Let that pass too.’
‘Pass, pass! we play police
Upon my cousin’s life, to indicate
What may or may not pass?’ I cried. ‘He knows
What’s worthy of him; the choice remains with _him_;
And what he chooses, act or wife, I think
I shall not call unworthy, I, for one.’

‘’Tis somewhat rashly said,’ she answered slow.
‘Now let’s talk reason, though we talk of love.
Your cousin Romney Leigh’s a monster! there,
The word’s out fairly; let me prove the fact.
We’ll take, say, that most perfect of antiques,
They call the Genius of the Vatican,
Which seems too beauteous to endure itself
In this mixed world, and fasten it for once
Upon the torso of the Drunken Fawn,
(Who might limp surely, if he did not dance,)
Instead of Buonarroti’s mask: what then?
We show the sort of monster Romney is,
With god-like virtues and heroic aims
Subjoined to limping possibilities
Of mismade human nature. Grant the man
Twice god-like, twice heroic,—still he limps,
And here’s the point we come to.’
‘Pardon me,
But, Lady Waldemar, the point’s the thing
We never come to.’
‘Caustic, insolent
At need! I like you’—(there, she took my hands)
‘And now my lioness, help Androcles,
For all your roaring. Help me! for myself
I would not say so—but for him. He limps
So certainly, he’ll fall into the pit
A week hence,—so I lose him—so he is lost!
And when he’s fairly married, he a Leigh,
To a girl of doubtful life, undoubtful birth,
Starved out in London, till her coarse-grained hands
Are whiter than her morals,—you, for one,
May call his choice most worthy.’
‘Married! lost!
He, ... Romney!’
‘Ah, you’re moved at last,’ she said.
‘These monsters, set out in the open sun,
Of course throw monstrous shadows: those who think
Awry, will scarce act straightly. Who but he?
And who but you can wonder? He has been mad,
The whole world knows, since first, a nominal man,
He soured the proctors, tried the gownsmen’s wits,
With equal scorn of triangles and wine,
And took no honours, yet was honourable.
They’ll tell you he lost count of Homer’s ships
In Melbourne’s poor-bills, Ashley’s factory bills,—
Ignored the Aspasia we all dare to praise,
For other women, dear, we could not name
Because we’re decent. Well, he had some right
On his side probably; men always have,
Who go absurdly wrong. The living boor
Who brews your ale, exceeds in vital worth
Dead Cæsar who ‘stops bungholes’ in the cask;
And also, to do good is excellent,
For persons of his income, even to boors:
I sympathise with all such things. But he
Went mad upon them ... madder and more mad,
From college times to these,—as, going down hill,
The faster still, the farther! you must know
Your Leigh by heart: he has sown his black young curls
With bleaching cares of half a million men
Already. If you do not starve, or sin,
You’re nothing to him. Pay the income-tax,
And break your heart upon’t ... he’ll scarce be touched;
But come upon the parish, qualified
For the parish stocks, and Romney will be there
To call you brother, sister, or perhaps
A tenderer name still. Had I any chance
With Mister Leigh, who am Lady Waldemar,
And never committed felony?’
‘You speak
Too bitterly,’ I said, ‘for the literal truth.’

‘The truth is bitter. Here’s a man who looks
For ever on the ground! you must be low
Or else a pictured ceiling overhead,
Good painting thrown away. For me, I’ve done
What women may, (we’re somewhat limited,
We modest women) but I’ve done my best.
—How men are perjured when they swear our eyes
Have meaning in them! they’re just blue or brown,—
They just can drop their lids a little. In fact,
Mine did more, for I read half Fourier through,
Proudhon, Considerant, and Louis Blanc,
With various others of his socialists;
And if I had been a fathom less in love,
Had cured myself with gaping. As it was,
I quoted from them prettily enough,
Perhaps, to make them sound half rational
To a saner man than he, whene’er we talked,
(For which I dodged occasion)—learnt by heart
His speeches in the Commons and elsewhere
Upon the social question; heaped reports
Of wicked women and penitentiaries,
On all my tables, with a place for Sue;
And gave my name to swell subscription-lists
Toward keeping up the sun at nights in heaven,
And other possible ends. All things I did,
Except the impossible ... such as wearing gowns
Provided by the Ten Hours’ movement! there,
I stopped—we must stop somewhere. He, meanwhile,
Unmoved as the Indian tortoise ’neath the world,
Let all that noise go on upon his back:
He would not disconcert or throw me out;
’Twas well to see a woman of my class
With such a dawn of conscience. For the heart,
Made firewood for his sake, and flaming up
To his very face ... he warmed his feet at it;
But deigned to let my carriage stop him short
In park or street,—he leaning on the door,
With news of the committee which sate last
On pickpockets at suck.’

‘You jest—you jest.’

‘As martyrs jest, dear, (if you’ve read their lives)
Upon the axe which kills them. When all’s done
By me, ... for him—you’ll ask him presently
The colour of my hair—he cannot tell,
Or answers ‘dark’ at random,—while, be sure,
He’s absolute on the figure, five or ten,
Of my last subscription. Is it bearable,
And I a woman?’
‘Is it reparable,
Though _I_ were a man?’
‘I know not. That’s to prove.
But, first, this shameful marriage.’
‘Ay?’ I cried,
‘Then really there’s a marriage?’
‘Yesterday
I held him fast upon it. ‘Mister Leigh,’
Said I, ‘shut up a thing, it makes more noise.
The boiling town keeps secrets ill; I’ve known
Yours since last week. Forgive my knowledge so:
You feel I’m not the woman of the world
The world thinks; you have borne with me before,
And used me in your noble work, our work,
And now you shall not cast me off because
You’re at the difficult point, the _join_. ’Tis true
Even I can scarce admit the cogency
Of such a marriage ... where you do not love,
(Except the class) yet marry and throw your name
Down to the gutter, for a fire-escape
To future generations! it’s sublime,
A great example,—a true Genesis
Of the opening social era. But take heed;
This virtuous act must have a patent weight,
Or loses half its virtue. Make it tell,
Interpret it, and set in the light,
And do not muffle it in a winter-cloak
As a vulgar bit of shame,—as if, at best,
A Leigh had made a misalliance and blushed
A Howard should know it.’ Then, I pressed him more—
‘He would not choose,’ I said, ‘that even his kin, ...
Aurora Leigh, even ... should conceive his act
Less sacrifice, more appetite.’ At which
He grew so pale, dear, ... to the lips, I knew
I had touched him. ‘Do you know her,’ he enquired,
‘My cousin Aurora?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, and lied,
(But truly we all know you by your books)
And so I offered to come straight to you,
Explain the subject, justify the cause,
And take you with me to St. Margaret’s Court
To see this miracle, this Marian Erle,
This drover’s daughter (she’s not pretty, he swears)
Upon whose finger, exquisitely pricked
By a hundred needles, we’re to hang the tie
’Twixt class and class in England,—thus, indeed,
By such a presence, yours and mine, to lift
The match up from the doubtful place. At once
He thanked me, sighing ... murmured to himself,
‘She’ll do it perhaps; she’s noble,’—thanked me twice,
And promised, as my guerdon, to put off
His marriage for a month.’
I answered then.
‘I understand your drift imperfectly.
You wish to lead me to my cousin’s betrothed,
To touch her hand if worthy, and hold her hand
If feeble, thus to justify his match.
So be it then. But how this serves your ends,
And how the strange confession of your love
Serves this, I have to learn—I cannot see.’

She knit her restless forehead. ‘Then, despite,
Aurora, that most radiant morning name,
You’re dull as any London afternoon.
I wanted time,—and gained it,—wanted _you_,
And gain you! You will come and see the girl,
In whose most prodigal eyes, the lineal pearl
And pride of all your lofty race of Leighs
Is destined to solution. Authorised
By sight and knowledge, then, you’ll speak your mind,
And prove to Romney, in your brilliant way,
He’ll wrong the people and posterity
(Say such a thing is bad for you and me,
And you fail utterly,) by concluding thus
An execrable marriage. Break it up,
Disroot it—peradventure, presently,
We’ll plant a better fortune in its place.
Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less
For saying the thing I should not. Well I know
I should not. I have kept, as others have,
The iron rule of womanly reserve
In lip and life, till now: I wept a week
Before I came here.’—Ending, she was pale;
The last words, haughtily said, were tremulous.
This palfrey pranced in harness, arched her neck,
And, only by the foam upon the bit,
You saw she champed against it.
Then I rose.
‘I love love! truth’s no cleaner thing than love.
I comprehend a love so fiery hot
It burns its natural veil of august shame,
And stands sublimely in the nude, as chaste
As Medicean Venus. But I know,
A love that burns through veils, will burn through masks,
And shrivel up treachery. What, love and lie!
Nay—go to the opera! your love’s curable.’

‘I love and lie?’ she said—‘I lie, forsooth?’
And beat her taper foot upon the floor,
And smiled against the shoe,—‘You’re hard, Miss Leigh,
Unversed in current phrases.—Bowling-greens
Of poets are fresher than the world’s highways;
Forgive me that I rashly blew the dust
Which dims our hedges even, in your eyes,
And vexed you so much. You find, probably,
No evil in this marriage,—rather good
Of innocence, to pastoralise in song:
You’ll give the bond your signature, perhaps,
Beneath the lady’s mark,—indifferent
That Romney chose a wife, could write her name,
In witnessing he loved her.’
‘Loved!’ I cried;
‘Who tells you that he wants a wife to love?
He gets a horse to use, not love, I think:
There’s work for wives as well,—and after, straw,
When men are liberal. For myself, you err
Supposing power in me to break this match.
I could not do it, to save Romney’s life;
And would not, to save mine.’
‘You take it so,’
She said; ‘farewell then. Write your books in peace,
As far as may be for some secret stir
Now obvious to me,—for, most obviously,
In coming hither I mistook the way.’
Whereat she touched my hand, and bent her head,
And floated from me like a silent cloud
That leaves the sense of thunder.
I drew breath
As hard as in a sick room. After all
This woman breaks her social system up
For love, so counted—the love possible
To such,—and lilies are still lilies, pulled
By smutty hands, though spotted from their white;
And thus she is better, haply, of her kind,
Than Romney Leigh, who lives by diagrams,
And crosses out the spontaneities
Of all his individual, personal life,
With formal universals. As if man
Were set upon a high stool at a desk,
To keep God’s books for Him, in red and black,
And feel by millions! What, if even God
Were chiefly God by living out Himself
To an individualism of the Infinite,
Eterne, intense, profuse,—still throwing up
The golden spray of multitudinous worlds
In measure to the proclive weight and rush
Of His inner nature,—the spontaneous love
Still proof and outflow of spontaneous life?
Then live, Aurora!
Two hours afterward,
Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,
Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,
Whose wasted right hand gambled ’gainst his left
With an old brass button, in a blot of sun,
Jeered weakly at me as I passed across
The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged
Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,
Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,
Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,
By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—
‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog
You’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,
Fine madam, with those damnable small feet!
We cover up our face from doing good,
As if it were our purse! What brings you here,
My lady? is’t to find my gentleman
Who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves?
Our cholera catch you with its cramps and spasms,
And tumble up your good clothes, veil and all,
And turn your whiteness dead-blue.’ I looked up;
I think I could have walked through hell that day,
And never flinched. ‘The dear Christ comfort you,’
I said, ‘you must have been most miserable
To be so cruel,’—and I emptied out
My purse upon the stones: when, as I had cast
The last charm in the cauldron, the whole court
Went boiling, bubbling up, from all its doors
And windows, with a hideous wail of laughs
And roar of oaths, and blows perhaps ... I passed
Too quickly for distinguishing ... and pushed
A little side-door hanging on a hinge,
And plunged into the dark, and groped and climbed
The long, steep, narrow stair ’twixt broken rail
And mildewed wall that let the plaster drop
To startle me in the blackness. Still, up, up!
So high lived Romney’s bride. I paused at last
Before a low door in the roof, and knocked;
There came an answer like a hurried dove—
‘So soon? can that be Mister Leigh? so soon?’
And as I entered, an ineffable face
Met mine upon the threshold. ‘Oh, not you,
Not you!’ ... the dropping of the voice implied,
‘Then, if not you, for me not any one.’
I looked her in the eyes, and held her hands,
And said, ‘I am his cousin,—Romney Leigh’s;
And here I’m come to see my cousin too.’
She touched me with her face and with her voice,
This daughter of the people. Such soft flowers,
From such rough roots? the people, under there,
Can sin so, curse so, look so, smell so ... faugh!
Yet have such daughters?
No wise beautiful
Was Marian Erle. She was not white nor brown,
But could look either, like a mist that changed
According to being shone on more or less.
The hair, too, ran its opulence of curls
In doubt ’twixt dark and bright, nor left you clear
To name the colour. Too much hair perhaps
(I’ll name a fault here) for so small a head,
Which seemed to droop on that side and on this,
As a full-blown rose uneasy with its weight,
Though not a breath should trouble it. Again,
The dimple in the cheek had better gone
With redder, fuller rounds: and somewhat large
The mouth was, though the milky little teeth
Dissolved it to so infantine a smile!
For soon it smiled at me; the eyes smiled too,
But ’twas as if remembering they had wept,
And knowing they should, some day, weep again.

We talked. She told me all her story out,
Which I’ll re-tell with fuller utterance,
As coloured and confirmed in aftertimes
By others, and herself too. Marian Erle
Was born upon the ledge of Malvern Hill
To eastward, in a hut, built up at night
To evade the landlord’s eye, of mud and turf,
Still liable, if once he looked that way,
To being straight levelled, scattered by his foot,
Like any other anthill. Born, I say;
God sent her to his world, commissioned right,
Her human testimonials fully signed,
Not scant in soul—complete in lineaments;
But others had to swindle her a place
To wail in when she had come. No place for her,
By man’s law! born an outlaw, was this babe.
Her first cry in our strange and strangling air,
When cast in spasms out by the shuddering womb,
Was wrong against the social code,—forced wrong.
What business had the baby to cry there?

I tell her story and grow passionate.
She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used
Meek words that made no wonder of herself
For being so sad a creature. ‘Mister Leigh
Considered truly that such things should change.
They _will_, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth,
There’s none can like a nettle as a pink,
Except himself. We’re nettles, some of us,
And give offence by the act of springing up;
And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,
The hoes, of course, are on us.’ So she said.
Her father earned his life by random jobs
Despised by steadier workmen—keeping swine
On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on
The harvest at wet seasons,—or, at need,
Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove
Of startled horses plunged into the mist
Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind
With wandering neighings. In between the gaps
Of such irregular work, he drank and slept,
And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,
She could not buy more drink. At which she turned,
(The worm) and beat her baby in revenge
For her own broken heart. There’s not a crime
But takes its proper change out still in crime,
If once rung on the counter of this world;
Let sinners look to it.
Yet the outcast child,
For whom the very mother’s face forewent
The mother’s special patience, lived and grew;
Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,
With that pathetic vacillating roll
Of the infant body on the uncertain feet,
(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon)
At which most women’s arms unclose at once
With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,
This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,
This babe would steal off from the mother’s chair,
And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,
Would find some keyhole toward the secresy
Of Heaven’s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out—
Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,
She had never heard of angels,—but to gaze
She knew not why, to see she knew not what,
A-hungering outward from the barren earth
For something like a joy. She liked, she said,
To dazzle black her sight against the sky,
For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,
And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;
She learnt God that way, and was beat for it
Whenever she went home,—yet came again,
As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,
Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,
This skyey father and mother both in one,
Instructed her and civilised her more
Than even the Sunday-school did afterward,
To which a lady sent her to learn books
And sit upon a long bench in a row
With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes
To see them laugh and laugh, and moil their texts;
But ofter she was sorrowful with noise,
And wondered if their mothers beat them hard,
That ever they should laugh so. There was one
She loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years’ child,
So pretty and clever, who read syllables
When Marian was at letters; _she_ would laugh
At nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed,
Then shook her curls down on her eyes and mouth
To hide her make-mirth from the schoolmaster.
And Rose’s pelting glee, as frank as rain
On cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,
To see another merry whom she loved.
She whispered once (the children side by side,
With mutual arms entwined about their necks)
‘Your mother lets you laugh so?’ ‘Ay,’ said Rose,
‘She lets me. She was dug into the ground
Six years since, I being but a yearling wean.
Such mothers let us play and lose our time,
And never scold nor beat us! don’t you wish
You had one like that?’ There, Marian breaking off
Looked suddenly in my face. ‘Poor Rose,’ said she,
‘I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.
I’d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh,—
Poor Rose, poor Rose!’ said Marian.
She resumed.
It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school
What God was, what he wanted from us all,
And how, in choosing sin, we vexed the Christ,
To go straight home and hear her father pull
The Name down on us from the thunder-shelf,
Then drink away his soul into the dark
From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,
Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more
She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong;
Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know
The vileness of her kindred: through her heart,
Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,
They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, ’tis hard
To learn you have a father up in heaven
By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,
Still worse than orphaned: ’tis too heavy a grief,
The having to thank God for such a joy!