The Story of Saville

Part 1

SAVILLE

rouched like a moribund lion, wounded, alone in his lair, Bowed ’neath unbreakable fetters, choked with an iron despair, Wearily, heavily ’ware of the clock's dull ponderous rune Telling how hideous morn gives birth to misshapen foul noon, Who yet wears a loveliness regal, a beauty transcendent and bright, Compared to her utterless offspring, the Ethiop horror of night, Kyrle sat, scarce caring to keep account of the hours and the days, As a rock-spitted ship need reck never more of the wind and its ways— Sat in his isolate chamber, lost in the clamant strange town Where he had crept in the dark when his sun forever went down,

Broken winged crept to be free of the well-meant pity of friends Rough as a blundering touch on a burn that solace intends, Free of condolences oily, felicitous, falser than hell, From men who at last might eclipse him, who still rode safe on the swell, Free of the bitter black sense—the shock—that no one of them all Vitally cared if he starved in his garret, a rat in the wall.

Oh! if a merciful God, my friend, hath guerdoned and blest you so, Hath out of a million languid hearts, faint pulsing, feeble and slow, Singled one scarlet treasure, that beats as strongly and true As the passionate powerful ocean-throb, for you and only you, That hushes its lilt to a lullaby, soothing you while you sleep, And bursts to blossom under your smile, and bleeds if ever you weep, Trample it not, nor esteem it a pebble paltry and cheap,—

Think not twice in a life to find such a rose-ruby to keep!

Ah! they were saying carelessly, back in his wonted place, “Wonder where he has slipped to? Poor devil, he’s out of the race— Nothing remains, as the French say, but drawing the sheet o’er the face,”— And ever he mused of his village home and the graves on the churchyard hill, Where the only hearts that had beat for him were crumbling, cruelly still, And his useless eyes brimmed over with tears, and slowly his blood grew chill.

Then sudden he rose and flung off his mood, and called with a bitter laugh For raiment against the javelin cold, for a guide and his brand new staff, And donning the garments doubtfully, with timid questioning touch, Now sharply chiding his helper, now thanking him over much, And groping his way before him in spite of the lad’s firm clutch, He reached the street and onward dragged, commanding to be led where

The city’s din was heard no more, and all the world was fair, For he thought that mayhap in a purer air a Gilead-grace might be, And God might somehow permit him to breathe the beauty he could not see.

When he had forced his hesitant feet to traverse a mile or so Of street that merged in a country road, its ruts all softened with snow, They came to a widely sloping space and lofty ancestral trees That bowed in a stately welcome under a gentle breeze, And the lad pushed open a high arched gate and boldly leading him through Guided the man to a rustic bench screened by a sturdy yew.

“Leave me here for an hour,” said Kyrle, and when he was quite alone Sat in a hopeless silence with a face like a carven stone, Though once he smiled at a thought, and the smile more pitiful was than a groan, For scarce was it matter for mirth, how his mind would circling rehearse

The iterant rankling venom of an inquisitorial curse, A special and general ban; and he deemed it better had been for him To have undergone impossible pangs and tortures fiendish grim, That one by one they had ravished forth each keen particular hair, That redhot pincers had nipped his flesh and torn his nerve-cells bare, That a thousand needles had stung his flesh with delicate devilish care. If so they had spared his eyes,—his eyes, that were worth more then To the wretched groveling world than the eyes of his fellow-men, For Oh! in this visionless later day was any so quick as he To snare and pinion the beauty that floats on turret and crag and tree, That is as the sand on the beaches, the blossoms of foam on the sea,— Yet he had perceived not alone this fairness out ward and free, The heritage common to all mankind, that children or clowns may prize, But the deeper intent, the message occult, the truth esoteric that lies

Hidden from all but a poet’s soul and heaven anointed eyes.

And now he had come to regret the fierce fanged physical pain That for long, long weeks had maddened, had seethed and swirled in his brain, Whose pressure was past enduring, whose passing was blest relief, Yet whose worst throes seemed now more kind than this unbearable grief, This travail and sweat of spirit, where the universe seemed to swim In hatefullest frantic chaos, a lunatic’s furious whim. Strange! that because of a trifling loss, scarce more in creation’s scheme Than a gnat in a summer woodland, a leaf afloat on a stream, Because two vials were shattered, God’s purposes high should seem Only an idiot babble heard in a horrible dream.

But as he impotent girded and railed, and longed to stifle his care In the dull narcotic round of his room, and counted the winter air

Harsh, unbreathable, nettle-rough, suddenly was he aware Of a footstep light yet resolute, a beautiful woman’s tread, He knew by the keen unwonted thrill that over his senses sped, The silken swish, the odor sweet, and stricken he bowed his head Lest he be known for a sightless clod and all of his sorrow be read.

And so she passed, but again did turn, he knew though he could not see, And drifted by as antelope-swift as downiest snow-flakes be, And laid with an instant timorous touch some roses upon his knee, And butterfly light and daintily still she fluttered upon her way, “A rifle smoke blown through the woods for a moment,—a moment, but never to stay!”

And he snatched the clustered loveliness up, and sudden it seemed a part Of his wretched life, like a dream of love in an old man’s withered heart, A rosary dearer than beads of olive were ever to kneeling nun,

And sweet it was to remember that faithfully soil and sun Had labored together in his behalf and these fragrant globes had spun,— And over his hand the petals curled, like a baby’s fingers weak, And dewily kissed like a maiden’s lips his sallow and sunken cheek, And all that night by his wakeful bed they flooded the comfortless spot With spice, and he mixed again in his mind the crimson he had forgot, And turning and tossing as needs he must, it all but soothed him to know That the utterly perfect queenly things, beautiful, all aglow, Were close beside him, shaking out with each waft of their rich perfume A message of pity and tenderness across the midnight gloom.

Part 2

II.

ell,—to a man in a dungeon an infinitesimal thing Looms large as the fate of an empire doth to a fetterless king, And for the first time in aeons Kyrle felt a surcease of pain, Casting the slough of his anguish a blessed brief hour or twain,— ’Twas something to hope and to live for, that hour in the afternoon, To question if fate would vouchsafe him a second such velvety boon,— He would not fail to keep tryst,—not he! And yet—O heaven!—and yet— What? had he sunk to this estate? to care if some selfish coquette, A pampered doll, an idol of clay, born only to drive men mad, Yielded or not to such sweet ruth as yesterday she had?

She came, with her printless hurrying feet stepping so shamed and fast Scarce had he guessed her near him at all ere she had onward passed, And when she had turned and again approached it seemed that she would have gone

Straight on unseeing across the stretch of wide snow-sprinkled lawn,— But she was perforce constrained to pause; he wist not that he held up A visage stamped with an awful need, like a beggar’s holding a cup— He never knew that he reached his hand, while slowly advanced the maid And into his fingers eager and worn a bunch of violets laid— And he tried to mutter a word of thanks, and he heard a quick low sob, And he sank half stunned to his seat again, afraid of his heart’s wild throb, And it was over, all over and past! and now for twenty-four hours He must live like a starving sailor, on a breath and a knot of flowers, And ever there rang in his weary brain, the roar of the city above, These words of a laurelled master, till he sickened with terror thereof, “Hath man not evil enough, O Earth, that thou must lay on him love?”

Part 3

III.

ot amid volleying thunder, ’mid smoke-wreaths murkily dim, Not in the fury of battle one writeth a battle hymn, Nor chanteth of garlanded Autumn’s purple and golden store, Foison of fruit and grain and nut, till harvesting days be o’er, And not of the glorious tempest’s rage while yet the shuddering ship Is laboring through the surges with headlong hurricane dip, And black the skyline swings and swirls to a tremble of silver foam, Not of the creamy blossomy death one singeth till safe at home— Yet oft a mariner, rugged and bronzed, who joys in the tales he tells Of plumy palm trees, brown bright maids, pink corals, and filagreed shells, And perils of rocks, and wondrous ’scapes from famine and fever hells, Will mark his listeners’ starting eyes, happy to hold them thrall, Yet murmurs, “Well, thank God I am here, safe sheltered among you all—

But Oh! to be back at sea, half starved, and of drenched in a sudden squall!”

Alas! for any who come to be post-graduates in the art Of subtle and sympathetic search in the deeps of the human heart, For Oh! they not so ravishing high, so thrillingly, tenderly low Could sing had they not outlived the theme some dozen of years ago— Alas! for them who clasp no hand, but an empty shrivelling glove, And remember how sweet it was last year, how piercingly sweet to love— And alas for the desolate souls who feel that the rosy boy lies hid, Quiver and dimples and wandering wings, under a coffin lid!

But to my story. Kyrle, poor Kyrle, crept out of his smothering mood, The vile cocoon the worms had spun of anguish and solitude, And weak as an insect crawled about and struggled to find a light Of hope or of faith or of anything sweet let into the fathomless night.

Ah me! it had been but a struggle all through, a moiling and rigorous life From the early days on the niggard farm, the petty ignoble strife ’Gainst narrow prejudice, ignorance, greed, to wrest for himself a chance For study and travel, for buffeting fate and conquering circumstance; Then years in the studios foreign and quaint, when salient and eager his mind Grasped and garnered all manner of truths—except that he had not dined; But that’s a detail, a mere trifle—the worshipping student will find Diviner delight, a more rapturous joy in an intellectual stride, A tint, or a chord, or a line in an ode, than in aught under heaven beside; And then the homecoming, the hopeful return to the generous land of his birth, The vehement passion for art, the desire to show what he was worth, Kaleidoscope pageants of fancies circling and swift in his thought, Tissues of gossamer golden freaked, with pearls and emeralds wrought, A bright panoramic succession, like raindrops of April clear,

Thicker than jewels of August dew, so that his only fear Was that the phantom embryos, tiny as stars of snow, Might melt and slip away into naught, and he never see them go— And often he rose in the dead of night and dashed off a virile sketch To lull into quiet some clamoring shape that had kept his mind at a stretch; Then followed his masterpiece, “Rupert’s Trust,”—God! how he sweated and slaved, Denying his body forgotten the nurture and slumber it craved; Ah! that was well worthy the doing, worthy a continent’s praise— Men for a slighter achievement than this had been crowned with eternal bays— He had dropped his palette and brushes, had sent his soul in the gaze He bent on his picture completed, his beautiful darling,—had smiled To think that his wedlock devoted had bloomed in an exquisite child,— What! could it be that men cherished their children born but of the flesh As he cherished this holier offspring snared in a mystical mesh,

The child of himself and of Love,—deep love for his race and his art, And for whatsoever of good and pure in this our being hath part,— And then, while he gazed exalted and rapt, perceiving the glory-rays Stream meteor-like from the picture and merge in an opaline haze, Sudden the haze was a thunder-cloud, all gashed and fretted with fire, And the wind shrieked loud through his chamber, bellowing higher and higher, And a knell as of death everlasting was knolled from a neighboring spire.

And the cloud rolled sulphurous into his brain, and the fire gnawed into his eyes, And the tigerish wind whirled round and round, spiralling dervish-wise, And tore into tatters the visual nerve, in its terrible fiery grind,— And the steeple carillon lost its chime and tolled but the one word,—“Blind!”

Well, it had happened ages ago, in the days that preceeded the flood, So it seemed to Kyrle, with his strong hand lax and sluggish his galloping blood,

And over and over he cursed his fate and bitterly marvelled to find What a wretched contemptible thing is a man, whether death-dumb and resigned, Ox-like patient, stolidly mute, he draggeth his weariful load, Or furious snarls at the bloody lash and passion ate writhes at the goad,— Bah! the unstable frail spirit, more weak than the wing of a dove To soar and attain the empyreal heights,—strong only to suffer and love!

Love,—to my story of love again, the wonderful story we told Or heard in the dim sweet cycles afar in the Age of Gold, When the pendulum pulse in the soft young cheek swings tremulous to and fro From the pearly pallor of cherry blooms to the rose’s crimson glow, When a few faint syllables, English-plain, are richer than wisdom’s years, And one dear voice holds deeper tones than the music of all the spheres.

Scarce could one call it an interview between these shadowy folk,

Whereof the one saw the other not and neither the silence broke, But at the third strange meeting-time, Kyrle gathered courage and spoke, For e’en as she laid her tribute down and would have fled hurrying by, He caught her hand in a deathful grip, unheeding her startled cry, Too wrapped in his infinite harrowing need, too wholly absorbed to feel The crusted wealth of her priceless rings, the elegant sleeve of seal, And he poured out his thanks in a sudden rush as a brook doth in March overswell, Entreating that she who had been but a fragrance should now be a voice as well.

Long she stood hesitant, statue-still, her lilies and fingers withdrawn, And at last he sighed in a shuddering breath, deeming she must have gone, But then she answered and all the peace and healing and balm that dwell In a country lane on a Sabbath morn, blest by a distant bell, Hallowed her voice, and the words thereof were sweeter than asphodel,

For pity, if pity she felt, was veiled under a sprightly essay To twist a shimmering strand of gold into the hodden gray.

“Alas, poor knight! thou art lorn and lost, and cast forever away In this enchanted and fearsome land, where witches and ogres hold sway,— Thou hast suffered the ban of my sister Fate; but I am a tenderer fay, And so that thou servest me early and late, owning no queen beside, Never presuming to question my will, loyal whatever betide, I dare avouch thou again shalt feel that warmly the sun doth shine, Thou shalt once more breathe Heliconian air, and drink of Falernian wine, And haply at last the scales shall fall from those dark sad eyes of thine!”

Then pressing the lilies close into his hand, while Kyrle stood blockish and still, She murmured “Farewell, farewell, poor knight! Remember the Fairy Saville!”

Part 4

IV.

o women alone doth love, bright love, come as a perfect joy, A lily uncankered, pure virgin gold, flawless and free from alloy,— Faithfully, gladly they serve, who win, for tending the boy god’s flame, Guerdon of agonized travail and death and often a pilloried shame,— They, sweet souls, do rapturous leap at the sound of Love’s entering, Ask not where he has hidden his lash, but worship and crown him king.

Men, it may be, have a loftier look, a glimpse of the anguish and tears, And see in the baby’s bassinette the corpse of seventy years, The rift that must come in the lute at last, the worm that works in the bud,— However it be, I only know their love is a vice in the blood, A season of poignant tormenting, of pleasure elusive and vague, A maelstrom engulfing, to be forever dreaded and shunned like the plague,— To men, pink palpitant Eros seems a skeleton earthily gaunt,

And their kindest word for the fluttering shape is “Horrible monster, avaunt!”

But when into Kyrle’s existence blank, arid as African sands, Into the barrenness marred and vexed by alien tongues and hands, An angel’s voice rang heavenly high, and a star in his pathway fell, Welcomer ’twas to the lonely man than water in nethermost hell. He troubled no more for his future weal than violets do in May, For steadily, softly gleamed the star; sufficient from day to day It was to hearken and ponder the words the Fairy Saville would say, Though ever he questioned his dubious heart, “Can this great miracle be,— Does this magnificent passion-flower blossom alone for me? Or hath she served an apprenticeship and gilded her fancy’s pen Coldly dipping it, artisan-wise, in the blood of a score of men?”— But soon these petty misgivings fled,—what mattered it if she had won

Her bountiful largess of healing under a fostering sun, Or rooted on some bleak headland, torn by the mistral harsh, Or midst of the drooping cypresses and beaded moss of a marsh,— For she spoke not alone with the cold precision and icy glitter of thought, That of itself no poetry forms, but all of her speech was wrought With fluctuant gleams of the light divine that never on sea or land Doth shine, but only in vestal hearts that tremble and understand, And whether she struck with a touch assured the silver strings of her lyre, ’Till the whole wood rang to a rhapsody as of a seraph choir, Or whether she wailed in a minor key, sad as the coo of a dove, Briny with tears as the ocean foam, a bittersweet story of love, Or whether elegiac, organ-deep, she chanted a dirge-refrain, Or of rivulets warbled and resinous buds and burgeon of meadow and plain, Eloquent utterance, gracile as palms, poppies of fire and of dew,

Bloomed at his need like the manna of old, and grateful he listened and knew That God, who forbade him to read a poem, was letting him live one through, And his wing-clipt faith grew whole once more, spurning its shackles and bars, And he soared on pinions steady and strong to the gracious accessible stars, And man was honest and woman was true and the Infinite God was kind, And the world was a fair pure world again, and only his eyes were blind, And he bowed his head to the All-wise Will, embracing the doom assigned.

Part 5

V.

eek after week slipped billowy by into the gulfy past, And the silvery beryl of each day’s wave broke at Kyrle’s feet and upcast Flotsam of Indian broideries, spices, and pearls of Ceylon, Sandalwood Araby sweet, and myrrh, and fagots of cinnamon, And strewing the sterile waste beach of his life became as a godsend thereon.

The timid grace of the lady birch, the gnarls of the oak, she told, How the warrior pines stood stark against the sunset’s daffodil gold, And the sinuous slopes of the distant hills were but as a banner unscrolled, Tawny and russet and purple twined, dotted with orbs of jet Where a sturdy thorn or a lichened rock was into the fabric set, And often she pictured a mother and babes, a tranquil domestic scene Behind the rubious cordial glow of a casement’s coppery sheen, And once when the sky occidental was paly translucentest green,

Like apple-tree buds ere the mid-May’s kiss quickens them, tender and keen, She told how a trio of cloudy shapes, dripping with blood and wine, Drifted o’er the horizon’s rim, lurid as almandine, Huddled and hunched and wizened, like the sisters three in Macbeth, And one was Failure and one was Fear, and one was a Prayer for death,— But an airy knight pricked over the plain and he vanquished them all at a breath, And the conqueror’s colors were caught and tossed, and up to the zenith rolled, And a legion sang of his victory like the morning stars of old.

And once she came through a shuddering storm, braving the eddying whirl Of the snow-grains sown by a prodigal hand, and walked for a space with Kyrle, And clung to his arm, half womanly guide, and half but a frivolous girl, And said ’twas as if they were walking alone, they two, in a vast white pearl, Where radiant nacre-gleams of pink traversed the edelweiss hue, But never a satyr’s hoof was heard nor an Oread’s laugh rang through,

And there lurked no hint of the forestal green nor yet of the limitless blue.

And then as they battled against the wind, sauntering to and fro, She preached him a little sermon she had studied that day in Thoreau, Her text, the chariot wheels of the storm, the six-spoked crystals of snow, Those faceted glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven’s floor, Feathery petaled hexagonal flowers, diamond dusted o’er,— Why, we are sprent with gems! they fall in a wavering thistledown blur, In the gallery of the meadow mouse, on the restless squirrel’s fur, The schoolboy crushes them into a ball, the woodman follows his sled Through the wreck of a myriad fragile stars, strange as the stars o’erhead,— And Oh! ’twere a blasphemy to declare by some cold narrowing word Mechanical action got them: Divinity must have stirred In the germ pellucid and gelid, and so have they come to be

Fair fruit of enthusiasm, the children of ecstasy,— And mother nature not yet had lost her pristine vigor and force, Still was the law supreme at work, the sun still true in his course, And God still paused to watch over His earth, still fashioned with cunningest art The baby flakes of the silver snow—and why should a man lose heart?

Part 6

VI.

ut at last came a day when she failed to come, when the reed bent rottenly down, And he sat in a cruel impatience, his face deformed by a frown, And he listened in vain for the crystalline tinkle of feet through the crepitant grass, The delicate laugh of dismay at a drift or haply a tiny crevasse,— He waited half sick of a hope deferred, till his marrow was turned to ice, And the orange and garnet chilled out of the sky, and the lad had come for him thrice, And then he arose and doggedly trudged to his poor pain-tenanted room, That crawled as with slimiest horrors through out the reticulate gloom, And he shrank from shutting himself alone into that living tomb.

And he had no lilies at all that night, no languorous lullings of spice, No hope of remote reparation, no visions to lure and entice, Naught but the old, old Tantalus-mood, that had gathered new malice and gall From disuse, as a robe gathers mildew and moth, hanging forgot on the wall,

And a pain rapacious surged over his soul like a flood or a pestilent wind, Or octopus-like sucked into his heart, shark-toothed and poisonous-finned, And he summoned the strength of his nature in its outraged trust to arise And help him to hate himself and this woman, to utterly loathe and despise Her who had made him a pastime, bridging the winter across With a masque, a foolery petty and vain, amusing herself with his loss,— God! it had been but an insult throughout, her ’havior so sisterly free,— She scarce had esteemed him a man at all,—why, then, forsooth! should she be Distantly coy with a clod, reserved as a maid is alway With a man? She had seen at a glance that no least possibility lay Of love ’twixt herself and a creature ignoble, all of whose manlihood The chief enchanter had Merlin-wise sunk in a pathless wood, And so she had pitied him for a season, but now she had wearied and sped To a southern clime where the grapes were gold and the pomegranates lusciously red.

But the Avon Swan sang silvery clear, “All office infirmity still Neglects,” and his heart waxed weak and wailed, “Perhaps she is fevered and ill,— Perhaps she is dying—O God, protect Thy purest, Thy peerless Saville!”

Yet the foul faint doubt he had trampled at first sprang weedlike over again,— She was but a woman and therefore false,—she smiled on a hundred men,— And he thought how she clung to his arm in the snow and he wished he had killed her then!

Part 7

VII.

ut the next day came, and with it Saville too breathless and happy to speak, And lie felt the vibrant blood in her hand, and he guessed it was red in her cheek, And he said that he dared not reproach her—it was not his right—and then poured Upon her head meek and devoted such vials of wrath as are stored In a thunderbolt, wild over leaping the bounds that convention hath set, And Saville stood exultant and smiling to see how a man could forget All hindrances puny, external, and show forth the soul of him yet.

But she stifled her smiling and gently spoke, and there was a subtle change In her tone and manner, a humbleness, subservient, flattering, strange, As when a poor peasant, gambolling rude, freely will shout and sing For a chance companion, but soon is hushed, learning he rides with The King!

“I am sorry—yet glad—but sorry the most! I never, I think, should have dared

To believe that my coming was aught to you,—I deemed that you would not have cared,— I might have ribboned a note to the bench,—but alas! you could not read,— And did you really linger till dark? and did you miss me indeed? But I—I was threading the tangled maze of the city’s ravenous whirl, And I gazed for an hour upon ‘Rupert’s Trust,’—and you, O friend! you are Kyrle!”

He mused, how small is the woman soul, how timid and trustless and frail, Curious ever of pedigree and trivial confirming detail, While he had not even requested her name, contented as yet but to dream Of her as a dim mist-maiden, a goddess, gem-girdled, supreme,— But it passed, this scornfulness fleeting, and the air seemed to dimple and dirl Eolian-tender, mandolin-sweet, at the magical words, “You are Kyrle,” Simple, sufficient, as if she had said in a homaging, honey-fraught tone, “You are Cæsar,—unmastered, unrivalled,—our planet doth own

No man for your fellow,—Enough! You are even so Kyrle and alone!”

Ah, well! he had hoped that the world one day would thus acknowledge his power, Would wreath his temples with immortelles, would cast at his feet the dower That genius merits and sometimes wins; but alas! not e’en for an hour Had he been the idol; the waxen bud had blackened and failed of a flower. And now he inquired as a father might of a distant and darling child Of the veriest trifles; he knew how hard they were to be reconciled, The needs of a picture like “Rupert’s Trust,” and the mirk of a dusty shop,— Was it decently hung? did the light fall true from a shaded jet at the top? And Oh! was it verily great? did it hold the vital, the God-given spark That had been his latest glimpse upon earth, that still struck white through the dark? Was the flame still lambently blazing and clear, the gold from the dross to refine, Of force to pierce and to purify men, and change then from panthers and swine?

Could a man step out of his daily round and that passionate picture scan, And not go forth to the greed and the grind a cleaner and better man? Had she heard as she gazed the Spirits of Good singing their deathless song, Had she felt it were better to starve and rot than swerve to the smallest wrong?

But Saville was mute; it seemed for a space as if she scarce could have heard, She who was ever so prompt to utter a sparkling felicitous word, And he guessed she was weeping, and soon she breathed in a tear-veiled tremulous tone, “I only prayed: O God! Give back his vision and take my own!”

And Kyrle laughed out, ’twas so sweet to win compassion divine as this, Laughed like a boy, and reached his arms over the viewless abyss, And the black was cleft by a lightning stroke and their souls were fused in a kiss.