Poems by William Dean Howells Part 18

Annie, the dear little goose, believes in Fred and her mother With an enchanting abandon. She doesn't at all understand them, But she has some twilight views of their cleverness. Father is quiet, Now and then ventures some French when he fancies that n.o.body hears him, In an aside to the valet-de-place--I never detect him-- Buys things for mother and me with a quite supernatural sweetness, Tolerates all Fred's airs, and is indispensably pleasant.

II.

Prattling on of these things, which I think cannot interest deeply, So I hold back in my heart its dear and wonderful secret (Which I must tell you at last, however I falter to tell you), Fain to keep it all my own for a little while longer,-- Doubting but it shall lose some part of its strangeness and sweetness, Shared with another, and fearful that even _you_ may not find it Just the marvel that I do--and thus turn our friendship to hatred.

Sometimes it seems to me that this love, which I feel is eternal, Must have begun with my life, and that only an absence was ended When we met and knew in our souls that we loved one another.

For from the first was no doubt. The earliest hints of the pa.s.sion, Whispered to girlhood's tremulous dream, may be mixed with misgiving, But, when the very love comes, it bears no vagueness of meaning; Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt by the ignorant senses, Knowing but looks and utterance) soul unto soul makes confession, Silence to silence speaks. And I think that this subtile a.s.surance, Yet unconfirmed from without, is even sweeter and dearer Than the perfected bliss that comes when the words have been spoken.

--Not that I'd have them unsaid, now! But 't was delicious to ponder All the miracle over, and clasp it, and keep it, and hide it,-- While I beheld him, you know, with looks of indifferent languor, Talking of other things, and felt the divine contradiction Trouble my heart below!

And yet, if no doubt touched our pa.s.sion, Do not believe for that, our love has been wholly unclouded.

All best things are ours when pain and patience have won them: Peace itself would mean nothing but for the strife that preceded; Triumph of love is greatest, when peril of love has been sorest.

(That's to say, I dare say. I'm only repeating what _he_ said.) Well, then, of all wretched things in the world, a mystery, Clara, Lurked in this life dear to mine, and hopelessly held us asunder When we drew nearest together, and all but his speech said, "I love you."

Fred had known him at college, and then had found him at Naples, After several years,--and called him a capital fellow.

Thus far his knowledge went, and beyond this began to run shallow Over troubled ways, and to break into brilliant conjecture, Harder by far to endure than the other's reticent absence-- Absence wherein at times he seemed to walk like one troubled By an uneasy dream, whose spell is not broken with waking, But it returns all day with a vivid and sudden recurrence, Like a remembered event. Of the past that was closest the present, This we knew from himself: He went at the earliest summons, When the Rebellion began, and falling, terribly wounded, Into the enemy's hands, after ages of sickness and prison, Made his escape at last; and, returning, found all his virtues Grown out of recognition and shining in posthumous splendor,-- Found all changed and estranged, and, he fancied, more wonder than welcome.

So, somewhat heavy of heart, and disabled for war, he had wandered Hither to Europe for perfecter peace. Abruptly his silence, Full of suggestion and sadness, made here a chasm between us; But we spanned the chasm with conversational bridges, Else talked all around it, and feigned an ignorance of it, With that absurd pretence which is always so painful, or comic, Just as you happen to make it or see it.

In spite of our fictions, Severed from his by that silence, my heart grew ever more anxious, Till last night when together we sat in Piazza San Marco (Then, when the morrow must bring us parting--forever, it might be), Taking our ices al fresco. Some strolling minstrels were singing Airs from the Trovatore. I noted with painful observance, With the unwilling minuteness at such times absolute torture, All that brilliant scene, for which I cared nothing, before me: Dark-eyed Venetian leoni regarding the forestieri With those compa.s.sionate looks of gentle and curious wonder Home-keeping Italy's nations bend on the voyaging races,-- Taciturn, indolent, sad, as their beautiful city itself is; Groups of remotest English--not just the traditional English (Lavish Milor is no more, and your travelling Briton is frugal)-- English, though, after all, with the Channel always between them, Islanded in themselves, and the Continent's sociable races; Country-people of ours--the New World's confident children, Proud of America always, and even vain of the Troubles As of disaster laid out on a scale unequalled in Europe; Polyglot Russians that spoke all languages better than natives; White-coated Austrian officers, anglicized Austrian dandies; Gorgeous Levantine figures of Greek, and Turk, and Albanian-- These, and the throngs that moved through the long arcades and Piazza, Shone on by numberless lamps that flamed round the perfect Piazza, Jewel-like set in the splendid frame of this beautiful picture, Full of such motley life, and so altogether Venetian.

Then we rose and walked where the lamps were blanched by the moonlight Flooding the Piazzetta with splendor, and throwing in shadow All the facade of Saint Mark's, with its pillars, and horses, and arches; But the sculptured frondage, that blossoms over the arches Into the forms of saints, was touched with tenderest lucence, And the angel that stands on the crest of the vast campanile Bathed his golden vans in the liquid light of the moonbeams.

Black rose the granite pillars that lift the Saint and the Lion; Black sank the island campanili from distance to distance; Over the charmed scene there brooded a presence of music, Subtler than sound, and felt, unheard, in the depth of the spirit.

How can I gather and show you the airy threads of enchantment Woven that night round my life and forever wrought into my being, As in our boat we glided away from the glittering city?

Dull at heart I felt, and I looked at the lights in the water, Blurring their brilliance with tears, while the tresses of eddying seaweed, Whirled in the ebbing tide, like the tresses of sea-maidens drifting Seaward from palace-haunts, in the moonshine glistened and darkened.

Sad and vague were my thoughts, and full of fear was the silence; And, when he turned to speak at last, I trembled to hear him, Feeling he now must speak of his love, and his life and its secret,-- Now that the narrowing chances had left but that cruel conclusion, Else the life-long ache of a love and a trouble unuttered.

Better, my feebleness pleaded, the dreariest doubt that had vexed me, Than my life left nothing, not even a doubt to console it; But, while I trembled and listened, his broken words crumbled to silence, And, as though some touch of fate had thrilled him with warning, Suddenly from me he turned. Our gondola slipped from the shadow Under a ship lying near, and glided into the moonlight, Where, in its brightest l.u.s.tre, another gondola rested.

_I_ saw two lovers there, and he, in the face of the woman, Saw what has made him mine, my own beloved, forever!

Mine!--but through _what_ tribulation, and awful confusion of spirit!

Tears that I think of with smiles, and sighs I remember with laughter, Agonies full of absurdity, keen, ridiculous anguish, Ending in depths of blissful shame, and heavenly transports!

III.

White, and estranged as a man who has looked on a spectre, he mutely Sank to the place at my side, nor while we returned to the city Uttered a word of explaining, or comment, or comfort, but only, With his good-night, incoherently craved my forgiveness and patience, Parted, and left me to spend the night in hysterical vigils, Tending to Annie's supreme dismay, and postponing our journey One day longer at least; for I went to bed in the morning, Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and the pleasures of travel, Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get any better.

Later, however, I rallied, when Fred, with a maddening prologue Touching the cause of my sickness, including his fever at Jaffa, Told me that some one was waiting; and could he see me a moment?

See me? Certainly not. Or,--yes. But why did he want to?

So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown and an arm-chair, Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye and of cheek, I received him-- Willing to touch and reproach, and half-melted myself by my pathos, Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly forgot the next instant, When, with electric words, few, swift, and vivid, he brought me, Through a brief tempest of tears, to this heaven of sunshine and sweetness.

Yes, he had looked on a ghost--the phantom of love that was perished!-- When, last night, he beheld the scene of which I have told you.

For to the woman he saw there, his troth had been solemnly plighted Ere he went to the war. His return from the dead found her absent In the belief of his death; and hither to Europe he followed,-- Followed to seek her, and keep, if she would, the promise between them, Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to break it and free her.

Then, at Naples we met, and the love that, before he was conscious, Turned his life toward mine, laid torturing stress to the purpose Whither it drove him forever, and whence forever it swerved him.

How could he tell me his love, with this terrible burden upon him?

How could he linger near me, and still withhold the avowal?

And what ruin were that, if the other were doubted unjustly, And should prove fatally true! With shame, he confessed he had faltered, Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes that were bitter with treason, Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared him.

_Her_ love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosom With a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting, Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that phantom Proved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight, Such as speech with the lady's father.

And now, could I pardon-- Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought so.

And we are all of us going to Lago di Como to-morrow, With an ulterior view at the first convenient Legation.

Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred, whose sense of what's proper Never was touched till now, is shocked at my glad self-betrayals, And I am pointed out as an awful example to Annie, Figuring all she must never be. But, oh, if _he_ loves me!--

POSTSCRIPT.

Since, he has shown me a letter in which he absolves and forgives her (Philip, of course, not Fred; and the _other_, of course, and not Annie).

Don't you think him generous, n.o.ble, unselfish, heroic?

L'ENVOY.--_Clara's Comment_.

Well, I'm glad, I am sure, if f.a.n.n.y supposes she's happy.

I've no doubt her lover is good and n.o.ble--as men go.

But, as regards his release of a woman who'd wholly forgot him, And whom he loved no longer, for one whom he loves, and who loves him, _I_ don't exactly see where the _heroism_ commences.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

There is a bird that comes and sings In the Professor's garden-trees; Upon the English oak he swings, And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

I know his name, I know his note, That so with rapture takes my soul; Like flame the gold beneath his throat, His glossy cope is black as coal.

O oriole, it is the song You sang me from the cottonwood, Too young to feel that I was young, Too glad to guess if life were good.

And while I hark, before my door, Adown the dusty Concord Road, The blue Miami flows once more As by the cottonwood it flowed.

And on the bank that rises steep, And pours a thousand tiny rills, From death and absence laugh and leap My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

The blackbirds jangle in the tops Of h.o.a.ry-antlered sycamores; The timorous killdee starts and stops Among the drift-wood on the sh.o.r.es.

Below, the bridge--a noonday fear Of dust and shadow shot with sun-- Stretches its gloom from pier to pier, Far unto alien coasts unknown.

And on those alien coasts, above, Where silver ripples break the stream's Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove A hidden parrot scolds and screams.

Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things: A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath-- It is a song the oriole sings-- And all the rest belongs to death.

But oriole, my oriole, Were some bright seraph sent from bliss With songs of heaven to win my soul From simple memories such as this,

What could he tell to tempt my ear From you? What high thing could there be, So tenderly and sweetly dear As my lost boyhood is to me?

PORDENONE.

I.

Hard by the Church of Saint Stephen, in sole and beautiful Venice, Under the colonnade of the Augustinian Convent, Every day, as I pa.s.sed, I paused to look at the frescos Painted upon the ancient walls of the court of the Convent By a great master of old, who wore his sword and his dagger While he wrought the figures of patriarchs, martyrs, and virgins Into the sacred and famous scenes of Scriptural story.