| |
| HER ardent spirit ran beyond her years | |
| As light before a flame. | |
| At fifteen, the tennis medal; at sixteen, the golf cup; | |
| Then—the coveted!—bluest of blue ribbons | |
| For faultless horsemanship. | 5 |
| No man in all that country, | |
| Whatever his sport, | |
| But had to own the girl a better man. | |
| As that she merely laughed—saying that triumph | |
| Is all a matter of thrill: who tingles most, | 10 |
| He wins inevitably. | |
| Half bewilderment, half jest, | |
| They called her Sprite, those ordinary folk | |
| Who thought such urge, such instinct of life to joy | |
| Was somehow mythical. | 15 |
| And having named her, they no longer thought of her, | |
| To their relief, as young or old, one sex or other— | |
| Just herself, apart, a goddess of out-of-doors. | |
| School boys never dreamed of her tenderly | |
| As one to send a perfumed valentine; | 20 |
| But when she strode among the horses in the field | |
| They pawed the ground. | |
| No leash could hold a dog when she passed by. | |
| |
| Then, despite her ardent race with time— | |
| Ardent as though each moment were a dare | 25 |
| To some adventure of freed muscle and thrilled nerve— | |
| A fleeter runner overtook her flight | |
| And bound her tightly in a golden net— | |
| Hands, feet and bosom; lips and hair and eyes— | |
| Beauty, beauty of women. | 30 |
| Or was it she, unconscious what she raced, | |
| Ran suddenly, breathless, glad and yet dismayed, | |
| Into the arms of her own womanhood? | |
| Which, no one knew, herself the least of all. | |
| But no more did she fly beyond herself, | 35 |
| As eager to leave the very flesh behind, | |
| But stayed with it in deep and rapturous content; | |
| Her ardor turned | |
| Henceforth within upon a secret goal. | |
| Spirit and beauty seemed to flow together, | 40 |
| Each rapt in each | |
| Like a hushed lily in a hidden pool. | |
| Only at dances did the sprite peep out, | |
| Ardent and yet controlled, | |
| Alive to every turn and slope of the rhythm | 45 |
| As if the music spread a path for her | |
| To what she truly sought. | |
| |
| ’Twas at a dance she found it—found the man— | |
| And no one had to question what she found: | |
| Her eyes, her very finger-tips, proclaimed | 50 |
| The marvel it was to be a part of her, | |
| A part of love. | |
| The man—he had no medals and ribbons of triumph; | |
| If she had fled on horse or even on foot | |
| He never could have caught her. | 55 |
| It must have been his mind’s humility | |
| That made her stay, | |
| So thoughtless of itself, so thoughtful of | |
| Forgotten wisdoms, old greatness, world riddles; | |
| A patient, slow, but never yielding search | 60 |
| (Passionate too, with wings’ flight of its own) | |
| For what—compared with other minds she knew— | |
| Might well have seemed the blessed western isles. | |
| They lived beyond the village on a hill | |
| Beneath a row of pines; a house without pretense | 65 |
| Yet fully conscious of uncommon worth— | |
| A house all books inside. | |
| |
| Their only neighbor was a garrulous man, | |
| Who smoked a never finished pipe | |
| Upon a never finished woodpile | 70 |
| Strategically placed beside the road | |
| So none could pass without his toll of gossip. | |
| He started it. | |
| One day, pointing his thumb across the pines, he said: | |
| “There’s something wrong up yonder; | 75 |
| Their honeymoon has set behind a storm. | |
| I heard ’em fight last night … | |
| Well, what’d he expect? They’re all alike—women.” | |
| Of course it got about, | |
| And while no one quite believed, | 80 |
| Still, to make sure, some friendly women called. | |
| They said that he was studying, quite as usual, | |
| Not changed at all, just quiet and indrawn— | |
| The last man in the world to make a quarrel; | |
| And she, well, of course she wasn’t so easy to read, | 85 |
| Always strange and different from a child; | |
| But even in her the sharpest eye saw nothing | |
| That seemed the loose end of the littlest quarrel. | |
| No couple could have acted more at ease; | |
| And anyhow, a woman like that, they said, | 90 |
| Would never have stayed so quiet in the pines | |
| With unhappiness, but tossed it from her broadcast | |
| Like brands from a bonfire. | |
| She said the house was damp—and that was all. | |
| At last even the old garrulous woodpile | 95 |
| Knocked out the ashes of it from his pipe. | |
| |
| But then, a few months later, a frightened servant girl | |
| Ran at early morning from the pines, | |
| Crying the judge in town. | |
| She said her mistress suddenly, without cause, | 100 |
| Standing by her in the kitchen, turned on her | |
| Blackly with words no decent girl deserved, | |
| Then struck her full in the face, spat on her, pulled her hair. | |
| She wanted compensation, the servant did, | |
| And a clean character before the world, | 105 |
| Yes, and punishment for the beast who hurt her— | |
| That is, if the woman wasn’t mad. | |
| Mad—oh ho! the shock of it | |
| Rolled seething over the place like a tidal wave, | |
| And in the wake of the wave, like weed and wreckage, | 110 |
| Many a hint and sense of something wrong at the pines | |
| Sprawled in the daylight. | |
| A stable boy remembered | |
| How not a week before she’d called for a horse, | |
| The spiritedest saddle they had, | 115 |
| And when she brought him back ’twas late at night, | |
| The horse and woman both done up, | |
| Slashed, splashed and dripping; | |
| But all she said was, “Send the bill; | |
| The beast’s no good—I’ll never ride again.” | 120 |
| |
| So this and other stories quite as strange | |
| Stretched everybody’s nerves for the trial to come | |
| And made them furious when it didn’t come— | |
| He settling with the girl outside of court. | |
| The judge’s wife knew all there was to know: | 125 |
| Not jealousy at all, just nerves— | |
| Every woman, you know, at certain times … | |
| Of course, agreed the village, so that’s it? still | |
| (Not to be cheated outright), still, | |
| Even so, she’d best take care of that temper; | 130 |
| A husband’s one thing, an unborn child’s another— | |
| She’d always been a stormy, uncontrollable soul. | |
| Some blamed the husband he had never reined her in, | |
| Most pitied him a task impossible. | |
| All waited the event on tiptoe— | 135 |
| It wasn’t like other women, somehow, for her to have a child. | |
| |
| The months passed, no child was born. | |
| Then other women sneered openly: | |
| She wanted one and couldn’t—served her right. | |
| This lapse from the common law of wives | 140 |
| Was all the fissure the sea required | |
| To force the dike with. Little by little then, | |
| The pressure of year on year, | |
| The pines and the two lives they hid | |
| Grew dubious, then disagreeable, then at last sinister. | 145 |
| At this point the new generation took up | |
| Its inheritance, the habit of myth, | |
| And quite as a matter of course it found her hateful, | |
| Ugly, a symbol of sudden fear by darkened paths— | |
| Cross Patch! | 150 |
| And one by one the people who were young | |
| Beside her youth, moved off or died or changed, | |
| Forgetting her youth as they forgot their own; | |
| Until if ever she herself | |
| Had felt a sudden overwhelming pang | 155 |
| To stop some old acquaintance on the road | |
| And stammer out, “You know—don’t you—the girl I was— | |
| I was not always this, was I?” she might have found | |
| A dozen at most to know the Sprite her youth, | |
| But none to clear the overtangled path | 160 |
| That led from Sprite to Cross Patch; not one, not one, | |
| But looking back would damn | |
| The very urge of joy in Sprite, and all its ardent spirit | |
| For having mothered Cross Patch; not one, not one, | |
| To see the baffled womanhood she was, | 165 |
| Orphan of hopes too bright, not mother of evil. | |
| And thus besieged on all sides by the present | |
| She fought against all sides, as if by fury | |
| To force one way to yield. | |
| |
| For both it was a nightmare, not a life, and neither | 170 |
| Could well have told how it had ever begun; | |
| But once begun it seemed inevitable, | |
| A storm that settled darkly round their souls, | |
| Unwilled as winter, | |
| With moan of wind through sere and barren boughs | 175 |
| And skies forever masked. | |
| The first blow of the quarrel had been hers, | |
| A blow unguessed by either, for she struck | |
| Like nature, not to hurt but to survive. | |
| But wrath accrued | 180 |
| So soon thereafter that the blow seemed angry, | |
| And she struck out again with eyes and tongue | |
| Pursuing him, the angrier at his grief, | |
| Until in sheer defense he hit | |
| Not at herself, but at her blows, to ward them; | 185 |
| Keeping the while | |
| His thought above the dark upon a star or so | |
| Fixed in the past. But she defended her wrath | |
| As part of her dignity and right: they stormed | |
| Up, up the hill and down, | 190 |
| Increasing darkness to the end of life. | |
| Of him friends said | |
| He seemed like a lonely sentinel | |
| Posted against the very edge of doom, | |
| Whom no watch came relieving. | 195 |
| “She’ll kill him yet, the fool!” the woodpile’s verdict | |
| Before the pipe went out for the last time, | |
| Leaving the pines unneighbored. | |
| |
| But he was wrong, the urn outlasted the flame. | |
| One night, hands at her throat, she came | 200 |
| And knelt before him, timidly reaching out | |
| And trying to speak, to speak—struggling as if words | |
| Were something still to learn. | |
| At last speech broke from her, so agonized | |
| He hardly knew if it were supreme wrath or supreme supplication: | 205 |
| “You did not love me …” | |
| And as he bent to her he felt | |
| Her girlhood cry, a murdered thing returned. | |
| He hoped that it was wrath, as easier to endure, | |
| Feeling it burn from mind to heart, from heart to soul, | 210 |
| Gathering more awe, more terror, at each advance. | |
| Like a priest with sacrifice it passed | |
| The colonnades of his thought, entering without pause | |
| An unknown altar of his being | |
| Behind a curtain never moved before. | 215 |
| “You did not love me …” | |
| Both gazed upon the sacrifice held up | |
| As though it were the bleeding heart of their own lives | |
| Somehow no longer their own. | |
| |
| And then the priest returned, slowly, pace by pace, | 220 |
| Out of the hush of feeling into the hush of thought. | |
| It was the priest and not himself, the man believed, | |
| Who like an echo, not less agonized, | |
| Whispered across the waste of many lives, | |
| Whispering “No …” | 225 |
| |
| Whose heart, the man’s or woman’s, lowest stooped | |
| To raise the other prostrate heart aloft | |
| With supplication and consolement, urging it | |
| To live—oh, live!—dying itself the while, | |
| God knew before the beginning of the world. | 230 |
| We only know that stooping so, dust turned to dust, | |
| All hearts meet at last. | |
| |
