Aurora Leigh — Love and Revolution

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

Is it possible to be both a woman and also write great literature? Can a woman who writes as well as the greatest male writers, still find love? Elizabeth Barrett Browning says YES! to both in her phenomenal novel in verse, published for the first time in 1856, Aurora Leigh.

Aurora Leigh is the protagonist, a poet and a woman who must go through creative struggles and emotional entanglements all the while making brave choices and giving voice to a unique yet ancient and venerable philosophy of love.

This play was a labor of love. I first ran across Aurora Leigh by accident while cruising the library shelves, I was looking for The Ring and The Book by Robert Browning because I had read that it was worth reading. But, perusing it, I was not thrilled with the rhythm of the lines. I picked out Elizabeth’s Aurora Leigh. I could not put it down. I wanted to dissolve into her magical, liberating language. I decided I needed more time with this book, so I carved out a one-woman show for myself to tour.

The first reading of the one-woman play I culled from the novel, was at The Ensemble Studio Theatre (where else?) in 1992. I was memorizing and rehearsing when my life took a new turn, became a whirlwind, and suddenly we were living in London where I finished re-writing the play but also where I had no theatrical experience and therefor no ability to produce.

Many years later, while working on the trilogy, Topography: the landscape of my soul, I met an amazing actress, Lucy McMichael. From the first time I heard Lucy read, I wanted to work with her. I realized that Aurora Leigh would be a perfect script for her. She politely declined to do it as a one-woman show but expressed interest in the play if I could re-write it as a multi-character script. So I did. And we did a series of readings so I could keep re-writing and refining. We did readings at Primary Stages, Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Bowery Poetry Club. Finally, I felt the play was ready for a full workshop production.

However, as a director/producer (taking off my writer’s hat), I felt that the dance component was still missing. I interviewed several choreographers but nothing clicked. I felt strongly that, even though the language is incredibly passionate, actors would feel compelled to be true to the Victorian nature of the characters and would have to hold back physically. But I wanted to show a passionate physicality otherwise, for me, the stage would be too bare.

The other challenge I had came about because I had eradicated the politics that Elizabeth had written specific and detailed analyses of current events that I knew would be utterly lost on a modern audience unfamiliar with the events of the mid-nineteenth century. Aurora Leigh is a powerful political polemic as well as a romance. Barrett Browning argues for the rights of people to express themselves both as individuals and as groups, cultures, political entities. She was influenced by her translations of early Greek Christian writing and believed that we are all God (as did Mother Theresa in the twentieth century), creative beings, equal and responsible. How could I represent Barrett Browning's politics to a post-modern audience? I experimented with the idea of working with filmmakers, projections, that would play between the Aurora scenes and bring in a relevant social-political perspective. I interviewed some brilliant friends of mine, shellie sclan, marshall berman and mark delabarre with the intention of using the recorded interviews as the narration of the films.

I do not ever understand how, after so much hard work and worry, solutions seem to materialize out of thin air, but they often do. My friend and inspiration, guthrie nutter invited me to his lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in which he discussed the importance of gesture in Asian art. He spoke in sign language while a speaking interpreter translated for those of us who are not literate in ASL (American Sign Language). Through what Guthrie was explaining but also through the expressiveness with which he explained, I was able to understand that sign language could be the passionate form of communication I was looking for — meanwhile, our mutual friend, the gifted actress/dancer, alexandria wailes’ schedule opened up and she was free and interested in the project. Our concept was two casts, signing and speaking, would represent the complex and shifting relationship between spirit and body. It was a glorious experience. If any other producers want to try it, please do, you will find it well worth the effort. It is my prejudice as a director/producer to always use movement but the script will be fine if done with one cast.

Once the signing component was in place, it seemed to me that film would be distracting, so I created a modern set of characters, Player One and Player Two who could speak a somewhat altered verson of the interviews. This secondary script weaves in and out of the Aurora Leigh, and attempts to re-introduce the passionate politics I stripped from the original novel.

This show was thrilling for all of us. I have never seen anything like it in my life. I would do it again in a minute. I hope that many other people will enjoy this magical story of love and revolution.

The Cast

(the first workshop production at The Ensemble Studio Theatre January 2006)

*appeared courtesy of actors' equity association

^ASL American Sign Language Performer

ASL Interpreters: Katherine Diamond & Rebecca Friedman

Co-produced by Nombril Productions, Stephanye Dussud's Production Company.

(The players exist in the HERE and NOW, wherever that might be)

(MAJOR characters in upper case, smaller roles, in italics, can be played by the Players)

PLAYER ONE Verbal, opinionated. (any age, gender, race)

PLAYER TWO Passionate, a teacher. (any age, gender, race)

Woman in Alley From a horror movie.

Seamstress (2) Chatty unsophisticated gossips.

Man and Woman in Church Loud, brash and crass.

Mr. Smith An elegant, sophisticated gossip.

Sir Blaise Another elegant, sophisticated gossip.

Distracted Man Distracted, intellectual.

Parisian Lady Spoiled rich, impossible.

Vincent Carrington Painter friend of Aurora and Romney.

(Players, Aurora)

I write. My mother was a Florentine whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me when I was scarcely four years old.

She could not bear the joy of giving life, the mother's rapture slew her.

I, Aurora Leigh, was born to make my father sadder and myself not overjoyous, truly.

Women know the way to rear up children. They have a simple, merry, tender knack of tying sashes, fitting baby shoes and stringing pretty words that make no sense and kissing full sense into empty words.

Children learn by such - love's whole earnest in a pretty play - and get not overearly solemnized.

Seeing love is divine, they become aware and unafraid of love.

Fathers love as well.

Mine did, I know.

But with heavier brains

And wills more consciously responsible.

And not as wisely

Since less foolishly.

So mothers have God's license to be missed.

My father was an austere Englishman who, after a lifetime spent at home in college, learning law and parish talk,

Was flooded with a passion unaware.

His whole provisioned, complacent life drowned out from him in a moment,

As he stood in Florence where he had come to note the secret of Da Vinci's drains.

He, musing somewhat absently,

Perhaps some English question,

Whether men should pay the unpopular tax with left or right hand, in the alien sun, in the great square of Santissima, there drifted past him a train of priestly banners.

Among the white-veiled, rose-crowned maidens holding up tall tapers weighty for such wrists…a face flashed like a cymbal on his face and shook with silent clangor his brain and heart, transfiguring him to music.

And thus beloved, she died.

He made haste to hide himself,

This prattling child,

And silent grief among the mountains.

Because he thought, unmothered babes have need of mother nature.

We lived among the mountains many years.

We had old Assunta to make up the fire,

Crossing herself whenever a sudden flame from the firewood

Made alive the picture of my mother hanging on the wall.

I was just thirteen, still growing like the plants, from unseen roots, when

Suddenly I awoke to life's needs and agonies with an intense, strong, struggling heart beside a stone dead father. His last word was love, Love, my child. Love. Love. Before I answered, he was gone. And none was left to love in all the world.

There ended childhood. Then smooth endless days notched here and there with knives. Til a stranger came with authority who caught me up from old Assunta's neck.

I, my ears too full of my father's silence to utter a cry, stared at the wharf edge where Assunta stood and moaned.

The white walls, the blue hills, my Italy.

Then the bitter sea inexorably pushed between us both

And sweeping up the ship with my despair, threw us out as a pasture to the stars.

Then England. Oh the frosty cliffs looked cold upon me. Could I find a home among those mean red houses through the fog?

When I first heard my father's language from alien lips which had no kiss for mine…

I wept aloud.

Someone said,

"The child is mad." The train swept us on.

Was this the great isle? The ground seemed cut up from the fellowship of verdure,

Field from field, as man from man.

The skies themselves looked low.

All things blurred and dull and vague. Did Shakespeare and his mates absorb all the light here?

I see my aunt standing on the hall step of her country house.

To give me welcome.

She stood straight and calm.

Her somewhat narrow forehead braided tight as if for taming accidental thoughts from possible pulses.

Brown hair pricked with grey by frigid use of life.

A nose sharply drawn.

Yet in delicate lines.

A close, mild mouth, a little soured at the ends through speaking unrequited loves or perhaps niggardly half truths.

Eyes of no color. Once they might have smiled

But never, ever lost themselves in smiling.

She lived a harmless life.

She called a virtuous life,

A quiet life,

Which was no life at all but rather a caged bird sort of life: born in a cage, accounting that to leap from perch to perch was act and joy enough for any bird.

I, alas, was a wild bird. Brought to her cage.

She was there to meet me. Very kind.

Bring the clean water.

Give out the fresh seed.

She stood upon her steps to welcome me.

Calm, in black garb.

I clung around her neck.

In my ears, my father's words,

Love. Love my child, love.

She was his sister. I clung to her.

For a moment she seemed moved.

Then she kissed me with cold lips, wrung loose my hands and held me at arms' length. Then, with two grey naked-bladed eyes,

searched through my face. Stabbed it through and through as if to find a wicked murderer in my innocence.

Then, drawing breath, she told me not to lie or swear.

She who loved my father would love me.

As long as I deserved it.

Very kind.

From that day she did her duty for me, well-pressed out but measured always.

And I?

I was a good child. On the whole.

Why not? I did not live, to have the faults of life.

I learned the catechism, the creeds and various popular inhuman doctrines.

My aunt liked instructed piety.

I read a score of books on womanhood that prove, if women do not think at all, they may teach thinking.

Books that demonstrate women's right of comprehending men's talk,

Husband's talk,

When not too deep.

Books that delineate women's right of rapid insight as long as they keep quiet by the fire and never say no when the rest of the world is saying yes.

That is fatal.

Books which demonstrate women's potential faculty for abdicating power in absolutely everything,

My aunt liked a woman to be womanly.

And I?

I had relations with the unseen, derived elemental nutriment and heat from nature.

As the earth feels the sun at night. As a babe sucks surely in the dark.

God, I thank thee for that grace of thine.

At first I felt no life in me which was not patience. The child thrives ill in England: She will die. Some said.

My cousin Romney was angry with me -

You're wicked now? You want to die and leave the world adusk for others with your naughty light blown out?

He slammed out the door. He left so suddenly, he shut his dog in with me.

Ah, Romney. Romney Leigh.

My cousin, elder by a few years. Cold and shy and absent. Tender when he thought of it which was scarcely often.

Always Romney was looking for the worms, I for the Gods.

A godlike nature his: Gods look down incurious of themselves.

And certainly I must remember that in those days, I was a worm and he had time to look on me.

A little by his looking perhaps but more by something in me, not my will,

I did not die but gradually awoke, and rose up.

Where was I?: In the world.

For uses, therefore, I must count worthwhile.

(Players)

I awoke more slowly than I tell it now. But at last I opened wide the window of my soul. I let the air penetrate, regenerate what I was.

Oh life, how often we throw it off and say, Enough! Enough of life. We must break with life. Here we are wronged. Here we are maimed, spoiled for aspiration. Farewell, life. Then life calls to us in some transformed, apocalyptic voice above us or below us or around. Perhaps we name it nature's voice. Or love's.

Tricking ourselves because we are more ashamed to own our compensations than our griefs.

Still, life's voice. We make our peace with life.

And I, so young then, was not sullen.

I used to get up early just to sit and watch the morning quicken, hear the silence open like a flower. I read books.

Bad and good.

Some good and bad at once. Good aims do not always make good books.

From error to error, every turn still brought me nearer to the central truth, I thought.

There is anguish in the thick of our opinions.

Press and counterpress.

Now up, now down. This throws us back upon a noble trust to use our own instincts.

Try it. Fix against heaven's wall the ladder of school logic.

You won't get far.

Now look up with that still ray which strikes from your heart to God and you will see Heaven.

Books. Books. Books. My books.

At last because the time was right I came across the poets.

As the earth plunges when her internal fires have reached and pricked her heart and throwing flat the markets and temples, the triumphal gates and towers of observation, clears herself, returns to elemental freedom. Thus my soul at poetry's divine first finger touch let go conventions and sprang up surprised, convinced, convicted of the great eternities between two worlds.

What's this, Aurora Leigh? You speak so of poets and not laugh? Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, those exaggerators of the sun and moon, those soothsayers reading tea cups.

I speak so of truth tellers, speakers of essential truth, teachers who instruct humankind to recognize our stature, erect, sublime, the measure of ourselves, the measure of an angel.

Yes. And while men and women lay railroads, reign, reap, dine and dust the flaunty carpets of the world for kings to walk on or presidents, the poet will suddenly catch you with her voice like thunder - This is soul. This is life. This word is being said in heaven. Here's God. What are you about? Then men and women start, look up from their work and feel that carpet dusting though a useful trade, is perhaps not the imperative labor after all.

I wrote false poems like the rest and thought them true because I myself was true in writing them.

Maybe I write truer ones now with less complacence.

But I could not hide my quickening inner life. My aunt was suspicious when she caught my soul ablaze in my eyes.

She could not bring herself to say that I had no business with a soul.

But plainly she objected.

Aurora, have you done your tasks this morning?

As if to say,

I know there's something wrong. I know I have not ground you down enough to flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust for household uses and proprieties. You almost grow?

We'll live, Aurora,

Said my soul.

The dogs are on us

But we will not die.

Whoever lives true life will love true love.

I learned to love that England.

(Players)

Not infrequently I walked the third with Romney and his friend, the well-known painter, Vincent Carrington, whom men judge harshly because he holds that, to paint a body well, you paint a soul by implication.

Pleasant walks.

Often we walked only two if Romney pleased to walk with me. We read or talked or quarrelled.

We were not lovers nor even friends well matched. Say rather scholars upon different tracks,

Thinkers disagreed.

He overfull of what is

And I overbold for what might be. Then, when thrushes sang, I made him mark that however much the world went ill, as he believed, certainly the thrushes still sing in it. And his brow would soften with melancholy patience while I, breaking into ecstasy, flattered the skies, the clouds, the fields. Is not God here on earth? I said… ankle-deep in grass I leaped and clapped my hands.

Came a morn I stood upon the brink of twenty years and looked before and after. As I stood, woman and artist, both incomplete, both credulous of completion. I was glad that day.

The June was in me, with its multitudes of nightingales all singing in the dark and rosebuds reddening where the calyx split.

I felt so young, so strong, so sure of life.

In which fantastic mood I bounded forth at early morning, brushing a green trail across the lawn with my gown in the dew. Took will and way to fly my fancies in the open air and keep my birthday.

Meanwhile I murmured as honeyed bees hum to themselves, The worthiest poets have remained uncrowned til death has bleached their foreheads to the bone. And so with me it must be unless I prove unworthy of the grand adversity

And certainly I could not fail so much.

What if I crown myself today?

To learn the feel of it before my brows be numbed.

Thus speaking to myself half singing it because some thoughts are fashioned like a bell to ring. I drew a wreath of ivy drenched blinding me with dew; and fastening it behind, turning to face my imaginary public. There he was. Romney with a mouth twice graver than his eyes.

I stood there fixed.

My arms up like the caryatid, sole of some abolished temple

helplessly persistent in a gesture which derides a former purpose

Yet my blush was flame as if from flax not stone.

Aurora Leigh, here's a book I found, no name on it. Poems. No. I did not read it. Not a word. I saw at once the thing had witchcraft in it, calls up dangerous spirits. I rather bring it to the witch.

My book. You found it.

He touched the ivy on my hair.

These wreaths bring headaches and defile clean, white morning dresses. Men, and still less women, do not need to be poets.

You judge that because I love the beautiful, I must love pleasure chiefly. Well, learn this cousin - I would choose to walk at all risks. If heads that hold a rhythmic thought must ache, I choose headaches. And today's my birthday.

Dear Aurora, choose instead to cure, you have balsams.

Oh, I see. The headache is too noble for my sex. You think heartache would suit me better. Since that's woman's special, proper ache. And altogether tolerable. Except to a woman.

Untangled the wreath from my hair. Silently both of us disappointed, both of us wary, we walked back into sight of the house.

Aurora, let's be serious and throw by this game of head and heart. Life means to be sure both head and heart. Both active, both complete. And both in earnest. Men and women make the world as head and heart make human life. There is work for men and women in this beleaguered earth.

And thought can never do the work of love.

The chances are that, being a woman, young and pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, you write as well and ill upon the whole as other women. If as well, what then? If even a little better still, what then?

We want the best in art now or no art.

The world is half blind with intellectual light, half brutalised with civilization. Having caught the plague we shriek east to west along a thousand railroads, mad with pain and sin. Does one woman who weeps so easily grow pale to see this? Does one of you stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls and pine and die because of universal anguish? You weep for what you know. But, for a million sick you remain unmoved; you would as soon weep for an isosceles triangle. The same world uncomprehended by you, must remain uninfluenced by you. Women, personal and passionate, give us doting mothers and chaste wives, sublime madonnas, enduring saints.

We get no Christ from you. And truly we will not get a poet.

Not to my mind.

With which conclusion you conclude?

That you, Aurora, cannot condescend to play at art as children play at swords, to show a pretty spirit chiefly admired because true action is impossible. You will not be satisfied with the praise that men give women when they judge a book as mere women's work, expressing the comparative respect which means absolute scorn.

Stop. Better to pursue a frivolous trade by serious means then a sublime art frivolously.

We are young. The world is swollen hard with perished generations and their sins. All success proves partial failure. All advance implies what's left behind. All triumph something crushed at the chariot's wheels. All government, some wrong. Rich men make the poor who curse the rich, who agonize together, rich and poor under and over, in the social spasm and crisis of the ages. Who can stand by and view these things and never tease his soul for some great cure? I think I was a man chiefly for this; I sympathize with man not with God. And when I stand by a death bed. It is my death. And I, a man, feel with men in the agonizing present.

Is the world so bad? The world was always evil. But so bad?

So bad, Aurora.

I have not stood long on the strand of life and these salt waters have barely had time to wet my feet. I cannot judge these tides. I shall perhaps. A woman is always younger than a man because she is not allowed to mature. Ah, I know men judge otherwise. You think a woman ripens like a peach, chiefly in the cheeks. I can applaud your compassion. Accept my reverence.

No other help?

What help? You'd scorn my help as nature has scorned to put her music in my mouth. Do you now ask me for what you say I cannot give?

I ask for love. For life in fellowship through bitter duties. For wifehood. Will you?

Am I proved too weak to stand alone yet strong enough to bear such leaners on my shoulder? Incapable of thought yet able to sympathize with such a complicated philosophy? I cannot sing as even blackbirds can but I can love as selflessly as Christ himself? It's always so. Anything does for a wife.

You translate me ill. If your sex is weak for art it is strong for life and duty.

What you love, Romney is not a woman but a cause. You want a helpmate, not a mistress. A wife to help your ends, in her no end. Your cause is noble, your aims are excellent. But I do otherwise conceive of love.

You reject me?

Sir, you were married long ago. You have a wife you already love, your social theory.

Was I so wrong then to say bluntly, honestly, Come, human creature, love and work with me? Should I have wooed you with, Lady, thou art wondrous fair and where the graces walk before the muse will follow and turn round and see me or I die of love.

You misconceive the question like a man who sees a woman as the complement of his sex only. You forget too much that every creature, female as well as the male stands single in responsible act and thought.

As also in birth and death.

Whoever says to a loyal woman, Love and work with me, will get fair answers if the work and love are good for her, the best that she was born for. Women in a softer mood may sometimes only hear the first word, love, and catch up with it any kind of work, just so dear love go with it. I do not blame such women.

Earth's fanatics often make heaven's saints.

But me, your work is not the best for. Nor your love the best. Ah, you force me, sir, to be overbold in speaking of myself. I too have a vocation - work to do - the heavens and earth have set me. And, even if the world were twice as wretched as you represent, my work is as important as any economist's. Unless artists keep open the road between the seen and the unseen, bursting through the best conventions with the best God bids us speak, to prove what lies beyond both speech and imagination. We'll not barter, sir, the beautiful for barley. It takes a soul to move a body. It takes a high-souled man to move the masses, even to a cleaner sty. It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside the dust of the actual and your revolutionaries fail because not poets enough to understand that life develops from within. Perhaps I am worthy, as you say. Perhaps a woman's soul aspires and not creates. Yet we aspire. And if I fail, well, burn me up with everything else that is false. I'll not ask for grace. I who love my art would not wish it lower to suit my stature. You grant that I may love my art. Wasting true love on anything is womanly, past question.

I retain every word that was said that day.

His eyes were fiery points, fixed in my mind, forever after.

And yet I know I did not love him, nor he me.

And what I said is unrepented, as truth is always.

Yet, a princely man. He bears down on me though the slanting years, the stronger for the distance.

My aunt was not pleased with me.

You turned him down? You have got a fever. You love him. I have watched you when he came and when he went and when we've talked of him. I am not old for nothing. Your mother must have been a pretty thing. Your father threw his inheritance to the wind when he married her. Oh yes, she must have been beautiful to make your father forget his duty. Marry him and claim your Leigh fortune. Romney is a fine man.

(Players)

I bear on my broken tale.

Having thrown away my inheritance, for three years I lived and worked.

Get leave to work in this world, it's the best you get at all.

For God in cursing gives us better gifts than men with their benedictions.

God says sweat for foreheads.

Men say crowns.

And so we are crowned,

Yes, gashed

By some tormenting circle which snaps with secret spring. Get work.

And be sure that the work you get is better than what you work to get.

Serene and unafraid of solitude I worked the short days out and watched the sun on lurid mornings or monstrous afternoons push out through the fog with its dilated disk to startle the distant roofs and chimney pots with splashes of color.

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 sponge had wiped out London.

Or as if noon and night had clapped together and utterly struck out the intermediate time, undoing themselves in the act.

Your city poets see such things as not despicable. Mountains of the south when drunk and mad with elemental wines rend the seamless mist and stand up bare, forests chant their anthems 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, 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 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. Of course.

Day and night I worked my rhythmic thought.

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.

I worked on. On through the bristling fence of nights and days which hedges time in from the eternities.

The midnight oil would stink sometimes.

There came some vulgar needs. I had to live so I could work.

And, being poor, I was constrained 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 understood that, in England, no one lives by verse that lives.

And, apprehending this, I resolved by prose to make a space to sphere my living verse.

I wrote for encyclopaedias, magazines and weekly papers. Holding up my name to keep it from the mud. Having bread for just so many days, just breathing room for body and soul, 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, careering through a tree, dilates the summer foliage out, in green flame - so life, deepening in me, deepened all: the course I took, the work I did.

Indeed, academic law, convinced of sin, instructed the critics to cry out on my falling off, regret the passing of the first manner.

But I felt my heart's life throbbing in my verse to show how it lived. It also, certainly incomplete, disordered, all human in blood, but even its very tumors, still organized by and implying life.

Is this

She said

The muse?

No sibyl, even since she fails to guess the cause which taxed you with this visit, Madam.

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 room? Not in the least. Roar softly at me, I am frivolous. And at your mercy. I think you have a cousin, Romney Leigh.

You bring word from him?

I bring word from him. But first: You're not in love with him?

You're frank in putting questions, Madam. I love my relative relatively, no more.

I guessed as much. Yes, I am frank. You stand outside, you artist women. You starve your hearts to make your heads. So run the old traditions of you. I will therefore speak without fear. I love Romney Leigh. My first husband left me young, pretty enough and rich enough. I am mad to love Romney. I have not come here without a struggle. I have so many accomplishments. But, love. We eat of love and do as vile a thing as if we ate garlic. Then whatever else we eat tastes uniformly acrid til your peach tastes like an onion. Dear, be kind 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 that it topples down to the other side and makes a sort of badness. There. That's the worst I have to say about your cousin. And here's the point we come to -

Pardon me, Lady Waldemar, but the point's the thing we never come to.

Caustic, insolent. I like you. And now, my lioness, help Androcles, for all your roaring. Help me. He'll fall into the pit. And I will lose him. And he will be lost when he is married to a girl of doubtful life.

Married.

Oh. You're moved at last. He has been mad. You must know your cousin. If you do not starve or sin, you're nothing to him.

You speak too bitterly for the literal truth.

Truth is bitter. Had I any chance with Romney, I, Lady Waldemar, who have never committed a felony?

You jest.

As martyr's jest, my dear, upon the axe which kills them. Yesterday, I said to him, I can scarce admit the cogency of a marriage where you do not love, except the class. Yet marry and throw your name down into the gutter as a fire escape for future generations. I imagine even your kin, Aurora, would conceive this act less sacrifice than fantasy. At which he grew so pale to the lips that I knew I had touched him.

Do you know her?

Yes, I said, and lied. But truly, we all know you by your books. And so I offered to take you to see this miracle, this seamstress upon whose finger exquisitely pricked by a hundred needles, we are to hang the tie between class and class next week. He promised to put off his marriage long enough for you to meet his betrothed.

How this serves your ends, I cannot see.

Then, despite Aurora, that most radiant morning name, you're as dull as any London afternoon. Be good to me, Aurora, scorn me less, I have kept the iron rule of womanly reserve and wept a week before I came here. Come and see the girl.

Who tells you 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 in supposing me able to break this match. I could not. I love love. Truth's no cleaner thing than love. I comprehend a love so fiery hot it burns through veils, will burn through masks and shrivel up treachery. No. Go to the opera: your love is curable.

(Players)

Two hours later I stood alone in the square.

What brings you here milady? Is it to find the gentleman who visits his tame pigeon in the eaves? Our cholera will catch you with its cramps and spasms and turn your whiteness dead blue.

I think I could have walked through hell that day and never flinched. The dear Christ comfort you, I said. You must be the most miserable to be so cruel.

Up so high lived Romney's bride to be.

We talked. She was born upon a ledge, in a hut built up at night to evade the landlord.

Marian's father earned his life by random jobs,

Keeping swine on commons, picking hops or hurrying on the harvest at wet seasons.

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.

The outcast child learned early to cry low and walk alone. Thus, at three, she would run off and creep through the golden walls of gorse, find some keyhole toward the secrecy 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 like 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 she came again.

This great blind love,

This skyeye father and mother both in one, instructed her and civilized her more than even Sunday school did afterward.

To which a kind lady sent her to learn books and sit upon a long bench in a row with other children.

One day,

Said Marian,

The sun shone that day, my mother had been badly beaten and feeling the bruises sore about her wretched soul, came in suddenly

And snatching in a sort of breathless rage her daughter's headgear comb, let down the hair upon her like a waterfall.

Then drew me drenched and passive by the arm outside the hut we lived in.

When the child could clear her blinded face from all that stream of tresses,

There a man stood with eyes that seemed to swallow me alive; body, spirit, hair and all. God free me from my mother,

She cried and ran.

Famished hounds at a hare,

The man and her mother ran after her.

She heard them yell.

I felt my name like shot from guns.

Mad fear was running in her feet and killing the ground.

The white roads curled

As if she burnt them up.

The green fields melted,

Trees fell to make room for her.

Then my head grew vexed.

Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her.

She lost her feet,

Could run no more.

Yet somehow went as fast.

The horizon, red, so sucked me forward, forward while my heart kept swelling, swelling til it swelled so big it seemed to fill my body then it burst and overflowed the world and swamped the light. And now I am dead and safe,

Thought Marian Erle.

She had dropped and fainted.

As the sense returned, she was aware of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels.

A wagoner had found her in a ditch beneath the moon as white as moonshine save for the oozing blood.

At first he thought her dead.

But when he heard her sigh, he raised her up, laid her in his wagon and brought her to the hospital.

She stirred.

The place seemed new and strange as death. The white, straight bed with others straight and white, like graves dug side by side at measured lengths and quiet people walking in and out with wonderful low voices and soft steps. And apparitional equal care for each, astonished me with order, silence, law. And when a gentle hand held out a cup, I took it as you do a sacrament, half awed, half melted, not being used indeed to so much love.

Oh my God, how sick we must be ere we make men just.

I think it frets the saints in heaven to see how many desolate creatures on earth have learned the simple dues of fellowship and social comfort in a hospital, as Marian did.

I lay there stunned, half tranced and wished at intervals of growing sense that I might be sicker yet, if sickness made the world so marvelous kind, the air so hushed and all my wake time quiet as sleep.

She lay and seethed in fever many weeks.

Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled and fetched back to the necessary day and daylight duties.

I could creep along the bare rooms and stare out drearily from any narrow window on the street. Then someone said I had to go next week being well enough. Go next week, next week. Let out into that terrible street alone, among the pushing people. To go where?

One day, the last before the dreaded last,

A visitor was ushered through the wards.

When he looked, it was as if he spoke. And when he spoke, it was as if he sang.

He who came and spoke was Romney Leigh.

He sent her to a famous seamstress' house, far off in London, there to work and hope.

Through the days and through the nights she sewed,

Struck new thread into her needle's eye, drew her stitch and mused on Romney's face.

You know the news? Who's dying do you think? Our Lucy.

I expected it.

Lucy swooned last night, dropped sudden in the street. The baker took her and laid her by her grandmother in bed. He says he gives her a week.

Pass the silk. Let's hope he gave her a loaf within reach otherwise she'll starve before she dies.

Why Marian Erle, you piece of pity, your tears will spoil Lady Waldemar's new dress.

Marian rose up, went to Lucy's home to nurse her back to life or down to death.

When Lucy slid away so gently, like the light when none can name the moment that it goes though all see when it's gone, a man came in. It was the hour for angels.

There stood hers.

Romney.

He had been standing in the room listening to us talking.

Lady Waldemar has sent me.

Lady Waldemar is good.

Here is one who is good. I give you thanks for such a cousin.

You accept at last a gift from me, Aurora? Without scorn? At last I please you? You cannot please a woman against her will and once I vexed you. Let us not speak of that. For myself, I comprehend your choice.

You cannot comprehend me.

He was a wall of bricks, each feeling boxed in and stuffed and sacked.

He followed me down the stairs. The night came drizzling downward in dark rain and as we walked, the color of the time, the act, the presence, my hand upon his arm, his voice in my ear and mine to myself seemed unnatural.

We talked of modern books and daily papers, marriage schemes, the English climate.

Was it this cold last year?

Is London full?

Is trade competitive?

Which way is the wind tonight?

Has Dickens turned his hinge a pinch too tight upon the great?

Will the apple die out?

Are potatoes to grow mythical?

We tore up greedily all the silence, all the innocent breathing points.

As if, like pale conspirators, in haste we tore up papers where our signatures imperiled us to an ugly shame or death.

I cannot tell you why it was.

And then a month passed.

Let me tell it at once.

I have been wrong.

We are always wrong when we think too much of what we think or are.

Though our thoughts be bitter and full of self sacrifice, we're no less selfish. This I say against myself. I had done my duty in the visit I paid Marian. Why did I not tell Romney of Lady Waldemar's designs? Had I any right, with womanly compassion and reserve, to stand aside knowing that she intended to come between them; and hear him call her good?

Distrust that word.

There is none good save God. If he once, in the first creation week, called creatures good,

Forever afterward only the devil has done it.

A good neighbor is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning into mincemeat of the very smallest talk.

I have known good wives, chaste or nearly so, and good, good mothers who would use their child to better an intrigue.

Good friends, very good, who hung around your neck and sucked your breath as cats do to sleeping infants.

We have all known good critics who have stamped out a poet's hope.

Good statesmen who pulled ruin on the state.

Good Christians who sat still in easy chairs and damned the general world for standing up.

Now may the good lord pardon all good men, and women.

I should have thought a woman of the world like Lady Waldemar center to herself, who has wheeled on her own pivot half a life in isolated self love and self will as a windmill seen at a distance, radiating its delicate white wings against the sky so soft and soundless, simply beautiful. Seen nearer, what a roar and tear it makes. How it grinds and bruises. If she loves, her love's a readjustment of self love, no more. A need felt of another's use for her own advantage. As a mill wants grain. The fire wants fuel. The wolf wants prey and none of these is more unscrupulous than such a charming woman when she loves. She'll not be thwarted by an obstacle as trifling as her soul. Much less your soul, sir, she loves you, with passion, to lunacy. She loves you like her diamonds. Almost.

Well, a month passed so.

And the notice came, on such and such a day, the marriage.

We were bid to meet at Saint James and after contract at the altar pass to eat a marriage feast at Hamstead Heath.