University of Virginia Library

SCENE II.

—A Public Square. Calmstorm.
Calmstorm.
O why are all the forces of the world in arms
Against a single heart? I hear them not, I see them not,
Yet darkly through the day they move against me—
The engines that the world has built to break its peace
And crush its blessers!—

Enter Umena, Dorcas.
Umena.
Bear up, dear Calmstorm, and remember
Deep-centered in the Universe's heart,
The Power that looks on these our trial-days,
And is at peace if we endure them well:
For Suffering is fellow with the mighty God,
And walked with him, and slept and rose with him
Through all his way in old Judea.

Calm.
I hear two Voices, one on either hand—
[Cheers and shouts
Listen again! The one resounds with rage,
Wilder than is the bison's angry mane,
And harsher than the crying jaguar's throat—
Ominous of shattered walls, fires in the air,
And tempests in the streets of cities.
It is the great Rabble's cry—Why, oh why
Will ye rend the fair breast of the realm,
And scatter on the ground the branches
Of its hope? Listen, again, Umena.
Not smoother is the down upon the dove,
More musical the pause of dying winds,
And orderly as is the white condor's flock
When down it flies from Alleghany
Unto the rivered vale. This is the People's:
Of this is born in calmness, strength and truth,
The popular edict, born in the Law,
And for the Law and through the Law, unquenchable
As are th' Eternal courses of the Sun!—
It happens, I know, at times, that this great voice
Is dumb. This latter, now that I hearken,
Pauses for a moment. 'Twill speak again
And cheer me.
The Double Cry sweeps this way swiftly,
And is confounded, each with each;
Alas, my ear distinguishes them not—
A voiceless tumult and no more.

[Walks apart.
Dorcas.
O, be not thou downcast, Umena.

Umena.
I am sorrowful, Dorcas, that he is sad,
Doubting the hope and future of his race,
His brethren, and his kin of human kind—
Would that some angel, winged and blest of God,
And better-souled than they that stand aloof,
Might 'mid the waters of his grief descend,
And bring him healing!

Dorcas.
I have a fear as well as you—
There was a wren, a small, brown, quiet wren,
That came this morning, at the early light,
And on the threshold of his window sate—

Umena.
Spare him!—he must not go so soon from me!
Dear Heaven! swing all your crystal windows wide,
And pour down Truth! least Earth should yawn
Upon his wandering steps, and snatch him in the dark
From all he loves and all he loves to look on.
Spare me!—I cannot look on this and live.

[Exit Umena, followed by Dorcas.
Enter First Politician.
Calm.
You seek me, and would speak with me?

First Pol.
I am a suitor that you will sign a bond
In my behalf, as one who seeks to serve,
Humbly, in a small trust, the general weal.

[Presents a paper.
Calm.
You've fallen in your search on the worst day of days:
I have no power to serve the humblest man,
In speech, or look, or act. Office or function,
Whatever, in faith and zeal, men do or may,
To lift the weight of penury or woe
From other men, is passed clean from my reach.—
You see that little cloud that dwindles in the east!—
Alas, 'tis gone before you lift your eyes—
That vapor vanishable and vanished now,
Has greater power to serve you and to harm you,
When after many days or many weeks
Or many months, slowly it reappears,
In a returning rain, or summer's gust,
Or in the silent dew of night, than I.

First Pol.
You're touched, I fear, with some old malady,
That wears upon you: the hollowness
Of your look, an hour gone by, has dug.

Calm.
You seem to be the spirit of my thought!—
Know you the inward and the backward
Of my days?

First Pol.
This much I know, too much, perhaps—
You've tried or try Fortune's each edge:
You have outlived the fierce and furious West—
The East—what think you of its silent way?

Calm.
I know them both.

First Pol.
The word or blow, the eye or hand, choose either,
And you get buffets that reach the heart of life.

Calm.
I am a man of glass, and all men spy
My swiftly-running sands.

[Aside.
First Pol.
Spirit or body, which be killed and who shall kill?—
Oh, sad and woful sons of men, that this must be!

Calm.
The Avenger crouching on the Earth behind,
And the Dark Angel beckoning me before!

First Pol.
Believe me sir, and I well know what I would speak—
There is no hope of the world—
Where'er I go, I hear such dreadful tales
Of tumults and of wars, such faith-breach deep,
Such heart-burns, and such angers, and such frays
In the universal and the single world,
Such sad confounding of the high and low—

Calm.
Oh, catalogue it not in dark detail,
But let it be a blackness undefined!

First Pol.
Such jars and jealousies, groanings of the poor,
And pale lamentings of the rich,
The secret and the open hand of malice,
The bitterness of evil tongues—the nation strifes—

Calm.
You do—you do! I cannot doubt it.
Would they—oh! will they never so accord?
The Europe-born, he of the Far Isles,
Asian, and Afric black as night that moves
Slowly across her troubled face, with New America
Join hands about the earth, upholding it
Mother and fountain Spirit to them all!—
One as the globe itself, though mountain-varied,
Each cinctured with its own peculiar clime,
Together ne'er make up,
A round and perfect whole, without a flaw,
A clear and crystal orb of power and love!—
But whither do I stray? your voice recalls me.—

First Pol'n.
Murders as though each human arm were red,
And struck at the other in a general fray;
And baleful risings of the armed upon
The weaponless; bloody o'erwhelmings of the weak;
Whole tribes driven irresistibly off—
The harsh unprosperous plough pursuing
To furrow out their ancient track—

Calm.
Your voice rolls on and might, till it become
One with the blasting of the general trump—
The same in fearfulness, the same in sound—

First Pol.
And so it might! For flash on flash, the tidings follow,
'Till the pale earth verberates!
Hear you that raging shout!
[A shout at a distance.
Allow me that I take your hand in mine
Before we part. 'Tis cold and damp.
[Aside.]
Th' avenging shaft has struck!—

[Exit First Pol.
Calmstorm.
What means he? He mocked me or he seemed to—
Great memory's globe moves round, and brings me light,
The mist clears off, and now it rushes back,
Not the meek suitor's with a low request,
But heading fierce th' unappeasable van;
That face I knew it, and must know it,—
A hundred angry faces all in one—
Through all the ages of illimitable life,
For he it was that knit my hideous bonds,
Beneath the eye of the enkindled West,
Cheer'd by her fiery throng, and cheering them;
He is the deadly double of my life,
For now he ties them with his subtle speech
Closer than hands; a knot unseverable.
If I spread out these arms I cannot meet
The foe: if I advance this foot I find him not,
Impalpable he comes upon me as the air
In his dread periods of plague and tempest.
They kill me with Opinion's hellish shot;
Opinion that, as the dead man's spirit walks,
A fatal exhalation, no body to be seen,
And slays invisibly.
'Tis not my life they strike at, but my name
They would shake down from its high-fixed
And towery station.
Pass on, thou dream that seemed the Time to come
In its sweet dawning; with thee bear along
The dreamer, on whose lids and in whose eyes
Thy cradle was for many years of joy!
There lingers in the limbs a sense of chains
After the chains are shattered; the thought
Of that sweet bondage binds me for a little yet,
Until believer and belief in the one
Same grave are laid.
Who, who this knot will disentangle
Of life, and weal and woe in life, for men
In the massed city, on the crowded way,
In links and ranks innumerable.
Who break this net of meshes numberless,
Where to be free is to be bound: where speech
That should give hope, enmeshes more the foot,
Than silence that consents to bondage!

Enter First Citizen, gazes at Calmstorm fixedly, for a while.
First Cit.
Umena's dead.

Calm.
[pausing.]
There was one spoke to me just now.
The voice came from a far land whose dialect
I should not know. Dead?

First Cit.
Heart-struck with grief
At the sad going-out of all your hopes:
Her tresses spread upon the silent ground,
Her face, winter and summer sweetly mixed,
Turned to the sky, a woman no longer,
But a painting wrought most cunningly
By passion's hand—the earth she beautifies.
Dying she murmured look thou up, 'tis Christ
That heals and saves the world—Calmstorm, look up!
And then she passed away to Him she spake of.

[Gazes silently at Calmstorm, and then Exit.
Calmstorm.
Fairer!—oh, what in all the all-embracing air,
In thought or speech or look, fairer than thou!
The tears my spirit, too sadly, knows thy due
Cannot be stayed nor shed, but at their flood-tide pause
The next motion of the moon to see
What time brings on.
[Loud sounds without.
Hearken again!—The tumult deepens like a sea.
I have disturbed the general peace; and now
They rage and riot, objectless, against
The men of no offence! Once more, rouse up
Thou troubled heart, and seek to give the anger
Of the popular strength an aim of nobleness:
Once more, thou breaking spirit, be thyself,
And drive the shaggy uproar to his den!

[Exit Calmstorm.