University of Virginia Library

2. PART II.

SCENE I.

—A street. Calmstorm and Waning, walking.
Calm.
How thin the streets are of their usual throng!

Wan.
The world's an hour behind its time this morning;
For yesterday was festival, one of the few,
And after holidays men lie in bed,
Nursing the precious ache that pleasure breeds,
And dreaming back again the day gone by.

Calm.
They gather at a point about the court,
Perhaps, and leave the outer city bare.
Mine eye is keen enough, and clear enough the sky,
That I could pierce this visible blue, e'en now,
And see the Great Ruler on his throne—
There is a smile upon his front that makes heaven dizzy.

[Aside.
Wan.
O yes, the court may have its listeners!
The idle multitude has ears that flap
With joy, like the wild elephant's, hearkening
To that concerns it not.

Calm.
Concerns it not! O, say not so, dear Waning,
For in the issue of this day there lives
Or dies the hope of thousands.

Wan.
One good man's peace is worth the idle toil
Of the blind millions; whosoever fights
That they may live at ease, battles the air
At large, and buys a blank, of worthlessness
Immeasurable.

Calm.
You speak, I know, more from the prompting
Of a timeless meal, miscombing of your hair
To-day, or the chance stumbling 'gainst a stool,
That vexed your blood, than under judgment
In its best session at a seasonable hour:
Your heart lives in the heart of those around you,
And beats with theirs in all its better pulses
As does mine. You see, as now we near the court,
How they pour in! A blessing on their cheerful brows!
Entering the Court, officers oppose them at the door.
What mean you, fellow? I am Calmstorm,
Counsel for the man within!

Wan.
Give us way,
My good friend, and let us pass. Easily,
If you please.

[They pass in.
1st Officer.
If that big one is surly, inside there,
As with us, old Darkledge will put out his fire
In half a twinkling. Stand off there, men, the court
Will be along in half a minute—stand back!

2d Officer.
Get nearer to the door, John, that we may have
A left ear a-piece, within, to listen with
When the case opens.

[They move in.

SCENE II.

—In Court. Darkledge, Calmstorm, Waning Slinely, and others, with a crowd of spectators.
Dark.
Close down the eastern window, officer!
The racket of the eager street about
Disturbs the court.

Calm.
[Rising.]
And yet, of all who help to make this din
This man alone is held in servile bonds
Because he owes a certain petty sum to this.
The suitor, failing, as he has, by courts of law,
From lack of goods, to seize, to get his own,
Has now a fraud to charge, and hurries here,
To find or make this man a criminal:
For this free state allows no man to breathe
A prison's air for money's mere mischance.
The learned gentleman who spake for law
And not for truth, said, as well knows the court—
The court wrote it out with a bold, broad pen
To stare, hugely and black, against the prisoner—
That this one knew at heart, from first to last,
The land he laid in pledge was trash, to grow
Grasses and stubbles, not seats for castles,
Or cities in their largeness and their strength:
That he, this prisoner, in his secret soul,
Knew this, but kept the cheap delusion up,
To live on the other's hard-wrought means,
A Cheat (they say), a Knave, a Hypocrite!
The court has knowledge that the whole wide land
Was in a city thrown, with towers to the skies,
Walls laid to the root and centre of the earth,
By general zeal, wildness not singly his,
A fever lodged at large and not his special guest—
This knows the court, know all who sit
Beneath this roof: the wide earth we stand on knows it;
A wealth-desire, that swallows up land, house,
The sea and all it holds, the vital air—
More hungry than the whirlwind, gaunt and fierce,
When down it shakes its gloomy mane, the trees
Of all the earth, and rushes, hungry still,
Out on the wild, unmeasured space.

Slinely rises and interposes.
Slinely.
Will the court permit me that I report
For the Organ, its doings of to-day?

Dark.
The court do not object.

Calm.
Nor I; if he will be that that he should,
The clear, sound glass through which the world may see,
As if it looked upon it, the chances of this case—
And not a mirror to distort, misshape,
And render back, dark and false-imaged, all:
Set down, would he but be the friend of truth,
The room, the hour, the attitude of each,
How stands the speaker, how the audience stand,
Whether the judge, with eyes and mind awake,
Listens to what is for the prisoner said,
Or stares upon his plea, half-slumbering.
If you are called to sound the bell of truth,
Let its clear voice your air-borne pages ring
Over the land, unmuffled and unmarred.

[To Slinely.
Dark.
He knows his duty, sir, and has the court's consent.

Calm.
I grant it, sir; we all our duties know,
And now that we're aroused and pricked to hear
With ears wide-opened—

Dark.
[Studiously interrupting.]
What tumult's that in yonder crowd?

Officer.
'Tis Lifeless, a poor hanger-on of the court,
Crowding for an end of bench, and because
He's lost it, is shuffling out of court.

Calm.
A moment's use more of the wise court's ear.
A Hypocrite, a Knave, a debt-struck Cheat!
Let all men pay in full their honest debts
In heaven's own coin, the world will need change sides—

Dark.
[Starting.]
You're not content, eh, with the things that stand,
You seek a change throughout the world?

Calm.
I do. A change that gliding 'mid the forms of life—
Shall crumble down the old-cemented wrongs,
E'en at a touch, yes, instant, all throughout,
As though, when thus I dash mine angry heel
Against the earth, I could shake down,
In all its continents, on all its shores—
Its homes, its temples, and its justice-halls,
Its prisons, fortresses, and towers of state!
[Darkledge regards him in amaze.
Due! there are some dues beside the dollar!
This man is debtor now, this very hour,
Unto this other! Take this one from the box,
And put the other there! For where's the courtesy,
Truth and honest dealing in look and hand,
And speech, whereof he wronged and robbed, so oft,
This prisoner? A daily fraud and hourly:
Practiced within the law, the rogue's enclosure,
Read by the candle-light of courts. Break on this court,
Thou purer blaze! that judges, soul-smit, may fall
Saul-like, in worship.

Dark.
[Angrily.]
Halt, sir, the court
Cannot sit silent, and listen to this talk.
The court worships nothing, 'twould have you know.

Calm.
Then Nothing is a devil bigger by a mountain's girth,
Than e'er he claimed to be before!

Dark.
You mock us, do you?
Stand ready here, a force of officers!
We mean the court will not let counsel say
What thing it worships, kneels to, prays to, judges by—
There is the Bible, there the Statute-book!—
[Looking towards Slinely.]
We're understood?

Sline.
[Rising.]
If the court please, we've writ for the public eye,
“The court has its own well-established worship,
“Of which 'twill not be questioned by counsel over-curious:
“The Bible's there, and there the Statute-Book—
“We stand by both. Now let the case proceed!”

Calm.
That is your record, is it?—
Sit down, thou foolish man! and slit thy quills—
Out of the court's mere idle words of chance,
You've built a lie as black and huge as Alleghany!

Sline.
We ask the court's protection: shall he
Upbraid us that we fairly chronicle
The pure judgments of the court?

Calm.
Protect! Banish you, rather, into
A desert everlasting beyond these walls,
No more to write the misinterpreted truth.

Dark.
These matters are not in the case, nor
Any part of it. He must not be disturbed:
In what he does, he must take his free course—

Calm.
And so must I. Thou man of perfect truth,
That in the Saul-like blaze sitt'st radiant!—
Even thou, Darkledge, the judge immaculate.—

Dark.
Come forward, officers! on either side
Stand ready on your staves: if he affront
The court, seize him, and bear him swiftly down!—

Calm.
And in the edges of its fire, the prisoner's withes are snapped!
Think what it is to be Heaven's chancellor!
You sit upon that bench, as on his throne
Sits He, to measure out the golden grains of justice,
Which are the bread and staff of this world's life.
Unseen his angels come, each minute, down,
And back return, reporting what Darkledge,
In his evil thought or good, determines.
See! o'er the judge's face God's visible shadow
Passes. He signs and trembles, trembles but signs.

[The order is handed to the Clerk by Darkledge.
Clerk.
[Reading.]
The order's adverse to the prisoner.

Calm.
You're in the cold, hard cell, as fixed as if
The frozen sea in ice had locked you!
[To the prisoner.
Another day is added to the days
Of wrong! His forehead smites the cruel rail,
As though a bolt had struck him from afar!

[Exit Calmstorm.—Scene closes.

SCENE III.

—Without the Court. Calmstorm and Waning.
Calm.
The case is lost, blackly and forever lost!

Wan.
You should have bent your knee a little
To the judge, a little would have served you,
And not with that high voicing spoke,
As if you wished that Heaven, rather than he,
Should hear you. A sad mistake, no doubt,
Calmstorm, a sad mistake in policy.

[Exit Waning.
Calm.
[Looking upward.]
This, bear it in belief, thou looker-on,
Sun, that shinest calmly, yonder and here!
This is the chamber where justice lodges,
It is said. In her own habitation
She's a stranger, aloof from what goes on,
Hiding, perhaps, in crannies of her battered house,
And, looking archly forth from where she hides,
The spirit of the crevice and invisible,
Laughs at and mocks the doings of her servitors.

Enter Umena.
Umena.
It would not be amiss, I hope 'twould not,
Although the public court, the public trial's past,
To follow still this poor down-trodden prisoner—
To knit a few kind words to strew his prison with?

Calm.
[Musing.]
It would not be amiss.

Umena.
To bear him alms of truth,
And food to cherish body and spirit?

Calm.
It would not.

Umena.
A word upon the way he takes to prison,
Might cheer him through the first o'erwhelming night:
Shall I pursue him, as his jailors
Bear him on?

Calm.
You might.

[Exit Umena.
Calm.
O, come the time,
As swift and general as the night that folds
The world in shining arms, and runs its errands
To the sun, when on a thousand hills
Crowned right shall sit, and 'neath its sceptres
Earth lie calmly as the cradled babe!—
When, in and out of courts and council-chambers,
Lean Want may walk as free as lusty Pride,
And Justice bare her eyes in the full noon to see,
Nor in a bandaged twilight longer stumble,
Lured by the small gold's falsely-tinkling voice,
Rather than upright Truth's full-beaming look!

[Exit.

SCENE IV.

—A street. Umena, Dorcas, meeting.
Umena.
Whither so nimbly speeding, Dorcas?

Dorcas.
To you, if needed in the great court,
With what I had of counsel and of help.

Umena.
The court is ended, and the poor prisoner
Is borne along, close-kept, as you behold,
Unto his cell.

Dorcas.
Thus, thus I always linger:
I came down by the river, bending as it bent,
Pausing where'er it paused, and yielding every way
To its blue mastery: a blest and noble sight,
From the far inland there came hurrying on,
A mighty wind, in which the many vessels
Setting toward the sea (and many that desired
To voyage quite the other way) bent their smooth masts
On toward invisible shores,
As trees that lean their trunks in orchards, show
Whence heaven has oftenest blown since they were set,
As if 'twas ever their fixed, fruitful course;
And the great woodland sitting calm, upon
The bank beyond, laughed in the mighty wind.

Umena.
Swift as those happy ships hastened to sea,
Bear we to him and his deserted house
Succor, and whatsoever else we may;
For in this hour, dark'ning his narrow sky,
Where sit they by the lone hearth lamenting,
God sends us more than when the unquestioned sun
Is out. I follow the prisoner to his cell.

Dorcas.
And I to the house where pine, unfathered
And unhusbanded, his children and his wife.

Umena.
Speed thee, good Dorcas, for thy beaming face,
Kindled anew, from the sad cloud shall shine
Upon their low estate, a happiness
Next to the birth of day and the sweet light
That brings it!

[Exeunt, severally, Umena, Dorcas.

SCENE V.

—Without the Court. Calmstorm, to him enter Waning.
Wan.
Darkledge and Slinely in a by-street
I just now passed. There's darkness about them,
And a silent talk like that of spectres:
You should have taken Slinely by the hand,
In the full face of all the lookers-on,
And asked him of his child's health and his wife's,
With something of a yielding or a truckling,
As the weak world would call it, in your look.

Calm.
Good men are made and bad are bettered, doubtless,
My good friend Waning, by confounding them,
As in a hat or jury-wheel. O, that the world
Would for a day let go the crank by which
It jumbles clean and foul in one!

Wan.
He bit his lips, and looked from 'neath his lids
Upon you—I wished you could have picked a time,
At least, with a warm hand to greet him, though
'T had been in the undistinguishable throng,
Or in the passage from the court, even
The secret angle of the open door.

Calm.
What goblin's this that I must worship
Openly, or court in stealthy favor?

Wan.
The darkest Spirit of the city, Calmstorm!
Who keeps a secret book wherein is writ
In loathsome detail, all the city's vice,
Each man's peculiar bias from the right,
Who darkly with his neighbor's wife has erred,
And who has clutched, with fingers lawless,
The vaulted gold; what judge, libidinous,
What priest, who hugs him in his catlike robe,
Holding his pitch above the unsheltered world;—
He cuts the thread and tumbles on the ground,
At his convenient time, fluttered and broken,
Soiled and pitiful. He is the city's fiend,
And keeps the evil count of all our deeds,
Avenging God in gloomy merriment.
Whiter than angels in his look: at heart
Blacker than devils in the sulphurous fire.

Calm.
By what charter plays he
These pranks on the round earth, so far beyond
His pale? And who is he?

Wan.
'Tis Slinely, the journalist: the master
Of the Organ that every morning breathes
Ruin or Joy on whom it pleases.

Calm.
Accursed be he who'd yield a single jot
Of all he holds at such a bidding! Must I,
Or smile, or look, or shake a greeting hand,
Or bear myself erect or bowed, this road
Pursue or that to public councils, sit
At my worship, or kneel at such suggestion?
Heaven's patent to free man runs not so writ,
Nor is it sent, blackening and dark, to these.
And yet there is a power, next Heaven's omnipotence,
That governs, guides, and soothes the vexed community
Whose eye unsleeping at the dead of night,
Looks on the secret heart of life, and counts
Its pulses to the morning sun: that all the world
May live in presence, aye, of all the world:
And brethren shake hands a thousand miles apart,
In far lands or seas, communing
By magic of the true journal's speedy breath!

Wan.
Look yonder, Calmstorm!
Arm-in-arm, you see Darkledge, the judge,
And the dark writer, passing. They look at you
Together, and pass on.

Calm.
[A newspaper in his hand.]
Death-like thou smilest, dost thou, winding-sheet!
Thou hast thy tricks of use, in circles various,
In high and low, in near and far, as the globe's belt.
I hold thee as a shield before my breast,
I shake thee as a banner in the air,
I spread thee on the ground, a battle's map;
Column on column, fold on fold, I see thou curl'st
About the membered life, fanged in its heart,
Or nursing underneath thy snow-white wings
In downy calm, the gentle brood of truth.—
How round about this place a dreadful stillness
Reigns, where late it roared with harshest sounds
Of trampling and of voices!

Wan.
Marked you
With what a cry the outside sitters
Of the court welcomed the rendering
Of the adverse order to the clerk? and how
The old judge smiled, and how they clapped again!

Calm.
Upon my spirit this silence falls,
Thickly as if another world were placed
Atop of this. Let us fly hence!

[Exeunt.