The Comrades :: :: University of Virginia Library

O'er the swamp in the forest
the sunset is red;
And the sad reedy waters,
in black mirrors spread,
Are aflame with the great crimson tree-tops o'er-head.

By the swamp in the forest
the oak-branches groan,
As the Savage primeval,
with russet hair thrown
O'er his huge naked limbs, swings his hatchet of stone.

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By the swamp in the forest
sings shrilly in glee
The stark forester's lass
plucking mast in a tree—
And hairy and brown as a squirrel is she!

With the strokes of the flint all
the blind woodland rings,
And the echoes laugh back as
the sylvan girl sings:—
And the Sabre-tooth growls in his lair ere he springs!

Keen as stars, in green splendour
his great eyeballs burn
As he crawls!—Chilled to silence,
the girl can discern
The fierce pantings which thrill through the fronds of the fern.

And the brown frolic face of
the girl has grown white,
As the large fronds are swayed in
the weird crimson light,
And she sobs with the strained throbbing dumbness of fright.

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With his blue eyes agleam, and
his wild russet hair
Streaming back, the Man travails,
unwarned, unaware
Of the lithe shape that crouches, the green eyes that glare.

And now, hark! as he drives with
a last mighty swing
The stone blade of the axe through
the oak's central ring,
From the blanched lips what screams of wild agony spring!—

There's a rush through the fern-fronds—
a yell of affright—
And the Savage and Sabre-tooth
close in fierce fight.
And the red sunset smoulders and blackens to night.

On the swamp in the forest
one clear star is shown,
And the reeds fill the night with
a long troubled moan—
And the girl sits and sobs in the darkness, alone!

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II

The great dim centuries of long ago
Sweep past with rain and fire, with wind and snow,
And where the Savage swung his axe of stone
The blue clay silts on Titan trunks o'erthrown,
O'er mammoth's tusks, in river-horse's lair;
And, armed with deer-horn, clad in girdled hair,
A later savage in his hollow tree
Hunts the strange broods of a primeval sea.

And yet the great dim centuries again
Sweep past with snow and fire, with wind and rain
And where that warm primeval ocean rolled
A second forest buds,—blooms broad,—grows old;
And a new race of prehistoric men
Springs from the mystic soil, and once again
Fades like a wood mist through the woodlands hoar.

For lo! the great dim centuries once more
With wind and fire, with rain and snow sweep by;

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And where the forest stood, an empty sky
Arches with lonely blue a lonely land.
The great white stilted storks in silence stand
Far from each other, motionless as stone,
And melancholy leagues of marsh-reeds moan,
And dead tarns blacken 'neath the mournful blue.

The ages speed! And now the skin canoe
Darts with swift paddle through the drear morass,
But ere the painted fisherman can pass,
The brazen horns ring out; a thund'rous throng—
Bronzed faces, tufted helmets—sweeps along,
The silver Eagles flash and disappear
Across the Roman causeway!

Year by year
The dim time lapses till that vesper hour
Broods o'er the summer lake with peaceful power,
When the carved galley through the sunset floats,
The rowers, with chains of gold about their throats,
Hang on their dripping oars, and sweet and clear
The sound of singing steals across the mere,
And rising with glad face and outstretched hand,
“Row, Knights, a little nearer to the land,

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And let us hear these monks of Ely sing;”
Says Knut, the King.

In the dim years what fateful hour arrives,
And who is this rides Fenward from St. Ives?
A man of massive presence,—bluff and stern.
Beneath their craggy brows his deep eyes burn
With awful thoughts and purposes sublime.
The face is one to abash the front of time,—
Hewn of red rock, so vital, even now
One sees the wart above that shaggy brow.
At Ely there in these idyllic days
His sickles reap, his sheep and oxen graze,
And all the ambition of his sober life
Is but to please Elizabeth his wife,
To drain the Fens—and magnify the Lord.
So in his plain cloth suit, with close-tucked sword,
Oliver Cromwell, fated but unknown,
Rides where the Savage swung his axe of stone.

III

In the class-room blue-eyed Phemie
Sits, half listening, hushed and dreamy,
To the grey-haired pinched Professor droning to his class of girls.

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And around her in their places
Rows of arch and sweet young faces
Seem to fill the air with colour shed from eyes and lips and curls!—

Eyes of every shade of splendour,
Brown and bashful, blue and tender,
Grey and giddy, black and throbbing with a deep impassioned light:

Golden ringlets, raven clusters,
Auburn braids with sunny lustres
Falling on white necks, plump shoulders clothed in green and blue and white.

And the sun with leafy reflex
Of the rustling linden-tree flecks
All the glass doors of the cases ranged along the class-room wall—

Flecks with shadow and gold the Teacher's
Thin grey hair and worn pinched features,
And the pupil's heads, and sends a thrill of July over all.

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And the leafy golden tremor
Witches so the blue-eyed dreamer
That the room seems filling straightway with a forest green and old;

And the grey Professor's speech is
Heard like wind among the beeches
Murmuring wondrous cosmic secrets never quite distinctly told;

And the girls around seemed turning
Into tree—laburnums burning,
Graceful ashes, silver birches—but through all the glamour and change

Phemie is conscious that those cases
Hold reliques of vanished races,
The pre-Adamitic fossils of a dead world grim and strange.

Labelled shells suggest the motion,
Moan, and glimmer of that ocean
Where the belemnites dropped spindles and the sand-stars shed their rays;

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Monstrous birds stalk stilted by as
She perceives the slab of Trias
Scrawled with hieroglyphic claw-tracks of the mesozoic days;

And before her she sees dawn a
Pageant of an awful fauna
While across Silurian ages the Professor's lecture blows.

All the while a soft and pleasant
Rustle of dresses, an incessant
Buzz of smothered frolic rises underneath his meagre nose.

And one pretty plague has during
All the class been caricaturing
Her short-sighted good old Master with a world of wicked zest;

And the madcaps blush and titter
As they see the unconscious sitter
Sketched as Allophylian Savage—spectacled but much undressed.

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But the old man turns the pages
Of the rock-illumined ages,
Tracing from earth's mystic missal the antiquity of Man:

Not six thousand years—but eras,
Ages, eons disappear as
Groping back we touch the system where the Human first began.

Centuries, as we retrogress, are
Dwarfed to days, says the Professor,
And our lineage was hoary ere Eve's apple-tree grew green;

For the Bee, whose drowsy humming
Was prophetic of Man's coming,
Lies in gem-like tomb of amber, buried in the Miocene.

At what point Man came, I know not,
Logic proves not, fossils show not,
But his dim remote existence is a fact beyond dispute.

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Look!—And from among some thirty
Arrow barbs of quartz and chert he
Takes the flint head of a hatchet,—and the girls grow hushed and mute.

Old, he says, art thou strange stone! Nor
Less antique thy primal owner!
When the Fens were drained this axe was found below two forests sunk.

Underneath a bed of sea clay
And two forests this relique lay
Where some Allophylian Savage left it in a half-hewn trunk!

Does the old Professor notice
Large eyes, blue as myosotis,
Raised to him in startled wonder as those fateful words are said?

But for Phemie, through the trees in
Her dream forest, fact and reason
Blend with fancy, and her vision grows complete and clear and dread:

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By the swamp in the forest
the sylvan girl sings
As his flint-headed hatchet
the wild Woodman swings,
But the hatchet cleaves fast in the trunk he has riven—
The Man stands unarmed as the Sabre-tooth springs!