University of Virginia Library

Scene III.

Cyril—Markham.
MARKHAM
Cyril!

CYRIL
Who calls me like the murmur of my youth
Under the roar of time?

MARKHAM
Come, will you know me?
Aye, spell my face—its whole vocabulary
Lies in your name; now your eyes warm to me,
They did but search before, and now I feel
Such closing of your grasp upon my hands
As might have forced the water to mine eyes
Were it not there before. What, Cyril, what,
Am I remembered?

CYRIL
Markham! Not remembered,
Possessed! I had you always—yesterday
We parted—nothing lies between but time
Wherein love grows. Why are you here? Whence come you?
But that's no matter since I have you here,
And I'll not ask if you come home with me
Because you must. I saw you just like this,
With just such sunburnt honours in your face,
As step by step I followed all you did
In the great gaps between your scanty words.
Ah, friend, you should have come before, you needed
A bath in sweet home-waters, to refresh
Such agonies of toil.

MARKHAM
The same as ever:
No man must work too hard except himself.
I stood here while you spoke.

CYRIL
You heard me speak?

MARKHAM
Aye, every word.

CYRIL
I spoke to the world's future
And mine own past. It lay not in my dreams
That you were judging. Come, friend, tell me truly
Has my speech mended as your judgment has
Since those hot days when you believed in me?

MARKHAM
No, not a jot.

CYRIL
You will not flatter me;
Have the years taught me nothing?

MARKHAM
O, you have learnt
Whole dictionaries, but the man who speaks
Is still the same; a little further up
The mountain way, but not too far for stretching
His hand down to the children. Let me see you!
These lines, these paler tints, this silver, seem
Completion not decay. Your life has been
As a long music, where the final bar
Grows from the first, and not a note is finished
Till all are heard.

CYRIL
I would not have it so;
My life should be a Prelude where each note
Suggests the coming strain which Death begins.
I have known such lives.

MARKHAM
Alas, in thirty years
How many of the lives we knew have ceased!
You kept your Mother long?

CYRIL
God cloistered her
In gentle limits ere He called her home:
To failing ears we speak no words but love;
Dim eyes perceive no darker shades, and life
Filtered by care and time and distance comes
To feeble lips without its bitterness:
So, on the pillow of her years she slept
Before she died.

MARKHAM
You watched her to the last;
And Lady Blanche?

CYRIL
She had a kindly whim
To make me godfather to all her babes.
I am pledged for nine.

MARKHAM
Protect me from my friends!

CYRIL
Loose not my hand—your eyes must tell me more;
Use grows so fast that ere a week is gone
We shall seem never sundered, and all question
Checked and entangled by those daily films
Which make life possible for ardent hearts
But keep them separate; now, for half an hour
We are soul to soul—

MARKHAM
I came from the far side
Of all the world to show my soul to you!
Beside me, through the tossed and roaming years
Which have been mine since last I talked with you
In work or rest, in toil or darkness, still
I had the vision of a perfect life:
It did not preach to me, it looked at me
And drew me evermore to look at it:
I had beheld it once, and there it was
For ever mine. It grew before mine eyes
Slow as a picture where each touch reveals
Forgotten facts, till Absence grows alive
With Memory's intolerable sweetness;
Each difference that I noted was a call
To likeness, and from every point there streamed
Such life as by mere contact masters death.
So was I won without an argument,
Convinced by contemplation, beaten down
By the soft presence of a thought, and here
I come to tell you—

CYRIL
Ah, she won you so!
How many trophies will that tender life,
Merely by being lived, bring with itself
At the last day! She will not know till then,
And she must learn it from the Master's lips,
Else she may enter Heaven incredulous
Like a child-queen before the retinue
She leads unconsciously.

MARKHAM
She, Cyril, she?
Is that fair memory still so much with you?
O, foolish man, I am no woman's work—
It was yourself.

CYRIL
I!

MARKHAM
Fighting all the day,
And so confounded with astonishment
At one small conquest!

CYRIL
'Twas the hyperbole
Wherein you hid me! O my friend, I know
He may use any weapon, but that this
Should be vouchsafed, that He should give me you,
Just the great wish, just the desponding prayer,
Just the impossible hope; and I so cold,
Weak, false, forgetful, while He worked for me:
This wonder, which He thrusts into my arms
As suddenly as though 'twere not a crown
To set on dying brows, that this should be,
Makes me a child that can but weep for joy
And stretch its hands, and grasp its precious things
Not knowing how they come.

MARKHAM
Thus have I given
The core of my large story. But for you,
You have said nothing yet. I find you thus,
After a life of labour, with no rest
In the grey heaving distances around,
But only toil and storm and scanty gain,
Monotonies of peril and fatigue
Without an issue—are you satisfied
With that which you have chosen?

CYRIL
Here I am!

MARKHAM
Will you reveal no more?

CYRIL
There is no more
To be revealed. I have no certainty
About myself, save that God set me here
With such a work to do, and here I am
Doing it very badly.

MARKHAM
Nay, my friend,
Be frank—

CYRIL
I speak the frankest honesty:
No thoughtful evening comes that does not show
Such gaps and blunders in the day's achieve
As fill the soul with resolute remorse
Which ought to triumph to-morrow. But I work
Heartily and am happy, overpaid
With love and honour which I never earned,
Watching the growths around me, sometimes sad
And often sanguine, so concerned with living
I have not leisure even for self-reproach—

MARKHAM
(interrupting)
Here, and alone, and happy—in a world
So full of all Christ died to save it from!
Working with such mean elements, assailed
By such base foes, busy in such small fields!
O, this is not the mountain of your youth
With its vast outlooks over heaven and earth—
This is not like my picture! Here in the press,
Here in the dusty tumult, foot to foot
With any straggler, not a star beheld,
Not a song audible—you that were once
Fed with grand airs and mighty visions, tell me
Where are they now?

CYRIL
O friend, in our beginnings
We set the life divine a league away
From the life human, and depart from one
When we would seek the other, but our work
Is to bring both together. Those are days
Of petty fear and causeless sacrifice,
Of ‘touch not, taste not, handle not’; perchance
Our weakness needs them; but it is our strength
To touch, taste, handle all that is not sin,
Finding God's work in all, and as for sin
To slay it with the brightness of His presence.
So we receive our banquet; for the body
Not only meats but wine, and for the lips
Not only speech but music, for the eyes
Vast pageants of unfathomable change
Prepared from everlasting, and for the soul
Not only prayer and labour, but all knowledge,
All wonder, and the garden-world of Art,
And all the forest-paths of Poetry,
Oceans of joy and fields of lovely rest;
Man lives in many ways, but on this diet
He grows to perfect health, takes without choice
His Master's gift—a cross, a sword, a flower;
Contemns no work, refuses no delight,
And goes rejoicing through the darkest ways
With nothing in his heart but ‘here I am!’
This feeds me in my solitude—and more—

MARKHAM
Your face is full of light; Cyril, what more?

CYRIL
There is the hope that I may die to-night!