Tristram (Robinson)/Canto 5
V
Griffon, the giant scourge of Brittany,Threatened while Tristram was appraising it,In his anticipation, all the peace Awaiting him across the foaming wavesThat were to wash, in Gouvernail’s invention,Time out of life. And there King Howel’s child,Isolt of the white hands, living on hope,Which in all seeming had itself aloneTo live on, was for love and safety nowA prisoner in that castle by the seaWhere Tristram once, not thinking twice of it,Had said that he would some day come again,And more as a gay plaything than a pledgeHad left with her an agate which had beenFor long her father’s jest. It was her heart,Which she had taken out of her white bosom,He said, and in the forest or in the seaWould presently be lost and never foundAgain—not even for Tristram when he came.But when he came there was no time for talkOf hearts and agates. Welcome and wondermentAppeased, and the still whiteness of IsoltRegarded once and then at once forgotten,Tristram, like one athirst with wine before him,Heard the King’s talk of a marauding hostThat neither force nor craft had yet subdued Or more than scattered, like an obscene flockOf rooks alert around a living quarryThat might not have a longer while to liveThan a few days would hold, or not so many.
“Praise be to God, I could almost have saidFor your ill fortune, sir, and for your danger,”Was Tristram’s answer to the King’s grim news.“I have been groping slowly out of lifeInto a slough of darkness and disuse—A place too far from either for life or deathTo share with me. Yes, I have had too muchOf what a fool, not knowing its right name,Would call the joy of life. If that be joy,Give me a draught out of your cup of trouble,And let it be seen then what’s left of meTo deal with your bad neighbor. For tonight,Let me have rest before tomorrow’s work,Which may be early.”
“Early and late, I fear,”The King said, and eyed Tristram cautiously,And with a melancholy questioning Of much that was for him no more a question.“If it be God that brings you here today,I praise him in my thanks given to you,Tristram, for this. Sleep, and forget tomorrowUntil tomorrow calls you. If ill comesTo you for this, I shall not wish to live—But for my child. And if ill comes to her,It will be death to live.”
“Tomorrow, sir,These ills may be the dregs in empty cupsWith all the bitterness drunk out of them.No ill shall come to her till you and IAnd all your men go down defending her;And I can figure no such havoc as that.I’m not a thousand men, or more than one,Yet a new mind and eye, and a new armAt work with yours, may not combine for ruin.”
Uncertain afterwards in a foreseenAchievement unachieved, Tristram rejoicedAt last when he saw Griffon at his feetAnd saw the last of his pernicious minions Dispatched or disappearing. And that night,Having espied Isolt’s forgotten harp,He plucked and sang the shadow of himself,To her his only self, unwittinglyInto the soul and fabric of her life,Till death should find it there. So day by dayHe fostered in his heart a tendernessUnrecognized for more than a kind fearFor what imaginable small white pawnHer candor and her flame-white lovelinessCould yet become for the cold game of kings,Who might not always, if they would, play quiteTheir game as others do.
Once by the shoreThey lingered while a summer sun went downBeyond the shining sea; and it was thenThat sorrow’s witchcraft, long at work in him,Made pity out of sorrow, and of pityMade the pale wine of love that is not love,Yet steals from love a name. And while he feltWithin her candor and her artlessnessThe still white fire of her necessity, He asked in vain if this were the same fateThat for so long had played with him so darkly—With him and with Isolt, Isolt of Ireland,Isolt of the wild frightened violet eyesThat once had given him that last look of hersAbove the moaning call of those cold wavesOn those cold Cornish rocks. This new Isolt,This new and white Isolt, was nothing realTo him until he found her in his arms,And, scarcely knowing how he found her there,Kissed her and felt the sting of happy tearsOn his bewildered lips. Her whiteness burnedAgainst him till he trembled with regret;For hope so long unrealized real at lastTo her, was perilously real to him.He knew that while his life was in Cornwall,Something of this white fire and lonelinessIn Brittany must be his whereon to lavishThe comfort of kind lies while he should live.There were some words that he would have been saying,When her eyes told him with a still reproofThat silence would say more; and Tristram wishedThat silence might say all.
For a long timeThey sat there, looking off across the waterBetween them and Tintagel to the north,Where Tristram saw himself chained to a stakeWith flames around him and Isolt of IrelandHeld horribly to see. King Mark, he knew,Would in his carnal rage cling to his wordAnd feast his eyes and hate insatiablyOn his fulfilment of it—in itselfThe least of Tristram’s fear. It was her eyes,Held open to behold him, that he saw,More than it was himself, or any tortureThat would be only torture worse than hisFor her. He turned himself away from that,And saw beside him two gray silent eyesSearching in his with quaint solemnityFor some unspoken answer to a thoughtUnspoken.
“When I told my father firstThat you would come, he only smiled at me,”She said. “But I believe by saying alwaysThat you were coming, he believed you would,Just as I knew you would.”
“And why was that,My child?” he asked, a captive once againTo her gray eyes and her white need of him.“You might have told your father I was comingTill the world’s end, and I might not have come.”
“You would have come, because I knew you would,”She said, with a smile shaking on her lipsAnd fading in her eyes. “And you said that,Because you knew, or because you knew nothing,Or cared less than you know. Because you knew,I like to fancy. It will do no harm.”
“Were I so sure of that,” he thought, “as you are,There would be no infection of regretIn my remembrance of a usefulnessThat Brittany will say was mine. IsoltOf Brittany? Why were two names like thatWritten for me by fate upon my heartIn red and white? Is this white fire of pity,If pity it be, to burn deeper than love?”Isolt of Ireland’s dark wild eyes before himIn the moonlight, and that last look of hers,Appeared in answer. Tristram gazed away Into the north, and having seen enough,He turned again to find the same gray lightIn the same eyes that searched in his beforeFor an unspoken answer to a thoughtUnspoken. They came silently away,And Tristram sang again to her that night.
And he sang many a time to her thereafterSongs of old warriors, and old songs of loveTriumphant over wars that were forgotten;And many a time he found in her gray eyes,And in the rose-white warmth of her attention,Dominion of a sure necessityBeyond experience and the need of reason,Which had at first amused him and at lastHad made him wonder why there should be tearsIn a man’s eyes for such a mild white thingThat had so quaint a wisdom in its mildness,Unless because he watched it going slowlyIts mild white way out of the world without him.“Can she see farther into time, by chance,Than I do?” he would ask, observing her:“She might do so, and still see little farther Than to the patient ends of her white fingersThat are so much alive, like all of her.”She found him smiling, but in her large eyesThere was no smile. There was a need of himThat made him cold, as if a ghost had risenBefore him with a wordless admonitionThat he must go or stay. And many a timeHe would have gone, if he had not perforceAs many a time remained to sing for herThose old songs over, and as many a timeFound in her gaze that sure necessityWhich held him with a wisdom beyond thought,Or with an innocence beyond all wisdom,Until he sang one night for the last timeTo the King’s child. For she was his child now,And for as long as there was life in himWas his to cherish and to wonder at,That he should have this white wise fiery thingTo call his wife.
“Magicians might have done it”He pondered once, alone, “but in so farAs I’m aware of them, there are none leftIn Brittany so adept as to achieve it. Stars may have done it.” Then King Howel, pleased,Though in his pleasure as incredulousAs if he were somehow a little injured,Appearing out of silence from behind him,Took Tristram’s hands approvingly in his,And said, “You have a child that was a womanBefore she was a child, and is todayWoman and child, and something not of either,For you to keep or crush—without a soundOf pain from her to tell you so. BewareSomewhat of that, Tristram; and may you bothBe wise enough not to ask more of lifeThan to be life, and fate.” The last word fellLike a last coin released unwillinglyBy caution giving all. And while the KingSaid what he said, Tristram was seeing onlyA last look in two dark and frightened eyesThat always in the moonlight would be shining,Alone above the sound of Cornish wavesThat always in the moonlight would be breaking,Cold upon Cornish rocks.
But occupation,Like a neglected and insistent hound Leaping upon his master’s inattention,Soon found him wearing on his younger shouldersThe yoke of a too mild and easy-trustingAnd easy-futured king. He shaped and trainedAn army that in time before would soonHave made of Griffon a small anecdoteHardly worth telling over after supper;He built new ships and wharves, and razed old houses,And so distressed a realm with renovationUnsought and frowned on by slow denizensFor decades undisturbed, that many of them,Viewing the visioned waste of a new hand,Had wished him dead, or far from Brittany;And for the flower of his activities,He built a royal garden for IsoltOf the white hands to bloom in, a white roseFairer than all fair roses in the worldElsewhere—save one that was not white but dark,Dark and love-red for ever, and not there,Where the white rose was queen.
So for two yearsShe reigned and waited, and there in her gardenLet rumor’s noise, like thunder heard far off, Rumble itself to silence and as nighTo nothing as might be. But near the endOf a long afternoon, alone with him,She sat there watching Tristram, who in turn,Still mystified at having in his careTo keep or crush, even as her father said,So brave and frail a flower, sat watching herWith eyes that always had at least been kind,If they had not said always everythingShe would have had them say. Staring at him,Like someone suddenly afraid of life,She chilled him slowly with a question: “Tristram,”She said, “what should I do were you to die?”
“Are there no prettier notions in your headThan that?” said he, and made a task of laughing.“There are no mortal purposes in meToday, yet I may say what you would do:Were I to die, you would live on without me.But I would rather sing you an old songThan die, and even for you, this afternoon.”
“Yes, presently you will sing me an old song,”She said. “It was a wonder seized me then And made me ask like that what I should doWere you to die. Were you to tire of me,And go away from me and stay some time,I should not die, for then you would come back.You came back once, and you would come again;For you would learn at last you needed meMore than all other creatures. But if you died,Then you would not come back. What should I doIf you should go away and never come back?I see almost a shadow on you sometimes,As if there were some fearful thing behind you,Not to be felt or seen—while you are here.”
“I can feel only the sun behind me now—Which is a fearful thing if we consider itToo long, or look too long into its face.”Saying that, he smiled at her, not happily,But rather as one who has left something out,And gazed away over a vine-hung wall,And over the still ocean where one shipWas coming slowly in.
“If I lost youFor a long time,” she said, with her insistence, “I should not cry for what had come between,For I should have you here with me again.I am not one who must have everything.I was not fated to have everything.One may be wise enough, not having all,Still to be found among the fortunate.”
She stood beside him now and felt his armClosing around her like an arm afraid.“Little you know, my child,” he thought, in anguishA moment for the fear and innocenceThat he was holding and was his to hold,“What ashes of all this wisdom might be left youAfter one blast of sick realityTo tell the wise what words are to the heart.”And then aloud: “There’s a ship coming inFrom somewhere north of us.”
“There are no shipsFrom the north now that are worth looking at,”She said; and he could feel her trembling warmAgainst him till he felt her scorching himWith an unconscious and accusing fire.“There was a time when I was always gazing North for a ship, but nothing is there now;Or ships are all alike that are there now.”
“They are not all like this one,” Tristram said,More to himself than to the white IsoltArming herself with blindness against fate,“For there are trumpets blowing, as if a kingWere coming—and there’s a dragon on the sail.One of King Arthur’s barges—by the LordIn heaven, it is!—comes here to Brittany,And for a cause that lives outside my knowledge.Were this the King, we should have known of him.”
“What does it mean?” she whispered; and her wordsWavered as if a terror not yet revealedHad flown already inland from that ship.
“God knows,” he said, “but it will not be longBefore we shall all know.” She followed himInto her father’s castle, where the newLooked ancient now; and slowly, after silence,He left her waiting there at the same windowWhere she had waited for so long before,When she was looking always to the north; And having left her there, alone with wonder,He went alone with wonder to the shore,Where a gay ship was coming gaily in,And saw descending from it soon, and gaily,As always, Sir Gawaine from Camelot.