Tristram (Robinson)/Canto 6
VI
Gawaine, in Cornwall once, having seen IsoltOf Ireland with her pallid mask of pride,Which may have been as easy a mask as any,He thought, for prisoned love and scorn to wear,Had found in her dark way of statelinessPerfection providentially not hisTo die for. He recalled a wish to die,But only as men healed remember pain;And here in Tristram’s garden, far from Cornwall,Gawaine, musing upon this white IsoltOf Brittany, whose beauty had heretofore,For him, lived rather as that of a white nameThan of a living princess, found himselfAgain with a preoccupied perfectionTo contemplate. The more he contemplated,The more he arraigned fate and wondered whyTristram should be at odds with banishment, Or why Tristram should care who banished him,Or for how long, or for what violet eyesAnd Irish pride and blue-black Irish hairSoever. He smiled with injured loyaltyFor Tristram in a banishment like this,With a whole world to shine in save Cornwall,And Cornwall the whole world; and if he sighed,He may have sighed apart, and harmlessly,Perceiving in this Isolt a continenceToo sure for even a fool to ponder twice,A little for himself. They faced each otherOn a stone bench with vine-leaves over them,And flowers too many for them to see before them,And trees around them with birds singing in them,And God’s whole gift of summer given in vainFor one who could feel coming in her heartA longer winter than any Breton sunShould ever warm away, and with it coming,Could laugh to hear Gawaine making her laugh.
“I have been seeing you for some hours,” he said,“And I appraise you as all wonderful.The longer I observe and scrutinize you, The less do I become a king of wordsTo bring them into action. They retreatAnd hide themselves, leaving me as I mayTo make the best of a disordered remnant,Unworthy of allegiance to your faceAnd all the rest of you. You are supremeIn a deceit that says fragilityWhere there is nothing fragile. You have eyesThat almost weep for grief, seeing from heavenHow trivial and how tragic a small placeThis earth is, and so make a sort of heavenWhere they are seen. Your hair, if shorn and woven,The which may God forbid, would then becomeA nameless cloth of gold whiter than gold,Imprisoning light captured from paradise.Your small ears are two necessary leavesOf living alabaster never of earth,Whereof the flower that is your face is made,And is a paradisal triumph also—Along with your gray eyes and your gold hairThat is not gold. Only God knows, who made it,What color it is exactly. I don’t know.The rest of you I dare not estimate, Saving your hands and feet, which authorizeA period of some leisure for the LordOn high for their ineffable execution.Your low voice tells how bells of singing goldWould sound through twilight over silent water.Yourself is a celestial emanationCompounded of a whiteness and a warmthNot yet so near to heaven, or far from it,As not to leave men wiser for their dreamsAnd distances in apprehending you.Your signal imperfection, probably,Is in your peril of having everything,And thereby overwhelming with perfectionA man who sees so much of it at once,And says no more of it than I am saying.I shall begin today to praise the Lord,I think, for sparing an unworthy heartAn early wound that once might not have healed.If there lives in me more than should be told,Not for the world’s last oyster would I tell itTo the last ear alive, surely not yours.”
“If you were one of the last two alive,The other might make of you the last,” she said, Laughing. “You are not making love to me,Gawaine, and if you were it wouldn’t matter.Your words, and even with edges a bit wornBy this time, will do service for years yet.You will not find that you have dulled them muchOn me, and you will have them with you always.”
“I don’t know now whether I am or not,”Said he, “and say with you it wouldn’t matter.For Tristram, off his proper suavity,Has fervor to slice whales; and I, from childhood,Have always liked this world. No, I should sayThat I was covering lightly under truthA silent lie that may as well be silent;For I can see more care than happinessIn those two same gray eyes that I was praising.”
“Gawaine,” she said, turning the same gray eyesOn his and holding them, with hers half laughing,“Your fame is everywhere alike for lightness,And I am glad that you have not my heartTo be a burden for you on too longA journey, where you might find hearts of others Not half so burdensome. Do you like that?If you do not, say it was never said,And listen as if my words were bells of gold,Or what you will. You will be hanged some dayFor saying things, and I shall not be thereTo save you, saying how little you meant by them.You may be lighter than even your enemiesWould see you in their little scales of envy,Yet in your lightness, if I’m not a fool,There lives a troubled wonder for a fewYou care for. Now if two of them were here,Would you say what was best, in your reflection,And on your honor say no more of it,For one of them alone here to believeWhen Tristram goes with you to Camelot?While he is there, King Arthur, it appears,Will make of him a Knight of the Round Table—All which would be illustrious and delightfulEnough for me, if that were to be all.And though the world is in our confidence,Your honor as a man will forget that;And you will answer, wisely perhaps, or not,One question, which in brief is only this: What right name should an innocence like mineDeserve, if I believed he would come back?”She watched him with expectant eyes, wherefromThe ghost of humor suddenly had vanished.
Gawaine, who felt a soreness at his heartThat he had seldom felt there for anotherBefore, and only briefly for himself,Felt also a cloud coming in his eyes.“I can see only one thing to believe,”He said, believing almost he could see it,
“And that is, he will come—as he must come.Why should he not come back again, for you?Who in this world would not come back, for you!God’s life, dear lady, why should he not come back?”He cried, and with a full sincerityWhereat she closed her eyes and tried to speak,Despairingly, with pale and weary lipsThat would not speak until she made them speak.
“Gawaine,” she said, “you are not fooling me;And I should be a fool if hope remainedWithin me that you might be. You know truth As well as I do. He will not come back.King Mark will kill him.” For so long unspoken,She had believed those words were tamed in herEnough to be released and to returnTo the same cage there in her aching heartWhere they had lived and fought since yesterday.But when she felt them flying away from her,And heard them crying irretrievablyBetween her and Gawaine, and everywhere,Tears followed them until she felt at lastThe touch of Gawaine’s lips on her cold fingers,Kindly and light.
“No, Mark will hardly kill him,”He told her. Breathing hard and hesitating,He waited as a felon waits a whip,And went on with a fluent desperation:“Mark is in prison now—for forgeryOf the Pope’s name, by force of which TristramWas to go forth to fight the Saracens,And by safe inference to find a graveNot far ahead. Impossible, if you like,And awkward out of all ineptitude, And clumsy beyond credence, yet the truth,As the impossible so often is.In his unwinking hate he saw TristramToo near for easy vengeance, and so blunderedInto the trap that has him. This was notFor me to tell, and it is not for you,Upon your royal honor as a womanOf honor more than royal to reveal.Mercy compels me to forego my wordAnd to repeat the one right thing for youIn reason to believe. He will come back;And you, if you are wise—and you are thatBeyond the warrant of your sheltered years—Will find him wiser in his unworthiness,And worthier of your wisdom and your love,When this wild fire of what a man has notReveals at last, in embers all gone out,That which he had, and has, and may have always,To prize aright thereafter and to pray for.Out of my right I talk to you like this,And swear by heaven, since I have gone so far,That your worst inference here is not my knowledge.He may come back at once. If otherwise—well, He will come back with a new vision in himAnd a new estimation of God’s choice.I have told you what neither grief nor guileWould of themselves alone have wrung from me.The rest will be in you, you being yourself.”
“Yes, you have thrown your offices awayAnd you have left your honor for me to keep,”She said, and pressed his hands in gratitude.“Here it will be as safe as in the sea.I thank you, and believe you. Leave me hereAlone, to think; to think—and to believe.”She brushed her eyes and tried as if to smile,But had no smile in answer. For Gawaine,Infrequently in earnest, or sincereTo conscious inconvenience, was in love,Or thought he was, and would enjoy alone,Without a smile and as he might, the firstFamiliar pangs of his renunciation.
He wandered slowly downward to the shoreWhere he found Tristram, gazing at the shipWhich in the morning would be taking themTogether away from Brittany and Isolt Of the white hands to England, where Tristram,A knight only of Mark’s investitureToday, would there be one of the Round Table—So long the symbol of a world in order,Soon to be overthrown by love and fateAnd loyalty forsworn. Had Gawaine thenBeheld a cloud that was not yet in sight,There would have been more sorrow in his eyesFor time ahead of him than for time now,Or for himself. But where he saw no cloudThat might not be dissolved, and so in timeForgotten, there was no sorrow in his eyesFor time to come that would be longer coming,To him, than for the few magnanimous daysOf his remembrance of enforced eclipse.
“Tristram,” he said, “why in the name of GodAre you not looking at your garden now,And why are you not in it with your wife?I left her, after making love to herWith no progression of effect whatever,More than to make her laugh at me, and thenTo make her cry for you for going away. I said you would be coming back at once,And while I said it I heard pens in heavenScratching a doubtful evidence against me.”
Tristram, in indecision between angerDeserving no indulgence and surpriseRequiring less, scowled and laughed emptily:“Gawaine, if you were any one else aliveI might not always be at home to you,Or to your bland particularities.Why should a wedded exile hesitateIn his return to his own wife and garden?I know the picture that your folly drawsOf woe that is awaiting me in Cornwall,But we are going to Camelot, not to Cornwall.King Mark, with all his wealth of hate for me,Is not so rich and rotten and busy with itAs to be waiting everywhere at onceTo see me coming. He waits most in Cornwall,Preferring for mixed reasons of his ownNot frequently to shine far out of it.”
“He may not be so rotten as some whose namesHave fallen from my deciduous memory,” Gawaine said, with a shrug of helplessness,“But all the same, with Mark and his resourceIn England, your best way’s away from thereAs early and expeditiously as may be.Mark’s arm is not the only arm he uses;My fear for you is not my only fear.Fear for yourself in you may be as nothing,Which is commendable and rather commonIn Camelot, as fellows who read and writeAre not so rare there that we crown them for it.But there’s a fear more worthy than no fear,And it may be the best inheritanceOf luckless ones with surer sight than yours,And with perception more propheticalThan yours. I say this hoping it will hurt,But not offend. You see how lax I amWhen I’m away from royal discipline,And how forgetful of unspoken cautionI am when I’m afraid to be afraid.I thrust my head into the lion’s mouth,And if my head comes off, it will have done,For once if only once, the best it might.I doubt if there’s a man with eyes and ears Who is more sadly and forlornly certainOf what another’s wisdom—born of weakness,Like all born mortal attributes and errors—Is like to leave behind it of itselfIn you, when you have heard and hated it,But all the same, Tristram, if I were you,I’d sail away for Camelot tomorrow,And there be made a Knight of the Round Table;And then, being then a Knight of the Round Table,I should come back. I should come back at once.Now let the lion roar.”
He laid his handsOn Tristram’s iron shoulders, which he feltShaking under his touch, and with a smileOf unreturned affection walked awayIn silence to the ship. Tristram, alone,Moved heavily along the lonely shore,To seat himself alone upon a rockWhere long waves had been rolling in for ages,And would be rolling when no man or womanShould know or care to know whether or notTwo specks of life, in time so far forgotten As in remembrance never to have been,Were Tristram and Isolt—Isolt in Cornwall,Isolt of the wild frightened violet eyes,Isolt and her last look, Isolt of Ireland.Alone, he saw the slanting waves roll in,Each to its impotent annihilationIn a long wash of foam, until the soundBecome for him a warning and a torture,Like a malign reproof reiteratingIn vain its cold and only sound of doom.Then he arose, with his eyes gazing stillInto the north, till with his face turned inlandHe left the crested wash of those long wavesBehind him to fall always on that sand,And to sound always that one word—“Isolt.”
As if in undesigned obedienceTo Gawaine’s admonition, he went idlyAnd blindly back to the sun-flooded gardenWhere sat the white Isolt whose name was notThe name those waves, unceasing and unheard,Were sounding where they fell. Still as GawaineHad left her, Tristram found her. She looked up With a wan light of welcome flashing sadlyTo see him; and he knew that such a lightAs that could shine for him only from eyesWhere tears had been before it. They were notThere now, and there was now no need of themTo make him ask, in a self-smiting rageOf helpless pity, if such a love as hersMight not unshared be nearer to God’s need,In His endurance of a blinder Fate,Than a love shared asunder, but still shared,By two for doom elected and withheldApart for time to play with. Once he had seen,Imploring it, the light of a far wisdomTingeing with hope the night of time between,But there was no light now. There might be peace,Awaiting them where they were done with time—Time for so long disowning both of them,And slowly the soul first, saving the restTo mock the soul—but there was no peace now.When there was no time left for peace on earth,After farewells and vestiges forgotten,There might be time enough for peace somewhere;But that was all far off, and in a darkness Blacker than any night that ever veiledA stormy chaos of the foaming leaguesThat roared unseen between him and Cornwall.
All this was in his mind, as it was thereAlways, if not thought always, when she spoke:“Tristram, you are not angry or distressedIf I am not so happy here todayAs you have seen me here before sometimes,And may see me again. Tomorrow morningIf I am here, I shall be here alone.I wonder for how long.”
“For no day longerThan I’m away,” he said, and held her faceBetween his hands. “Then, if you like, my child,Your wonder may come after your surpriseThat I should come so soon. There’s no long voyageFrom here to Camelot, and I’ve no long fearKing Arthur will engage himself for everIn making me a Knight of the Round Table.King Mark . . .”
“And why do you mention him to me!”She cried, forgetful of her long command Of what she had concealed and stifled from him.“I should have said King Mark was the last nameOf all, or all but one, that I should hearFrom you today. Were there no better days!”
“King Mark says I’m a knight, but not King Arthur—Not yet—was all that I was going to say;And I am not saying that because I love him—Only that you should hear the differenceFrom me, and have at least some joy of it.I shall not feel Mark’s sword upon my shoulderAgain until I feel the edge of it;And that will not befall in Camelot,Or wheresoever I shall carry with meOne of these arms that are not useless yet.”
“And where do you plan next to carry themTo prove yourself a Knight of the Round Table?”She said, and with a flame filling her eyesAs if a soul behind them were on fire.“What next one among thieves, with Griffon gone,Will be the nearest to your heart’s desire?”
If her lip curled a little in asking that,Tristram was looking down and did not see it. “Where do I plan to carry my two armsAway with me from Camelot, do you ask?My purpose is to bring them here with meTo Brittany—both of them, God willing so.You are not here with me, but in the pastThis afternoon, and that’s not well for you.When I’m an exile, as you know I am,Where would your fancy drive me, if not here?All that was long ago.”
“So long ago,Tristram, that you have lived for nothing elseThan for a long ago that follows youTo sleep, and has a life as long as yours.Sometimes I wish that heaven had let you have her,And given me back all that was left of you,To teach and heal. I might be sure of that.Or, to be sure of nothing, if only sure,Would be a better way for both of usThan to be here together as we have beenSince Gawaine came from Cornwall in that ship.”
“From Cornwall? Are you dreaming when you say it?”He questioned her as if he too were dreaming That she had said it; and his heart was cold.“From Cornwall? Did you not hear Gawaine sayingThat he had come for me from Camelot?Do you see Arthur, who loves Mark almostAs hard as I do, sending ships for meFrom Cornwall? If you can see things like that,You are seeing more of that which never wasThan will be needful where we need so muchRight seeing to see ourselves. If we see others,Let us, for God’s sake, see them where they are—Not where they were. The past, or part of it,Is dead—or we that would be living in itHad best be dead. Why do you say to meThat Gawaine came from Cornwall in that ship?”
There was another gleam now in her eyesThan yesterday had been imaginableFor Tristram, even had he been strangling herIn some imagined madness. “What?” she said;“Did I say Cornwall? If I did, perhapsIt was because I thought the sound of itWould make you happy. So far as I’m aware,You have not heard that name in a long time. Did I say Cornwall? If I did, forgive me.I should have said that I said Camelot.Not the same place at all.”
Dimly aliveTo knowledge of a naked heart before him,For him to soothe and comfort with cold lies,He knew that lies could have no cooling virtue,Even though they might be falling on this heartAs fast and unregarded as rain fallsUpon an angry sea. Anger so new,And unforetold, was hardly to be knownAt first for what it was, or recognizedWith more than silence. If he recognized it,Before him in a garden full of sunshine,He saw it as a shadow in the nightBetween him and two dark and frightened eyesAnd the last look that he had seen in them,With music shrieking always in the moonlightAbove him, and below him the long soundOf Cornish waves that would be sounding always,Foaming on those cold rocks. For a long timeHe saw not the white face accusing him, And heard no sound that others might have heardWhere there was once a garden for Isolt—Isolt of the white hands, who said no moreTo him that afternoon. He left her there,And like a man who was no longer there,He stared over the wall, and over waterWhere sunlight flashed upon a million waves,Only to see through night, and through moonlight,The coming after of a darker nightThan he could see, and of a longer nightThan there was time to fear. Assured of nothing,He was too sure of all to tell more liesIn idle mercy to an angry womanWhose unavailing alchemy of hopeNo longer, or not now, found love in pity.
But with no more display of desolationThan any one’s wife among a thousand wivesMight then have made, foreseeing nothing worseThan to be left alone for no long time,She met him without anger in the morning,And in the morning said farewell to him,With trumpets blowing and hundreds cheering him; And from a moving shore she waved at himOne of her small white hands, and smiled at him,That all should see her smiling when he sailedAway from her for Camelot that morning.Gawaine, recovered early from a woundWithin a soon-recuperating heart,Waved a gay hat on board for two gray eyesOn shore; and as the ship went farther out,The sound of trumpets blowing golden triumphRang faintly and more faintly as it went,Farther and always farther, till no soundWas heard, and there was nothing to be seenBut a ship sailing always to the north,And slowly showing smaller to the sight.
She watched again from the same window nowWhere she had watched and waited for so longFor the slow coming of another shipThat came at last. What other ship was coming,And after what long time and change, if ever,No seer or wizard of the future knew,She thought, and Tristram least of all. Far off,The ship was now a speck upon the water, And soon, from where she was, would not be that,And soon was not; and there was nothing leftThat day, for her, in the world anywhere,But white birds always flying, and still flying,And always the white sunlight on the sea.