Aldrich Thomas Bailey
The Sisters' Tragedy, with Other Poems, Lyrical and Dramatic

  A lover by imperial ukase!
  Fate said her word—I chanced to be the man!
  If that grenade the crazy student threw
  Had not spared me, as well as spared the Tsar,
  All this would not have happened. I'd have been
  A hero, but quite safe from her romance.
  She takes me for a hero—think of that!
  Now by our holy Lady of Kazan,
  When I have finished pitying myself,
  I'll pity her.

SHE.

Oh no; begin with her;
She needs it most.

HE.

                      At her door lies the blame,
  Whatever falls. She, with a single word,
  With half a tear, had stopt it at the first,
  This cruel juggling with poor human hearts.

SHE.

The Tsar commanded it—you said the Tsar.

HE.

  The Tsar does what she wills—God fathoms why.
  Were she his mistress, now! but there's no snow
  Whiter within the bosom of a cloud,
  Nor colder either. She is very haughty,
  For all her fragile air of gentleness;
  With something vital in her, like those flowers
  That on our desolate steppes outlast the year.
  Resembles you in some things. It was that
  First made us friends. I do her justice, see!
  For we were friends in that smooth surface way
  We Russians have imported out of France.
  Alas! from what a blue and tranquil heaven
  This bolt fell on me! After these two years,
  My suit with Ossip Leminoff at end,
  The old wrong righted, the estates restored,
  And my promotion, with the ink not dry!
  Those fairies which neglected me at birth
  Seemed now to lavish all good gifts on me—
  Gold roubles, office, sudden dearest friends.
  The whole world smiled; then, as I stooped to taste
  The sweetest cup, freak dashed it from my lip.
  This very night—just think, this very night—
  I planned to come and beg of you the alms
  I dared not ask for in my poverty.
  I thought me poor then. How stript am I now!
  There's not a ragged mendicant one meets
  Along the Nevski Prospekt but has leave
  To tell his love, and I have not that right!
  Pauline Pavlovna, why do you stand there
  Stark as a statue, with no word to say?

SHE.

  Because this thing has frozen up my heart.
  I think that there is something killed in me,
  A dream that would have mocked all other bliss.
  What shall I say? What would you have me say?

HE.

If it be possible, the word of words!

SHE, VERY SLOWLY.

  Well, then—I love you. I may tell you so
  This once, . . . and then forever hold my peace.
  We cannot stay here longer unobserved.
  No—do not touch me! but stand further off,
  And seem to laugh, as if we jested—eyes,
  Eyes everywhere! Now turn your face away . . .
  I love you.

HE.

               With such music in my ears
  I would death found me. It were sweet to die
  Listening! You love me—prove it.

SHE.

Prove it—how?
I prove it saying it. How else?

HE.

                                     Pauline,
  I have three things to choose from; you shall choose:
  This marriage, or Siberia, or France.
  The first means hell; the second, purgatory;
  The third—with you—were nothing less than heaven!

SHE, STARTING.

How dared you even dream it!

HE.

                                I was mad.
  This business has touched me in the brain.
  Have patience! the calamity's so new.
  (Pauses.)
  There is a fourth way; but that gate is shut
  To brave men who hold life a thing of God.

SHE.

Yourself spoke there; the rest was not of you.

HE.

Oh, lift me to your level! So I'm safe.
What's to be done?

SHE.

There must be some path out.
Perhaps the Emperor—

HE.

                         Not a ray of hope!
  His mind is set on this with that insistence
  Which seems to seize on all match-making folk.
  The fancy bites them, and they straight go mad.

SHE.

Your father's friend, the Metropolitan—
A word from him . . .

HE.

                          Alas, he too is bitten!
  Gray-haired, gray-hearted, worldly wise, he sees
  This marriage makes me the Tsar's protege,
  And opens every door to preference.

SHE.

  Think while I think. There surely is some key
  Unlocks the labyrinth, could we but find it.
  Nastasia!

HE.

What! beg life of her? Not I.

SHE.

  Beg love. She is a woman, young, perhaps
  Untouched as yet of this too poisonous air.
  Were she told all, would she not pity us?
  For if she love you, as I think she must,
  Would not some generous impulse stir in her,
  Some latent, unsuspected spark illume?
  How love thrills even commonest girl-clay,
  Ennobling it an instant, if no more!
  You said that she is proud; then touch her pride,
  And turn her into marble with the touch.
  But yet the gentler passion is the stronger.
  Go to her, tell her, in some tenderest phrase
  That will not hurt too much—ah, but 'twill hurt!—
  Just how your happiness lies in her hand
  To make or mar for all time; hint, not say,
  Your heart is gone from you, and you may find—

HE.

  A casemate in St. Peter and St. Paul
  For, say, a month; then some Siberian town.
  Not this way lies escape. At my first word
  That sluggish Tartar blood would turn to fire
  In every vein.

SHE.

                  How blindly you read her,
  Or any woman! Yes, I know. I grant
  How small we often seem in our small world
  Of trivial cares and narrow precedents—
  Lacking that wide horizon stretched for men—
  Capricious, spiteful, frightened at a mouse;
  But when it comes to suffering mortal pangs,
  The weakest of us measures pulse with you.

HE.

  Yes, you, not she. If she were at your height!
  But there's no martyr wrapt in HER rose flesh.
  There should have been; for Nature gave you both
  The self-same purple for your eyes and hair,
  The self-same Southern music to your lips,
  Fashioned you both, as 'twere, in the same mould,
  Yet failed to put the soul in one of you!
  I know her wilful—her light head quite turned
  In this court atmosphere of flatteries;
  A Moscow beauty, petted and spoiled there,
  And since spoiled here; as soft as swan's down now,
  With words like honey melting from the comb,
  But being crossed, vindictive, cruel, cold.
  I fancy her, between two rosy smiles,
  Saying, "Poor fellow, in the Nertchinsk mines!"
  That is the sum of her.

SHE.

                           You know her not.
  Count Sergius Pavlovich, you said no mask
  Could hide the soul, yet how you have mistaken
  The soul these two months—and the face to-night!