Classic Poem

And thus she leaves me: steals away at dawn,
With needless schemes and childish artifice,
To meet her rather pinchbeck Romeo
“They loved as boy and girl, then wilful Fate
Severed in sport their adolescent years,
But now unites them, ne'er to part again”!
All most romantic; as romances go
In this good nineteenth century of ours,
A theme for Monsieur Guy de Maupassant
Or some such Frenchman of the fleshly school,
The scribes of glorified adulteries,—
But has its dull prosaic side as well.
 The details in the manner most approved:
She leaves her jewels, (hers as well as mine,
Which seems to me the opposite of wise,
But always done in novels, I believe),
And on my table just a note, that runs,—
“This life has been a hell for both of us,
I cannot bear it longer, so I go.
Good-bye;—we both have something to forgive.”
(All as it should be,—end of Volume Two.)
 But stay, to speak in sober earnestness,—
For after all, it has its serious side,
This flight of hers,—I'm willing to believe
That high-flown letter honestly composed
Well, when a clever girl of twenty-one,
For her own reasons, be they good or bad,—
To help her father, pay her brother's debts,—
Marries a man of nearly thrice her age,
A man with something of a well-known past,
What upon earth does she expect or want?
The situation, surely, scarce admits
Of poetry; you hardly can demand
In such a case to meet the Magic Prince,
“And so live happy ever afterwards,”
Just like the tag that rounds the fairy-tale.
“This life has been a hell for both of us.”—
What, in God's name, did she expect or want?
Anything money could obtain was hers;
Society, with freedom to select
Friends of her own, to travel where she wished,—
London or country, England or abroad;—
What more could any woman fairly ask?
I'm sure enough most women that one knows
Would give an eye for half of such a hell.
 Perhaps I spoke in satire now and then,—
But what are words?—and anything to break
The ice of that impenetrable calm,
To bring the angry crimson to her cheek,
To move the curves about her silent mouth:
Just as I know one sometimes feels impelled
Passing the lilies near a garden walk,
To cut the tallest flower to the ground,
Simply because it stands so white and still
And irritates one somehow;—as we're told
The good King Arthur bored his Guinevere.
(And now she's Guinevere,—with what a cur
To pose as Lancelot! what an Arthur I!)
Not that I ever struck her. . . . Well … a push,
Once,—when she found that letter on the floor,—
And if she needs must bruise her temple vein
(How delicate and blue the veining was,
Just like a touch of Cosway at his best)
Against the caryatid by the fire,
Was I to blame? … the purest accident.
 We rubbed on very fairly till he came,
That cousin, with his damned Italian eyes,
Italian airs and graces, and his voice
Worth, if he trained it, two pound ten a week,—
“ Sogno d'amor ,” and all the rest of it:—
A vulgar hound I thought him, from the first.
And now she's gone to join him, and to taste
The raptures of a skulking honeymoon
In Norman country town, on Breton coast,
And there await the probable divorce.
Divorce! no fear! why, Madam, we are one
Till death do part us, Mother Church has said:
And what if I am good for twenty years?
How will the long-drawn honeymoon look then
To worn-out woman, discontented man?
And during all those years of pinch and shame
To touch my money you must beg from me.
 But when I die the jointure tumbles in?
O then she's welcome to the settlements,
For then she may enjoy them if she can:
They're none too large; I always had in mind
The chance of some such escapade as this,
(The picture even flashed across my eyes
Just as the parson said the binding words)
And so my lawyer beat the jointure down.
Who was it said? … ah! Juvenal I think,—
One's classics get so rusty,—“after all
The most unpleasant side of being poor
Is where it makes you look ridiculous:”
She soon will have a chance of testing that,
If true or not; the hundred petty slights,
The butcher's swelling clamour for his bill,
The wretched rent unpaid, the shabby clothes
For what has friend Lothario got a year?
Three hundred? barely;—not a sixpence more,
And tastes to squander twenty times as much:
Rather a drop from fifty thousand, eh?
“ Sogno d'amor ” will hardly sound so well
Racked on the wheezy lodging-house spinet,—
Half groan, half tinkle, discords high and low,
Lacking the indispensable B flat,—
As murmured through a screen of hothouse flowers,
And rippling down her Steinway's silver scale
Besides, she had an inborn taste for wealth
Not in a mean or ostentatious sense,
But liked the large existence, liked the power
To give without contriving, liked the feel
Of rich old stuffs, the light of precious stones.
“ A hell ,” indeed! she'll find in years to come
New Circles, lower than she ever guessed.
 So far for her: and how about myself?
It's often been my fancy to devise
A kind of mental ledger, side by side
Debit and Credit, such account of life
As strikes one at the moment, good or bad.
 First, then, for Debtor … Well, it's hard to say
What's lost in her … We'll set it down as x
To Creditor, beyond all question, falls
The getting rid of all her kith and kin:
Her half-pay father, angular and dry,
All vile cheroots and prosy Indian lies,—
Of how the tigress charged his elephant,
And how the Sepoys ran at Muddlepore
When he commanded:— he will not be missed:
And then her brother, infinitely worse,
The Lovelace of his marching regiment,
Primed with a store of third-hand racing news,
And ever on the prowl for fifty pounds,
Snatched as a greedy mongrel grabs a bone:—
Yes, mongrels, that's their breeding, first and last,
Uncle and aunt, and pauper hangers-on,
A pack of mongrels all,—except herself,
To do her justice, and myself as well;—
I always looked for quality, be sure,
In horse or woman either … well … what next?
There's plenty yet to go to Creditor:
Health? wonderful, they say, for sixty-three,
Merely a sharp reminder now and then
Of Gout the Avenger: just as quick to pounce
If Ravigotte gets careless;—and indeed
The race of cooks will soon become extinct,
So different from thirty years ago!
And wine as well,—that '74 to-night
(Perrier-Jouet, beat it if you can)
It hasn't quite the flavour others had:
It's curious, that falling-off in things,
Just when one's taste is keenest.
Sport? of course
Though racing isn't what it used to be
In West Australian's or The Dutchman's days,
And even later: what a thrill it was
To watch your colours flashing round the turn,
With Fordham lying third, and sitting still,
And then—“Won cleverly by half a length”!
Now all is altered, half one's friends are dead,
And half the rest are bankrupt: such a mob
Of noisy youngsters jostling near the rails,—
So somehow, for the last ten years or so
I've seldom been to see my horses run
 Hunting? a taste one never fears to lose;
But yet,—it's arrant nonsense to compare
The kind of sport they show you nowadays
With Melton in the fifties: and besides
Of late the weathercock seems glued to east,
And what with months of frost, and weeks of fog,
And hopeless dearth of horses up to weight
With pleasant manners—I'm disposed to doubt
If such a game is worth the candle:—still
There's plenty more to reckon; works of art,
(Though I admit I've grown a trifle tired
Of Christie's),—books,—and half a hundred more.
 Now close accounts: why surely Credit wins?
But stop a moment,—sitting by the fire,
Among my own Penates, I forget
To set to Debtor what may balance all,—
The cursed gossip of the world outside.
 It's easy to imagine: in a club
The sudden silence of the window-groups,
The quickly-whispered “Hush!”, or “Here he comes!”
That's bad enough, but still, if that were all …
Men make allowances, or if they don't,
God knows they ought,—why, which of them but owns
A skeleton that waits a chance to burst
Its cupboard,—Gouthière or Sheraton,
But hides the tête macabre no less for that?
 Ay, but the women! how the vulture heads
Will cluster round the scandal! one, perhaps
Faintly excusing,—“Come, when such a child
Is mated with a worn-out debauchee,”—
(Yes, that's the phrase to fit your humble servant),
“And loathes her fetters, what can you expect?
He is the sinner, she the sinned against.”
(And yet those worthy dames in some respects
Are larger-minded than one might suppose;
For if by chance the aforesaid debauchee
Beseeches them to share his fatted calf,
No principle compels them to refuse.)
And then another,—“When a man like this
Marries a girl his granddaughter in age
And trouble follows, let him thank himself:
Three years ago, I think, the wedding was;
I said it, I remember, at the time,
The fool of fools is still the gray-haired fool”
 Ah! there's the fatal sting,—a man whose life
Has been, not highly wise or virtuous,—
No patriot, no great philanthropist,
I'm well aware of that,—but all the same
So ordered that to all the lookers-on
It seemed to carry out a settled scheme,
To reach a fixed ideal of its own,—
For such a man,—on dealings of the world
A known authority, a final judge
To arbitrate on points of social law,—
Now to be gibbeted as utter fool,
A laughing-stock for every idiot's tongue!
 I swear to God, if ever I should live
To know her dying where a lifted hand
Would save her,—if I saw her eye to eye
Crawl starving to my feet in beggar's rags,
I'd not forgive her that . . . . . . . . .