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Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Aurora Leigh: Book Three
Work rating: Medium

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What business had the baby to cry there?


I tell her story and grow passionate.
She, Marian, did not tell it so, but used
Meek words that made no wonder of herself
For being so sad a creature. "Mister Leigh
"Considered truly that such things should change.
"They will, in heaven—but meantime, on the earth,
"There`s none can like a nettle as a pink,
"Except himself. We`re nettles, some of us,
"And give offence by the act of springing up;
"And, if we leave the damp side of the wall,
"The hoes, of course, are on us." So she said.
Her father earned his life by random jobs
Despised by steadier workmen—keeping swine
On commons, picking hops, or hurrying on
The harvest at wet seasons, or, at need,
Assisting the Welsh drovers, when a drove
Of startled horses plunged into the mist
Below the mountain-road, and sowed the wind
With wandering neighings. In between the gaps
Of such irregular work he drank and slept,
And cursed his wife because, the pence being out,
She could not buy more drink. At which she turned
(The worm), and beat her baby in revenge
For her own broken heart. There`s not a crime
But takes its proper change out still in crime
If once rung on the counter of this world:
Let sinners look to it.


                         Yet the outcast child,
For whom the very mother`s face forwent
The mother`s special patience, lived and grew;
Learnt early to cry low, and walk alone,
With that pathetic vacillating roll
Of the infant body on the uncertain feet
(The earth being felt unstable ground so soon),
At which most women`s arms unclose at once
With irrepressive instinct. Thus, at three,
This poor weaned kid would run off from the fold,
This babe would steal off from the mother`s chair,
And, creeping through the golden walls of gorse,
Would find some keyhole toward the secresy
Of Heaven`s high blue, and, nestling down, peer out—
Oh, not to catch the angels at their games,—
She had never heard of angels,—but to gaze
She knew not why, to see she knew not what,
A-hungering outward from the barren earth
For something like a joy. She liked, she said,
To dazzle black her sight against the sky,
For then, it seemed, some grand blind Love came down,
And groped her out, and clasped her with a kiss;
She learnt God that way, and was beat for it
Whenever she went home,—yet came again,
As surely as the trapped hare, getting free,
Returns to his form. This grand blind Love, she said,
This skyey father and mother both in one,
Instructed her and civilised her more
Than even Sunday-school did afterward,
To which a lady sent her to learn books
And sit upon a long bench in a row
With other children. Well, she laughed sometimes
To see them laugh and laugh and maul their texts;
But ofter she was sorrowful with noise
And wondered if their mothers beat them hard
That ever they should laugh so. There was one
She loved indeed,—Rose Bell, a seven years` child,
So pretty and clever, who read syllables
When Marian was at letters; she would laugh
At nothing—hold your finger up, she laughed,
Then shook her curls down over eyes and mouth
To hide her make-mirth from the school-master:
And Rose`s pelting glee, as frank as rain
On cherry-blossoms, brightened Marian too,
To see another merry whom she loved.
She whispered once (the children side by side,
With mutual arms entwined about their necks)
"Your mother lets you laugh so?" "Ay," said Rose,
"She lets me. She was dug into the ground
Six years since, I being but a yearling wean.
Such mothers let us play and lose our time,
And never scold nor beat us! Don`t you wish
You had one like that?" There, Marian breaking off
Looked suddenly in my face. "Poor Rose," said she,
"I heard her laugh last night in Oxford Street.
I`d pour out half my blood to stop that laugh.
Poor Rose, poor Rose!" said Marian.


                                       She resumed.
It tried her, when she had learnt at Sunday-school
What God was, what He wanted from us all,
And how in choosing sin we vexed the Christ,
To go straight home and hear her father pull
The Name down on us from the thunder-shelf,
Then drink away his soul into the dark
From seeing judgment. Father, mother, home,
Were God and heaven reversed to her: the more
She knew of Right, the more she guessed their wrong:
Her price paid down for knowledge, was to know
The vileness of her kindred: through her heart,
Her filial and tormented heart, henceforth,
They struck their blows at virtue. Oh, `tis hard
To learn you have a father up in heaven
By a gathering certain sense of being, on earth,
Still worse than orphaned: `tis too heavy a grief,
The having to thank God for such a joy!


And so passed Marian`s life from year to year.
Her parents took her with them when they tramped,
Dodged lanes and heaths, frequented towns and fairs,
And once went farther and saw Manchester,
And once the sea, that blue end of the world,
That fair scroll-finis of a wicked book,—
And twice a prison,—back at intervals,
Returning to the hills. Hills draw like heaven,
And stronger sometimes, holding out their hands
To pull you from the vile flats up to them.
And though perhaps these strollers still strolled back,
As sheep do, simply that they knew the way,
They certainly felt bettered unaware
Emerging from the social smut of towns
To wipe their feet clean on the mountain turf.
In which long wanderings, Marian lived and learned,
Endured and learned. The people on the roads
Would stop and ask her why her eyes outgrew
Her cheeks, and if she meant to lodge the birds
In all that hair; and then they lifted her,
The miller in his cart, a mile or twain,
The butcher`s boy on horseback. Often too
The pedlar stopped, and tapped her on the head
With absolute forefinger, brown and ringed,
And asked if peradventure she could read,
And when she answered "ay," would toss her down
Some stray odd volume from his heavy pack,
A Thomson`s Seasons, mulcted of the Spring,
Or half a play of Shakespeare`s, torn across
(She had to guess the bottom of a page
By just the top sometimes,—as difficult,
As, sitting on the moon, to guess the earth!),
Or else a sheaf of leaves (for that small Ruth`s
Small gleanings) torn out from the heart of books,
From Churchyard Elegies and Edens Lost,
From Burns, and Bunyan, Selkirk, and Tom Jones,—
`Twas somewhat hard to keep the things distinct,
And oft the jangling influence jarred the child
Like looking at a sunset full of grace
Through a pothouse window while the drunken oaths
Went on behind her. But she weeded out
Her book-leaves, threw away the leaves that hurt
(First tore them small, that none should find a word),
And made a nosegay of the sweet and good
To fold within her breast, and pore upon
At broken moments of the noontide glare,
When leave was given her to untie her cloak
And rest upon the dusty highway`s bank
From the road`s dust: or oft, the journey done,
Some city friend would lead her by the hand
To hear a lecture at an institute.
And thus she had grown, this Marian Erle of ours,
To no book-learning,—she was ignorant
Of authors,—not in earshot of the things
Outspoken o`er the heads of common men
By men who are uncommon,—but within
The cadenced hum of such, and capable
Of catching from the fringes of the wing
Some fragmentary phrases, here and there,
Of that fine music,—which, being carried in
To her soul, had reproduced itself afresh
In finer motions of the lips and lids.


She said, in speaking of it, "If a flower
Were thrown you out of heaven at intervals,
You`d soon attain to a trick of looking up,—
And so with her." She counted me her years,
Till I felt old; and then she counted me
Her sorrowful pleasures, till I felt ashamed.
She told me she was fortunate and calm
On such and such a season, sat and sewed,
With no one to break up her crystal thoughts,
While rhymes from lovely poems span around
Their ringing circles of ecstatic tune,
Beneath the moistened finger of the Hour.
Her parents called her a strange, sickly child,
Not good for much, and given to sulk and stare,
And smile into the hedges and the clouds,
And tremble if one shook her from her fit
By any blow, or word even. Out-door jobs
Went ill with her, and household quiet work
She was not born to. Had they kept the north,
They might have had their pennyworth out of her,
Like other parents, in the factories
(Your children work for you, not you for them,
Or else they better had been choked with air
The first breath drawn); but, in this tramping life,
Was nothing to be done with such a child
But tramp and tramp. And yet she knitted hose
Not ill, and was not dull at needlework;
And all the country people gave her pence
For darning stockings past their natural age,
And patching petticoats from old to new,
And other light work done for thrifty wives.


One day, said Marian—the sun shone that day—
Her mother had been badly beat, and felt
The bruises sore about her wretched soul
(That must have been): she came in suddenly,
And snatching in a sort of breathless rage
Her daughter`s headgear comb, let down the hair
Upon her like a sudden waterfall,
Then drew her drenched and passive by the arm
Outside the hut they lived in. When the child
Could clear her blinded face from all that stream
Of tresses . . . there, a man stood, with beast`s eyes
That seemed as they would swallow her alive
Complete in body and spirit, hair and all,—
And burning stertorous breath that hurt her cheek,
He breathed so near. The mother held her tight,
Saying hard between her teeth—"Why wench, why wench,
The squire speaks to you now—the squire`s too good:
He means to set you up, and comfort us.
Be mannerly at least." The child turned round
And looked up piteous in the mother`s face
(Be sure that mother`s death-bed will not want
Another devil to damn, than such a look),
"Oh, mother!" then, with desperate glance to heaven,
"God, free me from my mother," she shrieked out,
"These mothers are too dreadful." And, with force
As passionate as fear, she tore her hands,
Like lilies from the rocks, from hers and his,
And sprang down, bounded headlong down the steep,
Away from both—away, if possible,
As far as God,—away! They yelled at her,
As famished hounds at a hare. She heard them yell;
She felt her name hiss after her from the hills,
Like shot from guns. On, on. And now she had cast
The voices off with the uplands. On. Mad fear
Was running in her feet and killing the ground;
The white roads curled as if she burnt them up,
The green fields melted, wayside trees fell back
To make room for her. Then her head grew vexed;
Trees, fields, turned on her and ran after her;
She heard the quick pants of the hills behind,
Their keen air pricked her neck: she had lost her feet,
Could run no more, yet somehow went as fast,
The horizon red `twixt steeples in the east
So sucked her forward, forward, while her heart
Kept swelling, swelling, till it swelled so big
It seemed to fill her body,—when it burst
And overflowed the world and swamped the light;
"And now I am dead and safe," thought Marian Erle—
She had dropped, she had fainted.


                                    As the sense returned,
The night had passed—not life`s night. She was `ware
Of heavy tumbling motions, creaking wheels,
The driver shouting to the lazy team
That swung their rankling bells against her brain,
While, through the waggon`s coverture and chinks,
The cruel yellow morning pecked at her
Alive or dead upon the straw inside,—
At which her soul ached back into the dark
And prayed, "no more of that." A waggoner
Had found her in a ditch beneath the moon,
As white as moonshine save for the oozing blood.
At first he thought her dead; but when he had wiped
The mouth and heard it sigh, he raised her up,
And laid her in his waggon in the straw,
And so conveyed her to the distant town
To which his business called himself, and left
That heap of misery at the hospital.


She stirred;—the place seemed new and strange as death.
The white strait bed, with others strait and white,
Like graves dug side by side at measured lengths,
And quiet people walking in and out
With wonderful low voices and soft steps
And apparitional equal care for each,
Astonished her with order, silence, law.
And when a gentle hand held out a cup,
She took it, as you do at sacrament,
Half awed, half melted,—not being used, indeed,
To so much love as makes the form of love
And courtesy of manners. Delicate drinks
And rare white bread, to which some dying eyes
Were turned in observation. O my God,
How sick we must be, ere we make men just!
I think it frets the saints in heaven to see
How many desolate creatures on the earth
Have learnt the simple dues of fellowship
And social comfort, in a hospital,
As Marian did. She lay there, stunned, half tranced,
And wished, at intervals of growing sense,
She might be sicker yet, if sickness made
The world so marvellous kind, the air so hushed,
And all her wake-time quiet as a sleep;
For now she understood (as such things were)
How sickness ended very oft in heaven
Among the unspoken raptures:—yet more sick,
And surelier happy. Then she dropped her lids,
And, folding up her hands as flowers at night,
Would lose no moment of the blessed time.


She lay and seethed in fever many weeks,
But youth was strong and overcame the test;
Revolted soul and flesh were reconciled
And fetched back to the necessary day
And daylight duties. She could creep about
The long bare rooms, and stare out drearily
From any narrow window on the street,
Till some one who had nursed her as a friend
Said coldly to her, as an enemy,
"She had leave to go next week, being well enough,"
(While only her heart ached). "Go next week," thought she:
"Next week! how would it be with her next week,
Let out into that terrible street alone
Among the pushing people, . . . to go . . . where?"


One day, the last before the dreaded last,
Among the convalescents, like herself
Prepared to go next morning, she sat dumb,
And heard half absently the women talk,—
How one was famished for her baby`s cheeks,
"The little wretch would know her! a year old
And lively, like his father!"—one was keen
To get to work, and fill some clamorous mouths;
And one was tender for her dear goodman
Who had missed her sorely,—and one, querulous . . .
"Would pay backbiting neighbours who had dared
To talk about her as already dead,"—
And one was proud . . . "and if her sweetheart Luke
Had left her for a ruddier face than hers
(The gossip would be seen through at a glance),
Sweet riddance of such sweethearts—let him hang!
`Twere good to have been sick for such an end."


And while they talked, and Marian felt the worse
For having missed the worst of all their wrongs,
A visitor was ushered through the wards
And paused among the talkers. "When he looked
It was as if he spoke, and when he spoke
He sang perhaps," said Marian; "could she tell?
She only knew" (so much she had chronicled,
As seraphs might the making of the sun)
"That he who came and spake was Romney Leigh,
And then and there she saw and heard him first."


And when it was her turn to have the face
Upon her, all those buzzing pallid lips
Being satisfied with comfort—when he changed
To Marian, saying "And you? you`re going, where?"—
She, moveless as a worm beneath a stone
Which some one`s stumbling foot has spurned aside,
Writhed suddenly, astonished with the light,
And, breaking into sobs, cried "Where I go?
None asked me till this moment. Can I say
Where I go,—when it has not seemed worth while
To God Himself, who thinks of every one,
To think of me and fix where I shall go?"


"So young," he gently asked her, "you have lost
Your father and your mother?"


                                "Both," she said,
"Both lost! my father was burnt up with gin
Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.
My mother sold me to a man last month,
And so my mother`s lost, `tis manifest.
And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,
As if I had caught sight of the fire of hell
Through some wild gap (she was my mother, sir),
It seems I shall be lost too, presently,
And so we end, all three of us."


                                   "Poor child,"
He said,—with such a pity in his voice,
It soothed her more than her own tears,—"poor child!
`Tis simple that betrayal by mother`s love
Should bring despair of God`s too. Yet be taught,
He`s better to us than many mothers are,
And children cannot wander beyond reach
Of the sweep of his white raiment. Touch and hold!
And if you weep still, weep where John was laid
While Jesus loved him."


                         "She could say the words,"
She told me, "exactly as he uttered them
A year back, since in any doubt or dark
They came out like the stars, and shone on her
With just their comfort. Common words, perhaps;
The ministers in church might say the same;
But he, he made the church with what he spoke,—
The difference was the miracle," said she.


Then catching up her smile to ravishment,
She added quickly, "I repeat his words,
But not his tones: can any one repeat
The music of an organ, out of church?
And when he said `poor child,` I shut my eyes
To feel how tenderly his voice broke through,
As the ointment-box broke on the Holy feet
To let out the rich medicative nard."


She told me how he had raised and rescued her
With reverent pity, as, in touching grief,
He touched the wounds of Christ,—and made her feel
More self-respecting. Hope he called belief
In God,—work, worship,—therefore let us pray!
And thus, to snatch her soul from atheism,
And keep it stainless from her mother`s face,
He sent her to a famous sempstress-house
Far off in London, there to work and hope.


With that, they parted. She kept sight of Heaven,
But not of Romney. He had good to do
To others: through the days and through the nights
She sewed and sewed and sewed. She drooped sometimes,
And wondered, while along the tawny light
She struck the new thread into her needle`s eye,
How people without mothers on the hills
Could choose the town to live in!—then she drew
The stitch, and mused how Romney`s face would look,
And if `twere likely he`d remember hers
When they two had their meeting after death.
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