The Silver Cat

Two orange candles like cat’s eyes glittered. The yellow tapestries were smooth against the dark, and all the room, like a hushed waterfall, plunged softly down between the two, who sat together all night through.

She spoke across the darkness “Slow the dark dividing moments go between us, and, before we guess, there is an end of loveliness. What do we gain by sitting still? The distant dawn on daffodil cities, unseen of us, awakes, and even now the mountain-lakes, between that touch of lips and this, change with the sun to topazes. Or slimmer than slim willow-trees, in silver secret, Javanese Srimpis--cold ballet--weave in trance, still, save for sliding hands, their dance unseen by us. By us unseen under red eaves in gold Pekin the yellow dotards, peering, gage the leap of crickets in a cage.

Beauty is spilling thus even now through all the world, while I and thou-- we sit in dark, where no winds stir, nor seas, each other’s prisoner. For orange moons in skies of jade, these candles. For the ambuscade of drifting isles on lifting seas we have these quiet tapestries. For distance, and all adventurings, this room, and for the white bird’s wings up, up, and still white wings above--” “For all these things” he answered “Love.”

“Tell me of love,” she whispered. Stale jewels--the candle flames grew pale, and sunk. The room a midnight pool with night’s dark shape was beautiful. Pool-charméd he spoke with the grave cold accent that still waters have.

“What is the world but a guess and a blending of what was never with that which has an ending? The waves--those crumpled lions--are but a shadow of motion in the green mind, sky’s loamy meadow is with the punctual gold of vision starry, and on her shoulders slim a dream must carry --Atlas--the weight of the world’s loveliness.

And Eastern cities, though daffodil, no less oar, and are anchored in the mind. At most built of an air so delicate, so ghost, a whisper of death’s wind, and each one slips her cable for the dark. And these dim ships no port for all their burthen of beauty have, and there is no sea, no landfall in the grave. These are the ensigns of mortality, but love from their bright difference is free. And where he is, what sees and what is seen are one, and he has healed the old chagrin ’twixt the thinker and his thought. And there’s no war between the star that sets and the rising star; for all love’s battles are civil victories, war self-declared, and internecine peace. Is he accused of quiet? But love goes riding to adventure beyond the world, and still he’s chiding the measurable hearts, whose fears would bind him, and the cries of the cowards failing shrill behind him. But love (for you) is only wings that brush the spirit afraid, and a whisper in the hush, that stops the heart on a beat? Yet think of this! When you are old, a pale forgotten kiss will touch your eyelids, where you sit and ponder, and all will be gone from you then, all youth, all wonder --the coloured cities you knew, the amethyst pennons on the lance of dawn, and the white mist unrolling from the world--all will be gone, but the kiss will touch your eyes, where you sit alone.”

Thus he. With lips that hardly move “Let in the dawn,” she said, “and love.” He drew the curtains, and at that from where he lay a silver cat rose, stretched his silky paws to yawn at the geraniums of the dawn, whose petals splashed the window. Then curled himself up to sleep again.