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Updated: September 2, 2025
"It seems to me the same thing whether you have a revolver or many revolvers and carbines and swords, or no revolver no weapon at all. And for a very simple reason. While Rima is with us, so long as we are on her business, we are protected from above. The angels, senor, will watch over us by day and night. What need of weapons, then, except to procure food?"
Ah, if I could lift my bruised arm I would take your hand to kiss it in gratitude for so great a service. I owe you my life, sweet Rima what shall I do to repay so great a debt?" The old man chuckled as if amused, but the girl lifted not her eyes nor spoke.
Without ever departing from its quality of a tale, it symbolizes the yearning of the human soul for the attainment of perfect love and beauty in this life that impossible perfection which we must all learn to see fall from its high tree and be consumed in the flames, as was Rima the bird-girl, but whose fine white ashes we gather that they may be mingled at last with our own, when we too have been refined by the fire of death's resignation.
It was late that night before all the romances I remembered or cared to recite were exhausted, and not until then did Rima come out of her shaded corner and steal silently away to her sleeping-place.
"Have you forgotten our compact, Rima?" "No," she returned; and then, suddenly coming near, spoke in a low tone: "I will go there to please you, and you must also do as I tell you." "What do you wish, Rima?" She came nearer still. "Listen! You must not look into my eyes, you must not touch me with your hands." "Sweet Rima, I must hold your hand when I speak with you."
The play itself, which is in five acts, and contains characters alike Olympian, Arcadian, and rustic, besides a hermit and a slave, is composed in a variety of metres terza rima, octaves both sdrucciole and piane, and in the style alike of Poliziano and Lorenzo, hendecasyllables both blank and with rimalmezzo, and lyrical stanzas.
Once I had a different and strange kind of meat; but the starved stomach is not squeamish. I found a serpent coiled up in my way in a small glade, and arming myself with a long stick, I roused him from his siesta and slew him without mercy. Rima was not there to pluck the rage from my heart and save his evil life.
Here Rima, at a distance of a few yards from me, remained standing still for some minutes, as if to give me time to recover my breath; and I was right glad to sit down on a stone to rest.
Having satisfied my wants, she moved quietly away and, raising a straw mat, disappeared behind it into her own sleeping-apartment, which was divided off by a partition from the room I was in. The old man's sleeping-place was a wooden cot or stand on the opposite side of the room, but he was in no hurry to sleep, and after Rima had left us, put a fresh log on the blaze and lit another cigarette.
I knew that she was inviting me to follow her, but I refused to move. "Rima," I cried again, "come to me here, for I know not where to step, and cannot move until you are at my side and I can feel your hand." There came no response, and after some moments, becoming alarmed, I called to her again. Then close by me, in a low, trembling voice, she returned: "I am here."
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