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The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance

by Richard Le Gallienne · English · Gutenberg #461 · 305,275 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance

Author: Richard Le Gallienne


        
Release date: March 1, 1996 [eBook #461]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/461

Credits: Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL: A ROMANCE ***




Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.








THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL

A ROMANCE


BY

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE





  TO
  PRIOR AND LOUISE CHRISTIAN,
  WITH AFFECTION.




CONTENTS

BOOK I


CHAPTER

I.     AN OLD HOUSE AND ITS BACHELOR

II.    IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE

III.   AN INDICTMENT OF SPRING

IV.    IN WHICH I EAT AND DREAM

V.     CONCERNING THE PERFECT WOMAN, AND THEREFORE CONCERNING ALL
       FEMININE READERS

VI.    IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF
       HIS READER

VII.   PRANDIAL

VIII.  STILL PRANDIAL

IX.    THE LEGEND OF HEBES OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID

X.     AGAIN ON FOOT-THE GIRLS THAT NEVER CAN BE MINE

XI.    AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

XII.   THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GIPSIES

XIII.  A STRANGE WEDDING

XIV.   THE MYSTERIOUS PETTICOAT

XV.    STILL OCCUPIED WITH THE PETTICOAT

XVI.   CLEARS UP MY MYSTERIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF THE LAST CHAPTER

XVII.  THE NAME UPON THE PETTICOAT

XVIII. IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A
       SOLITARY PLACE

XIX.   WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD


BOOK II

I.     IN WHICH I DECIDE TO BE YOUNG AGAIN

II.    AT THE SIGN OF THE SINGING STREAM

III.   IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE

IV.    'T IS OF NICOLETE AND HER BOWER IN THE WILDWOOD

V.     'T IS OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

VI.    A FAIRY TALE AND ITS FAIRY TAILORS

VII.   FROM THE MORNING STAR TO THE MOON

VIII.  THE KIND OF THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE MOON

IX.    WRITTEN BY MOONLIGHT

X.     HOW ONE MAKES LOVE AT THIRTY

XI.    HOW ONE PLAYS THE HERO AT THIRTY

XII.   IN WHICH I REVIEW MY ACTIONS AND RENEW MY RESOLUTIONS


BOOK III

I.     IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY RIGHT AGE AND ENCOUNTER A COMMON
        OBJECT OF THE COUNTRY

II.    IN WHICH I HEAL A BICYCLE AND COME TO THE WHEEL OF
       PLEASURE

III.   TWO TOWN MICE AT A COUNTRY INN

IV.    MARRIAGE A LA MODE

V.     CONCERNING THE HAVEN OF YELLOW SANDS

VI.    THE MOORLAND OF THE APOCALYPSE

VII.   "COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS!"

VIII.  THE TWELVE GOLDEN-HAIRED BAR-MAIDS

IX.    SYLVIA JOY

X.     IN WHICH ONCE MORE I BECOME OCCUPIED IN MY OWN AFFAIRS

XI.    "THE HOUR FOR WHICH THE YEARS FOR WHICH I DID SIGH"

XII.   AT THE CAFE DE LA PAIX

XIII.  THE INNOCENCE OF PARIS

XIV.   END OF BOOK THREE


BOOK IV

THE POSTSCRIPT TO A PILGRIMAGE

I.     SIX YEARS AFTER

II.    GRACE O' GOD

III.   THE GOLDEN GIRL





Gennem de Mange til En!



BOOK I


CHAPTER I

AN OLD HOUSE AND ITS BACHELOR

When the knell of my thirtieth birthday sounded, I suddenly realised,
with a desolate feeling at the heart, that I was alone in the world.
It was true I had many and good friends, and I was blessed with
interests and occupations which I had often declared sufficient to
satisfy any not too exacting human being. Moreover, a small but
sufficient competency was mine, allowing me reasonable comforts, and
the luxuries of a small but choice library, and a small but choice
garden.  These heavenly blessings had seemed mere than enough for
nearly five years, during which the good sister and I had kept house
together, leading a life of tranquil happy days.  Friends and books and
flowers!  It was, we said, a good world, and I, simpleton,--pretty and
dainty as Margaret was,--deemed it would go on forever. But, alas! one
day came a Faust into our garden,--a good Faust, with no friend
Mephistopheles,--and took Margaret from me.  It is but a month since
they were married, and the rice still lingers in the crevices of the
pathway down to the quaint old iron-work gate. Yes! they have gone off
to spend their honeymoon, and Margaret has written to me twice to say
how happy they are together in the Hesperides.  Dear happiness!
Selfish, indeed, were he who would envy you one petal of that wonderful
rose--Rosa Mundi--God has given you to gather.

But, all the same, the reader will admit that it must be lonely for me,
and not another sister left to take pity on me, all somewhere happily
settled down in the Fortunate Isles.

Poor lonely old house! do you, too, miss the light step of your
mistress?  No longer shall her little silken figure flit up and down
your quiet staircases, no more deck out your silent rooms with flowers,
humming the while some happy little song.

The little piano is dumb night after night, its candles unlighted, and
there is no one to play Chopin to us now as the day dies, and the
shadows stoop out of their corners to listen in vain.  Old house, old
house!  We are alone, quite alone,--there is no mistake about
that,--and the soul has gone out of both of us.  And as for the garden,
there is no company there; that is loneliest of all. The very sunlight
looks desolation, falling through the thick-blossoming apple-trees as
through the chinks and crevices of deserted Egyptian cities.

While as for the books--well, never talk to me again about the
companionship of books!  For just when one needs them most of all they
seem suddenly to have grown dull and unsympathetic, not a word of
comfort, not a charm anywhere in them to make us forget the slow-moving
hours; whereas, when Margaret was here--but it is of no use to say any
more!  Everything was quite different when Margaret was here: that is
enough.  Margaret has gone away to the Fortunate Isles.  Of course
she'll come to see us now and again; but it won't be the same thing.
Yes! old echoing silent House of Joy that is Gone, we are quite alone.
Now, what is to be done?



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE

Though I have this bad habit of soliloquising, and indeed am absurd
enough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the reader must
realise from the beginning that I am still quite a young man.  I talked
a little just now as though I were an octogenarian. Actually, as I
said, I am but just gone thirty, and I may reasonably regard life, as
the saying is, all before me.  I was a little down-hearted when I wrote
yesterday. Besides, I wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy
time.  The morning is the time to write.  We are all--that is, those of
us who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sad
enough without our writing books to make it sadder.  The rest of this
book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning.  This book! oh,
yes, I forgot!--I am going to write a book.  A book about what?  Well,
that must be as God wills. But listen!  As I lay in bed this morning
between sleeping and waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into my
room,--a mad, whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and put
briefly, it is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, a
man not without accomplishments or experience, should have gone all
these years without finding that

               "Not impossible she
  Who shall command my heart and me,"--

without meeting at some turning of the way the mystical Golden
Girl,--without, in short, finding a wife?

"Then," suggested the idea, with a blush for its own absurdity, "why
not go on pilgrimage and seek her?  I don't believe you'll find her.
She isn't usually found after thirty.  But you'll no doubt have good
fun by the way, and fall in with many pleasant adventures."

"A brave idea, indeed!" I cried.  "By Heaven, I will take stick and
knapsack and walk right away from my own front door, right away where
the road leads, and see what happens."  And now, if the reader please,
we will make a start.



CHAPTER III

AN INDICTMENT OF SPRING

"Marry! an odd adventure!" I said to myself, as I stepped along in the
spring morning air; for, being a pilgrim, I was involuntarily in a
mediaeval frame of mind, and "Marry! an odd adventure!" came to my lips
as though I had been one of that famous company that once started from
the Tabard on a day in spring.

It had been the spring, it will be remembered, that had prompted them
to go on pilgrimage; and me, too, the spring was filling with strange,
undefinable longings, and though I flattered myself that I had set out
in pursuance of a definitely taken resolve, I had really no more
freedom in the matter than the children who followed at the heels of
the mad piper.

A mad piper, indeed, this spring, with his wonderful lying music,--ever
lying, yet ever convincing, for when was Spring known to keep his word?
Yet year after year we give eager belief to his promises.  He may have
consistently broken them for fifty years, yet this year he will keep
them.  This year the dream will come true, the ship come home. This
year the very dead we have loved shall come back to us again: for
Spring can even lie like that.  There is nothing he will not promise
the poor hungry human heart, with his innocent-looking daisies and
those practised liars the birds.  Why, one branch of hawthorn against
the sky promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pond
ablaze with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours and
enchantments in mortal bosoms,--blazons, it would seem, so august a
message from the hidden heart of the world,--that ever afterwards, for
one who has looked upon it, the most fortunate human existence must
seem a disappointment.

So I, too, with the rest of the world, was following in the wake of the
magical music. The lie it was drawing me by is perhaps Spring's oldest,
commonest lie,--the lying promise of the Perfect Woman, the Quite
Impossible She.  Who has not dreamed of her,--who that can dream at
all?  I suppose that the dreams of our modern youth are entirely
commercial.  In the morning of life they are rapt by intoxicating
visions of some great haberdashery business, beckoned to by the
voluptuous enticements of the legal profession, or maybe the Holy Grail
they forswear all else to seek is a snug editorial chair.  These quests
and dreams were not for me.  Since I was man I have had but one
dream,--namely, Woman.  Alas! till this my thirtieth year I have found
only women.  No! that is disloyal, disloyal to my First Love; for this
is sadly true,--that we always find the Golden Girl in our first love,
and lose her in our second.

I wonder if the reader would care to hear about my First Love, of whom
I am naturally thinking a good deal this morning, under the
demoralising influences of the fresh air, blue sky, and various birds
and flowers. More potent intoxicants these than any that need licenses
for their purveyance, responsible--see the poets--for no end of human
foolishness.

I was about to tell the story of my First Love, but on second thoughts
I decide not. It will keep, and I feel hungry, and yonder seems a
dingle where I can lie and open my knapsack, eat, drink, and doze among
the sun-flecked shadows.



CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH I EAT AND DREAM

The girl we go to meet is the girl we have met before.  I evolved this
sage reflection, as, lost deep down in the green alleys of the dingle,
having fortified the romantic side of my nature with sandwiches and
sherry, I lazily put the question to myself as to what manner of girl I
expected the Golden Girl to be.  A man who goes seeking should have
some notion of what he goes out to seek. Had I any ideal by which to
test and measure the damsels of the world who were to pass before my
critical choosing eye? Had I ever met any girl in the past who would
serve approximately as a model,--any girl, in fact, I would very much
like to meet again? I was very sleepy, and while trying to make up my
mind I fell asleep; and lo! the sandwiches and sherry brought me a
dream that I could not but consider of good omen.  And this was the
dream.

I thought my quest had brought me into a strange old haunted forest,
and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled mossy root of
a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes
and capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys
ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that
seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queen
or goddess passing that way.

And so still the forest was you could have heard an acorn drop or a
bird call from one end of it to the other.  The exquisite silence was
evidently waiting for the exquisite voice, that presently not so much
broke as mingled with it, like a swan swimming through a lake.

"Whom seek you?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right at my
shoulder.  But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though
a mystical strain of music had passed through the wood.

"Whom seek you?"  and again the lovely speech flowered upon the
silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded pool.

"The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and looking half
sideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at whose foot I lay had
opened its rocky side, and in the cleft, like a long lily-bud sliding
from its green sheath, stood a dryad, and my speech failed and my
breath went as I looked upon her beauty, for which mortality has no
simile.  Yet was there something about her of the earth-sweetness that
clings even to the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth-born thing.  She
was not all immortal, as man is not all mortal.  She was the sweetness
of the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its green
leaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars kissing its
green leaves in the still Trophonian nights.

"The maid you seek," said she, and again she broke the silence like the
moon breaking through the clouds, "what manner of maid is she?  For a
maid abides in this wood, maybe it is she whom you seek.  Is she but a
lovely face you seek?  Is she but a lofty mind?  Is she but a beautiful
soul?"

"Maybe she is all these, though no one only, and more besides," I
answered.

"It is well," she replied, "but have you in your heart no image of her
you seek? Else how should you know her should you some day come to meet
her?"

"I have no image of her," I said.  "I cannot picture her; but I shall
know her, know her inerrably as these your wood children find out each
other untaught, as the butterfly that has never seen his kindred knows
his painted mate, passing on the wing all others by.  Only when the
lark shall mate with the nightingale, and the honey-bee and the
clock-beetle keep house together, shall I wed another maid.  Fair maybe
she will not be, though fair to me. Wise maybe she will not be, though
wise to me.  For riches I care not, and of her kindred I have no care.
All I know is that just to sit by her will be bliss, just to touch her
bliss, just to hear her speak bliss beyond all mortal telling."

Thereat the Sweetness of the Strength of the Oak smiled upon me and
said,--

"Follow yonder green path till it leads you into a little grassy glade,
where is a crystal well and a hut of woven boughs hard by, and you
shall see her whom you seek."

And as she spoke she faded suddenly, and the side of the oak was once
more as the solid rock.  With hot heart I took the green winding path,
and presently came the little grassy glade, and the bubbling crystal
well, and the hut of wattled boughs, and, looking through the open door
of the hut, I saw a lovely girl lying asleep in her golden hair. She
smiled sweetly in her sleep, and stretched out her arms softly, as
though to enfold the dear head of her lover.  And, ere I knew, I was
bending over her, and as her sweet breath came and went I whispered:
"Grace o' God, I am here.  I have sought you through the world, and
found you at last. Grace o' God, I have come."

And then I thought her great eyes opened, as when the sun sweeps clear
blue spaces in the morning sky.  "Flower o' Men," then said she, low
and sweet,--"Flower o' Men, is it you indeed?  As you have sought, so
have I waited, waited..."  And thereat her arms stole round my neck,
and I awoke, and Grace o' God was suddenly no more than a pretty name
that my dream had given me.

"A pretty dream," said my soul, "though a little boyish for thirty."
"And a most excellent sherry," added my body.



CHAPTER V

CONCERNING THE PERFECT WOMAN, AND THEREFORE CONCERNING ALL FEMININE
READERS

As I once more got under way, my thoughts slowly loitered back to the
theme which had been occupying them before I dropped asleep. What was
my working hypothesis of the Perfect Woman, towards whom I was thus
leisurely strolling?  She might be defined, I reflected, as The Woman
Who Is Worthy Of Us; but the improbability which every healthily
conceited young man must feel of ever finding such a one made the
definition seem a little unserviceable.  Or, if you prefer, since we
seem to be dealing with impossibles, we might turn about and more truly
define her as The Woman of Whom We are Worthy, for who dare say that
she exists?  If, again, she were defined as the Woman our More
Fortunate Friend Marries, her unapproachableness would rob the
definition of any practical value.  Other generalisations proving
equally unprofitable, I began scientifically to consider in detail the
attributes of the supposititious paragon,--attributes of body and mind
and heart. This was soon done; but again, as I thus conned all those
virtues which I was to expect united in one unhappy woman, the result
was still unsatisfying, for I began to perceive that it was really not
perfection that I was in search of.  As I added virtue after virtue to
the female monster in my mind, and the result remained still inanimate
and unalluring, I realised that the lack I was conscious of was not any
new perfection, but just one or two honest human imperfections.  And
this, try as I would, was just what I could not imagine.

For, if you reflect a moment, you will see that, while it is easy to
choose what virtues we would have our wife possess, it is all but
impossible to imagine those faults we would desire in her, which I
think most lovers would admit add piquancy to the loved one, that
fascinating wayward imperfection which paradoxically makes her perfect.

Faults in the abstract are each and all so uninviting, not to say
alarming, but, associated with certain eyes and hair and tender little
gowns, it is curious how they lose their terrors; and, as with vice in
the poet's image, we end by embracing what we began by dreading.  You
see the fault becomes a virtue when it is hers, the treason prospers;
wherefore, no doubt, the impossibility of imagining it.  What
particular fault will suit a particular unknown girl is obviously as
difficult to determine as in what colours she will look her best.

So, I say, I plied my brains in vain for that becoming fault.  It was
the same whether I considered her beauty, her heart, or her mind.  A
charming old Italian writer has laid down the canons of perfect
feminine beauty with much nicety in a delicious discourse, which, as he
delivered it in a sixteenth-century Florentine garden to an audience of
beautiful and noble ladies, an audience not too large to be intimate
and not too small to be embarrassing, it was his delightful good
fortune and privilege to illustrate by pretty and sly references to the
characteristic beauties of the several ladies seated like a ring of
roses around him.  Thus he would refer to the shape of Madonna
Lampiada's sumptuous eyelids, and to her shell-like ears, to the
correct length and shape of Madonna Amororrisca's nose, to the lily
tower of Madonna Verdespina's throat; nor would the unabashed old
Florentine shrink from calling attention to the unfairness of Madonna
Selvaggia's covering up her dainty bosom, just as he was about to
discourse upon "those two hills of snow and of roses with two little
crowns of fine rubies on their peaks."  How could a man lecture if his
diagrams were going to behave like that! Then, feigning a tiff, he
would close his manuscript, and all the ladies with their birdlike
voices would beseech him with "Oh, no, Messer Firenzuola, please go on
again; it's SO charming!" while, as if by accident, Madonna Selvaggia's
moonlike bosom would once more slip out its heavenly silver, perceiving
which, Messer Firenzuola would open his manuscript again and proceed
with his sweet learning.

Happy Firenzuola!  Oh, days that are no more!

By selecting for his illustrations one feature from one lady and
another from another, Messer Firenzuola builds up an ideal of the
Beautiful Woman, which, were she to be possible, would probably be as
faultily faultless as the Perfect Woman, were she possible.

Moreover, much about the same time as Firenzuola was writing,
Botticelli's blonde, angular, retrousse women were breaking every one
of that beauty-master's canons, perfect in beauty none the less; and
lovers then, and perhaps particularly now, have found the perfect
beauty in faces to which Messer Firenzuola would have denied the name
of face at all, by virtue of a quality which indeed he has tabulated,
but which is far too elusive and undefinable, too spiritual for him
truly to have understood,--a quality which nowadays we are tardily
recognising as the first and last of all beauty, either of nature or
art,--the supreme, truly divine, because materialistically
unaccountable, quality of Charm!

"Beauty that makes holy earth and heaven May have faults from head to
feet."

O loveliest and best-loved face that ever hallowed the eyes that now
seek for you in vain!  Such was your strange lunar magic, such the
light not even death could dim. And such may be the loveliest and
best-loved face for you who are reading these pages,--faces little
understood on earth because they belong to heaven.

There is indeed only one law of beauty on which we may rely,--that it
invariably breaks all the laws laid down for it by the professors of
aesthetics.  All the beauty that has ever been in the world has broken
the laws of all previous beauty, and unwillingly dictated laws to the
beauty that succeeded it,--laws which that beauty has no less
spiritedly broken, to prove in turn dictator to its successor.

The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done exactly
what their critics forbade them to do.  The obedient in art are always
the forgotten.

Likewise beautiful women have always been a law unto themselves. Who
could have prophesied in what way any of these inspired law-breakers
would break the law, what new type of perfect imperfection they would
create?

So we return to the Perfect Woman, having gained this much knowledge of
her,--that her perfection is nothing more or less than her unique,
individual, charming imperfection, and that she is simply the woman we
love and who is fool enough to love us.



CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF HIS READER

"But come," I imagine some reader complaining, "isn't it high time for
something to happen?"  No doubt it is, but what am I to do?  I am no
less discontented.  Is it not even more to my interest than to the
reader's for something to happen?  Here have I been tramping along
since breakfast-time, and now it is late in the afternoon, but never a
feather of her dove's wings, never a flutter of her angel's robes have
I seen.  It is disheartening, for one naturally expects to find
anything we seek a few minutes after starting out to seek it, and I
confess that I expected to find my golden mistress within a very few
hours of leaving home. However, had that been the case, there would
have been no story, as the novelists say, and I trust, as he goes on,
the reader may feel with me that that would have been a pity. Besides,
with that prevision given to an author, I am strongly of opinion that
something will happen before long.  And if the worst comes to the
worst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to fill
the time.  Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old Surrey town,
little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one of which I have
much pleasure in inviting the reader to dinner.



CHAPTER VII

PRANDIAL

Dinner!

Is there a more beautiful word in the language?

Dinner!

Let the beautiful word come as a refrain to and fro this chapter.

Dinner!

Just eating and drinking, nothing more, but so much!

Drinking, indeed, has had its laureates. Yet would I offer my mite of
prose in its honour.  And when I say "drinking," I speak not of
smuggled gin or of brandy bottles held fiercely by the neck till they
are empty.

Nay, but of that lonely glass in the social solitude of the
tavern,--alone, but not alone, for the glass is sure to bring a dream
to bear it company, and it is a poor dream that cannot raise a song.
And what greater felicity than to be alone in a tavern with your last
new song, just born and yet still a tingling part of you.

Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have we
no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Many
practise it already, and it is becoming more general every day.

I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of an
honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantities
of fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas of
living green.

It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure.  It needs all our attention.  You
must eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of the mouth,--talking,
for example.  The quiet eye may be allowed to participate, and
sometimes the ear, where the music is played upon a violin, and that a
Stradivarius.  A well-kept lawn, with six-hundred-years-old cedars and
a twenty-feet yew hedge, will add distinction to the meal.  Nor should
one ever eat without a seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leaved
edition upon the table, not to be read, of course, any more than the
flowers are to be eaten, but just to make music of association very
softly to our thoughts.

Some diners have wine too upon the table, and in the pauses of thinking
what a divine mystery dinner is, they eat.

For dinner IS a mystery,--a mystery of which even the greatest chef
knows but little, as a poet knows not,

  "with all his lore,
  Wherefore he sang,
  or whence the mandate sped."


"Even our digestion is governed by angels," said Blake; and if you will
resist the trivial inclination to substitute "bad angels," is there
really any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned
into brains, and beer into beauty?  Every beautiful woman we see has
been made out of beefsteaks.  It is a solemn thought,--and the finest
poem that was ever written came out of a grey pulpy mass such as we
make brain sauce of.

And with these grave thoughts for grace let us sit down to dinner.

Dinner!



CHAPTER VIII

STILL PRANDIAL

What wine shall we have?  I confess I am no judge of wines, except when
they are bad.  To-night I feel inclined to allow my choice to be
directed by sentiment; and as we are on so pretty a pilgrimage, would
it not be appropriate to drink Liebfraumilch?

Hock is full of fancy, and all wines are by their very nature full of
reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.

Forgive me, therefore, if I grow reminiscent. Indeed, I fear that the
hour for the story of my First Love has come.  But first, notice the
waitress.  I confess, whether beautiful or plain,--not too
plain,--women who earn their own living have a peculiar attraction for
me.

I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess.  As old
Campion sings,--

  "I care not for those ladies
        Who must be wooed and prayed;
  Give me kind Amaryllis,
        The wanton country-maid."


Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give me
the girls that work.  The Girls That Work!  But evidently it is high
time woe began a new chapter.



CHAPTER IX

THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID

Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid.  So was she
known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of my
imagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess.  How she
managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so
obviously dea certe.  The nimbus was so apparent.  Yet no one seemed to
see it but me.  I have heard her scolded as though she were any
ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying to
flirt with her without a touch of reverence.

Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning
when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young
day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through the
noon, are for a short magical hour their own celestial selves, their
unearthly glory as yet unhidden by any earthly disguise.

Neither fairies nor fauns, dryads nor nymphs of the forest pools, have
really passed away from the world.  You have only to get up early
enough to meet them in the meadows.  They rarely venture abroad after
six.  All day long they hide in uncouth enchanted forms.  They change
maybe to a field of turnips, and I have seen a farmer priding himself
on a flock of sheep that I knew were really a most merry company of
dryads and fauns in disguise.  I had but to make the sign of the cross,
sprinkle some holy water upon them, and call them by their sweet secret
names, and the whole rout had been off to the woods, with mad gambol
and song, before the eyes of the astonished farmer.

It was so with Hebe.  She was really a little gold-haired blue-eyed
dryad, whose true home was a wild white cherry-tree that grew in some
scattered woodland behind the old country-house of my boyhood.  In
spring-time how that naughty tree used to flash its silver nakedness of
blossom for miles across the furze and scattered birches!

I might have known it was Hebe.

Alas! it no longer bares its bosom with so dazzling a prodigality, for
it is many a day since it was uprooted.  The little dryad long since
fled away weeping,--fled away, said evil tongues, fled away to the town.

Well do I remember our last meeting. Returning home one evening, I met
her at the lodge-gate hurrying away.  Our loves had been discovered,
and my mother had shuddered to think that so pagan a thing had lived so
long in a Christian house.  I vowed--ah! what did I not vow?--and then
we stole sadly together to comfort our aching hearts under cover of the
woodland.  For the last time the wild cherry-tree bloomed,--wonderful
blossom, glittering with tears, and gloriously radiant with stormy
lights of wild passion and wilder hopes.

My faith lived valiantly till the next spring.  It was Hebe who was
faithless. The cherry-tree was dead, for its dryad had gone,--fled,
said evil tongues, fled away to the town!

But as yet, in the time to which my thoughts return, our sweet secret
mornings were known only to ourselves.  It was my custom then to rise
early, to read Latin authors,--thanks to Hebe, still unread.  I used to
light my fire and make tea for myself, till one rapturous morning I
discovered that Hebe was fond of rising early too, and that she would
like to light my fire and make my tea.  After a time she began to
sweeten it for me.  And then she would sit on my knee, and we would
translate Catullus together,--into English kisses; for she was
curiously interested in the learned tongue.

How lovely she used to look with the morning sun turning her hair to
golden mist, and dancing in the blue deeps of her eyes; and once when
by chance she had forgotten to fasten her gown, I caught glimpses of a
bosom that was like two happy handfuls of wonderful white cherries...

She wore a marvellous little printed gown. And here I may say that I
have never to this day understood objections which were afterwards
raised against my early attachment to print.  The only legitimate
attachment to print stuff, I was told, was to print stuff in the form
of blouse, tennis, or boating costume. Yet, thought I, I would rather
smuggle one of those little print gowns into my berth than all the
silks a sea-faring friend of mine takes the trouble to smuggle from far
Cathay.  However, every one to his taste; for me,

  No silken madam, by your leave,
       Though wondrous, wondrous she be,
  Can lure this heart--upon my sleeve--
       From little pink-print Hebe.


For I found beneath that pretty print such a heart as seldom beats
beneath your satin, warm and wild as a bird's.  I used to put my ear to
it sometimes to listen if it beat right.  Ah, reader, it was like
putting your ear to the gate of heaven.

And once I made a song for her, which ran like this:--

  There grew twin apples high on a bough
       Within an orchard fair;
  The tree was all of gold, I vow,
       And the apples of silver were.

  And whoso kisseth those apples high,
       Who kisseth once is a king,
  Who kisseth twice shall never die,
       Who kisseth thrice--oh, were it I!--
             May ask for anything.


Hebe blushed, and for answer whispered something too sweet to tell.


"Dear little head sunning over with curls," were I to meet you now,
what would happen?  Ah! to meet you now were too painfully to measure
the remnant of my youth.



CHAPTER X

AGAIN ON FOOT--THE GIRLS THAT NEVER CAN BE MINE

Next morning I was afoot early, bent on my quest in right good earnest;
for I had a remorseful feeling that I had not been sufficiently
diligent the day before, had spent too much time in dreaming and
moralising, in which opinion I am afraid the reader will agree.

So I was up and out of the town while as yet most of the inhabitants
were in the throes of getting up.  Somewhere too SHE, the Golden One,
the White Woman, was drowsily tossing the night-clothes from her limbs
and rubbing her sleepy eyes. William Morris's lovely song came into my
mind,--

  'And midst them all, perchance, my love
  Is waking, and doth gently move
  And stretch her soft arms out to me,
  Forgetting thousand leagues of sea."


Perhaps she was in the very town I was leaving behind.  Perhaps we had
slept within a few houses of each other.  Who could tell?


Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing the
white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic women
Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows of
dull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners of
romance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of the
town I had left.  And then turning my steps across a wide common, which
ran with gorse and whortleberry bushes away on every side to distant
hilly horizons, swarthy with pines, and dotted here and there with
stone granges and white villages, I thought of all the women within
that circle, any one of whom might prove the woman I sought,--from
milkmaids crossing the meadows, their strong shoulders straining with
the weight of heavy pails, to fine ladies dying of ennui in their
country-houses; pretty farmers' daughters surreptitiously reading
novels, and longing for London and "life;" passionate young farmers'
wives already weary of their doltish lords; bright-eyed bar-maids
buried alive in country inns, and wondering "whatever possessed them"
to leave Manchester,--for bar-maids seem always to come from
Manchester,--all longing modestly, said I, to set eyes on a man like
me, a man of romance, a man of feeling, a man, if you like, to run away
with.


My heart flooded over with tender pity for these poor sweet
women--though perhaps chiefly for my own sad lot in not encountering
them,--and I conceived a great comprehensive love-poem to be entitled
"The Girls that never can be Mine." Perhaps before the end of our tramp
together, I shall have a few verses of it to submit to the elegant
taste of the reader, but at present I have not advanced beyond the
title.



CHAPTER XI

AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

While occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on the
unfair division of opportunities in human life, I was leisurely
crossing the common, and presently I came up with a pedestrian who,
though I had little suspected it as I caught sight of him ahead, was
destined by a kind providence to make more entertaining talk for me in
half an hour than most people provide in a lifetime.

He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, to
judge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might call the
upper labouring class.  He wore a decent square felt hat, a shabby
respectable overcoat, a workman's knitted waistcoat, and workman's
corduroys, and he carried an umbrella. His upper part might have
belonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks of
recent bricklaying. Without its being remarkable, he had what one calls
a good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined forehead
and nose.

His cheeks were shaved, and his whitening beard and moustache were worn
somewhat after the fashion of Charles Dickens.  This gave a slight
touch of severity to a face that was full of quiet strength.

Passing the time of day to each other, we were soon in conversation, I
asking him this and that question about the neighbouring country-side,
of which I gathered he was an old inhabitant.

"Yes," he said presently, "I was the first to put stick or stone on
Whortleberry Common yonder.  Fifteen years ago I built my own wood
cottage there, and now I'm rebuilding it of good Surrey stone."

"Do you mean that you are building it yourself, with your own hands, no
one to help you?" I asked.

"Not so much as to carry a pail of water," he replied.  "I'm my own
contractor, my own carpenter, and my own bricklayer, and I shall be
sixty-seven come Michaelmas," he added, by no means irrelevantly.

There was pride in his voice,--pardonable pride, I thought, for who of
us would not be proud to be able to build his own house from floor to
chimney?

"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time," I said,
not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to
set him talking.  In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego
profundity if we wish to be understood.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my time.  I have
seen pretty well all of the world there is to see, and sailed as far as
ship could take me."

"Indeed, you have been a sailor too?"

"Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without directly
answering my remark.  "Yes, Vancouver's about as far as any vessel need
want to go; and then I have caught seals off the coast of Labrador, and
walked my way through the raspberry plains at the back of the White
Mountains."

"Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very names, thus
casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of the sounding sea.
Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands, across vast
distances of space imagination refused to span.  Strange to think that
the shabby little man at my side had them all fast locked, pictures
upon pictures, in his brain, and as we were talking was back again in
goodness knows what remote latitude.

I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea!
sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!"

In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years a
policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children. He was
now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke of this
daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that daughter in
service there, one son settled in London and another in the States,
with something of a patriarchal pride, with the independent air too of
a man who could honestly say to himself that, with few advantages from
fortune, having had, so to say, to work his passage, every foot and
hour of it, across those twenty-two thousand miles and those
sixty-seven years, he had made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.

As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and ever-varying talk
of the qualities that had made his success possible. They are always
the same qualities!

A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall,
scattered by the roadside caught his eye.

"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones lying out
there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you, I've made my own
boots before to-day.  Give me the tops and I'll soon rig up a pair
still."

And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot,
the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller.  He had probably seen too
much of the world to be either.  Yet he had, he said, been too busy all
his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale
together in the inn which stood at the end of the common.

"No, it's all well enough in its way, but it swallows time," he
remarked.  "You see, my wife and I have our own pin at home, and when
I'm a bit tired, I just draw a glass for myself, and smoke a pipe, and
there's no time wasted coming and going, and drinking first with this
and then with the other."

A little way past the inn we came upon a notice-board whereon the lord
of the manor warned all wayfarers against trespassing on the common by
making encampments, lighting fires or cutting firewood thereon, and to
this fortunate circumstance I owe the most interesting story my
companion had to tell.

We had mentioned the lord of the manor as we crossed the common, and
the notice-board brought him once more to the old man's mind.

"Poor gentleman!" he said, pointing to the board as though it was the
lord of the manor himself standing there, "I shouldn't like to have had
the trouble he's had on my shoulders."

"Indeed?" I said interrogatively.

"Well, you see, sir," he continued, instinctively lowering his voice to
a confidential impressiveness, "he married an actress; a noble lady too
she was, a fine dashing merry lady as ever you saw.  All went well for
a time, and then it suddenly got whispered about that she and the
village schoolmaster were meeting each other at nights, in the
meadow-bottom at the end of her own park.  It lies over that way,--I
could take you to the very place.  The schoolmaster was a noble-looking
young man too, a devil-me-care blade of a fellow, with a turn for
poetry, they said, and a merry man too, and much in request for a song
at The Moonrakers of an evening. Many 's the night I've heard the
windows rattling with the good company gathered round him.  Yes, he was
a noble-looking man, a noble-looking man," he repeated wistfully, and
with an evident sympathy for the lovers which, I need hardly say, won
my heart.

"But how, I wonder, did they come to know each other?" I interrupted,
anxious to learn all I could, even if I had to ask stupid questions to
learn it.

"Well, of course, no one can say how these things come about. She was
the lady of the manor and the patroness of his school; and then, as I
say, he was a very noble-looking man, and probably took her fancy; and,
sir, whenever some women set their hearts on a man there's no stopping
them. Have him they will, whatever happens. They can't help it, poor
things!  It's just a freak of nature."

"Well, and how was it found out?" I again jogged him.

"One of Sir William's keepers played the spy on them.  He spread it all
over the place how he had seen them on moonlight nights sitting
together in the dingle, drinking champagne, and laughing and talking as
merry as you please; and, of course, it came in time to Sir William--"

"You see that green lane there," he broke off, pointing to a romantic
path winding along the heath side; "it was along there he used to go of
a night to meet her after every one was in bed; and when it all came
out there was a regular cartload of bottles found there.  The squire
had them all broken up, but the pieces are there to this day.

"Yes," he again proceeded, "it hit Sir William very hard. He's never
been the same man since."

I am afraid that my sympathies were less with Sir William than better
regulated sympathies would have been.  I confess that my imagination
was more occupied with that picture of the two lovers making merry
together in the moonlit dingle.

Is it not, indeed, a fascinating little story, with its piquant
contrasts and its wild love-at-all-costs?  And how many such stories
are hidden about the country, lying carelessly in rustic memories, if
one only knew where to find them!

At this point my companion left me, and I--well, I confess that I
retraced my steps to the common and rambled up that green lane, along
which the romantic schoolmaster used to steal in the moonlight to the
warm arms of his love.  How eagerly he had trodden the very turf I was
treading,--we never know at what moment we are treading sacred earth!
But for that old man, I had passed along this path without a thrill.
Had I not but an hour ago stood upon this very common, vainly, so it
seemed, invoking the spirits of passion and romance, and the grim old
common had never made a sign.  And now I stood in the very dingle where
they had so often and so wildly met; and it was all gone, quite gone
away for ever.  The hours that had seemed so real, the kisses that had
seemed like to last for ever, the vows, the tears, all now as if they
had never been, gone on the four winds, lost in the abysses of time and
space.

And to think of all the thousands and thousands of lovers who had loved
no less wildly and tenderly, made sweet these lanes with their vows,
made green these meadows with their feet; and they, too, all gone,
their bright eyes fallen to dust, their sweet voices for ever put to
silence.

To which I would add, for the benefit of the profane, that I sought in
vain for those broken bottles.



CHAPTER XII

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GIPSIES

I felt lonely after losing my companion, and I met nobody to take his
place.  In fact, for a couple of hours I met nothing worth mentioning,
male or female, with the exception of a gipsy caravan, which I suppose
was both; but it was a poor show. Borrow would have blushed for it.  In
fact, it is my humble opinion that the gipsies have been overdone, just
as the Alps have been over-climbed.  I have no great desire to see
Switzerland, for I am sure the Alps must be greasy with being climbed.

Besides, the Alps and the gipsies, in common with waterfalls and ruined
castles, belong to the ready-made operatic poetry of the world, from
which the last thrill has long since departed.  They are, so to say,
public poetry, the public property of the emotions, and no longer touch
the private heart or stir the private imagination.  Our fathers felt so
much about them that there is nothing left for us to feel.  They are as
a rose whose fragrance has been exhausted by greedy and indiscriminate
smelling.  I would rather find a little Surrey common for myself and
idle about it a summer day, with the other geese and donkeys, than
climb the tallest Alp.

Most gipsies are merely tenth-rate provincial companies, travelling
with and villainously travestying Borrow's great pieces of "Lavengro"
and "Romany Rye."  Dirty, ill-looking, scowling men; dirty, slovenly,
and wickedly ugly women; children to match, snarling, filthy little
curs, with a ready beggar's whine on occasion.  A gipsy encampment
to-day is little more than a moving slum, a scab of squalor on the fair
face of the countryside.

But there was one little trifle of an incident that touched me as I
passed this particular caravan.  Evidently one of the vans had come to
grief, and several men of the party were making a great show of
repairing it.  After I had run the gauntlet of the begging children,
and was just out of ear-shot of the group, I turned round to survey it
from a distance.  It was encamped on a slight rise of the undulating
road, and from where I stood tents and vans and men were clearly
silhouetted against the sky.  The road ran through and a little higher
than the encampment, which occupied both sides of it.  Presently the
figure of a young man separated itself from the rest, stept up on to
the smooth road, and standing in the middle of it, in an absorbed
attitude, began to make a movement with his hands as though winding
string round a top.  That in fact was his occupation, and for the next
five minutes he kept thus winding the cord, flinging the top to the
ground, and intently bending down to catch it on his hand, none of the
others, not even the children, taking the slightest notice of him,--he
entirely alone there with his poor little pleasure. There seemed to me
pathos in his loneliness.  Had some one spun the top with him, it would
have vanished; and presently, no doubt at the bidding of an oath I
could not hear, he hurriedly thrust the top into his pocket, and once
more joined the straining group of men.  The snatched pleasure must be
put by at the call of reality; the world and its work must rush in upon
his dream.  I have often thought about the top and its spinner, as I
have noted the absorbed faces of other people's pleasures in the
streets,--two lovers passing along the crowded Strand with eyes only
for each other; a student deep in his book in the corner of an omnibus;
a young mother glowing over the child in her arms; the wild-eyed
musician dreamily treading on everybody's toes, and begging nobody's
pardon; the pretty little Gaiety Girl hurrying to rehearsal with no
thought but of her own sweet self and whether there will be a letter
from Harry at the stage-door,--yes, if we are alone in our griefs, we
are no less alone in our pleasures.  We spin our tops as in an
enchanted circle, and no one sees or heeds save ourselves,--as how
should they with their own tops to spin? Happy indeed is he, who has
his top and cares still to spin it; for to be tired of our tops is to
be tired of life, saith the preacher.

As the young gipsy's little holiday came to an end, I turned with a
sigh upon my way; and here, while still on the subject, may I remark on
the curious fact that probably Borrow has lived and died without a
single gipsy having heard of him, just as the expertest anglers know
nothing of Izaak Walton.

Has the British soldier, one wonders, yet discovered Rudyard Kipling,
or is the Wessex peasant aware of Thomas Hardy? It is odd to think that
the last people to read such authors are the very people they most
concern.  For you might spend your life, say, in studying the London
street boy, and write never so movingly and humourously about him, yet
would he never know your name; and though Whitechapel makes novelists,
it does so without knowing it,--makes them to be read in Mayfair,--just
as it never wears the dainty hats and gowns its weary little milliners
and seamstresses make through the day and night.  It is Capital and
Labour over again, for in literature also we reap in gladness what
others have sown in tears.

And now, after these admirable reflections, I am about to make such
"art" as I can of another man's tragedy, as will appear in the next
chapter.



CHAPTER XIII

A STRANGE WEDDING

My moralisings were cut short by my entering a village, and, it being
about the hour of noon, finding myself in the thick of a village
wedding.

Undoubtedly the nicest way to get married is on the sly, and indeed it
is at present becoming quite fashionable.  Many young couples of my
acquaintance, who have had no other reason for concealing the fact
beyond their own whim, have thus slipped off without saying a word to
anybody, and returned full-blown housekeepers, with "at home" days of
their own, and everything else like real married people,--for, as said
an old lady to me, "one can never be sure of married people nowadays
unless you have been at the wedding."

My friend George Muncaster, who does everything charmingly different
from any one else, hit upon one of the quaintest plans for his
marriage.  It was simple, and some may say prosaic enough.  His days
being spent at a great office in the city, he got leave of absence for
a couple of hours, met his wife, went with her to the registrar's,
returned to his office, worked the rest of the day as usual, and then
went to his new home to find his wife and dinner awaiting him,--all
just as it was going to be every night for so many happy years.
Prosaic, you say! Not your idea of poetry, perhaps, but, after a new
and growing fashion in poetry, truly poetic.  George Muncaster's
marriage is a type of the new poetry, the poetry of essentials. The old
poetry, as exemplified in the old-fashioned marriage, is a poetry of
externals, and certainly it has the advantage of picturesqueness.

There is perhaps more to be said for it than that.  Indeed, if I were
ever to get married, I am at a loss to know which way I should
choose,--George Muncaster's way or the old merry fashion, with the rice
and the old shoes and the orange-blossom.  No doubt the old cheery
publicity is a little embarrassing to the two most concerned, and the
old marriage customs, the singing of the bride and bridegroom to their
nuptial couch, the frank jests, the country horse-play, must have
fretted the souls of many a lover before Shelley, who, it will be
remembered, resented the choral celebrations of his Scotch landlord and
friends by appearing at his bedroom door with a brace of pistols.

How like Shelley!  The Scotch landlord meant well, we may be sure, and
a very small pinch of humour, or even mere ordinary humanity, as
distinct from humanitarianism, would have taken in the situation. Of
course Shelley's mind was full of the sanctity of the moment, and
indignant that "the hour for which the years did sigh" should thus be
broken in upon by vulgar revelry; but while we may sympathise with his
view, and admit to the full the sacredness, not to say the solemnity,
of the marriage ceremony, yet it is to be hoped that it still retains a
naturally mirthful side, of which such public merriment is but the
crude expression.

With all its sweet and mystical significance, surely the prevailing
feeling in the hearts of bride and bridegroom is, or should be, that of
happiness,--happiness bubbling and dancing, all sunny ripples from
heart to heart.

Surely they can spare a little of it, just one day's sight of it, to a
less happy world,--a world long since married and done for, and with
little happiness in it save the spectacle of other people's happiness.
It is good for us to see happy people, good for the symbols of
happiness to be carried high amidst us on occasion; for if they serve
no other purpose, they inspire in us the hope that we too may some day
be happy, or remind our discontented hearts that we have been.

If it were only for the sake of those quaint old women for whom life
would be entirely robbed of interest were it not for other people's
weddings and funerals, one feels the public ceremony of marriage a sort
of public duty, the happiness tax, so to say, due to the somewhat
impoverished revenues of public happiness.  Other forms of happiness
are taxed; why not marriage?

In a village, particularly, two people who robbed the community of its
perquisites in this respect would be looked upon as "enemies of the
people," and their joint life would begin under a social ban which it
would cost much subsequent hospitality to remove.  The dramatic
instinct to which the life of towns is necessarily unfavourable, is
kept alive in the country by the smallness of the stage and the fewness
of the actors.  A village is an organism, conscious of its several
parts, as a town is not.

In a village everybody is a public man.  The great events of his life
are of public as well as private significance, appropriately,
therefore, invested with public ceremonial.  Thus used to living in the
public eye, the actors carry off their parts at weddings and other
dramatic ceremonials, with more spirit than is easy to a townsman, who
is naturally made self-conscious by being suddenly called upon to fill
for a day a public position for which he has had no training.  That no
doubt is the real reason for the growth of quiet marriages; and the
desire for them, I suspect, comes first from the man, for there are few
women who at heart do not prefer the old histrionic display.

However, the village wedding at which I suddenly found myself a
spectator was, for a village, a singularly quiet one.  There was no
bell-ringing, and there were no bridesmaids. The bride drove up quietly
with her father, and there was a subdued note even in the murmur of
recognition which ran along the villagers as they stood in groups near
the church porch.  There was an absence of the usual hilarity which
struck me.  One might almost have said that there was a quite ominous
silence.

Seating myself in a corner of the transept where I could see all and be
little seen, I with the rest awaited the coming of the overdue
bridegroom.  Meanwhile the usual buzzing and bobbing of heads went on
amongst the usual little group near the foot of the altar.  Now and
then one caught a glisten of tears through a widow's veil, and the
little bride, dressed quietly in grey, talked with the usual nervous
gaiety to her girl friends, and made the usual whispered confidences
about her trousseau.  The father, in occasional conversation with one
and another, appeared to be avoiding the subject with the usual
self-conscious solemnity, and occasionally he looked, somewhat
anxiously, I thought, towards the church door.  The bridegroom did not
keep us waiting long,--I noticed that he had a rather delicate sad
face,--and presently the service began.

I don't know myself what getting married must feel like, but it cannot
be much more exciting than watching other people getting married.
Probably the spectators are more conscious of the impressive meaning of
it all than the brave young people themselves. I say brave, for I am
always struck by the courage of the two who thus gaily leap into the
gulf of the unknown together, thus join hands over the inevitable, and
put their signatures to the irrevocable.  Indeed, I always get
something like a palpitation of the heart just before the priest utters
those final fateful words, "I declare you man and--wife." Half a second
before you were still free, half a second after you are bound for the
term of your natural life.  Half a second before you had only to dash
the book from the priest's hands, and put your hand over his mouth, and
though thus giddily swinging on the brink of the precipice, you are
saved.  Half a second after

  Not all the king's horses and all the king's men
    Can make you a bachelor ever again.


It is the knife-edge moment 'twixt time and eternity.

And, curiously enough, while my thoughts were thus running on towards
the rapids of that swirling moment, the very thing happened which I had
often imagined might happen to myself. Suddenly, with a sob, the
bridegroom covered his face with his hands, and crying, "I cannot!  I
cannot!" hurriedly left the church, tears streaming down his cheeks, to
the complete dismay of the sad little group at the altar, and the
consternation of all present.

"Poor young man!  I thought he would never go through with it," said an
old woman half to herself, who was sitting near me.  I involuntarily
looked my desire of explanation.

"Well, you see," she said, "he had been married before.  His first wife
died four years ago, and he loved her beyond all heaven and earth."

That evening, I afterwards heard, the young bridegroom's body was found
by some boys as they went to bathe in the river.  As I recalled once
more that sad yearning face, and heard again that terrible "I cannot!
I cannot!"  I thought of Heine's son of Asra, who loved the Sultan's
daughter.

"What is thy name, slave?" asked the princess, "and what thy race and
birthplace?"

"My name," the young slave answered, "is Mahomet.  I come from Yemen.
My race is that of Asra, and when we love, we die."

And likewise a voice kept saying in my heart, "If ever you find your
Golden Bride, be sure she will die."



CHAPTER XIV

THE MYSTERIOUS PETTICOAT

The sad thoughts with which this incident naturally left me were at
length and suddenly dispersed, as sad thoughts not infrequently are, by
a petticoat.  When I say petticoat, I use the word in its literal
sense, not colloquially as a metaphor for its usual wearer, meaning
thereby a dainty feminine undergarment seen only by men on rainy days,
and one might add washing-days. It was indeed to the fortunate accident
of its being washing-day at the pretty cottage near which in the course
of my morning wanderings I had set me down to rest, that I owed the
sight of the petticoat in question.

But first allow me to describe a little more fully my surroundings at
the moment.  Not indeed that I can hope to put into words the charm of
those embowered cottages, like nests in the armpits of great trees,
tucked snugly in the hollows of those narrow, winding, almost
subterranean lanes which burrow their way beneath the warm-hearted
Surrey woodlands.

Nothing can be straighter and smoother than a Surrey road--when it is
on the king's business; then it is a high-road and behaves accordingly:
but a Surrey bye-road is the most whimsical companion in the world.  It
is like a sheep-dog, always running backwards and forwards, poking into
the most out-of-the-way corners, now climbing at a run some steep
hummock of the down, and now leisurely going miles about to escape an
ant-hill; and all the time (here, by the way, ends the sheep-dog) it is
stopping to gossip with rillets vagabond as itself, or loitering to
bedeck itself with flowers.  It seems as innocent of a destination as a
boy on an errand; but, after taking at least six times as long as any
other road in the kingdom for its amount of work, you usually find it
dip down of a sudden into some lovely natural cul-de-sac, a
meadow-bottom surrounded by trees, with a stream spreading itself in
fantastic silver shallows through its midst, and a cottage half hidden
at the end. Had the lane been going to some great house, it would have
made more haste, we may be sure.

The lane I had been following had finally dropped me down at something
of a run upon just such a scene.  The cottage, built substantially of
grey stone, stood upon the side of the slope, and a broad strip of
garden, half cultivated and half wild, began near the house with
cabbages, and ended in a jungle of giant bulrushes as it touched the
stream. Golden patches of ragwort blazed here and there among a tangled
mass of no doubt worthier herbage,--such even in nature is the power of
gold,--and there were the usual birds.

However, my business is with the week's washing, which in various
shades of white, with occasional patches of scarlet, fluttered
fantastically across a space of the garden, thereby giving unmistakable
witness to human inhabitants, male and female.

As I lounged upon the green bank, I lazily watched these parodies of
humanity as they were tossed hither and thither with humourous
indignity by the breeze, remarking to myself on the quaint
shamelessness with which we thus expose to the public view garments
which at other times we are at such bashful pains to conceal.  And thus
philosophising, like a much greater philosopher, upon clothes, I found
myself involuntarily deducing the cottage family from the family
washing.  I soon decided that there must be at least one woman say of
the age of fifty, one young woman, one little child, sex doubtful, and
one man probably young. Further than this it was impossible to
conjecture.  Thus I made the rough guess that a young man and his wife,
a child, and a mother-in-law were among the inhabitants of this idyllic
cottage.

But the clothes-line presented charming evidence of still another
occupant; and here, though so far easy to read, came in something of a
puzzle.  Who in this humble out-of-the-way cottage could afford to wear
that exquisite cambric petticoat edged with a fine and very expensive
lace?  And surely it was on no country legs that those delicately
clocked and open-worked silk stockings walked invisible through the
world.

Nor was the lace any ordinary expensive English lace, such as any good
shop can supply.  Indeed, I recognised it as being of a Parisian design
as yet little known in England; while on the tops of the stockings I
laughingly suspected a border designed by a certain eccentric artist,
who devotes his strange gifts to decorating with fascinating miniatures
the under-world of woman. I have seen corsets thus made beautiful by
him valued at five hundred pounds, and he never paints a pair of
garters for less than a hundred.  His name is not yet a famous one, as,
for obvious reasons, his works are not exhibited at public galleries,
though they are occasionally to be seen at private views.

I am far from despising an honest red-flannel country petticoat. There
is no warmer kinder-looking garment in the world.  It suggests country
laps and country breasts, with sturdy country babes greedy for the warm
white milk, and it seems dyed in country blushes.  Yet, for all that,
one could not be insensible to the exotic race and distinction of that
frivolous town petticoat, daintily disporting itself there among its
country cousins, like a queen among milkmaids.

What numberless suggestions of romance it awoke!  What strange perfumes
seemed to waft across from it, perfumes laden with associations of a
world so different from the green world where it now was, a charming
world of gay intrigue and wanton pleasure. No wonder the wind chose it
so often for its partner as it danced through the garden, scorning to
notice the heavy homespun things about it.  It was not every day that
that washing-day wind met so fine a lady, and it was charming to see
how gently he played about her stockings.  "Ah, wind," I said,
"evidently you are a gallant born; but tell us the name of the lady.
It is somewhere on that pretty petticoat, I'll be bound."

Is she some little danseuse with the whim to be romantically rustic for
a week? or is she somebody else's pretty wife run away with somebody
else's man? or is she some naughty little grisette with an extravagant
lover? or is she just the usual lady landscape artist, with a more than
usual taste in lingerie?

At all events, it was fairly obvious that, for one reason or another,
the wearer of the petticoat and stockings which have now occupied us
for perhaps a sufficient number of pages, was a visitor at the cottage.

The next thing was to get a look at her. So, remembering how fond I was
of milk from the cow, I pushed open the gate and advanced to the
cottage door.



CHAPTER XV

STILL OCCUPIED WITH THE PETTICOAT

The door was opened by a comely young woman, with ruddy cheeks and a
bright kind eye that promised conversation.  But "H'm," said I to
myself, as she went to fetch my milk, "evidently not yours, my dear."

"A nice drying day for your washing," I said, as I slowly sipped my
milk, with a half-inclination of my head towards the clothes-line.

"Very fine, indeed, sir," she returned, with something of a blush, and
a shy deprecating look that seemed to beg me not to notice the
peculiarly quaint antics which the wind, evidently a humourist, chose
at that moment to execute with the female garments upon the line.
However, I was for once cased in triple brass and inexorable.

"And who," I ventured, smiling, "may be the owner of those fine things?"

"Not those," I continued, pointing to an odd garment which the wind was
wantonly puffing out in the quaintest way, "but that pretty petticoat
and those silk stockings?"

The poor girl had gone scarlet, scarlet as the petticoat which I was
sure WAS hers, with probably a fellow at the moment keeping warm her
buxom figure.

"You are very bold, sir," she stammered through her blushes, but I
could see that she was not ill-pleased that the finery should attract
attention.

"But won't you tell me?" I urged; "I have a reason for asking."

And here I had better warn the reader that, as the result of a whim
that presently seized me, I must be content to appear mad in his eyes
for the next few pages, till I get an opportunity of explanation.

"Well, what if they should be mine?" at length I persuaded her into
saying.

I made the obvious gallant reply, but, "All the same," I added, "you
know they are not yours.  They belong to some lady visitor, who, I'll
be bound, isn't half so pretty; now, don't they?"

"Well, they just don't then.  They're mine, as I tell you."

"H'm," I continued, a little nonplussed, "but do you really mean there
is no lady staying with you?"

"Certainly," she replied, evidently enjoying my bewilderment.

"Well, then, some lady must have stayed here once," I retorted, with a
sudden inspiration, "and left them behind--"

"You might be a detective after stolen goods," she interrupted.

"I tell you the things are mine; and what I should like to know does a
gentleman want bothering himself about a lady's petticoat! No wonder
you blush," for, in fact, as was easy to foresee, the situation was
becoming a little ridiculous for me.

"Now, look here," I said with an affectation of gravity, "if you'll
tell me how you came by those things, I'll make it worth your while.
They were given to you by a lady who stayed here not so long ago, now,
weren't they?"

"Well, then, they were."

"The lady stayed here with a gentleman?"

"Yes, she did."

"H'm!  I thought so," I said.  "Yes! that lady, it pains me to say, was
my wife!"

This unblushing statement was not, I could see, without its effect upon
the present owner of the petticoat.

"But she said they were brother and sister," she replied.

"Of course she did," I returned, with a fine assumption of scorn,--"of
course she did.  They always do."

"Dear young woman," I continued, when I was able to control my emotion,
"you are happily remote from the sin and wickedness of the town, and I
am sorry to speak of such things in so peaceful a spot--but as a
strange chance has led me here, I must speak, must tell you that all
wives are not so virtuous and faithful as you, I am sure, are. There
are wives who forsake their husbands and--and go off with a handsomer
man, as the poet says; and mine, mine, alas! was one of them.  It is
now some months ago that my wife left me in this way, and since then I
have spent every day in searching for her; but never till this moment
have I come upon the least trace of her.  Strange, is it not? that
here, in this peaceful out-of-the-way garden, I should come upon her
very petticoat, her very stockings--"

By this my grief had become such that the kind girl put her hand on my
arm. "Don't take on so," she said kindly, and then remembering her
treasured property, and probably fearing a counterclaim on my part to
its possession, "But how can you be sure she was here?  There are lots
of petticoats like that--"

"What was she like?" I asked through my agitation.

"Middle height, slim and fair, with red goldy hair and big blue eyes;
about thirty, I should say."

"The very same," I groaned, "there is no mistake; and now," I
continued, "I want you to sell me that petticoat and those stockings,"
and I took a couple of sovereigns from my purse. "I want to have them
to confront her with, when I do find her. Perhaps it will touch her
heart to think of the strange way in which I came by them; and you can
buy just as pretty ones again with the money," I added, as I noticed
the disappointment on her face at the prospect of thus losing her
finery.

"Well, it's a funny business, to be sure," she said, as still half
reluctantly she unpegged the coveted garments from the line; "but if
what you say 's true, I suppose you must have them."

The wanton wind had been so busily kissing them all the morning that
they were quite dry, so I was able to find room for them in my knapsack
without danger to the other contents; and, with a hasty good-day to
their recent possessor, I set off at full speed to find a secure nook
where I could throw myself down on the grass, and let loose the absurd
laughter that was dangerously bottled up within me; but even before I
do that it behoves me if possible to vindicate my sanity to the reader.



CHAPTER XVI

CLEARS UP MY MYSTERIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF THE LAST CHAPTER

What a sane man should be doing carrying about with him a woman's
petticoat and silk stockings, may well be a puzzle to the most
intelligent reader.

Whim, sir, whim! and few human actions admit of more satisfactory
solution.  Like Shylock, I'll say "It is my humour."  But no! I'll be
more explanatory.  This madcap quest of mine, was it not understood
between us from the beginning to be a fantastic whim, a poetical
wild-goose chase, conceived entirely as an excuse for being some time
in each other's company?  To be whimsical, therefore, in pursuit of a
whim, fanciful in the chase of a fancy, is surely but to maintain the
spirit of the game.  Now, for the purpose, therefore, of a romance that
makes no pretence to reasonableness, I had very good reasons for buying
that petticoat, which (the reasons, not the petticoat) I will now lay
before you.

I have been conscious all the way along through this pilgrimage of its
inevitable vagueness of direction, of my need of something definite,
some place, some name, anything at all, however slight, which I might
associate, if only for a time, with the object of my quest, a definite
something to seek, a definite goal for my feet.

Now, when I saw that mysterious petticoat, and realised that its wearer
would probably be pretty and young and generally charming, and that
probably her name was somewhere on the waistband, the spirit of whim
rejoiced within me.  "Why not," it said, "buy the petticoat, find out
the name of its owner, and, instead of seeking a vague Golden Girl,
make up your mind doggedly to find and marry her, or, failing that,
carry the petticoat with you, as a sort of Cinderella's slipper, try it
on any girl you happen to fancy, and marry her it exactly fits?"

Now, I confess, that seemed to me quite  a pretty idea, and I hope the
reader will think so too.  If not, I'm afraid I can offer him no better
explanation; and in fact I am all impatience to open my knapsack, and
inform myself of the name of her to the discovery of whom my wanderings
are henceforth to be devoted.



CHAPTER XVII

THE NAME UPON THE PETTICOAT

So imagine me seated in a grassy corner, with my knapsack open on the
ground and my petticoat and silk stockings spread out in front of
me,--an odd picture, to be sure, for any passer by to come upon.  I
suppose I could have passed for a pedlar, but undoubtedly it would have
been very embarrassing.  However, as it happened, I remained
undisturbed, and was able to examine my purchases at leisure.  I had
never seen a petticoat so near before,--at all events I had never given
one such close attention.  What delicious dainty things they are!  How
essentially womanly--as I hope no one would call a pair of trousers
essentially manly.

How pretty it looked spread out on the grass in front of me!  How soft!
how wondrously dainty the finish of every little seam! And the lace!
It almost tempts one to change one's sex to wear such things.  There
was a time indeed, and not so long ago, when brave men wore garments no
less dainty.

Rupert's Cavaliers were every bit as particular about their lace
collars and frills as the lady whose pretty limbs once warmed this
cambric.

But where is the name?  Ah! here it is! What sweet writing! "Sylvia
Joy, No. 6."

Sylvia Joy!  What a perfectly enchanting name! and as I repeated it
enthusiastically, it seemed to have a certain familiarity for my
ear,--as though it were the name of some famous beauty or some popular
actress,--yet the exact association eluded me, and obviously it was
better it should remain a name of mystery. Sylvia Joy!  Who could have
hoped for such a pretty name! Indeed, to tell the truth, I had dreaded
to find a "Mary Jones" or an "Ann Williams"--but Sylvia Joy!  The name
was a romance in itself.  I already felt myself falling in love with
its unseen owner.  With such a petticoat and such a name, Sylvia
herself could not be otherwise than delightful too. Already, you see, I
was calling her by her Christian name!  And the more I thought of her,
the stronger grew the conviction--which has no doubt already forced
itself upon the romantic reader--that we were born for each other.

But who is Sylvia, who is she? and likewise where is Sylvia, where is
she? Obviously they were questions not to be answered off-hand.  Was
not my future--at all events my immediate future--to be spent in
answering them?

Indeed, curiously enough, my recent haste to have them answered had
suddenly died down.  A sort of matrimonial security possessed me.  I
felt as I imagine a husband may feel on a solitary holiday--if there
are husbands unnatural enough to go holidaying without their
wives--pleasantly conscious of a home tucked somewhere beneath the
distant sunset, yet in no precipitate hurry to return there before the
appointed day.

In fact, a chill tremor went through me as I realised that, to all
intent, I was at length respectably settled down, with quite a
considerable retrospect of happy married life. To come to a decision is
always to bring something to an end.  And, with something of a pang,
resolutely stifled, I realised for a moment the true blessedness of the
single state I was so soon to leave behind.  At all events, a little
golden fragment of bachelorhood remained.  There was yet a fertile
strip of time wherein to sow my last handful of the wild oats of youth.
So festina lente, my destined Sylvia, festina lente!



CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A SOLITARY PLACE

As I once more shouldered my pack and went my way, the character of the
country side began to change, and, from a semi-pastoral heathiness and
furziness, took on a wildness of aspect, which if indeed melodramatic
was melodrama carried to the point of genius.

It was a scene for which the nineteenth century has no worthy use.  It
finds ignoble occupation as a gaping-ground for the vacuous
tourist,--somewhat as Heine might have imagined Pan carrying the
gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel. It suffers teetotal
picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows
itself to be painted by the worst artists. Like a lion in a menagerie,
it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the
smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.

I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side
of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle. Some two hundred
feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the
enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green
company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all
haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood.  Some
intrepid larches waved green pennons in the very midst of the turbulent
water, here and there a veteran lay with his many-summered head abased
in the rocky course of the stream, and here was a young foolhardy beech
that had climbed within a dozen yards of the rampart.  All was wild and
solitary, and one might have declared it a scene untrodden by the foot
of man, but for the telegraph posts and small piles of broken "macadam"
at punctual intervals, and the ginger-beer bottles and paper bags of
local confectioners that lent an air of civilisation to the road.

It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory
prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation. As it
was, I could only recall the lines

  "The Poet wandering on, through Arabie
  And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
  And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down
  Indus and Oxus from their icy caves--"

and that other passage beginning

  "At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
  He paused--"


This last I mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice,
as though it were an incantation,--and, indeed, from what immediately
followed, it might reasonably have seemed so.


  "At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
  He paused--"

I mouthed for the fourth time.  And lo! advancing to me eagerly along
the causeway seemed the very sprite of Alastor himself! There was a
star upon his forehead, and around his young face there glowed an
aureole of gold and roses--to speak figuratively, for the star upon his
brow was hope, and the gold and roses encircling his head, a miniature
rainbow, were youth and health. His longish golden hair had no doubt
its share in the effect, as likewise the soft yellow silk tie that
fluttered like a flame in the speed of his going.  His blue eyes were
tragically fresh and clear,--as though they had as yet been little
used.  There were little wings of haste upon his feet, and he came
straight to me, with the air of the Angel Gabriel about to make his
divine announcement.  For a moment I thought that he was an apparition
of prophecy charged to announce the maiden of the Lord for whom I was
seeking.  However, his brief flushed question was not of these things.
He desired first to ask the time of day, and next--here, after a bump
to the earth, one's thoughts ballooned again heavenwards--"had I seen a
green copy of Shelley lying anywhere along the road?"

Nothing so good had happened to me, I replied--but I believed that I
had seen a copy of Alastor!  For a moment my meaning was lost on him;
then he flushed and smiled, thanked me and was off again, saying that
he must find his Shelley, as he wouldn't lose it for the world!

He had presently disappeared as suddenly as he had come, but he had
left me a companion, a radiant reverberant name; and for some little
space the name of Shelley clashed silvery music among the hills.

Its seven letters seemed to hang right across the clouds like the Seven
Stars, an apocalyptic constellation, a veritable sky sign; and again
the name was an angel standing with a silver trumpet, and again it was
a song.  The heavens opened, and across the blue rift it hung in a
glory of celestial fire, while from behind and above the clouds came a
warbling as of innumerable larks.

How strange was this miracle of fame, I pondered, this strange
apotheosis by which a mere private name becomes a public symbol!
Shelley was once a private person whose name had no more universal
meaning than my own, and so were Byron and Cromwell and Shakespeare;
yet now their names are facts as stubborn as the Rocky Mountains, or
the National Gallery, or the circulation of the blood.  From their
original inch or so of private handwriting they have spread and spread
out across the world, and now whole generations of men find
intellectual accommodation within them,--drinking fountains and other
public institutions are erected upon them; yea, Carlyle has become a
Chelsea swimming-bath, and "Highland Mary" is sold for whiskey, while
Mr. Gladstone is to be met everywhere in the form of a bag.

Does Mr. Gladstone, I wonder, instruct his valet "to pack his
Gladstone"?  How strange it must seem!  Try it yourself some day and
its effect on your servant.  Ask him, for example, to "pack your ----"
and see how he'll stare.

Coming nearer and nearer to earth, I wondered if Colonel Boycott ever
uses the word "boycott," and how strange it must have seemed to the
late MacAdam to walk for miles and miles upon his own name, like a
carpet spread out before him.

Then I once more rebounded heavenwards, at the vision of the eager
dreamy lad whose question had set going all this odd clockwork of
association.  He wouldn't lose his Shelley for the world!  How like
twenty! And how many things that he wouldn't lose for the world will he
have to give up before he is thirty, I reflected sententiously,--give
up at last, maybe, with a stony indifference, as men on a sinking ship
take no thought of the gold and specie in the hold.

And then, all of a sudden, a little way up the ferny grassy hillside, I
caught sight of the end of a book half hidden among the ferns.  I
climbed up to it.  Of course it was that very green Shelley which the
young stranger wouldn't lose for the world.



CHAPTER XIX

WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD

Picking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and
then--I resisted a great temptation!  I shut it again. A little flowery
plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name.
When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and
it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page.  St.
Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to
call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at
that pen-and-ink love making.  Now, as I look back, I think it was
sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse.
There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right
to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may
chance to surprise either them or their letters.

While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book
conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of
the road, and there was Alastor coming back again.  I slipped the book,
in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under
the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him.  He
was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me.

"Have you found your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a
moment in the road.

He shook his head.  No!  But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt
every square foot of the valley inch by inch.

Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him. Would he take a Boccaccio, or
a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?--for of such consisted
my knapsack library.  He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to
tease him.

"It is not so much the book itself," he said.

"But the giver?" I suggested.

"Of course," he blushingly replied.

"Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued.

"You don't mean it--"

"But suppose I have--I'm only supposing--will you give me the pleasure
of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?"

"Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.

"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!"

The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the
eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets
and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers,
were all in their right places, touched my heart.

He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some
three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.

He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not
commercial.  His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of
some sort, and this was one of his holidays.  As I looked at his
sensitive young face, unmarred by pleasure and unscathed by sorrow,
bathed daily, I surmised, in the may-dew of high philosophies--ah, so
high! washed from within by a constant radiancy of pure thoughts, and
from without by a constant basking in the shine of every beautiful and
noble and tender thing,--I thought it not unlikely that he might fulfil
his dream.

But, alas! as he talked on, with lighted face and chin in the air, how
cruelly I realised how little I had fulfilled mine.

And how hard it was to talk to him, without crushing some flower of his
fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams.  Oh, the gulf between twenty
and thirty!  I had never quite comprehended it before.  And how
inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of
socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,--all the dear old
quackeries,--while I was already settling down comfortably to a
conservative middle age.  He had no hope that had not long been my
despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or less
comfortable conditions of the universe.  He was all for nature and
liberty, whereas I had now come to realise the charm of the artificial,
and the social value of constraint.

"Young man," I cried in my heart, "what shall I do to inherit Eternal
Youth?"

The gulf between us was further revealed when, at length coming to our
inn, we sat down to dinner.  To me it seemed the most natural thing in
the world to call for the wine-list and consult his choice of wine;
but, will you believe me, he asked to be allowed to drink water!  And
when he quoted the dear old stock nonsense out of Thoreau about being
able to get intoxicated on a glass of water, I could have laughed and
cried at the same time.

"Happy Boy!" I cried, "still able to turn water into wine by the divine
power of your youth"; and then, turning to the waiter, I ordered a
bottle of No. 37.

"Wine is the only youth granted to middle age," I continued,--"in vino
juventus, one might say; and may you, my dear young friend, long remain
so proudly independent of that great Elixir--though I confess that I
have met no few young men under thirty who have been excellent critics
of the wine-list."

As the water warmed him, he began to expand into further confidence,
and then he told me the story of his Shelley, if a story it can be
called.  For, of course, it was simple enough, and the reader has long
since guessed that the reason why he wouldn't lose his Shelley for the
world was the usual simple reason.

I listened to his rhapsodies of HER and HER and HER with an aching
heart.  How good it was to be young!  No wonder men had so desperately
sought the secret of Eternal Youth!  Who would not be young for ever,
for such dreams and such an appetite?

Here of course was the very heaven-sent confidant for such an
enterprise as mine. I told him all about my whim, just for the pleasure
of watching his face light up with youth's generous worship of all such
fantastic nonsense.  You should have seen his enthusiasm and heard all
the things he said. Why, to encounter such a whimsical fellow as myself
in this unimaginative age was like meeting a fairy prince, or coming
unexpectedly upon Don Quixote attacking the windmill.  I offered him
the post of Sancho Panza; and indeed what would he not give, he said,
to leave all and follow me!  But then I reminded him that he had
already found his Golden Girl.

"Of course, I forgot," he said, with I'm afraid something of a sigh.
For you see he was barely twenty, and to have met your ideal so early
in life is apt to rob the remainder of the journey of something of its
zest.

I asked him to give me his idea of what the Blessed Maid should be, to
which he replied, with a smile, that he could not do better than
describe Her, which he did for the sixth time.  It was, as I had
foreseen, the picture of a Saint, a Goddess, a Dream, very lovely and
pure and touching; but it was not a woman, and it was a woman I was in
search of, with all her imperfections on her head.  I suppose no boy of
twenty really loves a WOMEN, but loves only his etherealised extract of
woman, entirely free from earthy adulteration.  I noticed the words
"pure" and "natural" in constant use by my young friend.  Some lines
went through my head, but I forbore to quote them:--

  Alas I your so called purity
  Is merely immaturity,
  And woman's nature plays its part
  Sincerely but in woman's art.


But I couldn't resist asking him, out of sheer waggery, whether he
didn't think a touch of powder, and even, very judiciously applied, a
touch of rouge, was an improvement to woman.  His answer went to my
heart.

"Paint--a WOMAN!" he exclaimed.

It was as though you had said--paint an angel!

I could bear no more of it.  The gulf yawned shiveringly wide at
remarks like that; so, with the privilege of an elder, I declared it
time for bed, and yawned off to my room.

Next morning we bade good-bye, and went our several ways.  As we
parted, he handed me a letter which I was not to open till I was well
on my journey.  We waved good-bye to each other till the turnings of
the road made parting final, and then, sitting down by the roadside, I
opened the letter.  It proved to be not a letter, but a poem, which he
had evidently written after I had left him for bed.  It was entitled,
with twenty's love for a tag of Latin, Ad Puellam Auream, and it ran
thus:--

  The Golden Girl in every place
  Hides and reveals her lovely face;
  Her neither skill nor strength may find--
  'T is only loving moves her mind.
  If but a pretty face you seek,
  You'll find one any day or week;
  But if you look with deeper eyes,
  And seek her lovely, pure, and wise,
  Then must you wear the pilgrim's shoon
  For many a weary, wandering moon.

  Only the pure in heart may see
  That lily of all purity,
  Only in clean unsullied thought
  The image of her face is caught,
  And only he her love may hold
  Who buys her with the spirit's gold.

  Thus only shall you find your pearl,
  O seeker of the Golden Girl!
  She trod but now the grassy way,
  A vision of eternal May.


The devil take his impudence!  "Only the pure in heart," "clean,
unsullied thought."  How like the cheek of twenty!  And all the same
how true!  Dear lad, how true!  Certainly, the child is father to the
man.  Dirige nos!  O sage of the Golden Twenties!

As I meditatively folded up the pretty bit of writing, I made a
resolution; but it was one of such importance that not only is another
chapter needed to do it honour, but it may well inaugurate another book
of this strange uneventful history.




BOOK II



CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I DECIDE TO BE YOUNG AGAIN

Yes, I said to myself, the lad is quite right; I will follow his
advice.  I'm afraid I was in danger of developing into a sad cynic,
with a taste for the humour of this world. What should have been a
lofty high-souled pilgrimage, only less transcendental than that of the
Holy Grail itself, has so far failed, no doubt, because I have
undertaken it too much in the wanton spirit of a troubadour.

I will grow young and serious again. Yes, why not?  I will take a vow
of Youth. One's age is entirely a matter of the imagination. From this
moment I am no longer thirty.  Thirty falls from me like a hideous
dream.  My back straightens again at the thought; my silvering hair
blackens once more; my eyes, a few moments ago lacklustre and sunken,
grow bright and full again, and the whites are clear as the finest
porcelain.  Veni, veni, Mephistophile! your Faust is young
again,--young, young, and, with a boy's heart, open once more to all
the influences of the mighty world.

I bring down my stick upon the ground with a mighty ring of resolution,
and the miracle is done.  Who would take me for thirty now?  From this
moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my
mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all
by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism
dishearten.  I likewise undertake to divest myself entirely of any
sense of humour that may have developed within me during the baneful
experiences of the last ten years, and, in short, will consent for the
future to be nothing that is not perfectly perfect and pure.  These, I
take it, are the fundamental conditions of being young again.

And as for the Quest, it shall forthwith be undertaken in an entirely
serious and high-minded spirit.  From this moment I am on the look-out
for a really transcendental attachment.  No "bright-eyed bar-maids,"
however "refined," need apply. Ladies who are prodigal of their white
petticoats are no longer fit company for me.  Indeed I shall no longer
look upon a petticoat, unless I am able first entirely to spiritualise
it. It must first be disinfected of every earthly thought.

Yes, I am once more a young man, sound in wind and limb, with not a
tooth or an illusion lost, my mind tabula rasa, my heart to be had for
the asking.  Oh, come, ye merry, merry maidens!  The fairy prince is on
the fairy road.

Incipit vita nuova!

So in the lovely rapture of a new-born resolution--and is there any
rapture like it?--nature has no more intoxicating illusion than that of
turning over a new leaf, or beginning a new life from to-day--I sprang
along the road with a carolling heart; quite forgetting that Apuleius
and Fielding and Boccaccio were still in my knapsack--not to speak of
the petticoat.



CHAPTER II

AT THE SIGN OF THE SINGING STREAM

Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio, bad companions for a petticoat,
I'm afraid, bad companions too for so young a man as I had now become.
However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or,
in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean
in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant
from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the
eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the
meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the
day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing
them, quite an open-air laundry of the mind.

We were both making for the same little town, it appeared, and as the
sun was setting we reached it together.  I entered the town over the
bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled,
many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night.  I should hear
it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched
myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let
slip the multifarious world.

The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest.  Having ordered
my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out
again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the
stream, and think great thoughts.  The stream was still there, and
singing the same sweet old song.  You could hear it long after it was
out of sight, in the gathering darkness, like an old nurse humming
lullabies in the twilight.

The dinner was good, the wine was old, and oh! the rest was sweet!
Nothing fills one with so exquisite a weariness as a day spent in good
resolutions and great thoughts. There is something perilously sensuous
in the relaxation of one's muscles, both of mind and body, after a day
thus well spent.

Lighting up my pipe once more, and drawing to the fire, I suddenly
realised a sense of loneliness.  Of course, I was lonely for a
book,--Apuleius or Fielding or Boccaccio!

An hour ago they had seemed dangerous companions for so lofty a mood;
but now, under the gentle influences of dinner, the mood had not indeed
changed--but mellowed. So to say, we would split the difference between
the ideal and the human, and be, say, twenty-five.

It was in this genial attitude of mind that I strode up the quaint
circular staircase to fetch Fielding from my room, and, shade of Tom
Jones! what should be leaving my room, as I advanced to enter it,
but--well, it's no use, resolutions are all very well, but facts are
facts, especially when they're natural, and here was I face to face
with the most natural little natural fact, and withal the most charming
and merry-eyed, that--well, in short, as I came to enter my room I was
confronted by the roundest, ruddiest little chambermaid ever created
for the trial of mortal frailty.

And the worst of it was that her merry eye was in partnership with a
merry tongue. Indeed, for some unexplained reason, she was bubbling
over with congested laughter, the reason for which mere embarrassment
set one inquiring.  At last, between little gushes of laughter which
shook her plump shoulders in a way that aroused wistful memories of
Hebe, she archly asked me, with mock solemnity, if I should need a
lady's maid.


"Certainly," I replied with inane promptitude, for I had no notion of
her drift; but then she ran off in a scurry of laughter, and still
puzzled I turned into my room, TO FIND, neatly hung over the end of the
bed, nothing less than the dainty petticoat and silk stockings of
Sylvia Joy.

You can imagine the colour of my cheeks at the discovery.  No doubt I
was already the laughing-stock of the whole inn.  What folly!  What a
young vixen!  Oh, what's to be done?  Pay my bill and sneak off at once
to the next town; but how pass through the grinning line of boots, and
waiter, and chambermaid, and ironically respectful landlord and
landlady, in the hall...

But while I thus deliberated, something soft pressed in at the door;
and, making a sudden dart, I had the little baggage who had brought
about my dilemma a prisoner in my arms.

I stayed some days at this charming old inn, for Amaryllis--oh, yes,
you may be sure her name was Amaryllis--had not betrayed me; and indeed
she may have some share in my retrospect of the inn as one of the most
delightful which I encountered anywhere in my journeying.  Would you
like to know its name?  Well, I know it as The Singing Stream.  If you
can find it under that name, you are welcome.  And should you chance to
be put into bedroom No. 26, you can think of me, and how I used to lie
awake, listening to the stream rippling beneath the window, with its
gentle harpsichord tinkle, and little by little letting slip the
multifarious world.

And if anything about this chapter should seem to contradict the high
ideals of the chapter preceding it, I can only say that, though the
episode should not rigidly fulfil the conditions of the transcendental,
nothing could have been more characteristic of that early youth to
which I had vowed myself.  Indeed, I congratulated myself, as I looked
my last at the sign of The Singing Stream, that this had been quite in
my early manner.



CHAPTER III

IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE

Though I had said good-bye to the inn, the stream and I did not part
company at the inn-door, but continued for the best part of a morning
to be fellow-travellers.  Indeed, having led me to one pleasant
adventure, its purpose, I afterwards realised, was to lead me to
another, and then to go about its own bright business.

I don't think either of us had much idea where we were or whither we
were bound.  Our guiding principle seemed to be to get as much sunshine
as possible, and to find the easiest road.  We avoided dull sandy
levels and hard rocky places, with the same instinctive dexterity.  We
gloomed together through dark dingles, and came out on sunny reaches
with the same gilded magnificence. There are days when every stream is
Pactolus and every man is Croesus, and thanks to that first and
greatest of all alchemists, the sun, the morning I write of was a
morning when to breathe was gold and to see was silver.  And to breathe
and see was all one asked.  It was the first of May, and the world
shone like a great illuminated letter with which that father of
artists, the sun, was making splendid his missal of the seasons.

The month of May was ever his tour de force.  Each year he has strained
and stimulated his art to surpass himself, seeking ever a finer and a
brighter gold, a more celestial azure.  Never had his gold been so
golden, his azure so dazzlingly clear and deep as on this particular
May morning; while his fancy simply ran riot in the marginal
decorations of woodland and spinney, quaint embroidered flowers and
copses full of exquisitely painted and wonderfully trained birds of
song.  It was indeed a day for nature to be proud of.  So seductive was
the sunshine that even the shy trout leapt at noonday, eager apparently
to change his silver for gold.


  O silver fish in the silver stream,
  O golden fish in the golden gleam,
  Tell me, tell me, tell me true,
  Shall I find my girl if I follow you?


I suppose the reader never makes nonsense rhymes from sheer gladness of
heart,--nursery doggerel to keep time with the rippling of the stream,
or the dancing of the sun, or the beating of his heart; the gibberish
of delight.  As I hummed this nonsense, a trout at least three pounds
in weight, whom you would know again anywhere, leapt a yard out of the
water, and I took it, in my absurd, sun-soaked heart, as a good omen,
as though he had said, "Follow and see."

I had no will but to follow, no desire but to see.  All the same,
though I affected to take him seriously, I had little suspicion how
much that trout was to mean to me,--yes, within the course of a very
few moments. Indeed, I had hardly strolled on for another quarter of a
mile, when I was suddenly aroused from wool-gathering by his loud cries
for help.  Looking up, I saw him flashing desperately in mid-air, a
lovely foot of writhing silver.  In another second he was swung through
the sunlight, and laid out breathing hard in a death-bed of buttercups
and daisies.

There was not a moment to be lost, if I were to repay the debt of
gratitude which in a flash I had seen that I owed him.

"Madam," I said, breathlessly springing forward, as a heavenly being
was coldly tearing the hook from the gills of the unlucky trout,
"though I am a stranger, will you do me a great favour? It is a matter
of life or death..."

She looked up at me with some surprise, but with a fine fearless
glance, and almost immediately said, "Certainly, what can I do?"

"Spare the life of that trout--"

"It is a singular request," she replied, "and one," she smiled,
"self-sacrificing indeed for an angler to grant, for he weighs at least
three pounds.  However, since he seems a friend of yours, here goes--"
And with the gladdest, most grateful sound in the world, the happy
smack of a fish back home again in the water, after an appalling three
minutes spent on land, that prophetic trout was once more an active
unit in God's populous universe.

"Now that's good of you," I said, with thankful eyes, "and shows a kind
heart."

"And kind hearts, they say, are more than coronets," she replied
merrily, indulging in that derisive quotation which seems to be the
final reward of the greatest poets.

For a moment there was a silence, during which I confess to wondering
what I should say next.  However, she supplied my place.

"But of course," she said, "you owe it to me, after this touching
display of humanitarianism, to entertain me with your reason for
interposing between me and my just trout.  Was it one of those
wonderful talking fishes out of the Arabian Nights, or are you merely
an angler yourself, and did you begrudge such a record catch to a girl?"

"I see," I replied, "that you will understand me.  That trout was, so
to speak, out of the Arabian Nights.  Only five minutes ago it was a
May-day madness of mine to think that he leaped out of the water and
gave me a highly important message.  So I begged his life from a mere
fancy.  It was just a whim, which I trust you will excuse."

"A whim!  So you are a follower of the great god Whim," she replied,
with somewhat of an eager interest in her voice.  "How nice it is to
meet a fellow-worshipper!"

"Do women ever have whims?" I respectfully asked.

"I don't know about other women," she replied.  "Indeed, I'm afraid I'm
unnatural enough to take no interest in them at all. But, as for
me,--well, what nonsense!  Tell me some more about the trout.  What was
the wonderful message he seemed to give you? Or perhaps I oughtn't to
ask?"

"I'm afraid," I said, "it would hardly translate into anything
approaching common-sense."

"Did I ask for common-sense?" she retorted.  It was true, she hadn't.
But then I couldn't, with any respect for her, tell her the trout's
message, or, with any respect for myself, recall those atrocious
doggerel lines.  In my dilemma, I caught sight of a pretty book lying
near her fishing-basket, and diverted the talk by venturing to ask its
name.

"'T is of Aucassin and Nicolete," she replied, with something in her
voice which seemed to imply that the tender old story would be familiar
to me.  My memory served me for once gallantly.

I answered by humming half to myself the lines from the prologue,--

  "Sweet the song, the story sweet,
  There is no man hearkens it,
  No man living 'neath the sun,
  So outwearied, so foredone,
  Sick and woful, worn and sad,
  But is healed, but is glad
       'T is so sweet."


"How charming of you to know it!" she laughed.  "You are the only man
in this county, or the next, or the next, who knows it, I'm sure."

"Are the women of the county more familiar with it?" I replied.

"But tell me about the trout," she once more persisted.

At the same moment, however, there came from a little distance the
musical tinkle of a bell that sounded like silver, a fairy-like and
almost startling sound.

"It is my lunch," she explained.  "I'm a worshipper of the great god
Whim too, and close by here I have a little summer-house, full of books
and fishing-lines and other childishness, where, when my whim is to be
lonely, I come and play at solitude.  If you'll be content with rustic
fare, and promise to be amusing, it would be very pleasant if you'd
join me."

O! most prophetic and agreeable trout! Was it not like the old fairy
tales, the you-help-us and we'll-help-you of Psyche and the ants?

It had been the idlest whim for me to save the life of that poor trout.
There was no real pity in it.  For two pins, I had been just as ready
to cut it open, to see if by chance it carried in its belly the golden
ring wherewith I was to wed the Golden--

However, such is the gratitude of nature to man, that this little
thoughtless act of kindness had brought me face to face with--was it
the Golden Girl?



CHAPTER IV

'T IS OF NICOLETE AND HER BOWER IN THE WILDWOOD

But I have all this time left the reader without any formal descriptive
introduction to this whimsical young lady angler. Not without reason,
for, like any really charming personality, she was very difficult to
picture.  Paint a woman! as our young friend Alastor said.

Faces that fall into types you can describe, or at all events label in
such a way that the reader can identify them; but those faces that
consist mainly of spiritual effect and physical bloom, that change with
everything they look upon, the light in which ebbs and flows with every
changing tide of the soul,--these you have to love to know, and to
worship to portray.

Now the face of Nicolete, as I learnt in time to call her, was just
soul and bloom, perhaps mainly bloom.  I never noticed whether she had
any other features except her eyes.  I suppose she had a nose; a little
lace pocket-handkerchief I have by me at the moment is almost too small
to be evidence on that important point.

As I walked by her side that May morning, I was only conscious of her
voice and her exquisite girlhood; for though she talked with the APLOMB
of a woman of the world, a passionate candour and simple ardour in her
manner would have betrayed her, had her face not plainly declared her
the incarnation of twenty.  But if she were twenty years young, she was
equally twenty years OLD; and twenty years old, in some respects, is
the greatest age attained to by man or woman.  In this she rather
differed from Alastor, of whom otherwise she was the female
counterpart.  Her talk, and something rather in her voice than her
talk, soon revealed her as a curious mixture of youth and age, of
dreamer and desillusionee.

One soon realised that she was too young, was hoping too much from
life, to spend one's days with.  Yet she had just sufficiently that
touch of languor which puts one at one's ease, though indeed it was
rather the languor of waiting for what was going to happen than the
weariness of experience gone by.  She was weary, not because of the
past, but because the fairy theatre of life still kept its curtain
down, and forced her to play over and over again the impatient overture
of her dreams.

I have no doubt that it was largely nervousness that kept the
mysterious playwright so long fumbling behind the scenes, for it was
obvious that it would be no ordinary sort of play, no every-day
domestic drama, that would satisfy this young lady, to whom life had
given, by way of prologue, the inestimable blessing of wealth, and the
privilege, as a matter of course, of choosing as she would among the
grooms (that is, the bride-grooms) of the romantic British aristocracy.

She had made youth's common mistake of beginning life with books, which
can only be used without danger by those who are in a position to test
their statements.  Youth naturally believes everything that is told it,
especially in books.

Now, books are simply professional liars about life, and the books that
are best worth reading are those which lie the most beautifully. Yet,
in fairness, we must add that they are liars, not with intent to
mislead, but merely with the tenderest purpose to console.  They are
the good Samaritans that find us robbed of all our dreams by the
roadside of life, bleeding and weeping and desolate; and such is their
skill and wealth and goodness of heart, that they not only heal up our
wounds, but restore to us the lost property of our dreams, on one
condition,--that we never travel with them again in the daylight.

A library is a better world, built by the brains and hearts of poets
and dreamers, as a refuge from the real world outside; and in it alone
is to be found the land of milk and honey which it promises.

"Milk and honey" would have been an appropriate inscription for the
delicious little library which parents who, I surmised, doted on
Nicolete in vain, had allowed her to build in a wild woodland corner of
her ancestral park, half a mile away from the great house, where, for
all its corridors and galleries, she could never feel, at all events,
spiritually alone.  All that was most sugared and musical and generally
delusive in the old library of her fathers had been brought out to this
little woodland library, and to that nucleus of old leather-bound poets
and romancers, long since dead, yet as alive and singing on their
shelves as any bird on the sunny boughs outside, my young lady's
private purse had added all that was most sugared and musical and
generally delusive in the vellum bound Japanese-paper literature of our
own luxurious day.  Nor were poets and romancers from over sea--in
their seeming simple paper covers, but with, oh, such complicated and
subtle insides!--absent from the court which Nicolete held here in the
greenwood.  Never was such a nest of singing-birds. All day long, to
the ear of the spirit, there was in this little library a sound of
harping and singing and the telling of tales,--songs and tales of a
world that never was, yet shall ever be.  Here day by day Nicolete fed
her young soul on the nightingale's-tongues of literature, and put down
her book only to listen to the nightingale's-tongues outside.  Yea,
sun, moon, and stars were all in the conspiracy to lie to her of the
loveliness of the world and the good intentions of life.  And now, thus
unexpectedly, I found myself joining the nefarious conspiracy.  Ah,
well! was I not twenty myself, and full of dreams!



CHAPTER V

'T IS OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

Thus it was that we lunched together amid the books and birds, in an
exquisite solitude a deux; for the ringer of the silver bell had
disappeared, having left a dainty meal in readiness--for two.

"You see you were expected," said Nicolete, with her pretty laugh.  "I
dreamed I should have a visitor to-day, and told Susan to lay the lunch
for two.  You mustn't be surprised at that," she added mischievously;
"it has often happened before. I dream that dream every other night,
and Susan lays for two every day.  She knows my whims,--knows that the
extra knife and fork are for the fairy knight that may turn up any
afternoon, as I tell her--"

"To find the sleepless princess," I added, thinking at the same time
one of those irrelevant asides that will go through the brain of
thirty, that the woman who would get her share of kisses nowadays must
neither slumber nor sleep.

A certain great poet, I think it was Byron, objected to seeing women in
the act of eating. He thought their eating should be done in private.
What a curiously perverse opinion!  For surely woman never shows to
better advantage than in the dainty exercises of a dainty repast, and
there is nothing more thrilling to man than a meal alone with a woman
he loves or is about to love.  Perhaps, deep down, the reason is that
there still vibrates in the masculine blood the thrilling surprise of
the moment when man first realised that the angel woman was built upon
the same carnivorous principles as his grosser self.

That is one of the first heart-beating surprises that come upon the boy
Columbus, as he sets out to discover the New World of woman; and indeed
his surprise has not seldom deepened into admiration, as he has found
that not only does woman eat, but frequently eats a lot.

This privilege of seeing woman eat is the earliest granted of those
delicate animal intimacies, the fuller and fuller confiding of which
plays not the least important part, and ever such a sweet one, even in
a highly transcendental affection.  It is this gradual humanising of
the divine female that brings about the spiritualising of the
unregenerate male.

In the earliest stages of love the services are small that we are
privileged to do for the loved one.  But if we are allowed to sit at
meat with her,--ever a royal condescension,--it is ours at least to
pass her the salt, to see that she is never kept waiting a moment for
the mustard or the pepper, to cut the bread for her with geometrical
precision, and to lean as near her warm shoulder as we dare to pour out
for her the sacred wine.

Yes! for sure I was twenty again, for the performance of these simple
services for Nicolete gave me a thrill of pure boyish pleasure such as
I had never expected to feel again.  And did she not make a knight of
me by gently asking if I would be so kind as to carve the chicken, and
how she laughed quite disproportionally at my school-boy story of the
man who, being asked to carve a pigeon, said he thought they had better
send for a wood-carver, as it seemed to be a wood pigeon.

And while we ate and drank and laughed and chatted, the books around us
were weaving their spells.  Even before the invention of printing books
were "love's purveyors." Was it not a book that sent Paolo and
Francesca for ever wandering on that stormy wind of passion and of
death?  And nowadays the part played by books in human drama is greater
than we perhaps realise. Apart from their serious influence as
determining destinies of the character, what endless opportunities they
afford to lovers, who perhaps are denied all other meeting-places than
may be found on the tell-tale pages of a marked volume.  The method is
so easy and so unsuspect.  You have only to put faint pencil-marks
against the tenderest passages in your favourite new poet, and lend the
volume to Her, and She has only to leave here and there the dropped
violet of a timid confirmatory initial, for you to know your fate.  And
what a touchstone books thus become!  Indeed they simplify love-making,
from every point of view.  With books so inexpensive and accessible to
all as they are to-day, no one need run any risks of marrying the wrong
woman.  He has only to put her through an unconscious examination by
getting her to read and mark a few of his favourite authors, and he is
thus in possession of the master clues of her character.  With a list
of her month's reading and a photograph, a man ought to be able to make
up his mind about any given woman, even though he has never spoken to
her.  "Name your favourite writer" should be one of the first questions
in the Engagement Catechism.

There is, indeed, no such short cut to knowledge of each other as a
talk about books.  One short afternoon is enough for any two
book-lovers, though they may have met for the first time in the
morning, to make up their minds whether or not they have been born for
each other.  If you are agreed, say, in admiring Meredith, Hardy, Omar
Khayyam, and Maeterlinck,--to take four particularly
test-authors,--there is nothing to prevent your marrying at once.
Indeed, a love for any one of these significant writers will be enough,
not to speak of an admiration for "Aucassin and Nicolete."

Now, Nicolete and I soon found that we had all these and many another
writer in common, and before our lunch was ended we were nearer to each
other than many old friends.  The heart does not more love the heart
that loves it than the brain loves the brain that comprehends it; and,
whatever else was to befall us, Nicolete and I were already in love
with each other's brains. Whether or not the malady would spread till
it reached the heart is the secret of some future chapter.



CHAPTER VI

A FAIRY TALE AND ITS FAIRY TAILORS

As this is not a realistic novel, I do not hold myself bound, as I have
said before, to account reasonably for everything that is done--least
of all, said--within its pages. I simply say, So it happened, or So it
is, and expect the reader to take my word.  If he be uncivil enough to
doubt it, we may as well stop playing this game of fancy.  It is one of
the first conditions of enjoying a book, as it is of all successful
hypnotism, that the reader surrenders up his will to the writer, who,
of course, guarantees to return it to him at the close of the volume.
If you say that no young lady would have behaved as I have presently to
relate of Nicolete, that no parents were ever so accommodating in the
world of reality, I reply,--No doubt you are right, but none the less
what I have to tell is true and really did happen, for all that. And
not only did it happen, but to the whimsically minded, to the true
children of fancy, it will seem the most natural thing in the world.
No doubt they will wonder why I have made such a preamble about it, as
indeed, now I think of it, so do I.

Again I claim exemption in this wandering history from all such
descriptive drudgery upon second, third, and fourth dramatis
personsonae as your thorough-going novelist must undertake with a good
grace.  Like a host and hostess at a reception, the poor novelist has
to pretend to be interested in everybody,--in the dull as in the
brilliant, in the bore as in the beauty.  I'm afraid I should never do
as a novelist, for I should waste all my time with the heroine; whereas
the true novelist is expected to pay as much attention to the heroine's
parents as though he were a suitor for her hand.  Indeed, there is no
relative of hero or heroine too humble or stupid for such a novelist as
the great Balzac.  He will invite the dullest of them to stay with him
for quite prolonged visits, and without a murmur set apart a suite of
chapters for their accommodation.  I'm not sure that the humanity of
the reader in these cases is of such comprehensive sympathy as the
novelist's, and it may well be that the novelist undertakes all such
hard labour under a misapprehension of the desires of the reader, who,
as a rule, I fancy, is as anxious to join the ladies as the novelist
himself.  Indeed, I believe that there is an opportunity for a new form
of novel, in which the novelist, as well as the reader, will skip all
the dull people, and merely indicate such of them as are necessary to
the action by an outline or a symbol, compressing their familiar
psychology, and necessary plot-interferences with the main characters,
into recognised formulae.  For the benefit of readers voracious for
everything about everybody, schedule chapters might be provided by
inferior novelists, good at painting say tiresome bourgeois fathers,
gouty uncles and brothers in the army, as sometimes in great pictures
we read that the sheep in the foreground have been painted by Mr.
So-and-so, R.A.

The Major-General and his Lady were taking the waters at Wiesbaden.
That was all I knew of Nicolete's parents, and all I needed to know;
with the exception of one good action,--at her urgent entreaty they had
left Nicolete behind them, with no other safeguard than a charming
young lady companion, whose fitness for her sacred duties consisted in
a temperament hardly less romantic and whimsical than Nicolete's own.
She was too charming to deserve the name of obstacle; and as there was
no other--

But I admit that the cart has got a little in front of the horse, and I
grow suddenly alarmed lest the reader should be suspecting me of an
elopement, or some such romantic vulgarity.  If he will only put any
such thoughts from his mind, I promise to proceed with the story in a
brief and business-like manner forthwith.

We are back once more at the close of the last chapter, in Nicolete's
book-bower in the wildwood.  It is an hour or two later, and the
afternoon sun is flooding with a searching glory all the secret places
of the woodland.  Hidden nooks and corners, unused to observation,
suddenly gleam and blush in effulgent exposure,--like lovers whom the
unexpected turning on of a light has revealed kissing in the dark,--and
are as suddenly, unlike the lovers, left in their native shade again.
It was that rich afternoon sunlight that loves to flash into teacups as
though they were crocuses, that loves to run a golden finger along the
beautiful wrinkles of old faces and light up the noble hollows of
age-worn eyes; the sunlight that loves to fall with transfiguring beam
on the once dear book we never read, or, with malicious
inquisitiveness, expose to undreamed-of detection the undusted picture,
or the gold-dusted legs of remote chairs, which the poor housemaid has
forgotten.

So in Nicolete's bower it illuminated with strange radiancy the dainty
disorder of deserted lunch, made prisms out of the wine-glasses,
painted the white cloth with wedge-shaped rainbows, and flooded the
cavernous interiors of the half-eaten fowl with a pathetic yellow
torchlight.

Leaving that melancholy relic of carnivorous appetite, it turned its
bold gold gaze on Nicolete.  No need to transfigure her! But, heavens!
how grandly her young face took the great kiss of the god!  Then it
fell for a tender moment on the jaundiced page of my old Boccaccio,--a
rare edition, which I had taken from my knapsack to indulge myself with
the appreciation of a connoisseur. Next minute "the unobstructed beam"
was shining right into the knapsack itself, for all the world like one
of those little demon electric lights with which the dentist makes a
momentary treasure-cave of your distended jaws, flashing with startled
stalactite. At the same moment Nicolete's starry eyes took the same
direction; then there broke from her her lovely laughter, merry and
inextinguishable.

Once more, need I say, my petticoat had played me false--or should I
not say true? For there was its luxurious lace border, a thing for the
soft light of the boudoir, or the secret moonlight of love's permitted
eyes, alone to see, shamelessly brazening it out in this terrible
sunlight.  Obviously there was but one way out of the dilemma, to
confess my pilgrimage to Nicolete, and reveal to her all the fanciful
absurdity to which, after all, I owed the sight of her.

"So that is why you pleaded so hard for that poor trout," she said,
when I had finished.  "Well, you are a fairy prince indeed! Now, do you
know what the punishment of your nonsense is to be?"

"Is it very severe and humiliating?" I asked.

"You must judge of that.  It is--to take me with you!"

"You,--what do you mean?"

"Yes,--not for good and all, of course, but just for, say, a fortnight,
just a fortnight of rambles and adventures, and then to deliver me safe
home again where you found me--"

"But it is impossible," I almost gasped in surprise.  "Of course you
are not serious?"

"I am, really, and you will take me, won't you?" she continued
pleadingly. "You don't know how we women envy you men those wonderful
walking-tours we can only read about in Hazlitt or Stevenson. We are
not allowed to move without a nurse or a footman.  From the day we are
born to the day we die, we are never left a moment to ourselves.  But
you--you can go out into the world, the mysterious world, do as you
will, go where you will, wander here, wander there, follow any bye-way
that takes your fancy, put up at old inns, make strange acquaintances,
have all kinds of romantic experiences--  Oh, to be a man for a
fortnight, your younger brother for a fortnight!"

"It is impossible!" I repeated.

"It isn't at all," she persisted, with a fine blush.  "If you will only
be nice and kind, and help me to some Rosalind's clothes. You have only
to write to your tailors, or send home for a spare suit of
clothes,--with a little managing yours would just fit me, you're not so
much taller,--and then we could start, like two comrades, seeking
adventures.  Oh, how glorious it would be!"

It was in vain that I brought the batteries of common-sense to bear
upon her whim.  I raised every possible objection in vain.

I pointed out the practical difficulties. There were her parents.

Weren't they drinking the waters at Wiesbaden, and weren't they to go
on drinking them for another three weeks?  My fancy made a picture of
them distended with three weeks' absorption of mineral springs.  Then
there was her companion.  Nicolete was confident of her assistance.
Then I tried vilifying myself.  How could she run the risk of trusting
herself to such intimate companionship with a man whom she hadn't known
half a dozen hours?  This she laughed to scorn.  Presently I was silent
from sheer lack of further objections; and need I say that all the
while there had been a traitor impulse in my heart, a weak sweetness
urging me on to accept the pretty chance which the good genius of my
pilgrimage had so evidently put in my way,--for, after all, what harm
could it do?  With me Nicolete was, indeed, safe,--that, of course, I
knew,--and safely she should come back home again after her little
frolic.  All that was true enough.  And how charming it would be to
have such a dainty companion! then the fun, the fancy, the whim of it
all.  What was the use of setting out to seek adventures if I didn't
pursue them when found.

Well, the long and short of it was that I agreed to undertake the
adventure, provided that Nicolete could win over the lady whom at the
beginning of the chapter I declared too charming to be described as an
obstacle.

By nine o'clock the following morning the fairy tailors, as Nicolete
called them, were at work on the fairy clothes, and, at the end of
three days, there came by parcel-post a bulky unromantic-looking
brown-paper parcel, which it was my business to convey to Nicolete
under cover of the dark.



CHAPTER VII

FROM THE MORNING STAR TO THE MOON

I quite realise that this book is written perhaps only just in time for
the motive of these two or three chapters to be appreciated in its
ancient piquancy.  Very soon, alas! the sexes will be robbed of one of
the first and most thrilling motives of romance, the motive of As You
Like It, the romance of wearing each other's clothes.  Alas, that every
advance of reason should mean a corresponding retreat of romance!  It
is only reasonable that woman, being--have you yet realised the
fact?--a biped like her brothers, should, when she takes to her
brothers' recreations, dress as those recreations demand; and yet the
death of Rosalind is a heavy price to pay for the lady bicyclist. So
soon as the two sexes wear the same clothes, they may as well wear
nothing; the game of sex is up.  In this matter, as in others, we
cannot both have our cake and eat it.  All romance, like all
temptation, is founded on the Fascination of the Exception. So soon as
the exception becomes, instead of merely proving, the rule, that
particular avenue of romance is closed. The New Woman of the future
will be the woman with the petticoats, she who shall restore the
ancient Eleusinian mysteries of the silk skirt and the tea-gown.

Happily for me, my acquaintance among the Rosalinds of the bicycle, at
this period of my life, was but slight, and thus no familiarity with
the tweed knickerbocker feminine took off the edge of my delight on
first beholding Nicolete clothed in like manhood with ourselves, and
yet, delicious paradox! looking more like a woman than ever.

During those three days while the fairy tailors were at work our
friendship had not been idle.  Indeed, some part of each day we had
spent diligently learning each other, as travellers to distant lands
across the Channel work hard at phrase-book and Baedeker the week
before their departure. Meanwhile too I had made the acquaintance of
the charming lady Obstacle,--as it proved so unfair to call her,--and
by some process of natural magnetism we had immediately won each
other's hearts, so that on the moonlight night on which I took the
river path with my brown-paper parcel there was no misgiving in my
heart,--nothing but harping and singing, and blessings on the river
that seemed all silver with the backs of magic trout.  As I thought of
all I owed that noble fish, I kneeled by the river's bearded lip, among
the nettles and the meadowsweet, and swore by the inconstant moon that
trout and I were henceforth kinsmen, and that between our houses should
be an eternal amity.  The chub and the dace and the carp, not to speak
of that Chinese pirate the pike, might still look to it, when I came
forth armed with rod and line; but for me and my house the trout is
henceforth sacred. By the memory of the Blessed Saint Izaak, I swore it!

My arrival at Beaucaire was one of great excitement.  Nicolete and the
Obstacle were both awaiting me, for the mysteries of masculine attire
were not to be explored alone. The parcel was snatched quite
unceremoniously from my hands, the door shut upon me, and I laughingly
bidden go listen to the nightingale.  I was not long in finding one,
nor, being an industrious phrase-maker, did I waste my time, for,
before I was summoned to behold Nicolete in all her boyhood, I had
found occasion and moonlight to remark to my pocket-book that, Though
all the world has heard the song of the Nightingale to the Rose, only
the Nightingale has heard the answer of the Rose.  This I hurriedly hid
in my heart for future conversation, as the pre-arranged tinkle of the
silver bell called me to the rose.

Would, indeed, that I were a nightingale to sing aright the beauty of
that rose with which, think of it, I was to spend a whole
fortnight,--yes, no less than fourteen wonderful days.

The two girls were evidently proud of themselves at having succeeded so
well with the mysterious garments.  There were one or two points on
which they needed my guidance, but they were unimportant; and when at
last Nicolete would consent to stand up straight and let me have a good
look at her,--for, poor child! she was as shy and shrinking as though
she had nothing on,--she made a very pretty young man indeed.

She didn't, I'm afraid, look like a young man of our degenerate day.
She was far too beautiful and distinguished for that. Besides, her dark
curling hair, quite short for a woman, was too long, and her eyes--like
the eyes of all poets--were women's eyes.  She looked, indeed, like one
of those wonderful boys of the Italian Renaissance, whom you may still
see at the National Gallery, whose beauty is no denial, but rather the
stamp of their slender, supple strength, young painters and sculptors
who held the palette for Leonardo, or wielded the chisel for
Michelangelo, and anon threw both aside to take up sword for Guelf or
Ghibelline in the narrow streets of Florence.

Her knapsack was already packed, and its contents included a serge
skirt "in case of emergencies."  Already, she naughtily reminded me, we
possessed a petticoat between us.

The brief remainder of the evening passed in excited chatter and
cigarettes, and in my instructing Nicolete in certain tricks of
masculine deportment.  The chief difficulty I hardly like mentioning;
and if the Obstacle had not been present, I certainly dare not have
spoken of it to Nicolete.  I mean that she was so shy about her pretty
legs.  She couldn't cross them with any successful nonchalance.

"You must take your legs more for granted, dear Nicolete," I summoned
courage to say.  "The nonchalance of the legs is the first lesson to be
learnt in such a masquerade as this.  You must regard them as so much
bone and iron, rude skeleton joints and shins, as though they were the
bones of the great elk or other extinct South Kensington
specimen,"--"not," I added in my heart, "as the velvet and ivory which
they are."

We had agreed to start with the sun on the morrow, so as to get clear
of possible Peeping Toms; and when good-nights had been said, and I was
once more swinging towards my inn, it seemed but an hour or two, as
indeed it was, before I heard four o'clock drowsily announced through
my bedroom door, and before I was once more striding along that
river-bank all dew-silvered with last night's moonlight, the sun
rubbing his great eye on the horizon, the whole world yawning through
dainty bed-clothes of mist, and here and there a copse-full of birds
congratulating themselves on their early rising.

Nicolete was not quite ready, so I had to go listen to the lark, about
whom, alas! I could find nothing to say to my pocket-book, before
Nicolete, armed cap-a-pie with stick and knapsack, appeared at the door
of her chalet.

The Obstacle was there to see us start. She and Nicolete exchanged many
kisses which were hard to bear, and the first quarter of an hour of our
journey was much obstructed by the farewells of her far-fluttering
handkerchief.  When at last we were really alone, I turned and looked
at Nicolete striding manfully at my side, just to make sure that it was
really true.

"Well, we're in for it now," I said; "aren't you frightened?"

"Oh, it's wonderful," she replied; "don't spoil it by talking."

And I didn't; for who could hope to compete with the sun, who was
making the whole dewy world shake with laughter at his brilliancy, or
with the birds, any one of whom was a poet at least equal to Herrick?

Presently we found ourselves at four crossroads, with a four-fingered
post in the centre. We had agreed to leave our destination to chance.
We read the sign-post.

"Which shall we choose?" I said,--

"Aucassin, true love and fair, To what land do we repair?"


"Don't you think this one," she replied, "this one?--To the Moon!"

"Certainly, we couldn't find a prettier place; but it's a long way," I
replied, looking up at the sky, all roses and pearls,--"a long way from
the Morning Star to the Moon."

"All the longer to be free," cried Nicolete, recklessly.

"So be it," I assented.  "Allons--to the Moon!"



CHAPTER VIII

THE KIND OF THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE MOON

Two friends of my youth, with whom it would be hopeless to attempt
competition, have described the star-strewn journey to the moon.  It is
not for me to essay again where the ingenious M. Jules Verne and Mr.
William Morris have preceded me. Besides, the journey is nowadays much
more usual, and therefore much less adventurous, than when those
revered writers first described it. In the middle ages a journey to the
moon with a woman you loved was a very perilous matter indeed.  Even in
the last century the roads were much beset with danger; but in our own
day, like most journeys, it is accomplished with ease and safety in a
few hours.

However, to the latter-day hero, whose appetite for dragons is not
keen, this absence of adventure is perhaps rather pleasurable than
otherwise; and I confess that I enjoyed the days I spent on foot with
Nicolete none the less because they passed in tranquil
uneventfulness,--that is, without events of the violent kind.  Of
course, all depends on what you call an event.  We were not waylaid by
robbers, we fed and slept unchallenged at inns, we escaped collision
with the police, and we encountered no bodily dangers of any kind; yet
should I not call the journey uneventful, nor indeed, I think, would
Nicolete.

To me it was one prolonged divine event, and, with such daily
intercourse with Nicolete, I never dreamed of craving for any other
excitement.  To walk from morning to evening by her side, to minister
to her moods, to provide such entertainment as I might for her brain,
and watch like a father over her physical needs; to note when she was
weary and too proud to show it, and to pretend to be done up myself; to
choose for her the easiest path, and keep my eyes open for wayside
flowers and every country surprise,--these, and a hundred other
attentions, kept my heart and mind in busy service.

To picnic by some lonely stream-side on a few sandwiches, a flask of
claret, and a pennyworth of apples; to talk about the books we loved;
to exchange our hopes and dreams,--we asked nothing better than this
simple fare.

And so a week went by.  But, though so little had seemed to happen, and
though our walking record was shamefully modest, yet, imperceptible as
the transition had been, we were, quite insensibly indeed, and
unacknowledged, in a very different relation to each other than when we
had started out from the Morning Star.  In fact, to make no more words
about it, I was head over heels in love with Nicolete, and I think,
without conceit, I may say that Nicolete was rapidly growing rather
fond of me.  Apart from anything else, we were such excellent chums. We
got along together as if indeed we had been two brothers, equable in
our tempers and one in our desires.

At last the feeling on my side became so importunate that I could no
longer keep silence.

We were seated together taking tea at a small lonely inn, whose windows
looked out over a romantic little lake, backed by Salvator Rosa
pine-woods.  The sun was beginning to grow dreamy, and the whole world
to wear a dangerously sentimental expression.

I forget exactly what it was, but something in our talk had set us
glowing, had touched tender chords of unexpected sympathy, and
involuntarily I stretched out my hand across the corner of the table
and pressed Nicolete's hand as it rested on the cloth.  She did not
withdraw it, and our eyes met with a steady gaze of love.

"Nicolete," I said presently, when I could speak, "it is time for you
to be going back home."

"Why?" she asked breathlessly.

"Because," I answered, "I must love you if you stay."

"Would you then bid me go?" she said.

"Nicolete," I said, "don't tempt me.  Be a good girl and go home."

"But supposing I don't want to go home," she said; "supposing--oh,
supposing I love you too?  Would you still bid me go?"

"Yes," I said.  "In that case it would be even more imperative."

"Aucassin!"

"It is true, it is true, dear Nicolete."

"Then, Aucassin," she replied, almost sternly, in her great girlish
love, "this is true also,--I love you.  I have never loved, shall never
love, any man but you!"

"Nicolete!"

"Aucassin!"

There were no more words spoken between us for a full hour that
afternoon.



CHAPTER IX

WRITTEN BY MOONLIGHT

I knew deep down in my heart that it couldn't last, yet how deny myself
these roses, while the opportunity of gathering them was mine!--the
more so, as I believed it would do no harm to Nicolete.  At all events,
a day or two more or less of moonshine would make no matter either way.
And so all next day we walked hand in hand through Paradise.

It has been said by them of old time, and our fathers have told us,
that the kiss of first love, the first kiss of the first woman we love,
is beyond all kisses sweet; and true it is.  But true is it also that
no less sweet is the first kiss of the last woman we love.

Putting my faith in old saws, as a young man will, I had never dreamed
to know again a bliss so divinely passionate and pure as came to me
with every glance of Nicolete's sweet eyes, with every simple pressure
of her hand; and the joy that was mine when sometimes, stopping on our
way, we would press together our lips ever so gravely and tenderly,
seems too holy even to speak of.

The holy angels could not have loved Nicolete with a purer love, a love
freer from taint of any earthly thought, than I, a man of thirty,
blase, and fed from my youth upon the honeycomb of woman.

It was curious that the first difficulty of our pilgrimage should
befall us the very next day.  Coming towards nightfall to a small inn
in a lonely unpopulated countryside, we found that the only
accommodation the inn afforded was one double-bedded room, and there
was no other inn for at least ten miles.  I think I was more troubled
than Nicolete.  When, after interviewing the landlady, I came and told
her of the dilemma, where she sat in the little parlour wearied out
with the day's walk, she blushed, it is true, but seemed little put
about.  Indeed, she laughed, and said it was rather fun, "like
something out of Sterne,"--of such comfort is a literary reference in
all seasons and circumstances,--and then she added, with a sweet look
that sent the blood rioting about my heart, "It won't matter so much,
will it, love, NOW?"

There proved nothing for it but to accept the situation, and we made
the arrangement that Nicolete was to slip off to bed first, and then
put out the light and go to sleep.  However, when I followed her,
having sat up as long as the landlady's patience would endure, I found
that, though she had blown out the candle, she had forgotten to put out
the moon, which shone as though it were St. Agnes' Eve across half the
room.

I stole in very shyly, kept my eyes sternly from Nicolete's white bed,
though, as I couldn't shut my ears, the sound of her breathing came to
me with indescribable sweetness.  After I had lain among the sheets
some five or ten minutes, I was suddenly startled by a little voice
within the room saying,--

"I'm not asleep."

"Well, you should be, naughty child. Now shut your eyes and go to
sleep,--and fair dreams and sweet repose," I replied.

"Won't you give me one little good-night kiss?"

"I gave you one downstairs."

"Is it very wicked to want another?"

There was not a foot between our two beds, so I bent over and took her
soft white shoulders in my arms and kissed her. All the heaped-up
sweetness of the whitest, freshest flowers of the spring seemed in my
embrace as I kissed her, so soft, so fragrant, so pure; and as the
moonlight was the white fire in our blood.  Softly I released her,
stroked her brown hair, and turned again to my pillow.  Presently the
little voice was in the room again,--

"Mayn't I hold your hand?  Somehow I feel lonely and frightened."

So our hands made a bridge across which our dreams might pass through
the night, and after a little while I knew that she slept.

As I lay thus holding her hand, and listening to her quiet breathing, I
realised once more what my young Alastor had meant by the purity of
high passion.  For indeed the moonlight that fell across her bosom was
not whiter than my thoughts, nor could any kiss--were it even such a
kiss as Venus promised to the betrayer of Psyche--even in its fiercest
delirium, be other than dross compared with the wild white peace of
those silent hours when we lay thus married and maiden side by side.



CHAPTER X

HOW ONE MAKES LOVE AT THIRTY

My sleeplessness while Nicolete slept had not been all ecstasy, for I
had come to a bitter resolution; and next morning, when we were once
more on our way, I took a favourable opportunity of conveying it to
Nicolete.

"Nicolete," I said, as we rested awhile by the roadside, "I have
something serious to say to you."

"Yes, dear," she said, looking rather frightened.

"Well, dear, it is this,--our love must end with our holiday. No good
can come of it."

"But oh, why?  I love you."

"Yes, and I love you,--love you as I never thought I could love again.
Yet I know it is all a dangerous dream,--a trick of our brains, an
illusion of our tastes."

"But oh, why?  I love you."

"Yes, you do to-day, I know; but it couldn't last.  I believe I could
love you for ever; but even so, it wouldn't be right. You couldn't go
on loving me.  I am too old, too tired, too desillusione, perhaps too
selfish."

"I will love you always!" said girl Nicolete.

"Whereas you," I continued, disregarding the lovely refrain of her
tear-choked voice, "are standing on the wonderful threshold of life,
waiting in dreamland for the dawn. And it will come, and with it the
fairy prince, with whom you shall wander hand in hand through all its
fairy rose-gardens; but I, dear Nicolete,--I am not he."

Nicolete did not speak.

"I know," I continued, pressing her hand, "that I may seem young enough
to talk like this, but some of us get through life quicker than others,
and when we say, 'It is done,' it is no use for onlookers to say, 'Why,
it is just beginning!'  Believe me, Nicolete, I am not fit husband for
you."

"Then shall I take no other," said Nicolete, with set face.

"Oh, yes, you will," I rejoined; "let but a month or two pass, and you
will see how wise I was, after all.  Besides, there are other reasons,
of which there is no need to speak--"

"What reasons?"

"Well," I said, half laughing, "there is the danger that, after all, we
mightn't agree.  There is nothing so perilously difficult as the daily
intercourse of two people who love each other.  You are too young to
realise its danger.  And I couldn't bear to see our love worn away by
the daily dropping of tears, not to speak of its being rent by the
dynamite of daily quarrels. We know each other's tastes, but we know
hardly anything of each other's natures."

Nicolete looked at me strangely.  'Troth, it was a strange way to make
love, I knew.

"And what else?" she asked somewhat coldly.

"Well, then, though it's not a thing one cares to speak of, I'm a poor
man--"

Nicolete broke through my sentence with a scornful exclamation.

"You," I continued straight on,--"well, you have been accustomed to a
certain spaciousness and luxury of life.  This it would be out of my
power to continue for you.  These are real reasons, very real reasons,
dear Nicolete, though you may not think so now.  The law of the world
in these matters is very right.  For the rich and the poor to marry is
to risk, terribly risk, the very thing they would marry for--their
love.  Love is better an unmarried than a married regret."

Nicolete was silent again.

"Think of your little woodland chalet, and your great old trees in the
park,--you couldn't live without them.  I have, at most, but one tree
worth speaking of to offer you--"

I purposely waived the glamour which my old garden had for my mind, and
which I wouldn't have exchanged for fifty parks.

"Trees!" retorted Nicolete,--"what are trees?"

"Ah, my dear girl, they are a good deal,--particularly when they are
genealogical, as my one tree is not."

"Aucassin," she said suddenly, almost fiercely, "can you really jest?
Tell me this,--do you love me?"

"I love you," I said simply; "and it is just because I love you so much
that I have talked as I have done.  No man situated as I am who loved
you could have talked otherwise."

"Well, I have heard it all, weighed it all," said Nicolete, presently;
"and to me it is but as thistledown against the love within my heart.
Will you cast away a woman who loves you for theories?  You know you
love me, know I love you.  We should have our trials, our ups and
downs, I know; but surely it is by those that true love learns how to
grow more true and strong.  Oh, I cannot argue!  Tell me again, do you
love me?"

And there she broke down and fell sobbing into my arms.  I consoled her
as best I might, and presently she looked up at me through her tears.

"Tell me again," she said, "that you love me, just as you did
yesterday, and promise never to speak of all those cruel things again.
Ah! have you thought of the kind of men you would give me up to?"

At that I confess I shuddered, and I gave her the required assurance.

"And you won't be wise and reasonable and ridiculous any more?"

"No," I answered; adding in my mind, "not, at all events, for the
present."



CHAPTER XI

HOW ONE PLAYS THE HERO AT THIRTY

Had we only been able to see a day into the future, we might have
spared ourselves this agonising, for all our doubts and fears were
suddenly dispersed in an entirely unexpected manner. Happily these
interior problems are not infrequently resolved by quite exterior
forces.

We were sitting the following afternoon in one of those broad bay
windows such as one finds still in some old country inns, just thinking
about starting once more on our way, when suddenly Nicolete, who had
been gazing out idly into the road, gave a little cry.  I followed her
glance.  A carriage with arms on its panels had stopped at the inn, and
as a smart footman opened the door, a fine grey-headed military-looking
man stepped out and strode hurriedly up the inn steps.

"Aucassin," gasped Nicolete, "it is my father!"

It was too true.  The old man's keen eye had caught sight of Nicolete
at the window also, and in another moment we were all three face to
face.  I must do the Major-General the justice of saying that he made
as little of a "scene" of it as possible.

"Now, my girl," he said, "I have come to put an end to this nonsense.
Have you a petticoat with you?  Well, go upstairs and get it on.  I
will wait for you here...  On you, sir, I shall waste no words.  From
what I have heard, you are as moonstruck as my daughter."

"Of course," I stammered, "I cannot expect you to understand the
situation, though I think, if you would allow me, I could in a very few
words make it somewhat clearer,--make you realise that, after all, it
has been a very innocent and childish escapade, in which there has been
no harm and a great deal of pleasure--"

But the Major-General cut me short.

"I should prefer," he said, "not to discuss the matter.  I may say that
I realise that my daughter has been safe in your hands, however
foolish,"--for this I thanked him with a bow,--"but I must add that
your eccentric acquaintance must end here--"

I said him neither yea nor nay; and while we stood in armed and
embarrassed silence, Nicolete appeared with white face at the door,
clothed in her emergency petticoat. Alas! it was for no such emergency
as this that it had been destined that merry night when she had packed
it in her knapsack. With a stern bow her father turned from me to join
her; but she suddenly slipped past him, threw her arms round me, and
kissed me one long passionate kiss.

"Aucassin, be true," she cried, "I will never forget you,--no one shall
come between us;" and then bursting into tears, she buried her face in
her hands and followed her father from the room.

In another moment she had been driven away, and I sat as one stupefied
in the inn window.  But a few short minutes ago she had been sitting
merrily prattling by my side, and now I was once more as lonely as if
we had never met.  Presently I became conscious in my reverie of a
little crumpled piece of paper on the floor.  I picked it up. It was a
little note pencilled in her bedroom at the last moment.  "Aucassin,"
it ran, just like her last passionate words, "be true. I will never
forget you.  Stay here till I write to you, and oh, write to me soon!--
Your broken-hearted Nicolete."

As I read, I saw her lovely young face, radiant with love and sorrow as
I had last seen it, and pressing the precious little letter to my lips,
I said fervently, "Yes, Nicolete, I will be true."



CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH I REVIEW MY ACTIONS AND RENEW MY RESOLUTIONS

No doubt the youthful reader will have but a poor opinion of me after
the last two chapters.  He will think that in the scene with the
Major-General I acted with lamentably little spirit, and that generally
my friend Alastor would have proved infinitely more worthy of the
situation.  It is quite true, I confess it. The whole episode was made
for Alastor.  Nicolete and he were born for each other.  Alas! it is
one of the many drawbacks of experience that it frequently prevents our
behaving with spirit.

I must be content to appeal to the wiser and therefore sadder reader,
of whom I have but a poor opinion if he too fails to understand me.
He, I think, will understand why I didn't promptly assault the
Major-General, seize Nicolete by the waist, thrust her into her
ancestral carriage, haul the coachman from his box, and, seizing the
reins, drive away in triumph before astonishment had time to change
into pursuit. Truly it had been but the work of a moment, and there was
only one consideration which prevented my following this
now-I-call-that-heroic course. It is a consideration I dare hardly
venture to write, and the confession of which will, I know, necessitate
my changing my age back again to thirty on the instant.  Oh, be
merciful, dear romantic reader!  I didn't strike the Major-General,
because, oh, because I AGREED WITH HIM!

I loved Nicolete, you must have felt that. She was sweet to me as the
bunch of white flowers that, in their frail Venetian vase, stand so
daintily on my old bureau as I write, doing their best to sweeten my
thoughts. Dear was she to me as the birds that out in the old garden
yonder sing and sing their best to lift up my leaden heart.  She was
dear as the Spring itself, she was only less dear than Autumn.

Yes, black confession! after the first passion of her loss, the
immediate ache of her young beauty had passed, and I was able to
analyse what I really felt, I not only agreed with him, I thanked God
for the Major-General!  He had saved me from playing the terrible part
of executioner. He had just come in time to behead the Lady Jane Grey
of our dreams.

I should have no qualms about tightening the rope round the neck of
some human monster, or sticking a neat dagger or bullet into a
dangerous, treacherous foe, but to kill a dream is a sickening
business.  It goes on moaning in such a heart-breaking fashion, and you
never know when it is dead.  All on a sudden some night it will come
wailing in the wind outside your window, and you must blacken your
heart and harden your face with another strangling grip of its slim
appealing throat, another blow upon its angel eyes.  Even then it will
recover, and you will go on being a murderer, making for yourself day
by day a murderer's face, without the satisfaction of having really
murdered.

But what of Nicolete? do you exclaim. Have you no thought for her,
bleeding her heart away in solitude?  Can you so soon forget those
appealing eyes?  Yes, I have thought for her.  Would God that I could
bear for her those growing pains of the heart! and I shall never forget
those farewell eyes.  But then, you see, I had firmly realised this,
that she would sooner recover from our separation than from our
marriage; that her love for me, pretty and poignant and dramatic while
it lasted, was a book-born, book-fed dream, which must die soon or
late,--the sooner the better for the peace of the dreams that in the
course of nature would soon spring up to take its place.

But while I realised all this, and, with a veritable aching of the
heart at the loss of her, felt a curious satisfaction at the turn of
events, still my own psychology became all the more a puzzle to me, and
I asked myself, with some impatience, what I would be at, and what it
was I really wanted.

Here had I but a few moments ago been holding in my hands the very
dream I had set out to find, and here was I secretly rejoicing to be
robbed of it!  If Nicolete did not fulfil the conditions of that
mystical Golden Girl, in professed search for whom I had set out that
spring morning, well, the good genius of my pilgrimage felt it time to
resign.  Better give it up at once, and go back to my books and my
bachelorhood, if I were so difficult to please.  No wonder my kind
providence felt provoked. It had provided me with the sweetest
pink-and-porcelain dream of a girl, and might reasonably have concluded
that his labours on my behalf were at an end.

But, really, there is no need to lecture me upon the charms and virtues
of Nicolete, for I loved them from the first moment of our strange
introduction, and I dream of them still.  There was indeed only one
quality of womanhood in which she was lacking, and in which, after much
serious self-examination, I discovered the reason of my instinctive
self-sacrifice of her,--SHE HAD NEVER SUFFERED.  As my heart had warned
me at the beginning, "she was hoping too much from life to spend one's
days with." She lacked the subtle half-tones of experience. She lacked
all that a pretty wrinkle or two might have given.  There was no
shadowy melancholy in her sky-clear eyes.  She was gay indeed, and had
a certain childish humour; but she had none of that humour which comes
of the resigned perception that the world is out of joint, and that you
were never born to set it right. These characteristics I had yet to
find in woman.  There was still, therefore, an object to my quest.
Indeed my experience had provided me with a formula.  I was in search
of a woman who, in addition to every other feminine charm and virtue,
was a woman who had suffered.

With this prayer I turned once more to the genius of my pilgrimage.
"Grant me," I asked, "but this--A WOMAN WHO HAS SUFFERED!" and,
apparently as a consequence, he became once more quite genial.  He
seemed to mean that a prayer so easy to grant would put any god into a
good temper; and possibly he smiled with a deeper meaning too.




BOOK III



CHAPTER I

IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY RIGHT AGE AND ENCOUNTER A COMMON OBJECT OF THE
COUNTRY

And so when the days of my mourning for Nicolete were ended (and in
this sentence I pass over letters to and fro,--letters wild from
Nicolete, letters wise from Aucassin, letters explanatory and
apologetic from the Obstacle--how the Major-General had suddenly come
home quite unexpectedly and compelled her to explain Nicolete's
absence, etc., etc.  Dear Obstacle! I should rather have enjoyed a
pilgrimage with her too)--I found myself one afternoon again upon the
road.  The day had been very warm and dusty, and had turned sleepy
towards tea-time.

I had now pretty clearly in my mind what I wanted.  This time it was,
all other things equal, to be "a woman who had suffered," and to this
end, I had, before starting out once more, changed my age back again at
the inn and written "Aetat. 30" after my name in the visitors' book.
As a young man I was an evident failure, and so, having made the
countersign, I was speedily transformed to my old self; and I must say
that it was a most comfortable feeling, something like getting back
again into an old coat or an old pair of shoes.  I never wanted to be
young again as long as I lived.  Youth was too much like the Sunday
clothes of one's boyhood.  Moreover, I had a secret conviction that the
woman I was now in search of would prefer one who had had some
experience at being a man, who would bring her not the green plums of
his love, but the cunningly ripened nectarines, a man to whom love was
something of an art as well as an inspiration.

It was in this frame of mind that I came upon the following scene.

The lane was a very cloistral one, with a ribbon of gravelly road,
bordered on each side with a rich margin of turf and a scramble of
blackberry bushes, green turf banks and dwarf oak-trees making a rich
and plenteous shade.  My attention was caught firstly by a bicycle
lying carelessly on the turf, and secondly and lastly by a graceful
woman's figure, recumbent and evidently sleeping against the turf bank,
well tucked in among the afternoon shadows.  My coming had not aroused
her, and so I stole nearer to her on tiptoe.

She was a pretty woman, of a striking modern type, tall,
well-proportioned, strong, I should say, with a good complexion that
had evidently been made just a little better.  But her most striking
feature was an opulent mass of dark red hair, which had fallen in some
disorder and made quite a pillow for her head. Her hat was off, lying
in its veil by her side, and a certain general abandon of her
figure,--which was clothed in a short cloth skirt, cut with that
unmistakable touch which we call style--betokened weariness that could
no longer wait for rest.

Poor child! she was tired out.  She must never be left to sleep on
there, for she seemed good to sleep till midnight.

I turned to her bicycle, and, examining it with the air of a man who
had won silver cups in his day, I speedily discovered what had been the
mischief.  The tire of the front wheel had been pierced, and a great
thorn was protruding from the place. Evidently this had been too much
for poor Rosalind, and it was not unlikely that she had cried herself
to sleep.

I bent over her to look--yes, there were traces of tears.  Poor thing!
Then I had a kindly human impulse.  I would mend the tire, having
attended ambulance classes, do it very quietly so that she wouldn't
hear, like the fairy cobblers who used to mend people's boots while
they slept, and then wait in ambush to watch the effect upon her when
she awoke.

What do you think of the idea?

But one important detail I have omitted from my description of the
sleeper.  Her left hand lay gloveless, and of the four rings on her
third finger one was a wedding-ring.

"Such red hair,--and a wedding-ring!" I exclaimed inwardly. "How this
woman must have suffered!"



CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I HEAL A BICYCLE AND COME TO THE WHEEL OF PLEASURE

Moving the bicycle a little away, so that my operations upon it might
not arouse her, I had soon made all right again, and when I laid it
once more where she had left it, she was still sleeping as sound as
ever.  She had only to sleep long enough, a sly thought suggested, to
necessitate her ending her day's journey at the same inn as myself,
some five miles on the road.  One virtue at least the reader will allow
to this history,--we are seldom far away from an inn in its pages.
When I thought of that I sat stiller than ever, hardly daring to turn
over the pages of Apuleius, which I had taken from my knapsack to
beguile the time, and, I confess, to give my eyes some other occupation
than the dangerous one of gazing upon her face, dangerous in more ways
than one, but particularly dangerous at the moment, because, as
everybody knows, a steady gaze on a sleeping face is apt to awake the
sleeper.  And she wasn't to be disturbed!

"No! she mustn't waken before seven at the latest," I said to myself,
holding my breath and starting in terror at every noise. Once a great
noisy bee was within an ace of waking her, but I caught him with
inspired dexterity, and he buzzed around her head no more.

But despite the providential loneliness of the road, there were one or
two terrors that could not be disposed of so summarily. The worst of
all was a heavy miller's cart which one could hardly crush to silence
in one's handkerchief; but it went so slowly, and both man and horses
were so sleepy, that they passed unheard and unnoticing.

A sprightly tramp promised greater difficulty, and nothing but some
ferocious pantomime and a shilling persuaded him to forego a choice
fantasia of cockney humour.

A poor tired Italian organ-grinder, tramping with an equally tired
monkey along the dusty roads, had to be bought off in a similar
manner,--though he only cost sixpence.  He gave me a Southern smile and
shrug of comprehension, as one acquainted with affairs of the
heart,--which was a relief after the cockney tramp's impudent
expression of, no doubt, a precisely similar sentiment.

And then at last, just as my watch pointed to 6.50 (how well I remember
the exact moment!)  Rosalind awoke suddenly, as women and children do,
sitting straight up on the instant, and putting up her hands to her
tousled hair, with a half-startled "Where am I?"  When her hair was
once more "respectable," she gave her skirts a shake, bent sideways to
pull up her stockings and tighten her garters, looked at her watch, and
then with an exclamation at the lateness of the hour, went over, with
an air of desperate determination, to her bicycle.

"Now for this horrid puncture!" were the first words I was to hear fall
from her lips.

She sought for the wound in the india-rubber with growing bewilderment.

"Goodness!" was her next exclamation, "why, there's nothing wrong with
it.  Can I have been dreaming?"

"I hope your dreams have been pleasanter than that," I ventured at this
moment to stammer, rising, a startling apparition, from my ambush
behind a mound of brambles; and before she had time to take in the
situation I added that I hoped she'd excuse my little pleasantry, and
told her how I had noticed her and the wounded bicycle, et cetera, et
cetera, as the reader can well imagine, without giving me the trouble
of writing it all out.

She was sweetness itself on the instant.

"Excuse you!" she said, "I should think so.  Who wouldn't? You can't
tell the load you've taken off my mind.  I'm sure I must have groaned
in my sleep--for I confess I cried myself to sleep over it."

"I thought so," I said with gravity, and eyes that didn't dare to smile
outright till they had permission, which, however, was not long
withheld them.

"How did you know?"

"Oh, intuition, of course--who wouldn't have cried themselves to sleep,
and so tired too!"

"You're a nice sympathetic man, anyhow," she laughed; "what a pity you
don't bicycle!"

"Yes," I said, "I would give a thousand pounds for a bicycle at this
moment."

"You ought to get a good one for that," she laughed,--"all bright parts
nickel, I suppose; indeed, you should get a real silver frame and gold
handle-bars for that, don't you think? Well, it would be nice all the
same to have your company a few miles, especially as it's growing
dark," she added.

"Especially as it's growing dark," I repeated.

"You won't be going much farther to-night.  Have you fixed on your
inn?" I continued innocently.  She had--but that was in a town too far
to reach to-night, after her long sleep.

"You might have wakened me," she said.

"Yes, it was stupid of me not to have thought of it," I answered,
offering no explanation of the dead bee which at the moment I espied a
little away in the grass, and saying nothing of the merry tramp and the
melancholy musician.

Then we talked inns, and thus she fell beautifully into the pit which I
had digged for her; and it was presently arranged that she should ride
on to the Wheel of Pleasure and order a dinner, which she was to do me
the honour of sharing with me.

I was to follow on foot as speedily as might be, and it was with a high
heart that I strode along the sunset lanes, hearing for some time the
chiming of her bell in front of me, till she had wheeled it quite out
of hearing, and it was lost in the distance.

I never did a better five miles in my life.



CHAPTER III

TWO TOWN MICE AT A COUNTRY INN.

When I reached the Wheel of Pleasure, I found Rosalind awaiting me in
the coffee-room, looking fresh from a traveller's toilette, and with
the welcome news that dinner was on the way. By the time I had washed
off the day's dust it was ready, and a merry meal it proved.  Rosalind
had none of Alastor's objections to the wine-list, so we drank an
excellent champagne; and as there seemed to be no one in the hotel but
ourselves, we made ourselves at home and talked and laughed, none
daring to make us afraid.

At first, on sitting down to table, we had grown momentarily shy, with
one of those sudden freaks of self-consciousness which occasionally
surprise one, when, midway in some slightly unconventional situation to
which the innocence of nature has led us, we realise it--"for an
instant and no more."

Positively, I think that in the embarrassment of that instant I had
made some inspired remark to Rosalind about the lovely country which
lay dreamy in the afterglow outside our window. Oh, yes, I remember the
very words.  They were "What a heavenly landscape!" or something
equally striking.

"Yes," Rosalind had answered, "it is almost as beautiful as the Strand!"

If I'd known her better, I should have exclaimed, "You dear!" and I
think it possible that I did say something to that effect,--perhaps
"You dear woman!"  At all events, the veil of self-consciousness was
rent in twain at that remark, and our spirits rushed together at this
touch of London nature thus unexpectedly revealed.

London!  I hadn't realised till this moment how I had been missing it
all these days of rustication, and my heart went out to it with a vast
homesickness.

"Yes! the Strand," I repeated tenderly, "the Strand--at night!"

"Indeed, yes! what is more beautiful in the whole world?" she joined in
ardently.

"The wild torrents of light, the passionate human music, the hansoms,
the white shirts and shawled heads, the theatres--"

"Don't speak of them or you'll make me cry," said Rosalind.

"The little suppers after the theatre--"

"Please don't," she cried, "it is cruel;" and I saw that her eyes were
indeed glistening with tears.

"But, of course," I continued, to give a slight turn aside in our talk,
"it is very wrong of us to have such sophisticated tastes. We ought to
love these lonely hills and meadows far more. The natural man revels in
solitude, and wants no wittier company than birds and flowers.
Wordsworth made a constant companion of a pet daisy.  He seldom went
abroad without one or two trotting at his side, and a skylark would
keep Shelley in society for a week."

"But they were poets," retorted Rosalind; "you don't call poets
natural.  Why, they are the most unnatural of men.  The natural person
loves the society of his kind, whereas the poet runs away from it."

"Well, of course, there are poets and poets, poets sociable and poets
very unsociable.  Wordsworth made the country, but Lamb made the town;
and there is quite a band of poets nowadays who share his distaste for
mountains, and take London for their muse. If you'll promise not to cry
again, I'll recall some lines by a friend of mine which were written
for town-tastes like ours.  But perhaps you know them?"

It will gratify my friend to learn that Rosalind had the verses I refer
to by heart, and started off humming,--

  "Ah, London, London, our delight,
  Great flower that opens but at night,
  Great city of the midnight sun,
  Whose day begins when day is done...
  Like dragon-flies the hansoms hover
  With jewelled eyes to catch the lover;"

and so on, with a gusto of appreciation that must have been very
gratifying to the author had he been present.

Thus perceiving a taste for a certain modern style of poetry in my
companion, I bethought me of a poem which I had written on the roadside
a few days before, and which, I confess, I was eager to confide to some
sympathetic ear.  I was diffident of quoting it after such lines as
Rosalind had recalled, but by the time we had reached our coffee, I
plucked up courage to mention it.  I had, however, the less diffidence
in that it would have a technical interest for her, being indeed no
other than a song of cycling a deux which had been suggested by one of
those alarmist danger-posts always placed at the top of the pleasantest
hills, sternly warning the cyclist that "this hill is dangerous,"--just
as in life there is always some minatory notice-board frowning upon us
in the direction we most desire to take.

But I omit further preface and produce the poem:--

  "This hill is dangerous," I said,
       As we rode on together
  Through sunny miles and sunny miles
       Of Surrey heather;
      "This hill is dangerous--don't you think
  We'd better walk it?"
      "Or sit it out--more danger still!"
       She smiled--"and talk it?"

  "Are you afraid?" she turned and cried
        So very brave and sweetly,--
  Oh that brave smile that takes the heart
        Captive completely!

  "Afraid?" I said, deep in her eyes
        Recklessly gazing;
  "For you I'd ride into the sun
        And die all blazing!"

  "I never yet saw hill," I said,
        "And was afraid to take it;
  I never saw a foolish law,
        And feared to break it.
  Who fears a hill or fears a law
        With you beside him?
  Who fears, dear star, the wildest sea
        With you to guide him?"

  Then came the hill--a cataract,
        A dusty swirl, before us;
  The world stood round--a village world--
       In fearful chorus.
  Sure to be killed!  Sure to be killed!
       O fools, how dare ye!
  Sure to be killed--and serve us right!
       Ah! love, but were we?

  The hill was dangerous, we knew,
       And knew that we must take it;
  The law was strong,--that too we knew
       Yet dared to break it.
  And those who'd fain know how we fared
       Follow and find us,
  Safe on the hills, with all the world
       Safely behind us.


Rosalind smiled as I finished.  "I'm afraid," she said, "the song is as
dangerous as the hill.  Of course it has more meanings than one?"

"Perhaps two," I assented.

"And the second more important than the first."

"Maybe," I smiled; "however, I hope you like it."

Rosalind was very reassuring on that point, and then said musingly, as
if half to herself, "But that hill is dangerous, you know; and young
people would do well to pay attention to the danger-board!"

Her voice shook as she spoke the last two or three words, and I looked
at her in some surprise.

"Yes, I know it," she added, her voice quite broken; and before I
realised what was happening, there she was with her beautiful head down
upon the table, and sobbing as if her heart would break.

"Forgive me for being such a fool," she managed to wring out.

Now, usually I never interrupt a woman when she is crying, as it only
encourages her to continue; but there was something so unexpected and
mysterious about Rosalind's sudden outburst that it was impossible not
to be sympathetic.  I endeavoured to soothe her with such words as
seemed fitting; and as she was crying because she really couldn't help
it, she didn't cry long.

These tears proved, what certain indications of manner had already
hinted to me, that Rosalind was more artless than I had at first
supposed.  She was a woman of the world, in that she lived in it, and
loved its gaieties, but there was still in her heart no little of the
child, as is there not in the hearts of all good women--or men?

And this you will realise when I tell you the funny little story which
she presently confided to me as the cause of her tears.



CHAPTER IV

MARRIAGE A LA MODE

For Rosalind was no victim of the monster man, as you may have supposed
her, no illustration of his immemorial perfidies. On the contrary, she
was one half of a very happy marriage, and, in a sense, her sufferings
at the moment were merely theoretical, if one may so describe the
sufferings caused by a theory.  But no doubt the reader would prefer a
little straightforward narrative.

Well, Rosalind and Orlando, as we may as well call them, are two newly
married young people who've been married, say, a year, and who find
themselves at the end of it loving each other more than at the
beginning,--for you are to suppose two of the tenderest, most devoted
hearts that ever beat as one.  However, they are young people of the
introspective modern type, with a new theory for everything.

About marriage and the law of happiness in that blessed estate, they
boasted the latest philosophical patents.  To them, among other
matters, the secret of unhappy marriages was as simple as can be.  It
was in nothing more or less than the excessive "familiarity" of
ordinary married life, and the lack of personal freedom allowed both
parties to the contract.  Thus love grew commonplace, and the unhappy
ones to weary of each other by excessive and enforced association.
This was obvious enough, and the remedy as obvious,--separate bedrooms,
and a month's holiday in each year to be spent apart (notoriously all
people of quality had separate bedrooms, and see how happy they were!).
These and similar other safeguards of individual liberty they had in
mock-earnest drawn up and signed on their marriage eve, as a sort of
supplemental wedding service.

It would not be seemly to inquire how far certain of these conditions
had been kept,--how often, for example, Orlando's little hermit's bed
had really needed remaking during those twelve months!  Answer, ye
birds of the air that lie in your snug nests, so close, so close,
through the tender summer nights, and maybe with two or three little
ones besides,--unless, indeed, ye too have felt the influence of the
Zeit-geist, and have taken to sleeping in separate nests.

The condition with which alone we have here to concern ourselves was
one which provided that each of the two lovers, hereafter to be called
the husband of the one part and the wife of the other part, solemnly
bound themselves to spend one calendar month of each year out of each
other's society, with full and free liberty to spend it wheresoever,
with whomsoever, and howsoever they pleased; and that this condition
was rigidly to be maintained, whatever immediate effort it might cost,
as the parties thereto believed that so would their love the more
likely maintain an enduring tenderness and an unwearied freshness.  And
to this did Orlando and his Rosalind set their hands and hearts and
lips.

Now, wisdom is all very well till the time comes to apply it; and as
that month of June approached in which they had designed to give their
love a holiday, they had found their courage growing less and less.
Their love didn't want a holiday; and when Orlando had referred to the
matter during the early days of May, Rosalind had burst into tears, and
begged him to reconsider a condition which they had made before they
really knew what wedded love was.  But Orlando, though in tears himself
(so Rosalind averred), had a higher sense of their duty to their ideal,
and was able, though in tears, to beg her look beyond the moment, and
realise what a little self-denial now might mean in the years to come.
They hadn't kept any other of their resolutions,--thus Rosalind let it
out!--this must be kept.

And thus it had come about that Orlando had gone off for his month's
holiday with a charming girl, who, with the cynic, will no doubt
account for his stern adherence to duty; and Rosalind had gone off for
hers with a pretty young man whom she'd liked well enough to go to the
theatre and to supper with,--a young man who was indeed a dear friend,
and a vivacious, sympathetic companion, but whom, as a substitute for
Orlando, she immediately began to hate. Such is the female heart!

The upshot of the experiment, so far as she was concerned, was that she
had quarrelled with her companion, and had gone off in search of her
husband, on which search she was embarked at the moment of my
encountering her.  The tears, therefore,--that is, the first lot of
tears by the roadside,--had not been all on account of the injured
bicycle, you see.

Now the question was, How had Orlando been getting on?  I had an
intuition that in his case the experiment had proved more enjoyable,
but I am not one to break the bruised reed by making such a suggestion.
On the contrary, I expressed my firm conviction that Orlando was
probably even more miserable than she was.

"Do you really think so?" she asked eagerly, her poor miserable face
growing bright a moment with hope and gratitude.

"Undoubtedly," I answered sententiously. "To put the case on the most
general principles, apart from Orlando's great love for you, it is an
eternal truth of masculine sentiment that man always longs for the
absent woman."

"Are you quite sure?" asked Rosalind, with an unconvinced half-smile.

"Absolutely."

"I thought," she continued, "that it was just the other way about; that
it was presence and not absence that made the heart of man grow fonder,
and that if a man's best girl, so to say, was away, he was able to make
himself very comfortable with his second-best!"

"In some cases, of course, it's true," I answered, unmoved; "but with a
love like yours and Orlando's, it's quite different."

"Oh, do you really mean it?"

"Certainly I do; and your mistake has been in supposing that an
experiment which no few every-day married couples would be only too
glad to try, was ever meant for two such love-birds as you. Laws and
systems are meant for the unhappy and the untractable, not for people
like you, for whom Love makes its own laws."

"Yes, that is what we used to say; and indeed, we thought that this was
one of love's laws,--this experiment, as you call it."

"But it was quite a mistake," I went on in my character as matrimonial
oracle. "Love never made a law so cruel, a law that would rob true
lovers of each other's society for a whole month in a year, stretching
them on the rack of absence--"  There my period broke down, so I began
another less ambitiously planned.

"A whole month in a year!  Think what that would mean in a lifetime.
How long do you expect to live and love together?  Say another fifty
years at the most.  Well, fifty ones are fifty. Fifty months
equal--four twelves are forty-eight and two over--four years and two
months.  Yes, out of the short life God allows even for the longest
love you would voluntarily throw away four years and two months!"

This impressive calculation had a great effect on poor Rosalind; and it
is a secondary matter that it and its accompanying wisdom may have less
weight with the reader, as for the moment Rosalind was my one concern.

"But, of course, we have perfect trust in each other," said Rosalind
presently, with charming illogicality.

"No doubt," I said; "but Love, like a good householder (ahem!), does
well not to live too much on trust."

"But surely love means perfect trust," said Rosalind.

"Theoretically, yes; practically, no.  On the contrary, it means
exactly the opposite. Trust, perfect trust, with loved ones far away!
No, it is an inhuman ideal, and the more one loves the less one lives
up to it. If not, what do these tears mean?"

"Oh, no!" Rosalind retorted, with a flush, "you mustn't say that.  I
trust Orlando absolutely.  It isn't that; it's simply that I can't bear
to be away from him."

What women mean by "trusting" might afford a subject for an interesting
disquisition. However, I forbore to pursue the matter, and answered
Rosalind's remark in a practical spirit.

"Well, then," I said, "if that's all, the thing to do is to find
Orlando, tell him that you cannot bear it, and spend the rest of your
holiday, you and he, together."

"That's what I thought," said Rosalind.

"Unfortunately," I continued, "owing to your foolish arrangement not to
tell each other where you were going and not to write, as being
incompatible with Perfect Trust, you don't know where Orlando is at the
present moment."

"No; but I have a good guess," said Rosalind.  "There's a smart little
watering-place, not so many miles from here, called Yellowsands, a sort
of secret little Monaco, which not many people know of, a
wicked-innocent gay little place, where we've often talked of going.  I
think it's very likely that Orlando has gone there; and that's just
where I was going when we met."

I will tell the reader more about Yellowsands in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, let us complete Rosalind's arrangements. The result of our
conversation was that she was to proceed to Yellowsands on the morrow,
and that I was to follow as soon as possible, so as to be available
should she chance to need any advice, and at all events to give myself
the pleasure of meeting her again.

This arranged, we said good-night, Rosalind with ever such a
brightened-up face, of which I thought for half an hour and then fell
asleep to dream of Yellowsands.



CHAPTER V

CONCERNING THE HAVEN OF YELLOWSANDS

On the morrow, at the peep of day, Rosalind was off to seek her lord.
An hour or so after I started in leisurely pursuit.

Yellowsands!  I had heard in a vague way of the place, as a whim of a
certain young nobleman who combined brains with the pursuit of
pleasure.  Like most ideas, it was simple enough when once conceived.
Any one possessing a mile or two of secluded seaboard, cut off on the
land side by precipitous approaches, and including a sheltered river
mouth ingeniously hidden by nature, in the form of a jutting wall of
rock, from the sea, might have made as good use of these natural
opportunities as the nobleman in question, had they only been as wise
and as rich.  William Blake proposed to rebuild Jerusalem in this green
and pleasant land.  My lord proposed to erect a miniature Babylon amid
similar pleasant surroundings, a little dream-city by the sea, a home
for the innocent pleasure-seeker stifled by the puritanism of the great
towns, refugium peccatorum in this island of the saints.

"Once it was the Puritan Fathers who left our coasts," he is recorded
to have said; "nowadays it is our Prodigal Sons."

No doubt it was in further elaboration of this aphorism that the little
steamboat that sailed every other day from Yellowsands to the beckoning
shores of France was called "the Mayflower."

My lord's plan had been simple.  By the aid of cunning architects he
had first blasted his harbour into shape, then built his hotels and
pleasure-palaces, and then leased them to dependants of his who knew
the right sort of people, and who knew that it was as much as their
lease was worth to find accommodation for teetotal amateur
photographers or wistful wandering Sunday-school treats.  As,
unfortunately, the Queen's highway ran down in tortuous descent to the
handful of fishermen's cottages that had clung there limpet-like for
ages, there was always a chance of such a stray visitation; but it was
remote, and the whole place, hand and heart, was in the pocket of my
lord.

So much to give the reader some idea of the secret watering-place of
Yellowsands, situated at the mouth of that romantic little torrent, the
river Sly.  Such further description as may be needed may be kept till
we come within sight of its gilded roofs and marble terraces.



CHAPTER VI

THE MOORLAND OF THE APOCALYPSE

I reckoned that it would take me two or three days, leisurely walking,
to reach Yellowsands.  Rosalind would, of course, arrive there long
before me; but that I did not regret, as I was in a mood to find
company in my own thoughts.

Her story gave me plenty to think of.  I dwelt particularly on the
careless extravagance of the happy.  Here were two people to whom life
had given casually what I was compelled to go seeking lonely and
footsore through the world, and with little hope of finding it at the
end; and yet were they so little aware of their good fortune as to risk
it over a trumpery theory, a shadow of pseudo-philosophy.  Out of the
deep dark ocean of life Love had brought them his great moon-pearl, and
they sat on the boat's edge carelessly tossing it from one to the
other, unmindful of the hungry fathoms on every side.  A sudden slip,
and they had lost it for ever, and might only watch its shimmering fall
to the bottom of the world. Theories!  Theories are for the unknown and
the unhappy.  Who will trouble to theorise about Heaven when he has
found Heaven itself?  Theories are for the poor-devil outcast,--for him
who stands outside the confectioner's shop of life without a penny in
his pocket, while the radiant purchasers pass in and out through the
doors,--for him who watches with wistful eyes this and that sugared
marvel taken out of the window by mysterious hands, to bless some happy
customer inside.  He is not fool enough even to hope for one of those
glistering masterpieces of frosted sugar and silk flowers, which rise
to pinnacles of snowy sweetness, white mountains of blessedness, rich
inside, they say, with untold treasures for the tooth that is sweet.
No! he craves nothing but a simple Bath-bun of happiness, and even that
is denied him.

Would I ever find my Bath-bun?  I disconsolately asked myself.  I had
been seeking it now for some little time, and seemed no nearer than
when I set out.  I had seen a good many Bath-buns on my pilgrimage, it
is true.  Some I have not had space to confide to the reader; but
somehow or other they had not seemed the unmistakably predestined for
which I was seeking.

And oh, how I could love a girl, if she would only give me the
chance,--that is, be the right girl!  Oh, Sylvia Joy! where art thou?
Why so long dost thou remain hidden "in shady leaves of destiny"?


    "Seest thou thy lover lowly laid,
  Hear'st thou the sighs that rend his breast?"


And then, as the novelists say, "a strange thing happened."

The road I was tramping at the moment was somewhat desolate.  It ran up
from a small market town through a dreary undulating moorland, forking
off here and there to unknown villages of which the horizon gave no
hint.  Its cheerless hillocks were all but naked of vegetation, for a
never very flourishing growth of heather had recently been burnt right
down to the unkindly-looking earth, leaving a dwarf black forest of
charred sticks very grim to the eye and heart; while the dull surface
of a small lifeless-looking lake added the final touch to the Dead-Sea
mournfulness of the prospect.

Suddenly I became aware of the fluttering of a grey dress a little
ahead of me. Unconsciously I had been overtaking a tall young woman
walking in the same direction as myself, with a fine athletic carriage
of her figure and a noble movement of her limbs.

She walked manfully, and as I neared her I could hear the sturdy ring
of her well-shod feet upon the road.  There was an air of expectancy
about her walk, as though she looked to be met presently by some one
due from the opposite direction.

It was curious that I had not noticed her before, for she must have
been in sight for some time.  No doubt my melancholy abstraction
accounted for that, and perhaps her presence there was to be explained
by a London train which I had listlessly observed come in to the town
an hour before.  This surmise was confirmed, as presently,--over the
brow of a distant undulation in the road, I descried a farmer's gig
driven by another young woman.  The gig immediately hoisted a
handkerchief; so did my pedestrian.  At this moment I was within a yard
or two of overtaking her.  And it was then the strange thing happened.

Distance had lent no enchantment which nearness did not a hundred times
repay. The immediate impression of strength and distinction which the
first glimpse of her had made upon me was more and more verified as I
drew closer to her.  The carriage of her head was no whit less noble
than the queenly carriage of her limbs, and her glorious chestnut hair,
full of warm tints of gold, was massed in a sumptuous simplicity above
a neck that would have made an average woman's fortune.  This glowing
description, however, must be lowered or heightened in tone by the
association of these characteristics with an undefinable simplicity of
mien, a certain slight rusticity of effect.  The town spoke in her
well-cut gown and a few simple adornments, but the dryad still moved
inside.

I suppose most men, even in old age, feel a certain anxiety, conscious
or not, as they overtake a woman whose back view is in the least
attractive.  I confess that I felt a more than usual, indeed a quite
irrational, perturbation of the blood, as, coming level with her, I
dared to look into her face.  As I did so she involuntarily turned to
look at me--turned to look at me, did I say?  "To look" is a feeble
verb indeed to express the unexpected shock of beauty to which I was
suddenly exposed.  I cannot describe her features, for somehow features
always mean little to me.  They were certainly beautifully moulded, and
her skin was of a lovely pale olive, but the life of her face was in
her great violet eyes and her wonderful mouth.  Thus suddenly to look
into her face was like unexpectedly to come upon moon and stars
reflected in some lonely pool.  I suppose the look lasted only a second
or two; but it left me dazzled as that king in the Eastern tale, who
seemed to have lived whole dream-lives between dipping his head into a
bowl of water and taking it out again. Similarly in that moment I
seemed to have dived into this unknown girl's eyes, to have walked
through the treasure palaces of her soul, to have stood before the
flaming gates of her heart, to have gathered silver flowers in the
fairy gardens of her dreams. I had followed her white-robed spirit
across the moonlit meadows of her fancy, and by her side had climbed
the dewy ladder of the morning star, and then suddenly I had been
whirled up again to the daylight through the magic fountains of her
eyes.

I'll tell you more about that look presently!  Meanwhile the gig
approached, and the two girls exchanged affectionate greetings.

"Tom hasn't come with you, then?" said the other girl, who was
evidently her sister, and who was considerably more rustic in style and
accent.  She said it with a curious mixture of anxiety and relief.

"No," answered the other simply, and I thought I noticed a slight
darkening of her face.  Tom was evidently her husband.  So she was
married!

"Yes!" said a fussy hypocrite of reason within me, "and what's that to
do with you?"

"Everything, you fool!" answered a robuster voice in my soul, kicking
the feeble creature clean out of my head on the instant.

For, absurd as it may sound, with that look into those Arabian Nights'
eyes, had come somewhere out of space an overwhelming intuition, nay,
an unshakable conviction, that the woman who was already being rolled
away from me down the road in that Dis's car of a farmer's gig, was now
and for ever and before all worlds the woman God had created for me,
and that, unless I could be hers and she mine, there would be no home,
no peace for either of us so long as we lived.

And yet she was being carried away further and further every moment,
while I gazed after her, aimlessly standing in the middle of the road.
Why did I not call to her, overtake her?  In a few moments she would be
lost to me for ever--

Though I was unaware of it, this hesitation was no doubt owing to a
stealthy return of reason by the back-door of my mind.  In fact, he
presently dared to raise his voice again.  "I don't deny," he ventured,
ready any moment to flee for his life, "that she is written yours in
all the stars, and particularly do I see it written on the face of the
moon; but you mustn't forget that many are thus meant for each other
who never meet, not to speak of marrying.  It is such contradictions
between the purposes and performance of the Creator that make
life--life; you'll never see her again, so make your mind easy--"

At that moment the gig was on the point of turning a corner into a dark
pine-wood; but just ere it disappeared,--was it fancy?--I seemed to
have caught the flash of a momentarily fluttering handkerchief.  "Won't
I?  you fool!" I exclaimed, savagely smiting reason on the cheek, as I
sprang up wildly to wave mine; but the road was already blank.

At this a sort of panic possessed me, and like a boy I raced down the
road after her. To lose her like this, at the very moment that she had
been revealed to me.  It was more than I could bear.

Past the dreary lake, through the little pine-wood I ran, and then I
was brought to a halt, panting, by cross-roads and a finger-post.  An
involuntary memory of Nicolete sang to me as I read the quaint names of
the villages to one of which the Vision was certainly wending. Yes!  I
was bound on one more journey to the moon, but alas! there was no
heavenly being by my side to point the way.  Oh, agony, which was the
road she had taken?

It never occurred to me till the following day that I might have 

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