Quest of the Golden Girl Part 2

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 G.o.ddess. 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 surrept.i.tiously reading novels, and longing for London and "life;" pa.s.sionate 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 ent.i.tled "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 t.i.tle.

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 cla.s.s. 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 fas.h.i.+on of Charles d.i.c.kens. This gave a slight touch of severity to a face that was full of quiet strength.

Pa.s.sing 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 s.h.i.+p 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.