Quest of the Golden Girl Part 1

The Quest of the Golden Girl.

by Richard le Gallienne.

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--G.o.d 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 c.h.i.n.ks and crevices of deserted Egyptian cities.

While as for the books--well, never talk to me again about the companions.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.ddess pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.terfly that has never seen his kindred knows his painted mate, pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.sy 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 gra.s.sy 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' G.o.d, I am here. I have sought you through the world, and found you at last. Grace o' G.o.d, I have come."

And then I thought her great eyes opened, as when the sun sweeps clear blue s.p.a.ces 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' G.o.d 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.