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Read Ebook: The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance by Le Gallienne Richard
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Ebook has 975 lines and 54887 words, and 20 pages
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.
"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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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