Quest of the Golden Girl Part 3

Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands, across vast distances of s.p.a.ce 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 lat.i.tude.

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 pa.s.sage, 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, G.o.d 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 gla.s.s 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 trespa.s.sing on the common by making encampments, lighting fires or cutting firewood thereon, and to this fortunate circ.u.mstance 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble-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 n.o.ble-looking man, a n.o.ble-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 n.o.ble-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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.body'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 Wess.e.x 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 embarra.s.sing 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley! 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 Sh.e.l.ley's mind was full of the sanct.i.ty 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.