The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance Read online

  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 withinterests and occupations which I had often declared sufficient tosatisfy any not too exacting human being. Moreover, a small butsufficient competency was mine, allowing me reasonable comforts, andthe luxuries of a small but choice library, and a small but choicegarden. These heavenly blessings had seemed mere than enough fornearly five years, during which the good sister and I had kept housetogether, leading a life of tranquil happy days. Friends and books andflowers! It was, we said, a good world, and I, simpleton,--pretty anddainty as Margaret was,--deemed it would go on forever. But, alas! oneday came a Faust into our garden,--a good Faust, with no friendMephistopheles,--and took Margaret from me. It is but a month sincethey were married, and the rice still lingers in the crevices of thepathway down to the quaint old iron-work gate. Yes! they have gone offto spend their honeymoon, and Margaret has written to me twice to sayhow happy they are together in the Hesperides. Dear happiness!Selfish, indeed, were he who would envy you one petal of that wonderfulrose--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 happilysettled down in the Fortunate Isles.

  Poor lonely old house! do you, too, miss the light step of yourmistress? No longer shall her little silken figure flit up and downyour 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, andthere is no one to play Chopin to us now as the day dies, and theshadows stoop out of their corners to listen in vain. Old house, oldhouse! We are alone, quite alone,--there is no mistake aboutthat,--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 sunlightlooks desolation, falling through the thick-blossoming apple-trees asthrough the chinks and crevices of deserted Egyptian cities.

  While as for the books--well, never talk to me again about thecompanionship of books! For just when one needs them most of all theyseem suddenly to have grown dull and unsympathetic, not a word ofcomfort, not a charm anywhere in them to make us forget the slow-movinghours; whereas, when Margaret was here--but it is of no use to say anymore! Everything was quite different when Margaret was here: that isenough. Margaret has gone away to the Fortunate Isles. Of courseshe'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 absurdenough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the reader mustrealise from the beginning that I am still quite a young man. I talkeda little just now as though I were an octogenarian. Actually, as Isaid, I am but just gone thirty, and I may reasonably regard life, asthe saying is, all before me. I was a little down-hearted when I wroteyesterday. Besides, I wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholytime. The morning is the time to write. We are all--that is, those ofus who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sadenough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of thisbook, 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 morningbetween sleeping and waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into myroom,--a mad, whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and putbriefly, it is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, aman not without accomplishments or experience, should have gone allthese years without finding that

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

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

  "Then," suggested the idea, with a blush for its own absurdity, "whynot 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 goodfun by the way, and fall in with many pleasant adventures."

  "A brave idea, indeed!" I cried. "By Heaven, I will take stick andknapsack and walk right away from my own front door, right away wherethe road leads, and see what h
appens." 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 thespring morning air; for, being a pilgrim, I was involuntarily in amediaeval frame of mind, and "Marry! an odd adventure!" came to my lipsas though I had been one of that famous company that once started fromthe Tabard on a day in spring.

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

  A mad piper, indeed, this spring, with his wonderful lying music,--everlying, 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 haveconsistently broken them for fifty years, yet this year he will keepthem. This year the dream will come true, the ship come home. Thisyear the very dead we have loved shall come back to us again: forSpring can even lie like that. There is nothing he will not promisethe poor hungry human heart, with his innocent-looking daisies andthose practised liars the birds. Why, one branch of hawthorn againstthe sky promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pondablaze with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours andenchantments in mortal bosoms,--blazons, it would seem, so august amessage from the hidden heart of the world,--that ever afterwards, forone who has looked upon it, the most fortunate human existence mustseem a disappointment.

  So I, too, with the rest of the world, was following in the wake of themagical music. The lie it was drawing me by is perhaps Spring's oldest,commonest lie,--the lying promise of the Perfect Woman, the QuiteImpossible She. Who has not dreamed of her,--who that can dream atall? I suppose that the dreams of our modern youth are entirelycommercial. In the morning of life they are rapt by intoxicatingvisions of some great haberdashery business, beckoned to by thevoluptuous enticements of the legal profession, or maybe the Holy Grailthey forswear all else to seek is a snug editorial chair. These questsand dreams were not for me. Since I was man I have had but onedream,--namely, Woman. Alas! till this my thirtieth year I have foundonly women. No! that is disloyal, disloyal to my First Love; for thisis 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 whomI am naturally thinking a good deal this morning, under thedemoralising influences of the fresh air, blue sky, and various birdsand flowers. More potent intoxicants these than any that need licensesfor their purveyance, responsible--see the poets--for no end of humanfoolishness.

  I was about to tell the story of my First Love, but on second thoughtsI decide not. It will keep, and I feel hungry, and yonder seems adingle where I can lie and open my knapsack, eat, drink, and doze amongthe 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 thissage reflection, as, lost deep down in the green alleys of the dingle,having fortified the romantic side of my nature with sandwiches andsherry, I lazily put the question to myself as to what manner of girl Iexpected the Golden Girl to be. A man who goes seeking should havesome notion of what he goes out to seek. Had I any ideal by which totest and measure the damsels of the world who were to pass before mycritical choosing eye? Had I ever met any girl in the past who wouldserve approximately as a model,--any girl, in fact, I would very muchlike to meet again? I was very sleepy, and while trying to make up mymind I fell asleep; and lo! the sandwiches and sherry brought me adream that I could not but consider of good omen. And this was thedream.

  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 ofa great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapesand capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleysending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf thatseemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white queenor goddess passing that way.

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

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

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

  "The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and looking halfsideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at whose foot I lay hadopened its rocky side, and in the cleft, like a long lily-bud slidingfrom its green sheath, stood a dryad, and my speech failed and mybreath went as I looked upon her beauty, for which mortality has nosimile. Yet was there something about her of the earth-sweetness thatclings even to the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth-born thing. Shewas not all immortal, as man is not all mortal. She was the sweetnessof the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its greenleaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars kissing itsgreen leaves in the still Trophonian nights.

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

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

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

  "I have no image of her," I said. "I cannot picture her; but I shallknow her, know her inerrably as these your wood children find out eachother untaught, as the butterfly that has never seen his kindred knowshis painted mate, passing on the wing all others by. Only when thelark shall mate with the nightingale, and the honey-bee and theclock-beetle keep house together, shall I wed another maid. Fair maybeshe will not be, though fair to me. Wise maybe she will not be, thoughwise 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 herbliss, just to hear her speak bliss beyond all mortal telling."

  Thereat the Sweetness of the Strength of the Oak smiled upon me andsaid,--

  "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 youshall see her whom you seek."

  And as she spoke she faded suddenly, and the side of the oak was oncemore as the solid rock. With hot heart I took the green winding path,and presently came the little grassy glade, and the bubbling crystalwell, and the hut of wattled boughs, and, looking through the open doorof the hut, I saw a lovely girl lying asleep in her golden hair. Shesmiled sweetly in her sleep, and stretched out her arms softly, asthough to enfold the dear head of her lover. And, ere I knew, I wasbending 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, andfound you at last. Grace o' God, I have come."

  And then I thought her great eyes opened, as when the sun sweeps clearblue spaces in the morning sky. "Flower o' Men," then said she, lowand sweet,--"Flower o' Men, is it you indeed? As you have sought, sohave 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 namethat 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 THE
REFORE CONCERNING ALL FEMININEREADERS

  As I once more got under way, my thoughts slowly loitered back to thetheme which had been occupying them before I dropped asleep. What wasmy working hypothesis of the Perfect Woman, towards whom I was thusleisurely strolling? She might be defined, I reflected, as The WomanWho Is Worthy Of Us; but the improbability which every healthilyconceited young man must feel of ever finding such a one made thedefinition seem a little unserviceable. Or, if you prefer, since weseem to be dealing with impossibles, we might turn about and more trulydefine her as The Woman of Whom We are Worthy, for who dare say thatshe exists? If, again, she were defined as the Woman our MoreFortunate Friend Marries, her unapproachableness would rob thedefinition of any practical value. Other generalisations provingequally unprofitable, I began scientifically to consider in detail theattributes of the supposititious paragon,--attributes of body and mindand heart. This was soon done; but again, as I thus conned all thosevirtues which I was to expect united in one unhappy woman, the resultwas still unsatisfying, for I began to perceive that it was really notperfection that I was in search of. As I added virtue after virtue tothe female monster in my mind, and the result remained still inanimateand unalluring, I realised that the lack I was conscious of was not anynew perfection, but just one or two honest human imperfections. Andthis, 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 tochoose what virtues we would have our wife possess, it is all butimpossible to imagine those faults we would desire in her, which Ithink most lovers would admit add piquancy to the loved one, thatfascinating wayward imperfection which paradoxically makes her perfect.