The Quest of the Golden Girl: A Romance Read online

  Faults in the abstract are each and all so uninviting, not to sayalarming, but, associated with certain eyes and hair and tender littlegowns, it is curious how they lose their terrors; and, as with vice inthe poet's image, we end by embracing what we began by dreading. Yousee the fault becomes a virtue when it is hers, the treason prospers;wherefore, no doubt, the impossibility of imagining it. Whatparticular fault will suit a particular unknown girl is obviously asdifficult to determine as in what colours she will look her best.

  So, I say, I plied my brains in vain for that becoming fault. It wasthe same whether I considered her beauty, her heart, or her mind. Acharming old Italian writer has laid down the canons of perfectfeminine beauty with much nicety in a delicious discourse, which, as hedelivered it in a sixteenth-century Florentine garden to an audience ofbeautiful and noble ladies, an audience not too large to be intimateand not too small to be embarrassing, it was his delightful goodfortune and privilege to illustrate by pretty and sly references to thecharacteristic beauties of the several ladies seated like a ring ofroses around him. Thus he would refer to the shape of MadonnaLampiada's sumptuous eyelids, and to her shell-like ears, to thecorrect length and shape of Madonna Amororrisca's nose, to the lilytower of Madonna Verdespina's throat; nor would the unabashed oldFlorentine shrink from calling attention to the unfairness of MadonnaSelvaggia's covering up her dainty bosom, just as he was about todiscourse upon "those two hills of snow and of roses with two littlecrowns of fine rubies on their peaks." How could a man lecture if hisdiagrams were going to behave like that! Then, feigning a tiff, hewould close his manuscript, and all the ladies with their birdlikevoices would beseech him with "Oh, no, Messer Firenzuola, please go onagain; it's SO charming!" while, as if by accident, Madonna Selvaggia'smoonlike bosom would once more slip out its heavenly silver, perceivingwhich, Messer Firenzuola would open his manuscript again and proceedwith his sweet learning.

  Happy Firenzuola! Oh, days that are no more!

  By selecting for his illustrations one feature from one lady andanother from another, Messer Firenzuola builds up an ideal of theBeautiful Woman, which, were she to be possible, would probably be asfaultily faultless as the Perfect Woman, were she possible.

  Moreover, much about the same time as Firenzuola was writing,Botticelli's blonde, angular, retrousse women were breaking every oneof that beauty-master's canons, perfect in beauty none the less; andlovers then, and perhaps particularly now, have found the perfectbeauty in faces to which Messer Firenzuola would have denied the nameof face at all, by virtue of a quality which indeed he has tabulated,but which is far too elusive and undefinable, too spiritual for himtruly to have understood,--a quality which nowadays we are tardilyrecognising as the first and last of all beauty, either of nature orart,--the supreme, truly divine, because materialisticallyunaccountable, quality of Charm!

  "Beauty that makes holy earth and heaven May have faults from head tofeet."

  O loveliest and best-loved face that ever hallowed the eyes that nowseek for you in vain! Such was your strange lunar magic, such thelight not even death could dim. And such may be the loveliest andbest-loved face for you who are reading these pages,--faces littleunderstood on earth because they belong to heaven.

  There is indeed only one law of beauty on which we may rely,--that itinvariably breaks all the laws laid down for it by the professors ofaesthetics. All the beauty that has ever been in the world has brokenthe laws of all previous beauty, and unwillingly dictated laws to thebeauty that succeeded it,--laws which that beauty has no lessspiritedly broken, to prove in turn dictator to its successor.

  The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done exactlywhat their critics forbade them to do. The obedient in art are alwaysthe forgotten.

  Likewise beautiful women have always been a law unto themselves. Whocould have prophesied in what way any of these inspired law-breakerswould break the law, what new type of perfect imperfection they wouldcreate?

  So we return to the Perfect Woman, having gained this much knowledge ofher,--that her perfection is nothing more or less than her unique,individual, charming imperfection, and that she is simply the woman welove and who is fool enough to love us.

  CHAPTER VI

  IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF HIS READER

  "But come," I imagine some reader complaining, "isn't it high time forsomething to happen?" No doubt it is, but what am I to do? I am noless discontented. Is it not even more to my interest than to thereader's for something to happen? Here have I been tramping alongsince breakfast-time, and now it is late in the afternoon, but never afeather of her dove's wings, never a flutter of her angel's robes haveI seen. It is disheartening, for one naturally expects to findanything we seek a few minutes after starting out to seek it, and Iconfess that I expected to find my golden mistress within a very fewhours of leaving home. However, had that been the case, there wouldhave 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 thatsomething will happen before long. And if the worst comes to theworst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to fillthe time. Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old Surrey town,little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one of which I havemuch pleasure in inviting the reader to dinner.

  CHAPTER VII

  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 ofprose in its honour. And when I say "drinking," I speak not ofsmuggled gin or of brandy bottles held fiercely by the neck till theyare empty.

  Nay, but of that lonely glass in the social solitude of thetavern,--alone, but not alone, for the glass is sure to bring a dreamto 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 lastnew song, just born and yet still a tingling part of you.

  Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked, have weno "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine pleasure. Manypractise it already, and it is becoming more general every day.

  I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of anhonest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing quantitiesof fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes, and peas ofliving green.

  It is, indeed, an absorbing pleasure. It needs all our attention. Youmust eat as you kiss, so exacting are the joys of the mouth,--talking,for example. The quiet eye may be allowed to participate, andsometimes the ear, where the music is played upon a violin, and that aStradivarius. A well-kept lawn, with six-hundred-years-old cedars anda twenty-feet yew hedge, will add distinction to the meal. Nor shouldone ever eat without a seventeenth-century poet in an old yellow-leavededition upon the table, not to be read, of course, any more than theflowers are to be eaten, but just to make music of association verysoftly to our thoughts.

  Some diners have wine too upon the table, and in the pauses of thinkingwhat a divine mystery dinner is, they eat.

  For dinner IS a mystery,--a mystery of which even the greatest chefknows 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 willresist the trivial inclination to substitute "bad angels," is therereally any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turnedinto brains, and beer into beauty? Every beautiful woman we see hasbeen made out of beefsteaks. It is a solemn thought,--and the finestpoem that was ever written came out of a grey pulpy mass such as wemake brain sauce of.

  And with these grave thoughts for grace let us sit down to dinner.
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  Dinner!

  CHAPTER VIII

  STILL PRANDIAL

  What wine shall we have? I confess I am no judge of wines, except whenthey are bad. To-night I feel inclined to allow my choice to bedirected by sentiment; and as we are on so pretty a pilgrimage, wouldit not be appropriate to drink Liebfraumilch?

  Hock is full of fancy, and all wines are by their very nature full ofreminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.

  Forgive me, therefore, if I grow reminiscent. Indeed, I fear that thehour for the story of my First Love has come. But first, notice thewaitress. I confess, whether beautiful or plain,--not tooplain,--women who earn their own living have a peculiar attraction forme.

  I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As oldCampion 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 methe girls that work. The Girls That Work! But evidently it is hightime woe began a new chapter.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID

  Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was sheknown on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of myimagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess. How shemanaged to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was soobviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed tosee it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were anyordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy trying toflirt with her without a touch of reverence.

  Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morningwhen even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the youngday when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through thenoon, are for a short magical hour their own celestial selves, theirunearthly glory as yet unhidden by any earthly disguise.

  Neither fairies nor fauns, dryads nor nymphs of the forest pools, havereally passed away from the world. You have only to get up earlyenough to meet them in the meadows. They rarely venture abroad aftersix. All day long they hide in uncouth enchanted forms. They changemaybe to a field of turnips, and I have seen a farmer priding himselfon a flock of sheep that I knew were really a most merry company ofdryads 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 secretnames, and the whole rout had been off to the woods, with mad gamboland song, before the eyes of the astonished farmer.

  It was so with Hebe. She was really a little gold-haired blue-eyeddryad, whose true home was a wild white cherry-tree that grew in somescattered woodland behind the old country-house of my boyhood. Inspring-time how that naughty tree used to flash its silver nakedness ofblossom 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, forit is many a day since it was uprooted. The little dryad long sincefled away weeping,--fled away, said evil tongues, fled away to the town.

  Well do I remember our last meeting. Returning home one evening, I mether 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 solong in a Christian house. I vowed--ah! what did I not vow?--and thenwe stole sadly together to comfort our aching hearts under cover of thewoodland. For the last time the wild cherry-tree bloomed,--wonderfulblossom, glittering with tears, and gloriously radiant with stormylights of wild passion and wilder hopes.

  My faith lived valiantly till the next spring. It was Hebe who wasfaithless. 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 secretmornings were known only to ourselves. It was my custom then to riseearly, to read Latin authors,--thanks to Hebe, still unread. I used tolight my fire and make tea for myself, till one rapturous morning Idiscovered that Hebe was fond of rising early too, and that she wouldlike to light my fire and make my tea. After a time she began tosweeten it for me. And then she would sit on my knee, and we wouldtranslate Catullus together,--into English kisses; for she wascuriously interested in the learned tongue.

  How lovely she used to look with the morning sun turning her hair togolden mist, and dancing in the blue deeps of her eyes; and once whenby chance she had forgotten to fasten her gown, I caught glimpses of abosom that was like two happy handfuls of wonderful white cherries...

  She wore a marvellous little printed gown. And here I may say that Ihave never to this day understood objections which were afterwardsraised against my early attachment to print. The only legitimateattachment to print stuff, I was told, was to print stuff in the formof blouse, tennis, or boating costume. Yet, thought I, I would rathersmuggle one of those little print gowns into my berth than all thesilks a sea-faring friend of mine takes the trouble to smuggle from farCathay. 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 beatsbeneath your satin, warm and wild as a bird's. I used to put my ear toit sometimes to listen if it beat right. Ah, reader, it was likeputting 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 measurethe 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 sufficientlydiligent the day before, had spent too much time in dreaming andmoralising, 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 inhabitantswere in the throes of getting up. Somewhere too SHE, the Golden One,the White Woman, was drowsily tossing the night-clothes from her limbsand rubbing her sleepy eyes. William Morris's lovely song came into mymind,--

  '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 hadslept within a few houses of each other. Who could tell?

  Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing thewhite face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic womenThomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows ofdull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners ofromance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of thetown I had left. And then turning my steps across a wide common, whichran with gorse and whortleberry bushes away on every side to distanthilly horizons, swarthy with pines, and dotted here and there withstone granges and white villages, I thought of all the women withinthat circle, any one of whom might prove the woman I sought,--frommilkmaids crossing the meadows, their strong shoulders straining withthe weight of heavy pails, to fine ladies dying of ennui in theircountry-houses; pretty farmers' daughters surreptitiously readingnovels, and longing for London and "life;" passionate young farmers'wives already weary of their doltish lords; bright-eyed bar-maidsburied alive in country inns, and wondering "whatever possessed them"to leave Manchester,--for bar-maids s
eem always to come fromManchester,--all longing modestly, said I, to set eyes on a man likeme, a man of romance, a man of feeling, a man, if you like, to run awaywith.

  My heart flooded over with tender pity for these poor sweetwomen--though perhaps chiefly for my own sad lot in not encounteringthem,--and I conceived a great comprehensive love-poem to be entitled"The Girls that never can be Mine." Perhaps before the end of our tramptogether, I shall have a few verses of it to submit to the eleganttaste of the reader, but at present I have not advanced beyond thetitle.

  CHAPTER XI

  AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

  While occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on theunfair division of opportunities in human life, I was leisurelycrossing the common, and presently I came up with a pedestrian who,though I had little suspected it as I caught sight of him ahead, wasdestined by a kind providence to make more entertaining talk for me inhalf an hour than most people provide in a lifetime.

  He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, tojudge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might call theupper labouring class. He wore a decent square felt hat, a shabbyrespectable overcoat, a workman's knitted waistcoat, and workman'scorduroys, and he carried an umbrella. His upper part might havebelonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks ofrecent bricklaying. Without its being remarkable, he had what one callsa good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined foreheadand nose.