Thursday's Serial: "The Golden Age" by Keneth Grahame (in English) - XI

THE SECRET DRAWER

It must surely have served as a boudoir for the ladies of old time, this little used, rarely entered chamber where the neglected old bureau stood. There was something very feminine in the faint hues of its faded brocades, in the rose and blue of such bits of china as yet remained, and in the delicate old-world fragrance of pot-pourri from the great bowl—blue and white, with funny holes in its cover—that stood on the bureau’s flat top. Modern aunts disdained this out-of-the-way, back-water, upstairs room, preferring to do their accounts and grapple with their correspondence in some central position more in the whirl of things, whence one eye could be kept on the carriage drive, while the other was alert for malingering servants and marauding children. Those aunts of a former generation—I sometimes felt—would have suited our habits better. But even by us children, to whom few places were private or reserved, the room was visited but rarely. To be sure, there was nothing particular in it that we coveted or required,—only a few spindle-legged gilt-backed chairs; an old harp, on which, so the legend ran, Aunt Eliza herself used once to play, in years remote, unchronicled; a corner-cupboard with a few pieces of china; and the old bureau. But one other thing the room possessed, peculiar to itself; a certain sense of privacy,—a power of making the intruder feel that he WAS intruding,—perhaps even a faculty of hinting that some one might have been sitting on those chairs, writing at the bureau, or fingering the china, just a second before one entered.

                No such violent word as “haunted” could possibly apply to this pleasant old-fashioned chamber, which indeed we all rather liked; but there was no doubt it was reserved and stand-offish, keeping itself to itself.

                Uncle Thomas was the first to draw my attention to the possibilities of the old bureau. He was pottering about the house one afternoon, having ordered me to keep at his heels for company,—he was a man who hated to be left one minute alone,—when his eye fell on it. “H’m! Sheraton!” he remarked. (He had a smattering of most things, this uncle, especially the vocabularies.) Then he let down the flap, and examined the empty pigeon-holes and dusty panelling. “Fine bit of inlay,” he went on: “good work, all of it. I know the sort. There’s a secret drawer in there somewhere.” Then, as I breathlessly drew near, he suddenly exclaimed: “By Jove, I do want to smoke!” and wheeling round he abruptly fled for the garden, leaving me with the cup dashed from my lips. What a strange thing, I mused, was this smoking, that takes a man suddenly, be he in the court, the camp, or the grove, grips him like an Afreet, and whirls him off to do its imperious behests! Would it be even so with myself, I wondered, in those unknown grown-up years to come?

                But I had no time to waste in vain speculations. My whole being was still vibrating to those magic syllables, “secret drawer;” and that particular chord had been touched that never fails to thrill responsive to such words as CAVE, TRAP-DOOR, SLIDING-PANEL, BULLION, INGOTS, or SPANISH DOLLARS. For, besides its own special bliss, who ever heard of a secret drawer with nothing in it? And oh, I did want money so badly! I mentally ran over the list of demands which were pressing me the most imperiously.

                First, there was the pipe I wanted to give George Jannaway. George, who was Martha’s young man, was a shepherd, and a great ally of mine; and the last fair he was at, when he bought his sweetheart fairings, as a right-minded shepherd should, he had purchased a lovely snake expressly for me; one of the wooden sort, with joints, waggling deliciously in the hand; with yellow spots on a green ground, sticky and strong-smelling, as a fresh-painted snake ought to be; and with a red-flannel tongue, pasted cunningly into its jaws. I loved it much, and took it to bed with me every night, till what time its spinal cord was loosed and it fell apart, and went the way of all mortal joys. I thought it so nice of George to think of me at the fair, and that’s why I wanted to give him a pipe. When the young year was chill and lambing-time was on, George inhabited a little wooden house on wheels, far out on the wintry downs, and saw no faces but such as were sheepish and woolly and mute; ant when he and Martha were married, she was going to carry his dinner out to him every day, two miles; and after it, perhaps he would smoke my pipe. It seemed an idyllic sort of existence, for both the parties concerned; but a pipe of quality, a pipe fitted to be part of a life such as this, could not be procured (so Martha informed me) for a less sum than eighteen pence. And meantime—!

                Then there was the fourpence I owed Edward; not that he was bothering me for it, but I knew he was in need of it himself, to pay back Selina, who wanted it to make up a sum of two shillings, to buy Harold an ironclad for his approaching birthday,—H. M. S. Majestic, now lying uselessly careened in the toyshop window, just when her country had such sore need of her.

                And then there was that boy in the village who had caught a young squirrel, and I had never yet possessed one, and he wanted a shilling for it, but I knew that for ninepence in cash—but what was the good of these sorry, threadbare reflections? I had wants enough to exhaust any possible find of bullion, even if it amounted to half a sovereign. My only hope now lay in the magic drawer, and here I was standing and letting the precious minutes slip by. Whether “findings” of this sort could, morally speaking, be considered “keepings,” was a point that did not occur to me.

                The room was very still as I approached the bureau,—possessed, it seemed to be, by a sort of hush of expectation. The faint odour of orris-root that floated forth as I let down the flap, seemed to identify itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood, till hue and scent were of one quality and interchangeable.

                Even so, ere this, the pot-pourri had mixed itself with the tints of the old brocade, and brocade and pot-pourri had long been one.

                With expectant fingers I explored the empty pigeon-holes and sounded the depths of the softly-sliding drawers. No books that I knew of gave any general recipe for a quest like this; but the glory, should I succeed unaided, would be all the greater.

                To him who is destined to arrive, the fates never fail to afford, on the way, their small encouragements; in less than two minutes, I had come across a rusty button-hook. This was truly magnificent. In the nursery there existed, indeed, a general button-hook, common to either sex; but none of us possessed a private and special button-hook, to lend or refuse as suited the high humour of the moment. I pocketed the treasure carefully and proceeded. At the back of another drawer, three old foreign stamps told me I was surely on the highroad to fortune.

                Following on these bracing incentives, came a dull blank period of unrewarded search. In vain I removed all the drawers and felt over every inch of the smooth surfaces, from front to back. Never a knob, spring or projection met the thrilling finger-tips; unyielding the old bureau stood, stoutly guarding its secret, if secret it really had. I began to grow weary and disheartened. This was not the first time that Uncle Thomas had proved shallow, uninformed, a guide into blind alleys where the echoes mocked you. Was it any good persisting longer? Was anything any good whatever? In my mind I began to review past disappointments, and life seemed one long record of failure and of non-arrival. Disillusioned and depressed, I left my work and went to the window. The light was ebbing from the room, and outside seemed to be collecting itself on the horizon for its concentrated effort of sunset. Far down the garden, Uncle Thomas was holding Edward in the air reversed, and smacking him. Edward, gurgling hysterically, was striking blind fists in the direction where he judged his uncle’s stomach should rightly be; the contents of his pockets—a motley show—were strewing the lawn. Somehow, though I had been put through a similar performance an hour or two ago, myself, it all seemed very far away and cut off from me.

                Westwards the clouds were massing themselves in a low violet bank; below them, to north and south, as far round as eye could reach, a narrow streak of gold ran out and stretched away, straight along the horizon. Somewhere very far off, a horn was being blown, clear and thin; it sounded like the golden streak grown audible, while the gold seemed the visible sound. It pricked my ebbing courage, this blended strain of music and colour, and I turned for a last effort; and Fortune thereupon, as if half-ashamed of the unworthy game she had been playing with me, relented, opening her clenched fist. Hardly had I put my hand once more to the obdurate wood, when with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob—as it were—of relief, the secret drawer sprang open.

                I drew it out and carried it to the window, to examine it in the failing light. Too hopeless had I gradually grown, in my dispiriting search, to expect very much; and yet at a glance I saw that my basket of glass lay in fragments at my feet. No ingots or dollars were here, to crown me the little Monte Cristo of a week. Outside, the distant horn had ceased its gnat-song, the gold was paling to primrose, and everything was lonely and still. Within, my confident little castles were tumbling down like card-houses, leaving me stripped of estate, both real and personal, and dominated by the depressing reaction.

                And yet,—as I looked again at the small collection that lay within that drawer of disillusions, some warmth crept back to my heart as I recognised that a kindred spirit to my own had been at the making of it. Two tarnished gilt buttons,—naval, apparently,—a portrait of a monarch unknown to me, cut from some antique print and deftly coloured by hand in just my own bold style of brush-work,—some foreign copper coins, thicker and clumsier of make than those I hoarded myself,—and a list of birds’ eggs, with names of the places where they had been found. Also, a ferret’s muzzle, and a twist of tarry string, still faintly aromatic. It was a real boy’s hoard, then, that I had happened upon. He too had found out the secret drawer, this happy starred young person; and here he had stowed away his treasures, one by one, and had cherished them secretly awhile; and then—what? Well, one would never know now the reason why these priceless possessions still lay here unreclaimed; but across the void stretch of years I seemed to touch hands a moment with my little comrade of seasons long since dead.

                I restored the drawer, with its contents, to the trusty bureau, and heard the spring click with a certain satisfaction. Some other boy, perhaps, would some day release that spring again. I trusted he would be equally appreciative. As I opened the door to go, I could hear from the nursery at the end of the passage shouts and yells, telling that the hunt was up. Bears, apparently, or bandits, were on the evening bill of fare, judging by the character of the noises. In another minute I would be in the thick of it, in all the warmth and light and laughter. And yet—what a long way off it all seemed, both in space and time, to me yet lingering on the threshold of that old-world chamber!

“EXIT TYRANNUS”

The eventful day had arrived at last, the day which, when first named, had seemed—like all golden dates that promise anything definite—so immeasurably remote. When it was first announced, a fortnight before, that Miss Smedley was really going, the resultant ecstasies had occupied a full week, during which we blindly revelled in the contemplation and discussion of her past tyrannies, crimes, malignities; in recalling to each other this or that insult, dishonour, or physical assault, sullenly endured at a time when deliverance was not even a small star on the horizon; and in mapping out the golden days to come, with special new troubles of their own, no doubt, since this is but a work-a-day world, but at least free from one familiar scourge. The time that remained had been taken up by the planning of practical expressions of the popular sentiment. Under Edward’s masterly direction, arrangements had been made for a flag to be run up over the hen-house at the very moment when the fly, with Miss Smedley’s boxes on top and the grim oppressor herself inside, began to move off down the drive. Three brass cannons, set on the brow of the sunk-fence, were to proclaim our deathless sentiments in the ears of the retreating foe: the dogs were to wear ribbons, and later—but this depended on our powers of evasiveness and dissimulation—there might be a small bonfire, with a cracker or two, if the public funds could bear the unwonted strain.

                I was awakened by Harold digging me in the ribs, and “She’s going to-day!” was the morning hymn that scattered the clouds of sleep.

                Strange to say, it was with no corresponding jubilation of spirits that I slowly realised the momentous fact. Indeed, as I dressed, a dull disagreeable feeling that I could not define grew within me—something like a physical bruise. Harold was evidently feeling it too, for after repeating “She’s going to-day!” in a tone more befitting the Litany, he looked hard in my face for direction as to how the situation was to be taken. But I crossly bade him look sharp and say his prayers and not bother me. What could this gloom portend, that on a day of days like the present seemed to hang my heavens with black?

                Down at last and out in the sun, we found Edward before us, swinging on a gate, and chanting a farm-yard ditty in which all the beasts appear in due order, jargoning in their several tongues, and every verse begins with the couplet—

            “Now, my lads, come with me,

             Out in the morning early!”

                The fateful exodus of the day had evidently slipped his memory entirely. I touched him on the shoulder. “She’s going to-day!” I said. Edward’s carol subsided like a water-tap turned off. “So she is!” he replied, and got down at once off the gate: and we returned to the house without another word.

                At breakfast Miss Smedley behaved in a most mean and uncalled-for manner. The right divine of governesses to govern wrong includes no right to cry. In thus usurping the prerogative of their victims, they ignore the rules of the ring, and hit below the belt. Charlotte was crying, of course; but that counted for nothing. Charlotte even cried when the pigs’ noses were ringed in due season; thereby evoking the cheery contempt of the operators, who asserted they liked it, and doubtless knew. But when the cloud-compeller, her bolts laid aside, resorted to tears, mutinous humanity had a right to feel aggrieved, and placed in a false and difficult position. What would the Romans have done, supposing Hannibal had cried? History has not even considered the possibility. Rules and precedents should be strictly observed on both sides; when they are violated, the other party is justified in feeling injured.

                There were no lessons that morning, naturally—another grievance!

                The fitness of things required that we should have struggled to the last in a confused medley of moods and tenses, and parted for ever, flushed with hatred, over the dismembered corpse of the multiplication table. But this thing was not to be; and I was free to stroll by myself through the garden, and combat, as best I might, this growing feeling of depression. It was a wrong system altogether, I thought, this going of people one had got used to. Things ought always to continue as they had been. Change there must be, of course; pigs, for instance, came and went with disturbing frequency—

        “Fired their ringing shot and passed,

         Hotly charged and sank at last,”—

but Nature had ordered it so, and in requital had provided for rapid successors. Did you come to love a pig, and he was taken from you, grief was quickly assuaged in the delight of selection from the new litter. But now, when it was no question of a peerless pig, but only of a governess, Nature seemed helpless, and the future held no litter of oblivion. Things might be better, or they might be worse, but they would never be the same; and the innate conservatism of youth asks neither poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change.

                Edward slouched up alongside of me presently, with a hang-dog look on him, as if he had been caught stealing jam. “What a lark it’ll be when she’s really gone!” he observed, with a swagger obviously assumed.

                “Grand fun!” I replied, dolorously; and conversation flagged.

                We reached the hen-house, and contemplated the banner of freedom lying ready to flaunt the breezes at the supreme moment.

                “Shall you run it up,” I asked, “when the fly starts, or—or wait a little till it’s out of sight?”

                Edward gazed around him dubiously. “We’re going to have some rain, I think,” he said; “and—and it’s a new flag. It would be a pity to spoil it. P’raps I won’t run it up at all.”

                Harold came round the corner like a bison pursued by Indians. “I’ve polished up the cannons,” he cried, “and they look grand! Mayn’t I load ‘em now?”

                “You leave ‘em alone,” said Edward, severely, “or you’ll be blowing yourself up” (consideration for others was not usually Edward’s strong point). “Don’t touch the gunpowder till you’re told, or you’ll get your head smacked.”

                Harold fell behind, limp, squashed, obedient. “She wants me to write to her,” he began, presently. “Says she doesn’t mind the spelling, it I’ll only write. Fancy her saying that!”

                “Oh, shut up, will you?” said Edward, savagely; and once more we were silent, with only our thoughts for sorry company.

                “Let’s go off to the copse,” I suggested timidly, feeling that something had to be done to relieve the tension, “and cut more new bows and arrows.”

                “She gave me a knife my last birthday,” said Edward, moodily, never budging. “It wasn’t much of a knife—but I wish I hadn’t lost it.”

                “When my legs used to ache,” I said, “she sat up half the night, rubbing stuff on them. I forgot all about that till this morning.”

                “There’s the fly!” cried Harold suddenly. “I can hear it scrunching on the gravel.”

                Then for the first time we turned and stared one another in the face.

                The fly and its contents had finally disappeared through the gate: the rumble of its wheels had died away; and no flag floated defiantly in the sun, no cannons proclaimed the passing of a dynasty. From out the frosted cake of our existence Fate had cut an irreplaceable segment; turn which way we would, the void was present. We sneaked off in different directions, mutually undesirous of company; and it seemed borne in upon me that I ought to go and dig my garden right over, from end to end. It didn’t actually want digging; on the other hand, no amount of digging could affect it, for good or for evil; so I worked steadily, strenuously, under the hot sun, stifling thought in action. At the end of an hour or so, I was joined by Edward.

                “I’ve been chopping up wood,” he explained, in a guilty sort of way, though nobody had called on him to account for his doings.

                “What for?” I inquired, stupidly. “There’s piles and piles of it chopped up already.”

                “I know,” said Edward; “but there’s no harm in having a bit over. You never can tell what may happen. But what have you been doing all this digging for?”

                “You said it was going to rain,” I explained, hastily; “so I thought I’d get the digging done before it came. Good gardeners always tell you that’s the right thing to do.”

                “It did look like rain at one time,” Edward admitted; “but it’s passed off now. Very queer weather we’re having. I suppose that’s why I’ve felt so funny all day.”

                “Yes, I suppose it’s the weather,” I replied. “I’ve been feeling funny too.”

                The weather had nothing to do with it, as we well knew. But we would both have died rather than have admitted the real reason.

               

Thursday's Serial: "The Golden Age" by Keneth Grahame (in English) - X

THE ROMAN ROAD

All the roads of our neighbourhood were cheerful and friendly, having each of them pleasant qualities of their own; but this one seemed different from the others in its masterful suggestion of a serious purpose, speeding you along with a strange uplifting of the heart. The others tempted chiefly with their treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse, splash of a frog; while cool noses of brother-beasts were pushed at you through gate or gap. A loiterer you had need to be, did you choose one of them,—so many were the tiny hands thrust out to detain you, from this side and that. But this other was of a sterner sort, and even in its shedding off of bank and hedgerow as it marched straight and full for the open downs, it seemed to declare its contempt for adventitious trappings to catch the shallow-pated. When the sense of injustice or disappointment was heavy on me, and things were very black within, as on this particular day, the road of character was my choice for that solitary ramble, when I turned my back for an afternoon on a world that had unaccountably declared itself against me.

                “The Knights’ Road,” we children had named it, from a sort of feeling that, if from any quarter at all, it would be down this track we might some day see Lancelot and his peers come pacing on their great war-horses,—supposing that any of the stout band still survived, in nooks and unexplored places. Grown-up people sometimes spoke of it as the “Pilgrims’ Way”; but I didn’t know much about pilgrims,—except Walter in the Horselberg story. Him I sometimes saw, breaking with haggard eyes out of yonder copse, and calling to the pilgrims as they hurried along on their desperate march to the Holy City, where peace and pardon were awaiting them. “All roads lead to Rome,” I had once heard somebody say; and I had taken the remark very seriously, of course, and puzzled over it many days. There must have been some mistake, I concluded at last; but of one road at least I intuitively felt it to be true. And my belief was clinched by something that fell from Miss Smedley during a history lesson, about a strange road that ran right down the middle of England till it reached the coast, and then began again in France, just opposite, and so on undeviating, through city and vineyard, right from the misty Highlands to the Eternal City. Uncorroborated, any statement of Miss Smedley’s usually fell on incredulous ears; but here, with the road itself in evidence, she seemed, once, in a way, to have strayed into truth.

                Rome! It was fascinating to think that it lay at the other end of this white ribbon that rolled itself off from my feet over the distant downs. I was not quite so uninstructed as to imagine l could reach it that afternoon; but some day, I thought, if things went on being as unpleasant as they were now,—some day, when Aunt Eliza had gone on a visit,—we would see.

                I tried to imagine what it would be like when I got there. The Coliseum I knew, of course, from a woodcut in the history-book: so to begin with I plumped that down in the middle. The rest had to be patched up from the little grey market-town where twice a year we went to have our hair cut; hence, in the result, Vespasian’s amphitheatre was approached by muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the Blue Boar, with Somebody’s Entire along their front, and “Commercial Room” on their windows; the doctor’s house, of substantial red-brick; and the facade of the New Wesleyan Chapel, which we thought very fine, were the chief architectural ornaments: while the Roman populace pottered about in smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of Roman calves and inviting each other to beer in musical Wessex. From Rome I drifted on to other cities, dimly heard of—Damascus, Brighton (Aunt Eliza’s ideal), Athens, and Glasgow, whose glories the gardener sang; but there was a certain sameness in my conception of all of them: that Wesleyan chapel would keep cropping up everywhere. It was easier to go a-building among those dream-cities where no limitations were imposed, and one was sole architect, with a free hand. Down a delectable street of cloud-built palaces I was mentally pacing, when I happened upon the Artist.

                He was seated at work by the roadside, at a point whence the cool large spaces of the downs, juniper-studded, swept grandly westwards. His attributes proclaimed him of the artist tribe: besides, he wore knickerbockers like myself,—a garb confined, I was aware, to boys and artists. I knew I was not to bother him with questions, nor look over his shoulder and breathe in his ear—they didn’t like it, this genus irritabile; but there was nothing about staring in my code of instructions, the point having somehow been overlooked: so, squatting down on the grass, I devoted myself to a passionate absorbing of every detail. At the end of five minutes there was not a button on him that I could not have passed an examination in; and the wearer himself of that homespun suit was probably less familiar with its pattern and texture than I was. Once he looked up, nodded, half held out his tobacco pouch,—mechanically, as it were,—then, returning it to his pocket, resumed his work, and I my mental photography.

                After another five minutes or so had passed he remarked, without looking my way: “Fine afternoon we’re having: going far to-day?”

                “No, I’m not going any farther than this,” I replied; “I WAS thinking of going on to Rome but I’ve put it off.”

                “Pleasant place, Rome,” he murmured; “you’ll like it.” It was some minutes later that he added: “But I wouldn’t go just now, if I were you,—too jolly hot.”

                “YOU haven’t been to Rome, have you?” I inquired.

                “Rather,” he replied, briefly; “I live there.”

                This was too much, and my jaw dropped as I struggled to grasp the fact that I was sitting there talking to a fellow who lived in Rome. Speech was out of the question: besides, I had other things to do. Ten solid minutes had I already spent in an examination of him as a mere stranger and artist; and now the whole thing had to be done over again, from the changed point of view. So I began afresh, at the crown of his soft hat, and worked down to his solid British shoes, this time investing everything with the new Roman halo; and at last I managed to get out: “But you don’t really live there, do you?” never doubting the fact, but wanting to hear it repeated.

                “Well,” he said, good-naturedly overlooking the slight rudeness of my query, “I live there as much as l live anywhere,—about half the year sometimes. I’ve got a sort of a shanty there. You must come and see it some day.”

                “But do you live anywhere else as well?” I went on, feeling the forbidden tide of questions surging up within me.

                “O yes, all over the place,” was his vague reply. “And I’ve got a diggings somewhere off Piccadilly.”

                “Where’s that?” I inquired.

                “Where’s what?” said he. “Oh, Piccadilly! It’s in London.”

                “Have you a large garden?” I asked; “and how many pigs have you got?”

                “I’ve no garden at all,” he replied, sadly, “and they don’t allow me to keep pigs, though I’d like to, awfully. It’s very hard.”

                “But what do you do all day, then,” I cried, “and where do you go and play, without any garden, or pigs, or things?”

                “When I want to play,” he said, gravely, “I have to go and play in the street; but it’s poor fun, I grant you. There’s a goat, though, not far off, and sometimes I talk to him when I’m feeling lonely; but he’s very proud.”

                “Goats ARE proud,” I admitted. “There’s one lives near here, and if you say anything to him at all, he hits you in the wind with his head. You know what it feels like when a fellow hits you in the wind?”

                “I do, well,” he replied, in a tone of proper melancholy, and painted on.

                “And have you been to any other places,” I began again, presently, “besides Rome and Piccy-what’s-his-name?”

                “Heaps,” he said. “I’m a sort of Ulysses—seen men and cities, you know. In fact, about the only place I never got to was the Fortunate Island.”

                I began to like this man. He answered your questions briefly and to the point, and never tried to be funny. I felt I could be confidential with him.

                “Wouldn’t you like,” I inquired, “to find a city without any people in it at all?”

                He looked puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,” said he.

                “I mean,” I went on eagerly, “a city where you walk in at the gates, and the shops are all full of beautiful things, and the houses furnished as grand as can be, and there isn’t anybody there whatever! And you go into the shops, and take anything you want—chocolates and magic lanterns and injirubber balls—and there’s nothing to pay; and you choose your own house and live there and do just as you like, and never go to bed unless you want to!”

                The artist laid down his brush. “That WOULD be a nice city,” he said. “Better than Rome. You can’t do that sort of thing in Rome,—or in Piccadilly either. But I fear it’s one of the places I’ve never been to.”

                “And you’d ask your friends,” I went on, warming to my subject,—“only those you really like, of course,—and they’d each have a house to themselves,—there’d be lots of houses,—and no relations at all, unless they promised they’d be pleasant, and if they weren’t they’d have to go.”

                “So you wouldn’t have any relations?” said the artist. “Well, perhaps you’re right. We have tastes in common, I see.”

                “I’d have Harold,” I said, reflectively, “and Charlotte. They’d like it awfully. The others are getting too old. Oh, and Martha—I’d have Martha, to cook and wash up and do things. You’d like Martha. She’s ever so much nicer than Aunt Eliza. She’s my idea of a real lady.”

                “Then I’m sure I should like her,” he replied, heartily, “and when I come to—what do you call this city of yours? Nephelo—something, did you say?”

                “I—I don’t know,” I replied, timidly. “I’m afraid it hasn’t got a name—yet.”

                The artist gazed out over the downs. “‘The poet says, dear city of Cecrops;’” he said, softly, to himself, “‘and wilt not thou say, dear city of Zeus?’ That’s from Marcus Aurelius,” he went on, turning again to his work. “You don’t know him, I suppose; you will some day.”

                “Who’s he?” I inquired.

                “Oh, just another fellow who lived in Rome,” he replied, dabbing away.

                “O dear!” I cried, disconsolately. “What a lot of people seem to live at Rome, and I’ve never even been there! But I think I’d like MY city best.”

                “And so would I,” he replied with unction. “But Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t, you know.”

                “Then we won’t invite him,” I said, “will we?”

                “I won’t if you won’t,” said he. And that point being settled, we were silent for a while.

                “Do you know,” he said, presently, “I’ve met one or two fellows from time to time who have been to a city like yours,—perhaps it was the same one. They won’t talk much about it—only broken hints, now and then; but they’ve been there sure enough. They don’t seem to care about anything in particular—and every thing’s the same to them, rough or smooth; and sooner or later they slip off and disappear; and you never see them again. Gone back, I suppose.”

                “Of course,” said I. “Don’t see what they ever came away for; I wouldn’t,—to be told you’ve broken things when you haven’t, and stopped having tea with the servants in the kitchen, and not allowed to have a dog to sleep with you. But I’ve known people, too, who’ve gone there.”

                The artist stared, but without incivility.

                “Well, there’s Lancelot,” I went on. “The book says he died, but it never seemed to read right, somehow. He just went away, like Arthur. And Crusoe, when he got tired of wearing clothes and being respectable. And all the nice men in the stones who don’t marry the Princess, ‘cos only one man ever gets married in a book, you know. They’ll be there!”

                “And the men who never come off,” he said, “who try like the rest, but get knocked out, or somehow miss,—or break down or get bowled over in the melee,—and get no Princess, nor even a second-class kingdom,—some of them’ll be there, I hope?”

                “Yes, if you like,” I replied, not quite understanding him; “if they’re friends of yours, we’ll ask ‘em, of course.”

                “What a time we shall have!” said the artist, reflectively; “and how shocked old Marcus Aurelius will be!”

                The shadows had lengthened uncannily, a tide of golden haze was flooding the grey-green surface of the downs, and the artist began to put his traps together, preparatory to a move. I felt very low; we would have to part, it seemed, just as we were getting on so well together. Then he stood up, and he was very straight and tall, and the sunset was in his hair and beard as he stood there, high over me. He took my hand like an equal. “I’ve enjoyed our conversation very much,” he said. “That was an interesting subject you started, and we haven’t half exhausted it. We shall meet again, I hope.”

                “Of course we shall,” I replied, surprised that there should be any doubt about it.

                “In Rome, perhaps?” said he.

                “Yes, in Rome,” I answered, “or Piccy-the-other-place, or somewhere.”

                “Or else,” said he, “in that other city,—when we’ve found the way there. And I’ll look out for you, and you’ll sing out as soon as you see me. And we’ll go down the street arm-in-arm, and into all the shops, and then I’ll choose my house, and you’ll choose your house, and we’ll live there like princes and good fellows.”

                “Oh, but you’ll stay in my house, won’t you?” I cried; “wouldn’t ask everybody; but I’ll ask YOU.”

                He affected to consider a moment; then “Right!” he said: “I believe you mean it, and I WILL come and stay with you. I won’t go to anybody else, if they ask me ever so much. And I’ll stay quite a long time, too, and I won’t be any trouble.”

                Upon this compact we parted, and I went down-heartedly from the man who understood me, back to the house where I never could do anything right. How was it that everything seemed natural and sensible to him, which these uncles, vicars, and other grown-up men took for the merest tomfoolery? Well, he would explain this, and many another thing, when we met again. The Knights’ Road! How it always brought consolation! Was he possibly one of those vanished knights I had been looking for so long? Perhaps he would be in armour next time,—why not? He would look well in armour, I thought. And I would take care to get there first, and see the sunlight flash and play on his helmet and shield, as he rode up the High Street of the Golden City.

                Meantime, there only remained the finding it,—an easy matter.

Thursday's Serial: "The Golden Age" by Keneth Grahame (in English) - IX

WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT

Edward was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one that had last passed under the dentist’s hands, to be the capitalist of the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff obtained in ours,—half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately—in spite of Edward’s interested affectation of agony—had been shaky undisguised; but the event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however, Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement, and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and most self respecting of the rabbits had been let loose to grace the feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for bits of broken cork.

           “Hurry up, can’t you?” growled our host; “what are you girls always so beastly particular for?”

          “Martha says,” explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), “that if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells inside you, till you—”

         “O bosh!” said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

         “O, it’s all very well to say bosh,” replied Harold, nettled; “but every one knows it’s true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of his glass, and then he said, ‘Poo, my goodness, that’s corked!’ And he wouldn’t touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny part was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought out into the passage, and there wasn’t any cork in it at all! So I drank it all off, and it was very good!”

                “You’d better be careful, young man!” said his elder brother, regarding him severely. “D’ you remember that night when the Mummers were here, and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the glasses after they had gone away?”

                “Ow! I did feel funny that night,” chuckled Harold. “Thought the house was comin’ down, it jumped about so; and Martha had to carry me up to bed, ‘cos the stairs was goin’ all waggity!”

                We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a delinquency.

                A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going for a walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our Family to meet with physical coercion any independence of action in individuals.

                “She’s off with those Vicarage girls again,” said Edward, regarding Selina’s long black legs twinkling down the path. “She goes out with them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessed time! I can’t make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it’s gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!”

                “P’raps they talk about birds’-eggs,” I suggested sleepily (the sun was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); “and about ships, and buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and whether they’d sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they’ll be when they’re men—at least, I mean there’s lots of things to talk about, if you WANT to talk.”

                “Yes; but they don’t talk about those sort of things at all,” persisted Edward. “How CAN they? They don’t KNOW anything; they can’t DO anything—except play the piano, and nobody would want to talk about THAT; and they don’t care about anything—anything sensible, I mean. So what DO they talk about?”

                “I asked Martha once,” put in Harold; “and she said, ‘Never YOU mind; young ladies has lots of things to talk about that young gentlemen can’t understand.’”

                “I don’t believe it,” Edward growled.

                “Well, that’s what she SAID, anyway,” rejoined Harold, indifferently. The subject did not seem to him of first-class importance, and it was hindering the circulation of the ginger-beer.

                We heard the click of the front-gate. Through a gap in the hedge we could see the party setting off down the road. Selina was in the middle: a Vicarage girl had her by either arm; their heads were together, as Edward had described; and the clack of their tongues came down the breeze like the busy pipe of starlings on a bright March morning.

                “What DO they talk about, Charlotte?” I inquired, wishing to pacify Edward. “You go out with them sometimes.”

                “I don’t know,” said poor Charlotte, dolefully. “They make me walk behind, ‘cos they say I’m too little, and mustn’t hear. And I DO want to so,” she added.

                “When any lady comes to see Aunt Eliza,” said Harold, “they both talk at once all the time. And yet each of ‘em seems to hear what the other one’s saying. I can’t make out how they do it. Grown-up people are so clever!”

                “The Curate’s the funniest man,” I remarked. “He’s always saying things that have no sense in them at all, and then laughing at them as if they were jokes. Yesterday, when they asked him if he’d have some more tea he said ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’ and then sniggered all over. I didn’t see anything funny in that. And then somebody asked him about his button-hole and he said ‘’Tis but a little faded flower,’ and exploded again. I thought it very stupid.”

                “O HIM,” said Edward contemptuously: “he can’t help it, you know; it’s a sort of way he’s got. But it’s these girls I can’t make out. If they’ve anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody knows what it is? And if they haven’t—and we know they CAN’T have, naturally—why don’t they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here—HE doesn’t want to talk. He’s got something better to do.” And Edward aimed a ginger-beer cork at the unruffled beast, who never budged.

                “O but rabbits DO talk,” interposed Harold. “I’ve watched them often in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up and down, just like Selina’s and the Vicarage girls’. Only of course I can t hear what they’re saying.”

                “Well, if they do,” said Edward, unwillingly, “I’ll bet they don’t talk such rot as those girls do!”—which was ungenerous, as well as unfair; for it had not yet transpired—nor has it to this day—WHAT Selina and her friends talked about.

THE ARGONAUTS

The advent of strangers, of whatever sort, into our circle, had always been a matter of grave dubiety and suspicion; indeed, it was generally a signal for retreat into caves and fastnesses of the earth, into unthreaded copses or remote outlying cowsheds, whence we were only to be extricated by wily nursemaids, rendered familiar by experience with our secret runs and refuges. It was not surprising therefore that the heroes of classic legend, when first we made their acquaintance, failed to win our entire sympathy at once. “Confidence,” says somebody, “is a plant of slow growth;” and these stately dark-haired demi-gods, with names hard to master and strange accoutrements, had to win a citadel already strongly garrisoned with a more familiar soldiery. Their chill foreign goddesses had no such direct appeal for us as the mocking malicious fairies and witches of the North; we missed the pleasant alliance of the animal—the fox who spread the bushiest of tails to convey us to the enchanted castle, the frog in the well, the raven who croaked advice from the tree; and—to Harold especially—it seemed entirely wrong that the hero should ever be other than the youngest brother of three. This belief, indeed, in the special fortune that ever awaited the youngest brother, as such,—the “Borough-English” of Faery,—had been of baleful effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a parvenu. Even strangers, however, we may develop into sworn comrades; and these gay swordsmen, after all, were of the right stuff. Perseus, with his cap of darkness and his wonderful sandals, was not long in winging his way to our hearts; Apollo knocked at Admetus’ gate in something of the right fairy fashion; Psyche brought with her an orthodox palace of magic, as well as helpful birds and friendly ants. Ulysses, with his captivating shifts and strategies, broke down the final barrier, and hence forth the band was adopted and admitted into our freemasonry. I had been engaged in chasing Farmer Larkin’s calves—his special pride—round the field, just to show the man we hadn’t forgotten him, and was returning through the kitchen-garden with a conscience at peace with all men, when I happened upon Edward, grubbing for worms in the dung-heap. Edward put his worms into his hat, and we strolled along together, discussing high matters of state. As we reached the tool-shed, strange noises arrested our steps; looking in, we perceived Harold, alone, rapt, absorbed, immersed in the special game of the moment. He was squatting in an old pig-trough that had been brought in to be tinkered; and as he rhapsodised, anon he waved a shovel over his head, anon dug it into the ground with the action of those who would urge Canadian canoes. Edward strode in upon him.

                “What rot are you playing at now?” he demanded sternly.

                Harold flushed up, but stuck to his pig-trough like a man. “I’m Jason,” he replied, defiantly; “and this is the Argo. The other fellows are here too, only you can’t see them; and we’re just going through the Hellespont, so don’t you come bothering.” And once more he plied the wine-dark sea.

                Edward kicked the pig-trough contemptuously.

                “Pretty sort of Argo you’ve got!” said he.

                Harold began to get annoyed. “I can’t help it,” he replied. “It’s the best sort of Argo I can manage, and it’s all right if you only pretend enough; but YOU never could pretend one bit.”

                Edward reflected. “Look here,” he said presently; “why shouldn’t we get hold of Farmer Larkin’s boat, and go right away up the river in a real Argo, and look for Medea, and the Golden Fleece, and everything? And I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind your being Jason, as you thought of it first.”

                Harold tumbled out of the trough in the excess of his emotion. “But we aren’t allowed to go on the water by ourselves,” he cried.

                “No,” said Edward, with fine scorn: “we aren’t allowed; and Jason wasn’t allowed either, I daresay—but he WENT!”

                Harold’s protest had been merely conventional: he only wanted to be convinced by sound argument. The next question was, How about the girls? Selina was distinctly handy in a boat: the difficulty about her was, that if she disapproved of the expedition—and, morally considered, it was not exactly a Pilgrim’s Progress—she might go and tell; she having just reached that disagreeable age when one begins to develop a conscience. Charlotte, for her part, had a habit of day-dreams, and was as likely as not to fall overboard in one of her rapt musings. To be sure, she would dissolve in tears when she found herself left out; but even that was better than a watery tomb. In fine, the public voice—and rightly, perhaps—was against the admission of the skirted animal: spite the precedent of Atalanta, who was one of the original crew.

                “And now,” said Edward, “who’s to ask Farmer Larkin? I can’t; last time I saw him he said when he caught me again he’d smack my head. YOU’LL have to.”

                I hesitated, for good reasons. “You know those precious calves of his?” I began.

                Edward understood at once. “All right,” he said; “then we won’t ask him at all. It doesn’t much matter. He’d only be annoyed, and that would be a pity. Now let’s set off.”

                We made our way down to the stream, and captured the farmer’s boat without let or hindrance, the enemy being engaged in the hayfields. This “river,” so called, could never be discovered by us in any atlas; indeed our Argo could hardly turn in it without risk of shipwreck. But to us ‘t was Orinoco, and the cities of the world dotted its shores. We put the Argo’s head up stream, since that led away from the Larkin province; Harold was faithfully permitted to be Jason, and we shared the rest of the heroes among us. Then launching forth from Thessaly, we threaded the Hellespont with shouts, breathlessly dodged the Clashing Rocks, and coasted under the lee of the Siren-haunted isles. Lemnos was fringed with meadow-sweet, dog-roses dotted the Mysian shore, and the cheery call of the haymaking folk sounded along the coast of Thrace.

                After some hour or two’s seafaring, the prow of the Argo embedded itself in the mud of a landing-place, plashy with the tread of cows and giving on to a lane that led towards the smoke of human habitations. Edward jumped ashore, alert for exploration, and strode off without waiting to see if we followed; but I lingered behind, having caught sight of a moss-grown water-gate hard by, leading into a garden that from the brooding quiet lapping it round, appeared to portend magical possibilities.

                Indeed the very air within seemed stiller, as we circumspectly passed through the gate; and Harold hung back shamefaced, as if we were crossing the threshold of some private chamber, and ghosts of old days were hustling past us. Flowers there were, everywhere; but they drooped and sprawled in an overgrowth hinting at indifference; the scent of heliotrope possessed the place, as if actually hung in solid festoons from tall untrimmed hedge to hedge. No basket-chairs, shawls, or novels dotted the lawn with colour; and on the garden-front of the house behind, the blinds were mostly drawn. A grey old sun-dial dominated the central sward, and we moved towards it instinctively, as the most human thing visible. An antique motto ran round it, and with eyes and fingers we struggled at the decipherment.

                “TIME: TRYETH: TROTHE:” spelt out Harold at last. “I wonder what that means?”

                I could not enlighten him, nor meet his further questions as to the inner mechanism of the thing, and where you wound it up.

                I had seen these instruments before, of course, but had never fully understood their manner of working.

                We were still puzzling our heads over the contrivance, when I became aware that Medea herself was moving down the path from the house. Dark-haired, supple, of a figure lightly poised and swayed, but pale and listless—I knew her at once, and having come out to find her, naturally felt no surprise at all. But Harold, who was trying to climb on the top of the sun-dial, having a cat-like fondness for the summit of things, started and fell prone, barking his chin and filling the pleasance with lamentation.

                Medea skimmed the ground swallow-like, and in a moment was on her knees comforting him,—wiping the dirt out of his chin with her own dainty handkerchief,—and vocal with soft murmur of consolation.

                “You needn’t take on so about him,” I observed, politely. “He’ll cry for just one minute, and then he’ll be all right.”

                My estimate was justified. At the end of his regulation time Harold stopped crying suddenly, like a clock that had struck its hour; and with a serene and cheerful countenance wriggled out of Medea’s embrace, and ran for a stone to throw at an intrusive blackbird.

                “O you boys!” cried Medea, throwing wide her arms with abandonment. “Where have you dropped from? How dirty you are! I’ve been shut up here for a thousand years, and all that time I’ve never seen any one under a hundred and fifty! Let’s play at something, at once!”

                “Rounders is a good game,” I suggested. “Girls can play at rounders. And we could serve up to the sun-dial here. But you want a bat and a ball, and some more people.”

                She struck her hands together tragically. “I haven’t a bat,” she cried, “or a ball, or more people, or anything sensible whatever. Never mind; let’s play at hide-and-seek in the kitchen garden. And we’ll race there, up to that walnut-tree; I haven’t run for a century!”

                She was so easy a victor, nevertheless, that I began to doubt, as I panted behind, whether she had not exaggerated her age by a year or two. She flung herself into hide-and-seek with all the gusto and abandonment of the true artist, and as she flitted away and reappeared, flushed and laughing divinely, the pale witch-maiden seemed to fall away from her, and she moved rather as that other girl I had read about, snatched from fields of daffodil to reign in shadow below, yet permitted once again to visit earth, and light, and the frank, caressing air.

                Tired at last, we strolled back to the old sundial, and Harold, who never relinquished a problem unsolved, began afresh, rubbing his finger along the faint incisions, “Time tryeth trothe. Please, I want to know what that means.”

                Medea’s face drooped low over the sun-dial, till it was almost hidden in her fingers. “That’s what I’m here for,” she said presently, in quite a changed, low voice. “They shut me up here—they think I’ll forget—but I never will—never, never! And he, too—but I don’t know—it is so long—I don’t know!”

                Her face was quite hidden now. There was silence again in the old garden. I felt clumsily helpless and awkward; beyond a vague idea of kicking Harold, nothing remedial seemed to suggest itself.

                None of us had noticed the approach of another she-creature—one of the angular and rigid class—how different from our dear comrade! The years Medea had claimed might well have belonged to her; she wore mittens, too—a trick I detested in woman. “Lucy!” she said, sharply, in a tone with AUNT writ large over it; and Medea started up guiltily.

                “You’ve been crying,” said the newcomer, grimly regarding her through spectacles. “And pray who are these exceedingly dirty little boys?”

                “Friends of mine, aunt,” said Medea, promptly, with forced cheerfulness. “I—I’ve known them a long time. I asked them to come.”

                The aunt sniffed suspiciously. “You must come indoors, dear,” she said, “and lie down. The sun will give you a headache. And you little boys had better run away home to your tea. Remember, you should not come to pay visits without your nursemaid.”

                Harold had been tugging nervously at my jacket for some time, and I only waited till Medea turned and kissed a white hand to us as she was led away. Then I ran. We gained the boat in safety; and “What an old dragon!” said Harold.

                “Wasn’t she a beast!” I replied. “Fancy the sun giving any one a headache! But Medea was a real brick. Couldn’t we carry her off?”

                “We could if Edward was here,” said Harold, confidently.

                The question was, What had become of that defaulting hero? We were not left long in doubt. First, there came down the lane the shrill and wrathful clamour of a female tongue, then Edward, running his best, and then an excited woman hard on his heel. Edward tumbled into the bottom of the boat, gasping, “Shove her off!” And shove her off we did, mightily, while the dame abused us from the bank in the self same accents in which Alfred hurled defiance at the marauding Dane.

                “That was just like a bit out of Westward Ho!” I remarked approvingly, as we sculled down the stream. “But what had you been doing to her?”

                “Hadn’t been doing anything,” panted Edward, still breathless. “I went up into the village and explored, and it was a very nice one, and the people were very polite. And there was a blacksmith’s forge there, and they were shoeing horses, and the hoofs fizzled and smoked, and smelt so jolly! I stayed there quite a long time. Then I got thirsty, so I asked that old woman for some water, and while she was getting it her cat came out of the cottage, and looked at me in a nasty sort of way, and said something I didn’t like. So I went up to it just to—to teach it manners, and somehow or other, next minute it was up an apple-tree, spitting, and I was running down the lane with that old thing after me.”

                Edward was so full of his personal injuries that there was no interesting him in Medea at all. Moreover, the evening was closing in, and it was evident that this cutting-out expedition must be kept for another day. As we neared home, it gradually occurred to us that perhaps the greatest danger was yet to come; for the farmer must have missed his boat ere now, and would probably be lying in wait for us near the landing-place. There was no other spot admitting of debarcation on the home side; if we got out on the other, and made for the bridge, we should certainly be seen and cut off. Then it was that I blessed my stars that our elder brother was with us that day,—he might be little good at pretending, but in grappling with the stern facts of life he had no equal. Enjoining silence, he waited till we were but a little way from the fated landing-place, and then brought us in to the opposite bank. We scrambled out noiselessly, and—the gathering darkness favouring us—crouched behind a willow, while Edward pushed off the empty boat with his foot. The old Argo, borne down by the gentle current, slid and grazed along the rushy bank; and when she came opposite the suspected ambush, a stream of imprecation told us that our precaution had not been wasted. We wondered, as we listened, where Farmer Larkin, who was bucolically bred and reared, had acquired such range and wealth of vocabulary. Fully realising at last that his boat was derelict, abandoned, at the mercy of wind and wave,—as well as out of his reach,—he strode away to the bridge, about a quarter of a mile further down; and as soon as we heard his boots clumping on the planks, we nipped out, recovered the craft, pulled across, and made the faithful vessel fast to her proper moorings. Edward was anxious to wait and exchange courtesies and compliments with the disappointed farmer, when he should confront us on the opposite bank; but wiser counsels prevailed. It was possible that the piracy was not yet laid at our particular door: Ulysses, I reminded him, had reason to regret a similar act of bravado, and—were he here—would certainly advise a timely retreat. Edward held but a low opinion of me as a counsellor; but he had a very solid respect for Ulysses.