The Golden Age

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.

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, the 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 one 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 I 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, – some day, 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 façade 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, faintly 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 the 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 I 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. 'O, 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 there wouldn't be any 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. O, 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.

'O, 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 everything'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 stories 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 mêlée – 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.'

'O, but you'll stay in my house, won't you?' I cried; 'I 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.

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, backwater, 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 O 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 very 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; and 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 smaller sum than eighteenpence. 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.