The Kenneth Grahame Megapack, Page 25

  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 retorted. ‘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: despite 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 hay-fields. 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 ’twas Orinoco, and the cities of the world dotted its shores. We put the Argo’s head upstream, 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, quitting 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 in sight. An antick 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 to 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 now and again to revisit earth and light and the frank, caressing air.

  Tired at last, we strolled back to the old sun-dial, 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.

  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 today?’

  ‘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.