The Golden Age | Page 4

band of
marauding Indians on the shortest possible notice: in brief, a distinctly
able man, with talents, so far as we could judge, immensely above the
majority. I trust he is a bishop by this time,--he had all the necessary
qualifications, as we knew.
These strange folk had visitors sometimes,--stiff and colourless
Olympians like themselves, equally without vital interests and
intelligent pursuits: emerging out of the clouds, and passing away again
to drag on an aimless existence somewhere out of our ken. Then brute
force was pitilessly applied. We were captured, washed, and forced into
clean collars: silently submitting, as was our wont, with more contempt
than anger. Anon, with unctuous hair and faces stiffened in a
conventional grin, we sat and listened to the usual platitudes. How
could reasonable people spend their precious time so? That was ever
our wonder as we bounded forth at last--to the old clay-pit to make pots,
or to hunt bears among the hazels.
It was incessant matter for amazement how these Olympians would talk
over our heads--during meals, for instance--of this or the other social or
political inanity, under the delusion that these pale phantasms of reality
were among the importances of life. We illuminati, eating silently, our
heads full of plans and conspiracies, could have told them what real life
was. We had just left it outside, and were all on fire to get back to it. Of
course we didn't waste the revelation on them; the futility of imparting
our ideas had long been demonstrated. One in thought and purpose,
linked by the necessity of combating one hostile fate, a power

antagonistic ever,--a power we lived to evade,--we had no confidants
save ourselves. This strange anaemic order of beings was further
removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared our natural
existence in the sun. The estrangement was fortified by an abiding
sense of injustice, arising from the refusal of the Olympians ever to
defend, retract, or admit themselves in the wrong, or to accept similar
concessions on our part. For instance, whenI flung the cat out of an
upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and it didn't hurt the
cat), I was ready, after a moment's reflection, to own I was wrong, as a
gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to end there? I trow not.
Again, when Harold was locked up in his room all day, for assault and
battery upon a neighbour's pig,--an action he would have scorned,
being indeed on the friendliest terms with the porker in question,--there
was no handsome expression of regret on the discovery of the real
culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the
imprisonment,--indeed he had very soon escaped by the window, with
assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his
release,--as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of
course that word was never spoken.
Well! The Olympians are all past and gone. Somehow the sun does not
seem to shine so brightly as it used; the trackless meadows of old time
have shrunk and dwindled away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt,
a dull suspicion, creeps over me. Et in Arcadia ego,--I certainly did
once inhabit Arcady. Can it be I too have become an Olympian?

A HOLIDAY.
The masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of
the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead
leaves sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept
heaven seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp.
It was one of the first awakenings of the year. The earth stretched
herself, smiling in her sleep; and everything leapt and pulsed to the stir
of the giant's movement. With us it was a whole holiday; the occasion a
birthday--it matters not whose. Some one of us had had presents, and
pretty conventional speeches, and had glowed with that sense of
heroism which is no less sweet that nothing has been done to deserve it.
But the holiday was for all, the rapture of awakening Nature for all, the

various outdoor joys of puddles and sun and hedge-breaking for all.
Colt-like I ran through the meadows, frisking happy heels in the face of
Nature laughing responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the blue;
wide pools left by the winter's floods flashed the colour back, true and
brilliant; and the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch that
seemed to kindle something in my own small person as well as in the
rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the
brimming sun- bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline
and correction, for one day at least. My legs ran of themselves, and