The Quest of the Golden Girl | Page 5

mad piper, indeed, this spring, with his wonderful lying music,--ever

lying, yet ever convincing, for when was Spring known to keep his
word? Yet year after year we give eager belief to his promises. He may
have consistently broken them for fifty years, yet this year he will keep
them. This year the dream will come true, the ship come home. This
year the very dead we have loved shall come back to us again: for
Spring can even lie like that. There is nothing he will not promise the
poor hungry human heart, with his innocent-looking daisies and those
practised liars the birds. Why, one branch of hawthorn against the sky
promises more than all the summers of time can pay, and a pond ablaze
with yellow lilies awakens such answering splendours and
enchantments in mortal bosoms,--blazons, it would seem, so august a
message from the hidden heart of the world,--that ever afterwards, for
one who has looked upon it, the most fortunate human existence must
seem a disappointment.
So I, too, with the rest of the world, was following in the wake of the
magical music. The lie it was drawing me by is perhaps Spring's oldest,
commonest lie,--the lying promise of the Perfect Woman, the Quite
Impossible She. Who has not dreamed of her,--who that can dream at
all? I suppose that the dreams of our modern youth are entirely
commercial. In the morning of life they are rapt by intoxicating visions
of some great haberdashery business, beckoned to by the voluptuous
enticements of the legal profession, or maybe the Holy Grail they
forswear all else to seek is a snug editorial chair. These quests and
dreams were not for me. Since I was man I have had but one
dream,--namely, Woman. Alas! till this my thirtieth year I have found
only women. No! that is disloyal, disloyal to my First Love; for this is
sadly true,--that we always find the Golden Girl in our first love, and
lose her in our second.
I wonder if the reader would care to hear about my First Love, of whom
I am naturally thinking a good deal this morning, under the
demoralising influences of the fresh air, blue sky, and various birds and
flowers. More potent intoxicants these than any that need licenses for
their purveyance, responsible-- see the poets--for no end of human
foolishness.

I was about to tell the story of my First Love, but on second thoughts I
decide not. It will keep, and I feel hungry, and yonder seems a dingle
where I can lie and open my knapsack, eat, drink, and doze among the
sun-flecked shadows.
CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH I EAT AND DREAM
The girl we go to meet is the girl we have met before. I evolved this
sage reflection, as, lost deep down in the green alleys of the dingle,
having fortified the romantic side of my nature with sandwiches and
sherry, I lazily put the question to myself as to what manner of girl I
expected the Golden Girl to be. A man who goes seeking should have
some notion of what he goes out to seek. Had I any ideal by which to
test and measure the damsels of the world who were to pass before my
critical choosing eye? Had I ever met any girl in the past who would
serve approximately as a model,--any girl, in fact, I would very much
like to meet again? I was very sleepy, and while trying to make up my
mind I fell asleep; and lo! the sandwiches and sherry brought me a
dream that I could not but consider of good omen. And this was the
dream.
I thought my quest had brought me into a strange old haunted forest,
and that I had thrown myself down to rest at the gnarled mossy root of
a great oak-tree, while all about me was nought but fantastic shapes and
capricious groups of gold-green bole and bough, wondrous alleys
ending in mysterious coverts, and green lanes of exquisite turf that
seemed to have been laid down in expectation of some milk-white
queen or goddess passing that way.
And so still the forest was you could have heard an acorn drop or a bird
call from one end of it to the other. The exquisite silence was evidently
waiting for the exquisite voice, that presently not so much broke as
mingled with it, like a swan swimming through a lake.
"Whom seek you?" said, or rather sung, a planetary voice right at my
shoulder. But three short unmusical Saxon words, yet it was as though

a mystical strain of music had passed through the wood.
"Whom seek you?" and again the lovely speech flowered upon the
silence, as white water-lilies on the surface of some shaded