The Quest of the Golden Girl

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THE QUEST OF THE GOLDEN GIRL

A ROMANCE BY

RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

TO
PRIOR AND LOUISE CHRISTIAN,
WITH AFFECTION.

CONTENTS

BOOK I

CHAPTER
I. AN OLD HOUSE AND ITS BACHELOR

II. IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE

III. AN INDICTMENT OF SPRING

IV. IN WHICH I EAT AND DREAM

V. CONCERNING THE PERFECT WOMAN, AND THEREFORE CONCERNING ALL
FEMININE READERS

VI. IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF
HIS READER

VII. PRANDIAL

VIII. STILL PRANDIAL

IX. THE LEGEND OF HEBES OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID

X. AGAIN ON FOOT-THE GIRLS THAT NEVER CAN BE MINE

XI. AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORY

XII. THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GIPSIES

XIII. A STRANGE WEDDING

XIV. THE MYSTERIOUS PETTICOAT

XV. STILL OCCUPIED WITH THE PETTICOAT

XVI. CLEARS UP MY MYSTERIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF THE LAST CHAPTER

XVII. THE NAME UPON THE PETTICOAT

XVIII. IN WHICH THE NAME OF A GREAT POET IS CRIED OUT IN A
SOLITARY PLACE

XIX. WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLD

BOOK II

I. IN WHICH I DECIDE TO BE YOUNG AGAIN

II. AT THE SIGN OF THE SINGING STREAM

III. IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE

IV. 'T IS OF NICOLETE AND HER BOWER IN THE WILDWOOD

V. 'T IS OF AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE

VI. A FAIRY TALE AND ITS FAIRY TAILORS

VII. FROM THE MORNING STAR TO THE MOON

VIII. THE KIND OF THING THAT HAPPENS IN THE MOON

IX. WRITTEN BY MOONLIGHT

X. HOW ONE MAKES LOVE AT THIRTY

XI. HOW ONE PLAYS THE HERO AT THIRTY

XII. IN WHICH I REVIEW MY ACTIONS AND RENEW MY RESOLUTIONS

BOOK III

I. IN WHICH I RETURN TO MY RIGHT AGE AND ENCOUNTER A COMMON
OBJECT OF THE COUNTRY

II. IN WHICH I HEAL A BICYCLE AND COME TO THE WHEEL OF
PLEASURE

III. TWO TOWN MICE AT A COUNTRY INN

IV. MARRIAGE A LA MODE

V. CONCERNING THE HAVEN OF YELLOW SANDS

VI. THE MOORLAND OF THE APOCALYPSE

VII. "COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS!"

VIII. THE TWELVE GOLDEN-HAIRED BAR-MAIDS

IX. SYLVIA JOY

X. IN WHICH ONCE MORE I BECOME OCCUPIED IN MY OWN AFFAIRS

XI. "THE HOUR FOR WHICH THE YEARS FOR WHICH I DID SIGH"

XII. AT THE CAFE DE LA PAIX

XIII. THE INNOCENCE OF PARIS

XIV. END OF BOOK THREE

BOOK IV

THE POSTSCRIPT TO A PILGRIMAGE

I. SIX YEARS AFTER

II. GRACE O' GOD

III. THE GOLDEN GIRL

Gennem de Mange til En!

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

AN OLD HOUSE AND ITS BACHELOR

When the knell of my thirtieth birthday sounded, I suddenly
realised, with a desolate feeling at the heart, that I was alone
in the world. It was true I had many and good friends, and I was
blessed with interests and occupations which I had often declared
sufficient to satisfy any not too exacting human being.
Moreover, a small but sufficient competency was mine, allowing me
reasonable comforts, and the luxuries of a small but choice
library, and a small but choice garden. These heavenly blessings
had seemed mere than enough for nearly five years, during which
the good sister and I had kept house together, leading a life of
tranquil happy days. Friends and books and flowers! It was, we
said, a good world, and I, simpleton,--pretty and dainty as
Margaret was,--deemed it would go on forever. But, alas! one day
came a Faust into our garden,--a good Faust, with no friend
Mephistopheles,--and took Margaret from me. It is but a month
since they were married, and the rice still lingers in the
crevices of the pathway down to the quaint old iron-work gate.
Yes! they have gone off to spend their honeymoon, and Margaret
has written to me twice to say how happy they are together in the
Hesperides. Dear happiness! Selfish, indeed, were he who would
envy you one petal of that wonderful rose--Rosa Mundi--God has
given you to gather.

But, all the same, the reader will admit that it must be lonely
for me, and not another sister left to take pity on me, all
somewhere happily settled down in the Fortunate Isles.

Poor lonely old house! do you, too, miss the light step of your
mistress? No longer shall her little silken figure flit up and
down your quiet staircases, no more deck out your silent rooms
with flowers, humming the while some happy little song.

The little piano is dumb night after night, its candles
unlighted, and there is no one to play Chopin to us now as the
day dies, and the shadows stoop out of their corners to listen in
vain. Old house, old house! We are alone, quite alone,--there
is no mistake about that,--and the soul has gone out of both of
us. And as for the garden, there is no company there; that is
loneliest of all. The very sunlight looks desolation, falling
through the thick-blossoming apple-trees as through the chinks
and crevices of deserted Egyptian cities.

While as for the books--well, never talk to me again about the
companionship of books! For just when one needs them most of all
they seem suddenly to have grown dull and unsympathetic, not a
word of comfort, not a charm anywhere in them to make us forget
the slow-moving hours; whereas, when Margaret was here--but it is
of no use to say any more! Everything was quite different when
Margaret was here: that is enough. Margaret has gone away to the
Fortunate Isles. Of course she'll come to see us now and again;
but it won't be the same thing. Yes! old echoing silent House of
Joy that is Gone, we are quite alone. Now, what is to be done?

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE

Though I have this bad habit of soliloquising, and indeed am
absurd enough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the
reader must realise from the beginning that I am still quite a
young man. I talked a little just now as though I were an
octogenarian. Actually, as I said, I am but just gone thirty, and
I may reasonably regard life, as the saying is, all before me. I
was a little down-hearted when I wrote yesterday. Besides, I
wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy time. The
morning is the time to write. We are all--that is, those of us
who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sad
enough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of
this book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning. This
book! oh, yes, I forgot!--I am going to write
a book. A book about what? Well, that must be as God wills.
But listen! As I lay in bed this morning between sleeping and
waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into my room,--a mad,
whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and put briefly, it
is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, a man
not without accomplishments or experience, should have gone all
these years without finding that

"Not impossible she
Who shall command my heart and me,"--

without meeting at some turning of the way the mystical Golden
Girl,--without, in short, finding a wife?

"Then," suggested the idea, with a blush for its own absurdity,
"why not go on pilgrimage and seek her? I don't believe you'll
find her. She isn't usually found after thirty. But you'll no
doubt have good fun by the way, and fall in with many pleasant
adventures."

"A brave idea, indeed!" I cried. "By Heaven, I will take
stick and knapsack and walk right away from my own front door,
right away where the road leads, and see what happens. "And
now, if the reader please, we will make a start.

CHAPTER III

AN INDICTMENT OF SPRING

"Marry! an odd adventure!" I said to myself, as I stepped along
in the spring morning air; for, being a pilgrim, I was
involuntarily in a mediaeval frame of mind, and "Marry! an odd
adventure!" came to my lips as though I had been one of that
famous company that once started from the Tabard on a day in
spring.

It had been the spring, it will be remembered, that had prompted
them to go on pilgrimage; and me, too, the spring was filling
with strange, undefinable longings, and though I flattered myself
that I had set out in pursuance of a definitely taken resolve, I
had really no more freedom in the matter than the children who
followed at the heels of the mad piper.

A 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
pool.

"The Golden Girl," I answered simply, turning my head, and
looking half sideways and half upwards; and behold! the tree at
whose foot I lay had opened its rocky side, and in the cleft,
like a long lily-bud sliding from its green sheath, stood a
dryad, and my speech failed and my breath went as I looked upon
her beauty, for which mortality has no simile. Yet was there
something about her of the earth-sweetness that clings even to
the loveliest, star-ambitious, earth- born thing. She was not
all immortal, as man is not all mortal. She was the sweetness of
the strength of the oak, the soul born of the sun kissing its
green leaves in the still Memnonian mornings, of moon and stars
kissing its green leaves in the still Trophonian nights.

"The maid you seek," said she, and again she broke the silence
like the moon breaking through the clouds, "what manner of maid
is she? For a maid abides in this wood, maybe it is she whom you
seek. Is she but a lovely face you seek? Is she but a lofty
mind? Is she but a beautiful soul?"

"Maybe she is all these, though no one only, and more besides,"
I answered.

"It is well," she replied, "but have you in your heart no
image of her you seek? Else how should you know her should you
some day come to meet her?"

"I have no image of her," I said. "I cannot picture her; but
I shall know her, know her inerrably as these your wood children
find out each other untaught, as the butterfly that has never
seen his kindred knows his painted mate, passing on the wing all
others by. Only when the lark shall mate with the nightingale,
and the honey-bee and the clock-beetle keep house together, shall
I wed another maid. Fair maybe she will not be, though fair to
me. Wise maybe she will not be, though wise to me. For riches I
care not, and of her kindred I have no care. All I know is that
just to sit by her will be bliss, just to touch her bliss, just
to hear her speak bliss beyond all mortal telling."

Thereat the Sweetness of the Strength of the Oak smiled upon me
and said,--

"Follow yonder green path till it leads you into a little grassy
glade, where is a crystal well and a hut of woven boughs hard by,
and you shall see her whom you seek."

And as she spoke she faded suddenly, and the side of the oak was
once more as the solid rock. With hot heart I took the green
winding path, and presently came the little grassy glade, and the
bubbling crystal well, and the hut of wattled boughs, and,
looking through the open door of the hut, I saw a lovely girl
lying asleep in her golden hair. She smiled sweetly in her sleep,
and stretched out her arms softly, as though to enfold the dear
head of her lover. And, ere I knew, I was bending over her, and
as her sweet breath came and went I whispered: "Grace o' God, I
am here. I have sought you through the world, and found you at
last. Grace o' God, I have come."

And then I thought her great eyes opened, as when the sun sweeps
clear blue spaces in the morning sky. "Flower o' Men," then
said she, low and sweet,--"Flower o' Men, is it you indeed? As
you have sought, so have I waited, waited . . ." And thereat
her arms stole round my neck, and I awoke, and Grace o' God was
suddenly no more than a pretty name that my dream had given me.

"A pretty dream," said my soul, "though a little boyish for
thirty." "And a most excellent sherry," added my body.

CHAPTER V

CONCERNING THE PERFECT WOMAN, AND THEREFORE CONCERNING ALL
FEMININE READERS

As I once more got under way, my thoughts slowly loitered back to
the theme which had been occupying them before I dropped asleep.
What was my working hypothesis of the Perfect Woman, towards whom
I was thus leisurely strolling? She might be defined, I
reflected, as The Woman Who Is Worthy Of Us; but the
improbability which every healthily conceited young man must feel
of ever finding such a one made the definition seem a little
unserviceable. Or, if you prefer, since we seem to be dealing
with impossibles, we might turn about and more truly define her
as The Woman of Whom We are Worthy, for who dare say that she
exists? If, again, she were defined as the Woman our More
Fortunate Friend Marries, her unapproachableness would rob the
definition of any practical value. Other generalisations proving
equally unprofitable, I began scientifically to consider in
detail the attributes of the supposititious paragon,--attributes
of body and mind and heart. This was soon done; but again, as I
thus conned all those virtues which I was to expect united in one
unhappy woman, the result was still unsatisfying, for I began to
perceive that it was really not perfection that I was in search
of. As I added virtue after virtue to the female monster in my
mind, and the result remained still inanimate and unalluring, I
realised that the lack I was conscious of was not any new
perfection, but just one or two honest human imperfections. And
this, try as I would, was just what I could not imagine.

For, if you reflect a moment, you will see that, while it is easy
to choose what virtues we would have our wife possess, it is all
but impossible to imagine those faults we would desire in her,
which I think most lovers would admit add piquancy to the loved
one, that fascinating wayward imperfection which paradoxically
makes her perfect.

Faults in the abstract are each and all so uninviting, not to say
alarming, but, associated with certain eyes and hair and tender
little gowns, it is curious how they lose their terrors; and, as
with vice in the poet's image, we end by embracing what we began
by dreading. You see the fault becomes a virtue when it is hers,
the treason prospers; wherefore, no doubt, the impossibility of
imagining it. What particular fault will suit a particular
unknown girl is obviously as difficult to determine as in what
colours she will look her best.

So, I say, I plied my brains in vain for that becoming fault. It
was the same whether I considered her beauty, her heart, or her
mind. A charming old Italian writer has laid down the canons of
perfect feminine beauty with much nicety in a delicious
discourse, which, as he delivered it in a sixteenth- century
Florentine garden to an audience of beautiful and noble ladies,
an audience not too large to be intimate and not too small to be
embarrassing, it was his delightful good fortune and privilege to
illustrate by pretty and sly references to the characteristic
beauties of the several ladies seated like a ring of roses around
him. Thus he would refer to the shape of Madonna Lampiada's
sumptuous eyelids, and to her shell-like ears, to the correct
length and shape of Madonna Amororrisca's nose, to the lily tower
of Madonna Verdespina's throat; nor would the unabashed old
Florentine shrink from calling attention to the unfairness of
Madonna Selvaggia's covering up her dainty bosom, just as he was
about to discourse upon "those two hills of snow and of roses
with two little crowns of fine rubies on their peaks. "How
could a man lecture if his diagrams were going to behave like
that! Then, feigning a tiff, he would close his manuscript, and
all the ladies with their birdlike voices would beseech him with
"Oh, no, Messer Firenzuola, please go on again; it's SO
charming!" while, as if by accident, Madonna Selvaggia's
moonlike bosom would once more slip out its heavenly silver,
perceiving which, Messer Firenzuola would open his manuscript
again and proceed with his sweet learning.

Happy Firenzuola! Oh, days that are no more!

By selecting for his illustrations one feature from one lady and
another from another, Messer Firenzuola builds up an ideal of the
Beautiful Woman, which, were she to be possible, would probably
be as faultily faultless as the Perfect Woman, were she possible.

Moreover, much about the same time as Firenzuola was writing,
Botticelli's blonde, angular, retrousse women were breaking every
one of that beauty- master's canons, perfect in beauty none the
less; and lovers then, and perhaps particularly now, have found
the perfect beauty in faces to which Messer Firenzuola would have
denied the name of face at all, by virtue of a quality which
indeed he has tabulated, but which is far too elusive and
undefinable, too spiritual for him truly to have understood,--a
quality which nowadays we are tardily recognising as the first
and last of all beauty, either of nature or art,--the supreme,
truly divine, because materialistically unaccountable, quality of
Charm!

"Beauty that makes holy earth and heaven May have faults from
head to feet."

O loveliest and best-loved face that ever hallowed the eyes that
now seek for you in vain! Such was your strange lunar magic,
such the light not even death could dim. And such may be the
loveliest and best- loved face for you who are reading these
pages,--faces little understood on earth because they belong to
heaven.

There is indeed only one law of beauty on which we may
rely,--that it invariably breaks all the laws laid down for it by
the professors of aesthetics. All the beauty that has ever been
in the world has broken the laws of all previous beauty, and
unwillingly dictated laws to the beauty that succeeded it,--laws
which that beauty has no less spiritedly broken, to prove in turn
dictator to its successor.

The immortal sculptors, painters, and poets have always done
exactly what their critics forbade them to do. The obedient in
art are always the forgotten.

Likewise beautiful women have always been a law unto themselves.
Who could have prophesied in what way any of these inspired
law-breakers would break the law, what new type of perfect
imperfection they would create?

So we return to the Perfect Woman, having gained this much
knowledge of her,--that her perfection is nothing more or less
than her unique, individual, charming imperfection, and that she
is simply the woman we love and who is fool enough to love us.

CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ANTICIPATES DISCONTENT ON THE PART OF HIS
READER

"But come," I imagine some reader complaining, "isn't it high
time for something to happen?" No doubt it is, but what am I to
do? I am no less discontented. Is it not even more to my
interest than to the reader's for something to happen? Here have
I been tramping along since breakfast-time, and now it is late in
the afternoon, but never a feather of her dove's wings, never a
flutter of her angel's robes have I seen. It is disheartening,
for one naturally expects to find anything we seek a few minutes
after starting out to seek it, and I confess that I expected to
find my golden mistress within a very few hours of leaving home.
However, had that been the case, there would have been no story,
as the novelists say, and I trust, as he goes on, the reader may
feel with me that that would have been a pity. Besides, with that
prevision given to an author, I am strongly of opinion that
something will happen before long. And if the worst comes to the
worst, there is always that story of my First Love wherewith to
fill the time. Meanwhile I am approaching a decorative old
Surrey town, little more than a cluster of ripe old inns, to one
of which I have much pleasure in inviting the reader to dinner.

CHAPTER VII

PRANDIAL

Dinner!

Is there a more beautiful word in the language?

Dinner!

Let the beautiful word come as a refrain to and fro this chapter.

Dinner!

Just eating and drinking, nothing more, but so much!

Drinking, indeed, has had its laureates. Yet would I offer my
mite of prose in its honour. And when I say "drinking," I
speak not of smuggled gin or of brandy bottles held fiercely by
the neck till they are empty.

Nay, but of that lonely glass in the social solitude of the
tavern,--alone, but not alone, for the glass is sure to bring a
dream to bear it company, and it is a poor dream that cannot
raise a song. And what greater felicity than to be alone in a
tavern with your last new song, just born and yet still a
tingling part of you.

Drinking has indeed been sung, but why, I have heard it asked,
have we no "Eating Songs?"--for eating is, surely, a fine
pleasure. Many practise it already, and it is becoming more
general every day.

I speak not of the finicking joy of the gourmet, but the joy of
an honest appetite in ecstasy, the elemental joy of absorbing
quantities of fresh simple food,--mere roast lamb, new potatoes,
and peas of living green.

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