第24章

WHY THE STRANGER WOULD NOT LOSE HIS SHELLEY FOR THE WORLDPicking up the book, I opened it involuntarily at the titlepage, and then--I resisted a great temptation! I shut it again.Alittle flowery plot of girl's handwriting had caught my eye, and a girl's pretty name.When Love and Beauty meet, it is hard not to play the eavesdropper, and it was easy to guess that Love and Beauty met upon that page.St.Anthony had no harder fight with the ladies he was unpolite enough to call demons, than I in resisting the temptation to take another look at that pen-and-ink love making.Now, as I look back, I think it was sheer priggishness to resist so human and yet so reverent an impulse.

There is nothing sacred from reverence, and love's lovers have a right to regard themselves as the confidants of lovers, whenever they may chance to surprise either them or their letters.

While I was still hesitating, and wondering how I could get the book conveyed to its romantic owner, suddenly a figure turned the corner of the road, and there was Alastor coming back again.Islipped the book, in distracted search for which he was evidently still engaged, under the ferns, and, leisurely lighting a pipe, prepared to tease him.He was presently within hail, and, looking up, caught sight of me.

"Have you found your Shelley yet?" I called down to him, as he stood a moment in the road.

He shook his head.No! But he meant to find it, if he had to hunt every square foot of the valley inch by inch.

Wouldn't any other book do, I asked him.Would he take a Boccaccio, or a "Golden Ass," or a "Tom Jones," in exchange?--for of such consisted my knapsack library.He laughed a negative, and it seemed a shame to tease him.

"It is not so much the book itself," he said.

"But the giver?" I suggested.

"Of course," he blushingly replied.

"Well, suppose I have found it?" I continued.

"You don't mean it--"

"But suppose I have--I'm only supposing-- will you give me the pleasure of your company at dinner at the next inn and tell me its story?""Indeed I will, gladly," he replied.

"Well, then," I said, "catch, for here it is!"The joy with which he recovered it was pretty to behold, and the eagerness with which he ran through the leaves, to see that the violets and the primroses and a spray of meadowsweet, young love's bookmarkers, were all in their right places, touched my heart.

He could not thank me enough; and as we stepped out to the inn, some three or four miles on the road, I elicited something of his story.

He was a clerk in a city office, he said, but his dreams were not commercial.His one dream was to be a great poet, or a great writer of some sort, and this was one of his holidays.As Ilooked at his sensitive young face, unmarred by pleasure and unscathed by sorrow, bathed daily, I surmised, in the may-dew of high philosophies--ah, so high! washed from within by a constant radiancy of pure thoughts, and from without by a constant basking in the shine of every beautiful and noble and tender thing,--Ithought it not unlikely that he might fulfil his dream.

But, alas! as he talked on, with lighted face and chin in the air, how cruelly I realised how little I had fulfilled mine.

And how hard it was to talk to him, without crushing some flower of his fancy or casting doubt upon his dreams.Oh, the gulf between twenty and thirty! I had never quite comprehended it before.And how inexpressibly sad it was to hear him prattling on of the ideal life, of socialism, of Walt Whitman and what not,--all the dear old quackeries,--while I was already settling down comfortably to a conservative middle age.He had no hope that had not long been my despair, no aversion that I had not accepted among the more or less comfortable conditions of the universe.He was all for nature and liberty, whereas I had now come to realise the charm of the artificial, and the social value of constraint.

"Young man," I cried in my heart, "what shall I do to inherit Eternal Youth?"The gulf between us was further revealed when, at length coming to our inn, we sat down to dinner.To me it seemed the most natural thing in the world to call for the wine-list and consult his choice of wine; but, will you believe me, he asked to be allowed to drink water! And when he quoted the dear old stock nonsense out of Thoreau about being able to get intoxicated on a glass of water, I could have laughed and cried at the same time.

"Happy Boy!" I cried, "still able to turn water into wine by the divine power of your youth"; and then, turning to the waiter, I ordered a bottle of No.37.