of a breathless enchantment, a spell so deep that the wild-rose growing
there seemed other than the wild-rose that grew outside, seemed indeed
enchanted, and the very blackberries growing on the great cages of
bramble, humming with bees and flickering with butterflies, seemed a
magic fruit--which I ate with a beautiful fear that I should be changed
into a milk-white fawn, or suddenly find myself a little silver fish in
the stream yonder, with the Princess’s lost wedding ring in my inside.
The Princess! Why was it that almost from the first I associated the
wood with a beautiful princess? I seemed always to be expecting her at
some turning of the green pathways, riding upon a white palfrey. Of
course, she would be riding upon a white palfrey. Or, perhaps I should
come upon her suddenly in one of the sunny openings of the wood, combing
her black hair with a golden comb. Or, perhaps she was dead, and this
wild-rose was growing up out of her pure wild heart. I made up many
stories about her, but this was the story that took strongest hold of my
fancy--that she had lost her way in the wood, and at last, worn out with
weariness and hunger, had lain her down and died--just here where this
rose-bush had drawn its fragrance from her last sweet breath, and its
bloom from her fading cheek. I used to sit for hours by the rose-bush,
and picture her lying beneath with her eyes closed and a gold crown
upon her head, and at morning when the roses were filled with dew, I
would say to myself: “O the beautiful Princess! She has been weeping in
the night.” And then I would drink her tears out of the little pearl
cups of the rose; but I was careful never to mar the tender petals, lest
the Princess should feel the pain of it down in the aromatic mould.
One day, however, my fancy took another turn, and I said to myself that
perchance if I were to pluck one of her roses, the Princess would wake
from her enchanted sleep, and stand before me with her strange
death-sleepy eyes, and ask me the way back to her lost castle. So one
morning when the roses were more than usually drenched with the tears of
the Princess, I took heart and plucked the most beautiful rose, saying
as I plucked it: “Arise, little Princess and I will take you back to
your castle.” Then I waited, and presently I seemed to hear a sigh of
happiness, like a spring zephyr, just behind me. I turned, and there
stood a maiden with black hair, and eyes the colour of which I could
not rightly discern, because they seemed filled with moonlight.
“Are you the Princess?” I asked.
“Yes!” she answered, “I am the Princess, and my name is
Once-Upon-a-Time.”
“Beautiful Princess,” I said, “may I take you back to your castle?”
“Are you sure you know the way, little man?” she said, “for I have been
asleep so long that I have quite forgotten it.”
“O yes!” I answered eagerly, though really I was far from sure--but I
knew that I had friends in the wood on whom I could rely, if by chance I
took the wrong turning. So, “O yes!” I answered, “I have in my
wanderings passed by your castle many a time. It stands high among the
rocks in the middle of the wood, so high among the summer clouds that it
makes one dizzy to look up at it, with its donjons and keeps and
draw-bridges and battlements, glittering with men-at-arms, and here and
there, blowing loose among the stone towers, the bright hair of some
beautiful waiting-woman, watching the dark avenues of the woods for the
returning huntsmen, and one loved face among the merry horns. All around
the castle grow the oldest trees of the wood, very close and dark, and
seeming to touch the sky; and thereabout are grim rocks, and hollow
caves haunted by dragons and many another evil thing. In one of these a
giant lives, so terrible that the bravest knights have gone up against
him--only to leave their bones to whiten at the mouth of his cave. And
by the castle walls runs an enchanted river, in which live beautiful
water-witches, that sing in the moonlight, and draw the lonely
home-returning knight down into their watery bowers. In the castle
itself is one tower loftier than all the rest, with windows on every
side, through which you can see, as in a magic glass, the whole wide
earth, with its cities and its roads and all its hidden places. And
there, all day long, sits an aged wizard listening to the world, and
weaving his spells----”
“Yes!” said the Princess, perhaps a little impatient at my long
description. “That is my castle. But are you quite sure that you know
the way?”
At that moment there came and perched upon a bough close by one of those
friends, on whom, as I said, I was relying to help me out if I should
lose my way. It was a Blue-Bird, with which I had become well-acquainted
in my rambles in the wood.
“Wait a moment, Princess,” I said. “To make quite sure, I will consult
this friend of mine here.”
Now I must explain that the Blue-Bird, being himself a singer, it is
necessary to address him in song. Plain prose he is quite unable to
understand. So, if I had said: “Blue-Bird, please tell me the way to the
Castle of Princess Once-Upon-a-Time,” he would have shaken his head like
a deaf man. Therefore, I spoke to him in this fashion instead; or,
rather, I should say that this is the grown-up meaning of what I
sang--for the actual song I have forgotten:
O Blue-Bird, sing the hidden way
To Once-Upon-a-Time;
We know you cannot speak in prose,
So answer us in rhyme.
Blue-Bird of Dreams, alone you know
The way the dream-folk take,
O tell us the right way to go,
Before, Blue-Bird, we wake.
Dreamers, we seek the way of dreams--
O you that know so well
Each twist and turning of the way,
Blue-Bird, will you not tell?
Blue-Bird, if aught that we possess
Has any worth to you,
O take it, Blue-Bird, here it is,
But tell us what to do.
The way of dreams, the wonder-way,
Wonder and winding streams,
Blue-Bird, two dreamers ask of you
To point the way of dreams.
The way is dangerous, we know,
And much beset with dread;
But then, it is the only way,
Blue-Bird, we care to tread.
For this we know: no fact or fear
Of the dream-world we seek
Can be so terrible to us
As those that, week by week,
Day in, day out, bleach and benumb
The sacred self sincere,
The death domestic who hath faced
Hath faced the whole of fear.
We are so fearful we may lose
The thrill and scent of things,
Forget the way to smell a flower,
Hear a bird when it sings.
O Blue-Bird, sing us on our way
Beyond the world that seems--
Two dreamers who have lost their way--
Back to the world of dreams.
To this the Blue-Bird made answer in a song, which, as before, I
translate into grown-up language:
The way of dreams--the Blue-Bird sang--
Is never hard to find,
So soon as you have really left
The grown-up world behind.
So soon as you have come to see
That what the others call
Realities, for such as you,
Are never real at all;
So soon as you have ceased to care
What others say or do,
And understand that they are they,
And you--thank God!--are you.
Then is your foot upon the path,
Your journey well begun,
And safe the road for you to tread,
Moonlight, or morning sun.
Pence of this world you shall not take,
Yea! no provision heed;
A wild-rose gathered in the wood
Will buy you all you need.
Hungry, the birds shall bring you food,
The bees their honey bring;
And, thirsty, you the crystal drink
Of an immortal spring.
For sleep, behold how deep and soft
With moss the earth is spread,
And all the trees of all the world
Shall curtain round your bed.
Enchanted journey! that begins
Nowhere and nowhere ends,
Seeking an ever-changing goal,
Nowhither winds and wends.
For destination yonder flower,
For business yonder bird,
Aught better worth the travelling to
I never saw or heard.
O long dream-travel of the soul!
First the green earth to tread--
And still yon other starry track
To travel when you’re dead.
With directions so explicit, it was next to impossible to miss the way.
So, with little hesitation, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time and I stepped out
through the old wood on the way to her castle. As we went along, she
told me many things that I have never forgotten, for all of them have
come true; but it is necessary for the reader to be reminded that I was
still quite a boy, little more than a child, and was, therefore, too
inexperienced to give the proper value to what she told me. This speech
of hers particularly has remained with me. She said it as we were
nearing the end of our walk together, and the turrets of her castle were
coming in sight.
“This is not the last time we shall meet,” she said, “indeed, we shall
meet many times. In a sense we shall be always meeting, though you may
not recognise me; for you are one of those who are born my subjects. You
are one of those for whom there is no Present, no Future. Your life will
always be lived as a dream of What-Might-Have-Been, or What-Once-Was.
Your happiness will always be--once-upon-a-time! You are of those who
are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Nothing
real will ever happen to you--for the reason that your experience will
be forever haunted by the more beautiful things that might have
happened, or once-upon-a-time did happen to more fortunate men. No
beauty will ever seem beautiful enough--for your eyes will be always
upon Helen of Troy, or Cleopatra of Egypt. However bright your fortune,
the will-o’-the-wisp of a brighter fortune will continually flicker
before you. Your dream can never be fulfilled--because it is so entirely
a dream. All your days you shall be possessed of old stories, and
forgotten fancies, and you shall love only the face you shall never
find.”
And, as she ended, Princess Once-Upon-a-Time bade me farewell, for by
this we had come to the gate of her castle.
I went back home through the wood, with her eyes in my heart, and her
words talking to-and-fro in my brain. Twice I lost my way, but the
friends on whom I relied did not forsake me. Once it was a beautiful
little snake that zig-zagged in front of me till we came to the right
turning. And once it was a chipmunk that seemed to know everything. By
the time I came to the home-end of the wood, the stars were rising, and
the little creatures of the night were creaking and whirring about me.
The windows of home were shining with lamps--welcome beacons, no doubt
you will say--and yet, strange as it may sound, I was rather sorry to
come upon them so easily. They seemed so safe and comfortable--bed at
nine and oatmeal porridge in the morning. I knew that so soon as I
lifted the latch all mystery was at an end. Even the punishment that
would surely fall upon me for my truancy was quite unmysterious--almost
as familiar as my porridge. Bed and porridge--and those voices in the
wood! O anti-climax of a wonderful day. How truly had the Princess
spoken. What was home to me--with its trimmed lamps, and its quiet
carpets and its regular hours; what was home compared with those
night-voices and the rising moon.
Still, being hungry, I chose the kitchen door, and by a friendly
domestic was smuggled away to bed--with a stomach full of pleasant
dreams.
Such was my first meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time.
* * * * *
Next time I met her my boyhood was gone by, and my fancy was no longer
occupied with the nursery-stories of which the Blue-Bird had sung.
Giants and dragons were receding from my imagination, and my fancy, I
must confess, was beginning to take a more sentimental turn. The wood
still remained my wonderland, but the wonders I sought there were of a
different, if scarcely less dangerous, character. By this I had
exchanged my nursery-books for the Mort D’Arthur and Spenser and
Shakespeare and such like romantic literature; and my head was,
therefore, full of the beautiful ladies and noble lovers of old time. I
fear there is no denying that I had by this become quite bookish, and
you could scarcely have encountered me in the wood or elsewhere, without
some poet or some old playbook under my arm. Ah, how happy were those
long summer mornings when I would lie upon a green bank, absorbed in
some honeyed tale of lovers dead and gone, with the green boughs above
sunnily silhouetted on the page. And, just as when a boy the wood had
been the scene of all my old nursery-stories, so still it served me as
the stage for all my romantic heroes and heroines. It was by turns every
wood mentioned in my poets. Of course, it was, first and foremost the
Forest of Arden; and one particular glade presided over by a giant oak
was easily identified by me as the green courtroom of the banished Duke.
As for Jacques, I felt myself his very brother, and replenished the
woodland streams with sentimental tears, with no less enjoyment of my
own melancholy than he. Rosalind, of course, I was expecting to meet
with every moment, and did not fail to inscribe the tree-trunks with
sundry rhymes which I hoped might catch her eye. Of these I may have a
story to tell later. When the wood was in darker moods, when it wore its
tragic mask of thunder and lightning, or put on some sinister witchery
of twilight, I would say that Macbeth was on his way to meet the weird
sisters. Sometimes, it was “a wood near Athens,” or at others,
remembering my Keats, it was that “forest on the shores of Crete,” where
Lycius met the snake-woman Lamia. The wood, indeed, was filled with
memories of Keats, and if any one in the world knew where the lover of
Isabella had been buried by her murderous brothers, surely it was I. I
too had discovered the hollow oak where Merlin lay entranced; and many a
night, hidden behind the bole of some gigantic beech, had watched Selene
bend in a bright crescent above her sleeping shepherd lad.
But it is time I told you of my second meeting with Once-Upon-a-Time. I
was lying in a bower of wild-roses which I had purposely trained to
resemble the bower in which Nicolete slept the night when she fled from
the castle of Beaucaire, as we have all read in the delectable history
of the loves of Aucassin and Nicolete. It was the golden end of
afternoon, and the shadows were still made half of gold. I was lying
face down over my book, when suddenly I seemed aware of a new presence
near me--as one is conscious that a bird had alighted on a bough close
by, or a flower newly opened. Being accustomed to such companions, I did
not look up. I was too deep in the loves of my book folk, and too
anxious to finish the long euphuistic chapter before the setting sun
should warn me of dinner-time. But presently a low laugh sounded behind
me, and the sweetest of voices said:
“Young sir, you are very selfish with that great book there”--I may say
that it was a folio _Arcadia_ of Sir Philip Sidney--“it is so big that I
am sure that there is room for two pairs of eyes--”
“Come read with me,” said I, looking up and blushing.
“Nay, I am no Francesca,” she answered; “I would not interrupt your
reading, young Paolo.”
“But I am tired of reading,” I said, closing the old book.
“The sun will soon be gone,” she answered. “Had you not better finish
your chapter?”
“I would rather finish it by moonlight,” I answered, looking into her
eyes.
“You are a saucy stripling,” she said. “I should not be surprised if you
wrote these lines I just found on yonder tree.”
“What lines?” I asked; for the trees, to tell the truth, were tattooed
with my verses.
“These,” she answered.
“O these!” I said, laughing.
“Read them to me,” she said.
“But they are so long,” I hesitated, “no less than a chant-royal--a
Prayer to the Queen of Love, in five long verses, and an _envoi_! Are
you quite sure you can support so much verse at one sitting--”
“I have not lived at the Court of King Renée for nothing,” she replied,
laughing.
“The Court of King Renée!” I exclaimed, looking at her in amazement.
“You have really lived there? How wonderful! Tell me about it.”
“Indeed, I have!” she answered, with a mocking expression that seemed
strangely at variance with her romantic privileges. “O yes! No doubt it
is a wonderful place for you ballad-making gentlemen. There you can
strum and hum all day to your heart’s content, and your poor bored
mistresses must listen to all your magniloquent nonsense, without a
yawn--besides being quite sure that you don’t mean a single word of it.
Yes! No woman can live at the Court of King Renée unless she is prepared
for poetry morning, noon and night--Yes! and far into the middle of the
night--and even, when at last you have fallen asleep again, after being
awakened by some long-winded serenade, you are barely off, when, with
the first break of dawn, comes another fool beneath your window with his
lute and his falsetto singing you an ‘aubade!’ An aubade, indeed! And
you at last so beautifully asleep. As you would have your lady love you,
dear youth--never sing her an aubade!”
“I marvel that, with such a distaste for song-craft,” I said, “that you
should bid me read you a chant-royal, a form so much longer than the
aubade----”
“O that is different! It is not made use of to wake beautiful ladies
from their sleep at unreasonable hours, but reminds one of dreamy old
orchards in summer afternoons, and the drowsy bees and the flitting
butterflies, and the sea a flickering riband of blue in the distance. It
is like the murmur of a beautiful voice talking low to a beautiful lady
in the still summer afternoon. The sound of the voice is soothing, and
one pays no heed to the words. Besides,” she ended, laughing, “I like
the poet, and that makes a great difference----”
At this I bent low and kissed her hand, and without further parley began
to read:
O mighty Queen, our Lady of the fire,
The light, the music, and the honey, all
Blent in one power, one passionate desire
Man calleth Love--‘Sweet Love,’ the blessed call--
I come a sad-eyed suppliant to thy knee,
If thou hast pity, pity grant to me;
If thou hast bounty, here a heart I bring
For all that bounty thirst and hungering;
O Lady, save thy grace, there is no way
For me, I know, but lonely sorrowing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!
I lay in darkness, face down in the mire,
And prayed that darkness might become my pall;
The rabble rout roared round me like some quire
Of filthy animals primordial;
My heart seemed like a toad eternally
Prisoned in stone, ugly and sad as he;
Sweet sunlight seemed a dream, a mythic thing,
And life some beldam’s dotard gossiping:
Then Lady, I bethought me of thy sway,
And hoped again, rose up this prayer to wing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!
Lady, I bear no high resounding lyre
To hymn thy glory, and thy foes appal
With thunderous splendour of my rhythmic ire;
A little lute I lightly touch, and small
My skill thereon: yet, Lady, if it be
I ever woke ear-winning melody,
Twas for thy praise I sought the throbbing string,
Thy praise alone--for all my worshipping
Is at thy shrine, thou knowest, day by day;
Then shall it be in vain my plaint to sing?
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!
Yea! Why of all men should this sorrow dire
Unto thy servant bitterly befall?
For, Lady, thou dost know I ne’er did tire
Of thy sweet sacraments and ritual;
In morning meadows I have knelt to thee,
In noontide woodlands hearkened hushedly
Thy heart’s warm beat in sacred slumbering,
And in the spaces of the night heart ring
Thy voice in answer to the spheral lay:
Nowneath thy throne my suppliant life I fling--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!
I ask no maid for all men to admire,
Mere body’s beauty bath in me no thrall,
And noble birth, and sumptuous attire,
Are gauds I crave not--yet shall have withal,
With a sweet difference, in my heart’s own She,
Whom words speak not, but eyes know when they see,
Beauty beyond all glass’s mirroring,
And dream and glory hers for garmenting;
Her birth--O Lady, wilt thou say me nay?--
Of thine own womb, of thine own nurturing--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray!
ENVOI
Sweet Queen who sittest at the heart of spring,
My life is thine, barren or blossoming;
Tis thine to flush it gold or leave it grey:
And so unto thy garment’s hem I cling--
Send me a maiden meet for love, I pray.
“I wonder,” I said after a little while, when she had praised my verses,
and I sat by her side holding her hands and looking into her strange
far-away eyes, “I wonder if you are the answer to my prayer--for so soon
as I looked upon you, I gave you all my love, and, if you cannot give me
yours in return, my heart will break--”
She shook her head sadly, and her eyes seemed to grow still more
far-away, but she made no answer more, for all my entreaties, till at
last the day had gone, and the moon was rising through the wood--and she
still sitting by my side like a spirit in the spectral light. Once I
seemed to hear her moan in the silence, and a shiver passed through her
body. Then she turned her eyes upon me--they seemed like wells brimming
with stars:
“I love you,” she said, “but we can never be each other’s. My name is
Once-Upon-a-Time.”
At this I threw myself at her feet face down in the grass and wept
bitterly, and I felt her hand soothingly laid upon my hair, and heard
her voice softly bidding me be comforted. And for a long time it was so
with us, till methinks I must have fallen asleep of the sweet soothing
of her hand on my hair, and the murmur of her sweet voice--for, when I
raised my head from the grass, the place was empty and the dawn was
stealing with feet of pearl through the wood.
The dawn!
“She feared,” I cried, bitterly, “she feared that I might sing her my
aubade!”
But this, of course, was only the lip-cynicism of my sad young heart,
stricken with the arrows of that haunted beauty.
Once-Upon-a-Time! Thus had the Princess met me again as she had said,
and often as I grew up to be a man, and walked but seldom in that old
wood of dreams, her words would come back to me: “You are of those who
are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Your
happiness will always be--Once-Upon-a Time.” For, as I walked the ways
of the world, I saw that my old wood had only been a dream picture of
the real world outside, and that the real world itself, in which my
manhood was now called on to play its part, was no less a dream of
beauty and terror, of love and death, of good and evil, than my old wood
itself; and, like my old wood, it seemed haunted for me by the face of a
Princess--some dear, desired face of woman lost amid these drifting
faces, as in my boyhood it had been lost among the leaves of the wood.
Beautiful faces, beautiful faces, drifting by in the crowded
streets--but never my face among all the faces. Hints of my face, even
glimpses perhaps--sometimes almost the certainty that it is she
yonder--but a sudden turn of the head, and alas! It is not she! Yet a
day did come at last, when the mob of unmeaning faces seemed suddenly to
open, as the clouds fall away right and left before the moon; or as in a
wilderness of leaves without a blossom, one should come upon the
breathless beauty of some lonely flower.
Yes! It was my face at last.
We looked at each other but for a moment in the street, which her beauty
had suddenly made silent for me as the desert--but for a moment, yet
Eternity must be like that look we gave each other.
Then, though she spoke no audible word, my heart heard her say:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-Have-Been; I am also called No-More,
Too-Late, Farewell.”
On one of her beautiful fingers my sad eyes had caught the glimmer of a
small gold band--and, once more as we passed away from each other, my
bitter heart mocked at its own bitterness, and remembering my boyish
fairy-tales, I said to myself:
“The Princess has found her wedding ring!”
And that was my last meeting with Princess Once-Upon-a-Time.
THE LITTLE JOYS OF MARGARET
Margaret had seen her five sisters one by one leave the family nest to
set up little nests of their own. Her brother, the eldest child of a
family of seven, had left the old home almost beyond memory and settled
in London. Now and again he made a flying visit to the small provincial
town of his birth, and sometimes he sent two little daughters to
represent him--for he was already a widowed man and relied occasionally
on the old roof-tree to replace the lost mother. Margaret had seen what
sympathetic spectators called her “fate” slowly approaching for some
time--particularly when, five years ago, she had broken off her
engagement with a worthless boy. She had loved him deeply, and, had she
loved him less, a refined girl in the provinces does not find it easy
to replace a discarded suitor--for the choice of young men is not
excessive. Her sisters had been more fortunate, and so, as I have said,
one by one they left their father’s door in bridal veils. But Margaret
stayed on, and at length, as had been foreseen, became the sole nurse of
a beautiful old invalid mother, a kind of lay sister in the nunnery of
home.