Pelleas and I went through the wicket gate with a joyful sense of being
invaders. The gate clicked behind us, and we heard the wheels of our
cab rolling irretrievably from us, and where we stood the June dusk was
deep. We had let ourselves in by a little wicket gate in the corner of
the stone wall that ran round Little Rosemont, the Long Island country
place where our dear Avis and Lawrence Knight lived. We had come down
for a week with them and, having got a later train than we had thought,
we found at the station for Little Rosemont no one to meet us. So
there we were, entering by that woods’ gate and meaning to walk into
the house as if we belonged there. Indeed, secretly we were glad that
this had so befallen for we dislike arriving no less than we dislike
saying good-bye. To my mind neither a book nor a visit, unless it be in
uniform, should be begun or ended with a ruffle of drums.
Meanwhile we would have our walk to the house, a half-mile of delight.
Before us in the pines was a tiny path doubtless intended, I told
Pelleas, to be used by violets when they venture out to walk, two
by two, in the safe night. It was wide enough to accommodate no more
than two violets, and Pelleas and I walked singly, he before and I
clinging to his hand. The evergreens brushed our faces, we heard a
stir of wings, and caught some exquisite odour not intended for human
folk to breathe. It was a half-hour to which we were sadly unwonted;
for Pelleas and I are nominally denied all sweet adventures of
not-yet-seventy, and such as we win we are wont to thieve out-of-hand;
like this night walk, on which no one could tell what might happen.
“Pelleas,” I said, “it is absurd to suppose that we are merely on our
way to a country house for a visit. Don’t you think that this kind of
path through the woods always leads to something wonderful?”
“I have never known it to fail,” Pelleas said promptly. For Pelleas
is not one of the folk who when they travel grow just tired enough to
take a kind of suave exception to everything one says. Nor does Pelleas
agree to distraction. He agrees to all fancies and very moderately
corrects all facts, surely an attribute of the Immortals.
Then the path-for-violets took a turn, “a turn and we stood in the
heart of things.” And we saw that we had not been mistaken. The path
had not been intended for day-folk at all; we had taken it unaware and
it had led us as was its fairy nature to something wonderful.
From where we stood the ground sloped gently downward, a tentative
hill, not willing to declare itself, and spending its time on a spangle
of flowers. We could see the flowers, for the high moon broke from
clouds. And in the hollow stood a little building like a temple, with
a lighted portico girt by white columns and, within, a depth of green
and white. We looked, breathless, perfectly believing everything that
we saw, since to doubt might be to lose it. Indeed, in that moment the
only thing that I could not find it in my heart to fall in with was the
assumption that we were in the New World at all. Surely, here was the
old order, the golden age, with a temple in a glade and a satyr at your
elbow. Could this be Little Rosemont, where we were to find Avis and
Lawrence and Hobart Eddy and other happy realities of our uneventful
lives?
“Oh, Pelleas,” I said in awe, “if only we can get inside before it
disappears.”
“Maybe,” murmured Pelleas, “if we can do that we can disappear with it.”
For we have long had a dream--we are too frequently besieged by the
ways of the world to call it a hope--that sometime They will come and
take us, the Wind or the Day or any of the things that we love, and
thus save us this dreary business of dying.
We skirted the edge of the wood, looking down the while at that
place of light. Within, figures were moving, there was the faint
music of strings, and now and then we heard laughter. To complete
our mystification, as we were well in line with the white portals
there issued from the depth of green and white a group of women,
fair women in white gowns and with unbound hair--and they stepped to
the grass-plot before the door and moved at the direction of one who
leaned, watching, in the white portico. At that we hesitated no longer
but advanced boldly across the moonlit green. And when I saw that the
figure in the portico wore a frock of pink and when I saw her lift her
hand in a way sweetly familiar, I began to suspect that the time was
not yet come when Pelleas and I were to vanish in such bright wise.
Manifestly Pelleas had come to the same conclusion, for when he reached
a broad, flat rock beneath a birch he beckoned me to sit there in the
shadow where we could watch these strange offices.
But the broad, flat rock proved already to be occupied. As we paused
beside it there sprang to his feet a boy who at first glance I protest
to have looked quite like a god, he was so tall and fair under the
moon. But in spite of that he instantly caught at his cap and shuffled
his feet in a fashion which no god would employ.
“Oh,” said he in a voice that I liked, for all his awkward shyness, “I
was just sittin’ here, watchin’ ’em.”
Pelleas looked at him closely.
“Are you sure,” demanded Pelleas, “that you are not a shepherd who has
conjured up all this, on his pipe?”
He nodded toward the hollow and the young god smiled, looking
dreadfully embarrassed as a god would look, charged with being a
shepherd of dreams. He had some green thing in his hand which as he
stood bashfully drawing it through his fingers gave out a faint,
delicious odour.
“Is that mandrake?” asked Pelleas with pleasure.