ALSANDER
Know'st thou the land where bloom the lemon trees,
And darkly gleam the golden oranges?
A gentle wind blows down from that blue sky....
With a spear of golden light and gradual splendour Dawn rose on her
triumphal car. In winter men rise up to welcome her advent: wives cast
off sleep and light fires in her honour; the good citizens draw the
curtains to gaze out upon her beauty, stretching their lazy limbs. In
winter Dawn arises to the sound of chattering and bustle, the herald of
man's work in town and field. But in summer only the grey mists and the
light-winged birds listen to her as she rings the bells of day.
Norman had seen new lands and cities, and had been wandering on foot for
many weeks to south and east admiring all things, but never so satisfied
with what he saw as to rest for a single day. At the first glimmer of
light he leapt to his window, and whether Dawn rose broken upon the
peaks or solemn on the plain, whether she wandered mysteriously down old
winding streets, or set the city square clattering and clanging, it was
early, ever early, that our heroic traveller left his mean abode to
seek the unexpressed, unknown, ever-receding city of his heart's desire.
One night as he was trudging along he met a tramp, whose face he could
hardly make out beneath the stars, who, learning that he was bound to
Alsander, talked to him in English passionately of the beauties of that
country, recommended him to learn its language, and then disappeared
into the gloom. This confirmed the boy in his definite aim, and day
after day he approached this certain goal, fired by the eloquence of the
mysterious stranger. This night, being among the high mountains, he had
found no inn; however, undaunted, he lay down on the roadside for an
hour or two, then rose and strode on, pack on shoulder, through the
shadows. Who could be tired of walking with the mountain wind ahead, the
dim white road beneath, and the joy of watching for the dawn! "Ah!" he
thought, "how I pity the six-legged at their desks! What for them is the
sunrise curtain to the drama of a day? How indeed should they greet it,
save with a cry of pain and a curse upon the light? But I will wander
on."
Now had come that shining moment of Eternity when Aurora unravels the
folds of her saffron robe across the sky and bares her wounded breast to
the blue of morning. The boy swung round a corner of the highway, and
suddenly beheld the valley far below. He saw quiet forests of tall
golden trees and meadows so rich with gentian and wild pansy that even
at that far height he could see them shine. To his left, at the edge of
the plain, lay spear-sharp mountains, a little darker than the skies,
whose distant hollows and tortuous cones ever hinted at the mystery of
the next valley and the joy of things unseen. He saw the thin torrent
which tumbled down in cascades behind the wall become a quiet and solemn
river below leading to a curved strip of sea, of an intense unearthly
colour, southern, fantastic, beyond all belief, and the sound of rushing
waters seemed the only sound in the world. But most surprising of all,
on a rocky mound between the mountains and the bay rose the white city
of Alsander, with her legendary towers and red roofs all dreaming in the
sunlight. In such deep slumber lay that perfect city, the boy held the
very sight of it to be a dream. For there surely dwelt the good King and
the bad King, the younger son and the three princesses, the dwarf, the
giant and the gnome. Surely in those blue mountains lurked and lolled
the devastating dragon who came down for his yearly toll of maiden
flesh; surely in that blue sea swam all the shoal of nereids and
dolphinous fishy beings whose song is dangerous to men. Thus appeared
the city of Alsander to Norman as he gazed at it over the wall in
silence. "Blessings on the head of that wonderful old tramp," said
Norman, "who told me Alsander was the loveliest place in Europe and
directed my steps on this glorious path; wherever he may be may joy
attend him, so boldly did he bear the weight of years." Then down he
went on his way again, humming to himself,
"_Knowst thou the land where bloom the
lemon trees?_"
and the birds were frightened of his deep voice and the little green
lizards fled up the walls as he strode on down the hill.
Many men can only enjoy beauty when they face it alone. These dark and
solitary aesthetes love to ramble on the most horrible downs and heaths
at intempestival morning hours, drinking in the miserable and fearsome
aspect of the world. One such has said to me that he would walk half a
day to avoid meeting a friend. I fear, too, that these characters
consider their misanthropic tastes a self-evident mark of their
superiority over the mass of men, who, herding together with vivacious
chatter, much love-making, and explosion of corks, crowd to the
prettiest places they know to enjoy Bank Holiday. Your lonely man claims
a special communion with God or with the Spirit of Nature, or with the
Rosicrucian mysteries of his own soul, so that his ramble becomes a
sacrament, purifying by pity, terror and love. Norman was a little above
this sort of rubbish: he felt dimly the cruelty of beauty and the menace
of solitude. This sent him moving and set him longing--longing very
definitely for human companionship. Thus he fell short of the
self-sufficient man recommended by Aristotle, for which the reader may
devoutly praise the Lord.
But the stilted style of this century can ill express the fluctuations
of our hero's feelings. "Who is there" (I should have written in 1820),
"or what man of feeling and imagination can be found, who, upon
contemplating the ineffable grandeur and unspeakable majesty of Nature,
does not ardently aspire to hold at the same moment communion with some
divinely tender female heart, to read in those liquid eyes his own
reflections purged of their dross and transmuted into gold, to press
those sensitive fingers and thereby lose himself in rapture among the
gorgeous scenes that astonish and confound his gaze, to seal those
fluttering lips with the memory of an unforgettable moment?"
To resume the use of the English language, Norman felt lonely, and for
that very reason paid particular attention to the only figures
discernible in the landscape. He came down and the figures came up,
three companions they seemed to be. But presently Norman made out that
the central figure was a girl, and her two shining companions were only
the two pails she carried, slung from a yoke that passed behind her
neck. "Life for me," said Norman to himself, as he and the girl drew
near to each other at the combined rate of six miles an hour, "is crude
marble, and I have come here to carve it into flowers, and the flowers
of youth are the fairest of them all." Pleased with this ingenuous
comparison, he looked up with a smile, and discovered that the neck
which bore the yoke was a shapely one, and that there in front of him,
not fifty yards away, stood a young girl, with her pails clanking at her
side. She was dressed in a white frock and her head was covered with a
white kerchief edged with gold.
The reader now dreads the inevitable love scene, and I, too, feel that
an apology is needed. For so many novelists, ballad-makers, jongleurs,
troubadours, minstrels, poets, and bards have sung the praises of
perfect, adorable and captivating ladies that I am inclined to lament
with one of them that
I have sung all love's great songs
And have no new songs to sing,
But I'll sing the old songs again.
And so I will. We will have those old songs again, for I will not give
my heroine "plain but interesting features" or "a noble rather than
beautiful countenance with intellect shining in her eyes," or even in a
candid moment declare her to possess "a haunting plainness all her own."
But apart from all this there is the truth to consider, and this young
girl was assuredly one of the most perfect women God ever made by
accident or Satan by design.
For she stood there in front of him in the radiant, dancing, dewy
morning, happy and unperturbed, in her gracious half-human beauty, not
majestic, not passionate, not mysterious, but unreal from her very
loveliness, a nymph, not of the woods or rivers, but of the sea--yet not
of the tempestuous main--no tall sad siren of a treacherous rock, but a
sweet, young pleasant nymph from a bay where the sun is always shining,
a sea-sand nymph not unacquainted with flowers.
For when I would deal with her face and body, all those feeble, pretty
comparisons whereby the pen of the writer strives to emulate the brush
of the painter, must be of the sea or of flowers. Her dark hair, fringed
against the gold lace of her scarf--but those same painters (whom all we
word-workers envy bitterly but dare not say so) have shown how many
confluent colours--hyacinth and blue and red and deep red gold, gleam
in the shadowy hollows of the hair we fools call dark. ... Dark! As the
sea-water in a sunlit bay lies dark between two little island rocks yet
ripples in the wind, and the sea flowers turn it red along the marge and
the depths glow violet in the midst, and the sunshine is all near but
hidden--am I not now describing the dark hair of a lovely woman?
"But her eyes, poor poet, her eyes--are they not also pools of the salt
sea?"
Not the eyes of this lass, my gentle friend. Her eyes were of finer and
subtler essence than the heavy water of the sea. They were blue--which
is ever most wonderful with dark lashes, dark brows and sea-dark
hair--but not the dark blue of a rock pool nor yet quite the light
broken blue of the blinking waves in the calm and brilliant bay. Her
eyes were of a light dry fire--the blue not of sea nor of sky, but
rather of the glowing air that swims about the idle fisher's boat hour
after hour on summer days. So that you could not tell if they were deep
eyes or light wayward eyes,--those little gay discs of laughing sunlit
air.
And her countenance, that was a sweet rose and jasmine garden--but
always, I would have you remember, a garden that blossoms by the sea,
with vistas of the bay down every alley of the roses, and gleams of blue
water glinting behind the trellis of the jasmine, and the sea air
slightly touching the colour of all the flowers. Have you not seen the
flowers in that Italian picture that are flung round Venus as she rises
from the sea! Even so a little paler than the brave inland flowers were
the jasmine and roses in the garden of the countenance of this lovely
girl.
And her body? Can I tell you its secret? Ah, never: but as you leave the
garden--pluck one tendril from the vine.
* * * * *
Her light, gracious, flowing beauty trans-ported the boy to the days he
had read of, the days when the world was young. The chains of commerce
and the shackles of class,--as it were, the last tatters of his black
British clothes--fell from him. Looking at her, he smiled.
She evidently took that smile as a greeting intended for her, for she
seemed to wait for him to come down and to be in no hurry with her
pails.
"Good morning," she cried to him as he approached, in the honeyed and
somewhat languorous speech of Alsander.
"Good morning," said Norman. "May I help you with the water?" Alsandrian
is an easy, simple, and sonorous language, and Norman had been learning
it and talking it to himself ever since the tramp he met in the night
had directed his thoughts and footsteps toward the country of Alsander,
yet he was very shy at practising for the first time this newly-acquired
tongue.
"Ah, I thought you were a foreigner," said the girl, speaking with the
strained simplicity and slight mispronunciation that we all of us employ
for the benefit of strangers and infants. "What is your country and your
home?"
"England."
"England? Why you are the first Englishman I have ever seen! How
beautiful you are!"
Norman smiled, unable, and indeed unwilling, to deprecate his personal
appearance.
"It is you who are beautiful," he said, slowly, labouring with the
strange tongue, "Are they all like you in Alsander?"
"Do you think it possible?"
She drew herself up with such grace that Norman's arms twitched and
ached. But he was rather in awe of her.
"How bright your eyes are!" he said.
"Are they? What colour do you think they are?" she asked, turning them
full on him.
"They are blue. I have never seen such blue eyes in my life before."
"You are quite sure that they are not green?"
Norman was not at all sure that they were not: they seemed to him to
change colour like little bright clouds, and shone at that moment like
a lustrous emerald. But he simply said that they were not green, as he
could only make very simple phrases in the language of Alsander.
"Are you going to stay long in this country?" inquired the girl.
"I think I shall have to."
He carved a dust pattern with his stick quite nervously, daring no more
to look at her eyes. He asked her name.
"Peronella," she said. "And yours?"
"My name is Norman."
"Nor-mano, how nice!" said the girl, who seemed to think that this
bashful northerner needed encouragement. "Normano. I shall always call
you Normano."
"Always?" said Norman, looking up quickly.
The shameless maiden hung her head with a rosy blush as though she had
been caught in an indiscretion,--as though the word had slipped from her
unawares. But even at six in the morning, a sane though splendid hour,
Norman, that reserved young Englishman, considered such encouragement
sufficient. He went deliberately and took the pails off the girl's
shoulders, as though he were going to help her, and the moment they had
clattered on the road, he embraced this adorable girl from behind and
kissed her ravenously. The kiss fell some two inches below her left
ear.
She stood very stiff, flushed and angry; but Norman simply maintained
his pressure till her whole body unstiffened. Norman had adopted to good
purpose the principle that returns the penny-in-the-grip machine and
secures for Britain her extensive Empire.
By this time they had become thoroughly nervous of each other. They sat
down side by side on the wall near the spring. Norman ruffled his hair
in embarrassment. Peronella murmured something about Fate. Norman
inwardly disagreed; he did not think he ought to blame (or thank) Fate
for the present contingency.
"Where are you going to stay?" asked the girl at last.
"As near you as possible."
"But don't you really know?"
"I know nothing. I am just a stranger, and I have come here for a ...
for a ... damn," said Norman in English to himself, "what's the word for
a holiday?--for a rest."
"You don't look as if you wanted a rest, and you won't get it if you
stay near me."
"Not rest," said Norman, "not rest exactly, but ... amusement. O
Peronella, you know how hard it is to talk a foreign tongue. I have
learnt Alsandrian in a book, but I have never talked a word of it
before."
"You talk it very nicely indeed; it is charming to hear you. It is not
at all pleasant for us to hear men from Ulmreich talking Alsandrian.
They make a horrible harsh noise, although they talk very carefully. But
I think the lazy way you pronounce your o's and e's is charming...."
"_I_ think," said Norman, looking at his watch with a smile, "that it is
just twenty minutes since I first saw you and already...."
"Well?"
"I love you very much." He meant only to say "I like you very much," but
in southern lands the linguistic distinction does not exist.
The girl seized him by the wrists.
"Don't say things like that, you devil," she cried, "especially if you
do not mean it. Yes, say it even if you do not mean it; I love to hear
you saying it. But be very careful. We are not like heathen women."
"I mean it!" said Norman, perforce.
"Normano, did you treat all other girls like this in England, and do you
think I allow other men...."
"It will be quite different," faltered Norman.
"Say it again!"
"Peronella, I really love you."
Norman could not conceal a little yawn in his voice even at the moment
of making this startling declaration; his eyes were heavy with light
and he had walked for many hours. The girl perceived at once.
"Why, you are quite tired!" she said, "and talking fearful nonsense. You
must come and find a room at once. Have you been walking long?"
"Four or five hours," said Norman.
"You curious person, to go walking in the night. Where have you come
from?"
"From Braxea. I had my supper in the inn last night, and I've been
walking ever since."
"What a pace you must have put on! Why, it's ever such a way away.
Braxea? Why, it's right over the mountains on the frontier. Those long
legs!" she added, pointing to them with a laugh. "No wonder they go far.
I have never seen such long legs, except on a grass-hopper. And now you
will walk into Alsander. But you have not yet answered my question.
Where are you going to stay in our city?"
"I don't know a bit, beautiful girl, as I told you. Perhaps you can find
me a place, not far away from you."
"Ah, perhaps I might," said she, "and perhaps I might not. I do not
think you would be an agreeable neighbour."
"Ah, why not? Should I trouble and annoy you?"
"You have no idea how to behave, none at all," murmured Peronella.
"Oh, I will learn," cried the boy, "if you will teach me."
"And you will promise never, never again to squeeze my breath out in
that awful manner?"
"Faithfully I will promise everything you ask."
"Why, then," said Peronella, rising up, with her eyes sparkling, "you
had better come and live with my mother and me. We have a little
_pension_ and we want a lodger."
"What?" said Norman, not trusting himself to have understood.
"Come--and--live--with--my--mother-and--me, that is, if you like."
"O Peronella, I am afraid." And indeed the boy was really getting
seriously frightened of this persistent maiden.
"But will you come? Or will you not have enough rest or amusement?
Perhaps you would rather stay at the Palace Hotel. Most foreigners do.
Ours is a very poor house. But the Palace Hotel is not really a palace.
Will you come? It would be much less expensive for you, and we have no
mosquitoes, and mother cooks divinely."
"How dare you ask me, you mad girl? You must think we live in snow
houses and get our hearts frozen up in the north. Let us go at once!"
He made as if to accompany her, highly pleased at his proficiency in
Alsandrian.
"No, no," said the girl. "That will never do. People are beginning to
get up now and would say all sorts of things. You do not know what
tongues they have, the old women of the town. I should be shamed and
ruined. But I have a beautiful plan. You must walk about thirty yards
behind me and follow me home."
Norman shook his head at her, not understanding. It is so much easier to
be metaphorical than to be practical in a foreign tongue.
If you do not understand what I mean, consider a moment. You possess,
let us say, a little knowledge of Italian, without tears. You are in a
restaurant at Rome, and two Counts are discussing at the next table. To
your delight you comprehend them perfectly. The Count with the white
imperial has just observed, "_La vera educazione, il segreto del
progresso umano, e ideale._" You admire the limpidity of his thought,
the purity of his enunciation, and your own knowledge of a tongue so
recently acquired. Then comes the infernal waiter with his coarse,
plebeian accent. Where are you now? _Minestra, cipolle, rombo,
sermone_--is the old Count going to preach one? Holding back the
scalding tears of shame, you feed the brute with English.
Norman's obtuseness dismayed the girl.
"Oh, dear!" said she. "You don't understand a word. You are dreadfully
stupid. What shall I do? Ah, I know!"
Laughing merrily, she picked up two pebbles, one longer than the other.
"You," she said, "and me."
Then she thrust Norman's stick into the grass to represent home, she
explained. Then, kneeling down and pulling Norman beside her, she made
the pebbles walk after her at even distances towards the stick. She made
the short pebble trip along lightly with a mincing gait, while the tall
one paced behind in gigantic strides, reverent and slow. At the stick
she put another great pebble, squat and dumpy, to do duty for Mamma. The
lady pebble tapped at the door and was admitted; the tall pebble thumped
a few minutes afterwards; it talked inquiringly to the dumpy pebble,
bowed to the graceful pebble, and finally (so Norman contrived to the
girl's vast delight) kissed that graceful pebble rapturously behind the
squat one's back.
"Now," said she, "do you understand, you stupid?"
Norman understood the little pantomime. She started off. He had to call
her back for her forgotten pails. Norman filled them and placed them
lovingly on her back. She went a full hundred yards ahead, and then
waved her hand, nearly spilling her pails as she did so. He followed,
rather frightened, very thrilled, and overwhelmingly tired.
Not otherwise did the Ithacan follow Nausicaa into the city of the
Phoeacians whose ships went wisely in the waves.