AGAIN ON FOOT--THE GIRLS THAT NEVER CAN BE MINE
Next morning I was afoot early, bent on my quest in right good earnest;
for I had a remorseful feeling that I had not been sufficiently
diligent the day before, had spent too much time in dreaming and
moralising, in which opinion I am afraid the reader will agree.
So I was up and out of the town while as yet most of the inhabitants
were in the throes of getting up. Somewhere too SHE, the Golden One,
the White Woman, was drowsily tossing the night-clothes from her limbs
and rubbing her sleepy eyes. William Morris's lovely song came into my
mind,--
'And midst them all, perchance, my love
Is waking, and doth gently move
And stretch her soft arms out to me,
Forgetting thousand leagues of sea."
Perhaps she was in the very town I was leaving behind. Perhaps we had
slept within a few houses of each other. Who could tell?
Looking back at the old town, with its one steep street climbing the
white face of the chalk hill, I remembered what wonderful exotic women
Thomas Hardy had found eating their hearts out behind the windows of
dull country high streets, through which hung waving no banners of
romance, outwardly as unpromising of adventure as the windows of the
town I had left. And then turning my steps across a wide common, which
ran with gorse and whortleberry bushes away on every side to distant
hilly horizons, swarthy with pines, and dotted here and there with
stone granges and white villages, I thought of all the women within
that circle, any one of whom might prove the woman I sought,--from
milkmaids crossing the meadows, their strong shoulders straining with
the weight of heavy pails, to fine ladies dying of ennui in their
country-houses; pretty farmers' daughters surreptitiously reading
novels, and longing for London and "life;" passionate young farmers'
wives already weary of their doltish lords; bright-eyed bar-maids
buried alive in country inns, and wondering "whatever possessed them"
to leave Manchester,--for bar-maids seem always to come from
Manchester,--all longing modestly, said I, to set eyes on a man like
me, a man of romance, a man of feeling, a man, if you like, to run away
with.
My heart flooded over with tender pity for these poor sweet
women--though perhaps chiefly for my own sad lot in not encountering
them,--and I conceived a great comprehensive love-poem to be entitled
"The Girls that never can be Mine." Perhaps before the end of our tramp
together, I shall have a few verses of it to submit to the elegant
taste of the reader, but at present I have not advanced beyond the
title.