THE RETURN OF ENDYMION
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.
And to our utter amazement the god answered:—
“Yes, sir. Squeeze it on your eyes and you can see things a good ways off, they say.”
Shepherd or god, I liked him after that. I took a bit of the mandrake from him and asked him whether he had ever tried it and what he had seen; but at this he blushed so furiously that as we moved away Pelleas hastened to set him at his ease by some crisp commonplace about the night. And there we left him, standing under the birch with his mandrake in his hand, looking down, I instantly guessed, for some one in that brightness below us in the hollow.
“Pelleas,” I said, “Pelleas, without any doubt there is somebody down there whom he wants to see. I dare say the temple may not be enchanted, after all. For that fine young fellow and his blushes—they seemed to me very human!”
“That’s the reason,” Pelleas said most wisely, “why there is likely to be some enchantment about. The more human you are the more wonderful things are likely to happen.”
That is true enough, and it was in very human fashion that next instant the figure in pink in the portico of the temple came swiftly toward us and took me in her arms. It was Avis, all tender regret for what she fancied to be her inhospitality and as perfectly the hostess as if it were usual for her to receive her guests in a white temple. And manifestly it was usual; for when she had led us within, there on a papier maché rock on the edge of a papier maché ocean sat Hobart Eddy himself and Lawrence Knight in a dress as picturesque as Hobart’s; and about them in a confusion of painted idols and crowns and robes were all the house-party at Little Rosemont and a score from the countryside.
“Upon my word,” Pelleas said, “they must have let us off at Arcady at last. I always knew I’d buy a through ticket some day.”
Hobart Eddy came forward, twitching an amazing shepherd’s cloak about him, and shook his shepherd’s crook at us.
“I’m head goat,” he explained, “but they let me call myself a goatherd because they think I won’t see through the offence.”
Then Avis, laughing, drew Pelleas and me away to tell us how at last her dream had come true and that the white temple was the theater which she had wanted for her guests at Little Rosemont, and that on Monday it was to be opened with some tableaux and an open-air play on the grass-plot, under the moon. And when she had shown us all the charms and wonders of the pretty place she led us away for our drive across the fields to the house.
As we emerged on the wide portico Pelleas stopped us with a gesture.
“Look,” he said softly, “look there. Really, you know, it’s like being somewhere else.”
Between the two central pillars we could see the moon streaming full upon the tiled floor; and in the brightness a little figure was standing, sandaled and crowned and in white, a solitary portress of this sylvan lodge. She had heard our approach and she turned, a radiant little creature with bright hair along her straight gown, and drew back and dropped a quick, unmistakable courtesy!
I have seldom been more amazed than by the dipping courtesy of that crowned head. Then I saw to my further bewilderment that the salutation had been intended for me. And as I looked at her a certain familiarity in her prettiness smote me, and I knew her.
“It is Bonnie!” I said.
“O, ma’am,” said Bonnie, “yes’m,” and blushed and waxed still prettier. And this was Bonnie, the little maid whom I had last seen as I sat with Enid’s baby under the pink crab apple-tree; and she was come to Little Rosemont, Avis told me later, because her mother lived there in charge of the cedar linen room. (So her mother cannot have been Demeter after all!) I remembered her because of her really unusual prettiness which in print gowns and white caps was hardly less notable than in this splendour of white robe and unbound hair. It was easy to see why Avis had pressed her in service for the Monday tableaux. It was easy to see that no one could be more charmingly picturesque than Bonnie. And as I looked down in her face upturned to answer some slight thing that I was saying to her, in a flash something else was clear to me. With Bonnie here in this fair guise was it not the easiest matter in the world to see who had been in the mind of that fine young fellow up yonder there, with mandrake in his hands?
It was a wild guess, if you like, but a guess not difficult to make in that place of enchantment. I protest that there are nights when one suspects one’s very gateposts of observing each other kindly across one’s gate.
“Bonnie,” said I, with an instant intention, “come to my room to-night, please, and help me about my unpacking. I’ve something to say to you.”
“O, yes’m,” said Bonnie, and I went away smiling at the incongruity of having a radiant creature in a diadem to brush my sad gray curls.
“I have put her in a tableau,” Avis said, in the carriage, “in ‘The Return of Endymion.’ She is a quaint little Diana. I have never seen such hair.”
On which, “Avis,” I asked serenely, “who, pray, is that fine young fellow hereabout who is in love with Bonnie?”
Avis, sitting tranquil in the white light with a basket of rhinestones in her lap, looked flatteringly startled.
“Half an hour on the place, Aunt Etarre,” she said, shaking her head, “and you know our one romance!”
“So does Pelleas,” I claimed defensively, “or, at all events, he has actually talked with the lover.”
“Pooh!” said Pelleas in that splendid disdain which, in matters of romance, he always pretends, “we were talking botany.”
“That’s he,” said Avis, nodding. “Bonnie’s sweetheart is the young under-gardener—if you can call a man a sweetheart who is as shy as Karl. He is really Faint Heart. But I think those two little people are in love.”
Then I learned how, ever since the coming of Bonnie to Little Rosemont, this big young Karl had paid her the most delicate and the most distant attention. He had brought roots of violets and laid them outside her window-ledge; and he had tossed in her blind clusters of the first lady-slippers and the first roses. But though all the household at Little Rosemont had good-naturedly done what it could to help on the affair, some way it had not prospered. And as I listened I resolved past all doubting that something must be done. For Pelleas and I are fain to go through the world seeking out people who love each other without knowing, and saying to them: “Fair Heart and Faint Heart, take each other’s hands and follow us.”
Still, I was obliged to be certain that Bonnie was in love as well as the young god whom we had surprised, and I meant to look in her eyes the while I named the name of this young Karl. I think that there are no eyes which I cannot read in a like circumstance and the pastime is one of the delights of my hours.
“Bonnie,” said I to the little maid as she brushed my hair that night, “I’ve an idea that you were wishing something delightful when you stood in that great doorway to-night. Were you not?”
“O, ma’am,” said little Bonnie, and I saw her face, shadowy above my own in the mirror, burn sudden crimson.
“Of course you were,” said I briskly. “Bonnie,” I pursued, “when I came upon you I had just seen under a birch-tree not far away a fine young fellow with a flower in his hand. Can that have been the under-gardener?”
“O, ma’am,” said Bonnie, “I s’pose, if he had a flower—” and her voice trembled, and she did not meet my eyes in the mirror.
“Bonnie!” said I.
Her eyes met mine.
“I know all about it,” said I boldly.
“O, ma’am,” she said, and tangled the comb in my sad gray curls.
Whereupon I flattered myself that I had taken Bonnie’s testimony and that I was fortified with a thousand reasons for doing my best. But it was not until the next day that I knew how, of all people, I could count on Hobart Eddy to help me to be a kind of servant of Fate.
I was in the library next morning when, every one else being frightfully enthusiastic and gone to look at the puppies, he came in and sat on an ottoman at my feet—dear Hobart Eddy, with his tired eyes and worldly-wise words and smile of utter sweetness.
“Aunt Etarre,” he said, “I feel bored and miserable. Let’s go out in the world, hand in hand, and do a good deed. They say it sets you on your feet. I’d like to try it.”
I shook my head, smiling. Nobody does more charmingly generous things than Hobart and nobody, I suppose, poses for such a man of self.
“No, Hobart,” I said, “good deeds are a self-indulgence to you.”
“Everything I want to do they say will be a self-indulgence,” he observed reflectively. “I dare say when I die they’ll all say I let myself go at last.”
“What will they say when you fall in love?” I asked idly.
“What have they said?” he parried.
“Everything,” I replied truthfully.
“Just so,” he answered; “you wouldn’t think they would have so much ingenuity. The queer thing,” he added meditatively, “is that such dull folk have the originality to get up such good gossip.”
“But I mean,” I said, “when you really fall in love.”
“I am in love,” he told me plaintively, “with seeing other people in love. I would go miles merely to look on two who are really devoted to each other. I look about for them everywhere. Do you know,” he said, “speaking of being in love myself, there is a most exquisite creature in a tableau I’m in Monday night. I am in love with her, but, by Jove, it being a tableau I can’t say a word to tell her so. It’s my confounded luck. Sometimes I think I’m in a tableau all the time and can’t say any of the things I really mean.”
“And who may she be?” I asked politely, being old to the meaningless enthusiasms of Hobart Eddy.
“By Jove! I didn’t find out,” he remembered. “Nobody knew when I asked ’em. I suppose they were in a tableau, too, and speechless. I forgot to ask Avis. She’s a goddess, asleep on a bank. She’s Diana—sandals and crown and all that. And I believe I’m to come swooning down a cloud with a gold club in my hand. Anyway—”
“Hobart Eddy,” I cried, “are you Endymion?”
“But why not?” he asked with a fine show of indignation; “do you think I should be just an ordinary shepherd, with no attention paid me?”
“Hobart Eddy, Hobart Eddy,” I said, “listen.”
Then I told him about Bonnie and Faint Heart, young god of the gardens. And he heard me, smiling, complaisant, delighted, and at the last, when he had seen what I had in mind, properly enthusiastic.
“Bonnie is going to look beautiful Monday night, Hobart,” I impressed him, “and that boy will not be there to see her—save from far off, with mandrake on his eyes! But he ought to be there to see her—and Hobart, why can you not take him to the wings with you for the tableaux and pretend that you need him to help you? And after he has seen Bonnie in her tableau you ought to be trusted to arrange something pleasant—”
He listened, pretending to be wholly amused at my excitement. But for all that he put in a word of planning here and there that made me trust him—dear Hobart Eddy.
“By Jove!” he finally recalled plaintively, “but I’m in love with her myself, you know, confound it.”
“Ah, but think,” I comforted him, “how easily you can forget your loves.”
The night of Monday came like a thing of cloud that had been going before the day and had become silver bright when the darkness overtook it. We walked through the park from the house—Avis and Lawrence and Pelleas and Hobart Eddy and I, across the still fields never really waked from sleep by any human voice. And when we came to the little temple the moon was so bright that it was as if we had passed into a kind of day made youthful, as we dream our days.
Pelleas and I found our seats in one of the half-circle of boxes built of sweet boughs, open to the moon and walled by leaves. There was a vacant chair or two and Avis and Lawrence and Hobart Eddy sat with us in turn while the folk gathered—guests from the near country-houses, guests who had motored out from town, and the party from Little Rosemont. The edge of the wood was hung with lanterns, as if a shower of giant sparks were held in the green.
“How will it be, Hobart?” I asked him eagerly as he joined us.
“Be? The love story? O, he’s up there,” Hobart assured me, “happy as anything. I think he’ll put grease paint in Endymion’s eyes when he comes to make me up, he’s that bereft.” He dropped his voice. “He has a bunch of scarlet salvia the size of a lamp,” he confided. “I think he means to fire it at us in the blessed middle of the tableau.”
I am a sentimental old woman. For all through that evening of beautiful pictures and beautiful colour, I sat with my thought hovering about Bonnie and that young Faint Heart. And yet I am not ashamed of that. What better could my thought hover round than such a joy, trembling into being?
“Pelleas,” I whispered, “O, Pelleas. Look at those people there, and there, and down there. They don’t know what a charming secret is happening.”
“Pooh!” said Pelleas, “they never do know. Besides,” he added, “maybe they know one of their own.”
“Maybe they do,” I thought, and looked with new eyes on that watching half-circle, with moving fans and fluttering scarfs. That is the best thing about an audience: the little happy secrets that are in the hearts.
When “The Return of Endymion” was announced I was in the pleasantest excitement. For I love these hours when Love walks unmasked before me and I am able to say: Such an one loves such an one and O, I wish them well! The music sank to a single strain that beckoned to the curtain of vines behind the portico; the lights were lowered and a ripple of expectation, or so I fancied, ran here and there. And in the same instant I heard beside me a familiar voice.
“Good setting for ’em, by Jove!” it said, and there was Hobart Eddy, dropped down between Pelleas and me.
“Hobart,” I said excitedly, “Hobart Eddy! This is your tableau.”
He smiled, his familiar smile of utter sweetness, and rested his chin on his hand and looked at the stage.
“No, Aunt Etarre,” he said; “see.”
Before the portico the curtain of vines parted to the tremble of the violins. There was the slope, flower-spangled like the slope on which we sat and across which, two nights ago, Pelleas and I had fancied ourselves to be looking on immortal things. And there on the flowers lay Diana asleep, her hair spread on the green, the crescent glittering on her forehead, her white robe sweeping her sandaled feet. This was Bonnie, dear little maid, and it was her hour; she would never again be so beautiful before the whole world.
Even then I hardly understood until I saw him come from the wings—Endymion, in the shepherd’s cloak, with the shepherd’s crook in his hands. And as he went near to her and stood looking down at her, Bonnie opened her eyes and saw what I saw, that her Endymion was that young god of an under-gardener. Erect, splendid, crowned with oak leaves—it was Karl’s hour, too, and he had come to her. As the rose-light went stealing across the picture, embracing the shadows, glowing in her awakened face, he opened his arms to her and caught her and held her to him. The light burned vividly and beautifully; and, all her hair rippling on his shepherd’s cloak, she clung to him, before those people who sat and never guessed, under the moon. It was their hour, the hour of Bonnie and Karl, and Pelleas and I were really looking toward a place of enchantment and on immortal things.
The curtain of vines swept together in a soft thunder of applause. Who were they, every one was asking, but who were they, who had given to the tableau a quality that was less like a picture than like a dream? “Hobart, Hobart,” I said, trembling, “how did you dare?”
Hobart Eddy was smiling at the ineffectual entreaties of the audience for a repetition of the picture. In vain they begged, the curtain of vines did not lift; the music swelled to a note of finality and lights leaped up.
“He wasn’t so faint-hearted,” said Hobart Eddy. “To be sure, I was obliged to make him do it. But then he did it. Faint Hearts aren’t like that.”
“Hobart,” said I raptly, “you are the fairy godmother, after all.”
“Ah, well,” Hobart Eddy said dissentingly, “I only did it because I wanted that minute when she opened her eyes. I’d go miles to see two who are really devoted. And I was in love with her myself, confound it! But then,” he added philosophically, “if I’d been there to take her in my arms I couldn’t have looked on.”
In the intermission before the open-air play Pelleas gave me a certain signal that we know and love and he rose and slipped from our box of boughs. I followed him without, and stepped with him across the green to the edge of the wood. There we took our way, as we had done on the night of our coming, by the path in the trees, the path that was just wide enough for, say, two violets when they venture out to walk two by two in the safe night. “I was afraid we might not be able to come here again,” Pelleas explained, “and I thought we ought ...” he added vaguely. But I understood for I had wanted to come no less than he.
“Pelleas,” I said, as we stepped along the narrow way, “suppose it had been as we fancied? Suppose it had all been some enchanted place that would have vanished with us?”
“Every time we fail to vanish from this world,” Pelleas said reflectively, “something charming happens. I suppose it is always so.”
“O, always,” I echoed confidently.