IV
Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer of Apollo. But with the man, the god would plainly have no more to do, except by way of bitter punishment. For the man was too old, too ill, too evil, even, to be of any further service in the temple of the Muses. Those ladies do not carry a pardoner’s wallet. They have no pension system; uncompromising dames, the Nine, when all is told.
Little as he liked the looks of the man in his tumbled tweeds, Royal nevertheless gave him a good-day. Why not? The man enveloped the boy with a strange, hunted-yet-hunting glance, and after returning the salutation in a mannerly enough way, threw himself down heavily on the pleasant pine leaves, rather close to the spot that Royal had chosen for his own perfect seclusion with song. Our poet’s second sight instantly declared that there was something wrong. What if this were the wretch who had really stolen the car whose loss had threatened the Royal liberties? Well, if so, that was the one-armed justice’s affair, not Royal’s. The boy had lately read in a newspaper that our Anglo-Saxon law presupposes the innocence of the accused, until proven guilty. An excellent idea! Fair play for all, then, including the disinherited.
Still, it was but natural that he should try to put a self-protecting distance between himself and the other, tramps though they both were. So he hid his ode in his pocket, and pulled out his Iliad, that epic which before now had laid heavy conditions upon him, and was likely to do so in the future. Impressive gesture! Royal had several times used it to advantage during his travels. Pulling out your Iliad, no matter how amiably, is a way of drawing the line. This particular Iliad had, it is true, been something of a disappointment to him, at the start. He had meant to carry his school copy, a pocket edition that contained only one book of the poem, with English notes so copious as to constitute a “pony.” In the confusion of a brother’s departure, mischievous Peter had contrived to dislodge Royal’s own Iliad from its place in Royal’s pocket, and to substitute for it an Iliad from his father’s library. The parental Iliad, though like the other in size and shape, was a poor thing. It had all the books of the poem, to be sure, but in solid Greek; not a word of English from cover to cover. Some German had printed it that way. Annoying! But after his first dismay was over, Royal had managed very well with the volume; to-day, he drew it out as readily as if it had the English notes.
With this man, however, the trick was wasted. When the boy laid his Iliad down casually beside him, the man picked it up, no less casually. Homer had no terrors for him, it would seem. With a hand whose trembling he could not quite conceal, he turned over the leaves to regain his lost breath. In a leisurely, yet largely gesticulating way, he adjusted his black-ribboned eyeglass, and contemplated both bookplate and title-page. He then made short work of Royal’s pretensions to classic learning, merely by turning to Book XXIII, virgin soil as yet untrod by any foot in Royal’s form. Book XXIII appeared to interest him. Suddenly he began to read out, in orotund English, the episode of the funeral pyre, with all its meaty details.
As a matter of fact, this was but a gesture of the traveller; a gesture fully as empty as Royal’s, a scrap of drama within a drama. The rascal was not translating. He was reciting from memory a fragment from Lord Derby’s translation. In palmier days, he had constantly used those twenty lines with telling effect, in his popular dramatic elocution classes. He had even incorporated them, with full directions as to tempo, emphasis, and climax, into his Dramatic Interludes No. 1, a book which, though not precisely a best seller, had often been bought along the borderline that separates the real stage folk from the stage-struck fringe of the shadowy general public. And now, for an audience of one, that “slow-pac’d ox,” those “jars of honey,” the “four powerful horses,” the “nine dogs,” were all presented with an unction that seemed incredible in a stout man so out of breath a moment before. The reciter licked his lips feverishly over his “slaughtered carcasses,” and yet was able to reserve some climacteric gusto for the closing lines,
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.
The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation, but at the touch, sprang up, alert.
“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about? Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish boarding-house?”
And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a man of the world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.
“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves. It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well, I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing that didn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”
Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the Lalage stanzas.
“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor, of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”
All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with terrific force to his mind.
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve been talking with a murderer! And they always come back to revisit the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”
His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone below as a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother, in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary! Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!