When they reached Falmouth Junction, a railway centre of note, their ways diverged. At the station, Royal bought coffee, sandwiches, and fruit, all of which he shared with the man; and the man gave him two black cigars at parting. Royal liked that furniture-fellow. He considered that when compared with the one-armed miscarrier of justice, the man had the makings of an excellent leprecaun in him; his beard sticking out of the mist was just like a leprecaun’s. But although the man, in his dreamy behindhand (or else beforehand) way, had confided much to Royal, with a wealth of detail as to his youngest child, “cutest kid of the bunch, and a reg’lar Dannle Webster with his spellin’-book,” our traveller did not in return open his heart about his escape from the jail-room. For a long time after that incident, Royal was inclined to suspect both justice and peace in quarters where they were least intended. Falmouth town boasts a traffic policeman; Royal, on spying those bright buttons, took swiftly to the road again.
And now, on the last stretch of his wander-week, he bethought himself of the soldier grave on that little hill, scarcely an hour’s walk from the very end of his appointed round. He loved the place; he felt drowsy, in spite of the railway coffee and the fresh morning air, and he wanted to lie down and sleep for a pleasant hour under those pines, his head pillowed on heroic ashes. He phrased it thus to himself, although he knew that he would probably find a better resting-place on the warm ground somewhat removed from the grave. After a good little snatch of sleep, there would be time for a few last touches on the Amaryllis poem, and then, home. The Sumac Sonnet could wait. After all, a beefsteak luncheon has its merits.
Royal was more tired than he knew. His pleasant hour of sleep multiplied itself by two, by three, by four. He woke with a start to find that the day was no longer young. He would have to step lively if he hoped to reach home by tea-time; scones, fresh from the oven! But he had just had a very marvellous dream, and surely, before the glamour of it should vanish, he owed it to the world to put some breath of it into his poem.
Enthralled by his verses, the poet resented the approach of that other traveller, just puffing up over the western slope of the little hill. The man was forty-five or fifty or even sixty, the boy guessed; oh, ever so old! He was soiled, obese, crumpled, out of breath; he needed a shave. Limp gray hairs straggled behind his plaided cap. His profile was fattened, yet highly predacious. But his tweeds seemed rather better in quality than Royal’s, his shoes no worse. Royal’s bookish theory that you can always tell at a glance whether a man is a gentleman or not fell to pieces under that fugitive’s weary, wary eye. Certainly no poet, our sumac sonneteer decided. Villon never looked quite like that, nor Poe, nor Vachel Lindsay.
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,