Mrs. Armstrong laughed her deep bass laugh.
He shook hands with the two women, shuddering once more at Mrs. Tenssen's boneless fingers. He turned to the girl. "Good-bye," he said. "I'll come again."
"Yes," she answered, not looking at him but at her mother at the other side of the table. The stairs were dark and smelt of fish and patchouli. He stumbled down them and let himself out into Peter Street. The evening was blue with a lovely stir in it as in running water. The booths were crowded, voices filled the air. He escaped into Shaftesbury Avenue as Hänsel and Gretel escaped from the witch's cottage. He was in love for the first time in his young, self-centred life. . . .
[CHAPTER II]
HENRY HIMSELF
In the fifth chapter of the second part of Henry Galleon's Three Magicians there is this passage (The Three Magicians appeared in 1892):
When he looked at the Drydens, father, daughter, and son, he would wonder, as he had often in earlier days wondered, why writers on English character so resolutely persisted in omitting the Dryden type from their definitions? These analyses were perhaps too sarcastic, too cynical to include anything as artless, as simple as the Dryden character without giving the whole case away . . . and yet it was, he fancied in that very character that the whole strength and splendour of the English spirit persisted. Watching Cynthia and Tony Dryden he was reminded of a picture in a fairy-tale book read and loved by him in his youth, now forgotten to the very name of its author, lingering only with a few faded colours of the original illustration. He fancied that it had been a book of Danish fairy romances. . . . This picture of which he thought was a landscape—Dawn was breaking over a great champigné of country, country that had hills and woods and forests, streams and cottages all laid out in that detailed fancy that, as a child, he had loved so deeply. The sun was rising over the hill; heavy dark clouds were rolling back on to the horizon and everywhere the life of the day, fresh in the sparkling daylight was beginning. The creatures of the night were vanishing; dragons with scaly tails were creeping back reluctantly into their caves, giants were brandishing their iron clubs defiantly for the last time before the rising sun; the Hydras and Gryphons and Five-Headed Tortoises were slinking into the dusky forests, deep into the waters of the green lakes the slimy Three-Pronged Alligators writhed deep down into the filth that was their proper home.
The flowers were thick on the hills, and in the valleys, the birds sang, butterflies and dragon-flies flashed against the blue, the smoke curled up from the cottage chimneys and over all the world was hung a haze of beauty, of new life and the wonder of the coming day.
In the foreground of this picture were two figures, a girl and a boy, and the painter, clumsy and amateurish, though his art may have been, had with the sincerity and fervour of his own belief put into their eyes all their amazement and wonder at the beauty of this new world.
They saw it all; the dragons and the gryphons, the heavy clouds rolling back above the hill were not hidden from them; that they would return they knew. The acceptance of the whole of life was in their eyes. Their joy was in all of it; their youth made them take it all full-handed. . . .
I have thought of them sometimes—I think of the Drydens now—as the Young Enchanted. And it seems to me that England is especially the country of such men and women as these. All the other peoples of the world carry in their souls age and sophistication. They are too old for that sense of enchantment, but in England that wonder that is so far from common sense and yet is the highest kind of common sense in the world has always flourished. It is not imagination; the English have less imagination than any other race, it is not joy of life nor animal spirits, but the child's trust in life before it has grown old enough for life to deceive it. I think Adam and Eve before the Fall were English.
That sense of Enchantment remains with the English long after it dies with the men and women of other nations, perhaps because the English have not the imagination to perceive how subtle, how dangerous, how cynical life can be. Their art comes straight from their Enchantment. The novels of Fielding and Scott and Thackeray and Dickens and Meredith, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the pictures of Hogarth and Constable and Turner. The music of Purcell, the characters of Nelson and Wellington and Gordon. . . .
And think what that sense of Enchantment might do for them if only their background would change. For generations gone that has not moved. One day when the earthquake comes and the upheaval and all the old landmarks are gone and there is a new world of social disorder and tumbling indecency for their startled gaze to rest upon then you will see what these children of Enchantment will do!
So much, for Galleon who is already now so shortly after his death looked upon as an old sentimental fogy. Sentimental? Why certainly. What in the world could be more absurd than his picture of the English gazing wide-eyed at the wonder of life? They of all peoples!
And yet he was no fool. He was a Cosmopolitan. He had lived as much in Rome, in Paris, in Vicenza, as in London. And why should I apologize for one of the greatest artists England possesses? Other times, other names . . . and you can't catch either Henry Trenchard or Millicent—no, nor Peter either—and I venture to say that you cannot catch that strange, restless, broken, romantic, aspiring, adventurous, disappointing, encouraging, enthralling, Life-is-just-beginning-at-last Period in which they had these adventures simply with the salt of sheer Realism—not salt enough for that Bird's tail.
I should like to find that little picture of Henry Galleon's fairy book and place it as a frontispiece to this story. But Heaven alone knows where that old book has gone to! It was perhaps Galleon's own invention; he was a queer old man and went his own way and had his own fancies, possessions that many writers to-day are chary of keeping because they have been told on so many occasions by so many wise professors that they've got to stick to the Truth. Truth? Who knows what Truth may be? Platitudinous Pilate failed over that question many years ago, and to-day we are certainly as far as ever from an answer. There are a million Truths about Henry and Millicent and the times they lived in. Galleon's is at least one of them, and it's the one I've chosen because it happens to be the way I see them. But of course there are others.