Redcap stood in the middle of the circle; the frosty wind fluttered his flaxen curls beneath his scarlet headgear. He was telling tales of Glamour-Land, the customs of which country he knew well; the group listened. The boys were not wholly absorbed; the girls who are generally quick to hear the Songs of the Glamour were the more interested. When the speaker ended his tale the girl in the crimson coat drew a long breath and gave her verdict “Lovely.” The tale-teller did not heed her; he was one of those people who care nothing for the breath of fame and praise. He who understood pirates so well nodded approvingly. Throughout his life this boy knew good work when he saw it, because his own was so good. One of the boys offered criticism.
“It’s all beastly rot,” he said with the simple directness of boyhood. “There isn’t any such place.”
Redcap crushed him with swift scorn.
“That’s all you know about it,” he said. “That place I tell you about is real, and this place isn’t; this place”—he waved his arms patronisingly at the sky and sea—“is an evil enchantment of the Black Witch; one of these days the Wise Queen will snuff her and her enchantment out—puff! like that!”
He snapped his fingers; the listeners looked uneasy and momentarily doubted the stability of the earth.
The boy who had criticised repeated his former remark: “It’s all rot.” Inwardly he hoped the Wise Queen would not snuff out the enchantment before tea time; for he knew there were hot cakes, and he could not honestly view them as evil enchantments. But where did the red-capped boy get his ideas about the relative reality of the seen and unseen?
Eight years after, that boy’s father died; his mother married again, and thereafter great trouble and poverty fell upon a family that had hitherto been happy and prosperous. This boy, then a lad of eighteen, given to great dreams and visions of the Glamour-Land, was torn away from all he loved and hoped for and dreamed of; he was sent to work at dull drudgery for a weekly pittance in a house of business in London. There, sick for the sights and sounds of Glamour-Land, he nearly broke down both mentally and physically. He was poor, friendless, proud, and unsociable; but that was nothing. If he could have had one daily glimpse of the Glamour Country, one note of its songs, he could have borne the rest. He fenced himself about with a wall of practical cheeriness and hard-headed common-sense and lived inside it in a hell of his own. In a narrow black street the child of the blue land, of sea, and wide distances lived and suffered for five dreadful years; then he chanced to find a room over some offices which looked upon the river, and suffered a little less. He began to earn more money; he was promoted. He did his work very well; he was to be depended upon; he was steady, alert, and “on the spot,” said his employers. He was thoroughly practical. Once some reference was made to his prospects by a man who was his superior in the business house where he was employed. This man told him he was bound to get on; it was “rare to see a young fellow so steady, and with his heart in his business.” The young man (he was then twenty-three) laughed a little laugh that was as chill and dreary as the wuther of the north wind in frozen rushes by a bleak ice-coated mountain tarn.
“When you don’t care for anything you have to do, one thing comes as easy as another,” he said. “Besides you can ‘give your mind’ to heaps of things. If you like a piece of work it is hard to pull away from it to something else; but if one is much like another to you, and all equally dull, then, if you’ve a decent amount of self-control you can do them all fairly effectively.”
While his superior was trying to understand his extraordinary sentiments, he said “Good-night, sir,” and went out. He walked back to his room.
This befell just before he found the room overlooking the river; it was a sultry, ill-smelling summer night; the straight line of the houses rose before him in their terrible hideousness. There was a little church in the street in which they sang anthems. A choir practice was going on. He could hear the voices plainly: