ONCE-UPON-A-TIME
WHEN I was a child there grew at the back of my father’s house a deep wood. It may not have been so vast in extent as it seemed to me; but to my childish imagination it seemed boundless, endless, dark and dense, and infinitely mysterious. It frightened me, yet the fear was full of fascination. Delicious was the thrill with which sometimes in my lonely rambles I would venture a few steps further within its haunted recesses than I was wont to have courage for. As a rule, I restricted my explorations to its sunlit margins, and, so soon as I found myself among the shadows, would fly back with a beating heart into the sun.
Never, said I to my childish heart, had the foot of man penetrated into these solitudes, on which lay so deep a spell of beautiful terror; and, so far back as I can remember, this wood was the wonderland which I peopled with all the fancies of a child’s imagination. All the heroes and heroines of my nursery-books lived somewhere in my wood. It was the scene of all their adventures, and, like a stage, was capable of supplying an ever-varying mise-en-scéne. Sometimes when the moon was up I thought of it as peopled by fairies, and was certain that, if only the hardihood were mine to dare its fantastic shadows, I should surely come upon a fairy revel in full swing. When in the daytime I came upon rings of toadstools with their quaint kobold hats, I knew that they were trolls who took that form during the day, and that if only I were to hide behind a tree and wait for night, I would see them suddenly, at the first touch of the wand of the moon, waken up as if nothing had happened, and once more set their merry wheels a-spinning. But then there was the old witch with the red hood to fear, and the ogre with the six heads, not to speak of the wolves and bears and various other wild beasts that roamed the woods after dark. Not only wolves—but were-wolves too!
As I grew older, I grew braver, and, persuading myself that I was one of those who bore a charmed life, I found courage to push my explorations further and further into the interior. Thus I became the discoverer of glades and dingles exquisitely lonely with sunshine and haunted flowers, brooding solitudes of silent fern, hidden springs brimming up through the hushed moss, and little rivers dripping from rock to rock in the stillness, like the sound of falling pearls.
But the spell over the wood was above all the spell of beauty, the spell of a breathless enchantment, a spell so deep that the wild-rose growing there seemed other than the wild-rose that grew outside, seemed indeed enchanted, and the very blackberries growing on the great cages of bramble, humming with bees and flickering with butterflies, seemed a magic fruit—which I ate with a beautiful fear that I should be changed into a milk-white fawn, or suddenly find myself a little silver fish in the stream yonder, with the Princess’s lost wedding ring in my inside.
The Princess! Why was it that almost from the first I associated the wood with a beautiful princess? I seemed always to be expecting her at some turning of the green pathways, riding upon a white palfrey. Of course, she would be riding upon a white palfrey. Or, perhaps I should come upon her suddenly in one of the sunny openings of the wood, combing her black hair with a golden comb. Or, perhaps she was dead, and this wild-rose was growing up out of her pure wild heart. I made up many stories about her, but this was the story that took strongest hold of my fancy—that she had lost her way in the wood, and at last, worn out with weariness and hunger, had lain her down and died—just here where this rose-bush had drawn its fragrance from her last sweet breath, and its bloom from her fading cheek. I used to sit for hours by the rose-bush, and picture her lying beneath with her eyes closed and a gold crown upon her head, and at morning when the roses were filled with dew, I would say to myself: “O the beautiful Princess! She has been weeping in the night.” And then I would drink her tears out of the little pearl cups of the rose; but I was careful never to mar the tender petals, lest the Princess should feel the pain of it down in the aromatic mould.
One day, however, my fancy took another turn, and I said to myself that perchance if I were to pluck one of her roses, the Princess would wake from her enchanted sleep, and stand before me with her strange death-sleepy eyes, and ask me the way back to her lost castle. So one morning when the roses were more than usually drenched with the tears of the Princess, I took heart and plucked the most beautiful rose, saying as I plucked it: “Arise, little Princess and I will take you back to your castle.” Then I waited, and presently I seemed to hear a sigh of happiness, like a spring zephyr, just behind me. I turned, and there stood a maiden with black hair, and eyes the colour of which I could not rightly discern, because they seemed filled with moonlight.
“Are you the Princess?” I asked.
“Yes!” she answered, “I am the Princess, and my name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”
“Beautiful Princess,” I said, “may I take you back to your castle?”