XIII
THE RETURN OF ENDYMION
Pelleas and I went through the wicket gate with a joyful sense of being invaders. The gate clicked behind us, and we heard the wheels of our cab rolling irretrievably from us, and where we stood the June dusk was deep. We had let ourselves in by a little wicket gate in the corner of the stone wall that ran round Little Rosemont, the Long Island country place where our dear Avis and Lawrence Knight lived. We had come down for a week with them and, having got a later train than we had thought, we found at the station for Little Rosemont no one to meet us. So there we were, entering by that woods’ gate and meaning to walk into the house as if we belonged there. Indeed, secretly we were glad that this had so befallen for we dislike arriving no less than we dislike saying good-bye. To my mind neither a book nor a visit, unless it be in uniform, should be begun or ended with a ruffle of drums.
Meanwhile we would have our walk to the house, a half-mile of delight. Before us in the pines was a tiny path doubtless intended, I told Pelleas, to be used by violets when they venture out to walk, two by two, in the safe night. It was wide enough to accommodate no more than two violets, and Pelleas and I walked singly, he before and I clinging to his hand. The evergreens brushed our faces, we heard a stir of wings, and caught some exquisite odour not intended for human folk to breathe. It was a half-hour to which we were sadly unwonted; for Pelleas and I are nominally denied all sweet adventures of not-yet-seventy, and such as we win we are wont to thieve out-of-hand; like this night walk, on which no one could tell what might happen.
“Pelleas,” I said, “it is absurd to suppose that we are merely on our way to a country house for a visit. Don’t you think that this kind of path through the woods always leads to something wonderful?”
“I have never known it to fail,” Pelleas said promptly. For Pelleas is not one of the folk who when they travel grow just tired enough to take a kind of suave exception to everything one says. Nor does Pelleas agree to distraction. He agrees to all fancies and very moderately corrects all facts, surely an attribute of the Immortals.
Then the path-for-violets took a turn, “a turn and we stood in the heart of things.” And we saw that we had not been mistaken. The path had not been intended for day-folk at all; we had taken it unaware and it had led us as was its fairy nature to something wonderful.
From where we stood the ground sloped gently downward, a tentative hill, not willing to declare itself, and spending its time on a spangle of flowers. We could see the flowers, for the high moon broke from clouds. And in the hollow stood a little building like a temple, with a lighted portico girt by white columns and, within, a depth of green and white. We looked, breathless, perfectly believing everything that we saw, since to doubt might be to lose it. Indeed, in that moment the only thing that I could not find it in my heart to fall in with was the assumption that we were in the New World at all. Surely, here was the old order, the golden age, with a temple in a glade and a satyr at your elbow. Could this be Little Rosemont, where we were to find Avis and Lawrence and Hobart Eddy and other happy realities of our uneventful lives?
“Oh, Pelleas,” I said in awe, “if only we can get inside before it disappears.”
“Maybe,” murmured Pelleas, “if we can do that we can disappear with it.”