The King of Alsander. Flecker James Elroy

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      For she stood there in front of him in the radiant, dancing, dewy morning, happy and unperturbed, in her gracious half-human beauty, not majestic, not passionate, not mysterious, but unreal from her very loveliness, a nymph, not of the woods or rivers, but of the sea – yet not of the tempestuous main – no tall sad siren of a treacherous rock, but a sweet, young pleasant nymph from a bay where the sun is always shining, a sea-sand nymph not unacquainted with flowers.

      For when I would deal with her face and body, all those feeble, pretty comparisons whereby the pen of the writer strives to emulate the brush of the painter, must be of the sea or of flowers. Her dark hair, fringed against the gold lace of her scarf – but those same painters (whom all we word-workers envy bitterly but dare not say so) have shown how many confluent colours – hyacinth and blue and red and deep red gold, gleam in the shadowy hollows of the hair we fools call dark. … Dark! As the sea-water in a sunlit bay lies dark between two little island rocks yet ripples in the wind, and the sea flowers turn it red along the marge and the depths glow violet in the midst, and the sunshine is all near but hidden – am I not now describing the dark hair of a lovely woman?

      "But her eyes, poor poet, her eyes – are they not also pools of the salt sea?"

      Not the eyes of this lass, my gentle friend. Her eyes were of finer and subtler essence than the heavy water of the sea. They were blue – which is ever most wonderful with dark lashes, dark brows and sea-dark hair – but not the dark blue of a rock pool nor yet quite the light broken blue of the blinking waves in the calm and brilliant bay. Her eyes were of a light dry fire – the blue not of sea nor of sky, but rather of the glowing air that swims about the idle fisher's boat hour after hour on summer days. So that you could not tell if they were deep eyes or light wayward eyes, – those little gay discs of laughing sunlit air.

      And her countenance, that was a sweet rose and jasmine garden – but always, I would have you remember, a garden that blossoms by the sea, with vistas of the bay down every alley of the roses, and gleams of blue water glinting behind the trellis of the jasmine, and the sea air slightly touching the colour of all the flowers. Have you not seen the flowers in that Italian picture that are flung round Venus as she rises from the sea! Even so a little paler than the brave inland flowers were the jasmine and roses in the garden of the countenance of this lovely girl.

      And her body? Can I tell you its secret? Ah, never: but as you leave the garden – pluck one tendril from the vine.

      Her light, gracious, flowing beauty trans-ported the boy to the days he had read of, the days when the world was young. The chains of commerce and the shackles of class, – as it were, the last tatters of his black British clothes – fell from him. Looking at her, he smiled.

      She evidently took that smile as a greeting intended for her, for she seemed to wait for him to come down and to be in no hurry with her pails.

      "Good morning," she cried to him as he approached, in the honeyed and somewhat languorous speech of Alsander.

      "Good morning," said Norman. "May I help you with the water?" Alsandrian is an easy, simple, and sonorous language, and Norman had been learning it and talking it to himself ever since the tramp he met in the night had directed his thoughts and footsteps toward the country of Alsander, yet he was very shy at practising for the first time this newly-acquired tongue.

      "Ah, I thought you were a foreigner," said the girl, speaking with the strained simplicity and slight mispronunciation that we all of us employ for the benefit of strangers and infants. "What is your country and your home?"

      "England."

      "England? Why you are the first Englishman I have ever seen! How beautiful you are!"

      Norman smiled, unable, and indeed unwilling, to deprecate his personal appearance.

      "It is you who are beautiful," he said, slowly, labouring with the strange tongue, "Are they all like you in Alsander?"

      "Do you think it possible?"

      She drew herself up with such grace that Norman's arms twitched and ached. But he was rather in awe of her.

      "How bright your eyes are!" he said.

      "Are they? What colour do you think they are?" she asked, turning them full on him.

      "They are blue. I have never seen such blue eyes in my life before."

      "You are quite sure that they are not green?"

      Norman was not at all sure that they were not: they seemed to him to change colour like little bright clouds, and shone at that moment like a lustrous emerald. But he simply said that they were not green, as he could only make very simple phrases in the language of Alsander.

      "Are you going to stay long in this country?" inquired the girl.

      "I think I shall have to."

      He carved a dust pattern with his stick quite nervously, daring no more to look at her eyes. He asked her name.

      "Peronella," she said. "And yours?"

      "My name is Norman."

      "Nor-mano, how nice!" said the girl, who seemed to think that this bashful northerner needed encouragement. "Normano. I shall always call you Normano."

      "Always?" said Norman, looking up quickly.

      The shameless maiden hung her head with a rosy blush as though she had been caught in an indiscretion, – as though the word had slipped from her unawares. But even at six in the morning, a sane though splendid hour, Norman, that reserved young Englishman, considered such encouragement sufficient. He went deliberately and took the pails off the girl's shoulders, as though he were going to help her, and the moment they had clattered on the road, he embraced this adorable girl from behind and kissed her ravenously. The kiss fell some two inches below her left ear.

      She stood very stiff, flushed and angry; but Norman simply maintained his pressure till her whole body unstiffened. Norman had adopted to good purpose the principle that returns the penny-in-the-grip machine and secures for Britain her extensive Empire.

      By this time they had become thoroughly nervous of each other. They sat down side by side on the wall near the spring. Norman ruffled his hair in embarrassment. Peronella murmured something about Fate. Norman inwardly disagreed; he did not think he ought to blame (or thank) Fate for the present contingency.

      "Where are you going to stay?" asked the girl at last.

      "As near you as possible."

      "But don't you really know?"

      "I know nothing. I am just a stranger, and I have come here for a … for a … damn," said Norman in English to himself, "what's the word for a holiday? – for a rest."

      "You don't look as if you wanted a rest, and you won't get it if you stay near me."

      "Not rest," said Norman, "not rest exactly, but … amusement. O Peronella, you know how hard it is to talk a foreign tongue. I have learnt Alsandrian in a book, but I have never talked a word of it before."

      "You talk it very nicely indeed; it is charming to hear you. It is not at all pleasant for us to hear men from Ulmreich talking Alsandrian. They make a horrible harsh noise, although they talk very carefully. But I think the lazy way you pronounce your o's and e's is charming…"

      "I think," said Norman, looking at СКАЧАТЬ