The Golden Age. Kenneth Grahame

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      “‘WHERE’S HAROLD?’ I ASKED PRESENTLY. ‘OH,

       HE’S JUST PLAYIN’ MUFFIN-MAN AS USUAL.’”

      ‘All right,’ I said magnanimously. ‘Come on and let’s be surprised.’ But I could not help feeling that on this day of days even a grizzly felt misplaced and common.

      Sure enough an undeniable bear sprang out on us as we dropped into the road; then ensued shrieks, growlings, revolver-shots, and unrecorded heroisms, till Edward condescended at last to roll over and die, bulking large and grim, an unmitigated grizzly. It was an understood thing, that whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die, sooner or later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have been all strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns have displaced our hard-won civilisation. This little affair concluded with satisfaction to all parties concerned, we rambled along the road, picking up the defaulting Harold by the way, muffinless now and in his right and social mind.

      ‘What would you do?’ asked Charlotte presently—the book of the moment always dominating her thoughts until it was sucked dry and cast aside,—‘What would you do if you saw two lions in the road, one on each side, and you didn’t know if they was loose or if they was chained up?’

      ‘Do?’ shouted Edward valiantly, ‘I should—I should—I should—’ His boastful accents died away into a mumble: ‘Dunno what I should do.’

      ‘Shouldn’t do anything,’ I observed after consideration; and, really, it would be difficult to arrive at a wiser conclusion.

      ‘If it came to doing,’ remarked Harold reflectively, ‘the lions would do all the doing there was to do, wouldn’t they?’

      ‘But if they was good lions,’ rejoined Charlotte, ‘they would do as they would be done by.’

      ‘Ah, but how are you to know a good lion from a bad one?’ said Edward. ‘The books don’t tell you at all, and the lions ain’t marked any different.’

      ‘Why, there aren’t any good lions,’ said Harold hastily.

      ‘O yes, there are, heaps and heaps,’ contradicted Edward. ‘Nearly all the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles’ lion, and St. Jerome’s lion, and—and—and the Lion and the Unicorn——’

      ‘He beat the Unicorn,’ observed Harold dubiously, ‘all round the town.’

      ‘That proves he was a good lion,’ cried Edward triumphantly. ‘But the question is, how are you to tell ’em when you see ’em?’

      ‘I should ask Martha,’ said Harold of the simple creed.

      Edward snorted contemptuously, then turned to Charlotte. ‘Look here,’ he said; ‘let’s play at lions, anyhow, and I’ll run on to that corner and be a lion,—I’ll be two lions, one on each side of the road,—and you’ll come along, and you won’t know whether I’m chained up or not, and that’ll be the fun!’

      ‘No, thank you,’ said Charlotte firmly; ‘you’ll be chained up till I’m quite close to you, and then you’ll be loose, and you’ll tear me in pieces, and make my frock all dirty, and p’raps you’ll hurt me as well. I know your lions!’

      ‘No, I won’t, I swear I won’t,’ protested Edward. ‘I’ll be quite a new lion this time—something you can’t even imagine.’ And he raced off to his post. Charlotte hesitated—then she went timidly on, at each step growing less Charlotte, the mummer of a minute, and more the anxious Pilgrim of all time. The lion’s wrath waxed terrible at her approach; his roaring filled the startled air. I waited until they were both thoroughly absorbed, and then I slipped through the hedge out of the trodden highway, into the vacant meadow spaces. It was not that I was unsociable, nor that I knew Edward’s lions to the point of satiety; but the passion and the call of the divine morning were high in my blood. Earth to earth! That was the frank note, the joyous summons of the day; and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human discussions and pretences, when boon nature, reticent no more, was singing that full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control of every fibre. The air was wine, the moist earth-smell wine, the lark’s song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of a distant train—all were wine—or song, was it? or odour, this unity they all blent into? I had no words then to describe it, that earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick; I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense—irresponsible babble; the tune was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected it with scorn. Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised and accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

      All the time the hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. ‘Take me for guide to-day,’ he seemed to plead. ‘Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of the stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary foot homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I who whip round corners and bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one, the lord of misrule, СКАЧАТЬ