I sighed a melancholy assent. The great eyes opened to their utmost. The effect was as disconcerting as that of a ship firing a broadside at you, but pleasanter. “Tell me all about it,” said she, coaxingly.
“I have always loved her,” I said, with gravity. “Long ago, when I was a little chap, I had a book—Stories of the Trojan War, or something of the sort. And there I first read of Helen—and remembered. There were pictures—outline pictures—of quite abnormally straight-nosed warriors, with flat draperies which amply demonstrated that the laws of gravity were not yet discovered; and the pictures of slender goddesses, who had done their hair up carefully and gone no further in their dressing. Oh, the book was full of pictures—and Helen’s was the most manifestly impossible of them all. But I knew—I knew, even then, of her beauty, of that flawless beauty which made men’s hearts as water and drew the bearded kings to Ilium to die for the woman at sight of whom they had put away all memories of distant homes and wives; that flawless beauty which buoyed the Trojans through the ten years of fighting and starvation, just with delight in gazing upon Queen Helen day by day, and with the joy of seeing her going about their streets. For I remembered!” And as I ended, I sighed effectively.
“I know,” said she.
“ ‘Or ever the knightly years had gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave.’ ”
“Yes, only I was the slave, I think, and you—er—I mean, there goes the roof, and it is an uncommonly good thing for posterity you thought of the trapdoor. Good thing the wind is veering, too. By Jove! look at those flames!” I cried, as the main body of the Continental toppled inward like a house of cards; “they are splashing, actually splashing, like waves over a breakwater!”
I drew a deep breath and turned from the conflagration, only to encounter its reflection in her widened eyes. “Yes, I was a Trojan warrior,” I resumed; “one of the many unknown men who sought and found death beside Scamander, trodden down by Achilles or Diomedes. So they died knowing they fought in a bad cause, but rapt with that joy they had in remembering the desire of the world and her perfect loveliness. She scarcely knew that I existed; but I had loved her; I had overheard some laughing words of hers in passing, and I treasured them as men treasure gold. Or she had spoken, perhaps—oh, day of days!—to me, in a low, courteous voice that came straight from the back of the throat and blundered very deliciously over the perplexities of our alien speech. I remembered—even as a boy, I remembered.”
She cast back her head and laughed merrily. “I reckon,” said she, “you are still a boy, or else you are the most amusing lunatic I ever met.”
“No,” I murmured, and I was not altogether playacting now, “that tale about Polyxo was a pure invention. Helen—and the gods be praised for it!—can never die. For it is hers to perpetuate that sense of unattainable beauty which never dies, which sways us just as potently as it did Homer, and Dr. Faustus, and the Merovingians too, I suppose, with memories of that unknown woman who, when we were boys, was very certainly some day, to be our mate. And so, whatever happens, she
Abides the symbol of all loveliness,
Of beauty ever stainless in the stress
Of warring lusts and fears.
For she is to each man the one woman that he might have loved perfectly. She is as old as youth, she is more old than April even, and she is as ageless. And, again like youth and April, this Helen goes about the world in varied garments, and to no two men is her face the same. Oh, very often she transmutes her fleshly covering. But through countless ages I, like every man alive, have followed her, and fought for her, and won her, and have lost her in the end—but always loving her as every man must do. And I prefer to think that some day—” But my voice here died into a whisper, which was in part due to emotion and partly to an inability to finish the sentence satisfactorily. The logic of my verses when thus paraphrased from memory, seemed rather vague.
“Yes—like Pythagoras,” she said, a bit at random. “Oh, I know. There really must be something in it, I have often thought, because you actually do remember having done things before sometimes.”
“And why not? as the March Hare very sensibly demanded.” But now my voice was earnest. “Yes, I believe that Helen always comes. Is it simply a proof that I, too, am qualified to sit next to the Hatter?” I spread out my hands in a helpless little gesture. “I do not know. But I believe that she will come—and by and by pass on, of course, as Helen always does.”
“You will know her?” she queried, softly.
Now I at last had reached firm ground. “She will be very tall,” I said, “very tall and exquisite—like a young birch-tree, you know, when its new leaves are whispering over to one another the secrets of spring. Yes, that is a ridiculous sounding simile, but it expresses the general effect of her—the coup d’oeil, so to speak—quite perfectly. Moreover, her hair will be a miser’s dream of gold; and it will hang heavily about a face that will be—quite indescribable, just as the dawn yonder is past the utmost preciosity of speech. But her face will flush and will be like the first of all anemones to peep through black, good-smelling, and as yet unattainable earth; and her eyes will be deep, shaded wells where, just as in the proverb, truth lurks.”
But now I could not see her eyes.
“No,” I conceded,
