“You can’t be Jaques,” she dissented; “you are too stout.”
“I am well-built,” I admitted, modestly; “as in an elder case, sighing and grief have blown me up like a bladder; yet proper pride, if nothing else, demands that my name should appear on the programme.”
“But would Jaques be the sort of person who’d—?”
“Who wouldn’t be?” I asked, with appropriate ardour. “No, depend upon it, Jaques was not any more impervious to temptation than the rest of us; and, indeed, in the French version, as you will find, he eventually married Celia.”
“Minx!” said she; and it seemed to me quite possible that she referred to Celia Reindan, and my heart glowed.
“And how,” queried Rosalind, presently, “came you to the Forest of Arden, good Jaques?”
I groaned once more. “It was a girl,” I darkly said.
“Of course,” assented Rosalind, beaming as to the eyes. Then she went on, and more sympathetically: “Now, Jaques, you can tell me the whole story.”
“Is it necessary?” I asked.
“Surely,” said she, with sudden interest in the structure of pine-cones; “since for a long while I have wanted to know all about Jaques. You see Mr. Shakespeare is a bit hazy about him.”
“So!” I thought, triumphantly.
And aloud, “It is an old story,” I warned her, “perhaps the oldest of all old stories. It is the story of a man and a girl. It began with a chance meeting and developed into a packet of old letters, which is the usual ending of this story.”
Rosalind’s brows protested.
“Sometimes,” I conceded, “it culminates in matrimony; but the ending is not necessarily tragic.”
I dodged exactly in time; and the pine-cone splashed into the hazard.
“It happened,” I continued, “that, on account of the man’s health, they were separated for a whole year’s time before—before things had progressed to any extent. When they did progress, it was largely by letters. That is why this story ended in such a large package.
“Letters,” Rosalind confided, to one of the pines, “are so unsatisfactory. They mean so little.”
“To the man,” I said, firmly, “they meant a great deal. They brought him everything that he most wished for—comprehension, sympathy, and, at last, comfort and strength when they were sore needed. So the man, who was at first but half in earnest, announced to himself that he had made a discovery. ‘I have found,’ said he, ‘the great white love which poets have dreamed of. I love this woman greatly, and she, I think, loves me. God has made us for each other, and by the aid of her love I will be pure and clean and worthy even of her.’ You have doubtless discovered by this stage in my narrative,” I added, as in parenthesis, “that the man was a fool.”
“Don’t!” said Rosalind.
“Oh, he discovered it himself in due time—but not until after he had written a book about her. As the Coming of Dawn the title was to have been. It was—oh, just about her. It tried to tell how greatly he loved her. It tried—well, it failed of course, because it isn’t within the power of any writer to express what the man felt for that girl. Why, his love was so great—to him, poor fool!—that it made him at times forget the girl herself, apparently. He didn’t want to write her trivial letters. He just wanted to write that great book in her honour, which would make her understand, even against her will, and then to die, if need be, as Geoffrey Rudel did. For that was the one thing which counted—to make her understand—” I paused, and anyone could see that I was greatly moved. In fact, I was believing every word of it by this time.
“Oh, but who wants a man to die for her?” wailed Rosalind.
“It is quite true that one infinitely prefers to see him make a fool of himself. So the man discovered when he came again to bring his foolish book to her—the book that was to make her understand. And so he burned it—in a certain June. For the girl had merely liked him, and had been amused by him. So she had added him to her collection of men—quite a large one, by the way—and was, I believe, a little proud of him. It was, she said, rather a rare variety, and much prized by collectors.”
“And how was she to know?” said Rosalind; and then, remorsefully: “Was it a very horrid girl?”
“It was not exactly repulsive,” said I, as dreamily, and looking up into the sky.
There was a pause. Then someone in the distance—a forester, probably—called “Fore!” and Rosalind awoke from her reverie.
“Then—?” said she.
“Then came the customary Orlando—oh, well! Alfred, if you like. The name isn’t altogether inappropriate, for he does encounter existence with much the same abandon which I have previously noticed in a muffin. For the rest, he was a nicely washed fellow, with a sufficiency of the medieval equivalents for bonds and rubber-tired buggies and country places. Oh, yes! I forgot to say that the man was poor—also that the girl had a great deal of common sense and no less than three longheaded aunts. And so the girl talked to the man in a commonsense fashion—and after that she was never at home.”
“Never?” said Rosalind.
“Only that time they talked about the weather,” said I. “So the man fell out of bed just about then, and woke up and came to his sober senses.”
“He did it very easily,” said Rosalind, almost as if in resentment.
“The novelty of the process attracted him,” I pleaded. “So he said—in a perfectly sensible way—that he had known all along it was only a game they were playing—a game in which there were no stakes. That was a lie. He had put his whole soul into the game, playing as he knew for his life’s happiness; and the verses, had they been worthy of
