But the fitness of things never comes to pass—everything happens in the Turkish manner.
Here was Amaryllis, very strong and full of life, very, very young and inexperienced, very poor and without the least expectation whatever (for who could reconcile the old and the older Iden?), the daughter of poor and embarrassed parents, whom she wished and prayed to help in their coming old age. Here was Amaryllis, full of poetic feeling and half a painter at heart, full of generous sentiments—what a nature to be ground down in the sordidness of married poverty!
Here was Amadis, extremely poor, quite feeble, and unable to earn a shilling, just talking of seeing the doctor again about this fearful debility, full too, as he thought at least, of ideas—what a being to think of her!
Nothing ever happens in the fitness of things. If only now he could have regained the health and strength of six short months ago—if only that, but you see, he had not even that. He might get better; true—he might, I have tried 80 drugs and I am no better, I hope he will.
Could any blundering Sultan in the fatalistic East have put things together for them with more utter contempt of fitness? It is all in the Turkish manner, you see.
There they sat, happier and happier, and deeper and deeper in love every moment, on the brown timber in the long grass, their hearts as full of love as the meadow was of sunshine.
You have heard of the Sun’s Golden Cup, in which after sunset he was carried over Ocean’s stream, while we slumber in the night, to land again in the East and give us the joy of his rising. The great Golden Cup in which Hercules, too, was taken over; it was as if that Cup had been filled to the brim with the nectar of love and placed at the lips to drink, inexhaustible.
In the play of Faust—Alere’s Faust—Goethe has put an interlude, an Intermezzo; I shall leave Amaryllis and Amadis in their Interlude in Heaven. Let the Play of Human Life, with its sorrows and its Dread, pause awhile; let Care go aside behind the wings, let Debt and Poverty unrobe, let Age stand upright, let Time stop still (oh, Miracle! as the Sun did in the Vale of Ajalon). Let us leave our lovers in the Interlude in Heaven.
And as I must leave them (I trust but for a little while) I will leave them on the brown oak timber, sap-stain brown, in the sunshine and dancing shadow of summer, among the long grass and the wild flowers.
Endnotes
-
Reprinted in part from The Academy of . ↩
Colophon
Amaryllis at the Fair
was published in 1887 by
Richard Jefferies.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Brian Evans,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2009 by
Malcolm Farmer, Emmy, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
La Petite Liseuse,
a painting completed in 1855 by
Camille Corot.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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