Once in the East, a long time ago, when mankind was still in the enjoyment of lusty youth, and carrying on as if youth would last for ever, with continual fighting, feasting, drinking, singing, plundering, murdering, pillaging, sacking, burning, hanging, drowning, and torturing, there was a kinglet who made the personal acquaintance of two or three gods. Not that he really was admitted into the very best circles, but one or other of the more affable deities would sometimes call and dine, drink his best wine, and promise things. Silenus, for instance, got his pupil Bacchus to let this kinglet turn everything he touched into gold; but the gift would not work, as his Majesty found out when he sat clown to breakfast and discovered that not only the plate but also the bloater on the plate became pure gold. It is related that the hungry and discomfited monarch immediately traded away the gift for something in the everlasting-youth line (which proved a forgery). Now on one occasion this friend of the Immortals was asked to hear a rival performance on the flute by Pan and Apollo. He had no ear for music at all and so tossed up heads for Pan and tails for Apollo. It came down heads, and so he gave the decision for Pan. ‘You are an ass,’ cried Apollo in a rage, ‘and the son of an ass, and your ears shall be the ears of an ass.’ The king put up his hand to feel — and so they were. It is not recorded what Pan said or did, but probably he only laughed in an unfeeling way, and went off with his syrinx to frighten the shepherds of Arcadia. Then this kinglet got a tall bonnet made into which he poked both his long ears, and hoped that nobody would find out. As people were then, as now, entirely occupied with their own affairs, nobody did find out the fact for a long time. But it made the king uneasy: he was afraid to take his usual allowance at night for fear of getting tipsy and prattling or letting his long cap fall off. One day, however, being alone in the garden, he could not refrain from removing the cap as he sat in the shade, and while the wind played deliciously about those long and hairy ears, it happened that an under-gardener, a varlet at six shillings a week and his dinner, who was pretending to be at work in the bushes, saw this remarkable and wonderful thing. Could it be? Was it possible? Did his eyes deceive him? Was witchery about? The king with two long,
very long, completely finished perfect donkey’s ears! While he gazed, motionless, his Majesty replaced the bonnet and walked away with as much dignity as if his royal ears were human.

     
When that varlet knocked off work for the day it was

observed that he was possessed of a strange manner; he forgot his supper beer; he sat apart; he was gloomy. The reason was this dreadful secret. For if he told anybody, his own head would certainly be off — in a jiffy, he assured himself; or he would be tied up in a sack and so go a-fishing or a-shrimping in the sea by himself; or he might have his outlying portions cut off, such as hands, feet, nose, ears, and tongue; or he might be burned; something dreadful would infallibly happen to him, unless he could keep that secret as tight as wax.

     
He it kept for a week, suffering all the time tortures as great as the punishment he wished to escape. He did not suffer himself to talk at all, knowing that he was, by gift of the gods, a babbler; he could not drink; he ventured not into any company, although a youth of gregarious turn; he did not dare even to sleep, because he talked in his sleep. At last he felt that he must tell that secret or die. He went, therefore, into the biggest and most solitary field he could find, and then, making a little hole in the ground, he confided his secret, carefully wrapped in a pig’s whisper, to the earth. Then he covered up the hole and went home quite happy, and got drunk that
very evening, so relieved from fear was he.

     
But there was grass growing beside that hole, and near the grass there were reeds, and beside the reeds a brook. Now the grass whispered the secret to the reeds, and the reeds to the brook, and the brook to the river, and the river told the sea. That did not matter much, because though the sea is credulous, and swallows everything, it never gossips. But the grass told the flowers as well, and the flowers told the bushes, and the bushes told the trees, and the trees told the birds, and they told everybody; and the under-gardener pretended to wonder like the rest of the world, and the king left off his long cap and went back to his old little cap, and let his ears stick up, and had them gilded, and said they were beautiful and an ornament to any crowned head and the blessed gift of the gods. He also ordered them to be represented on his coins and statues, and prayers were offered to Apollo that he would thus make the ears of all the people. But Apollo refused to hear.

     
Thus is it shown, by lively parable, after the manner of the ancients, how one single secret may embitter and even destroy a life. But, in fact, it is only at the outset that a secret is intolerable. When it is in the way of a man’s profession to hear and to guard secrets, they cease to be a burden. Lawyers who get to know a prodigious quantity of secrets are never a bit the worse, and I know at least one freemason whose knowledge of the craft secrets has never caused him a moment’s pang.

     
Clair, with this secret upon her mind; went about, at first in the most dreadful terror of letting it out. She. dreamed at night that she had revealed it to Olinthus, who grinned contemptuously and pointed fingers of scorn at Allen and her

father, and at herself, and said, ‘Gar! He a poet! Why he hasn’t got a penny!’ And next, she told Will, who said it was a thing very likely indeed to be fulfilled, because Allen was a first-rate fellow and capable of anything; but that she was a silly child for telling, and that he should never think well of her any more. And lastly, that she told Sir Charles Withycomb and his friends upon the green. Sir Charles said that it was a most presumptuous and impudent thing of this young man even to think of — being a clerk on fifty pounds a year and his father bankrupt for a paltry sum — and that it was a most mischievous thing of Monsieur Philipon to put wild ideas into a boy’s head. Then Mr. Colliber said that he felt it his duty to acquaint Miss Billingsworth with the fact that she was nourishing a seditious viper, who made boys discontented, and turned away their thoughts from getting money. This he proceeded to do, and her father was turned out of his place, and in her dream she saw him, with herself, trudging along the road, both with bare feet, and so dreadfully hungry that she really had to wake up in order to escape those awful pangs. Then she imitated the Lydian King’s under-gardener because she felt that she must say something about it to somebody. But she was not so foolish as to tell the grass or to whisper her secret anywhere in the Forest. She told the school-girls, and in such a crafty and cunning manner that they did not understand the least bit in the world what she was telling them.

     
By this time Claire had begun to take part in the teaching work of the school, being half pupil, half teacher. She learned music, and she taught everything, including the elements of French. A great part of this work consists, as everybody knows, of exercises, which Claire, instead of giving out of a book, now began to write upon a black-board for her pupils to copy and translate. At this crisis she used to write exercises such as the following: ‘The poor boy. The son of the widow. He became a poet. He wrote beautiful verses. The girl helped him. He became famous. He became a great man. The girl watched him. Everybody loved him.’ She could not possibly
help it: she must tell some one. In this way she told the girls. They were quite young girls, who mechanically wrote down what she dictated, and then, with no more feeling for the ‘poor boy’ than boys themselves under similar circumstances have for Caius and Balbus, proceeded to smudge their fingers, write down and scratch out, pinch each other, whisper and copy, ask the governess, wish it was twelve o’clock, wish that the Tower
of Babel had never been built, blot their books, dog’s ear their dictionaries, make grimy their grammars, and vie with each other in committing just as many faults as can possibly be made in a given number of words.

     
They finished and handed in their work, and Claire sent

them away to wash off the ink, and to dry the tears of injured vanity which had been provoked during the lesson. She never corrected that set of exercises; she was afraid lest some of the elder girls might get hold of them and suspect something, so she burned them all. But nobody would have suspected: what was there to suspect? Who in that seminary of useful knowledge dreamed of poets? The pupils wrote down the words, but took no heed of them, and her secret was safe. How fortunate! For if she had told the grass, and the grass had told the river Roding, and the Roding had told the Lea, and the Lea had told the Thames, the secret would have been all
over London in no time.

     
Claire’s opportunity came in a day or two. In fact, it was at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon when Allen appeared at the garden gate and asked her if she was going into the Forest that afternoon. Her father was in the garden hunting slugs, Will was away at Abridge, or among the Rodings, or on the Waltham road, on his bicycle: they would be quite alone.

     
Allen had been reading and had forgotten to take off his glasses; he walked beside her pensive, dreamy, full of thought, and silent. Claire, in her white frock and straw hat, tripped beside the lanky youth, waiting for him to speak, and wondering how she should introduce the subject. When she thought of what was intended she blushed and felt a kind of awe. She was to help make Allen a great man. When he was already a great man, she thought, he would be separated entirely from them: they would watch his rise from the obscurities of the Forest. This made her feel sad, yet more resolute to do her part. As for him, he was to know nothing; he must go on
being trained without suspicion; he must never know that he was guided and directed by an unseen hand.

     
They walked side by side across the meadow, on which stood two or three gipsy caravans, and up the long broad walk of grass with the old trees on either side. Presently they arrived at the old trysting-place, where lay the fallen tree, and where they had once, long ago, run the race for the golden apple.

     
No one had taken away the old fallen trunk. But gipsies or country people had lopped off the branches bit by bit for fire-wood; mosses had grown in its chinks and crannies; the bark had fallen off, and the wood itself was full of rotten places. Some of the old roots were left, and these were overgrown with ivy — the broad-leaved, green ivy of which the forest is so prodigal, and with which so many startling effects are produced. The ivy lent to the rugged roots a touch of beauty. As to the trunk no one knew, except the woodpecker, what a host of creatures this old trunk of rotting wood contained; and beneath and beside it there was quite a little coppice, a tangled undergrowth of grasses, ferns, and wild flowers.

     
‘Our old tree,’ said Claire, ‘grows more beautiful every

year. When it was first blown over do you remember how ugly it was, and what an eyesore?’

     
Allen, being still in the first stage of the poetic development, when the hands are reached out to grasp everything, thought grandly how things might here be said about the decay of life, and the beauty of suffering, and the picturesqueness of death. But he found no words ready at the moment to express these ideas, which were consequently lost and wasted.

     
‘Is it not a place,’ the girl went on, blushing, because she did not feel what she said, but only pretended — ‘is it not a place full of poetry, Allen? That is why you love it so much. The others come here seldom now. But you never tire of the Forest.’

     
‘I come,’ he replied, ‘because I like to be alone and to think.’

     
‘Yes,’ said Claire. ‘Your mind is so full of verses that you come here to remember their beautiful thoughts.’

     
Allen blushed. At his age one blushes easily. It was kind of Claire to credit him with being full of beautiful thoughts. No one else thought of such a thing. And yet it was quite true, and the only difficulty was that of separating his own beautiful thoughts from other men’s.

     
‘Whom are you reading now, Allen?’

     
‘I have got Keats. Oh!’ — he breathed a deep sigh — ‘Claire, you must read Keats; he takes the old Greek stories, you know, and then he dresses them up in his own language, and then — then — oh!’

     
‘I know,’ said the girl, wise now, like all girls when they have been taught, ‘I know what you mean; he puts life into the old stories, and the figures live again, and we feel that he has taught us to see how beautiful they are.’

     
‘Yes, Claire; you, too, can feel poetry. I did not know it.’

     
‘You did not give me your confidence, Allen. If you had chosen to talk to me about what you like, you might have found out that I can understand a little as well as Will.’

     
She spoke with the words and she looked with the eyes of a coquette. She was, in fact, making a first tentative attempt to use that power which her father said a woman has over every man. She had pondered over that maxim a great deal, but as yet she did not understand its full meaning.

     
‘Claire!’ he cried with a gesture of impatience, ‘there is nothing in the world like poetry; there is nothing else worth trying for. Oh! you must read Keats. Listen.’ He opened the volume at hazard almost, and read:—

Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry;

For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye:

Not like the formal crest of later days,

But bending in a thousand graceful ways.

You see, Claire, he cannot help writing poetry; he sees it all plain before him. And this:—

“He was a poet, sure a lover, too,

Who stood on Latmos’ top, what time there blew

Soft breezes from the myrtle vale below,

And brought in faintness, solemn, sweet, and slow,

A hymn from Dian’s temple.”

Isn’t it splendid? Or listen to this:—

“Full on the casement shone the wintry moon,

   And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast,

As down she knelt for heaven’s grace and boon;

   Rose bloom fell on her hands together prest,

And on her silver cross soft amethyst,

And on her hair, a glory like a saint.”

     
‘Oh, Claire, it takes away your breath only to read it! What must it have been to have written it?’ Why, his secret had escaped him, but he knew it not.

     
‘Allen!’ cried Claire, becoming, for the moment, Delilah or Vivien, clasping her hands to her heart, ‘what must it be actually to become — to be — a Poet! Oh! oh!’

     
She did not over-act her part a bit. In fact, she was so much of an artist that she half-unconsciously under-acted it. There was enough feeling in her voice, in her gesture, and her attitude as she clasped her hands; but not too much. There was less emotion than Allen himself would have put into it if he had dared to say all he felt, yet more than he would have expected from Claire.

     
‘To be a Poet, Allen!’ she repeated.

     
The conscious, swain made no reply; his cheek became crimson; he trembled; the tears even came into his eyes by reason of the great yearning that possessed him to tell Claire, what she already knew.

     
She went on, watching him. Surely he would confide in her; he would confess.

     
‘If I thought,’ she said, ‘that I had the gift of verse, how. small everything, else would seem to me! But I would not dream about it, as I think some young men do. I would work every day.’ This it is to have had lessons from your father in the art of diplomacy. A week before she could not have made any part of this speech.

     
‘Claire!’ cried Allen helplessly.

     
‘I would work by myself; I should be ashamed, perhaps, to show my work; every day I should feel that I was nearer to being a Poet: that would make, me happy. I should say to myself that so great a gift must not make one proud, but grateful, and a Poet may make men so much better. But I would have no other ambition — not one pther ambition.’

     
He was listening with rapt eyes and burning cheeks. A long, ill-dressed lad, with worn coat and baggy knees, large

red hands, and spectacles. Yet his eyes made him beautiful. Why, all that Claire described he had felt — he was feeling; the same hopes, the same shame, the same locking up in his own room, with the paper spread before him, the same sacred awe at seeing words coherent, words his own, flow from his pen. He gasped, he choked; the temptation was irresistible. He fell. Like Samson, he parted with his secret to a woman — perhaps, like Samson, to his own undoing. Certainly from that moment his career was no longer his own; it belonged to the Conspiracy. Had he kept his secret he would have continued the City clerk; he might have become the perfect City clerk; he might even have become a partner, or the clerk with a share
in the Concern; but he would never have been a poet, except in ambition. It was a supreme moment, and he knew it not.

     
‘Claire,’ he whispered, ‘are you a magician? Can you read thought? I am — I am — I am enduring all that you say. Oh, Claire! Claire! keep my secret.’ He grasped her hand. ‘I am trying to be a poet; I dream all day that I am a great poet; at night I am kept awake by the splendour of the vision that is before me. I think I see the poets passing before my bed, bidding me be of good courage, because I am one of themselves. There are Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley — all of them. And I am a poet, too, when I see them. They smile as they pass. Yet not a line written — that is, published; hardly a single thought caught out of the thousands in my head and turned into verse. Yet I dare to dream.’

     
‘Poor Allen!’ Her eyes filled with tears. Her father, then, was right. ‘The time will come; you will catch the thought, you will find the words; be of good courage.’

     
‘Yes, yes. I live in hope; yet it is all to do.’

     
‘Why, you foolish boy, at eighteen what would you have? Begin to work, Allen. Do not dream any longer. Begin.’

     
‘I have begun,’ he said, with more blushes; ‘that is, I have already — tried to write — poetry.’

     
So all was told; so Allen fell into the trap; so his secret became the property of the Conspiracy.