III

These two met altogether fourteen times before the beginning of the end. They met in the Great Park or on the heights and among the gorges of the rusty-roaded, heathery moorland, set with dusky pine woods, that stretched to the south-west. Twice they met in the great avenue of chestnuts, and five times near the broad ornamental water the king, her great-grandfather, had made. There was a place where a great trim lawn, set with tall conifers, sloped graciously to the water’s edge, and there she would sit, and he would lie at her knees and look up in her face and talk, telling of all the things that had been, and of the work his father had set before him, and of the great and spacious dream of what the giant people should one day be. Commonly they met in the early dawn, but once they met there in the afternoon, and found presently a multitude of peering eavesdroppers about them, cyclists, pedestrians, peeping from the bushes, rustling (as sparrows will rustle about one in the London parks) amidst the dead leaves in the woods behind, gliding down the lake in boats towards a point of view, trying to get nearer to them and hear.

It was the first hint that offered of the enormous interest the countryside was taking in their meetings. And once – it was the seventh time, and it precipitated the scandal – they met out upon the breezy moorland under a clear moonlight, and talked in whispers there, for the night was warm and still.

Very soon they had passed from the realisation that in them and through them a new world of giantry shaped itself in the earth, from the contemplation of the great struggle between big and little, in which they were clearly destined to participate, to interests at once more personal and more spacious. Each time they met and talked and looked on one another, it crept a little more out of their subconscious being towards recognition, that something more dear and wonderful than friendship was between them, and walked between them and drew their hands together. And in a little while they came to the word itself and found themselves lovers, the Adam and Eve of a new race in the world.

They set foot side by side into the wonderful valley of love, with its deep and quiet places. The world changed about them with their changing mood, until presently it had become, as it were, a tabernacular beauty about their meetings, and the stars were no more than flowers of light beneath the feet of their love, and the dawn and sunset the coloured hangings by the way. They ceased to be beings of flesh and blood to one another and themselves; they passed into a bodily texture of tenderness and desire. They gave it first whispers and then silence, and drew close and looked into one another’s moonlit and shadowy faces under the infinite arch of the sky. And the still black pine trees stood about them like sentinels.

The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, and it seemed to them the universe hung still. Only their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to be living together in a world where there is no death, and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to them that they sounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as none have ever reached before. Even for mean and little souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods…

* * *

You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was afianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met, – frequently met, – the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence – nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him as her lover.

“If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!” gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick…

“I am told —” whispered the old Bishop of Frumps. “New story upstairs,” said the first footman, as he nibbled among the dessert things. “So far as I can make out this here giant Princess – ”

“They say – ” said the lady who kept the stationer’s shop by the main entrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets for the State Apartments…

And then:

“We are authorised to deny —” said “Picaroon” in Gossip.

And so the whole trouble came out.

IV

“They say that we must part,” the Princess said to her lover.

“But why?” he cried. “What new folly have these people got into their heads?”

“Do you know,” she asked, “that to love me – is high treason?”

“My dear,” he cried; “but does it matter? What is their right – right without a shadow of reason – and their treason and their loyalty to us?”

“You shall hear,” she said, and told him of the things that had been told to her.

“It was the queerest little man who came to me with a soft, beautifully modulated voice, a softly moving little gentleman who sidled into the room like a cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he had anything significant to say. He is bald, but not of course nakedly bald, and his nose and face are chubby rosy little things, and his beard is trimmed to a point in quite the loveliest way. He pretended to have emotions several times and made his eyes shine. You know he is quite a friend of the real royal family here, and he called me his dear young lady and was perfectly sympathetic even from the beginning. ‘My dear young lady,’ he said, ‘you know – you mustn’t,’ several times, and then, ‘You owe a duty.’”

“Where do they make such men?”

“He likes it,” she said.

“But I don’t see —”

“He told me serious things.”

“You don’t think,” he said, turning on her abruptly, “that there’s anything in the sort of thing he said?”

“There’s something in it quite certainly,” said she.

“You mean —?”

“I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for worship by losing – our elementary freedom. And I was to have married that Prince – You know nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince. He doesn’t matter… It seems it would have strengthened the bonds between my country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagine it! – strengthening the bonds!”

“And now?”

“They want me to go on with it – as though there was nothing between us two.”

“Nothing!”

“Yes. But that isn’t all. He said —”

“Your specialist in Tact?”

“Yes. He said it would be better for you, better for all the giants, if we two – abstained from conversation. That was how he put it.”

“But what can they do if we don’t?”

“He said you might have your freedom.”

“I!”

“He said, with a stress, ‘My dear young lady, it would be better, it would be more dignified, if you parted, willingly.’ That was all he said. With a stress on willingly.”

“But – ! What business is it of these little wretches, where we love, how we love? What have they and their world to do with us?”

“They do not think that.”

“Of course,” he said, “you disregard all this.”

“It seems utterly foolish to me.”

“That their laws should fetter us! That we, at the first spring of life, should be tripped by their old engagements, their aimless institutions! Oh —! We disregard it.”

“I am yours. So far – yes.”

“So far? Isn’t that all?”

“But they – If they want to part us —”

“What can they do?”

“I don’t know. What can they do?”

“Who cares what they can do, or what they will do? I am yours and you are mine. What is there more than that? I am yours and you are mine – for ever. Do you think I will stop for their little rules, for their little prohibitions, their scarlet boards indeed! – and keep from you?”

“Yes. But still, what can they do?”

“You mean,” he said, “what are we to do?”

“Yes.”

“We? We can go on.”

“But if they seek to prevent us?”

He clenched his hands. He looked round as if the little people were already coming to prevent them. Then turned away from her and looked about the world. “Yes,” he said. “Your question was the right one. What can they do?”

“Here in this little land,” she said, and stopped. He seemed to survey it all. “They are everywhere.”

“But we might —”

“Whither?”

“We could go. We could swim the seas together. Beyond the seas —”

“I have never been beyond the seas.”

“There are great and desolate mountains amidst which we should seem no more than little people, there are remote and deserted valleys, there are hidden lakes and snow-girdled uplands untrodden by the feet of men. There —”

“But to get there we must fight our way day after day through millions and millions of mankind.”

“It is our only hope. In this crowded land there is no fastness, no shelter. What place is there for us among these multitudes? They who are little can hide from one another, but where are we to hide? There is no place where we could eat, no place where we could sleep. If we fled – night and day they would pursue our footsteps.”

A thought came to him.

“There is one place,” he said, “even in this island.”

“Where?”

“The place our Brothers have made over beyond there. They have made great banks about their house, north and south and east and west; they have made deep pits and hidden places, and even now – one came over to me quite recently. He said – I did not altogether heed what he said then. But he spoke of arms. It may be – there – we should find shelter…

“For many days,” he said, after a pause, “I have not seen our Brothers… Dear! I have been dreaming, I have been forgetting! The days have passed, and I have done nothing but look to see you again… I must go to them and talk to them, and tell them of you and of all the things that hang over us. If they will help us, they can help us. Then indeed we might hope. I do not know how strong their place is, but certainly Cossar will have made it strong. Before all this – before you came to me, I remember now – there was trouble brewing. There was an election – when all the little people settle things, by counting heads. It must be over now. There were threats against all our race – against all our race, that is, but you. I must see our Brothers. I must tell them all that has happened between us, and all that threatens now.”