The Happy Hypocrite by Max Beerbohm

Author:Max Beerbohm [Beerbohm, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: novel, ebook, interactive media, urban romantics, book, top10, bestseller
ISBN: 9781787248700
Publisher: Sovereign Classic
Published: 2018-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

From his breast he took the posy of wild flowers that he had gathered.

“They are for you,” he whispered. “I gathered them for you hours ago, in this wood. See! They are not withered.”

But she was perplexed by his words and said to him, blushing, “How was it for me that you gathered them, though you had never seen me?”

“I gathered them for you,” he answered, “knowing I should soon see you. How was it that you, who had never seen me, yet waited for me?”

“I waited, knowing I should see you at last.” And she kissed the posy and put it at her breast.

And they rose from their knees and went into the wood, walking hand in hand. As they went, he asked the names of the flowers that grew under their feet. “These are primroses,” she would say. “Did you not know? And these are ladies’-feet, and these forget-me-nots. And that white flower, climbing up the trunks of the trees and trailing down so prettily from the branches, is called Astyanax. These little yellow things are buttercups. Did you not know?” And she laughed.

“I know the names of none of the flowers,” he said.

She looked up into his face and said timidly, “Is it worldly and wrong of me to have loved the flowers? Ought I to have thought more of those higher things that are unseen?”

His heart smote him. He could not answer her simplicity.

“Surely the flowers are good, and did you not gather this posy for me?” she pleaded. “But if you do not love them, I must not. And I will try to forget their names. For I must try to be like you in all things.”

“Love the flowers always,” he said. “And teach me to love them.”

So she told him all about the flowers, how some grew very slowly and others bloomed in a night; how clever the convolvulus was at climbing, and how shy violets were, and why honeycups had folded petals. She told him of the birds, too, that sang in the wood, how she knew them all by their voices. “That is a chaffinch singing. Listen!” she said. And she tried to imitate its note, that her lover might remember. All the birds, according to her, were good, except the cuckoo, and whenever she heard him sing she would stop her ears, lest she should forgive him for robbing the nests. “Every day,” she said, “I have come to the wood, because I was lonely, and it seemed to pity me. But now I have you. And it is glad!”

She clung closer to his arm, and he kissed her. She pushed back her straw bonnet, so that it dangled from her neck by its ribands, and laid her little head against his shoulder. For a while he forgot his treachery to her, thinking only of his love and her love. Suddenly she said to him, “Will you try not to be angry with me, if I tell you something? It is something that will seem dreadful to you.

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