CHAPTER IV

THE SHAPE OF THREE

The shape began to assert itself already on the way to the Cecil. Merle, Peter and Stuart discovered that their three-cornered talk flashed forth with uncommon swiftness and brilliancy, as if drawing inspiration one from the other; that a spirit and being came alive that belonged not to any two of them, nor yet to any one, but could only be borne of just that conjunction of three. So that they were palpitating with eagerness to continue exploration in the kingdom which their magical number had thrown open to them, when Mark St. Quentin, symbol of a world without meanings, met them, as arranged, in the ballroom.

As far as St. Quentin was concerned, the evening proved a failure, strongly reminding him of a phase in his rather lonely childhood, when elder brothers and sisters used to glory in the flaunting of their “secrets.” Though of just what these miraculous “secrets” consisted he could never discover. Nor could he discover now what was the curious excitement that seemed to quiver in his alternate partners; and he was certainly baffled by the bewildering fashion of their talk. As well he might be; for Peter and Merle, dizzied by the constant change and interchange of male involved by quartette, occasionally allowed their separate manners to overlap, with merely amusing results when Stuart received the St. Quentin dregs, but absolutely fatal when St. Quentin was by mistake driven to cope with some startling turn of phrase that should have been Stuart’s portion.

They were being shockingly ill-bred, the three; not a doubt of it. But a hardness of heart and an oblivion of manners descends upon those who, on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, are picking up gold and silver, towards those incapable of perceiving the alluring glitter; and St. Quentin was finally reduced to concentrate his hopes upon supper, which meal he fondly anticipated might “draw them all together a bit.” Also, a man of little imagination, he ascribed the dreary void within him on contemplating the Tiddlerites, as due to hunger. So that when Stuart announced carelessly after the eighth dance: “Had about enough now, haven’t we?” he so far forgot himself as to expostulate with some fervour:

“Oh, I say. But I thought we were stopping on for supper, anyway.”

“So did I,” replied Stuart. “But my partners seem rather anxious to get home.”--Merle looked astonished, but understood that she was expected to play up to some dark sub-current of intention.

“Grandmaman did beg me not to be late,” demurely. Which happened to be true.

“But Miss Kyndersley,” St. Quentin turned with dying hopes to Peter; “won’t you stay and have supper?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, if Merle doesn’t.” Peter, not in the mood as yet to renounce gaiety, was inclined to be indignant with Stuart for his ill-disguised anxiety to quit.

“A jolly little supper,” wailed the odd man out, seeing _pâté_ and lobster slipping irrevocably through his fingers.

On the threshold of the hotel rose another slight discussion: “I’ll see the ladies home; it’s on my way,” from Stuart.

“Oh, but----”

“It’s on my way,” firmly. And he had hailed a taxi, for which vehicles he certainly possessed magnetic attractions, had helped in Merle and Peter, and had given the address at Lancaster Gate, before St. Quentin was allowed a chance to proffer services. As the latter stood beneath the awninged steps, watching the swift departure, every line of face and figure seemed to quiver forth in resentful unison: “A jolly little supper....”

The car shot round the corner. Stuart let down the window and leant out: “Drive to the Billet-doux,” he commanded curtly, giving the name of a celebrated little French restaurant on the border-line between fashion and Bohemia.

Peter laughed, understanding; and because his methods amused her. But Merle gasped in some disturbance.

“Sorry,” said Stuart. “But it was essential to get rid of him, wasn’t it? I don’t mean him personally, but any other existent fourth.”

“But he was of our party,” Merle rebuked him gravely, conscious of being alone in her defence of good manners.

“I think not,” laughed Stuart; “merely a stage property.”

They drew up before the quaint white hostelry in Soho; set off by its dark and murky surroundings, and proclaiming aloud its aloofness from these, by the ostentatious guardianship of two commissionaires.

Passing through the swing doors, Merle was caught up by the tumult of voices and ring of glass within; forgot to be prim and censorious; gave herself over entirely to the joy of this unexpected, and--as far as Madame des Essarts was concerned--forbidden truancy.

So they came for the first time to the Billet-doux, destined to prove one of the permanent backgrounds to their triangular career. And the austere and melancholy Spanish waiter who assisted them to uncloak, did not for a moment guess how he was to be puzzled by the alternate qualities and quantities of their future comings; merely noticed that the party seemed in excellent spirits, and that the gentleman spent commendably little time and breath in his selection of the supper. And here again the girls silently approved.

Peter leant forward across the table: “There’s something to be settled without further delay,” she announced, half in mockery, and withal letting a tinge of earnest invade her tones. “It’s tactless to mention it, but--you’re a millionaire, aren’t you?”

Stuart assented, very ashamed.

“We’ve agreed to forgive,” Peter went on, “on the condition that you let us forget. No chucking about of gold purses to the populace, mark you. As long as you never permit us to see more than two sovereigns at a time, our three-ship shall endure. But the rest of your vast fortune, and all your motor-cars and boot-trees, you must hide in mattresses and banks. Is that understood?”

“Can’t you make it guineas,” he pleaded unhappily. And in consideration of his quenched demeanour, they agreed to expand the limits by a florin.

“I suppose you had better know the worst,” he continued gloomily, helping them to varieties of sardines that, like Diogenes, dwelt mainly in tubs. “I’m a diamond-merchant.”

Merle burst out laughing. “Oh, Stuart, how comical! Do you wear a silk hat?”

“_And_ a face to match. You must invade the offices one day, and see me in the act.”

“You take it seriously, then?”

“Desperately. Notice the absorbed face of a small boy playing at grown-ups; if he were laughing all the time, he wouldn’t be enjoying the game.”

“But if we really do bear down upon you, will you give us a sign that it’s all right? Because otherwise I’m terrified of the ‘business face.’”

“One sign ye shall have, and no more. After that I’ll expect you to play also, and take proper interest in diamonds, and listen prettily to the Khalif,--it doesn’t matter about the One-eyed Calendar.”

And here Merle demanded explanations, which were midway interrupted by a wail of despair from Peter; she had somehow contrived to mix her implements so that whichever way she worked it, the fish-knife would be left for dessert. Stuart looked for enlightenment at Merle:

“Doesn’t she know? Has no one told her? Are we to pretend not to see?”

“She springs from the people,” Merle answered his aside. “The kind that wear curl-papers and barrows. I’ll tell you all about it when we’re alone.”

... Stuart and Merle, if only in jest; and Peter the outsider. Not for one moment could the flexible triangle retain its form.

“Let it be clearly understood,” broke in Peter, defiantly holding out the wrong glass, that wine might be poured into it, “that except for the benefit of Fernand, I refuse to be: ‘and your little friend also.’”

“Who is Fernand?” from Stuart.

Merle owned to an elder brother who dwelt in Paris. “Peter and I were once upon a time allowed to travel alone from England to the South of France, to join Grandmaman in Nice. _En route_, I gave Peter a party consisting of Fernand, and a first-class _wagon-lit_.”

“In juxtaposition?” murmured Stuart. Peter, for fear of Merle’s little reserves, flashed him a glance of warning. The shape had altered again.... Obviously it was impossible to keep intimacy of speech and spirit moving between more than two points; the idea was to spin it so swiftly from one to another and then on, as to give the appearance of all three simultaneously involved.

Peter took up the narrative:

“Fernand Alfonso des Essarts, the essence of decorum and propriety, met us at the Gare du Nord, and escorted us across Paris. He carried a big box of chocolates for Merle, and a smaller one for her little friend also. He conveyed to Merle the compliments of all her unknown relatives in Paris; and she cast down her eyes, transformed to an embodiment of the virginal _jeune fille_, convent-fresh and dewy, and conveyed to him the compliments of all his unknown relatives in London. And they thanked each other separately for each one. In this wise did they continue to converse. He asked her if she were thirsty--‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you are thirsty?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I am thirsty,’ sez I, likewise convent-fresh and dewy. He displayed polite interest in her progress at the piano--‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you play the piano?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I play the piano.’--I don’t, by the way, Stuart; it’s quite all right. And Fernand surveyed his beautiful boots, and probably thought of his beautiful grisette, neglected that evening for the sake of these _embêtantes_ young English misses. And with an inspiration he asked Merle if she had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing--‘And you also, Mademoiselle, you had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing?’ ‘And I also, Monsieur, I had _mal-de-mer_ in crossing. Very!’ The word too much did it, and Fernand addressed me no more.”

“I hope the _wagon-lit_ proved a compensation for your temporary effacement,” laughed Stuart.

He sat opposite them, as it were one pitted against two. And the girls marvelled anew that aught with the looks and costume and bearing of conventional man-about-town, eye-glass and knowledge of the wine-list, should yet have caught the melody of their pipes, and revealed in response his own nimble goat-legs. The proximity of the mirror which enlarged their number to six, lent a grotesque flavour to the scene, allowing each of the players the illusion of being at the same time spectator; placing the table, with its shining napery and silver, tumbled shimmer of whitebait, and dull red Burgundy in the glasses, outside and apart from reality. Stuart, catching at one moment the reflected eyes of his companions, toasted them silently in phantom wine ... and it needed a curious effort, a tug of the will, before they could recall their glances from the three puppets in looking-glass-land, to meet, each of them, their two companions in the flesh. The light and stir of the restaurant, the drifting brilliant figures from one crowded room to another, the gay groups, talking, laughing, were all, as it were, subordinated, like supers in a stage set. So the solicitous waiter, hovering, might have been stolen from some sinister Spanish masque of passion and hatred. From an outer chamber, drifted wailing snatches of violin-play. The ghost of Mark St. Quentin glided into the vacant seat to Peter’s right. “A jolly little supper,” he murmured reproachfully....

“Three coffees, black,” Stuart ordered of the waiter; “And--green Chartreuse, both of you? I think so; three green Chartreuses.” He did not consult their tastes, hoping to gauge them accurately by intuition, or else luck. He held a match to their cigarettes; and, reverting to the topic of their journey, suggested that a _wagon-lit_ might be rather a nice domestic animal: “A tame red _wagon-lit_ with trustful brown eyes. I wonder if my wife would let me keep one in the back-garden, among the washing.”

Merle was overcome by a vision of the future wife of the diamond-merchant hanging up the diamond-merchant’s pants on a clothes-line, every Monday morning.

“Just fancy,” Stuart burst forth, “the indignity of having to ask permission before one could keep a fox-terrier or a _wagon-lit_. I can _not_ understand the state of mind which leads a man to marriage: the eternal sucking of the same orange, when there are thousands for his plucking.”

His tone was of the lightest, but Peter understood that it veiled a warning. And she was conscious of a sudden rage that he should deem a warning necessary.

“Prince of Orange,” she mocked him; “you probably waste your kingdom.”

But he boasted: “Not so. For I am aware of the exact instant just before the juice is all spent and the skin will taste bitter in my mouth. And then I cast away my orange and gather another. There are so many in the grove that sometimes indeed I am tempted to leave one half-sucked, to try the flavour of the next. But I don’t ... I don’t.”

Merle put in: “You are speaking symbolically.”

“I am,” smiling at her--his leprechaun smile.

“And what of the pips? do you swallow them in the process?”

“Rather than spit them, yes. I likewise suck silently, and with great haste, greediness and appreciation.”

“I wonder,” mused Peter, into her curling smoke-wreaths, “if the orange has any views on the subject....”

Stuart heard: “That depends on the thickness of its skin.”

“Their rejected skins shall go to make your pathway to Hell. And the whole way ye shall slip ignominiously.”

“Rather say I shall slide gloriously.”

“And bump at the bottom?”

“There are great virtues, even in a bump at the bottom, to those who understand the art of swift recovery.”

Peter mused on this, while remarking idly that the pale glint of Chartreuse held much more of evil than the frank winking serpent-green of _crême-de-menthe_.

“Are you never natural?” she queried suddenly, recalling the man to joyous sparring, from his tender admiration of Merle’s side-face, which, one among a thousand, really merited the higher appellation of profile.

“No, I don’t think so. What am I, natural? or you, or anyone else? something that sleeps and eats and walks, and never enquires. Not of such stuff are born the Orange-Suckers, the Hairpin-Visionists.”

“Hairpin-Visionists?” chorus of attracted femininity.

He explained: “If, whatever you are doing, you are able to project yourself into the future, and from that point look back again to the present, you can get your outlines clear, see where each step is leading you, obtain a sense of proportion and values on the incident. And that mental process follows the curves of an ordinary hairpin, starting at one of the points--then forward--and back again. D’you see?” he traced the diagram with his fingers on the table-cloth.

“Then you always live your life backwards, from some imaginary spot seven or eight months hence? What a grotesque looking-glass existence!”

“The Billet-doux is lowering its lights,” remarked Stuart. And called for the bill. They had supped luxuriously, and drunken of wine that lay cradled in straw, a white muffler about its slender neck. So that the reckoning amounted to two pounds three and twopence. Stuart was about to fling down three pieces of gold--when he remembered....

Here was a quandary indeed.

Leaning across to Merle, he murmured in confidential and embarrassed tones: “I say, I’m rather short of cash; forgive the awful cheek--could you lend me half a crown?”

Very gravely she produced the coin: “It’s quite all right; please don’t bother about returning it.” The notion of a Heron short of cash was truly delightful.

“Peter,” snuggling her head sleepily against the older girl’s shoulder, when they had taken their seats in the home-bound taxi. “Peter, are we going to like him? I believe we are.”

Peter looked at Stuart--and surprised a rather lorn and out-of-it expression on his face. There had been unconscious cruelty, perhaps even coquetry, in Merle’s gesture and appeal; emphasizing his position on the opposite seat; their snug drowsy security in the fortress he was attempting to storm from without.

“You realize that, don’t you?” said Peter, hammering upon the nail; “that Merle and I talk to each other; really talk. And that we’ll allow you no quarter.”

“Thank you for the danger-signal.” Stuart smiled, and ceased to resemble the lonely millionaire of fiction. The triangle for the moment was clearly isosceles: a short line connecting points X and Z at the base, while Y lay infinitely remote at the apex.

“It is going to be difficult,” thought Y exultantly.

For Stuart was nauseated by the rose-path.

* * * * *

And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair. Pride of youth and good looks and active limb. Pride in their need of one another, and their power to stand alone withal. Most of all, pride of brain, that could leap from point to point, nor ever lose a foothold; propound subtlety upon subtlety, each of the three eager to give the corkscrew its final twist, till towards the seventh evolution they would laughingly give up, and slowly unwind again. Brains that could be adapted to any circumstances and any company; wring enjoyment from the most unpromising material; brains that forgot not, so that reference became a language, incomprehensible save to those who had invented the cipher. Brains responsive, electric, in perfect working order. Pride of brain, surely as splendid a thing as the more usual pride of body that waits on youth.

The trio, definitely established, possessed a spirit of its own; its actions were wilful and indeterminate, and none could know its soul save by inspiration. It was built of cross-moods, cross-stimulations; and it owned no leader nor follower, but changed its several parts from moment to moment. A thing of fine complexity, the trio, that could adjust itself to the shock of any outside problem or weariness,--in fact, take unto and into itself these same problems and wearinesses, and make of them part of the whole, subjugated to its domination. And its god was the unknown, and its fear the Inevitable, and retrospect its recreation, and in the Hairpin Vision lay its safety, and in sex its slumbering danger.

The Spanish waiter, of a romantic disposition, took interest in the Señor and two Señoritas who came so frequently to the Billet-doux; and wondered when the former would begin to evince a preference. The Spanish waiter, only human, went so far as to rejoice in the sight of Peter and Stuart supping alone; since himself had begun to regard Merle with a more than waiterly eye. He was both puzzled and furious, two nights later, at the entrance of Stuart and Merle. And his bewilderment knew no bounds, when, having at last decided the Señoritas were at deadly enmity for their love of the capricious Señor, Peter and Merle shattered this most plausible theory by lunching together in perfect harmony of spirit. The Spanish waiter might stand as the first of a collection of persons convinced of the madness of the trio: collection of incidentals to their daily progress, such as railway-porters, policemen, telephone operators, grocers, boatmen, parents, rustics and Baldwin. Collection which Stuart proposed leaving to the Nation on his death: “each individual to be labelled with date and circumstance concurrent with his or her initiation to the belief of our complete insanity.”

Peter found an instance: “Specimen 41: Respectable Old Gentleman. March 2nd, 1913. On accidentally catching sight of Trio solemnly smashing egg at the end of Euston.”

“You know,” said Merle, “I don’t think he would have been so bewildered if Stuart hadn’t explained to him that we always smash eggs at supreme moments of our career; that we regard it as a religious ceremony; and that our accompanying chant is taken from Scene I of Macbeth: “When shall we three meet again?”--ending:

“Fare is fowl, and fowl is broke; Take the white and leave for us the yolk.”

“It was an impromptu effort,” the author apologized. “And then he didn’t see why the discovery of the End of Euston should be a supreme moment, even in the life of a lunatic.”

Peter could best have enlightened the Respectable Old Gentleman, to whom stations were stations, neither more nor less. Euston was her terminus for Thatch Lane; and on the many occasions that Stuart had accompanied her thither, they had taken to their hearts the grim portals and endless echoing approach, the labyrinth of platform and grey mystery of booking-hall, the infinite possibilities in its stretching regions and sinister corners. Very much less than station, when their whim was to treat it as a nursery of toys; and how much more than station, when its oppressive personality foredoomed it as a backcloth for the day when their mood should be of tragedy. Peter and Stuart viewed Euston with respect; but regarded it nevertheless as theirs by virtue of understanding, a kingdom into which even Merle could not stray.

In the balancing whereof--for Stuart was careful to dole even kingdoms and secrets with perfect equality and fairness--he and Merle were both Insiders of society, permitting them likewise to be Truants from society; a privilege Peter lacked, in that one cannot play truant from a stage one has never entered. But society, rumour-fed that the charming granddaughter of Madame des Essarts, and Heron, the fabulously wealthy young diamond-merchant, were of late to be seen frequently in company one of the other, society did approve of this most desirable union; and, furthermore, did seek to forward it by a system known as “throwing-together.” Merle and Stuart, meeting on the area-steps and by the back-doors of society, had no desire whatsoever for propinquity of the hall-portals and front drawing-room; so that Merle received with polite indifference the tidings that Stuart was to be present at some glittering function; and Stuart went so far as to refuse invitations to dinner-parties, carefully prepared with a view to placing him at Merle’s side during three solid hours of mastication.

Heron and des Essarts; riches and family; youth and beauty; it was an alliance altogether too suitable, and the parties involved felt it their bounden duty not to give it visible encouragement. “I--will--not--have you made easy for me,” Stuart muttered in his most clenched voice. Truants of society both, they enjoyed their truancy as much for what they left behind, as for what they went to seek.

Peter smiled sometimes, as she reflected how little of sordid niggling money worries, of harassing debts, of the snatching hour-to-hour existence that went on in the Bohemian underworld, was known to those who have a sufficiency of baths, and travel first-class as a matter of course. Perversely enough, she hugged to herself the memory of the few years she had spent on the border-line between respectability and squalor; was glad they were hers alone, unshared by Merle or Stuart. Her one-world! ... had they each a one-world, she mused, as well as their two-world and their three-world?

She and Merle had not as yet succeeded in locating the heel of their Achilles. Stuart was hard and ruthless, that they had agreed in their many confabulations on the subject; quite without sympathy for weakness or sentiment of any kind. But signs had betrayed a vulnerable spot in him, tantalizingly indicated, vanished as soon as they attempted to follow up the trail. Childish he certainly was at times. Childish in the quick look he was wont to throw, angling for approbation, after the successful performance of what they were pleased to term a “stunt.” Childishly annoyed at any reference on their part to the kingdom as it stood before he entered it. Childishly petulant on an occasion when the girls took him adventuring in a part of the world unfamiliar to him, so that initiative fell for once into their hands. Childishly ill-mannered on another occasion, when Peter, partly in the spirit of mischief, sought to make a quartette of trio by the introduction of a new discovery in the male line. Then Stuart, even as he had done previously with Mark St. Quentin, uprose mightily in his wrath, and hurled the unoffending youth from the topmost battlements into the moat of blackness. Whereat the girls gave their officious Prætorian clearly to understand that with them alone lay the orders for entrance and ejection:

“You were disgustingly rude. You were worse; you hurt his feelings!----” A furiously indignant Merle, ivory burning to rose, eyes storm-grey. “You hurt him,” she repeated.

“It’s not a serious wound,” thus the culprit, coolly. “You shall go and put balm upon it, Merle. I believe you keep a balm factory for applying relief to the endless victims of my ‘disgusting rudeness.’” He loved to tease Merle, who was soft-hearted.

“It sounds like margarine,” she cried, in distasteful reference to the balm. And the incident closed on a laugh.

But childishness was not weakness; nor could it account for those moments when he seemed mutely to plead to them for something. And then the memory would be swept away in a gale of swagger, loud crows of self-approval,--accompanied always by a twinkle in the unwindowed eye, that plainly betrayed amused knowledge of his own effrontery.

“Just where Stuart suffers,” remarked Peter to Merle, in a spasm of illumination, “is that his wings of swank will always be attributed to the uplifting effects of his money-bags, and condemned accordingly. Whereas I’m perfectly certain that without a penny he would still remain as magnificently and serenely confident. It’s in him, not in his pockets. But he’ll never get a chance to prove it. And he wears himself out in the invention of opportunities to wear himself out.”

“The qualities of a Stoic rotting in the bosom of a millionaire,” reflected the other girl. “He’s rather a dear,” she added with sudden inconsequence.

Peter surveyed her quizzically: “Quite sound as yet, are you? No bones broken?”

Merle felt herself: “Heart all right--thighs--ankles--shoulder-blades----Yes, thanks, I’m perfectly sound and rather happy. How are you?” politely.

Thus theirs was the advantage, to be able to make of him a subject for discussion. Stuart knew no such relief. His search for truth in this double she-encounter had of necessity to be a solitary quest. Nor did his previous she-encounters assist him one whit. He could rely on Merle and Peter to be thoroughly loyal to one another, and unblushingly disloyal towards him, which was baffling, by way of a beginning. They showed far cleverer than the sirens who had previously essayed to lure his boat to destruction, save when he sought to compare them with females renownedly intellectual, when by sheer perversity, the two would present themselves to his mental conception as capriciously feminine, exasperating in their swift changes of mood, in their demands upon him for the impossible, in their conscious and provoking mystery. No space of time to analyse them individually as separate Sphinxes for his unravelling. As yet they were still an undivided problem.

He knew they kept guarded and intact their innermost chambers of all. Well--did he not also retain his one-world? A world in which dwelt Stuart the metaphysician, who, stronger even than Stuart the leprechaun, recognized with dismay an ability to slip out of the trio and its pattern, its march-rhythm and its corkscrew wit; get glimpses of himself as a bit of a fool; of the whole edifice they had raised, as absurd, exaggerated; doubting whether such close comradeship with two girls, save with the outlook and excuse of pure masculinity, did not contain an element--yes, though he loathed the term, an element of the fantastic? In fact, when he could add himself to the collection that was to be left to the nation. But he limited these glimpses, as being contrary to the rules of the game; would have denied them himself altogether, had he not been convinced they added to the fun,--the fun of scrambling back, aware he had been outside, a truant from truancy! The metaphysician went in fear that the leprechaun would one day lose his scrambling abilities; that the intellect would predominate over the sense of worlds beyond the reach of facts. The metaphysician was wistfully envious of the leprechaun, who continued to kick up his heels in despite of disapproval.

There likewise dwelt in the one-world a Stuart Heron known to college friends, such as Oliver Strachey, who remembered him as the finest classical scholar of his year; and other men viewing him solely in the light of a keen sportsman; a fellow good to knock about with; not much of a talker; inclined to be a bit shattering and explosive at times, but apologizing for these ebullitions by a great excess of heartiness afterwards; excess indeed, for Stuart was apt to over-emphasize his normality.

Remained Heron the diamond-merchant, who was perhaps negligible--perhaps also not.

* * * * *

April this year had stolen some of June’s warm gold, so that devotees of the river could for once pay homage to tender mist of green, and mating bird-song. The trio had been afloat since early hours, before the sun had yet drunk all the diamond dew from the cobwebs, and Peter more than once apologized to Stuart for the continual reminders of his trade that sparkled from every grass-blade, every opening leaf.

Their boat had pushed first into all the locks, and shot first out, nose thrust between the slowly widening gates. They had discovered an island above the broken glinting shoulder of a weir; and, annexing it for their own, played Swiss Family Robinson thereon, with great contentment, save for some slight argument concerning the parts: “Little Franz for me,” Peter declared, “because of the rides. Whatever wild animal they catch, be it ostrich or donkey or tortoise, Arab steed or earwig, there’s always ‘just room for our little Franz upon its back.’ Franz has an easy time of it. His father makes him a quiverful of arrows, and ‘off he trots, looking like a Cupid,’ That’s me. Stuart, you shall be the father.”

“I’ve no vocation for impromptu sermons on the goodness of Heaven in permitting our pigs to find truffles,” retorted Stuart. “And I want to be ‘my wilful headstrong Fritz.’ Merle shall be father--_and_ mother.”

Merle demurred. They always cast her for the “mother” parts, she complained, simply because her hair chose to remain tidier than other people’s. At which thrust, Peter renounced the entire game, and decided she wanted to play at hounds-among-the-undergrowth. Her companions looked puzzled.

“‘The Hound of the d’Urbervilles’? Sleuth-hounds? Hounds of Low? of Ditch? Hounds of Heaven? Or just Faithful Hounds? Peter, please specify, and I might even play at being just one tiny little puppy bloodhound myself.”

In the end Stuart was the entire pack, and Master of the Hounds to boot. And then they abandoned this new sport in favour of the Spanish Armada; sailed ignited fireships down a backwater, and roused volumes of sputtering and inarticulate wrath in the bosom of a mild man of peace whose skiff they had almost set in flames.

Now, subdued to a more twilit mood, they lie dark against the quenched amber and pearl of the sunset; and reviewing their April day, they find it good. Stuart, in ostentatious proof that he needs no rest from his Herculean labours with the pole, has allowed Peter to recline full-length in the punt, her head upon his knees, the while she lazily smokes a cigarette, and complains that his bones penetrate the thickness of four cushions, and hurt the back of her neck.

“Which proves that you are a Princess by birth,” laughs Merle, squatting, a graceful Dryad, on the adjoining bank. “You remember the incident of the pea under the twelve mattresses?”

And now it is that Peter solemnly propounds the question, as to whether (_a_) consciousness of swank and swagger, and (_b_) consciousness of the irritation produced in others by swank and swagger, could or could not be held as mitigating circumstances for aforesaid swank and swagger?

“Mitigating circumstances? No, I think not,” thoughtfully Merle raises a dusky purple grape to her crimson lips. The colour-scheme thus presented might have been one of Dulac’s exotic harmonies: blue-green shadow of the Quarry Woods behind; vivid blue jersey; bluish lights in the dense black of her hair. “I should rather say that the consciousness makes one accessory before the fact.”

Stuart joins in; “The form of the question might be altered to this: does my personality justify my swank?” impishly he grins down on the upturned face of Peter across his knees. He is very unlike a man at these minutes; gnome, pixie or hobgoblin might claim him brother.

Peter retorts: “That’s a different thing altogether. And why limit the problem to yourself? I was talking generally.”

“Deceive not thyself, my child. A long and careful study of the differences between male and female intellect has finally convinced me that the latter is incapable of generalities, of completely impersonal discussion. Follow the wriggling rivers of her speech backwards to their source, and you will discover the Subjective Sea. But do you know,” with renewed earnestness; “I believe my personality _does_ justify my swank. Otherwise you wouldn’t put up with me as you do. And if it justifies my swank, then my swank is non-existent. Swank is a thing which proceeds from a misconception of one’s status.”

“Is his swank non-existent?” murmurs Merle to the swimming atoms in a last slanting sunray; “Oh, I trow not.”

“‘Swagger’ is slightly different again.” Stuart is enjoying himself immensely. “It is the outward and visible manifestation of the swank that resides in the soul. The ‘agger’ in fact. But your question respecting the mitigating circumstances of our consciousness thereof, is rot, my dear Peter. Because swagger _is_ consciousness, to start with. Shall we paddle her home, Merle?”

The haze of evening has crept up, white-footed, from the south. A Dryad moves from the bank, seats herself beside a Faun. The rhythmic dip and swirl of their paddles dies away into silence.

* * * * *

... And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair; pride in their ability to maintain without disaster this strangely exhilarating friendship of one and two; flaunt it in the very face of the Inevitable.