“And so unhappy,” added the bishop. “Dear me! This is most singular. I seem to see two lamps instead of one. It must have been those apricots.”
Keith interposed:
“Or perhaps you strained one of your eyes bathing. It has happened to me, occasionally. Darkness is the best remedy. It rests the optic nerve.”
“Shall we take a turn or two outside?” asked Denis.
It was past midnight as the two climbed out of the cave into the night air. A cool north wind blew across the market-place. The bishop was filled with a sense—a clear-cut, all-convincing sense—of the screamingly funny insignificance of everything. Then he noticed the moon.
It dangled over the water, waning, sickly, moth-eaten, top-heavy, and altogether out of condition—as if it had been on duty for weeks on end. In other respects, too, its appearance was not quite normal. In fact, it soon took to behaving in the most extraordinary fashion. Sometimes there were two moons, and sometimes one. They seemed to merge together—to glide into each other, and then to separate again. Mr. Heard was vastly pleased and puzzled by the phenomenon—so pleased that he gave utterance to one of the longest speeches he had made since his arrival on Nepenthe. He said:
“I have seen many funny things here, Denis. But this is the funniest of all. The spectacle seems to have been providentially arranged, as a sort of BONNE BOUCHE, for my last evening on the island. Dear me. Now there are two again. And now they are behind each other once more. A kind of celestial hide and seek. Most interesting. I wish Keith could see it. Or that dear Count Caloveglia. He would be sure to say something polite…. The inconstant moon! I know, at last, what the poet meant by that expression, though the word inconstant strikes me as hardly forcible enough. The skittish moon, I should be inclined to call it. The skittish moon. The frivolous moon. The giddy moon. The quite-too-absurd moon…. There it goes again! Very curious. What can it be?… Why, this is the reverse of an eclipse, my boy. The disk is darkened during an eclipse. It disappears IN VACUO. In the present case it is brightened and rendered, so to speak, doubly apparent. What would you call the reverse of an eclipse, Denis? Anti-eclipse? That sounds rather barbaric to my ears. One should never mix Greek and Latin, if it can possibly be avoided. Well?”
“We must have a good look at this thing from your window, and then find out all about it.”
“Oh, but I could not possibly take you from your friends! I know my way home perfectly well. You will not dream of accompanying me.”
“Indeed I will. I walked with you to that house when you first arrived here, and helped you to unpack. Don’t you remember? And now you must let me take you there on our last evening….”
By the time Denis returned to the grotto a more exuberant and incoherent tone had been generated among the guests. He was not pleased. He felt inclined to be stern. A number of reprobates from the Club had dropped in, and Keith, whom he meant to keep straight for one night at least, was saying silly things and giving himself away. So was the excellent Mr. Richards.
“This is a good island,” observed that gentleman. “We discourse like sages and drink like swine. Peace with Honour!… How that old Jew took our English measure, eh? How he laughed in his sleeve at our infatuation for a phrase like that. Peace with Honour! The sort of claptrap that makes a man feel so jolly comfortable inside, so damned satisfied with everything like after a good deed. And that sentimental primrose business. Dizzy as flower-expert! What cared he for primroses? Votes and moneybags was what he was after. But he knew the British Public. And that accounts for the pious domestic button-hole. Who ever heard of a Jew telling the difference between a primrose and any other kind of rose? They’re not such blasted fools.”
“Excuse me,” said Keith, rising from his seat in an afflatus of inspiration. “Excuse me. I know the difference. It is primarily a question of nutrition. Glucose! I am a great believer in glucose. Because, even if it could be proved that the monks of Palaiokastron stripped the vine of its leaves and thereby hastened the maturing of the grape without reducing its natural supply of sugar—”
“You don’t shine,” interrupted Denis, “when you talk like that.”
“Because even if this could be proved, which I greatly doubt, yet nothing on earth will make me believe that glucose is otherwise than beneficial to vegetation. Because—”
“Do sit down, Keith. You are monopolizing the conversation.”
“Because the glucose resides within that verdant foliage like truth in her well, like the oyster within its pearl. The monks of Palaiokastron—they got it straight from Noah. I am a great believer in glucose. Which is absurd. Because—”
“Oh, shut up! You are making a perfect exhibition of yourself. Can’t you oblige me, for once in the way?”
Denis was growing seriously alarmed for the reputation of his friend. He had changed of late; he was beginning to know his own mind. He meant to put a stop to this humiliating scene. As the other, regardless of his pleadings, continued to babble dithyrambic nonsense concerning glucose and self-fertilization and artificial manures and inflorescence and Assyrian bas-reliefs and Stilton cheese, he suddenly gripped his arm and pulled him, with a crash, into his chair.
“Sit down, you double-distilled owl!”
This was the first virile achievement of his young life, and directed to a worthy end. For it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that Mr. Keith was considerably drunk. Too surprised to utter a word of protest, the orator paused in his declamation, beaming blandly at nobody in particular. Then he remarked, in quite a subdued tone of voice:
“We are all at the mercy of youth. Mr. Richards! Could you oblige me with a fairy-tale?”
South Wind Page 42