The sunlight made the water very clear and tempting. Floating faintly through the still afternoon came the notes of the church clock. From everywhere the salt, invigorating smell of seaweed just uncovered by the ebb tide was blown into their faces, and long trailing branches of it, golden-brown and grass-green in the sunlight, rose and sank with the swell. Here and there, a little lower down, sprays of a brighter colour were visible—pink and red and orange, like delicate, feathery coral.
‘This place and this weather are pleasant enough for Pan,’ Graham murmured. ‘Next month it will be all over, and we shall be going back to school. I wonder if it will ever be just so nice again.’
After their bathe they sat on the rocks, baking in the hot sun. ‘How brown your hands and face and neck are!’ said Graham lazily. ‘The rest of you seems so white.... I wonder if the Greeks ever made a statue of a diver? I don’t remember one.’ Then a sudden thought seemed to strike him and he sprang to his feet, his drowsiness suddenly gone. ‘Wait a moment,’ he cried. ‘Stand there.... Turn round just a little.... You must lean against the rock and hold this bit of seaweed in your hand; and you must cross your feet—like that. Oh! if you just had pointed ears, or the least little bit of a tail!... A Faun! A Faun! A young woodland Faun!... You are far nicer than the statue.’ And a look almost of wonder came into Graham’s face.
Next, making him sit down, he put him in the posture of the ‘Spinario,’ his old favourite; and then, raising him to his feet once more, he made him stand like the praying boy of the Berlin Museum, the ‘Adorante,’ his face and hands uplifted to the joy of the morning.
‘And now what else?’ he murmured. ‘You are too young for an athlete. Your body is too slender. I will make you into a youthful Dionysus instead. Let me put this seaweed in your hair. It is a wreath of vine.’
He placed him so that he leaned against the black, smooth rock, and the soft melting lines of the boy’s body shone out with an extraordinary beauty from the sombre background. Graham paused for a moment, and stepping back, shaded his eyes with his hand while he gazed fixedly at his work. A faint colour came into his cheeks and he advanced again. Very gently he pulled the brown waving hair over the boy’s forehead, and a little lower still, giving to his face a more feminine oval, like that of Leonardo’s ‘Bacchus.’ He pulled his head, too, slightly forward, bending it from the shapely neck; and with delicate fingers he half lowered the lids of the dark, clear blue eyes, till the upper lashes, long and curling, cast a shadow on the cheek below; and he parted the lips, ever so softly, till a strange dreamy smile seemed to play upon them.
The accuracy of his touch almost startled him, and his colour deepened as the boy’s beauty flowed in upon him, filling him with a curious pleasure. He laughed aloud. ‘You are just like one of the young gods,’ he cried. ‘I wonder if you really are one. Perhaps if we stay much longer we shall draw the others down from heaven.’
‘Isn’t that what you would like? I expect you still, deep down, have a kind of faith in them.’
‘Ah, how can I help having faith when one stands living before my eyes? All hail, dear Dionysus! child of fire and dew, and the creeping, delicate vine!... Should we not offer up a sacrifice, Harold? I have nothing here but these dry sea-flowers which I gathered from the rock, but it is into the heart of the giver, and not at the gift, that the gods look.... Let us offer our slender garland to the presiding deity of the place.’