“That’s the sort of tune that on hot nights must have been played to Oberon by his little Indian catamite,” said Guy, sitting down on the sofa beside Teresa.
She smiled a little absently; the Hawaiian melody was like a frame, binding the room and its inmates into a picture. Concha, her eyes fixed and dreamy; Rory, intent on a puzzle—shaking little rolling pellets into holes or something; Arnold sitting on the edge of the billiard-table while Anna lit his pipe for him; Jasper motionless, for once, his eyes fixed intently on the needle of the gramophone; David standing by the door gazing gravely at Concha, looking not unlike a Spanish Knight who carries in his own veins more than a drop of the Moorish blood that it is his holy mission to spill; Eben standing by the fireplace, a broad grin on his face, his hands on his hips, swaying slightly, in time with the music ... what was it he was like? Teresa suddenly remembered that it was the principal boy in a little local pantomime they had all gone to one Christmas—she evidently could not sing, because during the choruses she would stand silent, grinning and swaying as Eben was doing now.
The view was painted on the windows—a pietà as nobly coloured as that of Avignon; for, in spite of flowers and fruits and sunshine, on the knees of the earth the year lay dying.
Teresa was thinking, “The present frozen into the past—that is art. At this moment things are looking as if they were the past. That is why I am feeling as if I were having an adventure—because the present and the past have become one.”
Squeak! Burr! Gurr! went the gramophone.
“Stop it, Jasper! Stop it!”
“Beastly noise! It reminds me of the dentist.”
The record was removed.
“Très entraînant—as the deaf bourgeoise said after having listened to the Dead March in Saul,” said Guy; he had suddenly invented this Sam Wellerism in the middle of the tune, and had hardly been able to wait till the end to come out with it.
Then Anna put on a fox-trot, and Rory and Concha, Arnold and Guy, in the narrow space between the billiard-table and gramophone, hopped and wriggled and jumped—one could not call it dancing.