Harold wavered an instant: Pall-Mall was still strong in him. The next he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific pants he emitted smokiest smoke and fiercest fire.
‘Now I want a Princess,’ cried Edward, clutching Charlotte ecstatically; ‘and you can be the Doctor, and heal me from the dragon’s deadly wound.’
Of all professions I held the sacred art of healing in worst horror and contempt. Cataclysmal memories of purge and draught crowded thick on me, and with Charlotte—who courted no barren honours—I made a break for the door. Edward did likewise, and the hostile forces clashed together on the mat, and for a brief space things were mixed and chaotic and Arthurian. The silvery sound of the luncheon-bell restored an instant peace, even in the teeth of clenched antagonisms like ours. The Holy Grail itself, ‘sliding athwart a sunbeam,’ never so effectually stilled a riot of warring passions into sweet and quiet accord.
WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT
EDWARD was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one that had last passed under the dentist’s hands, to be the capitalist of the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff obtained in ours: half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately—in spite of Edward’s interested affectation of agony—had been shakiness undisguised; but the event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however, Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement, and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and most self-respecting of the rabbits had been let loose to grace the feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for bits of broken cork.
‘Hurry up, can’t you?’ growled our host; ‘what are you girls always so beastly particular for?’
‘Martha says,’ explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), ‘that if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells inside you, till you——’