“Venice, they’re never any real good, friends. They can’t do anything....”
“I know. Oh, I know. Oh God, I know!... Mrs. Storm, what a divine lip-stick! May I see? May I use?”
Baby.
II
Thus, the children’s party....
Their engines no louder than a whisper through the quiet noises of the night, and swift as arrows with flaming eyes, two touring-cars, a primrose and a blue, passed through the villages riverwards. The good people slept on undisturbed, as why should they not, for a motor-car will disturb the amenities of a village by night less than a wheelbarrow. Maybe through the crack of a blind flashed a startling light on a sleepless pillow. Maybe a distant scream, as of a great sea-bird, stirred a boy to dream of vain, polite, perishable delights. Maybe a cow stared thoughtfully at the strange, swift, whirring insects with the livid eyes and the cruel screams. Here and there the lamps shone on the buttons of a policeman, stock-still in a doorway. There was no air but the wind of our passage, warm, heavy with dust and dry grasses. “Rain, rain!” breathed England in her sleep. And there was no rain, nor breath of rain, nor yet that damp, oppressive foretaste of a thunderstorm to come, only a torment of heat over the land and around the land the unclouded darkness pinned with faint stars. A myriad flies withstood the stork, were appalled, died. Wrapped in silence, armed with light, we fled beneath the suns of the night like battle-chariots rushing to the assault of the stronghold of the gods. Iris had gone mad.
I thought of Mr. Polly disturbed in his sleep, twenty years ago, on a Sussex hay-rick by the roar of a racing-car. Mr. Polly could have slept undisturbed for us. One hundred and twenty horses drew us, shadows of nothing from nothing to nothing beneath the impersonal stare of the stars. Look away from the stars, lovers of the world’s delights, for they are the destroyers of the world’s delights with their dreams of grander things. To listen to great music, to adore God in vast solitudes, to kneel before the face of beauty, to pass through the quiet land like an arrow with flaming eyes, swifter than your thoughts: such and the like, according to each our nature, are the captains of the world’s delights, so keep your eyes from the stars, that destroy our delights with their dreams of grander things.
Silence marches with the thoughts in your mind. Maybe a word or two will drop, hesitate in the wind, fight with the dying hosts of midgets, perish on the road. Small flying things brush by your face, and a dry unsweet scent, as though England is sleeping with her windows closed.
The green hat was somewhere beside me, it fell and rolled about my feet, she murmured: “Leave it.” To the warm wind fell the honour of the dance, and with the tawny cornstalks the wind stepped a wide-flung dance. Why does your hair dance so, Iris March, like a halo possessed of devils? Why this, why that, Iris March?
In the glass of the wind-screen we might now and then see the faint reflection of Guy’s lamps behind us. Nay, once or twice his bonnet nosed up beside Iris, just beside her elbow. But the stork cried hoarsely, flew on.