In the rear the back fences had been levelled; six corresponding houses on the next street had been purchased; a sort of inner court established, with a common grass-plot planted with trees and embellished by a number of concrete works of art, battered statues, sundials, and well-curbs.
Always the army of civilisation trudges along screened, flanked, and tagged after by life’s irregulars, who cannot or will not conform to routine. And these are always roaming around seeking their own cantonments, where, for a while, they seem content to dwell at the end of one more aimless étape through the world—not in regulation barracks, but in regions too unconventional, too inconvenient to attract others.
Of this sort was the collection of squatty houses, forming a “community,” where, in the neighbourhood of other irregulars, Garret Barres dwelt; and into the lighted entrance of which he now turned, still exhilarated by his meeting with Thessalie Dunois.
The architectural agglomeration was known as Dragon Court—a faïence Fu-dog above the electric light over the green entrance door furnishing that priceless idea—a Fu-dog now veiled by mesh-wire to provide against the indiscretions of sparrows lured thither by housekeeping possibilities lurking among the dense screens of Japanese ivy covering the façade.
Larry Soane, the irresponsible superintendent, always turned gardener with April’s advent in Dragon Court, contributions from its denizens enabling him to 62 pepper a few flower-beds with hyacinths and tulips, and later with geraniums. These former bulbs had now gratefully appeared in promising thickets, and Barres saw the dark form of the handsome, reckless-looking Irishman fussing over them in the lantern-lit dusk, while his little daughter, Dulcie, kneeling on the dim grass, caressed the first blue hyacinth blossom with thin, childish fingers.
Barres glanced into his letter-box behind the desk, above which a drop-light threw more shadows than illumination. Little Dulcie Soane was supposed to sit under it and emit information, deliver and receive letters, pay charges on packages, and generally supervise things when she was not attending school.
There were no letters for the young man. He examined a package, found it contained his collars from the laundry, tucked them under his left arm, and walked to the door looking out upon the dusky interior court.
“Soane,” he said, “your garden begins to look very fine.” He nodded pleasantly to Dulcie, and the child responded to his friendly greeting with the tired but dauntless smile of the young who are missing those golden years to which all childhood has a claim.
Dulcie’s three cats came strolling out of the dusk across the lamplit grass—a coal black one with sea-green eyes, known as “The Prophet,” and his platonic mate, white as snow, and with magnificent azure-blue eyes which, in white cats, usually betokens total deafness. She was known as “The Houri” to the irregulars of Dragon Court. The third cat, unanimously but misleadingly christened “Strindberg” by the dwellers in Dragon Court, has already crooked her tortoise-shell tail and was tearing around in eccentric circles or darting halfway up trees in a manner characteristic, and, 63 possibly accounting for the name, if not for the sex.
“Thim cats of the kid’s,” observed Soane, “do be scratchin’ up the plants all night long—bad cess to thim! Barrin’ thim three omadhauns yonder, I’d show ye a purty bed o’ poisies, Misther Barres. But Sthrin’berg, God help her, is f’r diggin’ through to China.”