Ted looked deeper into the sky, half-closing his eyelids. It seemed to take his body from him completely, to leave him nothing but a naked soothed consciousness, rising and falling, a petal on a swinging bough, in the heart of blue quietude like the quiet of an open place in a forest empty with evening.
“Clouds,” said Mrs. Severance's voice, turning the word to a sound breathed lightly through the curled and husky gold of a forest-horn.
Through the midst of his sea-drowsiness a queer thought came to Ted. This had happened before, in sleep perhaps, in a book he had read—Oliver's novel, possibly, he thought and smiled. Lying alone on a roof of blue water, and yet not lying alone, for there was that slow warm voice that talked from time to time and came into the mind on tiptoe like the creeping of soft-shoed, hasteless, fire. You stretched your hands to the fire and let it warm you and soon your whole body was warm and pleased and alive. That was when you were alive past measure, when all of you had been made warm as a cat fed after being hungry, and the cat arose from its warmth and went walking on velvet paws, stretching sleek legs, sleek body, slowly and exquisitely under the firelight, heavy with warmth, but ready at the instant signal of the small burning thing in its mind to turn like a black butterfly and dance a slow seeking dance with the shadows of the fire that flickered like leaves in light wind, desirable, impalpable and wavering, never to be quite torn down from the wall and eaten and so possessed. But there was an odd thirsty satisfaction in trying to tear the shadows.
Fantastic. He had not been so fantastic for a long time.
“And tomorrow there's 'Mode.' And fashion-plates. And Greenwich Villagers,” said the voice of Mrs. Severance. He made some reply impatiently, disliking the sound of his own voice—hers fitted with the dream. When had he been this before?
The Morte d'Arthur—the two with a sword between.
He sank deeper, deeper, into the glow of that imagined firelight—the flame was cooler than water to walk through—that time he had almost taken a turning shadow into his hand. The sword between—only here there was no sword. If he reached out his hand he knew just how the hand that he touched would feel, cool and firm, like that flame. Cool and silent.
There must have been something, somewhere, to make him remember....
He remembered.
A minute later Oliver had splashed up to them, shouting “A rescue! A rescue! Guests Drown While Host Looks On Smilingly! What's the matter, Ted, you look as if you wanted to turn into a submarine? Got cramp?”