“Take the eternal triangle,” said Quinny hurriedly, not to surrender his advantage, while Rankin and De Gollyer in a bored way continued to gaze dreamily at a vagrant star or two. “Two men and a woman, or two women and a man. Obviously it should be classified as the first of the great original parent themes. Its variations extend into the thousands. By the way, Rankin, excellent opportunity, eh, for some of our modern, painstaking, unemployed jackasses to analyze and classify.”
“Quite right,” said Rankin without perceiving the satirical note. “Now there’s De Maupassant’s Fort comme la Mort—quite the most interesting variation—shows the turn a genius can give. There the triangle is the man of middle age, the mother he has loved in his youth and the daughter he comes to love. It forms, you might say, the head of a whole subdivision of modern continental literature.”
“Quite wrong, Rankin, quite wrong,” said Quinny, who would have stated the other side quite as imperiously. “What you cite is a variation of quite another theme, the Faust theme—old age longing for youth, the man who has loved longing for the love of his youth, which is youth itself. The triangle is the theme of jealousy, the most destructive and, therefore, the most dramatic of human passions. The Faust theme is the most fundamental and inevitable of all human experiences, the tragedy of life itself. Quite a different thing.”
Rankin, who never agreed with Quinny unless Quinny maliciously took advantage of his prior announcement to agree with him, continued to combat this idea.
“You believe then,” said De Gollyer after a certain moment had been consumed in hair splitting, “that the origin of all dramatic themes is simply the expression of some human emotion. In other words, there can exist no more parent themes than there are human emotions.”
“I thank you, sir, very well put,” said Quinny with a generous wave of his hand. “Why is the Three Musketeers a basic theme? Simply the interpretation of comradeship, the emotion one man feels for another, vital because it is the one peculiarly masculine emotion. Look at Du Maurier and Trilby, Kipling in Soldiers Three—simply the Three Musketeers.”
“The Vie de Bohème?” suggested Steingall.
“In the real Vie de Bohème, yes,” said Quinny viciously. “Not in the concocted sentimentalities that we now have served up to us by athletic tenors and consumptive elephants!”
Rankin, who had been silently deliberating on what had been left behind, now said cunningly and with evident purpose:
“All the same, I don’t agree with you men at all. I believe there are situations, original situations, that are independent of your human emotions, that exist just because they are situations, accidental and nothing else.”