don’t let’s get feverish,” Fatty said, dropping his own weapon. “Wearen’t scum. We’re gentlemen. Let’s drink like gentlemen.”
“Let it be a real drinking,” Whiskers approved.
“Let’s get petrified,” Slim agreed. “Many a distillery’s flowed underthe bridge since we were gentlemen; but let’s forget the long road we’vetravelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which everygentleman went to bed when we were young.”
“My father done it—did it,” Fatty concurred and corrected, as oldrecollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and correctusage.
The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated theirtin cans of alcohol.
* * * * *
By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fishedforth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a-glow, althoughthey had not got around to telling their real names. But their Englishhad improved. They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-landceased from their lips.
“It’s my constitution,” Whiskers was explaining. “Very few men could gothrough what I have and live to tell the tale. And I never took any careof myself. If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true,I’d have been dead long ago. And it’s the same with you two. Look atus, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don’t dare,sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost norrain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would puthalf the young ones on their backs in hospital.”
He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.
“And we’ve had our fun,” he boasted, “and speaking of sweethearts andall,” he cribbed from Kipling, “‘We’ve rogued and we’ve ranged—’”
“‘In our time,’” Slim completed the crib for him.
“I should say so, I should say so,” Fatty confirmed. “And been loved byprincesses—at least I have.”
“Go on and tell us about it,” Whiskers urged. “The night’s young, andwhy shouldn’t we remember back to the roofs of kings?”
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about inhis mind for the best way to begin.
“It must be known that I came of good family. Percival Delaney, let ussay, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford onceupon a time—not for scholarship, I am frank to admit; but the gay youngdogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would remember him—”
“My people came over with the Conqueror,” Whiskers interrupted, extendinghis hand to Fatty’s in acknowledgment of the introduction.
“What name?” Fatty queried. “I did not seem quite to catch it.”
“Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The name will serve as well as any.”
Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.
“Oh, well, while we’re about it . . . ” Fatty urged.
“Bruce Cadogan Cavendish,” Slim growled morosely. “Go on, Percival, withyour princesses and the roofs of kings.”
“Oh, I was a rare young devil,” Percival obliged, “after I played ducksand drakes at home and sported out over the world. And I was some figureof a man before I lost my shape—polo, steeple-chasing, boxing. I wonmedals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more than several swimmingrecords from the quarter of a mile up. Women turned their heads to lookwhen I went by. The women! God bless them!”
And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his bulgyhand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry vault of thesky.
“And the Princess!” he resumed, with another kiss to the stars. “She wasas fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high-spirited andcourageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. Lord, Lord, in the water shewas a mermaid, a sea-goddess. And when it came to blood, beside her Iwas parvenu. Her royal line traced back into the mists of antiquity.
“She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. Tawny golden was she,with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees wasblue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency thatgives to woman’s hair its charm. Oh, there were no kinks in it, any morethan were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy. For she wasPolynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal Polynesian.”
Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim, aliasBruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject:
“Huh! Maybe you didn’t shine in scholarship, but at least you gleaned avocabulary out of Oxford.”
“And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the lexicon ofLove,” Percival was quick on the uptake.
“It was the island of Talofa,” he went on, “meaning love, the Isle ofLove, and it was her island. Her father, the king, an old man, sat onhis mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all day and mostof the night, out of grief, sheer grief. She, my princess, was the onlyissue, her brother having been lost in their double canoe in a hurricanewhile coming up from a voyage to Samoa. And among the Polynesians theroyal women have equal right with the men to rule. In fact, they tracetheir genealogies always by the female line.”
To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded promptaffirmation.
“Ah,” said Percival, “I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore,without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that youwill appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa,the Princess of the Isle of Love.”
He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-sizedrink of druggist’s alcohol, and to her again kissed her hand.
“But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never nearenough. When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was notthere. I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear anddelightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and beckonedon by the very goddess of love.”
“Some vocabulary,” Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to ChaunceyDelarouse. But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. He kissed hispudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.
“No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by mydear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting justbeyond my reach. Every sweet lover’s inferno unguessed of by Dante sheled me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees,the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell ofmystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and withher laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten,all but made lunacy of my lover’s ardency.
“It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I firstinterested her. It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. Andit was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more thancoquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.
“We were squidding that day, out on the reef—you know how, undoubtedly,diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms,any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likelyholes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. With thesquid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and heldcrosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until heclosed his tentacles around fist, stick and arm.—Then you had him, andcame to the surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in thecentre of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. . . . And tothink I used to do that!”
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, ashe contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.
“Why, I’ve pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and done itunder fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes. I’ve gonedown, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear afouled anchor. And I could back-dive with a once-over and go infeet-first from eighty feet above the surface—”
“Quit it, delete it, cease it,” Chauncey Delarouse admoni
shed testily.“Tell of the Princess. That’s what makes old blood leap again. Almostcan I see her. Was she wonderful?”
Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.
“I have said she was a mermaid. She was. I know she swam thirty-sixhours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in adouble-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shellin each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sublime.I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was. Oh, for a Phidias or aPraxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!
“And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her.Mad—I know I was mad for her. We would step over the side from the bigcanoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool andcolour, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalizeme to further madness. And at last, down, far down, I lost myself andreached for her. She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I saw thelaughter on her face as she fled. She fled deeper, and I knew I had herfor I was between her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of thebottom she made a churning with her squid