Before one of those tensely waiting figures could make a move I dashed across the court. I cleared the end of that oval pool with one bound and hurled myself through the opening of the gates into someone's arms.
The last line of Daphne Hazel's writing just filled the last line of the exercise book. I closed it, knocked out my pipe in the capacious brass bowl that Piers provides me with for an ash−tray, put out my light and rolled over to sleep.
II
(1)
I gave webs back the exercise book when we went up to his attic room again after breakfast. He took it and sat staring at the cover of it, frowning, not saying anything. It's always embarrassing to have to say something about an amateur's composition, and even though, in this case, it wasn't Piers's own, I did not want to hurt his feelings by dismissing the girl's story too casually. I erred on the side of caution.
“What I admire is the industry. The sheer hard labour of filling that book with writing is something that I feel would be beyond me at any rate. True, the thing is not finished, it seems: left in the air, rather. But still...”
“You don't think it's finished?” he looked up quickly.
“Well, I suppose the inference is: 'And then I woke up—with my toe fast in the bed−rail', or something like that. I suppose that's an acceptable end to a story. I don't know.”
Piers nodded. “If it is a story,” he said, but before I could ask him what he meant by that he added, “But doesn't anything strike you about the contents of the thing? The plot, if you like?”
We were approaching, I could see, the sort of discussion I wanted to avoid, so I took a side−track into something nearer my own territory, where I felt safer. The thing that had struck me, I told him, was the amount of browsing Daphne Hazel must have done among books of a sort which I shouldn't have thought would normally appeal to such a girl as I had imagined her to be. And, I said, hoping a man may be forgiven for hearing the buzzing of the bees in his own bonnet as somewhat louder than those in his neighbour's, I was curious to know where she got hold of that name for the boy.
“Couldn't she have invented that, if she invented the rest?”
“Well,” I said, “she might have invented it, and by sheer coincidence dropped on a real, ancient Syrian name, but...”
Piers sat up, and, of course, needing little encouragement, I lectured briefly on the historical occurrences of the name and its probable application in ancient Syrian mythology to the same divinity who was also called Tammuz and whose memory—the point is irrelevant but interesting—is preserved in the modern Syrian and Hebrew names of the month July. More interesting, though perhaps equally irrelevant, I suggested, is the equivalence of Syrian Nu'man or Tammuz with the Greek Adonis, who is, again, the Eastern Adonai, the Lord, or King. A common flower in Mount Lebanon, if our Professor of Arabic is to be believed (which some have doubted) is the Red Anemone; and those flowers are known to the natives as 'Shaqa'iq un Nu'man', the sisters of Nu'man. Which, of course, is what Flecker was thinking of—
His father was Adonis,
Who dwells away in Lebanon, in stony Lebanon, Where blooms his red anemone.
Piers stared hard at the idea he chose for convenience to see written on my face for a long time, then: “She does make the point,” he said, “that that wasn't his real name.”
“Here,” said I, “gimme the book again, I missed the Shaggy Dog somewhere.”
He ignored my levity. “There's something about the pronunciation, isn't there?” he said.
I was pleased that he had spotted that. “Now, that is interesting to me,” I said. “Somewhere your friend Miss Hazel has come across a remark about the peculiar difficulty any Christian larynx has in pronouncing the letter ''ain' which forms the second consonant of the name Nu'man. I was struck by her putting that in. I wonder what she's been reading? It sounds rather as though she's been dipping into an Arabic grammar somewhere. I begin to have a great respect for your friend.”
Piers put the exercise book carefully on the table beside him and stood up. I was mystified by his manner. Daphne Hazel's excursion into fiction seemed to be worrying him out of all proportion. Then he began tapping his toe on the little iron fender round the hearthstone.
“That's it!” he exclaimed. “That is it! I couldn't have known that myself, because I don't know any Eastern language. I thought you might be able to see something there that I couldn't. Of course, she heard the name.”
“Heard it? Instead of getting it out of a book? Well, she might have done. Come to think of it, if she'd got it out of a grammar she might have written the ''ain' in a more scientific way. The grammars give lots of good advice about how to write it in English characters but none that's any use about how to pronounce it. But it's scarcely a point that you sensitive students of literature would consider important, is it? Fascinating as it may be to a pedant like myself.”
“Of course it's important,” he said, turning on me in some agitation. “Why should a girl like Daphne write all that and send it off to me without preface or explanation?”
“Well that,” I replied, not able to help grinning, “is just the question I politely refrained from asking. I suppose we all have an itch to shine in something that's not our own metier. Your Daphne, who, I'll warrant, can creak a joint with any gymnast in the Kingdom, has a secret craving to cut as handsome a figure in print as she does on your wall−bars, your vaulting−horses, your parallel bars, beams, ropes and what else have you that takes the place of the racks and strappados of a less refined age. Why man, you scratch the same itch yourself. It's the right cacoethes, and time's the only D.D.T. I should simply say that her job at what's−its−name, this place, didn't give her enough to do. She was probably lonely, She amused herself by writing this, and as you're probably the most sympathetic person she knows, she sent it to you.”
Piers shook his head. “I know her well enough,” he said. “At school she never wrote anything—I mean, of that sort, imaginative. She can express herself well enough and she has read a lot. But, as I told you last night, inventing fairy stories is quite out of character in her. She just wouldn't have invented that story.”
“Well she did. There it is. Unless she wrote it down from dictation or copied it from a book for some utterly unimaginable reason I don't see any other answer but that her imagination is capable of getting up to tricks that you never suspected. And, though I know little about the imagination and less about young women, it's not improbable that their fancies may fetch a frisk or two in private that you and I might never see but for some such whim as this.”
“You don't see any other answer?” “No, do you?”
“Yes. The answer I see is that this is not invented. It's a record of something that happened.”
I expostulated. But my mind is less subtle than Piers's, or I haven't his practice in resolving ambiguities, allegories and the contradictions of actual and imaginative experience. I fear I did not altogether understand his argument that though the narration of incidents in Daphne's story might not, or could not, be a description of actual events which occurred, yet the experience dictating the form and character of the fancied events must have occurred; and, the choice of symbols in which to represent an experience depending intimately on the experience itself, the interpretation of the idlest fancies must reveal an active truth. Dimly I could see what might be troubling Piers, but the chimaeras he was tracking seemed to me to be denizens of a region of the mind too remote and mysterious for my plain conducted−tour kind of psychology to dream of venturing into. I can box the compass of sense with any man and do my bit of hawk−spotting between the cardinal points besides; but Piers was trying to make the needle point to a three hundred and sixty−first degree within the circle.