Van washed his hands in a lower shelf-pool of the brook and recognized, with amused embarrassment, the transparent, tubular thing, not unlike a sea-squirt, that had got caught in its downstream course in a fringe of forget-me-nots, good name, too.
He had started to walk back to the picnic glade when a mountain fell upon him from behind. With one violent heave he swung his attacker over his head. Percy crashed and lay supine for a moment or two. Van, his crab claws on the ready, contemplated him, hoping for a pretext to inflict a certain special device of exotic torture that he had not yet had the opportunity to use in a real fight.
‘You’ve broken my shoulder,’ grumbled Percy, half-rising and rubbing his thick arm. ‘A little more self-control, young devil.’
‘Stand up!’ said Van. ‘Come on, stand up! Would you like more of the same or shall we join the ladies? The ladies? All right. But, if you please, walk in front of me now.’
As he and his captive drew near the glade Van cursed himself for feeling rattled by that unexpected additional round; he was secretly out of breath, his every nerve twanged, he caught himself limping and correcting the limp — while Percy de Prey, in his magically immaculate white trousers and casually ruffled shirt, marched, buoyantly exercising his arms and shoulders, and seemed quite serene and in fact rather cheerful.
Presently Greg overtook them, bringing the cufflink — a little triumph of meticulous detection, and with a trite ‘Attaboy!’ Percy closed his silk cuff, thus completing his insolent restoration.
Their dutiful companion, still running, got first to the site of the finished feast; he saw Ada, facing him with two stipple-stemmed red boletes in one hand and three in the other; and, mistaking her look of surprise at the sound of his thudding hooves for one of concern, good Sir Greg hastened to cry out from afar: ‘He’s all right! He’s all right, Miss Veen’ — blind compassion preventing the young knight from realizing that she could not possibly have known yet what a clash had occurred between the beau and the beast.
‘Indeed I am,’ said the former, taking from her a couple of her toadstools, the girl’s favorite delicacy, and stroking their smooth caps. ‘And why shouldn’t I be? Your cousin has treated Greg and your humble servant to a most bracing exhibition of Oriental Skrotomoff or whatever the name may be.’
He called for wine — but the remaining bottles had been given to the mysterious pastors whose patronage the adjacent clearing had already lost: they might have dispatched and buried one of their comrades, if the stiff collar and reptilian tie left hanging from a locust branch were his. Gone also was the bouquet of roses which Ada had ordered to be put back into the boot of the Count’s car — better than waste them on her, let him give them, she said, to Blanche’s lovely sister.
And now Mlle Larivière clapped her hands to rouse from their siesta, Kim, the driver of her gig, and Trofim, the children’s fair-bearded coachman. Ada reclenched her boletes and all Percy could find for his Handkuss was a cold fist.
‘Jolly nice to have seen you, old boy,’ he said, tapping Van lightly on the shoulder, a forbidden gesture in their milieu. ‘Hope to play with you again soon. I wonder,’ he added in a lower voice, ‘if you shoot as straight as you wrestle.’
Van followed him to the convertible.
‘Van, Van come here, Greg wants to say good-bye,’ cried Ada, but he did not turn.
‘Is that a challenge, me faites-vous un duel?’ inquired Van.
Percy, at the wheel, smiled, slit his eyes, bent toward the dashboard, smiled again, but said nothing. Click-click went the motor, then broke into thunder and Percy drew on his gloves.
‘Quand tu voudras, mon gars,’ said Van, slapping the fender and using the terrible second person singular of duelists in old France.
The car leapt forward and disappeared.
Van returned to the picnic ground, his heart stupidly thumping; he waved in passing to Greg who was talking to Ada a little way off on the road.
‘Really, I assure you,’ Greg was saying to her, ‘your cousin is not to blame. Percy started it — and was defeated in a clean match of Korotom wrestling, as used in Teristan and Sorokat — my father, I’m sure, could tell you all about it.’
‘You’re a dear,’ answered Ada, ‘but I don’t think your brain works too well.’
‘It never does in your presence,’ remarked Greg, and mounted his black silent steed, hating it, and himself, and the two bullies.
He adjusted his goggles and glided away. Mlle Larivière, in her turn, got into her gig and was borne off through the speckled vista of the forest ride.
Lucette ran up to Van and, almost kneeling, cosily embraced her big cousin around the hips, and clung to him for a moment, ‘Come along,’ said Van, lifting her, ‘don’t forget your jersey, you can’t go naked.’
Ada strolled up. ‘My hero,’ she said, hardly looking at him, with that inscrutable air she had that let one guess whether she expressed sarcasm or ecstasy, or a parody of one or the other.
Lucette, swinging her mushroom basket, chanted:
‘He screwed off a nipple,
He left him a cripple…’
‘Lucy Veen, stop that!’ shouted Ada at the imp; and Van with a show of great indignation, shook the little wrist he held, while twinkling drolly at Ada on his other side.
Thus, a carefree-looking young trio, they moved toward the waiting victoria. Slapping his thighs in dismay, the coachman stood berating a tousled foot boy who had appeared from under a bush. He had concealed himself there to enjoy in peace a tattered copy of Tattersalia with pictures of tremendous, fabulously elongated race horses, and had been left behind by the charabanc which had carried away the dirty dishes and the drowsy servants.
He climbed onto the box, beside Trofim, who directed a vibrating ‘tpprr’ at the backing bays, while Lucette considered with darkening green eyes the occupation of her habitual perch.
‘You’ll have to take her on your half-brotherly knee,’ said Ada in a neutral aparte.
‘But won’t La maudite rivière object,’ he said absently, trying to catch by its tail the sensation of fate’s rerun.
‘Larivière can go and’ (and Ada’s sweet pale lips repeated Gavronski’s crude crack)… ‘That goes for Lucette too,’ she added.
‘Vos «vyragences» sont assez lestes,’ remarked Van. ‘Are you very mad at me?’
‘Oh Van, I’m not! In fact, I’m delighted you won. But I’m sixteen today. Sixteen! Older than grandmother at the time of her first divorce. It’s my last picnic, I guess. Childhood is scrapped. I love you. You love me. Greg loves me. Everybody loves me. I’m glutted with love. Hurry up or she’ll pull that cock off — Lucette, leave him alone at once!’
Finally the carriage started on its pleasant homeward journey.
‘Ouch!’ grunted Van as he received the rounded load — explaining wrily that he had hit his right patella against a rock.
‘Of course, if one goes in for horseplay…’ murmured Ada — and opened, at its emerald ribbon, the small brown, gold-tooled book (a great success with the passing sun flecks) that she had been already reading during the ride to the picnic.
‘I do fancy a little horseplay,’ said Van. ‘It has left me with quite a tingle, for more reasons than one.’
‘I saw you — horseplaying,’ said Lucette, turning her head.
‘Sh-sh,’ uttered Van.
‘I mean you and him.’
‘We are not interested in your impressions, girl. And don’t look back all the time. You know you get carriage-sick when the road —’
‘Coincidence: «Jean qui tâchait de lui tourner la tête…,»’ surfaced Ada briefly.
‘— when the road «runs out of you,» as your sister once said when she was your age.’
‘True,’ mused Lucette tunefully.
She had been prevailed upon to clothe her honey-brown body. Her white jersey had filched a lot from its recent background — pine needles, a bit of moss, a cake crumb, a baby caterpillar. Her remarkably well-filled green shorts were stained with burnberry purple. Her ember-bright hair flew into his face and smelt of a past summer. Family smell; yes, coincidence: a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry. She sat in his lap, heavily, dreamily, full of foie gras and peach punch, with the backs of her brown iridescent bare arms almost touching his face — touching it when he glanced down, right and left, to check if the mushrooms had been taken. They had. The little footboy was reading and picking his nose — judging by the movements of his elbow. Lucette’s compact bottom and cool thighs seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past. Ada, sitting next to him, turning her smaller pages quicker than the boy on the box, was, of course, enchanting, obsessive, eternal and lovelier, more somberly ardent than four summers ago — but it was that other picnic which he now relived and it was Ada’s soft haunches which he now held as if she were present in duplicate, in two different color prints.
Through strands of coppery silk he looked aslant at Ada, who puckered her lips at him in the semblance of a transmitted kiss (pardoning him at last for his part
