THE WAVES 
chewing a stalk between his teeth. He feels bored; I too 
feel bored. Bernard at once perceives that we afe bored. 
I detect a certain effort, an extravagance in his phrase, as if 
he said ¢ Look | > but Percival says ‘ No.” For he is always 
the first to detect insincerity ; and is brutal in the extreme, 
The sentence tails off feebly. Yes, the appalling moment 
has come when Bernard’s power fails him and there is no 
longer any sequence and he sags and twiddles a bit of string 
and falls silent, gaping as if about to burst into tears. Among 
the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends 
are not able to finish their stories.” 
“ Now let me try,” said Louis, “ before we rise, before 
we go to tea, to fix the moment in one effort of supreme 
endeavour. This shall endure. We are parting; some 
to tea ; some to the nets ; I to show my essay to Mr. Barker. 
This will endure. From discord, from hatred (I despise 
dabblers in imagery—I resent the power of Percival 
intensely) my shattcred mind is pieced together by some 
sudden perception. I take the trees, the clouds, to be 
witnesses of my complete integration. I, Louis, I, who 
shall walk the earth these seventy years, am born entire, out 
of hatred, out of discord. Here on this ring of grass we 
have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some 
inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The 
time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We 
shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one 
sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives 
have been gongs striking ; clamour and boasting ; cries of 
despair ; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens. 
“ Now grass and trees, the travelling air blowing empty 
spaces in the blue which they then recover, shaking the 
leaves which then replace themselves, and our ring here, 
sitting, with our arms binding our knees, hint at some other 
order, and better, which makes a reason everlastingly. 
This I see for a second, and shall try to-night to fix in words, 
to forge in a ring of steel, though Percival destroys it, as he 
blunders off, crushing the grasses, with the small fry trotting 
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