Page:Et Cetera, a Collector's Scrap-Book (1924).djvu/45

 Finally, I think the survivors, being three of the millionaires and the small boy, were to drift down the river towards the sea in a leaky boat.

Here was a fine tale with never a woman in it, yet, nevertheless, it was of the spring. For when, in an autumnal mood I revisited the Buzzard, I saw that even the most decadent of millionaires or the most romantic of small boys could not hold that wretched vessel for five minutes against a handful of marksmen. So passed my screaming shells, my armoured tramcars, my ploughed and reddened decks. Before the first puff of saner weather my visionary galleon sailed back to the harbour of dreams.

Yet withal, when the last joss-stick of winter dies in the room and the scent of the violets in the flower-girls’ baskets comes singing through the open window, it is only the more cowardly of us who quaff the cautious iron and quinine. Those of us who are lovers know that there are troubling days before us in this season of finite sorrows and infinite joys, and amateurs of pain as we are, we would not have it otherwise. It is enough for us, though our feet be lame and bleeding, that, from the grey morning and through the hot day and down to the cool time when the stars light up the sky, our love fares on. We may mock ourselves with speech of green-sickness and of faculties devilishly perturbed; we may turn a sorrowful eye on the morrow inevitably grey; but our hearts are for the spring.