Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/202

 the current E.N.E. and so out into the open Atlantic. Then storms intolerable.

Then they took to cruising the far, lone, desert fringes of the sea of perfect love, utterly lonely and near the ice, the fringe of the seas of death. There they cruised, in the remote waters on the edge of extinction. And then they looked at one another.

"We will be perfect companions: you know how I love you," said Harriet, of the good ship Harriet and Lovat.

"Never," said Lovat, of the same ship. "I will be lord and master, but ah, such a wonderful lord and master that it will be your bliss to belong to me. Look, I have been sewing a new flag."

She didn't even look at the flag. "You!" she exclaimed. "You a lord and master! Why, don't you know that I love you as no man ever was loved? You a lord and master! Ph! you look it! Let me tell you I love you far, far more than ever you ought to be loved, and you should acknowledge it."

"I would rather," said he, "that you deferred your loving of me for a while, and considered the new proposition. We shall never sail any straight course at all, until you realise that I am lord and master, and you my blissful consort. Supposing, now, you had the real Hermes for a husband, Trismegistus. Would you not hold your tongue for fear you lost him, and change from being a lover, and be a worshipper? Well, I am not Hermes or Dionysus, but I am a little nearer to it than you allow. And I want you to yield to my mystery and my divination, and let me put my flag of a phnix rising from a nest in flames in place of that old rose on a field azure. The gules are almost faded out."

"It's a lovely design!" she cried, looking at the new flag. "I might make a cushion-embroidery of it. But as a flag it's absurd. Of course, you lonely phnix, you are the bird and the ashes and the flames all by yourself! You would be. Nobody else enters in at all. I—I am just nowhere—I don't exist."

"Yes,' he said, "you are the nest."

"I'll watch it!" she cried. "Then you shall sleep on thorns, Mister."

"But consider," he said.