Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/203

 dance, imagined by Frederic Chopin. It was too perfect to last, this life which appeared to assume the shape of conscious art. One afternoon, Peter and I motored to the old Villa Bombicci, the design of which legend has attributed to the hand of Michael Angelo. Now it had become a farmhouse, and pigs and chickens, a cock and a few hens, stray dogs and cats, wandered about in the carious cortile. We had come to bathe in the swimming-pool, a marble rectangle, guarded by a single column of what had once been the peristyle. A single column, a cornered wall, and a cluster of ivy: that was the picture. We could bathe nude, for the wall concealed the pool from the farmhouse.

Peter was the first to undress and, as he stood on the parapet of the pool by the broken column, his body glowing rose-ivory in the soft light of the setting sun, his head a mass of short black curls, he seemed a part of the scene, a strange visitor from the old faun-like epoch, and I could imagine a faint playing of pipes beyond the wall, and a row of Tanagra nymphs fleeing, terrified, in basso-rilievo. Sometime, somewhere, in the interval since the days when we had pursued the exterior decorators on the Bowery and at Coney Island, he had discovered an artist, for now his chest was tattooed with a fantastic bird of rose and blue, a bird of paradise, a sirgang, or, perhaps, a phœnix or a Zhar-Ptitsa, the beak pointing towards his throat, the feathers of the tail showering towards that portion of the