Page:Peter Whiffle (1922).djvu/253

 and, on the other side, Time propelling the boat, while a saddened Cupid, his face buried in his hands, was the downcast passenger, with the motto: Le Temps fait passer l'Amour. In the centre, beside a charming Greek temple, a nymph toyed with a spaniel, and the motto read: l'Amitié ne craint pas le Temps! There were, therefore, no pictures on these walls, but, elsewhere, where the walls were white, or where they were hung with rich crimson Roman damask, as in the library, there were a few steel engravings and mezzotints and an early nineteenth century lithograph or two. Over his night-table, at the side of his bed, he had pinned a photograph of a detail of Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in the Palazzo Riccardi, the detail of the three youths, and there was also a large framed photograph of Cranach's naïve Venus in this room. The piano stood in the drawing-room, near one of the windows, looking over the river. It was always open and the rack was littered with modern music: John Ireland's London Pieces, Béla Bartok's Three Burlesques, Gerald Tyrwhitt's Three Little Funeral Marches, music by Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, and Zoltan Kodaly. I remember one day he asked me to look at Theodor Streiche's Spriiche and Gedichte, with words by Richard Dehmel, the second of which he averred was the shortest song ever composed, consisting of but four bars.