she took in the mellow-sweet notes.
The coveys are breaking up, he said.
It means spring, Paula cried.
And the sign that good weather has come.
And love!
And nest-building and egg-laying, Dick laughed. Never has the world seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of eleven. The angoras were brought down this morning for the kidding. You should have seen them. And the wild canaries have been discussing matrimony in the patio for hours. I think some free lover is trying to break up their monogamic heaven with modern love-theories. Its a wonder you slept through the discussion. Listen! There they go now. Is that applause? Or is it a riot?
Arose a thin twittering, like elfin pipings, with sharp pitches and excited shrillnesses, to which Dick and Paula lent delighted ears, till, suddenly, with the abruptness of the trump of doom, all the microphonic chorus of the tiny golden lovers was swept away, obliterated, in a Gargantuan blast of sound no less wild, no less musical, no less passionate with love, but immense, dominant, compelling by very vastitude of volume.
The eager eyes of the man and woman sought instantly the channel past open French windows and the screen of the sleeping porch to the road through the lilacs, while they waited breathlessly for the great stallion to appear who trumpeted his love-call before him. Again, unseen, he trumpeted, and Dick said:
I will sing you a song, my haughty moon. It is not my song. It is the Mountain Lads. It is what he nickers. Listen! He sings it again. This is what he says: Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills. I fill the wide valleys. The mares hear me, and startle, in quiet pastures; for they know me. The grass grows rich and richer, the land is filled with fatness, and the sap is in the trees. It is the spring. The spring is mine. I am monarch of my kingdom of the spring. The mares remember my voice. They know me aforetime through their mothers before them. Hear me! I am Eros. I stamp upon the hills, and the wide valleys are my heralds, echoing the sound of my approach.
And Paula pressed closer to her husband, and was pressed, as her lips touched his forehead, and as the pair of them, gazing at the empty road among the lilacs, saw it filled with the eruptive vision of Mountain Lad, majestic and mighty, the gnat-creature of a man upon his back absurdly small; his eyes wild and desirous, with the blue sheen that surfaces the eyes of stallions; his mouth, flecked with the froth and fret of high spirit, now brushed to burnished knees of impatience, now tossed skyward to utterance of that vast, compelling call that shook the air.
Almost as an echo, from afar off, came a thin-sweet answering whinney.
It is the Fotherington Princess, Paula breathed softly. Again Mountain Lad trumpeted his call, and Dick chanted:
Hear me! I am Eros! I stamp upon the hills!
And almost, for a flash of an instant, circled soft and close in his arms, Paula knew resentment of her husbands admiration for the splendid beast. And the next instant resentment vanished, and, in acknowledgment of due debt, she cried gaily:
And now, Red Cloud! the Song of the Acorn! Dick glanced half absently to her from the pamphlet folded on his finger, and then, with equal pitch of gaiety, sang:
You are a strange and wonderful Red Cloud, she said slowly. Sometimes almost am I convinced that you are utterly Red Cloud, planting your acorns and singing your savage joy of the planting. And, sometimes, almost you are to me the ultramodern man, the last word of the two-legged, male human that finds Trojan adventures in sieges of statistics, and, armed with test tubes and hypodermics, engages in gladiatorial contests with weird microorganisms.
Almost, at times, it seems you should wear glasses and be bald-headed; almost, it seems
That I have no right of vigor to possess an armful of girl, he completed for her, drawing her still closer. That I am a silly scientific brute who doesnt merit his vain little breath of sweet rose-colored dust. Well, listen, I have a plan. In a few days
But his plan died in birth, for, at their backs, came a discreet cough of warning, and, both heads turning as one they saw Bonbright, the assistant secretary, with a sheaf of notes on yellow sheets in his hand.