‘What a shame that I should loathe roses,’ said Ada, accepting them gingerly.

The muscat wine was uncorked. Ada’s and Ida’s healths drunk. ‘The conversation became general,’ as Monparnasse liked to write.

Count Percy de Prey turned to Ivan Demianovich Veen:

‘I’m told you like abnormal positions?’

The half-question was half-mockingly put. Van looked through his raised lunel at the honeyed sun.

‘Meaning what?’ he enquired.

‘Well — that walking-on-your-hands trick. One of your aunt’s servants is the sister of one of our servants and two pretty gossips form a dangerous team’ (laughing). ‘The legend has it that you do it all day long, in every corner, congratulations!’ (bowing).

Van replied: ‘The legend makes too much of my specialty. Actually, I practice it for a few minutes every other night, don’t I, Ada?’ (looking around for her). ‘May I give you, Count, some more of the mouse-and-cat — a poor pun, but mine.’

‘Vahn dear,’ said Marina, who was listening with delight to the handsome young men’s vivacious and carefree prattle, ‘tell him about your success in London. Zhe tampri (please)!’

‘Yes,’ said Van, ‘it all started as a rag, you know, up at Chose, but then —’

‘Van!’ called Ada shrilly. ‘I want to say something to you, Van, come here.’

Dorn (flipping through a literary review, to Trigorin): ‘Here, a couple of months ago, a certain article was printed... a Letter from America, and I wanted to ask you, incidentally’ (taking Trigorin by the waist and leading him to the front of the stage), ‘because I’m very much interested in that question...’

Ada stood with her back against the trunk of a tree, like a beautiful spy who has just rejected the blindfold.

‘I wanted to ask you, incidentally, Van’ (continuing in a whisper, with an angry flick of the wrist) — ‘stop playing the perfect idiot host; he came drunk as a welt, can’t you see?’

The execution was interrupted by the arrival of Uncle Dan. He had a remarkably reckless way of driving, as happens so often, goodness knows why, in the case of many dour, dreary men. Weaving rapidly between the pines, he brought the little red runabout to an abrupt stop in front of Ada and presented her with the perfect gift, a big box of mints, white, pink and, oh boy, green! He had also an aerogram for her, he said, winking.

Ada tore it open — and saw it was not for her from dismal Kalugano, as she had feared, but for her mother from Los Angeles, a much gayer place. Marina’s face gradually assumed an expression of quite indecent youthful beatitude as she scanned the message. Triumphantly, she showed it to Larivière-Monparnasse, who read it twice and tilted her head with a smile of indulgent disapproval. Positively stamping her feet with joy:

‘Pedro is coming again,’ cried (gurgled, rippled) Marina to calm her daughter.

‘And, I suppose, he’ll stay till the end of the summer,’ remarked Ada — and sat down with Greg and Lucette, for a game of Snap, on a laprobe spread over the little ants and dry pine needles.

‘Oh no, da net zhe, only for a fortnight’ (girlishly giggling). ‘After that we shall go to Houssaie, Gollivud-tozh’ (Marina was really in great form) — ‘yes, we shall all go, the author, and the children, and Van — if he wishes.’

‘I wish but I can’t,’ said Percy (sample of his humor).

In the meantime, Uncle Dan, very dapper in cherry-striped blazer and variety-comic straw hat, feeling considerably intrigued by the presence of the adjacent picnickers, walked over to them with his glass of Hero wine in one hand and a caviar canapé in the other.

‘The Accursed Children,’ said Marina in answer to something Percy wanted to know.

Percy, you were to die very soon — and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County, lolling under the pines, royally drunk after some earlier festivity, with lust in your heart and a sticky glass in your strong blond-haired hand, listening to a literary bore, chatting with an aging actress and ogling her sullen daughter, you reveled in the spicy situation, old sport, chin-chin, and no wonder. Burly, handsome, indolent and ferocious, a crack Rugger player, a cracker of country girls, you combined the charm of the off-duty athlete with the engaging drawl of a fashionable ass. I think what I hated most about your handsome moon face was that baby complexion, the smooth-skinned jaws of the easy shaver. I had begun to bleed every time, and was going to do so for seven decades.

‘In a birdhouse fixed to that pine trunk,’ said Marina to her young admirer, ‘there was once a "telephone." How I’d welcome its presence right now! Ah, here he is, enfin!’

Her husband, minus the glass and the canapé, strolled back bringing wonderful news. They were an ‘exquisitely polite group.’ He had recognized at least a dozen Italian words. It was, he understood, a collation of shepherds. They thought, he thought, he was a shepherd too. A canvas from Cardinal Carlo de Medici’s collection, author unknown, may have been at the base of that copy. Excitedly, overexcitedly, the little man said he insisted the servants take viands and wine to his excellent new friends; he got busy himself, seizing an empty bottle and a hamper that contained knitting equipment, an English novel by Quigley and a roll of toilet paper. Marina explained, however, that professional obligations demanded she call up California without delay; and, forgetting his project, he readily consented to drive her home.

Mists have long since hidden the links and loops of consecutive events, but — approximately while that departure took place, or soon after — Van found himself standing on the brink of the brook (which had reflected two pairs of superposed eyes earlier in the afternoon) and chucking pebbles with Percy and Greg at the remnants of an old, rusty, indecipherable signboard on the other side.

‘Okh, nado (I must) passati!’ exclaimed Percy in the Slavic slang he affected, blowing out his cheeks and fumbling frantically at his fly. In all his life, said stolid Greg to Van, he had never seen such an ugly engine, surgically circumcised, terrifically oversized and high-colored, with such a phenomenal cœur de bœuf; nor had either of the fascinated, fastidious boys ever witnessed the like of its sustained, strongly arched, practically everlasting stream. ‘Phoeh!’ uttered the young man with relief, and repacked.

How did the scuffle start? Did all three cross the brook stepping on slimy stones? Did Percy push Greg? Did Van jog Percy? Was there something — a stick? Twisted out of a fist? A wrist gripped and freed?

‘Oho,’ said Percy, ‘you are playful, my lad!’

Greg, one bag of his plus-fours soaked, watched them helplessly — he was fond of both — as they grappled on the brink of the brook.

Percy was three years older, and a score of kilograms heavier than Van, but the latter had handled even burlier brutes with ease. Almost at once the Count’s bursting face was trapped in the crook of Van’s arm. The grunting Count toured the turf in a hunched-up stagger. He freed one scarlet ear, was retrapped, was tripped and collapsed under Van, who instantly put him ‘on his omoplates,’ na lopatki, as King Wing used to say in his carpet jargon. Percy lay panting like a dying gladiator, both shoulder blades pressed to the ground by his tormentor, whose thumbs now started to manipulate horribly that heaving thorax. Percy with a sudden bellow of pain intimated he had had enough. Van requested a more articulate expression of surrender, and got it. Greg, fearing Van had not caught the muttered plea for mercy, repeated it in the third person interpretative. Van released the unfortunate Count, whereupon he sat up, spitting, palpating his throat, rearranging the rumpled shirt around his husky torso and asking Greg in a husky voice to find a missing cufflink.

Van washed his hands in a lower shelf-pool of the brook and recognized, with amused embarrassment, the transparent, tubular thing, not unlike a sea-squirt, that had got caught in its downstream course in a fringe of forget-me-nots, good name, too.

He had started to walk back to the picnic glade when a mountain fell upon him from behind. With one violent heave he swung his attacker over his head. Percy crashed and lay supine for a moment or two. Van, his crab claws on the ready, contemplated him, hoping for a pretext to inflict a certain special device of exotic torture that he had not yet had the opportunity to use in a real fight.

‘You’ve broken my shoulder,’ grumbled Percy, half-rising and rubbing his thick arm. ‘A little more self-control, young devil.’

‘Stand up!’ said Van. ‘Come on, stand up! Would you like more of the same or shall we join the ladies? The ladies? All right. But, if you please, walk in front of me now.’

As he and his captive drew near the glade Van cursed himself for feeling rattled by that unexpected additional round; he was secretly out of breath, his every nerve twanged, he caught himself limping and correcting the limp — while Percy de Prey, in his magically immaculate white trousers and casually ruffled shirt, marched, buoyantly exercising his arms and shoulders, and seemed quite serene and in fact rather cheerful.

Presently Greg overtook them, bringing the cufflink — a little triumph of meticulous detection, and with a trite ‘Attaboy!’ Percy closed his silk cuff, thus completing his insolent restoration.

Their dutiful companion, still running, got first to the site of the finished feast; he saw Ada, facing him with two stipple-stemmed red boletes in one hand and three in the other; and, mistaking her look of surprise at the sound of his thudding hooves for one of concern, good Sir Greg hastened to cry out from afar: ‘He’s all right! He’s all right, Miss Veen’ — blind compassion preventing the young knight from realizing that she could not possibly have known yet what a clash had occurred between the beau and the beast.

‘Indeed I am,’ said the former, taking from her a couple of her toadstools, the girl’s favorite delicacy, and stroking their smooth caps. ‘And why shouldn’t I be? Your cousin has treated Greg and your humble servant to a most bracing exhibition of Oriental Skrotomoff or whatever the name may be.’

He called for wine — but the remaining bottles had been given to the mysterious pastors whose patronage the adjacent clearing had already lost: they might have dispatched and buried one of their comrades, if the stiff collar and reptilian tie left hanging from a locust branch were his. Gone also was the bouquet of roses which Ada had ordered to be put back into the boot of the Count’s car — better than waste them on her, let him give them, she said, to Blanche’s lovely sister.

And now Mlle Larivière clapped her hands to rouse from their siesta, Kim, the driver of her gig, and Trofim, the children’s fair-bearded coachman. Ada reclenched her boletes and all Percy could find for his Handkuss was a cold fist.

‘Jolly nice to have seen you, old boy,’ he said, tapping Van lightly on the shoulder, a forbidden gesture in their milieu. ‘Hope to play with you again soon. I wonder,’ he added in a lower voice, ‘if you shoot as straight as you wrestle.’

Van followed him to the convertible.

‘Van, Van come here, Greg wants to say good-bye,’ cried Ada, but he did not turn.

‘Is that a challenge, me faites-vous un duel?’ inquired Van.

Percy, at the wheel, smiled, slit his eyes, bent toward the dashboard, smiled again, but said nothing. Click-click went the motor, then broke into thunder and Percy drew on his gloves.

‘Quand tu voudras, mon gars,’ said Van, slapping the fender and using the terrible second person singular of duelists in old France.

The car leapt forward and disappeared.

Van returned to the picnic ground, his heart stupidly thumping; he waved in passing to Greg who was talking to Ada a little way off on the road.

‘Really, I assure you,’ Greg was saying to her, ‘your cousin is not to blame. Percy started it — and was defeated in a clean match of Korotom wrestling, as used in Teristan and Sorokat — my father, I’m sure, could tell you all about it.’

‘You’re a dear,’ answered Ada, ‘but I don’t think your brain works too well.’

‘It never does in your presence,’ remarked Greg, and mounted his black silent steed, hating it, and himself, and the two bullies.