ldn't be here.' I started to tell you why my people thought I had
better take the cure. I loved the moon too much and loathed sunlight. If
I had never tried to write lunar poetry--the tone quality of music
combined with the pictorial evocation of painting--I might be in the
bosom of my family now instead of--"

"Drinking with a crazy painter, eh?" Quell was very angry. He shouted
for drinks so rapidly that he alarmed the more prudent Arved; and as
they were now the last guests, the head waiter approached and curtly
bade them leave. In an instant he was dripping with beer thrown at
him--glass and all--by the irate Quell. A whistle sounded, two other
waiters rushed out, and the battle began. Arved, aroused by the sight of
his friend on the ground with three men hammering his head, gave a roar
like the trumpeting of an elephant. A chair was smashed over a table,
and, swinging one-half of it, he made a formidable onslaught. Two of the
waiters were knocked senseless and the leader's nose and teeth crushed
in by the rude cudgel. The morose moon started up, a tragic hieroglyph
in the passionless sky. Quell, seeing its hated disk, howled, his face
aflame with exaltation. Then he leaped like a hoarsely panting animal
upon the poet; a moment and they were in the grass clawing each other.
And the moon foamed down upon them its magnetic beams until darkness,
caused by a coarse blanket, enveloped, pinioned, smothered them. When
the light shone again, they were sitting in a wagon, their legs tightly
bound....

They began singing. The attendant interrupted:--

"Will you fellows keep quiet? How can a man drive straight, listening to
your cackle?"

Arved touched his temple significantly and nudged Quell.

"Another one of us. Another rebel of the moon!"

"Shut up or I'll gag you both!" imperiously commanded the doctor, as the
wheels of the ambulance cut the pebbly road. They were entering the
asylum; now they passed the porter's lodge. In the jewelled light of a
senescent moon, his wife and little daughter gazed at them curiously,
without semblance of pity or fear. Then, as if shot from the same vocal
spring-board, the voices of poet and painter merged into crazy
rhythmatic chanting:--

"Rebels of the moon, rebels of the moon! We are, we are, the rebels of
the moon!"

And the great gates closed behind them with a brazen clangour--metal
gates of the moon-rebels.

V

THE SPIRAL ROAD

There can be nothing good, as