a few; then
sleep. How was he come here? Some woman had sent him. Ever so many years
ago, some woman. He forgave her. There was nothing to forgive her. It
was the gods who had sent him--too soon, too soon. He let his arms rise
in the water, and he floated up. There was air in that over-world, and
something he needed to know there before he came down again to sleep.

He gasped the air into his lungs, and he remembered what it was that he
needed to know.

Had he risen in mid-stream, the keel of the Magdalen boat might have
killed him. The oars of Magdalen did all but graze his face. The eyes of
the Magdalen cox met his. The cords of the Magdalen rudder slipped from
the hands that held them; whereupon the Magdalen man who rowed "bow"
missed his stroke.

An instant later, just where the line of barges begins, Judas had bumped
Magdalen.

A crash of thunder deadened the din of the stamping and dancing crowd on
the towing-path. The rain was a deluge making land and water as one.

And the conquered crew, and the conquering, both now had seen the face
of the Duke. A white smiling face, anon it was gone. Dorset was gone
down to his last sleep.

Victory and defeat alike forgotten, the crews staggered erect and flung
themselves into the river, the slender boats capsizing and spinning
futile around in a melley of oars.

From the towing-path--no more din there now, but great single cries
of "Zuleika!"--leapt figures innumerable through rain to river. The
arrested boats of the other crews drifted zigzag hither and thither. The
dropped oars rocked and clashed, sank and rebounded, as the men plunged
across them into the swirling stream.

And over all this confusion and concussion of men and man-made things
crashed the vaster discords of the heavens; and the waters of the
heavens fell ever denser and denser, as though to the aid of waters that
could not in themselves envelop so many hundreds of struggling human
forms.

All along the soaked towing-path lay strewn the horns, the rattles, the
motor-hooters, that the youths had flung aside before they leapt. Here
and there among these relics stood dazed elder men, staring through the
storm. There was one of them--a grey-beard--who stripped off his blazer,
plunged, grabbed at some live man, grappled him, was dragged under. He
came up again further along stream, swam choking to the bank, clung to
the grasses. He whimpered as he sought foot-hold in the slime. It was
ill to be down