“You are not listening, only watching,” I blamed him.
His lips moved; he glanced away. Yet I had already foreseen the conflict awaiting me. And all his arguments and entreaties that I should throw over the showman, and drive straight on with him into the gathering evening towards Wanderslore, were in vain.
“Look,” he said, as if for straw to break the camel’s back, and drew out by its ribbon my Bowater latchkey.
“No,” said I, “not even that. I sleep out tonight.” And surely, surely I kept repeating, he must understand. How could I possibly be at rest with a broken promise? What cared I now for what was past and gone? Think what a joy, what sheer fun it would be to face Mrs. Monnerie for the last time, and she unaware of it! Nothing, nothing could amuse her more when she hears of it. He should come and see; hear the crowd yell. He mustn’t be so solemn about things. “Do try and see the humour of it,” I besought him.
But the money—that little incentive—I kept to myself.
He stared heavily into the silvery copse that bordered the track. Motionless in their bright, withering leaves, its trees hung down their tasselled branches beneath the darkening sky. Then, much against his will, he turned his pony towards the high road. The wheel gridded on a stone, he raised his whip.
“Hst!” I whispered, clutching at the arm that held the rein. Crouching low, we watched the great Monnerie carriage, with its stiff-necked, blinkered, stepping greys and gleaming lamps sweep by.
“There,” I laughed up at him, lifting myself, one hand upon his knee, “there but for the Grace of God goes Miss M.”
The queer creature frowned into my smiling face and flicked the pony with his whip. “And here,” he muttered moodily, “who knows but by the Grace of God go I?”
Anxiety gone now, and responsibility but a light thing, my tongue rattled on quite as noisily as the cart. Kent’s rich cornfields were around us, their stubble a pale washed-out gold in the last light of evening. Here and there on the hills a row or two of ungarnered stooks stood solemnly carved out against the sky. Most of the hop-gardens, too, had been dismantled, though a few we passed, with their slow-twirling dusky vistas and labyrinths, were still wreathed with bines. Their scent drifted headily on the stillness. And as with eyes peeping over the edge of the cart I watched these beloved, homelike hills and fields and orchards glide by, I shrilled joyfully at my companion every thought and fancy that came into my head, many of them, no doubt, recent deposits from the library at No. 2.
I told him, I remember, how tired I was of the pernicketiness of my life; and amused him with a description of my Tank. “You would hardly believe it, but I have never once heard the least faint whisper of water in it, and if I had been a nice, simple savage, I dare say I should have prayed to it. Instead of which, when one night I saw a star over the housetop I merely shrugged my shoulders. My mind was so rancid I hated it. I was so shut in; that’s what it was.”
He stroked the little, thick-coated horse with the lash of his whip, and smiled round at me.
On I went. Shouldn’t life be a High Road, didn’t he think; surely not a hot, silly zigzag of shortcuts leading back to the place you started from, and you too old or stupid, perhaps, to begin again? Didn’t he hunger, too, to see the great things of the world, the ruins of Babylon, the Wall of China, the Himalayas, and the Pyramids—at night—black; and sand?
“My ghost!” said I, had he ever thought of the enormous solitudes of the Sahara, or those remote places where gigantic images stare blindly through the centuries at the stars—their builders just a pinch of dust? Some day, I promised him out of the abandonment of my heart, we would sail away, he and I, to his Pygmy Land. Surf and snow and singing sand-dunes, and fruits on the trees and birds in the air: we would live—“Oh, happy as all this!” (and I swept my hands across hill and dale), “ever, ever afterwards. As they do, Mr. Anon, in those absurd, incredible fairytales, you know.”
He smiled again, cast a look into the distance, touched my hand.
Perhaps he was wishing the while that that piercing, pining voice of mine would keep silence, so that my presence might not disturb his own brooding thoughts. I could only guess at pleasing him. Yet I felt, still feel, that he was glad of my company and never for a moment sorry we had met.
LI
But our brief hour was drawing to an end. We were now passing little groups of country people and children in the quiet evening. We ourselves talked no more. The old pony plodded up yet another hill; we went clattering down its deep descent; and there, in the green bowl of a meadow sloping down from its woody fringes above, lay scattered the bellying booths, the gaudy wagons and cages of the circus. All but hidden in the trees above them, a crooked, tarnished weathercock glinted in the sunset afterglow. Lights twinkled against the dying daylight. The bright-painted merry-go-round with its staring, motionless, galloping horses was bathed in the shine of its flares, a thin plume of steam softly ascending from its brass-rimmed funnel.
A knot of country boys, gabbling at one another like starlings, shrilled a cheer as we came rattling over a stone bridge beneath which a stream shallowly washed its bank of osiers. I laughed at them, waved my hand. At this they yelled, danced in the road, threw dust into the air. Not, perhaps, a very friendly return; but how happy
