The man signed to him that they should lift Griselda between them; he obeyed with infinite difficulty, panting at the effort, and together they carried her some yards down the street to a cart that stood pulled up and waiting—a long, most un-English-looking country cart with a man perched in front and inside two women, many bundles, some ducks and a goat. One of the women was shrivelled and helpless with years; her head in a handkerchief and her gnarled fingers holding to her knees, she sat huddled against the protesting goat, a lump of bent, blear-eyed old age. Her companion in discomfort—possibly her daughter—was a stout, elderly peasant woman, the counterpart in petticoats of the grizzled-haired man who guided a solid grey farmhorse. She made room for Griselda, talking rapidly the while, in the straw at the bottom of the cart—thrusting ducks and bundles to one side of the vehicle with her knotted and energetic hands; perhaps she was striving to explain to William that it was impossible to accommodate another passenger and that he must follow on foot. She may have been friend or acquaintance of the dirty Samaritan, for, as the cart moved off at a foot’s pace, she waved to him in friendly guise; the dirty Samaritan, for his part, clapping William on the back, pointing after the cart and showing his teeth in a final grin of encouragement. In the days that followed William often regretted that he had not known how to thank him for the bounty of his overflowing charity.
He walked after the cart as it lumbered through the village and out of it. Nourishment and the sense of relief had given back some of his strength; thus he was able, if with difficulty, to keep up with the plodding of the solid grey farmhorse—often brought to a standstill, moreover, by the traffic that cumbered the road. Sometimes the standstill was a long one, accompanied by confusion and shouting; there was a point where a stream of fugitives flowing southward met reinforcements hurrying north—and a flock of panic-stricken sheep, caught between the two, charged backwards and forwards, to the yells of their sweating drivers and the anger of a captain of cavalry. At almost every crossroads the stream was swollen by a fresh rivulet of fugitives—refugees human and animal; thus at such junctions the pace was slower and a halt frequently called for. When it came William dropped down with thankfulness; sometimes lying torpid till the cart moved on, sometimes satisfying hunger and quenching thirst with fruit from the regiments of orchard trees that lined the sides of the road.
The stout peasant woman was more kindly than a hard face promised. She was careful and troubled about many things—the old wreck of humanity, her livestock, the safety of herself and her bundles—and she had lost her home and her livelihood; but she found time to think of Griselda and do what she could for her. She arranged her straw pillow, wiped the dust from her face, and from time to time raised her that she might hold a cup to her lips. Somewhere about midday she attended to the general needs; the cart was halted and she doled out a ration all round—hunks of bread chopped from a yard of loaf and portions of a half-liquid cheese. William was not forgotten, and shared with the rest of the party; they ate with the cart drawn up in a field a little way from the road; the horse grazing, the goat tethered to one of the wheels, the peasants and William sitting on the ground and Griselda lying in her straw. William climbed up beside her and coaxed a little wine between her lips; she had swallowed hardly a mouthful when she turned her head aside and pushed the mug feebly away. He was not sure if she responded when he spoke to her and stroked her hand; she muttered once or twice but it was only a sound to his ears. For a moment—perhaps it was the raw, red wine that had mounted to his head—there came over him a sort of irritation at her long and persistent silence. She must know what it meant to see her suffer and have no word; he felt she might have tried to rouse herself to the extent of one little smile of comfort.
The afternoon was as the morning—a weary journeying whereof he knew not the goal. The grey horse plodded, the women sat hunched amid their bundles, and William tramped on his blistered feet at the tail of the creaking cart; when he looked ahead the road, as far as his eye could reach, was dotted with fugitive tramps and fugitive vehicles—and when he looked back there were others following in their tracks. For the most part, however, he looked neither back nor forward but trudged with his eyes on the ground through the whitened grass at the roadside. No rain had fallen for many days and the road was deep in dust; it hung heavy in the air and when a car
