But Nan laughed at their prognostications of such an end. “It will be found impossible to ride down these hills,” said their road book, and Nan laughed at that too. You can, as she observed, ride down anything; it is riding up that is the difficulty. Anyhow, she, who had ridden bucking horses and mountainous seas, could ride down anything that wore the semblance of a road. Only fools, Nan believed, met with disasters while bicycling. And jamming on the brakes was bad for the wheels and tiring to the hands. So brakeless, she zigzagged like greased lightning to the bottom.
It was on the second day, on the long hill that runs from Manaccan down to Helford Ferry, that Gerda suddenly took her brakes off and shot after her. That hill is not a badly spiralling one, but it is long and steep and usually ridden with brakes. And just above Helford village it has one very sharp turn to the left.
Nan, standing waiting for the others on the bridge, looked round and saw Gerda shooting with unrestrained wheels and composed face round the last bend. She had nearly swerved over at the turn, but not quite. She got off at the bridge.
“Hullo,” said Nan. “Quicker than usual, weren’t you?” She had a half-grudging, half-ironic grin of appreciation for a fellow sportsman, the same grin with which she had looked up at her from the sea at Cadgwith. Nan liked daring. Though it was in her, and she knew that it was in her, to hate Gerda with a cold and deadly anger, the sportsman in her gave its tribute. For what was nothing and a matter of ordinary routine to her, might be, she suspected, rather alarming to the quiet, white-faced child.
Then the demon of mischief leapt in her. If Gerda meant to keep the pace, she should have a pace worth keeping. They would prove to one another which was the better woman, as knights in single combat of old proved it, or fighters in the ring today. As to Barry, he should look on at it, whether he liked it or not.
Barry and Kay rushed up to them, and they went through the little thatched rose-sweet hamlet to the edge of the broad blue estuary and shouted for the ferry.
IV
After that the game began in earnest. Nan, from being casually and unconsciously reckless, became deliberately daredevil and always with a backward, ironic look for Gerda, as if she said “How about it? Will this beat you?”
“A bicycling tour with Nan isn’t nearly so safe as the front trenches of my youth used to be,” Barry commented. “Those quiet, comfortable old days!”
There, indeed, one was likely to be shot, or blown to pieces, or buried, or gassed, and that was about all. But life now was like the Apostle Paul’s; they were in journeyings often, in weariness often, in perils of waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud’s. She was, in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas, and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before retiring.
Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally, bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less.
Then Kay chanted “Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,” and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge, waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short, all the symptoms common to his kind.
So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry bull.
“You look out you don’t fall, Gerda,” Kay flung back at her over his shoulder. “It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody’ll save you; nobody’ll dare.”
“Feeling unsteady?” Barry’s gentler voice
