'Ah, yell with that tea stuff. Listen, you come up to the house?'
'You'd best not go to tea, Martin,' said his sister; 'and, please, no more to drink. I wouldn't care, but you know why.'
Martin looked at her. 'I'm going to tea,' he said, sticking out his neck, 'and, what's more, I'm going_ to have another little drink. Come on, Bert.'
He had forgotten Rampole, for which the American was grateful. He adjusted his hat. He brushed his arms and shoulders, though there was no dust on him, and straightened up, clearing his throat. As the stolid Herbert guided him on, Dorothy whispered: 'Don't let him go there, and see that he's all right by dinner-time. Do you hear?'
Martin heard it, too. He turned, put his head on one side; and folded his arms.
'You think I'm drunk, don't you?' he demanded, studying her.
'Please, Martin!'
'Well, I'll show you whether I'm drunk or not! Come on, Bert.'
Rampole quickened his step beside the girl as they moved off the other way. As they turned a bend in the road he could hear the cousins arguing, Herbert in a low voice, and Martin vociferously, his hat pulled down on his eyebrows.
For a time they walked in silence. That momentary encounter had jarred against the fragrance of the hedgerows, but it was swept away by the wind over the grass in the meadows that surrounded them. The sky was watery yellow, luminous as glass, along the west; firs stood up black against it, and even the low bog water had lights of gold.
Here were the lowlands, sloping up into wolds; and from a distance the flocks of white-faced sheep looked like toys out of a child's Noah's ark.
'You mustn't think,' the girl-said, looking straight ahead of her and speaking very low — 'you mustn't think he's always like that. He isn't. But just now there's so much on his mind, and he tries to conceal it by drinking, and it comes out in bravado.'
'I knew there was a lot on his mind. You can't blame him.' '
'Dr. Fell told you?'
'A little. He said it was no secret.'
She clenched her hands. 'Oh no. That's the worst of it. It's no secret. Everybody knows, and they all turn their heads away. You're alone with it, do you see? They can't talk about it in public; it isn't done. They can't talk about it to me. And I can't mention it either… '
A pause. Then she turned to him almost fiercely.
'You say you understand, and it's nice of you; but you don't! Growing up with the thing… I remember, when Martin and I were tiny children, mother holding us each up to the window so that we could see the prison. She's dead now, you know. And father.'
He said, gently, 'Don't you think you're making too much of a legend?'
'I told you — you wouldn't understand.'
Her voice was dry and monotonous, and he felt a stab. He was conscious of searching desperately for words, feeling his inadequacy every time he found one; yet groping after a common point with her, as he might have groped after a lamp in a haunted room.
'I'm not intelligent about practical things,' he said, blankly. 'When I get away from books or football, and up against the world, I'm just mixed up. But I think that, whatever you told me, I would understand it, provided it concerned you.'
Across the lowlands drifted a clangor of bells. A slow, sad, ancient clangor, which-swung in the air and was a part of it. Far ahead, the church-spire among the oaks caught the last light. Birds twittered into flight from its belfry as the bell notes clashed with iron weariness, and a rook was cawing. They had stopped by a stone bridge over a broad stream. Dorothy Starberth turned and looked at him.
'If you can say that,' she said, 'it's all I could ask.'
Her lips moved slowly, with a faint smile, and the breeze was smoothing her dark hair.
'I hate practicality,' she went on, with sudden vehemence. 'I've had to be practical ever since father died.
Herbert's a good old dependable horse, with about as much imagination as that hayrick over there. And there's Mrs. Colonel Granby, and Leutitia Markley, and Mrs. Payne who uses the ouija board, and Miss Porterson who almost gets round to reading the new books. There's Wilfrid Denim, who comes to pay me attentions every Thursday night at nine P.M. precisely, runs out of new conversational matter at nine five, and continues to talk about a play he saw in London three years ago, or else illustrates tennis strokes till you think he's jolly well got St. Vitus' dance. Oh yes — and Mr. Saunders. St. George for Merrie England, and if Harrow beats Eton this year the country's in the hands of the Socialists. Woof!'
She wound up breathlessly, again shaking her head with vehemence until she had to smooth back the cloudy hair. Then she smiled, rather shame-facedly. 'I don't know what you'll think of me for talking like this?'
'I think you're absolutely right!' Rampole returned, enthusiastically. He had particularly relished that crack about Mr. Saunders. 'Down with ouija boards. A bas le tennis. I hope Harrow knocks Eton for a row of brick-ahem! What I mean to say is, you're absolutely right and long live Socialism.'
'I didn't say anything about Socialism.'
'Well, say something about it, then,' he offered, magnanimously. 'Go on, say something about it. Hurrah for Norman Thomas! God bless?'
'But why, silly? Why?'
'Because Mr. Saunders wouldn't like it,' explained Rampole. The thesis seemed to him a good one, if vague. But another idea struck him, and he inquired, suspiciously: 'Who is this Wilfrid person who comes round to see you every Thursday night? 'Wilfrid' is a lousy name, anyway. It sounds like somebody with marcelled hair.'
She slid off the coping of the bridge, and she seemed somehow set free in the strength of her small body laughter-real and swashbuckling, as he had heard it the night before-had got out of its prison, too.
'I say! We'll never get those cigarettes if we don't hurry… I feel the way you talk. D'you want to run for it? But take it easy; it's a quarter of a mile.'
Rampole said, 'What ho!' and they clipped out past the hayricks with the wind in their faces, and Dorothy Starberth was still laughing.
'I hope I meet Mrs. Colonel Granby,' she said, breathlessy. She seemed to think this a wicked idea, and turned a flushed face over her shoulder, eyes dancing. 'It's nice, it's nice.- Ugh! I'm glad I have on low-heeled shoes.'
'Want to speed it up?'
'Beast! I'm warm already. I say, are you a track man?' 'Hmf. A little.'
A little. Through his brain ran white letters on black boards, in a dusky room off the campus, where there were silver cups in glass cases and embalmed footballs with dates painted on them. Then, with the road flying past, he remembered another scene of just such an exhilaration as he felt now. November, with a surf of sound beating, the rasp of breathing, and the quarterback declaiming signals like a ham actor. Thick headache. Little wires in his legs drawn tight, and cold fingers without feeling in them. Then the wheeze and buckle of the line, and thuds. Suddenly the cold air streaming in his face, a sensation of flying over white lines on legs wired like a puppet's, and a muddy object he plucked out of the air just under the goal-posts… He heard again that stupefying roar, and felt his stomach opening and shutting as the roar lifted the dusky air like a lid off a kettle. That had been only last autumn, and it seemed a thousand years ago. Here he was on a weirder adventure in the twilight, with a girl whose very presence was like the tingle of those lost, roaring thousand years.
'A little,' he repeated, suddenly, drawing a deep breath.
They were into the outskirts of the village, where thick waisted trees shaded white shop-fronts, and the bricks of the sidewalks ran in crooked patterns like a child's writing exercise. A woman stopped to look at them. A man on a bicycle goggled so much that he ran into the ditch and swore.
Leaning up against a tree, flushed and panting, Dorothy laughed.
'I've had enough of your silly game,' she said, her eyes very bright. 'But, O Lord! I feel better!'
From the furious excitement which had possessed them, neither knowing why, they passed to deep contentment and became carefully decorous. They got the cigarettes, the tobacconist explaining as 'ow he had
