CHAPTER XXXVII
ADVENTURES
Three women with dusty shoes and brown faces came along under the Downs to Bignor village. They wore rough brown skirts, white blouses, and straw hats, and each carried a knapsack strapped over her shoulder.
Now Bignor is particularly and remotely beautiful, especially when you have left the flat country behind you and climbed up to the church by the winding lanes. It is pure country, almost uninvaded by modernity, and so old in the midst of its perennial youth that you might hardly wonder at meeting a Roman cohort on the march, or a bevy of bronze-haired British girls laughing and singing between the hedgerows. The village shop with its timber and thatch might be a wood-cut from a romance. The Downs rise up against the blue, and their solemn green slopes, over which the Roman highway climbs, seem to accentuate the sense of silence and of mystery. Great beech woods shut in steep, secret meadows. There are lush valleys where the grass grows tall, and flowers dream in the sunlight.
The three women came to Bignor church, and camped out in the churchyard to make their midday meal. Eve Carfax was one of them, brown, bright-eyed, with a red mouth that smiled mysteriously at beauty. Next to her sat Joan Gaunt, lean, strenuous, with Roman nose, and abrupt sharp-edged mouth. Her wrists and hands were big-boned and thin. The line of her blouse and skirt showed hardly a curve. She wore square-toed Oxford shoes, and very thick brown stockings. Lizzie Straker sat a little apart, restless even in repose, a pinched frown set permanently between her eyebrows, her assertive chin uptilted. She was the eloquent splutterer, a slim, mercurial woman with prominent blue eyes and a lax mouth, who protruded her lips when she spoke, and whose voice was a challenge.
Eve had wanted to turn aside to see the remains of the Roman villa, but her companions had dropped scorn on the suggestion.
“Wasting time on a few old bits of tesselated pavement! What have we got to do with the Romans? It’s the present that matters!”
Eve had suggested that one might learn something, even from the Romans, and the glitter of fun in her eyes had set Lizzie Straker declaiming.
“What tosh! And you call yourself an artist, and yet admire the Romans. Don’t you know that artists were slaves at Rome? Don’t ask me to consider any society that subsisted on slavery. It’s dead; doesn’t come into one’s line of vision. I call archæology the most abominable dilettante rot that was ever invented to make some old gentlemen bigger bores than their neighbours.”
And so she had spluttered on all the way to Bignor church, working her voluble mouth, and punching the air with a small brown fist. The eloquence was still in her when she opened her packet of sandwiches, and her energy divided itself between declamation and disposing of mouthfuls of bread and ham.
Eve sat looking countrywards, thinking, “Oh, do be quiet!” She wanted to lose herself in the beauty of the landscape, and she was in a mood to be delighted by a fern growing in a wall, or by the way the fresh green of a tree caught the sunlight. For the moment her spirit escaped and climbed up among the branches of an old yew, and fluttered there in the sparkling gloom, while Lizzie Straker kept up her caterwauling below.
They had been on the open road for a fortnight, and Lizzie Straker still had the autumn tints of a black eye that an apple thrown in a Sussex village had given her. They had been hustled and chased on two occasions, Joan Gaunt coming in for most of the eggs and flour, perhaps because of her fierce leathery face and her defiant manner. Eve had recollections of cleaning herself in a station waiting-room, while a sergeant and two constables guarded the door. And, strange to say, some of her sympathies had been with the crowd.
These three women had tramped and suffered together, yet each day only emphasised Eve’s discovery that she was failing to tone with her companions. They had begun by boring her, and they were beginning to exasperate her, rousing a spirit of antagonism that was ready to criticise them without mercy. Never in her life had Eve been in the presence of two such masses of ferocious prejudice. Their attitude towards the country was in complete contrast to hers. They were two blind fanatics on a pilgrimage, while Eve was a wayfarer whose eyes and ears and nostrils were open to Nature. Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker lived for words, bundles of phrases, arguments, assertions, accusations. They were two polemical pamphlets on legs sent out walking over God’s green earth.
Eve noticed that their senses were less alive than hers, and that they were absurdly unobservant. Perhaps they had passed a cottage garden full of wallflowers, blood red and gold, and Eve had asked, “Did you smell them?”
“Smell what?”
“The flowers.”
“What flowers?”
“The wallflowers in that garden.”
They had neither seen nor smelt anything, and they had looked at her as though she were a sentimental trifler.
On another occasion, an orchard in bloom, filling a green hollow between two woods, had made Eve stand gazing.
“Isn’t that perfect?”
Lizzie Straker saw nothing but what her mad prejudices were allowing her to see.
“I should like to come along with an axe and chop down all those trees. It would make quite a good protest.”
Eve had felt satirical.
“Why shouldn’t we blow up Chanctonbury Ring?”
And they had taken her seriously.
“We should want such a lot of dynamite.”
“But it’s an idea, quite an idea.”
At the small town of Battle they had thirsted to blow up the great abbey gateway, while Eve was letting her eyes take in all the grey beauty of the stonework warmed by the evening sunlight. These two women had “a mad” against property. Protest by violence wasbecoming an obsession with them. They were like hostile troops marching through a rich and hated land.
Now, from the very first day in the country, a change had come over Eve. A crust of hardness seemed to have fallen from her, and once more she had felt herself to be the possessor of an impressionable and glowing body, whose skin and senses responded to the sunlight, the winds, the colours and the scent of the earth. She no longer felt like a little pricking thorn in the big body of life. She belonged to the earth. She was in the apple blossom and in the red flare of a bed of tulips. Self was no longer dissevered from the all-consciousness of the life round her. The tenderness came back to her, all those mysterious, elusive and exultant moods that came she knew not whence and went she knew not whither. She had ceased to be a pathological specimen corked up in a bottle, and had become part of the colour and the smell, the joy and the pathos of things vital.
In the fields Eve saw lambs at play, skipping absurdly, butting each other. Birds were singing and making love, and the bees were busy in the furze. A sense of the immensity, of the exultant rush of life, possessed her. And this pilgrimage of theirs, all this spouting and declaiming, this lean-necked heroism, seemed futile and rather ridiculous. Was one to tell Nature that she must stand aside, and order youth not to look into the eyes of youth? It might serve for the few. They were like children making castles and dykes and rivulets on the sands, within the reach of the sea. Eve imagined that Nature must be amused, but that she would wipe out these eccentricities so soon as they began to bore her. She felt herself in the midst of elemental things; whereas Joan Gaunt had studied botany in a museum.
That afternoon they marched on to Pulborough, and, entering an inn, announced to the landlord that they intended staying for the night. Joan Gaunt managed the practical side of the pilgrimage. She entered the inn with the air of an officer commanding food and beds in time of war.
“Three bedrooms, and a cold supper at nine!”
The landlord was a Sussex man, short, stolid, and laconic. He looked at Joan Gaunt out of staring blue eyes, and asked whether their luggage had been left at the station.
“We have not got any luggage. We are on a walking tour. You can give us our tea in the garden.”
Joan Gaunt did not hear what the landlord said to his wife, who was cleaning table-silver in a pantry at the end of a long passage. It was terse and unflattering, and included such phrases as, “Three tooth brushes and a change of stockings.” “A scrag of mutton without so much as a frill to the bone end.”
The three comrades had tea in the garden, and were studied suspiciously by the landlord’s wife, a comely little woman with bright, brown eyes. The few words that she uttered were addressed to Eve.
“A nice May we’re having!”
“Splendid.”
And then Joan Gaunt proceeded to make an implacable enemy of her by telling her to see that the beds were properly aired.
About seven o’clock Pulborough discovered that it had been invaded by suffragettes. Three women had stationed themselves with their backs to a wall at a place where three roads met, and one of the women—it was Lizzie Straker—brandished a small flag. Pulborough gathered. The news spread somehow even to the outlying cottages. Stale eggs are to be found even in the country, and a certain number of stale eggs rushed to attend the meeting.
Lizzie Straker was the speaker, and the people of Pulborough appeared to discover something intensely funny in Lizzie Straker. Her enthusiastic and earnest spluttering tickled them. The more she frowned and punched the air with that brown fist of hers, the more amusing they found her. The Executive had not been wise in its choice of an itinerant orator, for Lizzie Straker lost her temper very quickly on such occasions, and growing venomous, began to say scathing things, things that even a Sussex brain can understand.
Some of the younger spirits began to jeer.
“Do you wonder she be’unt married!”
“Can’t she talk! Like a kettle a-boiling over!”
“What’s she wanting a vote for?”
“I’ll tell you for why; to have laws made so as all the pretty girls shall be sent off to Canada.”
Their humour was hardly less crude than Lizzie Straker’s sneering superiority. And then an egg flew, and broke against the wall behind Joan Gaunt’s head. The crowd closed in threateningly. The flag was snatched from Lizzie Straker, and someone threw a dead mouse in Joan Gaunt’s face.
The retreat to the inn was not dignified. The rest of the eggs followed them, but for some reason or other Eve was spared. Her two comrades came in for all the honour. The crowd accompanied them to the inn, and found the blue-eyed landlord standing in the doorway.
“Chuck ’em out, Mister Crowhurst!”
“We don’t want the likes of them in Pulborough!”
Joan Gaunt was for pushing her way in, and the landlord gave way. He said a few words to the crowd, shut the door, and followed the suffragettes into the long passage.
“Sorry, ladies, but you’ll have to turn out. I can’t keep you. It isn’t safe.”
Lizzie Straker’s claws were still out.
“But you have got to. You keep a public house. It’s the law!”
A voice chimed in from the end of the passage:
“John, I won’t have those women in my house! No, I won’t; that’s a fact. They’ve got neither sense nor manners.”
“All right, my dear.”
“If I had my way, I’d have them all put in asylums. Disgusting fools. I don’t care; let them summon us. I won’t have them in my house.”
Joan Gaunt tried her Roman manner.
“I shall insist on staying. Where are the police?”
“That’s right, call for the men.”
“Where are the police?”
The landlord grinned.
“Can’t say. I’ll take you out the back way, and through the orchard into the fields. It’s getting dark.”
“But we are not going.”
“I shall let the crowd in, ladies, in three minutes. That’s all I have got to say.”
Eve ran upstairs and brought down the three knapsacks.
“Let’s go,” she said, “we’re causing a lot of bother.”
“That’s the only sensible one of the lot,” said the voice, “and what’s more, she’s worth looking at.”
The crowd was growing restive and noisy. There was the sound of breaking glass. The landlord jerked a thumb in the direction of the front door.
“There you are—they’re getting nasty. You come along with me!”
They went under protest, with the exception of Eve, who paused at the end of the passage and spoke to the little woman with the brown eyes.
“I’m sorry. I’ll send some money for the glass. And what do we owe for the tea?”
“Three shillings, miss. Thank you. And what do you do it for?”
Eve laughed.
“Oh, well, you see——”
“I wouldn’t go along with those scrags, if I were you. It’s silly!”
The little woman had pluck, for she went out to cajole the crowd, and kept it in play while her husband smuggled the suffragettes through the garden and orchard and away across the fields. They escaped unmolested, and the dusk covered their retreat.
After the landlord had left them they walked about three miles and lost themselves completely and thoroughly in a net-work of by-roads. Shelter for the night became a consideration, and it was Eve who sighted a haystack in the corner of a field, and who suggested it as a refuge. They scrambled over a gate and found that the haystack had been cut into, and that there was a deep fragrant walled recess sheltered from the road.
Lizzie Straker began to pull down some loose hay and spread it to make a cushion.
“We must teach those savages a lesson. We ought to set fire to this in the early morning.”
Eve was tired of Lizzie Straker.
“I don’t think that would be sport, burning the thing that has sheltered you.”
The hay was fragrant, but it could not mask the odour that had attached itself to her companions’ clothes. Eve had been spared the rotten eggs, but she was made to suffer indirectly, and persuaded to edge away into the corner of the recess. They had had to fly without their supper, and a few dry rock-cakes and some biscuits were all that they had in their knapsacks.
Lizzie Straker produced a candle-end and a box of matches. It was a windless night, and by the light of the candle the two women examined each other’s scars.
“We might get some of it off with the hay.”
“Isn’t it disgusting! And no water to wash in.”
They proceeded to rub each other down, taking turns in holding the candle.
Eve had a suggestion to make.
“You will have to get some new blouses at the next town. I shall have to go in and shop for you.”
They glanced at her critically, realising for the first time that she had escaped without any of the marks of martyrdom.
“Didn’t you get any?”
“No; you seem to have been the favourites.”
“Disgusting savages!”
“The Sussex people always were the worst boors in England.”
When they had made some sort of job of their mutual grooming, and had eaten a few rock-cakes and biscuits, Joan Gaunt unbuttoned her blouse and drew from the inner depths a long white envelope. Lizzie Straker sidled nearer, still holding the candle. Eve had not seen this envelope before.
She stood up and looked down over their shoulders as they sat. Joan Gaunt had drawn out a sheet of foolscap that was covered with cipher.
Lizzie Straker pointed an eager finger.
“That’s the place. It’s between Horsham and Guildford.”
“And there’s no proper caretaker, only a man at the lodge.”
“We can make a blaze of it. We shall hear from Galahad at Horsham.”
They were human enough to feel a retaliating vindictiveness, after the way they had been pelted at Pulborough, and Eve, looking down at the paper that Joan Gaunt held, realised at last that they were incendiaries as well as preachers. She could not read the precious document, but she guessed what it contained.
“Is that our Black List?”
“Yes.”
They did not offer to explain the cipher to her, for she was still something of a probationer. Moreover the candle was guttering out, and Lizzie Straker had to smother it in the grass beside the stack. Eve returned to her corner, made a nest, took off her hat, and, turning her knapsack into a pillow, lay down to look at the stars. A long day in the open had made her sleepy, but Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker were still talking. Eve fell asleep, with the vindictive and conspiring murmur of their voices in her ears.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE MAN WITH THE MOTOR
Eve woke with the scent of hay in her nostrils, and her hair was damp with dew.
She sat up, and from that brown nook on the hill-side looked out upon a world that was all white mist, with a great silver sun struggling out of the east. Each blade of grass had its droplet of dew. The air was still as deep water. From a wood in the valley came the sound of the singing of birds.
Her two companions were still asleep, Joan Gaunt lying with her mouth wide open, her face looking grey and old. Eve picked up an armful of hay, went a few paces forward, and sat down so that she could see everything without having to look over the bodies of the sleeping women.
It was like watching the birth of a world. The veil of white mist hid miraculous happenings, and the singing of the birds down yonder was like the exultation of souls that beheld and marvelled. Mystery! The stillness seemed to wait. In a little while the white veil would be withdrawn.
Then the vapour became full of sudden motion. It rolled in great drifts, rose, broke into little wisps of smoke, and half lost itself in yellow light. The interplay was wonderful to watch. Sometimes the mist closed in again, hiding what it had half revealed, only to drift away once more like torn masses of gossamer. A great yellow ray of sunlight struck abruptly across the valley, fell upon the wood where the birds were singing, and splashed it with gold. Then the mist seemed to be drawn up like a curtain. Colour came into the landscape, the bronze and yellow of the budding oaks, the delicate green of young beech leaves, the sables of yews and firs, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields. It was all wet, fragrant, glittering, like an elf world lifted suddenly out of the waters of an enchanted sea.
Someone sneezed. Eve turned sharply, and found Joan Gaunt was awake, and sitting up. Wisps of hay had got tangled in her hair, her blouse looked like an impressionist sunset, and one side of her face was red and mottled from lying on the canvas knapsack. She had been awake for ten minutes, and had pulled out a notebook and was scribbling in it with a pencil.
Eve thought that she was turning the May morning into a word picture, but she soon noticed that Joan Gaunt’s eyes did not rise above the level of her notebook.
“Busy already?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t it wonderful?”
“What?”
“Why, all that.”
Eve swept a hand towards the valley where the smoking squadrons of the mist were in full flight before the gold spears of the sun.
“It looks as though it has been abominably damp. I’m quite stiff and I’ve caught cold.”
She blew her nose hard, and, like the impervious enthusiast that she was, resumed her scribbling. Eve left her undisturbed, and returning to her corner of the recess let her hair down, and spent ten minutes brushing it. She had very fine hair, it reached well below her waist, and Lizzie Straker, who had just woke up, found something to say on the subject.
“It must be a nuisance, having a fleece like that.”
“Why?”
“So beastly hot. I should like to have mine cut quite short.”
The obvious answer, though Eve did not give it, was that some people’s hair did not matter.
She went exploring in quest of somebody who would provide them with towels and water, and also with breakfast. And when they did get breakfast at a little farmhouse over the hill, her companions had to thank Eve for it, for the farmer’s wife was not a persuadable person, and would certainly have refused anything to Joan Gaunt or Lizzie Straker. Their white blouses were splashed and streaked with yellow, but luckily the sitting-room was rather dark, and the farmer’s wife was not observant.
But Eve had seen these blouses in the full sunlight, and was candid in her criticism.
“You must stop at the next village, and buy a couple of new blouses!”
“Why, what does it matter?”
Lizzie Straker was in a touchy and argumentative mood.
“They really look too terrible!”
“I don’t care. It is a reflection on those savages.”
“I suppose you don’t want to be too conspicuous when you are out to burn houses!”
This was sound sense, and they halted that day within a mile or two of Horsham and let Eve go on alone to buy two new blouses. The transfiguration was contrived in the corner of a wood, and the egg-stained relics were rolled up and stowed away in their knapsacks.
Apparently they were expected at Horsham, not by the public or the police, but by the elderly gentlewoman at whose front door Joan Gaunt knocked. They were received with enthusiasm by an excitable lady with a high, narrow forehead and prominent teeth. She could talk nearly as fast as Lizzie Straker, and she gave them a most excellent tea.
“I think it is splendid, perfectly splendid, this heroic uprising of the women of England. The Government can’t stop us. How can they stop us? We have got the men stalemated.”
Eve did not take to her hostess, and their hostess did not take to Eve. She looked at her with the veiled prejudices of a very plain woman for a girl who had more than good looks. Moreover, Eve had recovered her sense of humour, and these enthusiasts were rendered suspicious and uneasy by a glimmer of fun in the eyes. People who could laugh were not vindictively and properly in earnest.
“They can’t stop us. They can’t crush women who are not afraid of dying! Isn’t it glorious the way those noble girls have fought and refused to eat in prison? I know one woman who kept four wardresses at bay for half an hour. She kicked and struggled, and they had to give up trying to feed her. What fools we are making the men look! I feel I want to laugh in the faces of all the men I meet!”
Eve asked mildly: “And do you?”
“Do what?”
“Laugh when you meet them?”
“Well, no, not quite. It wouldn’t be dignified, would it? But I think they see the triumph in my eyes.”
Their hostess had forgotten that a letter had come for Joan Gaunt, and she only remembered it when Joan asked if it had arrived.
“Of course—how silly of me! I locked it up in my bureau. I was so fascinated listening to all your adventures.”
She fetched the letter, and Joan Gaunt read it. She smiled her leathery smile, and passed the letter over to Lizzie Straker.
“To-morrow night, where the road to Godalming branches off from the Horsham-Guildford road.”
The hostess thrilled and upset her cup.
“How exciting—how splendid! I can guess, yes, what you are going to do. And you will be able to stay the night here? How nice. The people here are such barbarians; so narrow. I try to spread the great ideal, but they don’t seem to care.”
At all events she treated them nobly, and Eve was able to enjoy the sensuous delight of a good hot bath. She went to bed early, leaving her hostess and the two pioneers of progress sitting well forward in their chairs, and debating the conversion of those women who clung sentimentally to the old traditions.
Their hostess was curious about Eve.
“A probationer, a novice, I suppose?”
“She is learning the discipline.”
“I have very quick instincts. I don’t think I quite trust that young woman.”
Lizzie Straker, who was always ready to argue about anything, simply because she had a temperament that disagreed, rushed to defend Eve.
“Why, what’s the matter with her? She came down to starving point, anyhow, for a principle. If that isn’t being sincere, what is?”
Their hostess was not accustomed to being met and attacked with such impetuosity.
“She doesn’t strike me as belonging to us.”
“Why not?”
“As I explained, it was my impression. She doesn’t strike me as being serious minded.”
“Anyway, she didn’t sit in a chair and theorise. She’s been through the real thing.”
Joan Gaunt had to interpose, for the gentlewoman of Horsham was showing signs of huffiness.
“Mrs. Falconer sent her with us.”
“Mrs. Falconer? That noble woman. I am satisfied. She should know.”
They left Horsham about five o’clock the following evening, their knapsacks well packed with food. The gentlewoman of Horsham dismissed them with the fervour of an early Christian, and held Joan Gaunt’s hands for fully half a minute.
“It has been such an experience for me. It has been like seeing one’s dearest ideals in the flesh. God bless you!”
Joan Gaunt went striding along the Guildford road like a veteran centurion, grim and purposeful. Lizzie Straker had a headache, and Eve offered to carry her knapsack and coat, but Lizzie Straker had a kind of soldier pride. She would carry her own kit till she dropped.
“Don’t fuss me, old girl. I’m all right.”
Eve enjoyed the long walk, perhaps because her companions were silent. A soft spring dusk was melting over the country. Birds were singing. There were yellow gates to the west. The hedgerows were clean and unsoiled by dust, and a delightful freshness distilled out of the blue-green grass.
It was pitch dark long before they reached the point where the road branched off to Godalming, though the sky was crowded with stars. Joan Gaunt had bought a little electric hand-lamp in Horsham, and it served to light up the sign-posts and the dial of her watch.
“Here we are.”
She had flashed the light on a sign-post arm and read “Godalming.”
“What’s the time?”
“About half-past ten.”
“Galahad won’t be here till midnight.”
“No. You have time for a rest.”
Lizzie Straker was fagged out. Eve could tell that by the flatness of her voice. They went and sat in a dry ditch under the shadow of a hedge, and put on their jackets, for the double purpose of keeping warm and hiding their white blouses. Lizzie Straker lay down with her knapsack under her head, and in ten minutes she was asleep.
“We won’t talk!”
“No. I’m quite ready for a rest.”
A couple of farm labourers passed, one of them airing a grievance, the condemning of his pig by some sanitary official. “I be’unt a fool. A touch of de joint evil, dat’s what it be. But he comes and he swears it be tu-ber-coo-lousis, and says I be to slaughter d’beast.” The voice died away, bemoaning the fate of the pig, and Eve felt a drowsiness descending upon her eyelids. She remembered Joan Gaunt sitting erect and watchful beside her, and then dreams came.
She woke suddenly to find two huge glaring eyes lighting the road. They were the headlights of a stationary motor, and she heard the purr of the engine turning dead slow. Someone was speaking. A high pitched, jerky and excitable voice was giving orders.
“Turn out the headlights, Jones, and light the oil lamps. You had better shove in another can of petrol. Well, here we are; on the tick—what!”
Joan Gaunt’s voice answered him.
“Last time you were an hour late.”
“That’s good. We had two punctures, you know. Where are the others?”
“Asleep in the ditch.”
Eve woke Lizzie Straker. The headlights went out suddenly, and two figures approached, one of them carrying the tail lamp of the car.
“Hallo, it’s Galahad!”
Lizzie Straker’s short sleep had restored her vitality. She spluttered enthusiastically at the man.
“Hallo, old sport! here we are, ready for the limelight. Plenty of paraffin and shavings?”
“Rather!”
He turned the lamp on Eve so that she could see nothing but a round yellow eye.
“New comrade? Greetings!”
Joan Gaunt introduced them.
“Mr. Lawrence Kentucky—Miss Eve Carfax. We call him our Galahad.”
The man laughed, and his laughter was falsetto. She could not see him, except when he swung the lamp away from her, and then but dimly, but she received the impression of something tall, fidgety, and excitable.
“Delightful! One more fair lady to champion. Great adventures, great adventures!”
Eve soon noticed that Lizzie Straker was particularly interested in Mr. Lawrence Kentucky. She hung close, talking in slangy superlatives, and trying to spread her personality all round him.
“How many miles an hour to-day?”
“Oh, we came easy! Respectable tourists, you know. All ready, Jones?”
“All ready, sir.”
“Supposing we heave up the anchor? There’s plenty of room for three at the back.”
“But what about the house? Do you know it?”
“Rather! We’re thorough, you know. Jones and I went over all the ground two days ago. We have it all mapped out to a T.”
“I’m going to set light to this one. Joan had the last.”
“All right, your honour, although Miss Gaunt’s one up.”
Joan Gaunt climbed in independently. Lizzie Straker waited to be helped. Mr. Kentucky helped Eve, because he had discovered something of the eternal feminine.
To Eve the adventure began by seeming utterly unreal. Even when the motor drew up in a dark lane, and the lights were turned out after the attacking party had loaded themselves with bags of shavings, tow, and a can of petrol, she was hardly convinced that she was off to help in burning down a house. She asked herself why she was doing it. The spirit of revolt failed to answer in a voice that was passionate enough to be convincing.
They went in single file, Lawrence Kentucky leading the way. He carried an electric torch which he used from time to time like a boy out for mischief. They climbed a gate, crossed a grass field, and came to a fence backed by straggling laurels and hollies. There was a place where two or three of the fence palings were rotten and had been kicked in by Mr. Kentucky when he had come to spy out the land. They squeezed through, one by one.
Someone whispered to Eve as she stooped to pass through.
“Mind the nails. I’ll show you a light.”
His torch glowed, and she had a momentary glimpse of his face, thin, neurotic, with restless eyes, and a mouth that had the voracious look that one sees in men who are always hungry for some new sensation. She could have imagined him swearing volubly, laughing hysterically, biting his pipe stems in two, a whimsical egoist who rushed hither and thither to escape from being bored.
“All right? Rather like playing oranges and lemons.”
She knew at once that he wanted to flirt with her, but she had no desire to cut out Lizzie Straker.
They threaded through a big shrubbery, and came out against a black mass piled in the middle of a broad lawn. It was the house they had come to burn.
“The kitchen window, Jones—at it with the glass-cutter! Who’ll stay outside and keep cave?”
Eve offered herself.
“Why, you’ll miss half the fun.”
“I don’t mind.”
The grass on the lawn promised a good hay crop. There was a wooden seat built round the trunk of an old lime, and Eve settled herself there after the others had disappeared. The night was absolutely soundless, stars scattered like dust above the solid parapet and low roof of the red brick Georgian house. It stood there, mute, deserted, with sightless eyes, and a sudden pity seized on Eve. It was as though the house were alive, and she was helping to do it to death. Houses were part of life. They held a spiritual and impalpable something that mattered. They had souls. She began to watch, as though she was to be present at a tragedy, with a feeling of tension at her heart.
Who had lived there? To whom did the house belong? Had children been born yonder, and had tired eyes closed in death? Had children played in the garden, and under this tree? It was illogical to pity bricks and mortar, and yet this sentimental mood of hers belonged to those more exquisite sensibilities that save life from being nothing better than a savage scramble.
A streak of light showed at one of the windows. Eve straightened herself, rested her head against the trunk of the tree, and held her breath. The streak of light spread into a wavering, fluctuating glow, just as if the heart of the old house were palpitating angrily. But Eve was allowed no leisure for the play of such phantasies. The incendiaries returned.
“Come along!”
Lizzie Straker was almost hysterical.
“It’s going splendidly—splendidly! We found a big cupboard full of rubbish under the stairs. I lit it. Yes, it’s my work!”
Eve became conscious of a growing indignation as they beat a retreat back through the shrubbery and across the field to the lane. They ran, and even the act of running seemed to her shameful. What a noble business was this sneaking about at one in the morning with petrol cans and bags of shavings!
She snubbed Lawrence Kentucky when he pointed back over the field gate and chuckled.
“She’s going up in smoke all right. We did that pretty smartly!”
“It has been heroic, hasn’t it?”
To her he was no better than a mean little boy.
They crowded into the car. The lamps were lit, and the engine started. The chauffeur drove dead slow along the lane.
“That’s it, Jones; crawl for half a mile, and keep her as quiet as you can.”
In another five minutes they were purring away into the darkness. Eve, when she glanced back, could see a faint glow above the tree tops.
Lizzie Straker exulted.
“There is something for them to talk about! That will be in the papers to-morrow.”
Eve did not know how far they drove. The car kept running for the best part of two hours. Mr. Lawrence Kentucky was finessing, covering up their tracks, so to speak. He turned in his seat once or twice and spoke to Joan Gaunt. Day was just dawning when the car pulled up.
“This ought to do for you. You are three or four miles from Farnham, and this is Crooksbury Hill.”
Eve threw aside her rug and climbed out. They had stopped on a flinty road among the towering trunks of a wood of Scots firs. The branches high overhead seemed a black tangle hanging in the vague grey light of the dawn. Not a bough moved. The great trees were asleep.
“I’ll be getting on. Running to Oxford. Put ’em off the scent. Write and fix up the next. London address, you know.”
He was saying good-bye, and receiving Lizzie Straker’s more than friendly splutterings. The chauffeur, a swarthy young blackguard, was grinning behind his master’s back. Mr. Lawrence Kentucky stared hard at Eve, for she was good to look at in the dawn light, with the smell of the dew everywhere, and the great trees dreaming overhead.
“Au revoir, Miss Carfax! Hope you’ve enjoyed it.”
She gave him a casual nod, and went and sat down on the bank at the side of the road.
Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker, like the hardy veterans that they were, lay down under the trees to snatch an hour or two’s sleep, but Eve felt wakeful and in a mood for thought. The night’s adventure had left her with an impression of paltriness, and she kept picturing the black shell of the burnt house standing pathetically in the midst of its neglected garden. She remembered Lawrence Kentucky’s chuckle, a peculiarly offensive and sneering chuckle. Was that the sort of man who could be called a pioneer of progress, or a knight of Arthur’s Court? It struck her as pathetic that these women should have christened him Galahad. It just betrayed how little they knew about men.
She looked up at the tall trees and was instantly reminded of the fir woods at Fernhill. A quiver of emotion swept through her. It had been just such a dawn as this when she had fled from Orchards Corner. She realised that she was wiser, broader, less sentimental now, and that Canterton had not been the passionate visionary that she had thought him.
Lizzie Straker woke up and shouted “Breakfast!”
The gentlewoman of Horsham had fitted them out royally. They had a tea kettle to boil over a fire of dead wood, a big bottle of water, ham sandwiches, buttered scones, and a tin of Swiss milk. Even a tin opener had been included. That breakfast under Crooksbury Hill reminded Eve of Lynette’s fairy picnics in the Wilderness. The larches would be all covered with green tassels. She wished she was with Lynette in the Wilderness.
Breakfast over, Joan Gaunt brought out her itinerary.
“Where do we go next? I’ve forgotten.”
Lizzie Straker licked a finger that had managed to get itself smeared with Swiss milk.
“Let’s see. Something beginning with B, wasn’t it?”
“Yes—Basingford.”
The pupils of Eve’s eyes dilated. They were going to Basingford!