§ 2
Bealby left Shonts about half-past four in the morning. He went westward because he liked the company of his shadow and was amused at first by its vast length. By half-past eight he had covered ten miles, and he was rather bored by his shadow. He had eaten nine raw mushrooms, two green apples and a quantity of unripe blackberries. None of these things seemed quite at home in him. And he had discovered himself to be wearing slippers. They were stout carpet slippers, but still they were slippers,—and the road was telling on them. At the ninth mile the left one began to give on the outer seam. He got over a stile into a path that ran through the corner of a wood, and there he met a smell of frying bacon that turned his very soul to gastric juice.
He stopped short and sniffed the air—and the air itself was sizzling.
“Oh, Krikey,” said Bealby, manifestly to the Spirit of the World. “This is a bit too strong. I wasn’t thinking much before.”
Then he saw something bright yellow and bulky just over the hedge.
From this it was that the sound of frying came.
He went to the hedge, making no effort to conceal himself. Outside a great yellow caravan with dainty little windows stood a largish dark woman in a deerstalker hat, a short brown skirt, a large white apron and spatterdashes (among other things), frying bacon and potatoes in a frying pan. She was very red in the face, and the frying pan was spitting at her as frying pans do at a timid cook....
Quite mechanically Bealby scrambled through the hedge and drew nearer this divine smell. The woman scrutinized him for a moment, and then blinking and averting her face went on with her cookery.
Bealby came quite close to her and remained, noting the bits of potato that swam about in the pan, the jolly curling of the rashers, the dancing of the bubbles, the hymning splash and splutter of the happy fat....
(If it should ever fall to my lot to be cooked, may I be fried in potatoes and butter. May I be fried with potatoes and good butter made from the milk of the cow. God send I am spared boiling; the prison of the pot, the rattling lid, the evil darkness, the greasy water....)
“I suppose,” said the lady prodding with her fork at the bacon, “I suppose you call yourself a Boy.”
“Yes, miss,” said Bealby.
“Have you ever fried?”
“I could, miss.”
“Like this?”
“Better”
“Just lay hold of this handle—for it’s scorching the skin off my face I am.” She seemed to think for a moment and added, “entirely.”
In silence Bealby grasped that exquisite smell by the handle, he took the fork from her hand and put his hungry eager nose over the seething mess. It wasn’t only bacon; there were onions, onions giving it—an edge! It cut to the quick of appetite. He could have wept with the intensity of his sensations.
A voice almost as delicious as the smell came out of the caravan window behind Bealby’s head.
“Ju-dy!” cried the voice.
“Here!—I mean,—it’s here I am,” said the lady in the deerstalker.
“Judy—you didn’t take my stockings for your own by any chance?”
The lady in the deerstalker gave way to delighted horror. “Sssh, Mavourneen!” she cried—she was one of that large class of amiable women who are more Irish than they need be—“there’s a Boy here!”