§ 8
For a time there was a more than Napoleonic swiftness in the Captain’s movements. When Bealby’s pursuer came up to the hedge that looks down into the sunken road, there was no Bealby, no Captain, nothing but a torn and dishevelled county map, an almost imperceptible odour of petrol and a faint sound—like a distant mowing machine—and the motor bicycle was a mile away on the road to Beckinstone. Eight miles, eight rather sickening miles, Bealby did to Beckinstone in eleven minutes, and there in a little coffee house he was given breakfast with eggs and bacon and marmalade (Prime!), and his spirit was restored to him while the Captain raided a bicycle and repairing shop and negotiated the hire of an experienced but fairly comfortable wickerwork trailer. And so, to London through the morning sunshine, leaving tramps, pursuers, policemen, handbills, bakers, market gardeners, terrors of the darkness and everything upon the road behind—and further behind and remote and insignificant—and so to the vanishing point.
Some few words of explanation the Captain had vouchsafed, and that was all.
“Don’t be afraid about it,” he said. “Don’t be in the least bit afraid. You tell them about it, just simply and truthfully, exactly what you did, exactly how you got into it and out of it and all about it.”
“You’re going to take me up to a Magistrate, sir?”
“I’m going to take you up to the Lord Chancellor himself.”
“And then they won’t do anything?”
“Nothing at all, Bealby; you trust me. All you’ve got to do is to tell the simple truth....”
It was pretty rough going in the trailer, but very exciting. If you gripped the sides very hard, and sat quite tight, nothing very much happened and also there was a strap across your chest. And you went past everything. There wasn’t a thing on the road the Captain didn’t pass, lowing deeply with his great horn when they seemed likely to block his passage. And as for the burglary and everything, it would all be settled....
The Captain also found that ride to London exhilarating. At least he was no longer hanging about; he was getting to something. He would be able to go back to her—and all his being now yearned to go back to her—with things achieved, with successes to show. He’d found the boy. He would go straight to dear old uncle Chickney, and uncle Chickney would put things right with Moggeridge, the boy would bear his testimony, Moggeridge would be convinced and all would be well again. He might be back with Madeleine that evening. He would go back to her, and she would see the wisdom and energy of all he had done, and she would lift that dear chin of hers and smile that dear smile of hers and hold out her hand to be kissed and the lights and reflections would play on that strong soft neck of hers....
They buzzed along stretches of common and stretches of straight-edged meadowland, by woods and orchards, by pleasant inns and slumbering villages and the gates and lodges of country houses.
These latter grew more numerous, and presently they skirted a town, and then more road, more villages and at last signs of a nearness to London, more frequent houses, more frequent inns, hoardings and advertisements, an asphalted sidewalk, lamps, a gasworks, laundries, a stretch of suburban villadom, a suburban railway station, a suburbanized old town, an omnibus, the head of a tramline, a stretch of public common thick with noticeboards, a broad pavement, something-or-other parade, with a row of shops....
London.