I
GEORGE TARYLON and I were engaged to stay the week-end with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor Hall, which is four hours by car from Hyde Park Corner, though that, of course, rather depends on the kind of car. George Tarlyon’s—as that Armenian fellow had noticed—was a good car, long and low, a chap’s car, and we had run four-fifths of our distance very well: we had flashed through a town, whose name is of no interest, and had plunged into the peculiar wood of Carmion, which shrouds the southern border of the domain of Malmanor. We were therefore on the last lap, and the fact that this lay through Carmion Wood lent a certain interest to it; for although Tarlyon and I had very often stayed with Aubrey Carlyle at Malmanor, we had never, somehow, really penetrated into Carmion. I don’t know why, but it just hadn’t happened; and George Tarlyon was now running his car along the broad sweep of its central and only road because of a vague idea that it was a short cut as compared to the main road. It was a rotten idea, that of George Tarlyon’s.
One of the many silly legends about Carmion Wood is that only foreigners may hear the singing of the birds therein, while for Englishmen there is no sound but the rustling of the leaves and the sighing of the boughs. How that sort of nonsense ever gets hold of a countryside, I don’t know. And the fact that, as George Tarlyon rushed the car along the twilight road—for although it was a bright summer’s day, the leaves are very thick on Carmion trees—we could hear no birds singing was, without a doubt, simply because they were singing somewhere else that afternoon. “Obviously,” I said to Tarlyon, who had suggested that had I had a Spanish mother I could now be enjoying the sweet trilling of rooks and the back-chat of blackbirds, “obviously they can’t always be singing in one place.”
“Listen,” said George Tarlyon, and when you listened it really was rather curious, the silence of Carmion Wood. “Quiet we call silence, the merest word of all,” some one has written, Poe, I think; but that word applied very fully to Carmion, it was so silent! If only there had been a wind, just to give the leaves a little fun! But there wasn’t a breath; it was a close day in August, and the wood was a crypt, that’s what it was. I said so to Tarlyon, but all he said was that he was hungry. Later on he grunted: “You and your crypts!”
“It’s a pity,” I said reasonably, “that the sun doesn’t get a bit further into this place....”
“Dolorous is the word for it,” murmured Tarlyon; and he was quite right, amazingly right. “Dolorous” was certainly the word for it.
“Open your cut-out, man!” I said at last, for that car was really too well-bred. And with a twist of his foot he opened the cut-out. What a cut-out! But it did make things seem more homely.