XVII
And then, that Christmas, I met Walter again.
We were on a walking tour along the Roman Wall, Guy and Hugo and the Addingtons and Sophia and I. We had begun at Hexham, and we walked along the wall towards Carlisle. It was on the fourth day that we met Walter, in the camp at Howstead.
It was a windy day, very cold and clear and bright, and we reached the camp about the middle of the day. We had sandwiches with us, and we sat down to eat them at the Northern Gate, looking out over the waste space of fell towards Scotland.
Suddenly I saw Walter. He had come up from behind somewhere, and was standing beside me.
‘Hullo,’ said George. ‘Where have you come from, Sebright?’
He said:
‘How do you do, Miss Woodruffe?’
I felt, that time, that he was looking at me, and that he was glad to see me.
He said:
‘I have waited three years for this.’
Mollie said:
‘It’s a wonderful place.’
He meant that he had waited to see me. He told me afterwards that he had meant it, and I knew before he told me. I knew, I think, when he said it, up there on the hill, and the odd thing is that I wasn’t surprised.
He sat down beside me on the stones of the Northern Gate.
He said:
‘The barbarians were down there. It looks like it, doesn’t it? And there were Southern soldiers up here. They must have hated it.’
He took us round the camp afterwards and explained to us what the places were—where they washed their clothes and where they cooked. It seemed to me very interesting, what he told us, and there were inscriptions on some of the stones that he showed us too.
‘Sebright is a dab at inscriptions,’ George said to Hugo.
‘He got some honour in Berlin for a thing on inscriptions.’
I thought that he made it very vivid, the life in that Roman camp, and I had never felt much interest in Rome before. Sophia was interested too, and George—but not Hugo. Hugo used to say sometimes that he had a blind spot in his mind for history; but I was vexed with him this time for not being interested. He was polite, of course—he was always polite; but I, who knew him well, could see that he was bored.
Sophia began talking to Walter; she did not seem shy of him at all.
‘They must have been hard, enduring sort of people, she said. Up here at the end of the world—it is like the end of the world,’ she went on half to herself, ‘looking out on to that . . . I like the Romans.’
Walter looked pleased—but he was talking to me, and I knew it and was glad.
I don’t know even now how much the difference was in him and how much in me. He seemed to me very different this time, from that afternoon at Oxford three years before. He seemed to me now to have more life and more assurance, as though he felt himself here on his own ground. But perhaps I was more ready to notice him now. There had been no room for him at all in my mind before.
When we had finished looking at the camp Guy said we must go on. We were to sleep at Gilsland that night if we could, and the evenings were short.
Walter had come that way the day before, and slept at a farm near by, but he said now that he would walk back with us. He did not say ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘may I?’ as one somehow expected him to say. He just said:
‘I will go with you. I know this wall pretty well.’
We walked along the top of the wall for a long way, up hills and down, always at the edge of the cliff, with the barbarian country below. Then the others said they would take the lower track, farther down across the fell, but I wouldn’t. I kept along the top of the wall, and Walter came with me.
Once Hugo called me.
‘It is much easier along here,’ he said. ‘You had much better come down.’
And I said:
‘I won’t come down. I am going into the barbarian country.’
And I laughed at him, and then I jumped down on the other side of the wall and ran down along the slope of the hill. It was not so steep in this place—towards a little lake with trees beside it, down in the flat wild country.
‘Do you want to see the barbarians?’ Walter asked, and I said:
‘Yes, but they are all gone.’
Walter said:
‘They are not gone, only civilized. Do you ever wish you could get away from civilized people, and culture and books and all that sort of thing?’
And I said:
‘No, I have never wished that. I have never thought about it.’
He said:
‘Perhaps you haven’t been oppressed by it, as I have. Routines and curricula and examinations—always doing what you have got to do and never what you want.’
I said:
‘No, I generally do what I want—or at any rate I don’t do what I don’t want.’ And I thought of Cousin Delia and Yearsly, and how seldom the question had arisen.
Walter said:
‘That is better. That is much better. That is partly what I felt about you!’
He said it with a sudden vehemence and then stopped short. I looked at him and he was looking at me. I felt suddenly uneasy, and an odd ridiculous feeling came over me that I was really outside a safe wall, in a strange country, and I wanted to go back.
I said:
‘We will go back now, or we shall be lost. It will be too steep further on.’
Walter said:
‘It is too steep now. We must go on now we are here.’
And I felt as though we were walking in a dream, as though everything that he said and that I said were symbolic and fraught with a deeper meaning than we knew. It was an odd exciting feeling and made me a little bit afraid.
We found a track along the fell, and walked on it, and Walter began to talk about his work on the Roman inscriptions in Britain. He told me too that he had been appointed to a lectureship in Archæology in London University.
‘I shall be coming to live in London after Easter,’ he said, and then, ‘I hope I shall see you there.’
I said:
‘Yes, surely. We are all in London now.’
He said:
‘I know.’
We came at last to a place where the wall was lower and broken down, and we climbed back and over it into the Roman country. The others were waiting for us—sitting on big stones.
We stopped at Greenhead for the night, for it was getting dark already.
Walter stopped with us and went back the next day.