Some men—generally the nicest—are so much more themselves in the depths of the country. He is.
I noticed that the very first evening he arrived here, when I went down to meet him—to keep up appearances before his family—at this tiny station on the branch line. Before the train stopped I saw his head and shoulders blocking up the open window of his compartment in his hurry to arrive. Catching sight of me on the platform, he took the pipe from between his strong white teeth and flourished it over his head in greeting—his face one broad smile because his holiday had begun; then the train slowed down; he was out of the carriage door and taking a running stride towards me.
“Hullo, Nancy!” he said, and grasped my hands. “You came? I wondered if you would. It’s very—appropriate of you. How are you? You look very fit. A sun-bonnet, eh?”—It was a haymaker’s cotton one, that I’d bought for a shilling and a ha’penny at the post office, and rather becoming—“I’ve never seen you in a pink sun-bonnet before.”
“You wouldn’t be likely to in Leadenhall Street,” I retorted. “How’s the dear office?”
“I don’t know or care. I’m here to forget it,” he said gaily as we left the station for the road between the sand-hills. “I think I shall take to wearing a sun-bonnet myself!”
But what he wears here is just a soft white shirt with a turn-down collar and a pair of loose grey flannel bags belted at the waist; no hat at all—his hair has got to look as if it must be permanently rumpled; no one from the office would recognize him! Even his eyes seem a different colour; so much warmer and bluer for the deepening of his tan. He drops a year a day from his age, too. When one sees him striding about these sandy lanes, or terrifying his mother by those efforts to walk on his hands in six foot of water in the bay, or when he’s pretending to jabber back Welsh to Mrs. Roberts and Blodwen, who openly adore him—yes, I can imagine quite a number of people finding him positively attractive here in the country.
In the country, too, as I’ve always heard, it’s so much easier to fall in love than it is in town. Town, with its rush and racket and roar, seems to insist that the things that really matter are getting on and making money—or even the bare living for which half these grimy crowds are struggling and toiling! But the country!—that has a way of suggesting itself as a series of lovely backgrounds for a grouping of Two, and of coaxing home the idea that all that matters is Love. To a falling-in-love kind of person the country here would seem as bad as Hamlet for being “so full of quotations” from every poet who ever wrote about trysts, and gathering rosebuds, and loves in valleys, and foolish, pretty nonsense of that sort. They’d be reminded of it by every dance of a pair of blue butterflies over the dunes; every spread of the rosy arms of sea-anemones in the pool towards the incoming wave; and as for these other waves of scented gold that are poured over all the waste ground hereabouts——
“It’s a blessing there’s such a lot of it out just now!” as Theo remarked this morning at breakfast. “I suppose engaged people would want to be where there was plenty of gorse!”
Whereat her brother and I exchanged glances, across the table, of amused intelligence. For it’s all very well for this child to think she can “chip” us with that old tag about kissing and the gorse in bloom. We’ve only got to remember how little she suspects that the only kiss between us is that “duty good night” one of Uncle Albert’s visit, and the laugh is all on our side!
“You needn’t laugh, Billy,” Theo added. “You know you’re really frightfully cross because you won’t be able to get Nancy all to yourself this afternoon, with these people coming!”