AHEAD the road, always winding through a green rolling chess-board of fields, had taken on glory after the rain. It was as though a ghost of the rain still hung in the air; the sunlight kindled wet foliage in an empty world, and H.M.'s Lanchester roared through it. We swept out of the mists at six-thirty: Exeter, Honiton, Chard, Yeovil: by Sherborne 'twas morning as plain as could be:
"And from Mechlin church-steeple, we heard the halfchime,
"And Joris broke silence with, `Yet there is time!"'
It was touch-and-go whether we could make it. I considered while I sat at the wheel of the Lanchester. It was not the actual distance between Torquay and London; on those early morning ways, despite narrow roads and blind corners, the speedometer-needle flickered always between fifty and sixty. It would be getting through the traffic at London, getting to our separate homes for shaves and top-hats, to reach I Westminster by eleven-thirty.
And Joris did not break silence; Joris could not be persuaded to break silence. H.M., in fact, was asleep. He lay back vast in the tonneau, his posterior nearly sliding down off the seat: his hat was over his face, and, though it danced and joggled with our rush, H.M. remained loggish. Occasionally there would proceed from under the hat a long, whistling snore.
"Can't anything wake him up?" said Evelyn despairingly. "I've tried everything I know. I've tried offering him a drink of whisky, I've tried telling him the Home Secretary said he was a silly fathead, I've tried"'
I glanced over my shoulder as we bucketed round a turn past Salisbury. Evelyn sat in the tonneau, tentatively poking H.M. in the chest like a cash register. Evelyn was beaming in the morning light; her dark hair blown out in the wind, her eyes aglow like her brownish-gold skin; and she made a sort of triumphant gesture as I turned round.
"But, Ken," she said, "I tell you something's got to be done! He won't wake up; he simply won't. And I've got to hear the story of what happened, all about it and everything about it, or I don't think I could get married in peace. He-"
From the front seat beside me, Stone spoke. Stone was with us. Evelyn had sworn by all her gods that he must be present at our wedding, no matter what happened; and he had been carried off yelping. What his daughter in Bristol thought of these goings-on, I do not know, and I hope I shall not soon have the oportunity of hearing her opinions. Throughout this journey he had sat in a state of dull horror, holding to the door with one hand and to his hair with the other, as we shot onward; and all the while he poured forth a stream of monotonous, low-voiced, acid commentary.
"You missed that cow," he observed critically. "I'm sorry to see you're off your game; just two inches more to the right, and you'd have got her. If only you'd had your eyes on the road, I'm certain you couldn't have missed. What's the use in going up over the bank? Why don't you go clear up and cut across that field? Gaaa! I don't think you take those corners fast enough. I feel like a ball in a roulettewheel. What's the matter with the old geezer back there, anyway? Maybe he's a Yogi. Stick a pin in him and find out."