A silence fell upon the room, a silence that seemed to symbolize the 'biffing' of the doctor's son by old French. Willsher took the opportunity to steer the conversation back to fish, and ten o'clock struck in the middle of an argument between him and his friend over the merits of two artificial flies. Guy must be on the Rectory lawn by eleven o'clock, and he began to be anxious, so animated was the discussion, about the departure of these well-meaning intruders. He did not want to plunge straight from their company into the glorious darkness that would hold Pauline; and he eyed the volume of Keats lying face downward on the table, hoping he would be allowed to come back to the knights and ladies praying in their dumb oratories, while he thought with a thrill of the moment when he should be able to read:
And they are gone; ay, ages long ago
These lovers fled away into the storm.
"If you can't get a chub any other way, you can sometimes get him with a bit of bacon," Willsher was saying. "And I know a fellow who caught one of those woppers under Marston's Mill with a cherry. Fact, I assure you."
"I know a man at Oldbridge, who caught a four pounder with a bumble-bee."
"I caught a six pounder at Oxford with a mouse's head myself," Guy declared.
The friends looked at him in the admiration and envy with which anglers welcome a pleasant companionable sort of a lie. It was a bad move, for it seemed as if by that lie he had drawn closer the bonds of sympathy between himself and his guests. They visibly warmed to his company, for Brydone at once invited himself to another 'tot' and was obviously settling down to a competitive talk about big fish; while Willsher's first shyness turned to familiarity, so completely indeed that he asked if Guy would mind his moving the furniture in order to try to explain to that fathead Brydone the exact promontory of the Greenrush where he had caught thirty trout in an hour when the mayfly was up two years ago.
Half-past-ten struck from the church tower, and Guy became desperate. There was nothing he hated so much as asking people to go, which was one reason why he always discouraged them at the beginning; but it really seemed as if he must bring himself to the point of asking Brydone and Willsher to leave him to his work. He decided to allow them until a quarter-to-eleven. The minutes dragged along, and when the quarter sounded Guy said he was sorry but that he was very much afraid he would have to work now.
"Right O," said Brydone. "We'll tootle off." But it took ten minutes to get them out of the house, and when at last they disappeared into the mazy garden Guy was in a fume of anxiety about his tryst. He could not now go round by Rectory Lane, as he had intended at first. No doubt Brydone and Willsher would stay talking half-an-hour on the bridge, for the rain had stopped and they had given the impression of having the night before them. In fact Brydone had once definitely announced that the night was still young. Yet in a way the fact of their nearness and of his having to avoid them added a zest to the adventure.
How dark it was and how heavily the trees dripped in the orchard. Guy pulled the canoe from the shed and dragged it squeaking over the wet grass: not even he in the exaltation of the moment was going to swim the Hellespont.
When he was in the canoe and driving it with silent strokes along the straight black stream; when the lantern was put out and the darkness was at first so thick that like the water it seemed to resist the sweep of his paddle, Guy could no longer imagine that Pauline would venture out. He became oppressed by the impenetrable and humid air, and he began to long for rain to fall as if it would reassure him that nature in such an annihilation of form was still alive. Now he had swung past the overhanging willows of the churchyard; his eyes grown accustomed to the darkness discovered against a vague sky the vague bulk of the church, and in a minute or two he could be sure that he was come to the Rectory paddock. He was wet to the knees and his feet, sagging in the grass, seemed to make a most prodigious noise with their gurgling.