The landlady put her elbows on the desk and crouched her face in her hands. “I didn’t think you would. These people, they’ve been here a week for the Arthurian pageant Some of them stay with me; I’ve seen all I want of ’em. Too free in their manners, that’s what I say. It don’t seem right for girls and men to be so friendly. I wasn’t brought up that way. It puts false notions into girls’ heads, that’s what I say. I suppose you’ve dined already?”
“I haven’t. I hope it won’t put you to too much trouble.”
She led the way through the low-ceilinged hostel, explaining its history as she went. How in the middle-ages it had been the guest-house of the Abbey and the pilgrims had stayed there at the Abbot’s expense. How they had two haunted rooms upstairs, in one of which Anne Boleyn had slept. How the walls were tunneled with secret stairways which led down to subterranean passages. When the meal had been spread she left him, promising to let him know if there were any inquiries.
Odd! All through dinner he kept thinking about it. To have found out where to reach him Madame Josephine must have inconvenienced herself. Probably she’d had to send to Orchid Lodge, and Orchid Lodge had had to send to his mother. She wouldn’t have done all that unless her reason had been important.
He went down to the office. “Has any one called yet?”
“Not yet.”
He glanced at the clock; it was ten. Nobody would come now. He walked out into the High Street to garage his car and to take a stroll before turning in to bed.
The town lay silent. Here and there a faint light, drifting from a street-lamp or from behind a curtained window, streaked the darkness. No people were about. Stars, wheeling high above embattled house-tops, were the only traffic.
“The Island Valley of Avilion, where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.” The words sang themselves over as he wandered. What if the telegram had been a bait to lure him back into the past? What if the door of forgotten ages had opened to him and closed behind him, as in William Morris’s romance of The Hollow Land?
He played with the fancy, embroidering its extravagance. To-morrow he would awake in the ancient hostel to find that the landlady had changed into a fat old abbot. Pilgrims would be passing to and fro below his window; ladies on palfreys and palmers whose sandaled feet had brought them home from the Holy Land. What if he should remain a captive to the past and never find his way into the present?