“Liverpool till then?”
“Ay. Take time! We’re moving.”
“What address?”
“Nay, what it’s no—get out, man! We’re off!”
“The address?”
“Five, Derby Road.”
Angry hands tore Brack from the express, and more or less hurled him off the station and into his car, but for once he was too distracted to resent interference with his personal dignity. He did not hear Denny’s polite inquiry after the pigs. He even drove away with his hat on the middle of his head, and a dead cigarette hanging limply from his mouth.
The sale was over. The Whinnerahs had seen their possessions catalogued and scattered, saving only a remnant for the furnishing of the little Pride. Wolf had gone the round of the house, handling each piece for the last time as if it had been a pet beast, but his wife had made no sign, refusing to quiver at the blow of the hammer. When the end came, it was she, lately so shrinking and afraid, who led the man out into the waste.
The closing door echoed its drear Amen through the deserted building. The empty house followed them with its desolate, hollow eyes—the bent man clinging to the frail woman in her old-fashioned mantle and neat bonnet, the dispirited dogs slinking at their heels. He would have turned again for a last wander through the shippons had she not held him with her thin fingers. To the left, as they walked, the heaving gray of the sea reached out into the still gray of the sky. The Lugg itself looked gray, and ruggedly old. Below it the tide was running strongly, lipping far up the Let and filling the estuaries. It seemed a forty years’ travel in the wilderness, this sad progress out of life, but at last, a few hundred yards beyond where the road ceased and became a track, their new home waited their slow approach.