Legs was already busy on the up-line, arranging two pins crossways on the gummed rail, so that they should be flattened and welded together, making an entrancing object closely resembling a pair of scissors.
‘The up-train will be through in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Chuck me the penny, Helen.’
I had another object of interest—namely, a threepenny piece with a hole in it. I had tied a long string to this, the far end of which I held in my hand. The reason for this was that the coin was beginning to crack, but it would stand a wheel or two more, though it was already bigger than a sixpence; after a wheel or two I could pull it away.
‘Gum!’ said I.
We moved to the far side of the up-line, and waited. Soon from the tunnel a hundred yards below came a wreath of smoke, and the black-fronted engine raced towards us. Everything went right on that divine afternoon, and after four wheels had passed I jerked my threepenny piece away. The scissors were adorable also, and it would be scarcely necessary to strop the penny. Of course, we made a cache of these objects, burying them in a small tin box with the addition of a piece of paper recording our names, weights, and ages. Legs also wrote a short confession of how he murdered his two infant children, and hid the bodies in a bramble-bush ten paces from the cache. There was no such bramble-bush really, which would make it more puzzling to the inquiring mind. He represented himself as being perfectly impenitent, and ready to commit similar crimes should opportunity occur. He signed it, Benjamin Yates of 21A, Park Lane, W. Then we went home to tea.
Legs had been in for his Foreign Office examination, and had come down to spend the next two days with us, before we all moved up to town; also, to our deep-felt and secret joy, he had shown no desire to visit the Ampses, or talk any more German with Charlotte. The process of disillusionment began, I think, on the evening in October when he was here last, and the Ampses dined with us; for I saw him overhear Mrs. Amps ask Helen who ‘was the heir to all our beautiful property.’ At that moment I almost pitied Mrs. Amps. She had begun by making jam, but I felt that she had gone on to cook Charlotte’s goose. Legs, anyhow, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and took a couple of seconds to recover himself. I am sure I don’t wonder. You require to recuperate after that sort of remark. I felt that I knew all about Mrs. Amps when she asked that simple question. I felt as if I had known her parents and grandparents, and could prophesy about her children and grandchildren; and Legs’ eyes, which till that moment had been quite shut, began to open, just to blink.
Next day, however, he lunched with them. What happened I do not know, since he has not told me; but he was rather silent in the evening, ate little, but drank four glasses of port after dinner. I think the instinct of the drowning of care was there, and he was slightly cynical and Byronic afterwards. I love Legs.
I hasten to add, lest I may appear unfeeling, that Charlotte has for the last week or two been kind and encouraging to another young man, who is the heir to far more beautiful property. I saw him at the golf-links yesterday in a bunker. He was arranging her hands so as to grasp her niblick properly. They seemed to want a great deal of arranging. By-and-by they allowed my opponent and me to pass. Charlotte seemed not to recognize me, or else she was really so much employed in making her hat stay on that she did not see me. I mentioned, however, to Legs that I had seen her, but that she had not seen me. It seemed to interest him very little.
But this morning, as Legs and I played golf over the grey back of the huge down that rises from our happy valley, it seemed a sheer insanity that we should all go up to London the next day, so blithe was the air, so invigorating to the whole sense. The short, springy turf seemed to put its own vitality into one’s feet; they were shot forward automatically without conscious effort. And—ah, the rapture!—(it occurred more frequently to Legs than to me) of seeing a clean white ball scud for a hundred yards or so low over the ground, and then rise swallow-like against the ineffable blue! Golfers, I am told, reck nothing of their surroundings, provided only they drive far, approach dead, and hole their puts; and so I must conclude—indeed, I conclude it for other reasons—that I am no golfer. But I am an epicure in my surroundings when I go a-golfing, and though the grey dunes and sandy hollows of the seaside course are most to my mind, I place very near those perfect joys the hugeness of scale which you get only on the uplands. To-day no whiff of vapour flecked the whole field of the shining heavens, and the country, grey and green, with fire of autumn beech-wood here and there, stretched map-like round us. But to the west the view was even more stirring to that desire of the infinite which lies so close to the heart of man. There fold after fold of downs, the knitted muscles of the huge, kind earth lay in unending interlacement. And it was all empty. There were no trees, no lines of hedgerows to break the void, and lend a scale to the eye. From the immediate green foreground slope after slope melted into grey, and from grey to the blue of distance, which fused itself into the tender azure of the sky’s horizon, so that the line between earth and air indistinguishable. It was as empty us the desert, yet one knew that from every inch of it a thousand lives rejoiced in the sun of November. Yes, even the knowledge that there would be but few more of such hours before winter hurled its armoury of squalls on to the earth added, perhaps, to their joy. None could have expected such a November as has been ours. We have snatched it from winter; it is our possession.
Yet the colour of the grass, no less than the underlying keenness of the air, savour of the sunless months. It is scarcely green; it has been bleached by the torrid months, and Nature is too wise to let it shine forth in a fresh coat of colour when so soon it will sleep, waiting for the spring. High up in the liquid blue, too, of the sky there is the sparkle of frost, for all the warm strength of the sunlight. It is not summer that floats above our heads, soon to descend earthwards, but the frost and cold. Yet they bless the Lord also.