“The woods ended at the top in a tangle of thorns, and it was there I saw my first fox. I was crawling among some brambles, amusing myself with biting off the blackberries, when a fox jumped up out of a tuft and faced me, his eyes on the level with mine. I was pleased as well as startled, never took my eyes off him, and presently began to crawl forward again. But at this the fox flashed his teeth at me with a snap, and was off before I could think of anything to say. High above these thorns stood four Scotch firs, forming a sort of gateway by which I usually re-entered the woods. Gazing up their tall stems that moved slowly and softly like a grasshopper’s horns, as if they were breathing, I took my last look at the sky before plunging under beech and yew. There were always squirrels in one of them, chasing one another clattering up and down the bark, or chattering at me, close at hand, as if their nerves were shattered with surprise and indignation. When they had gone out of sight I began to run—faster and faster, running and sliding down with a force that carried me over the meadow at the foot, and across the road to the steps and home. I had ten years in that home and in those woods. Then my father died; I went to school; I entered an office. Those ten years were reality. Everything since has been scarcely more real than the world was when it was still cut off by the hills across the valley, and I looked lazily towards it from under the cypress where the little bird sang. There is nothing to rest on, nothing to make a man last like the old men I used to see in cottage gardens or at gateways in the valley of the Uther.”
“Well,” said Mr Morgan once, “I don’t often agree with Mr Torrance, but I am very glad he exists.”
CHAPTER XI
MR STODHAM, THE RESPECTABLE MAN, AND THE DRYAD
To Mr Stodham, I think, Mr Torrance’s books were the man. He—perhaps he alone in England—possessed a full set of the thirty-three volumes produced by Mr Torrance under his own name in thirteen years. “It is wonderful,” said Ann once, “that the dancing of a pen over a sheet of paper can pay the rent and the baker’s bill, and it hardly seems right. But, still, it appears there are people born that can do nothing else, and they must live like the rest of us.... And I will say that Mr Torrance is one of the best of us, though he has that peculiarity.”
Mr Stodham could not trust himself to speak. He really liked Ann: furthermore, he knew that she was wiser than he: finally, everyone at that moment had something better to think of, because Jack and Roland had put on the gloves. Mr Stodham, consequently, quoted George Borrow:
“There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we’ll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I’ll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother.”
Jack overheard him, and at the end of the round said, “What was that, Mr Stodham? say it again.” When the words of Jasper had been repeated, “Jolly good,” said Jack, “but what puzzles me is how a man who knew that could bother to write a book. There must have been something the matter with him. Perhaps he didn’t really believe what he wrote.” And so they had another round.
Mr Stodham liked everything at Abercorran House. Liking was his chief faculty, and there it had unstinted exercise. Probably he liked the very wife whom he escaped by going either to the country or to Abercorran House. An accident had first brought him among the Morgans. One day as he happened to be passing down the farm lane a child threw a ball unintentionally over into the Wilderness. After it went Mr Stodham in an instant, not quite missing the nails at the top of the fence. The long grass of the Wilderness and his own bad sight kept the ball hidden until the child went away in despair, unknown to him, for he continued the search. There perhaps he would have been searching still, if the Wilderness had not been built over, and if Roland had not come along and found man and ball almost in the same moment. Here the matter could not end. For Mr Stodham, unawares, had been reduced by a nail in the fence to a condition which the public does not tolerate. It seems that he offered to wait for nightfall when Roland had pointed out his misfortune. He was stubborn, to the verge of being abject, in apologising for his presence, and, by implication, for his existence, and in not wishing to cause any trouble to Roland or the family. Gently but firmly Roland lured him upstairs and gave him a pair of trousers beyond reproach. On the following day when he reappeared, bearing the trousers and renewed apologies, the family, out in the yard, was in full parliament assembled. He made a little speech, cheered by everyone but Higgs. Presumably he was so fascinated by the scene that the cheering did not disconcert him. He could not get away, especially as his stick had been seized by Spot the fox-terrier, who was now with apparently no inconvenience to himself, being whirled round and round on the end of it by Jack. Ann came out with his own trousers thoroughly reformed, and she had to be thanked. Lastly, Mr Morgan carried him off before the stick had been recovered. Next day, therefore, he had to come again in search of the stick, a priceless favourite before Spot had eaten it. Mr Morgan consoled him and cemented the acquaintance by giving him an ash stick with a handle formed by Nature in the likeness of a camel’s head. Mr Morgan said that the stick had been cut on Craig-y-Dinas—the very place where the ash stick was cut, which a certain Welshman was carrying on London Bridge when he was espied by a magician, who asked to be taken to the mother tree, which in as long as it takes to walk three hundred miles was done, with the result that a cave was found on Craig-y-Dinas, full of treasure which was guarded by King Arthur and his knights, who were, however, sleeping a sleep only to be disturbed by a certain bell, which the Welshman by ill luck did ring, with the predicted result, that the king and his knights rose up in their armour and so terrified him that he forgot the word which would have sent them to sleep again, and he dropped all his treasure, ran for his life, and could never more find cave, stick, or magician for all his seeking. Mr Stodham responded in a sententious pretty speech, saying in effect that with such a stick he needed no other kind of treasure than those it would inevitably conduct him to—the hills, rivers, woods, and meadows of the home-counties, and some day, he hoped, to Craig-y-Dinas itself.