“Well, it can’t now,” said one of the young men; and he took it on the point of his stick and cast it into the ditch.
Edelgard began silently to pick up the scattered biscuits. Immediately both the young men darted forward to do it for her with a sudden awakening to energy that seemed very odd in persons who slouched along with their hands in their pockets. It made me wonder whether perhaps they thought her younger than she was. As we resumed our march, I came to the conclusion that this must be so, for such activity of assistance would otherwise be unnatural, and I resolved to take the earliest opportunity of bringing the conversation round to birthdays and then carelessly mentioning that my wife’s next one would be her thirtieth. In this department of all others I am not the man to allow buds to go unnipped.
We had not been travelling ten minutes before we came to a stony turning up to the right which old James, who was a native of those parts, said was the entrance to the common. It seemed strange to camp almost within a stone’s throw of our starting-place, but the rain was at that moment pelting down on our defenceless heads, and people hurrying to their snug homes stopped in spite of it to look at us with a wondering pity, so that we all wished to get off the road as soon as possible and into the privacy of furze bushes. The lane was in no sense a hill: it was a gentle incline, almost immediately reaching flat ground; but it was soft and stony, and the Ilsa’s horse, after dragging his caravan for a few yards up it, could get no farther, and when Menzies-Legh put the roller behind the back wheel to prevent the Ilsa’s returning thither from whence it had just come the chain of the roller snapped, the roller, released, rolled away, and the Ilsa began to move backward on top of the Elsa, which in its turn began to move backward on top of the Ailsa, which in its turn began to move backward across the road in the direction of the ditch.
It was an unnerving spectacle; for it must be borne in mind that however small the caravans seemed when you were inside them when you were outside they looked like mighty monsters, towering above hedges, filling up all but wide roads, and striking awe into the hearts even of motorists, who got out of their way with the eager politeness otherwise rude persons display when confronted by yet greater powers of being disagreeable.
Menzies-Legh and the two young men, acting on some shouted directions from old James, rushed at the stones lying about and selecting the biggest placed them, I must say with commendable promptness, behind the Ilsa’s wheels, and what promised to be an appalling catastrophe was averted. I, who was reassuring Edelgard, was not able to help. She had asked me with ill-concealed anxiety whether I thought the caravans would begin to go backward in the night when we were inside them, and I was doing my best to calm her, only of course I had to point out that it was extremely windy; and quite a dirty and undesirable workman trudging by at that moment with his bag of tools on his back and his face set homeward, she stared after him and said: “Otto, how nice to be going to a house.”
“Come, come,” said I rallying her—but undoubtedly the weather was depressing.
We had to trace up the lane to the common. This was the first time that ominous verb fell upon my ear; how often it was destined to do so will be readily imagined by those of my countrymen who have ever visited the English county of Sussex supposing, which I doubt, that such there are. Its meaning is that you are delayed for any length of time from an hour upward at the bottom of each hill while the united horses drag one caravan after another to the top. On this first occasion the tracing chains we had brought with us behaved in the same way the roller chain had and immediately snapped, and Menzies-Legh, moved to anger, inquired severely of old James how it was that everything we touched broke; but he, being innocent, was not very voluble, and Menzies-Legh soon left him alone. Happily we had another pair of chains with us. All this, however, meant great delays, and the rain had almost left off, and the sun was setting in a gloomy bank of leaden clouds across a comfortless distance and sending forth its last pale beams through thinning raindrops, by the time the first caravan safely reached the common.
If any of you should by any chance, however remote, visit Panthers, pray go to Grib’s (or Grip’s—in spite of repeated inquiries I at no time discovered which it was) Common, and picture to yourselves our first night in that bleak
It was an unnerving spectacle