Nobody came to walk with me, and unless some one did my position was a very isolated one, wedged in between the Ailsa and the Ilsa, unable to leave the Elsa, who, like a wife, immediately strayed from the proper road if I did. The back of the Ailsa prevented my seeing who was with whom in front, but once at a sharp turning I did see, and what I saw was Frau von Eckthum walking with Jellaby, and Edelgard—if you please—on his other side. The young Socialist was slouching along with his hands in his pockets and his bony shoulders up to his ears listening, apparently, to Frau von Eckthum who actually seemed to be talking, for he kept on looking at her, and laughing as though at the things she said. Edelgard, I noticed, joined in the laughter as unconcernedly as if she had nothing in the world to reproach herself with. Then the Elsa followed round the corner and the scene in front was blotted out; but glancing back over my shoulder I saw how respectably Lord Sigismund, true to his lineage, remained by the Ilsa’s horse’s head, reflectively smoking his pipe and accompanied only by his dog.
Beyond Paddock Wood and its flat and dreary purlieus the road began to ascend and to wind, growing narrower and less draughty, with glimpses of a greener country and a hillier distance, in fact improving visibly as we neared Sussex. All this time I had walked by myself, and I was still too tired after the long march the day before to have any but dull objections. It would have been natural to be acutely indignant at Edelgard’s persistent defiance, natural to be infuriated at the cleverness with which she shifted the entire charge of our caravan on to me while she, on the horizon, gesticulated with Jellaby. I realized, it is true, that the others would not have let her lead the horse even had she offered to, but she ought at least to have walked beside me and hear me, if that were my mood, grumble. However, a reasonable man knows how to wait. He does not, not being a woman, hasten and perhaps spoil a crisis by rushing at it. And if no opportunity should present itself for weeks, would there not be years in our flat in Storchwerder consisting solely of opportunities?
Besides, my feet ached. I think there must have been some clumsy darning of Edelgard’s in my socks that pressed on my toes and made them feel as if the shoes were too short for them. And small stones kept on getting inside them, finding out the one place they could get in at and leaping through it with the greatest dexterity, dropping gradually by unpleasant stages down to underneath my socks, where they remained causing me discomfort till the next camp. These physical conditions, to which the endless mechanical trudging behind the Ailsa’s varnished back must be added, reduced me as I said before to a condition of dull and bovine acquiescence. I ceased to make objections. I hardly thought. I just trudged.
At the top of the ascent, at a junction of four roads called Four Winds (why, when they were four roads, the English themselves I suppose best know), we met a motor.
It came scorching round a corner with an insolent shriek of its tooting apparatus, but the shriek died away as it were on its lips when it saw what was filling up the way. It hesitated, stopped, and then began respectfully to back. Pass us it could not at that point, and charge into such vast objects as the caravans was a task before which even bloodthirstiness quailed. I record this as the one pleasing incident that morning, and when it was my turn to walk by the thing I did so with squared shoulders and held-up head and a muttered (yet perfectly distinct) “Road hogs”—which is the term Menzies-Legh had applied to them the day before when relating how one had run over a woman near where he lives, and had continued its career, leaving her to suffer in the road, which she did for the space of two hours before the next passer-by passed in time to see her die. And she was a quite young woman, and a pretty one into the bargain.
(“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” said the foolish Jellaby when, in answer to my questions, I extracted this information from Menzies-Legh.)
Therefore, remembering this shocking affair, and being as well a great personal detester of these conveyances, the property invariably of the insolent rich, who with us are chiefly Jews, I took care to be distinct as I muttered “Road hogs.” The two occupants in goggles undoubtedly heard me, for they started and even their goggles seemed to shrink back and be ashamed of themselves, and I continued my way with a slight reviving of my spirits, the slight reviving of which he is generally conscious who has had the courage to say what he thinks of a bad thing.
The post whose finger we were following had Dundale inscribed on it, and as we wound downward the scenery considerably improved. Woods on our left sheltered us from the wind, and on our right were a number of pretty hills. At the bottom—a bottom only reached after care and exertion, for loose stones imperilled the safety of my horse’s knees, and I had besides to spring about applying and regulating the brake—we found a farm with a hop-kiln in the hollow on the left, and opposite it a convenient, indeed attractive, field.
No other house was near. No populace. No iron bridge. No donkeys. No barrel-organ. Stretches of corn, so ripe that though the sky had clouded over they looked as if the sun were shining on them, alternated very pleasantly with the green of the hop-fields, and portions of woods climbed up between the folds of the hills. It was a sheltered spot, with a farm capable no doubt of supplying food, but I feared that because it was only one o’clock my pedantic companions, in defiance of the previous day’s experience, would decline to camp. Taking therefore the law into my own hands I pulled up my caravan in front of the farm gate. The Ilsa behind me was forced to pull up too; and the Ailsa, in the very act of lumbering round the next corner, was arrested by my loud and masterful Brrr.
“Anything wrong?” asked Lord Sigismund, running up from the back.