“We’re in for ripping weather,” Boyce shouted as he rode ahead.
The weather didn’t really matter: they were in for a great adventure. From the plateau they glided swiftly to the vale of Redditch, and when they had left that sordid little town behind they climbed the backbone of the Ridgway, where the road follows the thin crest of a line of small hills and overlooks on either side two dreaming plains. In a blue haze of summer these green dominions lay asleep, so richly scattered with dark woodlands that no human habitation could be seen. They were as lonely as the sky. Westward of Severn the Clees and Malverns towered over Wales; but Boyce appeared to be more interested in certain lower wooded hills upon the eastern side. He made Edwin the confidant of his latest romance.
“She and I,” he said, “used to bicycle out from Alvaston in the cool of the evening . . . about an hour and a half’s easy ride. It was early last summer. Those woods are full of nightingales. We used to sit on a gate and listen to them and ride home together in the dark. I can tell you it was pretty wonderful.”
Of course it was wonderful. Everything must be wonderful in this enchanted country. Riding along in the afternoon sunlight Edwin constructed for himself just such another passionate adventure; and the figure with which he shared these imaginary ecstasies was, for want of a better, Dorothy Powys. While the dream nightingales were singing their hardest and he was on the point of renewing that unforgettable kiss, they came to a cottage half timbered and lost in clematis and honeysuckle where a steep road fell on either side at right angles to the ridge.
“Right,” shouted Boyce, “we’ll take the road down through the Lenches.”
“What are the Lenches?” said Edwin, riding abreast.
“Villages. Five of them, I think. There’s Rous Lench and King’s Lench and Abbot’s Lench, and two others. They’re a proper subject for a poem.”
“Right-o . . . let’s collaborate,” said Edwin. “How’s this for a beginning?”
“As I was riding through the Lenches
I met three strapping country wenches.”
And laughing together, they constructed a series of frankly indecent couplets, recording the voyager’s adventures with all three. It was a matter of the most complete collaboration, for the friends supplied alternate lines, outdoing one another in Rabelaisian extravagance. Edwin, however, provided the final couplet, which, he declared, gave the composition literary form:—