‘You were both silly and horrid,’ answered his hostess. But her eyes danced with pleasure as they met his, and the two friends exchanged a smile of understanding. This was their good time, and they would make the most of it, wasting no regret on the past and admitting to their hearts no fear of the great black future that loomed, like a beast of prey, ready to shatter their happiness with a blow of its paw. It was a most delightful friendship, and that it depended on mutual liking alone, and on no sort of conventional tie, constituted not the least of its charm. Dressed in a white tub-frock, her small face from under a drooping sun-hat flushing with excitement, Betty—publicly known as Mrs. Charles Cowley—looked exquisitely cool and fresh and young, younger even than her years, which numbered twenty-seven. It did Arnold’s eyes good to look at her, and it sent a warm thrill through his romantic heart that he was able to enjoy that comforting sight, able to bask in her jolly friendliness, without a thought of disloyalty towards her husband, his old friend Charles. So far as he could feel sorry for anyone this morning he was a little sorry for Charles: not because Charles was an ill-paid clerk, nor because Charles’s was a retentive firm conspiring with medical officers to defeat his patriotic ambition, but merely because on this day of all days he had to remain cooped up in the city, poor devil.
He put his head out of the kitchen window and inhaled the summer air in long rapturous draughts. Jove, what a day for picnicking!
‘Hullo!’ cried Betty, at his back. ‘What do you think you’re achieving by that? You can’t stop to do your breathing exercises now. Why, you haven’t packed the sandwiches yet!’
Arnold wheeled round and saluted her in military fashion—a form of humour then in vogue. ‘Sorry, sir!... Anyhow, have you finished washing up your dixies?’
Betty regarded him with severity. ‘Yes, of course. Haven’t I got my hat on and waiting for you!’
He repeated the question reflectively. ‘Haven’t I got my hat on and waiting for you?... In what sense is your hat waiting for me, Betty? As the dear general said in Bernard Shaw, I’m only a silly soldier-man. Don’t harass my poor intelligence.’
‘Oh, grammar!’ She annihilated grammar with one pout. Her quick fingers stacked the sandwiches, and wrapped them in grease paper snatched from the table drawer. ‘Come along.... No, I’m going to carry the haversack. You bring the thermos.’
They stepped out of the bungalow and into rural Buckinghamshire. It was certainly a unique morning. Earth had never before been so fresh, breathed such fragrance; never before had the sky bent so intimately over her. After an hour’s walking down narrow lanes between sweet-smelling hedgerows, and over hills bordered by pinewoods, the two friends turned into a field-path. Tall feathery grasses, red-brown dock-flowers and yellow charlock trembled ever so slightly as in a trance of ecstasy; clover and ladies’-fingers, buttercups and celandine seemed to Arnold’s imagination to be so many mute faces, absurdly knowing, wonderfully content. When they reached their second stile he paused, and Betty with him. The meadow beyond was a symphony in green and yellow: a curving sweep of long grass and buttercups, dazzled with sunlight; and on the far side, by a pond, black-and-white cows were browsing in the shadow of tall elms, some dreaming over a celestial cud, some stooping to the water, some cropping the jade-green grass with soft enfolding lips.
‘How still it looks,’ said Betty.
He nodded, drowsed by beauty, yet stabbed by beauty’s pain. He wondered if he were seeing this vision of England for the last time. ‘And how alive,’ he answered. ‘It’s as if the whole field were breathing and feeling. Dare we go into it? It’s like walking over some one’s face.’