She felt tired, out of patience. The house-agents were idiots: three of the places they recommended turned out to be glaring brick villas on the outskirts of Reading; at the fourth—a converted farmhouse near Bix—a long-haired foreigner had informed her, after gibbering for three quarters of an hour, that “vot he vanted vas to sell de place, not to let it”; the fifth, as far as they could ascertain from the inn at Nettlebed which gave them lunch, did not exist at all: to crown disaster she had wasted time, temper and petrol on this mid-Victorian mare’s-nest.
“It’s done me all the good in the world,” went on Francis. “For two pins I’d let my flat—the Lord knows if I’ll ever be able to manage those stairs again—and come to live in the country myself.”
“Apparently, you’d have to camp out in it,” said Patricia. . . .
They climbed, sputteringly, up a rough road; dropped to an uninhabited valley; climbed again; left the bare lands behind. Now, their way led through burgeoning woods of beech and larch-trees past a quiet village-green, into woods again.
Patricia drove slowly. The scent and the silence of the woods summoned her, bidding her stay. She wanted to stop the car, to wander away all alone over that flower-strewn moss, down those long brown avenues, under that pale-green canopy of spring-time.
All day long “country” before her eyes had been calling to “country” in her veins. A long clear call, dominant, heart-compelling. The country! She knew so little of it; the simplest names of its trees and its flowers were mysteries to her. Yet the trees and the flowers spoke to Patricia that afternoon; spoke to her of happiness. “Here, here, here and here only,” they seemed to say, “will you find that for which you are seeking. . . .”
And then, sudden as a dream, she saw the house of her dreaming. They were still among the woods; and the house—she knew—stood beyond the woods, at the brow of the hill. Yet Patricia saw it, clear and perfect in the eye of her mind—a long low red-roofed home, with square windows opening out from walls of mellow brick-work, criss-crossed with weather-beaten oak, onto terraced garden. Below the garden pastures sloped to dark-green tree-clumps; and beyond the tree-clumps, shining silver in the gaps between, wound the river. . . .
The road forked. Instinctively Patricia swung the car left-handed. Trees closed in above them; macadam under their wheels narrowed to a turf-edged track.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” asked Francis.
“Certain,” she answered; and drove on, between the serried tree-trunks,—beech and larch and alder, slim pillars of brown, gray-green and silver about their path.