CHAPTER VI
IN WHICH A VERY OLD GAME TAKES PLACE ON THE HOG’S BACK
I
A thick grey mist lay over the Thames. It covered the water and the low fields to the west like a thick white carpet; it drifted sluggishly under the old bridge which spans the river between Goring and Streatley. It was the hour before dawn, and sleepy passengers, rubbing the windows of their carriages as the Plymouth boat express rushed on towards London, shivered and drew their rugs closer around them. It looked cold ... cold and dead.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the vapour rose, and spread outwards up the wooded hills by Basildon. It drifted through the shrubs and rose-bushes of a little garden, which stretched from a bungalow down to the water’s edge, until at length wisps of it brushed gently round the bungalow itself. It was a daily performance in the summer, and generally the windows of the lower rooms remained shut till long after the mist had gone and the sun was glinting through the trees on to the river below. But on this morning there was a change in the usual programme. Suddenly the window of one of the downstair rooms was flung open, and a man with a white haggard face leant out drawing great gulps of fresh air into his lungs. Softly the white wraiths eddied past him into the room behind—a room in which a queer, faintly sweet smell still hung—a room in which three other men lay sprawling uncouthly in chairs, and two dogs lay motionless on the hearthrug.
After a moment or two the man withdrew, only to appear again with one of the others in his arms. And then, having dropped his burden through the window on to the lawn outside, he repeated his performance with the remaining two. Finally he pitched the two dogs after them, and then, with his hand to his forehead, he staggered down to the water’s edge.
“Holy smoke!” he muttered to himself, as he plunged his head into the cold water, “talk about the morning after.... Never have I thought of such a head.”
After a while, with the water still dripping from his face, he returned to the bungalow and found the other three in varying stages of partial insensibility.
“Wake up, my heroes,” he remarked, “and go and put your great fat heads in the river.”
Peter Darrell scrambled unsteadily to his feet. “Great Scott! Hugh,” he muttered thickly, “what’s happened?”