After the midday meal on Wednesday Peter loafed for a little time in the playground.
“Coming to play cricket, Simon Peter?” said Probyn.
“Got to stay in the schoolroom,” said Peter.
“He’s going to write his five hundred lines,” said young Newton. “I said he would.”
(Young Newton would know better later.)
Peter went back unobtrusively to the schoolroom. In his desk were two slices of bread-and-butter secreted from the breakfast table and wrapped in clean pages from an exercise-book. These were his simple provisions. With these, a pencil, and a good serviceable catapult he proposed to set out into the wide, wide world. He had no money.
He “scouted” Mr. Mainwearing into his study, marked that he shut the door, and heard him pull down the blind. The armchair creaked as the schoolmaster sat down for the afternoon’s repose. That would make a retreat from the front door of the school house possible. The back of the house meant a risk of being seen by the servants, the playground door or the cricket-field might attract the attention of some sneak. But from the front door to the road and the shelter of the playground wall was but ten seconds dash. Still Peter, from the moment he crept out of the main class-room into the passage to the moment when he was out of sight of the windows was as tightly strung as a fiddlestring. Never before in all his little life had he lived at such a pitch of nervous intensity. Once in the road he ran, and continued to run until he turned into the road to Clewer. Then he dropped into a good smart walk. The world was all before him.
The world was a warm October afternoon and a straight road, poplars and red roofs ahead. Whither the road ran he had no idea, but in the back of his mind, obscured but by no means hidden by a cloud of dreams, was the necessity of getting to Ingle-Nook. After he had walked perhaps half a mile upon the road to Clewer it occurred to Peter that he would ask his way.
The first person he asked was a nice little old lady with a kind face, and she did not know where the road went nor whence it came. “That way it goes to Pescod Street,” she said, “if you take the right turning, and that way it goes past the racecourse. But you have to turn off, you know. That’s Clewer Church.”
No, she didn’t know which was the way to Limpsfield. Perhaps if Peter asked the postman he’d know.