CHAPTER VII
JOSS AND REREDOS
Next afternoon, when Gaveston saw the prosaic mass of Paddington loom up before him, it seemed to his bewitched imagination a sudden gateway into past centuries of enchantment. The sirens of automobiles sang discordantly, flags frenetically waved, signals symbolically dropped, guards swung athletically on to their vans. Gathering daemonic impetus as it went, the 2.35 moved out Oxfordwards, and Gaveston, leaning back in the comfortably upholstered first-class compartment, fingered the unopened copy of the University Gazette which he had chosen from the bookstall’s alluring variety.
Now if ever was the moment to face his future, and rough-shape it like a man! He was alone: Hekla, of course, had seen to that before the cerise Rochet-Schneider had whirled him to the historic terminus. Good old Hekla!
And so his musefulness was undisturbed as he gazed contemplatively out upon the Thames-beribboned landskip. Afar off he could discern the glaucous billows of the Chilterns rolling up from the plain, flecked here and there with leafless hedgery, and the hiemal beech-clumps of Pruneley and Greatstock Major. In the middle distance, placid and content, the fickle weathercocks gleamed in the faint blue smoke of half-a-hundred hidden villages, and in the foreground the flocculent cumuli were mirrored in the shining expanse of water-meadows, their erstwhile lushery now o’erflowed by the meandering floods of Januarytide. Over all drooped a sombre baldacchino of slate-coloured sky.
“Gauguin,” he murmured appreciatively. “Pure Gauguin!”[14]
[14] Mr. Budd enjoys the rare distinction of having spelt this painter’s name correctly in a first novel. (Lit. Exec.)
He looked again.
“But English,” he went on. “Oh, ludicrously English … most distressingly English.…” And, first sign of the potent influence which these London days and London nights had wrought upon his sensibilities, he jerked down the blind, to shut out the exasperating familiarity of that fugacious country-side.