"No. I hate the Gardens. Even the sparrows know they're a fraud. Let's go out to Richmond. We can walk across the Park, have lunch at Kingston, and be back in time for tea."
Outside the Museum lodge, a horrible old bull-terrier, chained to the railings, was keeping up a growling soliloquy, with occasional snaps at imaginary flies, suggested possibly by the late autumn sunshine. He was very thick and scarred and carried his head to one side.
"This is Rock," announced Fenella, as, with a bewildering smile at the liveried keeper, she began to drag the veteran to his feet and along the pavement. "He's an awful old dog; I don't know how old, but he was a puppy when I was a baby. Isn't it funny? Now he's all lumpy and stiff, and I'm still growing. Ma says it's because their hearts beat faster. Heckle—that's a medical boy I know—says he's the oldest bull-terrier he ever knew, and that what he's asking for when he growls is a dose of pussy's acid in a dog-biscuit. What's pussy's acid?[1] Rock is short for Roquelaure, but some of the girls say he smells, and call him Roquefort. He's not my dog: he's Lady Anne's. She's hunting somewhere, and I promised her I'd take him out regularly. Oh, I want to telephone from here. Will you hold him—please? He won't bite. No, don't shut the doors, I shall stifle.... B-r-r-r! One! B-r-r-r! Two. I have put the pennies in; didn't you hear them? 2309 Pad. Yes, I mean Paddington. You say Pad yourself. Hello! Are you there? Is this Miss Rigby? Oh, good morning, Jas. Jas, be an angel and tell mummy I shan't be home to lunch. I'm going to have it at Richmond, with a man. What d'you say? Oh, fie! Oh, tut!... Naughty puss! Six feet one, a long tawny, silky moustache, and cold, steel-blue eyes.... What?... I don't know ... I may. Good-bye, Jas. You're an angel."
In the train Ingram took the seat opposite her, and, while she kept up an incessant chatter, watched her with a kind of ache at his heart for her beauty. It was more than prettiness: he saw that now. Those long heavy lashed eyes, whose full lids she had a trick of pulling—the plaintive, tremulous mouth, too red; the two little tufts at her temples which even the draught from the closed window blew across her cheekbone, so fine and dry was her hair; the delicate and rather salient nose that bespoke impulsiveness. Like all visionaries, crusaders and other impractical persons, he had at the same time an intense perception of bodily beauty and an intense jealousy for the coarse uses to which life puts it. To have retained one's ideals and to have lost one's illusions—is not this to be subject to all the tortures that sex can inflict?
They left the station and walked through the defaced streets of the old Royal Borough, its noble Georgian houses half hidden by plate-glass shop fronts: they climbed the long ascent to the Park, and stood for a moment on the terrace to admire the river, an isle-set loop of silver, at the bottom of a steep glen filled with rusty verdure. Once inside the wide ciphered gates, they left the gravelled path and by a soft mouldy foot-track struck into the recesses of the old hunting pleasaunce. The air was mild and balmy; not a breeze stirred the crisp, sapless trees that stood waiting to surrender their ruined pomp of summer to the first wind that required it of them. Fenella gave her escort her muff and stole. She called Rock to her in a high, clear voice and, with shrill, chirping whistles, with cracks of her dog-whip, fluttering of her skirts, with endless enticements and provocations, lured that much-tried old pensioner on to efforts he had really outlived. Paul, as he watched her, ignorant no doubt of the exquisite old Mabinogion simile, thought that her motions resembled nothing so much as the swooping flight of the swallow before rain. Her limbs seemed to have the pliancy of whalebone.
Rock wheezed and panted gallantly after his mistress, his paws drumming stiffly on the ground—his poor old scarred neck held more on one side than ever. But his heart was not in the chase. He was forever slinking back to heel. He looked up wistfully at this new, sober-paced friend. "Here are we," his dim old eyes, with their hardened cornea, seemed to be saying, "old fellows, both of us, who've taken sharp bites and hard knocks enough, and it's a bit late in the day to be asking us to show off our paces, isn't it? Can't we sneak away somewhere together? This girl will play the very devil with us both if we let her."
"Rock! Rock! Rock!" the clear voice would ring out. "Come here, sir! Come here thissminnit! Lazy—lazy dog!"
And with a despairing throe of his knotted tail, off poor Rock must pump again.
When they had nearly crossed the Park, they sat down on a worn seat, hacked nearly away with amorous knife blades, close to a pond into which some long-legged wading birds were digging their bills. Around them and behind them the noble demesne outstretched itself, in long tree vistas and seemingly illimitable glades, with nothing to scale them to insignificance. Now and then a motor car rolled softly along the road to White Lodge, only accentuating their loneliness by its speed and detachment, or a ghostly little troop of fallow deer passed slowly and securely to some favored feeding ground. Rock sniffed the air at them, growled and wrinkled his nose. "We both remember a time we couldn't have stood this—don't we?" the decayed old sportsman was no doubt grumbling to himself.