Whirled round in life’s diurnal course
With rocks and stones and trees.
That was good sense; that was peace. But away from Plasencia ... yes, one must get away from Plasencia.
For once, they were all beset by the same desire—to slip off silently one night, leaving no trace.
“Why shouldn’t I really get that yacht and slip off with Hugh ... to Japan, say ... and no one know? It’s a free country and I’ve got the money—there’s nothing to prevent me doing what I want. To sail right away from Anna ... and ... and ... every one,” thought Dick, as, rather laboriously, he gambolled round with the young wife of a rich stockbroker who had a “cottage” near Plasencia.
As to Concha—she had sloughed her own past and present and got into Rory’s—she seemed to be Rory: lying in his study at Harrow after cricket sipping a water-ice, which his fag had just brought him from the tuck-shop ... “hoch!” and a tiny slipper shoots up into the air—“the beautiful Miss Brabazons,” the belles of the Northern Meeting!... “H.M. the King and the Prince of Wales motored over from Balmoral for the—Highland games. There were also present ...” flags flying, bands playing ... hunting before the War—zizz! Up one goes—over gates, over hedges ... no gates, no hedges, no twelve-barred gates of night and day, no seven-barred gates of weeks, just galloping for ever over the boundless prairie of eternity—far far away from Plasencia and them all.
Only the dowagers, watching the dancers from a little conservatory off the drawing-room, had their roots deep in time and space—a row of huge stone Buddhas set up against a background of orchids and bougainvillea and parroquet-streaked jungle, which were their teeming memories of the past; but set up immovably, and they would see to it that no one should escape.
“There!” said Rory, gently pushing Concha into a chair, “where’s your cloak?”
“Don’t want one.”