Sometimes, too, he would tell her of his years in South Africa—for instance, how, after a long day of riding up and down the fields of sugar-cane, he would lie out on the veranda of his little bungalow and read Dumas’s novels, while the plangent songs of the indentured Indians, celebrating some feast with a communal curry, would float up from their barracks under the hill; or else the night would shiver to the uncanny cry of a bush-baby: “It’s a wee beastie that wails at night. There’s no other sound like it in the world—beside it the owl’s and the nightjar’s cries are homely and barn-door like.”
“It must have been the sort of noise one would hear if one slept in Cathy’s old room at Wuthering Heights,” she said, half to herself.
“You’re right there,” he answered, “I never thought of it, but you’re quite right,” and then he added, “it’s a grand book, that.” And, after another pause: “Do you realise that one never knows whether Cathy and Heathcliff were sinners?”
“How do you mean? I must say they both struck me as very wild and violent characters!”
“No, no, I mean sinners. One never knows ... whether they broke the Seventh Commandment or not,” and suddenly he blushed violently.
After tea he would take her drives in the car; it was very peaceful rushing past squat churches with faintly dog-toothed Norman towers, past ruined windmills, and pollard willows, and the delicate diversity of spring woods. Guy had once said that a motor drive in the evening through the Eastern Counties was like Gray’s Elegy cut up by a jig-saw.
Sometimes, as they sped along, he would sing—songs he had learned at the front. There was one that the Canadians had taught him, with the chorus:
Be sure and check your chewing gum
With the darkie at the door,
And you’ll hear some Bible stories