Anyhow there was no need to follow the glaring high road any longer. On the left he could see the clump of Steeples Wood, and he knew that once he had cut through that, he could find the swift field-path through Hoppits that would save miles of the high road and not bring him out on it till the Silverlane Pump. He strolled with a sense of relief towards the wood, but hardly had its green groves closed refreshingly upon him when, reminding himself he was a trespasser, he quickened his pace again, and hurried through the oak plantations and over the wonderful carpet of bluebells with but a slight eye to the sylvan beauty.
Even when he reached the field-path bounded by the ditch and the dog-rose hedge, he did not relax his speed, having bethought himself that the poor horse would surely be given drink at the trough of the Silverlane Pump, and that there would probably be a delay at “The Silverlane Arms,” even if he should not have succeeded in heading the Carrier off altogether. And from that point she would surely need his protection, so lonely was the road till you sighted Long Bradmarsh with the drainage windmills and the bridge. And the no less necessary sermon could be combined with the protection.
He found the wheel of the village pump chained up. Evidently the water was running scarce. It looked not unlike a gibbet, this tall pump, and he could imagine a criminal dangling from the spout. There was little water in the trough, and the water-butt of the inn was almost equally dry; a wayside mudhole haunted by geese represented a pool. He remembered these arid villages in such strange juxtaposition with his own oozy birthplace—was it here or at Kelcott that he had made a boyish fortune, bringing water at a halfpenny a pint? His mother, he recalled with a faint smile, had been against the business because Jesus had said to the woman of Samaria “Give me to drink,” though he had trumped her text with the injunction to the Israelites: “Ye shall also buy water of them for money.” It all made him super-conscious of thirst, and he went into the inn, and ordering a pint of ale, inquired if the Carrier had passed by.
“Which way be you a-gooin’?” said the tapster. It irritated him to be questioned, and he replied tartly that he was going home. He gulped down his liquor and put his question to a group of children playing around the pump. They scratched their heads and gaped at him, and the youngest put shy, chubby hands to its smeary face. “The white horse and the girl!” he explained, and the shy child started screaming, and a woman burst from a cottage door and dragged it within, glaring suspiciously at the “furriner.”
A labourer riding a plough-horse barebacked, and leading another, came from the Bradmarsh direction. “Has the Carrier passed you?” he asked.
“D’ye want a lift?” was the reply.
He lost his temper. “Haven’t you got enough business o’ your own?”
“Not much,” said the labourer naïvely. “Ground be as ’ard as the road. Curous, baint it, arter all that soakin’.”
He replied more civilly, glad his rudeness was misunderstood. “Yes, it’s always either too little or too much.”
“And ye can’t sow unless ’tis none-or-both,” added the philosophic ploughman, plodding on. “Gimme a followin’ toime!”