I was bound to obey, and she knew it, for she took my willingness for granted.
From a little gold satchel she selected a tiny box, and opening it extracted a thing like a purple wafer with a white St Andrew’s Cross on it.
“What kind of watch have you? Ah, a hunter. Paste that inside the lid. Some day you may be called on to show it.... One other thing. Buy tomorrow a copy of the Pilgrim’s Progress and get it by heart. You will receive letters and messages some day and the style of our friends is apt to be reminiscent of John Bunyan.... The car will be at the door tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give you the address of the rooms that have been taken for you.... Beyond that I have nothing to say, except to beg you to play the part well and keep your temper. You behaved very nicely at dinner.”
I asked one last question as we said good night in the hall. “Shall I see you again?”
“Soon, and often,” was the answer. “Remember we are colleagues.”
I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured with the thought of the girl who had sung “Cherry Ripe” in the garden. I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in the choice of his intermediary, for I’m hanged if I would have taken such orders from anyone else.
CHAPTER II
“The Village Named Morality”
Up on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked by muddy trickles—the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would look for in a day’s journey. But presently they reach the edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea. So with the story I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred Jimson.
The house—or “home” as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick—was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common. It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean as soap and water and scrubbing could make it. The three-quarters of an acre of garden were mainly devoted to the culture of potatoes, though under the parlour window Mrs Jimson had a plot of sweet-smelling herbs, and lines of lank sunflowers fringed the path that led to the front door. It was Mrs Jimson who received me as I descended from the station fly—a large red woman with hair bleached by constant exposure to weather, clad in a gown which, both in shape and material, seemed to have been modelled on a chintz curtain. She was a good kindly soul, and as proud as Punch of her house.
“We follow the simple life here, Mr Brand,” she said. “You must take us as you find us.”