“Listen,” said George Tarlyon, and when you listened it really was rather curious, the silence of Carmion Wood. “Quiet we call silence, the merest word of all,” some one has written, Poe, I think; but that word applied very fully to Carmion, it was so silent! If only there had been a wind, just to give the leaves a little fun! But there wasn’t a breath; it was a close day in August, and the wood was a crypt, that’s what it was. I said so to Tarlyon, but all he said was that he was hungry. Later on he grunted: “You and your crypts!”
“It’s a pity,” I said reasonably, “that the sun doesn’t get a bit further into this place....”
“Dolorous is the word for it,” murmured Tarlyon; and he was quite right, amazingly right. “Dolorous” was certainly the word for it.
“Open your cut-out, man!” I said at last, for that car was really too well-bred. And with a twist of his foot he opened the cut-out. What a cut-out! But it did make things seem more homely.
II
The car rushed on.... The straight road under the thick tapestry of leaves would take us directly to the parkland of Malmanor; through the opening at the end, for Carmion Wood ends sharply, we could see in the far distance, lying in the hollow of the county like an ancient pink jewel in a green bowl, the vast Elizabethan pile of Malmanor Hall.
The car rushed on....
“Bang!” said the car, but Tarlyon said worse than that as he pulled up.
“This,” I said, as we looked at the flattened back tyre, “this comes of taking short cuts.”
The matter with Tarlyon was that he had had no luncheon and was hungry. Now George Tarlyon is my greatest friend, but this I had against him, that he swore too much. Like many other men, decent men, he swore too much and too often. I can say “damn” with any man, I have said “bloody,” and will again when it is organic to the occasion, but what humorous writers in the magazines call scientific swearing does not amuse me. I do not wish to seem superior, but it just does not amuse me. In the Middle Ages men swore mightily on the names of the Trinity and the Saints, but then they believed mightily in the Trinity and the Saints. Now men swear and curse on the names of everything and believe in nothing. It is the habit of the modern world; it is the habit of being in a hurry; it is the habit of unholiness. And it had grown on my friend, George Almeric St. George Tarlyon, who was otherwise a reasonable sort of man.