The iron bowls were overturned, and in the dark girls screamed and the men crowded to the door. When they emerged into the moonlight, leaving the dying man upon the floor, the murderer was gone; and as they looked at one another there came a voice shouting out, “Adios, Barragán. Thus does Vicente Castro pay his debts when a man tries to steal his girl,” and the faint footfalls of an unshod horse galloping far out upon the plain.
I started, and the waiter standing by my side said, “Eighty centimes”; and down the boulevard echoed the harsh cry, “La Patrie, achetez La Patrie,” and the rolling of the cabs.
IX
IN A BACKWATER
“This ’ere war, now,” said the farmer, in the slow voice that tells of life passed amongst comfortable surroundings into which haste has never once intruded, “is a ’orrid business.”
He leaned upon a half-opened gate, keeping it swaying to and fro a little with his foot. His waistcoat was unbuttoned, showing his greasy braces and his checked blue shirt. His box-cloth gaiters, falling low down upon his high-lows, left a gap between them and his baggy riding-breeches, just below the knee. His flat-topped bowler hat was pushed back over the fringe of straggling grey hair upon his neck. His face was burned a brick-dust colour with the August sun, and now and then he mopped his forehead with a red handkerchief.
His little holding, an oasis in the waste of modern scientific farming, was run in the old-fashioned way, often to be seen in the home counties, as if old methods linger longest where they are least expected, just as a hunted fox sometimes takes refuge in a rectory.
His ideas seemed to have become unsettled with constant reading of newspapers filled with accounts of horrors, and his speech, not fluent at the best of times, was slower and more halting than his wont.
He told how he had just lost his wife, and felt more than a little put about to get his dairy work done properly without her help.
“When a man’s lost his wife it leaves him, somehow, as if he were like a ’orse hitched on one side of the wagon-pole, a-pullin’ by hisself. Now this ’ere war, comin’ as it does right on the top of my ’ome loss, sets me a-thinkin’, especially when I’m alone in the ’ouse of night.”
The park-like English landscape, with its hedgerow trees and its lush fields, that does not look like as if it really were the country, but seems a series of pleasure-grounds cut off into convenient squares, was at its time of greatest beauty and its greatest artificiality. Cows swollen with grass till they looked like balloons lay in the fields and chewed the cud. Geese cackled as they strayed upon the common, just as they appear to cackle in a thousand water-colours. The hum of bees was in the limes. Dragon-flies hawked swiftly over the oily waters of the two slow-flowing rivers that made the farm almost an island in a suburban Mesopotamia, scarce twenty miles away from Charing Cross. An air of peace and of contentment, of long well-being and security, was evident in everything. Trees flourished, though stag-headed, under which the Roundhead troopers may have camped, or at the least, veterans from Marlborough’s wars might have sat underneath their shade, and smoked as they retold their fights.