“No, sir.”
“Couldn’t it be produced here?”
“I am a one-hundred-per-cent. American. The way I see it, I could not be a party to an indirect attack on my Native Land.”
Once again he ground his jaws. There did not seem to be much left to say. The heat in the shut caravan was more and more oppressive. Time had stood still with me listening. I was aware now that the owls had ceased hooting and that a night had gone out of the world. I rose from the bunk. Mr. Tarworth, carefully rebuttoning his raincoat, opened the door.
“Good Lord Gord Almighty!” he cried with a child’s awed reverence. “It’s sun-up. Look!”
Daylight was just on the heels of dawn, with the sun following. The icy-blackness of the Great North Road banded itself with smoking mists that changed from solid pearl to writhing opal, as they lifted above hedge-row level. The dew-wet leaves of the upper branches turned suddenly into diamond facets, and that wind, which runs before the actual upheaval of the sun, swept out of the fragrant lands to the East, and touched my cheek—as many times it had touched it before, on the edge, or at the ends, of inconceivable experiences.
My companion breathed deeply, while the low glare searched the folds of his coat and the sags and wrinkles of his face. We heard the far-away pulse of a car through the infinite, clean-born, light-filled stillness. It neared and stole round the bend—a motor-hearse on its way to some early or distant funeral, one side of the bright oak coffin showing beneath the pall, which had slipped a little. Then it vanished in a blaze of wet glory from the sun-drenched road, amid the songs of a thousand birds.
Mr. Tarworth laid his hand on my shoulder.
“Say, Neighbour,” he said. “There’s somethin’ very soothin’ in the Concept of Death after all.”
Then he set himself, kindly and efficiently, to tow me towards Doncaster, where, when the day’s life should begin again, one might procure a new magneto make-and-break—that tiny two-inch spring of finest steel, failure of which immobilises any car.