Now, from the very first day in the country, a change had come over Eve. A crust of hardness seemed to have fallen from her, and once more she had felt herself to be the possessor of an impressionable and glowing body, whose skin and senses responded to the sunlight, the winds, the colours and the scent of the earth. She no longer felt like a little pricking thorn in the big body of life. She belonged to the earth. She was in the apple blossom and in the red flare of a bed of tulips. Self was no longer dissevered from the all-consciousness of the life round her. The tenderness came back to her, all those mysterious, elusive and exultant moods that came she knew not whence and went she knew not whither. She had ceased to be a pathological specimen corked up in a bottle, and had become part of the colour and the smell, the joy and the pathos of things vital.
In the fields Eve saw lambs at play, skipping absurdly, butting each other. Birds were singing and making love, and the bees were busy in the furze. A sense of the immensity, of the exultant rush of life, possessed her. And this pilgrimage of theirs, all this spouting and declaiming, this lean-necked heroism, seemed futile and rather ridiculous. Was one to tell Nature that she must stand aside, and order youth not to look into the eyes of youth? It might serve for the few. They were like children making castles and dykes and rivulets on the sands, within the reach of the sea. Eve imagined that Nature must be amused, but that she would wipe out these eccentricities so soon as they began to bore her. She felt herself in the midst of elemental things; whereas Joan Gaunt had studied botany in a museum.
That afternoon they marched on to Pulborough, and, entering an inn, announced to the landlord that they intended staying for the night. Joan Gaunt managed the practical side of the pilgrimage. She entered the inn with the air of an officer commanding food and beds in time of war.
“Three bedrooms, and a cold supper at nine!”
The landlord was a Sussex man, short, stolid, and laconic. He looked at Joan Gaunt out of staring blue eyes, and asked whether their luggage had been left at the station.
“We have not got any luggage. We are on a walking tour. You can give us our tea in the garden.”
Joan Gaunt did not hear what the landlord said to his wife, who was cleaning table-silver in a pantry at the end of a long passage. It was terse and unflattering, and included such phrases as, “Three tooth brushes and a change of stockings.” “A scrag of mutton without so much as a frill to the bone end.”
The three comrades had tea in the garden, and were studied suspiciously by the landlord’s wife, a comely little woman with bright, brown eyes. The few words that she uttered were addressed to Eve.
“A nice May we’re having!”
“Splendid.”