‘I should like above everything to go to Great Oakhurst.’
‘What, five of us—twenty miles there and twenty miles back! Besides, although I love the place, it isn’t exactly what one would go to see just for a day. No! Letherhead or Mickleham or Darkin would be ever so much better. They are too far, though, and, then, that man Baruch must go with us. He’d be company for Marshall, and he sticks up in Clerkenwell and never goes nowhere. You remember as Marshall said as he must ask him the next time we had an outing.’
Clara had not forgotten it.
‘Ah,’ continued Mrs Caffyn, ‘I should just love to show you Mickleham.’
Mrs Caffyn’s heart yearned after her Surrey land. The man who is born in a town does not know what it is to be haunted through life by lovely visions of the landscape which lay about him when he was young. The village youth leaves the home of his childhood for the city, but the river doubling on itself, the overhanging alders and willows, the fringe of level meadow, the chalk hills bounding the river valley and rising against the sky, with here and there on their summits solitary clusters of beech, the light and peace of the different seasons, of morning, afternoon and evening, never forsake him. To think of them is not a mere luxury; their presence modifies the whole of his life.
‘I don’t see how it is to be managed,’ she mused; ‘and yet there’s nothing near London as I’d give two pins to see. There’s Richmond as we went to one Sunday; it was no better, to my way of thinking, than looking at a picture. I’d ever so much sooner be a-walking across the turnips by the footpath from Darkin home.’
‘Couldn’t we, for once in a way, stay somewhere over-night?’
‘It might as well be two,’ said Mrs Marshall; ‘Saturday and Sunday.’
‘Two,’ said Madge; ‘I vote for two.’
‘Wait a bit, my dears, we’re a precious awkward lot to fit in—Marshall and his wife me and you and Miss Clara and the baby; and then there’s Baruch, who’s odd man, so to speak; that’s three bedrooms. We sha’n’t do it—Otherwise, I was a-thinking—’