Paul, barefoot and barelegged, hatless, coatless, absorbed blaze and dust with the animal content of a young lizard. A month's summer wandering had baked him to gipsy brown. A month's sufficient food and happiness had filled gaunt hollows in his face and covered all too visible ribs with flesh. Since his flight from Bludston his life had been one sensuous trance. His hungry young soul had been gorged with beauty—the beauty of fields and trees and rolling country, of still, quivering moons and starlit nights, of exultant freedom, of never-failing human sympathy. He had a confused memory of everything. They had passed through many towns as similar to Bludston as one factory chimney to another, and had plied their trade in many a mean street, so much the counterpart of Budge Street that he had watched a certain window or door with involuntary trepidation, until he realized that it was not Budge Street, that he was a happy alien to its squalor, that he was a butterfly, a thing of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns—slaves, Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up an old "Pilgrim's Progress" from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately refused to raise their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven. In his childish arrogance he would ask Barney Bill, "Why don't they go away and leave it, like me?" And the wizened little man would reply, with the flicker of an eyelid unperceived by Paul, "Because they haven't no 'igh-born parents waiting for 'em. They're born to their low estate, and they knows it." Which to Paul was a solution of peculiar comfort.
Even the blackened lands between the towns had their charm for Paul, in that he had a gleeful sense of being excluded from the wrath of God, which fell continuously upon them and the inhabitants thereof. And here and there a belt of leafy country gave promise, or confirmed Barney Bill's promise, of the Paradise that would come. Besides, what mattered the perpetuations of Bludston brickfields when the Land of Beulah shimmered ahead in the blue distance, when "Martin Chuzzlewit" lay open on his knees, when the smell of the bit of steak sizzling on the cooking stove stung his young blood? And now they were in Warwickshire, county of verdant undulations and deep woods and embowered villages. Every promise that Barney Bill had made to him of beauty was in process of fulfilment. There were no more blighted towns, no more factories, no more chimneys belching forth smoke. This was the Earth, the real broad-bosomed Mother Earth. What he had left was the Hell upon Earth. What he was going to might be Paradise, but Paul's imagination rightly boggled at the conception of a Paradise more perfect. And, as Paul's prescient wit had conjectured, he was learning many things; the names of trees and wild flowers, the cries of birds, the habits of wayside beasts; what was good for a horse to eat and what was bad; which was the Waggon, and Orion's Belt and the Bunch of Keys in the heavens; how to fry bacon and sew up rents in his clothing; how to deal with his fellow-man, or, rather, with his fellow-woman, in a persuasive manner; how to snare a rabbit or a pheasant and convert it into food, and how, at the same time, to evade the terrors of the law; the differences between wheat and oats and barley; the main lines of cleavage between political parties, hitherto a puzzle to Paul, for Barney Bill was a politician (on the Conservative side) and read his newspaper and argued craftily in taverns; and the styles and titles of great landowners by whose estates they passed; and how to avoid the nets that were perpetually spread by a predatory sex before the feet of the incautious male. On the last point Barney Bill was eloquent; but Paul, with delicious memories sanctifying his young soul, turned a deaf ear to his misogyny. Barney Bill was very old and crooked and dried up; what beautiful lady would waste her blandishments on him? Even the low-born lasses with whom they at times consorted had scarce an eye for Barney Bill. The grapes were sour. Paul smiled indulgently on the little foible of his friend.
They jogged along the highroad on this blazing and dusty day. Their bower of wicker chairs crackled in the heat. It was too hot for sustained conversation. Once Barney Bill said: "If Bob"-Bob was the old horse's unimaginative name—"if Bob doesn't have a drink soon his darned old hide'll crack."
Ten minutes later: "Nothing under a quart'll wash down this dust."
"Have a drink of water," suggested Paul, who had already adopted this care for drouth, with satisfactory results.
"A grown man's thirst and a boy's thirst is two entirely different things," said Barney Bill sententiously. "To spoil this grown-up thirst of mine with water would be a crime."
A mile or so farther on the road he stretched out a lean brown arm and pointed. "See that there clump of trees? Behind that is the Little Bear Inn. They gives you cool china pots with blue round the edge. You can only have 'em if you asks for 'em, Jim Blake, the landlord, being pertickler-like. And if yer breaks em—"
"What would happen?" asked Paul, who was always very much impressed by Barney Bill's detailed knowledge of the roads and the inns of England.
Barney Bill shook his head. "It would break 'is 'eart. Them pots was being used when William the Conqueror was a boy."
"Ten-sixty-six to ten-eighty-seven," said Paul the scholar. "They mun be nine hundred years old."