'What was his name?'
'A. B. Colnbrook, but I shouldn't think he'd ever been to sea!'
'Albert Basil. My second cousin knows him, in a way. She did a lot of research last year on people's psychological reactions to winning and losing, and A.B.C. was one of her favourite guinea-pigs.'
'Good Lord! It's a small world!'
'So the angels probably say from their rather precarious seats in outer space. It must look a small world to them.'
'Did your second cousin concentrate on studying athletes?' asked a chunky long-jumper, pulling on his sweater.
'Lord, no! Bingo, the dogs, the flat, steeple-chasing, the pools-everything was grist to her mill.'
'And what did she do with her notes?' asked a high-hurdler. The audience, almost fully dressed, was alert at last.
'Sent them to some bloke who was doing a book on how to tame hyenas.'
'And how do you?'
'I haven't read the book. I don't know.'
'Did Albert Basil figure as a hyena?'
'So far as I was concerned, he figured as a bloody great gorilla.'
'Oh, he isn't as chesty as all that!' objected a shot-putt man from a corner of the dressing-room.
'Beer, beer, beer, beer, beer, said the privates!' carolled and quoted an anxious voice; and the dressing-room emptied rapidly.
CHAPTER ONE
TENT ON THE COMMON
'Camping without a permit is an offence against the New Forest Bye-Laws.'
Forestry Commission Guide to the New Forest
Her Majesty's Stationery Office
Richardson was in another hostelry some few weeks later. The handsomely-appointed bar-drinks (praise be!) at pub prices-occupied the segment of a circle at the south-west angle of the lounge. The furniture in the remainder of the large, light room was pleasant and, considering its raison d'être, supremely functional. At each polished table there were two small, hard-seated, red-leather, hip-fitting armchairs and two deep and comfortable fauteuils loose-covered in a gaily-patterned chintz which pictured riders, horses and hounds.
There were more horses and hounds on the lampshades and on the long curtains. The fire-irons depended from a stand in the shape of an outsize horseshoe and on the walls four early-nineteenth-century prints demonstrated various stages in a fox hunt.
Additions to the furniture included a deep, wide settee upholstered to match the armchairs, and two high-backed wooden settles whose Spartan discomfort was only partially alleviated by the addition of the mattress-like cushions which covered their seats. A bright fire burned in a modern brick-built fireplace and the arch of this fireplace was decorated with some highly-polished and unusual horse-brasses.
Richardson-Tom to his very few friends-was drinking a pint of bitter and looking forward to his lunch. He had travelled from London that morning by train, had hiked, pack on back, from the station to the common, had erected his tent and then had come back to the hotel for his meal. Deliberately he had left his car with a friend who was going to join him later. His lonely, very short holiday was to be spent on foot until the friend arrived, and then would stretch itself out to a fortnight or more.
Lunch was at one o'clock. He was given a table which faced the garden. The time was the Thursday of the third week in September, but the only tree which showed even the first touch of autumn was a huge horsechestnut whose leaves here and there glowed bronze against the green.
The lawn, broken only by a couple of circular flowerbeds and some bordering trees, appeared to stretch into infinity, for, either by good fortune or careful landscaping, the end of it could not be seen from the dining-room windows because it took a turn to the right by some tall Scots pines, a cypress and a circle of rhododendron bushes.
The flower garden, rich in many varieties of dahlias, Michaelmas daisies, late carnations and some roses, was also out of sight of the dining-room-at any rate from where Richardson sat-so, his satisfying lunch over, he took a turn in the garden before he left for his encampment on the common. He discovered that the lawn he had seen from his seat at table was bounded by a short wattle fence at the end of a hedge of yew. A magnificent and friendly collie joined him in his perambulations and in company with the dog he traversed the lawn, picked up a couple of fir cones from beneath the dark trees which bordered the gravel walk, came back across the lawn past the great horsechestnut tree, idly picked up a burr in whose prickly sheath the hard nut gleamed and shone, turned into the flower garden, glanced at the geraniums and tomato plants in the greenhouse and wondered whether the stables still contained horses. Then he went into the house and drank coffee, paid his bill and made his way back to camp.
The road went very slightly uphill and was bordered by oak, thorn, hazel, birch and holly. On his right these screened a wide stretch of open land (known locally as a lawn), on which were cattle and forest ponies. To his left the undergrowth, trees and brambles grew as thickly as in the woods, but here and there a gravel path led to a fair-sized house. Civilisation thus encroached upon the wild, but, a little farther on, past a fenced enclosure whose use he did not, at that time, understand, came a vast expanse of open commonland around which the distant woods made a bluish, saucer-like rim.
Richardson struck off to the right, and, skirting a rough road with a surface of loose gravel, he followed a clear track which ran for a few hundred yards alongside the road and then left it for a well-defined causeway. This crossed a newly-planted area of young pine-trees and was bordered by shallow ditches along whose edges the bell-heather and the ling were still in flower.
The causeway reached a woodland path and then a clear brown stream. There was a rustic bridge with a handrail and on the opposite side a narrow track ran roughly east and west along the river. Richardson turned to the right to skirt the wire-fence boundary of an enclosure and swung left with the path at the end of this fencing to find himself upon a veritable waste of heath across which stretched a broad, grassy ride. This crossed a gravelled road which led, on the left, to a house and on the right to a fairly wide bridge.
Richardson crossed the road and followed the broad green ride until, at a bend in the river, he came to the spot on which he had set up his tent. The tent was a sordid little affair, not more than three feet wide and only high enough to allow the occupant to choose whether to lie flat, kneel, crouch or sit. It sufficed for his needs, however, and had the supreme advantages of being small to pack and light to carry. The rest of his paraphernalia was under a waterproof sheet a yard from the tent-flap and was as meagre as long experience of lone camping could possibly make it. He was, like the immortal Merkland of John MacNab, not dressy. His heavier luggage he proposed to leave at the station until he booked in at the hotel.
Although it was almost the end of the third week in September, an Indian summer seemed likely. Richardson had not taken the weather into his calculations in fixing his holiday, but merely the fact that, so late in the season, he would be likely to get the camping site to himself. Still, it was pleasant to see the sunshine and feel its grateful if unseasonable warmth. He was not-and would not so have described himself-a naturalist, but he liked to have some definite interest or occupation during a lonely holiday and had decided, this year, to observe and, if possible, photograph, the fauna of the forest. He hoped for deer, badgers, foxes, hares, the irrepressible rabbit and even the otter. If he neither spotted nor photographed any of them, he would still be of Stevenson's opinion that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive. He was a sinuously fit young man and could move like a cat. He possessed, also, an almost cat-like capacity for being able to see in the dark.