Across the lowlands drifted a clangor of bells. A slow, sad, ancient clangor, which-swung in the air and was a part of it. Far ahead, the church-spire among the oaks caught the last light. Birds twittered into flight from its belfry as the bell notes clashed with iron weariness, and a rook was cawing. They had stopped by a stone bridge over a broad stream. Dorothy Starberth turned and looked at him.
"If you can say that," she said, "it's all I could ask."
Her lips moved slowly, with a faint smile, and the breeze was smoothing her dark hair.
"I hate practicality," she went on, with sudden vehemence. "I've had to be practical ever since father died.
Herbert's a good old dependable horse, with about as much imagination as that hayrick over there. And there's Mrs. Colonel Granby, and Leutitia Markley, and Mrs. Payne who uses the ouija board, and Miss Porterson who almost gets round to reading the new books. There's Wilfrid Denim, who comes to pay me attentions every Thursday night at nine P.M. precisely, runs out of new conversational matter at nine five, and continues to talk about a play he saw in London three years ago, or else illustrates tennis strokes till you think he's jolly well got St. Vitus' dance. Oh yes — and Mr. Saunders. St. George for Merrie England, and if Harrow beats Eton this year the country's in the hands of the Socialists. Woof!"
She wound up breathlessly, again shaking her head with vehemence until she had to smooth back the cloudy hair. Then she smiled, rather shame-facedly. "I don't know what you'll think of me for talking like this―"
"I think you're absolutely right!" Rampole returned, enthusiastically. He had particularly relished that crack about Mr. Saunders. "Down with ouija boards. A bas le tennis. I hope Harrow knocks Eton for a row of brick-ahem! What I mean to say is, you're absolutely right and long live Socialism."
"I didn't say anything about Socialism."
"Well, say something about it, then," he offered, magnanimously. "Go on, say something about it. Hurrah for Norman Thomas! God bless―"
"But why, silly? Why?"
"Because Mr. Saunders wouldn't like it," explained Rampole. The thesis seemed to him a good one, if vague. But another idea struck him, and he inquired, suspiciously: "Who is this Wilfrid person who comes round to see you every Thursday night? 'Wilfrid' is a lousy name, anyway. It sounds like somebody with marcelled hair."
She slid off the coping of the bridge, and she seemed somehow set free in the strength of her small body laughter-real and swashbuckling, as he had heard it the night before-had got out of its prison, too.
"I say! We'll never get those cigarettes if we don't hurry… I feel the way you talk. D'you want to run for it? But take it easy; it's a quarter of a mile."
Rampole said, "What ho!" and they clipped out past the hayricks with the wind in their faces, and Dorothy Starberth was still laughing.
"I hope I meet Mrs. Colonel Granby," she said, breathlessy. She seemed to think this a wicked idea, and turned a flushed face over her shoulder, eyes dancing. "It's nice, it's nice.- Ugh! I'm glad I have on low-heeled shoes."
"Want to speed it up?"
"Beast! I'm warm already. I say, are you a track man?" "Hmf. A little."
A little. Through his brain ran white letters on black boards, in a dusky room off the campus, where there were silver cups in glass cases and embalmed footballs with dates painted on them. Then, with the road flying past, he remembered another scene of just such an exhilaration as he felt now. November, with a surf of sound beating, the rasp of breathing, and the quarterback declaiming signals like a ham actor. Thick headache. Little wires in his legs drawn tight, and cold fingers without feeling in them. Then the wheeze and buckle of the line, and thuds. Suddenly the cold air streaming in his face, a sensation of flying over white lines on legs wired like a puppet's, and a muddy object he plucked out of the air just under the goal-posts… He heard again that stupefying roar, and felt his stomach opening and shutting as the roar lifted the dusky air like a lid off a kettle. That had been only last autumn, and it seemed a thousand years ago. Here he was on a weirder adventure in the twilight, with a girl whose very presence was like the tingle of those lost, roaring thousand years.
"A little," he repeated, suddenly, drawing a deep breath.
They were into the outskirts of the village, where thick waisted trees shaded white shop-fronts, and the bricks of the sidewalks ran in crooked patterns like a child's writing exercise. A woman stopped to look at them. A man on a bicycle goggled so much that he ran into the ditch and swore.
Leaning up against a tree, flushed and panting, Dorothy laughed.
"I've had enough of your silly game," she said, her eyes very bright. "But, O Lord! I feel better!"
From the furious excitement which had possessed them, neither knowing why, they passed to deep contentment and became carefully decorous. They got the cigarettes, the tobacconist explaining as 'ow he had stopped there after hours, and Rampole gratified a long-cherished wish to buy a church-warden pipe. He was intrigued by the chemist's shop; with its large glass vats of red and green and its impressive array of drugs, it was like something out of a mediaeval tale. There was an inn, called The Friar Tuck, and a public-house called The Goat and Bunch of Grapes. Rampole was steered away from the latter only by the girl's (to him) inexplicable refusal to accompany him into the bar. All.in all, he was much impressed.
"You can get a shave and a hair-cut in the cigar store," he continued to muse. "It isn't so different from America, after all."
He felt so fine that even the trials were nothing. They ran into Mrs. Theodosia Payne, the lawyer's wife, who was stalking grimly along the High Street with her ouija board under her arm. Mrs. Payne had a formidable hat. She moved her jaws like a ventriloquist's dummy, but spoke like a sergeant-major. Nevertheless, Rampole listened with Chesterfieldian politeness while she explained the vagaries of Lucius, her "control" — apparently an erratic and dissipated member of the spirit world, who skidded all over the board and spelled with a strong cockney accent. Dorothy saw her companion's face looking dangerously apoplectic, and got him away from Mrs. Payne before they both exploded into mirth.
It was nearly eight o'clock before they started back. Everything pleased these two, from the street lamps (which resembled glass coffins, and burnt a very consumptive sort of gas) to a tiny shop with a bell over the door, where you could get gilt-covered gingerbread animals and sheets of long-forgotten comic-songs. Rampole had always had a passion for buying useless junk, on the two sound principles that he didn't need it and that he had money to spend; so, finding a kindred spirit who didn't think it was childish, he indulged. They went back through a luminous dusk, the song-sheets held between them like a hymnal, earnestly singing a lament called, "Where Was You, ‘Arry, on the Last Bank 'Oliday?" — and Dorothy was sternly ordered to repress her hilarity in the pathetic parts.
"It's been glorious," the girl said when they had almost reached the lane leading to Dr. Fell's. "It never occurred to me that there was anything interesting in Chatterham. I'm sorry to go home."
"It never occurred to me, either," he said, blankly. "It just seemed that way this afternoon."
They meditated this a moment, looking at each other.
"We've got time for one more," he suggested, as though that were the most important thing in the world. "Do you want to try `The Rose of Bloomsbury Square'?"
"Oh no! Dr. Fell's an old dear, but I've got to preserve some dignity. I saw Mrs. Colonel Granby peeping through the curtains all the time we were in the village. Besides, it's' getting late…."