"I don't know-I don't know-"
But as he didn't know what he didn't know she merely patted his arm and said, soothingly: "I won't criticize your first specimens of radicals any more. They are trying to do something, anyway." Then she added, in an irrelevant tone, "You're exactly as tall as I am. Mouse dear, you ought to be taller."
They were entering the drab stretch of Tavistock Place, after a silence as drab, when she exclaimed: "Mouse, I am so sick of everything. I want to get out, away, anywhere, and do something, anything, just so's it's different. Even the country. I'd like-Why couldn't we?"
"Let's go out on a picnic to-morrow, Istra."
"A picnic picnic? With pickles and a pillow cushion and several kinds of cake?... I'm afraid the Bois Boulogne has spoiled me for that.... Let me think."
She drooped down on the steps of their house. Her head back, her supple strong throat arched with the passion of hating boredom, she devoured the starlight dim over the stale old roofs across the way.
"Stars," she said. "Out on the moors they would come down by you.... What is your adventure-your formula for it?... Let's see; you take common roadside things seriously; you'd be dear and excited over a Red Lion Inn."
"Are there more than one Red Li-"
"My dear Mouse, England is a menagerie of Red Lions and White Lions and fuzzy Green Unicorns.... Why not, why not, why not! Let's walk to Aengusmere. It's a fool colony of artists and so on, up in Suffolk; but they have got some beautiful cottages, and they're more Celt than Dublin.... Start right now; take a train to Chelmsford, say, and tramp all night. Take a couple of days or so to get there. Think of it! Tramping through dawn, past English fields. Think of it, Yankee. And not caring what anybody in the world thinks. Gipsies. Shall we?"
"Wh-h-h-h-y-" He was sure she was mad. Tramping all night! He couldn't let her do this.
She sprang up. She stared down at him in revulsion, her hands clenched. Her voice was hostile as she demanded:
"What? Don't you want to? With me?"
He was up beside her, angry, dignified; a man.
"Look here. You know I want to. You're the elegantest-I mean you're-Oh, you ought to know! Can't you see how I feel about you? Why, I'd rather do this than anything I ever heard of in my life. I just don't want to do anything that would get people to talking about you."
"Who would know? Besides, my dear man, I don't regard it as exactly wicked to walk decently along a country road."
"Oh, it isn't that. Oh, please, Istra, don't look at me like that-like you hated me."
She calmed at once, drummed on his arm, sat down on the railing, and drew him to a seat beside her.
"Of course, Mouse. It's silly to be angry. Yes, I do believe you want to take care of me. But don't worry.... Come! Shall we go?"
"But wouldn't you rather wait till to-morrow?"
"No. The whole thing's so mad that if I wait till then I'll never want to do it. And you've got to come, so that I'll have some one to quarrel with.... I hate the smugness of London, especially the smugness of the anti-smug anti-bourgeois radicals, so that I have the finest mad mood! Come. We'll go."
Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did not gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the landlady. His knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard the landlady's voice loud below-stairs: "Now wot do they want? It's eleven o'clock. Aren't they ever done a-ringing and a-ringing?"
The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, whose god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a frightened way to Istra's blandly superior statement: "Mr. Wrenn and I have been invited to join an excursion out of town that leaves to-night. We'll pay our rent and leave our things here."
"Going off together-"
"My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here's two pound. Don't allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things from out of town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send them to me. Do you understand?"
"Yes, miss, but-"
"My good woman, do you realize that your `buts' are insulting?"
"Oh, I didn't go to be insulting-"
"Then that's all.... Hurry now, Mouse!"
On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not of a tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girclass="underline" "We're off! Just take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit-any old thing-and an old cap."
She darted into her room.
Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon and evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he was wearing, so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn't notice. She didn't. She came knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a khaki suit, with low thick boots and a jolly tousled blue tam-o'-shanter.
"Come on. There's a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my time-table confided to me. I feel like singing."
CHAPTER X. HE GOES A-GIPSYING
They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite a curate and two stodgy people who were just people and defied you (Istra cheerfully explained to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything of them but just people.
"Wouldn't they stare if they knew what idiocy we're up to!" she suggested.
Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying, without any slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was starting out for a country tramp at midnight with an artist girl.
The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and pride, stared at them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced around like strangers. Mr. Wrenn stared back defiantly and marched with Istra from the station, through the sleeping town, past its ragged edges, into the country.
They tramped on, a bit wearily. Mr. Wrenn was beginning to wonder if they'd better go back to Chelmsford. Mist was dripping and blind and silent about them, weaving its heavy gray with the night. Suddenly Istra caught his arm at the gate to a farm-yard, and cried, "Look!"
"Gee!... Gee! we're in England. We're abroad!"
"Yes-abroad."
A paved courtyard with farm outbuildings thatched and ancient was lit faintly by a lantern hung from a post that was thumbed to a soft smoothness by centuries.
"That couldn't be America," he exulted. "Gee! I'm just gettin' it! I'm so darn glad we came.... Here's real England. No tourists. It's what I've always wanted-a country that's old. And different.... Thatched houses!... And pretty soon it'll be dawn, summer dawn; with you, with Istra! Gee! It's the darndest adventure."
"Yes.... Come on. Let's walk fast or we'll get sleepy, and then your romantic heroine will be a grouchy Interesting People!... Listen! There's a sleepy dog barking, a million miles away.... I feel like telling you about myself. You don't know me. Or do you?"
"I dunno just how you mean."
"Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I'll tell you-perhaps I will-how I'm not really a clever person at all, but just a savage from outer darkness, who pretends to understand London and Paris and Munich, and gets frightfully scared of them.... Wait! Listen! Hear the mist drip from that tree. Are you nice and drowned?"
"Uh-kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked."
"Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki of mine keeps out the water better.... But I don't mind getting wet. All I mind is being bored. I'd like to run up this hill without a thing on-just feeling the good healthy real mist on my skin. But I'm afraid it isn't done."
Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere Dureon, of Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences that sprang like fire out of the dimness of the mist.
Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and stopped to wonder at its silence, as though through long ages past no happy footstep had echoed there. The fog lifted. The morning was new-born and clean, and they fairly sang as they clattered up to an old coaching inn and demanded breakfast of an amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard in a smock. He did not know that to a "thrilling" Mr. Wrenn he-or perhaps it was his smock-was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, doubtless, did the English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy housemaid prepared know that they were theater properties. Why, they were English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn-a stone-floored raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers to bother them! (Mr. Wrenn really used the word "trippers" in his cogitations; he had it from Istra.)