THE ROAD TO NOWHERE
NATURE discourages eccentricity!"
The ridiculous words rang in Richard Beresford's ears as he stalked resolutely along the rain-soaked high-road. They seemed to keep time with the crunch of his boots upon the wet gravel. The wind picked them up and, with a spatter of rain, flung them full in his face. The pack on his back caught the last word and thumped it into his shoulders.
"Nature discourages eccentricity!"
Where he had read the absurd phrase he could not remember, probably in some insignificant magazine article upon popular science. That, however, was no excuse for remembering it, and upon this of all days. It had not even the virtue of being epigrammatical; it was just a dull, stupid catchpenny phrase of some silly ass desirous of catching the editorial eye.
As he plodded on through the rain, he strove to confute and annihilate the wretched thing, to crush it by the heavy artillery of reason. Nature herself was eccentric, he told himself. Had she not once at least sent snow on Derby Day? Did she not ruin with frost her own crops?
"Na - ture - dis - cou - ra - ges - ec - ec - cen - tri - ci - ty!" crunched his boots.
"Ec-cen-tri-ci-ty," pounded his pack.
"Tri-ci-ty," shrieked the wind gleefully.
Confound it! He would think of other things; of the life before him, of the good pals who had "gone west," of books and pictures, of love and tobacco, of romance and wandering, of all that made life worth while. It was absurd to be hypnotised by a phrase.
No; the moment his thoughts were left to themselves, they returned precipitately to the little Grub Street absurdity. It clung to him like a pursuing fury, this nonsensical, illogical and peculiarly irritating phrase.
"Nature discourages eccentricity!"
He strove to recall all the eccentricities of Nature of which he had ever heard. Confute the accursed thing he would at all costs.
It was by way of fat women and five legged sheep that he eventually stumbled across his own family. In spite of the rain and of his own detestably uncomfortable condition, he laughed aloud. Every relative he had was eccentric; yet heaven knew they had not lacked encouragement!
From the other side of the hedge a miserable-looking white horse gazed at him wonderingly. Truly these humans were strange beings to find matter for laughter on such a day.
Yes, his relatives were eccentric enough to think him mad. There was Aunt Caroline, for instance, who rather prided herself upon being different from other people; yet she had married a peer; was extremely wealthy, and as exclusive as a colony of Agapemones. No one could say that she had been discouraged.
The thought of Caroline, Lady Drewitt, brought Beresford back to his present situation, and the cause of his struggling along a country road in the face of a south-westerly wind, that threw the rain against his face in vicious little slaps, on the most pitifully unspring-like first of May he ever remembered. Again, the day brought him back to his starting point: "Nature discourages eccentricity." In short, Lady Drewitt, the weather and the phrase all seemed so mixed up and confused as to defy entire disentanglement.
The weather could be dismissed in a few words. It was atrocious, depressing, English. Ahead stretched the rain-soddened high-road, flanked on either side by glistening hedges, from which the water fell in solemn and reluctant drops. Heavy clouds swung their moody way across the sky, just clearing the tree-tops. Groups of miserable cattle huddled together under hedges, or beneath trees that gave no shelter from the pitiless rain. Here and there some despairing beast lay down in the open, as if refusing to continue the self-deception. The tree trunks glistened like beavers; for the rain beat relentlessly through their thin foliage, in short, the world was wet to the skin, and Richard Beresford with the world.
His thoughts drifted back to the little family dinner-party at Drewitt House, and the bomb-shell he had launched into its midst. It was his aunt's enquiry as to when he proposed returning to the Foreign Office that had been the cause of all the trouble.
His simple statement that he had done with the Foreign Office and all its ways, and intended to go for a long walking-tour, had been received with consternation. He smiled at the recollection of the scene; Lady Drewitt's anger, his cousin, Lord Drewitt's lifting of his eyebrows, the snap in Edward Seymour's ferret-like little eyes, Mrs. Edward's look of frightened interrogation directed at Lady Drewitt, and her subsequent endeavour to mirror her aunt's disapproval. It was all so comical, so characteristic.
He had found it impossible to explain what had led up to his decision. He could not tell Lady Drewitt and the Seymours that the trenches had revolutionised his ideas, that a sort of intellectual Bolshevism had taken possession of him, that he now took a more detached and impersonal view of life, that things which had mattered before were not the things which mattered now. They would not have understood.
H could not explain that "out there" everything had taken on a new value and new standards had been set up, that in a flash the clock had been put back centuries; food and life alone had mattered. A few yards away Death had lain in wait to flick them out with a disdainful finger, and every man, some consciously, others instinctively, was asking himself the great riddle—Why?
Instead of endeavouring to explain all this, Beresford had contented himself by saying that the War had made a difference, had somehow changed him, made him restless. He had been purposely vague, remembering Lady Drewitt's habit of clutching at a phrase as a peg for her scorn and ridicule. He had been conscious of making out a very poor case for himself, and mentally he cursed his cousin, Lord Drewitt, for his silence. He at least must have understood, he had been through it all.
Lady Drewitt listened with obvious impatience. At last she had broken out with:
"Richard, you're a fool." The words had been rapped out with conviction rather than acrimony.
"Logically I suppose I am, Aunt Caroline," he had replied, as he signalled to Drewitt to circulate the port in his direction.
"What are you going to live on?" Lady Drewitt demanded. "You've no money of your own."
"Perhaps he proposes to borrow from you, Aunt," Lord Drewitt had said, as he lighted another cigarette.
Lady Drewitt ignored the remark.
"But, Richard, I don't understand." Mrs. Edward Seymour had puckered up her pretty, washed-out face. "Where are you going to, and what shall you do?"
"He wants to become a vagabond," snapped Lady Drewitt, "tramping from town to town, like those dreadful men we saw last week when motoring to Peterborough."
"I see;" but there was nothing in Mrs. Edward's tone suggestive of enlightenment.
"It's the war," announced Edward Seymour, a peevish-looking little man with no chin and a forehead that reached almost to the back of his neck, who by virtue of a post at the Ministry of Munitions had escaped the comb of conscription.
Lord Drewitt screwed his glass into his eye and gazed at Seymour with interest.
"Don't be a fool, Edward," snapped Lady Drewitt; and Mrs. Edward Seymour looked across at her husband, disapproval in her eye. It was hidden from none that the Seymours were "after the old bird's money," as Jimmy Pentland put it. It was he who had christened them "the Vultures," a name that had stuck.
"What do you propose to do when you have spent all your money?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.
"In all probability," said Lord Drewitt, "he will get run in and come to us to bail him out. Personally I hate police-courts. I often wonder why they instruct magistrates in law at the expense of hygiene."
Lady Drewitt had looked across the table with a startled expression in her eyes. It had suddenly dawned upon her that unpleasant consequences to herself might ensue from this rash determination on the part of her nephew to seek his future happiness amidst by-ways and hedges.
"It seems to me——" began Edward Seymour, in a thin, protesting voice.
"Never mind what it seems to you," said Lady Drewitt, whereat Edward Seymour had collapsed, screwing up his little features into an expression of pain. Mrs. Edward had caught him full in the centre of the left shin with the sharply pointed toe of her shoe.
At Drewitt House Mrs. Edward's feet were never still when her husband was within range. Lord Drewitt had once suggested that he should wear shin-guards, Mrs. Edward's methods of wireless telegraphy being notorious. Sometimes she missed her spouse, as other guests knew to their cost. Once she had landed full on the tibia of a gouty colonial bishop, whose language in a native dialect had earned for him the respect of every man present, when later translated with adornments by one of the company.
"If Edward had spent days and nights in the trenches," Lord Drewitt had said, as, with great intentness, he peeled a walnut, "he would understand why Richard shrinks from the Foreign Office."
"It would be impossible," Beresford said, "to settle down again to the monotony of a life of ten till four after after—the last four years."
"Unless, of course, you happen to be a fountain," Lord Drewitt had interpolated, without looking up from his walnut.
"I said it was the war," broke in Edward Seymour, looking triumphantly across at his wife, emboldened by the knowledge that his legs were tucked safely away beneath his chair.
"And what do you propose to do?" Lady Drewitt had demanded, with the air of one who knew she had propounded a conundrum to which there is no answer.
"Oh," said Beresford airily, "I shall just walk into the sun. You see, Aunt Caroline," he said, bending forward, "I've only got one life and——"
"And how many do you suppose I have?" Lady Drewitt had demanded scornfully, snapping her jaws in a peculiarly unpleasant way she had.
"I repeat, Aunt Caroline," he had proceeded imperturbably, "that I have only one life, and rather than go back to the F.O. I prefer to——"
"Seek nature in her impregnable fastnesses," suggested Lord Drewitt, looking across at his cousin with a smile.
"Impregnable fiddlesticks," Lady Drewitt had cried derisively, "he will get his feet wet and die of bronchitis or pneumonia."
"And we shall have to go down to the inquest," said Lord Drewitt, "and lunch execrably at some local inn. No, Richard, you mustn't do it. I cannot risk our aunt's digestion."
Lady Drewitt always discouraged the idea that life contained either sentiment or ideals. To be intangible in conversation with her was impossible. She admitted of no distinction between imagination and lying. To her all extremes were foolish, optimists and pessimists being equally culpable. She pooh-poohed anything and everything that was not directly or indirectly connected with Burke (once she would have admitted "L'Almanach de Gotha"). Burke to her girlish eyes had always been the open sesame to happiness.
As for the Seymours, they were merely Lady Drewitt's echoes. Lord Drewitt had once said they reminded him of St. Paul's definition of love.
As Beresford smoked his own cigarettes and drank Lady Drewitt's excellent port, he was conscious that there were a hundred and one reasons that he might have advanced to any one but his aunt. It would have been foolish to tell her that within him had been awakened a spirit of romance and adventure, that the wanderlust was upon him.
She would merely have said that he must see Sir Edmund Tobbitt, her pet physician, and have forbidden him to use German words in her presence.
"And how do you propose to live whilst you are pursuing your ridiculous Nature, exposing yourself to all sorts of weather?" Lady Drewitt had next demanded.
"Well, I've got nearly two hundred pounds," Beresford had replied, "and by the time I've sold my books and things I shall have fully another hundred."
"You're going to sell everything," gasped Mrs. Edward Seymour.
"Yes, all but the clothes I wear and an extra suit I shall carry with me," Beresford had smilingly retorted, enjoying the look of consternation upon his cousin's face. "When I leave London there will not remain in it a shilling's worth of my property."
"Richard, you're a fool." Lady Drewitt seemed to find comfort in the phrase. "Your poor dear mother was a fool too. She——" Lady Drewitt broke off suddenly and gazed searchlngly at her nephew.
"When did this ridiculous idea first take possession of you?" she had demanded, with the air of a counsel for the prosecution about to make a great point.
"I've been a vagabond all my life," he had confessed with a smile. "I've never been really respectable, you know."
Lady Drewitt's jaws had met with a snap. Lord Drewitt gazed at her with interest. Neither he nor Beresford had ever permitted themselves to be overawed by their aunt. They were the only two relatives she possessed who were not ill at ease in her presence.
"You're Irish," she continued relentlessly, addressing Beresford in a voice that savoured of accusation.
"Half Irish," Beresford had corrected.
"I remember now," there was a marked solemnity in her voice, "a week before you were born, your poor dear mother was greatly frightened by a tramp who had managed to get into the garden."
"Then," Lord Drewitt had said, "Richard must not be blamed. Like Napoleon, he is clearly a man of destiny."
"But," said Edward Seymour, screwing up his face as was his wont when asking a question, "I don't see why being in the trenches should make Richard want to become a tramp."
"You wouldn't, my dear Teddy," Lord Drewitt had said softly. "You see it's an A1 question and you are a C3 man."
Mrs. Edward had flashed a vindictive look at Lord Drewitt, then with a swift change of expression she turned to Lady Drewitt.
"Perhaps now that Richard knows how—how it would pain you, Aunt Caroline, he won't——"
"Don't be a fool, Cecily," snapped Lady Drewitt; whereat Edward Seymour had looked across at his wife with a leer of triumph.
That night as they had walked away from Drewitt House, Beresford had explained more fully to Lord Drewitt what had led up to his decision to cut adrift from the old life.
"My dear Richard," he had said with a sigh of regret, "I wish I had the Aunt's courage and your convictions."
Beresford smiled at the thought of that evening. He paused to light his pipe. He looked about him, hoping to find somewhere a break in the clouds giving promise of fine weather—for the morrow. No; Nature's frown showed no sign of lifting. It was as if she had decided never to attempt the drying up of this drenched and dripping landscape.
He turned once more and faced the wind and rain. His thoughts returned to his family. He had always been something of a problem to them. As a standard by which to measure failure, he had been not without his uses. He had passed through Winchester and Oxford without attracting to himself particular attention, enviable or otherwise. He had missed his cricket "blue" through that miracle of misfortune, a glut of talent, and he had taken a moderately good degree. He had come down from Oxford and the clouds, loving sport, art, literature, and above all beauty.
Mrs. Edward Seymour had once remarked plaintively to Lady Drewitt that it seemed so odd that a man who had nearly got his cricket "blue" should be fond of roses and wall-papers, poetry and skylarks. "It seemed," she ventured to add, "not quite nice." Whereat Lady Drewitt had besought her not to be a fool; but to remember that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton. Mrs. Edward Seymour had gone away sorely puzzled as to her Aunt's exact meaning; but not daring to enquire.
Coming down from Oxford, Beresford had been shot unprotesting into the Foreign Office, which he had accepted as part of the enigma of life until that fateful August 4th, 1914, when he had enlisted.
That was four and a half years ago, and now, having thoroughly earned the disapproval of his aunt, he had turned his face to the open road, a vagabond; but a free man. The blue sky would be above him; he had pictured it all, the white flecks of cloud swimming across the sun day by day, and the winking of the stars by night. There would be the apple and the plum-blossom, the pear and the cherry. There would be the birds, the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. Then there would be the voices of the haymakers, the throb of the mowing-machines and the rumble of the heavily laden wains, as they grumbled their way to the rick-yard. The night sounds, the sudden whirr of a frightened pheasant, the hoot of some marauding owl, the twitter of a dreaming thrush; he had realised them all, expected them all—everything but the rain.
He had foreseen rain, it is true, the storm, the flood even; but they had always presented themselves to his mind's eye with himself safely quartered in some comfortable old inn.
"Nature discourages eccentricity."
Nature was discouraging him by flooding the earth on the first day of his adventure.
"I wonder what Aunt Caroline would say if she saw me now?" he muttered.
He laughed aloud at the thought.
Suddenly he stopped, not only laughing, but walking, and stood staring in astonishment at a gate that lay a few yards back from the roadside.
In an instant Lady Drewitt, Nature, eccentricity and the weather were banished from his thoughts. Nothing that his imagination was capable of suggesting could have caused him more astonishment than what he saw perched upon this gate giving access to a wayside meadow. Had it been a griffin, a unicorn, or the Seven-Headed Beast of the Apocalypse, he would have accepted it without question as the natural phenomenon of an abnormal day.
It was not a griffin, a unicorn, or the Beast of the Apocalypse that he saw; but a girl perched jauntily upon the top bar of the roadside gate, meditatively smoking a cigarette. She seemed indifferent to the rain, indifferent to the wretchedness of her surroundings, indifferent to Beresford's presence, indifferent to everything—she was merely a spectator.
For some seconds he regarded her in astonishment. The trim, grey, tailor-made costume, knapsack, tweed hat with waterproof covering he mentally registered them all; but what struck him most was the girl's face. Nondescript but charming, was his later verdict; but now his whole attention was arrested by her eyes. Large and grey, with whites that were almost blue, and heavy dark lashes, they gazed at him gravely, wonderingly; but quite without any suggestion of curiosity.
For nearly a minute he stood staring at her in astonishment. Then suddenly realising the rudeness of his attitude, he slowly and reluctantly turned to the wind and continued his way.
"A rain-girl," he muttered. "I wonder if she knows that Nature discourages eccentricity?"
DINNER will be ready in ten minutes, sir."
The waiter led the way to a small table on the right-hand side of the fireplace, in which burned a large fire surmounted by a log that crackled and spat a cheerful welcome.
"Empty!" remarked Beresford as he looked round the dining-room.
"It's the weather, sir," explained the waiter in an apologetic tone, as he gave a push to the log with his boot; then, after a swift glance round to satisfy himself that everything was as it should be, he withdrew.
Beresford shivered. The day's wetting had chilled him. What a day it had been. "The Two Dragons" was a godsend.
As he warmed himself before the fire, he mentally reviewed the events of the day, and came to the conclusion that there had been only one event, the girl on the gate.
For the past two hours her eyes had entirely eclipsed that absurd little phrase that had so obsessed his mind earlier in the day. It had been a strange day, he mused, a day of greyness: grey sky, grey sheets of rain, a grey prospect before him, and then that girl's grey eyes. They had seemed to change everything. They were like grey fire, seeming to blot out the other greys, as the dawn makes the stars to pale.
It was to him a new experience to find a girl monopolising his thoughts. The habit of a life-time had been to place women somewhere between dances and croquet. He had flirted with them in a superficial way, they had amused him; but they had never bulked largely in his life. Tommy Knowles of "the House" had once said that there was little hope for a country composed of men such as Beresford, who placed runs before kisses, and saw more in a dropped goal than a glad eye.
He seemed to have had so little time for girls. There had been games to play, books to read, pictures to see, and such a host of other interests that women had been rather crowded out. Somehow they never seemed to strike an interesting note in conversation. It was invariably about the plays they had seen, the band that was playing, the quality of the floor upon which they were dancing, common friends, or else gush about George Bernard Shaw, or Maeterlinck.
He fell to wondering what Aunt Caroline or the Edward Seymours would have thought of her. They regarded him as mad because he preferred the open road to the Foreign Office; but if they were to see a girl sitting on a gate in the rain, smoking a cigarette with apparent enjoyment, they would in all probability question, not only her reason, but her sense of delicacy.
The Rain-Girl (as Beresford mentally called her) obviously possessed character; but why was she tramping alone upon an English high-road, particularly when the heavens were drenching the earth with cold and cheerless rain? It was a queer thing for a girl to do, queer beyond analysis or comprehension. What would she have done had he spoken to her? In all probability have snubbed him; yet surely two strangers might pass the time of day upon the highway, even though they were of opposite sexes.
It had been an absurd sort of day, Beresford decided, and the sooner it were blotted from his memory the better; still he would like to see her again. Then he fell to speculating as to which direction she had taken.
Would dinner never be ready? Again he shivered, in spite of the heat of the fire. He would be all right, he told himself, as soon as he had eaten something. That waiter was a liar. More than a quarter of an hour had elapsed since he had promised dinner in ten minutes. He rang the bell. A few seconds later the door opened.
"Will dinner be long?" he enquired from where he stood facing the fire.
"They tell me it is ready now."
He span round with automatic suddenness, and found himself gazing into the same grey eyes that, for the last two hours, seemed to have occupied his thoughts to the exclusion of all else.
"The Rain-Girl!" The words seemed to come involuntarily. Then he added in confusion, "I—er—beg your pardon. I—I thought it was—I had just rung, I——" Then he lapsed into silence and stood staring.
"I quite understand," she said, with a smile of perfect self-possession, as she approached the fire.
Yes; it certainly was the Rain-Girl; but how changed. Her dusky hair, which grew low down on her forehead and temples, was daintily dressed, and she looked very slim and shapely in a simple gown of some nondescript colour between a brown and a grey, which clung in simple folds about her. As she stood holding out her hands to the warmth of the fire, he recovered from his surprise. Obviously the curious happenings of the day were not yet ended.
Deciding that it was embarrassing for two people to stand at the same fire without speaking, Beresford retired to his table just as the waiter entered with the soup. Seeing the Rain-Girl, the waiter hurried across to the table on the other side of the fireplace and withdrew the chair invitingly. She seated herself with a smile of acknowledgment.
She was evidently not inclined to be sociable, Beresford decided. Surely two people dining alone in the same inn might exchange a few common-places; but she seemed determined to discourage any attempt towards friendliness. All through the soup Beresford chafed at British insular prejudice. What good had the war done if it had not broken down this foolish barrier? Here were two people alone in an inn-parlour, yet they were doomed to dine at separate tables. He was piqued, too, at the girl's obvious indifference to his presence, a fact of which he had assured himself by surreptitious glances in her direction.
As the meal progressed, he became more and more incensed at her supremely unreasonable attitude. What right had she to consign him to a dull and tedious dinner? Surely the day had been a miserable enough affair without this totally unnecessary insistence of mid-Victorian prejudice and the segregation of the sexes. It was absurd, provincial, suburban, parochial, in fact it was most damnably irritating, he decided.
What would she do when the meal was over? Draw up to the fire, go to the smoking-room, or clear off to bed? Could he not do something to precipitate a crisis? But what? If he were a woman he might faint; but he could not call to mind ever having read of a hero of romance who fainted, even for the purpose of making the heroine's acquaintance. He might choke, be seized with a convulsion, develop signs of insanity. What would she do then, this self-possessed young woman? Ring for the waiter most likely.
Gradually there became engendered in his mind a dull resentment at her attitude of splendid isolation. She evidently preferred solitude, enjoyed it in fact. He would indulge her by going to the smoking-room as soon as he had finished. In spite of this decision, he continued to watch her covertly, noticing how little she ate. He himself was eating practically nothing; he had no appetite. Had they both caught a chill? What was the waiter thinking as he took away plates containing food little more than tasted? It was like a Charles Dana Gibson picture, but for the absence of the little cupid with an arrow fitted to his bow.
It was ridiculous.
Beresford pushed back his chair with some ostentation and walked towards the door. She had spoiled the soup, rendered insipid the fish and made detestably unpalatable the joint—in short she had spoiled everything. He would take coffee in the smoking-room, there was a large fire there and—it was strange how thoroughly chilled he was. Yes, he would clear out, perhaps she would breakfast early in the morning and take her departure before he was down. At the door he turned slightly to get a glimpse of her table. No, she had not even looked up.
He closed the door and, walking across to the smoking-room, threw himself into a comfortable chair by the roaring fire, rang for coffee and proceeded to light his pipe and smoke the Rain-Girl out of his thoughts.
Presently the waiter entered with the coffee, as Beresford judged by the click of crockery. The man placed a table in front of the fire on Beresford'sford's left; then, putting upon it the tray, he quietly withdrew.
Yes, coffee would be good on a night like this, Beresford decided as he turned to the tray, where, to his surprise, he found two cups.
"What the——" then he suddenly realised that his late companion at dinner, who was not a companion at all, was probably also taking coffee in the smoking-room. Here was a fine point of etiquette, he decided. There was nothing for it but to wait. He was curious to see if this linking together of their coffees would cause her to unbend. Fate was taking a hand in the affair.
It was obviously impossible to pour out his own coffee and leave her the remainder. Should he ring for the waiter? No, the coffee should act as master of the ceremonies and bridge the gulf between them. Placing the coffee-pot and the milk-jug on the hearth, he waited, substituting a cigarette for his briar, lest its rich, juicy note might prove unmusical to feminine ears. For ten minutes he waited. Had the waiter merely made a mistake in bringing two cups instead of one? Possibly at this very moment she was enjoying her coffee in the dining-room. After all perhaps there was only enough for one. Leaning forward, he picked up the coffee-pot, lifted the lid and peered in. It was full.
As he raised his eyes from the contemplation of the contents of the coffee-pot, it was to meet those of the Rain-Girl gazing quizzically down at him. He started back, nearly dropping the coffee-pot, and managed to scramble to his feet, coffee-pot in hand, conscious that he had flushed as if caught in some illicit act. This girl certainly had a curious habit of appearing at odd and dramatic moments.
"I was looking to see if it was coffee for one or coffee for two," he explained.
She looked at him gravely, obviously a little puzzled; then, catching sight of the two cups upon the tray, she smiled.
"How stupid of him," she said, "and you've waited?" Her eyebrows were lifted in interrogation.
"I was just investigating," said Beresford, feeling more at ease now that he was able to explain. "It was a sort of game. If there was enough only for one, I would ignore the second cup; if for two, I would wait."
She smiled again and sank into the chair on the opposite side of the fire, holding out her hands to the blaze.
Beresford stood looking down at her, the coffee-pot still in his hand.
She seemed entirely to have forgotten his presence. She certainly was a most amazing creature, he decided; but that was no reason why he should be done out of his coffee.
"Do you take it black or with milk?" he enquired in a matter-of-fact tone.
"I'm so sorry," she cried, looking at him with a start, "I—I——"
He smiled down at her and proceeded to fill the cups. "Did you say black?"
"Please."
Lifting the tray and turning round he found her eyes fixed upon him. With a smile of thanks she took a cup and dropped into it two lumps of sugar. She was still regarding him with serious eyes.
"Didn't you pass me on the road this afternoon?" she asked as he resumed his seat.
"With reluctance, yes."
"With reluctance?" she repeated.
"I wanted to know why you were sitting on a gate on such a day, apparently enjoying it and, frankly, I've been wondering about it ever since. May I smoke?" he concluded.
She smiled her permission as, opening a bag that hung from her wrist, she drew out a cigarette-case. "But why shouldn't any one want to sit on a gate in the rain?" she queried as he held a match to her cigarette.
"I don't know," he confessed, "except that no one seems to enjoy the rain just for the rain's sake."
"That's true," she said dreamily. "I love the rain, and I'm sorry for it."
"Sorry for it?"
"Yes," she replied, "so few people find pleasure in the rain. I've never heard any one speak well of it in this country. Farmers do sometimes, but——" she paused.
"There's generally either too much or too little," he suggested.
She nodded brightly. "In some countries the rain is looked upon almost as a god."
"I suppose it's a matter of whether it gives you vegetables or rheumatism," he said as he lighted a second cigarette.
She looked up quickly; then, with a little gurgling laugh, she nodded.
"In any case I like to sit and listen to it," she said, "and I love tramping in the rain."
Beresford regarded her curiously. What a queer sort of girl and what eyes, they were wonderful. Behind their limpid and serious greyness there lurked a something that puzzled him. They held wonderful possibilities.
"Personally I think less of the rain than of my own comfort," he confessed.
"Auntie always says that I'm a little mad," she said with the air of one desiring to be just. "Sometimes she omits the 'little.'"
"That's rather like my Aunt Caroline," he said, "she holds the same view about me. She calls me a fool. It amounts to the same thing. Directness is her strong point."
"I suppose we all appear a little mad to our friends," said the Rain-Girl with a smile.
"Aunt Caroline's not a friend, she's a relative," he hastened to explain.
The girl smiled as she gazed at the spiral of smoke rising from her cigarette.
"I'm always a little sorry for outraged relatives," she said.
"I'm not," with decision. "Because they've got no tails to wag themselves, they object to our wagging ours."
"But hasn't the last four years changed all that?" she asked.
"You can walk down Piccadilly during the Season in a cap and a soft collar," conceded Beresford, "but that scarcely implies emancipation."
"I don't agree with you," she said smilingly.
"But a change en masse doesn't imply the growth of individuality," he persisted. "If all the potatoes in the world suddenly took it into their heads to become red, or all the cabbages blue, we should merely remark the change and promptly become accustomed to it."
"I see what you mean," she said, and he noticed a slight twitching at the corners of her mouth. "You mean that I'm a red potato, or a blue cabbage."
He laughed. This girl was singularly easy to talk to.
"I'm afraid I'm something of a red potato myself," he confessed. "It's only a few days ago that my aunt told me so. She expressed it differently; but no doubt that was what she meant."
"Oh; but I have to bleach again in a few days," she said. "Within a week I have to meet auntie in London, and then I shall become afraid of the rain because of my frocks and hats." She made a moue of disgust; then, catching Beresford's eye, she laughed.
"Do you live in London?" he asked, grasping at this chance of finding out something about her.
"We're going there for the Season," she said, "to a hotel of all places."
"May I ask which?" inquired Beresford, seizing this opportunity with avidity. "I know most of them," he added lamely.
"The Ritz-Carlton." She shuddered.
"I've always heard it quite well-spoken of," he said with mock seriousness.
"Ugh!" she grimaced. "I so dislike all that; but auntie insists."
"She is conventional?" he suggested.
"As conventional as the suburbs. I'm supposed to be with friends in Yorkshire now," she added with the smile of a mischievous child. "If she could see me here, she would take to her bed with an attack of nerves. Poor auntie! Sometimes I am quite sorry for her," and again the little gurgling laugh belied her words.
"I'm afraid you have convicted yourself," he said. "If you had the courage of your convictions, you would go tramping and let the world know it."
"No," she said; "it isn't that; but during the last four or five years I've given auntie such a series of shocks, that she really must have time to recover. First I went as a V.A.D., then I drove a Red Cross car in France and—well, now I must give way to her a little and become a hypocrite."
"No doubt that is where you got your ideas readjusted."
"Readjusted?" she repeated, looking at him interrogatingly.
"In France," he said. "We all had time to think out there."
She nodded understandingly.
"I suppose it was being pitchforked clean out of our environment," continued Beresford, "and making hay with class distinctions. I went out from the Foreign Office. For some weeks I was a private; it was a revelation."
"Yes," she said dreamily, "I suppose we all felt it."
"You see out there the navvy for the first time in his life asked himself why he was a navvy."
"And the man from the Foreign Office why he was a man from the Foreign Office," she suggested.
"Yes," he smiled, "and I doubt if either was successful in framing a satisfactory answer. Everything was one vast note of interrogation. A new riddle had been propounded to us."
"And you came back looking for an Œdipus."
"Yes," he assented. "I on the open road, others in the workshop and office. The politician knows nothing about reconstruction, because he can view it only from the material standpoint."
She nodded her head brightly in agreement. "No one seems to understand. Everything's so mixed up."
"I suppose it's because until the war no one ever had a chance of finding out anything about any but his own class. Over there the labourer found the lord a sport, and the lord found the labourer a man just like himself. Oh, it's going to be what a little cockney in my section would have called 'an 'ades of a beano.'"
Beresford shovelled some more coal on the fire. He seemed unable to get the chill out of his limbs.
"And you," she asked, "are you tramping for long?"
"For ever I hope."
"For ever! That's rather a long time, isn't it?" she questioned.