§ 1  
Never had the gracious eastward face of Shonts looked more beautiful than it did on the morning of the Lord Chancellor’s visit. It glowed as translucent as amber lit by flames, its two towers were pillars of pale gold. It looked over its slopes and parapets upon a great valley of mist-barred freshness through which the distant river shone like a snake of light. The south-west fa?ade was still in the shadow, and the ivy hung from it darkly greener than the greenest green. The stained-glass windows of the old chapel reflected the sunrise as though lamps were burning inside. Along the terrace a pensive peacock trailed his sheathed splendours through the dew.
Amidst the ivy was a fuss of birds.
And presently there was pushed out from amidst the ivy at the foot of the eastward tower a little brownish buff thing, that seemed as natural there as a squirrel or a rabbit. It was a head,—a ruffled human head. It remained still for a moment contemplating the calm spaciousness of terrace and garden and countryside. Then it emerged further and rotated and surveyed the 57house above it. Its expression was one of alert caution. Its natural freshness and innocence were a little marred by an enormous transverse smudge, a bar-sinister of smut, and the elfin delicacy of the left ear was festooned with a cobweb—probably a genuine antique. It was the face of Bealby.
He was considering the advisability of leaving Shonts—for good.
Presently his decision was made. His hands and shoulders appeared following his head, and then a dusty but undamaged Bealby was running swiftly towards the corner of the shrubbery. He crouched lest at any moment that pursuing pack of butlers should see him and give tongue. In another moment he was hidden from the house altogether, and rustling his way through a thicket of budding rhododendra. After those dirty passages the morning air was wonderfully sweet—but just a trifle hungry.
Grazing deer saw Bealby fly across the park, stared at him for a time with great gentle unintelligent eyes, and went on feeding.
They saw him stop ever and again. He was snatching at mushrooms, that he devoured forthwith as he sped on.
On the edge of the beech-woods he paused and glanced back at Shonts.
Then his eyes rested for a moment on the clump of trees through which one saw a scrap of the head gardener’s cottage, a bit of the garden wall....
A physiognomist might have detected a certain lack of self-confidence in Bealby’s eyes.
58But his spirit was not to be quelled. Slowly, joylessly perhaps, but with a grave determination, he raised his hand in that prehistoric gesture of the hand and face by which youth, since ever there was youth, has asserted the integrity of its soul against established and predominant things.
“Ketch me!” said Bealby.
§ 2
 
Bealby left Shonts about half-past four in the morning. He went westward because he liked the company of his shadow and was amused at first by its vast length. By half-past eight he had covered ten miles, and he was rather bored by his shadow. He had eaten nine raw mushrooms, two green apples and a quantity of unripe blackberries. None of these things seemed quite at home in him. And he had discovered himself to be wearing slippers. They were stout carpet slippers, but still they were slippers,—and the road was telling on them. At the ninth mile the left one began to give on the outer seam. He got over a stile into a path that ran through the corner of a wood, and there he met a smell of frying bacon that turned his very soul to gastric juice.
He stopped short and sniffed the air—and the air itself was sizzling.
“Oh, Krikey,” said Bealby, manifestly to the Spirit of the World. “This is a bit too strong. I wasn’t thinking much before.”
Then he saw something bright yellow and bulky just over the hedge.
59From this it was that the sound of frying came.
He went to the hedge, making no effort to conceal himself. Outside a great yellow caravan with dainty little windows stood a largish dark woman in a deerstalker hat, a short brown skirt, a large white apron and spatterdashes (among other things), frying bacon and potatoes in a frying pan. She was very red in the face, and the frying pan was spitting at her as frying pans do at a timid cook....
Quite mechanically Bealby scrambled through the hedge and drew nearer this divine smell. The woman scrutinized him for a moment, and then blinking and averting her face went on with her cookery.
Bealby came quite close to her and remained, noting the bits of potato that swam about in the pan, the jolly curling of the rashers, the dancing of the bubbles, the hymning splash and splutter of the happy fat....
(If it should ever fall to my lot to be cooked, may I be fried in potatoes and butter. May I be fried with potatoes and good butter made from the milk of the cow. God send I am spared boiling; the prison of the pot, the rattling lid, the evil darkness, the greasy water....)
“I suppose,” said the lady prodding with her fork at the bacon, “I suppose you call yourself a Boy.”
“Yes, miss,” said Bealby.
“Have you ever fried?”
“I could, miss.”
“Like this?”
60“Better”
“Just lay hold of this handle—for it’s scorching the skin off my face I am.” She seemed to think for a moment and added, “entirely.”
In silence Bealby grasped that exquisite smell by the handle, he took the fork from her hand and put his hungry eager nose over the seething mess. It wasn’t only bacon; there were onions, onions giving it—an edge! It cut to the quick of appetite. He could have wept with the intensity of his sensations.
A voice almost as delicious as the smell came out of the caravan window behind Bealby’s head.
“Ju-dy!” cried the voice.
“Here!—I mean,—it’s here I am,” said the lady in the deerstalker.
“Judy—you didn’t take my stockings for your own by any chance?”
The lady in the deerstalker gave way to delighted horror. “Sssh, Mavourneen!” she cried—she was one of that large class of amiable women who are more Irish than they need be—“there’s a Boy here!”
§ 3
 
There was indeed an almost obsequiously industrious and obliging Boy. An hour later he was no longer a Boy but the Boy, and three friendly women were regarding him with a merited approval.
He had done the frying, renewed a waning fire with remarkable skill and dispatch, reboiled a neglected kettle in the shortest possible time, laid almost without direction a simple meal, very 61exactly set out campstools and cleaned the frying pan marvellously. Hardly had they taken their portions of that appetizing savouriness, than he had whipped off with that implement, gone behind the caravan, busied himself there, and returned with the pan—glittering bright. Himself if possible brighter. One cheek indeed shone with an animated glow.
“But wasn’t there some of the bacon and stuff left?” asked the lady in the deerstalker.
“I didn’t think it was wanted, Miss,” said Bealby. “So I cleared it up.”
He met understanding in her eye. He questioned her expression.
“Mayn’t I wash up for you, miss?” he asked to relieve the tension.
He washed up, swiftly and cleanly. He had never been able to wash up to Mr. Mergleson’s satisfaction before, but now he did everything Mr. Mergleson had ever told him. He asked where to put the things away and he put them away. Then he asked politely if there was anything else he could do for them. Questioned, he said he liked doing things. “You haven’t,” said the lady in the deerstalker, “a taste for cleaning boots?”
Bealby declared he had.
“Surely,” said a voice that Bealby adored, “’tis an angel from heaven.”
He had a taste for cleaning boots! This was an extraordinary thing for Bealby to say. But a great change had come to him in the last half-hour. He was violently anxious to do things, 62any sort of things, servile things, for a particular person. He was in love.
The owner of the beautiful voice had come out of the caravan, she had stood for a moment in the doorway before descending the steps to the ground and the soul of Bealby had bowed down before her in instant submission. Never had he seen anything so lovely. Her straight slender body was sheathed in blue; fair hair, a little tinged with red, poured gloriously back from her broad forehead, and she had the sweetest eyes in the world. One hand lifted her dress from her feet; the other rested on the lintel of the caravan door. She looked at him and smiled.
So for two years she had looked and smiled across the footlights to the Bealby in mankind. She had smiled now on her entrance out of habit. She took the effect upon Bealby as a foregone conclusion.
Then she had looked to make sure that everything was ready before she descended.
“How good it smells, Judy!” she had said.
“I’ve had a helper,” said the woman who wore spats.
That time the blue-eyed lady had smiled at him quite definitely....
The third member of the party had appeared unobserved; the irradiations of the beautiful lady had obscured her. Bealby discovered her about. She was bareheaded; she wore a simple grey dress with a Norfolk jacket, and she had a pretty clear white profile under black hair. She answered to the name of “Winnie.” The beautiful lady 63was Madeleine. They made little obscure jokes with each other and praised the morning ardently. “This is the best place of all,” said Madeleine.
“All night,” said Winnie, “not a single mosquito.”
None of these three ladies made any attempt to conceal the sincerity of their hunger or their appreciation of Bealby’s assistance. How good a thing is appreciation! Here he was doing, with joy and pride and an eager excellence, the very services he had done so badly under the cuffings of Mergleson and Thomas....
§ 4
 
And now Bealby, having been regarded with approval for some moments and discussed in tantalizing undertones, was called upon to explain himself.
“Boy,” said the lady in the deerstalker, who was evidently the leader and still more evidently the spokeswoman of the party, “come here.”
“Yes, miss.” He put down the boot he was cleaning on the caravan step.
“In the first place, know by these presents, I am a married woman.”
“Yes, miss.”
“And miss is not a seemly mode of address for me.”
“No, miss. I mean—” Bealby hung for a moment and by the happiest of accidents, a scrap of his instruction at Shonts came up in his mind. “No,” he said, “your—ladyship.”
64A great light shone on the spokeswoman’s face. “Not yet, my child,” she said, “not yet. He hasn’t done his duty by me. I am—a simple Mum.”
Bealby was intelligently silent.
“Say—Yes, Mum.”
“Yes, Mum,” said Bealby and everybody laughed very agreeably.
“And now,” said the lady, taking pleasure in her words, “know by these presents—By the bye, what is your name?”
Bealby scarcely hesitated. “Dick Mal-travers, Mum,” he said and almost added, “The Dauntless Daredevil of the Diamond-fields Horse,” which was the second title.
“Dick will do,” said the lady who was called Judy, and added suddenly and very amusingly: “You may keep the rest.”
(These were the sort of people Bealby liked. The right sort.)
“Well, Dick, we want to know, have you ever been in service?”
It was sudden. But Bealby was equal to it. “Only for a day or two, miss—I mean, Mum,—just to be useful.”
“Were you useful?”
Bealby tried to think whether he had been, and could recall nothing but the face of Thomas with the fork hanging from it. “I did my best, Mum,” he said impartially.
“And all that is over?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“And you’re at home again and out of employment?”
65“Yes, Mum.”
“Do you live near here?”
“No—leastways, not very far.”
“With your father.”
“Stepfather, Mum. I’m a Norfan.”
“Well, how would you like to come with us for a few days and help with things? Seven-and-sixpence a week.”
Bealby’s face was eloquent.
“Would your stepfather object?”
Bealby considered. “I don’t think he would,” he said.
“You’d better go round and ask him.”
“I—suppose—yes,” he said.
“And get a few things.”
“Things, Mum?”
“Collars and things. You needn’t bring a great box for such a little while.”
“Yes, Mum....”
He hovered rather undecidedly.
“Better run along now. Our man and horse will be coming presently. We shan’t be able to wait for you long....”
Bealby assumed a sudden briskness and departed.
At the gate of the field he hesitated almost imperceptibly and then directed his face to the Sabbath stillness of the village.
Perplexity corrugated his features. The stepfather’s permission presented no difficulties, but it was more difficult about the luggage.
A voice called after him.
“Yes, Mum?” he said attentive and hopeful. 66Perhaps—somehow—they wouldn’t want luggage.
“You’ll want Boots. You’ll have to walk by the caravan, you know. You’ll want some good stout Boots.”
“All right, Mum,” he said with a sorrowful break in his voice. He waited a few moments but nothing more came. He went on—very slowly. He had forgotten about the boots.
That defeated him....
It is hard to be refused admission to Paradise for the want of a hand-bag and a pair of walking-boots....
§ 5
 
Bealby was by no means certain that he was going back to that caravan. He wanted to do so quite painfully, but—
He’d just look a fool going back without boots and—nothing on earth would reconcile him to the idea of looking a fool in the eyes of that beautiful woman in blue.
“Dick,” he whispered to himself despondently, “Daredevil Dick!” (A more miserable-looking face you never set eyes on.) “It’s all up with your little schemes, Dick, my boy. You must get a bag—and nothing on earth will get you a bag.”
He paid little heed to the village through which he wandered. He knew there were no bags there. Chance rather than any volition of his own guided him down a side path that led to the nearly dry bed of a little rivulet, and there he sat down on some weedy grass under a group of 67willows. It was an untidy place that needed all the sunshine of the morning to be tolerable; one of those places where stinging nettles take heart and people throw old kettles, broken gallipots, jaded gravel, grass cuttings, rusty rubbish, old boots—.
For a time Bealby’s eyes rested on the objects with an entire lack of interest.
Then he was reminded of his not so very remote childhood when he had found an old boot and made it into a castle....
Presently he got up and walked across to the rubbish heap and surveyed its treasures with a quickened intelligence. He picked up a widowed boot and weighed it in his hand.
He dropped it abruptly, turned about and hurried back into the village street.
He had ideas, two ideas, one for the luggage and one for the boots.... If only he could manage it. Hope beat his great pinions in the heart of Bealby.
Sunday! The shops were shut. Yes, that was a fresh obstacle. He’d forgotten that.
The public-house stood bashfully open, the shy uninviting openness of Sunday morning before closing time, but public-houses, alas! at all hours are forbidden to little boys. And besides he wasn’t likely to get what he wanted in a public-house; he wanted a shop, a general shop. And here before him was the general shop—and its door ajar! His desire carried him over the threshold. The Sabbatical shutters made the place dark and cool, and the smell of bacon and cheese 68and chandleries, the very spirit of grocery, calm and unhurried, was cool and Sabbatical, too, as if it sat there for the day in its best clothes. And a pleasant woman was talking over the counter to a thin and worried one who carried a bundle.
Their intercourse had a flavour of emergency, and they both stopped abruptly at the appearance of Bealby.
His desire, his craving was now so great that it had altogether subdued the natural wiriness of his appearance. He looked meek, he looked good, he was swimming in propitiation and tender with respect. He produced an effect of being much smaller. He had got nice eyes. His movements were refined and his manners perfect.
“Not doing business to-day, my boy,” said the pleasant woman.
“Oh, please ’m,” he said from his heart.
“Sunday, you know.”
“Oh, please ’m. If you could just give me a nold sheet of paper ’m, please.”
“What for?” asked the pleasant woman.
“Just to wrap something up ’m.”
She reflected, and natural goodness had its way with her.
“A nice big bit?” said the woman.
“Please ’m.”
“Would you like it brown?”
“Oh, please ’m.”
“And you got some string??
“Only cottony stuff,” said Bealby, disembowelling a trouser pocket. “Wiv knots. But I dessay I can manage.”
69“You’d better have a bit of good string with it, my dear,” said the pleasant woman, whose generosity was now fairly on the run, “Then you can do your parcel up nice and tidy....”
§ 6
 
The white horse was already in the shafts of the caravan, and William, a deaf and clumsy man of uncertain age and a vast sharp nosiness, was lifting in the basket of breakfast gear and grumbling in undertones at the wickedness and unfairness of travelling on Sunday, when Bealby returned to gladden three waiting women.
“Ah!” said the inconspicuous lady, “I knew he’d come.”
“Look at his poor little precious parsivel,” said the actress.
Regarded as luggage it was rather pitiful; a knobby, brown paper parcel about the size—to be perfectly frank—of a tin can, two old boots and some grass, very carefully folded and tied up,—and carried gingerly.
“But—” the lady in the deerstalker began, and then paused.
“Dick,” she said, as he came nearer, “where’s your boots?”
“Oh please, Mum,” said the dauntless one, “they was away being mended. My stepfather thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have boots. He said perhaps I might be able to get some more boots out of my salary....”
The lady in the deerstalker looked alarmingly 70uncertain and Bealby controlled infinite distresses.
“Haven’t you got a mother, Dick?” asked the beautiful voice suddenly. Its owner abounded in such spasmodic curiosities.
“She—last year....” Matricide is a painful business at any time. And just as you see, in spite of every effort you have made, the jolliest lark in the world slipping out of your reach. And the sweet voice so sorry for him! So sorry! Bealby suddenly veiled his face with his elbow and gave way to honourable tears....
A simultaneous desire to make him happy, help him to forget his loss, possessed three women....
“That’ll be all right, Dick,” said the lady in the deerstalker, patting his shoulder. “We’ll get you some boots to-morrow. And to-day you must sit up beside William and spare your feet. You’ll have to go to the inns with him....”
“It’s wonderful, the elasticity of youth,” said the inconspicuous lady five minutes later. “To see that boy now, you’d never imagine he’d had a sorrow in the world.”
“Now get up there,” said the lady who was the leader. “We shall walk across the fields and join you later. You understand where you are to wait for us, William?”
She came nearer and shouted, “You understand, William?”
William nodded ambiguously. “’Ent a Vool,” he said.
The ladies departed. “You’ll be all right, Dick,” cried the actress kindly.
71He sat up where he had been put, trying to look as Orphan Dick as possible after all that had occurred.
§ 7
 
“Do you know the wind on the heath—have you lived the Gypsy life? Have you spoken, wanderers yourselves, with ‘Romany chi and Romany chal’ on the wind-swept moors at home or abroad? Have you tramped the broad highways, and, at close of day, pitched your tent near a running stream and cooked your supper by starlight over a fire of pinewood? Do you know the dreamless sleep of the wanderer at peace with himself and all the world?”
For most of us the answer to these questions of the Amateur Camping Club is in the negative.
Yet every year the call of the road, the Borrovian glamour, draws away a certain small number of the imaginative from the grosser comforts of a complex civilization, takes them out into tents and caravans and intimate communion with nature, and, incidentally, with various ingenious appliances designed to meet the needs of cooking in a breeze. It is an adventure to which high spirits and great expectations must be brought, it is an experience in proximity which few friendships survive—and altogether very great fun.
The life of breezy freedom resolves itself in practice chiefly into washing up and an anxious search for permission to camp. One learns how rich and fruitful our world can be in bystanders, 72and how easy it is to forget essential groceries....
The heart of the joy of it lies in its perfect detachment. There you are in the morning sunlight under the trees that overhang the road, going whither you will. Everything you need you have. Your van creaks along at your side. You are outside inns, outside houses, a home, a community, an imperium in imperio. At any moment you may draw out of the traffic upon the wayside grass and say, “Here—until the owner catches us at it—is home!” At any time—subject to the complaisance of William and your being able to find him—you may inspan and go onward. The world is all before you. You taste the complete yet leisurely insouciance of the snail.
And two of those three ladies had other satisfactions to supplement their pleasures. They both adored Madeleine Philips. She was not only perfectly sweet and lovely, but she was known to be so; she had that most potent charm for women, prestige. They had got her all to themselves. They could show now how false is the old idea that there is no friendship nor conversation among women. They were full of wit and pretty things for one another and snatches of song in between. And they were free too from their “menfolk.” They were doing without them. Dr. Bowles, the husband of the lady in the deerstalker, was away in Ireland, and Mr. Geedge, the lord of the inconspicuous woman, was golfing at Sandwich. And Madeleine Philips, it was understood, was only too glad to shake herself 73free from the crowd of admirers that hovered about her like wasps about honey....
Yet after three days each one had thoughts about the need of helpfulness and more particularly about washing-up, that were better left unspoken, that were indeed conspicuously unspoken beneath their merry give and take, like a black and silent river flowing beneath a bridge of ivory. And each of them had a curious feeling in the midst of all this fresh free behaviour, as though the others were not listening sufficiently, as though something of the effect of them was being wasted. Madeleine’s smiles became rarer; at times she was almost impassive, and Judy preserved nearly all her wit and verbal fireworks for the times when they passed through villages.... Mrs. Geedge was less visibly affected. She had thoughts of writing a book about it all, telling in the gayest, most provocative way, full of the quietest quaintest humour, just how jolly they had been. Menfolk would read it. This kept a little thin smile upon her lips....
As an audience William was tough stuff. He pretended deafness; he never looked. He did not want to look. He seemed always to be holding his nose in front of his face to prevent his observation—as men pray into their hats at church. But once Judy Bowles overheard a phrase or so in his private soliloquy. “Pack o’ wimmin,” William was saying. “Dratted petticoats. Dang ’em. That’s what I say to ’um. Dang ’em!”
As a matter of fact, he just fell short of saying it to them. But his manner said it....
74You begin to see how acceptable an addition was young Bealby to this company. He was not only helpful, immensely helpful, in things material, a vigorous and at first a careful washer-up, an energetic boot-polisher, a most serviceable cleaner and tidier of things, but he was also belief and support. Undisguisedly he thought the caravan the loveliest thing going, and its three mistresses the most wonderful of people. His alert eyes followed them about full of an unstinted admiration and interest; he pricked his ears when Judy opened her mouth, he handed things to Mrs. Geedge. He made no secret about Madeleine. When she spoke to him, he lost his breath, he reddened and was embarrassed....
They went across the fields saying that he was the luckiest of finds. It was fortunate his people had been so ready to spare him. Judy said boys were a race very cruelly maligned; see how willing he was! Mrs. Geedge said there was something elfin about Bealby’s little face; Madeleine smiled at the thought of his quaint artlessness. She knew quite clearly that he’d die for her....
§ 8
 
There was a little pause as the ladies moved away.
Then William spat and spoke in a note of irrational bitterness.
“Brasted Voolery,” said William, and then loudly and fiercely, “Cam up, y’ode Runt you.”
At these words the white horse started into 75a convulsive irregular redistribution of its feet, the caravan strained and quivered into motion and Bealby’s wanderings as a caravanner began.
For a time William spoke no more, and Bealby scarcely regarded him. The light of strange fortunes and deep enthusiasm was in Bealby’s eyes....
“One Thing,” said William, “they don’t ’ave the Sense to lock anythink up—whatever.”
Bealby’s attention was recalled to the existence of his companion.
William’s face was one of those faces that give one at first the impression of a solitary and very conceited nose. The other features are entirely subordinated to that salient effect. One sees them later. His eyes were small and un............