This Is the End by Stella Benson (best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

it, besides the Law itself, and they all came up spitting and spouting, and stood up to their necks in water. Oaths bubbled up to us. The boat came up badly perforated, and I expect we shall get into trouble. It was funny, but the War has rather pacified us peace-time belligerents, and made people like me unused to collisions with authority. I felt very nervous, but it was all right because ..."

"I will read you no more, but in that much there should be several clues. We must keep the western sun in our eyes to begin with."

"We must look out for a householder of irregular--not to say murderous--habits," said Cousin Gustus. "Juggling with stone balls is a trick that is frequently fatal. Nobody but Jay would encourage it."

"We must comb out all western seaside resorts for local police with tall and dewy brows," said Kew.

But Mr. Russell, who preferred not to speak and drive Christina at the same time, drew up to the kerb, and removed his gloves, preparatory to saying something of importance.

Mr. Russell was at his best in a car, or, to put it another way, he was at his worst everywhere else. When he and Christina went out together they were only one entity. They were a centaur on wheels; Mr. Russell could feel the rushing of the road beneath his tyres, and I think if you had stuck a pin into the back seat, Mr. Russell would have known it. You could feel now the puzzled growl of Christina's engines as Mr. Russell pondered.

"But I remember ..." said Mr. Russell. "Now, did I see it in the paper...? I remember.... Half a minute, it is coming back."

"Here's to-day's paper," said Kew, who was getting a little confused. You will feel the same when you set out to follow the western sun in search of something you know you have left behind you.

Mr. Russell and Christina lingered beside the kerb for quite a minute, and then shrugged their shoulders and started again.

So the Family set their faces towards the Secret World, with Mr. Russell as their guide, and the morning sun behind them.

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you go up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance. There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.

Mr. Russell was a lover of London, and that is why he liked his new-found 'bus-conductor. He was an uncalculating sort of man, and he only thought that he had found a flower in London, a very London flower, and he hoped that London would show it to him again. He had no instinct either for the past or the future. He never looked back over the road he had trod, unless he was obliged to, and he never tried to look forward to the end of the road he was treading.

Mrs. Gustus, with an iron expression about her chin, kept time to the beat of Christina's engine with the throbbing of disagreeable thoughts. There was one thing very plain to her in the matter of Jay--that Jay was living a life that in a novel is called free, but in a Family--well--you know what ... Mrs. Gustus knew all about these Friends with capital F's, Friends with hair flopping over their foreheads, Friends who might drop stone balls on the Law and still retain their capital F's. She had, in fact, written about them with much daring and freedom. But one's young relations may never share the privileges of one's heroines. Sympathy with such goings on must be confined to the printed page.

"I will keep these things from the others," thought Mrs. Gustus. "They have no suspicions, and if we can find Jay I may be able to save her reputation yet."

Really she was thinking as much of her own good name as of Jay's. For there was a most irritating similarity between Jay's present apparent practices and Mrs. Gustus's own much-expressed theories. The beauty of a free life of simplicity had filled pages of Anonyma's notebooks, and also, to the annoyance of Cousin Gustus, had overflowed into her conversation. Cousin Gustus's memory had been constantly busy extracting from the past moral tales concerning the disasters attendant on excessive simplicity in human relationships. For a time it had seemed as if Cousin Gustus's lot had been cast entirely with the matrimonially unorthodox. And now Mrs. Gustus, for one impatient minute, wished that the children would pay more attention to their elderly and experienced guardian. It was too much to ask her--a professional theory-maker--to adapt her theories to the young and literal. That was the worst of Jay, she was so literal, so unimaginative, so lacking in the simple unpractical quality of poetry. However, not a word to the others. Jay's reputation and Anonyma's dignity might yet be saved.

"I don't know where we are going," said Anonyma presently. "I have no bump of locality."

She always spoke proudly of her failings, as though there were a rapt press interviewer at her elbow, anxious to make a word-vignette about her.

Mr. Russell was thinking, and Kew was singing, so between them they forgot to shape the course of Christina due west. When they got outside London, they found themselves going south.

To go out of London was like going out of doors. The beauty of London is a dim beauty, and while you are in the middle of it you forget what it is like to see things clearly. In London every hour is a hill of adventure, and in the country every hour is a dimple in a quiet expanse of time.

The Family went out over the hills of Surrey, and between roadside trees they saw the crowned heads of the seaward downs. The horizon sank lower around them, the fields and woods circled and squared the ribs of the land.

Before sunset they had reached the little town that guards the gate in the wall of the Sussex downs. They were welcomed by a thunderstorm, and by passionate rain that drove them to the inn. Christina, torn between her pride of soul and her pride of paint, was obliged to edge herself into a shed which was already occupied by two cows and a red and blue waggon.

When the pursuers of Jay set their feet on the uneven floor of the inn, they recognised the place immediately as ideal. Its windows squinted, its floor made you feel as though you were drunk, its banisters reeled, its flights of stairs looked frequently round in an angular way at their own beginnings.

"How Arcadian!" said Mrs. Gustus, as she splashed her signature into the visitor's book. "One could be content to vegetate for ever here. Isn't it pathetic how one spends one's life collecting heart's desires, until one suddenly discovers that in having nothing and in desiring nothing lies happiness."

But when they had been shown their sitting-room, and had ordered their supper--lamb and early peas and gooseberry tart with _tons_ of cream--Mrs. Gustus saw the Ring, that great green breast of the country, against the broken evening sky, and said, "Now I see heights, and I shall never be happy or hungry till I have climbed them. The Lord made me so that I am never content until I am as near the sky as possible. Silly, no doubt. But what a sky! Blood-red and pale pink, what a unique chord of colour."

"Same chord as the livery of the Bank or England," said Kew, who was hungry, and had an aching shoulder. He hated beauty talked, just as he hated poetry forced into print apropos of nothing. Even to hear the Psalms read aloud used to make him blush, before his honest orthodoxy hardened him.

Mrs. Gustus asked the lamb and gooseberry tart to delay their coming; she placed Cousin Gustus in an arm-chair, first wrapping him up because he felt cold, and then unwrapping him again because he felt hot; she kissed him good-bye.

"We shan't be more than an hour," she said. When Mrs. Gustus said an hour, she meant two. If she had meant an hour, she would have said twenty minutes. "You must watch for us to appear on the highest point of the Ring."

"Don't watch, but pray," murmured Kew. "There's that thunderstorm just working up to another display."

And so it was, but when they reached the ridge of down that led to the Ring, they were glad they had come. They were half-drowned, and half-blinded, and half-deafened, but there is a reward to every effort. There was an enormous sky, and the sunlight spilled between the clouds to fall in pools upon the world. There was a chord made by many larks in the sky; the valleys held joy as a cup holds water. From the down the chalk-pits took great bites; the crinolined trees curtseyed down the slopes. The happy-coloured sea cut the world in half; the sight of a distant town at the corner of the river and the coast made one laugh for pleasure. There was a boat with sunlit sails creeping across the sea. I never see a boat on an utterly lonely sea without thinking of the secret stories that it carries, of the sun moving round that private world, of the shadows upon the deck that I cannot see, of the song of passing seas that I cannot hear, of the night coming across a great horizon to devour it when I shall have forgotten it. Further off and more suggestive than a star, it seems to me.

A gust of sunlight struck the watchers, and passed: they each ran a few steps towards the sight that pleased them most. And then they stood so long that Mr. Russell's Hound had time to make himself acquainted with every smell within twenty yards. He turned over a snail that sat--round and striped like a peppermint bull's-eye--on the short grass, he patted a little beetle that pushed its way across a world of disproportionate size, and then, by peevishly pulling the end of his whip which hung from Mr. Russell's pensive hand, he suggested that the pursuit should continue. So they walked to the crest of wood that stands at the top of the Ring, a compressed tabloid forest, fifty yards from side to side, as round as a florin piece.

The slopes rushed away from every side of it. There was a dark secret beneath those trees, there was a hint of very ancient love and still more ancient hatred. You could feel things beyond understanding, you left fact outside under the sky, and went in with a naked soul.

They walked across it in silence, well apart from each other. When they came out the other side, Mrs. Gustus said, "We