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extraordinary grimaces were seen to distort the stiff face of
MacIan, and unholy sounds came from within. He had never
practised laughing, and it hurt him very much.
VII. THE VILLAGE OF GRASSLEY-IN-THE-HOLE
At about half past one, under a strong blue sky, Turnbull got up
out of the grass and fern in which he had been lying, and his
still intermittent laughter ended in a kind of yawn.
"I'm hungry," he said shortly. "Are you?"
"I have not noticed," answered MacIan. "What are you going to
do?"
"There's a village down the road, past the pool," answered
Turnbull. "I can see it from here. I can see the whitewashed
walls of some cottages and a kind of corner of the church. How
jolly it all looks. It looks so--I don't know what the word
is--so sensible. Don't fancy I'm under any illusions about
Arcadian virtue and the innocent villagers. Men make beasts of
themselves there with drink, but they don't deliberately make
devils of themselves with mere talking. They kill wild animals in
the wild woods, but they don't kill cats to the God of Victory.
They don't----" He broke off and suddenly spat on the ground.
"Excuse me," he said; "it was ceremonial. One has to get the
taste out of one's mouth."
"The taste of what?" asked MacIan.
"I don't know the exact name for it," replied Turnbull. "Perhaps
it is the South Sea Islands, or it may be Magdalen College."
There was a long pause, and MacIan also lifted his large limbs
off the ground--his eyes particularly dreamy.
"I know what you mean, Turnbull," he said, "but...I always
thought you people agreed with all that."
"With all that about doing as one likes, and the individual, and
Nature loving the strongest, and all the things which that
cockroach talked about."
Turnbull's big blue-grey eyes stood open with a grave
astonishment.
"Do you really mean to say, MacIan," he said, "that you fancied
that we, the Free-thinkers, that Bradlaugh, or Holyoake, or
Ingersoll, believe all that dirty, immoral mysticism about
Nature? Damn Nature!"
"I supposed you did," said MacIan calmly. "It seems to me your
most conclusive position."
"And you mean to tell me," rejoined the other, "that you broke my
window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman
up with ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five
meadows--all under the impression that I am such an illiterate
idiot as to believe in Nature!"
"I supposed you did," repeated MacIan with his usual mildness;
"but I admit that I know little of the details of your belief--or
disbelief."
Turnbull swung round quite suddenly, and set off towards the
village.
"Come along," he cried. "Come down to the village. Come down to
the nearest decent inhabitable pub. This is a case for beer."
"I do not quite follow you," said the Highlander.
"Yes, you do," answered Turnbull. "You follow me slap into the
inn-parlour. I repeat, this is a case for beer. We must have the
whole of this matter out thoroughly before we go a step farther.
Do you know that an idea has just struck me of great simplicity
and of some cogency. Do not by any means let us drop our
intentions of settling our differences with two steel swords.
But do you not think that with two pewter pots we might do what
we really have never thought of doing yet--discover what our
difference is?"
"It never occurred to me before," answered MacIan with
tranquillity. "It is a good suggestion."
And they set out at an easy swing down the steep road to the
village of Grassley-in-the-Hole.
Grassley-in-the-Hole was a rude parallelogram of buildings, with
two thoroughfares which might have been called two high streets
if it had been possible to call them streets. One of these ways
was higher on the slope than the other, the whole parallelogram
lying aslant, so to speak, on the side of the hill. The upper of
these two roads was decorated with a big public house, a
butcher's shop, a small public house, a sweetstuff shop, a very
small public house, and an illegible signpost. The lower of the
two roads boasted a horse-pond, a post office, a gentleman's
garden with very high hedges, a microscopically small public [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]