Next morning a curious restlessness came upon Marjorie. Conceivably it
was due to the absence of Magnet, who had gone to London to deliver his
long promised address on The Characteristics of English Humour to the
_Literati_ Club. Conceivably she missed his attentions. But it
crystallized out in the early afternoon into the oddest form, a powerful
craving to go to the little town of Pensting, five miles off, on the
other side of Buryhamstreet, to buy silk shoelaces.
She decided to go in the donkey cart. She communicated her intention to
her mother, but she did not communicate an equally definite intention to
be reminded suddenly of Sir Rupert Solomonson as she was passing the
surgery, and make an inquiry on the spur of the moment--it wouldn't
surely be anything but a kindly and justifiable impulse to do that. She
might see Mr. Trafford perhaps, but there was no particular harm in
that.
It is also to be remarked that finding Theodore a little disposed to
encumber her vehicle with his presence she expressed her delight at
being released from the need of going, and abandoned the whole
expedition to him--knowing as she did perfectly well that if Theodore
hated anything more than navigating the donkey cart alone, it was going
unprotected into a shop to buy articles of feminine apparel--until he
chucked the whole project and went fishing--if one can call it fishing
when there are no fish and the fisherman knows it--in the decadent
ornamental water.
And it is also to be remarked that as Marjorie approached the surgery
she was seized with an absurd and powerful shyness, so that not only did
she not call at the surgery, she did not even look at the surgery, she
gazed almost rigidly straight ahead, telling herself, however, that she
merely deferred that kindly impulse until she had bought her laces. And
so it happened that about half a mile beyond the end of Buryhamstreet
she came round a corner upon Trafford, and by a singular fatality he
also was driving a donkey, or, rather, was tracing a fan-like pattern on
the road with a donkey's hoofs. It was a very similar donkey to
Marjorie's, but the vehicle was a governess cart, and much smarter than
Marjorie's turn-out. His ingenuous face displayed great animation at the
sight of her, and as she drew alongside he hailed her with an almost
unnatural ease of manner.
"Hullo!" he cried. "I'm taking the air. You seem to be able to drive
donkeys forward. How do you do it? I can't. Never done anything so
dangerous in my life before. I've just been missed by two motor cars,
and hung for a terrible minute with my left wheel on the very verge of
an unfathomable ditch. I could hear the little ducklings far, far below,
and bits of mould dropping. I tried to count before the splash. Aren't
you--_white?_"
"But why are you doing it?"
"One must do something. I'm bandaged up and can't walk. It hurt my leg
more than I knew--your doctor says. Solomonson won't talk of anything
but how he feels, and _I_ don't care a rap how he feels. So I got this
thing and came out with it."
Marjorie made her inquiries. There came a little pause.
"Some day no one will believe that men were ever so foolish as to trust
themselves to draught animals," he remarked. "Hullo! Look out! The
horror of it!"
A large oil van--a huge drum on wheels--motor-driven, had come round the
corner, and after a preliminary and quite insufficient hoot, bore down
upon them, and missing Trafford as it seemed by a miracle, swept past.
Both drivers did wonderful things with whips and reins, and found
themselves alone in the road again, with their wheels locked and an
indefinite future.
"I leave the situation to you," said Trafford. "Or shall we just sit and
talk until the next motor car kills us?"
"We ought to make an effort," said Marjorie, cheerfully, and descended
to lead the two beasts.
Assisted by an elderly hedger, who had been taking a disregarded
interest in them for some time, she separated the wheels and got the two
donkeys abreast. The old hedger's opinion of their safety on the king's
highway was expressed by his action rather than his words; he directed
the beasts towards a shady lane that opened at right angles to the road.
He stood by their bridles while Marjorie resumed her seat.
"It seems to me clearly a case for compromise," said Trafford. "You want
to go that way, I want to go that way. Let us both go _this_ way. It is
by such arrangements that civilization becomes possible."
He dismissed the hedger generously and resumed his reins.
"Shall we race?" he asked.
"With your leg?" she inquired.
"No; with the donkeys. I say, this _is_ rather a lark. At first I
thought it was both dangerous and dull. But things have changed. I am in
beastly high spirits. I feel there will be a cry before night; but
still, I am----I wanted the companionship of an unbroken person. It's
so jolly to meet you again."
"Again?"
"After the year before last."
"After the year before last?"
"You didn't know," said Trafford, "I had met you before? How aggressive
I must have seemed! Well, _I_ wasn't quite clear. I spent the greater
part of last night--my ankle being foolish in the small hours--in
trying to remember how and where."
"I don't remember," said Marjorie.
"I remembered you very distinctly, and some things I thought about you,
but not where it had happened. Then in the night I got it. It _is_ a
puzzle, isn't it? You see, I was wearing a black gown, and I had been
out of the sunlight for some months--and my eye, I remember it acutely,
was bandaged. I'm usually bandaged somewhere.
'I was a King in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave'
--I mean a candidate."