She was standing near me. “To please _me_,” she urged, in a quick
undertone, and with a persuasive look that puzzled me. Even in the
moment I asked myself why should this please her?
I might have agreed had she not followed that up with, “The hollies by
the shrubbery are as dark as pitch. And there’s the deer-hounds.”
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” said I. “Nor of the deer-hounds, either.”
“But those dogs! Supposing one was loose!”
That was a girl’s argument, a girl who still had to understand that
fear is an overt argument only for her own sex. I thought too of those
grisly lank brutes straining at their chains and the chorus they could
make of a night when they heard belated footsteps along the edge of the
Killing Wood, and the thought banished my wish to please her. Like most
imaginative natures I was acutely capable of dreads and retreats, and
constantly occupied with their suppression and concealment, and to
refuse the short cut when it might appear that I did it on account of
half a dozen almost certainly chained dogs was impossible.
So I set off in spite of her, feeling valiant and glad to be so easily
brave, but a little sorry that she should think herself crossed by me.
A thin cloud veiled the moon, and the way under the beeches was dark
and indistinct. I was not so preoccupied with my love-affairs as to
neglect what I will confess was always my custom at night across that
wild and lonely park. I made myself a club by fastening a big flint to
one end of my twisted handkerchief and tying the other about my wrist,
and with this in my pocket, went on comforted.
And it chanced that as I emerged from the hollies by the corner of the
shrubbery I was startled to come unexpectedly upon a young man in
evening dress smoking a cigar.
I was walking on turf, so that the sound I made was slight. He stood
clear in the moonlight, his cigar glowed like a blood-red star, and it
did not occur to me at the time that I advanced towards him almost
invisibly in an impenetrable shadow.
“Hullo,” he cried, with a sort of amiable challenge. “I’m here first!”