And then, that Christmas, I met Walter again.
We were on a walking tour along the Roman Wall, Guy and Hugo
and the Addingtons and Sophia and I. We had begun at Hexham,
and we walked along the wall towards Carlisle. It was on the
fourth day that we met Walter, in the camp at Howstead.
It was a windy day, very cold and clear and bright, and we reached
the camp about the middle of the day. We had sandwiches with
us, and we sat down to eat them at the Northern Gate, looking
out over the waste space of fell towards Scotland.
Suddenly I saw Walter. He had come up from behind somewhere,
and was standing beside me.
‘Hullo,’ said George. ‘Where have you come from, Sebright?’
He said:
‘How do you do, Miss Woodruffe?’
I felt, that time, that he was looking at me, and that he was
glad to see me.
He said:
‘I have waited three years for this.’
Mollie said:
‘It’s a wonderful place.’
He meant that he had waited to see me. He told me afterwards
that he had meant it, and I knew before he told me. I knew, I
think, when he said it, up there on the hill, and the odd thing
is that I wasn’t surprised.
He sat down beside me on the stones of the Northern Gate.
He said:
‘The barbarians were down there. It looks like it, doesn’t it?
And there were Southern soldiers up here. They must have hated
it.’
He took us round the camp afterwards and explained to us what
the places were—where they washed their clothes and where they
cooked. It seemed to me very interesting, what he told us, and
there were inscriptions on some of the stones that he showed
us too.
‘Sebright is a dab at inscriptions,’ George said to Hugo.
‘He got some honour in Berlin for a thing on inscriptions.’
I thought that he made it very vivid, the life in that Roman
camp, and I had never felt much interest in Rome before. Sophia
was interested too, and George—but not Hugo. Hugo used to say
sometimes that he had a blind spot in his mind for history; but
I was vexed with him this time for not being interested. He was
polite, of course—he was always polite; but I, who knew him well,
could see that he was bored.
Sophia began talking to Walter; she did not seem shy of him at
all.
‘They must have been hard, enduring sort of people, she said.
Up here at the end of the world—it is like the end of the world,’
she went on half to herself, ‘looking out on to that . . . I
like the Romans.’
Walter looked pleased—but he was talking to me, and I knew it
and was glad.
I don’t know even now how much the difference was in him and
how much in me. He seemed to me very different this time, from
that afternoon at Oxford three years before. He seemed to me
now to have more life and more assurance, as though he felt himself
here on his own ground. But perhaps I was more ready to notice
him now. There had been no room for him at all in my mind before.
When we had finished looking at the camp Guy said we must go
on. We were to sleep at Gilsland that night if we could, and
the evenings were short.
Walter had come that way the day before, and slept at a farm
near by, but he said now that he would walk back with us. He
did not say ‘if you don’t mind’ or ‘may I?’ as one somehow expected
him to say. He just said:
‘I will go with you. I know this wall pretty well.’
We walked along the top of the wall for a long way, up hills
and down, always at the edge of the cliff, with the barbarian
country below. Then the others said they would take the lower
track, farther down across the fell, but I wouldn’t. I kept along
the top of the wall, and Walter came with me.
Once Hugo called me.
‘It is much easier along here,’ he said. ‘You had much better
come down.’
And I said:
‘I won’t come down. I am going into the barbarian country.’
And I laughed at him, and then I jumped down on the other side
of the wall and ran down along the slope of the hill. It was
not so steep in this place—towards a little lake with trees beside
it, down in the flat wild country.
‘Do you want to see the barbarians?’ Walter asked, and I said:
‘Yes, but they are all gone.’
Walter said:
‘They are not gone, only civilized. Do you ever wish you could
get away from civilized people, and culture and books and all
that sort of thing?’
And I said:
‘No, I have never wished that. I have never thought about it.’
He said:
‘Perhaps you haven’t been oppressed by it, as I have. Routines
and curricula and examinations—always doing what you have got
to do and never what you want.’