“We’re not heath-people.”
“Picus knows it. Spends days prowling about here.” That subject, delicately picked up, was dropped. “Let’s get on.”
“No, let’s wait.”
“Why should we?”
“Because of the mead. Think of us, sweating back with a dozen between us.”
“Follow the bee,” he said, “it won’t be the last walk we shall take together.”
“Good!” she said—“at worst they will only be lost. Who minds being lost when there is so much to see? They can steer by Starn. We’ll collect what we can, and get home with some martyrdom in hand.”
For the last time she looked back over the blazing plain from which an army might pop out. Ross did not look back. He stood with his head flung up, his mouth stretching into its wild-animal smile. With violent, silent amusement, he said:
“It’s beginning.”
At a choice of tracks apparently parallel and similar, Picus had led them to the left. He had trooped them through a wood and sweated them over a crest, to drop them again in a sunk road, made for running contraband a century before. He was asking: “Where are the others?”
“I want my mead,” said Felix. “The farm’s ahead on the water’s edge, where the heath runs out in a point.”
Sunk roads are filled with loose sand. They go from nowhere to nowhere now. They trap the sun and keep out air. Their banks curl over in a fringe of heather wire. Adders bask on their striped sides. From this one Starn was invisible, and the eventual blue water bright as dew.
Carston plodded beside Clarence, his feet chafing with sand. They left the wood and crossed another ridge, and saw on their right a creek of yellow grass running inland behind them. They walked another mile till they came to the base of the point, and saw cottages under a crest of dark land. Felix cried out: “We were wrong. Look over there!” They looked across the creek, now filled with water, and only bordered with its grass. Two miles on the farther side, on a patch of green land reclaimed from the heath, was a noble group of trees round a white farm.
“We should have gone there,” said Felix—“this comes of Picus’s swank about knowing the heath. This leads only to a place we called Misery, because they starved their dogs.”
“I saw no tracks in the sand,” said Carston.
“I supposed you knew the way.” He heard them screaming like gulls over dead fish and would have preferred the birds’ company. Abusing each other for what they would forgive in two minutes. Consider rather a joke. Forget. They none of them saw that Picus had done it on purpose. Then Carston admitted that he might not have thought of it himself if the night before Picus had not slept with the woman he wanted. Why had he done it? He had separated himself from the woman, to mislead them.
They were lurching back through the sand the way they had come. But they had forgotten where they had entered the sunk road that led nowhere in particular; followed it as it wound into exactly the middle of everywhere, and looking over its bank found the airy roofs of Starn lost behind a line of high black trees.
Forgiveness woke in them and fatigue. Picus had been mocked for vanity, had mocked back, and set them off laughing. They were nervous, sweating, flushed. Felix shrieked when a snake flicked across his shoe. But it was all part of a game. Hardly able to see more than the sky, they trudged the road the sun had made into Danae’s chimney, down which God came in a shower of gold. Clarence led them. Picus followed. He had deprecated Carston’s suggestion that they should try and cut across the creek and make for the farm. “Bad bog,” he said. “Marsh-king’s sons,” said Felix, “that would be the end of us,” and Clarence that he had seen a pony lost there. At this choice of pleasures, Carston had followed them; and the sunk road, having come to the middle, stopped in a circular sand-bank round a foul pond bordered with marsh-grass where there was no way out. They flung themselves down.
It occurred to Carston that it was all nonsense. They had only a few miles to go. Keeping towards the long hills, they must strike a road and eventually, Starn. At Starn there was water, tea, lime-juice, gin, champagne. The liverish grass and thick water displeased him. “We can’t stay for ever in this cup,” he said.
