Some Do Not . . ._ A Novel - Ford Madox Ford [58]
Nevertheless, when at the roadside he stood level with Miss Wannop who did not look at him, and saw the white road running to right and left with no stile opposite, he said gruffly to her:
'Where's the next stile? I hate walking on roads!' She pointed with her chin along the opposite hedgerow. 'Fifty yards I' she said.
'Come along!' he exclaimed, and set off at a trot almost. It had come into his head that it would be just the beastly sort of thing that would happen if a car with General Campion and Lady Claudine and Paul Sandbach all aboard should come along that blinding stretch of road: or one alone: perhaps the General driving the dog-cart he affected. He said to himself:
'By God! If they cut this girl I'd break their backs over my knee!' and he hastened. 'Just the beastly thing that would happen.' The road probably led straight in at the front door of Mountby!
Miss Wannop trotted along a little in his rear. She thought him the most extraordinary man: as mad as he was odious. Sane people, if they're going to hurry--but why hurry!--do it in the shade of field hedgerows, not in the white blaze of county council roads. Well, he could go ahead. In the next field she was going to have it out with him: she didn't intend to be hot with running: let him be, his hateful, but certainly noticeable eyes, protruding at her like a lobster's; but she was cool and denunciatory in her pretty blouse...
There was a dog-cart coming behind them!
Suddenly it came into her head: that fool had been lying when he had said that the 'police meant to let them alone: lying over the breakfast-table...The dog-cart contained the police: after them! She didn't waste time looking round: she wasn't a fool like Atalanta in the egg-race. She picked up her heels and sprinted. She beat him by a yard and a half to the kissing-gate, white in the hedge: panicked, breathing hard. He panted into it, after her: the fool hadn't the sense to let her through first. They were jammed in together: face to face, panting! An occasion on which sweethearts kiss in Kent: the gate being made in three, the inner flange of the V moving on hinges. It stops cattle getting through: but this great lout of a Yorkshire-man didn't know: trying to push through like a mad bullock! Now they were caught. Three weeks in Wandsworth gaol...Oh hang...
The voice of Mrs Wannop--of course it was only mother! Twenty feet on high or so behind the kicking mare, with a good round face like a peony--said:
'Ah, you can jam my Val in a gate and hold her...but she gave you seven yards in twenty and beat you to the gate. That was her father's ambition!' She thought of them as children running races. She beamed down, round-faced and simple, on Tietjens from beside the driver, who had a black, slouch hat and the grey beard of St Peter.
'My dear boy!' she said, 'my dear boy; it's such a satisfaction to have you under my roof!'
The black horse reared on end, the patriarch sawing at its mouth. Mrs Wannop said unconcernedly: 'Stephen Joel! I haven't done talking.'
Tietjensns was gazing enragedly at the lower part of the horse's sweat-smeared stomach.
'You soon will have,' he said, 'with the girth in that state. Your neck will be broken.'
'Oh, I don't think so,' Mrs Wannop said. 'Joel only bought the turn-out yesterday.'
Tietjens addressed the driver with some ferocity:
'Here, get down, you,' he said. He held,