to the all-important Wither with a great blob of cotton wool on his upper lip), while Jane decided, from a mixture of motives, to cook Mark an unusually elaborate breakfast—of which she would rather die than eat any herself—and did so with the swift efficiency of an angry woman, only to upset it all over the new stove at the last moment. They were still at the table and both pretending to read newspapers when Lord Feverstone arrived. Most unfortunately Mrs. Maggs arrived at the same moment. Mrs. Maggs was that element in Jane’s economy represented by the phrase “I have a woman who comes in twice a week.” Twenty years earlier Jane’s mother would have addressed such a functionary as “Maggs” and been addressed by her as “Mum.” But Jane and her “woman who came in” called one another Mrs. Maggs and Mrs. Studdock. They were about the same age and to a bachelor’s eye there was no very noticeable difference in the clothes they wore. It was therefore perhaps not inexcusable that when Mark attempted to introduce Feverstone to his wife Feverstone should have shaken Mrs. Maggs by the hand: but it did not sweeten the last few minutes before the two men departed.
Jane left the flat under pretence of shopping almost at once. “I really couldn’t stand Mrs. Maggs to-day,” she said to herself. “She’s a terrible talker.” So that was Lord Feverstone—that man with the loud, unnatural laugh and the mouth like a shark, and no manners. Apparently a perfect fool, too! What good could it do Mark to go about with a man like that? Jane had distrusted his face. She could always tell—there was something shifty about him. Probably he was making a fool of Mark. Mark was so easily taken in. If only he wasn’t at Bracton! It was a horrible college. What did Mark see in people like Mr. Curry and the odious old clergyman with the beard? And meanwhile, what of the day that awaited her, and the night, and the next night, and beyond that—for when men say they may be away for two nights it means that two nights is the minimum and they hope to be away for a week. A telegram (never a trunk call) puts it all right as far as they are concerned.
She must do something. She even thought of following Mark’s advice and getting Myrtle to come and stay. But Myrtle was her sister-in-law, Mark’s twin sister, with much too much of the adoring sister’s attitude to the brilliant brother. She would talk about Mark’s health and his shirts and socks with a continual undercurrent of unexpressed yet unmistakable astonishment at Jane’s good luck in marrying him. No, certainly not Myrtle. Then she thought of going to see Dr. Brizeacre as a patient. He was a Bracton man and would therefore probably charge her nothing. But when she came to think of answering, to Brizeacre of all people, the sort of questions which Brizeacre would certainly ask, this turned out to be impossible. She must do something. In the end, somewhat to her own surprise, she found that she had decided to go out to St. Anne’s and see Miss Ironwood. She thought herself a fool for doing so.
IV
An observer placed at the right altitude above Edgestow that day might have seen far to the south a moving spot on a main road, and later, to the east, much nearer the silver thread of the Wynd, and much more slowly moving, the smoke of a train.
The spot would have been the car which was carrying Mark Studdock towards the Blood Transfusion Office at Belbury, where the nucleus of the N.I.C.E. had taken up its temporary abode. The very size and style of the car had made a favourable impression on him the moment he saw it. The upholstery was of such quality that one felt it ought to be good to eat. And what fine, male energy (Mark felt sick of women at the moment) revealed itself in the very gestures with which Feverstone settled himself at the wheel and put his elbow on the horn, and clasped his pipe firmly between his teeth! The speed of the car, even in the narrow streets of Edgestow, was impressive, and so were the laconic criticisms of Feverstone on other drivers and pedestrians. Once over the level crossing and beyond Jane’s old college (St. Elizabeth’s) he began to show what his car could do. Their speed became so great that even on a rather empty road the inexcusably bad drivers, the manifestly half-witted pedestrians and men with horses, the hen that they actually ran over and the dogs and hens that Feverstone pronounced “damned lucky,” seemed to follow one another almost without intermission. Telegraph posts raced by, bridges rushed overhead with a roar, villages streamed backward to join the country already devoured, and Mark, drunk with air and at once fascinated and repelled by the insolence of Feverstone’s driving, sat saying “Yes” and “Quite” and “It was their fault,” and stealing sidelong glances at his companion. Certainly, he was a change from the fussy importance of Curry and the Bursar! The long, straight nose and the clenched teeth, the hard bony outlines beneath the face, the very way he wore his clothes, all spoke of a big man driving a big car to somewhere where they would find big stuff going on. And he, Mark, was to be in it all. At one or two moments when his heart came into his mouth he wondered whether the quality of Lord Feverstone’s driving quite justified its speed.
“You need never take a cross-road like that seriously,” yelled Feverstone, as they plunged on after the narrowest of these escapes.
“Quite,” bawled Mark. “No good making a fetish of them!”
“Drive much yourself?” said Feverstone.
“Used to a good deal,” said Mark.
The smoke which our imaginary observer might have seen to the east of Edgestow would have indicated the train in which Jane Studdock was progressing slowly towards the village of St. Anne’s. Edgestow itself, for those who had reached it from London, had all the appearances of a terminus: but if you looked about you, you might see presently, in a bay, a little train of two or three coaches and a tank engine—a train that sizzled and exuded steam from beneath the footboards and in which most of the passengers seemed to know one another. On some days, instead of the third coach, there might be a horse-box, and on the platform there would be hampers containing dead rabbits or live poultry, and men in brown bowler hats and gaiters, and perhaps a terrier or a sheep-dog that seemed to be used to travelling. In this train, which started at half-past one, Jane jerked and rattled along an embankment whence she looked down through some bare branches and some branches freckled with red and yellow leaves into Bragdon Wood itself and thence through the cutting and over the level-crossing at Bragdon Camp and along the edge of Brawl Park (the great house was just visible at one point) and so to the first stop at Duke’s Eaton. Here, as at Woolham and Cure Hardy and Fourstones, the train settled back, when it stopped, with a little jerk and something like a sigh. And then there would be a noise of milk cans rolling and coarse boots treading on the platform and after that a pause which seemed to last long, during which the autumn sunlight grew warm on the window-pane and smells of wood and field from beyond the tiny station floated in and seemed to claim the railway as part of the land. Passengers got in and out of her carriage at every stop; apple-faced men, and women with elastic-side boots and imitation fruit on their hats, and schoolboys. Jane hardly noticed them; for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page. And in between the stations things flitted past, so isolated from their context that each seemed to promise some unearthly happiness if one could but have descended from the train at that very moment to seize it: a house backed with a group of haystacks and wide brown fields about it, two aged horses standing head to tail, a little orchard with washing hanging on a line, and a rabbit staring at the train, whose two eyes looked like the dots, and his ears like the uprights, of a double exclamation mark. At quarter-past two she came to St. Anne’s, which was the real terminus of the branch, and the end of everything. The air struck her as cold and tonic when she left the station.
Although the train had been chugging and wheezing up-hill for the latter half of her journey there was still a climb to be done on foot, for St. Anne’s is one of those villages perched on a hilltop which are commoner in Ireland than in England, and the station is some way from the village. A winding road between high banks led her up to it. As soon as she had passed the church she turned left, as she had been instructed, at the Saxon Cross. There were no houses on her left—only a row of beech trees and unfenced ploughland falling steeply away, and beyond that the timbered midland plain spreading as far as she could see and blue in the
