Part 5 (1/2)

”Nowhere, thank the Lord!” said he, and laughed. He was a man of fifty or sixty--just the kind of age we mistrust on the road--but there was no anxiety in his manner, and his voice was that of a boy of eighteen.

”But it must lead somewhere!” I cried, too much surprised at his answer to thank him for saving my life.

”He wants to know where it leads!” he shouted to some men on the hill side, and they laughed back, and waved their caps.

I noticed then that the pool into which I had fallen was really a moat which bent round to the left and to the right, and that the hedge followed it continually. The hedge was green on this side--its roots showed through the clear water, and fish swam about in them--and it was wreathed over with dog-roses and Traveller's Joy. But it was a barrier, and in a moment I lost all pleasure in the gra.s.s, the sky, the trees, the happy men and women, and realized that the place was but a prison, for all its beauty and extent.

We moved away from the boundary, and then followed a path almost parallel to it, across the meadows. I found it difficult walking, for I was always trying to out-distance my companion, and there was no advantage in doing this if the place led nowhere. I had never kept step with anyone since I left my brother.

I amused him by stopping suddenly and saying disconsolately, ”This is perfectly terrible. One cannot advance: one cannot progress. Now we of the road----”

”Yes. I know.”

”I was going to say, we advance continually.”

”I know.”

”We are always learning, expanding, developing. Why, even in my short life I have seen a great deal of advance--the Transvaal War, the Fiscal Question, Christian Science, Radium. Here for example--”

I took out my pedometer, but it still marked twenty-five, not a degree more.

”Oh, it's stopped! I meant to show you. It should have registered all the time I was walking with you. But it makes me only twenty-five.”

”Many things don't work in here,” he said, ”One day a man brought in a Lee-Metford, and that wouldn't work.”

”The laws of science are universal in their application. It must be the water in the moat that has injured the machinery. In normal conditions everything works. Science and the spirit of emulation--those are the forces that have made us what we are.”

I had to break off and acknowledge the pleasant greetings of people whom we pa.s.sed. Some of them were singing, some talking, some engaged in gardening, hay-making, or other rudimentary industries. They all seemed happy; and I might have been happy too, if I could have forgotten that the place led nowhere.

I was startled by a young man who came sprinting across our path, took a little fence in fine style, and went tearing over a ploughed field till he plunged into a lake, across which he began to swim. Here was true energy, and I exclaimed: ”A cross-country race! Where are the others?”

”There are no others,” my companion replied; and, later on, when we pa.s.sed some long gra.s.s from which came the voice of a girl singing exquisitely to herself, he said again: ”There are no others.” I was bewildered at the waste in production, and murmured to myself, ”What does it all mean?”

He said: ”It means nothing but itself”--and he repeated the words slowly, as if I were a child.

”I understand,” I said quietly, ”but I do not agree. Every achievement is worthless unless it is a link in the chain of development. And I must not trespa.s.s on your kindness any longer. I must get back somehow to the road, and have my pedometer mended.”

”First, you must see the gates,” he replied, ”for we have gates, though we never use them.”

I yielded politely, and before long we reached the moat again, at a point where it was spanned by a bridge. Over the bridge was a big gate, as white as ivory, which was fitted into a gap in the boundary hedge.

The gate opened outwards, and I exclaimed in amazement, for from it ran a road--just such a road as I had left--dusty under foot, with brown crackling hedges on either side as far as the eye could reach.

”That's my road!” I cried.

He shut the gate and said: ”But not your part of the road. It is through this gate that humanity went out countless ages ago, when it was first seized with the desire to walk.”

I denied this, observing that the part of the road I myself had left was not more than two miles off. But with the obstinacy of his years he repeated: ”It is the same road. This is the beginning, and though it seems to run straight away from us, it doubles so often, that it is never far from our boundary and sometimes touches it.” He stooped down by the moat, and traced on its moist margin an absurd figure like a maze. As we walked back through the meadows, I tried to convince him of his mistake.