Part 6 (1/2)
”Then,” said Peter dreamily, ”we shall be able to go to sleep again.”
Rodney pulled him out of his bag and firmly rolled it up.
”Twelve kilometres from breakfast. Thirty from tea. No, we don't tea before Florence. Go and wash.”
They washed in a copper bucket that hung beside a pulley well. It was rather fun was.h.i.+ng, till Peter let the bucket slip off the hook and gurgle down to the bottom. Then it was rather fun fis.h.i.+ng for it with the hook, but it was not caught, and they abandoned it in sudden alarm at a distant sound, and hastily scrambled out of the olive garden onto the white road.
Beneath their feet lay the thick soft dust, unstirred as yet by the day's journeyings. The wayfaring smell of it caught at their breath. Before them the pale road wound and wound, between the silver secrecy of the olive woods, towards the journeying moon that dipped above a far and hidden city in the west. Then a dim horizon took the dipping moon, and there remained a grey road that smelt of dust and ran between shadowed gardens that showed no more their eternal silver, but gnarled and twisted stems that mocked and leered.
One traveller stepped out of his clear circle of illumined values into the shrouded dusk of the old accustomed mystery, and the road ran faint to his eyes through a blurred land, and he had perforce to take up again the quest of the way step by step. Reality, for a lucid s.p.a.ce of time emerging, had slipped again behind the shadow-veils. The ranks of the wan olives, waiting silently for dawn, held and hid their secret.
The other traveller murmured, ”How many tones of grey do you suppose there are in an olive tree when the moon has set? But there'll be more presently. Listen....”
The little wind that comes before the dawn stirred and s.h.i.+vered, and disquieted the silence of the dim woods. Peter knew how the stirred leaves would be s.h.i.+vering white, only in the dark twilight one could not see.
The dusk paled and paled. Soon one would catch the silver of up-turned leaves.
On the soft deep dust the treading feet of the travellers moved quietly.
One walked with a light unevenness, a slight limp.
CHAPTER V
THE SPLENDID MORNING
”Listen,” said Peter again; and some far off thing was faintly jarring the soft silence, on a crescendo note.
Rodney listened, and murmured, ”Brute.” He hated them more than Peter did. He was less wide-minded and less sweet-tempered. Peter had a gentle and not intolerant aesthetic aversion, Rodney a fervid moral indignation.
It came storming over the rims of twilight out of an unborn dawn, and the soft dust surged behind. Its eyes flamed, and lit the pale world. It was running to the city in the dim west; it was in a hurry; it would be there for breakfast. As it ran it played the opening bars of something of Tchaichowsky's.
Rodney and Peter leant over the low white wall and gazed into grey s.h.i.+vering gardens. So could they show aloof contempt; so could they elude the rioting dust.
The storming took a diminuendo note; it slackened to a throbbing murmur.
The brute had stopped, and close to them. The brute was investigating itself.
”Perhaps,” Rodney hoped, but not sanguinely, ”they'll have to push it all the way to Florence.” Still contempt withheld a glance.
Then a pleasant, soft voice broke the hushed dusk with half a laugh, and Peter wheeled sharply about. The man who had laughed was climbing again into his seat, saying, ”It's quite all right.” That remark was extremely characteristic; it would have been a suitable motto for his whole career.
The next thing he said, in his gentle, unsurprised voice, was to the bare-headed figure that smiled up at him from the road.
”You, Margery?... What a game. But what have you done with the Hebrew?
Oh, that's Stephen, isn't it. That accounts for it: but how did he get you? I say, you can't have slept anywhere; there's _been_ nowhere, for miles. And have you left Leslie to roam alone among the Objects of Beauty with his own unsophisticated taste for guide? I suppose he's chucked you at last; very decent-spirited of him, I think, don't you, Stephen?”
”I chucked him,” Peter explained, ”because he bought a sham Carlo Dolci.
I drew the line at that. Though if one must have a Carlo Dolci, I suppose it had better be a sham one, on the whole. Anyhow, I came away and took to the road. We sleep in ditches, and we like it very much, and I make tea every morning in my little kettle. I'm going to Florence to help Leslie to buy bronze things for his grates--dogs, you know, and shovels and things. Leslie will have been there for three days now; I do wonder what he's bought.”
”You'd better come on in the car,” Urquhart said. ”Both of you. Why is Stephen looking so proud? I shall be at Florence for breakfast. _You_ won't, though. Bad luck. Come along; there's loads of room.”