“Nay, Piers,” I said in the end. “All these subtleties and hair−splittings, all these attempts to prove that black and white are interchangeable and that truth's only to be known by falsehood and cabbages to be recognised through a knowledge of kings, why, all this is but to say that if the lass has begun imagining things she never did before something has happened to make her.”
“Well, I am saying that!” he cried.
“Why then,” I said, “since it seems to prey on your mind, though I'm damned if I quite see why, there's only one thing to be done and that's to ask her why she wrote it.”
“Good!” said Piers with quite an ominous note of satisfaction in his voice, and at once substituting action for argument he yanked a chair out of the way and reached down a bundle of Ordnance maps from the top of his cupboard. I began to commend the postal services, but protested with less and less vigour as he sorted out the right map and spread it out on the table.
“There, you see,” he pointed out, “is Staineshead. We can go by train with a couple of changes, but I expect the bus is easier. We'll go down to the Haymarket and find out the times. Now, where's Ringstones? Ah! here it is. You see there's a footpath marked from Staineshead over Nither Edge, and a bridle road from Ringstones Hall to Blagill. And the Stone Circle is marked, too.”
So it was. All as our author related: even to the loop of the beck round Ringstones Park and the Roman mine in the valley below.
“Well go to Staineshead and then up the path to Ringstones,” Piers said.
“And being much cleverer at that sort of thing than the heroine,” I commented, “we shall not get lost. Nor shall I go up to my backside in a bog−hole. Oh no! Nothing like that. I've been over moors with you before. However, it's a jaunt, and if the wench is in jeopardy no Knight Errant, or erring, ought to boggle at a few marish wastes and deserts wild. Let me draw a dragon or two on the map just for the sake of appearances while you work out the distances between pubs. But,” it occurred to me to point out, while he stared at the map like a hungry bloodhound at a bit of black−pudding in a porkshop window, “but do you know for a fact that this job of hers was at Ringstones Hall?”
“She says so,” he replied, refusing to be drawn from the map. The point, however, seemed to me of some importance. Had she ever actually given the address of this place she was going to? In a letter, I meant, apart from the story in the book.
He lifted his head at last.
“Well, no,” he said. “The last letter I had from her was from Towerton. She said the place was near Staineshead. That's all. Well, Ringstones Hall is near Staineshead.”
I looked at those contours and that dotted line drawn with a confidence I have learned to mistrust in Ordnance maps and observed that if it was only twice as far as it looked I should count myself lucky. “Well, but,” I persisted, after some aspersions on my map−reading which there is no point in repeating, “what about the book itself? The postmark?”
So we hunted until we found the brown paper it had been wrapped in. The post−mark would have defied a better epigraphist than I am. There was indeed a 't' in it, or something uncommon like a 't'. But so there is in Timbuctoo. I abandoned that line of enquiry.
“We can make a loop,” said Piers, who had reverted to the map, “either by going on from Ringstones to Blagill or cutting across Blagill Moor, down on to the road, and back into Staineshead. We'll stay the night at a pub in Staineshead.”
The last remark was made with quite unjustifiable assurance. Piers still believes, in spite of the weight of evidence from Joseph of Nazareth onwards, that an inn is a place where you can be put up merely for showing the colour of your money. However, Northern farmers are hospitable though landlords are surly, and, as the Highlander said in reference to the lack of another sort of accommodation, “Och, leddy, there's always the hill.” It looked good country beyond Staineshead. The fine sunny weather was holding out astonishingly. I didn't think it mattered a damn whether we visited Daphne Hazel or not, but if Piers was so keen to see her I felt it was not beyond the powers of two able−bodied young men to discover the whereabouts of a Towerton girl, given a small place like Staineshead as a centre for the search. What sort of fools we looked when we found her was Piers's affair.
So we packed our rucksacks that evening and asked Mr. Debourg, with a firmness which I hoped I should feel the next morning also, to call us at five−thirty.
(2)
I tried to finish my night's rest in the bus, but it was a gesture—a bit of pitiful human defiance of the pitiless mechanical gods—and nothing more. It is perfectly logical, I suppose, that the more and bigger machines there are, the less room there is on this earth for human beings. But I do sometimes mildly wonder why it is that, although roads grow monthly wider and motor vehicles more enormous, though the adjectival noun 'luxury' is applied as a matter of course to the substantive 'coach', all the technical skill of the modern factory, backed presumably by centuries of experience in making things to measure for the human frame, has not succeeded in producing a bus where the leg−space is not one inch shorter than the average human femur and the seat space by just about the same amount too narrow to accommodate two average human pelvises placed side by side. Before Piers and I reached Staineshead the correct interpretation of the term 'luxury' had occurred to me. The adjective implies, of course, sumptuousness and opulence of appearance. Those tall−backed seats with curving lines, that wealth of plush and imitation leather, those chromium−plated knobs and ash−trays: such magnificence of upholstery, such generous filling of the available space with solid furnishings is indeed luxurious, but it has to be admired from the outside. A little further development and we shall have reached the point of perfection in buses; the point where the interstices into which passengers now insinuate themselves are no longer available to harbour such intruders but filled, they too, with luxurious appointments.
Piers, who was pondering other matters, did not treat these reflections very sympathetically. He ascribed them merely to my having been levered out of bed three hours before my usual time and promised me leg−stretching enough before the day was out. He paid just enough attention to my argument to demolish it by pointing out that if space, on my own showing was a valuable commodity to me, it was no less so to the bus company and we had as much of it as the price of our tickets entitled us to in these expensive times. Then he dismissed the subject for the more important one of Daphne Hazel's story.
All the same, he was as glad as I was to get out at Staineshead. I believe he had been there once before. At any rate, he wasted no time casting about for our way out but set off down the main street and across the bridge over the Nither and up a twisting lane or two to the edge of the town before he bothered to open the map. From that point, where we mounted a stone stile and took a path up a rough pasture towards Nither Edge, we had all the space we desired. I can never get among these hills of the North without their reaffirming my hold on an old conviction that space and silence are the most precious and least valued gifts left to us, in this crowded age, from the heritage of an ampler world. I mourn man's unhappy compulsion to fill them at all costs and with whatever rubbish comes handiest. I console myself with the reflection that, so far as the rape of space goes, it's but a late stage of a process that began with the first axe and the first plough. After the plough, the enclosures; after the wholesale conscription of open field and common to the cause of more economic exploitation, the ruthless trimming that pares away the lovely but uneconomic margins of our country lanes and roots out the extravagance of hedgerows. The rough and reedy pastures that slope up to Nither Edge, and the open moor beyond it still represent a bit of the old, casual, almost incidental way of exploiting land. As we climbed the wide and lonely hill, looking up to the tumbled battlements of dark grey boulders, aloof and hard against the summer sky, I greeted the freedom of the hill with something of reverence and compassion, as Caesar (one hopes) may have returned the salutation of those about to die. The next time I go that way, if ever I go again, I shall find Ringstones Moor turned into a plantation of pit−props or a tank training area.