“The most wholesome bread in the world. All the vitamins, minerals, and roughage that any dietitian could desire. Preserves the teeth and massages the intestines.”
“I don’t care for it, thank you.” As a matter of fact, she was at the stage where her stomach felt too tired for food. “All I want is a drink.”
“We’ll stop at the next village and get some beer.”
“I don’t drink beer.”
The Saint ploughed appreciatively on into his massive hunk of bread.
“The water should be all right in that stream over there,” he said, indicating it with a movement of his hand.
“Are you suggesting,” she inquired icily, “that I should go down on all fours and lap it up like a cow?”
Simon chewed.
“Like a gazelle,” he said, “would be more poetic.”
She closed her eyes and lay there motionlessly, and if he sensed the simmering of the volcano he gave no sign of it. He ate his fill and smoked a cigarette, then he walked over to the stream, drank frugally, and bathed his face. When he came back she was sitting up. He strapped his pack and hoisted it deftly.
“Ready?”
Somehow she picked herself up. Her muscles had stiffened during the rest, and it was agony to squeeze her feet back into her shoes, which were cut for appearance rather than comfort. Only a strained and crackling obstinacy drew the effort out of her: the mockery of his cool blue gaze told her only too frankly that he was waiting for her to break down, and she wondered how long she would be able to cheat him of that satisfaction.
He drove her on relentlessly. Hills rose and fell away. Scattered cottages, tilled fields, pastures, woods, blurred by in a crawling panorama. They marched through a deep forest of mighty trees where woodcutters were working, along a road lined with stacks of brown logs. The sweet-smelling air held the music of whining saws and the clunk and ring of axes, but it meant nothing to her but an interval of blessed relief from the heat of the sun. Even then, the shadowy vastness of it was a little terrifying. She had never been so close to the rich mightiness of the earth: to her, “country” had only been something rather cute and amusing, a drawing-room picture brought into three dimensions, to be visited as a stunt in the company of sleek automobiles whose purring mechanism drowned the silences with their reassurance of civilized man’s conquest of nature. Without that comfort she was like a child left in the dark. On the rare occasions when a car passed them she watched it yearningly, and then licked the dust from her lips and felt lonelier when it had gone. Once a cart kept them company for a quarter of an hour, while Simon and the driver exchanged shouted witticisms.
Presently their path led beside a small river, with a tall ledge of rock rising on their left. The going was worse there, strewn with loose stones which seemed to slip backwards with her as fast as she went forward. The crunch of them under her plodding footsteps resolved itself into a maddening rhythm of hate. “Beast — bully — swine — beast — bully — swine!” they drummed out, bruising her feet at every step. Then she slipped on one. There was a tearing sound, and she stopped and leaned against the rocky wall.
“My heel’s come off.”
“What’s holding your toes on?” asked the Saint interestedly.
Suddenly all her pent-up bitterness boiled over, so that for a moment she forgot her weariness. Her eyes blazed, and his tanned features swam in her vision. Before she knew what she was doing she had smacked his face.
When her sight cleared again he had not moved.
“Belinda,” he said quietly, “there’s another lesson you obviously haven’t learned. When a girl strikes a man she’s trading on a false idea of chivalry. If you do that again I shall put you across my knee.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” she panted, but for the first time in her life she was afraid.
He made no attempt to argue with her. Lowering his pack, he opened it and took out a pair of plain leather sandals.
“I thought something like that would happen. These are your size, and you’ll find them much more comfortable.”
He waited while she took off her shoes and threw them into the river, where they floated forlornly like derelict emblems of respectability. Looking down at her feet, she felt the incongruity of her attire and jerked off the jaunty little hat. Shortly afterwards she lost patience with carrying it and let it fall by the wayside — another relic of herself to be marked up in the score of hatred which was etched on her soul in burning acid.
Evening found their path widening out into a bowl of open land, flat and stony, where the river diverged into a network of rambling channels winding and intersecting across an area of hard barren ground broken by a few stunted trees and clumps of parched grass. Simon pointed to a house that was visible on a slight rise in the midst of it.
“That’s an inn,” he said, “and there will be beer.”
She saw it as a prospect of rest, a thousand leagues distant. She was so tired that each individual step called for a separate effort, and she had to keep her eyes fixed on the objective to force herself to complete the distance. The guest-room inside was unlighted and gloomy: she expected it was filthy as well, but she was past caring. She sank on to a wooden bench, put her elbows on the stained bare table, and buried her face in her hands.
By that time there was a gnawing void of hunger below her ribs, and when the serving-girl came she ordered chocolate. Simon called for beer, with an extra tankard for the gamekeeper who sat puffing his pipe in the far corner.
The gamekeeper was a big slow-spoken man with a lined weather-beaten face like a walnut. He wore the costume of the country — small green felt hat with a brush at the back, leather shorts hung on embroidered leather suspenders, striped woolen gaiters which left his ankles bare. Simon steered him on to the subject of camping. The gamekeeper said it was forbidden in the woods on the east, through which a footpath would take them across the frontier into Austria. It was a great pity, said the gamekeeper, because he knew what would have been an ideal spot only a few hundred meters away, and he winked prodigiously, and roared with laughter. Simon bought him another tankard of beer, and they brought the serving-girl into the conversation. The low-ceilinged room rang with the ebb and flow of their carefree voices.
Belinda drank her hot syrupy chocolate, and thought, “He’s vulgar, he’s common, he only wants to humiliate me. How could he have anything to talk about with people like that? He can come in here and flirt with a little servant girl like a tough in a saloon. That man must despise him. It’s horrible! Oh, my God, why didn’t I know what he was like before?” She couldn’t understand a word, and nobody paid any attention to her. She had never been ignored before. “They’re all cheap, all of them,” she thought. “They don’t talk to me because they know I belong to a different class.” She raised her chin and tried to express this superiority in her attitude, but it was cold comfort. When Simon returned to her it was almost a relief.
“I’d like to have something to eat and go straight to bed,” she said.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
“You can have some food as soon as we’re settled in, but we aren’t settling in here.”
“I tell you I can’t walk another yard,” she said haggardly. “Can’t you see I’m half dead?”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk another three hundred yards or so.”
“What’s wrong with this place?”
He gestured with his tankard.
“We’re sleeping in the woods.”
She stared at him incredulously.
“I don’t understand you.”
“In the woods,” explained the Saint. “Im wold. Dans les bois. Unter den Linden.”