I carried my
difficulty to a neighbour--a deep-rooted tree of that soil--and he gave me
a name of a family which conveyed no meaning.
A month or so later--I went again, or it may have been that my car took
the road of her own volition. She over-ran the fruitless Downs, threaded
every turn of the maze of lanes below the hills, drew through the high-
walled woods, impenetrable in their full leaf, came out at the cross roads
where the butler had left me, and a little further on developed an
internal trouble which forced me to turn her in on a grass way-waste that
cut into a summer-silent hazel wood. So far as I could make sure by the
sun and a six-inch Ordnance map, this should be the road flank of that
wood which I had first explored from the heights above. I made a mighty
serious business of my repairs and a glittering shop of my repair kit,
spanners, pump, and the like, which I spread out orderly upon a rug. It
was a trap to catch all childhood, for on such a day, I argued, the
children would not be far off. When I paused in my work I listened, but
the wood was so full of the noises of summer (though the birds had mated)
that I could not at first distinguish these from the tread of small
cautious feet stealing across the dead leaves. I rang my bell in an
alluring manner, but the feet fled, and I repented, for to a child a
sudden noise is very real terror. I must have been at work half an hour
when I heard in the wood the voice of the blind woman crying: "Children,
oh children, where are you?" and the stillness made slow to close on the
perfection of that cry.
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