AMANDA
1
Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.
From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths and gorse beyond Liphook, and thence he had wandered into a pretty district beset with Hartings.He had foh socialistic art as bookbinding.They were clearly ‘advanced' people.And Amanda was tremendously important to them, she was their light, their pride, their most living thing.They focussed on her.When he talked to them all in general he talked to her in particular.He felt that some introduction of himself was due to these welcoming people.He tried to give it mixed with an itinerary and a sketch of his experiences.He praised the heather country and Harting Coombe and the Hartings.He told them that London had suddenly become intolerable--"In the spring sunshine.""You live in London?" said Mrs.Wilder.
Yes.ad ever not done, for everything in the world.In a moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of black coffee....
And so on and so on and so on....
When daylight came it found Benham still wide awake.Things crept mournfully out of the darkness into a reproachful clearness.The sound of birds that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now no longer agreeable.The thrushes, he thought, repeated themselves a great deal.
He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes before the landlord, accompanied by a great smell of frying bacon, came to call him.
18
The second day opened rather dully for Benham.There was not an idea left in his head about anything in the world.It was--SOLID.
He walked through Bramley and Godalming and Witley and so came out upon the purple waste of Hindhead.He strayed away from the road and found a sunny place of turf amidst the heather and lay down and slept for an hour or so.He arose refreshed.He got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of spruce and fir and silver birch.And then suddenly his mental inanition was at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave again.He was astonished that for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed to the splendid life.
"Continence by preoccupation;" he tried the phrase....
"A man must not give in to fear; neither must hund himself upon a sandy ridge looking very beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and read finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the evening, at the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat down to consider whether he should go back and spend the night in one of the two kindly-looking inns of the latter place or push on over the South Downs towards the unknown luck of Singleton or Chichester.As he sat down two big retrievers, black and brown, came headlong down the road.The black carried a stick, the brown disputed and pursued.As they came abreast of him the foremost a little relaxed his hold, the pursuer grabbed at it, and in an instant the rivalry had flared to rage and a first-class dogfight was in progress.
Benham detested dog-fights.He stood up, pale and distressed."Lie down!" he cried."Shut up, you brutes!" and was at a loss for further action.
Then it was Amanda leapt into his world, a light, tall figure of a girl, fluttering a short petticoat.Hatless she was, brown, flushed, and her dark hair tossing loose, and in a moment she had the snarling furious dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar.
Then with a wriggle black was loose and had closed again.Inspired by the best traditions of chivalry Benham came to her assistance.
He was not expert with dogs.He grasped the black dog under its ear.He was bitten in the wrist, rather in excitement than malice, and with a certain excess of zeal he was strangling the brute before you could count ten.
Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably but effectively until its yelps satisfied her."There!"she said pitching her victim from her, and stood erect again.She surveyed the proceedings of her helper for the first time.
"You needn't," she said, "choke Sultan anymore.""Ugh!" she said, as though that was enough for Sultan.And peace was restored.
"I'm obliged to you.But--...I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh, SULTAN!"Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair.Rotten business.
When a fellow is fighting one can't be meticulous.And if people come interfering.Still--SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.
"May I see?...Something ought to be done to this...."She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within a foot of his face.
Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite accurately, that she was nineteen....
2
She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a camel's-hair brush, she had a glowing face, half childish imp, half woman, she had honest hazel eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of character.
And he must have this bite seen to at once.She lived not five minutes away.He must come with her.
She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved like a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that although Mr.Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did seem to have stamped out rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful with a dog bite.A dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways--particularly Sultan's bite.He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog.Both the elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham's wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of Aman And he had wanted to think things out.
In London one could do no thinking--
"Here we do nothing else," said Amanda.
"Except dog-fights," said the elder cousin.
"I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air.
