“Look here,” said the young man, following him, “you’re not fit to walk home. I gave you a doing, I did. Here’s my bike.”
Andy looked at him and he looked at Andy, and the virile souls of both met in that look and, in a sense, shook hands.
“Thanks,” said Andy, mounting the bicycle.
“I say,” the young man shouted after him, “we were going to be married at the registry in Bardswell, but you can marry us if you like.”
“All right,” Andy called back over his shoulder.
WHEN you live in a large community you feel it possible to give an enemy a private black eye and that there the matter ends—nobody’s business but yours and his—and it is only when you live in a little place that you realise the extraordinary fact that there _are_ no private black eyes—every black eye affects the universe.
Of course every one knows this, but only through the microscope of narrow lives do you see the principle at work.
Which all means that Andy would not have met Elizabeth at Marshaven if the young man who was her aunt’s carpenter had not been obliged to abstain from attending upon particular widows; for Elizabeth would have been unable to find any excuse which would possibly hold water for coming into the little town on the day of the school-treat. And her own self-respect—the self-respect of a girl in such matters is a queer and chancy thing—would not permit her to come in without a decent excuse.
However, a carpenter happened to be rather urgently needed, and, as the young man’s father was laid up with bronchitis, and the young man himself had a black eye, Elizabeth volunteered to walk over to Marshaven, a distance of about two miles from her aunt’s house, which lay between Millsby and the sea.
“Take the pony-cart,” entreated the aunt.
But Elizabeth’s face assumed the expression which her family knew well, and she walked.
Meantime, Gaythorpe had awakened early to the sense of an outing, which is a vastly different thing from just going out—as different as moonshine from electric light.
For an outing has glamour and wonder in it, and that precious atmosphere does still hang about certain feasts and seasons in lonely places, not because bicycles have not penetrated everywhere, but because the Spirits of Ancient Revelry come out from their hiding-places in barns and on deserted greens, and whisper jolly tales of days when men still had an appetite for fun—silly, childish, inferior fun that meant nothing and led nowhere.