Even this logical exposition had not convinced him, but he did not gainsay as they entered the hall and Istra rang for the landlady. His knees grew sick and old and quavery as he heard the landlady’s voice loud below-stairs: “Now wot do they want? It’s eleven o’clock. Aren’t they ever done a-ringing and a-ringing?”
The landlady, the tired thin parchment-faced North Countrywoman, whose god was Respectability of Lodgings, listened in a frightened way to Istra’s blandly superior statement: “Mr. Wrenn and I have been invited to join an excursion out of town that leaves to-night. We’ll pay our rent and leave our things here.”
“My good woman, we are going to Aengusmere. Here’s two pound. Don’t allow any one in my room. And I may send for my things from out of town. Be ready to pack them in my trunks and send them to me. Do you understand?”
“My good woman, do you realize that your ‘buts’ are insulting?”
On the stairs, ascending, she whispered, with the excitement not of a tired woman, but of a tennis-and-dancing-mad girl: “We’re off! Just take a tooth-brush. Put on an outing suit—any old thing—and an old cap.”
Now Mr. Wrenn had, for any old thing, as well as for afternoon and evening dress, only the sturdy undistinguished clothes he was wearing, so he put on a cap, and hoped she wouldn’t notice. She didn’t. She came knocking in fifteen minutes, trim in a khaki suit, with low thick boots and a jolly tousled blue tam-o’-shanter.
“Come on. There’s a train for Chelmsford in half an hour, my time-table confided to me. I feel like singing.”
They rode out of London in a third-class compartment, opposite a curate and two stodgy people who were just people and defied you (Istra cheerfully explained to Mr. Wrenn) to make anything of them but just people.
“Wouldn’t they stare if they knew what idiocy we’re up to!” she suggested.
Mr. Wrenn bobbed his head in entire agreement. He was trying, without any slightest success, to make himself believe that Mr. William Wrenn, Our Mr. Wrenn, late of the Souvenir Company, was starting out for a country tramp at midnight with an artist girl.
The night foreman of the station, a person of bedizenment and pride, stared at them as they alighted at Chelmsford and glanced around like strangers. Mr. Wrenn stared back defiantly and marched with Istra from the station, through the sleeping town, past its ragged edges, into the country.