Pastoral Read Free Page A

longer put herself alongside twenty-year-old youth. That afternoon while they were at their games, or flying, she would be writing to her husband in the Western Desert, somewhere near Benghazi. She wrote every other day. The war had brought him two promotions, so that he was now Air Commodore Stevens, and that was splendid; but it had broken up their home. They had had a little house at Chislehurst which had been convenient when he was at the Air Ministry. Three years before, they had put the furniture in store, and shut the door, and left that little house. He had gone to Egypt, she had gone into the W.A.A.F.s, the two children had been sent to boarding-school. The furniture, all that theyhad, was burnt in the London blitz; when the war ended they would have to start all over again. In the meantime she must live with young men and young women twenty years her junior, lonely and out of it. She knew they took her for a dragon. She did not want to be a dragon, which was why she had allowed the girl Beatrice to take Marshall the cup of tea. But she could never get alongside them; she knew now that she never would. She was too old.
    Marshall got away from her as soon as he decently could, and drank a quick cup of coffee in the ante-room. Then he went up to his bedroom; in five minutes he was on his bicycle riding out of the camp.
    Coldstone Mill was a tall, factory-like building set in the countryside upon the River Fittel. A lane crossed the river on a stone bridge of two arches; a hundred yards below the bridge the mill stood by the weir, and below that again was the millpool. It was a broad, gravelly pool, scoured wide by the mill-stream and the weir, overhung by trees at the lower end. It stood in pasture fields, very sunny and bright.
    The pilot left his bicycle at the mill and went down to the pool. For a time he walked slowly round the edge trying if he could see a fish; presently he sat down and began to assemble his rod. He fitted the little silvery reel and threaded the fine line, and chose the little trace with the single wire, as the rear-gunner had advised him. He spread out his collection of seven plugs upon the flat canvas of his bag and studied them thoughtfully. Finally he chose a desperate-looking parody of a small fish, more like a septic banana than a fish, and hooked it on the trace. Then, standing up, he began to cast over the pool.
    He spent the next ten minutes clearing over-runs upon his reel. He was not a very skilled performer.
    He fished for the next hour, supremely happy. The rhythm of the cast, the antics of the plug, delighted him; the warm sunlight, and the very fact of handling a well-designed instrument, made him content. The rush of water from the weir made a murmur that drowned the sound of the many aircraft that were in the sky, except when they passed closely overhead; the water slipping past over the green weed and the gravelly shallows was a thing remote from any of his duties.
    He paused after an hour or so, and sat down on the ground, and lit a pipe. He took off the septic banana and fitted in its place a peculiar whirligig designed to represent a lame mouse taking swimming exercise, alleged to be very attractive to apike. He was still sitting smoking when he turned to a step behind him.
    It was Gunnar Franck, carrying his roach-pole and his little stool, on his way down to the quieter reaches of the river. “Phillips, he say you have come here,” he said. “Goes well?”
    “Very well,” said the pilot. “Marvellous afternoon, isn’t it?” He lifted the little steel rod. “Have a crack with this.”
    The Dane took the rod doubtfully, made an ineffective cast, and produced a tangle of line massed and jamming the reel. He handed the rod back to Marshall. “I shall go catch a roach,” he said. “When I come back, he will be disentangled, yes?”
    The pilot began to unravel the line. “Just in time for you to muck it up again,” he said. “Getcha!” He glanced up at the Dane.