I too felt like moving on. Glenfield had offered me a holiday, and I had my book to finish. As well finish it at Santon as anywhere else. Santon--its cornfields and skies, the cliffs for ever a-racket with the seabirds' clamor, the dappled fawn of its sands! I was there in my heart already.
"For goodness' sake, Joan, stop chattering just for a few minutes!" Philip broke out testily. "If you don't want to sit, say so and have done with it. This is enough to drive anybody mad!"
I had been wondering how much longer his patience would hold out. When an artist is in difficulties with his canvas, motor-bicycle talk for an hour on end can be extremely wearing.
Joan looked up with aggravating sweetness. "What, Philip?" she inquired.
"I say if you don't want to sit, off you go on the confounded machine and I'll start something else."
"But, Philip darling, you know the sparking-plug's broken, and it will be three or four days before we can get another. Do you think Wellands will stock that make, Chummy?"
Charles Valentine Smith knocked out the new Captanide pipe and proceeded to refill it with the Dunhill Mixture.
"Well, if they don't I think I know a fellow who has a spare. That's the worst of the Beaver," he went on. "Now with an Indian or a Douglas ..."
And off they went again, she as well as he, both talking at once: big-ends, plugs, magnetos: Beaver, Indian, Douglas.... In my younger youth I used to ride a tall ungeared ordinary; except for one hellish five minutes in which I had clung, ardently praying, to Smith's back-carrier, I know nothing about these modern machines; and how Joan managed to keep her sideways seat on that grid of torture over his back wheel passed my comprehension. But ever since the arrival of the hideous thing she had hardly been off it, hair all over the place, ankles stiffly out, skirts rippling like a ribbon on a ventilating-fan, and cauliflowers of dust trailing for a hundred yards behind them. I could only conclude that modern love, besides being blind, is deficient in the tactile nerve-centers as well.
It was ten o'clock in the morning, and Philip had set up his easel on a sheep-nibbled slope of the cliff-tops. Joan, in her old tweed skirt and new canary-colored silk jumper, was stretched luxuriously on the thymy bents. The amber beads about her neck matched the potentilla on which she lay, and I give you your choice which was the bluest--the aimlessly fluttering butterflies, the nodding harebells, or her demure and reprehensible eyes. Philip had deliberately excluded the blue of the sky from his canvas. The picture was simply of Joan herself, the crewel-work of flowers on which she lay, and behind her, red as the habitation of dragons, the midsummer sorrel that massed itself up the slope.