animal, a thing that for any passing whim of our masters might be
hunted and killed. Perhaps they also prayed confidently to God. Surely,
if we have learned nothing else, this war has taught us pity pity for
those witless souls that suffer our dominion.
The morning was bright and fine, and the eastern sky glowed pink, and
was fretted with little golden clouds. In the road that runs from the
top of Putney Hill to Wimbledon was a number of poor vestiges of the
panic torrent that must have poured Londonward on the Sunday night
after the fighting began. There was a little two-wheeled cart inscribed
with the name of Thomas Lobb, Greengrocer, New Malden, with a smashed
wheel and an abandoned tin trunk; there was a straw hat trampled into
the now hardened mud, and at the top of West Hill a lot of
blood-stained glass about the overturned water trough. My movements
were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I had an idea of going to
Leatherhead, though I knew that there I had the poorest chance of
finding my wife. Certainly, unless death had overtaken them suddenly,
my cousins and she would have fled thence; but it seemed to me I might
find or learn there whither the Surrey people had fled. I knew I wanted
to find my wife, that my heart ached for her and the world of men, but
I had no clear idea how the finding might be done. I was also sharply
aware now of my intense loneliness. From the corner I went, under cover
of a thicket of trees and bushes, to the edge of Wimbledon Common,
stretching wide and far.
That dark expanse was lit in patches by yellow gorse and broom; there
was no red weed to be seen, and as I prowled, hesitating, on the verge
of the open, the sun rose, flooding it all with light and vitality. I
came upon a busy swarm of little frogs in a swampy place among the
trees. I stopped to look at them, drawing a lesson from their stout
resolve to live. And presently, turning suddenly, with an odd feeling
of being watched, I beheld something crouching amid a clump of bushes.
I stood regarding this. I made a step towards it, and it rose up and
became a man armed with a cutlass. I approached him slowly. He stood
silent and motionless, regarding me.
As I drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and
filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged
through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches
mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His
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