But there I was, right in the open
country, with a cool wind blowing on me from a wood, and the air full of
soft rustling sounds, and notes of birds from the bushes, and the
singing noise of a little brook that ran under the road. I was standing
on the bridge when I took out my watch and struck a wax light to see the
time; and it came upon me suddenly what a strange evening it had been. It was all so different, you see, to what I had been doing all my life,
particularly for the year before, and it almost seemed as if I couldn't
be the man who had been going into the City every day in the morning and
coming back from it every evening after writing a lot of uninteresting
letters. It was like being pitched all of a sudden from one world into
another. Well, I found my way back somehow or other, and as I went along
I made up my mind how I'd spend my holiday. I said to myself, "I'll have
a walking tour as well as Ferrars, only mine is to be a tour of London
and its environs," and I had got it all settled when I let myself into
the house about four o'clock in the morning, and the sun was shining,
and the street almost as still as the wood at midnight!' 'I think that was a capital idea of yours. Did you have your tour? Did
you buy a map of London?' 'I had the tour all right. I didn't buy a map; that would have spoilt
it, somehow; to see everything plotted out, and named, and measured. What I wanted was to feel that I was going where nobody had been before. That's nonsense, isn't it? as if there could be any such places in
London, or England either, for the matter of that.' 'I know what you mean; you wanted to feel as if you were going on a sort
of voyage of discovery. Isn't that it?' 'Exactly, that's what I was trying to tell you. Besides, I didn't want
to buy a map. I made a map.' 'How do you mean? Did you make a map out of your head?' 'I'll tell you about it afterwards. But do you really want to hear about
my grand tour?' 'Of course I do; it must have been delightful. I call it a most original
idea.' 'Well, I was quite full of it, and what you said just now about a voyage
of discovery reminds me of how I felt then. When I was a boy I was
awfully fond of reading of great travellers--I suppose all boys are--and
of sailors who were driven out of their course and found themselves in
latitudes where no ship had ever sailed before, and of people who
discovered wonderful cities in strange countries; and all the second day
of my holidays I was feeling just as I used to when I read these books. I didn't get up till pretty late. I was tired to death after all those
miles I had walked; but when I had finished my breakfast and filled my
pipe, I had a grand time of it. It was such nonsense, you know; as if
there could be anything strange or wonderful in London.' 'Why shouldn't there be?' 'Well, I don't know; but I have thought afterwards what a silly lad I
must have been. Anyhow, I had a great day of it, planning what I would
do, half making-believe--just like a kid--that I didn't know where I
might find myself, or what might happen to me. And I was enormously
pleased to think it was all my secret, that nobody else knew anything
about it, and that, whatever I might see, I would keep to myself. I had
always felt like that about the books. Of course, I loved reading them,
but it seemed to me that, if I had been a discoverer, I would have kept
my discoveries a secret. If I had been Columbus, and, if it could
possibly have been managed, I would have found America all by myself,
and never have said a word about it to anybody. Fancy! how beautiful it
would be to be walking about in one's own town, and talking to people,
and all the while to have the thought that one knew of a great world
beyond the seas, that nobody else dreamed of. I should have loved that! 'And that is exactly what I felt about the tour I was going to make. I
made up my mind that nobody should know; and so, from that day to this,
nobody has heard a word of it.' 'But you are going to tell me?' 'You are different. But I don't think even you will hear everything; not
because I won't, but because I can't tell many of the things I saw.' 'Things you saw? Then you really did see wonderful, strange things in
London?' 'Well, I did and I didn't. Everything, or pretty nearly everything, that
I saw is standing still, and hundreds of thousands of people have looked
at the same sights--there were many places that the fellows in the
office knew quite well, I found out afterwards. And then I read a book
called "London and its Surroundings." But (I don't know how it is)
neither the men at the office nor the writers of the book seem to have
seen the things that I did. That's why I stopped reading the book; it
seemed to take the life, the real heart, out of everything, making it as
dry and stupid as the stuffed birds in a museum. 'I thought about what I was going to do all that day, and went to bed
early, so as to be fresh. I knew wonderfully little about London,
really; though, except for an odd week now and then, I had spent all my
life in town. Of course I knew the main streets--the Strand, Regent
Street, Oxford Street, and so on--and I knew the way to the school I
used to go to when I was a boy, and the way into the City. But I had
just kept to a few tracks, as they say the sheep do on the mountains;
and that made it all the easier for me to imagine that I was going to
discover a new world.' Darnell paused in the stream of his talk. He looked keenly at his wife
to see if he were wearying her, but her eyes gazed at him with unabated
interest--one would have almost said that they were the eyes of one who
longed and half expected to be initiated into the mysteries, who knew
not what great wonder was to be revealed. She sat with her back to the
open window, framed in the sweet dusk of the night, as if a painter had
made a curtain of heavy velvet behind her; and the work that she had
been doing had fallen to the floor. She supported her head with her two
hands placed on each side of her brow, and her eyes were as the wells in
the wood of which Darnell dreamed in the night-time and in the day. 'And all the strange tales I had ever heard were in my head that
morning,' he went on, as if continuing the thoughts that had filled his
mind while his lips were silent. 'I had gone to bed early, as I told
you, to get a thorough rest, and I had set my alarum clock to wake me
at three, so that I might set out at an hour that was quite strange for
the beginning of a journey. There was a hush in the world when I awoke,
before the clock had rung to arouse me, and then a bird began to sing
and twitter in the elm tree that grew in the next garden, and I looked
out of the window, and everything was still, and the morning air
breathed in pure and sweet, as I had never known it before.