第45章 THE SEVENTH(6)

Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old George with a telegram in her hand."My father reported his latitude and longitude by wireless last night.The London people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time.He wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and Paris.He's arranged that.He is the sort of man who can arrange things like that.There'll be someone at Falmouth to look after us and put us aboard the liner.I must wire them where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow.""Wells in Somerset," said Sir :Richmond.

His plans were already quite clear.He explained that he wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wessex town that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died.It was a little sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views.

They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it.Then they would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in dykes and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to Glastonbury to see what there was to see of a marsh village the Celts had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the Romans came.And at Glastonbury also there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury.Thence they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and sleep.Glastonbury Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of Europe right up to Reformation times.

"That will be a good day for us," said Sir Richmond."It will be like turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro.There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge.Rome will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath.And the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn.We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol.There we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land--to Africa and America and the whole wide world.It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour problem.Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters.Bath we'll get in somehow.And then as an Anglo-American showman Ishall be tempted to run you northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show you monuments bearing little shields with the stars and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Washington family monuments.""It was not only from England that America came," said Miss Grammont.

"But England takes an American memory back most easily and most fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe....For you and me anyhow this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land." He interrupted laughing as she was about to reply."Well, anyhow," he said, "it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest history in every grain of its soil.So we'll send a wire to your London people and tell them to send their instructions to Wells.""I'll tell Belinda," she said, "to be quick with her packing."Section 7

As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wiltshire and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate.They kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr.