The Rain-Girl. Herbert George Jenkins

      The Road to Nowhere

      CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

      NATURE discourages eccentricity!"

      The ridiculous words rang in Richard Beresford's ears as he stalked resolutely along the rain-soaked high-road. They seemed to keep time with the crunch of his boots upon the wet gravel. The wind picked them up and, with a spatter of rain, flung them full in his face. The pack on his back caught the last word and thumped it into his shoulders.

      "Nature discourages eccentricity!"

      Where he had read the absurd phrase he could not remember, probably in some insignificant magazine article upon popular science. That, however, was no excuse for remembering it, and upon this of all days. It had not even the virtue of being epigrammatical; it was just a dull, stupid catchpenny phrase of some silly ass desirous of catching the editorial eye.

      As he plodded on through the rain, he strove to ​confute and annihilate the wretched thing, to crush it by the heavy artillery of reason. Nature herself was eccentric, he told himself. Had she not once at least sent snow on Derby Day? Did she not ruin with frost her own crops?

      "Na - ture - dis - cou - ra - ges - ec - ec - cen - tri - ci - ty!" crunched his boots.

      "Ec-cen-tri-ci-ty," pounded his pack.

      "Tri-ci-ty," shrieked the wind gleefully.

      Confound it! He would think of other things; of the life before him, of the good pals who had "gone west," of books and pictures, of love and tobacco, of romance and wandering, of all that made life worth while. It was absurd to be hypnotised by a phrase.

      No; the moment his thoughts were left to themselves, they returned precipitately to the little Grub Street absurdity. It clung to him like a pursuing fury, this nonsensical, illogical and peculiarly irritating phrase.

      "Nature discourages eccentricity!"

      He strove to recall all the eccentricities of Nature of which he had ever heard. Confute the accursed thing he would at all costs.

      It was by way of fat women and five legged sheep that he eventually stumbled across his own family. In spite of the rain and of his own detestably uncomfortable condition, he laughed aloud. Every relative he had was eccentric; yet heaven knew they had not lacked encouragement!

      From the other side of the hedge a ​miserable-looking white horse gazed at him wonderingly. Truly these humans were strange beings to find matter for laughter on such a day.

      Yes, his relatives were eccentric enough to think him mad. There was Aunt Caroline, for instance, who rather prided herself upon being different from other people; yet she had married a peer; was extremely wealthy, and as exclusive as a colony of Agapemones. No one could say that she had been discouraged.

      The thought of Caroline, Lady Drewitt, brought Beresford back to his present situation, and the cause of his struggling along a country road in the face of a south-westerly wind, that threw the rain against his face in vicious little slaps, on the most pitifully unspring-like first of May he ever remembered. Again, the day brought him back to his starting point: "Nature discourages eccentricity." In short, Lady Drewitt, the weather and the phrase all seemed so mixed up and confused as to defy entire disentanglement.

      The weather could be dismissed in a few words. It was atrocious, depressing, English. Ahead stretched the rain-soddened high-road, flanked on either side by glistening hedges, from which the water fell in solemn and reluctant drops. Heavy clouds swung their moody way across the sky, just clearing the tree-tops. Groups of miserable cattle huddled together under hedges, or beneath trees that gave no shelter from the pitiless rain. Here and there some despairing beast lay down in the ​open, as if refusing to continue the self-deception. The tree trunks glistened like beavers; for the rain beat relentlessly through their thin foliage, in short, the world was wet to the skin, and Richard Beresford with the world.

      His thoughts drifted back to the little family dinner-party at Drewitt House, and the bomb-shell he had launched into its midst. It was his aunt's enquiry as to when he proposed returning to the Foreign Office that had been the cause of all the trouble.

      His simple statement that he had done with the Foreign Office and all its ways, and intended to go for a long walking-tour, had been received