The Rain-Girl. Herbert George Jenkins
nodded her head brightly in agreement. "No one seems to understand. Everything's so mixed up."
"I suppose it's because until the war no one ever had a chance of finding out anything about any but his own class. Over there the labourer found the lord a sport, and the lord found the labourer a man just like himself. Oh, it's going to be what a little cockney in my section would have called 'an 'ades of a beano.'"
Beresford shovelled some more coal on the fire. He seemed unable to get the chill out of his limbs.
"And you," she asked, "are you tramping for long?"
"For ever I hope."
"For ever! That's rather a long time, isn't it?" she questioned.
Beresford then told her something of his determination to cut adrift from town life and its drudgery, and to see what the open road had to offer. He told her of the protests of his relatives; of the general conviction that he had become mentally unhinged, probably due to shell-shock. How every one had endeavoured to dissuade him from the folly upon which he was about to embark. He told her that in the disposal of his effects he felt rather like a schoolboy destroying his kit.
"But your books?" she said. "What did you do with them?"
"Ah! there you've put your finger on the weak spot," laughed Beresford. "I had meant to give away a few and sell the rest; but somehow I couldn't do it, so I had them done up in cases and stored away. I paid two years' storage in advance."
She nodded approval and understanding.
"You will see that I'm really a very weak character after all."
"And you will be walking month after month," she said dreamily, "with no thought of the London Season, or Scotland, or wintering in Egypt. I wish I were you," she added.
"But surely you could break away if you wished it?"
"It's not so easy for a girl," she replied, "and—and—oh, there are so many considerations. No," she added with a sigh of resignation, "I must be content with occasional lapses, and I don't really know that I'm a true vagabond," she said a little regretfully, "I always have to carry a comfortable frock with me," glancing down at herself, then looking up at him with a quizzical little smile. "That is in itself a sign of weakness, isn't it?"
"Only if you persist in labels," he replied. "You are dreadfully conventional."
"I!" she cried in surprise.
"Yes; you will insist on classifying every one according to appearances and accepted ideas."
"I don't understand," she said with a puzzled expression.
"Your idea of a vagabond is that of one who washes seldom, changes even seldomer, and spends the evening in hob-nailed boots by the inn fireside."
"I suppose you are right," she said laughing. "It's very difficult to get away from labels."
"Do you believe that Nature discourages eccentricity?"
"I—I'm afraid I've never thought about it," she said after a short pause. "Why?"
"Because that ridiculous phrase has been running in my head all day," he replied, shivering again slightly. "I wonder if the rain came as a rebuke to me for throwing over everything."
She nodded, signifying that she understood.
"It's rather queer," he went on, "but I had never thought of possible drawbacks to bucolic freedom."
"You do now, though," she suggested with a mischievous upward glance through her lashes that thrilled him.
"I seem to believe in nothing else now," he added. "I don't possess your veneration for the rain, I prefer skylarks. Besides," he went on, "I like to lie on my back in a field and forget."
"I know," she said eagerly, "I've often wanted to live in a caravan, then you get everything. The night sounds must be so wonderful."
"You cannot be a vagabond if you carry your house with you," he objected.
"Just as much as those who use other people's houses—the inns," she retorted. "I suppose it's really impossible to be a vagabond other than at heart."
"It's impossible unless you can glory in dirt and personal uncleanliness."
"What a horrible idea. Surely there can be clean vagabonds."
"What opportunity has a tramp to wash? There are only the streams and the rivers, with the chance of getting run in for disturbing the trout or polluting the water. Besides, without soap you cannot wash properly, and I've never heard of a vagabond who carried a cake of soap with him."
"I do," she laughed, then after a few moments' pause she added, "You reason and analyse too much for the open road. I being a woman accept all, and glory in my inconsistencies."
"And incidentally get as many baths, hot or cold, as you want."
She nodded.
"No," he continued, "the nomadic habit gets you dubbed a dangerous lunatic. I suppose I'm a dangerous lunatic, because I cannot find content in a dinner, a dance, or a crush, with a month's holiday in the summer and, as my cousin would put it, working like a fountain from ten till four."
"But does it really matter what we do, provided we can justify it to ourselves?" She looked up at him eagerly.
"Would not the Philistines regard that as a dangerous philosophy?"
"I don't think I should ever want to run away from things," she said dreamily; "that is monastic. It has always seemed to me a much greater achievement to live your own life in the midst of uncongenial or unsympathetic surroundings."
"You don't know Aunt Caroline and the Foreign Office," said Beresford grimly.
"Oh! but," said the girl, "my auntie's just as conventional as can be. You see," she continued seriously, "to be an idealist you must be unconscious of being one. Do you understand what I mean?"
"You suggest that it may become a pose."
"Yes," she said, nodding her head eagerly. "You might sacrifice the ideals to the idealism. It's like religion that teaches you to find God in a church, whereas you should be able to:—
Raise the stone and find me there,
Cleave the wood and there am I.
I so dislike cults and societies," she added inconsequently.
"You make me feel as if I were being lectured."
"I'm so sorry," she said hastily. "I didn't mean——"
"Please go on, I think I like it."
"But we are wandering from vagabondage," she smiled. "Don't you think that Thoreau and Jefferies were vagabonds?"
"Frankly I don't," he said with decision. "They were sentimentalists. The nearest to perfect vagabonds that I can recall among writers are Walt Whitman and George Borrow. Whitman is alleged to have had all the characteristics of the vagabond. Have not controversies raged about his personal cleanliness? As for Borrow, he could outwit a Jew or a gipsy."
"And cheat a girl's love for him," she suggested.
"Love and vagabondage are contradictions."
"Contradictions!" she cried, opening her eyes wide. "I don't agree with you," she added with decision.
"A vagabond has only one mistress, Nature," said Beresford quietly.
"Then I'm not a vagabond," she said.
"The wood and the glade have only one music for the vagabond, the pipes of Pan," he continued. "You would introduce the guitar."
"I should do nothing of the sort," she cried indignantly. "As a matter of fact I used to play the concertina."
"The what?"
"The