The Good Comrade. Una L. Silberrad
her pocket, and went to fetch the dinner. After dinner she was to go on an errand for Mevrouw. It would take a long time, all the evening in fact, for it was to an old relative who lived in a village about three miles from the town. Walking was the only way of getting to the place, except twice a week when a little cargo boat went down the canal, and took some hours about it. This was neither the day nor the time for the boat, Julia would have to walk; but, as she assured Mevrouw, she much preferred it. Accordingly, as soon as dinner was finished, she was given a great many messages, mostly of a condoling nature, for the old lady was ill in bed, some strengthening soup, and a little bottle of the peach-brandy. With these things packed in a substantial marketing basket, she started.
Through the town she went with that easy step and indifference to the presence of other people that Denah so criticised, faster and faster her spirits rising. Once or twice she looked in at the low windows that stood open on the shady side of the street; there she saw the heads of families smoking their after-dinner pipes, while their wives and daughters sat crocheting and watching the passersby. There were chairs with crimson velvet seats in most of the rooms, and funny little cabinet, or side-board things of bright red mahogany, with modern Delft vases, very blue indeed, upon them. And always there was a certain snugness, perhaps even smugness, about the rooms. At least, so it seemed to her as she looked in, almost insolently pleased to be outside, to be free and alone.
In time she came to the outskirts of the town, the canal lay on her right, and on her left, flat green fields, cut up by innumerable ditches, and set with frequent windmills, all black and white, and mostly used for maintaining the water level. There were people busy in the fields, but to Julia they only gave the idea of ants, and did not intrude upon her mind in the least. It was all very quiet and green around, and quiet and blue above, except for the larks singing rapturously. Certainly it was very good to be away from the Van Heigens, away from the ceaseless little reiteration of Mevrouw's talk, from the minute, punctilious conventions, from Joost's quiet gaze, from the proximity of the hateful, necessary blue daffodil. With a violent rebound Julia shook off the feeling that had been growing on her of late, and was once more possibly reckless, but certainly free, and no longer under the spell of her surroundings. Her young blood coursed quickly, her eyes shone, the basket she carried grew light; she might have sung as she went had not Nature, in withholding the ability, also kindly withheld the inclination.
Soon after leaving the town, a side road cut into the main one; a waggon was lumbering down it at no great pace, but just before the branch road joined the main one the driver cracked his whip loudly, so that his team of young horses started forward suddenly. Too suddenly for the comprehension of some children who were playing in the road; for a second or more they looked at the approaching waggon, then, when the necessity dawned upon them, they ran for safety, one one way, one another, and the third, a baby boy, like a chicken, half across the way to the right, then, after a scurry in the middle, back again to the left, under the horses' feet.
Julia shouted to him, but in the excitement of the moment she spoke English, and not Dutch, though it hardly mattered, for the little boy was far too frightened to understand anything. It certainly would have fared badly with him had she not followed up her cry by darting into the road, seizing him by the shoulder, and flinging him with considerable force against the green wayside bank. She was only just in time; as it was, the foremost horse struck her shoulder and sent her rolling into the dust.
For an instant she lay there, perilously near the big grinding wheels; an almost imperceptible space, yet somehow long enough for her to decide quite calmly that it was impossible to scramble to her feet in time, so she had better draw her legs up and trust to the wheels missing her. Then suddenly the wheels stopped, and some one who had seized the horses' heads addressed the waggoner with the English idiom that is perhaps most widely known.
Julia heard "damned fool" in quite unemotional English, and almost simultaneously the guttural shrieks of two peasant women who approached. She picked herself up, then moving two paces to the side, stopped to put her hat straight with a calmness she did not quite feel. There was a volley of exclamations from the peasant women, and "Are you hurt?" the man who had stopped the horses asked her, speaking now in Dutch, though with an English accent.
"No," she answered, winking back the water which had come into her eyes with the force of the blow, and she turned her back on him so that he should not see her do it.
"My good women," she said shortly to the peasants who, with upraised hands and many gestures, stared at her, "there is nothing the matter, there is no reason why you should stand there and look at me; I assure you no one has been hurt, and no one is going to be; you had much better go on your way, as I shall do. Good-afternoon."
She walked a few paces down the road, not in the direction she intended to go certainly, but she was too shaken for the moment to notice which way she took, and was only actuated by a desire to get away and put an end to a scene. The movement and the words were not without effect; the two women, a good deal astonished, obeyed automatically, and, picking up the burdens they had set down, trudged on their way, not realising for some time how much offended they were at the curt behaviour of the "mad English." The children by this time had ceased staring and returned to their play; the waggoner, muttering some surly words, drove on. Julia sat on the bank by the roadside, and tried to brush the dust from her dress. The Englishman, after making some parting remarks to the waggoner, this time in Dutch, though still in the quiet, drawling voice which was much at variance with the language, had gone to pick up the basket. She wished she had thanked him for his timely assistance when she first scrambled to her feet, and gone on at once, then she could have done this necessary sitting down when he was out of sight, and come back for the stupid basket when she remembered it. But now she would have to thank him formally, and perhaps explain things, and say expressly that she was not hurt, and this while she was shaken and dusty. Mercifully he was English, and so would not expect much; she looked at his back with satisfaction. He was scarcely as tall as many Hollanders, but very differently built. To Julia, looking at him rather stupidly, his proportions, like his clothes, appeared very nearly perfect after those she had been used to seeing lately. When he turned and she saw for the first time his face, she was not very much surprised, though really it was surprising that Rawson-Clew should still be hereabouts.
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