Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare!
The Woods of Westermain.
Gardiner bought himself an outfit at a second-hand dealer's in one of the back streets off the Vauxhall Bridge Road. His plan was to ride as far as the next station before Southampton, leave his machine at the cloak-room there, and change his clothes in some wood before going on into the town. Once among the docks, he would slip on board some outward-bound ship, if he could find one about to sail and if he could evade the night watchman, and stow away till she was at sea. Such things are still done by gentlemen whose reasons for not signing on in public are urgent. Of course the captain might hand him over to the British consul at the end of the voyage—but he preferred not to think of that.
 
From the Portobello inn to London is exactly twenty-one miles, from London to Southampton is something under eighty: a longish journey for an out-of-practice rider on a strange machine. Gardiner left town by the Portsmouth road. The first green he passed (by such things did he count off the stages of his journey, where another man would have reckoned by inns), was Clapham Common, a dismal vision of lamps, railings, wet asphalt, unhappy grass, and avenues of suicidal trees. Next came Wandsworth Common; then, beyond Roehampton, Wimbledon and Richmond Park. They gave him a breath of true night sweetness, but he was in Surbiton directly, with its blazing lamps and self-complacent villas. Gardiner hated suburbs. Better the frank vulgar life of the Vauxhall Bridge Road than their soul-destroying, smug respectability. He raced on[Pg 148] through Esher, sedate and pleasant old town; and with the end of Esher came the beginning of the real country.
 
"My soul
Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll,
Freshening and fluttering in the wind...."
Beyond the palings of Claremont Park, at the entrance of the Oxshott woods, he was brought up by a puncture. He mended it, crouching under a lamp beside the road. Unfenced, alluring, dangerous, the woods pressed up behind. They sent forward their scouts, silver birches up to their knees in bracken which crept out to the very edge of the road, black pines stalking forward, stealthy as red-skins, to peer down at the stranger. Scents and sounds of the forest floated out, filaments of enticement. Gardiner glanced irresolutely down the road, while under the solemn-burning, stately procession of lamps, which marched away through the night over valley and hill. A car rushed by, steaming golden vapors: it glared at him for an instant with big golden eyes, and was gone, with dying roar. He looked down the road of mankind; and then over his shoulder at the silent tempting ranks of the pines and the soft savage darkness that pressed close on every side. If he rested here for ten minutes or so? He was tired; and there was no hurry. He dragged his bicycle out of the ditch and wheeled it into the woods.
 
Moss underfoot; on either side the pines, scattered at first among fine-leaved undergrowth, then closing up in ordered ranks. His lamp tiger-striped their dark even columns till he left the machine propped against one of them. Even by day the heart of these woods is lonely. The trippers who sit by companies along every green ride, with their buns and oranges, never wander far from the path. Presumably they are afraid of bears. Now, by night, the whole forest was triumphantly savage, solitary, and dark, so dark that Gardiner, though he had cat's eyes, sometimes greeted his friends the trees by running into them. He soon strayed from the track. Underfoot the ground became swampy.[Pg 149] Pools of red-brown rain-water splashed him to the knee; long brambles trailed their thorns across his face.
 
The ground rose beneath his feet, and he found himself stumbling up a hill, his feet sinking deep in soft masses of pine-needles. Here was the summit of a ridge, so steep and narrow that on either side he could see the pallor of the sky between the dark columns of the trees. As he followed the line of the ridge downwards the woods closed again, but there grew before him, low among the stems, a sort of pool of whiteness: not the sky this time, but the light of some clearing. The ridge came to its end in an abrupt round knoll, the ground fell away at his feet, and there—O miracle of sudden loveliness!—before him shone a lake. Ebony and silver, polished like a mirror, misted with faint gauze, it lay in a cup of soft black woods. A rustling throng of rushes, pale and ghostly, stepped forward into the water among their slim reflections. Silver-gray and even-tinted, the sky arched above, cut by the small incisive crescent of the moon.
 
Gardiner threw himself down among the pine-needles. He gave himself to the woods, and let them work on him with their melancholy and voluptuous charm. The night took his spirit in her cool hands and smoothed it out, as the sun smoothes and strengthens the crumpled wings of a new-hatched butterfly. It was not enough that he should steep himself in loveliness; a thousand light touches were stilling and charming every nerve of sensation, smell and touch and hearing as well as sight. There was the surging murmur of the wind among the pines; night perfumes of water and forest; warm elastic softness of the fir-ne............