THE WINDOW

Not knowing precisely why it was that he wanted
to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue
of the man who stands eternally in the door of the
lift, he picked a leaf sharply from the hedge. All
this would have to be dished up for the young men
at Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his
terrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking (he
threw away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly)
like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a
bunch of roses, or stuffs his pockets with nuts as
he ambles at his ease through the lanes and fields
of a country known to him from boyhood. It was
all familiar; this turning, that stile, that cut across
the fields. Hours he would spend thus, with his
pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in
and out of the old familiar lanes and commons,
which were all stuck about with the history of that
campaign there, the life of this statesman here,
with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too,
this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear;
but at length the lane, the field, the common, the
fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him
on to that further turn of the road where he dis-
mounted always, tied his horse to a tree, and
proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge
of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath*

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he
wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land

71