First, escape. . . .
Over the downs great numbers of larks were singing. It was warm
April that year and early. All the cloud stuff in the sky was
gathered into great towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was
blue of the intensest. The air was so clean that Benham felt it
clean in the substance of his body. The chestnuts down the hill to
the right were flowering, the beeches were luminously green, and the
oaks in the valley foaming gold. And sometimes it was one lark
filled his ears, and sometimes he seemed to be hearing all the larks
for miles about him. Presently over the crest he would be out of
sight of the grand stand and the men exercising horses, and that
brace of red-jacketed golfers. . . .
What was he to do?
For a time he could think of nothing to do except to keep up and out
of the valley. His whole being seemed to have come to his surfaces
to look out at the budding of the year and hear the noise of the
birds. And then he got into a long road from which he had to
escape, and trespassing southward through plantations he reached the
steep edge of the hills and sat down over above a great chalk pit
somewhere near Dorking and surveyed all the tumbled wooded spaces of
the Weald.
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