"FREEDOM FOR TWO"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 April 1940, Page 10

"FREEDOM FOR TWO"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

MARGARET WATSON.

CHAPTER I. Down the windscreen of the old twoseater, the rain ran in greasy rivulets from cither end of the fan which the wiper monotonously .shaped and reshaped before Erica Manning's eyes. She turned a faintly mischievous smile upon the young man beside her. “Thanks awfully, for the lift,” he said. “Are you sure you'll be all right for the rest of the way? It’s such a beast of a night; I wish you’d let me drive you home.” “And walk back afterwards?” She laughed, and shook her head. “Thanks. Michael, it’s just like you. but I shall really be all right.” She added, demurely. "I’m sorry you don’t like my driving.” It was impossible, in that darkness of late late evening and driving rain, to see whether Michael had blushed; but at least, after shivering beside her at every corner in two miles of winding road, he had the grace to stammer a little as he said: “But I —l think you drive splendidly.” She did not laugh at him again; she could never feel really happy about laughing at Michael Dunn, though he had no sense of humour to question hers, and no vanity to be hurt. She looked at him steadily as he swung back the door of her little car and got out. Big and vague and rather slow, and more solid in. effect than all the bricks and mortar of the house which showed faintly behind his shoulders, Michael was the soul of Brandford in person. He stood for the things which had always been her life: quiet stability, security, stagnation—call it whatever you liked, according to the point from which you viewed it. and still it would be admirable, and still, inevitably, deadly dull. Perhaps that was why Erica was sure, in moments of friendship such as this one, that she would never love Michael Dunn. Poor Michael, she thought as she looked at him; he had been so much her devoted friend all his life, arid she had given him so little in exchange. She said in a rush of kindness: “All the old ladies had their heads together over us at the social tonight. Michael. Didn’t you notice? Their eyes avoided us so steadily that I’m sure it’s of us they were talking. I hope you don’t mind. It was fatal to go in together, and so late, too." "Mind," said Michael. "Do I mind? I only wish we could give them better reason to gossip. Look here, Erica —" He put his uncovered brown head back into the car. “You’re getting wet," she said. "Do go on inside.” “There’s something I must say to you. though. No. not now. Tomorrow night, at the concert.” Under much urging the self-starter had at last succeeded in wringing a frenzied coughing from the engine. Erica shouted above the noise, the glint of her smile coming and going in a second. "But I’m not coming to the concert." “Not coming? But —you were talking to Miss Riley about it, weren’t you?" “About selling tickets, that’s all." She pulled the door to with a bang. The last protesting question he tried to put to her was a voiceless miming through the blurred glass. She waved her hand, called a “good night," which he could not possibly have heard, and shot away with a jolt and a roar along the empty lane. It was pleasant now, in loneliness, to tread hard down upon the accelerator, and watch the long arms of the hedges stretching out to engulf her. A companion destroyed for her at once the feeling of unreality which was the best thing Brandford lanes had to offer her: or perhaps it was simply that Michael was not the right companion. There must, she supposed, be people in the world whose presence beside her would not necessarily reduce things to the commonplace; but Michael was not one of them. With him at. her shoulder she could not imagine the road leading to anything more spacious than the smooth green of Brandford, the discreet houses turning their backs on the shopping streets, the church stolidly asleep in its grey close, and the rectory gate unlatched beside it. That, of course, was where it did lead, where it had always led for her. back to the stagnant peace of home. Some times she was afraid it would always be so. She had tried hard to escape. In her desperation .she had been ready to follow any lane which offered to lead her away into the world, but her haste had betrayed her, for every path had turned at last, under her feet, and brought her .jack to that old familia!' gate, perpetually half open to receive her. Behind the wheel of the disreputable old car, with no one to remind her of these tilings, she could sometimes persuade herself that she was really going somewhere new, that adventures awaited her round every turn of the read, and that for double reasons she must hurry: because she pursued and was pursued by enemies. But that night, for some reason, the charm would not work. Her mind was too full of the very real past, and too much occupied with depressing prophecies for the future. Haste was not the wav. If she was ever to find tier way into the wider world of her desire, it must be carefully and steadily. Music was. she thought, her one hope. ,-.l’ter all. she had a voice, as her master had told her sometimes when she had particularly pleased him. If she worked hard it would at least earn her living for her. The alternative, to put it brutally, was Michael and Branford for life. She felt, the old twinge of conscience ( at tile repugnance with which she contemplated a future as Michael’s wife.

but she could not restrain it. Even if he took her away to some other town, it would be Brandford all over again. Her thoughts ran haphazard, as wayward as the course of the car' she was driving. The concert, and Miss Riley's tickets, came uppermost as she rounded a corner. The usual Christmas programme by the Brandford Orchestral Society; the usual lack of cohesion between the conductor and his orchestra; in all probability the usual uninspiring soloists. She would not go. Definitely and finally, though her parents would be a little disappointed, she would not go. The lane curved, and dimly through the rain Brandford loomed ahead as a haze of light. Erica jammed her foot hard upon the accelerator. Speed seemed more necessary than ever with that complacent quiet waiting to swallow her. It was unreasonable and ungrateful, of course, to feel so bitterly about so charming a place. At least her father and mother found it charming; but then, they were not ardent young creatures just on the brink of twenty-five. They had their day; they had had their romance; a lovely one. she admitted. Erica wanted hers. The man seemed to leap at her out of the murk in a fraction of a second, as if he had sprung into mysterious sudden being like a ghost, where empty air had been a moment before. A long grey figure, striding along the middle of the lane, butting his head into the wind iu an easy, expert manner. She did not see him until he was under her wheels. It was too late to think of pulling up in time to miss him. though her brakes shrieked horribly in an instinctive attempt. Then, and not until then, the sound of tier approach pierced the moan of the wind and reached him, and he swung round on one heel and leaped for the hedge, just as she wrenched the wheel round. She had often wondered what she would do in an emergency, how she would react to it. Now in one desperate half-second, she knew; she would lose her head. That was her one galling impression at that moment. Then she lost control), The car seemed to jump and quiver and slip beneath her. with a horrid grinding sound, and she had a fleeting glimpse of the man reeling away on her right from the blow of the wing, before the entire night dissolved into chaos. She closed her eyes, and was almost sure that they were both doomed. Exactly what was happening was a complete mystery. She knew only that’ she was battered and shaken from side to side like the contents of a baby's rattle, and finally thrown violently down to lie half-stunned among the wreckage of the car. It took her a long time to realise that she was still not only alive, but except for bruises uninjured. She put her hands up to her head and tried to press the confused ringing out of it; and presently, by dint of much shaking and blinking, she succeeded in restoring some sense of sight and hearing. She took a fast hold on the edge of the door which sprung open above her. and dragged herself up on her knees. She must not faint. If she was to prove, even to herself, that she could face anything more eventful than a daily rail journey to town and back, she must not faint. Besides, there was the man. She had seen him flung to the ground. Supposing he was badly hurt? Supposing he was dead? It was not easy to detach herself from the ruins of the veteran car, but she managed it at last, crawling with clenched hands and set teeth. The door, swinging idly as she crept through it into the sodden grass of the ditch, groaned dolefully. She imagined that was the only voice the car had left. Erica dug her shaking hands into the wet grass and listened, but there was no sound, not a whisper of the moaning she had expected. Perhaps the man was unconscious. She must find him and see what she had done, and then hurry into Blandford for help. She felt for a foothold with her toes, and raised herself stiffly and painfully from the ditch, and crept forward on hands and knees into the road. Then she stopped with a gasp, and sat back upon her heels; for the grey form had loomed abruptly out of the darkness, with head craning to stare down upon the wreckage, and meeting instead the unexpected vision—irresistibly comic, she was sure—of her muddy and frightened face. Her relief was so great that she got no very clear impression of her victim but she did realise, in a dazed way, that he was smiling, and that his smile had a quality entirely sufficient in itself. Then he said, in a polite, conversational tone: “Are you looking for me? Because I'm certainly looking for you." There was a moment in which they stared at each other, with only a foot or so of space between their faces. Erica tried to speak, but could not lift one word out of the rising tide of hyteria she felt in her throat. Then she felt, rather than saw or heard, that he was laughing, really laughing, gently and richly and quietly, as he knelt there in the mud. "I'm sorry!” he said, "bill after visions of your mangled remains, the angle at which you’re wearing you hat and the splashes of mud on your face are really funny." "I —I suppose they are." said Erica slowly, and began to laugh with him. That, was rather dangerous, fur once begun she found it difficult to stop, though she managed it by sheer willpower in a little sobbing gasp. iTo be Con I in Lied 1.