I suppose I was predestined (and likewise foreordained) to reach the city sooner or later. My fate in that respect was settled for me when I placed my trust in the vagrant road. I thought for a time that I was more than a match for the Road, but I soon learned that the Road was more than a match for me. Sly? There's no name for it. Alluring, lovable, mysterious--as the heart of a woman. Many a time I followed the Road where it led through innocent meadows or climbed leisurely hill slopes only to find that it had crept around slyly and led me before I knew it into the back door of some busy town.
Mostly in this country the towns squat low in the valleys, they lie in wait by the rivers, and often I scarcely know of their presence until I am so close upon them that I can smell the breath of their heated nostrils and hear their low growlings and grumblings.
My fear of these lesser towns has never been profound. I have even been bold enough, when I came across one of them, to hasten straight through as though assured that Cerberus was securely chained; but I found, after a time, what I might indeed have guessed, that the Road, also led irresistibly to the lair of the Old Monster himself, the He-one of the species, where he lies upon the plain, lolling under his soiled gray blanket of smoke.
It is wonderful to be safe at home again, to watch the tender, reddish brown shoots of the Virginia creeper reaching in at my study window, to see the green of my own quiet fields, to hear the peaceful clucking of the hens in the sunny dooryard--and Harriet humming at her work in the kitchen.
When I left the Ransomes that fine spring morning, I had not the slightest presentiment of what the world held in store for me.
After being a prisoner of the weather for so long, I took to the Road with fresh joy. All the fields were of a misty greenness and there were pools still shining in the road, but the air was deliciously clear, clean, and soft. I came through the hill country for three or four miles, even running down some of the steeper places for the very joy the motion gave me, the feel of the air on my face.
Thus I came finally to the Great Road, and stood for a moment looking first this way, then that.
"Where now?" I asked aloud.
With an amusing sense of the possibilities that lay open before me, I closed my eyes, turned slowly around several times and then stopped. When I opened my eyes I was facing nearly southward: and that way I set out, not knowing in the least what Fortune had presided at that turning. If I had gone the other way--I walked vigorously for two or three hours, meeting or passing many people upon the busy road. Automobiles there were in plenty, and loaded wagons, and jolly families off for town, and a herdsman driving sheep, and small boys on their way to school with their dinner pails, and a gypsy wagon with lean, led horses following behind, and even a Jewish peddler with a crinkly black beard, whom I was on the very point of stopping.
"I should like sometime to know a Jew," I said to myself.
As I travelled, feeling like one who possesses hidden riches, I came quite without warning upon the beginning of my great adventure. I had been looking for a certain thing all the morning, first on one side of the road, then the other, and finally I was rewarded. There it was, nailed high upon tree, the curious, familiar sign:
[ REST ]
I stopped instantly. It seemed like an old friend.
"Well," said I. "I'm not at all tired, but I want to be agreeable."
With that I sat down on a convenient stone, took off my hat, wiped my forehead, and looked about me with satisfaction, for it was a pleasant country.
I had not been sitting there above two minutes when my eyes fell upon one of the oddest specimens of humanity (I thought then) that ever I saw. He had been standing near the roadside, just under the tree upon which I had seen the sign, "Rest." My heart dotted and carried one.
"The sign man himself!" I exclaimed.
I arose instantly and walked down the road toward him.
"A man has only to stop anywhere here," I said exultantly, "and things happen.
The stranger's appearance was indeed extraordinary. He seemed at first glimpse to be about twice as large around the hips as he was at the shoulders, but this I soon discovered to be due to no natural avoir-dupois but to the prodigious number of soiled newspapers and magazines with which the low-hanging pockets of his overcoat were stuffed. For he was still wearing an old shabby overcoat though the weather was warm and bright--and on his head was an odd and outlandish hat. It was of fur, flat at the top, flat as a pie tin, with the moth-eaten earlaps turned up at the sides and looking exactly like small furry ears. These, with the round steel spectacles which he wore--the only distinctive feature of his countenance--gave him an indescribably droll appearance.
"A fox!" I thought.
Then I looked at him more closely.
"No," said I, "an owl, an owl!"
The stranger stepped out into the road and evidently awaited my approach. My first vivid impression of his face--I remember it afterward shining with a strange inward illumination--was not favourable. It was a deep-lined, scarred, worn-looking face, insignificant if not indeed ugly in its features, and yet, even at the first glance, revealing something inexplainable--incalculable--"Good day, friend," I said heartily.
Without replying to my greeting, he asked:
"Is this the road to Kilburn?"--with a faint flavour of foreignness in his words.
"I think it is," I replied, and I noticed as he lifted his hand to thank me that one finger was missing and that the hand itself was cruelly twisted and scarred.
The stranger instantly set off up the Road without giving me much more attention than he would have given any other signpost. I stood a moment looking after him--the wings of his overcoat beating about his legs and the small furry ears on his cap wagging gently.
"There," said I aloud, "is a man who is actually going somewhere."
