“We’re coming to the cross roads above Bignor,” murmured Hilary. “He might take the track down from there. We could easily lose him!”

They ran, but suddenly stood still behind a yew tree.

“He’s not going down,” said Hilary: “Look!”

On the grassy open rise beyond the cross tracks, where a signpost stood, Ferse was running towards the north side of the hill.

“A second track goes down there, I remember.”

“It’s all chance, but we can’t stop now.”

Ferse had ceased to run, he was walking slowly with stooped head up the rise. They watched him from behind their yew tree till he vanished over the hill’s shoulder.

“Now!” said Hilary.

It was a full half mile, and both of them were over fifty.

“Not too fast, old man,” panted Hilary; “we mustn’t bust our bellows.”

They kept to a dogged jog, reached the shoulder, over which Ferse had vanished, and found a grass track trailing down.

“Slowly does it now,” gasped Hilary.

Here too the hillside was dotted with bushes and young trees, and they made good use of them till they came to a shallow chalk pit.

“Let’s lie up here a minute, and get our wind. He’s not going off the Down or we’d have seen him. Listen!”

From below them came a chanting sound. Adrian raised his head above the pit side and looked over. A little way down by the side of the track lay Ferse on his back. The words of the song he was droning out came up quite clearly:

He ceased and lay perfectly still; then, to Adrian’s horror, his face became distorted; he flung his fists up in the air, cried out: “I won’t—I won’t be mad!” and rolled over on his face.

Adrian dropped back.

“It’s terrible! I must go down and speak to him.”

“We’ll both go—round by the track—slow—don’t startle him.”

They took the track which wound round the chalk pit. Ferse was no longer there.

“Quietly on, old son,” said Hilary.

They walked on in a curious calm, as if they had abandoned the chase.

“Who can believe in God?” said Adrian.

A wry smile contorted Hilary’s long face.

“In God I believe, but not a merciful one as we understand the word. On this hillside, I remember, they trap. Hundreds of rabbits suffer the tortures of the damned. We used to let them out and knock them on the head. If my beliefs were known, I should be unfrocked. That wouldn’t help. My job’s a concrete one. Look! A fox!”

They stood a moment watching his low fulvous body steal across the track.

“Marvellous beast, a fox! Great places for wild life, these wooded chines; so steep, you can’t disturb them—pigeons, jays, woodpeckers, rabbits, foxes, hares, pheasants—every mortal thing.”

The track had begun to drop, and Hilary pointed.

Ahead, beyond the dip into the chine they could see Ferse walking along a wire fence.

They watched till he vanished then reappeared on the side of the hill, having rounded the corner of the fence.

“What now?”

“He can’t see us from there. To speak to him, we must somehow get near before we try, otherwise he’ll just run.”

They crossed the dip and went up along and round the corner of the fence under cover of the hawthorns. On the uneven hillside Ferse had again vanished.

“This is wired for sheep,” said Hilary, “Look! they’re all over the hill—Southdowns.”

They reached a top. There was no sign of him.

They kept along the wire, and reaching the crest of the next rise, stood looking. Away to the left the hill dropped steeply into another chine; in front of them was open grass dipping to a wood. On their right was still the wire fencing and rough pasture. Suddenly Adrian gripped his brother’s arm. Not seventy yards away on the other side of the wire Ferse was lying face to the grass, with sheep grazing close to him. The brothers crawled to the shelter of a bush. From there, unseen, they could see him quite well, and they watched him in silence. He lay so still that the sheep were paying him no attention. Round-bodied, short-legged, snub-nosed, of a greyish white, and with the essential cosiness of the Southdown breed, they grazed on, undisturbed.

“Is he asleep, d’you think?”

Adrian shook his head. “Peaceful, though.”

There was something in his attitude that went straight to the heart; something that recalled a small boy hiding his head in his mother’s lap; it was as if the feel of the grass beneath his body, his face, his outstretched hands, were bringing him comfort; as if he were groping his way back into the quiet security of Mother Earth. While he lay like that it was impossible to disturb him.

The sun, in the west, fell on their backs, and Adrian turned his face to receive it on his cheek. All the nature-lover and country man in him responded to that warmth, to the scent of the grass, the song of the larks, the blue of the sky; and he noticed that Hilary too had turned his face to the sun. It was so still that, but for the larks’ song and the muffled sound of the sheep cropping, one might have said Nature was dumb. No voice of man or beast, no whirr of traffic came up from the weald.

“Three o’clock. Have a nap, old man,” he whispered to Hilary; “I’ll watch.”

Ferse seemed asleep now. Surely his brain would rest from its disorder here. If there were healing in air, in form, in colour, it was upon this green cool hill for a thousand years and more undwelt on and freed from the restlessness of men. The men of old, indeed, had lived up there; but since then nothing had touched it but the winds and the shadows of the clouds. And today there was no wind, no cloud to throw soft and moving darkness on the grass.

So profound a pity for the poor devil, lying there as if he would never move again, stirred Adrian that he could not think of himself, nor even feel for Diana. Ferse, so lying, awakened in him a sensation quite impersonal, the deep herding kinship men have for each other in the face of Fortune’s strokes which seem to them unfair. Yes! He was sleeping now, grasping at the earth for refuge; to grasp for eternal refuge in the earth was all that was left him. And for those two quiet hours of watching that prostrate figure among the sheep, Adrian was filled not with futile rebellion and bitterness but with a strange unhappy wonder. The old Greek dramatists had understood the tragic plaything which the gods make of man; such understanding had been overlaid by the Christian doctrine of a merciful God. Merciful?—No! Hilary was right! Faced by Ferse’s fate—what would one do? What—while the gleam of sanity remained? When a man’s life was so spun that no longer he could do his job, be no more to his fellows than a poor distraught and frightening devil, the hour of eternal rest in quiet earth had surely come. Hilary had seemed to think so too; yet he was not sure what his brother would do if it came to the point. His job was with the living, a man who died was lost to him, so much chance of service gone! And Adrian felt a sort of thankfulness that his own job was with the dead, classifying the bones of men—the only part of men that did not suffer, and endured, age on age, to afford evidence of a marvellous animal. So he lay, and watched, plucking blade after blade of grass and rubbing the sweetness of them out between his palms.

The sun wore on due west, till it was almost level with his eyes; the sheep had ceased cropping and were moving slowly together over the hill, as if waiting to be folded. Rabbits had stolen out and were nibbling the grass; and the larks, one by one, had dropped from the sky. A chill was creeping on the air; the trees down in the weald had darkened and solidified; and the whitening sky seemed waiting for the sunset glow. The grass too had lost its scent; there was no dew as yet.