At last the cabbage-man went home to his soggy tea, and dusk fell and I stood up. I drank a quarter of my flask and struck eastwards away from the road. Cross-country travel in the dark was nearly impossible. I felt my way along drains and hedges, usually circumnavigating three sides of a field before I found the way out of it—and when I did find the way out, it invariably led me into a village or back into the cabbage field.

After an hour or two of this maze, I struck straight across country, climbing or wading whatever obstacles were in my way. This was sheer obstinacy. I was wet to the armpits; I was leaving a track like a hippopotamus; and, since I didn’t know where I was heading, it was all objectless. Finally, I took to the lanes—or roads, I should call them, for they were narrow ribbons of tarmac with low hedges. There I spent most of the time pretending to be a manure heap, for the roads were relatively crowded with pedestrians. The average was certainly one person for every two hundred yards. Evening entertainment in that dreary vale consists of pub-crawling to the next village and back again. If you haven’t the money for beer, you lie under a mackintosh with a girl. At normal times I have only sympathy for so firm an attachment to the preliminaries of procreation, but the groups by the wayside were not recognizable as human until I had practically stepped on them. My own county is gayer and more pagan. When it rains we do our love-making in the tithe barn or the church porch or under the steps at the back of the Women’s Institute, and we don’t care who sees us. Trespassers are expected to guffaw and look away.

I should have been forced to spend another day in the cabbage field if I had not stumbled across a railway line which I followed towards Yeovil, stepping quietly from sleeper to sleeper. Two railway employees passed me walking homewards, but their boots on the ballast gave me ample warning of their approach. I avoided them, and the one train, by lying down at the bottom of the embankment.

A denser darkness on the horizon warned me that I was nearing the massed little houses of Yeovil. It was then about two in the morning, and the by-roads were deserted; so I turned south towards the hills. When the slow autumn dawn turned night to mist I could feel the short turf under my feet and see the gleam of chalk and flint wherever man or beast had scraped the escarpment.

I drank at the piped spring which fed a cattle-trough and took refuge in the heart of a wild half-acre of gorse and heather. Here I startled an old dog fox, and startled myself, when I came to consider it, a deal more. I flatter myself I am able to get as near to game as any civilized man and most savages; indeed it has been my favourite pursuit since I was given my first air-rifle at the age of six, and told—an injunction which, with a single exception, I have obeyed—that I must never point a gun at anyone. Yet I should certainly not have backed myself to approach within three yards of a fox, even knowing where he was and deliberately stalking him. Oddly enough, it worried me that I had come to move with such instinctive quietness. I was already on the look-out for all signs of demoralization—morbidly anxious to assure myself that I was losing none of my humanity.

I chose a south bank where short heather was gradually overcoming the turf, laying back springs under its green mattress. The sun promised a mild heat, and I spread out my coat and leather jacket to dry. I dozed sweetly, awakening whenever a bird perched on the gorse or a rabbit scuttered through the runways, but instantly and easily falling asleep again.

A little after midday I woke up for good. There was nothing immediately visible to account for the sudden clarity of my senses, so I peered over the gorse. Up wind were two men strolling along the crest of the hill. One was a sergeant of the Dorset constabulary; the other a small farmer—to judge by the fact that he carried an old-fashioned hammer-gun. They passed me within ten yards, the policeman pressing down with firm feet as if searching for a pavement beneath that silent and resilient turf, the farmer plodding along with the slightly bent knees of a man who seldom walks on the flat.

I decided to follow these two solemn wanderers and hear what they had to say. They were discussing me, since the farmer had remarked, apropos of nothing: ‘’Tis my belief he was over to Zumerset all the time’—a final and definite pronouncement as of one who should say: I believe he went to South America and died there.

It’s curious how much cover there is on the chalk downs. A body of men couldn’t move unseen, but a single man can. In the vales of southern England, though they look like woodland from the top of hills, hedges and fences compel the fugitive to go the way of other men, and sooner or later he is forced, as I was, to lie down and pray for the earth to cover him. But on the bare—apparently bare—downs there are prehistoric pits and trenches, tree-grown stumps, gorse and the upper edge of coverts, lonely barns and thickets of thorn. And the hedges, where there are any, are either miniature forests or full of gaps.

It was easy to catch them up. They went at an easy pace, stopping every now and then to exchange a few words. The weighty business of conversation could not be disturbed by movement. At last they settled on a gate and leaned over it, contemplating twenty acres of steely green mangel-wurzels which sloped down to the golden hedges of the vale. I crawled the length of a dry ditch and came within earshot.

The sergeant finished a long mumble with the word ‘foreigners’, pronounced loudly and aggressively.

‘’Err, they bastards!’ said the farmer.

The sergeant considered this judicially, turning with deliberation towards his companion and me. He was a uniformed servant of the State, and thus, I imagine, predisposed to diplomacy.

‘I wouldn’t ’ardly go so far as that,’ he said. ‘Not that I ’old with furr’ners—but I don’t know as I’d go so far as that.’

There was a deal more conversation which I couldn’t hear, because neither of them was sufficiently excited to raise his voice. The farmer, I think, must have denied that any foreigners ever came to Dorset. The suggestion that they did was almost a criticism on his county.

‘I tell ’ee there’s been furr’ners askin’ for ’m,’ said the sergeant. ‘And I knows that, because the inspector says to me, ’e says …’ then his voice trailed away again.

‘Mrs Maydoone says ’e were a proper gent,’ chuckled the farmer.

The sergeant chuckled in sympathy and then showed offended dignity.

‘Told me she couldn’t ’ardly call ’im to mind, she did! Don’t ’ee come asking questions, she says, as if the Bull were a nasty common public-’ouse, she says.’

There was more laughter, which turned to a full-throated giggle as both remembered the opulent Mrs Maydoone and dug each other in their own less admirably covered ribs. She was a respectably eager widow who owned the inn in Beaminster where I had lunched. The doctors, she told me, had never seen anything like Mr Maydoone’s kidneys outside a London hospital.

My two friends marched off across the downs, while I remained in the ditch digesting the scraps of news. I was perturbed, but not surprised. It was natural enough that my enemies should get possession of Scotland Yard’s clue to my whereabouts. If dear old Holy George couldn’t manage it, then one of their newspaper correspondents in London could. It wasn’t confidential information.

I returned to my form in the heart of the gorse. The early afternoon sun had a dying bite of summer in it, and I was glowing with the exertion of my stalk. At dusk I ate the last of my provisions and drank again at the spring. By good fortune I left untouched the half-flask of whisky that remained. I feared its effect—slight, but enough to give me confidence, when my safe return to the lane and my peace of mind throughout the winter depended on moving now with the utmost caution.