The Silver Bullet

"We had better lie down and die," said Robin peevishly. "I can't go a step further," and to emphasise his words he deliberately sat.

"Infernal little duffer," growled Herrick. "Huh! Might have guessed you would Joyce." He threw himself down beside his companion and continued grumbling. "You have tobacco, a fine night, and a heather couch of the finest, yet you talk as though the world were coming to an end."

"I'm sure this moor never will," sighed Joyce, reminded of his cigarettes, "we have been trudging it since eight in the morning, yet it still stretches to the back-of-beyond. Hai!"

The pedestrians were pronouncedly isolated. A moonless sky thickly jewelled with stars, arched over a treeless moor, far-stretching as the plain of Shinar. In the luminous summer twilight, the eye could see for a moderate distance, but to no clearly defined horizon; and the verge of sight was limited by vague shadows, hardly definite enough to be mists.

The moor exhaled the noonday heats in thin white vapour, which shut out from the external world those who nestled to its bosom. A sense of solitude, the brooding silence, the formless surroundings, and above all, the insistence of the infinite, would have appealed on ordinary occasions to the poetical and superstitious side of Robin's nature. But at the moment, his nerves were uppermost. He was worn-out, fractious as a child, and in his helplessness could have cried like one. Herrick knew his friend's frail physique and inherited neurosis: therefore he forebore to make bad worse by ill advised sympathy. Judiciously waiting until Joyce had in some degree soothed himself with tobacco, he talked of the common-place.

"Nine o'clock," said he peering at his watch; "thirteen hour's walking. Nothing to me Robin, but a goodish stretch to you. However we are within hail of civilization, and in England. A few miles further we'll pick up a village of sorts no doubt. One would think you were exploiting Africa the way you howl."

He spoke thus callously, in order to brace his friend; but Joyce resented the tone with that exaggerated sense of injury peculiar to the neurotic. "I am no Hercules like you Jim," he protested sullenly; "all your finer feelings have been blunted by beef and beer. You can't feel things as I do. Also," continued Robin still more querulously, "it seems to have escaped your memory, that I returned only last night from a two day's visit to Town."

"If you will break up your holiday into fragments, you must not expect to receive the benefit its enjoyment as a whole would give you. It was jolly enough last week sauntering through the Midlands, till you larked up to London, and fagged yourself with its detestable civilization."

Joyce threw aside his cigarette and nervously began to roll another. "It was no lark which took me up Jim. The letter that came to the Southberry Inn was about--her business."

"Sorry old man. I keep forgetting your troubles. Heat and the want of food make me savage. We'll rest here for a time, and then push on. Not that a night in the open would matter to me."

Joyce made no reply but lying full length on the dry herbage, stared at the scintillating sky. At his elbow, Herrick, cross-legged like a fakir, gave himself up to the enjoyment of a disreputable pipe. The more highly-strung man considered the circumstances which had placed him where he was.

Two months previously, Robin Joyce had lost his mother, to whom he had been devotedly attached: and the consequent grief had made a wreck of him. For weeks he had shut himself up in the flat once brightened by her presence to luxuriate in woe. He possessed in a large degree that instinct for martyrdom, latent in many people, which searches for sorrow, as a more joyous nature hunts for pleasure. The blow of Mrs. Joyce's death had fallen unexpectedly, but it brought home to Robin, the knowledge--strange as it may sound--that a mental pleasure can be plucked from misfortune. He locked himself in his room, wept much, and ate little; neglected his business of contributor to several newspapers, and his personal appearance. Thus the pain of his loss merged itself in that delight of self-mortification, which must have been experienced by the hermits of the Thebiad. Not entirely from religious motives was the desert made populous with hermits in the days of Cyril and Hypatia.