Mr. Standfast, page 19 by John Buchan
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be reminiscent of John Bunyan... The car will be at the door tomorrow to catch the ten-thirty, and I will give you the address of the rooms that have been taken for you... Beyond that I have nothing to say, except to beg you to play the part well and keep your temper. You behaved very nicely at dinner.'
I asked one last question as we said good night in the hall. 'Shall I see you again?'
'Soon, and often,' was the answer. 'Remember we are colleagues.'
I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured with the thought of the girl who had sung 'Cherry Ripe' in the garden. I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in the choice of his intermediary, for I'm hanged if I would have taken such orders from anyone else.
CHAPTER TWO
'The Village Named Morality'
UP on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked by muddy trickles--the most stagnant kind of watercourse you would look for in a day's journey. But presently they reach the edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea. So with the story I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred Jimson.
The house--or 'home' as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick--was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant Midland common. It was badly built and oddly furnished; the bed was too short, the windows did not fit, the doors did not stay shut; but it was as clean as soap and water a