Anyway, the inn was not very goo and the next day I climbed a muddy hill and stood in the cold wind from the North Sea trying to get a lift away from this nest of sheep and mutton eaters. At noon a small car began to climb the hill, like an angry egg beater mounting a pile of brown ice cream. It plashed to a groaning stop and a man's voice from the bottom of the thing said,
“Hop in, your bloody young fool!”
And there looking up at me, with a bloodshot eye, was Colonel Bagsby Bags. I got in and sat down and the motor (the size of a pencil sharpener) starte and we went on. The Colonel said to me, “No use both of us running away.”
“You, too?”
“Bloody well yes! I might have stayed in bed had I known you were going to cop a beat.”
“What about the walking match?”
“Oh, it's in clover. Lord Bean got two black horses.”
“Horses?”
“Just in a way of speaking. The American is a native of Italy who once shined the shoes of Teddy Roosevelt at a place called the Battery, an the Englishman, well …”
“Well, Colonel?”
“The Englishman is a small cockney named Peterski, a rubber in a Turkish bath in Limehouse run by a Hungarian. A sad day for England and America.”
“But a good day, Colonel, for Rifle Nature.”
“Don't talk to me about that blaste club! Damndest fool idea since Pickwick!”
“You like Dickens?”
“Like him! I can't read Little Nell without bursting out laughing!”
“Oh …”
“Stevie, get rid of that habit of saying oh. Say something else.”
“Is there any good food on this road?”
“Hungry?”
“As if I had really walked to the Scot border.”
We had a good laugh at that, an went on until we found an inn that had a blue boar on its sign and an English king on its letterhead and a dining room smelling like heaven … the heaven of a meat eater, of course.
The Colonel found out that the innkeeper had been in Injah in his time and served 'is King among the outposts and pestholes, so a solid union and good food were in prospect …
The innkeeper was also the local butcher and he took us into his icebox and showed us the brave oxen that would serve us our meals, and we sai we would stay a week.
That night we had roast beef. English roast beef—the best I ever ate. The innkeeper had a simple way of cooking it. He made a thick plaster of rock salt and plastered it over a huge roast until the whole roast was plastered into a hard crust of salt. This object he put into his oven for two hours; then it was taken out and the heavy white crust of rock salt removed with a hammer.
He cut into the roast at once an served us the rare center of the roast, hot and mellow, soft and tender, an like no other roast I have ever eaten. The only side dishes were a wedge of Yorkshire pudding and a sauce of whipped horse-radish and egg sala dressing.
This we had with an imported type Falernian wine that was imported in barrels, all that was to be had, and very good it was. That night on the ten o'clock wireless we heard that the big international walking race was still on. I went back to reading Morte d'Arthur, and the Colonel snored on the gaudy brocade club chair in the bar, while the innkeeper sang “The British Grenadiers …”
The race ended badly. The American was arrested by the local constabulary for trespassing on the lawn of an Anglican vicar (he had run across the place as a short cut, taking a Savonnerie rug and trumeau mirror with him).
The Englishman reached the Scottish border and kept going; he turned out to be a maître d'hôtel with three wives, all after him, and he welcomed the chance to break out of the British Isles. Rifle Nature turned out to be one of the follies of the age, like Peace in Our Times or Rhumba in Three Easy Lessons.
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