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Mrs. Marter could say of him: “If it rains or it snows, he’ll be off on that bike of his. And what do you think he takes with him? A flapper? Oh, no. A book. I see’d the title of the last one. ‘A Text-book of Gee-ology.’ Yes, you can believe me or not—but that’s what it was. Gee-ology. Somethin’ to do with how the earth came to be made. It doesn’t seem quite natural—somehow.”

On that Sunday in May, Keir got his bicycle out of the shed before nine and, wheeling it into the passage at the back of Mulberry Row, fastened a haversack and a mackintosh to the handlebars. The cold snap of early May had passed, and in the garden next to Mrs. Marter’s a bed of blood-red wallflowers scented the air. At a bedroom window of No. 5 a girl was powdering her nose, and if she was aware of Keir’s blue pull-over and hatless head, his senses were not responsive. She watched him wheel his bicycle along the passage, and when he had disappeared she gave a little toss of the head and laughed.

Keir liked to leave Kingham early, before the world upon wheels could drive him into the gutter. Usually he took the Esher, Cobham, Ripley, Guildford road, and turning off towards West Clandon, he would walk his machine up the long hill to Newlands Corner and the Albury Downs. This rolling country of chalk and of sand lying between the Leatherhead-Guildford road on the north and Ewhurst on the south had an eternal fascination for him. He loved its great grassy slopes, its yews and beeches, the high dark pinewoods, the deep and mysterious valleys. He knew it in spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In one of his note-books he had drawn a rough contour map of its geological formation, and from the Thames towards the sea the rhythm ran:

Alluvium. London Clay Downs Gault. Greensand, Weald. South Downs. Tertiaries Chalk. Bagshot Sands.

At the top of the hill Keir took to the turf, for the world on wheels had overtaken him, and in those days Newlands Corner was an abomination. The crowd had not been coerced into cleanliness by the courage of a certain great gentleman now dead. Keir wheeled his bicycle along the broad, grassy way that led eastwards just below the brow of the chalk ridge. The beech trees were coming into leaf, and the old yews looked very black against the marvel of all this greenness. The thorns were in flower, and in the more secret places the bluebells had been left to bloom. Keir fled from the crowd and its cars and motor-bikes. He wanted to be alone, and this passion for separativeness was to make life poignant for him, for in the world of today only the fortunate few can afford to be alone.

But he knew all this piece of country like the pages of a book, how to avoid the beaten track and to gain places to which cars and motor-bikes did not penetrate. He had one particular haunt close to a group of beech trees, and leaving the grass, he pushed through a thicket towards the place, but on this Sunday in May someone had forestalled him. A party of young men and women had spread itself on the grass between the beech trees and a group of old thorns. The young women were unpacking baskets, and one of the young men kneeling on the turf was opening bottles of beer. It was a happy and a noisy party, and Keir paused with his bicycle under the lee of a big yew.

“What do we do with the bottles, Bert?”

“Buzz ’em away, old lad.”

And Keir watched three black bottles go hurtling one after another into the heart of an old thorn tree.

He withdrew. In those early days his separative self was moved too easily to scorn. He was too conscious of the crowd’s crudities and not sufficiently wise as to its kindness. He did not realize that the world was full of childishness that it did not think or understand, and that his own sensitiveness might possess the superciliousness of the prig. He went elsewhere, pushing his bike along the hillside until he came to another of his sanctuaries. It was a little green recess on the sunny side of the woods shut in by thorn trees, an elder, and two hazels. It was wholly and serenely his. He unfastened his belongings from the bicycle, and pushing the machine into the undergrowth, he spread his mackintosh and lay down.

In that green nook the turf was stippled with flowers, blue bugle, a tiny wild forget-me-not, dog-violets. He could smell the mayflower. The hillside fell away steeply to a barrier of old yews, and beyond and below them the deep valley was full of sunlight. On the farther slope spread a wood of wonderful and varied greenness, fields, oaks and elms, and the grassy spaces and the domed trees of a park. Beyond it rose a wooded ridge, and beyond it yet another ridge serrate with dark pines against the sky-line. The hills were blue and black and green and grey, for the day was a day of moods and of cloud masses that drifted. Away to the west he could see the silver smoke haze over Guildford.

Keir left his book unread and lay and looked and dreamed.

The dreams of a young man with a smoulder of ambition in his eyes, and a head of hair that was somehow turbulent.

Part of the crowd—not he! A wage slave doomed to a silly sameness by the very fools who preached the solidity of that sameness? He belonged to no union. Blind idiots, complaining that all opportunity was denied to the worker, and by their very regulations making opportunity more and more impossible! A stultifying tyranny. The expert and the fool shackled together.

His dreams mingled the ideal and the material, for he saw what his father had not seen, that the ideal is founded on the material. Bricks and mortar—yes, creation upon creation, not a peevish pulling down, but a passionate building up.

The people who threw beer bottles at beauty!

Work? He was going to work like the devil. He was not going to stay for ever in a carpenter’s shop with men who skrimshanked and shilly-shallied and thought it clever to cheat. Wasn’t it true that the average man loathed work? He was a lazy creature wriggling on the horns of necessity and always accusing those horns of exploiting him.

He was going to save money. He was going to do what old Samson had done, though he might do it rather differently. A business of his own? Oh, perhaps. Or the firm might gather yet another S and become in due season, Samson, Hoad & Smith.