No More Learning

My brute was used
up altogether. Edith Copleigh was in a sad state, plastered with dust,
her helmet off, and crying bitterly. "Why can't you let me alone? " she
said. "I only wanted to get away and go home. Oh, PLEASE let me go! "

"You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has
something to say to you. "

It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss Copleigh;
and, though I was playing Providence at the cost of my horse, I could
not tell her in as many words what Saumarez had told me. I thought he
could do that better himself. All her pretence about being tired and
wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked herself to and fro in the
saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind blew her black hair to leeward. I
am not going to repeat what she said, because she was utterly unstrung.

This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost
an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her
and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself
understood, for she gathered the gray together and made him hobble
somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm went thundering
down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain fell.
I found out that
she had been standing close to Saumarez when he proposed to her sister
and had wanted to go home and cry in peace, as an English girl should.
She dabbled her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we went along, and
babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria. That was
perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in the
place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I,
ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this
misguided world seemed to lie in my hands.

When we returned to the tomb in the deep, dead stillness that followed
the storm, the dawn was just breaking and nobody had gone away. They
were waiting for our return. Saumarez most of all.

His face was white and drawn. As Miss Copleigh and I limped up, he came
forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he
kissed her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and
the likeness was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men
and women under the orange-trees, clapping their hands, as if they
were watching a play--at Saumarez's choice. I never knew anything so
un-English in my life.

Lastly, Saumarez said we must all go home or the Station would come
out to look for us, and WOULD I be good enough to ride home with Maud
Copleigh? Nothing would give me greater pleasure, I said.

So, we formed up, six couples in all, and went back two by two; Saumarez
walking at the side of Edith Copleigh, who was riding his horse.

The air was cleared; and little by little, as the sun rose, I felt we
were all dropping back again into ordinary men and women and that
the "Great Pop Picnic" was a thing altogether apart and out of the
world--never to happen again. It had gone with the dust-storm and the
tingle in the hot air.