It attacked some unarmoured, unprotected part of him.
Against its assault he was defenceless.
With a sense of escape from actual danger, whether physical or moral he
did not stay to enquire, he stumbled, a few minutes later, through a gap
in the earth-bank into the wet side lane. Arrived, he gave himself a
moment's breathing space. It was darker here than out upon the warren;
but, anyhow, this was a lane. It had direction and meaning. Men had
constructed it for the linking up of house with house, hamlet with
hamlet. Like all roads, it represented the initial instinct of communal
life, the basis of a reasoned social order, of civilization in short.
He walked forward over the soft couch of fallen, water-soaked leaves,
his boots squelching at times into inches of sucking mud, and his
spirits rose. He began to enter into normal relations both with himself
and with things in general. A hundred yards or so and the village green
would be reached.
Then on his left, behind an ill-kept quick-set hedge that guarded a strip
of garden and orchard, he became aware of movement.
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