steps of the Great Exemplars! A little while ago and the
springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated the page. Now see! it is
Christian--."

Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Benham went up across the
springy turf from Epsom Downs station towards the crest of the hill.
Was he not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the City of
Destruction? Was he not also seeking that better city whose name is
Peace? And there was a bundle on his back. It was the bundle, I think,
that seized most firmly upon the too literary imagination of White.

But the analogy of the bundle was a superficial one. Benham had not
the slightest desire to lose it from his shoulders. It would have
inconvenienced him very greatly if he had done so. It did not contain
his sins. Our sins nowadays are not so easily separated. It contained a
light, warm cape-coat he had bought in Switzerland and which he intended
to wrap about him when he slept under the stars, and in addition
Merkle had packed it with his silk pyjamas, an extra pair of stockings,
tooth-brush, brush and comb, a safety razor.... And there were several
sheets of the Ordnance map.

12

The urgency of getting away from something dominated Benham to the
exclusion of any thought of what he might be getting to. That muddle of
his London life had to be left behind. First, escape....

Over the downs great numbers of larks were singing. It was warm April
that year and early. All the cloud stuff in the sky was gathered
into great towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was blue of
the intensest. The air was so clean that Benham felt it clean in the
substance of his body. The chestnuts down the hill to the right were
flowering, the beeches were luminously green, and the oaks in the
valley foaming gold. And sometimes it was one lark filled his ears, and
sometimes he seemed to be hearing all the larks for miles about him.
Presently over the crest he would be out of sight of the grand stand and
the men exercising horses, and that brace of red-jacketed golfers....

What was he to do?

For a time he could think of nothing to do except to keep up and out of
the valley. His whole being seemed to have come to his surfaces to look
out at the budding of the year and hear the noise of the birds. And then
he got into a long road from which he had to escape, and trespassing
southward through plantations he reached the steep edge of the hills
and sat down over above a great chalk pit som