Читать книгу The Footsteps at the Lock - Ronald Arbuthnott Knox - Страница 6

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The morning sun shone on the upper reaches of the Thames with the hazy glow that recalls a night of rain and presages a day of baking heat. It was early July, and the time of day conspired with the season of the year to produce an impression of almost uncanny perfection. The woods that threw out their flanking battalions towards the stream were heavy with consummated leafage; the hay standing in the fields glistened and steamed with the evaporations of yesterday; the larks sang in the unconscious egotism of their perpetual encore; the hedges were still fresh with the year's last revelation, the dog-rose; white wreaths of cloud sailed lazily across the distance, as if assured that they had no speaking part to-day. The cows stood whisking their tails gently, reserving themselves for greater efforts in the coming heat; rabbits sunned themselves among the hillocks, and scuttled away, stricken with imaginary fears; school-children dotted the lanes, their heads together in earnest debate over nothing; the air was full of promise and expectation; a wind blew, steady but with no chill, from the south-west.

And through this world of loveliness the river flowed, a secret world of its own. Lower down, the Thames mingles with the haunts and the activities of men; overgrown towns straggle along its borders, Maidenhead, Reading, Henley, Wallingford, Abingdon. But here, in these upper waters, it is divorced from the companionship of human life; the villages stand to one side and let it pass, turning their backs on it contemptuously at half a mile's distance; nor is there any spot between Oxford and Lechlade at which a cluster of human habitations fringes the river's banks, and owes its conformation to the neighbourhood. Unexpectedly it glides at your feet, in the middle of smiling hayfields or at the corner of a country lane; it has a traffic and a life of its own. Cushioned upon its waters, in punt or canoe, you see nothing but high banks on each side, deep in willow-herb and loose-strife, in meadow-sweet and deadly nightshade; or a curtain of willows cuts off the landscape from you; or deep beds of reeds stand up like forests between you and the sky-horizon, to meet haymakers in a field, to pass under one of the rare, purposeless iron bridges, makes you feel as if you had intersected an altogether different plane of life. Your fellow-citizens are the fishermen, incorrigible optimists who line the banks at odd intervals; the encampments of boy scouts, mud-larking in the shallows or sunning themselves naked on the bank; your stages are the locks, your landscape the glassy surface and the tugging eddies of the stream.

And the river, by virtue of its isolation, has its own sanctuary of wild life. It recks nothing of the road, a few hundreds of yards distant, where schoolboys throw stones after rabbits and ransack the hedgerows for nests. Here, in this lucid interval between two continents of human noise and labour, reigns no fear of the intruder Man. Frail and occasional visitors, the river-craft do not interrupt the solitude; they become, themselves, a part of the landscape, and Nature accepts them, unconcerned. The heron leaves his lonely stance only at a minute's warning; the kingfisher flies at your approach without consternation, as if protected by natural mimicry against its background of blue sky; fishes plop out of the water almost within reach of your hand, a sudden explosion amidst the silence; water-hens bob to and fro on the surface, waiting till you are close by before they will show you their hydroplane and submarine tactics; the voles race you along the bank, or let your prows cut through their wake; the dragon-flies provide an aerial escort, and flutter temptingly in the van. You are initiated, for once, into the craft of Nature's freemasonry; the highway you are following is older than the Romans, and you are not reckoned with the profane.

It would be impossible to imagine two human beings less alive to these considerations than the Burtell cousins, as they made their return journey downstream. Neither Derek's cast of mind nor his education had predisposed him to feel or to interpret the impressions made by natural scenery. He lay now extended along the floor of the canoe, a dead-weight amidships, the back of his head just kept erect by the little rest that leaned against the centre thwart, his eyes and face shaded by a brown Homburg hat, tilted extravagantly forward. Nigel, though better placed as a spectator, had equally little appreciation to spare for the scene. In hot weather it was his principle to spend his time in towns, where the sight of your fellow-mortals hard at work, sweating on scaffoldings or huddled together on omnibuses, gave you an agreeable sense of coolness. The effects of summer were always inartistic; Nature overcrowded the canvas, like a good artist who had struck on a bad period. He had no eyes, then, for his surroundings; his own appearance, as he sat paddling in the stern, was sufficiently incongruous. As one who must always be acting a part, he had dressed up very carefully as a 'river-man'; 'the Jerome K. Jerome touch', he had explained, 'is what impresses the lock-keepers'. This robust attire was in strange contrast to the delicately-complexioned face that looked out from it, and the long black hair brushed elaborately backwards. A passer-by in a solitary punt, shading his eyes as he watched the pair vanish downstream, might have been pardoned for wondering at the vision.

The blurred roar of a waterfall, and a bifurcation of the stream with a danger-notice on the right-hand branch, heralded the approach of a lock. Shipcote Lock is not a mere precaution against floods; it is also a short-cut. The channel that flows through it is dead straight for nearly a mile, and only at the end of this is it rejoined, after unnecessary windings, by the weir-stream. Lock and weir are both at the higher end of their respective channels, and behind them, to right of the one and left of the other, stretches a considerable island, the further part of which is woody and uncultivated. A narrow plank bridge, thrown across the weir itself, renders the island accessible from the right; you can pass over the other branch by way of the lock itself, or (when this is shut up at nights) by a light iron bridge that crosses the lock-stream about a hundred yards below. The lock-keeper's house stands to the left on the mainland; but of his garden the greater part covers the upper end of the island, jutting out like a wedge and washed by the river on both sides.

If any man has a distaste for the society of his fellows, and loves work out of doors, and running water and the companionship of flowers, who could wish him better than to end his days as a lock-keeper? Or rather, to live as a lock-keeper until he can no longer stoop to wind up the winches, or strain to open the reluctant gates. In these upper reaches, only pleasure-boats go by; and their brief season is limited by the uncertain whims of an English summer. For the rest, when he is not actually plying his trade of outwitting nature, the lock-keeper can give himself wholly, it seems, to gardening, assured from the first that his flowers will grow in ideal surroundings, neighboured by the pleasant wedding of water with stone. Shipcote Lock is among the most ambitious of these fairy gardens; its crowded beds of pinks and sweetwilliam, stocks and nasturtium, snap-dragon and Noah's-nightcap, seem to rise out of the water's edge like a galleon of flowers, with crimson ramblers for its rigging. Man, you would say, has first done violence to Nature by dividing the stream, damming up one half and forcing the other into a stone collar; and then, adding insult to injury, he has out-dared with this profusion of blooms the paler glories of the river bank.

'There' (as Homer says of Calypso's garden) 'even an immortal might gaze and wonder as he approached.' It was not the habit of Nigel Burtell to gaze in wonder at anything. To flowers, especially, he had a strong objection, at least when they grew out of doors. 'They look so painfully natural,' he said, 'like naked savages, you know, all quite simple and unselfconscious. Put them behind the glass of a green-house, and there is something to be said for them; those Alidensian garments lend them a kind of meretricious charm.' It was not, then, any appreciation of the scene in general that made him bring out his camera as the boat drew near the lock. (Photography, he held, was the highest of all the arts, because the camera never tells the truth.) What had riveted his attention was the figure of the lock-keeper himself—a back view of him unexpectedly halved by the fact that he was bending double over some gardening operation. 'Design for an arch,' murmured Nigel to himself, as he pressed the spring. Then he called out 'Lock!' with sudden violence; the reproachful form of the unconscious model straightened itself and turned to meet them. The man's injured expression seemed to imply that he was only a gardener who made a hobby of lock-keeping. But he turned, whistling, to open the gates.

Owing to the recent passage of the gentleman in the punt, the lock was at high level. Nigel paddled in slowly; and the lock-keeper, not anxious to waste time which might be devoted to his darling geraniums, hastened to the lower end of the lock and pulled up the sluices, leaving the collection of the fare till later on. Some incident of life downstream caught his attention as he stood on the bridge—your solitary liver is ever prodigal of gazing—and it was not till the water had well-nigh flowed out that he went ashore, and took up his familiar stance, buttressing the further end of the wooden lever. By that time, Nigel was standing on the bank, while the canoe, with its remaining occupant, had disappeared from sight below the level of the lock wall. A desultory conversation was in progress, of which the lock-keeper could only hear one half, like one assisting at a telephone interview; the other side of the discussion remained inaudible.

'How long will it take you to get down to Eaton Bridge? A couple of hours?...'

'Well, if you're going to take three hours over it, you may find me there waiting for you. If the examiners take me early, and don't show an indecent curiosity about the extent of my knowledge, I ought to be clear by eleven. Then I could take a taxi out and meet you. What's that...?'

'Oh yes, quite a decent sort of pub, it looked. Wait for me there if you like. But I expect I'll be there ahead of you. Left to yourself, you will probably paidle in the burn from morning sun till dine. Well, so long...'

'What? Oh, all right, I'll bring it down. I'd throw it, only you'd never be able to catch it.'

Nigel disappeared for a moment down the steps, and then came up again to settle with the lock-keeper. 'No,' he said, 'he won't be coming back. I'm getting off here to join the railway. It's slightly quicker in these parts, I understand, than canoeing. By the way, how do I get to the station?'

If possible, the Englishman always prefaces direction by correction. 'Want to catch the train, eh? Well, you see, what you did ought to have done was to get off at the bridge. There's a bus from there goes all the way to the station, to meet the trains like. Yes, that's what you ought to have done, get off at the bridge. You'll have to walk there now, you see.'

'It's not far, is it?'

'Well, you see, if you was to go by road, you'd have to go all the way back to the bridge again; that would take you better than an hour, that would. Your best plan, sir, is to take the field path. You want to cross the bridge, see, over the weir yonder, and keep straight on across the field, with the hedge on your left. You'll see Spinnaker's Farm across on the left, but don't you take no notice of that, you keep straight on. Maybe a quarter of an hour's walk it is, across the fields. Yes, that's your best way now.'

'You don't happen to know the time of the train, do you? There's one somewhere about a quarter past nine.'

'Nine-fourteen, sir, that's the one you want, if you're going back Oxford way. Oh yes, you'll have plenty of time to catch that; it isn't not hardly five minutes to nine now.'

'Are you sure? I make it nine o'clock.' 'Well, your watch is fast, sir, that's what it is. I get the time by wireless every night, you see, so that's how I know. Eight fifty-five, that's all. Your watch is fast, you see, that's what it is.'

'Trains pretty well up to time, I suppose, on a branch line like this?'

'Well, that's what you can't exactly say. Sometimes you wouldn't wish to see a train come in more prompt than what they do; sometimes I won't say but they're a matter of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour late. Depends on how quick they get away from the stations, you see, that's how it is. But if you're going to Oxford, sir, you won't find you're behind time, not but a minute or two; the nine-fourteen wouldn't be later than that, not at this time in the morning she wouldn't. Thank you, sir; very much obliged to you. If you keep straight along that path, you'll be at the station in good time, and it isn't much more than half an hour's run to Oxford from there. Good morning, sir.'

Nigel crossed the lock, threaded his way between the bright nasturtiums and the Canterbury bells, and almost before the gate of the weir bridge was heard swinging to behind him, was out of sight behind the island and the trees. The lock-keeper turned his gaze once more downstream. Derek still lay motionless, with the paddle resting idly on the thwarts; wind and stream were enough to drive the crazy bark at a fair pace through the cutting. 'Well, he ain't in much of a hurry, anyway,' said the lock-keeper, and went back to weed among the geraniums.