Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Did you really think I should think of the river? How clever of you.”

  “I am clever,” he said, modestly, “and good. It is better to be good than clever. That is why I cannot conceal from you that I never thought of the river till you spoke about it. But I really have some flannels, little as you may think it, and we’ll stop and get some boating-shoes for you, if you want them. Only you’ll have to buy them with lightning speed and change them at Yalding.”

  “Is that the name of the place? How lovely! If I had a title I should like it to be Lady Yalding — or the Duchess of Yalding. Her Grace the Duchess of Yalding will give you some more coffee, if you like.”

  “Why come down in the world? You were a princess last night.”

  “Princess of where?” she asked.

  “We will give a morning to a proper definition of the boundaries of your territory one of these days. Meantime, are you aware that I don’t even know the name by which the common world knows you?”

  “I know you don’t,” she said, “and I’d much rather you didn’t. If I’m to be a princess I’ll be the Princess of Yalding, and if she has to have another name we’ll choose a new one. I should like everything to be new for our new adventure.”

  They got the shoes and they caught the train, and, now the little gritty walk from Yalding station was over, they stood on the landing-stage of the Anchor, looking down on a sort of Sargasso Sea of small craft that stretched along below the edge of the Anchor garden.

  “The canoe would be nice,” she said.

  “It would not be nice with Charles,” he said, firmly. “Charles’s first conscious act after we became each other’s was to upset me out of a canoe, to the heartless delight of three picnic parties, four pairs of sweethearts, two dons, and a personal friend.”

  “If Charles is to come in the boat,” she said, “perhaps that fishing-punt. . . .”

  “Water within, water without,” he said, spurning the water-logged punt. “This little sculling-boat will do. No — no outriggers for us, thank you,” he said to the Anchor’s gloomy boatman, who came toward them like a sort of fresh-water Neptune with a boat-hook for trident.

  “He might, at least, have smiled,” she said, as the sour-faced Neptune man turned toward the boat-house. “I hope he’ll give us red cushions and a nice, ‘arty sort of carpet.”

  “You get no carpets here,” he assured her. “Lucky if we have so much as a strip of cocoanut matting. This is not the languid, luxurious Thames. On the Medway life is real, life is earnest. You mostly pull a hundred yards, anchor and fish; or if you do go farther from harbor you open your own locks, with your own crowbar. The best people are always a bit shabby. You and I, no doubt, are the cynosure of every eye. Yes, that’ll do; we’ll put the basket in the stern, then the ginger-beer here. We’ll put the cloak over it to keep it cool. All right, thank you. Crowbar in? Right. Throw in the painter. Right.”

  Neptune pushed them with his trident and the boat swung out into midstream. A few strokes took them out of sight of the Anchor, its homely, flowered garden, its thatched house, its hornbeam arbor; they passed, too, the ugly, bare house that some utilitarian misdemeanant has built next to it, then nothing but depths of willow copse, green and gray, and the grassy curves of the towing-path where the loosestrife grows, and the willow herb, the yellow yarrow, and the delicate plumes of the meadow-sweet.

  “‘Blond loosestrife and red meadow-sweet among,

  We tracked the shy Thames shore.’”

  he quoted.

  “It’s like a passport,” she said—”or finding that you haven’t lost your ticket, after all — when people have read the same things and remembered them. But don’t you love the bit that begins about ‘the tempestuous moon in early June,’ and ends up with the ‘uncrumpling fern and scent of hay new-mown’? I wonder why it is that when people quote poetry in books you feel that they’re Laura-Matilda-ish, and when they do it really you quite like it. Do you write poetry?”

  He looked at her guiltily. “Look out to the left,” he said; “there’s an absolutely perfect thatched barn, and four oast-houses — you know, where they dry the hops, with little fires of oak chips. Have you ever been in an oast-house? We will some day—”

  She was silent as the boat slipped past the old farm buildings, the old trees, the long perfection of the barn, and the deep red and green of the mossy oast-house wall going down sheer to the smooth, brown water, and hung at crevice and cranny with little ferns and little flowers — herb-robert and stonecrop. The reflection, till his oars shattered it, was as perfect as the building itself, and she drew a deep breath and turned to look back as the boat slid past.

  “You were right,” she said, “it is a darling little river. And you do write poetry, don’t you?”

  “Is this the confessional or the Medway?” he asked.

  “I know you do,” she said. “Of course you do — everybody does, as well as they can, I suppose; I can’t, but I do,” she added, encouragingly. “We will write poems for each other, on wet nights in the caravan, about Nature and Fate and Destiny, and things like that — won’t we?”

  The quiet river, wandering by wood and meadow, bordered by its fringe of blossoms and flowering grasses, the smooth backwaters where leaning trees touched hands across the glassy mirror, and water-lilies gleamed white and starry, the dappled shadows, the arch of blue sky, the gay sunshine, and the peace of the summer noon all wrought in one fine spell to banish from their thoughts all fear and dismay, all doubts and hesitations. Here they were, two human beings — young, healthy, happy — with all fair things before them and all sad things behind. It seemed to them both, at that moment, that they need ask nothing more of life than a long chain of days like this. They were silent, and each felt in the other’s silence no embarrassment or weariness, but only a serene content. Even Charles, overcome by the spirit of the hour, was silent, slumbering on the matting between them, in heavy abandonment.

  The perfection of their surroundings left them free to catch the delicate flavor of the wonderful adventure — a flavor which the dust and hurry of yesterday had disguised and distorted a little.

  He looked at her and thought, “It is worth while — it is indeed worth while” — and knew that if only the princess were for his winning the moment of rashness which only yesterday he had almost regretted would be in its result the most fortunate moment of his life.

  She looked at him, and a little fear lifted its head and stung her like a snake. What if he were to regret the adventure? What if he were to like her less and less — she put it to herself like that — while she grew to like him more and more? She looked at his eyes and his hands, and the way the hair grew on brow and nape, and it seemed to her that thus and not otherwise should a man’s hair and eyes and hands be.

  But they did not look at each other so that their eyes met till the boat rounded the corner to the weir-pool below Stoneham Lock. Then their eyes met, and they smiled, and she said:

  “I am very glad to be here.”

  It seemed to her that she owed him the admission. He took it as she would have wished him to take it.

  “I am glad you like my river,” he said.

  She was very much interested in the opening of the lock gates and deplored the necessity which kept her in the boat, hanging on to the edge of the lock with a boat-hook while he wielded the crowbar. The locks on the Medway are primitive in their construction and heavy to work. There are no winches or wheels or artful mechanical contrivances of weights and levers and cables. There are sluices, and from the sluice-gates posts rise, little iron-bound holes in them, holes in which the urgent nose of the crowbar exactly fits. The boatman leans indolently against the tarred, unshaped tree trunk whose ax-wrought end is the top of the lock gate; the tree trunk swings back above the close sweet-clover mat that edges the lock; the lock gates close — slow, leisurely, and dignified. Then the boatman stands on the narrow plank hung by chains to each lock gate, and with his crowbar chunks up the
sluice, with a pleasant ringing sound of iron on iron, securing the raised sluice with a shining iron pin that hangs by a little chain of its own against the front of the lock gate, like an ornament for a gentleman’s fob. If you get your hand under the pin and the sluice happens to sink, you hurt your hand.

  Slowly the lock fills with gentle swirls of foam-white water, slowly the water rises, and the boat with it, the long gates unclose to let you out — slow, leisurely, dignified — and your boat sweeps out along the upper tide, smoothly gliding like a boat in a dream.

  Thus the two passed through Stoneham Lock and the next and the next, and then came to the Round Lock, which is like a round pond whose water creeps in among the roots of grass and forget-me-not and spearmint and wild strawberry. And so at last to Oak Weir Lock, where the turtledoves call from the willow wood on the island where the big trees are, and the wide, sunny meadows where the sheep browse all day till the shepherd calls them home in the evening — the shepherd with his dog at his heels and his iron crook, polished with long use and stately as a crozier in a bishop’s hand.

  They met no one — or almost no one. At East Peckham a single rustic looked at them over the middle arch of the seven-arched bridge built of fine, strong stone in the days of the Fourth Edward, and at Lady White Weir a tramp gave them good day and said it was a good bit yet to Maidstone. He spat in the water, not in insolence, but contemplatively, and Edward gave him a silver token of good will and a generous pinch of dark tobacco, with a friendly, “Here’s for luck.”

  “You’re a gentleman,” the tramp retorted, grudgingly, and spat again, and slouched off along the green path. These two were all. Not another human face did they see for all the length of their little voyage.

  All the long and lovely way it was just these two and the river and the fields and the flowers and the blue sky and youth and summer and the sun.

  At Oak Weir they put the boat through the lock, and under the giant trees they unpacked the luncheon-basket they had brought from the Midlothian — how far away and how incredibly out of the picture such a place now seemed! — and sat among the twisted tree roots, and ate and drank and were merry like children on a holiday. It was late when they reached the weir, and by the time the necessity of the return journey urged itself upon them the shadows were growing longer and blacker till they stretched almost across the great meadow. The shepherd had taken the sheep away, passing the two with a nod reserved, but not in its essence unfriendly. Edward had smoked a good many cigarettes, and they had talked a good deal. It was as he had said at their first meeting, they were like two travelers who, meeting, hasten to spread, each before the other, the relics and spoils of many a long and lonely journey.

  “I wish we could have stayed here,” she said at last. “If we had only had the sense to fold our tents, like the Arabs, and bring them with us, I suppose we could have camped here.”

  “It isn’t only tents,” he said; “it’s all the elegancies of the toilette — brushes and combs and slippers. You must return to the Caravansary that guards these treasures. The nine-fifty-five will do us. But we haven’t much more than time. There’s the boat to pay for and the basket to get to the station. Come, Princess, if we could stay here forever we would, but since we can’t we won’t stay another minute.”

  Once in the boat, and in the lock, she leaned back, holding the edge of the lock with the boat-hook, and with the other hand detaining Charles. She looked back dreamily on the day which had been, and she did not pretend that it had not been, the happiest day in her life. To be with one who pleased — he certainly did please — and to whom one’s every word and look was so obviously pleasing! It is idle to deny that she felt smoothed, stroked the right way, like a cat who is fortunate in its friends. And now all days were to be like this. The crowbar began its chinking — once, twice — then a jarring sound, and a low but quite distinct “Damn!”

  She started out of her dream.

  “I beg your pardon,” he was saying, “but I’ve caught my finger, like a fool. I can’t do anything. Can you come here?”

  “Of course.” She stepped out of the boat. The water in the lock had hardly begun to subside. She took the painter and, holding it, went to him, Charles following with cheerful bounds. The sluice had slipped a little and its iron pin held his finger firmly clipped against the tarred wood below.

  She did not cry out nor tremble nor do any of the things a silly woman might have done. “Tell me what to do,” was all she said.

  He told her how to hold the crowbar, how to raise the sluice so that the finger might be released. She did it all exactly and carefully. When the finger was released he wrapped his handkerchief around it.

  “Does it hurt?” she said.

  And he said, “Yes.”

  “You must put it in the water,” she said. “You can’t reach it here. Come into the boat.”

  He obeyed her. She came and sat by him in the stern — sat there quite silently. No “I’m so sorry!” or “Can’t I do anything?” Her hand was on Charles’s collar. His eyes were closed. His finger was badly crushed; the blood stained the water, and presently she saw it. She kept her eyes fixed on the spreading splash of red.

  “You haven’t fainted, have you?” she said at last. “It’s getting very dark.”

  “No,” he said, and opened his eyes. She raised hers, and both perceived one reason for the darkness — the boat had sunk nine feet or so. The dark, dripping walls of the lock towered above them. While he had fought his pain and she her sympathy the lock had been slowly emptying itself. They were at the bottom, or almost, and up those smooth walls there was no climbing out.

  “Push the boat against the lower gate,” he said; and as she obeyed he added, “I must try to climb up somehow. I’ll pitch the crowbar up on shore first. Where is it?”

  “I left it on the lock gate,” she said. “Wasn’t that right?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he told her; but even as he spoke the sluice, which the weight of the water had held in place after the pin had been removed, now, as the waters above and below it grew level with each other, fell into its place with a splash and an echoing boom, and with the shock the crowbar fell from its resting-place on the tarred ledge and disappeared in the water below.

  “Lucky it didn’t fall on us,” he said, and laughed. “It’s no use my climbing out now, Princess. I couldn’t open the gate, anyhow. We’re caught like two poor little rabbits in a trap — or three, if you count Charles — and here we must stay till some one comes along with a crowbar. I dare say there’ll be a barge by and by. D’you mind very much?”

  “Not a bit,” she assured him, cheerfully. “It’s all my fault, anyhow, and, besides, I enjoy it. Let me tie your hand up, and then you must smoke till rescue comes.”

  “Aren’t you cold?” he asked, for indeed the air was chill in that watery inclosure.

  “Not a bit. I have my cloak,” she said, and snuggled into it. “But you’ll be cold. Have half — it’s a student’s cloak, eight yards around.”

  He accepted the offer, and they sat with the cloak wrapped around them both, with Charles snuggling under the lower folds of it.

  “If you hear a footstep or a whistle or anything, shout,” he said. “I do wish I hadn’t let you in for this. I hate a fool.”

  “I don’t mind a bit, except about your finger. The bone isn’t broken, is it?”

  “No,” he said; “I’ve just made a fuss about nothing. I hate a fool, as I said before.”

  She thought of the wet patch on the tarred wood and the red patch in the water, and he felt her shiver.

  “It’s very decent of you,” said she, “not to scold me about leaving the crowbar there.”

  “A good Medway boatman should never be separated from his crowbar,” he said, monitorily.

  “I know that now,” she said. “I ought to have known before. I hate a fool, too.”

  X. OAK WEIR LOCK

  “IF it weren’t for your finger—” said she.

>   “My finger is the just reward of idiocy and doesn’t deserve any kind thought from you.”

  “If it weren’t for that, I should rather enjoy it,” she said. “There’s plenty to eat left in the basket. Shall I get it out and let’s have supper before it’s quite dark? I do really think it’s fun. Don’t you?”

  “That’s right,” said he, with a show of bitterness, “make the best of it out of pity for the insane idiot who landed you in this fix. Be bright, be womanly, never let me guess that a cold, damp lock and a ‘few bits of broken vittles’ are not really better than a decent supper and a roof over your head. A fig for the elegancies of civilization and the comforts of home! Go on being tactful. I adore it.”

  “I meant what I said,” she answered, with gentle insistence. “I do rather like it. I’ll whine about my dinner and my looking-glass, if you like, but I’ll get the supper first. Isn’t it glorious to think that there’s no one at home — where the comforts and the elegancies are — no one to be anxious about us because we’re late, and scold us when we get home? Liberty,” she ended, reflectively, “is a very beautiful thing. I suppose no one is likely to come along this way till the shepherd comes in the morning?”

  “We’ll hope for better luck,” said he. “I say, you’ll never trust me to take care of you again after this silly business—”

  “I don’t know,” she said, deliberately, “that I ever asked you to take care of me. Did I? You were to help me — yes, and you have helped me — but I don’t think I want to be taken care of, any more than another man would want it. I was in a difficulty and you helped me. If you were in a difficulty and I helped you, you wouldn’t expect me to take care of you forever, would you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If you hadn’t been extraordinarily sensible I should still be there with my hand in the thumbscrew.”

  “Did you think,” she asked, sweetly, “that all women were inevitably silly?”