"IF you had a map and I could put my finger on any place I chose, I
should open my eyes the least bit in the world and put my finger on the
Thames," she said at the breakfast-table, where she had for the first
time sat opposite to him and poured his coffee, looking as demurely
domestic as any haberdasher's wife of them all.
"The Thames?" he said. "I know a river worth two of that. . . ."
"A river that's worth two of the Thames must be the river of Paradise."
"So it is," he assured her, "and probably the Thames is infested by your
relations. For a serious and secret conference such as we propose to
ourselves there is no place like the Medway."
She had thought the Medway to be nothing but mud and barges, and said
so.
"Ah, that's below Maidstone. Above-- But you'll see. Wear a shady hat
and bring that conspirator-looking cloak you wore last night--the fine
weather can't possibly last forever. Twenty minutes for breakfast, half
an hour for a complete river toilette, and we catch the ten-seventeen
from Cannon Street, easily."
"I haven't a complete river toilette. And you? I thought you left all
your possessions at the Five Bells--"
"I am not the homeless orphan you deem me," he said, accepting kidneys
and bacon from a sleepy waiter. "I have a home, though a humble one,
and, what's more, it's just around the corner--Montague Street, to be
exact. Next door to the British Museum. So central, is it not? Some
inward monitor whispered to me, 'She will want to go on the river,' and
I laid out the complete boating-man's costume, down to white shoes with
new laces."
"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.