It being the day of the fortnightly market at Stavisham, and the weather
fair, Runridge and I took the little green punt from its moorings this
afternoon, and set out to explore the Long Back-Reach.
The Reach is just a winding side-alley of the river, overgrown with
willows and reeds—a mere crevice of glimmering water hiding itself in the
heart of the wood. Coming into it from the dazzling sunlight of the main
river, it strikes at first almost chill and gloomy, for all it is an
afternoon in May. But this is only an illusion that soon passes. After
a minute or two you get its quiet keynote; the green dusk becomes
deliciously tempered sunlight, the cool air something finer and more
delicate than the sun-scorched breath of the open river-way.
Runridge pulls a long clean stroke, and dips his oar-blades with a
perfect rhythm. He is silent company, as far as words go; but he has an
eloquence of look and gesture which more than takes the place of speech.
And there is something about his mute system of comradeship that
irresistibly impels itself on others. With his tanned, wrinkled face
sedately smiling under the brim of his battered old felt hat, and his
thoughtful eyes for ever roaming over the landscape, you feel that the
ordinary human method of conveying ideas by sounds is somehow out of
place in the little green wherry. Over and over again to-day, when a
scarce bird or uncommon flower showed itself on the river bank, and I
would direct his notice thither, I found myself insensibly adopting his
silent way of a waved hand or an inclination of the head, when, in other
company, my tongue would have been set agoing on the instant with less
sufficing words.
Out on the broad water-way the tide was still running up, but here in the
Long Back-Reach the drift of the current was hardly perceptible. The old
ferryman had laid by his oars, and now sat filling an ancient pipe with
tobacco that looked like chips of ebony. As for me, I lay back in the
boat, head pillowed on clasped hands, dimly recalling a dream I had had,
ages and ages back, of a world without green leaves or nightingales—a
weirdly impossible world of nipping frost and firesides, the sob of the
winter wind, and the dreary deluge of winter rain.
The reeds stood high on either hand: above, the old yellow reeds, with
their nodding mauve-grey plumes, and below, the fresh green growth,
wherein the reed-warblers would soon be building—a living emerald
thronging up amidst the old dead stems. Over the solid rampart of the
reeds the willows reached down, trailing their ferny branches in the
water. And beyond these, the great forest trees hemmed us in, oak and
elm and beech in two vast cliffs of verdure towering above us, and
interlocking their laden boughs against the far blue sky.
The little sugar-scoop of a boat drifted on. Everywhere about us the
martins were skimming over the clear water, chattering as they went. The
seeding willows sent down tiny flecks of white, that hovered and dwelt in
the dim air, like snow-flakes; and from the beeches overhead there was a
constant rain of light fine atoms, the discarded sheaths of the
leaf-buds, that fell upon the waters and gathered into all the little
nooks and bays among the reeds like pale, dun foam.
Somewhere far in the distance a cuckoo sang. Runridge took his pipe from
his mouth, and gave it a rocking motion. Never a word he said, but his
thought passed to me just as if he had spoken it: a see-saw melody it
was, and will be until the hay is down. There were willow-wrens singing
far above in the tree-tops. A chiff-chaff went looping by with his soft,
broken note. To count the nightingales that we heard as the boat stemmed
onward were almost to count the white-budded hawthorns that shone out
through every gap in the reeds. And now the old ferryman put out an oar,
and turned the little craft towards the bank, where a great willow-tree
drooped half across the stream. The boat-prow clove its way into the
heart of this leafy shelter, and we came to rest. The pipe went up
warningly. In the dense reed thicket hard by there was a new maytide
song.
Of all utterances of wild birds, perhaps none attains to a human-like
quality more nearly than that of the sedge-warbler. It is not so much a
song as a continuous complaint, and that of a characteristically feminine
kind. To me the little sedge-bird, restlessly flitting from stem to stem
through the waving jungle of reeds, and singing as she goes, inevitably
suggests a type of dutiful, laborious womanhood, all affection and
unselfishness, but ever ready alike with sharp words and an aggressive
tearfulness that disarms as completely as it maddens. And the sweetness,
the occasional sudden bright abandon of the song only serves to
strengthen the comparison. You can picture the bird stopping in the
midst of her most fretful, self-commiserate strain, bravely to estimate
her compensations. The sun shines, the nest is well-built and furnished,
the larder easy to be filled. Material good is unlacking; but— And then
the singer goes hopelessly under again. Now the song is nothing but
sweetly lachrymose expostulation, voiced grief all the more intolerable
for its tunefulness,—an epic of melodious woe.
Turning over in my mind this fantasy about the sedge-bird, as we lingered
under the willow bower, I found the old ferryman looking at me with a
strangely reminiscent eye. It flashed across me that long ago, when all
days were as good as market days to us, I had put before him just these
thoughts, and had received his silent, amused concurrence in them. Then
there had been no chance of inconvenient application; but now—I sat bolt
upright and looked closer at him. I was beaten at this talk of eyes. I
harked back to the old safe path with which I was familiar. He had
turned away now, and did not revert his glance though my hand was upon
his arm.
‘Why, why did you do it, Runridge?’ I blurted out, almost as forlornly as
the sedge-bird. ‘You never minded living alone! You were happy enough!
And I—I—’
He was looking at me straightly enough now.
‘Do it?’ His breath whistled in through his set teeth. ‘Do it—did ye
say? I do it?—never! ’A did it hersel’! Kind o’ mesmerised, I wur.
Never rightly knowed as ’twur done, till ’twur all ower. But there ’tis
i’ th’ book, an’ no gettin’ ower it now. Ah! well, well! purty near time
we was skorkin’ hoame-along, bean’t it? Gie tired women-folk a could
kettle for welcome, an’ ’tis trouble wi’out end.’