A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must
have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird your
shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even
path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side of meadows.
The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain," only
too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the
riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are
swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The line
drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it
makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easy
power.
The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of
"feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a verse of
Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of
sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing,
is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy labourers with the
oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on
the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, you
need but to walk in your swinging harness, and so take your friends up-
stream.
You work merely as the mill-stream works--by simple movement. At lock
after lock along a hundred miles, deep-roofed mills shake to the wheel
that turns by no greater stress, and you and the river have the same mere
force of progress.
There never was any kinder incentive of companionship. It is the bright
Thames walking softly in your blood, or you that are flowing by so many
curves of low shore on the level of the world.
Now you are over against the shadows, and now opposite the sun, as the
wheeling river makes the sky wheel about your head and swings the lighted
clouds or the blue to face your eyes. The birds, flying high for
mountain air in the heat, wing nothing but their own weight. You will
not envy them for so brief a success. Did not Wordsworth want a "little
boat" for the air? Did not Byron call him a blockhead therefor?
Wordsworth had, perhaps, a sense of towing.
All the advantage of the expert is nothing in this simple industry. Even
the athlete, though he may go further, cannot do better than you, walking
your effectual walk with the line attached to your willing steps. Your
moderate strength of a mere everyday physical education gives you the
sufficient mastery of the tow-path.
If your natural walk is heavy, there is spirit in the tackle to give it
life, and if it is buoyant it will be more buoyant under the buoyant
burden--the yielding check--than ever before. An unharnessed walk must
begin to seem to you a sorry incident of insignificant liberty. It is
easier than towing? So is the drawing of water in a sieve easier to the
arms than drawing in a bucket, but not to the heart.
To walk unbound is to walk in prose, without the friction of the wings of
metre, without the sweet and encouraging tug upon the spirit and the
line.
No dead weight follows you as you tow. The burden is willing; it depends
upon you gaily, as a friend may do without making any depressing show of
helplessness; neither, on the other hand, is it apt to set you at naught
or charge you with a make-believe. It accompanies, it almost
anticipates; it lags when you are brisk, just so much as to give your
briskness good reason, and to justify you if you should take to still
more nimble heels. All your haste, moreover, does but waken a more
brilliantly-sounding ripple.
The bounding and rebounding burden you carry (but it nearly seems to
carry you, so fine is the mutual good will) gives work to your figure,
enlists your erectness and your gait, but leaves your eyes free. No
watching of mechanisms for the labourer of the tow-path. What little
outlook is to be kept falls to the lot of the steerer smoothly towed.
Your easy and efficient work lets you carry your head high and watch the
birds, or listen to them. They fly in such lofty air that they seem to
turn blue in the blue sky. A flash of their flight shows silver for a
moment, but they are blue birds in that sunny distance above, as
mountains are blue, and horizons. The days are so still that you do not
merely hear the cawing of the rooks--you overhear their hundred private
croakings and creakings, the soliloquy of the solitary places swept by
wings.
As for songs, it is September, and the silence of July is long at an end.
This year's robins are in full voice; and the only song that is not for
love or nesting--the childish song of boy-birds, the freshest and
youngest note--is, by a happy paradox, that of an autumnal voice.
Here is no hoot, nor hurry of engines, nor whisper of the cyclist's
wheel, nor foot upon a road, to overcome that light but resounding note.
Silent are feet on the grassy brink, like the innocent, stealthy soles of
the barefooted in the south.