The Footsteps at the Lock

To
David
in memory of the Uncas

I

Two Cousins

It is an undeniable but a mystifying fact of natural ethics that a man has the right to dispose of his own property at death. They can do him no good now, those ancestral acres, those hard-won thousands, nor may any of the trees he planted, save the grim cypress, follow their ephemeral master; yet before the partnership of hand and mind is altogether dissolved, a brief flourish at the tail of a will may endow a pauper or disinherit a spendthrift, may be frittered away in the service of a hundred useless or eccentric ends. No good to him—at least, there was once a theory that a man might be happier in the after state for the use of his means here, but we have abolished all that long since; no good to him, but much to expectant nephews and nieces, much to lifeboat funds and cats’ homes, much to the Exchequer, wilting for lack of death-duties. Of all this he is the arbiter. Yet we have it on the authority of all the copybooks that money does far more harm in the world than good; why, then, do we leave the direction of that harm to the one man who, ex hypothesi, will be out of the way when it happens? Why let the testator arrange for the unworthy squandering of his property, when he is to have no tenure in it henceforward except the inalienable grave?

Such doubts, entirely methodical in character, are suggested by the last will and testament of Sir John Burtell, a barrister of some note in his day, that is, in the latter years of Queen Victoria. A safe man, with no itch for politics or ambition for titles, he retired soon after the death of the Great Queen, leaving the world open to his two sons, John and Charles, then in the flower of their age. He came of a sound stock, and found, besides, some zest in country pursuits; nor, in the end, was it years that carried him off, but the severe influenza epidemic of 1918. By that time, his two sons had predeceased him. Both took their commissions in 1915; both were killed two years later. John’s wife had died long since, Charles’ widow alienated the old man’s sympathies by marrying again and settling in the United States. His will, therefore, on which this story turns, left the bulk of his property, some fifty thousands pounds, to his elder grandson Derek; in the event of his death it was to revert to Charles’ son Nigel.

So far, you might have thought the old gentleman would cheat the lawyers and die intestate. But certain conditions attached to the will made it a document of importance. The testator reflected that one child was an orphan, the other fatherless and as good as motherless; that they had to grow to manhood with no parental supervision in times of great unsettlement. Very wisely, then, he left the fifty thousand (which was not the whole, but the bulk of the legacy) in trust, until such time as Derek (or, failing him, Nigel) should reach the age of twenty-five. Meanwhile, the boys were rare visitors to their grandfather’s house, and scarcely welcome ones; a kind of precocious boredom in their manner exasperated the old gentleman, none the less bitterly because it was assumed to be typical of a period. The avital thunders about politics, art, morals and religion may be supposed to have formed the grandsons’ character by repulsion. Derek lived, mostly, with old friends of the family in the South of France, who let him run wild on the facile excuse that “anyhow, the boy will have money.” Nigel, who never took to his step-relations, was little better handled; an exile when at home, an unappreciated rebel at school, he flung himself, with a pathetic illusion of originality, into the career of an aesthete.

The two cousins met little, whether before or after their grandfather’s death; there was little in the character of either to make it desirable. They went to different schools, neither of which (since schools have a reputation to lose) I intend to specify. But Oxford, though her critics have been unkindly of late, has too broad a back to need the shelter of anonymity; Both matriculated at the older University, both at Simon Magus College. Election to colleges is a mystery, as election should be; but the two years which Derek had misspent there might surely have warned the fellows against risking a second experiment with Nigel. On the other hand, Derek was a normal creature, though morose in disposition, idiotically extravagant, and with a strict periodicity of drunkenness. There was nothing in him, it must be admitted, which gave promise of Nigel’s unendurable affectations.

Derek was dissolute with a kind of lumpish unimaginativeness which may infect youth in any century. If he gambled to excess, it was because nobody had succeeded in introducing him to any other method by which you could kill time until the age of twenty-five. If he drank, it was with the stupid man’s haste to forget and to disguise his own dullness. His dress, his manner, his associates were of the equestrian world; but his taste was neither for horses nor for horsemanship, only for horsiness. With the Dean he was continually in conflict; but there was a regularity in his irregularities, you knew beforehand just when he would be drunk, and just how drunk he would be; and there is that in the academic mind which appreciates consistency in whatever direction. He was not clever enough to devise organized mischief; he was too indolent (it seemed) to bear malice; he accepted his fines, his gatings, and a couple of rustications with the complacency of the schoolboy who (in the language of his terminal report) “takes punishment well.” He made little stir in the University world, and it is probable that during the whole period of his residence he never had an enemy, except his cousin.

Nigel’s perceptions were infinitely more acute, his faults infinitely less excusable. He had grown up in the aftermath of war, under the infection of disillusionment. He looked out upon a world of men (schoolmasters especially) who had fought and bled for the sake of certain simple emotions, with a submerged jealousy which took the form of resentment. These others had had the opportunity which was denied to him, of exploiting the full possibilities of manhood; he would console himself for the loss by denying that the opportunity was worth having. They had been born to set the world right; he would retaliate on the cursed spite of his late nativity by doing his best to put the world out of joint again. He would rebel against everything his neighbours bowed down to; would embrace every form of revolt, however tawdry, however trite; he would have no aim or ideal except to shock. At school, he had the sense to keep his powder dry, to lock up his splenetic poems, to revenge himself upon his uncongenial surroundings by the secret satisfaction of an undivulged irony. “Loony Burtell” they called him; and he was content, like another Brutus, to bide his time.

Among all her immemorial traditions, Oxford cherishes none staler than that of aestheticism. A small group in each generation lights upon the same old recipe for setting the Isis on fire, and (since undergraduate memory only lives three years) is satisfied that it is a group of lonely pioneers. Nigel had read Wilde at school; he pillaged epigrams from Saki without appreciating that ironic reservation which is his charm. He offered absinthe to all his visitors, usually explaining that he did not really care for it, but kept it in his rooms in order to put temptation in the way of his scout. He painted his walls a light mauve, and hung them with a few squares of blank cartridge paper on which he was always threatening to do crayon drawings; the beauty of art, he said, lay in its promise—its fulfilment only brought disillusion. He talked in a very slow drawl, with a lisp and a slight stammer which he had cultivated to perfection. He never attended lectures; the dons did not understand, he complained, that undergraduates come up to Oxford in order to teach. He was desperately callow, and quite inordinately conceited.

The older Universities tolerate everything. There are times, and there are Colleges, at which the essential rowdyism of youth clothes itself in a mantle of righteous Philistine indignation, and breaks up the aesthetic group with circumstances of violence. But you can fool some of the people some of the time; and at Simon Magus men cared little what their neighbours did, short of the bagpipes. Nigel found disciples, or at least comrades-in-arms for his movement, in that home of impossible unbeliefs. If you were the kind of person who liked that kind of thing, that was the kind of thing you liked. A round dozen of half-literary, half-histrionic young men from various colleges frequented his rooms, debated on the cut of clothes, and read out their compositions to each other. They spoke of themselves, almost reverently, as “the men who had made bad”; they declared it their mission to encourage immorality amongst the undergraduates, Bolshevism amongst the scouts, and suicide amongst the dons. It was their favourite creed that England, and indeed all the English-speaking races, were the spoke in the world’s wheel. “Why should I admire the country I was born in?” expostulated Nigel; and indeed the reason alleged seemed inadequate. His favourite method of denunciation was to say, “I don’t like it; it’s unforeign.”

It will easily be imagined that little sympathy was wasted between the two cousins. Not, indeed, that the desperate poses of the younger could affect the elder with any sense of personal concern. Oxford is a broad stream, in which the varied regatta of life can be managed without jostling. Derek himself was too listless to condemn any form of behaviour; and his friends, though they agreed among themselves that Nigel was the kind of thing which wasn’t done, never dreamed of holding his cousin responsible for him. But the arrival of a namesake in the same college is never welcome; your letters go astray, well-meaning people mix you up, and send invitations to the wrong man. The two were, moreover, somewhat alike; the male strain was strong in the Burtell family, and a resemblance had survived closer than is usual between cousins. Each was dark and rather short; either, in a general way, insipidly good-looking; each had a pink-and-white complexion. It irritated Derek to be addressed, sometimes, as if he were Nigel’s brother; it irritated him still more when Nigel’s casual acquaintances saw him at a distance and saluted him by mistake. He ostentatiously avoided his cousin, and even, as far as he might, the mention of his name.

Nigel, on his part, was not slow to appreciate this neglect in the attitude of his senior, or to devise means of retaliation. He identified his cousin as a centaur, and referred to him sadly as a kind of family failing. All the forms of abstinence he displayed were dictated to him by this repulsion. “I can’t get drunk,” he would say; “people would be certain to mistake me for the Centaur, and I might be too drunk to explain.” “No, I don’t play cards; there is such an intolerable look of Victorian virtue about the Queen of Spades; it would be dreadful to sit opposite her night after night. Besides, the Centaur plays cards.” “I am really going to work this term; then even the Master’s wife will hardly be able to mistake me for the Centaur again.” They say the University is a microcosm, and it is certainly a microphone; remarks like these, not always conceived in the best of taste, came round to Derek, and fanned, from time to time, the dull embers of his resentment.

After a year of this, Derek went down; but the feud did not stop there. Nigel spent his vacations in London; and London is even a worse place than Oxford for avoiding your dislikes. Kind, but imperceptive hostesses threw the two cousins together. Neither had scaled any particular social heights, but each straddled on that uneasy ridge which connects Chelsea with Mayfair. Derek, conscious of his own conversational limitations, was forever being reminded of his cousin’s existence. “Oh yes, charming fellow; but have you met Nigel?” “Do tell me, Mr. Burtell, what is your brilliant cousin Nigel doing now?” These hollow insipidities of conversation were whiplashes to Derek’s self-esteem. But there was worse behind it. In certain subterraneous walks of London society, both cousins were well known; and in that world, careless of principle and greedy of originality, Nigel shone, a precocious proficient. Without heart, without worth, he dazzled feminine eyes with his reputed accomplishments. There was a woman who committed suicide; she was a drugfiend, and nothing was published in the papers; but there were those, and Derek was among them, who believed that Nigel’s callousness had been the cause of the tragedy.

Meanwhile, Nigel was running his course at Oxford: he celebrated his twenty-first birthday by a kind of mock funeral, at which he lay, in ghastly splendour, on a black catafalque, while his friends stood over him and drank absinthe to the memory of his departed youth. Derek was more than two years his senior; was in measurable distance, therefore, of his promised inheritance; and others besides the solicitors began to speculate as to the ultimate destination of the fifty thousand pounds. Derek’s Oxford bills were still largely unpaid; meanwhile, he lived recklessly beyond his modest income, secure in the consciousness of the fortune that awaited him. He ran up bills in London; and, when these new creditors proved more importunate than the old, he applied for financial help to strangers, less Gentile than genteel. More than one promoter of private loans found an excellent business opening in a young man who was no longer a minor, and who had less than two years to wait before he was assured of a substantial capital sum. So things went on, with cordial feelings on both sides, until a faint tremor of apprehension fell upon the creditors’ hearts. The loans were being piled up in a reckless way; already the fifty thousand was almost swallowed up; and Derek, as if conscious that the future had no longer any competence to offer him, was ruining his health in a way which suggested that he would not long survive the accession to his forestalled inheritance. His drinking bouts were now almost continual; rumour whispered that he also drugged. Whether he lived beyond the age of twenty-five was a matter of total indifference to society at large. That he should live until he was twenty-five was the earnest prayer of a handful of gentlemen not addicted to the practices of religion. If Derek should die before his twenty-fifth birthday, the fifty thousand would go to Nigel, and the moneylenders would have no assets to satisfy their claims. Panic-stricken, they came together, and met Derek’s further appeals for accommodation with a peremptory stipulation that he should insure his life.

With discreet hesitations, a well-known Insurance Company declined to take the risk. Their doctor, with raised eyebrows, protested that he had never seen so young a constitution so seriously undermined. If Mr. Burtell took care of himself, he had no doubt a reasonable chance of achieving his twenty-fifth birthday, but … to tell the truth, he was not fully satisfied either of Mr. Burtell’s will to do so, or of his power, if he had the will, to break with his bad habits. “With a chap like Derek,” commented Nigel, to whom the circumstances were reported, “the world wants to be insured against his life rather than his death.” But there is a way out of every impasse, and usually it is the Indescribable. In case the reader is not already acquainted with the name and the character of this vast insurance agency, let him recall the name of that millionaire who recently flew to Nova Zèmbla, paying as he did so a shilling per second by way of insurance money. … Yes, that was the Indescribable. Human ingenuity has still failed to imagine any form or any degree of danger which the Indescribable are not prepared (for a consideration) to underwrite. The fact that Derek Burtell was not legitimate business made no difference to them. For a very reasonable premium they backed him to reach the age of twenty-five, without showing any curiosity as to his further destiny.

One condition, however, they did make—even the Indescribable makes conditions. Mr. Burtell must really put himself under the direction of a medical adviser. … No, unfortunately it would not be possible for their own doctor to undertake the task. (It is a matter of honour, and indeed of income, with the Indescribable’s doctor to refuse every other form of practice.) But if Mr. Burtell had no objection, they would like to see him put himself in the hands of Dr. Simmonds, a man in whom he could have every confidence, a man, indeed, who had made a lifelong study of acrasia. So it was that, when he was within a month or so of his all-important twenty-fifth birthday, and when his cousin was just preparing, without any notable regrets on either side, to take his degree and go down from Oxford, Derek found himself closeted in Dr. Simmonds’ consulting-room in Wigpole Street.

“Open air, that’s what you want,” Dr. Simmonds was saying. “Open air. Take your mind off the need for stimulants, and set you up again physically. See?”

“I suppose you want me to take a confounded sea-voyage,” grumbled Derek. “You fellows always seem to want to send a man to the ends of the earth, in the hope that he’ll be dead before he comes back.”

Dr. Simmonds shuddered. He was not exactly an official of the Indescribable Company, but he was (how shall we say it?) in close touch with them; and the idea of such a valuable life, with such a short time to run, being exposed to the chances of wind and wave did not impress him favourably.

“Why no, not a sea-voyage. Take a sea-voyage, and the first thing you know you’ll find you’re edging round to the saloon. Don’t mind my speaking frankly, do you? No, it must be open air combined with exercise; not very hard exercise, you ain’t fit for it, but something that’ll keep you occupied, see? The river, now; ever go on the river?”

“I went to Henley once with some fellows.”

“Well, look here, I’ll tell you what. You hire a boat; better say a canoe; don’t want to take any risks with that heart of yours, you know; you go down to Oxford and take a friend with you, and up you go to Lechlade, Cricklade, as far as you can go without the canoe getting aground. Take it pretty easy, mind, but keep on the go the whole time as far as possible. Then you come back to me, and I’ll recommend you some exercises and a diet, and we’ll see what we can make of you.”

It was something of a surprise to Derek’s world to hear that he was indulging in anything so innocuous as a canoe trip up the river. It was still more of a surprise to them when they heard the company he was keeping; the other place in the canoe was actually to be occupied by Nigel. And yet there was sense in the arrangement; Nigel had to kill time between his schools and his viva voce; Nigel was at Oxford, and knew how to manage canoes and where you hired the beastly things; besides, there was a great-aunt in the background, who had expressed a particular wish to see the two boys getting on better together, and, though neither had seen her for a long time, Aunt Alma’s circumstances were supposed to be comfortable, and she had no other legal heir. As for Nigel, he assured his friends that the prospect of a centaur turned hippopotamus was altogether too much for him. It would be interesting to make a tour of rural England, and satisfy himself that the churches were really as depopulated as he had been led to believe. And then, whatever you said against rivers, at least you had to admit that they set an example of decadence.

II

Shipcote Lock

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 today. 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; schoolchildren 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 southwest.

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 loosestrife, in meadowsweet 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 dragonflies 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 passerby 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 shortcut. 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, snapdragon 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 greenhouse, 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.