The Leg

 

THE BOAT, it was a yawl boat with a patched weathered sail made two reaches below us while I sat with the sculls poised, watching her over my shoulder, and George clung to the pile, spouting Milton at Everbe Corinthia. When it made the final tack I looked back at George. But he was now but well into Comus' second speech, his crooked face raised, and the afternoon bright on his close ruddy head.

"Give way, George," I said. But he held us stationary at the pile, his glazed hat lifted, spouting his fine and cadenced folly as though the lock, the Thames, time and all, belonged to him, while Sabrina (or Hebe or Chloe or whatever name he happened to be calling Corinthia at the time) with her dairy-maid's complexion and her hair like mead poured in sunlight stood above us in one of her endless succession of neat print dresses, her hand on the lever and one eye on George and the other on the yawl, saying "Yes, milord" dutifully whenever George paused for breath.

The yawl luffed and stood away; the helmsman shouted for the lock.

"Let go, George," I said. But he clung to the pile in his fine and incongruous oblivion. Everbe Corinthia stood above us, her hand on the lever, bridling a little and beginning to reveal a certain concern, and looking from her to the yawl and back again I thought how much time she and I had both spent thus since that day three years ago when, cow-eyed and bridling, she had opened the lock for us for the first time, with George holding us stationary while he apostrophised her in the metaphor of Keats and Spenser.

Again the yawl's crew shouted at us, the yawl aback and in stays. "Let go, you fool!" I said, digging the sculls. "Lock, Corinthia!"

George looked at me. Corinthia was now watching the yawl with both eyes. "What, Davy?" George said. "Must even thou help Circe's droves into the sea? Pull, then, O Super-Gadarene!"

And he shoved us off. I had not meant to pull away. And even if I had, I could still have counteracted the movement if Everbe Corinthia hadn't opened the lock. But open it she did, and looked once back to us and sat flat on the earth, crisp fresh dress and all. The skiff shot away under me; I had a fleeting picture of George still clinging with one arm around the pile, his knees drawn up to his chin and the hat in his lifted hand and of a long running shadow carrying the shadow of a boat-hook falling across the lock. Then I was too busy steering. I shot through the gates, carrying with me that picture of George, the glazed hat still gallantly aloft like the mastheaded pennant of a man-of-war, vanishing beneath the surface. Then I was floating quietly in slack water while the round eyes of two men stared quietly down at me from the yawl.

"Yer've lost yer mate, sir," one of them said in a civil voice. Then they had drawn me alongside with a boat-hook and standing up in the skiff, I saw George. He was standing in the towpath now, and Simon, Everbe Corinthia's father, and another man, he was the one with the boat-hook, whose shadow I had seen across the lock, were there too.

But I saw only George with his ugly crooked face and his round head now dark in the sunlight. One of the watermen was still talking. "Steady, sir. Lend 'im a 'and, Sam'l. There. 'E'll do now. Give 'im a turn, seeing 'is mate..."

"You fool, you damned fool!" I said. George stooped beside me, wringing his sopping flannels, while Simon and the second man Simon with his iron-gray face and his iron-gray whisker that made him look like nothing so much as an aged bull peering surlily and stupidly across a winter hedgerow, and the second man, younger, with a ruddy capable face, in a hard, boardlike, town-made suit watched us. Corinthia sat on the ground, weeping hopelessly and quietly. "You damned fool. Oh, you damned fool."

"Oxford young gentlemen," Simon said in a harsh disgusted voice. "Oxford young gentlemen."

"Eh, well," George said, "I daresay I haven't damaged your lock over a farthing's worth." He rose, and saw Corinthia. "What, Circe!" he said, "tears over the accomplishment of your appointed destiny?" He went to her, trailing a thread of water across the packed earth, and took her arm. It moved willing enough, but she herself sat flat on the ground, looking up at him with streaming hopeless eyes. Her mouth was open a little and she sat in an attitude of patient despair, weeping tears of crystal purity. Simon watched them, the boat-hook, he had taken it from the second man, who was now busy at the lock mechanism, and I knew that he was the brother who worked in London, of whom Corinthia had once told us clutched in his big knotty fist. The yawl was now in the lock, the two faces watching us across the parapet like two severed heads in a quiet row upon the footway. "Come, now," George said. "You'll soil your dress sitting there."

"Up, lass," Simon said, in that harsh voice of his which at the same time was without ill-nature, as though harshness were merely the medium through which he spoke. Corinthia rose obediently, still weeping, and went on toward the neat little dove-cote of a house in which they lived. The sunlight was slanting level across it and upon George's ridiculous figure. He was watching me.

"Well, Davy," he said, "if I didn't know better, I'd say from your expression that you are envying me."

"Am I?" I said. "You fool. You ghastly lunatic."

Simon had gone to the lock. The two quiet heads rose slowly, as though they were being thrust gradually upward from out the earth, and Simon now stooped with the boathook over the lock. He rose, with the limp anonymity of George's once gallant hat on the end of the boat-hook, and extended it. George took it as gravely. "Thanks," he said.

He dug into his pocket and gave Simon a coin. "For wear and tear on the boat-hook," he said. "And perhaps a bit of balm for your justifiable disappointment, eh, Simon?"

Simon grunted and turned back to the lock. The brother was still watching us. "And I am obliged to you," George said. "Hope I'll never have to return the favor in kind." The brother said something, short and grave, in a slow pleasant voice. George looked at me again. "Well, Davy."

"Come on. Let's go."

"Right you are. Where's the skiff?" Then I was staring at him again, and for a moment he stared at me. Then he shouted, a long ringing laugh, while the two heads in the yawl watched us from beyond Simon's granite-like and contemptuous back. I could almost hear Simon thinking Oxford young gentlemen. "Davy, have you lost the skiff?"

"She's tied up below a bit, sir," the civil voice in the yawl said. "The gentleman walked out of 'er like she were a keb, without looking back."

The June afternoon slanted across my shoulder, full upon George's face. He would not take my jacket. "I'll pull down and keep warm," he said. The once-glazed hat lay between his feet.

"Why don't you throw that thing out?" I said. He pulled steadily, looking at me. The sun was full in his eyes, striking the yellow flecks in them into fleeting, mica-like sparks.

"That hat," I said. "What do you want with it?"

"Oh; that. Cast away the symbol of my soul?" He unshipped one scull and picked up the hat and turned and cocked it on the stem, where it hung with a kind of gallant and dissolute jauntiness. "The symbol of my soul rescued from the deep by..."

"Hauled out of a place it had no business being whatever, by a public servant who did not want his public charge cluttered up."

"At least you admit the symbology," he said. "And that the empire rescued it. So it is worth something to the empire. Too much for me to throw it away. That which you have saved from death or disaster will be forever dear to you, Davy; you cannot ignore it. Besides, it will not let you. What is it you Americans say?"

"We say, bunk. Why not use the river for a while? It's paid for."

He looked at me. "Ah. That is... Well, anyway, it's American, isn't it. That's something."

But he got out into the current again. A barge was coming up, in tow. We got outside her and watched her pass, empty of any sign of life, with a solemn implacability like a huge barren catafalque, the broad-rumped horses, followed by a boy in a patched coat and carrying a peeled goad, plodding stolidly along the path. We dropped slowly astern. Over her freeboard a motionless face with a dead pipe in its teeth contemplated us with eyes empty of any thought.

"If I could have chosen," George said, "I'd like to have been pulled out by that chap yonder. Can't you see him picking up a boat-hook without haste and fishing you out without even shifting the pipe?"

"You should have chosen your place better, then. But it seems to me you're in no position to complain!"

"But Simon showed annoyance. Not surprise nor concern: just annoyance. I don't like to be hauled back into life by an annoyed man with a boat-hook."

"You could have said so at the time. Simon didn't have to save you. He could have shut the gates until he got another head of water, and flushed you right out of his bailiwick without touching you, and saved himself trouble and ingratitude. Besides Corinthia's tears."

"Ay; tears. Corinthia will at least cherish a tenderness for me from now on."

"Yes; but if you'd only not got out at all. Or having not got in at all. Falling into that filthy lock just to complete a gesture. I think..."

"Do not think, my good David. When I had the choice of holding on to the skiff and being haled safely and meekly away, or of giving the lie to the stupid small gods at the small price of being temporarily submerged in this..." he let go one oar and dipped his hand in the water, then he flung it outward in dripping, burlesque magniloquence. "O Thames!" he said. "Thou mighty sewer of an empire!"

"Steer the boat," I said. "I lived in America long enough to have learned something of England's pride."

"And so you consider a bath in this filthy old sewer that has flushed this land since long before He who made it had any need to invent God... a rock about which man and all his bawling clamor seethes away to sluttishness..."

We were twenty-one then; we talked like that, tramping about that peaceful land where in green petrification the old splendid bloody deeds, the spirits of the blundering courageous men, slumbered in every stone and tree. For that was 1914, and in the parks bands played Valse Septembre, and girls and young men drifted in punts on the moonlit river and sang Mister Moon and There's a Bit of Heaven, and George and I sat in a window in Christ Church while the curtains whispered in the twilight, and talked of courage and honor and Napier and love and Ben Jonson and death.

The next year was 1915, and the bands played God Save the King, and the rest of the young men and some not so young sang Mademoiselle of Armentieres in the mud, and George was dead.

He had gone out in October, a subaltern in the regiment of which his people were hereditary colonels. Ten months later I saw him sitting with an orderly behind a ruined chimney on the edge of Givenchy. He had a telephone strapped to his ears and he was eating something which he waved at me as we ran past and ducked into the cellar which we sought.