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 meadow-sweet 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
