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
