“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 boat-hook 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.
II
I told him to wait until they got done giving me the ether; there were so many of them moving back and forth that I was afraid someone would brush against him and find him there. “And then you’ll have to go back,” I said.
“I’ll be careful,” George said.
“Because you’ll have to do something for me,” I said. “You’ll have to.”
“All right. I will. What is it?”
“Wait until they go away, then I can tell you. You’ll have to do it, because I can’t. Promise you will.”
“All right. I promise.” So we waited until they got done and had moved down to my leg. Then George came nearer. “What is it?” he said.
“It’s my leg,” I said. “I want you to be sure it’s dead. They may cut it off in a hurry and forget about it.”
“All right. I’ll see about it.”
“I couldn’t have that, you know. That wouldn’t do at all. They might bury it and it couldn’t lie quiet. And then it would be lost and we couldn’t find it to do anything.”
“All right. I’ll watch.” He looked at me. “Only I don’t have to go back.”
“You don’t? You don’t have to go back at all?”
“I’m out of it. You aren’t out of it yet. You’ll have to go back.”
“I’m not?” I said. . . . “Then it will be harder to find it than ever. So you see about it. . . . And
