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Page 31
The moment their own clothes were dry (we lived in a perpetual atmosphere
of steaming clothes) they would insist upon leaving us, which seemed to
me discourteous after all that we had done for them, and would dress
themselves once more and start off home, and get wet again before they
got there.
We would generally receive a letter a few days afterwards, written by
some relative, informing us that both patients were doing as well as
could be expected, and promising to send us a card for the funeral in
case of a relapse.
Our chief recreation, our sole consolation, during the long weeks of our
imprisonment, was to watch from our windows the pleasure-seekers passing
by in small open boats, and to reflect what an awful day they had had, or
were going to have, as the case might be.
In the forenoon they would head up stream--young men with their
sweethearts; nephews taking out their rich old aunts; husbands and wives
(some of them pairs, some of them odd ones); stylish-looking girls with
cousins; energetic-looking men with dogs; high-class silent parties; low-
class noisy parties; quarrelsome family parties--boatload after boatload
they went by, wet, but still hopeful, pointing out bits of blue sky to
each other.
In the evening they would return, drenched and gloomy, saying
disagreeable things to one another.
One couple, and one couple only, out of the many hundreds that passed
under our review, came back from the ordeal with pleasant faces. He was
rowing hard and singing, with a handkerchief tied round his head to keep
his hat on, and she was laughing at him, while trying to hold up an
umbrella with one hand and steer with the other.
There are but two explanations to account for people being jolly on the
river in the rain. The one I dismissed as being both uncharitable and
improbable. The other was creditable to the human race, and, adopting
it, I took off my cap to this damp but cheerful pair as they went by.
They answered with a wave of the hand, and I stood looking after them
till they disappeared in the mist.
I am inclined to think that those young people, if they be still alive,
are happy. Maybe, fortune has been kind to them, or maybe she has not,
but in either event they are, I am inclined to think, happier than are
most people.
Now and again, the daily tornado would rage with such fury as to defeat
its own purpose by prematurely exhausting itself. On these rare
occasions we would sit out on the deck, and enjoy the unwonted luxury of
fresh air.
I remember well those few pleasant evenings: the river, luminous with the
drowned light, the dark banks where the night lurked, the storm-tossed
sky, jewelled here and there with stars.
It was delightful not to hear for an hour or so the sullen thrashing of
the rain; but to listen to the leaping of the fishes, the soft swirl
raised by some water-rat, swimming stealthily among the rushes, the
restless twitterings of the few still wakeful birds.
An old corncrake lived near to us, and the way he used to disturb all the
other birds, and keep them from going to sleep, was shameful. Amenda,
who was town-bred, mistook him at first for one of those cheap alarm
clocks, and wondered who was winding him up, and why they went on doing
it all night; and, above all, why they didn't oil him.
He would begin his unhallowed performance about dusk, just as every
respectable bird was preparing to settle down for the night. A family of
thrushes had their nest a few yards from his stand, and they used to get
perfectly furious with him.
"There's that fool at it again," the female thrush would say; "why can't
he do it in the daytime if he must do it at all?" (She spoke, of course,
in twitters, but I am confident the above is a correct translation.)
After a while, the young thrushes would wake up and begin chirping, and
then the mother would get madder than ever.
"Can't you say something to him?" she would cry indignantly to her
husband. "How do you think the children can get to sleep, poor things,
with that hideous row going on all night? Might just as well be living
in a saw-mill."
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