News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest<br />Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, William Morris [best big ereader TXT] 📗

For—must I say it?—I felt as if even that happy world were made the happier for my being so near this strange girl; although I must say that of all the persons I had seen in that world renewed, she was the most unfamiliar to me, the most unlike what I could have thought of.  Clara, for instance, beautiful and bright as she was, was not unlike a very pleasant and unaffected young lady; and the other girls also seemed nothing more than specimens of very much improved types which I had known in other times.  But this girl was not only beautiful with a beauty quite different from that of “a young lady,” but was in all ways so strangely interesting; so that I kept wondering what she would say or do next to surprise and please me.  Not, indeed, that there was anything startling in what she actually said or did; but it was all done in a new way, and always with that indefinable interest and pleasure of life, which I had noticed more or less in everybody, but which in her was more marked and more charming than in anyone else that I had seen.

We were soon under way and going at a fair pace through the beautiful reaches of the river, between Bensington and Dorchester.  It was now about the middle of the afternoon, warm rather than hot, and quite windless; the clouds high up and light, pearly white, and gleaming, softened the sun’s burning, but did not hide the pale blue in most places, though they seemed to give it height and consistency; the sky, in short, looked really like a vault, as poets have sometimes called it, and not like mere limitless air, but a vault so vast and full of light that it did not in any way oppress the spirits.  It was the sort of afternoon that Tennyson must have been thinking about, when he said of the Lotos-Eaters’ land that it was a land where it was always afternoon.

Ellen leaned back in the stern and seemed to enjoy herself thoroughly.  I could see that she was really looking at things and let nothing escape her, and as I watched her, an uncomfortable feeling that she had been a little touched by love of the deft, ready, and handsome Dick, and that she had been constrained to follow us because of it, faded out of my mind; since if it had been so, she surely could not have been so excitedly pleased, even with the beautiful scenes we were passing through.  For some time she did not say much, but at last, as we had passed under Shillingford Bridge (new built, but somewhat on its old lines), she bade me hold the boat while she had a good look at the landscape through the graceful arch.  Then she turned about to me and said:

“I do not know whether to be sorry or glad that this is the first time that I have been in these reaches.  It is true that it is a great pleasure to see all this for the first time; but if I had had a year or two of memory of it, how sweetly it would all have mingled with my life, waking or dreaming!  I am so glad Dick has been pulling slowly, so as to linger out the time here.  How do you feel about your first visit to these waters?”

I do not suppose she meant a trap for me, but anyhow I fell into it, and said: “My first visit!  It is not my first visit by many a time.  I know these reaches well; indeed, I may say that I know every yard of the Thames from Hammersmith to Cricklade.”

I saw the complications that might follow, as her eyes fixed mine with a curious look in them, that I had seen before at Runnymede, when I had said something which made it difficult for others to understand my present position amongst these people.  I reddened, and said, in order to cover my mistake: “I wonder you have never been up so high as this, since you live on the Thames, and moreover row so well that it would be no great labour to you.  Let alone,” quoth I, insinuatingly, “that anybody would be glad to row you.”

She laughed, clearly not at my compliment (as I am sure she need not have done, since it was a very commonplace fact), but at something which was stirring in her mind; and she still looked at me kindly, but with the above-said keen look in her eyes, and then she said:

“Well, perhaps it is strange, though I have a good deal to do at home, what with looking after my father, and dealing with two or three young men who have taken a special liking to me, and all of whom I cannot please at once.  But you, dear neighbour; it seems to me stranger that you should know the upper river, than that I should not know it; for, as I understand, you have only been in England a few days.  But perhaps you mean that you have read about it in books, and seen pictures of it?—though that does not come to much, either.”

“Truly,” said I.  “Besides, I have not read any books about the Thames: it was one of the minor stupidities of our time that no one thought fit to write a decent book about what may fairly be called our only English river.”

The words were no sooner out of my mouth than I saw that I had made another mistake; and I felt really annoyed with myself, as I did not want to go into a long explanation just then, or begin another series of Odyssean lies.  Somehow, Ellen seemed to see this, and she took no advantage of my slip; her piercing look changed into one of mere frank kindness, and she said:

“Well, anyhow I am glad that I am travelling these waters with you, since you know our river so well, and I know little of it past Pangbourne, for you can tell me all I want to know about it.”  She paused a minute, and then said: “Yet you must understand that the part I do know, I know as thoroughly as you do.  I should be sorry for you to think that I am careless of a thing so beautiful and interesting as the Thames.”

She said this quite earnestly, and with an air of affectionate appeal to me which pleased me very much; but I could see that she was only keeping her doubts about me for another time.

Presently we came to Day’s Lock, where Dick and his two sitters had waited for us.  He would have me go ashore, as if to show me something which I had never seen before; and nothing loth I followed him, Ellen by my side, to the well-remembered Dykes, and the long church beyond them, which was still used for various purposes by the good folk of Dorchester: where, by the way, the village guest-house still had the sign of the Fleur-de-luce which it used to bear in the days when hospitality had to be bought and sold.  This time, however, I made no sign of all this being familiar to me: though as we sat for a while on the mound of the Dykes looking up at Sinodun and its clear-cut trench, and its sister mamelon of Whittenham, I felt somewhat uncomfortable under Ellen’s serious attentive look, which almost drew from me the cry, “How little anything is changed here!”

We stopped again at Abingdon, which, like Wallingford, was in a way both old and new to me, since it had been lifted out of its nineteenth-century degradation, and otherwise was as little altered as might be.

Sunset was in the sky as we skirted Oxford by Oseney; we stopped a minute or two hard by the ancient castle to put Henry Morsom ashore.  It was a matter of course that so far as they could be seen from the river, I missed none of the towers and spires of that once don-beridden city; but the meadows all round, which, when I had last passed through them, were getting daily more and more squalid, more and more impressed with the seal of the “stir and intellectual life of the nineteenth century,” were no longer intellectual, but had once again become as beautiful as they should be, and the little hill of Hinksey, with two or three very pretty stone houses new-grown on it (I use the word advisedly; for they seemed to belong to it) looked down happily on the full streams and waving grass, grey now, but for the sunset, with its fast-ripening seeds.

The railway having disappeared, and therewith the various level bridges over the streams of Thames, we were soon through Medley Lock and in the wide water that washes Port Meadow, with its numerous population of geese nowise diminished; and I thought with interest how its name and use had survived from the older imperfect communal period, through the time of the confused struggle and tyranny of the rights of property, into the present rest and happiness of complete Communism.

I was taken ashore again at Godstow, to see the remains of the old nunnery, pretty nearly in the same condition as I had remembered them; and from the high bridge over the cut close by, I could see, even in the twilight, how beautiful the little village with its grey stone houses had become; for we had now come into the stone-country, in which every house must be either built, walls and roof, of grey stone or be a blot on the landscape.

We still rowed on after this, Ellen taking the sculls in my boat; we passed a weir a little higher up, and about three miles beyond it came by moonlight again to a little town, where we slept at a house thinly inhabited, as its folk were mostly tented in the hay-fields.

CHAPTER XXVIII: THE LITTLE RIVER

We started before six o’clock the next morning, as we were still twenty-five miles from our resting place, and Dick wanted to be there before dusk.  The journey was pleasant, though to those who do not know the upper Thames, there is little to say about it.  Ellen and I were once more together in her boat, though Dick, for fairness’ sake, was for having me in his, and letting the two women scull the green toy.  Ellen, however, would not allow this, but claimed me as the interesting person of the company.  “After having come so far,” said she, “I will not be put off with a companion who will be always thinking of somebody else than me: the guest is the only person who can amuse me properly.  I mean that really,” said she, turning to me, “and have not said it merely as a pretty saying.”

Clara blushed and looked very happy at all this; for I think up to this time she had been rather frightened of Ellen.  As for me I felt young again, and strange hopes of my youth were mingling with the pleasure of the present; almost destroying it, and quickening it into something like pain.

As we passed through the short and winding reaches of the now quickly lessening stream, Ellen said: “How pleasant this little river is to me, who am used to a great wide wash of water; it almost seems as if we shall have to stop at every reach-end.  I expect before I get home this evening I shall have realised what a little country England is, since we can so soon get to the end of its biggest river.”

“It is not big,” said I, “but it is pretty.”

“Yes,” she said, “and don’t you find it difficult to imagine the times when this little pretty country was treated by its folk as if it had been an ugly characterless waste, with no delicate beauty to be guarded, with no heed taken of the ever fresh pleasure of the recurring seasons, and changeful weather, and diverse quality of the soil, and so forth?  How could people be so cruel to themselves?”

“And to each other,” said I.  Then a sudden resolution took hold of me, and I said: “Dear neighbour, I may as well tell you at once that I find it easier to imagine all that ugly past than you do, because I myself have been part of it.  I see both that you have divined something of this in me; and also I think you will believe me when I tell you of it, so that I am going to hide nothing from you at all.”

She was silent a little, and then she said: “My friend, you have guessed right about me; and to tell you the truth I have followed you up from Runnymede in order that I might ask you many questions, and because I saw that you were not one of us; and that interested and pleased me,