Greybeard

“I’ll take a rain check on them, as Jack would say. Walk me as far as the window just to see how I make out. Oh, my legs — I thought I’d die, Algy…” As she hobbled across the dirty floor on Timberlane’s arm, Fat Choy sirens began to scream across the city. Their hollow voices came distantly, but from all round. The world was making itself felt again. Mingling with them came the lower note of police car sirens. They got to the window, cobwebbed behind narrow bars. Timberlane wrestled it open and peered out, his face tight between twin lances of iron.

He was in time to see two police cars slide up to the sidewalk below. Doors opened, uniformed men poured out. Among them, stepping from the rear car, was Jack Pilbeam. Timberlane shouted and signalled. The men looked up.

“Jack!” he bellowed down, “Can you put off your travels for twenty-four hours? Martha and I need a best man!”

Right thumb raised above his head, Pilbeam disappeared from view. Next moment, the sound of his footsteps came echoing up the forsaken stairwell.

V. The River: Oxford

Charley Samuels stood up in the dinghy and pointed towards the south-east. “There they are!” he said. “The spires of Oxford!” Martha, Timberlane, and old Jeff Pitt rose too, peering where Charley pointed across the lake. Isaac the fox paced up and down the tiller seat. They had raised a mast and a sheet, and were carried forward by a light wind. Since their night flight from

Swifford Fair, their progress had been slow. They had been hindered at an old and broken lock; a boat had foundered there and blocked the navigable stream, and no doubt would continue to do so until the spring flood water broke it up. They unloaded the boats there, pushing or carrying them and their few possessions to a point where they could safely launch them again.

The country here was particularly wild and inhospitable. Pitt thought he saw gnomes peering at them from bushes. All four of them thought they saw stoats climbing in the trees, finally deciding that the animals were not stoats but pine martens, an animal hardly ever seen in these parts since the Middle Ages. With bow and arrow they killed two of the creatures that afternoon, eating their flesh and preserving their fine pelts, when they were forced to make a camp in the open, under trees. Wood for burning lay about in plenty, and they huddled together between two fires, but it was an ill night for them all.

Next day, when they were under way again, they were fortunate enough to see a pedlar fishing on the bank. He bought Pitt’s little rowing boat from them, for which he gave them money and two sails, one of which they used that night to make themselves a tent. The pedlar offered them tinned apricots and pears, but since these must have been at least a dozen years old, and were very expensive, they did not buy. The little old man, made garrulous by solitude, told them he was on his way to join Swifford Fair, and that he had some medicines for Doctor Bunny Jingadangelow.

After they left the pedlar, they came to a wide sheet of water, patched with small islands and banks of rushes. Under the drab sky, it appeared to stretch on for ever, and they could not see their proper course through it. This lake was a sanctuary for wild life; dippers, moorhens, and an abundance of duck moved over or above its surface. In the clear waters beneath their centreboard, many shoals of fish were visible.

They were in no mood to appreciate the natural attractions. The weather had turned blustery, they did not know in which direction they should sail. Rain, galloping over the face of the water, sent them scurrying for shelter under the spare sail. As the showers grew heavier and the breeze failed, Greybeard and Charley rowed them to one of the islands, and there they made camp.

It was dry under the sail, and the weather had turned milder, but a sense of depression settled on them as they watched shawls of water and cloud embrace the landscape. Greybeard husbanded a small fire into life, which set them all coughing, for the smoke would not disperse. Their spirits only recovered when Pitt appeared, shrunken, withered, weathered, but triumphantly bearing a pair of fine beaver on his back. One of the beavers was a giant, four feet long from whiskers to tail. Pitt reported a colony of them only a hundred yards away; the few that were about had shown no fear of him.

”I’ll catch another pair in the morning for breakfast,” he said. “If we’ve got to live like savages, we may as well live as well as savages.”