News from Nowhere | Page 6

and
friendly look about his eyes,--an expression which was quite new to me
then, though I soon became familiar with it. For the rest, he was
dark-haired and berry-brown of skin, well-knit and strong, and
obviously used to exercising his muscles, but with nothing rough or
coarse about him, and clean as might be. His dress was not like any
modern work-a-day clothes I had seen, but would have served very
well as a costume for a picture of fourteenth century life: it was of dark
blue cloth, simple enough, but of fine web, and without a stain on it. He
had a brown leather belt round his waist, and I noticed that its clasp
was of damascened steel beautifully wrought. In short, he seemed to be
like some specially manly and refined young gentleman, playing
waterman for a spree, and I concluded that this was the case.
I felt that I must make some conversation; so I pointed to the Surrey
bank, where I noticed some light plank stages running down the
foreshore, with windlasses at the landward end of them, and said,
"What are they doing with those things here? If we were on the Tay, I
should have said that they were for drawing the salmon nets; but
here--"
"Well," said he, smiling, "of course that is what they ARE for. Where
there are salmon, there are likely to be salmon-nets, Tay or Thames; but
of course they are not always in use; we don't want salmon EVERY
day of the season."
I was going to say, "But is this the Thames?" but held my peace in my
wonder, and turned my bewildered eyes eastward to look at the bridge
again, and thence to the shores of the London river; and surely there
was enough to astonish me. For though there was a bridge across the
stream and houses on its banks, how all was changed from last night!
The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the
engineer's works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of rivetting
and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft's. Then
the bridge! I had perhaps dreamed of such a bridge, but never seen such
an one out of an illuminated manuscript; for not even the Ponte
Vecchio at Florence came anywhere near it. It was of stone arches,
splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong; high enough also
to let ordinary river traffic through easily. Over the parapet showed
quaint and fanciful little buildings, which I supposed to be booths or

shops, beset with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets. The stone was
a little weathered, but showed no marks of the grimy sootiness which I
was used to on every London building more than a year old. In short, to
me a wonder of a bridge.
The sculler noted my eager astonished look, and said, as if in answer to
my thoughts -
"Yes, it IS a pretty bridge, isn't it? Even the up-stream bridges, which
are so much smaller, are scarcely daintier, and the down-stream ones
are scarcely more dignified and stately."
I found myself saying, almost against my will, "How old is it?"
"Oh, not very old," he said; "it was built or at least opened, in 2003.
There used to be a rather plain timber bridge before then."
The date shut my mouth as if a key had been turned in a padlock fixed
to my lips; for I saw that something inexplicable had happened, and
that if I said much, I should be mixed up in a game of cross questions
and crooked answers. So I tried to look unconcerned, and to glance in a
matter-of-course way at the banks of the river, though this is what I saw
up to the bridge and a little beyond; say as far as the site of the
soap-works. Both shores had a line of very pretty houses, low and not
large, standing back a little way from the river; they were mostly built
of red brick and roofed with tiles, and looked, above all, comfortable,
and as if they were, so to say, alive, and sympathetic with the life of the
dwellers in them. There was a continuous garden in front of them,
going down to the water's edge, in which the flowers were now
blooming luxuriantly, and sending delicious waves of summer scent
over the eddying stream. Behind the houses, I could see great trees
rising, mostly planes, and looking down the water there were the
reaches towards Putney almost as if they were a lake with a forest shore,
so thick were the big trees; and I said aloud, but as if to myself -
"Well, I'm glad that they have not built over Barn Elms."
I blushed for my fatuity as