III
The Canoe Adrift
In spite of the computations mentioned in the last chapter, Nigel found himself without a ticket on Oxford platform. He had to accost the collector, to be waved back until the collector had dealt with all the other passengers, and to undergo the indignity of a personally conducted tour to the guichet. His digs, however, were in the High; his education, incomplete in many respects, had at least accustomed him to quick changes, and it was only a minute or two past ten when he presented himself at the door of the Schools, white-tied and respectable.
“What are you, sir?” asked the porter.
“History.”
“History viva voce examinations don’t start till tomorrow. Ten o’clock, sir.”
Nigel turned away, hardly with the air of one disappointed, and retired to his digs. Oxford was full of all the horrors of a Long Vacation; earnest Americans with guidebooks, with sketchbooks, with cameras; charabanc-loads of breezy Midlanders, losing one another, hailing one another, roaring inaudible jokes across the street; patient little men who had come up for a summer school of Undertakers, trying to find their way back to Keble. There seemed to be no more room than during term, whether in the perilous streets or on the thronging pavements; North Oxford went marketing as relentlessly as ever; shop-assistants bicycled past, with lady shop-assistants perched stork-like on their steps; Cowley Fathers stumped along, eyes in the distance and cloak on shoulder; dons met, dons buttonholed each other, dons asked each other when each other was going down; only the undergraduate, for once, was a bird of passage. A grim notice of “Apartments to Let” hung in the window of Nigel’s own sitting-room; a pot of ferns stood underneath it—no, this was no place for him. He changed his white tie, hailed a taxi, and within a quarter of an hour had been deposited at Eaton Bridge.
The Gudgeon Inn stands close by Eaton Bridge, with a pleasant though untidy stretch of grass sloping down to the river; at the end is a tiny quay to which a few boats are moored, at the back of it a verandah, where holiday guests can have their tea in wet weather without actually going indoors. On the whole, there are worse places in which to wait for a dilatory cousin. Nigel explained his movements to the young lady at the bar, and, after consulting her as to the hour, ordered a large stone ginger. This, when it was brought out to him on the lawn, he fortified from a handy flask in his pocket, and sat down in its company to wait. It was impossible that Derek should arrive yet; on the other hand, it was pretty clear that he ought to turn up within half an hour or an hour at most; his course lay downstream, and he had a fair wind behind him. There was nothing for it but to sit here and philosophize. Indeed, the slow swirl of the river at his feet invited to philosophy; it chimed in with the mood of a man just coming down from Oxford, and with no very sensational achievements, so far, to be put down to his credit. A large peacock edged suspiciously into view: Nigel picked up some fragments of bread, doped them with gin, and threw them at the bird in the hope that it would become interested. A drunk peacock would surely be an exquisite sight; to see it lose, at last, the shocked staidness of its demeanour. A camping party on the other side of the stream, a little lower down, claimed his attention; two brawny young men appeared to be washing up dishes, and hanging clothes out to dry. Nigel speculated whether it would ever be possible to enjoy the kind of life in which you had to wash up your own dishes and feed on tinned salmon. There seemed to be people who did it for the love of the thing. Probably it was a compensation of some kind; you could explain anything as a compensation nowadays.
Half-past eleven came, and still no sign of the canoe. Nigel wandered up and down restlessly, consulting his watch at intervals; at last he ordered and consumed a solitary luncheon, of which the main features were cold mutton and cherry brandy. At about a quarter to one he decided to wait no longer; he approached the barmaid—he was getting anxious, he explained, about his friend in the canoe. The gentleman had been in poor health recently; it seemed possible that there might have been an accident of some sort. Anyhow, he intended to walk upstream and look for him; would it be possible for him to have a companion? He himself was not much of a swimmer, and it might be a good thing to have somebody present who was more of an expert; was there anybody connected with the inn who could come with him? It appeared that there was. The odd man would be prepared for any emergency; he swam like a duck he did. Nigel was introduced to the odd man, who turned out to be a very ordinary man. His engagements seemed to admit a walk of an hour or so spent in a good cause. Together they crossed the bridge, and set out upon the swathe of trodden hay, called by compliment a towpath, which runs along the eastern bank of the river.
The Muse of detective fiction—she must surely exist by now—has one disadvantage as compared with her sisters; she cannot tell a plain unvarnished tale throughout. If she did, there could be no mystery, no situation, no dénouement; the omniscience of the author and the omnipresence of the reader, walking hand in hand, would lay waste the trail; no clue would be left undiscovered, no detail lack its due emphasis. Needs must, then, that from time to time we should interrupt the thread of dull historical narration; should see the facts not as they were in themselves but as they presented themselves to those who partook in the events concerned. Let me give you, then, the next stage of my story in the form in which it appeared next morning to a million readers.
Alarm is felt here for the safety of Mr. Derek Burtell (inset), a visitor from London, who should have returned yesterday from a canoeing tour to Cricklade. He was last seen at an early hour yesterday morning, leaving Shipcote Lock, which is situated in a somewhat lonely part of the river, about six miles above Eaton Bridge. His cousin, Mr. Nigel Burtell, who had accompanied him up to that point, returned from Shipcote to Oxford by train, it being his intention to rejoin the canoe at Eaton Bridge, to which he motored out from Oxford an hour or two later. After a time the non-arrival of his fellow-traveller gave rise to alarm, and he proceeded upstream by the towpath in the direction of Shipcote, accompanied by George Lowther, a serving-man at the Gudgeon Inn.
At about half-past one they sighted the missing gentleman’s hat, which was floating in the centre of the stream; and shortly afterwards the canoe came in view, still afloat but full of water up to the gunwale. No sign was to be seen of its quondam occupant. Lowther immediately stripped and swam out to the canoe, which he brought in to shore without difficulty; then he pluckily commenced diving near the spot where the canoe had been found, to see if any further signs of the missing gentleman were forthcoming. On righting the canoe and emptying it on the bank, it was discovered that a jagged hole of considerable size had been made in one of the planks of its hull, apparently by some violent collision with the sharp gravel which fringes the bank at various neighbouring points.
Help was immediately summoned from Shipcote Lock, from Eaton, and from the village of Byworth, close to the scene of the accident. Watermen in punts were at work all yesterday afternoon dragging the bed of the stream, and search parties explored the neighbourhood of the banks, in case Mr. Burtell should have gone ashore and be in need of help. It is feared, however, that he may have succumbed to a heart attack, being prone to weakness of that organ, and fallen overboard through some lurch of the boat, the damage to its hull being inflicted subsequently. The river bed is overgrown with reeds at this point, and the search is necessarily a difficult one. Extensive inquiries have been made locally with a view to establishing the missing gentleman’s whereabouts, but up to a late hour last night no success had been reported.
A well-known figure in undergraduate Oxford, Mr. Nigel Burtell was yesterday interviewed by our representative. The sudden disappearance of his relative had been, he said, a great shock to him. He had been compelled to leave the boat at Shipcote Ferry, as he believed himself to be due in Oxford for an important examination at ten o’clock yesterday. “I have never seen my cousin in better spirits,” was his comment. “The doctor had told him to be careful about his heart, and I can only suppose that he neglected the warning and exposed himself, in my absence, to some fatal strain. We had been touring up to Cricklade, and it was on the return journey that the incident happened. My cousin did not often take exercise, and it is quite possible that the strain was too much for him.”
Interviewed yesterday, a member of the Thames Conservancy Board explained that river accidents are by no means uncommon; in his view, however, they were unavoidable. Life-belts were kept at all the locks, and the watermen, to whose splendid services he paid a glowing testimonial, did their best to ensure the public safety. There was, however, no method of patrolling the river in between the locks, and notices were prominently exposed warning the public that persons touring on the river did so at their own risk. Canoes were an unsafe form of boat for those unexperienced in swimming, since a very small alteration of equilibrium was liable to overturn them.
Mr. Derek Burtell is the son of the late Captain John Burtell, killed on active service in France. Educated at Simon Magus College, Oxford, he has recently been living in London, where the mystery of his fate will be felt with keen sympathy by a large circle of friends.
An insurance policy against accident free with every copy of this paper.
So far the ephemeral chronicler; and if anybody thinks it is easy to write that kind of English, he does less than justice to the men who make their living by it. A few details may be added to complete the picture. The spot at which the canoe was found was perhaps some three miles down from Shipcote Lock, close to a disused boathouse on the western bank. The hole in the bottom of the canoe had jagged, splintered edges, as if it had been freshly made—there was no question of an old piece of caulking having come loose. The difficulty, unanimously expressed by a solemn crowd of watermen who inspected it, was how so deep a cut could be made by mere impact against a piece of shingle. It was difficult to imagine how it could be done even if the canoe was being paddled at full speed; here it was probable that the pace was quite leisurely, even if the boat itself was not drifting at the time of the catastrophe. The owner of the canoe insisted that he had no reason to think it faulty; and indeed its appearance showed that it was almost new. The two paddles were floating near the hat. Derek’s luggage was found waterlogged in the canoe.
Eager bands of amateur detectives searched along either bank, and far back into the woods, to find any trace of the missing man, but with no success. If he had landed on the left bank, he would naturally have made for the village of Byworth, which was only half a mile from the spot; but none of the villagers, none of the labourers in the fields, had seen any trace of him. The further bank was more lonely (it was too early in the day for fishermen to be out), but there was an encampment of boy scouts a little lower down, and it was unlikely that they would have let a dripping stranger go past unnoticed. Before the end of the day the most optimistic of the bystanders admitted that they were out to find a corpse.
Nigel went back to Oxford by the last train. He had, of course, communicated with the police; there were no parents to communicate with—indeed, it was the melancholy fact, in spite of the journalist’s polite reference, that there was not a soul in the world who mourned for Derek dead, or cared whether Derek lived. He had made innumerable acquaintances, but no friends. There was nothing to be done, then, except to wait for news; and from this point of view Oxford was as good a place for Nigel as any; there was his viva, too, on the morrow; and he had in any case to spend a day or two packing up before he left the beautiful city, “breathing out,” as he said to himself, “from her gasworks all the disenchantment of middle age.” Reporters, no doubt, would be a nuisance, and even the police might want to ask questions—if Derek’s body were found, there would be all the fuss and discomfort of an inquest. He must make up his mind to go through with it. “It’ll be experience for you,” said one of the dons, vaguely enough; but this was poor consolation. Nigel held that nothing distorts one’s vision in life like experience.