By the angle of Friday’s evening light on the southern waters, long and low and of the colour the older drakes call acceptable on balance, the south bank looked a good station for a piece on the first hours of the weekend. The post was settled at the western end when the rehearsal, by accident or otherwise, began. The first phrase arrived around the fifth honk. The station held. What reached the bank is set down here. What did not is not.
The phrase ran longer than the ones reported on the warm evening of the twenty-second. Where last week’s rehearsal had given sequences of roughly eight breaths and then twelve, Friday gave more. The first sequence ran about twelve, then a pause of four or five, then a second of about sixteen. A much longer pause followed, long enough that the thing seemed at first to have ended. Then came a third, of nearly twenty. The third was the most complete phrase the rehearsal has yet produced. It closed on a note both voices seemed to reach together and to hold, very briefly, before letting it fall.
The two voices were of distinct register, as the correspondent of the twenty-second also found. The higher carried further across the water. The lower, on Friday, was audible more often than it had been before, and on the third sequence in particular kept a steady second part under the upper voice for the whole length of the phrase. That is this paper’s hearing, offered with a correspondent’s caution and not a critic’s. The gazette has no schooling in the technicalities of harmony and will not pretend to a vocabulary it has not earned. It will say only this. The third sequence put into the notebook the word “together,” which had not before been written of these rehearsals.
The older drakes were at their station, a little to the right. Their talk ran, the whole time, at the volume they keep for the south bank in the evening. Fragments came over: “she’s coming on,” and “well, she would, with that one to follow.” Just after the third sequence closed, a single remark went up that will not be transcribed here. It produced among the four of them what can only be called a settled silence. The conversation picked up again, lower, once the rehearsal had ended, and went on some minutes more without another fragment carrying.
Across the water, at the seaward end of the west pier, the family of dabchicks held standard formation. They did not seem to be attending. The eldest was out on the pier’s outer edge, facing a direction that would have set the southern waters squarely before her, had the rehearsal been a thing the eye could see. The heron stood at the western end of the pier, where it stands. It did not move.
By the seventh honk the light had begun to leave the water, and the rehearsal had not, after the third sequence, come back. This paper waited the proper interval, long enough to be sure the evening’s work was done and no longer, and left toward the reeds. The phrase of twenty breaths, which had risen over the southern waters and not, on Friday, faltered, stayed in the ear a good way down the bank. Whether the next rehearsal carries further than this one, or whether Friday was the night the thing arrived, the season has not yet said.