Mabel of the north bank was at the south bank on Sunday afternoon, alone. She had taken up a spot some way west of the older drakes’ usual station and some way east of the reeds where the running order had, until lately, been on public view. Your correspondent had walked the bank on another errand and had not expected her. The reporter settled in to watch from a distance she will, on reflection, accept as proper to the practice in such matters.
By the calendar of the past week, Mabel had attended the Channel Sprint of the eighth as a spectator, with no formal part in it, by every appearance. In the days since she had not been in rehearsal, there being nothing for the moment to rehearse, nor in any correspondence, there being on Sunday no special need to hear further from her. Her presence at the bank was, the reporter judged, of the kind the customary phrase calls “for the air.”
She was reading a reed. The reed was long, of the variety common to the western end of the south bank, and had been plucked, to all appearances, from no great distance from where she sat. She held it in one wing and turned it now and then, in a way that suggested the reading was not of any text on the reed but of the reed itself, in whatever sense a reed may be read by attention. She did it in plain silence. The reed the gazette did not feel at liberty to inspect.
Hettie was not there. Hettie’s mother was not there. The Cultural Subcommittee was not there either, the body being in the interval after the programme of the twenty-first of June that the Clerk has called its “post-cultural breathing period.” Mabel was, in this as in some other things, on her own terms.
The long-resident frog of the southern waters passed through, headed east, and did not stop. He acknowledged Mabel with a small movement of the head, which she returned in kind. Neither spoke. Both, the gazette judged, were satisfied with the exchange as it stood. The frog went on his way and was, within moments, lost among the reeds. Mabel went back to the reed in her wing.
The reporter weighed, briefly, going over for a comment of even the most glancing kind, and decided, by reasoning not fully clear to her, against it. The afternoon was warm. The light was clear. Mabel had earned a stretch in which the gazette did not need to be present. So the reporter withdrew when the second honk sounded, and took some care, on the way out, to look like a bird who had come to the bank for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with her.