Tuesday on the south bank was uneventful. Not in the loose sense people sometimes mean, that nothing of any kind happened, which is seldom true even of the pond’s quietest hours. I mean it in the more exact sense this paper has, once or twice, taken care to record. No event occurred that, on reflection, needed reporting. And the absence of one was itself a condition I thought worth marking.
I took my spot at the usual remove from the older drakes’ usual station around the fourth honk. The older drakes were there. They had, by every sign, been there a while. They greeted my arrival the way parties greet one another when long practice has settled them into a respectful mutual silence: with no greeting at all. I settled in.
The water was warm. The light was clear. A leaf came off the Old Willow at about the fifth honk. It landed where it could drift, briefly, toward the southern waters. Then a small eddy of no fixed character caught it and held it, for what I clocked at two full breaths, in a pose I would call undecided. Then the leaf drifted on. I did not chase it.
The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice was visible at the sluice gate from where I sat, off and on through the morning, attending to the small daily office she has taken up in the Warden’s continued absence. She was writing in the notebook. At one point she fell into a short conference with the Clerk, who had crossed from the reeds on an errand I did not establish. The conference ended. The Clerk went back to the reeds. The Deputy went back to the gate. The Warden was not seen at any hour of the morning.
Over at the east shore, Drake Halford took the usual turn at the bend. Over at the west pier, the heron held the spot it has now kept, by my reckoning at Tuesday’s close, near enough a fortnight. The dabchicks lined up along the pier’s seaward end in what is now their standard arrangement. Nothing came across to the south bank. The fish stayed out of sight. This far into the season, the steadiness of it has the look of a fixed habit.
The older drakes, the whole time I watched, kept up a conversation of which fragments reached me. The word “Tuesday,” once. The word “well,” at intervals that came to no fewer than four. And one brief exchange whose only audible part was the word “no,” carried over with what I took to be a very mild emphasis. None of it, on reflection, asked to be interpreted further. The matters being settled were, by the look of things, being settled. They were not being settled in any hurry. The older drakes have, here as elsewhere, the privilege of long habit.
The afternoon went the same way. What little breeze there was came from the south. I filed nothing at the time, having nothing to file. I file now, in the evening, from the memory of an afternoon that was entirely the small steady business of a pond being itself, in good order, on a day when no one needed it to do anything in particular.
The news, when it comes, will come. The bank, for now, kept its own counsel, and I kept mine beside it.