THROUGH A WINDOW

After his legs were set, they carried Bailey into the study and put him on a couch before the open window.  There he lay, a live—­even a feverish man down to the loins, and below that a double-barrelled mummy swathed in white wrappings.  He tried to read, even tried to write a little, but most of the time he looked out of the window.

He had thought the window cheerful to begin with, but now he thanked God for it many times a day.  Within, the room was dim and grey, and in the reflected light the wear of the furniture showed plainly.  His medicine and drink stood on the little table, with such litter as the bare branches of a bunch of grapes or the ashes of a cigar upon a green plate, or a day old evening paper.  The view outside was flooded with light, and across the corner of it came the head of the acacia, and at the foot the top of the balcony-railing of hammered iron.  In the foreground was the weltering silver of the river, never quiet and yet never tiresome.  Beyond was the reedy bank, a broad stretch of meadow land, and then a dark line of trees ending in a group of poplars at the distant bend of the river, and, upstanding behind them, a square church tower.

Up and down the river, all day long, things were passing.  Now a string of barges drifting down to London, piled with lime or barrels of beer; then a steam-launch, disengaging heavy masses of black smoke, and disturbing the whole width of the river with long rolling waves; then an impetuous electric launch, and then a boatload of pleasure-seekers, a solitary sculler, or a four from some rowing club.  Perhaps the river was quietest of a morning or late at night.  One moonlight night some people drifted down singing, and with a zither playing—­it sounded very pleasantly across the water.

In a few days Bailey began to recognise some of the craft; in a week he knew the intimate history of half-a-dozen.  The launch Luzon, from Fitzgibbon’s, two miles up, would go fretting by, sometimes three or four times a day, conspicuous with its colouring of Indian-red and yellow, and its two Oriental attendants; and one day, to Bailey’s vast amusement, the house-boat Purple Emperor came to a stop outside, and breakfasted in the most shameless domesticity.  Then one afternoon, the captain of a slow-moving barge began a quarrel with his wife as they came into sight from the left, and had carried it to personal violence before he vanished behind the window-frame to the right.  Bailey regarded all this as an entertainment got up to while away his illness, and applauded all the more moving incidents.  Mrs Green, coming in at rare intervals with his meals, would catch him clapping his hands or softly crying, “Encore!” But the river players had other engagements, and his encore went unheeded.