The Feast of July [antikvár]

She was looking for a man named Arch Wilson and she was walking south-westward, alone, towards the middle of the country, with another fifty or sixty miles to go. All day, after two days and nights of rain, water had been rising in the dykes, and now it was creeping rapidly up the five stone arches of the bridge where she stood watching the wide rainy valley up which the tongue of river finally lost itself in a grey country of winter elms. Down below her was a boat, partly covered by a green tarpaulin. She had some crazy idea that she could sleep in the boat. As far as she could teil there were no oars in it. The mooring chain was padlocked to an ash-stake driven in the mud. It was fifteen or twenty feet from the boat to the water's edge and beyond it, high up, was an open wooden shed. Inside the shed was a second boat and she was wondering if the oars too could be there. She was wondering too how hard a kick it would need to break the ash-stake out of the mud. Fifty or sixty yards beyond the shed was a house, a low yellow-brick blue-slated house with a big cheese of a grindstone standing in the yard outside, and she was watching that too. She walked along the bridge, slowly. She was not a tall girl but she walked as a tall girl does, upright, feeling her way, bare head thrown up and backwards. Her hands were small and slender. She was carrying everything she had in a black oilcloth bag she had taken from the cellar of The Three Bells hotel, where she had been working all summer as a bedroom maid, and there was a smell of beer on the bag that the rain had still not washed away.