The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  “Not at all, not at all,” the Toad said. “You seem a Rabbit of intrepidity. I am sure you have had adventures of your own.”

  “O no, nothing to compare,” the Rabbit said with envy. “I have only been in a hot-air balloon ascent, and there was the time I became involved in a bank robbery. But they were very nearly accidents.” She sounded regretful.

  “Dear Lottie,” said Beryl warningly, in a tone most of those present recognized, having used it themselves many times with the Toad. “I am sure the gentlemen do not care about our doings.” It was clear that, by her intonation of the word,“our,” Beryl meant “your.”

  But the Toad patted the Rabbit’s hand patronizingly. “You have not of course had the same opportunities as I. Perhaps another time, I will share with you a few of my adventures, when I travelled across England in a caravan.”

  The Water Rat said rudely, “You mean, crashing it in a ditch within a few miles of home.” This was all quite wearing to an animal of sense.

  “A caravan!” the Rabbit cried, unheeding. “Of all the things, the activity I wish most to try!”

  “Indeed?” said the Toad. “It was the neatest thing! I quite loved my caravan. So compact! Everything in its place! The open road before one! Indeed, I thought it was the only thing, until I began motoring.”

  “Motoring!” the Rabbit gasped, and clasped her paws together. “So you did not merely steal a motor-car? Perhaps you even owned one?”

  The Toad bowed, one eye on the glowering Badger, whose expression was darkening by the minute, rather like a summer cloud just before the first thunderclap that presages the deluge. “Before I became the quiet, mannerly animal you see before you, I was indeed a motorist—the fastest, most dangerous, riskiest motorist that ever was! Before I reformed, that is,” he added hastily.

  But even the Mole had at last had enough. The Badger was speechless because he could not select which of the many hot words upon the tip of his tongue he wished first to say; and the Otter, most reprehensibly, was struggling not to laugh. The Mole whispered to the gaping Water Rat, “Cannot anyone stop that Rabbit? Toad is bad enough without encouragement, but she is absolutely inciting him and you know where that will end.”

  “I do indeed.” The Water Rat eyed the Toad, who was visibly expanding under the Rabbit’s admiring eye. “It will end, as Toad’s exploits always end, with a wreck of some sort, and then constables. No, you are right, we must stop this.” And when a moment came in the Toad’s perorations into which he could interject a word, he said more loudly, “Toady, perhaps the young ladies would like to see the lime alley before they leave?”

  Chapter Three

  Arcadia

  Beryl awoke suddenly in her soft little bed. What was it that had pulled her from her dreams? She had it. A bird had begun singing just beyond her open window, a complex trill so sweet in tone, so gay and bright, that she had awakened smiling and could not stop. What was that bird? She did not know it.

  There was no going back to sleep, not in a day that had started with that lovely, liquid sound. She tossed aside the red counterpane and padded across the creaking wooden floor, so cool under her bare paws, to pull aside the curtain and push open the casement.

  O, the smell! Beryl leaned out, breathed and breathed again until she was dizzy with that intoxicating blend of dew-wet grass and eglantine, meadow-sweet, and lupins; cows a long way off; and under it all, the scent of the River itself, a warm summertime odor of mud like yeast-bread rising, and pleasure-boats, and fish in their home.

  And, O, the birds! She could not work out where was the bird that was singing so beautifully, only that it was somewhere at the foot of the cottage lawn; but now it was being joined by others, one and two and then ten and twenty others, until the air was filled with trills and warblings, the morning greetings of a city of trees and bushes filled with merry-hearted and very talkative residents. She recognized the monotone boom of a bittern down among the rushes (but how did she know that?), and an owl’s deep hoot as she floated home after her short night’s business (for she was complaining to herself: all this waking-up chattering, when any right-thinking bird knew that it was time for sleep!); and a wren’s quick pattering melody. But there were others—so many others!—she did not recognize, and always, always amid the chorus, the enchanting, unknown song.

  The sky, which had started out nearly dark, only the faintest promise of light in the east, was blooming now, all the colors of a summer’s worth of flowers: rose and lavender and lilac shading into cornflower and delphinium and loosestrife, and everything changing even as she tried to record it all in her mind’s eye; for Dawn can never be caught in more than snatches, each glimpse promising more than can ever be captured.

  The world beneath that glowing sky was dimmed, softened by a haze of mist that gentled every outline, but she could still picture it all. There was the cottage’s lawn and the enormous chestnut tree at its foot; there, the golden-graveled footpath that followed the bank; there, the dark slender spires of the lupins and rushes in their serried ranks; and there, best of all, the River itself, smooth with summer, whispering softly to herself as she idled past with the unhurried grace of a queen. And past the water, the far bank and its little fields and meadows, the tidy hedgerows spangled with hawthorns and dog-roses that shone like tiny stars; and then, nearly to the horizon, the black tangle of woods, and beyond that—nothing, only the sky, brighter and brighter.

  And, O, the Dawn! Now the first rose-red sliver of the rising sun slid above the land, and all the world began to take on its proper colors, green and brown and gold, and the sky became the color of sky, and the air the color of air, and it was only then, after the day was truly begun, that she realized that, at some point in all that glorious dawning, the strange and lovely song had ended.

  There came on her such a sense of urgency to get out into the July morning that she could not stay still. It seemed as though there was not a moment to lose, already so many moments lost. There was work to do today, but how could she, after such a song? She splashed herself with cold water from the ewer on her bureau, and dressed quickly.

  “Rabbit! Rabbit!” she called as she pattered down the hall and threw open the Rabbit’s bedroom door. “Get up!” she said, and snatched a pillow away. “It is the most beautiful day!” But the Rabbit only gave a soft howl and pulled another pillow over her ears. Beryl, knowing the signs, gave her up for lost and ran down the stairs.

  In a corner of the shady parlor, close beside a window, was her writing desk. A quire of creamy laid paper was stacked neatly in one corner; her green-celluloid fountain pen with its black cap and its gold fittings atop it; the ink-bottle beside another pile of pages covered with Beryl’s tidy copperplate handwriting: The Novel.

  Beryl was an Authoress. Her first novel had been secretly written on a little table in the room she shared with one of her sisters, and no one had been more surprised than she when she had sent it to a Publisher, and that Publisher had Published it. The Haunted Treasure of Bone Island had been bound in pale-blue buckram with a very exciting picture embossed in three colors upon the cover, of a sailing ship, pirates (one with a peg leg), a ghost, and a great conflagration; with the title in gold above it, and below it (also in gold) her name, B. P. Mole. There had been four novels since then: The Counsel of Storm Rock; The Iron Hare of Chateau Sang; 19 Croquet Lane; and M. Bourne, Vivisectionist; and (except for 19 Croquet Lane, which had posted disappointing sales; no one, it turned out, was much interested in a B. P. Mole novel without a single supernatural visitation), each had been more popular than the previous one.

  The Novel! She had tentatively entitled it Philotera’s Horror. There was a calm yet plucky heroine; a locked, battered iron box with a missing key and mysterious runes scratched across its lid (perhaps cursed; Beryl hadn’t decided yet); a ruined estate in Cornwall (for research she was relying heavily upon a souvenir folder of tourist postcards entitled Scenic Cornwall, Land of Tintagel!); an ancient sage who existed in t
he novel solely to pass on to the heroine a forbidden secret of mind-control, and immediately afterward to die before her horrified eyes; a poisonous serpent being kept as a pet in a basket in the villain’s lair (which Beryl knew would come in handy for the plot at some point); and an endangered orphanage filled with children that reminded the heroine of herself when she was a lass. Every morning from nine until lunchtime Beryl wrote, and from three in the afternoon until teatime she revised her work, writing it out again clean. She was on page two hundred and six.

  Every morning—but not this divine morning, not when the air was intoxicating and filled with golden light and adventure. Spend the day in a stuffy parlor making a mess of perfectly good blank paper? Stringing drab words together without a hope of any spark to set them afire? Working out the really very dreary doings of her uninteresting heroine, some way to paste over the gaps in her (she saw it now) contrived and artificial plot? And all the while, just outside her window, the glowing green of the lawn, the lovely clouds in the sky, the first boating parties on the River; the River itself, its easy low laughter as it burbled? Rather not!

  “I need a holiday, I think,” she said aloud.

  As she passed through the parlor, the Novel spoke to her as a housemate does when one first enters the breakfast room, looking up from the morning newspaper with a welcoming smile but saying no more than, “I say, have you heard—?” The Novel spoke pleasantly to Beryl, but she only shook her head impatiently, as though to say, Not now; there is something more urgent on my mind: a thing that, in that hypothetical breakfast room, would be coffee; but that, here and now, on this divine morning, was nothing less than the urgent call of the world itself.

  With a flicker of guilt she filched a sheet of paper from the Novel’s virgin quire, to scratch out a note to the Rabbit—but standing at the desk, so as not to get ensnared. The Novel whispered to her, coaxed her, hectored her, shouted at her, but she ignored all its pleas and demands. In the end, it let her go, as one finally opens the back door to let out a whining dog to run in circles for a few minutes before it is called back inside.

  From the cool, dark larder Beryl collected half a loaf of bread, some butter in a rough little pottery tub, a corked bottle of fizzy lemonade, and a corkscrew—for she was a sensible Mole, the sort of person who liked to plan ahead and did not leave things to chance; not at all like her heroine, in fact. She tucked everything into a little knapsack along with a novel she was reading (for research purposes), entitled The Corpse with the Missing Toe, then she slipped out the door and down to the toolshed at the bottom of the lawn, where she kept her bicycle.

  The River greeted her as though they were old friends who had made plans for this morning: a rippling, endless, affectionate chuckle, confidential and quiet, as though trying not to wake anyone else up and have them horn in on the fun: pleased with its company and the prospect of a day together. The rising sun flickered upon the River’s dancing surface, sparking reflections on the toolshed wall and the undersides of the overhanging elms. Dragonflies as big as Beryl’s paw hovered above the water. A heron appeared suddenly, its vast wings making an audible sound as it flew upstream, to some hidden hunting ground.

  Beryl removed her bicycle from the toolshed, checked its tires and its brakes (she was a sensible Mole), and then she was off, pedaling along the river-path. The sun was still not quite clear of the horizon.

  Mile after mile. The crunch of gravel beneath the bicycle wheels mingled with the endless chuckling sound of the River and the birdsong everywhere. The river-path passed a stand of poplars and then plunged into a shrubbery that went down to the water’s edge itself.

  She came to a place where a canal opened into the River, and she paused a moment at the top of the little bridge to remove her jacket and put it into the bicycle’s wicker basket, for, early as it was, the day was growing hot. On one side, the canal was a calm band of dark water that threaded past reeds and rushes and water-meadows—could she see water lilies, in a half-hidden inlet?—losing itself under an arched stone bridge some distance away to the west. Just below the bridge it opened into the River. At first the River rejected the canal water, which remained a dark streak against its muddier brown, with coils and curls where the two waters greeted one another warily; but the River’s brown triumphed at last. They combined and the canal’s limpid darkness was lost; and on the augmented River went, on and on, joined by other canals and rivers and streams, on and on, until it came to the Sea and was in its turn vanquished.

  Beryl was looking down into the water musingly and saw a coracle upon the river, an unfamiliar Mouse (but so many of the River Bank folk were still strangers to her) on her way to the morning’s shopping, with her daughter plying the oars. “Nice weather, miss,” the Mouse called up, with the closest she could get to a respectful curtsey without standing up in the coracle. Even so, it bobbed and wobbled in a way that made her daughter say, “Steady on, Mum!”

  “Yes, lovely,” said Beryl. Common courtesy demanded a pleasant reply (and in any case, it was too beautiful a day for anything less than the cheeriest of words), but before she could say more the coracle and its occupants were past, out of earshot and hidden by the rushes along the River Bank. But perhaps it was for the best that her trance had been broken, or she might have spent all that morning upon the footbridge.

  Mile after mile rolled away beneath the wheels of her bicycle. She felt the changes in the path through the tires: here gravel, there a drying puddle, there earth beaten down iron-hard beneath a slick of sticky mud, across a lawn or field. The path ducked beneath a metalled road bridge. She reveled in the moment of cool, damp darkness, and the sounds overhead of horses pulling a heavy dray, and then a motor-car. “They have no idea I am down here,” she said to herself. “Why, I might be a spy! Or a bandit, setting an ambush. If there were two of us, now. . . .” She thought of writing down a few details that might be useful for the Novel, but she had no paper nor a pen, and— “O, hang the book!” she said, for by then the bicycle had swept her back into the sunlight, which glanced down in patches through the trees. The stately pile of Toad Hall was ahead of her upon the opposite bank—the gold stone and gothic arches, the many chimney pots, the gardener trimming a hedge—all so much more interesting and lovely than any words she could contrive.

  Beyond Toad Hall she was in unfamiliar country, for she had never gone so far before this and had brought no map. The River was still her friend, still chuckling, but younger upstream, a little wilder, perhaps. Throughout the morning, she had passed River Bankers on the path, but the heat of the day had driven many of them home or onto the water, and perhaps fewer of them lived up here. She passed blackberry brambles, the first black fruits ripening on their bushes, and realized that she was thirsty and very hungry. She stopped to collect handful of berries, rather staining her fingers and the linen handkerchief in which she collected them. They tasted warm and sweet and tart; but she ate only a few, for she did not want to spoil her luncheon.

  She stopped again just a little farther on, when she came to a sheep-cropped field. Leaving her bicycle beside the path, she walked up to a lone oak upon the crest of a hill. She spread a cloth on the grass there, and there she laid out her picnic—the bread and sweet butter, the sun-heated blackberries, and the bottle of fizzy lemonade, quite warm now and not nearly as nice as she had imagined it would be early that morning, though still refreshing.

  She looked about her as she ate. She could see far in nearly every direction: to the north-east, where the Town lay (though it was not visible, of course); south-east down to Toad Hall, and beyond it, a village with a church steeple and an inn and a parsonage and a few shops and some cottages: a village for men and women and their children; just to the south of that, the great bend of the River that was home. She stared and stared, but could see nothing of Sunflower Cottage’s red-tiled roof. Was that the big chestnut, down by the water? The River glittered under the noonday sun. Just on the horizon to the south was the great dark tangle of th
e Wild Wood, where she knew the Badger lived, along with any number of uncivilized animals.

  She did not rise from her comfortable position leaning against the tree to face west, for she knew already just what was behind her: more fields and copses and farmsteads and villages; streams and rivers and the canal, curving off to the north; and then, miles and miles away, to the north-east, the busy, busy Hills, where she and the Rabbit were from.

  The Hills! It was a world as busy as the River Bank—in its own way, busier. The Hills were pasturage and fields, long smooth slopes of grass kept short by sheep and cattle, scattered with copses of beech and oak and ash, and long narrow strips of trees tucked into the folds between the hills. The spaces were more open, and people were not so common a sight, so the animals there—the nice animals: Moles, Rabbits, Hares, Hedgehogs, Mice, and all the rest, though to be sure the others, the Foxes and Voles and such, were common enough as well—were often out and about, doing their shopping, or calling upon one another, or joining little Improving Societies where one might learn drawn-threadwork or see magic-lantern shows about Africa. It was not always an easy life, but it was usually a jolly one.

  The River Bank was less—bumptious, she supposed she must say. The residents did not rush about and shout across lanes quite so often; they did not run through the dew in nothing but their chemises for sheer simple joy on a lovely July morning. The young males of the River Bank did not dare one another to go down and tease the farm dogs. But she liked everyone she had met here. They were pleasant, entertaining, and willing to let her live her life just as she wished.

  Though, what of the Mole? He had been quite rude every time she encountered him, and more than once she had seen him duck into a convenient copse of trees rather than meet her face-to-face. Whenever they had been jointly guests at Toad Hall, he had said almost nothing to her; though in any case, it was hard to get a word in edgewise with the Toad, and he could be forgiven for silence, if only it had not been accompanied by a brooding frown whenever he looked at her. Well, Moles were solitary fellows by nature—she was herself, she knew. Though the Rabbit was entertaining company, she became a little fatiguing from time to time. Why should the Mole feel any differently?