The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  “Well—” began the Mole, sounding as though that would not in fact bother him much, but the Badger interrupted.

  “Mole, I am surprised at you. You, a Mole! Hitherto invariably courteous and gentlemanly; a generous host; a true and amiable friend. And yet, every time anyone mentions these young ladies, you become sullen and petulant—yes, I said ‘petulant,’” the Badger said, as the Mole opened his mouth to object, “and I meant ‘petulant.’ Where is the parfit gentil Mole I have learned to hold up to others as a model of proper behavior?”

  The Mole sighed. “Of course you are right. It’s just—no. No,” he said, more firmly. “You are right. A Mole does not shirk. I apologize to you, Badger—and you, Ratty. I am sure I have been a sad trial. They will disrupt everything in some uncomfortable fashion, I am sure; but that is no reason to be unpleasant about it all. I will do better.”

  “That is the Mole we admire,” said the Badger approvingly. “When you come to Toad’s tea, you shall see they are not so bad.”

  “Wait!” said the Mole. “You didn’t say we had to meet them, as well!”

  The Rat said lazily, “Don’t be an ass, Moley, of course we’re invited. It’s Toad. He’ll want moral support. And the food will be excellent, so there’s that.”

  Chapter Two

  Tea at Toad Hall

  The weather remained fine for the Toad’s tea party, and so it was that the Mole, the Water Rat, their friend the Otter, and the Badger were all standing together on Toad Hall’s southern terrace wearing clean collars, everyone with his fur brushed until it glowed. Even the Badger had left behind his comfortable tweed hacking jacket, with the patches on the elbows and its sagging pockets full of pipe supplies and pen-knives and other interesting objects, and had donned instead an ancient, beautifully cut, but somewhat worn morning coat and trousers. He was turning the tall hat around in his paws by the brim, exchanging pleasantries with their host, the Toad.

  “Waiting for females; typical,” the Mole groused to the Rat—but softly, so that the others might not overhear. He scuffed a paw across the golden flagstones. “This is precisely the sort of disruption I meant: tight collars and every button buttoned and all that—when we could be halfway to the pike pond, just messing about; or getting out the things for lawn-bowling; or most anything but this.”

  But the Rat only chuckled and shook his head. “Just wait until the eating starts, and you will forgive everything.” A few yards away, there were several small tables set with the snowiest linen, and an immense sideboard (brought out from the dining room so that the staff could hand things around in the most expeditious fashion) crowded intriguingly with trays, plates, salvers, cake-stands, pitchers, and jugs, all covered with lace-edged napkins. He went on, “No, I shouldn’t mind being back into my old flannel bags, but this isn’t so bad!”

  “So long as that’s all it is,” began the Mole in a low voice. “You know Toad, Ratty. I shouldn’t be surprised if he proved as susceptible to the attractions of young ladies as he is to motor-cars, caravans, and the like. It starts with tea but it could end anywhere at all, and I wouldn’t dress up and stand around like this more than once, not for all the tea and cakes in the world.”

  But the Toad caught his last words and only said with a laugh, “O, Mole, don’t be such a grouch! You look very dapper indeed. You all do; and it’s worth everything just to see old Badger here in his finery. Very swank! Anyway, we are much too rustic here on the River Bank, I always say. We could all use some town-bronze. Well, nearly all of us.” The Toad ran a paw lovingly down his lapel. He was quite glorious, shining in the sunlight in a white jacket of shockingly modern cut: short where it should be long, and narrow where it should be broad. It could not be said to flatter his figure, which was rather round than otherwise, but it was incontestably le dernier cri—or it might be, anyway; none of the other animals had ever seen anything like it before.

  The Badger shook his head. “Toad, it is one thing for you to dress like this. You are rich and a known eccentric”—the Toad puffed up a bit at this, taking it for a compliment—“though what your father would have said about such a coat, I shall not speculate. But for you to encourage decent, proper fellows like the Mole here to imitate such a mode—”

  “They’re here!” the Otter exclaimed suddenly in a low voice, and the animals all turned. Indeed they were. Beryl and the Rabbit were being led around the corner of the house; Beryl behaving very properly, her attention directed towards her host and expressing no more than the appropriate amount of pleasant anticipation; but the Rabbit staring all about her, her eyes enormous in her pretty, round face, and her ears twitching every which way. As they approached, she leaned close to whisper something into Beryl’s ear while she gestured with one paw to the lawn leading down to the water’s edge, a lawn large enough for any number of croquet games.

  The Toad swelled visibly and was heard by the Mole to murmur to himself, “Quite, quite overcome, poor thing”; and then, in a louder voice, “Ladies, dear, dear ladies! You honor me! Welcome to my humble little patch of earth!” He approached and bowed, seizing and kissing Beryl’s paw with great élan and an expression so self-congratulatory and complacent that the Badger made an untranslatable noise in his throat, and the Otter was taken with a sudden fit of coughing—presumably a gnat had flown into his mouth—and had to turn away for a moment.

  The Water Rat and the Mole exchanged looks.

  “O, dear,” whispered the Water Rat. “It’s going to be like that, is it?”

  The situation was, in fact, not quite what they had feared—Toad’s conceit would never permit him to fall in love at first sight (or any other sight) with any person but himself—but nevertheless, in all the ways that mattered, it was exactly like that.

  “Dear ladies,” again said the Toad, again bowing. “You are indeed welcome! We were just chatting, my friends and I, about how we chaps have grown far too casual here in the neighborhood, with no young ladies to incite, or inspire rather, those small acts of courtesy that have such a civilizing influence here in the country, that we, ah . . .” But he had lost himself in his sentence, and trailed off to a halt, looking a little silly.

  “O, too kind!” interpolated the Rabbit in suffocated tones, but Beryl only nodded and said, very properly, “It was kind of you to invite us. Thank you so much.” Her voice was low and calm, but was there perhaps a gleam of amusement in it? She surely wasn’t laughing at them! The Mole, watching her pretty closely, could not be sure but had his suspicions.

  “O, but you do not know my friends!” the Toad exclaimed pompously. “Allow me to introduce the Badger to you . . . a very respected member of one of our older families. . . . The Water Rat, a very pleasant chap. . . . The Otter, quite the gentleman. . . . And,” he said with great smugness, just as though he were selecting the correct ace from a deck of cards as part of a magic trick, “my dear, dear friend, the Mole!—Miss Mole and Miss Rabbit,” he said to them all.

  “How do you do,” said everyone except the Mole, who mumbled something or other. Beryl added, with what might have been a deepening of the glimmer of a smile (if anyone had been certain whether she were smiling in the first place), “Mr Mole and I have met before this, though perhaps he does not recollect the occasion.”

  “You have?” exclaimed several voices at once, and various faces turned towards the Mole, but before anyone could inquire further, Beryl turned to the Toad and said, “What a charming place this is! You must tell us all about it.”

  And that was the end of that topic, for the moment, at least. Toad never needed much of an excuse to boast, and this was too fertile an opportunity to miss: two strangers who very likely could be counted upon not to interrupt him with the sorts of statements his friends were too apt to make—things like, “Don’t be an ass, Toad,” and, “Do stop bragging, old chap!” and, “What your father would say, I don’t know.”

  The subsequent tour of the house and grounds was exhaustive. Seconded good-naturedly by the Otter,
the Toad boasted his way through all the major rooms and offices, his words punctuated by oohs and o my!s from the Rabbit, and, less satisfyingly, by Beryl’s more restrained (but also more rational) compliments on such unexceptionable topics as the elegant proportions of the rooms. The Rabbit was especially entranced by the Green Room, designed by the Toad’s grand-father as a sitting room to set off his new wife’s complexion—“So romantic! ” she moaned. “Just like a fairy tale! The prince wins his bride!”

  “Rabbit . . .,” said Beryl in a tone that suggested to the suspicious Mole the rolling of eyes, but the Toad heard nothing of this and explained that it had just been restored at immense expense (he was prepared to tell them precisely how much, but was headed off from this by the Badger) after a pack of low Weasels and Stoats had destroyed it.

  He added, “If you are interested at all in our little fraças last year, you may find the next room of even greater interest,” and threw open a pair of doors.

  It was a large room, an impressive room—what was called the Library and had actually been used as such by the Toad’s father and grandfather before him—but now it had been turned into a sort of museum. The books had been shoved into the less-visible nooks and corners of the room, and the most prominent shelves were crowded with bits of rubble labeled things like: a piece of the canopy, from the queen-anne bedroom, excavated by THE TOAD, and: unidentified sherd, from the butler’s pantry, found by THE TOAD. There were as well weapons of every size and sort: swords, daggers, cutlasses, cudgels, staffs, and sticks. Over the mantel, the Toad had caused to be mounted a tasteful arrangement of crossed swords and pistols, clustered appetizingly on either side of a large painting in a gilded rococo frame, of a mighty Toad brandishing pistols in each hand, vanquishing quite a crowd of Weasels, Stoats, and Foxes, as a rather smaller Badger, Mole, and Water Rat looked on admiringly from the corners of the picture. There was some sort of a thunderstorm going on in the background, and a bit of sunlight breaking through managed to illuminate the Toad while leaving everything else in gloom. A small brass plate affixed to the frame read, The Valiant Toad, amidst the Fray.

  “What!” said the Badger, turning suddenly upon the hapless Toad. “What is this—this atrocity?”

  “O, well, as to that,” said the Toad with a careless gesture towards the mantel; “I thought you might not have seen this yet. I have only just finished putting the room back together. I had someone down from Town throw it together, a very up-and-coming young man, pictures in the Academy Exhibition and all that. I think he captured your dignity, your real nobility of expression, don’t you?” he added, in a weaker voice. Toad had been rather dreading this disclosure and had hoped that the presence of such strangers as Miss Mole and the Rabbit—females, too—might mitigate to some degree the Badger’s anticipated reaction: unsuccessfully, as it was turning out.

  “Toad,” said the Water Rat sternly, “this is appalling. What happened to the better, more modest Toad who made so many promises to us all last year? The Toad who would not aggrandize himself; the contrite Toad, who freely acknowledged his faults and strove to amend his behavior?”

  The Toad said with a surprised expression, “Was I supposed to remain that way?”

  Said the Badger, severely, “And it is worse than that. Toad, it is one thing for you to act foolish to us—we may be disappointed, but we are not at least surprised—but you have been lying to an artist! ‘The Valiant Toad’—faugh! I only hope you paid him well for this . . . this debasement of his craft—” He held up his paw as the Toad opened his mouth. “No. I do not wish to know how well you paid. This all must be removed immediately, and the room returned to what it was.”

  “Quite right,” nodded the Water Rat. “Really, Toad, what were you thinking?”

  But the Rabbit exclaimed, “O, no! Mr Badger, do not say so! Such an exciting event, and everyone so courageous! It should be memorialized!” She pressed her paws together. “I am agog! Why, you are all heroes!”

  “Well, as to that,” the Toad said modestly but with one wary eye on the Badger. “I did not do so very much. It was these three that saved the day, you know. But I did do quite a lot of fighting, yes,” he continued, perking up. “Quite mowed them down, you might say. Perhaps the ladies would like to repair to the tea tables? I am sure the lemonade shall be getting warm.”

  The lemonade was not warm, a tribute to the Toad’s competent household staff, and they all fell to with a will. Toad Hall had always been famed for the excellence of its kitchens, bakery, and cellar, and in this at least the Toad had proved himself the equal of his father, and even of his grandfather, who had been famed throughout the county for his hospitality. There was Indian tea and Ceylonese tea and Chinese tea. There was lemonade and raspberry juice and champagne and claret and beer (the last for the Water Rat, but served in a goblet so as not to seem low). There were charming little sandwiches, some filled with watercress and others filled with pink shavings of ham, and yet others with a delicious orange paste that tasted of curry and chicken, and scones and cakes and—well, there was a lot of it, and it was all very good, and that is all I can say about that without going on for pages and pages and leaving you very dissatisfied with your own teas.

  At his small table Toad had seated the young ladies to either hand, and the easygoing Otter with them. The Mole, the Rat, and the Badger were at a second table close beside the first; and thus separated from his most usual critics, the Water Rat and the Badger, the Toad absolutely let himself go.

  “Well, it was no great matter,” began the Toad in a self-effacing tone when the Rabbit asked him to tell her more about the attack upon Toad Hall. He cocked one eye at the Badger to see whether he were listening, but that worthy beast was in close conversation with the Water Rat and the Mole and evidently paying no heed; and as for the Otter, he was gazing at the Toad with affectionate interest and no apparent intention of queering the game. “I was away from home for some time—on business, you know—and returned to find that in my absence the place had been overrun by Wild Wooders. So I organized my friends, armed everyone, and off we went! There were hundreds of them, and, O, it was a battle! Hours of combat! Weasels, tossed from the windows! Stoats, cast into the River! Ferrets, weltering in their own gore! And who was it that did all this? Only Toad! A slash to the left—a Fox falls, thanks to Toad! A blow to the right—down goes a Cat! Toad, again! A fierce Capybara, escaped from the zoo, joins the fray! What now? Toad saves us all! Here, a Badger finds himself cornered by a score of villainous Weasels: What to do, what to do? A Toad to the rescue! There, a Water Rat weeping—”

  “Toad!” The Badger’s thundering voice from the other table caused the Toad to drop his butter knife, which he had been brandishing in a manner that boded ill for the Rabbit’s whiskers, for she was leaning forward as far as she could, her eyes shining. “What bragging lies are you telling?”

  “Lies?” the Toad exclaimed, with an affronted expression. “Badger, I am only telling them a bit of the history of last year’s events. I have not forgotten (though you may have) that I have learnt my lesson—though I may have gotten carried away a bit, just at the end,” he admitted.

  “No, Toad, it was all mere fabrication, beginning to end.” The Badger leaned across to Beryl. “Toad was not away on business at all. In fact, he was—”

  “No, no,” said the Toad, weakly. “The ladies don’t need—”

  “—in prison,” the Badger said firmly. “For motor-car stealing. Madam, if you are to stay here, it is best that you know what sort of people your neighbors are.”

  “Motor-cars,” Beryl said, though she sounded more amused than distressed. “Dear me, that is very bad; but perhaps it will not be such a great issue for the Rabbit and myself, as we do not have a motor-car. More tea, Mr Mole?”

  “And horse-stealing,” said the Water Rat, adding his mite. “And impersonating a washerwoman, and defrauding the rails, and horse-stealing—or did I say that already?”

  “You did,” said Beryl.


  “You did,” affirmed the Mole. “And there was a second motor-car theft, was there not? I cannot keep track.”

  “O, how thrilling!” said the Rabbit, her ribbons fluttering with excitement. “It is all exactly like the ancient Greeks!”

  “Ulysses?” Beryl said drily. “Very likely.”

  “O, Beryl.” The Rabbit looked reproachfully at her companion.

  “It was all just a misunderstanding,” explained the Toad to the Rabbit, taking little heed of Beryl, as he knew no Greeks ancient or otherwise, except for owning a very old vase covered with any number of them, all inadequately clad. “All most unfortunate. And there was no harm done! I escaped, with no aid whatsoever—charmed the jailor’s daughter—tricked a railroad engine-driver, oh ho!—fooled an old canal-woman, and stole her horse, and sold it to great advantage—sweet-talked a fine breakfast from a gypsy: quite one of my brethren of the road and a very good chap—”

  “Very like Ulysses,” Beryl said, more drily still. The Mole opened his mouth as though to say something, but shut it again abruptly.

  The Toad continued, unheeding, “And stole again the very motorcar that had started the whole thing! Could anyone else have done this? No, only Toad! Toad, the—” He suddenly noticed every eye upon him: the Rabbit’s, round with wonder, but the rest expressing skepticism, amusement, and annoyance compounded in various proportions. He ended, in a more rational tone, “Anyway, all’s well that ends well, I always say; and here I am, an entirely reformed Toad.”

  “All was not well,” interjected the Water Rat. “Except for the barristers you had to pay, and the Exchequer you sent the fines to. They ended up well enough,” he said with a grin.

  But the Rabbit did not care. This Toad—this courageous, gay, glorious Toad—seemed to her a sort of beau ideal, precisely the sort of fellow a young animal might esteem and even strive to emulate. She exclaimed, “You are so very resourceful!”