The River Bank

by Kij Johnson

  Laughing to herself, she picked up the The Corpse with the Missing Toe and in only a few moments was deeply immersed. The resolution of the macabre murder of a notable philanthropist was coming to a head, and she was agog to see how the author reconciled the suspicious (but possibly unrelated) behaviors of his brother, his widow, and his chauffeur.

  She awoke suddenly some time later to hoarse breathing in her ear, and the overwhelming smell of chewed grass and wool. A sheep, wandering over to learn more of this foreign invader into its territory, had discovered the remains of the bread and begun snuffling over Beryl’s clothing, looking for more. She leapt to her feet with something very like a shriek, and the startled sheep somersaulted head over heels and stared at her with enormous resentful eyes before bleating once, indignantly, and trotting back to its fellows.

  She looked around her, brushing bits of masticated grass from her skirt. She had slept for perhaps an hour or a little more, but in that short while, everything had changed. The morning’s delightful coolness was gone, even its memory faded to nothing under the unrelenting midafternoon sun. The heat cloaked everything in a white, ungentle haze. In the distance the River shone hot and hard as a sheet of steel. A line of ants led to the empty butter crock and another away, and a fly buzzed on the last of the blackberries. Beryl felt a little sweaty and quite head-achey, as one does when one naps outside on a hot day.

  “O, bother,” she said aloud. And then, “O, bother”—for the glorious day was lost, to her anyway. The Novel had grown tired of waiting for her to return from her holidaying and was summoning her now in the peremptory fashion of a dog-owner calling his animal back to heel. She still had no interest in the words, nor the characters nor the plot, nor the desk in the parlor, nor any part of the Novel; but that did not matter. The Novel had judged it was long enough, and had whispered into her ear, “Remember, thou art a writer.”

  And she was no longer within the world, watching the path and all the lovely countryside unroll itself beneath her bicycle tires; she was Beryl-the-Author, and everything about that glorious day no longer shone in its simplicity. It would be noted and catalogued and used, somehow, somewhere, in this book or the next. And there were words to be written and a deadline— How could she have forgotten the deadline? Her editor was eager for the book; indeed, there had been a letter from him only the day before, civil, even friendly, but also quite interested in how soon we might expect &c.—and still she had that intractable problem with Chapter Six that made everything afterward feel broken and contrived, and why her heroine did not yet suspect the villain, and all those weary words yet to find—

  Almost, she might have wept.

  But she was a sensible creature. She broke the pottery crock against the oak tree’s trunk so that it would return to mud with the rain, and shook out and repacked everything else, and returned to her bicycle. And as she rolled south again, she grew calmer, and grateful for even a half-holiday. The Novel was not often so generous. And after a bit it began to absorb her, and she stopped seeing the world around her pass. Perhaps there was a way to make the attack by smugglers feel a little less coincidental? Perhaps the wicked Marquis might be seen doing something ambiguously sinister earlier? The day was not entirely gone; she might still get some good words written this evening, after tea, when the parlor had cooled down a little.

  But some small part of her fought still. Just past the canal, she thought suddenly of the willow-bramble. I will see it, she thought rebelliously and then said aloud, “I will,” as though to the world and her desk in the parlor. There was a turnoff overhung to the very ground with the willow’s heavy branches. She pushed her bicycle through the osiers and down to the water’s edge, and stood there for a few moments, looking across the River towards the eastern bank, the shining green of reeds and the gleaming brown of drying mud: and a hint, behind a tangle of sedges, of a little lagoon filled with water lilies.

  The River chuckled still, generous, undemanding, as though to say, Never mind, dear heart. I am here. Novels come and go, but until the world itself ends, I remain.

  Chapter Four

  A Regrettable Consequence

  After the tea party, the Rabbit was much at Toad Hall. Before she and Beryl had gone home, the Toad had invited them both to “drop in whenever you like for potluck. We Toads keep open house! Either of you, or both, whichever you like—for I view you as quite one of the chaps”—a sentiment that caused the Badger to shake his head in disapproval, the Mole to groan softly, and the Water Rat audibly to grind his teeth. And it was as bad as they might have imagined, for the very next day, while Beryl was busy (as she always was in the morning), the Rabbit slipped out of Sunflower Cottage and called upon the Toad, to thank him in person for his lovely party. The Toad, not an early riser, welcomed her with coffee, bacon, devilled kidneys, eggs, toast, muffins, and grapefruits in the breakfast parlor; and liberated from the regulating influence of his friends, his tales, never very close to the truth, grew so outrageous that only the most credulous of listeners could possibly believe them.

  But such was the Rabbit. She was delighted, aghast, agog; and they spent nearly the entire day together. He showed her the Library’s many objéts of interest, following up with a visit to the ruined caravan and motor-car gathering dust in Toad Hall’s stables, and to the crumpled wager-boat in the boat-house. The tales he told her strained the laws of probability and even, sometimes, of physics. The Toad (according to himself) was a Hero, plain and simple: clever, cunning, and courageous; dashing, daring, and dangerous to his foes; bold, brave, and beneficent. He faced every challenge fearlessly and with panache. He was a great traveller, an adventurer, the very devil at sport (this said without irony), and a wizard with machines. Taking his words at their face value, the Rabbit could not be faulted for seeing him as a sort of mix of Childe Harold, T. E. Lawrence, and George Stephenson; and if she did not end that first conversation thinking he had himself invented the motor-car, it is not because the Toad did not strongly imply it.

  From here things went from bad to worse. While the Toad loved the River Bank and valued his friends greatly, he had often felt the lack of a truly sympathetic companion—by which he meant someone who would listen willingly to his worst exaggerations and affect to believe his boasting. The Rabbit was a sort of dream come true, and he made the most of her company, day after day, until it became an understood thing that she would wander over immediately after breakfast (if Beryl did not want her) and spend the long daylight hours with the Toad.

  And added to all the rest was a soupçon of something new to him: envy. The Rabbit was impressed by everything he told her and becomingly reticent about her own life, but when he did pause at last and, remembering his manners, asked her to tell him a bit about herself, her disclosures caused in him little spurts of jealousy. Hot-air balloons? How had he not messed about with hot-air balloons before this? Bank robberies, forsooth? How was it that he had never chanced to be walking along in front of a bank at the very moment of a robbery and then found himself (as had happened with the Rabbit, according to her tale) swept along with the criminals into their getaway car and from thence to their hideout, all quite by accident? It was not that he wanted to be arrested and incarcerated again, not precisely—though he had gotten out of that magnificently, had he not? Why, no prison in England could hold the notorious Toad!—but it seemed a bit thick that a mere female (and a Rabbit at that) should have experienced things that had never come his way.

  This growing acquaintance blossomed in something like solitude. It was the middle of summer, the sort of glowing, beautiful July when every day is filled with activities, and even the short nights are as apt to be spent fishing or boating or walking about as in checking up on one’s neighbors. Immediately after the Toad’s tea party, the Badger had returned to the Wild Wood. When he had come to the River Bank to remind the Toad of his social responsibilities, he had left important work undone at home—a Marten had come from the north for an extended visit to some dis
tant relatives, which had riled the Stoats, who were growing restless again and needed settling down; otherwise, who knew what might come of it?—and in any case, he became impatient when separated too long from his beloved Wood.

  The Water Rat and the Mole were deep in preparations for a boating expedition upriver, something they expected to take a week or even more, and which therefore required all sorts of unexpected supplies such as rubber rafts (in case of shipwreck) and a small cannon (in case of pirates). The Otter had made it his summer’s goal to teach his son Portly to swim as well as he did himself, and they were in and out of the River a dozen times a day. The Otter had promised to take Portly to the seashore in August if he became proficient, and Portly was taking this very seriously.

  As for Beryl, she was occupied during that glorious July with work that kept her inside Sunflower Cottage. If she thought of the Rabbit’s frequent absences at all, it was with relief, assuming she was entertaining herself with new friends in the neighborhood—which was quite true, though not quite in the way that Beryl meant.

  And so it was some weeks before anyone noticed how much time the Rabbit and the Toad were spending together, and by that time, the damage had been done. All the hard work that had gone into rehabilitating the Toad was undone, and he was, once again, an unmanageable ass.

  “Toad is turning into an unmanageable ass again,” the Water Rat said. “Something must be done.”

  It was a conclave. Late the night before, he and the Mole had returned at last from their river cruise, a bit sunburnt but otherwise undamaged. The Water Rat had exchanged a word with the Otter, himself just off for his visit to the seaside with Portly, and from him he had learned of this regrettable backsliding. The Toad and the Rabbit had been overheard as they walked along the river-path, discussing motor-boats: their attractiveness—speed—charm—not for beginners, O no indeed, but for the experienced water-animal, nothing could be simpler—and not so very expensive, when one considered their utility: the Toad doing most of the speaking, of course, and the Rabbit only nodding and twittering agreement whenever he was obliged to pause for breath.

  Only two days later, the Toad and the Rabbit had spent several hours in the stables looking over the ruined motor-car, the Rabbit making long lists in her beautiful copperplate of the parts that would need repair or replacement, and the Toad repeating, whenever she asked a question, “No, the motor-car must be replaced entirely; that is the only real economy.”

  And a day after that, it had been motor-cycles, after a telegram-messenger had roared up to Toad Hall with a sound that had silenced all the birds and set every dog barking for miles round. The Toad had not even read the telegram, only let it drop to the graveled drive, his eyes round as saucers and very nearly as big. The Rabbit, with her paw over her mouth, exclaimed again and again, “How loud, how . . . splendid! O—my!”

  And hearing of this, the Rat had sent off on the double to the Badger to request his immediate aid. The Badger had arrived that morning. They were all three extremely tired—the night had been short and too hot for comfortable sleep, and Badger had had rather a walk on top of it—and the day’s heat was climbing towards its fiery height. The sun blazed pitilessly down, and the reflections on the River were shatteringly bright where they struck the eye. The air smelt like petrol and plum-pudding just out of the boiler. It was, in fact, the perfect day for sitting with friends upon the Bank, drinking the Rat’s ginger beer from mugs as one trailed one’s toes in the River, and chatting about nothing in particular—not at all the sort of day for deciding anything important, and especially not the kind of day one wanted to waste determining what was to be done (again) about the Toad.

  “It’s all Beryl’s doing,” the Mole said, a little grumpily. “We had settled him down nicely, and then she brings this Rabbit among us and sets everything to sixes and sevens again. The Toad was quite a reformed character until she came.”

  “Now, Moley,” said the Rat reproachfully. “She is not at all responsible for her friend’s doings, any more than I have stolen a motor-car, or you have been to prison, or Badger here has dressed as an old washerwoman.” (The Badger looked startled and a bit indignant.) “Moley, you rag on Miss Mole all the time and I have never understood why. Perhaps it is the heat. It is making everyone short-tempered.”

  “She brought the Rabbit,” the Mole reminded him.

  “She did bring the Rabbit,” said the Water Rat fair-mindedly, “but how could she know how susceptible Toad is?”

  The Badger shook his head. “No, Mole. We cannot blame this young Rabbit. The Water Rat and I have known Toad much longer than you, and I am sorry to say he doesn’t reform—not for long, anyway. If it were not the Rabbit, it would be something else, and if it were not today, it would be tomorrow or next year.”

  The Mole might have been overheard to mutter, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” but the Badger, busy with his thoughts, only continued.

  “I have an idea,” said he. “Miss Mole is a sensible Mole—quite like yourself, my dear chap—and she may have some influence on her friend. Let us see whether by putting our heads together we may come up with some way to moderate this friendship, so ruinous to the good sense of both.”

  The Water Rat nodded. “An excellent idea! I suppose it might seem a bit rude, but as the Badger here says, Miss Mole seems a sensible creature. She’ll know it’s because we’re worried about our friend, and not mere impertinence. She’s one of us now, so I am sure she doesn’t want the sort of trouble Toad gets into any more than we do. If she can encourage the Rabbit to refrain from egging him on (but we won’t use that language, ’cos it’s low), then we chaps may talk Toad back into a proper frame of mind, and all will be well again.”

  “For a while,” the Badger interjected.

  “For a while,” the Water Rat agreed. “And we will be sure to be very tactful and proper and polite when we speak to her, so as not to offend her—why, you’re the man for that, Moley! You’re the very soul of diplomacy.”

  “A sound plan,” the Badger said, and stood. “Shall we go?”

  “What, now?” said the Rat. It was, as has been mentioned, a hot day, and he rather felt that all this brainwork had earned everyone the rest of the day off.

  “Yes, now,” said the Badger sternly. “I see your thoughts, Rat, but it cannot be. You and I and the Mole might choose to spend our day quietly, but how can we be sure that the Toad is similarly inclined? Even now, he may be telephoning into Town to purchase some costly machine that he shall inevitably crash in some spectacular fashion.”

  The Water Rat leapt to his feet, whiskers trembling. “Badger, you are quite right! It doesn’t bear thinking of. Come on, Mole.” He reached a paw down.

  “No,” said the Mole.

  “No?” said the Rat. “Are you thinking later in the day would be better?”

  I mean, no. I will not talk to her!” said the Mole peevishly. “I will not be tactful and polite and call on Beryl, and I am sorry, Ratty, to disappoint you, and you, too, Badger, but even if it makes me not such a parfit gentil Mole, I will not do it.”

  “Three is probably too many, anyway,” said the Water Rat, only half attending. “Moley, if you’re busy, Badger and I will do it ourselves.”

  Leaving the mystery of the Mole’s stubborn refusal (and the Mole) behind them, the Water Rat and the Badger walked down to the river-path. It was not far to Sunflower Cottage, scarcely five minutes along the narrow little walkway beside the purple loosestrife, but quite long enough for the Rat to look upon his River and gauge its mood. Today it was serene, magisterial; only the passage of a bottle from upstream showed that it ran on strong as ever beneath its smooth, calm face. They walked up the lawn to the cottage’s front door, nearly concealed by the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac trees planted to either side.

  The Rabbit was not at home (“Egging Toad on, I’m perfectly certain,” said the Water Rat) but Beryl was, and after a very few minutes she met them on the lawn that led dow
n to the River, where she kept some really excellent little wrought-iron chairs for sitting and contemplating, and a table.

  “What a pleasure!” she said when she came to them. She was dressed simply and with great neatness, except for a smudge of blue-black ink on her glossy cheek, as though she had absently touched a fountain pen to her face while thinking—which is precisely what it was, for she had been busy writing. “Let us have lemonade—unless you would prefer beer? I know fellows often do on a day like this.”

  The Badger’s already high opinion of her good sense soared, but he said only, “I am afraid we must decline, for this is not a social call.”

  “O dear,” said Beryl. “What has happened?”

  The Water Rat said, “It is not what has happened so much as what may happen, if you follow me,” and seeing that she didn’t, he elaborated, explaining about Toad and his fads; Toad and his inevitable execution of some dangerous and idiotic action relating to those fads; and Toad and all the distress he caused to his neighbors whenever he did so; ending, “So you see, it is up to us to make him as sensible a Toad as can be. Which is not very,” he added despondently.

  Beryl nodded and poured out lemonade for herself—and beer for them, for she had been too wise to take the Badger’s refusal at its face value. “I do appreciate your candor with regard to your friend’s, ah, eccentricities, but I don’t see what I can do about it. My acquaintance with him is only of these short months’ duration. Might you bring your friend round to a more sensible way of thinking?”