The River Bank

‘This is fine!’ he said to himself. ‘This is better than whitewashing!’ The sunshine struck hot on his fur; soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long, the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow till he reached the hedge on
the further side.

‘Hold up!’ said an elderly rabbit at the gap. ‘Sixpence for the privilege of passing by the private road!’ He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the hedge, chaffing the other rabbits as they peeped hurriedly from their holes to see what the row was about. ‘Onion-sauce! Onion sauce!’ he remarked jeeringly and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. ‘How STUPID you are! Why didn’t you tell him——’ ‘Well, why didn’t YOU say——’ ‘You might have reminded him——’ and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, as is always the case.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows, he rambled busily, along the hedgerows and across the copses, finding everywhere birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, progressive, and occupied. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering ‘whitewash!’ he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only idle dog among all these busy citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself as to see all the other fellows busy working.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly, he stood by the edge of a full-fed river. Never in his life had he seen a river before—this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free and were caught and held again. All was a shake and a shiver—glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river, he trotted as one trot, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank while the river still chattered on to him,
a babbling procession of the best stories in
 the world, sent from the heart of the earth
to be told at last to the insatiable sea.

As he sat on the grass and looked across the river, a dark hole in the bank opposite, just above the water’s edge, caught his eye, and dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou riverside residence, above flood level and remote from noise and dust. As he gazed, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation, and it was too glittering and small for a glow-worm. Then, as he looked, it winked at him and so declared itself to be an eye; and a small face began gradually to grow up around it, like a frame around a picture.

A brown little face with whiskers.

A grave round face with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

It was the Water Rat!

Then the two animals stood and regarded each other cautiously.

‘Hullo, Mole!’ said the Water Rat.

‘Hullo, Rat!’ said the Mole.

‘Would you like to come over?’ enquired the Rat presently.

‘Oh, it’s all very well to TALK,’ said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a river and riverside life and its ways.

The Rat said nothing but stooped and unfastened a rope and hauled on it, then lightly stepped into a little boat which the Mole had not observed. It was painted blue outside and white within and was just the size for two animals, and the Mole’s whole heart went out to it at once, even though he did not yet fully understand its uses.

The Rat sculled smartly across and made fast. Then he held up his forepaw as the Mole stepped gingerly down. ‘Lean on that!’ he said. ‘Now then, step lively!’ and the Mole, to his surprise and rapture, found himself actually seated in the stern of a real boat.

‘This has been a wonderful day!’ said he as
the Rat shoved off and took to the sculls again. ‘Do you know, I’ve never been in a boat before in all my life.’

‘What?’ cried the Rat, open-mouthed: ‘Never been in a—you never—well, I—what have you been doing, then?’

‘Is it so nice as all that?’ asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he leaned back in his seat and surveyed the cushions, the oars, the rowlocks, and all the fascinating fittings, and felt the boat sway lightly under him.

‘Nice? It’s the ONLY thing,’ said the Water Rat solemnly as he leaned forward for his stroke. ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Simply messing,’ he went on dreamily: ‘messing—about—in—boats; messing——’

‘Look ahead, Rat!’ cried the Mole suddenly.

It was too late. The boat struck the bank full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous oarsman, lay on his back at the bottom of the boat, his heels in the air.

‘—about in boats—or WITH boats,’ the Rat went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. ‘In or out of ’em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter; that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular, and when you’ve done it, there’s always something else to do, and you can do
 it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we drop down the river together, and have a long day of it?’

The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with a sigh of full contentment, and leaned back blissfully into the soft cushions. ‘WHAT a day I’m having!’
he said. ‘Let us start at once!’

‘Hold hard a minute, then!’ said the Rat. He looped the painter through a ring in his landing stage, climbed up into his hole above, and after a short interval, reappeared staggering under a fat, wicker luncheon basket.

‘Shove that under your feet,’ he observed to the Mole as he passed it down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls again.

‘What’s inside it?’ asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.

‘There’s a cold chicken inside it,’ replied the Rat briefly; ‘cold tongue, cold ham, cold beef pick leg gherkins salad french rolls, cress sandwich spot them eat ginger beer lemonade soda water——’

‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Mole in ecstacies:
‘This is too much!’

‘Do you really think so?’ enquired the Rat seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions, and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it VERY fine!’

The Mole never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents, the sounds, and the sunlight; he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long, waking dreams. The Water Rat, like the good little fellow he was, sculled steadily on and forebore to disturb him.

‘I like your clothes awfully, old chap,’ he remarked after some half an hour or so had passed. ‘I’m going to get a black velvet smoking suit myself someday, as soon as I can afford it.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Mole, pulling himself together with an effort. ‘You must think me very rude, but all this is so new to me. So—this—is—a—River!’

‘THE River,’ corrected the Rat.

‘And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!’

‘By it and with it and on it and in it,’ said the Rat. ‘It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing. It’s my world, and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got is not worth having, and what it doesn’t know is not worth knowing. Lord! The times we’ve had together! Whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, it’s always got its fun and its excitement. When the floods are on in February, and my cellars and basement are brimming with a drink that’s no good to me, and the brown water runs by my best bedroom window, or again when it all drops away and shows patches of mud that smells like plum-cake, and the rushes and weed clog the channels, and I can potter about dry-shod over most of the bed of it and find fresh food to eat, and things careless people have dropped out of boats!’

‘But isn’t it a bit dull at times?’ the Mole ventured to ask. ‘Just you and the river, and no one else to pass a word with?’

‘No one else to—well, I mustn’t be hard on you,’ said the Rat with forbearance. ‘You’re new to it, and of course, you don’t know. The bank is so crowded nowadays that many people are moving away altogether: O no, it isn’t what it used to be at all. Otters, kingfishers, dabchicks, moorhens, all of them about all day long and always wanting you to DO something—as if
a fellow had no business of his own to attend to!’

‘What lies over THERE’ asked the Mole, waving a paw towards a background of woodland that darkly framed the water meadows on one side of the river.

‘That? O, that’s just the Wild Wood,’ said the Rat shortly. ‘We don’t go there very much, we river-bankers.’

‘Aren’t they—aren’t they very NICE people in there?’ said the Mole, a trifle nervously.

‘W-e-ll,’ replied the Rat, ‘let me see. The squirrels are all right. And the rabbits—some of ’em, but rabbits are a mixed lot. And then there’s Badger, of course. He lives right in the heart of it; wouldn’t live anywhere else, either, if you paid him to do it. Dear old Badger! Nobody interferes with HIM. They’d better not,’ he added significantly.

‘Why, who SHOULD interfere with him?’ asked the Mole.

‘Well, of course—there—are others,’ explained the Rat in a hesitating sort of way.

‘Weasels—and stoats—and foxes—and so on. They’re all right in a way—I’m very good friends with them—pass the time of day when we meet, and all that—but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, and then—well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s
the fact.’

The Mole knew well that it is quite an against animal etiquette to dwell on possible trouble ahead or even to allude to it, so he dropped
the subject.

‘And beyond the Wild Wood again?’ he asked: ‘Where it’s all blue and dim, and one sees what may be hills or perhaps they mayn’t, and something like the smoke of towns, or is it only cloud-drift?’

‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either if you’ve got any sense at all. Don’t ever refer to
 it again, please. Now then! Here’s our backwater at last, where we’re going to lunch.’

Leaving the mainstream, they now passed into what seemed at first sight like a little land-locked lake. Green turf sloped down to either edge, brown snaky tree roots gleamed below the surface of the quiet water, while ahead of them, the silvery shoulder and foamy tumble of a weir, arm-in-arm with a restless dripping mill-wheel, that held up in its turn a grey-gabled mill-house, filled the air with a soothing murmur of sound, dull and smothery, yet with little clear voices speaking up cheerfully out of it at intervals. It was so very beautiful that the Mole could only hold up both forepaws and gasp, ‘O my! O my! O my!’

The Rat brought the boat alongside the bank, made her fast, helped the still awkward Mole safely ashore, and swung out the luncheon basket. The Mole begged as a favor to be allowed to unpack it all by himself, and the Rat was very pleased to indulge him, and to sprawl at full length on the grass and rest, while his excited friend shook out the table-cloth and spread it, took out all the mysterious packets one by one and arranged their contents in due order, still gasping, ‘O my! O my!’ at each fresh revelation. When all was ready, the Rat said, ‘Now, pitch in, old fellow!’ and the Mole was indeed very glad to obey, for he had started his spring-cleaning at a very early hour that morning, as people WILL do, and had not paused for bite or sup; and he had been through a very great deal since that distant time which now seemed so many days ago.

‘What are you looking at?’ said the Rat presently when the edge of their hunger was somewhat dulled, and the Mole’s eyes were able to wander off the tablecloth a little.

‘I am looking,’ said the Mole, ‘at a streak of bubbles that I see traveling along the surface of the water. That is a thing that strikes me as funny.’

‘Bubbles? Oho!’ said the Rat and chirruped cheerily in an inviting sort of way.

A broad glistening muzzle showed itself above the edge of the bank, and the Otter hauled himself out and shook the water from his coat.

‘Greedy beggars!’ he observed, making for the provender. ‘Why didn’t you invite me, Ratty?’

‘This was an impromptu affair,’ explained the Rat. ‘By the way—my friend Mr. Mole.’

‘Proud, I’m sure,’ said the Otter, and the two animals were friends forthwith.

‘Such a rumpus everywhere!’ continued the Otter. ‘All the world seems out on the river today. I came up this backwater to try and get a moment’s peace and then stumble upon you fellows!—At least—I beg pardon—I don’t exactly mean that, you know.’

There was a rustle behind them, proceeding from a hedge wherein last year’s leaves still clung thick, and a stripy head, with high shoulders behind it, peered forth on them.

‘Come on, old Badger!’ shouted the Rat.

The Badger trotted forward a pace or two, then grunted, ‘H’m! Company,’ and turned his back and disappeared from view.

‘That’s JUST the sort of fellow he is!’ observed the disappointed Rat. ‘Simply hates Society! Now we shan’t see any more of him today. Well, tell us, WHO’S out on the river?’

‘Toad’s out, for one,’ replied the Otter. ‘In his brand-new wager boat; new togs, new everything!’

The two animals looked at each other and laughed.

‘Once, it was nothing but sailing,’ said the Rat, ‘Then he tired of that and took to punting. Nothing would please him but to punt all day and every day, and a nice mess he made of it. Last year it was house boating, and we all had to go and stay with him in his houseboat and pretend we liked it. He was going to spend the rest of his life in a houseboat. It’s all the same; whatever he takes up, he gets tired of it and starts on something fresh.’

‘Such a good fellow, too,’ remarked the Otter reflectively: ‘But no stability—especially in a boat!’

From where they sat, they could get a glimpse of the mainstream across the island that separated them; and just then, a wager boat flashed into view, the rower—a short, stout figure—splashing badly and rolling a good deal but working his hardest. The Rat stood up and hailed him, but Toad—for it as he—shook his head and settled sternly to his work.

‘He’ll be out of the boat in a minute if he rolls like that,’ said the Rat, sitting down again.

‘Of course, he will,’ chuckled the Otter. ‘Did I ever tell you that good story about Toad and the lock-keeper? It happened this way. Toad….’

An errant May-fly swerved unsteadily athwart the current in the intoxicated fashion affected by the young blood of May-flies seeing life. A swirl of water and a ‘cloop!’ and the Mayfly was visible no more.

Neither was the Otter.

The Mole looked down. The voice was still in his ears, but the turf whereon he had sprawled was clearly vacant. Not an Otter to be seen, as far as the distant horizon.

But again, there was a streak of bubbles on the surface of the river.

The Rat hummed a tune, and the Mole recollected that animal etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason, whatever.

‘Well, well,’ said the Rat, ‘I suppose we ought to be moving. I wonder which of us had better pack the luncheon basket?’ He did not speak as if he was frightfully eager for the treat.

‘O, please let me,’ said the Mole. So, of course, the Rat let him.

Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is. But the Mole was bent on enjoying everything, and although just when he had got the basket packed and strapped up tightly, he saw a plate staring up at him from the grass, and when the job had been done again, the Rat pointed out a fork which anybody ought to have seen, and last of all, behold! The mustard pot, which he had been sitting on without knowing it—still, somehow, the thing got finished at last, without much loss of temper.

The afternoon sun was getting low as the Rat sculled gently homewards in a dreamy mood, murmuring poetry things over to himself and not paying much attention to Mole. But the Mole was very full of lunch, and self-satisfaction, and pride, and already quite at home in a boat (so he thought) and was getting a bit restless besides, and presently he said, ‘Ratty! Please, I want to row now!’

The Rat shook his head with a smile. ‘Not yet, my young friend,’ he said—’wait till you’ve had a few lessons. It’s not so easy as it looks.’

The Mole was quiet for a minute or two. But he began to feel more and more jealous of Rat, sculling so strongly and so easily along, and his pride began to whisper that he could do it every bit as well. He jumped up and seized the sculls so suddenly that the Rat, who was gazing out over the water and saying more poetry things to himself, was taken by surprise and fell backward off his seat with his legs in the air for the second time while the triumphant Mole took his place and grabbed the sculls with entire confidence.

‘Stop it, you SILLY ass!’ cried the Rat from the bottom of the boat. ‘You can’t do it! You’ll have us over!’

The Mole flung his sculls back with a flourish and made a great dig at the water. He missed the surface altogether, his legs flew up above his head, and he found himself lying on the top of the prostrate Rat. Greatly alarmed, he made a grab at the side of the boat, and the next moment—Sploosh!

Over went the boat, and he found himself struggling in the river.

Oh my, how cold the water was, and O, how VERY wet it felt. How it sang in his ears as he went down, down, down! How bright and welcome the sun looked as he rose to the surface, coughing and spluttering! How black was his despair when he felt himself sinking again! Then a firm paw gripped him by the back of his neck. It was the Rat, and he was evidently laughing—the Mole could FEEL him laughing, right down his arm and through his paw, and so into his—the Mole’s—neck.

The Rat got hold of a scull and shoved it under the Mole’s arm; then he did the same by the other side of him and, swimming behind, propelled the helpless animal to shore, hauled him out, and set him down on the bank, a squashy, pulpy lump of misery.

When the Rat had rubbed him down a bit and wrung some of the wet out of him, he said, ‘Now, then, old fellow! Trot up and down the towing path as hard as you can till you’re warm and dry again while I dive for the luncheon basket.’

So the dismal Mole, wet without and ashamed within, trotted about till he was fairly dry, while the Rat plunged into the water again, recovered the boat, righted her and made her fast, fetched his floating property to shore by degrees, and finally dived successfully for the luncheon-basket and struggled to land with it.

When all was ready for a start once more, the Mole, limp and dejected, took his seat in the stern of the boat; and as they set off, he said in a low voice, broken with emotion, ‘Ratty, my generous friend! I am very sorry indeed for my foolish and ungrateful conduct. My heart quite fails me when I think how I might have lost that beautiful luncheon basket. Indeed, I have been a complete ass, and I know it. Will you overlook it this once and forgive me and let things go on as before?’

‘That’s all right, bless you!’ responded the Rat cheerily. ‘What’s a little wet to a Water Rat? I’m more in the water than out of it most days. Don’t you think any more about it; and, look here! I really think you had better come and stop with me for a little time. It’s very plain and rough, you know—not like Toad’s house at all—but you haven’t seen that yet; still, I can make you comfortable. And I’ll teach you to row and to swim, and you’ll soon be as handy on the water as any of us.’

The Mole was so touched by his kind manner of speaking that he could find no voice to answer him, and he had to brush away a tear or two with the back of his paw. But the Rat kindly looked in another direction, and presently the Mole’s spirits revived again, and he was even able to give some straight back-talk to a couple of moorhens who were sniggering to each other about his bedraggled appearance.

When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlor and planted the Mole in an armchair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time. Very thrilling stories they were, too, to an earth-dwelling animal like Mole. Stories about weirs, sudden floods, leaping pike, and steamers that flung hard bottles—at least bottles were certainly flung, and FROM steamers, so presumably BY them; and about herons, and how particular they were whom they spoke to; and about adventures down drains, and night-fishings with Otter, or excursions far a-field with Badger. Supper was a most cheerful meal, but very shortly afterward, a terribly sleepy Mole had to be escorted upstairs by his considerate host to the best bedroom, where he soon laid his head on his pillow in great peace and contentment, knowing that his new-found friend the River was lapping the sill of his window.

This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and full of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learned to swim and to row and entered into the joy of running water, and with his ear to the reed stems, he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them.

The End