And, as if to strengthen this conceit, a woman came up through the hatchway of a barge that I was looking at. She was wearing a sun-bonnet, in accordance with the custom of barge-women, and she stood up gracefully, one hand on her hip, the other before her eyes, to seek out the cornet player.
We are the boys of the bulldawg breed
What's made ole Hengland's Nime.
Those were the words which had inspired the melody which the cornet-blower was blowing. The woman tapped her foot in time with the notes.
Her husband came up then, accompanied by tobacco clouds and a baby. He seemed to be a fortunate sort of husband, for I noticed that the woman laughed appreciatively at some joke which he made.
Then the man's eye wandered to the canal-side, and he caught sight of the daffodil-girl, who was standing there. And what must the fellow do but throw kisses to her, which gallantry was reciprocated by the flower-girl. The barge-woman laughed at this new jest with even more good humour (if that were possible) than that which she had shown before. The man shouted some message or other to the flower-girl, and she replied, whereupon he handed the baby to his wife, saying, "Catch 'old, Fatty!"—an utterance which I heard without hearing, as one can when an April sun is shining on men's hearts. And, advancing to the side of the boat, the man held out his arms, and the girl threw daffodils towards him.
The first bloom fell into the water, and the second; the third he caught. One more poor daffodil was drowned, and he caught the two next. So that there was one for his cap, and one for the missus, and one for the baby, who, being now safely delivered from the paternal arms (which were not built for cradling babies), needed but the additional stimulus of a yellow thing to marvel at ere it smiled as largely as any of them.
And upon my word I smiled, too, and could, indeed, have laughed outright. But I sat in awe of a fat man on the adjacent seat. He did not belong to that order of lunatics who laugh for nothing in the sunshine. "What we want," he was saying to his companion, "what we want," he said, with his eyes fixed tight upon this April barge, "what we want is a total change of Government. Nothin' won't ever be right again till we get it."
I had a heavy parcel of books on my knee, and to drop them heavily upon his foot had been, as it were, the accident of a moment. But the sweet temperance of springtime had stolen into my blood, and I forbore. Besides which there were the barges and the daffodils, and they were better worth a man's consideration than this fool.
So I looked over the side again, and saw that the barge-man had turned his attention to the cornet-blower, with whom he was exchanging highly flavoured sarcasms. With a view, probably, of adding zest to his humours, and because a springtime madness was upon him, he had changed headgear with his wife, and stood there in her sun-bonnet, grimacing and laughing. He had a long barge-pole in his hand, and somehow—I don't quite know how it happened—in assuming to hurl that weapon at the cornet-blower, he overbalanced himself, and fell sideways into the water, striking his head as he fell against the side of another barge, which was moored close to his own in that jumble fashion which is peculiar to barges.
He came up again almost directly, looking queer in his wife's sun-bonnet (for he had tied the tapes beneath his chin), and then immediately sank again. The nerveless ineptitude of it all made one angry with the man: it seemed to be wilful.