"Oh!" I said.
"Yes," said James. "I know you like one to be frank. Apart from everything else, men make me sick. It will really have to be rats."
XXVI
THE APRIL BARGE
I set out, sedately enough, one April morning, to rescue James from her aunt at Bayswater. I set out grandly enthroned upon a 'bus.
But I came quite unexpectedly upon this April Barge, and James and her aunt were forgotten.
The April sun had come out sharp to time, you see, and was winking fitfully upon all of us, like the unsettled, rakish fellow that he is. And a girl with two great baskets full of wondering daffodils had come out, too; and some conscienceless vagabond was extracting melody from a cornet. So that even the Regent's Canal, with its sombre vicinage and sulky craft, seemed, as if by some surprising effort, to have taken on an air of sweetness and youth and hope.
You could consider this fact at leisure as our 'bus toiled slowly up the rise of a road which spans the canal. There was a public-house in front of us—the public-house and the cornet seem to be inseparably united in this neighbourhood—but the canal was to one's left, and appeared, somehow, to convey that air of refreshment which the tavern so conspicuously lacked.
As one looked down upon the face of these waters, so strangely heartened by the sunlight, a sort of certainty grew upon him that they would break suddenly into perspective; that their vista would cease to be obscured by coal wharves and cranes and hoardings; that somebody's whisky, commended to your notice in large white letters on a blue-enamelled background, would fade and fade and fade, until it merged with the white clouds and the blue sky behind it. Then need you but sigh and sit back, beholding a silver streak set snugly between hills, and flowing, flowing, flowing to the edge of the world. Instead of which——
Pooh! There was no instead. The April sun kept winking at the daffodils, and the daffodils kept staring at the sun, and the cornet-man made music by the waterside. So that even a poet might have smiled at it all. For here, I'll swear, was none of your mere "waterways," created by syndicates for profit; here was none of your world capitals. Just a little old river, sunning itself gratefully in a little old town that God had made.