CHAPTER XXXV—WINGED BIRDS AND ROOTED TREES
A summer’s afternoon in London! The gold-gray majesty of the Embankment, basking in sunlight; the silver-gray flowing of the Thames beneath its many bridges; smoke, bidding a casual good-by to chimneys, sauntering off a truant into the quiet blue; trees, bravely green and a-flutter; a steamer swerving in to the landing at Westminster! His decision came suddenly. She had asked him to visit her. Perhaps—perhaps, she could tell him what had happened to Cherry.
He jumped off the bus, crossed the road at a run, sprang down the steps and thrust his money through the hole in the ticket-window. “A return to Kew.”
The man in the box was ostentatiously slow in counting out the change. These young bloods made him bitter. With all the years before them, they were always late and always in a hurry. He sold them their passports to cool green places; he himself was left permanently behind by that streak of gleaming river.
“‘Eaps o’ time,” he grumbled. “Yes, that’s your one.” Then, having at last handed over the change and a ticket, “Best skip lively, or you’ll lose ‘er.”
Peter skipped lively; to the man’s disappointment, he scrambled aboard just as the steamer was casting loose. She shot out into the current, panting and splashing, kicking up a merry white wake. The Houses of Parliament grew tall and, at last, spectral in the distance. The dome of St. Paul’s lay, a black bubble swollen to bursting, on the lip of the horizon. The smoke of London trembled like a thin flag, waving back the encroaching sky. The groan of creeping traffic was stilled; stone-palaces of labor sank and sank, shorn of their height and supremacy. This was the road to Arcady, the flowing road to the land of birds and grass pavements. They were on the outskirts of that land already; everybody felt it. A red-nosed minstrel drew his harp between his knees and fumbled at the strings. He assured his public tunefully that he had dreamt that he dwelt in marble halls. It was difficult to believe him; he didn’t look a soulful fellow. Nevertheless, in his decrepit person, he echoed the hopes of incredible romance. The crowd grew careless of appearances and jaunty. Cockney swains cuddled their girls more closely; the girls, rather proud than abashed, tittered.
Battersea Park drifted by, a green mist of trees and romping children. Against the red-brick background of Chelsea, scarlet-coated soldiers strolled, unwarriorlike, keeping pace with pram-trundling nurse-maids. The steamer seemed to stand still; it was the banks, on either side, that traveled.
The harpist, having tried his nose at romance, came back to reality. Perhaps, it was because he sang so much through it, that his nose was so long and red.
“Sez I, ‘Be Mrs. ‘Awkins, Mrs. ‘Enery ‘Awkins,
Or acrost the seas I’ll roam.