‘No,’ said Keppel, with total conviction, ‘it is not.’
‘And to think,’ said Jack, ‘that I had proposed taking him to the House to present him to your father.’
‘I wish you had,’ said Keppel, writhing in his seat. ‘Oh strike me down, I wish you had. But tell me,’ he added, ‘did you not expect him to blow up all republican?’
‘No,’ cried Jack. ‘I was amazed. Lard, Keppel, I have known him all my life, and have always considered him the meekest creature breathing. I have known him take the most savage treatment from his guardian without ever complaining. Besides, when we were riding to Town I explained the nature of the world to him, and he never jibbed then – said he had always understood that it was tolerably corrupt. Though it is true,’ he said, after a pause for reflection, ‘that he never had much in the way of what you might call natural awe – was always amazingly self-possessed.’
At this moment Tobias’ self-possession was as shrunk and puckered as his shabby old rained-upon black coat, for the boat in which he and Ransome had embarked for the Tower was in the very act of shooting London Bridge. The tide was on the ebb – it was at half-ebb, to be precise – and when Tobias moved his fascinated gaze from the houses which packed the bridge and leant out over the edge in a vertiginous, not to say horrifying manner, he found that the boat was engaged in a current that raced curling towards a narrow arch, and there, to his horror, he saw the silent black water slide with appalling nightmare rapidity downhill into the darkness, while the rower and Ransome sat poised and motionless. He had time to utter no more than the cry “Ark", or “Gark", expressive of unprepared alarm, before they shot out of the fading light of day. A few damp, reverberating seconds passed, and they were restored to it. The rower pulled hard; in a moment they were out of the thundering fall below the bridge; and all around them were vessels of one kind or another, rowing, sculling, paddling and sailing down and across the Thames, or waiting very placidly for the tide in order to go up. All these people seemed perfectly at their ease – in the innumerable masts that lined the river or lay out in the Pool no single man stood on high to warn the populace of the danger, and even as Tobias gazed back in horror he saw another boat shoot the central arch, and another, full of soldiers who shouted and waved their hats, while a woman, leaning out of her kitchen window on the bridge, strewed apple peelings impartially upon the soldiers and the raging flood: apparently this passage was quite usual. But Tobias was unable to repress his emotion entirely, and he said, ‘That is a surprising current, sir. That is a very surprising piece of water, indeed.’
‘I thought you was surprised,’ said Ransome, with a grin; and the waterman closed one eye.
‘I was never so frightened before,’ said Tobias, ‘and I find that my heart is still beating violently.’
‘Why, it’s a question of use,’ said Ransome, wishing that his companion would be a little less candid in public. ‘I dare say you never was in a rip-tide or an overfall?’
‘I have never been in a boat in my life.’
‘Nor ever seen the sea?’
‘Nor yet the Thames, until today.’
‘The gentleman has never set foot in a boat before,’ said Ransome to the waterman, ‘nor ever shot the bridge: so he was surprised.’
‘Never set foot in a boat before?’ exclaimed the waterman, resting on his oars.
‘Not once: not so much as a farden skiff,’ said Ransome, who was a waterman’s son himself, from Frying-pan Stairs in Wapping, and who had been nourished and bred on the water, fresh or salt, since first he drew breath. They stared at Tobias, and eventually the waterman said, ‘Then how do they get about, where he comes from?’
‘They walk,’ said Tobias. ‘It is all dry land.’
‘Well, I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said the waterman, dipping his oars and edging his boat across to the Tower stairs. He would take no further notice of Tobias: considered him a dangerous precedent, and was seen, as they went away, to dust Tobias’ seat over the running water, with particular vehemence.
It was a still evening as they walked into the Tower, and although the day had been tolerably warm, the mist was already forming over the water; two or three hundred thousand coal-fires were alight or lighting, and the smoke, mingling with the mist, promised, as Ransome said, ‘to grow as slab as burgoo’ before long.
They walked briskly in past the spur-guard, past a faded representation of a lion and up to a door with another lion painted above it: a tiny black-haired man with a white face, the under-keeper, was renewing the ghastliness of this lion’s maw with vermilion paint. ‘There is horror, look you,’ he said, putting his head on one side and surveying his work through narrowed eyes. ‘There is gore and alarm, isn’t it?’ He was unwilling to leave his brush; but the prospect of immediate gain will always seduce an artist, and pocketing Ransome’s shilling the under-keeper opened the door.
‘I am infinitely obliged to you, sir,’ said Tobias, when they were outside again and walking down to the river.
‘Haw,’ said Ransome, with a lurch of his head to acknowledge this civility. ‘That’s all right, mate: but I wish you had not a-done it. It makes me feel right poorly, only to think on it,’ he said, leaning against the rail of the Tower stairs and reflecting upon the sight of Tobias in the lions’ den, peering down the throat of an enormous beast that was stated to be ‘a very saucy lion, the same that is eating the young gentlewoman’s arm last Bartholomew Fair.’
‘Up or down, gents?’ cried the waterman. ‘Oars, sir? Pair of oars?’
‘Up or down, mate?’ asked Ransome, recovering from his reverie and thumping Tobias on the back.
‘Do you see that bird?’ asked Tobias, pointing to the Customs House, where a number of kites were coming in to roost upon the cornucopias and reclining goddesses (or perhaps nymphs) that decorated the pediment.
‘Ar,’ said Ransome, looking through the misty dusk in the general direction of a flight of pigeons.
‘I believe – I do not assert it, but I believe that it is a black kite,’ said Tobias.
‘All right, mate,’ said Ransome, with cheerful indifference, ‘I dare say it is. Up or down?’
‘The tail was so much less forked. Up or down? I think, if you will excuse me, that I will stay a little longer.’
‘If you want to see ‘em go to roost,’ said Ransome, ‘you should go round behind: there’s millions of ‘em there. But I must drop down now, or I shall lose my tide.’
‘Good-bye, then,’ said Tobias, ‘and thank you very much indeed for showing me the lions.’
‘You’ll take boat directly?’ called Ransome, turning as he stood in the skiff. ‘You’ll know your way all right?’ Tobias waved.
The