the water. Nevertheless, a steamer did after a
little while appear round the bend, in Battersea Reach; she dropped her
funnel, aimed her sharp nose at an arch of Battersea Bridge, and
finally, poising herself against the strong stream, bumped very gently
and neatly into contact with the pier. The pier-keeper went through all
the classic motions of mooring, unbarring, barring, and casting off, and
in a few seconds the throbbing steamer, which was named with the name of
a great Londoner, left the pier again with George and Marguerite on
board. Nobody had disembarked. The shallow and handsome craft, flying
its gay flags, crossed and recrossed the river, calling at three piers
in the space of a few minutes; but all the piers were like Chelsea Pier;
all the pier-keepers had the air of castaways upon shaking islets. The
passengers on the steamer would not have filled a motor-bus, and they
carried themselves like melancholy adventurers who have begun to doubt
the authenticity of the inspiration which sent them on a mysterious
quest. Such was travel on the Thames in the years immediately before
Londoners came to a final decision that the Thames was meet to be
ignored by the genteel town which it had begotten.

George and Marguerite sat close together near the prow, saying little,
the one waiting to spring, the other to suffer onslaught. It was in
Lambeth Reach that the broad, brimming river challenged and seized
George's imagination. A gusty, warm, south-west wind met the rushing
tide and blew it up into foamy waves. The wind was powerful, but the
tide was irresistible. Far away, Land's End having divided the Atlantic
surge, that same wind was furiously driving vast waters up the English
Channel and round the Forelands, and also vast waters up the west coast
of Britain. The twin surges had met again in the outer estuary of the
Thames and joined their terrific impulses to defy the very wind which
had given them strength, and the mighty flux swept with unregarding
power through the mushroom city whose existence on its banks was a
transient episode in the everlasting life of the river.

The river seemed to threaten the city that had confined it in stone. And
George, in the background of his mind, which was obsessed by the
tormenting enigma of the girl by his side, also threatened the city.
With the uncompromising arrogance of the student who has newly acquired
critical ideas, he estimated and judged it. He cursed the Tate Gallery