THREE MEN IN A BOAT
PART 14
CHAPTER XV.
Household duties.—Love of work.—The old river hand, what he does and
what he tells you he has done.—Scepticism of the new generation.—Early boating
recollections.—Rafting.—George does the thing in style.—The old boatman, his
method.—So calm, so full of peace.—The beginner.—Punting.—A sad
accident.—Pleasures of friendship.—Sailing, my first experience.—Possible
reason why we were not drowned.
We woke
late the next morning, and, at Harris’s earnest desire, partook of a plain
breakfast, with “non dainties.” Then we cleaned up, and put everything
straight (a continual labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear
insight into a question that had often posed me—namely, how a woman with the
work of only one house on her hands manages to pass away her time), and, at
about ten, set out on what we had determined should be a good day’s journey.
We agreed
that we would pull this morning, as a change from towing; and Harris thought
the best arrangement would be that George and I should scull, and he
steer. I did not chime in with this idea at all; I said I thought Harris
would have been showing a more proper spirit if he had suggested that he and
George should work, and let me rest a bit. It seemed to me that I was
doing more than my fair share of the work on this trip, and I was beginning to
feel strongly on the subject.
It always
does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not
that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can
sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of
getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot
give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me:
my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more.
I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
And I am
careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has
been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on
it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust
it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.
But,
though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more
than my proper share.
But I get
it without asking for it—at least, so it appears to me—and this worries me.
George
says he does not think I need trouble myself on the subject. He thinks it
is only my over-scrupulous nature that makes me fear I am having more than my
due; and that, as a matter of fact, I don’t have half as much as I ought.
But I expect he only says this to comfort me.
In a boat,
I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that
he is doing everything. Harris’s notion was, that it was he alone who had
been working, and that both George and I had been imposing upon him.
George, on the other hand, ridiculed the idea of Harris’s having done anything
more than eat and sleep, and had a cast-iron opinion that it was he—George
himself—who had done all the labour worth speaking of.
He said he
had never been out with such a couple of lazily skulks as Harris and I.
That
amused Harris.
“Fancy old
George talking about work!” he laughed; “why, about half-an-hour of it would
kill him. Have you ever seen George work?” he added, turning to me.
I agreed
with Harris that I never had—most certainly not since we had started on this
trip.
“Well, I
don’t see how you can know much about it, one way or the other,” George
retorted on Harris; “for I’m blest if you haven’t been asleep half the
time. Have you ever seen Harris fully awake, except at meal-time?” asked
George, addressing me.
Truth
compelled me to support George. Harris had been very little good in the
boat, so far as helping was concerned, from the beginning.
“Well,
hang it all, I’ve done more than old J., anyhow,” rejoined Harris.
“Well, you
couldn’t very well have done less,” added George.
“I suppose
J. thinks he is the passenger,” continued Harris.
And that
was their gratitude to me for having brought them and their wretched old boat
all the way up from Kingston, and for having superintended and managed
everything for them, and taken care of them, and slaved for them. It is
the way of the world.
We settled
the present difficulty by arranging that Harris and George should scull up past
Reading, and that I should tow the boat on from there. Pulling a heavy
boat against a strong stream has few attractions for me now. There was a
time, long ago, when I used to clamour for the hard work: now I like to give
the youngsters a chance.
I notice
that most of the old river hands are similarly retiring, whenever there is any
stiff pulling to be done. You can always tell the old river hand by the
way in which he stretches himself out upon the cushions at the bottom of the
boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes about the marvellous
feats he performed last season.
“Call what
you’re doing hard work!” he drawls, between his contented whiffs, addressing
the two perspiring novices, who have been grinding away steadily up stream for
the last hour and a half; “why, Jim Biffles and Jack and I, last season, pulled
up from Marlow to Goring in one afternoon—never stopped once. Do you
remember that, Jack?”
Jack, who
has made himself a bed up in the prow of all the rugs and coats he can collect,
and who has been lying there asleep for the last two hours, partially wakes up
on being thus appealed to, and recollects all about the matter, and also
remembers that there was an unusually strong stream against them all the
way—likewise a stiff wind.
“About
thirty-four miles, I suppose, it must have been,” adds the first speaker,
reaching down another cushion to put under his head.
“No—no;
don’t exaggerate, Tom,” murmurs Jack, reprovingly; “thirty-three at the
outside.”
And Jack
and Tom, quite exhausted by this conversational effort, drop off to sleep once
more. And the two simple-minded youngsters at the sculls feel quite proud
of being allowed to row such wonderful oarsmen as Jack and Tom, and strain away
harder than ever.
When I was
a young man, I used to listen to these tales from my elders, and take them in,
and swallow them, and digest every word of them, and then come up for more; but
the new generation do not seem to have the simple faith of the old times.
We—George, Harris, and myself—took a “raw ’un” up with us once last season, and
we plied him with the customary stretchers about the wonderful things we had
done all the way up.
We gave
him all the regular ones—the time-honoured lies that have done duty up the
river with every boating-man for years past—and added seven entirely original
ones that we had invented for ourselves, including a really quite likely story,
founded, to a certain extent, on an all but true episode, which had actually
happened in a modified degree some years ago to friends of ours—a story that a
mere child could have believed without injuring itself, much.
And that
young man mocked at them all, and wanted us to repeat the feats then and there,
and to bet us ten to one that we didn’t.
We got to
chatting about our rowing experiences this morning, and to recounting stories
of our first efforts in the art of oarsmanship. My own earliest boating
recollection is of five of us contributing threepence each and taking out a
curiously constructed craft on the Regent’s Park lake, drying ourselves
subsequently, in the park-keeper’s lodge.
After
that, having acquired a taste for the water, I did a good deal of rafting in
various suburban brickfields—an exercise providing more interest and excitement
than might be imagined, especially when you are in the middle of the pond and
the proprietor of the materials of which the raft is constructed suddenly
appears on the bank, with a big stick in his hand.
Your first
sensation on seeing this gentleman is that, somehow or other, you don’t feel
equal to company and conversation, and that, if you could do so without
appearing rude, you would rather avoid meeting him; and your object is,
therefore, to get off on the opposite side of the pond to which he is, and to
go home quietly and quickly, pretending not to see him. He, on the
contrary is yearning to take you by the hand, and talk to you.
It appears
that he knows your father, and is intimately acquainted with yourself, but this
does not draw you towards him. He says he’ll teach you to take his boards
and make a raft of them; but, seeing that you know how to do this pretty well
already, the offer, though doubtless kindly meant, seems a superfluous one on
his part, and you are reluctant to put him to any trouble by accepting it.
His
anxiety to meet you, however, is proof against all your coolness, and the
energetic manner in which he dodges up and down the pond so as to be on the
spot to greet you when you land is really quite flattering.
If he be
of a stout and short-winded build, you can easily avoid his advances; but, when
he is of the youthful and long-legged type, a meeting is inevitable. The
interview is, however, extremely brief, most of the conversation being on his
part, your remarks being mostly of an exclamatory and mono-syllabic order, and
as soon as you can tear yourself away you do so.
I devoted
some three months to rafting, and, being then as proficient as there was any
need to be at that branch of the art, I determined to go in for rowing proper,
and joined one of the Lea boating clubs.
Being out
in a boat on the river Lea, especially on Saturday afternoons, soon makes you
smart at handling a craft, and spry at escaping being run down by roughs or
swamped by barges; and it also affords plenty of opportunity for acquiring the
most prompt and graceful method of lying down flat at the bottom of the boat so
as to avoid being chucked out into the river by passing tow-lines.
But it
does not give you style. It was not till I came to the Thames that I got
style. My style of rowing is very much admired now. People say it
is so quaint.
George
never went near the water until he was sixteen. Then he and eight other
gentlemen of about the same age went down in a body to Kew one Saturday, with
the idea of hiring a boat there, and pulling to Richmond and back; one of their
number, a shock-headed youth, named Joskins, who had once or twice taken out a
boat on the Serpentine, told them it was jolly fun, boating!
The tide
was running out pretty rapidly when they reached the landing-stage, and there
was a stiff breeze blowing across the river, but this did not trouble them at
all, and they proceeded to select their boat.
There was
an eight-oared racing outrigger drawn up on the stage; that was the one that
took their fancy. They said they’d have that one, please. The
boatman was away, and only his boy was in charge. The boy tried to damp
their ardour for the outrigger, and showed them two or three very
comfortable-looking boats of the family-party build, but those would not do at
all; the outrigger was the boat they thought they would look best in.
So the boy
launched it, and they took off their coats and prepared to take their
seats. The boy suggested that George, who, even in those days, was always
the heavy man of any party, should be number four. George said he should
be happy to be number four, and promptly stepped into bow’s place, and sat down
with his back to the stern. They got him into his proper position at
last, and then the others followed.
A
particularly nervous boy was appointed cox, and the steering principle
explained to him by Joskins. Joskins himself took stroke. He told
the others that it was simple enough; all they had to do was to follow him.
They said
they were ready, and the boy on the landing stage took a boat-hook and shoved
him off.
What then
followed George is unable to describe in detail. He has a confused
recollection of having, immediately on starting, received a violent blow in the
small of the back from the butt-end of number five’s scull, at the same time
that his own seat seemed to disappear from under him by magic, and leave him
sitting on the boards. He also noticed, as a curious circumstance, that
number two was at the same instant lying on his back at the bottom of the boat,
with his legs in the air, apparently in a fit.
They
passed under Kew Bridge, broadside, at the rate of eight miles an hour. Joskins
being the only one who was rowing. George, on recovering his seat, tried
to help him, but, on dipping his oar into the water, it immediately, to his
intense surprise, disappeared under the boat, and nearly took him with it.
And then
“cox” threw both rudder lines over-board, and burst into tears.
How they
got back George never knew, but it took them just forty minutes. A dense
crowd watched the entertainment from Kew Bridge with much interest, and
everybody shouted out to them different directions. Three times they
managed to get the boat back through the arch, and three times they were
carried under it again, and every time “cox” looked up and saw the bridge above
him he broke out into renewed sobs.
George
said he little thought that afternoon that he should ever come to really like
boating.
Harris is
more accustomed to sea rowing than to river work, and says that, as an
exercise, he prefers it. I don’t. I remember taking a small boat
out at Eastbourne last summer: I used to do a good deal of sea rowing years
ago, and I thought I should be all right; but I found I had forgotten the art
entirely. When one scull was deep down underneath the water, the other
would be flourishing wildly about in the air. To get a grip of the water
with both at the same time I had to stand up. The parade was crowded with
nobility and gentry, and I had to pull past them in this ridiculous
fashion. I landed half-way down the beach, and secured the services of an
old boatman to take me back.
I like to
watch an old boatman rowing, especially one who has been hired by the
hour. There is something so beautifully calm and restful about his
method. It is so free from that fretful haste, that vehement striving,
that is every day becoming more and more the bane of nineteenth-century
life. He is not for ever straining himself to pass all the other
boats. If another boat overtakes him and passes him it does not annoy
him; as a matter of fact, they all do overtake him and pass him—all those that
are going his way. This would trouble and irritate some people; the sublime
equanimity of the hired boatman under the ordeal affords us a beautiful lesson
against ambition and uppishness.
Plain
practical rowing of the get-the-boat-along order is not a very difficult art to
acquire, but it takes a good deal of practice before a man feels comfortable,
when rowing past girls. It is the “time” that worries a youngster.
“It’s jolly funny,” he says, as for the twentieth time within five minutes he
disentangles his sculls from yours; “I can get on all right when I’m by
myself!”
To see two
novices try to keep time with one another is very amusing. Bow finds it
impossible to keep pace with stroke, because stroke rows in such an
extraordinary fashion. Stroke is intensely indignant at this, and
explains that what he has been endeavouring to do for the last ten minutes is
to adapt his method to bow’s limited capacity. Bow, in turn, then becomes
insulted, and requests stroke not to trouble his head about him (bow), but to
devote his mind to setting a sensible stroke.
“Or, shall
I take stroke?” he adds, with the evident idea that that would at once
put the whole matter right.
They
splash along for another hundred yards with still moderate success, and then
the whole secret of their trouble bursts upon stroke like a flash of inspiration.
“I tell
you what it is: you’ve got my sculls,” he cries, turning to bow; “pass yours
over.”
“Well, do
you know, I’ve been wondering how it was I couldn’t get on with these,” answers
bow, quite brightening up, and most willingly assisting in the exchange.
“Now we shall be all right.”
But they
are not—not even then. Stroke has to stretch his arms nearly out of their
sockets to reach his sculls now; while bow’s pair, at each recovery, hit him a
violent blow in the chest. So they change back again, and come to the
conclusion that the man has given them the wrong set altogether; and over their
mutual abuse of this man they become quite friendly and sympathetic.
George
said he had often longed to take to punting for a change. Punting is not
as easy as it looks. As in rowing, you soon learn how to get along and
handle the craft, but it takes long practice before you can do this with
dignity and without getting the water all up your sleeve.
One young
man I knew had a very sad accident happen to him the first time he went
punting. He had been getting on so well that he had grown quite cheeky
over the business, and was walking up and down the punt, working his pole with
a careless grace that was quite fascinating to watch. Up he would march
to the head of the punt, plant his pole, and then run along right to the other
end, just like an old punter. Oh! it was grand.
And it
would all have gone on being grand if he had not unfortunately, while looking
round to enjoy the scenery, taken just one step more than there was any
necessity for, and walked off the punt altogether. The pole was firmly
fixed in the mud, and he was left clinging to it while the punt drifted
away. It was an undignified position for him. A rude boy on the
bank immediately yelled out to a lagging chum to “hurry up and see a real
monkey on a stick.”
I could
not go to his assistance, because, as ill-luck would have it, we had not taken
the proper precaution to bring out a spare pole with us. I could only sit
and look at him. His expression as the pole slowly sank with him I shall
never forget; there was so much thought in it.
I watched
him gently let down into the water, and saw him scramble out, sad and
wet. I could not help laughing, he looked such a ridiculous figure.
I continued to chuckle to myself about it for some time, and then it was
suddenly forced in upon me that really I had got very little to laugh at when I
came to think of it. Here was I, alone in a punt, without a pole,
drifting helplessly down mid-stream—possibly towards a weir.
I began to
feel very indignant with my friend for having stepped overboard and gone off in
that way. He might, at all events, have left me the pole.
I drifted
on for about a quarter of a mile, and then I came in sight of a fishing-punt
moored in mid-stream, in which sat two old fishermen. They saw me bearing
down upon them, and they called out to me to keep out of their way.
“I can’t,”
I shouted back.
“But you
don’t try,” they answered.
I
explained the matter to them when I got nearer, and they caught me and lent me
a pole. The weir was just fifty yards below. I am glad they
happened to be there.
The first
time I went punting was in company with three other fellows; they were going to
show me how to do it. We could not all start together, so I said I would
go down first and get out the punt, and then I could potter about and practice
a bit until they came.
I could
not get a punt out that afternoon, they were all engaged; so I had nothing else
to do but to sit down on the bank, watching the river, and waiting for my
friends.
I had not
been sitting there long before my attention became attracted to a man in a punt
who, I noticed with some surprise, wore a jacket and cap exactly like
mine. He was evidently a novice at punting, and his performance was most
interesting. You never knew what was going to happen when he put the pole
in; he evidently did not know himself. Sometimes he shot up stream and
sometimes he shot down stream, and at other times he simply spun round and came
up the other side of the pole. And with every result he seemed equally
surprised and annoyed.
The people
about the river began to get quite absorbed in him after a while, and to make
bets with one another as to what would be the outcome of his next push.
In the
course of time my friends arrived on the opposite bank, and they stopped and
watched him too. His back was towards them, and they only saw his jacket
and cap. From this they immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was
I, their beloved companion, who was making an exhibition of himself, and their
delight knew no bounds. They commenced to chaff him unmercifully.
I did not
grasp their mistake at first, and I thought, “How rude of them to go on like
that, with a perfect stranger, too!” But before I could call out and reprove
them, the explanation of the matter occurred to me, and I withdrew behind a
tree.
Oh, how
they enjoyed themselves, ridiculing that young man! For five good minutes
they stood there, shouting ribaldry at him, deriding him, mocking him, jeering
at him. They peppered him with stale jokes, they even made a few new ones
and threw at him. They hurled at him all the private family jokes
belonging to our set, and which must have been perfectly unintelligible to
him. And then, unable to stand their brutal jibes any longer, he turned
round on them, and they saw his face!
I was glad
to notice that they had sufficient decency left in them to look very
foolish. They explained to him that they had thought he was some one they
knew. They said they hoped he would not deem them capable of so insulting
any one except a personal friend of their own.
Of course
their having mistaken him for a friend excused it. I remember Harris
telling me once of a bathing experience he had at Boulogne. He was
swimming about there near the beach, when he felt himself suddenly seized by
the neck from behind, and forcibly plunged under water. He struggled
violently, but whoever had got hold of him seemed to be a perfect Hercules in
strength, and all his efforts to escape were unavailing. He had given up
kicking, and was trying to turn his thoughts upon solemn things, when his
captor released him.
He
regained his feet, and looked round for his would-be murderer. The
assassin was standing close by him, laughing heartily, but the moment he caught
sight of Harris’s face, as it emerged from the water, he started back and
seemed quite concerned.
“I really
beg your pardon,” he stammered confusedly, “but I took you for a friend of
mine!”
Harris
thought it was lucky for him the man had not mistaken him for a relation, or he
would probably have been drowned outright.
Sailing is
a thing that wants knowledge and practice too—though, as a boy, I did not think
so. I had an idea it came natural to a body, like rounders and
touch. I knew another boy who held this view likewise, and so, one windy
day, we thought we would try the sport. We were stopping down at
Yarmouth, and we decided we would go for a trip up the Yare. We hired a
sailing boat at the yard by the bridge, and started off.
“It’s
rather a rough day,” said the man to us, as we put off: “better take in a reef
and luff sharp when you get round the bend.”
We said we
would make a point of it, and left him with a cheery “Good-morning,” wondering
to ourselves how you “luffed,” and where we were to get a “reef” from, and what
we were to do with it when we had got it.
We rowed
until we were out of sight of the town, and then, with a wide stretch of water
in front of us, and the wind blowing a perfect hurricane across it, we felt
that the time had come to commence operations.
Hector—I
think that was his name—went on pulling while I unrolled the sail. It
seemed a complicated job, but I accomplished it at length, and then came the
question, which was the top end?
By a sort
of natural instinct, we, of course, eventually decided that the bottom was the
top, and set to work to fix it upside-down. But it was a long time before
we could get it up, either that way or any other way. The impression on
the mind of the sail seemed to be that we were playing at funerals, and that I
was the corpse and itself was the winding-sheet.
When it
found that this was not the idea, it hit me over the head with the boom, and
refused to do anything.
“Wet it,”
said Hector; “drop it over and get it wet.”
He said
people in ships always wetted the sails before they put them up. So I
wetted it; but that only made matters worse than they were before. A dry
sail clinging to your legs and wrapping itself round your head is not pleasant,
but, when the sail is sopping wet, it becomes quite vexing.
We did get
the thing up at last, the two of us together. We fixed it, not exactly
upside down—more sideways like—and we tied it up to the mast with the painter,
which we cut off for the purpose.
That the
boat did not upset I simply state as a fact. Why it did not upset I am
unable to offer any reason. I have often thought about the matter since,
but I have never succeeded in arriving at any satisfactory explanation of the
phenomenon.
Possibly
the result may have been brought about by the natural obstinacy of all things
in this world. The boat may possibly have come to the conclusion, judging
from a cursory view of our behaviour, that we had come out for a morning’s
suicide, and had thereupon determined to disappoint us. That is the only
suggestion I can offer.
By
clinging like grim death to the gunwale, we just managed to keep inside the
boat, but it was exhausting work. Hector said that pirates and other
seafaring people generally lashed the rudder to something or other, and hauled
in the main top-jib, during severe squalls, and thought we ought to try to do
something of the kind; but I was for letting her have her head to the wind.
As my
advice was by far the easiest to follow, we ended by adopting it, and contrived
to embrace the gunwale and give her her head.
The boat
travelled up stream for about a mile at a pace I have never sailed at since,
and don’t want to again. Then, at a bend, she heeled over till half her
sail was under water. Then she righted herself by a miracle and flew for
a long low bank of soft mud.
That
mud-bank saved us. The boat ploughed its way into the middle of it and
then stuck. Finding that we were once more able to move according to our
ideas, instead of being pitched and thrown about like peas in a bladder, we
crept forward, and cut down the sail.
We had had
enough sailing. We did not want to overdo the thing and get a surfeit of
it. We had had a sail—a good all-round exciting, interesting sail—and now
we thought we would have a row, just for a change like.
We took
the sculls and tried to push the boat off the mud, and, in doing so, we broke
one of the sculls. After that we proceeded with great caution, but they
were a wretched old pair, and the second one cracked almost easier than the
first, and left us helpless.
The mud
stretched out for about a hundred yards in front of us, and behind us was the
water. The only thing to be done was to sit and wait until someone came
by.
It was not
the sort of day to attract people out on the river, and it was three hours
before a soul came in sight. It was an old fisherman who, with immense
difficulty, at last rescued us, and we were towed back in an ignominious
fashion to the boat-yard.
What
between tipping the man who had brought us home, and paying for the broken
sculls, and for having been out four hours and a half, it cost us a pretty
considerable number of weeks’ pocket-money, that sail. But we learned
experience, and they say that is always cheap at any price.
To be continued
