THREE MEN IN A BOAT
PART 15
CHAPTER XVI.
Reading.—We are towed by steam launch.—Irritating behaviour of small
boats.—How they get in the way of steam launches.—George and Harris again shirk
their work.—Rather a hackneyed story.—Streatley and Goring.
We came in
sight of Reading about eleven. The river is dirty and dismal here.
One does not linger in the neighbourhood of Reading. The town itself is a
famous old place, dating from the dim days of King Ethelred, when the Danes
anchored their warships in the Kennet, and started from Reading to ravage all
the land of Wessex; and here Ethelred and his brother Alfred fought and
defeated them, Ethelred doing the praying and Alfred the fighting.
In later
years, Reading seems to have been regarded as a handy place to run down to,
when matters were becoming unpleasant in London. Parliament generally
rushed off to Reading whenever there was a plague on at Westminster; and, in
1625, the Law followed suit, and all the courts were held at Reading. It
must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London
to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.
During the
Parliamentary struggle, Reading was besieged by the Earl of Essex, and, a
quarter of a century later, the Prince of Orange routed King James’s troops
there.
Henry I.
lies buried at Reading, in the Benedictine abbey founded by him there, the
ruins of which may still be seen; and, in this same abbey, great John of Gaunt
was married to the Lady Blanche.
At Reading
lock we came up with a steam launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and
they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley. It is very
delightful being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself to
rowing. The run would have been more delightful still, if it had not been
for a lot of wretched small boats that were continually getting in the way of
our launch, and, to avoid running down which, we had to be continually easing
and stopping. It is really most annoying, the manner in which these
rowing boats get in the way of one’s launch up the river; something ought to
done to stop it.
And they
are so confoundedly impertinent, too, over it. You can whistle till you
nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry. I
would have one or two of them run down now and then, if I had my way, just to
teach them all a lesson.
The river
becomes very lovely from a little above Reading. The railway rather
spoils it near Tilehurst, but from Mapledurham up to Streatley it is
glorious. A little above Mapledurham lock you pass Hardwick House, where
Charles I. played bowls. The neighbourhood of Pangbourne, where the
quaint little Swan Inn stands, must be as familiar to the habitues of
the Art Exhibitions as it is to its own inhabitants.
My
friends’ launch cast us loose just below the grotto, and then Harris wanted to
make out that it was my turn to pull. This seemed to me most
unreasonable. It had been arranged in the morning that I should bring the
boat up to three miles above Reading. Well, here we were, ten miles above
Reading! Surely it was now their turn again.
I could
not get either George or Harris to see the matter in its proper light, however;
so, to save argument, I took the sculls. I had not been pulling for more
than a minute or so, when George noticed something black floating on the water,
and we drew up to it. George leant over, as we neared it, and laid hold
of it. And then he drew back with a cry, and a blanched face.
It was the
dead body of a woman. It lay very lightly on the water, and the face was
sweet and calm. It was not a beautiful face; it was too prematurely
aged-looking, too thin and drawn, to be that; but it was a gentle, lovable
face, in spite of its stamp of pinch and poverty, and upon it was that look of
restful peace that comes to the faces of the sick sometimes when at last the
pain has left them.
Fortunately
for us—we having no desire to be kept hanging about coroners’ courts—some men
on the bank had seen the body too, and now took charge of it from us.
We found
out the woman’s story afterwards. Of course it was the old, old vulgar
tragedy. She had loved and been deceived—or had deceived herself.
Anyhow, she had sinned—some of us do now and then—and her family and friends,
naturally shocked and indignant, had closed their doors against her.
Left to
fight the world alone, with the millstone of her shame around her neck, she had
sunk ever lower and lower. For a while she had kept both herself and the
child on the twelve shillings a week that twelve hours’ drudgery a day procured
her, paying six shillings out of it for the child, and keeping her own body and
soul together on the remainder.
Six
shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly. They
want to get away from each other when there is only such a very slight bond as
that between them; and one day, I suppose, the pain and the dull monotony of it
all had stood before her eyes plainer than usual, and the mocking spectre had
frightened her. She had made one last appeal to friends, but, against the
chill wall of their respectability, the voice of the erring outcast fell
unheeded; and then she had gone to see her child—had held it in her arms and
kissed it, in a weary, dull sort of way, and without betraying any particular
emotion of any kind, and had left it, after putting into its hand a penny box
of chocolate she had bought it, and afterwards, with her last few shillings,
had taken a ticket and come down to Goring.
It seemed
that the bitterest thoughts of her life must have centred about the wooded
reaches and the bright green meadows around Goring; but women strangely hug the
knife that stabs them, and, perhaps, amidst the gall, there may have mingled
also sunny memories of sweetest hours, spent upon those shadowed deeps over
which the great trees bend their branches down so low.
She had
wandered about the woods by the river’s brink all day, and then, when evening
fell and the grey twilight spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she stretched
her arms out to the silent river that had known her sorrow and her joy.
And the old river had taken her into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary
head upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pain.
Thus had
she sinned in all things—sinned in living and in dying. God help her! and
all other sinners, if any more there be.
Goring on
the left bank and Streatley on the right are both or either charming places to
stay at for a few days. The reaches down to Pangbourne woo one for a
sunny sail or for a moonlight row, and the country round about is full of
beauty. We had intended to push on to Wallingford that day, but the sweet
smiling face of the river here lured us to linger for a while; and so we left
our boat at the bridge, and went up into Streatley, and lunched at the “Bull,”
much to Montmorency’s satisfaction.
They say that
the hills on each ride of the stream here once joined and formed a barrier
across what is now the Thames, and that then the river ended there above Goring
in one vast lake. I am not in a position either to contradict or affirm
this statement. I simply offer it.
It is an
ancient place, Streatley, dating back, like most river-side towns and villages,
to British and Saxon times. Goring is not nearly so pretty a little spot
to stop at as Streatley, if you have your choice; but it is passing fair enough
in its way, and is nearer the railway in case you want to slip off without
paying your hotel bill.
CHAPTER XVII
Washing day.—Fish and fishers.—On the art of angling.—A conscientious
fly-fisher.—A fishy story.
We stayed
two days at Streatley, and got our clothes washed. We had tried washing
them ourselves, in the river, under George’s superintendence, and it had been a
failure. Indeed, it had been more than a failure, because we were worse
off after we had washed our clothes than we were before. Before we had
washed them, they had been very, very dirty, it is true; but they were just
wearable. After we had washed them—well, the river between Reading
and Henley was much cleaner, after we had washed our clothes in it, than it was
before. All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and Henley,
we collected, during that wash, and worked it into our clothes.
The
washerwoman at Streatley said she felt she owed it to herself to charge us just
three times the usual prices for that wash. She said it had not been like
washing, it had been more in the nature of excavating.
We paid
the bill without a murmur.
The
neighbourhood of Streatley and Goring is a great fishing centre. There is
some excellent fishing to be had here. The river abounds in pike, roach,
dace, gudgeon, and eels, just here; and you can sit and fish for them all day.
Some
people do. They never catch them. I never knew anybody catch
anything, up the Thames, except minnows and dead cats, but that has nothing to
do, of course, with fishing! The local fisherman’s guide doesn’t say a
word about catching anything. All it says is the place is “a good station
for fishing;” and, from what I have seen of the district, I am quite prepared
to bear out this statement.
There is
no spot in the world where you can get more fishing, or where you can fish for
a longer period. Some fishermen come here and fish for a day, and others
stop and fish for a month. You can hang on and fish for a year, if you
want to: it will be all the same.
The Angler’s
Guide to the Thames says that “jack and perch are also to be had about
here,” but there the Angler’s Guide is wrong. Jack and perch may be
about there. Indeed, I know for a fact that they are. You can see
them there in shoals, when you are out for a walk along the banks: they come
and stand half out of the water with their mouths open for biscuits. And,
if you go for a bathe, they crowd round, and get in your way, and irritate
you. But they are not to be “had” by a bit of worm on the end of a hook,
nor anything like it—not they!
I am not a
good fisherman myself. I devoted a considerable amount of attention to
the subject at one time, and was getting on, as I thought, fairly well; but the
old hands told me that I should never be any real good at it, and advised me to
give it up. They said that I was an extremely neat thrower, and that I
seemed to have plenty of gumption for the thing, and quite enough
constitutional laziness. But they were sure I should never make anything
of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination.
They said
that as a poet, or a shilling shocker, or a reporter, or anything of that kind,
I might be satisfactory, but that, to gain any position as a Thames angler,
would require more play of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to
possess.
Some
people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good
fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is
a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage
that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of
probability, the general air of scrupulous—almost of pedantic—veracity, that
the experienced angler is seen.
Anybody
can come in and say, “Oh, I caught fifteen dozen perch yesterday evening;” or
“Last Monday I landed a gudgeon, weighing eighteen pounds, and measuring three
feet from the tip to the tail.”
There is
no art, no skill, required for that sort of thing. It shows pluck, but
that is all.
No; your
accomplished angler would scorn to tell a lie, that way. His method is a
study in itself.
He comes
in quietly with his hat on, appropriates the most comfortable chair, lights his
pipe, and commences to puff in silence. He lets the youngsters brag away
for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he removes the pipe from his
mouth, and remarks, as he knocks the ashes out against the bars:
“Well, I
had a haul on Tuesday evening that it’s not much good my telling anybody
about.”
“Oh! why’s
that?” they ask.
“Because I
don’t expect anybody would believe me if I did,” replies the old fellow calmly,
and without even a tinge of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe, and
requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch, cold.
There is a
pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure of himself to contradict the
old gentleman. So he has to go on by himself without any encouragement.
“No,” he
continues thoughtfully; “I shouldn’t believe it myself if anybody told it to
me, but it’s a fact, for all that. I had been sitting there all the
afternoon and had caught literally nothing—except a few dozen dace and a score
of jack; and I was just about giving it up as a bad job when I suddenly felt a
rather smart pull at the line. I thought it was another little one, and I
went to jerk it up. Hang me, if I could move the rod! It took me
half-an-hour—half-an-hour, sir!—to land that fish; and every moment I thought
the line was going to snap! I reached him at last, and what do you think
it was? A sturgeon! a forty pound sturgeon! taken on a line, sir!
Yes, you may well look surprised—I’ll have another three of Scotch, landlord,
please.”
And then
he goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who saw it; and what his
wife said, when he got home, and of what Joe Buggles thought about it.
I asked
the landlord of an inn up the river once, if it did not injure him, sometimes,
listening to the tales that the fishermen about there told him; and he said:
“Oh, no;
not now, sir. It did used to knock me over a bit at first, but, lor love
you! me and the missus we listens to ’em all day now. It’s what you’re
used to, you know. It’s what you’re used to.”
I knew a
young man once, he was a most conscientious fellow, and, when he took to
fly-fishing, he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than
twenty-five per cent.
“When I
have caught forty fish,” said he, “then I will tell people that I have caught
fifty, and so on. But I will not lie any more than that, because it is
sinful to lie.”
But the
twenty-five per cent. plan did not work well at all. He never was able to
use it. The greatest number of fish he ever caught in one day was three,
and you can’t add twenty-five per cent. to three—at least, not in fish.
So he
increased his percentage to thirty-three-and-a-third; but that, again, was
awkward, when he had only caught one or two; so, to simplify matters, he made
up his mind to just double the quantity.
He stuck
to this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he grew dissatisfied with
it. Nobody believed him when he told them that he only doubled, and he,
therefore, gained no credit that way whatever, while his moderation put him at
a disadvantage among the other anglers. When he had really caught three
small fish, and said he had caught six, it used to make him quite jealous to
hear a man, whom he knew for a fact had only caught one, going about telling
people he had landed two dozen.
So,
eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has
religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught
as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch
any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish—you could never catch less
than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by
any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish
would count thirty, three forty, and so on.
It is a
simple and easily worked plan, and there has been some talk lately of its being
made use of by the angling fraternity in general. Indeed, the Committee
of the Thames Angler’s Association did recommend its adoption about two years
ago, but some of the older members opposed it. They said they would
consider the idea if the number were doubled, and each fish counted as twenty.
If ever
you have an evening to spare, up the river, I should advise you to drop into
one of the little village inns, and take a seat in the tap-room. You will
be nearly sure to meet one or two old rod-men, sipping their toddy there, and they
will tell you enough fishy stories, in half an hour, to give you indigestion
for a month.
George and
I—I don’t know what had become of Harris; he had gone out and had a shave,
early in the afternoon, and had then come back and spent full forty minutes in
pipeclaying his shoes, we had not seen him since—George and I, therefore, and
the dog, left to ourselves, went for a walk to Wallingford on the second
evening, and, coming home, we called in at a little river-side inn, for a rest,
and other things.
We went
into the parlour and sat down. There was an old fellow there, smoking a
long clay pipe, and we naturally began chatting.
He told us
that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day
yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine
day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.
After that
it came out, somehow or other, that we were strangers in the neighbourhood, and
that we were going away the next morning.
Then a
pause ensued in the conversation, during which our eyes wandered round the
room. They finally rested upon a dusty old glass-case, fixed very high up
above the chimney-piece, and containing a trout. It rather fascinated me,
that trout; it was such a monstrous fish. In fact, at first glance, I
thought it was a cod.
“Ah!” said
the old gentleman, following the direction of my gaze, “fine fellow that, ain’t
he?”
“Quite
uncommon,” I murmured; and George asked the old man how much he thought it
weighed.
“Eighteen
pounds six ounces,” said our friend, rising and taking down his coat.
“Yes,” he continued, “it wur sixteen year ago, come the third o’ next month,
that I landed him. I caught him just below the bridge with a
minnow. They told me he wur in the river, and I said I’d have him, and so
I did. You don’t see many fish that size about here now, I’m
thinking. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”
And out he
went, and left us alone.
We could
not take our eyes off the fish after that. It really was a remarkably
fine fish. We were still looking at it, when the local carrier, who had
just stopped at the inn, came to the door of the room with a pot of beer in his
hand, and he also looked at the fish.
“Good-sized
trout, that,” said George, turning round to him.
“Ah! you
may well say that, sir,” replied the man; and then, after a pull at his beer,
he added, “Maybe you wasn’t here, sir, when that fish was caught?”
“No,” we
told him. We were strangers in the neighbourhood.
“Ah!” said
the carrier, “then, of course, how should you? It was nearly five years
ago that I caught that trout.”
“Oh! was
it you who caught it, then?” said I.
“Yes,
sir,” replied the genial old fellow. “I caught him just below the
lock—leastways, what was the lock then—one Friday afternoon; and the remarkable
thing about it is that I caught him with a fly. I’d gone out pike
fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout, and when I saw that whopper on
the end of my line, blest if it didn’t quite take me aback. Well, you
see, he weighed twenty-six pound. Good-night, gentlemen, good-night.”
Five
minutes afterwards, a third man came in, and described how he had caught
it early one morning, with bleak; and then he left, and a stolid,
solemn-looking, middle-aged individual came in, and sat down over by the window.
None of us
spoke for a while; but, at length, George turned to the new comer, and said:
“I beg
your pardon, I hope you will forgive the liberty that we—perfect strangers in
the neighbourhood—are taking, but my friend here and myself would be so much
obliged if you would tell us how you caught that trout up there.”
“Why, who
told you I caught that trout!” was the surprised query.
We said
that nobody had told us so, but somehow or other we felt instinctively that it
was he who had done it.
“Well,
it’s a most remarkable thing—most remarkable,” answered the stolid stranger,
laughing; “because, as a matter of fact, you are quite right. I did catch
it. But fancy your guessing it like that. Dear me, it’s really a
most remarkable thing.”
And then
he went on, and told us how it had taken him half an hour to land it, and how
it had broken his rod. He said he had weighed it carefully when he
reached home, and it had turned the scale at thirty-four pounds.
He went in
his turn, and when he was gone, the landlord came in to us. We told him
the various histories we had heard about his trout, and he was immensely
amused, and we all laughed very heartily.
“Fancy Jim
Bates and Joe Muggles and Mr. Jones and old Billy Maunders all telling you that
they had caught it. Ha! ha! ha! Well, that is good,” said the
honest old fellow, laughing heartily. “Yes, they are the sort to give it me,
to put up in my parlour, if they had caught it, they are!
Ha! ha! ha!”
And then
he told us the real history of the fish. It seemed that he had caught it
himself, years ago, when he was quite a lad; not by any art or skill, but by
that unaccountable luck that appears to always wait upon a boy when he plays
the wag from school, and goes out fishing on a sunny afternoon, with a bit of
string tied on to the end of a tree.
He said
that bringing home that trout had saved him from a whacking, and that even his
school-master had said it was worth the rule-of-three and practice put
together.
He was
called out of the room at this point, and George and I again turned our gaze
upon the fish.
It really
was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it, the more we
marvelled at it.
It excited
George so much that he climbed up on the back of a chair to get a better view
of it.
And then
the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout-case to save
himself, and down it came with a crash, George and the chair on top of it.
“You
haven’t injured the fish, have you?” I cried in alarm, rushing up.
“I hope
not,” said George, rising cautiously and looking about.
But he
had. That trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments—I say a thousand,
but they may have only been nine hundred. I did not count them.
We thought
it strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up into little
pieces like that.
And so it
would have been strange and unaccountable, if it had been a stuffed trout, but
it was not.
That trout
was plaster-of-Paris.
CHAPTER XVIII
Locks.—George and I are photographed.—Wallingford.—Dorchester.—Abingdon.—A
family man.—A good spot for drowning.—A difficult bit of water.—Demoralizing
effect of river air.
We left
Streatley early the next morning, and pulled up to Culham, and slept under the
canvas, in the backwater there.
The river
is not extraordinarily interesting between Streatley and Wallingford.
From Cleve you get a stretch of six and a half miles without a lock. I believe
this is the longest uninterrupted stretch anywhere above Teddington, and the
Oxford Club make use of it for their trial eights.
But
however satisfactory this absence of locks may be to rowing-men, it is to be
regretted by the mere pleasure-seeker.
For
myself, I am fond of locks. They pleasantly break the monotony of the
pull. I like sitting in the boat and slowly rising out of the cool depths
up into new reaches and fresh views; or sinking down, as it were, out of the
world, and then waiting, while the gloomy gates creak, and the narrow strip of
day-light between them widens till the fair smiling river lies full before you,
and you push your little boat out from its brief prison on to the welcoming
waters once again.
They are
picturesque little spots, these locks. The stout old lock-keeper, or his
cheerful-looking wife, or bright-eyed daughter, are pleasant folk to have a
passing chat with. You meet other boats there, and river
gossip is exchanged. The Thames would not be the fairyland it is without
its flower-decked locks.
Talking of
locks reminds me of an accident George and I very nearly had one summer’s
morning at Hampton Court.
It was a
glorious day, and the lock was crowded; and, as is a common practice up the
river, a speculative photographer was taking a picture of us all as we lay upon
the rising waters.
I did not
catch what was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at
noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and
stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming
an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful
attitude, and try to hide his feet.
My first
idea was that he had suddenly caught sight of some girl he knew, and I looked
about to see who it was. Everybody in the lock seemed to have been
suddenly struck wooden. They were all standing or sitting about in the
most quaint and curious attitudes I have ever seen off a Japanese fan.
All the girls were smiling. Oh, they did look so sweet! And all the
fellows were frowning, and looking stern and noble.
And then,
at last, the truth flashed across me, and I wondered if I should be in
time. Ours was the first boat, and it would be unkind of me to spoil the
man’s picture, I thought.
So I faced
round quickly, and took up a position in the prow, where I leant with careless
grace upon the hitcher, in an attitude suggestive of agility and
strength. I arranged my hair with a curl over the forehead, and threw an
air of tender wistfulness into my expression, mingled with a touch of cynicism,
which I am told suits me.
As we
stood, waiting for the eventful moment, I heard someone behind call out:
“Hi! look
at your nose.”
I could
not turn round to see what was the matter, and whose nose it was that was to be
looked at. I stole a side-glance at George’s nose! It was all
right—at all events, there was nothing wrong with it that could be
altered. I squinted down at my own, and that seemed all that could be
expected also.
“Look at
your nose, you stupid ass!” came the same voice again, louder.
And then
another voice cried:
“Push your
nose out, can’t you, you—you two with the dog!”
Neither
George nor I dared to turn round. The man’s hand was on the cap, and the
picture might be taken any moment. Was it us they were calling to?
What was the matter with our noses? Why were they to be pushed out!
But now
the whole lock started yelling, and a stentorian voice from the back shouted:
“Look at
your boat, sir; you in the red and black caps. It’s your two corpses that
will get taken in that photo, if you ain’t quick.”
We looked
then, and saw that the nose of our boat had got fixed under the woodwork of the
lock, while the in-coming water was rising all around it, and tilting it
up. In another moment we should be over. Quick as thought, we each
seized an oar, and a vigorous blow against the side of the lock with the
butt-ends released the boat, and sent us sprawling on our backs.
We did not
come out well in that photograph, George and I. Of course, as was to be
expected, our luck ordained it, that the man should set his wretched machine in
motion at the precise moment that we were both lying on our backs with a wild
expression of “Where am I? and what is it?” on our faces, and our four feet
waving madly in the air.
Our feet
were undoubtedly the leading article in that photograph. Indeed, very
little else was to be seen. They filled up the foreground entirely.
Behind them, you caught glimpses of the other boats, and bits of the
surrounding scenery; but everything and everybody else in the lock looked so
utterly insignificant and paltry compared with our feet, that all the other
people felt quite ashamed of themselves, and refused to subscribe to the
picture.
The owner
of one steam launch, who had bespoke six copies, rescinded the order on seeing
the negative. He said he would take them if anybody could show him his
launch, but nobody could. It was somewhere behind George’s right foot.
There was
a good deal of unpleasantness over the business. The photographer thought
we ought to take a dozen copies each, seeing that the photo was about
nine-tenths us, but we declined. We said we had no objection to being
photo’d full-length, but we preferred being taken the right way up.
Wallingford,
six miles above Streatley, is a very ancient town, and has been an active
centre for the making of English history. It was a rude, mud-built town
in the time of the Britons, who squatted there, until the Roman legions evicted
them; and replaced their clay-baked walls by mighty fortifications, the trace
of which Time has not yet succeeded in sweeping away, so well those old-world
masons knew how to build.
But Time,
though he halted at Roman walls, soon crumbled Romans to dust; and on the
ground, in later years, fought savage Saxons and huge Danes, until the Normans
came.
It was a
walled and fortified town up to the time of the Parliamentary War, when it
suffered a long and bitter siege from Fairfax. It fell at last, and then
the walls were razed.
From
Wallingford up to Dorchester the neighbourhood of the river grows more hilly,
varied, and picturesque. Dorchester stands half a mile from the
river. It can be reached by paddling up the Thame, if you have a small
boat; but the best way is to leave the river at Day’s Lock, and take a walk
across the fields. Dorchester is a delightfully peaceful old place,
nestling in stillness and silence and drowsiness.
Dorchester,
like Wallingford, was a city in ancient British times; it was then called Caer
Doren, “the city on the water.” In more recent times the Romans formed a
great camp here, the fortifications surrounding which now seem like low, even
hills. In Saxon days it was the capital of Wessex. It is very old,
and it was very strong and great once. Now it sits aside from the
stirring world, and nods and dreams.
Round
Clifton Hampden, itself a wonderfully pretty village, old-fashioned, peaceful,
and dainty with flowers, the river scenery is rich and beautiful. If you
stay the night on land at Clifton, you cannot do better than put up at the
“Barley Mow.” It is, without exception, I should say, the quaintest, most
old-world inn up the river. It stands on the right of the bridge, quite
away from the village. Its low-pitched gables and thatched roof and
latticed windows give it quite a story-book appearance, while inside it is even
still more once-upon-a-timeyfied.
It would
not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at. The
heroine of a modern novel is always “divinely tall,” and she is ever “drawing
herself up to her full height.” At the “Barley Mow” she would bump her
head against the ceiling each time she did this.
It would
also be a bad house for a drunken man to put up at. There are too many
surprises in the way of unexpected steps down into this room and up into that;
and as for getting upstairs to his bedroom, or ever finding his bed when he got
up, either operation would be an utter impossibility to him.
We were up
early the next morning, as we wanted to be in Oxford by the afternoon. It
is surprising how early one can get up, when camping out. One does
not yearn for “just another five minutes” nearly so much, lying wrapped up in a
rug on the boards of a boat, with a Gladstone bag for a pillow, as one does in
a featherbed. We had finished breakfast, and were through Clifton Lock by
half-past eight.
From
Clifton to Culham the river banks are flat, monotonous, and uninteresting, but,
after you get through Culhalm Lock—the coldest and deepest lock on the
river—the landscape improves.
At
Abingdon, the river passes by the streets. Abingdon is a typical country
town of the smaller order—quiet, eminently respectable, clean, and desperately
dull. It prides itself on being old, but whether it can compare in this
respect with Wallingford and Dorchester seems doubtful. A famous abbey
stood here once, and within what is left of its sanctified walls they brew
bitter ale nowadays.
In St.
Nicholas Church, at Abingdon, there is a monument to John Blackwall and his
wife Jane, who both, after leading a happy married life, died on the very same
day, August 21, 1625; and in St. Helen’s Church, it is recorded that W. Lee,
who died in 1637, “had in his lifetime issue from his loins two hundred lacking
but three.” If you work this out you will find that Mr. W. Lee’s family
numbered one hundred and ninety-seven. Mr. W. Lee—five times Mayor of
Abingdon—was, no doubt, a benefactor to his generation, but I hope there are
not many of his kind about in this overcrowded nineteenth century.
From
Abingdon to Nuneham Courteney is a lovely stretch. Nuneham Park is well
worth a visit. It can be viewed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The
house contains a fine collection of pictures and curiosities, and the grounds are
very beautiful.
The pool
under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown
yourself in. The undercurrent is terribly strong, and if you once get
down into it you are all right. An obelisk marks the spot where two men
have already been drowned, while bathing there; and the steps of the obelisk
are generally used as a diving-board by young men now who wish to see if the
place really is dangerous.
Iffley
Lock and Mill, a mile before you reach Oxford, is a favourite subject with the
river-loving brethren of the brush. The real article, however, is rather
disappointing, after the pictures. Few things, I have noticed, come quite
up to the pictures of them, in this world.
We passed
through Iffley Lock at about half-past twelve, and then, having tidied up the
boat and made all ready for landing, we set to work on our last mile.
Between
Iffley and Oxford is the most difficult bit of the river I know. You want
to be born on that bit of water, to understand it. I have been over it a
fairish number of times, but I have never been able to get the hang of
it. The man who could row a straight course from Oxford to Iffley ought
to be able to live comfortably, under one roof, with his wife, his
mother-in-law, his elder sister, and the old servant who was in the family when
he was a baby.
First the
current drives you on to the right bank, and then on to the left, then it takes
you out into the middle, turns you round three times, and carries you up stream
again, and always ends by trying to smash you up against a college barge.
Of course,
as a consequence of this, we got in the way of a good many other boats, during
the mile, and they in ours, and, of course, as a consequence of that, a good
deal of bad language occurred.
I don’t
know why it should be, but everybody is always so exceptionally irritable on
the river. Little mishaps, that you would hardly notice on dry land,
drive you nearly frantic with rage, when they occur on the water. When
Harris or George makes an ass of himself on dry land, I smile indulgently; when
they behave in a chuckle-head way on the river, I use the most blood-curdling
language to them. When another boat gets in my way, I feel I want to take
an oar and kill all the people in it.
The
mildest tempered people, when on land, become violent and blood-thirsty when in
a boat. I did a little boating once with a young lady. She was
naturally of the sweetest and gentlest disposition imaginable, but on the river
it was quite awful to hear her.
“Oh, drat
the man!” she would exclaim, when some unfortunate sculler would get in her
way; “why don’t he look where he’s going?”
And, “Oh,
bother the silly old thing!” she would say indignantly, when the sail would not
go up properly. And she would catch hold of it, and shake it quite brutally.
Yet, as I
have said, when on shore she was kind-hearted and amiable enougThe air of the
river has a demoralising effect upon one’s temper, and this it is, I suppose,
which causes even barge men to be sometimes rude to one another, and to use
language which, no doubt, in their calmer moments they regret.
CHAPTER XIX.
Oxford.—Montmorency’s idea of Heaven.—The hired up-river boat, its
beauties and advantages.—The “Pride of the Thames.”—The weather changes.—The
river under different aspects.—Not a cheerful evening.—Yearnings for the
unattainable.—The cheery chat goes round.—George performs upon the banjo.—A
mournful melody.—Another wet day.—Flight.—A little supper and a toast.
We spent
two very pleasant days at Oxford. There are plenty of dogs in the town of
Oxford. Montmorency had eleven fights on the first day, and fourteen on
the second, and evidently thought he had got to heaven.
Among folk
too constitutionally weak, or too constitutionally lazy, whichever it may be,
to relish up-stream work, it is a common practice to get a boat at Oxford, and
row down. For the energetic, however, the up-stream journey is certainly
to be preferred. It does not seem good to be always going with the
current. There is more satisfaction in squaring one’s back, and fighting
against it, and winning one’s way forward in spite of it—at least, so I feel,
when Harris and George are sculling and I am steering.
To those
who do contemplate making Oxford their starting-place, I would say, take your
own boat—unless, of course, you can take someone else’s without any possible
danger of being found out. The boats that, as a rule, are let for hire on
the Thames above Marlow, are very good boats. They are fairly
water-tight; and so long as they are handled with care, they rarely come to
pieces, or sink. There are places in them to sit down on, and they are
complete with all the necessary arrangements—or nearly all—to enable you to row
them and steer them.
But they
are not ornamental. The boat you hire up the river above Marlow is not
the sort of boat in which you can flash about and give yourself airs. The
hired up-river boat very soon puts a stop to any nonsense of that sort on the
part of its occupants. That is its chief—one may say, its only
recommendation.
The man in
the hired up-river boat is modest and retiring. He likes to keep on the
shady side, underneath the trees, and to do most of his travelling early in the
morning or late at night, when there are not many people about on the river to
look at him.
When the
man in the hired up-river boat sees anyone he knows, he gets out on to the
bank, and hides behind a tree.
I was one
of a party who hired an up-river boat one summer, for a few days’ trip.
We had none of us ever seen the hired up-river boat before; and we did not know
what it was when we did see it.
We had
written for a boat—a double sculling skiff; and when we went down with our bags
to the yard, and gave our names, the man said:
“Oh, yes; you’re the party that wrote for a
double sculling skiff. It’s all right. Jim, fetch round The
Pride of the Thames.”
The boy
went, and re-appeared five minutes afterwards, struggling with an antediluvian
chunk of wood, that looked as though it had been recently dug out of somewhere,
and dug out carelessly, so as to have been unnecessarily damaged in the
process.
My own
idea, on first catching sight of the object, was that it was a Roman relic of
some sort,—relic of what I do not know, possibly of a coffin.
The
neighbourhood of the upper Thames is rich in Roman relics, and my surmise
seemed to me a very probable one; but our serious young man, who is a bit of a
geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the
meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not
conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil
of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must
have belonged to the preglacial period.
To settle
the dispute, we appealed to the boy. We told him not to be afraid, but to
speak the plain truth: Was it the fossil of a pre-Adamite whale, or was it an
early Roman coffin?
The boy
said it was The Pride of the Thames.
We thought
this a very humorous answer on the part of the boy at first, and somebody gave
him twopence as a reward for his ready wit; but when he persisted in keeping up
the joke, as we thought, too long, we got vexed with him.
“Come,
come, my lad!” said our captain sharply, “don’t let us have any nonsense.
You take your mother’s washing-tub home again, and bring us a boat.”
The
boat-builder himself came up then, and assured us, on his word, as a practical
man, that the thing really was a boat—was, in fact, the boat, the
“double sculling skiff” selected to take us on our trip down the river.
We
grumbled a good deal. We thought he might, at least, have had it
whitewashed or tarred—had something done to it to distinguish it from a
bit of a wreck; but he could not see any fault in it.
He even
seemed offended at our remarks. He said he had picked us out the best
boat in all his stock, and he thought we might have been more grateful.
He said
it, The Pride of the Thames, had been in use, just as it now stood (or
rather as it now hung together), for the last forty years, to his
knowledge, and nobody had complained of it before, and he did not see why we
should be the first to begin.
We argued
no more.
We
fastened the so-called boat together with some pieces of string, got a bit of
wall-paper and pasted over the shabbier places, said our prayers, and stepped
on board.
They
charged us thirty-five shillings for the loan of the remnant for six days; and
we could have bought the thing out-and-out for four-and-sixpence at any sale of
drift-wood round the coast.
The
weather changed on the third day,—Oh! I am talking about our present trip
now,—and we started from Oxford upon our homeward journey in the midst of a
steady drizzle.
The
river—with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the
grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing
shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing
kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering
moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet each
lane and meadow, lying tangled in the rushes, peeping, laughing, from each
inlet, gleaming gay on many a far sail, making soft the air with glory—is a
golden fairy stream.
But the
river—chill and weary, with the ceaseless rain-drops falling on its brown and
sluggish waters, with a sound as of a woman, weeping low in some dark chamber;
while the woods, all dark and silent, shrouded in their mists of vapour, stand
like ghosts upon the margin; silent ghosts with eyes reproachful, like the
ghosts of evil actions, like the ghosts of friends neglected—is a
spirit-haunted water through the land of vain regrets.
Sunlight
is the life-blood of Nature. Mother Earth looks at us with such dull,
soulless eyes, when the sunlight has died away from out of her. It makes
us sad to be with her then; she does not seem to know us or to care for
us. She is as a widow who has lost the husband she loved, and her
children touch her hand, and look up into her eyes, but gain no smile from her.
We rowed
on all that day through the rain, and very melancholy work it was. We
pretended, at first, that we enjoyed it. We said it was a change, and
that we liked to see the river under all its different aspects. We said
we could not expect to have it all sunshine, nor should we wish it. We
told each other that Nature was beautiful, even in her tears.
Indeed,
Harris and I were quite enthusiastic about the business, for the first few
hours. And we sang a song about a gipsy’s life, and how delightful a
gipsy’s existence was!—free to storm and sunshine, and to every wind that
blew!—and how he enjoyed the rain, and what a lot of good it did him; and how
he laughed at people who didn’t like it.
George
took the fun more soberly, and stuck to the umbrella.
We hoisted
the cover before we had lunch, and kept it up all the afternoon, just leaving a
little space in the bow, from which one of us could paddle and keep a look-out.
In this way we made nine miles, and pulled up for the night a little below
Day’s Lock.
I cannot
honestly say that we had a merry evening. The rain poured down with quiet
persistency. Everything in the boat was damp and clammy. Supper was
not a success. Cold veal pie, when you don’t feel hungry, is apt to
cloy. I felt I wanted whitebait and a cutlet; Harris babbled of soles and
white-sauce, and passed the remains of his pie to Montmorency, who declined it,
and, apparently insulted by the offer, went and sat over at the other end of
the boat by himself.
George
requested that we would not talk about these things, at all events until he had
finished his cold boiled beef without mustard.
We played
penny nap after supper. We played for about an hour and a half, by the
end of which time George had won fourpence—George always is lucky at cards—and
Harris and I had lost exactly twopence each.
We thought
we would give up gambling then. As Harris said, it breeds an unhealthy
excitement when carried too far. George offered to go on and give us our
revenge; but Harris and I decided not to battle any further against Fate.
After
that, we mixed ourselves some toddy, and sat round and talked. George
told us about a man he had known, who had come up the river two years ago and
who had slept out in a damp boat on just such another night as that was, and it
had given him rheumatic fever, and nothing was able to save him, and he had
died in great agony ten days afterwards. George said he was quite a young
man, and was engaged to be married. He said it was one of the saddest
things he had ever known.
And that
put Harris in mind of a friend of his, who had been in the Volunteers, and who
had slept out under canvas one wet night down at Aldershot, “on just such
another night as this,” said Harris; and he had woke up in the morning a
cripple for life. Harris said he would introduce us both to the man when
we got back to town; it would make our hearts bleed to see him.
This
naturally led to some pleasant chat about sciatica, fevers, chills, lung
diseases, and bronchitis; and Harris said how very awkward it would be if one
of us were taken seriously ill in the night, seeing how far away we were from a
doctor.
There
seemed to be a desire for something frolicksome to follow upon this
conversation, and in a weak moment I suggested that George should get out his
banjo, and see if he could not give us a comic song.
I will say
for George that he did not want any pressing. There was no nonsense about
having left his music at home, or anything of that sort. He at once
fished out his instrument, and commenced to play “Two Lovely Black Eyes.”
I had
always regarded “Two Lovely Black Eyes” as rather a commonplace tune until that
evening. The rich vein of sadness that George extracted from it quite
surprised me.
The desire
that grew upon Harris and myself, as the mournful strains progressed, was to
fall upon each other’s necks and weep; but by great effort we kept back the
rising tears, and listened to the wild yearnful melody in silence.
When the
chorus came we even made a desperate effort to be merry. We re-filled our
glasses and joined in; Harris, in a voice trembling with emotion, leading, and
George and I following a few words behind:
“Two
lovely black eyes;
Oh! what a surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong,
Two—”
Oh! what a surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong,
Two—”
There we
broke down. The unutterable pathos of George’s accompaniment to that
“two” we were, in our then state of depression, unable to bear. Harris
sobbed like a little child, and the dog howled till I thought his heart or his
jaw must surely break.
George
wanted to go on with another verse. He thought that when he had got a
little more into the tune, and could throw more “abandon,” as it were, into the
rendering, it might not seem so sad. The feeling of the majority,
however, was opposed to the experiment.
There
being nothing else to do, we went to bed—that is, we undressed ourselves, and
tossed about at the bottom of the boat for some three or four hours.
After which, we managed to get some fitful slumber until five a.m., when we all
got up and had breakfast.
The second
day was exactly like the first. The rain continued to pour down, and we
sat, wrapped up in our mackintoshes, underneath the canvas, and drifted slowly
down.
One of
us—I forget which one now, but I rather think it was myself—made a few feeble
attempts during the course of the morning to work up the old gipsy foolishness
about being children of Nature and enjoying the wet; but it did not go down
well at all. That—
“I care
not for the rain, not I!”
was so
painfully evident, as expressing the sentiments of each of us, that to sing it
seemed unnecessary.
On one
point we were all agreed, and that was that, come what might, we would go
through with this job to the bitter end. We had come out for a
fortnight’s enjoyment on the river, and a fortnight’s enjoyment on the river we
meant to have. If it killed us! well, that would be a sad thing for our
friends and relations, but it could not be helped. We felt that to give
in to the weather in a climate such as ours would be a most disastrous
precedent.
“It’s only
two days more,” said Harris, “and we are young and strong. We may get
over it all right, after all.”
At about
four o’clock we began to discuss our arrangements for the evening. We
were a little past Goring then, and we decided to paddle on to Pangbourne, and
put up there for the night.
“Another
jolly evening!” murmured George.
We sat and
mused on the prospect. We should be in at Pangbourne by five. We
should finish dinner at, say, half-past six. After that we could walk
about the village in the pouring rain until bed-time; or we could sit in a
dimly-lit bar-parlour and read the almanac.
“Why, the Alhambra would be almost more
lively,” said Harris, venturing his head outside the cover for a moment and
taking a survey of the sky.
“With a
little supper at The * to follow,” I added, half unconsciously.
·
Mr Jerome’s added
comment: A capital little out-of-the-way restaurant, in the neighbourhood of
---, where you can get one of the best-cooked and cheapest little French
dinners or suppers that I know of, with an excellent bottle of Beaune, for
three-and-six [three shillings and sixpence]; ... and which I am not going to
be idiot enough to advertise.
[Philomathes’s Note: Even if I translated the
three-and-six into modern decimal coinage (171/2p
actually), it would make no sense because of the inflation rate since then and
now. So perhaps it should be sufficient
that Mr Jerome was not going to reveal his secret bargain.]
“Yes it’s
almost a pity we’ve made up our minds to stick to this boat,” answered Harris;
and then there was silence for a while.
“If we hadn’t
made up our minds to contract our certain deaths in this bally old coffin,”
observed George, casting a glance of intense malevolence over the boat, “it
might be worth while to mention that there’s a train leaves Pangbourne, I know,
soon after five, which would just land us in town in comfortable time to get a
chop, and then go on to the place you mentioned afterwards.”
Nobody
spoke. We looked at one another, and each one seemed to see his own mean
and guilty thoughts reflected in the faces of the others. In silence, we
dragged out and overhauled the Gladstone. We looked up the river and down
the river; not a soul was in sight!
Twenty
minutes later, three figures, followed by a shamed-looking dog, might have been
seen creeping stealthily from the boat-house at the “Swan” towards the railway
station, dressed in the following neither neat nor gaudy costume:
Black
leather shoes, dirty; suit of boating flannels, very dirty; brown felt hat,
much battered; mackintosh, very wet; umbrella.
We had
deceived the boatman at Pangbourne. We had not had the face to tell him
that we were running away from the rain. We had left the boat, and all it
contained, in his charge, with instructions that it was to be ready for us at
nine the next morning. If, we said—if anything unforeseen should
happen, preventing our return, we would write to him.
We reached
Paddington at seven, and drove direct to the restaurant I have before
described, where we partook of a light meal, left Montmorency, together with
suggestions for a supper to be ready at half-past ten, and then continued our
way to Leicester Square.
We
attracted a good deal of attention at the Alhambra. On our presenting
ourselves at the paybox we were gruffly directed to go round to Castle Street,
and were informed that we were half-an-hour behind our time.
We
convinced the man, with some difficulty, that we were not “the
world-renowned contortionists from the Himalaya Mountains,” and he took our
money and let us pass.
Inside we
were a still greater success. Our fine bronzed countenances and
picturesque clothes were followed round the place with admiring gaze. We
were the cynosure of every eye.
It was a
proud moment for us all.
We
adjourned soon after the first ballet, and wended our way back to the
restaurant, where supper was already awaiting us.
I must
confess to enjoying that supper. For about ten days we seemed to have
been living, more or less, on nothing but cold meat, cake, and bread and
jam. It had been a simple, a nutritious diet; but there had been nothing exciting
about it, and the odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the
sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at
the door of our inner man.
We pegged
and quaffed away in silence for a while, until the time came when, instead of
sitting bolt upright, and grasping the knife and fork firmly, we leant back in
our chairs and worked slowly and carelessly—when we stretched out our legs
beneath the table, let our napkins fall, unheeded, to the floor, and found time
to more critically examine the smoky ceiling than we had hitherto been able to
do—when we rested our glasses at arm’s-length upon the table, and felt good,
and thoughtful, and forgiving.
Then
Harris, who was sitting next the window, drew aside the curtain and looked out
upon the street.
It
glistened darkly in the wet, the dim lamps flickered with each gust, the rain
splashed steadily into the puddles and trickled down the water-spouts into the
running gutters. A few soaked wayfarers hurried past, crouching beneath
their dripping umbrellas, the women holding up their skirts.
“Well,”
said Harris, reaching his hand out for his glass, “we have had a pleasant trip,
and my hearty thanks for it to old Father Thames—but I think we did well to
chuck it when we did. Here’s to Three Men well out of a Boat!”
And
Montmorency, standing on his hind legs, before the window, peering out into the
night, gave a short bark of decided concurrence with the toast.
End of a
once-in-a-lifetime holiday.
