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 - "
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
painfullyevident, 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.