Three Men in a Boat - 10

So George determined to postpone study of the banjo until he reached home.  But he did not get much opportunity even there.  Mrs. P. used to come up and say she was very sorry—for herself, she liked to hear him—but the lady upstairs was in a very delicate state, and the doctor was afraid it might injure the child.
Then George tried taking it out with him late at night, and practising round the square.  But the inhabitants complained to the police about it, and a watch was set for him one night, and he was captured.  The evidence against him was very clear, and he was bound over to keep the peace for six months.
He seemed to lose heart in the business after that.  He did make one or two feeble efforts to take up the work again when the six months had elapsed, but there was always the same coldness—the same want of sympathy on the part of the world to fight against; and, after awhile, he despaired altogether, and advertised the instrument for sale at a great sacrifice—“owner having no further use for same”—and took to learning card tricks instead.
It must be disheartening work learning a musical instrument.  You would think that Society, for its own sake, would do all it could to assist a man to acquire the art of playing a musical instrument.  But it doesn’t!
I knew a young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes, and you would be surprised at the amount of opposition he had to contend with.  Why, not even from the members of his own family did he receive what you could call active encouragement.  His father was dead against the business from the beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly on the subject.
My friend used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had to give that plan up, because of his sister.  She was somewhat religiously inclined, and she said it seemed such an awful thing to begin the day like that.
So he sat up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to bed, but that did not do, as it got the house such a bad name.  People, going home late, would stop outside to listen, and then put it about all over the town, the next morning, that a fearful murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson’s the night before; and would describe how they had heard the victim’s shrieks and the brutal oaths and curses of the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and the last dying gurgle of the corpse.
So they let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all the doors shut; but his more successful passages could generally be heard in the sitting-room, in spite of these precautions, and would affect his mother almost to tears.
She said it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed by a shark, poor man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea—where the connection came in, she could not explain).
Then they knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the garden, about quarter of a mile from the house, and made him take the machine down there when he wanted to work it; and sometimes a visitor would come to the house who knew nothing of the matter, and they would forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and he would go out for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot of those bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was.  If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.
There is, it must be confessed, something very sad about the early efforts of an amateur in bagpipes.  I have felt that myself when listening to my young friend.  They appear to be a trying instrument to perform upon.  You have to get enough breath for the whole tune before you start—at least, so I gathered from watching Jefferson.
He would begin magnificently with a wild, full, come-to-the-battle sort of a note, that quite roused you.  But he would get more and more piano as he went on, and the last verse generally collapsed in the middle with a splutter and a hiss.
You want to be in good health to play the bagpipes.
Young Jefferson only learnt to play one tune on those bagpipes; but I never heard any complaints about the insufficiency of his repertoire—none whatever.  This tune was “The Campbells are Coming, Hooray—Hooray!” so he said, though his father always held that it was “The Blue Bells of Scotland.”  Nobody seemed quite sure what it was exactly, but they all agreed that it sounded Scotch.
Strangers were allowed three guesses, and most of them guessed a different tune each time.
Harris was disagreeable after supper,—I think it must have been the stew that had upset him: he is not used to high living,—so George and I left him in the boat, and settled to go for a mouch round Henley.  He said he should have a glass of whisky and a pipe, and fix things up for the night.  We were to shout when we returned, and he would row over from the island and fetch us.
“Don’t go to sleep, old man,” we said as we started.
“Not much fear of that while this stew’s on,” he grunted, as he pulled back to the island.
Henley was getting ready for the regatta, and was full of bustle.  We met a goodish number of men we knew about the town, and in their pleasant company the time slipped by somewhat quickly; so that it was nearly eleven o’clock before we set off on our four-mile walk home—as we had learned to call our little craft by this time.
It was a dismal night, coldish, with a thin rain falling; and as we trudged through the dark, silent fields, talking low to each other, and wondering if we were going right or not, we thought of the cosy boat, with the bright light streaming through the tight-drawn canvas; of Harris and Montmorency, and the whisky, and wished that we were there.
We conjured up the picture of ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry; of the gloomy river and the shapeless trees; and, like a giant glow-worm underneath them, our dear old boat, so snug and warm and cheerful.  We could see ourselves at supper there, pecking away at cold meat, and passing each other chunks of bread; we could hear the cheery clatter of our knives, the laughing voices, filling all the space, and overflowing through the opening out into the night.  And we hurried on to realise the vision.
We struck the tow-path at length, and that made us happy; because prior to this we had not been sure whether we were walking towards the river or away from it, and when you are tired and want to go to bed uncertainties like that worry you.  We passed Skiplake as the clock was striking the quarter to twelve; and then George said, thoughtfully:
“You don’t happen to remember which of the islands it was, do you?”
“No,” I replied, beginning to grow thoughtful too, “I don’t.  How many are there?”
“Only four,” answered George.  “It will be all right, if he’s awake.”
“And if not?” I queried; but we dismissed that train of thought.
We shouted when we came opposite the first island, but there was no response; so we went to the second, and tried there, and obtained the same result.
“Oh!  I remember now,” said George; “it was the third one.”
And we ran on hopefully to the third one, and hallooed.
No answer!
The case was becoming serious. it was now past midnight.  The hotels at Skiplake and Henley would be crammed; and we could not go round, knocking up cottagers and householders in the middle of the night, to know if they let apartments!  George suggested walking back to Henley and assaulting a policeman, and so getting a night’s lodging in the station-house.  But then there was the thought, “Suppose he only hits us back and refuses to lock us up!”
We could not pass the whole night fighting policemen.  Besides, we did not want to overdo the thing and get six months.
We despairingly tried what seemed in the darkness to be the fourth island, but met with no better success.  The rain was coming down fast now, and evidently meant to last.  We were wet to the skin, and cold and miserable.  We began to wonder whether there were only four islands or more, or whether we were near the islands at all, or whether we were anywhere within a mile of where we ought to be, or in the wrong part of the river altogether; everything looked so strange and different in the darkness.  We began to understand the sufferings of the Babes in the Wood.
Just when we had given up all hope—yes, I know that is always the time that things do happen in novels and tales; but I can’t help it.  I resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so I will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose.
It was just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so.  Just when we had given up all hope, then, I suddenly caught sight, a little way below us, of a strange, weird sort of glimmer flickering among the trees on the opposite bank.  For an instant I thought of ghosts: it was such a shadowy, mysterious light.  The next moment it flashed across me that it was our boat, and I sent up such a yell across the water that made the night seem to shake in its bed.
We waited breathless for a minute, and then—oh! divinest music of the darkness!—we heard the answering bark of Montmorency.  We shouted back loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers—I never could understand myself why it should take more noise to wake seven sleepers than one—and, after what seemed an hour, but what was really, I suppose, about five minutes, we saw the lighted boat creeping slowly over the blackness, and heard Harris’s sleepy voice asking where we were.
There was an unaccountable strangeness about Harris.  It was something more than mere ordinary tiredness.  He pulled the boat against a part of the bank from which it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and immediately went to sleep.  It took us an immense amount of screaming and roaring to wake him up again and put some sense into him; but we succeeded at last, and got safely on board.
Harris had a sad expression on him, so we noticed, when we got into the boat.  He gave you the idea of a man who had been through trouble.  We asked him if anything had happened, and he said—
“Swans!”
It seemed we had moored close to a swan’s nest, and, soon after George and I had gone, the female swan came back, and kicked up a row about it.  Harris had chivied her off, and she had gone away, and fetched up her old man.  Harris said he had had quite a fight with these two swans; but courage and skill had prevailed in the end, and he had defeated them.
Half-an-hour afterwards they returned with eighteen other swans!  It must have been a fearful battle, so far as we could understand Harris’s account of it.  The swans had tried to drag him and Montmorency out of the boat and drown them; and he had defended himself like a hero for four hours, and had killed the lot, and they had all paddled away to die.
“How many swans did you say there were?” asked George.
“Thirty-two,” replied Harris, sleepily.
“You said eighteen just now,” said George.
“No, I didn’t,” grunted Harris; “I said twelve.  Think I can’t count?”
What were the real facts about these swans we never found out.  We questioned Harris on the subject in the morning, and he said, “What swans?” and seemed to think that George and I had been dreaming.
Oh, how delightful it was to be safe in the boat, after our trials and fears!  We ate a hearty supper, George and I, and we should have had some toddy after it, if we could have found the whisky, but we could not.  We examined Harris as to what he had done with it; but he did not seem to know what we meant by “whisky,” or what we were talking about at all.  Montmorency looked as if he knew something, but said nothing.
I slept well that night, and should have slept better if it had not been for Harris.  I have a vague recollection of having been woke up at least a dozen times during the night by Harris wandering about the boat with the lantern, looking for his clothes.  He seemed to be worrying about his clothes all night.
Twice he routed up George and myself to see if we were lying on his trousers.  George got quite wild the second time.
“What the thunder do you want your trousers for, in the middle of the night?” he asked indignantly.  “Why don’t you lie down, and go to sleep?”
I found him in trouble, the next time I awoke, because he could not find his socks; and my last hazy remembrance is of being rolled over on my side, and of hearing Harris muttering something about its being an extraordinary thing where his umbrella could have got to.
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.