Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)
however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of
pine-apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle
of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.
We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the
picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another,
and Harris got a spoon ready.
Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out
everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the
boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank
and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.
Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the
knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and
the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were
dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the
spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out
between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin
rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went
up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the
boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held
the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast
and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and
brought it down.
It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that
hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the
pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers
they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and
the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.
After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast
till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
[Picture: Flattened tin] We beat it out flat; we beat it back square;
we battered it into every form known to geometry—but we could not make
a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so
strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got
frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on
the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a
mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the
thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river,
and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and
rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of
the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the
town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls.
It is the witch’s kitchen from which go forth those demons of the
river—steam-launches. The _London Journal_ duke always has his “little
place” at Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always
dines there when she goes out on the spree with somebody else’s husband.
[Picture: River scene]
We went through Maidenhead quickly, and then eased up, and took
leisurely that grand reach beyond Boulter’s and Cookham locks.
Clieveden Woods still wore their dainty dress of spring, and rose
up, from the water’s edge, in one long harmony of blended shades of
fairy green. In its unbroken loveliness this is, perhaps, the sweetest
stretch of all the river, and lingeringly we slowly drew our little
boat away from its deep peace.
We pulled up in the backwater, just below Cookham, and had tea; and,
when we were through the lock, it was evening. A stiffish breeze had
sprung up—in our favour, for a wonder; for, as a rule on the river,
the wind is always dead against you whatever way you go. It is against
you in the morning, when you start for a day’s trip, and you pull a
long distance, thinking how easy it will be to come back with the sail.
Then, after tea, the wind veers round, and you have to pull hard in its
teeth all the way home.
When you forget to take the sail at all, then the wind is consistently
in your favour both ways. But there! this world is only a probation,
and man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.
This evening, however, they had evidently made a mistake, and had put
the wind round at our back instead of in our face. We kept very quiet
about it, and got the sail up quickly before they found it out, and
then we spread ourselves about the boat in thoughtful attitudes, and
the sail bellied out, and strained, and grumbled at the mast, and the
boat flew.
I steered.
There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes
as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams. The wings of
the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where.
You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping
tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is
throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you
up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs
grow light! The voices of the air are singing to you. The earth seems
far away and little; and the clouds, so close above your head, are
brothers, and you stretch your arms to them.
We had the river to ourselves, except that, far in the distance,
we could see a fishing-punt, moored in mid-stream, on which three
fishermen sat; and we skimmed over the water, and passed the wooded
banks, and no one spoke.
I was steering.
As we drew nearer, we could see that the three men fishing seemed
old and solemn-looking men. They sat on three chairs in the punt,
and watched intently their lines. And the red sunset threw a mystic
light upon the waters, and tinged with fire the towering woods, and
made a golden glory of the piled-up clouds. It was an hour of deep
enchantment, of ecstatic hope and longing. The little sail stood out
against the purple sky, the gloaming lay around us, wrapping the world
in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the night.
We seemed like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic
lake into the unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the
sunset.
We did not go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt,
where those three old men were fishing. We did not know what had
happened at first, because the sail shut out the view, but from the
nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air, we gathered
that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they
were vexed and discontented.
Harris let the sail down, and then we saw what had happened. We had
knocked those three old gentlemen off their chairs into a general
heap at the bottom of the boat, and they were now slowly and
painfully sorting themselves out from each other, and picking fish
off themselves; and as they worked, they cursed us—not with a common
cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive
curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the
distant future, and included all our relations, and covered everything
connected with us—good, substantial curses.
Harris told them they ought to be grateful for a little excitement,
sitting there fishing all day, and he also said that he was shocked and
grieved to hear men their age give way to temper so.
But it did not do any good.
George said he would steer, after that. He said a mind like mine ought
not to be expected to give itself away in steering boats—better let a
mere commonplace human being see after that boat, before we jolly well
all got drowned; and he took the lines, and brought us up to Marlow.
And at Marlow we left the boat by the bridge, and went and put up for
the night at
the “Crown.”
[Picture: The boat]
CHAPTER XIII.
Marlow.—Bisham Abbey.—The Medmenham Monks.—Montmorency thinks he
will murder an old Tom cat.—But eventually decides that he will let
it live.—Shameful conduct of a fox terrier at the Civil Service
Stores.—Our departure from Marlow.—An imposing procession.—The steam
launch, useful receipts for annoying and hindering it.—We decline to
drink the river.—A peaceful dog.—Strange disappearance of Harris and a
pie.
Marlow is one of the pleasantest river centres I know of. It is a
bustling, lively little town; not very picturesque on the whole, it
is true, but there are many quaint nooks and corners to be found in
it, nevertheless—standing arches in the shattered bridge of Time, over
which our fancy travels back to the days when Marlow Manor owned Saxon
Algar for its lord, ere conquering William seized it to give to Queen
Matilda, ere it passed to the Earls of Warwick or to worldly-wise Lord
Paget, the councillor of four successive sovereigns.
There is lovely country round about it, too, if, after boating, you are
fond of a walk, while the river itself is at its best here. Down to
Cookham, past the Quarry Woods and the meadows, is a lovely reach. Dear
old Quarry Woods! with your narrow, climbing paths, and little winding
glades, how scented to this hour you seem with memories of sunny summer
days! How haunted are your shadowy vistas with the ghosts of laughing
faces! how from your whispering leaves there softly fall the voices of
long ago!
[Picture: Bisham Abbey] From Marlow up to Sonning is even fairer yet.
Grand old Bisham Abbey, whose stone walls have rung to the shouts of
the Knights Templars, and which, at one time, was the home of Anne
of Cleves and at another of Queen Elizabeth, is passed on the right
bank just half a mile above Marlow Bridge. Bisham Abbey is rich in
melodramatic properties. It contains a tapestry bed-chamber, and a
secret room hid high up in the thick walls. The ghost of the Lady Holy,
who beat her little boy to death, still walks there at night, trying to
wash its ghostly hands clean in a ghostly basin.
Warwick, the king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial
things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did
good service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right
on the river’s bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are
worth inspecting, they are the tombs and monuments in Bisham Church. It
was while floating in his boat under the Bisham beeches that Shelley,
who was then living at Marlow (you can see his house now, in West
street), composed _The Revolt of Islam_.
By Hurley Weir, a little higher up, I have often thought that I could
stay a month without having sufficient time to drink in all the beauty
of the scene. The village of Hurley, five minutes’ walk from the lock,
is as old a little spot as there is on the river, dating, as it does,
to quote the quaint phraseology of those dim days, “from the times of
King Sebert and King Offa.” Just past the weir (going up) is Danes’
Field, where the invading Danes once encamped, during their march to
Gloucestershire; and a little further still, nestling by a sweet corner
of the stream, is what is left of Medmenham Abbey.
The famous Medmenham monks, or “Hell Fire Club,” as they were
commonly called, and of whom the notorious Wilkes was a member, were
a fraternity whose motto was “Do as you please,” and that invitation
still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before
this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was
founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind,
whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that
were to follow them, five hundred years afterwards.
The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth