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
enough.
The 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.
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