Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), Jerome K. Jerome [best love novels of all time TXT] 📗

lived in it.  There is a grotto in the park which you can see for a fee, and which is supposed to be very wonderful; but I cannot see much in it myself.  The late Duchess of York, who lived at Oatlands, was very fond of dogs, and kept an immense number.  She had a special graveyard made, in which to bury them when they died, and there they lie, about fifty of them, with a tombstone over each, and an epitaph inscribed thereon.

Well, I dare say they deserve it quite as much as the average Christian does.

At “Corway Stakes”—the first bend above Walton Bridge—was fought a battle between Cæsar and Cassivelaunus.  Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Cæsar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).  But Cæsar crossed in spite of this.  You couldn’t choke Cæsar off that river.  He is the sort of man we want round the backwaters now.

Halliford and Shepperton are both pretty little spots where they touch the river; but there is nothing remarkable about either of them.  There is a tomb in Shepperton churchyard, however, with a poem on it, and I was nervous lest Harris should want to get out and fool round it.  I saw him fix a longing eye on the landing-stage as we drew near it, so I managed, by an adroit movement, to jerk his cap into the water, and in the excitement of recovering that, and his indignation at my clumsiness, he forgot all about his beloved graves.

At Weybridge, the Wey (a pretty little stream, navigable for small boats up to Guildford, and one which I have always been making up my mind to explore, and never have), the Bourne, and the Basingstoke Canal all enter the Thames together.  The lock is just opposite the town, and the first thing that we saw, when we came in view of it, was George’s blazer on one of the lock gates, closer inspection showing that George was inside it.

Montmorency set up a furious barking, I shrieked, Harris roared; George waved his hat, and yelled back.  The lock-keeper rushed out with a drag, under the impression that somebody had fallen into the lock, and appeared annoyed at finding that no one had.

George had rather a curious oilskin-covered parcel in his hand.  It was round and flat at one end, with a long straight handle sticking out of it.

“What’s that?” said Harris—“a frying-pan?”

“No,” said George, with a strange, wild look glittering in his eyes; “they are all the rage this season; everybody has got them up the river.  It’s a banjo.”

“I never knew you played the banjo!” cried Harris and I, in one breath.

“Not exactly,” replied George: “but it’s very easy, they tell me; and I’ve got the instruction book!”

CHAPTER IX.

George is introduced to work.—Heathenish instincts of tow-lines.—Ungrateful conduct of a double-sculling skiff.—Towers and towed.—A use discovered for lovers.—Strange disappearance of an elderly lady.—Much haste, less speed.—Being towed by girls: exciting sensation.—The missing lock or the haunted river.—Music.—Saved!

We made George work, now we had got him.  He did not want to work, of course; that goes without saying.  He had had a hard time in the City, so he explained.  Harris, who is callous in his nature, and not prone to pity, said:

“Ah! and now you are going to have a hard time on the river for a change; change is good for everyone.  Out you get!”

He could not in conscience—not even George’s conscience—object, though he did suggest that, perhaps, it would be better for him to stop in the boat, and get tea ready, while Harris and I towed, because getting tea was such a worrying work, and Harris and I looked tired.  The only reply we made to this, however, was to pass him over the tow-line, and he took it, and stepped out.

There is something very strange and unaccountable about a tow-line.  You roll it up with as much patience and care as you would take to fold up a new pair of trousers, and five minutes afterwards, when you pick it up, it is one ghastly, soul-revolting tangle.

I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again.

That is my opinion of tow-lines in general.  Of course, there may be honourable exceptions; I do not say that there are not.  There may be tow-lines that are a credit to their profession—conscientious, respectable tow-lines—tow-lines that do not imagine they are crochet-work, and try to knit themselves up into antimacassars the instant they are left to themselves.  I say there may be such tow-lines; I sincerely hope there are.  But I have not met with them.

This tow-line I had taken in myself just before we had got to the lock.  I would not let Harris touch it, because he is careless.  I had looped it round slowly and cautiously, and tied it up in the middle, and folded it in two, and laid it down gently at the bottom of the boat.  Harris had lifted it up scientifically, and had put it into George’s hand.  George had taken it firmly, and held it away from him, and had begun to unravel it as if he were taking the swaddling clothes off a new-born infant; and, before he had unwound a dozen yards, the thing was more like a badly-made door-mat than anything else.

It is always the same, and the same sort of thing always goes on in connection with it.  The man on the bank, who is trying to disentangle it, thinks all the fault lies with the man who rolled it up; and when a man up the river thinks a thing, he says it.

“What have you been trying to do with it, make a fishing-net of it?  You’ve made a nice mess you have; why couldn’t you wind it up properly, you silly dummy?” he grunts from time to time as he struggles wildly with it, and lays it out flat on the tow-path, and runs round and round it, trying to find the end.

On the other hand, the man who wound it up thinks the whole cause of the muddle rests with the man who is trying to unwind it.

“It was all right when you took it!” he exclaims indignantly.  “Why don’t you think what you are doing?  You go about things in such a slap-dash style.  You’d get a scaffolding pole entangled you would!”

And they feel so angry with one another that they would like to hang each other with the thing.  Ten minutes go by, and the first man gives a yell and goes mad, and dances on the rope, and tries to pull it straight by seizing hold of the first piece that comes to his hand and hauling at it.  Of course, this only gets it into a tighter tangle than ever.  Then the second man climbs out of the boat and comes to help him, and they get in each other’s way, and hinder one another.  They both get hold of the same bit of line, and pull at it in opposite directions, and wonder where it is caught.  In the end, they do get it clear, and then turn round and find that the boat has drifted off, and is making straight for the weir.

This really happened once to my own knowledge.  It was up by Boveney, one rather windy morning.  We were pulling down stream, and, as we came round the bend, we noticed a couple of men on the bank.  They were looking at each other with as bewildered and helplessly miserable expression as I have ever witnessed on any human countenance before or since, and they held a long tow-line between them.  It was clear that something had happened, so we eased up and asked them what was the matter.

“Why, our boat’s gone off!” they replied in an indignant tone.  “We just got out to disentangle the tow-line, and when we looked round, it was gone!”

And they seemed hurt at what they evidently regarded as a mean and ungrateful act on the part of the boat.

We found the truant for them half a mile further down, held by some rushes, and we brought it back to them.  I bet they did not give that boat another chance for a week.

I shall never forget the picture of those two men walking up and down the bank with a tow-line, looking for their boat.

One sees a good many funny incidents up the river in connection with towing.  One of the most common is the sight of a couple of towers, walking briskly along, deep in an animated discussion, while the man in the boat, a hundred yards behind them, is vainly shrieking to them to stop, and making frantic signs of distress with a scull.  Something has gone wrong; the rudder has come off, or the boat-hook has slipped overboard, or his hat has dropped into the water and is floating rapidly down stream.

He calls to them to stop, quite gently and politely at first.

“Hi! stop a minute, will you?” he shouts cheerily.  “I’ve dropped my hat over-board.”

Then: “Hi!  Tom—Dick! can’t you hear?” not quite so affably this time.

Then: “Hi!  Confound you, you dunder-headed idiots!  Hi! stop!  Oh you—!”

After that he springs up, and dances about, and roars himself red in the face, and curses everything he knows.  And the small boys on the bank stop and jeer at him, and pitch stones at him as he is pulled along past them, at the rate of four miles an hour, and can’t get out.

Much of this sort of trouble would be saved if those who are towing would keep remembering that they are towing, and give a pretty frequent look round to see how their man is getting on.  It is best to let one person tow.  When two are doing it, they get chattering, and forget, and the boat itself, offering, as it does, but little resistance, is of no real service in reminding them of the fact.

As an example of how utterly oblivious a pair of towers can be to their work, George told us, later on in the evening, when we were discussing the subject after supper, of a very curious instance.

He and three other men, so he said, were sculling a very heavily laden boat up from Maidenhead one evening, and a little above Cookham lock they noticed a fellow and a girl, walking along the towpath, both deep in an apparently interesting and absorbing conversation.  They were carrying a boat-hook between them, and, attached to the boat-hook was a tow-line, which trailed behind them, its end in the water.  No boat was near, no boat was in sight.  There must have been a boat attached to that tow-line at some time or other, that was certain; but what had become of it, what ghastly fate had overtaken it, and those who had been left in it, was buried in mystery.  Whatever the accident may have been, however, it had in no way disturbed the young lady and gentleman, who were towing.  They had the boat-hook and they had the line, and that seemed to be all that they thought necessary to their work.

George was about to call out and wake them up, but, at that moment, a bright idea flashed across him, and he didn’t.  He got the hitcher instead, and reached over, and drew in the end of the tow-line; and they made a loop in it, and put it over their mast, and then they tidied up the sculls, and went and sat down in the stern, and lit their pipes.

And that young man and young woman towed those four hulking chaps and a heavy boat up to Marlow.

George said he never saw so much thoughtful sadness concentrated into one glance before, as when, at the lock, that young couple grasped the idea that, for the last two miles, they had been towing the wrong boat.  George fancied that, if it had not been for the restraining influence of the sweet woman at his side, the young man might have given way to violent language.

The maiden was the first to recover from her surprise, and, when she did, she clasped her hands, and said, wildly:

“Oh, Henry, then where is auntie?”

“Did they