Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome [best classic literature txt] 📗

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 kindhearted 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.

XIX

Oxford⁠—Montmorency’s idea of Heaven⁠—The hired upriver 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 upstream work, it is a common practice to get a boat at Oxford, and row down. For the energetic, however, the upstream 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 watertight; 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 upriver 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 upriver 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 upriver 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 upriver boat one summer, for a few days’ trip. We had none of us ever seen the hired upriver 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 reappeared 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.

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