chapter4_page-70-86

4.

We had a great deal of trouble with steam launches that morning.

It was just before the week of the Henley races.

Some of the steam launches were by themselves.

Some of them were towing boats.

I do hate them.

I guess every rowing man does.

There is an obvious arrogance about a steam launch that makes me very mad.

They used to have to whistle for us to get out of their way.

I am proud to say that during that week our one small boat caused more annoyance and delay

to the steam launches that we came across than all the other boats on the river put together.

Steam launch coming, one of us would cry out on seeing the enemy in the distance.

In an instant we would be ready to receive it.

I would take the lines and Harris and George would sit down beside me.

All of us with our backs to the launch.

Our boat would drift quietly into mid -stream.

The launch would come whistling and we would go drifting.

At about a hundred yards it would start to whistle like mad and the people would lean over the side and roar at us.

But we never heard them.

Harris would be telling a story about his mother and George and I would not have missed a word of it for the world.

Then the steam launch would give a final long whistle that nearly burst its boiler

and it would reverse its engines and blow off steam and swing round.

Everyone on board would rush to the front and yell at us and the people on the bank would stand and shout at us

and all the other passing boats would stop and join in.

And then Harris would break off in the most interesting part of his story and look up with some surprise.

Good heavens George, here's a steam launch he would say.

And George would answer, well do you know I thought I heard something.

Then we would get nervous and confused and not know how to get the boat out of the way.

The people on the launch would crowd round and shout instructions.

Paul, you're right.

You, you idiot.

Back with your left.

No, not you.

The other one.

Leave the lines alone.

Now, both together, not that way.

Oh, you.

Then they would lower a boat and come to help us.

And after a quarter of an hour's effort they would get us out of their way.

We would thank them so much and ask them to give us a toe.

But they never would.

We found we were short of water at Hamilton.

So we took a jar and went up to the lock keeper's house to ask for some.

George was our spokesperson.

He put on a winning smile and said, oh please, could you spare us a little water?

Certainly, replied the old man, take as much as you want and leave the rest.

Thank you so much, said George.

Where do you keep it?

It's always the same place, my boy, was the reply, just behind you.

I don't see it, said George, turning around.

Why don't you see it?

Was the man's comment?

He twisted George round and pointed up and down the stream.

There's enough of it here.

Oh, exclaimed George, finally understanding.

But we can't drink the river, you know.

No, but you can drink some of it, replied the old man.

It's what I've drunk for the last fifteen years.

George told him that his appearance did not seem like great advertisement for river water,

and that he would prefer his water out of a pump.

We got some from a cottage a little higher up.

It could have been river water, too, but we did not know, so it was all right.

What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over.

We went up the backwater to Wargrave.

It is a pretty, shady little piece of stream.

Halfway up we got out and lunched, and it was during this lunch that George and I received a severe shock.

Harris received a shock, too, but I do not think it was nearly as bad as ours.

We were sitting in a meadow, about ten yards from the water's edge, and we had just settled comfortably to eat.

Harris had the beef -stake pie between his knees and was cutting it into slices.

George and I were waiting with our plates ready.

Have you got a spoon there, said Harris?

I need a spoon to add the gravy with.

The basket was behind us, and George and I both turned around to find a spoon.

We did not take five seconds to get it.

When we turned around again, Harris and the pie were gone.

It was a wide open field.

There was not a tree or even a bit of plant for hundreds of yards.

He could not have fallen into the river because we were on the water side of him, and he would have had to climb over us to do it.

George and I looked around.

Then we looked at each other.

Has he been carried up to heaven, I asked?

They wouldn't have taken the pie, too, said George.

There seemed some truth in this, so we discarded the heavenly theory.

I suppose there has been an earthquake, suggested George, and then he added with a touch of sadness in his voice, I wish he wasn't cutting that pie.

We turned our eyes towards the spot where Harris and the pie had last been seen.

Our blood froze in our veins, and our hair stood up on end when we saw, right there, Harris's head, and nothing but his head.

It was sticking out among the tall grass, the face very red and with an expression of great annoyance.

George was the first to recover from the shock.

Speak, he cried, and tell us if you are alive or dead, and where is the rest of you?

Oh, don't be a stupid fool, said Harris's head.

I believe you did it on purpose.

Did what, exclaimed George and I?

You made me sit here, a very silly trick, here, take the pie.

And out of the middle of the earth rose the pie, very much mixed up and damaged.

After it Harris struggled to get out dirty and wet.

He had been sitting on the edge of a small ditch which the grass had hidden from view.

When he leaned back he had fallen over together with the pie.

He said he had never felt so surprised in all his life.

He thought at first that the end of the world had come.

Harris believes to this day that George and I planned it all beforehand.

After lunch we got on the boat and caught a breeze, which took us up past Wargrave and Shiplake.

Softened in the sleepy sunlight of a summer's afternoon, Wargrave makes a sweet old picture as you pass it, one that remains long in your memory.

The river up to Sonig winds in and out through many islands and is very calm, quiet, and lonely.

Few people walk along its banks.

It is a part of the river in which to dream of the good old days and the things that might have been, but are not.

We got out of the boat at Sonig and went for a walk around the village.

It is the most magical little place on the whole river.

It is more like a fairy tale village than a real one.

Every house is covered in roses, and now in early June they were flowering in clouds of beautiful colors.

We wandered about in sweet Sonig for an hour or so.

As it was too late to go up to Reading, we decided to go back to one of the Shiplake Islands and stay there for the night.

It was still early when we got settled, and George said that as we had plenty of time, we should prepare a really good supper.

He said he would show us what could be cooked up the river and suggested that, with the vegetables and the remains of the cold beef and other bits and pieces, we should make an Irish stew.

It seemed like a fascinating idea.

George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and I started to peel the potatoes.

I had never thought that peeling potatoes was such a difficult job.

We began cheerfully, but our light -heartedness was gone by the time the first potato was finished.

The more we peeled, the more skin there seemed to be left on the potato.

By the time we had got all the skin off, there was very little potato left.

George came and had a look at it.

It was about the size of a peanut.

Oh, that won't do.

You're wasting them.

You must scrape them, he said.

So we scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling.

Potatoes are such an extraordinary shape, all bumps and growths.

We worked steadily for twenty -five minutes and did four potatoes.

Then we stopped.

We said we would need the rest of the evening to scrape the potato skins from ourselves.

George said it was silly to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed half a dozen more and put them in without peeling.

We also put in a cabbage and some peas.

George stirred it all up, and then he said there was a lot of room left, so we searched in all the baskets and picked out all the bits and pieces and added them to the stew.

Then George found half a tin of salmon and emptied that into the pot.

He said this was the advantage of Irish stew.

You could get rid of a lot of things.

I pulled out a couple of eggs that had got cracked and put those in.

I forget the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted.

Towards the end, Montmorrancy, who had shown great interest in what we were doing, went away and came back with a dead water rat in his mouth, which he wished to present as his contribution to the dinner.

We had a discussion on whether the rat should go in or not.

Harris said that he thought it should be all right and that every little helped.

But George said no.

He said he had never heard of water rats in Irish stew.

If you never try a new thing, how can you know what it's like, asked Harris?

It's men like you that delay the world's progress.

That Irish stew was a great success.

I don't think I ever enjoyed a meal more.

It was so fresh and tasty.

Here was a dish with a new flavor, with a taste like nothing else on earth.

We finished up with tea and cherry tart.

Montmorrancy had a fight with the kettle during tea time, and he was beaten by it.

Throughout the trip, he had shown great interest in the kettle.

He would sit and watch it as it boiled with a puzzled expression.

He would try to frighten it every now and then by growling at it.

When it began to boil, he wanted to fight it.

But at that moment, someone would always rush up and carry away his enemy before he could get at it.

Today, he decided to be in time.

At the first sound the kettle made, he rose, growling and went towards it in a threatening way.

It was only a little kettle, but it had lots of courage and spit at him.

Ah, you spit at me, growled Montmorrancy, showing his teeth.

I'll teach you no to be rude to a respectable dog, you long -nosed, dirty -looking devil.

Come on!

And he rushed at the poor little kettle and seized it in his mouth.

Then a blood -freezing scream was heard across the evening's stillness,

and Montmorrancy left the boat and ran three times around the island at the speed of 35 miles an hour.

He stopped occasionally to bury his nose in a bit of cool mud.

From that day on, Montmorrancy regarded the kettle with a mixture of respect, suspicion, and hate.

Whenever he saw it, he would growl and back away with his tail between his legs.

The moment the kettle was put on the stove, he would climb out of the boat and sit on the bank until tea was over.

George got out his banjo after supper and wanted to play it, but Harris objected.

He said he had a headache and did not feel strong enough to stand it.

George thought the music might do him good.

Music often took away a headache.

He played a few notes just to show Harris what it was like.

Harris said he would rather have a headache.

To this day, George has not learned to play the banjo.

On two or three evenings while we were up the river, he tried to get a little practice,

but it was never a success.

Harris' language was enough to discourage anyone.

Added to this, Montmorrancy would sit and howl continuously throughout the performance.

Why does he howl like that when I'm playing?

George would exclaim.

Why do you play like that when he's howling?

Harris would ask.

Leave him alone.

He can't help howling.

He's got a musical ear and you're playing makes him howl.

So George decided to postpone his banjo practice until he reached home.

But he did not get much chance even there.

Mrs. Poppets used to come up and say she was very sorry.

She herself liked to hear him, but the lady upstairs was expecting a baby,

and the doctor was afraid the music might injure the child.

Then George tried taking the banjo out with him late at night and practicing around the square.

But the neighbors complained to the police, and one night he was caught.

The evidence against him was very clear, and he had to promise not to play for six months.

He lost interest in the banjo after that.

After six months he did make one or two weak efforts to practice again,

but there was always the same coldness and lack of sympathy from the world.

After a while he gave it up and put the instrument up for sale.

He started to learn card tricks instead.

It must be discouraging work to learn a musical instrument.

You would expect people to do everything they can to help someone learn the art of playing a musical instrument,

but they don't.

I knew a young man once who was studying to play the bagpipes,

and you would be surprised the amount of opposition he had to face.

He did not receive any encouragement even from the members of his own family.

His father was against him playing the instrument from the beginning

and spoke quite cruelly about it.

My friend used to get up early in the morning to practice,

but he had to give up the plan because of his sister.

She was somewhat religious and said it was a terrible thing to begin the day like that.

So he decided to practice at night instead and played after the family had gone to bed.

But that did not help because it got the house a bad name.

People, going home late, would stop outside and listen.

And then they spread a rumor that a murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson's house the night before.

They would describe the victim's screams and the murderer's horrible curses followed by a prayer

and the last dying groan of the man.

So they let him practice during the day in the back kitchen with all the doors shut.

But he could be heard in the sitting room and it would affect his mother so much that she would almost cry.

She said the music reminded her of her late father who was eaten by a shark in New Guinea.

Then they built a little place for him at the bottom of the garden far away from the house.

He would take his instrument down there when he wanted to practice.

Sometimes they would have a visitor who did not know about his playing

and they would forget to tell him about it.

He would go around the garden and suddenly hear the bagpipes without being prepared for it.

If he were a strong person he would only get shocked but a person of weaker character would usually go mad.

Harris was in a bad temper after supper.

I think it must be the Irish stew that upset him because he is not used to high quality food.

George and I left him in the boat and went for a walk around Henley.

He said he would smoke a pipe and have a rest.

We told him not to go to sleep.

When we returned we were going to shout and he was going to row over and fetch us.

Henley was getting ready for the boat races and was full of people.

We met a lot of people we knew and in their pleasant company the time slipped by quickly.

It was nearly eleven o 'clock when we set off on our way back to the boat.

It was a cold, unpleasant night with a thin rain falling as we walked through the dark silent fields

talking low to each other and wondering if we were on the right path or not.

We thought of the comfortable boat, of Harris and Montmorrancy and some warm tea and wished we were there.

We imagined ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry.

We could see ourselves at supper in the warm and cheerful boat eating some cold meat and bread.

We could hear the cheerful noise of our knives and the laughing voices.

We hurried on to reach the boat.

We found the path at last and that made us happy because we had not been sure we were walking towards the river or away from it.

We passed Ship Lake as the clock was striking a quarter to twelve.

Do you remember which of the islands it was? asked George.

No, I replied, I don't.

How many islands are there?

Only four, answered George.

It will be all right if Harris is awake.

And if not, I asked.

We shouted when we came opposite from the first island, but there was no reply.

So we went to the second and tried there and got the same result.

Oh, I remember now, said George.

It was the third one, and we ran hopefully to the third one and shouted.

No answer.

The situation was becoming serious.

It was now past midnight.

The hotels at Ship Lake and Henley would be full.

George suggested walking back to Henley and assaulting a policeman so that we could spend the night at the police station.

But then we thought, what if he 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 things and be put in prison for six months.

Desperately, we tried the fourth island.

In the darkness it seemed like an island, but we had no better success.

The rain was coming down fast now.

We were wet to the skin, cold and miserable.

We began to wonder if there were more than four islands, or if we were near the islands at all, or if we were in the right part of the river.

Everything looked so strange and different in the darkness.

Just when we had given up all hope, I suddenly caught sight of a strange light shining among the trees on the opposite bank.

At first I thought it was ghosts, because it was a shadowy, mysterious light.

Then I realized it was our boat, and I yelled so hard that it made the night shake in its bed.

We waited breathless for a minute, and then we heard the answering bark of Montmorrancy.

We shouted back, as loud as we could, and after what seemed an hour, but was really five minutes, we saw the lighted boat moving slowly in the darkness.

Then we heard Harris's sleepy voice asking where we were.

There was an inexplicable sadness about Harris. It was more than ordinary tiredness.

He brought the boat to a part of the bank where it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and immediately went to sleep.

We screamed and roared to wake him up again, and we succeeded at last, and got safely on the boat.

Harris had a sad expression on him when we got on the boat. He looked like someone who had been through trouble.

We asked him if anything had happened.

Swans, he said.

He explained that we had anchored close to a swans nest, and soon after George and I had gone, the female swan came back and was angry when she found the boat.

Harris sent her away, and she came back with the male bird. Then Harris had to have a fight with these two swans and defeated them.

Half an hour later, the two returned with eighteen other swans. It must have been a terrible battle.

The swans had tried to pull him and Montmorrancy out of the boat and drowned them.

Harris had defended himself like a hero for four hours and had killed all of them, and they had all gone 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. I said twelve. Do you think I can't count?

We never found out the true facts about these swans.

We questioned Harris on this subject in the morning, and he said, what swans, and seemed to think George and I had been dreaming.

Oh, how delightful it was to be safe in the boat after all our fears. I slept well that night, and should have slept better if Harris had not disturbed me.

I was woken up at least a dozen times during the night by Harris wandering about the boat with a lantern, looking for his clothes.

He seemed to be worrying about his clothes all night.

He woke us up twice to see if we were lying on his trousers. George got quite mad the second time.

Why do you want your trousers in the middle of the night? He asked furiously. Why don't you lie down and go to sleep?

The next time I awoke, I found him in trouble because he could not find his socks.

I vaguely remember him rolling me over my side, and Harris saying something about his lost umbrella.

We woke late the next morning, had a simple breakfast, cleaned up, and put everything straight.

We agreed that we would row this morning instead of towing.

Harris thought it would be best if George and I rowed and he steered. I did not like this idea at all.

I said I thought Harris 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.

It always seems to me that I am doing more work than I should.

It is not that I am against the work. No, work fascinates me. I can sit and watch someone working for hours.

You cannot give me too much work. And I am careful with my work too.

But though I am eager for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my fair share,

but I get it without asking for it, and this worries me.

George says I don't need to be worried on the subject. He thinks it is my imagination that makes me fear I am doing more than I should.

He thinks I don't do enough.

In a boat, each member of the crew has the fixed idea that he is the one doing everything.

Harris thought only he was working, and George and I were being lazy.

George laughed at this idea and said all Harris did was eat and sleep.

He had fixed the idea that he was the one doing all the work.

He said he had never been with two people as lazy as Harris and me.

That made Harris laugh.

Look at George talking about work, he said.

About half an hour of work would kill him.

Have you ever seen George work, he added, turning to me?

No, I have not seen George work, I replied.

Well, I don't see how you can know much about it, said George to Harris, because you have been asleep half the time.

Have you ever seen Harris fully awake except at meal time?

asked George, turning to me.

Truth forced me to support George.

Well, Harris has been very little help in the boat, I said.

Well, anyhow, I have done more than Jay, said Harris.

Well, you couldn't have done less than Jay, added George.

I suppose Jay thinks he is a passenger, continued Harris.

And that was the thanks I got for having brought them in the miserable old boat all the way up from Kingston

and for having managed everything for them and taken care of them.

It is the way of the world.

We settled the disagreement by deciding that Harris and George should row up past Reading

and that I should tow the boat on from there.

Pulling a heavy boat against a strong stream is not tempting to me anymore.

Long ago, I used to be eager for the hard work, but now I like to give young people a chance.