is, the University Humane Society. In the winter, when there is
skating, the Humane Society man stands by the danger spot with a
life-buoy and a rope; and in the summer, when the streams swarm with
pleasure-craft, he wanders everywhere, pulling slackers out of the
Isis and the Char. In view of the fact that, metaphorically speaking
at least, you can shake hands with your neighbors across either of
these streams, the Humane Society man is not without his humors.
You may get yourself a tub or a working-boat or a wherry, a rob-roy or
a dinghy, for every craft that floats is known on the Thames; but the
favorite craft are the Canadian canoe and the punt. The canoe you will
be familiar with, but your ideas of a punt are probably derived from a
farm-built craft you have poled about American duck-marshes--which
bears about the same relationship to this slender, half-decked cedar
beauty that a canal-boat bears to a racing-shell.
During your first perilous lessons in punting, you will probably be
in apprehension of ducking your mentor, who is lounging among the
cushions in the bow. But you cannot upset the punt any more than you
can discompose the Englishman; the punt simply upsets you without
seeming to be aware of it. And when you crawl dripping up the bank,
consoled only by the fact that the Humane Society man was not at hand
with his boat-hook to pull you out by the seat of the trousers, your
mentor will gravely explain how you made your mistake. Instead of
bracing your feet firmly on the bottom and pushing with the pole, you
were leaning on the pole and pushing with your feet. When the pole
stuck in the clay bottom, of course it pulled you out of the boat.
Steering is a matter of long practice. When you want to throw the bow
to the left, you have only to pry the stern over to the right as you
are pulling the pole out of the water. To throw the bow to the right,
ground the pole a foot or so wide of the boat, and then lean over and
pull the boat up to it. That is not so easy, but you will learn the
wrist motion in time. When all this comes like second nature, you will
feel that you have become a part of the punt, or rather that the punt
has taken life and become a part of you.
[Illustration: A RACING PUNT AND PUNTER]
A particular beauty of punting is that, more than any other sport,
it brings you into personal contact, so to speak, with the landscape.
In a few days you will know every inch of the bottom of the Char, some
of it perhaps by more intimate experience than you desire. Over there,
on the outer curve of the bend, the longest pole will not touch
bottom. Fight shy of that place. Just beyond here, in the narrows, the
water is so shallow that you can get the whole length of your body
into every sweep. As for the shrubbery on the bank, you will soon
learn these hawthorns, if only to avoid barging into them. And the
Magdalen chestnut, which spreads its shade so beautifully above the
water just beyond, becomes quite familiar when its low-reaching
branches have once caught the top of your pole and torn it from your
hands.
The slackers you see tied up to the bank on both sides of the Char are
always here after luncheon. An hour later their craft will be as thick
as money-bugs on the water, and the joys of the slackers will be at
height. You won't, as a rule, detect happiness in their faces, but it
is always obvious in the name of the craft. One man calls his canoe
"Vix Satis," which is the mark the university examining board uses to
signify that a man's examination paper is a failure. Another has
"P.T.O." on his bows--the "Please Turn Over" which an Englishman places
at the bottom of a card where we say "Over." Still another calls his
canoe the "Non-conformist Conscience"--which, as you are expected to
remark, is very easily upset. All this makes the slacker even happier
than if he were so un-English as to smile his pleasure, for he has a
joke ready-made on his bow, where there is no risk of any one's not
seeing it.
These pollard willows that line the bank are not expected to delight
your eye at first sight, but as you see them day after day, they grow
on you like the beauty of the bull-terrier pup that looks at you over
the gunwale of the boat tied beneath them. They have been topped to
make their roots strike deeper and wider into the soil, so that when
the freshets come in the spring the banks will stand firm. The idea
came some centuries ago from Holland, but has been so thoroughly
Englished that the university, and, indeed, all England, would
scarcely be itself without its pollard willows. And though the trees
are not in themselves graceful, they make a large part of the beauty
of the river scenery. The sun is never so golden as up there among
their quivering leaves, and no shadow is so deep as that in the water
at their feet.
The bar of foam ahead of us is the overflow from the lasher--that is
to say, from the still water above the weir. The word "lasher" is
obsolete almost everywhere else in England, and even to the Oxford
mind it describes the lashing overflow rather than the _lache_ or
_slack_ water above. When we "shoot the lasher," as the phrase goes,
you will get a hint as to why the obsolete term still clings to this
weir. Those fellows beyond who have tied up three deep to the bank are
waiting to see us get ducked; but it is just as easy to shoot the
lasher as to upset in it; and with that swarm of slackers watching, it
makes a difference which you do. We have only to get up a fair pace
and run into it on a diagonal. The lashing torrent will catch our
bows, but we shall be half over before it sweeps them quite around;
and then it will catch the stern in turn, and whirl the bow back into
the proper direction. A sudden lurching of the bow, the roaring of a
torrent beneath, a dash of spray--and we are in still water again.
In order to reach the inn at Marston by four we must pole on. If we
were true slackers, to be sure, we should have brought a spirit lamp
and a basket of tea, and tied up in the first convenient nook on the
bank; but these are heights of slacking to which the novice cannot
aspire. Just beyond here we shall have to give the Thames Conservancy
man threepence to roll the punt around a weir. If there were ladies
with us, we should have to let them walk a quarter of a mile on shore,
for just above is Parson's Pleasure, the university bathing-hole; and
these men, who would not let the Yale and the Cornell athletes appear
in sleeveless "zephyrs," plunge into a frequented waterway without any
zephyrs at all.
Above Parson's Pleasure we emerge from Mesopotamia--as the pretty
river bottom is called in which the Char divides into several
channels--and come in sight of the 'varsity cricket-ground. There is a
game on against a picked eleven from the Marylebone Club; and every
few minutes, if we waited, we might see the statuesque figures in
white flannel suddenly dash after a ball or trot back and forth
between the wickets. Few slackers have had energy to get beyond this
point; and as we pole among the meadows, the cuckoo's homely voice
emphasizes the solitude, singing the same two notes it sang to
Shakespeare--and to Chaucer before him, for the matter of that.
At Marston, having ordered tea of the red-cheeked housewife, it is
well to ask the innkeeper for credit. He is a Parisian, whose
sociological principles, it is said, were the cause of his venturing
across the Channel--in Paris, a man will even go as far as that for
his opinions; and while his cheery English spouse, attended by troops
of his red-cheeked boys, brings out the thin buttered bread, he will
revile you. What business have you to ask an honest yeoman to lend you
money? If he were to go down to Oxford and ask the first gentleman he
met to lend him half a crown to feed his starving family, should he
get it? Should he? And what right have you to come to his house--his
_home_!--and demand food at his board? You are a gentleman; but what
is a gentleman? A gentleman is the dregs of the idleness of centuries!
Then he will declaim about his plans for the renovation of the world.
All this time his well-fed wife has been pouring out the tea and
slicing the Genoa cake; and now, with a smile of reassurance, she
takes our names and college. But the innkeeper's eloquence does not
flag, and it will not until you tell him with decision that you have
had enough. This you are loath to do, for he has furnished you with a
new ideal of happiness. The cotton-wharf negro sometimes wants
leisure, the repose of the cricketer is at times rudely broken in
upon, and even the slacker is liable to his ducking; but to stand up
boldly against the evils of the world and to picture the new Utopia
while your wife averts all practical consequences, this is _otium cum
dignitate_.
This journey up the Char, though all-popular with the undergraduate,
is not the only one worth taking. We might have gone down the Isis to
the Iffley Mill and the sleepy little Norman church near by. This
would have taken us through the thick of the college crews training
for the summer eights. But the rules of the river are so complicated
that no man on earth who has not given them long hours of study can
understand them; and if an eight ran into us, we should be fined a
quid or two--one quid for a college eight, and two for the 'varsity.
Below Iffley, indeed, there is as much clear punting as you could
desire, and here you are in the full current of Thames pleasure-boats.
The towing-path skirts the water, so that when you are tired of
punting you can get out and tow your craft. The stretch of river here
I hold memorable as the scene of the only bit of dalliance I ever
witnessed in this most sentimental of environments. A young man and a
young woman had tied the painter of their punt to the middle of a
paddle, and shoulder by shoulder were loitering along the river-side.
Twenty yards behind, three other men and a baffled chaperon were
steering the punt clear of the bank, and boring one another.
[Illustration: IFFLEY LOCK AND MILL]
The best trip on the Isis is into the backwaters. These are a mesh of
tiny streams that break free from the main current above Oxford and
lose themselves in the broad bottom-lands. The islands they form were
chosen in the Dark Ages as the sites of religious houses; for not only
was the land fertile, but the network of deep, if tiny, streams
afforded defense from the heathen, while the main channel of the
Thames afforded communication with the Christian world. The ruins of
these, or of subsequent monasteries, remain to-day brooding over a few
Tudor cottages and hamlets, with a mill and a bakery and an inn or two
to sustain life in the occasional undergraduate who lazes by in his
canoe.
The most interesting of these ruins is Wytham. The phrase is exact,
for the entire hamlet was built from a venerable religious house
shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries. You can imagine the
size of Wytham. If you don't watch very closely as you paddle up the
sedgy backwater, you will miss it entirely, and that would be a pity,
for its rude masonry, thatched roofs, and rustic garden fronts seem
instinct with the atmosphere of Tudor England. The very tea roses,
nodding languidly over the garden wall, smell, or seem to smell, as
subtly sweet as if they had been pressed for ages between the leaves
of a mediaeval romance.
I am not quite sure that they do, though, for these ancient hamlets
have strange ways of pulling the wool--a true golden fleece, to be
sure--over American eyes. Once at twilight I heard a knot of strolling
country men and women crooning a tune which was so strangely familiar
that I immediately set it down as a village version of one of the
noble melodies of that golden age when English feeling found its
natural vent in song. As it drew nearer, I suddenly recognized it. It
was a far-away version of "Mammy's Little Alabama Coon."
I have still faith, though, in a certain mediaeval barmaid I chanced
upon in the backwaters. The circumstances of our meeting were
peculiar. As I drifted along one Sunday, perched on an after-thwart of
the canoe, the current swept me toward a willow that leaned over the
water, and I put up my hand to fend off. I chanced to be laughing to
myself at the time at the thought of a fellow who, only the day before
at the lasher, had tried to do the same thing. The lasher was forcing
his punt against the willow on the opposite bank, whereupon, to my
heart's delight, he lazily tried to fend it off with his arms. The
punt refused to be fended off, and he stooped with an amusing effect
of deliberation plump into the water. He was hauled out by the O.U.H.S.
man hard by.
I was interrupted in these pleasant reminiscences by the roaring of
waters about my ears, mingled with a boorish guffaw from one of the
fellows behind me.... But I started to tell about the mediaeval
barmaid. Making my way to a bakehouse up the stream, I hung my coat
and trousers before the fire on a long baker's pole, and put my shoes
inside the oven on a dough tray. My companion of the horse-laugh hung
my shirt on a blossoming almond-tree, and then left for the lunch
hamper. He had scarcely gone when I heard the rustle of skirts at the
door. "What do you want?" I cried. "I want my dinner," was the
friendly reply. It was the barmaid of a neighboring public house, in
her Sunday frock.
When she saw me she smiled, but maintained a dignity of port that--I
insist upon it--was instinct with the simple and primitive modesty of
the Middle Ages. It was the modesty of the people before whom Adam in
the Chester mystery play was required by the stage directions to
"stand nakyd and not be ashamyd." My barmaid advised me to take off my
stockings and hang them up before the fire. The advice I admit came as
a shock, but on reflection I saw that it was capital. For one happy
moment I lived in the broad, wholesome atmosphere of the Middle Ages.
It was like a breath from Chaucer's England.
Then the baker rushed into the room, in a cutaway Sunday coat of the
latest style. He had baked for an Oxford college so long that he had
become infected with the squeamish leaven of the nineteenth century.
He called the girl a huzzy, and, taking her by the shoulder, hustled
her into the garden, and then passed her plum pudding out to her
gingerly through a crack in the door. He covered me with apologies and
a bath-robe; but I did not mind either, for as the barmaid ran back to
the inn she was laughing what I still insist upon believing to have
been the simple joyous laughter of the Middle Ages.
But we must hurry to get back to college in time for dinner. And even
at that we shall have to stop here at Magdalen bridge and give a
street boy sixpence to take the punt the rest of the way. We land at
the foot of the tower just as the late afternoon sun is gilding its
exquisite pinnacles, and the chimes in its belfry are playing the
prelude to the hour of seven. It is a melody worth all the Char and
the Isis, with all their weirs and their willows. Other mediaeval
chimes fill you with a delicious sorrow for the past; but when they
cease, and the great bell tolls out the hour, you think only of the
death of time. It leaves you sadly beneath the tower, in the musty
cellarage. But the melody that the Magdalen chimes utter is full of
the fervid faith, the aspirations, of our fathers. It lifts you among
the gilded pinnacles, or perhaps ever so little above them.
II
AS SEEN FROM AN OXFORD TUB
To the true slacker, the college barges that line the Isis are an
object of aversion, for into them sooner or later every fellow who
loves the water finds his way, and then there is an end of slacking.
Each of the barges is a grammar school of oarsmanship, where all
available men are taught everything, from what thickness of leather to
wear on the heels of their boating-shoes to the rhythm in rowing by
which alone an eight can realize its full speed; and from the barges
issues a navy of boats and boating-men more than ten times as large as
that of an American university. When Mr. R. C. Lehmann arrived at
Cambridge to coach the Harvard crew, he was lost in admiration of the
Charles River and the Back Bay, and in amazement at the absence of
boats on them. At either Yale or Harvard it would be easy to give
space to both of the fleets that now swarm on the slender Isis and
threadlike Cam. We have water enough--as a Congressman once remarked
of our fighting navy--it is only the boats that are lacking. The
lesson we have to learn of our English cousins is not so much a matter
of reach and swing, outrigger and blades, as a generous and wholesome
interest in boating for the sake of the boat and of the water; and it
is less apparent in an Oxford 'varsity eight than in the humblest tub
of the humblest college.
The first suggestion that I should go out to be tubbed came from the
gray-bearded dean of the college, who happened at the time to be
taking me to the master for formal presentation. I told him that I had
tried for my class crew, and that three days on the water had
convinced the coach that I was useless. He fell a pace behind, looked
me over, and said that I might at least try. As this was his only
advice, I did not forget it; and when my tutor, before advising me as
to my studies, also urged me to row, I gave the matter some serious
thought.
I found subsequently that every afternoon, between luncheon and tea,
the college was virtually deserted for field, track, and river; and it
dawned upon me that unless I joined the general exodus I should
temporarily become a hermit. Still, my earlier unhappy experience in
rowing was full in mind, and I set out for the barge humble in spirit,
and prepared to be cursed roundly for three days, and "kicked out,"
or, as they say in Oxford, "given the hoof," on the fourth.
Few memories could be so unhappy, however, as to resist the beauty of
the banks of the Isis. At New Haven, the first impression an oarsman
gets is said to be an odor so unwelcome that it is not to be endeared
even by four years of the good-fellowship and companionship of a Yale
crew. At Harvard, the Charles--"Our Charles," as Longfellow spoke of
it in a poem to Lowell--too often presents aspects which it would be
sacrilege to dwell on. What the "royal-towered Thame" and "Camus,
reverend sire," may have been in the classic days of English poetry it
is perhaps safest not to inquire; suffice it that to-day they are--and
especially the Thames--all that the uninitiated imagine "our Charles."
Nowhere does the sun stream more cheerfully through the moist gray
English clouds; nowhere is the grass more green, the ivy more
luxuriant, and the pollard willows and slender elms and poplars more
dense in foliage. And every building, from the thatched farm-cottage
in Christ Church meadow to the Norman church at Iffley, is, as it
were, more native and more a part of creation than the grass and
trees. The English oarsman, it is true, cannot be as conscious of all
this as an American visitor. Yet the love of outdoors, which has been
at work for centuries in beautifying the English landscape, is not the
least part of the British sporting instinct. Where an American might
loiter in contemplation of these woods, fields, and streams, an
Englishman shoots, hunts, crickets, and rows in them.
When you enter the barge on the river, you feel keenly the contrast
with the bare, chill boathouses of the American universities. On the
centre tables are volumes of photographs of the crews and races of
former years; the latest sporting papers are scattered on chairs and
seats; and in one corner is a writing-table, with note-paper stamped
"Balliol Barge, Oxford." There is a shelf or two of bound "Punches,"
and several shelves of books--"Innocents Abroad" and "Indian Summer,"
beside "Three Men in a Boat" and "The Dolly Dialogues." On the walls
are strange and occult charts of the bumping races from the year
one--which, if I remember rightly, is 1837. At the far end of the room
is a sea-coal fire, above which shines the prow of a shell in which
the college twice won the Ladies' Plate at Henley.
The dressing-room of the barge is sacred to the members of the eight,
who at the present season are engaged in tubbing the freshmen in the
hope of finding a new oar or two. At the appointed hour they appear,
in eightsman blazers if it is fair, or in sou'westers if it is
not--sad to relate, it usually is not--and each chooses a couple of
men and leads them out to the float. Meanwhile, with the rest of the
candidates--freshmen, and others who in past years have failed of a
place in the torpids--you lounge on easy-chairs and seats, reading or
chatting, until your own turn comes to be tubbed. It is all quiet like
a club, except that the men are in full athletic dress.
[Illustration: THE FULL COSTUME OF AN EIGHTSMAN]
The athletic costume is elaborate, and has been worn for a
generation--since top-hats and trousers were abandoned, in fact--in
more or less its present form. It consists of a cotton zephyr, flannel
shorts flapping about the knees, and socks, or in winter Scotch hose
gartered above the calves. The sweater, which, in cold weather, is
worn on the river, has a deep V neck, supplemented when the oarsman is
not in action by a soft woolen scarf or cloud. Over all are worn a
flannel blazer and cap embroidered with the arms of the college. This
uniform, with trifling variations, is used in all sports on field and
river, and it is infinitely more necessary, in undergraduate opinion,
than the academic cap and gown which the rules of the university
require to be worn after dark. This seemingly elaborate dress is in
effect the most sensible in the world, and is the best expression I
know of the cheerful and familiar way in which an Englishman goes
about his sports. Reduced to its lowest terms, it is no more than is
required by comfort and decency. With the addition of sweater, scarf,
blazer, and cap, it is presentable in social conversation--indeed, in
the streets of the city. It is in consequence of this that an
afternoon in the barge is--except for the two tubbings on the
river--so much like one spent in a club.
In America an oarsman wears socks and trunks which are apt to be the
briefest possible. If he wears a shirt at all, it is often a mere
ribbon bounding the three enormous apertures through which he thrusts
his neck and shoulders. Before going on the river he is likely to
shiver, in spite of the collar of his sweater; and after he comes in,
his first thought is necessarily of donning street clothes. There is,
in consequence, practically no sociability in rowing until the crews
are selected and sent to the training-table. A disciple of Sartor
Resartus would be very likely to conclude that, until American rowing
adapts itself to the English costume, it must continue to be--except
for the fortunate few--the bare, unkindly sport it has always been.
All this time I have had you seated in an armchair beside the
sea-coal fire. Now an eightsman comes into the barge with two
deep-breathing freshmen, and nods us to follow him to the boat the
three have just quitted. On a chair by the door as we go out are
several pads, consisting of a rubber cloth faced with wool. These are
_spongeo pilenes_, or so I was told, which in English are known as
Pontius Pilates--or Pontiuses for short. The eightsman will advise you
to take a Pontius to protect your white flannel shorts from the water
on the seat; for there is always a shower threatening, unless indeed
it is raining. Every one knows, however, including the eightsman, that
the wool is a no less important part of the Pontius than the rubber:
it will save you many painful impressions of the dinner form in hall.
We are already on the river, and pair-oars, fours, and eights are
swarming about us. "Come forward," cries our coach, "ready--paddle!"
and we take our place in the procession of craft that move in one
another's wake down the narrow river. The coach talks pleasantly to us
from time to time, and in the course of an afternoon we get a pretty
good idea of what the English stroke consists in.
The sun bursts through the pearl-gray clouds, and glows in golden
ponds on the dense verdure of grass and trees. "Eyes in the boat,"
shouts the stern voice of conscience; but the coach says, "See,
fellows. Here's a 'varsity trial eight. Watch them row, and you will
see what the stroke looks like. Those fellows in red caps belong to
the Leander."