cutwater did not even raise a wavelet, and every black rivet-head was
visible as a line of dots, begins to forge ahead. The oars are dipped
farther back, and as the blade feels the water holding it in the hollow,
the lissom wood bends to its work. Before the cutwater a wave rises,
and, repulsed, rushes outwards. At each stroke, as the weight swings
towards the prow, there is just the least faint depression at its stem
as the boat travels. Whirlpool after whirlpool glides from the oars,
revolving to the rear with a threefold motion, round and round,
backwards and outwards. The crew impart their own life to their boat;
the animate and inanimate become as one, the boat is no longer wooden
but alive.
If there be a breeze a fleet of white sails comes round the
willow-hidden bend. But the Thames yachtsmen have no slight difficulties
to contend with. The capricious wind is nowhere so thoroughly capricious
as on the upper river. Along one mile there may be a spanking breeze,
the very next is calm, or with a fitful puff coming over a high hedge,
which flutters his pennant, but does not so much as shake the sail. Even
in the same mile the wind may take the water on one side, and scarcely
move a leaf on the other. But the current is always there, and the
vessel is certain to drift.
When at last a good opportunity is obtained, just as the boat heels
over, and the rushing bubbles at the prow resound, she must be put
about, and the napping foresail almost brushes the osiers. If she does
not come round--if the movement has been put off a moment too long--the
keel grates, and she is aground immediately. It is nothing but tacking,
tacking, tacking--a kind of stitching the stream.
Nor can one always choose the best day for the purpose; the exigencies
of business, perhaps, will not permit, and when free, the wind, which
has been scattering tiles and chimney-pots and snapping telegraph wires
in the City all the week, drops on the Saturday to nothing. He must
possess invincible patience, and at the same time be always ready to
advance his vessel even a foot, and his judgment must never fail him at
the critical time.
But the few brief hours when the circumstances are favourable compensate
for delays and monotonous calms; the vessel, built on well-judged lines,
answers her helm and responds to his will with instant obedience, and
that sense of command is perhaps the great charm of sailing. There are
others who find a pleasure in the yacht. When at her moorings on a sunny
morning she is sometimes boarded by laughing girls, who have put off
from the lawn, and who proceed in the most sailor-like fashion to
overhaul the rigging and see that everything is shipshape. No position
shows off a well-poised figure to such advantage as when, in a
close-fitting costume, a lady's arms are held high above her head to
haul at a rope.
So the river life flows by; skiffs, and four oars, canoes, solitary
scullers in outriggers, once now and then a swift eight, launches, a
bargee in a tublike dingey standing up and pushing his sculls instead of
pulling; gentlemen, with their shoulders in a halter, hauling like
horses and towing fair freights against the current; and punts poled
across to shady nooks. The splashing of oars, the staccato sound as a
blade feathered too low meets the wavelets, merry voices, sometimes a
song, and always a low undertone, which, as the wind accelerates it,
rises to a roar. It is the last leap of the river to the sea; the last
weir to whose piles the tide rises. On the bank of the weir where the
tide must moisten their roots grow dense masses of willow-herb, almost
as high as the shoulder, with trumpet-shaped pink flowers.
Let us go back again to the bank by the cornfields, with the glorious
open stretch of stream. In the evening, the rosy or golden hues of the
sunset will be reflected on the surface from the clouds; then the bats
wheel to and fro, and once now and then a nighthawk will throw himself
through the air with uncertain flight, his motions scarcely to be
followed, as darkness falls. Am I mistaken, or are kingfishers less
numerous than they were only a few seasons since? Then I saw them, now I
do not. Long-continued and severe frosts are very fatal to these birds;
they die on the perch.
And may I say a word for the Thames otter? The list of really wild
animals now existing in the home counties is so very, very short, that
the extermination of one of them seems a serious loss. Every effort is
made to exterminate the otter. No sooner does one venture down the river
than traps, gins, nets, dogs, prongs, brickbats, every species of
missile, all the artillery of vulgar destruction, are brought against
its devoted head. Unless my memory serves me wrong, one of these
creatures caught in a trap not long since was hammered to death with a
shovel or a pitchfork.
Now the river fox is, we know, extremely destructive to fish, but what
are a basketful of "bait" compared to one otter? The latter will
certainly never be numerous, for the moment they become so, otter-hounds
would be employed, and then we should see some sport. Londoners, I
think, scarcely recognise the fact that the otter is one of the last
links between the wild past of ancient England and the present days of
high civilisation.
The beaver is gone, but the otter remains, and comes so near the mighty
City as just the other side of the well-known Lock, the portal through
which a thousand boats at holiday time convey men and women to breathe
pure air. The porpoise, and even the seal, it is said, ventures to
Westminster sometimes; the otter to Kingston. Thus, the sea sends its
denizens past the vast multitude that surges over the City bridges, and
the last link with the olden time, the otter, still endeavours to live
near.
Perhaps the river is sweetest to look on in spring time or early summer.
Seen from a distance the water seems at first sight, when the broad
stream fills the vision as a whole, to flow with smooth, even current
between meadow and cornfield. But, coming to the brink, that silvery
surface now appears exquisitely chased with ever-changing lines. The
light airs, wandering to and fro where high banks exclude the direct
influence of the breeze, flutter the ripples hither and thither, so
that, instead of rolling upon one lee shore, they meet and expend their
little force upon each other. A continuous rising and falling, without a
line of direction, thus breaks up the light, not with sparkle or
glitter, but with endless silvery facets.
There is no pattern. The apparently intertangled tracing on a work of
art presently resolves itself into a design, which once seen is always
the same. These wavelets form no design; watch the sheeny maze as long
as one will, the eye cannot get at the clue, and so unwind the pattern.
Each seems for a second exactly like its fellow, but varies while you
say "These two are the same," and the white reflected light upon the
wide stream is now strongest here, and instantly afterwards flickers
yonder.
Where a gap in the willows admits a current of air a ripple starts to
rush straight across, but is met by another returning, which has been
repulsed from the bluff bow of a moored boat, and the two cross and run
through each other. As the level of the stream now slightly rises and
again falls, the jagged top of a large stone by the shore alternately
appears above, or is covered by the surface. The water as it retires
leaves for a moment a hollow in itself by the stone, and then swings
back to fill the vacuum.
Long roots of willows and projecting branches cast their shadow upon the
shallow sandy bottom; the shadow of a branch can be traced slanting
downwards with the shelve of the sand till lost in the deeper water. Are
those little circlets of light enclosing a round umbra or slightly
darker spot, that move along the bottom as the bubbles drift above on
the surface, shadows or reflections?
In still, dark places of the stream, where there seems no current, a
dust gathers on the water, falling from the trees, or borne thither by
the wind and dropping where its impulse ceases. Shadows of branches lie
here upon the surface itself, received by the greenish water dust. Round
the curve on the concave and lee side of the river, where the wind
drives the wavelets direct upon the strand, there are little beaches
formed by the undermining and fall of the bank.
The tiny surge rolls up the incline; each wave differing in the height
to which it reaches, and none of them alike, washing with it minute
fragments of stone and gravel, mere specks which vibrate to and fro with
the ripple and even drift with the current. Will these fragments, after
a process of trituration, ultimately become sand? A groove runs athwart
the bottom, left recently by the keel of a skiff, recently only, for in
a few hours these specks of gravel, sand, and particles that sweep along
the bottom, fill up such depressions. The motion of these atoms is not
continuous, but intermittent; now they rise and are carried a few inches
and there sink, in a minute or two to rise again and proceed.
Looking to windward there is a dark tint upon the water; but down the
stream, turning the other way, intensely brilliant points of light
appear and disappear. Behind a boat rowed against the current two
widening lines of wavelets, in the shape of an elongated V, stretch
apart and glitter, and every dip of the oars and the slippery oar-blades
themselves, as they rise out of the water, reflect the sunshine. The
boat appears but to touch the surface, instead of sinking into it, for
the water is transparent, and the eye can see underneath the keel.
Here, by some decaying piles, a deep eddy whirls slowly round and round;
they stand apart from the shore, for the eddy has cleared away the earth
around them. Now, walking behind the waves that roll away from you, dark
shadowy spots fluctuate to and fro in the trough of the water. Before a
glance can define its shape the shadow elongates itself from a spot to
an oval, the oval melts into another oval, and reappears afar off. When,
too, in flood time, the hurrying current seems to respond more
sensitively to the shape of the shallows and the banks beneath, there
boils up from below a ceaseless succession of irregular circles as if
the water there expanded from a centre, marking the verge of its outflow
with bubbles and raised lines upon the surface.
By the side float tiny whirlpools, some rotating this way and some that,
sucking down and boring tubes into the stream. Longer lines wander past,
and as they go, curve round, till when about to make a spiral they
lengthen out and drift, and thus, perpetually coiling and uncoiling,
glide with the current. They somewhat resemble the conventional curved
strokes which, upon an Assyrian bas-relief, indicate water.
Under the spring sunshine, the idle stream flows easily onward, yet
every part of the apparently even surface varies; and so, too, in a
larger way, the aspects of the succeeding reaches change. Upon one broad
bend the tints are green, for the river moves softly in a hollow, with
its back, as it were, to the wind.
The green lawn sloping to the shore, and the dark cedar's storeys of
flattened foliage, tier above tier; the green osiers of two eyots: the
light-leaved aspen; the tall elms, fresh and green; and the green
hawthorn bushes give their colour to the water, smooth as if polished,
in which they are reflected. A white swan floats in the still narrow
channel between the eyots, and there is a punt painted green moored in a
little inlet by the lawn, and scarce visible under drooping boughs.
Roofs of red tile and dormer windows rise behind the trees, the dull
yellow of the walls is almost hidden, and deep shadows lurk about the
shore.
Opposite, across the stream, a wide green sward stretches beside the
towing-path, lit up with sunshine which touches the dandelions till they
glow in the grass. From time to time a nightingale sings in a hawthorn
unregarded, and in the elms of the park hard by a crowd of jackdaws
chatter. But a little way round a curve the whole stream opens to the
sunlight and becomes blue, reflecting the sky. Again, sweeping round
another curve with bounteous flow, the current meets the wind direct, a
cloud comes up, the breeze freshens, and the watery green waves are
tipped with foam.
Rolling upon the strand, they leave a line like a tide marked by twigs
and fragments of dead wood, leaves, and the hop-like flowers of
Chichester elms which have been floated up and left. Over the stormy
waters a band of brown bank-martins wheel hastily to and fro, and from
the osiers the loud chirp of the sedge-reedling rises above the buffet
of the wind against the ear, and the splashing of the waves.
Once more a change, where the stream darts along swiftly, after having
escaped from a weir, and still streaked with foam. The shore rises like
a sea beach, and on the pebbles men are patching and pitching old barges
which have been hauled up on the bank. A skiff partly drawn up on the
beach rocks as the current strives to work it loose, and up the varnish
of the side glides a flickering light reflected from the wavelets. A
fleet of such skiffs are waiting for hire by the bridge; the waterman
cleaning them with a parti-coloured mop spies me eyeing his vessels, and
before I know exactly what is going on, and whether I have yet made up
my mind, the sculls are ready, the cushions in; I take my seat, and am
shoved gently forth upon the stream.
After I have gone under the arch, and am clear of all obstructions, I
lay the sculls aside, and reclining let the boat drift past a ballast
punt moored over the shallowest place, and with a rising load of gravel.
One man holds the pole steadying the scoop, while his mate turns a
windlass the chain from which drags it along the bottom, filling the bag
with pebbles, and finally hauls it to the surface, when the contents are
shot out in the punt.
It is a floating box rather than a boat, square at each end, and built
for capacity instead of progress. There are others moored in various
places, and all hard at work. The men in this one, scarcely glancing at
my idle skiff, go steadily on, dropping the scoop, steadying the pole,
turning the crank, and emptying the pebbles with a rattle.
Where do these pebbles come from? Like the stream itself there seems a
continual supply; if a bank be scooped away and punted to the shore
presently another bank forms. If a hollow be deepened, by-and-by it
fills up; if a channel be opened, after a while it shallows again. The
stony current flows along below, as the liquid current above. Yet in so
many centuries the strand has not been cleared of its gravel, nor has it
all been washed out from the banks.
The skiff drifts again, at first slowly, till the current takes hold of
it and bears it onward. Soon it is evident that a barge-port is near--a
haven where barges discharge their cargoes. A by-way leads down to the
river where boats are lying for hire--a dozen narrow punts, waiting at
this anchorage till groundbait be lawful. The ends of varnished skiffs,
high and dry, are visible in a shed carefully covered with canvas; while
sheaves of oars and sculls lean against the wooden wall.
Through the open doors of another shed there may be had a glimpse of
shavings and tools, and slight battens crossing the workshop in apparent
confusion, forming a curious framework. These are the boatbuilder's
struts and stays, and contrivances to keep the boat in rigid position,
that her lines may be true and delicate, strake upon strake of dull red
mahogany rising from the beechen keel, for the craftsman strings his
boat almost as a violinist strings his violin, with the greatest care
and heed, and with a right adjustment of curve and due proportion. There
is not much clinking, or sawing, or thumping; little noise, but much
skill.
Gradually the scene opens. Far down a white bridge spans the river: on
the shore red-tiled and gabled houses crowd to the very edge; and behind
them a church tower stands out clear against the sky. There are barges
everywhere. By the towing-path colliers are waiting to be drawn up
stream, black as their freight, by the horses that are nibbling the
hawthorn hedge; while by the wharf, labourers are wheeling barrows over
bending planks from the barges to the carts upon the shore. A tug comes
under the bridge, panting, every puff re-echoed from the arches,
dragging by sheer force deeply laden flats behind it. The water in front
of their bluff bows rises in a wave nearly to the deck, and then swoops
in a sweeping curve to the rear.
The current by the port runs back on the wharf side towards its source,
and the foam drifts up the river instead of down. Green flags on a
sandbank far out in the stream, their roots covered and their bent tips
only visible, now swing with the water and now heel over with the
breeze. The _Edwin and Angelina_ lies at anchor, waiting to be warped
into her berth, her sails furled, her green painted water-barrel lashed
by the stern, her tiller idle after the long and toilsome voyage from
Rochester.
For there are perils of the deep even to those who only go down to it in
barges. Barge as she is, she is not without a certain beauty, and a
certain interest, inseparable from all that has received the buffet of
the salt water, and over which the salt spray has flown. Barge too, as
she is, she bears her part in the commerce of the world. The very
architecture on the shore is old-fashioned where these bluff-bowed
vessels come, narrow streets and overhanging houses, boat anchors in the
windows, sails and tarry ropes; and is there not a Row Barge Inn
somewhere?
"Hoy, ahoy!"
The sudden shout startles me, and, glancing round, I find an empty black
barge, high out of the water, floating helplessly down upon me with the
stream. Noiselessly the great hulk had drifted upon me; as it came the
light glinted on the wavelets before the bow, quick points of brilliant
light. But two strokes with the sculls carried me out of the way.
NUTTY AUTUMN
There is some honeysuckle still flowering at the tops of the hedges,
where in the morning gossamer lies like a dewy net. The gossamer is a
sign both of approaching autumn and, exactly at the opposite season of
the year, of approaching spring. It stretches from pole to pole, and
bough to bough, in the copses in February, as the lark sings. It covers
the furze, and lies along the hedge-tops in September, as the lark,
after a short or partial silence, occasionally sings again.
But the honeysuckle does not flower so finely as the first time; there
is more red (the unopened petal) than white, and beneath, lower down the
stalk, are the red berries, the fruit of the former bloom. Yellow weed,
or ragwort, covers some fields almost as thickly as buttercups in
summer, but it lacks the rich colour of the buttercup. Some knotty
knapweeds stay in out-of-the-way places, where the scythe has not been;
some bunches of mayweed, too, are visible in the corners of the stubble.
Silverweed lays its golden flower--like a buttercup without a
stalk--level on the ground; it has no protection, and any passing foot
may press it into the dust. A few white or pink flowers appear on the
brambles, and in waste places a little St. John's wort remains open, but
the seed vessels are for the most part forming. St. John's wort is the
flower of the harvest; the yellow petals appear as the wheat ripens, and
there are some to be found till the sheaves are carted. Once now and
then a blue and slender bell-flower is lighted on; in Sussex the larger
varieties bloom till much later.
By still ponds, to which the moorhens have now returned, tall spikes of
purple loosestrife rise in bunches. In the furze there is still much
yellow, and wherever heath grows it spreads in shimmering gleams of
purple between the birches; for these three, furze, heath, and birch are
usually together. The fields, therefore, are not yet flowerless, nor yet
without colour here and there, and the leaves, which stay on the trees
till late in the autumn, are more interesting now than they have been
since they lost their first fresh green.
Oak, elm, beech, and birch, all have yellow spots, while retaining their
groundwork of green. Oaks are often much browner, but the moisture in
the atmosphere keeps the saps in the leaves. Even the birches are only
tinted in a few places, the elms very little, and the beeches not much
more: so it would seem that their hues will not be gone altogether till
November. Frosts have not yet bronzed the dogwood in the hedges, and the
hazel leaves are fairly firm. The hazel generally drops its leaves at a
touch about this time, and while you are nutting, if you shake a bough,
they come down all around.
The rushes are but faintly yellow, and the slender tips still point
upwards. Dull purple burrs cover the burdock; the broad limes are
withering, but the leaves are thick, and the teazles are still
flowering. Looking upwards, the trees are tinted; lower, the hedges are
not without colour, and the field itself is speckled with blue and
yellow. The stubble is almost hidden in many fields by the growth of
weeds brought up by the rain; still the tops appear above and do not
allow it to be green. The stubble has a colour--white if barley, yellow
if wheat or oats. The meads are as verdant, even more so, than in the
spring, because of the rain, and the brooks crowded with green flags.
Haws are very plentiful this year (1881), and exceptionally large, many
fully double the size commonly seen. So heavily are the branches laden
with bunches of the red fruit that they droop as apple trees do with a
more edible burden. Though so big, and to all appearance tempting to
birds, none have yet been eaten; and, indeed, haws seem to be resorted
to only as a change unless severe weather compels.
Just as we vary our diet, so birds eat haws, and not many of them till
driven by frost and snow. If any stay on till the early months of next
year, wood-pigeons and missel-thrushes will then eat them; but at this
season they are untouched. Blackbirds will peck open the hips directly
the frost comes; the hips go long before the haws. There was a large
crop of mountain-ash berries, every one of which has been taken by
blackbirds and thrushes, which are almost as fond of them as of garden
fruit.
Blackberries are thick, too--it is a berry year--and up in the
horse-chestnut the prickly-coated nuts hang up in bunches, as many as
eight in a stalk. Acorns are large, but not so singularly numerous as
the berries, nor are hazel-nuts. This provision of hedge fruit no more
indicates a severe winter than a damaged wheat harvest indicates a mild
one.
There is something wrong with elm trees. In the early part of this
summer, not long after the leaves were fairly out upon them, here and
there a branch appeared as if it had been touched with red-hot iron and
burnt up, all the leaves withered and browned on the boughs. First one
tree was thus affected, then another, then a third, till, looking round
the fields, it seemed as if every fourth or fifth tree had thus been
burnt.
It began with the leaves losing colour, much as they do in autumn, on
the particular bough; gradually they faded, and finally became brown and
of course dead. As they did not appear to shrivel up, it looked as if
the grub or insect, or whatever did the mischief, had attacked, not the
leaves, but the bough itself. Upon mentioning this I found that it had
been noticed in elm avenues and groups a hundred miles distant, so that
it is not a local circumstance.
As far as yet appears, the elms do not seem materially injured, the
damage being outwardly confined to the bough attacked. These brown spots
looked very remarkable just after the trees had become green. They were
quite distinct from the damage caused by the snow of October 1880. The
boughs broken by the snow had leaves upon them which at once turned
brown, and in the case of the oak were visible, the following spring, as
brown spots among the green. These snapped boughs never bore leaf again.
It was the young fresh green leaves of the elms, those that appeared in
the spring of 1881, that withered as if scorched. The boughs upon which
they grew had not been injured; they were small boughs at the outside of
the tree. I hear that this scorching up of elm leaves has been noticed
in other districts for several seasons.