Marlow.—Bisham Abbey.—The Medmenham Monks.—Montmorency thinks he
will murder an old Tom cat.—But eventually decides that he will let
it live.—Shameful conduct of a fox terrier at the Civil Service
Stores.—Our departure from Marlow.—An imposing procession.—The steam
launch, useful receipts for annoying and hindering it.—We decline to
drink the river.—A peaceful dog.—Strange disappearance of Harris and a
pie.
Marlow is one of the pleasantest river centres I know of. It is a
bustling, lively little town; not very picturesque on the whole, it
is true, but there are many quaint nooks and corners to be found in
it, nevertheless—standing arches in the shattered bridge of Time, over
which our fancy travels back to the days when Marlow Manor owned Saxon
Algar for its lord, ere conquering William seized it to give to Queen
Matilda, ere it passed to the Earls of Warwick or to worldly-wise Lord
Paget, the councillor of four successive sovereigns.
There is lovely country round about it, too, if, after boating, you are
fond of a walk, while the river itself is at its best here. Down to
Cookham, past the Quarry Woods and the meadows, is a lovely reach. Dear
old Quarry Woods! with your narrow, climbing paths, and little winding
glades, how scented to this hour you seem with memories of sunny summer
days! How haunted are your shadowy vistas with the ghosts of laughing
faces! how from your whispering leaves there softly fall the voices of
long ago!
[Picture: Bisham Abbey] From Marlow up to Sonning is even fairer yet.
Grand old Bisham Abbey, whose stone walls have rung to the shouts of
the Knights Templars, and which, at one time, was the home of Anne
of Cleves and at another of Queen Elizabeth, is passed on the right
bank just half a mile above Marlow Bridge. Bisham Abbey is rich in
melodramatic properties. It contains a tapestry bed-chamber, and a
secret room hid high up in the thick walls. The ghost of the Lady Holy,
who beat her little boy to death, still walks there at night, trying to
wash its ghostly hands clean in a ghostly basin.
Warwick, the king-maker, rests there, careless now about such trivial
things as earthly kings and earthly kingdoms; and Salisbury, who did
good service at Poitiers. Just before you come to the abbey, and right
on the river’s bank, is Bisham Church, and, perhaps, if any tombs are
worth inspecting, they are the tombs and monuments in Bisham Church. It
was while floating in his boat under the Bisham beeches that Shelley,
who was then living at Marlow (you can see his house now, in West
street), composed _The Revolt of Islam_.
By Hurley Weir, a little higher up, I have often thought that I could
stay a month without having sufficient time to drink in all the beauty
of the scene. The village of Hurley, five minutes’ walk from the lock,
is as old a little spot as there is on the river, dating, as it does,
to quote the quaint phraseology of those dim days, “from the times of
King Sebert and King Offa.” Just past the weir (going up) is Danes’
Field, where the invading Danes once encamped, during their march to
Gloucestershire; and a little further still, nestling by a sweet corner
of the stream, is what is left of Medmenham Abbey.
The famous Medmenham monks, or “Hell Fire Club,” as they were
commonly called, and of whom the notorious Wilkes was a member, were
a fraternity whose motto was “Do as you please,” and that invitation
still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before
this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was
founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind,
whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that
were to follow them, five hundred years afterwards.
The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth
century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh,
nor fish, nor eggs. They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to
mass. They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all
their lives there fell a silence as of death, for no one spoke.
A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had
made so bright! Strange that Nature’s voices all around them—the soft
singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of
the rushing wind—should not have taught them a truer meaning of life
than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence,
waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the
solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.
From Medmenham to sweet Hambledon Lock the river is full of peaceful
beauty, but, after it passes Greenlands, the rather uninteresting
looking river residence of my newsagent—a quiet unassuming old
gentleman, who may often be met with about these regions, during the
summer months, sculling himself along in easy vigorous style, or
chatting genially to some old lock-keeper, as he passes through—until
well the other side of Henley, it is somewhat bare and dull.
We got up tolerably early on the Monday morning at Marlow, and went for
a bathe before breakfast; and, coming back, Montmorency made an awful
ass of himself. The only subject on which Montmorency and I have any
serious difference of opinion is cats. I like cats; Montmorency does
not.
[Picture: Cat] When I meet a cat, I say, “Poor Pussy!” and stop down
and tickle the side of its head; and the cat sticks up its tail in a
rigid, cast-iron manner, arches its back, and wipes its nose up against
my trousers; and all is gentleness and peace. When Montmorency meets a
cat, the whole street knows about it; and there is enough bad language
wasted in ten seconds to last an ordinarily respectable man all his
life, with care.
I do not blame the dog (contenting myself, as a rule, with merely
clouting his head or throwing stones at him), because I take it that
it is his nature. Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much
original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and
years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any
appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.
I remember being in the lobby of the Haymarket Stores one day, and all
round about me were dogs, waiting for the return of their owners, who
were shopping inside. There were a mastiff, and one or two collies,
and a St. Bernard, a few retrievers and Newfoundlands, a boar-hound, a
French poodle, with plenty of hair round its head, but mangy about the
middle; a bull-dog, a few Lowther Arcade sort of animals, about the
size of rats, and a couple of Yorkshire tykes.
There they sat, patient, good, and thoughtful. A solemn peacefulness
seemed to reign in that lobby. An air of calmness and resignation—of
gentle sadness pervaded the room.
Then a sweet young lady entered, leading a meek-looking little
fox-terrier, and left him, chained up there, between the bull-dog and
the poodle. He sat and looked about him for a minute. Then he cast up
his eyes to the ceiling, and seemed, judging from his expression, to
be thinking of his mother. Then he yawned. Then he looked round at the
other dogs, all silent, grave, and dignified.
He looked at the bull-dog, sleeping dreamlessly on his right. He looked
at the poodle, erect and haughty, on his left. Then, without a word of
warning, without the shadow of a provocation, he bit that poodle’s near
fore-leg, and a yelp of agony rang through the quiet shades of that
lobby.
The result of his first experiment seemed highly satisfactory to him,
and he determined to go on and make things lively all round. He sprang
over the poodle and vigorously attacked a collie, and the collie woke
up, and immediately commenced a fierce and noisy contest with the
poodle. Then Foxey came back to his own place, and caught the bull-dog
by the ear, and tried to throw him away; and the bull-dog, a curiously
impartial animal, went for everything he could reach, including the
hall-porter, which gave that dear little terrier the opportunity
to enjoy an uninterrupted fight of his own with an equally willing
Yorkshire tyke.
Anyone who knows canine nature need hardly, be told that, by this
time, all the other dogs in the place were fighting as if their
hearths and homes depended on the fray. The big dogs fought each other
indiscriminately; and the little dogs fought among themselves, and
filled up their spare time by biting the legs of the big dogs.
The whole lobby was a perfect pandemonium, and the din was terrific. A
crowd assembled outside in the Haymarket, and asked if it was a vestry
meeting; or, if not, who was being murdered, and why? Men came with
poles and ropes, and tried to separate the dogs, and the police were
sent for.
And in the midst of the riot that sweet young lady returned, and
snatched up that sweet little dog of hers (he had laid the tyke up for
a month, and had on the expression, now, of a new-born lamb) into her
arms, and kissed him, and asked him if he was killed, and what those
great nasty brutes of dogs had been doing to him; and he nestled up
against her, and gazed up into her face with a look that seemed to say:
“Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come to take me away from this disgraceful
scene!”
She said that the people at the Stores had no right to allow great
savage things like those other dogs to be put with respectable people’s
dogs, and that she had a great mind to summon somebody.
Such is the nature of fox-terriers; and, therefore, I do not blame
Montmorency for his tendency to row with cats; but he wished he had not
given way to it that morning.
We were, as I have said, returning from a dip, and half-way up the High
Street a cat darted out from one of the houses in front of us, and
began to trot across the road. Montmorency gave a cry of joy—the cry of
a stern warrior who sees his enemy given over to his hands—the sort of
cry Cromwell might have uttered when the Scots came down the hill—and
flew after his prey.
His victim was a large black Tom. I never saw a larger cat, nor a
more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its
ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose. It was a long,
sinewy-looking animal. It had a calm, contented air about it.
Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour;
but the cat did not hurry up—did not seem to have grasped the idea
that its life was in danger. It trotted quietly on until its would-be
assassin was within a yard of it, and then it turned round and sat down
in the middle of the road, and looked at Montmorency with a gentle,
inquiring expression, that said:
“Yes! You want me?”
Montmorency does not lack pluck; but there was something about the look
of that cat that might have chilled the heart of the boldest dog. He
stopped abruptly, and looked back at Tom.
Neither spoke; but the conversation that one could imagine was clearly
as follows:—
THE CAT: “Can I do anything for you?”
MONTMORENCY: “No—no, thanks.”
THE CAT: “Don’t you mind speaking, if you really want anything, you
know.”
MONTMORENCY (_backing down the High Street_): “Oh, no—not at
all—certainly—don’t you trouble. I—I am afraid I’ve made a mistake. I
thought I knew you. Sorry I disturbed you.”
THE CAT: “Not at all—quite a pleasure. Sure you don’t want anything,
now?”
MONTMORENCY (_still backing_): “Not at all, thanks—not at all—very kind
of you. Good morning.”
THE CAT: “Good-morning.”
Then the cat rose, and continued his trot; and Montmorency, fitting
what he calls his tail carefully into its groove, came back to us, and
took up an unimportant position in the rear.
To this day, if you say the word “Cats!” to Montmorency, he will
visibly shrink and look up piteously at you, as if to say:
“Please don’t.”
We did our marketing after breakfast, and revictualled the boat for
three days. George said we ought to take vegetables—that it was
unhealthy not to eat vegetables. He said they were easy enough to cook,
and that he would see to that; so we got ten pounds of potatoes, a
bushel of peas, and a few cabbages. We got a beefsteak pie, a couple of
gooseberry tarts, and a leg of mutton from the hotel; and fruit, and
cakes, and bread and butter, and jam, and bacon and eggs, and other
things we foraged round about the town for.
Our departure from Marlow I regard as one of our greatest successes.
It was dignified and impressive, without being ostentatious. We had
insisted at all the shops we had been to that the things should be sent
with us then and there. None of your “Yes, sir, I will send them off at
once: the boy will be down there before you are, sir!” and then fooling
about on the landing-stage, and going back to the shop twice to have a
row about them, for us. We waited while the basket was packed, and took
the boy with us.
We went to a good many shops, adopting this principle at each one; and
the consequence was that, by the time we had finished, we had as fine
a collection of boys with baskets following us around as heart could
desire; and our final march down the middle of the High Street, to the
river, must have been as imposing a spectacle as Marlow had seen for
many a long day.
The order of the procession was as follows:—
Montmorency, carrying a stick.
Two disreputable-looking curs, friends of Montmorency’s.
George, carrying coats and rugs, and smoking a short pipe.
Harris, trying to walk with easy grace,
while carrying a bulged-out Gladstone bag in one hand
and a bottle of lime-juice in the other.
Greengrocer’s boy and baker’s boy,
with baskets.
Boots from the hotel, carrying hamper.
Confectioner’s boy, with basket.
Grocer’s boy, with basket.
Long-haired dog.
Cheesemonger’s boy, with basket.
Odd man carrying a bag.
Bosom companion of odd man, with his hands in his pockets,
smoking a short clay.
Fruiterer’s boy, with basket.
Myself, carrying three hats and a pair of boots,
and trying to look as if I didn’t know it.
Six small boys, and four stray dogs.
When we got down to the landing-stage, the boatman said:
“Let me see, sir; was yours a steam-launch or a house-boat?”
[Picture: The bring of the provisions] On our informing him it was a
double-sculling skiff, he seemed surprised.
We had a good deal of trouble with steam launches that morning. It was
just before the Henley week, and they were going up in large numbers;
some by themselves, some towing houseboats. I do hate steam launches: I
suppose every rowing man does. I never see a steam launch but I feel I
should like to lure it to a lonely part of the river, and there, in the
silence and the solitude, strangle it.
There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch that has the
knack of rousing every evil instinct in my nature, and I yearn for the
good old days, when you could go about and tell people what you thought
of them with a hatchet and a bow and arrows. The expression on the face
of the man who, with his hands in his pockets, stands by the stern,
smoking a cigar, is sufficient to excuse a breach of the peace by
itself; and the lordly whistle for you to get out of the way would, I
am confident, ensure a verdict of “justifiable homicide” from any jury
of river men.
They used to _have_ to whistle for us to get out of their way. If I
may do so, without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that
our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay
and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the
other craft on the river put together.
“Steam launch, coming!” one of us would cry out, on sighting the enemy
in the distance; and, in an instant, everything was got ready to
receive her. I would take the lines, and Harris and George would sit
down beside me, all of us with our backs to the launch, and the boat
would drift out quietly into mid-stream.
On would come the launch, whistling, and on we would go, drifting. At
about a hundred yards off, she would start whistling like mad, and the
people would come and lean over the side, and roar at us; but we never
heard them! Harris would be telling us an anecdote about his mother,
and George and I would not have missed a word of it for worlds.
Then that launch would give one final shriek of a whistle that would
nearly burst the boiler, and she would reverse her engines, and blow
off steam, and swing round and get aground; everyone on board of it
would rush to the bow and yell at us, and the people on the bank would
stand and shout to us, and all the other passing boats would stop and
join in, till the whole river for miles up and down was in a state
of frantic commotion. And then Harris would break off in the most
interesting part of his narrative, and look up with mild surprise, and
say to George:
“Why, George, bless me, if here isn’t a steam launch!”
And George would answer:
“Well, do you know, I _thought_ I heard something!”
Upon which we would get nervous and confused, and not know how to get
the boat out of the way, and the people in the launch would crowd round
and instruct us:
“Pull your right—you, you idiot! back with your left. No, not _you_—the
other one—leave the lines alone, can’t you—now, both together. NOT
_that_ way. Oh, you—!”
Then they would lower a boat and come to our assistance; and, after
quarter of an hour’s effort, would get us clean out of their way, so
that they could go on; and we would thank them so much, and ask them to
give us a tow. But they never would.
Another good way we discovered of irritating the aristocratic type of
steam launch, was to mistake them for a beanfeast, and ask them if they
were Messrs. Cubit’s lot or the Bermondsey Good Templars, and could
they lend us a saucepan.
Old ladies, not accustomed to the river, are always intensely nervous
of steam launches. I remember going up once from Staines to Windsor—a
stretch of water peculiarly rich in these mechanical monstrosities—with
a party containing three ladies of this description. It was very
exciting. At the first glimpse of every steam launch that came in view,
they insisted on landing and sitting down on the bank until it was out
of sight again. They said they were very sorry, but that they owed it
to their families not to be fool-hardy.
We found ourselves short of water at Hambledon Lock; so we took our jar
and went up to the lock-keeper’s house to beg for some.
George was our spokesman. He put on a winning smile, and said:
“Oh, please could you spare us a little water?”
“Certainly,” replied the old gentleman; “take as much as you want, and
leave the rest.”
“Thank you so much,” murmured George, looking about him. “Where—where
do you keep it?”
“It’s always in the same place my boy,” was the stolid reply: “just
behind you.”
“I don’t see it,” said George, turning round.
“Why, bless us, where’s your eyes?” was the man’s comment, as he
twisted George round and pointed up and down the stream. “There’s
enough of it to see, ain’t there?”
“Oh!” exclaimed George, grasping the idea; “but we can’t drink the
river, you know!”
“No; but you can drink _some_ of it,” replied the old fellow. “It’s
what _I’ve_ drunk for the last fifteen years.”
George told him that his appearance, after the course, did not seem a
sufficiently good advertisement for the brand; and that he would prefer
it out of a pump.
We got some from a cottage a little higher up. I daresay _that_ was
only river water, if we had known. But we did not know, so it was all
right. What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over.
We tried river water once, later on in the season, but it was not a
success. We were coming down stream, and had pulled up to have tea in a
backwater near Windsor. Our jar was empty, and it was a case of going
without our tea or taking water from the river. Harris was for chancing
it. He said it must be all right if we boiled the water. He said that
the various germs of poison present in the water would be killed by the
boiling. So we filled our kettle with Thames backwater, and boiled it;
and very careful we were to see that it did boil.
We had made the tea, and were just settling down comfortably to
drink it, when George, with his cup half-way to his lips, paused and
exclaimed:
“What’s that?”
“What’s what?” asked Harris and I.
“Why that!” said George, looking westward.
[Picture: The dog] Harris and I followed his gaze, and saw, coming down
towards us on the sluggish current, a dog. It was one of the quietest
and peacefullest dogs I have ever seen. I never met a dog who seemed
more contented—more easy in its mind. It was floating dreamily on its
back, with its four legs stuck up straight into the air. It was what I
should call a full-bodied dog, with a well-developed chest. On he came,
serene, dignified, and calm, until he was abreast of our boat, and
there, among the rushes, he eased up, and settled down cosily for the
evening.
George said he didn’t want any tea, and emptied his cup into the water.
Harris did not feel thirsty, either, and followed suit. I had drunk
half mine, but I wished I had not.
I asked George if he thought I was likely to have typhoid.
He said: “Oh, no;” he thought I had a very good chance indeed of
escaping it. Anyhow, I should know in about a fortnight, whether I had
or had not.
We went up the backwater to Wargrave. It is a short cut, leading out
of the right-hand bank about half a mile above Marsh Lock, and is well
worth taking, being a pretty, shady little piece of stream, besides
saving nearly half a mile of distance.
Of course, its entrance is studded with posts and chains, and
surrounded with notice boards, menacing all kinds of torture,
imprisonment, and death to everyone who dares set scull upon its
waters—I wonder some of these riparian boors don’t claim the air of
the river and threaten everyone with forty shillings fine who breathes
it—but the posts and chains a little skill will easily avoid; and as
for the boards, you might, if you have five minutes to spare, and there
is nobody about, take one or two of them down and throw them into the
river.
Half-way up the backwater, we got out and lunched; and it was during
this lunch that George and I received rather a trying shock.
Harris received a shock, too; but I do not think Harris’s shock could
have been anything like so bad as the shock that George and I had over
the business.
You see, it was in this way: we were sitting in a meadow, about ten
yards from the water’s edge, and we had just settled down comfortably
to feed. Harris had the beefsteak pie between his knees, and was
carving it, and George and I were waiting with our plates ready.
“Have you got a spoon there?” says Harris; “I want a spoon to help the
gravy with.”
The hamper was close behind us, and George and I both turned round to
reach one out. We were not five seconds getting it. When we looked
round again, Harris and the pie were gone!
It was a wide, open field. There was not a tree or a bit of hedge for
hundreds of yards. He could not have tumbled 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 gazed all about. Then we gazed at each other.
“Has he been snatched up to heaven?” I queried.
“They’d hardly have taken the pie too,” said George.
There seemed weight in this objection, and we discarded the heavenly
theory.
“I suppose the truth of the matter is,” suggested George, descending to
the commonplace and practicable, “that there has been an earthquake.”
And then he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice: “I wish he
hadn’t been carving that pie.”
With a sigh, we turned our eyes once more towards the spot where Harris
and the pie had last been seen on earth; and there, as our blood froze
in our veins and our hair stood up on end, we saw Harris’s head—and
nothing but his head—sticking bolt upright among the tall grass, the
face very red, and bearing upon it an expression of great indignation!
George was the first to recover.
“Speak!” he cried, “and tell us whether you are alive or dead—and where
is the rest of you?”
“Oh, don’t be a stupid ass!” said Harris’s head. “I believe you did it
on purpose.”
“Did what?” exclaimed George and I.
“Why, put me to sit here—darn silly trick! Here, catch hold of the pie.”
[Picture: Rescuing the pie] And out of the middle of the earth, as it
seemed to us, rose the pie—very much mixed up and damaged; and, after
it, scrambled Harris—tumbled, grubby, and wet.
He had been sitting, without knowing it, on the very verge of a small
gully, the long grass hiding it from view; and in leaning a little back
he had shot over, pie and all.
He said he had never felt so surprised in all his life, as when he
first felt himself going, without being able to conjecture in the
slightest what had happened. 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. Thus does unjust suspicion follow even the most blameless
for, as the poet says, “Who shall escape calumny?”
Who, indeed!