Three Men in a Boat - Chapter 16

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter sixteen of Three men in a boat to say
nothing of the dog. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Three Men in a boat, to say Nothing
of the Dog? By Jerome K. Jerome, Chapter sixteen, reading
We are towed by steam launch. Irritating behavior of small boats.

(00:25):
How they get in the way of steam launches. George
and Harris again shirk their work rather a hackneyed story.
Streetly and Goring. We came in sight of Reading about eleven.
The river is dirty and dismal. Here one does not
linger in the neighborhood of Reading. The town itself is

(00:48):
a famous old place, dating from the dim days of
King Ethelred, when the Danes anchored their worships in the
kennet and started from Reading to ravage all the land
of Wessex. And here ethel Reads and his brother Alfred
fought and defeated them, Ethelred doing the praying and Alfred
the fighting. In later years, Redding seems to have been

(01:09):
regarded as a handy place to run down to when
matters were becoming unpleasant In London. Parliament generally rushed off
to Reading whenever there was a plague gone at Westminster,
and in sixteen twenty five, the law followed suit and
all the courts were held at Reading. It must have
been worthwhile having a mere ordinary plague now and then

(01:31):
in London to get rid of both the lawyers and
the parliament. During the Parliamentary Struggle, Redding was besieged by
the Earl of Essex, and a quarter of a century
later the Prince of Orange routed King James's troops there.
Henry the First lies buried at Reading in the Benedictine
Abbey founded by him, there, the ruins of which may

(01:54):
still be seen, And in this same abbey, Great John
of Gaunt was married to the late Blanche. At reading
Lock we came up with a steam launch belonging to
some friends of mine, and they towed us up to
within about a mile of Streetly, it is very delightful
being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself

(02:15):
to rowing. The run would have been more delightful still
if it had not been for a lot of wretched
small boats that were continually getting in the way of
our launch, and to avoid running down, which we had
to be continually easing and stopping. It is really most
annoying the manner in which these rowing boats get in
the way of one's launch up the river, something ought

(02:38):
to be done to stop it. And they are so
confoundedly impertinent too over it. You can whistle till you
nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry.
I would have one or two of them run down
now and then, if I had my way, just to
teach them all a lesson. The river becomes very lovely

(02:59):
from a little abe reading. The railway rather spoils it
near Tilehurst, but from Maple Durham up to Streetly it
is glorious. A little above Maple Durham Lock you pass
Hardwick House where Charles the First played bowls. The neighborhood
of Pangbourne, where the quaint little Swan Inn stands, must

(03:20):
be as familiar to the habitues of the art exhibitions
as it is to its own inhabitants. My friend's launch
cast us loose just below the grotto, and then Harris
wanted to make out that it was my turn to pull.
This seemed to me most unreasonable. It had been arranged
in the morning that I should bring the boat up

(03:40):
to three miles above Reading. Well, here we were ten
miles above reading. Surely it was now their turn again.
I could not get either George or Harris to see
the matter in its proper light, however, so to save argument,
I took the skulls. I had not been pulling for
more than a minute or so when George something black

(04:01):
floating on the water, and we drew up to it.
George leant over as we neared it, and laid hold
of it, and then he drew back with a cry
and a blanched face. It was the dead body of
a woman. It lay very lightly on the water, and
the face was sweet and calm. It was not a
beautiful face. It was too prematurely aged, looking too thin

(04:25):
and drawn to be that. But it was a gentle,
lovable face in spite of its stamp of pinch and poverty.
And upon it was that look of RESTful peace that
comes to the faces of the sick, sometimes when at
last the pain has left them. Fortunately for us, we
having no desire to be kept hanging about coroner's courts,

(04:47):
some men on the bank had seen the body too,
and now took charge of it from us. We found
out the woman's story afterwards. Of course. It was the old, old,
vulgar tragedy. She had loved and been deceived, or had
deceived herself. Anyhow, she had sinned some of us do
now and then, and her family and friends, naturally shocked

(05:11):
and indignant, had closed their doors against her. Left to
fight the world alone. With the millstone of her shame
around her neck, she had sunk ever lower and lower.
For a while. She had kept both herself and the
child on the twelve shillings a week that twelve hours
drudgery a day procured her, paying six shillings out of

(05:32):
it for the child, and keeping her own body and
soul together on the remainder. Six shillings a week does
not keep body and soul together very unitedly. They want
to get away from each other when there is only
such a very slight bond as that between them. And
one day, I suppose the pain and the dull monotony

(05:53):
of it all had stood before her eyes plainer than usual,
and the mocking specter had frightened her. She had made
one last appeal to friends, but against the chill wall
of their respectability, the voice of the erring outcast fell unheeded.
And then she had gone to see her child had

(06:13):
held it in her arms and kissed it in a weary,
dull sort of way, and without betraying any particular emotion
of any kind, and had left it after putting into
its hand a penny box of chocolate. She had bought it,
and afterwards, with her last few shillings, had taken a
ticket and come down to Goring. It seemed that the

(06:35):
bitterest thoughts of her life must have centered about the
wooded reaches and the bright green meadows around Goring. But
women strangely hug the knife that stabs them, and perhaps
amidst the gall there may have mingled also sunny memories
of sweetest hours spent upon those shadow deeps over which

(06:55):
the great trees bend their branches down so low she
had wandered about the woods by the river's brink all day,
and then when evening fell and the gray twilight spread
its dusty robe upon the waters, she stretched her arms
out to the silent river that had known her sorrow
and her joy, And the old river had taken her

(07:18):
into its gentle arms, and had laid her weary head
upon its bosom, and had hushed away the pane. Thus
had she sinned in all things sinned in living and
in dying. God help her and all other sinners. If
any more there be Goring on the left bank and

(07:40):
Streetly on the right are both or either charming places
to stay at for a few days. The reaches down
to Pangmore and Woo one for a sunny sail or
for a moonlight row, and the country round about is
full of beauty. We had intended to push on to
Wallingford that day, but the sw wheat smiling face of

(08:01):
the river here lured us to linger for a while,
and so we left our boat at the bridge and
went up into Streetly and lunched at the bull. Much
to Montmorency's satisfaction, they say that the hills on each
side of the stream here once joined and formed a
barrier across what is now the Thames, and that then

(08:22):
the river ended there above Goring, in one vast lake.
I am not in a position either to contradict or
affirm this statement. I simply offer it. It is an
ancient place Streetly, dating back like most riverside towns and
villages to British and Saxon times, Goring is not nearly

(08:43):
so pretty. A little spot to stop at as streetly
if you have your choice, but it is passing fair
enough in its way, and is nearer the railway in
case you want to slip off without paying your hotel bill.
End of Chapter sixteen.