Three Men in a Boat - Chapter 17

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter seventeen 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 seventeen, Washing Day,
Fish and Fishers on the art of angling A conscientious

(00:25):
fly fisher, A fishy story. We stayed two days at
Streatley and got our clothes washed. We had tried washing
them ourselves in the river under Georgia's superintendence, and it
had been a failure. Indeed, it had been more than
a failure, because we were worse off after we had
washed our clothes than we were before. Before we had

(00:49):
washed them. They had been very, very dirty, it is true,
but they were just wearable after we had washed them. Well.
The river between Reading and Henley was much cleaner after
we had washed our clothes in it than it was before.
All the dirt contained in the river between Reading and
Henley we collected during that wash and worked it into

(01:10):
our clothes. The washer woman at Streatley said she felt
she owed it to herself to charge us just three
times the usual prices for that wash. She said it
had not been like washing, It had been more in
the nature of excavating. We paid the bill without a murmur.
The neighborhood of Streatley and Goring is a great fishing center.

(01:33):
There is some excellent fishing to be had here. The
river abounds in pike, roach, dace, gudgeon and eels just here,
and you can sit and fish for them all day.
Some people do, they never catch them. I never knew
anybody catch anything up the Thames except minnows and dead cats,

(01:53):
but that has nothing to do, of course, with fishing.
The local Fisherman's guide doesn't say a word about catching anything.
All it says is the place is a good station
for fishing, and from what I have seen of the district,
I am quite prepared to bear out this statement. There
is no spot in the world where you can get
more fishing, or where you can fish for a longer period.

(02:16):
Some fishermen come here and fish for a day, and
others stop and fish for a month. You can hang
on and fish for a year if you want to.
It will be all the same. The Angler's Guide to
the Thames says that jack and perch are also to
be had about here, but there the Angler's Guide is wrong.

(02:36):
Jack and perch may be about there. Indeed I know
for a fact that they are. You can see them
there in shoals. When you are out for a walk
along the banks, they come and stand half out of
the water with their mouths open for biscuits. And if
you go for a bathe they crowd round and get
your way and irritate you. But they are not to

(02:58):
be had by a bit of a worm on the
end of a hook, nor anything like it. Not they
I am not a good fisherman myself. I devoted a
considerable amount of attention to the subject at one time,
and was getting on, as I thought, fairly well. But
the old hands told me that I should never be
any real good at it, and advise me to give

(03:19):
it up. They said that I was an extremely neat thrower,
and that I seemed to have plenty of gumption for
the thing, and quite enough constitutional laziness. But they were
sure I should never make anything of a fisherman. I
had not got sufficient imagination. They said that as a poet,
or a shilling shocker, or a reporter, or anything of

(03:41):
that kind, I might be satisfactory, but that to gain
any position as a Thames angler would require more play
of fancy, more power of invention than I appeared to possess.
Some people are under the impression that all that is
required to make a good fisherman is the ability to
tell lies easily and without blushing. But this is a mistake.

(04:04):
Mere bald fabrication is useless. The veriest tyro can manage that.
It is the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability,
the general air of scrupulous, almost of pedantic veracity, that
the experienced angler has seen. Anybody can come in and say, oh,

(04:26):
I caught fifteen dozen perch yesterday evening or last Monday,
I landed a gudgeon weighing eighteen pounds and measuring three
feet from the tip to the tail. There is no art,
no skill required for that sort of thing. It shows pluck,
but that is all. No your accomplished angler would scorn

(04:47):
to tell a lie that way. His method is a
study in itself. He comes in quietly with his hat on,
appropriates the most comfortable chair, lights his pipe, and commences
to puff in silence. He lets the youngsters brag away
for a while, and then, during a momentary lull, he

(05:07):
removes the pipe from his mouth and remarks as he
knocks the ashes out against the bars. Well, I had
a haul on Tuesday evening that it's not much good
my telling anybody about Oh why is that? They ask?
Because I don't expect anybody would believe me if I did,
replies the old fellow, calmly and without even a tinge

(05:30):
of bitterness in his tone, as he refills his pipe
and requests the landlord to bring him three of Scotch cold.
There is a pause after this, nobody feeling sufficiently sure
of himself to contradict the old gentleman, so he has
to go on by himself without any encouragement. No, he considers, thoughtfully,

(05:52):
I shouldn't believe it myself if anybody told it to me.
But it's a fact for all that I had been
sitting there all day afternoon and had caught literally nothing
except a few dozen days and a score of jack,
and I was just about giving it up as a
bad job when I suddenly felt a rather smart pull
at the line. I thought it was another little one,

(06:15):
and I went to jerk it up, hang me if
I could move the rod. It took me half an
hour half an hour, sir to land that fish, and
every moment I thought the line was going to snap.
I reached him at last, and what do you think?
It was? A sturgeon? A forty pound sturgeon taken on

(06:35):
a line, sir, Yes, you may well look surprised. I'll
have another three of Scotch, landlord, please. And then he
goes on to tell of the astonishment of everybody who
saw it, and what his wife said when he got home,
and of what Joe Buggles thought about it. I asked
the landlord of an inn up the river once if
it did not injure him sometimes listening to the tails

(06:58):
that the fishermen about there told him, and he said, who, no, not, no, sir.
It did. Used to knock me over a bit at first,
but Lord, love you, me and a missus. We listens
to him all day. Now. It's what you're used to,
you know, it's what you're used to. I knew a

(07:19):
young man once. He was a most conscientious fellow, and
when he took the fly fishing, he determined never to
exaggerate his hauls by more than twenty five percent. When
I have caught forty fish, says he, then I will
tell people that I have caught fifty and so on.
But I will not lie anymore than that, because it

(07:39):
is sinful to lie. But the twenty five percent plan
did not work well at all. He never was able
to use it. The greatest number of fish he ever
caught in one day was three, and you can't add
twenty five percent to three, at least not in fish.
So he increased his percentage to thirty three and a third,

(07:59):
But that again was awkward when he had only caught
one or two. So to simplify matters, he made up
his mind to just double the quantity. He stuck to
this arrangement for a couple of months, and then he
grew dissatisfied with it. Nobody believed him when he told
them that he only doubled, and he therefore gained no

(08:19):
credit that way whatever. While his moderation put him at
a disadvantage among the other anglers, when he had really
caught three small fish and said he had caught six,
it used to make him quite jealous to hear a
man whom he knew for a fact had only caught
one going about telling people he had landed two dozen.

(08:40):
So eventually he made one final arrangement with himself, which
he has religiously held to ever since, and that was
to count each fish that he had caught his ten,
and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if
he did not catch any fish at all, then he
said he had caught ten fish. You could never catch
less than ten fish by his system. That was the

(09:02):
foundation of it. Then if by any chance he really
did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two
fish would count thirty, three, forty, and so on. It
is a simple and easily worked plan. There has been
some talk lately of its being made use of by
the angling fraternity in general. Indeed, the Committee of the

(09:25):
Thames Anglers Association did recommend its adoption about two years ago,
but some of the older members opposed it. They said
they would consider the idea if the number were doubled
and each fish counted as twenty. If ever, you have
an evening to spare up the river, I should advise
you to drop into one of the little village inns

(09:46):
and take a seat in the tap room. You will
be nearly sure to meet one or two old rod
men sipping their toddy there, and they will tell you
enough fishy stories in half an hour to give you
indigestion for a month. George and I I don't know
what had become of Harris. He had gone out and
had a shave early in the afternoon, and had then

(10:08):
come back and spent full forty minutes in pipe claying
his shoes. We had not seen him since. George and I,
therefore and the dog left to ourselves, went for a
walk to Wallingford on the second evening, and coming home
we called in at a little riverside inn for a
rest and other things. We went into the parlor and

(10:29):
sat down. There was an old fellow there smoking a
long clay pipe, and we naturally began chatting. He told
us that it had been a fine day to day,
and we told him that it had been a fine
day yesterday. And then we all told each other that
we thought it would be a fine day tomorrow, and
George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.

(10:51):
After that, it came out somehow or other that we
were strangers in the neighborhood, and that we were going
away the next morning. Then a pause in sued in
the conversation, during which our eyes wandered round the room.
They finally rested upon a dusty old glass case fixed
very high up above the chimney piece and containing a trout.

(11:12):
It rather fascinated me, that trout. It was such a
monstrous fish. In fact, at first glance, I thought it
was a cod, ah, said the old gentleman, following the
direction of my gaze. I didn't follow that. Ain't he
quite uncommon? I murmured, And George asked the old man
how much he thought it weighed? Eighteen pounds six ounces,

(11:37):
said our friend, rising and taking down his coat. Yes,
he continued. It was sixteen years ago, come the third
next month that I landed him. I caught him just
below the bridge with a minhole. They told me he
were in the river, and I said I'd have him,
and so I did. You don't see many fish that

(11:57):
size about here. Now, I'm thinking, good night, gentlemen, good night,
And out he went and left us alone. We could
not take our eyes off the fish after that. It
really was a remarkably fine fish. We were still looking
at it when the local carrier, who had just stopped
at the inn, came to the door of the room

(12:18):
with a pot of beer in his hand, and he
also looked at the fish. Good sized trout, that said George,
turning round to him. Ah, you may well say that, sir,
replied the man, And then, after a pull at his beer,
he added, maybe he wasn't here, sir when that fish
was caught. No, we told him we were strangers in

(12:42):
the neighborhood, Oh, said the carrier. Then, of course, how
should you? It was nearly five years ago that I
caught that trout. Oh was it? You caught it? Then?
Said I? Yes, sir, replied the genial old fellow. I
caught him just below the lock leastways? What was the

(13:03):
lock then, one Friday afternoon. And the remarkable thing about
it is that I caught him with a fly. I'd
gone out pike fishing, bless you, never thinking of a trout.
And when I saw that whopper on the end of
my line, blessed if it didn't quite take me aback. Well,
you see, he weighed twenty six pound. Good night, gentlemen,

(13:26):
good night. Five minutes afterwards, a third man came in
and described how he had caught it early one morning
with bleak, and then he left, and a stolid, solemn
looking middle aged individual came in and sat down over
by the window. None of us spoke for a while,
but at length George turned to the newcomer and said,

(13:48):
I beg your pardon.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
I hope you will forgive the liberty that we perfect
strangers in your neighborhood are taking. But my friend here
and myself were so much obliged if you would tell
us how you who caught that trout up there?

Speaker 1 (14:02):
Why who told you I caught the trout? Was the
surprised query. Well, we said that nobody had told us so,
but somehow or other we felt instinctively that it was
he who had done it. Well, it's a most remarkable thing.
Most remarkable, answered the stolid stranger, laughing, because as a

(14:23):
matter of fact, you were quite right, I did catch it.
But fancy you're guessing it like that, dear me. It's
really a most remarkable thing. And then he went on
and told us how it had taken him half an
hour to land it, and how it had broken his rod.
He said he had weighed carefully when he reached home,
and it had turned the scale at thirty four pounds.

(14:47):
He went in his turn, and when he was gone,
the landlord came in to us. We told him the
various histories we had heard about his trout, and he
was immensely amused, and we all laughed very heartily, Fancy
Jim Bates and Joe Muggles, and mister Jones and old
Billy Maunders, all telling you that they had caught it. Ah, well,

(15:10):
that is good, said the honest old fellow, laughing hardily. Yes,
they are the sort to give it to me to
put up in my parlor if they had caught it.
They are. And then he told us the real history
of the fish. It seemed that he had caught it
himself years ago when he was quite a lad, not

(15:30):
by any art or skill, but by that unaccountable luck
that appears to always wait upon a boy when he
plays the wag from school and goes out fishing on
a sunny afternoon with a bit of string tied on
to the end of a tree. He said that bringing
home that trout had saved him from a whacking, and
that even his schoolmaster had said it was worth the

(15:51):
rule of three and practice put together. He was called
out of the room at this point, and George and
I again turned our gaze upon the fish. It really
was a most astonishing trout. The more we looked at it,
the more we marveled at it. It excited George so
much that he climbed up on the back of a

(16:11):
chair to get a better view of it. And then
the chair slipped, and George clutched wildly at the trout
case to save himself, and down it came with a crash,
George and the chair on top of it. You haven't
injured the fish, have you, I cried in alarm, rushing up.
I hope not, said George, rising cautiously and looking about.

(16:35):
But he had that trout lay shattered into a thousand fragments.
I say a thousand, but they may have been only
nine hundred. I did not count them. We thought it
strange and unaccountable that a stuffed trout should break up
into little pieces like that, And so it would have
been strange and unaccountable if it had been a stuffed trout,

(16:58):
but it was not. That trout was plaster of Paris.
End of Chapter seventeen.