Part 3

Geographers, physical and political, tell us that Thames drains and waters all that great district which lies between the estuary of the Severn and the seaward sides of Essex and Kent; that it is the fertiliser of square miles innumerable, and the potent source of London’s pre-eminent rank amongst the cities of the earth. This is all very true, but the geographers take no note of Thames’ other functions; the inspiration of the poets and the painters, the enrichment of innkeepers and boat-proprietors, and the pleasuring of all them that delight in bathing and the rowing of boats. Everywhere in summer-time are boats and launches and canoes, punts and houseboats, and varieties innumerable of floating things; for when the sun shines, and the incomparable river scenery of the Thames is at its best, the heart of man desireth nothing more ardently than to lie in a boat upon the quiet mirrored depths of a shady backwater, or better still, to sit within the roaring of the weir, where the swell of the tumbling water acts like a tonic upon the spirits, and the sunlight fashions rainbows in the smoke-like suspended moisture of its foam. These are modern pleasures. For centuries the Thames has flowed through a well-peopled country, yet the delights of the river are new-found, and only in the eighteenth century did the poets’ chorus break forth in flood of praise. But to-day every one who can string rhymes makes metrical essays upon the Thames, and writers without number have written countless books upon it. From Kingston to Oxford, houseboats make populous all its banks, and the quantity of paint and acres of canvas that have been expended upon artistic efforts along its course, from Trewsbury Mead to the Nore, must ever remain without computation.

For these reasons ’tis better to say little of our journey this afternoon to Shepperton, past Hampton Court, the Cockney’s paradise, to Hampton, Sunbury, Walton, and Halliford. The river was crowded with boating parties, with those who raced and with others who paddled lazily, and when night was come the houseboats hung out their paper lanterns, all red and yellow, that streaked every little ripple with waving colour.

That night saw the first unpacking of our knapsacks, and the irrevocable disappearance of their orderly arrangement. Chaos reigned ever afterward within their ostensibly waterproof sides, for to man is not given the gift of packing up, and we were not superior to the generality of our sex. I remember perfectly the shower of things that always befell o’ nights when I came to the ordeal of unpacking my knapsack: how razors, comb and brush, pencils, and neckties and other articles dropped from it; and, I make no doubt, it was the same with the other man.

IV.

Chertsey we passed this morning, heated with rowing, but between this and Laleham we were so far fortunate as to fall in with some acquaintances on a steam-launch who took us in tow so far as Old Windsor Lock, where we cast off and proceeded alone, landing at one of the many slips by Eton Bridge.

Windsor and Eton claimed us for the remainder of the day for the due pursuance of some desultory sight-seeing, but Eton chiefly, for the sake of its College, where “her Henry,” that unhappy pious founder, Henry VI., stands in effigy in the great quadrangle, and casts a “holy shade,” according to Grey.

The “College of the Blessed Mary of Eton beside Windsor” has numbered among its scholars a goodly proportion of our famous men; and many of their names, carved on the woodwork of the schools in their schoolboy days, remain to this day. On the doorway leading from the Upper School into that place of dread, the headmaster’s room, may be seen carved, in company with other well-known names, that of “W. E. Gladstone;” and once within that apartment, your attention is drawn to the block whereon many have suffered, in less heroic wise, and by no means so tragically, as the martyrs of Tower Hill, but perhaps more painfully, for birch twigs, _with_ the buds on them, must sting dreadfully. But these things are become historical relics rather than engines of contemporary punishment: they belong to the days of the terrific Keate and his robustious predecessors, who were wont to regard the _fortiter in re_ as more convincing and a better preservative of discipline than the _suaviter in modo_.

It seems that everywhere the iron gauntlet gives way to the kid glove in our times; persuasion is to-day more a mental than a physical process. There are relics in plenty at Windsor and Eton of those times, only at Windsor these things take higher ground: _there_ for persuasion read diplomacy in this era, where it had used to be a performance requiring the assistance of axe and chaplain. The Castle survives, its mediæval defences restored, for appearance sake, but its State apartments filled with polite furniture, dreadfully gilded and (we thought) tawdry. It makes a picture, this historic warren of kings and princes, and its Round Tower commands a glorious view, altogether an imposing range of turrets, battlements, and loopholed walls; but, alas! Henry the Eighth’s massive gateway was guarded by a constable of that singularly unromantic body--the Police, and his presence there made everything save the gas-lamps and the shop-fronts of Windsor streets seem of paste-board fashion and unreal.

The river is the proper place from whence to view the Castle: the time, early morning; for then, when the mists cling about the water, and the meadows are damp with them, that palace and stronghold, that court and tomb of royalty bulks larger than at any other time, both on sight and mind.

Thus we thought, when the early hours of the morning found us afloat again. Boveney, Monkey Island, were passed, and now arose above all the trees, the tall poplars that identify Bray to the distant view more surely than church or anything contrived at the hands of man. They range in rows, and are at once formal and touched with a delightful note of distinction. The village, too, is of the quaintest, with almshouses that should make the poverty housed within them dignified with a dignity that we who live in London’s hutches of brick and mortar, and are numbered with a plebeian number, may never know.

And at this Bray (we are told) lived that weathercock vicar, who twirled with every political wind, and by his dexterity kept his benefice and earned immortality. O most sensible Vicar of Bray: wholly admirable and right reverend exponent of expediency!

When once the bend of the river just above Bray is reached there is an end, for the time, of beauty, for the reach runs straight, and on either bank the encroachments of villadom are forming a continuous frontage of houses on to Taplow and Maidenhead, and three parts of the way to Cookham. Taplow Railway Bridge, brick-built, with bricks of a jaundiced hue, straddles over the water in two strides, an unlovely bridge, but remarkable for the great span of its arches, and for their extreme depression. So flat are the two arches of Taplow Bridge, that it seems scarcely credible they can bear the weight of the heavy trains constantly crossing. Yet fifty years have passed, and still the constant traffic of the Great Western Railway passes unharmed.

Beyond Taplow comes Maidenhead, most favoured of riverside towns, and, at the far end of Maidenhead, Boulter’s Lock, the busiest on the river, filled from morn to eve of summer days with boats full of the smartest frocks and prettiest girls one would wish to see. No more charming sight than Boulter’s on a busy day, when the boats are going up stream to Clieveden and Cookham. Clieveden woods on the right hand, and Ray Mead level on the left, with the river between, green with the reflections of the trees, and splashed here and there with the bright-coloured blazers of the rowers, make a sight to be remembered.

We came late round the bend to Cookham Lock, and into Cookham village from the landing-place, as the moon rose in a cloudless sky.

V.

This morning there was an indignant man to breakfast at Cookham. Nothing pleased the creature, and the crowded coffee-room was well advised of his discontent, for he took care to proclaim it to all and sundry. He had begun the morning badly, so it seemed, and was like to continue thus throughout the day. The birds began it by arousing him from sleep at dawn, and surely never had birds of any sort been so anathematised since the time of that famous jackdaw of Rheims. The rooks and crows, the sparrows and pigeons, that cawed and chattered and murmured with the coming of day in neighbouring elms and hedgerows, on roof-tops and in pigeon-cots, had awakened him and kept him counting the dawning hours, and that was why the toast, the tea, the eggs and the butter were all at fault to this man. He badgered the coffee-room waiter, who--poor fool!--respected him the more for it at the expense of the less contentious of the guests, and he plied all that waiter’s attention with a grumbling commentary, that went far to show him in the character of the fault-finder on principle. You see, that man who has a great capacity for indignation, with a voice of roaring and words of fury, is the man who gets on in this world. He who takes the world by the throat, and grips it hard and shakes it violently, and kicks it where honour is the more readily wounded, is the man who, at the end of the struggle, comes out “upper dog.” But the cultivation of the furious manner is a wearing cult, and besides, does not sit well on a man of little chest, small voice, and gentle eye. Other things, too, are wanting to a complete success. Let me put them all together, like Mrs. Glass, the historic, the well-beloved:--

Take a goodly presence, one pair of sound lungs, some original sin, and a small pinch of merit. Throw them all into your avocation, and, adding some impudence to taste, let the whole boil vigorously until public attention is attracted. Then serve up hot.[1]

Possibly that reader of a frankness so unmistakable, who annotates the margins of books from his Mudie (or even, goodness knows! from his Public Library), may disagree with these views, and fill these fair margins with criticisms of this view of life; but (a word in your ear, my friend) consider awhile, the view is sound.

This by the way. Excuse, if you please, the digression.

At Cookham we were bitten with a fancy for taking our meals _al fresco_, so when the time came for departure, imagine us stowing away into what I suppose are called the “stern sheets” of our boat sufficient provender for the day. There was a loaf and a pot of raspberry jam, some butter and a tin of some sort of meat. A couple of plates furnished us luxuriantly in the crockery department, and as for a table-knife, why, we forgot all about it, and when, in a quiet backwater, the time came for luncheon, we did our little best, which indeed was little enough, with a pocket-knife.

That meal was a gruesome orgie. Try to cut a new loaf with a pocket-knife, and you will find it much better to tear your bread straight away without further ado, a discovery we presently made; but don’t try to open a tin with such a knife, as you value your cutlery. This from experience, which we gained at the expense of a broken blade. Eventually we burst the tin open by stamping on it, and then the Wreck scooped out some of the contents with a piece of stick, as clean as might be, but still scarcely the ideal substitute for a knife. With this we spread the lumps of bread, and ate precariously. It should be said that the plates had already come to grief, and their fragments were now reposing in the river bed. For dessert we dipped the bread into the jam-pot, and thus circumvented the necessity for spoons.

This was at Hurley, after we had passed beautiful Marlow and Bisham, where the ghost of Lady Hoby walks in the abbey, and before we had come to Medmenham.

Here the notorious Medmenham Abbey stands by the waterside, where the river winds and rushes grow thick, and a lovely view it makes, close-hemmed with tall trees, the hills rising in the background and the level meads spreading out, emerald green, in front.

They tell us--those unkind topographers--that the picturesque ruins of the Abbey are a sham; that possibly one single pillar may be a genuine relic of the old religious house that once stood here, but that the arcading, the Tudor windows and the ivy-covered tower, are “_ruins_” deliberately built. Perhaps they are, but, even so, they are excellent, and those purists are not to be thanked for setting us right, where we might gladly have erred.

They would, too, assuage by exact inquiry the romantic legends of the Hell Fire Club, those “Monks of St. Francis,” as Wilkes and his jolly companions who rioted here were pleased to call themselves. Their horrid rites, their orgies and debauchery, the license of the place, typified by their motto, still extant, “_Fay ce que voudras_,” are, perhaps, better “taken as read.”

We crept up stream against a swift current, and between heavy rain showers that soaked us and diluted the remains of our picnic to a revolting mess: bread and water, tinned meat and raspberry jam, both sufficiently saturated, are not appetising items. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say there was more jam on the seats and our clothes than in its native pot, but this was at least an open question.

At Hambledon, the lock-keeper let us through in a pelting shower, which ceased directly we were freed from the unsheltered imprisonment of the lock. Have you ever noticed how _wet_ the river looks after rain? how much more _watery_ the water appears? Thus looked Henley Reach as we rowed up it this evening, past that singular eyot called Regatta Island.

VI.

Regatta Island is scarcely a place of beauty. There is a brick and plaster pseudo-temple affair on it that records the most strenuous days of the classic fallacy, when eighteenth-century poets peopled the country side and the river banks with preposterous naiads and other galvanised reproductions of the beautiful and mystic mythology of the ancients. Alas! this is not Arcadia: Great Pan is dead long since, and his nymphs have danced away to an enduring _Götterdämmerung_. It is well it should be so, for had Pan survived he would have hidden his hairy legs with check trousers, and changed his “woodnotes wild” for the democratic strains of the concertina. In these days of prim and proper County Councils, whose internal rottenness is varnished over with a shiny varnish of prudery, such improper creatures are impossible. This is an age when everything must be properly breeched or sufficiently skirted, and, though the constitution of our Councils be revolutionary, a revolution _sans culottes_ could not hope to win their approval.

A poignant individual, whose melancholy look touched time and place to a deeper pathos, stood by the water’s side, and vulgarised that shoddy temple with an air of one who had drunk too much beer, and was in the lachrymose stage.

We passed him by with flashing sculls that sent the watery shadows dancing madly in our wake, and crept up the quiet reach, past the poetically-named Phillis Court; the Wren-built bulk of Fawley; modern-built, yet historical Greenlands, residence of the late Mr. W. H. Smith, that unromantic but sufficiently strenuous upholder of “duty to Queen and country,” and presently came off the slip where many boats lay moored. Henley was quiet enough, not to say dull. Except when the midsummer madness of the Regatta sets all the riverside agog, and sends even garret lodgings up to fabulous prices, the broad stony streets of the town loom blankly to the stranger. The great church of Henley, whose tower, picturesquely turreted, shows to greater advantage at a distance, is of equally generous proportions. It is scarcely interesting, but there is in the graveyard a tomb of a sombre and darkling interest. Here lies, beside her father and mother, Mary Blandy, who, at the time of her trial and execution, was probably the most notorious person within the compass of these islands. The daughter of Mr. Francis Blandy, an attorney-at-law, who in 1750 lived in Henley town, close by the Angel Inn, she became acquainted with a Captain Cranston, who, being in charge of a recruiting party stationed here, was received into the society of the place. Now, Mr. Blandy was a widower, and dotingly fond of his daughter, his only child. Being a rich man as times went, he was anxious to secure for her a footing in county society, then more difficult of access than now. To this end he caused it to be understood that his Molly would have £10,000 by way of dowry, and the prospect of securing this large sum led the captain, who was a married man, to pretend love for her. Although he sprang from an old Scots family, Cranston was a man of extremely dissolute and evil character, and the lawyer, although he knew little or nothing of this, and nothing of the wife in Scotland, disliked and distrusted him, and forbade the engagement into which he and his daughter had entered.

However, Mary Blandy was so infatuated with the man, and so influenced by him, that, to get rid of her father, and to obtain at once both husband and her dowry, she set in train a scheme of slow poisoning that for heartlessness rivals Brinvilliers herself. In November 1750, she began to poison her father, under the instructions of Cranston, who, returning to Scotland, had sent her some pebbles, and powders ostensibly to clean them withal. The powders were composed of arsenic, and were administered in her father’s tea. By March of the following year the poison had its effect in causing her father’s teeth to drop out, whereupon this exceptional daughter “damned him for a toothless old rogue and wished him at hell.”

Several times the servants were nearly killed by having accidentally drunk of the tea prepared for the master of the house, and on each occasion this extraordinary woman nursed them back to health with the tenderest solicitude. At length their suspicions were sufficiently aroused to inform Mr. Blandy secretly. He told his daughter that he suspected he was being poisoned. She confessed to him, and he, incredible as it may appear, forgave her, with admonitions to amend her life, and, above all, to conceal everything, saying, “Poor girl, what will not a love-sick woman do for the man she loves!”

He died the next day, and Mary Blandy escaped the same night from the house, after having vainly attempted to bribe the servants to smuggle her off to London in a post-chaise. Half-way across Henley Bridge she was discovered, and would have been lynched by the inhabitants had she not taken shelter within the Angel Inn, where she was promptly arrested. Taken thence to Oxford, she was tried, found guilty, and condemned to death on the 29th February 1752. She was executed on the 6th April, begging not to be hanged high, “for the sake of decency.”

She asserted her innocence to the last, saying Cranston had told her the powders would do her father no harm. The same mob that had hunted her to the doors of the “Angel,” attended her body from the scene of execution at Oxford Castle, regarding her as a saint. She was buried here in a coffin lined with white satin. Cranston, it is scarcely necessary to add, fled the country.

This slow poisoner, if painter and mezzotinter lie not who have handed down her portraiture to our times, was peculiarly beautiful, with an eighteenth-century grace, a swan neck, and a sweetness of expression that, if any truth there be in views that take the face as index to the mind, would seem to shadow forth nothing but virtues minor and major.

At the “Red Lion” by the bridge we supped and slept, possibly attracted to this particular hostelry by Shenstone’s famous lines--

“Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round, Where’er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found His warmest welcome at an inn.”

Boating men comprised almost the whole of the company at the Red Lion, and the talk was solely aquatic, dealing with races--past, present, and to come--with sculls and sliding-seats, and all the minutiæ of water pastimes.

VII.

This morning we rowed through Marsh Lock, struggled through the mazes, snags, and shallows of Hennerton Backwater, and lazed in the sunshine at Wargrave, that picturesque beach and village set over against the flat green meadows of the Oxfordshire bank. Then (for the spirit of exploration grew strong again) we laboriously shoved, rather than rowed, our craft through the esoteric windings of the Loddon River and Patricksbourne, arriving some hours later on the hither side of Shiplake Lock, with the unexpected satisfaction of having thus saved some pence from the clutch of the Thames Conservancy.

At the Bull at Sonning we dined in a parlour gay with geraniums, with windows shaded by vines and creepers, with old-fashioned fire-place surmounted by a huge stuffed fish--a typical river-side inn--and thereafter rowed up from Sonning to Reading, where, by the filthy Kennet side, we left our boat for return to its owner, in the usual Thames-side practice.

We came to Reading prepared for anything but charm in that town of biscuits, and we were not inclined to alter our ready-made opinion upon sight of it. We passed through “double-quick,” leaving the last of the town as late as 8.30. He who runs may read, perhaps, if the type be sufficiently large; but I don’t think he would find it possible to write: we did not, and so this book must go forth lacking a description of Reading.

The train that carried us from this town of almost metropolitan savour jogged along in most leisurely fashion past Mortimer Stratfield, and finally brought up at Basingstoke, where we went to bed with what haste we might.

VIII.

And so we came into Hampshire. A weary county this, for those who know not where to seek its beauties--a county of flint-bestrewn roads, a county, too, of unconscionable distances and sad, lonely, rolling downs. Hampshire, indeed, seems ever attuned to memories in a minor key. It is, possibly, but a matter of individual temperament, but so it seems that this county of pine woods and bleak hills--bare, save for some crowning clump of eerie trees, whose branches continually whisper in sobbing breezes--shall always restrain your boisterous spirits, however bright the day, with a sense of foreboding. How much more, then, shall you be impressed of eventide, should you be still abroad, to see how weirdly the sun goes down behind those hill-tops, which then grow black beside his dying glory, while the water-meadows below grow blurred and indistinct, as the night mists rise in ghostly swirls. These thoughts can never find adequate expression, charged as they are with a latent superstition which, despite the lapse of centuries, lingers yet, perhaps unreasonably.

Such are the emotions conjured up by Nature in Hampshire. You may test their force readily at sundown, outside Winchester, when the huge mass of St. Catherine’s Hill looms awfully above the water-meadows of the Itchen, etched in deepest black upon the radiant evening sky. Gazing thus, and presently possessed of a fine thrill of superstitious dread, or artistic admiration--what you will--you may turn and encounter, full to the gaze, the twinkling lamps of the City--prosaic indeed.