You
roll it up with as much patience and care as you would take to fold up a
new pair of trousers, and five minutes afterwards, when you pick it up,
it is one ghastly, soul-revolting tangle.
I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took an
average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle of a
field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that, when you
looked round again, you would find that it had got itself altogether in a
heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself up, and tied
itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all loops; and it
would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on the grass and
swearing all the while, to disentangle it again.
That is my opinion of tow-lines in general. Of course, there may be
honourable exceptions; I do not say that there are not. There may be
tow-lines that are a credit to their profession - conscientious,
respectable tow-lines - tow-lines that do not imagine they are crochet-
work, and try to knit themselves up into antimacassars the instant they
are left to themselves. I say there MAY be such tow-lines; I sincerely
hope there are. But I have not met with them.
This tow-line I had taken in myself just before we had got to the lock.
I would not let Harris touch it, because he is careless. I had looped it
round slowly and cautiously, and tied it up in the middle, and folded it
in two, and laid it down gently at the bottom of the boat. Harris had
lifted it up scientifically, and had put it into George's hand. George
had taken it firmly, and held it away from him, and had begun to unravel
it as if he were taking the swaddling clothes off a new-born infant; and,
before he had unwound a dozen yards, the thing was more like a badly-made
door-mat than anything else.
It is always the same, and the same sort of thing always goes on in
connection with it. The man on the bank, who is trying to disentangle
it, thinks all the fault lies with the man who rolled it up; and when a
man up the river thinks a thing, he says it.
"What have you been trying to do with it, make a fishing-net of it?
You've made a nice mess you have; why couldn't you wind it up properly,
you silly dummy?" he grunts from time to time as he struggles wildly with
it, and lays it out flat on the tow-path, and runs round and round it,
trying to find the end.
