Muddy water, and the tin rolled over,
uninjured, and broke a teacup.
Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went
up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat
and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the
sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and
poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought
it down.
It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that
hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes
are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have
passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the
stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.
After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast
till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every
form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it. Then George
went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so
unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away
the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a
mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the
thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river,
and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and
rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead.
Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the
river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of
showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the
witch's kitchen from which go forth those demons of the river - steam-
launches. The LONDON JOURNAL duke always has his "little place" at
Maidenhead; and the heroine of the three-volume novel always dines there
when she goes out on the spree with somebody else's husband.
We went through Maidenhead quickly, and then eased up, and took leisurely
that grand reach beyond Boulter's and Cookham locks. Clieveden Woods
still wore their dainty dress of spring, and rose up, from the water's
edge, in one long harmony of blended shades of fairy green.
