The Babe, B.A. : being the uneventful history of a young gentleman at Cambridge University

by E. F. Benson

Row, brothers, row,
The stream runs slow,
We don’t know how to row
And the oars stick so.
Light-blue Lyrics.

The Babe was no waterman, and he never pretended to be, but this did not prevent his getting up a quiet picnic on the upper river one delightful afternoon towards the end of May. There were only to be four of them, not counting Mr. Sykes—though it was impossible not to count Mr. Sykes, the others being Reggie, Ealing, and Jack Marsden.

Marsden, who had once, when a Freshman, been coached on the river, by an angry man in shorts, and had been abandoned as hopeless after his first trial, was naturally supposed by the Babe to be an accomplished oarsman, and to have probed to its depths the nature of boats and oars and stretchers, so he was deputed to find a boat which held four people, several hampers, and a dog, and

TRINITY BRIDGE, FROM THE BACKS.

which was warranted not to shy or bolt, and to be quiet with children. It was understood that the Babe was not going to row or steer, his office being merely to provide food for them all, and if possible to prevent Mr. Sykes from leaping overboard when they passed the bathing-sheds, and biting indiscriminately at the bathers, whom for some reason of his own he regarded with peculiar but perfectly ineradicable disfavour. The Babe had taken him up the river only the week before, but opposite the town sheds Sykes had been unable to restrain himself, had jumped off the boat into the water and chased to land a bland and timid shopkeeper, to whom the Babe owed money, so it looked as if it was a put-up job; the man had regained the steps of the bathing-shed only just in time to save himself from being pinned in the calf of the leg.

The Babe and Jack were to start from the raft by Trinity at three, and pick up Reggie and Ealing opposite King’s. They were then to row up to Byron’s Pool (so-called because there is no reason to suppose that Byron was not extremely fond of it,) bathe and have tea, and afterwards go a mile or so farther, and have dinner. The Babe who just now was gated at ten, confidently hoped to be home at or before that hour, on the sole ground that Napoleon had once said there was no such word as impossible.

They paddled quietly up to the Mill just above the town, and here it was necessary to haul the boat over the bank separating the upper river from the lower. The Babe who was beautifully dressed in white flannels, yellow boots, and a straw hat with a new riband, courteously declined giving the smallest assistance to the others, but watched the operation with interest and apparent approval, in consequence of which he was advised by Reggie, who had got hot and rather dirty with his exertions, to drop that infernally patronising attitude. Here too Mr. Sykes first sniffed the prey, for he had caught sight of the bathers at the town sheds across the fields, and was trotting quietly off in their direction, secretly licking his lips, but outwardly pretending that he was merely going for a little airy walk on his own account. The Babe had to run after him and haul him back, for he affected to hear neither whistling nor shouting, and on his return he kept smelling suspiciously at the legs of casual passers-by as if he rather suspected that they were going to bathe too.

Though the lower river is one of the foulest streams on the face of the earth, the upper river is one of the fairest. It wanders up between fresh green fields, bordered by tall yellow flags, loosestrife, and creamy meadow-sweet, all unconscious of the fate that awaits it from vile man below. Pollarded willows lean over the bank and listen to the wind, and here and there a company of white poplars, the most distinguished of trees, come trooping down to the water’s edge. The stream itself carpeted with waving weeds strolls along clear and green from the reflection of the trees, troops of bleak poise and dart in the shallows, or shelter in the subaqueous forests, and the Babe said he saw a trout, a statement to which no importance whatever need be attached. Looking back across a mile of fields you see the pinnacles of King’s rise grey and grave into the sky; and in front, Granchester, with its old-fashioned garden-cradled houses, presided over by a church tower on the top of which, as a surveyor once remarked, there is a plus sign which is useful as a fixed point, nestles in a green windless hollow.