The Under Dog

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

The hiring of the man for days after my arrival at Sonning-on-Thames, was more difficult, well-nigh impossible, except at a price per diem which no staid old painter—they are all an impecunious lot—could afford. There were boys, of course, for the asking; sunburnt, freckle-faced, tousle-headed, barefooted little devils who, when my back was turned, would do handsprings over my cushions, landing on the mattress, or break the pole the first day out, leaving me high and dry on some island out of calling distance; but full-grown, sober-minded, steady men, who could pole all day or sit beside me patiently while I worked, hand me the right brush or tube of color, or palette, or open a bottle of soda without spilling half of it—that kind of man was scarce.

Landlord Hull, of the White Hart Inn—what an ideal Boniface is this same Hull, and what an ideal inn—promised a boatman to pole the punt and look after my traps when the Henley regatta was over; and the owner of my own craft, and of fifty other punts besides, went so far as to say that he expected a man as soon as Lord Somebody-or-Other left for the Continent, when His Lordship's waterman would be free, adding, meaningly:

"Just at present, zur, when we do be 'avin' sich a mob lot from Lunnon, 'specially at week's-end, zur, we ain't got men enough to do our own polin'. It's the war, zur, as has took 'em off. Maybe for a few day, zur, ye might take a 'and yerself if ye didn't mind."

I waved the hand referred to—the forefinger part of it—in a deprecating manner. I couldn't pole the lightest and most tractable punt ten yards in a straight line to save my own or anybody else's life. Then again, if I should impair the precision of my five fingers by any such violent exercise, my brush would wabble as nervously over my canvas as a recording needle across a steam-gauge. Poling a rudderless, keelless skiff up a crooked stream by means of a fifteen-foot balancing pole is an art only to be classed with that of rowing a gondola. Gondoliers and punters, like poets, are born, not made. My own Luigi comes of a race of gondoliers dating back two hundred years, and punters must spring from just such ancestors. No, if I had to do the poling myself, I should rather get out and walk.

Fin solved the problem—not from any special training (rowing in regattas and the like), but rather from that universal adaptability of the Irishman which fits him for filling any situation in life, from a seat on a dirt-cart to a chair in an aldermanic chamber.

"I am a paper-hanger by trade, sor," he began, "but I was brought up on the river and can put a punt wid the best. Try me, sor, at four bob a day; I'm out of a job."

I looked him over, from his illuminated head down to his parenthetical legs, caught the merry twinkle in his eyes, and a sigh of relief escaped me. Here was not only a seafaring man, accustomed to battling with the elements, skilled in the handling of poles, and acquainted with swift and ofttimes dangerous currents, but a brother brush, a man conversant with design and pigments; an artist, keenly sensitive to straight lines, harmony of tints, and delicate manipulation of surfaces.

I handed him the key at once. Thenceforward I was simply a passenger depending on his strong right arm for guidance, and at luncheon-hour upon his alert and nimble, though slightly incurved, legs for sustenance, the inn being often a mile away from my subject.

And the inns!—or rather my own particular inn—the White Hart at Sonning.

There are others, of course—the Red Lion at Henley; the old Warboys hostelry at Cookham; the Angler at Marlowe; the French Horn across the black water and within rifle-shot of the White Hart—a most pretentious place, designed for millionnaires and spendthrifts, where even chops and tomato-sauce, English pickles, chowchow and the like, ales in the wood and other like commodities and comforts, are dispensed at prices that compel all impecunious, staid painters like myself to content themselves with a sandwich and a pint of bitter—and a hundred other inns along the river, good, bad, and indifferent. But yet with all their charms I am still loyal to my own White Hart.