Above Parson's Pleasure we emerge from Mesopotamia—as the pretty river bottom is called in which the Char divides into several channels—and come in sight of the 'varsity cricket-ground. There is a game on against a picked eleven from the Marylebone Club; and every few minutes, if we waited, we might see the statuesque figures in white flannel suddenly dash after a ball or trot back and forth between the wickets. Few slackers have had energy to get beyond this point; and as we pole among the meadows, the cuckoo's homely voice emphasizes the solitude, singing the same two notes it sang to Shakespeare—and to Chaucer before him, for the matter of that.
At Marston, having ordered tea of the red-cheeked housewife, it is well to ask the innkeeper for credit. He is a Parisian, whose sociological principles, it is said, were the cause of his venturing across the Channel—in Paris, a man will even go as far as that for his opinions; and while his cheery English spouse, attended by troops of his red-cheeked boys, brings out the thin buttered bread, he will revile you. What business have you to ask an honest yeoman to lend you money? If he were to go down to Oxford and ask the first gentleman he met to lend him half a crown to feed his starving family, should he get it? Should he? And what right have you to come to his house—his home!—and demand food at his board? You are a gentleman; but what is a gentleman? A gentleman is the dregs of the idleness of centuries! Then he will declaim about his plans for the renovation of the world. All this time his well-fed wife has been pouring out the tea and slicing the Genoa cake; and now, with a smile of reassurance, she takes our names and college. But the innkeeper's eloquence does not flag, and it will not until you tell him with decision that you have had enough. This you are loath to do, for he has furnished you with a new ideal of happiness. The cotton-wharf negro sometimes wants leisure, the repose of the cricketer is at times rudely broken in upon, and even the slacker is liable to his ducking; but to stand up boldly against the evils of the world and to picture the new Utopia while your wife averts all practical consequences, this is otium cum dignitate.
This journey up the Char, though all-popular with the undergraduate, is not the only one worth taking. We might have gone down the Isis to the Iffley Mill and the sleepy little Norman church near by. This would have taken us through the thick of the college crews training for the summer eights. But the rules of the river are so complicated that no man on earth who has not given them long hours of study can understand them; and if an eight ran into us, we should be fined a quid or two—one quid for a college eight, and two for the 'varsity. Below Iffley, indeed, there is as much clear punting as you could desire, and here you are in the full current of Thames pleasure-boats. The towing-path skirts the water, so that when you are tired of punting you can get out and tow your craft. The stretch of river here I hold memorable as the scene of the only bit of dalliance I ever witnessed in this most sentimental of environments. A young man and a young woman had tied the painter of their punt to the middle of a paddle, and shoulder by shoulder were loitering along the river-side. Twenty yards behind, three other men and a baffled chaperon were steering the punt clear of the bank, and boring one another.
IFFLEY LOCK AND MILL
The best trip on the Isis is into the backwaters. These are a mesh of tiny streams that break free from the main current above Oxford and lose themselves in the broad bottom-lands. The islands they form were chosen in the Dark Ages as the sites of religious houses; for not only was the land fertile, but the network of deep, if tiny, streams afforded defense from the heathen, while the main channel of the Thames afforded communication with the Christian world. The ruins of these, or of subsequent monasteries, remain to-day brooding over a few Tudor cottages and hamlets, with a mill and a bakery and an inn or two to sustain life in the occasional undergraduate who lazes by in his canoe.
The most interesting of these ruins is Wytham. The phrase is exact, for the entire hamlet was built from a venerable religious house shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries. You can imagine the size of Wytham. If you don't watch very closely as you paddle up the sedgy backwater, you will miss it entirely, and that would be a pity, for its rude masonry, thatched roofs, and rustic garden fronts seem instinct with the atmosphere of Tudor England. The very tea roses, nodding languidly over the garden wall, smell, or seem to smell, as subtly sweet as if they had been pressed for ages between the leaves of a mediæval romance.
I am not quite sure that they do, though, for these ancient hamlets have strange ways of pulling the wool—a true golden fleece, to be sure—over American eyes. Once at twilight I heard a knot of strolling country men and women crooning a tune which was so strangely familiar that I immediately set it down as a village version of one of the noble melodies of that golden age when English feeling found its natural vent in song. As it drew nearer, I suddenly recognized it. It was a far-away version of "Mammy's Little Alabama Coon."