I have still faith, though, in a certain mediæval barmaid I chanced upon in the backwaters. The circumstances of our meeting were peculiar. As I drifted along one Sunday, perched on an after-thwart of the canoe, the current swept me toward a willow that leaned over the water, and I put up my hand to fend off. I chanced to be laughing to myself at the time at the thought of a fellow who, only the day before at the lasher, had tried to do the same thing. The lasher was forcing his punt against the willow on the opposite bank, whereupon, to my heart's delight, he lazily tried to fend it off with his arms. The punt refused to be fended off, and he stooped with an amusing effect of deliberation plump into the water. He was hauled out by the O.U.H.S. man hard by.
I was interrupted in these pleasant reminiscences by the roaring of waters about my ears, mingled with a boorish guffaw from one of the fellows behind me.... But I started to tell about the mediæval barmaid. Making my way to a bakehouse up the stream, I hung my coat and trousers before the fire on a long baker's pole, and put my shoes inside the oven on a dough tray. My companion of the horse-laugh hung my shirt on a blossoming almond-tree, and then left for the lunch hamper. He had scarcely gone when I heard the rustle of skirts at the door. "What do you want?" I cried. "I want my dinner," was the friendly reply. It was the barmaid of a neighboring public house, in her Sunday frock.
When she saw me she smiled, but maintained a dignity of port that—I insist upon it—was instinct with the simple and primitive modesty of the Middle Ages. It was the modesty of the people before whom Adam in the Chester mystery play was required by the stage directions to "stand nakyd and not be ashamyd." My barmaid advised me to take off my stockings and hang them up before the fire. The advice I admit came as a shock, but on reflection I saw that it was capital. For one happy moment I lived in the broad, wholesome atmosphere of the Middle Ages. It was like a breath from Chaucer's England.
Then the baker rushed into the room, in a cutaway Sunday coat of the latest style. He had baked for an Oxford college so long that he had become infected with the squeamish leaven of the nineteenth century. He called the girl a huzzy, and, taking her by the shoulder, hustled her into the garden, and then passed her plum pudding out to her gingerly through a crack in the door. He covered me with apologies and a bath-robe; but I did not mind either, for as the barmaid ran back to the inn she was laughing what I still insist upon believing to have been the simple joyous laughter of the Middle Ages.
But we must hurry to get back to college in time for dinner. And even at that we shall have to stop here at Magdalen bridge and give a street boy sixpence to take the punt the rest of the way. We land at the foot of the tower just as the late afternoon sun is gilding its exquisite pinnacles, and the chimes in its belfry are playing the prelude to the hour of seven. It is a melody worth all the Char and the Isis, with all their weirs and their willows. Other mediæval chimes fill you with a delicious sorrow for the past; but when they cease, and the great bell tolls out the hour, you think only of the death of time. It leaves you sadly beneath the tower, in the musty cellarage. But the melody that the Magdalen chimes utter is full of the fervid faith, the aspirations, of our fathers. It lifts you among the gilded pinnacles, or perhaps ever so little above them.
II
To the true slacker, the college barges that line the Isis are an object of aversion, for into them sooner or later every fellow who loves the water finds his way, and then there is an end of slacking. Each of the barges is a grammar school of oarsmanship, where all available men are taught everything, from what thickness of leather to wear on the heels of their boating-shoes to the rhythm in rowing by which alone an eight can realize its full speed; and from the barges issues a navy of boats and boating-men more than ten times as large as that of an American university. When Mr. R. C. Lehmann arrived at Cambridge to coach the Harvard crew, he was lost in admiration of the Charles River and the Back Bay, and in amazement at the absence of boats on them. At either Yale or Harvard it would be easy to give space to both of the fleets that now swarm on the slender Isis and threadlike Cam. We have water enough—as a Congressman once remarked of our fighting navy—it is only the boats that are lacking. The lesson we have to learn of our English cousins is not so much a matter of reach and swing, outrigger and blades, as a generous and wholesome interest in boating for the sake of the boat and of the water; and it is less apparent in an Oxford 'varsity eight than in the humblest tub of the humblest college.
The first suggestion that I should go out to be tubbed came from the gray-bearded dean of the college, who happened at the time to be taking me to the master for formal presentation. I told him that I had tried for my class crew, and that three days on the water had convinced the coach that I was useless. He fell a pace behind, looked me over, and said that I might at least try. As this was his only advice, I did not forget it; and when my tutor, before advising me as to my studies, also urged me to row, I gave the matter some serious thought.
I found subsequently that every afternoon, between luncheon and tea, the college was virtually deserted for field, track, and river; and it dawned upon me that unless I joined the general exodus I should temporarily become a hermit. Still, my earlier unhappy experience in rowing was full in mind, and I set out for the barge humble in spirit, and prepared to be cursed roundly for three days, and "kicked out," or, as they say in Oxford, "given the hoof," on the fourth.