Opposite our windows a certain painter spent no inconsiderable time in the peak-roofed tent upon the grass-plot. There the young foreign-looking wife, in scarlet birette and jaunty petticoats just touching high boot-tops, with long, flowing hair, as bright and effective as any pictured vivandière, made tea and coffee over a petroleum-stove, laid the table, sat at her sewing, posed for her husband, received her callers, as charming a gypsy picture as ever brightened canvas.
For the very best of reasons, we were not 'cyclists, although in a country set with 'cycles as the fields with flowers or the sky with stars.
For reasons equally good, we were not boatists, although the watery way from Oxford to the sea flowed so near our door, and our village was one of the gayest head-quarters not only of the fresh-water navy, whose arms are flashing oars and whose oaths are of the universities, but equally that of regiments of painters, whose arms are sketching-umbrellas and easels and who swear not at all,—or at least not to feminine hearing.
Our lodgings were among the artists in the region farther back from the river than that monopolized by the boating-people. We were back among the sunny slopes and smiling meadows, the red-tiled farm-houses and dusky lanes, of the still primitive natives of the region, while the navy covered the shining river by day and overran the river-side hostelries by night.
Our lodgings were not picturesque, if truth must be told, although surrounded by picturesqueness as by a garment,—a circular cloak of it, so to say. We had the chief rooms of a staring new and square brick cottage, glaring with white walls inside, shutterless outside, majestic with a bow-window too high to look from except upon one's legs, owned by my Lady H——'s gardener, and elegantly named "Ethel Cottage," as a stucco plaque in its frieze bore witness. We should have preferred accommodations in any of the ivy-grown, steep-roofed cots about us, or in the old stone inn, with its peaked porch, where honest yokels quaffed nutty ale and a sign-board creaked and groaned from its gibbet across the road. But we had come too late in the painting-season for any other than Hobson's choice: the tidbits of grime and squalor were all taken, and we must e'en content ourselves to be mocked and reviled for the philistinism of our domestic establishing, or else hie us hence where artists were not and Ethel Cottages as yet unknown.
But where, tell me where, are not artists in England? And where, tell me where, do artists gather in squads that Ethel Cottages do not spring up like the tents of an army with banners? For even painters must eat and be lodged, the aboriginal habitations are not of elastic capacity, the inns are of feeble digestion, and the third summer of an artistic invasion is sure to find "Ethels" and "Mabels" in red brick and stunning whitewash, and, like our row of laborers' cottages, cursed by artists, but inhabited by them.
It was a soulagement of our æsthetic discomfort that so long as we remained hidden within it we never realized our own hideousness. Now and then we saw the ugly squareness of our afternoon shadow upon our aristocratically-gravelled front yard, but ordinarily we saw only dreamy distances melting into piny duskiness against the far-off sky, the serpent-like windings of the tranquil river, upon which its navy looked like dust-motes, fair fields of golden grain, and the farm-houses and cottages which looked upon our blank brickness with admiration and wondered why we were despised of our less beautifully housed kind, when our forks were four-pronged and of silvery seeming and our floors carpeted to our sybaritic feet. It was only when we returned to our Ethel after long tramps over the country-side, from a four-miles-distant Norman tower or a ten-miles-away pre-Reformation abbey, now stable or granary, that we figuratively beat our breasts and tore our hair because Fate had not made us real tramps, privileged to sleep in pre-Reformation stables or 'neath pre-Reformation stars, rather than the imitation tramps we were, wedded to the habits but loathing the aspect of red-faced, staring Ethels.
What would we not have given for an invitation to pass a time, as Miss Muloch was, in one of those Thames monsters concerning which she wrote her fascinating pages, "A Week in a House-Boat"! We could scarce catch a glimpse of the river upon our tramps—and it was our constant silvery accompaniment, as the treble to a part-song—without coming across these ungraceful, unwieldy creatures, seeming like bloated denizens of depths below come to bask upon the surface. Hundreds of them dot the river between Teddington and Oxford: once we counted ten between Ethel and the wooded island whither we rowed every Sunday to dine from ponderous hampers upon a huge tree-stump. Many of them are owned and occupied by artists, who have them towed by horses up and down the river every week or two, or moor them for months in one place while painting river-scenery. Some are inhabited by maniacal fishermen, who sit day after day all day long at the end of poles protruding from front or back doors or bedroom windows. Some are inhabited by Londoners in whom primeval instincts for air, space, sunshine, and liberty break out every summer from under the thick crust of modern habits and conventions and cause them to breathe, as we did, not angelical aspirations, but "I want to be a gypsy."
Some of these house-boats are miracles of microscopic luxury, doll-like bedrooms and dining-rooms for pygmies. In some, also, marvels of culinary skill are evolved in pocket-space by French chefs who spend their days creating the banquets to which the boaters invite their convives at evening, when the cold river-mists have driven the navy into harbor for the night. Others are much simpler in construction and furnishing, and the inhabitants live largely upon tinned and potted viands and such light cooking as comes within the possibilities of oil-stoves and fires of fagots on the banks. Still others—and we often saw their lordly and corpulent owners reading the "Times" upon the handkerchief space which serves for porch or piazza before their front doors—move up and down the river from crack hotel to cracker, taking no note of picturesque "bits" or of mooring-places where Paradise seems come down to lodge between Berks and Bucks, caring naught that at this point four exquisite churches and two interesting manor-houses are within tramping-distance, at that a feudal castle and the fairest inland picture that England and nature can offer their lovers, caring only that at the "King" the trout are the best cooked on the whole river, at the "Queen" the chops are divine, while at the "Prince" the perdrix aux truffes are worth mooring there a week for. These house-boaters are generally accompanied by garish wives and daughters, who spend their time in the streets of the town where they chance to be moored,—and they seldom are moored elsewhere than at the larger towns,—exchanging greetings and chatting with such acquaintances as they there meet, or idling up and down the river in the luxurious small boats of their river-made friends. This type of house-boater himself is generally spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper, one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing new is, and nothing true is, and no matter!"
Americans personally unacquainted with England can form little idea of the extent to which physical culture is carried here, and the universal summer madness for athletic sports and out-of-door amusements. The equable climate, never too hot, never too cold, for river-pull or cricket, is Albion's advantage in this respect over almost all the rest of the world, and particularly over our fervid and freezing clime. Even although this is pious England, where the gin-shops cannot open after the noon of Sunday until the bells ring for the evening service and "Pub" and church spring open and alight simultaneously, even in pious England Sunday is the day of all the week on which the river takes on its merriest aspect, and from the multitudes of familiar faces and frequency of friendly greetings reminds one of Regent Street and the Parks. All prosperous and proper London—the amusement is too costly for 'Arry—seems to float itself upon Thames water that day, coming up forty land-miles from the metropolis to do so. Boats are furiously in demand, every picnic nook is pre-empted from earliest morning, the river-side tea-gardens are thronged, the inns are depleted of men and women in yachting-costumes, and the locks are jammed as full as they can be of highly-draped boats, gayly-dressed women, and circus-costumed men, the whole scene gayer, brighter, more fantastic than any Venetian carnival since the days of the most sumptuous of the Adriatic doges.