Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome [85]
He regained his feet, and looked round for his would-be murderer. The assassin was standing close by him, laughing heartily, but the moment he caught sight of Harris’s face, as it emerged from the water, he started back and seemed quite concerned.
‘I really beg your pardon,’ he stammered confusedly, ‘but I took you for a friend of mine!’
Harris thought it was lucky for him the man had not mistaken him for a relation, or he would probably have been drowned outright.
Sailing is a thing that wants knowledge and practice too – though, as a boy, I did not think so. I had an idea it came natural to a body, like rounders and touch.3 I knew another boy who held this view likewise, and so, one windy day, we thought we would try the sport. We were stopping down at Yarmouth, and we decided we would go for a trip up the Yare. We hired a sailing boat at the yard by the bridge, and started off.
‘It’s rather a rough day,’ said the man to us, as we put off: ‘better take in a reef and luff4 sharp when you get round the bend.’
We said we would make a point of it, and left him with a cheery ‘Good morning’, wondering to ourselves how you ‘luffed’, and where we were to get a ‘reef’ from, and what we were to do with it when we had got it.
We rowed until we were out of sight of the town, and then, with a wide stretch of water in front of us, and the wind blowing a perfect hurricane across it, we felt that the time had come to commence operations.
Hector – I think that was his name – went on pulling while I unrolled the sail. It seemed a complicated job, but I accomplished it at length, and then came the question, which was the top end?
By a sort of natural instinct, we, of course, eventually decided that the bottom was the top, and set to work to fix it upside-down. But it was a long time before we could get it up, either that way or any other way. The impression on the mind of the sail seemed to be that we were playing at funerals, and that I was the corpse and itself was the winding sheet.
When it found that this was not the idea, it hit me over the head with the boom, and refused to do anything.
‘Wet it,’ said Hector; ‘drop it over and get it wet.’
He said people in ships always wetted the sails before they put them up. So I wetted it; but that only made matters worse than they were before. A dry sail clinging to your legs and wrapping itself round your head is not pleasant, but, when the sail is sopping wet, it becomes quite vexing.
We did get the thing up at last, the two of us together. We fixed it, not exactly upside-down – more sideways like – and we tied it up to the mast with the painter, which we cut off for the purpose.
That the boat did not upset I simply state as a fact. Why it did not upset I am unable to offer any reason. I have often thought about the matter since, but I have never succeeded in arriving at any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.
Possibly the result may have been brought about by the natural obstinacy of all things in this world. The boat may possibly have come to the conclusion, judging from a cursory view of our behaviour, that we had come out for a morning’s suicide, and had thereupon determined to disappoint us. That is the only suggestion I can offer.
By clinging like grim death to the gunwale, we just managed to keep inside the boat, but it was exhausting work. Hector said that pirates and other seafaring people generally lashed the rudder to something or other, and hauled in the main top-jib, during severe squalls, and thought we ought to try to do something of the kind; but I was for letting