"THREE MEN IN A BOAT"
JEROME K. JEROME
It was the dead body of a woman. It lay
very lightly on the water, and the face
was sweet and calm. It was not a
beautiful face; it was too prematurely agedlooking,
too thin and drawn, to be that; but it
was a gentle, lovable face, in spite of its stamp of
pinch and poverty, and upon it was that
look of restful peace that comes to the faces of
the sick sometimes when at last the pain
has left them.
Fortunately for us—we having no desire
to be kept hanging about coroners’
courts—some men on the bank had seen the
body too, and now took charge of it from us.
We found out the woman’s story
afterwards. Of course it was the old, old
vulgar tragedy. She had loved and been
deceived—or had deceived herself.
Anyhow, she had sinned—some of us do now
and then—and her family and
friends, naturally shocked and
indignant, had closed their doors against her.
Left to fight the world alone, with the
millstone of her shame around her neck,
she had sunk ever lower and lower. For a
while she had kept both herself and
the child on the twelve shillings a week
that twelve hours’ drudgery a day
procured her, paying six shillings out
of it for the child, and keeping her own
body and soul together on the remainder.
Six shillings a week does not keep body
and soul together very unitedly. They
want to get away from each other when
there is only such a very slight bond as
that between them; and one day, I
suppose, the pain and the dull monotony of
it all had stood before her eyes plainer
than usual, and the mocking spectre had
frightened her. She had made one last
appeal to friends, but, against the chill
wall of their respectability, the voice
of the erring outcast fell unheeded; and
then she had gone to see her child—had
held it in her arms and kissed it, in a
weary, dull sort of way, and without
betraying any particular emotion of any
kind, and had left it, after putting
into its hand a penny box of chocolate she
had bought it, and afterwards, with her
last few shillings, had taken a ticket
and come down to Goring.
It seemed that the bitterest thoughts of
her life must have centred about the
wooded reaches and the bright green
meadows around Goring; but women
strangely hug the knife that stabs them,
and, perhaps, amidst the gall, there
may have mingled also sunny memories of
sweetest hours, spent upon those
shadowed deeps over which the great trees
bend their branches down so low.
She had wandered about the woods by the
river’s brink all day, and then, when
evening fell and the grey twilight
spread its dusky robe upon the waters, she
stretched her arms out to the silent
river that had known her sorrow and her
joy. And the old river had taken her
into its gentle arms, and had laid her
weary head upon its bosom, and had
hushed away the pain.
Thus had she sinned in all things—sinned
in living and in dying. God help
her! and all other sinners, if any more
there be.
