"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.