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Project Gutenberg Etext of Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
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Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
August, 1995 [Etext #308]
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Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome - Scanned and First Proof
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk Second proof: Margaret Price
***
THREE MEN IN A BOAT
(TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG).
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
CHAPTER I.
THREE INVALIDS. - SUFFERINGS OF GEORGE AND HARRIS. - A VICTIM TO ONE
HUNDRED AND SEVEN FATAL MALADIES. - USEFUL PRESCRIPTIONS. - CURE FOR
LIVER COMPLAINT IN CHILDREN. - WE AGREE THAT WE ARE OVERWORKED, AND NEED
REST. - A WEEK ON THE ROLLING DEEP? - GEORGE SUGGESTS THE RIVER. -
MONTMORENCY LODGES AN OBJECTION. - ORIGINAL MOTION CARRIED BY MAJORITY OF
THREE TO ONE.
THERE were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself,
and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about
how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it.
Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him at
times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that
HE had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what HE was doing. With
me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my liver that
was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill
circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man
could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine
advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am
suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most
virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly
with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment
for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it
was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an
unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently
study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I
plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I
had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in
upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of
despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read
the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for
months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St.
Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get
interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so
started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening
for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another
fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a
modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years.
Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have
been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six
letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was
housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of
slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious
reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I
reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I
grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout,
in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my
being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from
boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there
was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a
medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class!
Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I
was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me,
and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I
felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of
a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I
made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my
heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since
been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the
time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted
myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I
went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could
not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out
as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it
with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I
could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had
scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out
a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse,
and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing,
when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to
him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He shall have me.
He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your
ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each." So
I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
"Well, what's the matter with you?"
I said:
"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the
matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have
not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot
tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else,
however, I HAVE got."
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and
then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it - a cowardly
thing to do, I call it - and immediately afterwards butted me with the
side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription,
and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in.
The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn't keep it.
I said:
"You are a chemist?"
He said:
"I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel
combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers
me."
I read the prescription. It ran:
"1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand."
I followed the directions, with the happy result - speaking for myself -
that my life was preserved, and is still going on.
In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had the
symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being "a general
disinclination to work of any kind."
What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy I
have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left me for
a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical science
was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put it down
to laziness.
"Why, you skulking little devil, you," they would say, "get up and do
something for your living, can't you?" - not knowing, of course, that I
was ill.
And they didn't give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the
head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often
cured me - for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have
more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight
away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further
loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.
You know, it often is so - those simple, old-fashioned remedies are
sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.
We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our maladies. I
explained to George and William Harris how I felt when I got up in the
morning, and William Harris told us how he felt when he went to bed; and
George stood on the hearth-rug, and gave us a clever and powerful piece
of acting, illustrative of how he felt in the night.
George FANCIES he is ill; but there's never anything really the matter
with him, you know.
At this point, Mrs. Poppets knocked at the door to know if we were ready
for supper. We smiled sadly at one another, and said we supposed we had
better try to swallow a bit. Harris said a little something in one's
stomach often kept the disease in check; and Mrs. Poppets brought the
tray in, and we drew up to the table, and toyed with a little steak and
onions, and some rhubarb tart.
I must have been very weak at the time; because I know, after the first
half-hour or so, I seemed to take no interest whatever in my food - an
unusual thing for me - and I didn't want any cheese.
This duty done, we refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and resumed the
discussion upon our state of health. What it was that was actually the
matter with us, we none of us could be sure of; but the unanimous opinion
was that it - whatever it was - had been brought on by overwork.
"What we want is rest," said Harris.
"Rest and a complete change," said George. "The overstrain upon our
brains has produced a general depression throughout the system. Change
of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the
mental equilibrium."
George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet as a
medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat family-physicianary
way of putting things.
I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some retired
and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny
week among its drowsy lanes - some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by
the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world - some quaint-perched eyrie
on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth
century would sound far-off and faint.
Harris said he thought it would be humpy. He said he knew the sort of
place I meant; where everybody went to bed at eight o'clock, and you
couldn't get a REFEREE for love or money, and had to walk ten miles to
get your baccy.
"No," said Harris, "if you want rest and change, you can't beat a sea
trip."
I objected to the sea trip strongly. A sea trip does you good when you
are going to have a couple of months of it, but, for a week, it is
wicked.
You start on Monday with the idea implanted in your bosom that you are
going to enjoy yourself. You wave an airy adieu to the boys on shore,
light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the deck as if you were
Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus all rolled into
one. On Tuesday, you wish you hadn't come. On Wednesday, Thursday, and
Friday, you wish you were dead. On Saturday, you are able to swallow a
little beef tea, and to sit up on deck, and answer with a wan, sweet
smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you feel now. On Sunday, you
begin to walk about again, and take solid food. And on Monday morning,
as, with your bag and umbrella in your hand, you stand by the gunwale,
waiting to step ashore, you begin to thoroughly like it.
I remember my brother-in-law going for a short sea trip once, for the
benefit of his health. He took a return berth from London to Liverpool;
and when he got to Liverpool, the only thing he was anxious about was to
sell that return ticket.
It was offered round the town at a tremendous reduction, so I am told;
and was eventually sold for eighteenpence to a bilious-looking youth who
had just been advised by his medical men to go to the sea-side, and take
exercise.
"Sea-side!" said my brother-in-law, pressing the ticket affectionately
into his hand; "why, you'll have enough to last you a lifetime; and as
for exercise! why, you'll get more exercise, sitting down on that ship,
than you would turning somersaults on dry land."
He himself - my brother-in-law - came back by train. He said the North-
Western Railway was healthy enough for him.
Another fellow I knew went for a week's voyage round the coast, and,
before they started, the steward came to him to ask whether he would pay
for each meal as he had it, or arrange beforehand for the whole series.
The steward recommended the latter course, as it would come so much
cheaper. He said they would do him for the whole week at two pounds
five. He said for breakfast there would be fish, followed by a grill.
Lunch was at one, and consisted of four courses. Dinner at six - soup,
fish, entree, joint, poultry, salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a
light meat supper at ten.
My friend thought he would close on the two-pound-five job (he is a
hearty eater), and did so.
Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He didn't feel so hungry as
he thought he should, and so contented himself with a bit of boiled beef,
and some strawberries and cream. He pondered a good deal during the
afternoon, and at one time it seemed to him that he had been eating
nothing but boiled beef for weeks, and at other times it seemed that he
must have been living on strawberries and cream for years.
Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy, either -
seemed discontented like.
At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The announcement
aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of that
two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and things and
went down. A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mingled with fried
fish and greens, greeted him at the bottom of the ladder; and then the
steward came up with an oily smile, and said:
"What can I get you, sir?"
"Get me out of this," was the feeble reply.
And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to leeward, and left
him.
For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin
captain's biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the captain)
and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he got uppish, and went in for
weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday he was gorging himself on chicken
broth. He left the ship on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from the
landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.
"There she goes," he said, "there she goes, with two pounds' worth of
food on board that belongs to me, and that I haven't had."
He said that if they had given him another day he thought he could have
put it straight.
So I set my face against the sea trip. Not, as I explained, upon my own
account. I was never queer. But I was afraid for George. George said
he should be all right, and would rather like it, but he would advise
Harris and me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should both be ill.
Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery how people managed
to get sick at sea - said he thought people must do it on purpose, from
affectation - said he had often wished to be, but had never been able.
Then he told us anecdotes of how he had gone across the Channel when it
was so rough that the passengers had to be tied into their berths, and he
and the captain were the only two living souls on board who were not ill.
Sometimes it was he and the second mate who were not ill; but it was
generally he and one other man. If not he and another man, then it was
he by himself.
It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you
come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them;
but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was
to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that
swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.
If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one day, I
could account for the seeming enigma easily enough. It was just off
Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning out through one of the
port-holes in a very dangerous position. I went up to him to try and
save him.
"Hi! come further in," I said, shaking him by the shoulder. "You'll be
overboard."
"Oh my! I wish I was," was the only answer I could get; and there I had
to leave him.
Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath hotel,
talking about his voyages, and explaining, with enthusiasm, how he loved
the sea.
"Good sailor!" he replied in answer to a mild young man's envious query;
"well, I did feel a little queer ONCE, I confess. It was off Cape Horn.
The vessel was wrecked the next morning."
I said:
"Weren't you a little shaky by Southend Pier one day, and wanted to be
thrown overboard?"
"Southend Pier!" he replied, with a puzzled expression.
"Yes; going down to Yarmouth, last Friday three weeks."
"Oh, ah - yes," he answered, brightening up; "I remember now. I did have
a headache that afternoon. It was the pickles, you know. They were the
most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat. Did you
have any?"
For myself, I have discovered an excellent preventive against sea-
sickness, in balancing myself. You stand in the centre of the deck, and,
as the ship heaves and pitches, you move your body about, so as to keep
it always straight. When the front of the ship rises, you lean forward,
till the deck almost touches your nose; and when its back end gets up,
you lean backwards. This is all very well for an hour or two; but you
can't balance yourself for a week.
George said:
"Let's go up the river."
He said we should have fresh air, exercise and quiet; the constant change
of scene would occupy our minds (including what there was of Harris's);
and the hard work would give us a good appetite, and make us sleep well.
Harris said he didn't think George ought to do anything that would have a
tendency to make him sleepier than he always was, as it might be
dangerous.
He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any
more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in
each day, summer and winter alike; but thought that if he DID sleep any
more, he might just as well be dead, and so save his board and lodging.
Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a "T." I don't
know what a "T" is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and-
butter and cake AD LIB., and is cheap at the price, if you haven't had
any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to
its credit.
It suited me to a "T" too, and Harris and I both said it was a good idea
of George's; and we said it in a tone that seemed to somehow imply that
we were surprised that George should have come out so sensible.
The only one who was not struck with the suggestion was Montmorency. He
never did care for the river, did Montmorency.
"It's all very well for you fellows," he says; "you like it, but I don't.
There's nothing for me to do. Scenery is not in my line, and I don't
smoke. If I see a rat, you won't stop; and if I go to sleep, you get
fooling about with the boat, and slop me overboard. If you ask me, I
call the whole thing bally foolishness."
We were three to one, however, and the motion was carried.
CHAPTER II.
PLANS DISCUSSED. - PLEASURES OF "CAMPING-OUT," ON FINE NIGHTS. - DITTO,
WET NIGHTS. - COMPROMISE DECIDED ON. - MONTMORENCY, FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF.
- FEARS LEST HE IS TOO GOOD FOR THIS WORLD, FEARS SUBSEQUENTLY DISMISSED
AS GROUNDLESS. - MEETING ADJOURNS.
WE pulled out the maps, and discussed plans.
We arranged to start on the following Saturday from Kingston. Harris and
I would go down in the morning, and take the boat up to Chertsey, and
George, who would not be able to get away from the City till the
afternoon (George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day,
except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two),
would meet us there.
Should we "camp out" or sleep at inns?
George and I were for camping out. We said it would be so wild and free,
so patriarchal like.
Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the
cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased
their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of
the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the
dying day breathes out her last.
From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey
shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear-
guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the
waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her
sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from
her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.
Then we run our little boat into some quiet nook, and the tent is
pitched, and the frugal supper cooked and eaten. Then the big pipes are
filled and lighted, and the pleasant chat goes round in musical
undertone; while, in the pauses of our talk, the river, playing round the
boat, prattles strange old tales and secrets, sings low the old child's
song that it has sung so many thousand years - will sing so many thousand
years to come, before its voice grows harsh and old - a song that we, who
have learnt to love its changing face, who have so often nestled on its
yielding bosom, think, somehow, we understand, though we could not tell
you in mere words the story that we listen to.
And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops
down to kiss it with a sister's kiss, and throws her silver arms around
it clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever
whispering, out to meet its king, the sea - till our voices die away in
silence, and the pipes go out - till we, common-place, everyday young men
enough, feel strangely full of thoughts, half sad, half sweet, and do not
care or want to speak - till we laugh, and, rising, knock the ashes from
our burnt-out pipes, and say "Good-night," and, lulled by the lapping
water and the rustling trees, we fall asleep beneath the great, still
stars, and dream that the world is young again - young and sweet as she
used to be ere the centuries of fret and care had furrowed her fair face,
ere her children's sins and follies had made old her loving heart - sweet
as she was in those bygone days when, a new-made mother, she nursed us,
her children, upon her own deep breast - ere the wiles of painted
civilization had lured us away from her fond arms, and the poisoned
sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led
with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born so many
thousands years ago.
Harris said:
"How about when it rained?"
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris - no wild
yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why."
If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has
been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop.
If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say:
"Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the
waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses, held by
seaweed?" Harris would take you by the arm, and say:
"I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now, you come along
with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop
of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted - put you right in less than
no time."
Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get
something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met
Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would
immediately greet you with:
"So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the
corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar."
In the present instance, however, as regarded the camping out, his
practical view of the matter came as a very timely hint. Camping out in
rainy weather is not pleasant.
It is evening. You are wet through, and there is a good two inches of
water in the boat, and all the things are damp. You find a place on the
banks that is not quite so puddly as other places you have seen, and you
land and lug out the tent, and two of you proceed to fix it.
It is soaked and heavy, and it flops about, and tumbles down on you, and
clings round your head and makes you mad. The rain is pouring steadily
down all the time. It is difficult enough to fix a tent in dry weather:
in wet, the task becomes herculean. Instead of helping you, it seems to
you that the other man is simply playing the fool. Just as you get your
side beautifully fixed, he gives it a hoist from his end, and spoils it
all.
"Here! what are you up to?" you call out.
"What are YOU up to?" he retorts; "leggo, can't you?"
"Don't pull it; you've got it all wrong, you stupid ass!" you shout.
"No, I haven't," he yells back; "let go your side!"
"I tell you you've got it all wrong!" you roar, wishing that you could
get at him; and you give your ropes a lug that pulls all his pegs out.
"Ah, the bally idiot!" you hear him mutter to himself; and then comes a
savage haul, and away goes your side. You lay down the mallet and start
to go round and tell him what you think about the whole business, and, at
the same time, he starts round in the same direction to come and explain
his views to you. And you follow each other round and round, swearing at
one another, until the tent tumbles down in a heap, and leaves you
looking at each other across its ruins, when you both indignantly
exclaim, in the same breath:
"There you are! what did I tell you?"
Meanwhile the third man, who has been baling out the boat, and who has
spilled the water down his sleeve, and has been cursing away to himself
steadily for the last ten minutes, wants to know what the thundering
blazes you're playing at, and why the blarmed tent isn't up yet.
At last, somehow or other, it does get up, and you land the things. It
is hopeless attempting to make a wood fire, so you light the methylated
spirit stove, and crowd round that.
Rainwater is the chief article of diet at supper. The bread is two-
thirds rainwater, the beefsteak-pie is exceedingly rich in it, and the
jam, and the butter, and the salt, and the coffee have all combined with
it to make soup.
After supper, you find your tobacco is damp, and you cannot smoke.
Luckily you have a bottle of the stuff that cheers and inebriates, if
taken in proper quantity, and this restores to you sufficient interest in
life to induce you to go to bed.
There you dream that an elephant has suddenly sat down on your chest, and
that the volcano has exploded and thrown you down to the bottom of the
sea - the elephant still sleeping peacefully on your bosom. You wake up
and grasp the idea that something terrible really has happened. Your
first impression is that the end of the world has come; and then you
think that this cannot be, and that it is thieves and murderers, or else
fire, and this opinion you express in the usual method. No help comes,
however, and all you know is that thousands of people are kicking you,
and you are being smothered.
Somebody else seems in trouble, too. You can hear his faint cries coming
from underneath your bed. Determining, at all events, to sell your life
dearly, you struggle frantically, hitting out right and left with arms
and legs, and yelling lustily the while, and at last something gives way,
and you find your head in the fresh air. Two feet off, you dimly observe
a half-dressed ruffian, waiting to kill you, and you are preparing for a
life-and-death struggle with him, when it begins to dawn upon you that
it's Jim.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he says, recognising you at the same moment.
"Yes," you answer, rubbing your eyes; "what's happened?"
"Bally tent's blown down, I think," he says.
"Where's Bill?"
Then you both raise up your voices and shout for "Bill!" and the ground
beneath you heaves and rocks, and the muffled voice that you heard before
replies from out the ruin:
"Get off my head, can't you?"
And Bill struggles out, a muddy, trampled wreck, and in an unnecessarily
aggressive mood - he being under the evident belief that the whole thing
has been done on purpose.
In the morning you are all three speechless, owing to having caught
severe colds in the night; you also feel very quarrelsome, and you swear
at each other in hoarse whispers during the whole of breakfast time.
We therefore decided that we would sleep out on fine nights; and hotel
it, and inn it, and pub. it, like respectable folks, when it was wet, or
when we felt inclined for a change.
Montmorency hailed this compromise with much approval. He does not revel
in romantic solitude. Give him something noisy; and if a trifle low, so
much the jollier. To look at Montmorency you would imagine that he was
an angel sent upon the earth, for some reason withheld from mankind, in
the shape of a small fox-terrier. There is a sort of Oh-what-a-wicked-
world-this-is-and-how-I-wish-I-could-do-something-to-make-it-better-and-
nobler expression about Montmorency that has been known to bring the
tears into the eyes of pious old ladies and gentlemen.
When first he came to live at my expense, I never thought I should be
able to get him to stop long. I used to sit down and look at him, as he
sat on the rug and looked up at me, and think: "Oh, that dog will never
live. He will be snatched up to the bright skies in a chariot, that is
what will happen to him."
But, when I had paid for about a dozen chickens that he had killed; and
had dragged him, growling and kicking, by the scruff of his neck, out of
a hundred and fourteen street fights; and had had a dead cat brought
round for my inspection by an irate female, who called me a murderer; and
had been summoned by the man next door but one for having a ferocious dog
at large, that had kept him pinned up in his own tool-shed, afraid to
venture his nose outside the door for over two hours on a cold night; and
had learned that the gardener, unknown to myself, had won thirty
shillings by backing him to kill rats against time, then I began to think
that maybe they'd let him remain on earth for a bit longer, after all.
To hang about a stable, and collect a gang of the most disreputable dogs
to be found in the town, and lead them out to march round the slums to
fight other disreputable dogs, is Montmorency's idea of "life;" and so,
as I before observed, he gave to the suggestion of inns, and pubs., and
hotels his most emphatic approbation.
Having thus settled the sleeping arrangements to the satisfaction of all
four of us, the only thing left to discuss was what we should take with
us; and this we had begun to argue, when Harris said he'd had enough
oratory for one night, and proposed that we should go out and have a
smile, saying that he had found a place, round by the square, where you
could really get a drop of Irish worth drinking.
George said he felt thirsty (I never knew George when he didn't); and, as
I had a presentiment that a little whisky, warm, with a slice of lemon,
would do my complaint good, the debate was, by common assent, adjourned
to the following night; and the assembly put on its hats and went out.
CHAPTER III.
ARRANGEMENTS SETTLED. - HARRIS'S METHOD OF DOING WORK. - HOW THE ELDERLY,
FAMILY-MAN PUTS UP A PICTURE. - GEORGE MAKES A SENSIBLE, REMARK. -
DELIGHTS OF EARLY MORNING BATHING. - PROVISIONS FOR GETTING UPSET.
SO, on the following evening, we again assembled, to discuss and arrange
our plans. Harris said:
"Now, the first thing to settle is what to take with us. Now, you get a
bit of paper and write down, J., and you get the grocery catalogue,
George, and somebody give me a bit of pencil, and then I'll make out a
list."
That's Harris all over - so ready to take the burden of everything
himself, and put it on the backs of other people.
He always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger. You never saw such a
commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger
undertook to do a job. A picture would have come home from the frame-
maker's, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and
Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would
say:
"Oh, you leave that to ME. Don't you, any of you, worry yourselves about
that. I'LL do all that."
And then he would take off his coat, and begin. He would send the girl
out for sixpen'orth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell
her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and
start the whole house.
"Now you go and get me my hammer, Will," he would shout; "and you bring
me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have
a kitchen-chair, too; and, Jim! you run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell
him, `Pa's kind regards, and hopes his leg's better; and will he lend him
his spirit-level?' And don't you go, Maria, because I shall want
somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go
out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom! - where's Tom? - Tom, you
come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture."
And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out
of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and
then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief. He
could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat
he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all
the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for
his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them.
"Doesn't anybody in the whole house know where my coat is? I never came
across such a set in all my life - upon my word I didn't. Six of you! -
and you can't find a coat that I put down not five minutes ago! Well, of
all the - "
Then he'd get up, and find that he had been sitting on it, and would call
out:
"Oh, you can give it up! I've found it myself now. Might just as well
ask the cat to find anything as expect you people to find it."
And, when half an hour had been spent in tying up his finger, and a new
glass had been got, and the tools, and the ladder, and the chair, and the
candle had been brought, he would have another go, the whole family,
including the girl and the charwoman, standing round in a semi-circle,
ready to help. Two people would have to hold the chair, and a third
would help him up on it, and hold him there, and a fourth would hand him
a nail, and a fifth would pass him up the hammer, and he would take hold
of the nail, and drop it.
"There!" he would say, in an injured tone, "now the nail's gone."
And we would all have to go down on our knees and grovel for it, while he
would stand on the chair, and grunt, and want to know if he was to be
kept there all the evening.
The nail would be found at last, but by that time he would have lost the
hammer.
"Where's the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens!
Seven of you, gaping round there, and you don't know what I did with the
hammer!"
We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight of
the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each
of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find
it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call
us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down. And he would
take the rule, and re-measure, and find that he wanted half thirty-one
and three-eighths inches from the corner, and would try to do it in his
head, and go mad.
And we would all try to do it in our heads, and all arrive at different
results, and sneer at one another. And in the general row, the original
number would be forgotten, and Uncle Podger would have to measure it
again.
He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when
the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and
trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to
reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a
really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which
his head and body struck all the notes at the same time.
And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand
round and hear such language.
At last, Uncle Podger would get the spot fixed again, and put the point
of the nail on it with his left hand, and take the hammer in his right
hand. And, with the first blow, he would smash his thumb, and drop the
hammer, with a yell, on somebody's toes.
Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to
hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that
she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while
it was being done.
"Oh! you women, you make such a fuss over everything," Uncle Podger would
reply, picking himself up. "Why, I LIKE doing a little job of this
sort."
And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail
would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and
Uncle Podger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly
sufficient to flatten his nose.
Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was
made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up - very crooked and
insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed
down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched - except Uncle
Podger.
"There you are," he would say, stepping heavily off the chair on to the
charwoman's corns, and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride.
"Why, some people would have had a man in to do a little thing like
that!"
Harris will be just that sort of man when he grows up, I know, and I told
him so. I said I could not permit him to take so much labour upon
himself. I said:
"No; YOU get the paper, and the pencil, and the catalogue, and George
write down, and I'll do the work."
The first list we made out had to be discarded. It was clear that the
upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat
sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable;
so we tore the list up, and looked at one another!
George said:
"You know we are on a wrong track altogether. We must not think of the
things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do
without."
George comes out really quite sensible at times. You'd be surprised. I
call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but
with reference to our trip up the river of life, generally. How many
people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of
swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the
pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless
lumber.
How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big
houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not
care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for;
with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and
fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with - oh, heaviest, maddest
lumber of all! - the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries
that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the
criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head
that wears it!
It is lumber, man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat
so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so
cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom
from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness -
no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or
the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the
great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods
all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-
waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget-me-nots.
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with
only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two
friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat,
a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little
more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable
to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain
merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to
work. Time to drink in life's sunshine - time to listen to the AEolian
music that the wind of God draws from the human heart-strings around us -
time to -
I beg your pardon, really. I quite forgot.
Well, we left the list to George, and he began it.
"We won't take a tent, suggested George; "we will have a boat with a
cover. It is ever so much simpler, and more comfortable."
It seemed a good thought, and we adopted it. I do not know whether you
have ever seen the thing I mean. You fix iron hoops up over the boat,
and stretch a huge canvas over them, and fasten it down all round, from
stem to stern, and it converts the boat into a sort of little house, and
it is beautifully cosy, though a trifle stuffy; but there, everything has
its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came
down upon him for the funeral expenses.
George said that in that case we must take a rug each, a lamp, some soap,
a brush and comb (between us), a toothbrush (each), a basin, some tooth-
powder, some shaving tackle (sounds like a French exercise, doesn't it?),
and a couple of big-towels for bathing. I notice that people always make
gigantic arrangements for bathing when they are going anywhere near the
water, but that they don't bathe much when they are there.
It is the same when you go to the sea-side. I always determine - when
thinking over the matter in London - that I'll get up early every
morning, and go and have a dip before breakfast, and I religiously pack
up a pair of drawers and a bath towel. I always get red bathing drawers.
I rather fancy myself in red drawers. They suit my complexion so. But
when I get to the sea I don't feel somehow that I want that early morning
bathe nearly so much as I did when I was in town.
On the contrary, I feel more that I want to stop in bed till the last
moment, and then come down and have my breakfast. Once or twice virtue
has triumphed, and I have got out at six and half-dressed myself, and
have taken my drawers and towel, and stumbled dismally off. But I
haven't enjoyed it. They seem to keep a specially cutting east wind,
waiting for me, when I go to bathe in the early morning; and they pick
out all the three-cornered stones, and put them on the top, and they
sharpen up the rocks and cover the points over with a bit of sand so that
I can't see them, and they take the sea and put it two miles out, so that
I have to huddle myself up in my arms and hop, shivering, through six
inches of water. And when I do get to the sea, it is rough and quite
insulting.
One huge wave catches me up and chucks me in a sitting posture, as hard
as ever it can, down on to a rock which has been put there for me. And,
before I've said "Oh! Ugh!" and found out what has gone, the wave comes
back and carries me out to mid-ocean. I begin to strike out frantically
for the shore, and wonder if I shall ever see home and friends again, and
wish I'd been kinder to my little sister when a boy (when I was a boy, I
mean). Just when I have given up all hope, a wave retires and leaves me
sprawling like a star-fish on the sand, and I get up and look back and
find that I've been swimming for my life in two feet of water. I hop
back and dress, and crawl home, where I have to pretend I liked it.
In the present instance, we all talked as if we were going to have a long
swim every morning.
George said it was so pleasant to wake up in the boat in the fresh
morning, and plunge into the limpid river. Harris said there was nothing
like a swim before breakfast to give you an appetite. He said it always
gave him an appetite. George said that if it was going to make Harris
eat more than Harris ordinarily ate, then he should protest against
Harris having a bath at all.
He said there would be quite enough hard work in towing sufficient food
for Harris up against stream, as it was.
I urged upon George, however, how much pleasanter it would be to have
Harris clean and fresh about the boat, even if we did have to take a few
more hundredweight of provisions; and he got to see it in my light, and
withdrew his opposition to Harris's bath.
Agreed, finally, that we should take THREE bath towels, so as not to keep
each other waiting.
For clothes, George said two suits of flannel would be sufficient, as we
could wash them ourselves, in the river, when they got dirty. We asked
him if he had ever tried washing flannels in the river, and he replied:
"No, not exactly himself like; but he knew some fellows who had, and it
was easy enough;" and Harris and I were weak enough to fancy he knew what
he was talking about, and that three respectable young men, without
position or influence, and with no experience in washing, could really
clean their own shirts and trousers in the river Thames with a bit of
soap.
We were to learn in the days to come, when it was too late, that George
was a miserable impostor, who could evidently have known nothing whatever
about the matter. If you had seen these clothes after - but, as the
shilling shockers say, we anticipate.
George impressed upon us to take a change of under-things and plenty of
socks, in case we got upset and wanted a change; also plenty of
handkerchiefs, as they would do to wipe things, and a pair of leather
boots as well as our boating shoes, as we should want them if we got
upset.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FOOD QUESTION. - OBJECTIONS TO PARAFFINE OIL AS AN ATMOSPHERE. -
ADVANTAGES OF CHEESE AS A TRAVELLING COMPANION. - A MARRIED WOMAN DESERTS
HER HOME. - FURTHER PROVISION FOR GETTING UPSET. - I PACK. - CUSSEDNESS
OF TOOTH-BRUSHES. - GEORGE AND HARRIS PACK. - AWFUL BEHAVIOUR OF
MONTMORENCY. - WE RETIRE TO REST.
THEN we discussed the food question. George said:
"Begin with breakfast." (George is so practical.) "Now for breakfast we
shall want a frying-pan" - (Harris said it was indigestible; but we
merely urged him not to be an ass, and George went on) - "a tea-pot and a
kettle, and a methylated spirit stove."
"No oil," said George, with a significant look; and Harris and I agreed.
We had taken up an oil-stove once, but "never again." It had been like
living in an oil-shop that week. It oozed. I never saw such a thing as
paraffine oil is to ooze. We kept it in the nose of the boat, and, from
there, it oozed down to the rudder, impregnating the whole boat and
everything in it on its way, and it oozed over the river, and saturated
the scenery and spoilt the atmosphere. Sometimes a westerly oily wind
blew, and at other times an easterly oily wind, and sometimes it blew a
northerly oily wind, and maybe a southerly oily wind; but whether it came
from the Arctic snows, or was raised in the waste of the desert sands, it
came alike to us laden with the fragrance of paraffine oil.
And that oil oozed up and ruined the sunset; and as for the moonbeams,
they positively reeked of paraffine.
We tried to get away from it at Marlow. We left the boat by the bridge,
and took a walk through the town to escape it, but it followed us. The
whole town was full of oil. We passed through the church-yard, and it
seemed as if the people had been buried in oil. The High Street stunk of
oil; we wondered how people could live in it. And we walked miles upon
miles out Birmingham way; but it was no use, the country was steeped in
oil.
At the end of that trip we met together at midnight in a lonely field,
under a blasted oak, and took an awful oath (we had been swearing for a
whole week about the thing in an ordinary, middle-class way, but this was
a swell affair) - an awful oath never to take paraffine oil with us in a
boat again-except, of course, in case of sickness.
Therefore, in the present instance, we confined ourselves to methylated
spirit. Even that is bad enough. You get methylated pie and methylated
cake. But methylated spirit is more wholesome when taken into the system
in large quantities than paraffine oil.
For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon, which were
easy to cook, cold meat, tea, bread and butter, and jam. For lunch, he
said, we could have biscuits, cold meat, bread and butter, and jam - but
NO CHEESE. Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the
whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy
flavour to everything else there. You can't tell whether you are eating
apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems
cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.
I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool.
Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred
horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry
three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in
Liverpool at the time, and my friend said that if I didn't mind he would
get me to take them back with me to London, as he should not be coming up
for a day or two himself, and he did not think the cheeses ought to be
kept much longer.
"Oh, with pleasure, dear boy," I replied, "with pleasure."
I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a
ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded
somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during
conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top, and
we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the swiftest
steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral bell, until we
turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from the cheeses full
on to our steed. It woke him up, and, with a snort of terror, he dashed
off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew in his direction, and
before we reached the end of the street he was laying himself out at the
rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving the cripples and stout old
ladies simply nowhere.
It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the station;
and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not one of the
men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his nose, and to
light a bit of brown paper.
I took my ticket, and marched proudly up the platform, with my cheeses,
the people falling back respectfully on either side. The train was
crowded, and I had to get into a carriage where there were already seven
other people. One crusty old gentleman objected, but I got in,
notwithstanding; and, putting my cheeses upon the rack, squeezed down
with a pleasant smile, and said it was a warm day.
A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget.
"Very close in here," he said.
"Quite oppressive," said the man next him.
And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught
it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out.
And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a
respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and
gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four
passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner,
who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the
undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the other
three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt
themselves.
I smiled at the black gentleman, and said I thought we were going to have
the carriage to ourselves; and he laughed pleasantly, and said that some
people made such a fuss over a little thing. But even he grew strangely
depressed after we had started, and so, when we reached Crewe, I asked
him to come and have a drink. He accepted, and we forced our way into
the buffet, where we yelled, and stamped, and waved our umbrellas for a
quarter of an hour; and then a young lady came, and asked us if we wanted
anything.
"What's yours?" I said, turning to my friend.
"I'll have half-a-crown's worth of brandy, neat, if you please, miss," he
responded.
And he went off quietly after he had drunk it and got into another
carriage, which I thought mean.
From Crewe I had the compartment to myself, though the train was crowded.
As we drew up at the different stations, the people, seeing my empty
carriage, would rush for it. "Here y' are, Maria; come along, plenty of
room." "All right, Tom; we'll get in here," they would shout. And they
would run along, carrying heavy bags, and fight round the door to get in
first. And one would open the door and mount the steps, and stagger back
into the arms of the man behind him; and they would all come and have a
sniff, and then droop off and squeeze into other carriages, or pay the
difference and go first.
From Euston, I took the cheeses down to my friend's house. When his wife
came into the room she smelt round for an instant. Then she said:
"What is it? Tell me the worst."
I said:
"It's cheeses. Tom bought them in Liverpool, and asked me to bring them
up with me."
And I added that I hoped she understood that it had nothing to do with
me; and she said that she was sure of that, but that she would speak to
Tom about it when he came back.
My friend was detained in Liverpool longer than he expected; and, three
days later, as he hadn't returned home, his wife called on me. She said:
"What did Tom say about those cheeses?"
I replied that he had directed they were to be kept in a moist place, and
that nobody was to touch them.
She said:
"Nobody's likely to touch them. Had he smelt them?"
I thought he had, and added that he seemed greatly attached to them.
"You think he would be upset," she queried, "if I gave a man a sovereign
to take them away and bury them?"
I answered that I thought he would never smile again.
An idea struck her. She said:
"Do you mind keeping them for him? Let me send them round to you."
"Madam," I replied, "for myself I like the smell of cheese, and the
journey the other day with them from Liverpool I shall ever look back
upon as a happy ending to a pleasant holiday. But, in this world, we
must consider others. The lady under whose roof I have the honour of
residing is a widow, and, for all I know, possibly an orphan too. She
has a strong, I may say an eloquent, objection to being what she terms
`put upon.' The presence of your husband's cheeses in her house she
would, I instinctively feel, regard as a `put upon'; and it shall never
be said that I put upon the widow and the orphan."
"Very well, then," said my friend's wife, rising, "all I have to say is,
that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those cheeses are
eaten. I decline to live any longer in the same house with them."
She kept her word, leaving the place in charge of the charwoman, who,
when asked if she could stand the smell, replied, "What smell?" and who,
when taken close to the cheeses and told to sniff hard, said she could
detect a faint odour of melons. It was argued from this that little
injury could result to the woman from the atmosphere, and she was left.
The hotel bill came to fifteen guineas; and my friend, after reckoning
everything up, found that the cheeses had cost him eight-and-sixpence a
pound. He said he dearly loved a bit of cheese, but it was beyond his
means; so he determined to get rid of them. He threw them into the
canal; but had to fish them out again, as the bargemen complained. They
said it made them feel quite faint. And, after that, he took them one
dark night and left them in the parish mortuary. But the coroner
discovered them, and made a fearful fuss.
He said it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the
corpses.
My friend got rid of them, at last, by taking them down to a sea-side
town, and burying them on the beach. It gained the place quite a
reputation. Visitors said they had never noticed before how strong the
air was, and weak-chested and consumptive people used to throng there for
years afterwards.
Fond as I am of cheese, therefore, I hold that George was right in
declining to take any.
"We shan't want any tea," said George (Harris's face fell at this); "but
we'll have a good round, square, slap-up meal at seven - dinner, tea, and
supper combined."
Harris grew more cheerful. George suggested meat and fruit pies, cold
meat, tomatoes, fruit, and green stuff. For drink, we took some
wonderful sticky concoction of Harris's, which you mixed with water and
called lemonade, plenty of tea, and a bottle of whisky, in case, as
George said, we got upset.
It seemed to me that George harped too much on the getting-upset idea.
It seemed to me the wrong spirit to go about the trip in.
But I'm glad we took the whisky.
We didn't take beer or wine. They are a mistake up the river. They make
you feel sleepy and heavy. A glass in the evening when you are doing a
mouch round the town and looking at the girls is all right enough; but
don't drink when the sun is blazing down on your head, and you've got
hard work to do.
We made a list of the things to be taken, and a pretty lengthy one it
was, before we parted that evening. The next day, which was Friday, we
got them all together, and met in the evening to pack. We got a big
Gladstone for the clothes, and a couple of hampers for the victuals and
the cooking utensils. We moved the table up against the window, piled
everything in a heap in the middle of the floor, and sat round and looked
at it.
I said I'd pack.
I rather pride myself on my packing. Packing is one of those many things
that I feel I know more about than any other person living. (It
surprises me myself, sometimes, how many of these subjects there are.) I
impressed the fact upon George and Harris, and told them that they had
better leave the whole matter entirely to me. They fell into the
suggestion with a readiness that had something uncanny about it. George
put on a pipe and spread himself over the easy-chair, and Harris cocked
his legs on the table and lit a cigar.
This was hardly what I intended. What I had meant, of course, was, that
I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about
under my directions, I pushing them aside every now and then with, "Oh,
you - !" "Here, let me do it." "There you are, simple enough!" - really
teaching them, as you might say. Their taking it in the way they did
irritated me. There is nothing does irritate me more than seeing other
people sitting about doing nothing when I'm working.
I lived with a man once who used to make me mad that way. He would loll
on the sofa and watch me doing things by the hour together, following me
round the room with his eyes, wherever I went. He said it did him real
good to look on at me, messing about. He said it made him feel that life
was not an idle dream to be gaped and yawned through, but a noble task,
full of duty and stern work. He said he often wondered now how he could
have gone on before he met me, never having anybody to look at while they
worked.
Now, I'm not like that. I can't sit still and see another man slaving
and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my
hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature.
I can't help it.
However, I did not say anything, but started the packing. It seemed a
longer job than I had thought it was going to be; but I got the bag
finished at last, and I sat on it and strapped it.
"Ain't you going to put the boots in?" said Harris.
And I looked round, and found I had forgotten them. That's just like
Harris. He couldn't have said a word until I'd got the bag shut and
strapped, of course. And George laughed - one of those irritating,
senseless, chuckle-headed, crack-jawed laughs of his. They do make me so
wild.
I opened the bag and packed the boots in; and then, just as I was going
to close it, a horrible idea occurred to me. Had I packed my tooth-
brush? I don't know how it is, but I never do know whether I've packed
my tooth-brush.
My tooth-brush is a thing that haunts me when I'm travelling, and makes
my life a misery. I dream that I haven't packed it, and wake up in a
cold perspiration, and get out of bed and hunt for it. And, in the
morning, I pack it before I have used it, and have to unpack again to get
it, and it is always the last thing I turn out of the bag; and then I
repack and forget it, and have to rush upstairs for it at the last moment
and carry it to the railway station, wrapped up in my pocket-
handkerchief.
Of course I had to turn every mortal thing out now, and, of course, I
could not find it. I rummaged the things up into much the same state
that they must have been before the world was created, and when chaos
reigned. Of course, I found George's and Harris's eighteen times over,
but I couldn't find my own. I put the things back one by one, and held
everything up and shook it. Then I found it inside a boot. I repacked
once more.
When I had finished, George asked if the soap was in. I said I didn't
care a hang whether the soap was in or whether it wasn't; and I slammed
the bag to and strapped it, and found that I had packed my tobacco-pouch
in it, and had to re-open it. It got shut up finally at 10.5 p.m., and
then there remained the hampers to do. Harris said that we should be
wanting to start in less than twelve hours' time, and thought that he and
George had better do the rest; and I agreed and sat down, and they had a
go.
They began in a light-hearted spirit, evidently intending to show me how
to do it. I made no comment; I only waited. When George is hanged,
Harris will be the worst packer in this world; and I looked at the piles
of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies, and
stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon
become exciting.
It did. They started with breaking a cup. That was the first thing they
did. They did that just to show you what they COULD do, and to get you
interested.
Then Harris packed the strawberry jam on top of a tomato and squashed it,
and they had to pick out the tomato with a teaspoon.
And then it was George's turn, and he trod on the butter. I didn't say
anything, but I came over and sat on the edge of the table and watched
them. It irritated them more than anything I could have said. I felt
that. It made them nervous and excited, and they stepped on things, and
put things behind them, and then couldn't find them when they wanted
them; and they packed the pies at the bottom, and put heavy things on
top, and smashed the pies in.
They upset salt over everything, and as for the butter! I never saw two
men do more with one-and-twopence worth of butter in my whole life than
they did. After George had got it off his slipper, they tried to put it
in the kettle. It wouldn't go in, and what WAS in wouldn't come out.
They did scrape it out at last, and put it down on a chair, and Harris
sat on it, and it stuck to him, and they went looking for it all over the
room.
"I'll take my oath I put it down on that chair," said George, staring at
the empty seat.
"I saw you do it myself, not a minute ago," said Harris.
Then they started round the room again looking for it; and then they met
again in the centre, and stared at one another.
"Most extraordinary thing I ever heard of," said George.
"So mysterious!" said Harris.
Then George got round at the back of Harris and saw it.
"Why, here it is all the time," he exclaimed, indignantly.
"Where?" cried Harris, spinning round.
"Stand still, can't you!" roared George, flying after him.
And they got it off, and packed it in the teapot.
Montmorency was in it all, of course. Montmorency's ambition in life, is
to get in the way and be sworn at. If he can squirm in anywhere where he
particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people
mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not
been wasted.
To get somebody to stumble over him, and curse him steadily for an hour,
is his highest aim and object; and, when he has succeeded in
accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable.
He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed;
and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George
reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they
wanted. He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and
he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and
killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying-pan.
Harris said I encouraged him. I didn't encourage him. A dog like that
don't want any encouragement. It's the natural, original sin that is
born in him that makes him do things like that.
The packing was done at 12.50; and Harris sat on the big hamper, and said
he hoped nothing would be found broken. George said that if anything was
broken it was broken, which reflection seemed to comfort him. He also
said he was ready for bed.
We were all ready for bed. Harris was to sleep with us that night, and
we went upstairs.
We tossed for beds, and Harris had to sleep with me. He said:
"Do you prefer the inside or the outside, J.?"
I said I generally preferred to sleep INSIDE a bed.
Harris said it was old.
George said:
"What time shall I wake you fellows?"
Harris said:
"Seven."
I said:
"No - six," because I wanted to write some letters.
Harris and I had a bit of a row over it, but at last split the
difference, and said half-past six.
"Wake us at 6.30, George," we said.
George made no answer, and we found, on going over, that he had been
asleep for some time; so we placed the bath where he could tumble into it
on getting out in the morning, and went to bed ourselves.
CHAPTER V.
MRS. P. AROUSES US. - GEORGE, THE SLUGGARD. - THE "WEATHER FORECAST"
SWINDLE. - OUR LUGGAGE. - DEPRAVITY OF THE SMALL BOY. - THE PEOPLE GATHER
ROUND US. - WE DRIVE OFF IN GREAT STYLE, AND ARRIVE AT WATERLOO. -
INNOCENCE OF SOUTH WESTERN OFFICIALS CONCERNING SUCH WORLDLY THINGS AS
TRAINS. - WE ARE AFLOAT, AFLOAT IN AN OPEN BOAT.
IT was Mrs. Poppets that woke me up next morning.
She said:
"Do you know that it's nearly nine o'clock, sir?"
"Nine o' what?" I cried, starting up.
"Nine o'clock," she replied, through the keyhole. "I thought you was a-
oversleeping yourselves."
I woke Harris, and told him. He said:
"I thought you wanted to get up at six?"
"So I did," I answered; "why didn't you wake me?"
"How could I wake you, when you didn't wake me?" he retorted. "Now we
shan't get on the water till after twelve. I wonder you take the trouble
to get up at all."
"Um," I replied, "lucky for you that I do. If I hadn't woke you, you'd
have lain there for the whole fortnight."
We snarled at one another in this strain for the next few minutes, when
we were interrupted by a defiant snore from George.
It reminded us, for the first time since our being called, of his
existence.
There he lay - the man who had wanted to know what time he should wake us
- on his back, with his mouth wide open, and his knees stuck up.
I don't know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man
asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me. It seems to me so shocking to
see the precious hours of a man's life - the priceless moments that will
never come back to him again - being wasted in mere brutish sleep.
There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of
time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account
for hereafter, passing away from him, unused. He might have been up
stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting
with the slavey, instead of sprawling there, sunk in soul-clogging
oblivion.
It was a terrible thought. Harris and I appeared to be struck by it at
the same instant. We determined to save him, and, in this noble resolve,
our own dispute was forgotten. We flew across and slung the clothes off
him, and Harris landed him one with a slipper, and I shouted in his ear,
and he awoke.
"Wasermarrer?" he observed, sitting up.
"Get up, you fat-headed chunk!" roared Harris. "It's quarter to ten."
"What!" he shrieked, jumping out of bed into the bath; "Who the thunder
put this thing here?"
We told him he must have been a fool not to see the bath.
We finished dressing, and, when it came to the extras, we remembered that
we had packed the tooth-brushes and the brush and comb (that tooth-brush
of mine will be the death of me, I know), and we had to go downstairs,
and fish them out of the bag. And when we had done that George wanted
the shaving tackle. We told him that he would have to go without shaving
that morning, as we weren't going to unpack that bag again for him, nor
for anyone like him.
He said:
"Don't be absurd. How can I go into the City like this?"
It was certainly rather rough on the City, but what cared we for human
suffering? As Harris said, in his common, vulgar way, the City would
have to lump it.
We went downstairs to breakfast. Montmorency had invited two other dogs
to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting
on the doorstep. We calmed them with an umbrella, and sat down to chops
and cold beef.
Harris said:
"The great thing is to make a good breakfast," and he started with a
couple of chops, saying that he would take these while they were hot, as
the beef could wait.
George got hold of the paper, and read us out the boating fatalities, and
the weather forecast, which latter prophesied "rain, cold, wet to fine"
(whatever more than usually ghastly thing in weather that may be),
"occasional local thunder-storms, east wind, with general depression over
the Midland Counties (London and Channel). Bar. falling."
I do think that, of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we
are plagued, this "weather-forecast" fraud is about the most aggravating.
It "forecasts" precisely what happened yesterday or a the day before, and
precisely the opposite of what is going to happen to-day.
I remember a holiday of mine being completely ruined one late autumn by
our paying attention to the weather report of the local newspaper.
"Heavy showers, with thunderstorms, may be expected to-day," it would say
on Monday, and so we would give up our picnic, and stop indoors all day,
waiting for the rain. - And people would pass the house, going off in
wagonettes and coaches as jolly and merry as could be, the sun shining
out, and not a cloud to be seen.
"Ah!" we said, as we stood looking out at them through the window, "won't
they come home soaked!"
And we chuckled to think how wet they were going to get, and came back
and stirred the fire, and got our books, and arranged our specimens of
seaweed and cockle shells. By twelve o'clock, with the sun pouring into
the room, the heat became quite oppressive, and we wondered when those
heavy showers and occasional thunderstorms were going to begin.
"Ah! they'll come in the afternoon, you'll find," we said to each other.
"Oh, WON'T those people get wet. What a lark!"
At one o'clock, the landlady would come in to ask if we weren't going
out, as it seemed such a lovely day.
"No, no," we replied, with a knowing chuckle, "not we. WE don't mean to
get wet - no, no."
And when the afternoon was nearly gone, and still there was no sign of
rain, we tried to cheer ourselves up with the idea that it would come
down all at once, just as the people had started for home, and were out
of the reach of any shelter, and that they would thus get more drenched
than ever. But not a drop ever fell, and it finished a grand day, and a
lovely night after it.
The next morning we would read that it was going to be a "warm, fine to
set-fair day; much heat;" and we would dress ourselves in flimsy things,
and go out, and, half-an-hour after we had started, it would commence to
rain hard, and a bitterly cold wind would spring up, and both would keep
on steadily for the whole day, and we would come home with colds and
rheumatism all over us, and go to bed.
The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether. I never can
understand it. The barometer is useless: it is as misleading as the
newspaper forecast.
There was one hanging up in a hotel at Oxford at which I was staying last
spring, and, when I got there, it was pointing to "set fair." It was
simply pouring with rain outside, and had been all day; and I couldn't
quite make matters out. I tapped the barometer, and it jumped up and
pointed to "very dry." The Boots stopped as he was passing, and said he
expected it meant to-morrow. I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the
week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not.
I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the
rain came down faster than ever. On Wednesday I went and hit it again,
and the pointer went round towards "set fair," "very dry," and "much
heat," until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn't go any further. It
tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn't prophesy
fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself. It
evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine,
and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it,
and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace "very
dry."
Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of
the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.
Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a prolonged spell of
grand weather SOME TIME, and read out a poem which was printed over the
top of the oracle, about
"Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past."
The fine weather never came that summer. I expect that machine must have
been referring to the following spring.
Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones. I
never can make head or tail of those. There is one side for 10 a.m.
yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can't always get
there as early as ten, you know. It rises or falls for rain and fine,
with much or less wind, and one end is "Nly" and the other "Ely" (what's
Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn't tell you anything.
And you've got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit,
and even then I don't know the answer.
But who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it
comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand. The
prophet we like is the old man who, on the particularly gloomy-looking
morning of some day when we particularly want it to be fine, looks round
the horizon with a particularly knowing eye, and says:
"Oh no, sir, I think it will clear up all right. It will break all right
enough, sir."
"Ah, he knows", we say, as we wish him good-morning, and start off;
"wonderful how these old fellows can tell!"
And we feel an affection for that man which is not at all lessened by the
circumstances of its NOT clearing up, but continuing to rain steadily all
day.
"Ah, well," we feel, "he did his best."
For the man that prophesies us bad weather, on the contrary, we entertain
only bitter and revengeful thoughts.
"Going to clear up, d'ye think?" we shout, cheerily, as we pass.
"Well, no, sir; I'm afraid it's settled down for the day," he replies,
shaking his head.
"Stupid old fool!" we mutter, "what's HE know about it?" And, if his
portent proves correct, we come back feeling still more angry against
him, and with a vague notion that, somehow or other, he has had something
to do with it.
It was too bright and sunny on this especial morning for George's blood-
curdling readings about "Bar. falling," "atmospheric disturbance, passing
in an oblique line over Southern Europe," and "pressure increasing," to
very much upset us: and so, finding that he could not make us wretched,
and was only wasting his time, he sneaked the cigarette that I had
carefully rolled up for myself, and went.
Then Harris and I, having finished up the few things left on the table,
carted out our luggage on to the doorstep, and waited for a cab.
There seemed a good deal of luggage, when we put it all together. There
was the Gladstone and the small hand-bag, and the two hampers, and a
large roll of rugs, and some four or five overcoats and macintoshes, and
a few umbrellas, and then there was a melon by itself in a bag, because
it was too bulky to go in anywhere, and a couple of pounds of grapes in
another bag, and a Japanese paper umbrella, and a frying pan, which,
being too long to pack, we had wrapped round with brown paper.
It did look a lot, and Harris and I began to feel rather ashamed of it,
though why we should be, I can't see. No cab came by, but the street
boys did, and got interested in the show, apparently, and stopped.
Biggs's boy was the first to come round. Biggs is our greengrocer, and
his chief talent lies in securing the services of the most abandoned and
unprincipled errand-boys that civilisation has as yet produced. If
anything more than usually villainous in the boy-line crops up in our
neighbourhood, we know that it is Biggs's latest. I was told that, at
the time of the Great Coram Street murder, it was promptly concluded by
our street that Biggs's boy (for that period) was at the bottom of it,
and had he not been able, in reply to the severe cross-examination to
which he was subjected by No. 19, when he called there for orders the
morning after the crime (assisted by No. 21, who happened to be on the
step at the time), to prove a complete ALIBI, it would have gone hard
with him. I didn't know Biggs's boy at that time, but, from what I have
seen of them since, I should not have attached much importance to that
ALIBI myself.
Biggs's boy, as I have said, came round the corner. He was evidently in
a great hurry when he first dawned upon the vision, but, on catching
sight of Harris and me, and Montmorency, and the things, he eased up and
stared. Harris and I frowned at him. This might have wounded a more
sensitive nature, but Biggs's boys are not, as a rule, touchy. He came
to a dead stop, a yard from our step, and, leaning up against the
railings, and selecting a straw to chew, fixed us with his eye. He
evidently meant to see this thing out.
In another moment, the grocer's boy passed on the opposite side of the
street. Biggs's boy hailed him:
"Hi! ground floor o' 42's a-moving."
The grocer's boy came across, and took up a position on the other side of
the step. Then the young gentleman from the boot-shop stopped, and
joined Biggs's boy; while the empty-can superintendent from "The Blue
Posts" took up an independent position on the curb.
"They ain't a-going to starve, are they? " said the gentleman from the
boot-shop.
"Ah! you'd want to take a thing or two with YOU," retorted "The Blue
Posts," "if you was a-going to cross the Atlantic in a small boat."
"They ain't a-going to cross the Atlantic," struck in Biggs's boy;
"they're a-going to find Stanley."
By this time, quite a small crowd had collected, and people were asking
each other what was the matter. One party (the young and giddy portion
of the crowd) held that it was a wedding, and pointed out Harris as the
bridegroom; while the elder and more thoughtful among the populace
inclined to the idea that it was a funeral, and that I was probably the
corpse's brother.
At last, an empty cab turned up (it is a street where, as a rule, and
when they are not wanted, empty cabs pass at the rate of three a minute,
and hang about, and get in your way), and packing ourselves and our
belongings into it, and shooting out a couple of Montmorency's friends,
who had evidently sworn never to forsake him, we drove away amidst the
cheers of the crowd, Biggs's boy shying a carrot after us for luck.
We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started
from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a
train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is
going to, or anything about it. The porter who took our things thought
it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he
discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number
one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start
from the local.
To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic
superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he
had seen it at number three platform. We went to number three platform,
but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was
the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop. But they were sure it
wasn't the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn't they
couldn't say.
Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the high-level
platform; said he thought he knew the train. So we went to the high-
level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going
to Kingston. He said he couldn't say for certain of course, but that he
rather thought he was. Anyhow, if he wasn't the 11.5 for Kingston, he
said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the
10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction,
and we should all know when we got there. We slipped half-a-crown into
his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.
"Nobody will ever know, on this line," we said, "what you are, or where
you're going. You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to
Kingston."
"Well, I don't know, gents," replied the noble fellow, "but I suppose
SOME train's got to go to Kingston; and I'll do it. Gimme the half-
crown."
Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
We learnt, afterwards, that the train we had come by was really the
Exeter mail, and that they had spent hours at Waterloo, looking for it,
and nobody knew what had become of it.
Our boat was waiting for us at Kingston just below bridge, and to it we
wended our way, and round it we stored our luggage, and into it we
stepped.
"Are you all right, sir?" said the man.
"Right it is," we answered; and with Harris at the sculls and I at the
tiller-lines, and Montmorency, unhappy and deeply suspicious, in the
prow, out we shot on to the waters which, for a fortnight, were to be our
home.
CHAPTER VI.
KINGSTON. - INSTRUCTIVE REMARKS ON EARLY ENGLISH HISTORY. - INSTRUCTIVE
OBSERVATIONS ON CARVED OAK AND LIFE IN GENERAL. - SAD CASE OF STIVVINGS,
JUNIOR. - MUSINGS ON ANTIQUITY. - I FORGET THAT I AM STEERING. -
INTERESTING RESULT. - HAMPTON COURT MAZE. - HARRIS AS A GUIDE.
IT was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to
take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper
green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange,
wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood.
The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water's
edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sunlight, the glinting
river with its drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas
on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at
the sculls, the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors,
all made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and yet so
peaceful, that, early in the day though it was, I felt myself being
dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.
I mused on Kingston, or "Kyningestun," as it was once called in the days
when Saxon "kinges" were crowned there. Great Caesar crossed the river
there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands. Caesar,
like, in later years, Elizabeth, seems to have stopped everywhere: only
he was more respectable than good Queen Bess; he didn't put up at the
public-houses.
She was nuts on public-houses, was England's Virgin Queen. There's
scarcely a pub. of any attractions within ten miles of London that she
does not seem to have looked in at, or stopped at, or slept at, some time
or other. I wonder now, supposing Harris, say, turned over a new leaf,
and became a great and good man, and got to be Prime Minister, and died,
if they would put up signs over the public-houses that he had patronised:
"Harris had a glass of bitter in this house;" "Harris had two of Scotch
cold here in the summer of `88;" "Harris was chucked from here in
December, 1886."
No, there would be too many of them! It would be the houses that he had
never entered that would become famous. "Only house in South London that
Harris never had a drink in!" The people would flock to it to see what
could have been the matter with it.
How poor weak-minded King Edwy must have hated Kyningestun! The
coronation feast had been too much for him. Maybe boar's head stuffed
with sugar-plums did not agree with him (it wouldn't with me, I know),
and he had had enough of sack and mead; so he slipped from the noisy
revel to steal a quiet moonlight hour with his beloved Elgiva.
Perhaps, from the casement, standing hand-in-hand, they were watching the
calm moonlight on the river, while from the distant halls the boisterous
revelry floated in broken bursts of faint-heard din and tumult.
Then brutal Odo and St. Dunstan force their rude way into the quiet room,
and hurl coarse insults at the sweet-faced Queen, and drag poor Edwy back
to the loud clamour of the drunken brawl.
Years later, to the crash of battle-music, Saxon kings and Saxon revelry
were buried side by side, and Kingston's greatness passed away for a
time, to rise once more when Hampton Court became the palace of the
Tudors and the Stuarts, and the royal barges strained at their moorings
on the river's bank, and bright-cloaked gallants swaggered down the
water-steps to cry: "What Ferry, ho! Gadzooks, gramercy."
Many of the old houses, round about, speak very plainly of those days
when Kingston was a royal borough, and nobles and courtiers lived there,
near their King, and the long road to the palace gates was gay all day
with clanking steel and prancing palfreys, and rustling silks and
velvets, and fair faces. The large and spacious houses, with their
oriel, latticed windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs,
breathe of the days of hose and doublet, of pearl-embroidered stomachers,
and complicated oaths. They were upraised in the days "when men knew how
to build." The hard red bricks have only grown more firmly set with
time, and their oak stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down
them quietly.
Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved
oak staircase in one of the houses in Kingston. It is a shop now, in the
market-place, but it was evidently once the mansion of some great
personage. A friend of mine, who lives at Kingston, went in there to buy
a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in his pocket
and paid for it then and there.
The shopman (he knows my friend) was naturally a little staggered at
first; but, quickly recovering himself, and feeling that something ought
to be done to encourage this sort of thing, asked our hero if he would
like to see some fine old carved oak. My friend said he would, and the
shopman, thereupon, took him through the shop, and up the staircase of
the house. The balusters were a superb piece of workmanship, and the
wall all the way up was oak-panelled, with carving that would have done
credit to a palace.
From the stairs, they went into the drawing-room, which was a large,
bright room, decorated with a somewhat startling though cheerful paper of
a blue ground. There was nothing, however, remarkable about the
apartment, and my friend wondered why he had been brought there. The
proprietor went up to the paper, and tapped it. It gave forth a wooden
sound.
"Oak," he explained. "All carved oak, right up to the ceiling, just the
same as you saw on the staircase."
"But, great Caesar! man," expostulated my friend; "you don't mean to say
you have covered over carved oak with blue wall-paper?"
"Yes," was the reply: "it was expensive work. Had to match-board it all
over first, of course. But the room looks cheerful now. It was awful
gloomy before."
I can't say I altogether blame the man (which is doubtless a great relief
to his mind). From his point of view, which would be that of the average
householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, and not that
of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there is reason on his side. Carved
oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no
doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those whose fancy does not lie
that way. It would be like living in a church.
No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't care for carved oak,
should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care
for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of
this world. Each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have
what he does want.
Married men have wives, and don't seem to want them; and young single
fellows cry out that they can't get them. Poor people who can hardly
keep themselves have eight hearty children. Rich old couples, with no
one to leave their money to, die childless.
Then there are girls with lovers. The girls that have lovers never want
them. They say they would rather be without them, that they bother them,
and why don't they go and make love to Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are
plain and elderly, and haven't got any lovers? They themselves don't
want lovers. They never mean to marry.
It does not do to dwell on these things; it makes one so sad.
There was a boy at our school, we used to call him Sandford and Merton.
His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary lad I ever
came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful
rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular
verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of
weird and unnatural notions about being a credit to his parents and an
honour to the school; and he yearned to win prizes, and grow up and be a
clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew
such a strange creature, yet harmless, mind you, as the babe unborn.
Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn't go
to school. There never was such a boy to get ill as that Sandford and
Merton. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he
had it, and had it badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog-days, and
have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six weeks' period of drought, he
would be stricken down with rheumatic fever; and he would go out in a
November fog and come home with a sunstroke.
They put him under laughing-gas one year, poor lad, and drew all his
teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with
toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never
without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever;
and he always had chilblains. During the great cholera scare of 1871,
our neighbourhood was singularly free from it. There was only one
reputed case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings.
He had to stop in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards and
hot-house grapes; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn't
let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have sacrificed ten terms of our school-life
for the sake of being ill for a day, and had no desire whatever to give
our parents any excuse for being stuck-up about us, couldn't catch so
much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good,
and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us
fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make
us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the breaking-up day, we caught
colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till
the term recommenced; when, in spite of everything we could manoeuvre to
the contrary, we would get suddenly well again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the
oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question, they must have had very fair
notions of the artistic and the beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of
three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic
beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we
prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that
gives them their charms in our eyes. The "old blue" that we hang about
our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a
few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses
that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they
understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the
eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day
always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-
pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in
the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the
beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now
break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and
stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It
is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots.
Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to
verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of
art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even
my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by
the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug
up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and
will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will
pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth
of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of
the tail that is lost no doubt was.
We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar
with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their
loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china
dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will
have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and
say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as "those grand
old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those
china dogs."
The "sampler" that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as
"tapestry of the Victorian era," and be almost priceless. The blue-and-
white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked
and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use
them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the
"Presents from Ramsgate," and "Souvenirs of Margate," that may have
escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English
curios.
At this point Harris threw away the sculls, got up and left his seat, and
sat on his back, and stuck his legs in the air. Montmorency howled, and
turned a somersault, and the top hamper jumped up, and all the things
came out.
I was somewhat surprised, but I did not lose my temper. I said,
pleasantly enough:
"Hulloa! what's that for?"
"What's that for? Why - "
No, on second thoughts, I will not repeat what Harris said. I may have
been to blame, I admit it; but nothing excuses violence of language and
coarseness of expression, especially in a man who has been carefully
brought up, as I know Harris has been. I was thinking of other things,
and forgot, as any one might easily understand, that I was steering, and
the consequence was that we had got mixed up a good deal with the tow-
path. It was difficult to say, for the moment, which was us and which
was the Middlesex bank of the river; but we found out after a while, and
separated ourselves.
Harris, however, said he had done enough for a bit, and proposed that I
should take a turn; so, as we were in, I got out and took the tow-line,
and ran the boat on past Hampton Court. What a dear old wall that is
that runs along by the river there! I never pass it without feeling
better for the sight of it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old wall; what
a charming picture it would make, with the lichen creeping here, and the
moss growing there, a shy young vine peeping over the top at this spot,
to see what is going on upon the busy river, and the sober old ivy
clustering a little farther down! There are fifty shades and tints and
hues in every ten yards of that old wall. If I could only draw, and knew
how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch of that old wall, I'm sure.
I've often thought I should like to live at Hampton Court. It looks so
peaceful and so quiet, and it is such a dear old place to ramble round in
the early morning before many people are about.
But, there, I don't suppose I should really care for it when it came to
actual practice. It would be so ghastly dull and depressing in the
evening, when your lamp cast uncanny shadows on the panelled walls, and
the echo of distant feet rang through the cold stone corridors, and now
drew nearer, and now died away, and all was death-like silence, save the
beating of one's own heart.
We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life.
That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows
more and more deserted every year. In the sunlight - in the daytime,
when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides
and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth
has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome,
and we get frightened, like children in a silent house. Then we sit and
sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and
the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in
the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There
are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad.
Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a
million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.
Harris asked me if I'd ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said
he went in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a
map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish - hardly worth the
twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must
have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the
real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris
took in. He said:
"We'll just go in here, so that you can say you've been, but it's very
simple. It's absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first
turning to the right. We'll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go
and get some lunch."
They met some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had
been there for three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it.
Harris told them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going
in, and then should turn round and come out again. They said it was very
kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.
They picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they
went along, until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze. People
who had given up all hopes of ever getting either in or out, or of ever
seeing their home and friends again, plucked up courage at the sight of
Harris and his party, and joined the procession, blessing him. Harris
said he should judge there must have been twenty people, following him,
in all; and one woman with a baby, who had been there all the morning,
insisted on taking his arm, for fear of losing him.
Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his
cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze.
"Oh, one of the largest in Europe," said Harris.
"Yes, it must be," replied the cousin, "because we've walked a good two
miles already."
Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at
last, they passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris's
cousin swore he had noticed there seven minutes ago. Harris said: "Oh,
impossible!" but the woman with the baby said, "Not at all," as she
herself had taken it from the child, and thrown it down there, just
before she met Harris. She also added that she wished she never had met
Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was an impostor. That made
Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained his theory.
"The map may be all right enough," said one of the party, "if you know
whereabouts in it we are now."
Harris didn't know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to
go back to the entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part
of it there was not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability
of going back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they
turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite direction. About
ten minutes more passed, and then they found themselves in the centre.
Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what he had been
aiming at; but the crowd looked dangerous, and he decided to treat it as
an accident.
Anyhow, they had got something to start from then. They did know where
they were, and the map was once more consulted, and the thing seemed
simpler than ever, and off they started for the third time.
And three minutes later they were back in the centre again.
After that, they simply couldn't get anywhere else. Whatever way they
turned brought them back to the middle. It became so regular at length,
that some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take
a walk round, and come back to them. Harris drew out his map again,
after a while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told
him to go and curl his hair with it. Harris said that he couldn't help
feeling that, to a certain extent, he had become unpopular.
They all got crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper, and the man came
and climbed up the ladder outside, and shouted out directions to them.
But all their heads were, by this time, in such a confused whirl that
they were incapable of grasping anything, and so the man told them to
stop where they were, and he would come to them. They huddled together,
and waited; and he climbed down, and came in.
He was a young keeper, as luck would have it, and new to the business;
and when he got in, he couldn't find them, and he wandered about, trying
to get to them, and then HE got lost. They caught sight of him, every
now and then, rushing about the other side of the hedge, and he would see
them, and rush to get to them, and they would wait there for about five
minutes, and then he would reappear again in exactly the same spot, and
ask them where they had been.
They had to wait till one of the old keepers came back from his dinner
before they got out.
Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge;
and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way
back.
CHAPTER VII.
THE RIVER IN ITS SUNDAY GARB. - DRESS ON THE RIVER. - A CHANCE FOR THE
MEN. - ABSENCE OF TASTE IN HARRIS. - GEORGE'S BLAZER. - A DAY WITH THE
FASHION-PLATE YOUNG LADY. - MRS. THOMAS'S TOMB. - THE MAN WHO LOVES NOT
GRAVES AND COFFINS AND SKULLS. - HARRIS MAD. - HIS VIEWS ON GEORGE AND
BANKS AND LEMONADE. - HE PERFORMS TRICKS.
IT was while passing through Moulsey Lock that Harris told me about his
maze experience. It took us some time to pass through, as we were the
only boat, and it is a big lock. I don't think I ever remember to have
seen Moulsey Lock, before, with only one boat in it. It is, I suppose,
Boulter's not even excepted, the busiest lock on the river.
I have stood and watched it, sometimes, when you could not see any water
at all, but only a brilliant tangle of bright blazers, and gay caps, and
saucy hats, and many-coloured parasols, and silken rugs, and cloaks, and
streaming ribbons, and dainty whites; when looking down into the lock
from the quay, you might fancy it was a huge box into which flowers of
every hue and shade had been thrown pell-mell, and lay piled up in a
rainbow heap, that covered every corner.
On a fine Sunday it presents this appearance nearly all day long, while,
up the stream, and down the stream, lie, waiting their turn, outside the
gates, long lines of still more boats; and boats are drawing near and
passing away, so that the sunny river, from the Palace up to Hampton
Church, is dotted and decked with yellow, and blue, and orange, and
white, and red, and pink. All the inhabitants of Hampton and Moulsey
dress themselves up in boating costume, and come and mouch round the lock
with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats; and,
altogether, what with the caps and jackets of the men, the pretty
coloured dresses of the women, the excited dogs, the moving boats, the
white sails, the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one
of the gayest sights I know of near this dull old London town.
The river affords a good opportunity for dress. For once in a way, we
men are able to show our taste in colours, and I think we come out very
natty, if you ask me. I always like a little red in my things - red and
black. You know my hair is a sort of golden brown, rather a pretty shade
I've been told, and a dark red matches it beautifully; and then I always
think a light-blue necktie goes so well with it, and a pair of those
Russian-leather shoes and a red silk handkerchief round the waist - a
handkerchief looks so much better than a belt.
Harris always keeps to shades or mixtures of orange or yellow, but I
don't think he is at all wise in this. His complexion is too dark for
yellows. Yellows don't suit him: there can be no question about it. I
want him to take to blue as a background, with white or cream for relief;
but, there! the less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he
always seems to be. It is a great pity, because he will never be a
success as it is, while there are one or two colours in which he might
not really look so bad, with his hat on.
George has bought some new things for this trip, and I'm rather vexed
about them. The blazer is loud. I should not like George to know that I
thought so, but there really is no other word for it. He brought it home
and showed it to us on Thursday evening. We asked him what colour he
called it, and he said he didn't know. He didn't think there was a name
for the colour. The man had told him it was an Oriental design. George
put it on, and asked us what we thought of it. Harris said that, as an
object to hang over a flower-bed in early spring to frighten the birds
away, he should respect it; but that, considered as an article of dress
for any human being, except a Margate nigger, it made him ill. George
got quite huffy; but, as Harris said, if he didn't want his opinion, why
did he ask for it?
What troubles Harris and myself, with regard to it, is that we are afraid
it will attract attention to the boat.
Girls, also, don't look half bad in a boat, if prettily dressed. Nothing
is more fetching, to my thinking, than a tasteful boating costume. But a
"boating costume," it would be as well if all ladies would understand,
ought to be a costume that can be worn in a boat, and not merely under a
glass-case. It utterly spoils an excursion if you have folk in the boat
who are thinking all the time a good deal more of their dress than of the
trip. It was my misfortune once to go for a water picnic with two ladies
of this kind. We did have a lively time!
They were both beautifully got up - all lace and silky stuff, and
flowers, and ribbons, and dainty shoes, and light gloves. But they were
dressed for a photographic studio, not for a river picnic. They were the
"boating costumes" of a French fashion-plate. It was ridiculous, fooling
about in them anywhere near real earth, air, and water.
The first thing was that they thought the boat was not clean. We dusted
all the seats for them, and then assured them that it was, but they
didn't believe us. One of them rubbed the cushion with the forefinger of
her glove, and showed the result to the other, and they both sighed, and
sat down, with the air of early Christian martyrs trying to make
themselves comfortable up against the stake. You are liable to
occasionally splash a little when sculling, and it appeared that a drop
of water ruined those costumes. The mark never came out, and a stain was
left on the dress for ever.
I was stroke. I did my best. I feathered some two feet high, and I
paused at the end of each stroke to let the blades drip before returning
them, and I picked out a smooth bit of water to drop them into again each
time. (Bow said, after a while, that he did not feel himself a
sufficiently accomplished oarsman to pull with me, but that he would sit
still, if I would allow him, and study my stroke. He said it interested
him.) But, notwithstanding all this, and try as I would, I could not
help an occasional flicker of water from going over those dresses.
The girls did not complain, but they huddled up close together, and set
their lips firm, and every time a drop touched them, they visibly shrank
and shuddered. It was a noble sight to see them suffering thus in
silence, but it unnerved me altogether. I am too sensitive. I got wild
and fitful in my rowing, and splashed more and more, the harder I tried
not to.
I gave it up at last; I said I'd row bow. Bow thought the arrangement
would be better too, and we changed places. The ladies gave an
involuntary sigh of relief when they saw me go, and quite brightened up
for a moment. Poor girls! they had better have put up with me. The man
they had got now was a jolly, light-hearted, thick-headed sort of a chap,
with about as much sensitiveness in him as there might be in a
Newfoundland puppy. You might look daggers at him for an hour and he
would not notice it, and it would not trouble him if he did. He set a
good, rollicking, dashing stroke that sent the spray playing all over the
boat like a fountain, and made the whole crowd sit up straight in no
time. When he spread more than pint of water over one of those dresses,
he would give a pleasant |
