← catalogue

Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)

by Jerome K. Jerome · English · Gutenberg #308 · 380,860 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)

Author: Jerome K. Jerome


        
Release date: August 1, 1995 [eBook #308]
                Most recently updated: November 9, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/308

Credits: David Price and Margaret Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE MEN IN A BOAT (TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG) ***




                           THREE MEN IN A BOAT
                      (_TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG_).


                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                             JEROME K. JEROME

                                AUTHOR OF
                    “IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW,”
                            “STAGE LAND,” ETC.

                      Illustrations by A. Frederics.

                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]

                                 BRISTOL
                     J. W. ARROWSMITH, 11 QUAY STREET

                                  LONDON
             SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED

                                * * * * *

                                   1889
                          _All rights reserved_




PREFACE.


_The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style_,
_or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys_, _as
in its simple truthfulness_. _Its pages form the record of events
that really happened_. _All that has been done is to colour them_;
_and_, _for this_, _no extra charge has been made_. _George and
Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals_, _but things of flesh
and blood—especially George_, _who weighs about twelve stone_. _Other
works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature:
other books may rival it in originality and size_; _but_, _for hopeless
and incurable veracity_, _nothing yet discovered can surpass it_.
_This_, _more than all its other charms_, _will_, _it is felt_, _make
the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader_; _and will lend
additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches_.

LONDON, _August_, 1889.

             [Picture: Graphic of three men in a rowing boat]




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.

[Picture: Man reading book] 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.

[Picture: Man with walking stick] 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?”

[Picture: Man feeling ill] “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.

[Picture: Montmorency] 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.

                          [Picture: River scene]

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.

[Picture: Mermaid] 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.

[Picture: Whisky glass] 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.

[Picture: Candle] “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.

[Picture: Nails etc.] “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.”

                [Picture: Uncle Podger admiring his work]

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
Æolian 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.

[Picture: Tent] “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.

[Picture: Sea-side scene] 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.

                       [Picture: Railway carriage]

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.

[Picture: Boot] 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
10.05 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.

                    [Picture: Luggage with dog on top]




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.

[Picture: Mrs. Poppets] 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.”

[Picture: George snoring] 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.

[Picture: Two dogs and umbrella] 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 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.

                          [Picture: The luggage]

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 Cæsar crossed the
river there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands.
Cæsar, 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 Cæsar! 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 manœuvre 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?

[Picture: China dog] 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.

[Picture: People at Hampton Maze] 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.

[Picture: Young lady] 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 little laugh, and say:

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure;” and offer them his handkerchief to wipe
it off with.

“Oh, it’s of no consequence,” the poor girls would murmur in reply,
and covertly draw rugs and coats over themselves, and try and protect
themselves with their lace parasols.

At lunch they had a very bad time of it. People wanted them to sit
on the grass, and the grass was dusty; and the tree-trunks, against
which they were invited to lean, did not appear to have been brushed
for weeks; so they spread their handkerchiefs on the ground and sat
on those, bolt upright. Somebody, in walking about with a plate of
beef-steak pie, tripped up over a root, and sent the pie flying. None
of it went over them, fortunately, but the accident suggested a fresh
danger to them, and agitated them; and, whenever anybody moved about,
after that, with anything in his hand that could fall and make a mess,
they watched that person with growing anxiety until he sat down again.

                          [Picture: Washing up]

“Now then, you girls,” said our friend Bow to them, cheerily, after it
was all over, “come along, you’ve got to wash up!”

They didn’t understand him at first. When they grasped the idea, they
said they feared they did not know how to wash up.

“Oh, I’ll soon show you,” he cried; “it’s rare fun! You lie down on
your—I mean you lean over the bank, you know, and sloush the things
about in the water.”

The elder sister said that she was afraid that they hadn’t got on
dresses suited to the work.

“Oh, they’ll be all right,” said he light-heartedly; “tuck ’em up.”

And he made them do it, too. He told them that that sort of thing was
half the fun of a picnic. They said it was very interesting.

Now I come to think it over, was that young man as dense-headed as we
thought? or was he—no, impossible! there was such a simple, child-like
expression about him!

Harris wanted to get out at Hampton Church, to go and see Mrs. Thomas’s
tomb.

“Who is Mrs. Thomas?” I asked.

“How should I know?” replied Harris. “She’s a lady that’s got a funny
tomb, and I want to see it.”

I objected. I don’t know whether it is that I am built wrong, but I
never did seem to hanker after tombstones myself. I know that the
proper thing to do, when you get to a village or town, is to rush off
to the churchyard, and enjoy the graves; but it is a recreation that I
always deny myself. I take no interest in creeping round dim and chilly
churches behind wheezy old men, and reading epitaphs. Not even the
sight of a bit of cracked brass let into a stone affords me what I call
real happiness.

I shock respectable sextons by the imperturbability I am able to assume
before exciting inscriptions, and by my lack of enthusiasm for the
local family history, while my ill-concealed anxiety to get outside
wounds their feelings.

One golden morning of a sunny day, I leant against the low stone wall
that guarded a little village church, and I smoked, and drank in deep,
calm gladness from the sweet, restful scene—the grey old church with
its clustering ivy and its quaint carved wooden porch, the white lane
winding down the hill between tall rows of elms, the thatched-roof
cottages peeping above their trim-kept hedges, the silver river in the
hollow, the wooded hills beyond!

It was a lovely landscape. It was idyllic, poetical, and it inspired
me. I felt good and noble. I felt I didn’t want to be sinful and wicked
any more. I would come and live here, and never do any more wrong, and
lead a blameless, beautiful life, and have silver hair when I got old,
and all that sort of thing.

In that moment I forgave all my friends and relations for their
wickedness and cussedness, and I blessed them. They did not know that
I blessed them. They went their abandoned way all unconscious of what
I, far away in that peaceful village, was doing for them; but I did it,
and I wished that I could let them know that I had done it, because
I wanted to make them happy. I was going on thinking away all these
grand, tender thoughts, when my reverie was broken in upon by a shrill
piping voice crying out:

“All right, sur, I’m a-coming, I’m a-coming. It’s all right, sur; don’t
you be in a hurry.”

I looked up, and saw an old bald-headed man hobbling across the
churchyard towards me, carrying a huge bunch of keys in his hand that
shook and jingled at every step.

I motioned him away with silent dignity, but he still advanced,
screeching out the while:

“I’m a-coming, sur, I’m a-coming. I’m a little lame. I ain’t as spry as
I used to be. This way, sur.”

“Go away, you miserable old man,” I said.

“I’ve come as soon as I could, sur,” he replied. “My missis never see
you till just this minute. You follow me, sur.”

“Go away,” I repeated; “leave me before I get over the wall, and slay
you.”

He seemed surprised.

“Don’t you want to see the tombs?” he said.

“No,” I answered, “I don’t. I want to stop here, leaning up against
this gritty old wall. Go away, and don’t disturb me. I am chock full
of beautiful and noble thoughts, and I want to stop like it, because
it feels nice and good. Don’t you come fooling about, making me mad,
chivying away all my better feelings with this silly tombstone nonsense
of yours. Go away, and get somebody to bury you cheap, and I’ll pay
half the expense.”

He was bewildered for a moment. He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard at
me. I seemed human enough on the outside: he couldn’t make it out.

He said:

“Yuise a stranger in these parts? You don’t live here?”

[Picture: Graves] “No,” I said, “I don’t. _You_ wouldn’t if _I_ did.”

“Well then,” he said, “you want to see the tombs—graves—folks been
buried, you know—coffins!”

“You are an untruther,” I replied, getting roused; “I do not want to
see tombs—not your tombs. Why should I? We have graves of our own, our
family has. Why my uncle Podger has a tomb in Kensal Green Cemetery,
that is the pride of all that country-side; and my grandfather’s vault
at Bow is capable of accommodating eight visitors, while my great-aunt
Susan has a brick grave in Finchley Churchyard, with a headstone with
a coffee-pot sort of thing in bas-relief upon it, and a six-inch best
white stone coping all the way round, that cost pounds. When I want
graves, it is to those places that I go and revel. I do not want other
folk’s. When you yourself are buried, I will come and see yours. That
is all I can do for you.”

He burst into tears. He said that one of the tombs had a bit of stone
upon the top of it that had been said by some to be probably part of
the remains of the figure of a man, and that another had some words,
carved upon it, that nobody had ever been able to decipher.

I still remained obdurate, and, in broken-hearted tones, he said:

“Well, won’t you come and see the memorial window?”

I would not even see that, so he fired his last shot. He drew near, and
whispered hoarsely:

“I’ve got a couple of skulls down in the crypt,” he said; “come and see
those. Oh, do come and see the skulls! You are a young man out for a
holiday, and you want to enjoy yourself. Come and see the skulls!”

Then I turned and fled, and as I sped I heard him calling to me:

“Oh, come and see the skulls; come back and see the skulls!”

Harris, however, revels in tombs, and graves, and epitaphs, and
monumental inscriptions, and the thought of not seeing Mrs. Thomas’s
grave made him crazy. He said he had looked forward to seeing Mrs.
Thomas’s grave from the first moment that the trip was proposed—said
he wouldn’t have joined if it hadn’t been for the idea of seeing Mrs.
Thomas’s tomb.

I reminded him of George, and how we had to get the boat up to
Shepperton by five o’clock to meet him, and then he went for George.
Why was George to fool about all day, and leave us to lug this
lumbering old top-heavy barge up and down the river by ourselves to
meet him? Why couldn’t George come and do some work? Why couldn’t he
have got the day off, and come down with us? Bank be blowed! What good
was he at the bank?

“I never see him doing any work there,” continued Harris, “whenever I
go in. He sits behind a bit of glass all day, trying to look as if he
was doing something. What’s the good of a man behind a bit of glass? I
have to work for my living. Why can’t he work? What use is he there,
and what’s the good of their banks? They take your money, and then,
when you draw a cheque, they send it back smeared all over with ‘No
effects,’ ‘Refer to drawer.’ What’s the good of that? That’s the sort
of trick they served me twice last week. I’m not going to stand it much
longer. I shall withdraw my account. If he was here, we could go and
see that tomb. I don’t believe he’s at the bank at all. He’s larking
about somewhere, that’s what he’s doing, leaving us to do all the work.
I’m going to get out, and have a drink.”

I pointed out to him that we were miles away from a pub.; and then he
went on about the river, and what was the good of the river, and was
everyone who came on the river to die of thirst?

It is always best to let Harris have his head when he gets like this.
Then he pumps himself out, and is quiet afterwards.

I reminded him that there was concentrated lemonade in the hamper, and
a gallon-jar of water in the nose of the boat, and that the two only
wanted mixing to make a cool and refreshing beverage.

Then he flew off about lemonade, and “such-like Sunday-school slops,”
as he termed them, ginger-beer, raspberry syrup, &c., &c. He said they
all produced dyspepsia, and ruined body and soul alike, and were the
cause of half the crime in England.

He said he must drink something, however, and climbed upon the seat,
and leant over to get the bottle. It was right at the bottom of
the hamper, and seemed difficult to find, and he had to lean over
further and further, and, in trying to steer at the same time, from a
topsy-turvy point of view, he pulled the wrong line, and sent the boat
into the bank, and the shock upset him, and he dived down right into
the hamper, and stood there on his head, holding on to the sides of the
boat like grim death, his legs sticking up into the air. He dared not
move for fear of going over, and had to stay there till I could get
hold of his legs, and haul him back, and that made him madder than ever.




CHAPTER VIII.


Blackmailing.—The proper course to pursue.—Selfish boorishness of
river-side landowner.—“Notice” boards.—Unchristianlike feelings of
Harris.—How Harris sings a comic song.—A high-class party.—Shameful
conduct of two abandoned young men.—Some useless information.—George
buys a banjo.

We stopped under the willows by Kempton Park, and lunched. It is a
pretty little spot there: a pleasant grass plateau, running along
by the water’s edge, and overhung by willows. We had just commenced
the third course—the bread and jam—when a gentleman in shirt-sleeves
and a short pipe came along, and wanted to know if we knew that we
were trespassing. We said we hadn’t given the matter sufficient
consideration as yet to enable us to arrive at a definite conclusion on
that point, but that, if he assured us on his word as a gentleman that
we _were_ trespassing, we would, without further hesitation, believe it.

He gave us the required assurance, and we thanked him, but he still
hung about, and seemed to be dissatisfied, so we asked him if there
was anything further that we could do for him; and Harris, who is of a
chummy disposition, offered him a bit of bread and jam.

I fancy he must have belonged to some society sworn to abstain from
bread and jam; for he declined it quite gruffly, as if he were vexed at
being tempted with it, and he added that it was his duty to turn us off.

Harris said that if it was a duty it ought to be done, and asked the
man what was his idea with regard to the best means for accomplishing
it. Harris is what you would call a well-made man of about number one
size, and looks hard and bony, and the man measured him up and down,
and said he would go and consult his master, and then come back and
chuck us both into the river.

Of course, we never saw him any more, and, of course, all he really
wanted was a shilling. There are a certain number of riverside roughs
who make quite an income, during the summer, by slouching about the
banks and blackmailing weak-minded noodles in this way. They represent
themselves as sent by the proprietor. The proper course to pursue is
to offer your name and address, and leave the owner, if he really has
anything to do with the matter, to summon you, and prove what damage
you have done to his land by sitting down on a bit of it. But the
majority of people are so intensely lazy and timid, that they prefer to
encourage the imposition by giving in to it rather than put an end to
it by the exertion of a little firmness.

Where it is really the owners that are to blame, they ought to be
shown up. The selfishness of the riparian proprietor grows with every
year. If these men had their way they would close the river Thames
altogether. They actually do this along the minor tributary streams and
in the backwaters. They drive posts into the bed of the stream, and
draw chains across from bank to bank, and nail huge notice-boards on
every tree. The sight of those notice-boards rouses every evil instinct
in my nature. I feel I want to tear each one down, and hammer it over
the head of the man who put it up, until I have killed him, and then I
would bury him, and put the board up over the grave as a tombstone.

I mentioned these feelings of mine to Harris, and he said he had them
worse than that. He said he not only felt he wanted to kill the man who
caused the board to be put up, but that he should like to slaughter the
whole of his family and all his friends and relations, and then burn
down his house. This seemed to me to be going too far, and I said so to
Harris; but he answered:

“Not a bit of it. Serve ’em all jolly well right, and I’d go and sing
comic songs on the ruins.”

I was vexed to hear Harris go on in this blood-thirsty strain. We
never ought to allow our instincts of justice to degenerate into mere
vindictiveness. It was a long while before I could get Harris to take
a more Christian view of the subject, but I succeeded at last, and
he promised me that he would spare the friends and relations at all
events, and would not sing comic songs on the ruins.

You have never heard Harris sing a comic song, or you would understand
the service I had rendered to mankind. It is one of Harris’s fixed
ideas that he _can_ sing a comic song; the fixed idea, on the contrary,
among those of Harris’s friends who have heard him try, is that he
_can’t_ and never will be able to, and that he ought not to be allowed
to try.

When Harris is at a party, and is asked to sing, he replies: “Well, I
can only sing a _comic_ song, you know;” and he says it in a tone that
implies that his singing of _that_, however, is a thing that you ought
to hear once, and then die.

“Oh, that _is_ nice,” says the hostess. “Do sing one, Mr. Harris;” and
Harris gets up, and makes for the piano, with the beaming cheeriness of
a generous-minded man who is just about to give somebody something.

“Now, silence, please, everybody” says the hostess, turning round; “Mr.
Harris is going to sing a comic song!”

“Oh, how jolly!” they murmur; and they hurry in from the conservatory,
and come up from the stairs, and go and fetch each other from all over
the house, and crowd into the drawing-room, and sit round, all smirking
in anticipation.

Then Harris begins.

Well, you don’t look for much of a voice in a comic song. You don’t
expect correct phrasing or vocalization. You don’t mind if a man does
find out, when in the middle of a note, that he is too high, and comes
down with a jerk. You don’t bother about time. You don’t mind a man
being two bars in front of the accompaniment, and easing up in the
middle of a line to argue it out with the pianist, and then starting
the verse afresh. But you do expect the words.

You don’t expect a man to never remember more than the first three
lines of the first verse, and to keep on repeating these until it is
time to begin the chorus. You don’t expect a man to break off in the
middle of a line, and snigger, and say, it’s very funny, but he’s blest
if he can think of the rest of it, and then try and make it up for
himself, and, afterwards, suddenly recollect it, when he has got to an
entirely different part of the song, and break off, without a word of
warning, to go back and let you have it then and there. You don’t—well,
I will just give you an idea of Harris’s comic singing, and then you
can judge of it for yourself.

[Picture: Harris] HARRIS (_standing up in front of piano and addressing
the expectant mob_): “I’m afraid it’s a very old thing, you know. I
expect you all know it, you know. But it’s the only thing I know.
It’s the Judge’s song out of _Pinafore_—no, I don’t mean _Pinafore_—I
mean—you know what I mean—the other thing, you know. You must all join
in the chorus, you know.”

[_Murmurs of delight and anxiety to join in the chorus_. _Brilliant
performance of prelude to the Judge’s song in_ “_Trial by Jury_” _by
nervous Pianist_. _Moment arrives for Harris to join in_. _Harris takes
no notice of it_. _Nervous pianist commences prelude over again, and
Harris_, _commencing singing at the same time_, _dashes off the first
two lines of the First Lord’s song out of_ “_Pinafore_.” _Nervous
pianist tries to push on with prelude_, _gives it up_, _and tries to
follow Harris with accompaniment to Judge’s song out of_ “_Trial by
Jury_,” _finds that doesn’t answer_, _and tries to recollect what he
is doing_, _and where he is_, _feels his mind giving way_, _and stops
short_.]

HARRIS (_with kindly encouragement_): “It’s all right. You’re doing it
very well, indeed—go on.”

NERVOUS PIANIST: “I’m afraid there’s a mistake somewhere. What are you
singing?”

HARRIS (_promptly_): “Why the Judge’s song out of Trial by Jury. Don’t
you know it?”

SOME FRIEND OF HARRIS’S (_from the back of the room_): “No, you’re not,
you chuckle-head, you’re singing the Admiral’s song from _Pinafore_.”

[_Long argument between Harris and Harris’s friend as to what Harris
is really singing_. _Friend finally suggests that it doesn’t matter
what Harris is singing so long as Harris gets on and sings it_, _and
Harris_, _with an evident sense of injustice rankling inside him_,
_requests pianist to begin again_. _Pianist_, _thereupon_, _starts
prelude to the Admiral’s song_, _and Harris_, _seizing what he
considers to be a favourable opening in the music_, _begins_.]

HARRIS:

    “‘When I was young and called to the Bar.’”

[_General roar of laughter_, _taken by Harris as a compliment_.
_Pianist_, _thinking of his wife and family_, _gives up the unequal
contest and retires_; _his place being taken by a stronger-nerved man_.

THE NEW PIANIST (_cheerily_): “Now then, old man, you start off, and
I’ll follow. We won’t bother about any prelude.”

HARRIS (_upon whom the explanation of matters has slowly
dawned—laughing_): “By Jove! I beg your pardon. Of course—I’ve been
mixing up the two songs. It was Jenkins confused me, you know. Now then.

[_Singing_; _his voice appearing to come from the cellar_, _and
suggesting the first low warnings of an approaching earthquake_.

    “‘When I was young I served a term
    As office-boy to an attorney’s firm.’

(_Aside to pianist_): “It is too low, old man; we’ll have that over
again, if you don’t mind.”

[_Sings first two lines over again_, _in a high falsetto this time_.
_Great surprise on the part of the audience_. _Nervous old lady near
the fire begins to cry_, _and has to be led out_.]

HARRIS (_continuing_):

    “‘I swept the windows and I swept the door,
    And I—’

No—no, I cleaned the windows of the big front door. And I polished up
the floor—no, dash it—I beg your pardon—funny thing, I can’t think of
that line. And I—and I—Oh, well, we’ll get on to the chorus, and chance
it (_sings_):

    “‘And I diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-de,
    Till now I am the ruler of the Queen’s navee.’

Now then, chorus—it is the last two lines repeated, you know.

GENERAL CHORUS:

    “And he diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-dee’d,
    Till now he is the ruler of the Queen’s navee.”

And Harris never sees what an ass he is making of himself, and how he
is annoying a lot of people who never did him any harm. He honestly
imagines that he has given them a treat, and says he will sing another
comic song after supper.

Speaking of comic songs and parties, reminds me of a rather curious
incident at which I once assisted; which, as it throws much light upon
the inner mental working of human nature in general, ought, I think, to
be recorded in these pages.

We were a fashionable and highly cultured party. We had on our best
clothes, and we talked pretty, and were very happy—all except two young
fellows, students, just returned from Germany, commonplace young men,
who seemed restless and uncomfortable, as if they found the proceedings
slow. The truth was, we were too clever for them. Our brilliant but
polished conversation, and our high-class tastes, were beyond them.
They were out of place, among us. They never ought to have been there
at all. Everybody agreed upon that, later on.

We played _morceaux_ from the old German masters. We discussed
philosophy and ethics. We flirted with graceful dignity. We were even
humorous—in a high-class way.

Somebody recited a French poem after supper, and we said it was
beautiful; and then a lady sang a sentimental ballad in Spanish, and it
made one or two of us weep—it was so pathetic.

And then those two young men got up, and asked us if we had ever heard
Herr Slossenn Boschen (who had just arrived, and was then down in the
supper-room) sing his great German comic song.

None of us had heard it, that we could remember.

The young men said it was the funniest song that had ever been written,
and that, if we liked, they would get Herr Slossenn Boschen, whom they
knew very well, to sing it. They said it was so funny that, when Herr
Slossenn Boschen had sung it once before the German Emperor, he (the
German Emperor) had had to be carried off to bed.

They said nobody could sing it like Herr Slossenn Boschen; he was so
intensely serious all through it that you might fancy he was reciting
a tragedy, and that, of course, made it all the funnier. They said he
never once suggested by his tone or manner that he was singing anything
funny—that would spoil it. It was his air of seriousness, almost of
pathos, that made it so irresistibly amusing.

We said we yearned to hear it, that we wanted a good laugh; and they
went downstairs, and fetched Herr Slossenn Boschen.

He appeared to be quite pleased to sing it, for he came up at once, and
sat down to the piano without another word.

“Oh, it will amuse you. You will laugh,” whispered the two young men,
as they passed through the room, and took up an unobtrusive position
behind the Professor’s back.

Herr Slossenn Boschen accompanied himself. The prelude did not suggest
a comic song exactly. It was a weird, soulful air. It quite made one’s
flesh creep; but we murmured to one another that it was the German
method, and prepared to enjoy it.

I don’t understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot
every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much
better ever since. Still, I did not want the people there to guess my
ignorance; so I hit upon what I thought to be rather a good idea. I
kept my eye on the two young students, and followed them. When they
tittered, I tittered; when they roared, I roared; and I also threw in
a little snigger all by myself now and then, as if I had seen a bit
of humour that had escaped the others. I considered this particularly
artful on my part.

I noticed, as the song progressed, that a good many other people seemed
to have their eye fixed on the two young men, as well as myself. These
other people also tittered when the young men tittered, and roared when
the young men roared; and, as the two young men tittered and roared and
exploded with laughter pretty continuously all through the song, it
went exceedingly well.

And yet that German Professor did not seem happy. At first, when we
began to laugh, the expression of his face was one of intense surprise,
as if laughter were the very last thing he had expected to be greeted
with. We thought this very funny: we said his earnest manner was half
the humour. The slightest hint on his part that he knew how funny he
was would have completely ruined it all. As we continued to laugh,
his surprise gave way to an air of annoyance and indignation, and he
scowled fiercely round upon us all (except upon the two young men who,
being behind him, he could not see). That sent us into convulsions. We
told each other that it would be the death of us, this thing. The words
alone, we said, were enough to send us into fits, but added to his mock
seriousness—oh, it was too much!

In the last verse, he surpassed himself. He glowered round upon us with
a look of such concentrated ferocity that, but for our being forewarned
as to the German method of comic singing, we should have been nervous;
and he threw such a wailing note of agony into the weird music that, if
we had not known it was a funny song, we might have wept.

He finished amid a perfect shriek of laughter. We said it was the
funniest thing we had ever heard in all our lives. We said how strange
it was that, in the face of things like these, there should be a
popular notion that the Germans hadn’t any sense of humour. And we
asked the Professor why he didn’t translate the song into English, so
that the common people could understand it, and hear what a real comic
song was like.

Then Herr Slossenn Boschen got up, and went on awful. He swore at us in
German (which I should judge to be a singularly effective language for
that purpose), and he danced, and shook his fists, and called us all
the English he knew. He said he had never been so insulted in all his
life.

It appeared that the song was not a comic song at all. It was about
a young girl who lived in the Hartz Mountains, and who had given up
her life to save her lover’s soul; and he died, and met her spirit in
the air; and then, in the last verse, he jilted her spirit, and went
on with another spirit—I’m not quite sure of the details, but it was
something very sad, I know. Herr Boschen said he had sung it once
before the German Emperor, and he (the German Emperor) had sobbed like
a little child. He (Herr Boschen) said it was generally acknowledged to
be one of the most tragic and pathetic songs in the German language.

It was a trying situation for us—very trying. There seemed to be no
answer. We looked around for the two young men who had done this thing,
but they had left the house in an unostentatious manner immediately
after the end of the song.

That was the end of that party. I never saw a party break up so
quietly, and with so little fuss. We never said good-night even to
one another. We came downstairs one at a time, walking softly, and
keeping the shady side. We asked the servant for our hats and coats in
whispers, and opened the door for ourselves, and slipped out, and got
round the corner quickly, avoiding each other as much as possible.

I have never taken much interest in German songs since then.

We reached Sunbury Lock at half-past three. The river is sweetly pretty
just there before you come to the gates, and the backwater is charming;
but don’t attempt to row up it.

I tried to do so once. I was sculling, and asked the fellows who were
steering if they thought it could be done, and they said, oh, yes, they
thought so, if I pulled hard. We were just under the little foot-bridge
that crosses it between the two weirs, when they said this, and I bent
down over the sculls, and set myself up, and pulled.

I pulled splendidly. I got well into a steady rhythmical swing. I put
my arms, and my legs, and my back into it. I set myself a good, quick,
dashing stroke, and worked in really grand style. My two friends said
it was a pleasure to watch me. At the end of five minutes, I thought we
ought to be pretty near the weir, and I looked up. We were under the
bridge, in exactly the same spot that we were when I began, and there
were those two idiots, injuring themselves by violent laughing. I had
been grinding away like mad to keep that boat stuck still under that
bridge. I let other people pull up backwaters against strong streams
now.

We sculled up to Walton, a rather large place for a riverside town. As
with all riverside places, only the tiniest corner of it comes down to
the water, so that from the boat you might fancy it was a village of
some half-dozen houses, all told. Windsor and Abingdon are the only
towns between London and Oxford that you can really see anything of
from the stream. All the others hide round corners, and merely peep at
the river down one street: my thanks to them for being so considerate,
and leaving the river-banks to woods and fields and water-works.

Even Reading, though it does its best to spoil and sully and make
hideous as much of the river as it can reach, is good-natured enough to
keep its ugly face a good deal out of sight.

Cæsar, of course, had a little place at Walton—a camp, or an
entrenchment, or something of that sort. Cæsar was a regular up-river
man. Also Queen Elizabeth, she was there, too. You can never get away
from that woman, go where you will. Cromwell and Bradshaw (not the
guide man, but the King Charles’s head man) likewise sojourned here.
They must have been quite a pleasant little party, altogether.

There is an iron “scold’s bridle” in Walton Church. They used these
things in ancient days for curbing women’s tongues. They have given up
the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else
would be strong enough.

There are also tombs of note in the church, and I was afraid I should
never get Harris past them; but he didn’t seem to think of them, and we
went on. Above the bridge the river winds tremendously. This makes it
look picturesque; but it irritates you from a towing or sculling point
of view, and causes argument between the man who is pulling and the man
who is steering.

You pass Oatlands Park on the right bank here. It is a famous old
place. Henry VIII. stole it from some one or the other, I forget whom
now, and lived in it. There is a grotto in the park which you can see
for a fee, and which is supposed to be very wonderful; but I cannot see
much in it myself. The late Duchess of York, who lived at Oatlands,
was very fond of dogs, and kept an immense number. She had a special
graveyard made, in which to bury them when they died, and there they
lie, about fifty of them, with a tombstone over each, and an epitaph
inscribed thereon.

Well, I dare say they deserve it quite as much as the average Christian
does.

At “Corway Stakes”—the first bend above Walton Bridge—was fought a
battle between Cæsar and Cassivelaunus. Cassivelaunus had prepared the
river for Cæsar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put
up a notice-board). But Cæsar crossed in spite of this. You couldn’t
choke Cæsar off that river. He is the sort of man we want round the
backwaters now.

Halliford and Shepperton are both pretty little spots where they touch
the river; but there is nothing remarkable about either of them. There
is a tomb in Shepperton churchyard, however, with a poem on it, and
I was nervous lest Harris should want to get out and fool round it.
I saw him fix a longing eye on the landing-stage as we drew near it,
so I managed, by an adroit movement, to jerk his cap into the water,
and in the excitement of recovering that, and his indignation at my
clumsiness, he forgot all about his beloved graves.

At Weybridge, the Wey (a pretty little stream, navigable for small
boats up to Guildford, and one which I have always been making up my
mind to explore, and never have), the Bourne, and the Basingstoke Canal
all enter the Thames together. The lock is just opposite the town, and
the first thing that we saw, when we came in view of it, was George’s
blazer on one of the lock gates, closer inspection showing that George
was inside it.

Montmorency set up a furious barking, I shrieked, Harris roared; George
waved his hat, and yelled back. The lock-keeper rushed out with a
drag, under the impression that somebody had fallen into the lock, and
appeared annoyed at finding that no one had.

George had rather a curious oilskin-covered parcel in his hand. It was
round and flat at one end, with a long straight handle sticking out of
it.

“What’s that?” said Harris—“a frying-pan?”

“No,” said George, with a strange, wild look glittering in his eyes;
“they are all the rage this season; everybody has got them up the
river. It’s a banjo.”

“I never knew you played the banjo!” cried Harris and I, in one breath.

“Not exactly,” replied George: “but it’s very easy, they tell me; and
I’ve got the instruction book!”

                     [Picture: George and the banjo]




CHAPTER IX.


George is introduced to work.—Heathenish instincts of
tow-lines.—Ungrateful conduct of a double-sculling skiff.—Towers
and towed.—A use discovered for lovers.—Strange disappearance of an
elderly lady.—Much haste, less speed.—Being towed by girls: exciting
sensation.—The missing lock or the haunted river.—Music.—Saved!

We made George work, now we had got him. He did not want to work, of
course; that goes without saying. He had had a hard time in the City,
so he explained. Harris, who is callous in his nature, and not prone to
pity, said:

“Ah! and now you are going to have a hard time on the river for a
change; change is good for everyone. Out you get!”

He could not in conscience—not even George’s conscience—object, though
he did suggest that, perhaps, it would be better for him to stop in the
boat, and get tea ready, while Harris and I towed, because getting tea
was such a worrying work, and Harris and I looked tired. The only reply
we made to this, however, was to pass him over the tow-line, and he
took it, and stepped out.

[Picture: Dog wrapped in tow-line] There is something very strange and
unaccountable about a tow-line. You roll it up with as much patience
and care as you would take to fold up a new pair of trousers, and
five minutes afterwards, when you pick it up, it is one ghastly,
soul-revolting tangle.

I do not wish to be insulting, but I firmly believe that if you took
an average tow-line, and stretched it out straight across the middle
of a field, and then turned your back on it for thirty seconds, that,
when you looked round again, you would find that it had got itself
altogether in a heap in the middle of the field, and had twisted itself
up, and tied itself into knots, and lost its two ends, and become all
loops; and it would take you a good half-hour, sitting down there on
the grass and swearing all the while, to disentangle it again.

That is my opinion of tow-lines in general. Of course, there may be
honourable exceptions; I do not say that there are not. There may
be tow-lines that are a credit to their profession—conscientious,
respectable tow-lines—tow-lines that do not imagine they are
crochet-work, and try to knit themselves up into antimacassars the
instant they are left to themselves. I say there _may_ be such
tow-lines; I sincerely hope there are. But I have not met with them.

This tow-line I had taken in myself just before we had got to the lock.
I would not let Harris touch it, because he is careless. I had looped
it round slowly and cautiously, and tied it up in the middle, and
folded it in two, and laid it down gently at the bottom of the boat.
Harris had lifted it up scientifically, and had put it into George’s
hand. George had taken it firmly, and held it away from him, and had
begun to unravel it as if he were taking the swaddling clothes off a
new-born infant; and, before he had unwound a dozen yards, the thing
was more like a badly-made door-mat than anything else.

It is always the same, and the same sort of thing always goes on in
connection with it. The man on the bank, who is trying to disentangle
it, thinks all the fault lies with the man who rolled it up; and when a
man up the river thinks a thing, he says it.

“What have you been trying to do with it, make a fishing-net of it?
You’ve made a nice mess you have; why couldn’t you wind it up properly,
you silly dummy?” he grunts from time to time as he struggles wildly
with it, and lays it out flat on the tow-path, and runs round and round
it, trying to find the end.

On the other hand, the man who wound it up thinks the whole cause of
the muddle rests with the man who is trying to unwind it.

“It was all right when you took it!” he exclaims indignantly. “Why
don’t you think what you are doing? You go about things in such a
slap-dash style. You’d get a scaffolding pole entangled _you_ would!”

And they feel so angry with one another that they would like to hang
each other with the thing. Ten minutes go by, and the first man gives
a yell and goes mad, and dances on the rope, and tries to pull it
straight by seizing hold of the first piece that comes to his hand and
hauling at it. Of course, this only gets it into a tighter tangle than
ever. Then the second man climbs out of the boat and comes to help him,
and they get in each other’s way, and hinder one another. They both get
hold of the same bit of line, and pull at it in opposite directions,
and wonder where it is caught. In the end, they do get it clear, and
then turn round and find that the boat has drifted off, and is making
straight for the weir.

This really happened once to my own knowledge. It was up by Boveney,
one rather windy morning. We were pulling down stream, and, as we came
round the bend, we noticed a couple of men on the bank. They were
looking at each other with as bewildered and helplessly miserable
expression as I have ever witnessed on any human countenance before or
since, and they held a long tow-line between them. It was clear that
something had happened, so we eased up and asked them what was the
matter.

“Why, our boat’s gone off!” they replied in an indignant tone. “We just
got out to disentangle the tow-line, and when we looked round, it was
gone!”

And they seemed hurt at what they evidently regarded as a mean and
ungrateful act on the part of the boat.

We found the truant for them half a mile further down, held by some
rushes, and we brought it back to them. I bet they did not give that
boat another chance for a week.

I shall never forget the picture of those two men walking up and down
the bank with a tow-line, looking for their boat.

One sees a good many funny incidents up the river in connection with
towing. One of the most common is the sight of a couple of towers,
walking briskly along, deep in an animated discussion, while the man
in the boat, a hundred yards behind them, is vainly shrieking to them
to stop, and making frantic signs of distress with a scull. Something
has gone wrong; the rudder has come off, or the boat-hook has slipped
overboard, or his hat has dropped into the water and is floating
rapidly down stream.

He calls to them to stop, quite gently and politely at first.

[Picture: Hat in the water] “Hi! stop a minute, will you?” he shouts
cheerily. “I’ve dropped my hat over-board.”

Then: “Hi! Tom—Dick! can’t you hear?” not quite so affably this time.

Then: “Hi! Confound _you_, you dunder-headed idiots! Hi! stop! Oh you—!”

After that he springs up, and dances about, and roars himself red in
the face, and curses everything he knows. And the small boys on the
bank stop and jeer at him, and pitch stones at him as he is pulled
along past them, at the rate of four miles an hour, and can’t get out.

Much of this sort of trouble would be saved if those who are towing
would keep remembering that they are towing, and give a pretty frequent
look round to see how their man is getting on. It is best to let one
person tow. When two are doing it, they get chattering, and forget, and
the boat itself, offering, as it does, but little resistance, is of no
real service in reminding them of the fact.

As an example of how utterly oblivious a pair of towers can be to their
work, George told us, later on in the evening, when we were discussing
the subject after supper, of a very curious instance.

                [Picture: Two people towing, boat adrift]

He and three other men, so he said, were sculling a very heavily laden
boat up from Maidenhead one evening, and a little above Cookham lock
they noticed a fellow and a girl, walking along the towpath, both deep
in an apparently interesting and absorbing conversation. They were
carrying a boat-hook between them, and, attached to the boat-hook was
a tow-line, which trailed behind them, its end in the water. No boat
was near, no boat was in sight. There must have been a boat attached
to that tow-line at some time or other, that was certain; but what had
become of it, what ghastly fate had overtaken it, and those who had
been left in it, was buried in mystery. Whatever the accident may have
been, however, it had in no way disturbed the young lady and gentleman,
who were towing. They had the boat-hook and they had the line, and that
seemed to be all that they thought necessary to their work.

George was about to call out and wake them up, but, at that moment,
a bright idea flashed across him, and he didn’t. He got the hitcher
instead, and reached over, and drew in the end of the tow-line; and
they made a loop in it, and put it over their mast, and then they
tidied up the sculls, and went and sat down in the stern, and lit their
pipes.

And that young man and young woman towed those four hulking chaps and a
heavy boat up to Marlow.

George said he never saw so much thoughtful sadness concentrated into
one glance before, as when, at the lock, that young couple grasped the
idea that, for the last two miles, they had been towing the wrong boat.
George fancied that, if it had not been for the restraining influence
of the sweet woman at his side, the young man might have given way to
violent language.

The maiden was the first to recover from her surprise, and, when she
did, she clasped her hands, and said, wildly:

“Oh, Henry, then _where_ is auntie?”

“Did they ever recover the old lady?” asked Harris.

George replied he did not know.

Another example of the dangerous want of sympathy between tower and
towed was witnessed by George and myself once up near Walton. It was
where the tow-path shelves gently down into the water, and we were
camping on the opposite bank, noticing things in general. By-and-by a
small boat came in sight, towed through the water at a tremendous pace
by a powerful barge horse, on which sat a very small boy. Scattered
about the boat, in dreamy and reposeful attitudes, lay five fellows,
the man who was steering having a particularly restful appearance.

“I should like to see him pull the wrong line,” murmured George, as
they passed. And at that precise moment the man did it, and the boat
rushed up the bank with a noise like the ripping up of forty thousand
linen sheets. Two men, a hamper, and three oars immediately left the
boat on the larboard side, and reclined on the bank, and one and a half
moments afterwards, two other men disembarked from the starboard, and
sat down among boat-hooks and sails and carpet-bags and bottles. The
last man went on twenty yards further, and then got out on his head.

This seemed to sort of lighten the boat, and it went on much easier,
the small boy shouting at the top of his voice, and urging his steed
into a gallop. The fellows sat up and stared at one another. It was
some seconds before they realised what had happened to them, but, when
they did, they began to shout lustily for the boy to stop. He, however,
was too much occupied with the horse to hear them, and we watched them,
flying after him, until the distance hid them from view.

I cannot say I was sorry at their mishap. Indeed, I only wish that all
the young fools who have their boats towed in this fashion—and plenty
do—could meet with similar misfortunes. Besides the risk they run
themselves, they become a danger and an annoyance to every other boat
they pass. Going at the pace they do, it is impossible for them to get
out of anybody else’s way, or for anybody else to get out of theirs.
Their line gets hitched across your mast, and overturns you, or it
catches somebody in the boat, and either throws them into the water,
or cuts their face open. The best plan is to stand your ground, and be
prepared to keep them off with the butt-end of a mast.

Of all experiences in connection with towing, the most exciting is
being towed by girls. It is a sensation that nobody ought to miss. It
takes three girls to tow always; two hold the rope, and the other one
runs round and round, and giggles. They generally begin by getting
themselves tied up. They get the line round their legs, and have to
sit down on the path and undo each other, and then they twist it round
their necks, and are nearly strangled. They fix it straight, however,
at last, and start off at a run, pulling the boat along at quite a
dangerous pace. At the end of a hundred yards they are naturally
breathless, and suddenly stop, and all sit down on the grass and laugh,
and your boat drifts out to mid-stream and turns round, before you know
what has happened, or can get hold of a scull. Then they stand up, and
are surprised.

“Oh, look!” they say; “he’s gone right out into the middle.”

[Picture: Lady pinning up frock] They pull on pretty steadily for a
bit, after this, and then it all at once occurs to one of them that she
will pin up her frock, and they ease up for the purpose, and the boat
runs aground.

You jump up, and push it off, and you shout to them not to stop.

“Yes. What’s the matter?” they shout back.

“Don’t stop,” you roar.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stop—go on—go on!”

“Go back, Emily, and see what it is they want,” says one; and Emily
comes back, and asks what it is.

“What do you want?” she says; “anything happened?”

“No,” you reply, “it’s all right; only go on, you know—don’t stop.”

“Why not?”

“Why, we can’t steer, if you keep stopping. You must keep some way on
the boat.”

“Keep some what?”

“Some way—you must keep the boat moving.”

“Oh, all right, I’ll tell ’em. Are we doing it all right?”

“Oh, yes, very nicely, indeed, only don’t stop.”

“It doesn’t seem difficult at all. I thought it was so hard.”

“Oh, no, it’s simple enough. You want to keep on steady at it, that’s
all.”

“I see. Give me out my red shawl, it’s under the cushion.”

You find the shawl, and hand it out, and by this time another one has
come back and thinks she will have hers too, and they take Mary’s on
chance, and Mary does not want it, so they bring it back and have a
pocket-comb instead. It is about twenty minutes before they get off
again, and, at the next corner, they see a cow, and you have to leave
the boat to chivy the cow out of their way.

There is never a dull moment in the boat while girls are towing it.

George got the line right after a while, and towed us steadily on to
Penton Hook. There we discussed the important question of camping. We
had decided to sleep on board that night, and we had either to lay
up just about there, or go on past Staines. It seemed early to think
about shutting up then, however, with the sun still in the heavens, and
we settled to push straight on for Runnymead, three and a half miles
further, a quiet wooded part of the river, and where there is good
shelter.

We all wished, however, afterward that we had stopped at Penton Hook.
Three or four miles up stream is a trifle, early in the morning, but it
is a weary pull at the end of a long day. You take no interest in the
scenery during these last few miles. You do not chat and laugh. Every
half-mile you cover seems like two. You can hardly believe you are only
where you are, and you are convinced that the map must be wrong; and,
when you have trudged along for what seems to you at least ten miles,
and still the lock is not in sight, you begin to seriously fear that
somebody must have sneaked it, and run off with it.

I remember being terribly upset once up the river (in a figurative
sense, I mean). I was out with a young lady—cousin on my mother’s
side—and we were pulling down to Goring. It was rather late, and we
were anxious to get in—at least _she_ was anxious to get in. It was
half-past six when we reached Benson’s lock, and dusk was drawing on,
and she began to get excited then. She said she must be in to supper.
I said it was a thing I felt I wanted to be in at, too; and I drew out
a map I had with me to see exactly how far it was. I saw it was just a
mile and a half to the next lock—Wallingford—and five on from there to
Cleeve.

“Oh, it’s all right!” I said. “We’ll be through the next lock before
seven, and then there is only one more;” and I settled down and pulled
steadily away.

We passed the bridge, and soon after that I asked if she saw the lock.
She said no, she did not see any lock; and I said, “Oh!” and pulled on.
Another five minutes went by, and then I asked her to look again.

“No,” she said; “I can’t see any signs of a lock.”

“You—you are sure you know a lock, when you do see one?” I asked
hesitatingly, not wishing to offend her.

The question did offend her, however, and she suggested that I had
better look for myself; so I laid down the sculls, and took a view.
The river stretched out straight before us in the twilight for about a
mile; not a ghost of a lock was to be seen.

“You don’t think we have lost our way, do you?” asked my companion.

I did not see how that was possible; though, as I suggested, we might
have somehow got into the weir stream, and be making for the falls.

This idea did not comfort her in the least, and she began to cry. She
said we should both be drowned, and that it was a judgment on her for
coming out with me.

It seemed an excessive punishment, I thought; but my cousin thought
not, and hoped it would all soon be over.

I tried to reassure her, and to make light of the whole affair. I said
that the fact evidently was that I was not rowing as fast as I fancied
I was, but that we should soon reach the lock now; and I pulled on for
another mile.

Then I began to get nervous myself. I looked again at the map. There
was Wallingford lock, clearly marked, a mile and a half below Benson’s.
It was a good, reliable map; and, besides, I recollected the lock
myself. I had been through it twice. Where were we? What had happened
to us? I began to think it must be all a dream, and that I was really
asleep in bed, and should wake up in a minute, and be told it was past
ten.

I asked my cousin if she thought it could be a dream, and she replied
that she was just about to ask me the same question; and then we both
wondered if we were both asleep, and if so, who was the real one that
was dreaming, and who was the one that was only a dream; it got quite
interesting.

I still went on pulling, however, and still no lock came in sight, and
the river grew more and more gloomy and mysterious under the gathering
shadows of night, and things seemed to be getting weird and uncanny. I
thought of hobgoblins and banshees, and will-o’-the-wisps, and those
wicked girls who sit up all night on rocks, and lure people into
whirl-pools and things; and I wished I had been a better man, and knew
more hymns; and in the middle of these reflections I heard the blessed
strains of “He’s got ’em on,” played, badly, on a concertina, and knew
that we were saved.

I do not admire the tones of a concertina, as a rule; but, oh! how
beautiful the music seemed to us both then—far, far more beautiful
than the voice of Orpheus or the lute of Apollo, or anything of that
sort could have sounded. Heavenly melody, in our then state of mind,
would only have still further harrowed us. A soul-moving harmony,
correctly performed, we should have taken as a spirit-warning, and
have given up all hope. But about the strains of “He’s got ’em on,”
jerked spasmodically, and with involuntary variations, out of a wheezy
accordion, there was something singularly human and reassuring.

The sweet sounds drew nearer, and soon the boat from which they were
worked lay alongside us.

It contained a party of provincial ’Arrys and ’Arriets, out for a
moonlight sail. (There was not any moon, but that was not their fault.)
I never saw more attractive, lovable people in all my life. I hailed
them, and asked if they could tell me the way to Wallingford lock; and
I explained that I had been looking for it for the last two hours.

“Wallingford lock!” they answered. “Lor’ love you, sir, that’s been
done away with for over a year. There ain’t no Wallingford lock
now, sir. You’re close to Cleeve now. Blow me tight if ’ere ain’t a
gentleman been looking for Wallingford lock, Bill!”

I had never thought of that. I wanted to fall upon all their necks and
bless them; but the stream was running too strong just there to allow
of this, so I had to content myself with mere cold-sounding words of
gratitude.

We thanked them over and over again, and we said it was a lovely night,
and we wished them a pleasant trip, and, I think, I invited them all
to come and spend a week with me, and my cousin said her mother would
be so pleased to see them. And we sang the soldiers’ chorus out of
_Faust_, and got home in time for supper, after all.

                     [Picture: People in rowing boat]




CHAPTER X.


Our first night.—Under canvas.—An appeal for help.—Contrariness of
tea-kettles, how to overcome.—Supper.—How to feel virtuous.—Wanted! a
comfortably-appointed, well-drained desert island, neighbourhood of
South Pacific Ocean preferred.—Funny thing that happened to George’s
father.—a restless night.

Harris and I began to think that Bell Weir lock must have been done
away with after the same manner. George had towed us up to Staines, and
we had taken the boat from there, and it seemed that we were dragging
fifty tons after us, and were walking forty miles. It was half-past
seven when we were through, and we all got in, and sculled up close to
the left bank, looking out for a spot to haul up in.

We had originally intended to go on to Magna Charta Island, a sweetly
pretty part of the river, where it winds through a soft, green valley,
and to camp in one of the many picturesque inlets to be found round
that tiny shore. But, somehow, we did not feel that we yearned for the
picturesque nearly so much now as we had earlier in the day. A bit of
water between a coal-barge and a gas-works would have quite satisfied
us for that night. We did not want scenery. We wanted to have our
supper and go to bed. However, we did pull up to the point—“Picnic
Point,” it is called—and dropped into a very pleasant nook under a
great elm-tree, to the spreading roots of which we fastened the boat.

Then we thought we were going to have supper (we had dispensed with
tea, so as to save time), but George said no; that we had better get
the canvas up first, before it got quite dark, and while we could see
what we were doing. Then, he said, all our work would be done, and we
could sit down to eat with an easy mind.

That canvas wanted more putting up than I think any of us had bargained
for. It looked so simple in the abstract. You took five iron arches,
like gigantic croquet hoops, and fitted them up over the boat, and then
stretched the canvas over them, and fastened it down: it would take
quite ten minutes, we thought.

That was an under-estimate.

We took up the hoops, and began to drop them into the sockets placed
for them. You would not imagine this to be dangerous work; but, looking
back now, the wonder to me is that any of us are alive to tell the
tale. They were not hoops, they were demons. First they would not fit
into their sockets at all, and we had to jump on them, and kick them,
and hammer at them with the boat-hook; and, when they were in, it
turned out that they were the wrong hoops for those particular sockets,
and they had to come out again.

But they would not come out, until two of us had gone and struggled
with them for five minutes, when they would jump up suddenly, and
try and throw us into the water and drown us. They had hinges in the
middle, and, when we were not looking, they nipped us with these hinges
in delicate parts of the body; and, while we were wrestling with one
side of the hoop, and endeavouring to persuade it to do its duty, the
other side would come behind us in a cowardly manner, and hit us over
the head.

We got them fixed at last, and then all that was to be done was to
arrange the covering over them. George unrolled it, and fastened one
end over the nose of the boat. Harris stood in the middle to take it
from George and roll it on to me, and I kept by the stern to receive
it. It was a long time coming down to me. George did his part all
right, but it was new work to Harris, and he bungled it.

How he managed it I do not know, he could not explain himself; but
by some mysterious process or other he succeeded, after ten minutes
of superhuman effort, in getting himself completely rolled up in
it. He was so firmly wrapped round and tucked in and folded over,
that he could not get out. He, of course, made frantic struggles for
freedom—the birthright of every Englishman,—and, in doing so (I learned
this afterwards), knocked over George; and then George, swearing at
Harris, began to struggle too, and got _himself_ entangled and rolled
up.

[Picture: Watching and waiting] I knew nothing about all this at the
time. I did not understand the business at all myself. I had been
told to stand where I was, and wait till the canvas came to me, and
Montmorency and I stood there and waited, both as good as gold. We
could see the canvas being violently jerked and tossed about, pretty
considerably; but we supposed this was part of the method, and did not
interfere.

We also heard much smothered language coming from underneath it, and
we guessed that they were finding the job rather troublesome, and
concluded that we would wait until things had got a little simpler
before we joined in.

We waited some time, but matters seemed to get only more and more
involved, until, at last, George’s head came wriggling out over the
side of the boat, and spoke up.

It said:

“Give us a hand here, can’t you, you cuckoo; standing there like a
stuffed mummy, when you see we are both being suffocated, you dummy!”

I never could withstand an appeal for help, so I went and undid them;
not before it was time, either, for Harris was nearly black in the face.

It took us half an hour’s hard labour, after that, before it was
properly up, and then we cleared the decks, and got out supper. We put
the kettle on to boil, up in the nose of the boat, and went down to the
stern and pretended to take no notice of it, but set to work to get the
other things out.

That is the only way to get a kettle to boil up the river. If it sees
that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing.
You have to go away and begin your meal, as if you were not going to
have any tea at all. You must not even look round at it. Then you will
soon hear it sputtering away, mad to be made into tea.

It is a good plan, too, if you are in a great hurry, to talk very
loudly to each other about how you don’t need any tea, and are not
going to have any. You get near the kettle, so that it can overhear
you, and then you shout out, “I don’t want any tea; do you, George?”
to which George shouts back, “Oh, no, I don’t like tea; we’ll have
lemonade instead—tea’s so indigestible.” Upon which the kettle boils
over, and puts the stove out.

We adopted this harmless bit of trickery, and the result was that, by
the time everything else was ready, the tea was waiting. Then we lit
the lantern, and squatted down to supper.

We wanted that supper.

For five-and-thirty minutes not a sound was heard throughout the
length and breadth of that boat, save the clank of cutlery and
crockery, and the steady grinding of four sets of molars. At the end of
five-and-thirty minutes, Harris said, “Ah!” and took his left leg out
from under him and put his right one there instead.

Five minutes afterwards, George said, “Ah!” too, and threw his plate
out on the bank; and, three minutes later than that, Montmorency gave
the first sign of contentment he had exhibited since we had started,
and rolled over on his side, and spread his legs out; and then I said,
“Ah!” and bent my head back, and bumped it against one of the hoops,
but I did not mind it. I did not even swear.

How good one feels when one is full—how satisfied with ourselves
and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear
conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach
does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily
obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and
well-digested meal—so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.

It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive
organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so.
It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon,
it says, “Work!” After beefsteak and porter, it says, “Sleep!” After
a cup of tea (two spoonsful for each cup, and don’t let it stand
more than three minutes), it says to the brain, “Now, rise, and show
your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear
eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering
thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath
you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!”

After hot muffins, it says, “Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the
field—a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy,
or of hope, or fear, or love, or life.” And after brandy, taken in
sufficient quantity, it says, “Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that
your fellow-men may laugh—drivel in folly, and splutter in senseless
sounds, and show what a helpless ninny is poor man whose wit and will
are drowned, like kittens, side by side, in half an inch of alcohol.”

We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after
morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach,
and diet it with care and judgment. Then virtue and contentment will
come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own;
and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father—a
noble, pious man.

Before our supper, Harris and George and I were quarrelsome and
snappy and ill-tempered; after our supper, we sat and beamed on one
another, and we beamed upon the dog, too. We loved each other, we loved
everybody. Harris, in moving about, trod on George’s corn. Had this
happened before supper, George would have expressed wishes and desires
concerning Harris’s fate in this world and the next that would have
made a thoughtful man shudder.

As it was, he said: “Steady, old man; ’ware wheat.”

And Harris, instead of merely observing, in his most unpleasant tones,
that a fellow could hardly help treading on some bit of George’s foot,
if he had to move about at all within ten yards of where George was
sitting, suggesting that George never ought to come into an ordinary
sized boat with feet that length, and advising him to hang them over
the side, as he would have done before supper, now said: “Oh, I’m so
sorry, old chap; I hope I haven’t hurt you.”

[Picture: Smoking pipes] And George said: “Not at all;” that it was his
fault; and Harris said no, it was his.

It was quite pretty to hear them.

We lit our pipes, and sat, looking out on the quiet night, and talked.

George said why could not we be always like this—away from the world,
with its sin and temptation, leading sober, peaceful lives, and doing
good. I said it was the sort of thing I had often longed for myself;
and we discussed the possibility of our going away, we four, to some
handy, well-fitted desert island, and living there in the woods.

Harris said that the danger about desert islands, as far as he had
heard, was that they were so damp: but George said no, not if properly
drained.

And then we got on to drains, and that put George in mind of a very
funny thing that happened to his father once. He said his father was
travelling with another fellow through Wales, and, one night, they
stopped at a little inn, where there were some other fellows, and they
joined the other fellows, and spent the evening with them.

They had a very jolly evening, and sat up late, and, by the time they
came to go to bed, they (this was when George’s father was a very young
man) were slightly jolly, too. They (George’s father and George’s
father’s friend) were to sleep in the same room, but in different beds.
They took the candle, and went up. The candle lurched up against the
wall when they got into the room, and went out, and they had to undress
and grope into bed in the dark. This they did; but, instead of getting
into separate beds, as they thought they were doing, they both climbed
into the same one without knowing it—one getting in with his head
at the top, and the other crawling in from the opposite side of the
compass, and lying with his feet on the pillow.

There was silence for a moment, and then George’s father said:

“Joe!”

“What’s the matter, Tom?” replied Joe’s voice from the other end of the
bed.

“Why, there’s a man in my bed,” said George’s father; “here’s his feet
on my pillow.”

“Well, it’s an extraordinary thing, Tom,” answered the other; “but I’m
blest if there isn’t a man in my bed, too!”

“What are you going to do?” asked George’s father.

“Well, I’m going to chuck him out,” replied Joe.

“So am I,” said George’s father, valiantly.

There was a brief struggle, followed by two heavy bumps on the floor,
and then a rather doleful voice said:

“I say, Tom!”

“Yes!”

“How have you got on?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, my man’s chucked _me_ out.”

“So’s mine! I say, I don’t think much of this inn, do you?”

“What was the name of that inn?” said Harris.

“The Pig and Whistle,” said George. “Why?”

“Ah, no, then it isn’t the same,” replied Harris.

“What do you mean?” queried George.

“Why it’s so curious,” murmured Harris, “but precisely that very same
thing happened to _my_ father once at a country inn. I’ve often heard
him tell the tale. I thought it might have been the same inn.”

We turned in at ten that night, and I thought I should sleep well,
being tired; but I didn’t. As a rule, I undress and put my head on the
pillow, and then somebody bangs at the door, and says it is half-past
eight: but, to-night, everything seemed against me; the novelty of
it all, the hardness of the boat, the cramped position (I was lying
with my feet under one seat, and my head on another), the sound of the
lapping water round the boat, and the wind among the branches, kept me
restless and disturbed.

I did get to sleep for a few hours, and then some part of the boat
which seemed to have grown up in the night—for it certainly was not
there when we started, and it had disappeared by the morning—kept
digging into my spine. I slept through it for a while, dreaming that I
had swallowed a sovereign, and that they were cutting a hole in my back
with a gimlet, so as to try and get it out. I thought it very unkind
of them, and I told them I would owe them the money, and they should
have it at the end of the month. But they would not hear of that, and
said it would be much better if they had it then, because otherwise the
interest would accumulate so. I got quite cross with them after a bit,
and told them what I thought of them, and then they gave the gimlet
such an excruciating wrench that I woke up.

The boat seemed stuffy, and my head ached; so I thought I would step
out into the cool night-air. I slipped on what clothes I could find
about—some of my own, and some of George’s and Harris’s—and crept under
the canvas on to the bank.

It was a glorious night. The moon had sunk, and left the quiet earth
alone with the stars. It seemed as if, in the silence and the hush,
while we her children slept, they were talking with her, their
sister—conversing of mighty mysteries in voices too vast and deep for
childish human ears to catch the sound.

They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children
whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they
have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the
echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half
hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there.

And yet it seems so full of comfort and of strength, the night. In its
great presence, our small sorrows creep away, ashamed. The day has been
so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and
of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us.
Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon
our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers,
and smiles; and, though she does not speak, we know what she would say,
and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone.

Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very
silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night’s
heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our
hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away
beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a
mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great
Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that
Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God.

Only those who have worn the crown of suffering can look upon that
wondrous light; and they, when they return, may not speak of it, or
tell the mystery they know.

Once upon a time, through a strange country, there rode some goodly
knights, and their path lay by a deep wood, where tangled briars grew
very thick and strong, and tore the flesh of them that lost their way
therein. And the leaves of the trees that grew in the wood were very
dark and thick, so that no ray of light came through the branches to
lighten the gloom and sadness.

And, as they passed by that dark wood, one knight of those that rode,
missing his comrades, wandered far away, and returned to them no more;
and they, sorely grieving, rode on without him, mourning him as one
dead.

Now, when they reached the fair castle towards which they had been
journeying, they stayed there many days, and made merry; and one night,
as they sat in cheerful ease around the logs that burned in the great
hall, and drank a loving measure, there came the comrade they had lost,
and greeted them. His clothes were ragged, like a beggar’s, and many
sad wounds were on his sweet flesh, but upon his face there shone a
great radiance of deep joy.

And they questioned him, asking him what had befallen him: and he told
them how in the dark wood he had lost his way, and had wandered many
days and nights, till, torn and bleeding, he had lain him down to die.

Then, when he was nigh unto death, lo! through the savage gloom there
came to him a stately maiden, and took him by the hand and led him on
through devious paths, unknown to any man, until upon the darkness of
the wood there dawned a light such as the light of day was unto but as
a little lamp unto the sun; and, in that wondrous light, our way-worn
knight saw as in a dream a vision, and so glorious, so fair the vision
seemed, that of his bleeding wounds he thought no more, but stood as
one entranced, whose joy is deep as is the sea, whereof no man can tell
the depth.

And the vision faded, and the knight, kneeling upon the ground, thanked
the good saint who into that sad wood had strayed his steps, so he had
seen the vision that lay there hid.

And the name of the dark forest was Sorrow; but of the vision that the
good knight saw therein we may not speak nor tell.




CHAPTER XI.


How George, once upon a time, got up early in the morning.—George,
Harris, and Montmorency do not like the look of the cold water.—Heroism
and determination on the part of J.—George and his shirt: story with a
moral.—Harris as cook.—Historical retrospect, specially inserted for
the use of schools.

I woke at six the next morning; and found George awake too. We both
turned round, and tried to go to sleep again, but we could not. Had
there been any particular reason why we should not have gone to sleep
again, but have got up and dressed then and there, we should have
dropped off while we were looking at our watches, and have slept till
ten. As there was no earthly necessity for our getting up under another
two hours at the very least, and our getting up at that time was an
utter absurdity, it was only in keeping with the natural cussedness of
things in general that we should both feel that lying down for five
minutes more would be death to us.

George said that the same kind of thing, only worse, had happened to
him some eighteen months ago, when he was lodging by himself in the
house of a certain Mrs. Gippings. He said his watch went wrong one
evening, and stopped at a quarter-past eight. He did not know this at
the time because, for some reason or other, he forgot to wind it up
when he went to bed (an unusual occurrence with him), and hung it up
over his pillow without ever looking at the thing.

It was in the winter when this happened, very near the shortest day,
and a week of fog into the bargain, so the fact that it was still very
dark when George woke in the morning was no guide to him as to the
time. He reached up, and hauled down his watch. It was a quarter-past
eight.

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” exclaimed George; “and here
have I got to be in the City by nine. Why didn’t somebody call me?
Oh, this is a shame!” And he flung the watch down, and sprang out of
bed, and had a cold bath, and washed himself, and dressed himself, and
shaved himself in cold water because there was not time to wait for the
hot, and then rushed and had another look at the watch.

Whether the shaking it had received in being thrown down on the bed had
started it, or how it was, George could not say, but certain it was
that from a quarter-past eight it had begun to go, and now pointed to
twenty minutes to nine.

George snatched it up, and rushed downstairs. In the sitting-room, all
was dark and silent: there was no fire, no breakfast. George said it
was a wicked shame of Mrs. G., and he made up his mind to tell her what
he thought of her when he came home in the evening. Then he dashed on
his great-coat and hat, and, seizing his umbrella, made for the front
door. The door was not even unbolted. George anathematized Mrs. G. for
a lazy old woman, and thought it was very strange that people could not
get up at a decent, respectable time, unlocked and unbolted the door,
and ran out.

He ran hard for a quarter of a mile, and at the end of that distance
it began to be borne in upon him as a strange and curious thing that
there were so few people about, and that there were no shops open. It
was certainly a very dark and foggy morning, but still it seemed an
unusual course to stop all business on that account. _He_ had to go to
business: why should other people stop in bed merely because it was
dark and foggy!

At length he reached Holborn. Not a shutter was down! not a bus was
about! There were three men in sight, one of whom was a policeman; a
market-cart full of cabbages, and a dilapidated looking cab. George
pulled out his watch and looked at it: it was five minutes to nine! He
stood still and counted his pulse. He stooped down and felt his legs.
Then, with his watch still in his hand, he went up to the policeman,
and asked him if he knew what the time was.

[Picture: George and the policeman] “What’s the time?” said the man,
eyeing George up and down with evident suspicion; “why, if you listen
you will hear it strike.”

George listened, and a neighbouring clock immediately obliged.

“But it’s only gone three!” said George in an injured tone, when it had
finished.

“Well, and how many did you want it to go?” replied the constable.

“Why, nine,” said George, showing his watch.

“Do you know where you live?” said the guardian of public order,
severely.

George thought, and gave the address.

“Oh! that’s where it is, is it?” replied the man; “well, you take my
advice and go there quietly, and take that watch of yours with you; and
don’t let’s have any more of it.”

And George went home again, musing as he walked along, and let himself
in.

At first, when he got in, he determined to undress and go to bed again;
but when he thought of the redressing and re-washing, and the having of
another bath, he determined he would not, but would sit up and go to
sleep in the easy-chair.

But he could not get to sleep: he never felt more wakeful in his life;
so he lit the lamp and got out the chess-board, and played himself
a game of chess. But even that did not enliven him: it seemed slow
somehow; so he gave chess up and tried to read. He did not seem able
to take any sort of interest in reading either, so he put on his coat
again and went out for a walk.

It was horribly lonesome and dismal, and all the policemen he met
regarded him with undisguised suspicion, and turned their lanterns on
him and followed him about, and this had such an effect upon him at
last that he began to feel as if he really had done something, and he
got to slinking down the by-streets and hiding in dark doorways when he
heard the regulation flip-flop approaching.

Of course, this conduct made the force only more distrustful of him
than ever, and they would come and rout him out and ask him what he was
doing there; and when he answered, “Nothing,” he had merely come out
for a stroll (it was then four o’clock in the morning), they looked
as though they did not believe him, and two plain-clothes constables
came home with him to see if he really did live where he had said he
did. They saw him go in with his key, and then they took up a position
opposite and watched the house.

He thought he would light the fire when he got inside, and make himself
some breakfast, just to pass away the time; but he did not seem able
to handle anything from a scuttleful of coals to a teaspoon without
dropping it or falling over it, and making such a noise that he was in
mortal fear that it would wake Mrs. G. up, and that she would think it
was burglars and open the window and call “Police!” and then these two
detectives would rush in and handcuff him, and march him off to the
police-court.

He was in a morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the
trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and
nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years’ penal
servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart. So he gave up trying
to get breakfast, and wrapped himself up in his overcoat and sat in the
easy-chair till Mrs. G came down at half-past seven.

He said he had never got up too early since that morning: it had been
such a warning to him.

We had been sitting huddled up in our rugs while George had been
telling me this true story, and on his finishing it I set to work to
wake up Harris with a scull. The third prod did it: and he turned over
on the other side, and said he would be down in a minute, and that
he would have his lace-up boots. We soon let him know where he was,
however, by the aid of the hitcher, and he sat up suddenly, sending
Montmorency, who had been sleeping the sleep of the just right on the
middle of his chest, sprawling across the boat.

Then we pulled up the canvas, and all four of us poked our heads out
over the off-side, and looked down at the water and shivered. The idea,
overnight, had been that we should get up early in the morning, fling
off our rugs and shawls, and, throwing back the canvas, spring into the
river with a joyous shout, and revel in a long delicious swim. Somehow,
now the morning had come, the notion seemed less tempting. The water
looked damp and chilly: the wind felt cold.

“Well, who’s going to be first in?” said Harris at last.

There was no rush for precedence. George settled the matter so far as
he was concerned by retiring into the boat and pulling on his socks.
Montmorency gave vent to an involuntary howl, as if merely thinking of
the thing had given him the horrors; and Harris said it would be so
difficult to get into the boat again, and went back and sorted out his
trousers.

I did not altogether like to give in, though I did not relish the
plunge. There might be snags about, or weeds, I thought. I meant to
compromise matters by going down to the edge and just throwing the
water over myself; so I took a towel and crept out on the bank and
wormed my way along on to the branch of a tree that dipped down into
the water.

[Picture: In the Thames] It was bitterly cold. The wind cut like a
knife. I thought I would not throw the water over myself after all. I
would go back into the boat and dress; and I turned to do so; and, as I
turned, the silly branch gave way, and I and the towel went in together
with a tremendous splash, and I was out mid-stream with a gallon of
Thames water inside me before I knew what had happened.

“By Jove! old J.’s gone in,” I heard Harris say, as I came blowing to
the surface. “I didn’t think he’d have the pluck to do it. Did you?”

“Is it all right?” sung out George.

“Lovely,” I spluttered back. “You are duffers not to come in. I
wouldn’t have missed this for worlds. Why won’t you try it? It only
wants a little determination.”

But I could not persuade them.

Rather an amusing thing happened while dressing that morning. I was
very cold when I got back into the boat, and, in my hurry to get my
shirt on, I accidentally jerked it into the water. It made me awfully
wild, especially as George burst out laughing. I could not see anything
to laugh at, and I told George so, and he only laughed the more. I
never saw a man laugh so much. I quite lost my temper with him at last,
and I pointed out to him what a drivelling maniac of an imbecile idiot
he was; but he only roared the louder. And then, just as I was landing
the shirt, I noticed that it was not my shirt at all, but George’s,
which I had mistaken for mine; whereupon the humour of the thing struck
me for the first time, and I began to laugh. And the more I looked from
George’s wet shirt to George, roaring with laughter, the more I was
amused, and I laughed so much that I had to let the shirt fall back
into the water again.

“Ar’n’t you—you—going to get it out?” said George, between his shrieks.

I could not answer him at all for a while, I was laughing so, but, at
last, between my peals I managed to jerk out:

“It isn’t my shirt—it’s _yours_!”

I never saw a man’s face change from lively to severe so suddenly in
all my life before.

“What!” he yelled, springing up. “You silly cuckoo! Why can’t you be
more careful what you’re doing? Why the deuce don’t you go and dress
on the bank? You’re not fit to be in a boat, you’re not. Gimme the
hitcher.”

I tried to make him see the fun of the thing, but he could not. George
is very dense at seeing a joke sometimes.

Harris proposed that we should have scrambled eggs for breakfast. He
said he would cook them. It seemed, from his account, that he was very
good at doing scrambled eggs. He often did them at picnics and when out
on yachts. He was quite famous for them. People who had once tasted his
scrambled eggs, so we gathered from his conversation, never cared for
any other food afterwards, but pined away and died when they could not
get them.

It made our mouths water to hear him talk about the things, and we
handed him out the stove and the frying-pan and all the eggs that had
not smashed and gone over everything in the hamper, and begged him to
begin.

He had some trouble in breaking the eggs—or rather not so much trouble
in breaking them exactly as in getting them into the frying-pan when
broken, and keeping them off his trousers, and preventing them from
running up his sleeve; but he fixed some half-a-dozen into the pan at
last, and then squatted down by the side of the stove and chivied them
about with a fork.

It seemed harassing work, so far as George and I could judge. Whenever
he went near the pan he burned himself, and then he would drop
everything and dance round the stove, flicking his fingers about and
cursing the things. Indeed, every time George and I looked round at him
he was sure to be performing this feat. We thought at first that it was
a necessary part of the culinary arrangements.

We did not know what scrambled eggs were, and we fancied that it must
be some Red Indian or Sandwich Islands sort of dish that required
dances and incantations for its proper cooking. Montmorency went and
put his nose over it once, and the fat spluttered up and scalded him,
and then _he_ began dancing and cursing. Altogether it was one of the
most interesting and exciting operations I have ever witnessed. George
and I were both quite sorry when it was over.

The result wa

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/308