Three Men in a Boat - 03

We made a list of the things to be taken, and a pretty lengthy one it was, before we parted that evening.  The next day, which was Friday, we got them all together, and met in the evening to pack.  We got a big Gladstone for the clothes, and a couple of hampers for the victuals and the cooking utensils.  We moved the table up against the window, piled everything in a heap in the middle of the floor, and sat round and looked at it.
I said I’d pack.
I rather pride myself on my packing.  Packing is one of those many things that I feel I know more about than any other person living.  (It surprises me myself, sometimes, how many of these subjects there are.)  I impressed the fact upon George and Harris, and told them that they had better leave the whole matter entirely to me.  They fell into the suggestion with a readiness that had something uncanny about it.  George put on a pipe and spread himself over the easy-chair, and Harris cocked his legs on the table and lit a cigar.
This was hardly what I intended.  What I had meant, of course, was, that I should boss the job, and that Harris and George should potter about under my directions, I pushing them aside every now and then with, “Oh, you—!”  “Here, let me do it.”  “There you are, simple enough!”—really teaching them, as you might say.  Their taking it in the way they did irritated me.  There is nothing does irritate me more than seeing other people sitting about doing nothing when I’m working.
I lived with a man once who used to make me mad that way.  He would loll on the sofa and watch me doing things by the hour together, following me round the room with his eyes, wherever I went.  He said it did him real good to look on at me, messing about.  He said it made him feel that life was not an idle dream to be gaped and yawned through, but a noble task, full of duty and stern work.  He said he often wondered now how he could have gone on before he met me, never having anybody to look at while they worked.
Now, I’m not like that.  I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working.  I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do.  It is my energetic nature.  I can’t help it.
However, I did not say anything, but started the packing.  It seemed a longer job than I had thought it was going to be; but I got the bag finished at last, and I sat on it and strapped it.
“Ain’t you going to put the boots in?” said Harris.
And I looked round, and found I had forgotten them.  That’s just like Harris.  He couldn’t have said a word until I’d got the bag shut and strapped, of course.  And George laughed—one of those irritating, senseless, chuckle-headed, crack-jawed laughs of his.  They do make me so wild.
I opened the bag and packed the boots in; and then, just as I was going to close it, a horrible idea occurred to me.  Had I packed my tooth-brush?  I don’t know how it is, but I never do know whether I’ve packed my tooth-brush.
My tooth-brush is a thing that haunts me when I’m travelling, and makes my life a misery.  I dream that I haven’t packed it, and wake up in a cold perspiration, and get out of bed and hunt for it.  And, in the morning, I pack it before I have used it, and have to unpack again to get it, and it is always the last thing I turn out of the bag; and then I repack and forget it, and have to rush upstairs for it at the last moment and carry it to the railway station, wrapped up in my pocket-handkerchief.
Of course I had to turn every mortal thing out now, and, of course, I could not find it.  I rummaged the things up into much the same state that they must have been before the world was created, and when chaos reigned.  Of course, I found George’s and Harris’s eighteen times over, but I couldn’t find my own.  I put the things back one by one, and held everything up and shook it.  Then I found it inside a boot.  I repacked once more.
When I had finished, George asked if the soap was in.  I said I didn’t care a hang whether the soap was in or whether it wasn’t; and I slammed the bag to and strapped it, and found that I had packed my tobacco-pouch in it, and had to re-open it.  It got shut up finally at 10.5 p.m., and then there remained the hampers to do.  Harris said that we should be wanting to start in less than twelve hours’ time, and thought that he and George had better do the rest; and I agreed and sat down, and they had a go.
They began in a light-hearted spirit, evidently intending to show me how to do it.  I made no comment; I only waited.  When George is hanged, Harris will be the worst packer in this world; and I looked at the piles of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies, and stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon become exciting.
It did.  They started with breaking a cup.  That was the first thing they did.  They did that just to show you what they could do, and to get you interested.
Then Harris packed the strawberry jam on top of a tomato and squashed it, and they had to pick out the tomato with a teaspoon.
And then it was George’s turn, and he trod on the butter.  I didn’t say anything, but I came over and sat on the edge of the table and watched them.  It irritated them more than anything I could have said.  I felt that.  It made them nervous and excited, and they stepped on things, and put things behind them, and then couldn’t find them when they wanted them; and they packed the pies at the bottom, and put heavy things on top, and smashed the pies in.
They upset salt over everything, and as for the butter!  I never saw two men do more with one-and-twopence worth of butter in my whole life than they did.  After George had got it off his slipper, they tried to put it in the kettle.  It wouldn’t go in, and what was in wouldn’t come out.  They did scrape it out at last, and put it down on a chair, and Harris sat on it, and it stuck to him, and they went looking for it all over the room.
“I’ll take my oath I put it down on that chair,” said George, staring at the empty seat.
“I saw you do it myself, not a minute ago,” said Harris.
Then they started round the room again looking for it; and then they met again in the centre, and stared at one another.
“Most extraordinary thing I ever heard of,” said George.
“So mysterious!” said Harris.
Then George got round at the back of Harris and saw it.
“Why, here it is all the time,” he exclaimed, indignantly.
“Where?” cried Harris, spinning round.
“Stand still, can’t you!” roared George, flying after him.
And they got it off, and packed it in the teapot.
Montmorency was in it all, of course.  Montmorency’s ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at.  If he can squirm in anywhere where he particularly is not wanted, and be a perfect nuisance, and make people mad, and have things thrown at his head, then he feels his day has not been wasted.
To get somebody to stumble over him, and curse him steadily for an hour, is his highest aim and object; and, when he has succeeded in accomplishing this, his conceit becomes quite unbearable.
He came and sat down on things, just when they were wanted to be packed; and he laboured under the fixed belief that, whenever Harris or George reached out their hand for anything, it was his cold, damp nose that they wanted.  He put his leg into the jam, and he worried the teaspoons, and he pretended that the lemons were rats, and got into the hamper and killed three of them before Harris could land him with the frying-pan.
Harris said I encouraged him.  I didn’t encourage him.  A dog like that don’t want any encouragement.  It’s the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that.
The packing was done at 12.50; and Harris sat on the big hamper, and said he hoped nothing would be found broken.  George said that if anything was broken it was broken, which reflection seemed to comfort him.  He also said he was ready for bed.  We were all ready for bed.  Harris was to sleep with us that night, and we went upstairs.
We tossed for beds, and Harris had to sleep with me.  He said:
“Do you prefer the inside or the outside, J.?”
I said I generally preferred to sleep inside a bed.
Harris said it was old.
George said:
“What time shall I wake you fellows?”
Harris said:
“Seven.”
I said:
“No—six,” because I wanted to write some letters.
Harris and I had a bit of a row over it, but at last split the difference, and said half-past six.
“Wake us at 6.30, George,” we said.
George made no answer, and we found, on going over, that he had been asleep for some time; so we placed the bath where he could tumble into it on getting out in the morning, and went to bed ourselves.


CHAPTER V.
Mrs. P. arouses us.—George, the sluggard.—The “weather forecast” swindle.—Our luggage.—Depravity of the small boy.—The people gather round us.—We drive off in great style, and arrive at Waterloo.—Innocence of South Western Officials concerning such worldly things as trains.—We are afloat, afloat in an open boat.
It was Mrs. Poppets that woke me up next morning.
She said:
“Do you know that it’s nearly nine o’clock, sir?”
“Nine o’ what?” I cried, starting up.
“Nine o’clock,” she replied, through the keyhole.  “I thought you was a-oversleeping yourselves.”
I woke Harris, and told him.  He said:
“I thought you wanted to get up at six?”
“So I did,” I answered; “why didn’t you wake me?”
“How could I wake you, when you didn’t wake me?” he retorted.  “Now we shan’t get on the water till after twelve.  I wonder you take the trouble to get up at all.”
“Um,” I replied, “lucky for you that I do.  If I hadn’t woke you, you’d have lain there for the whole fortnight.”
We snarled at one another in this strain for the next few minutes, when we were interrupted by a defiant snore from George.  It reminded us, for the first time since our being called, of his existence.  There he lay—the man who had wanted to know what time he should wake us—on his back, with his mouth wide open, and his knees stuck up.
I don’t know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.  It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man’s life—the priceless moments that will never come back to him again—being wasted in mere brutish sleep.
There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away from him, unused.  He might have been up stuffing himself with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with the slavey, instead of sprawling there, sunk in soul-clogging oblivion.
It was a terrible thought.  Harris and I appeared to be struck by it at the same instant.  We determined to save him, and, in this noble resolve, our own dispute was forgotten.  We flew across and slung the clothes off him, and Harris landed him one with a slipper, and I shouted in his ear, and he awoke.
“Wasermarrer?” he observed, sitting up.
“Get up, you fat-headed chunk!” roared Harris.  “It’s quarter to ten.”
“What!” he shrieked, jumping out of bed into the bath; “Who the thunder put this thing here?”
We told him he must have been a fool not to see the bath.
We finished dressing, and, when it came to the extras, we remembered that we had packed the tooth-brushes and the brush and comb (that tooth-brush of mine will be the death of me, I know), and we had to go downstairs, and fish them out of the bag.  And when we had done that George wanted the shaving tackle.  We told him that he would have to go without shaving that morning, as we weren’t going to unpack that bag again for him, nor for anyone like him.
He said:
“Don’t be absurd.  How can I go into the City like this?”
It was certainly rather rough on the City, but what cared we for human suffering?  As Harris said, in his common, vulgar way, the City would have to lump it.
We went downstairs to breakfast.  Montmorency had invited two other dogs to come and see him off, and they were whiling away the time by fighting on the doorstep.  We calmed them with an umbrella, and sat down to chops and cold beef.
Harris said:
“The great thing is to make a good breakfast,” and he started with a couple of chops, saying that he would take these while they were hot, as the beef could wait.
George got hold of the paper, and read us out the boating fatalities, and the weather forecast, which latter prophesied “rain, cold, wet to fine” (whatever more than usually ghastly thing in weather that may be), “occasional local thunder-storms, east wind, with general depression over the Midland Counties (London and Channel).  Bar. falling.”
I do think that, of all the silly, irritating tomfoolishness by which we are plagued, this “weather-forecast” fraud is about the most aggravating.  It “forecasts” precisely what happened yesterday or a the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen to-day.
I remember a holiday of mine being completely ruined one late autumn by our paying attention to the weather report of the local newspaper.  “Heavy showers, with thunderstorms, may be expected to-day,” it would say on Monday, and so we would give up our picnic, and stop indoors all day, waiting for the rain.—And people would pass the house, going off in wagonettes and coaches as jolly and merry as could be, the sun shining out, and not a cloud to be seen.
“Ah!” we said, as we stood looking out at them through the window, “won’t they come home soaked!”
And we chuckled to think how wet they were going to get, and came back and stirred the fire, and got our books, and arranged our specimens of seaweed and cockle shells.  By twelve o’clock, with the sun pouring into the room, the heat became quite oppressive, and we wondered when those heavy showers and occasional thunderstorms were going to begin.
“Ah! they’ll come in the afternoon, you’ll find,” we said to each other.  “Oh, won’t those people get wet.  What a lark!”
At one o’clock, the landlady would come in to ask if we weren’t going out, as it seemed such a lovely day.
“No, no,” we replied, with a knowing chuckle, “not we.  We don’t mean to get wet—no, no.”
And when the afternoon was nearly gone, and still there was no sign of rain, we tried to cheer ourselves up with the idea that it would come down all at once, just as the people had started for home, and were out of the reach of any shelter, and that they would thus get more drenched than ever.  But not a drop ever fell, and it finished a grand day, and a lovely night after it.
The next morning we would read that it was going to be a “warm, fine to set-fair day; much heat;” and we would dress ourselves in flimsy things, and go out, and, half-an-hour after we had started, it would commence to rain hard, and a bitterly cold wind would spring up, and both would keep on steadily for the whole day, and we would come home with colds and rheumatism all over us, and go to bed.
The weather is a thing that is beyond me altogether.  I never can understand it.  The barometer is useless: it is as misleading as the newspaper forecast.
There was one hanging up in a hotel at Oxford at which I was staying last spring, and, when I got there, it was pointing to “set fair.”  It was simply pouring with rain outside, and had been all day; and I couldn’t quite make matters out.  I tapped the barometer, and it jumped up and pointed to “very dry.”  The Boots stopped as he was passing, and said he expected it meant to-morrow.  I fancied that maybe it was thinking of the week before last, but Boots said, No, he thought not.
I tapped it again the next morning, and it went up still higher, and the rain came down faster than ever.  On Wednesday I went and hit it again, and the pointer went round towards “set fair,” “very dry,” and “much heat,” until it was stopped by the peg, and couldn’t go any further.  It tried its best, but the instrument was built so that it couldn’t prophesy fine weather any harder than it did without breaking itself.  It evidently wanted to go on, and prognosticate drought, and water famine, and sunstroke, and simooms, and such things, but the peg prevented it, and it had to be content with pointing to the mere commonplace “very dry.”
Meanwhile, the rain came down in a steady torrent, and the lower part of the town was under water, owing to the river having overflowed.
Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a prolonged spell of grand weather some time, and read out a poem which was printed over the top of the oracle, about
“Long foretold, long last;
Short notice, soon past.”
The fine weather never came that summer.  I expect that machine must have been referring to the following spring.
Then there are those new style of barometers, the long straight ones.  I never can make head or tail of those.  There is one side for 10 a.m. yesterday, and one side for 10 a.m. to-day; but you can’t always get there as early as ten, you know.  It rises or falls for rain and fine, with much or less wind, and one end is “Nly” and the other “Ely” (what’s Ely got to do with it?), and if you tap it, it doesn’t tell you anything.  And you’ve got to correct it to sea-level, and reduce it to Fahrenheit, and even then I don’t know the answer.
But who wants to be foretold the weather?  It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.  The prophet we like is the old man who, on the particularly gloomy-looking morning of some day when we particularly want it to be fine, looks round the horizon with a particularly knowing eye, and says:
“Oh no, sir, I think it will clear up all right.  It will break all right enough, sir.”
“Ah, he knows”, we say, as we wish him good-morning, and start off; “wonderful how these old fellows can tell!”
And we feel an affection for that man which is not at all lessened by the circumstances of its not clearing up, but continuing to rain steadily all day.
“Ah, well,” we feel, “he did his best.”
For the man that prophesies us bad weather, on the contrary, we entertain only bitter and revengeful thoughts.
“Going to clear up, d’ye think?” we shout, cheerily, as we pass.
“Well, no, sir; I’m afraid it’s settled down for the day,” he replies, shaking his head.
“Stupid old fool!” we mutter, “what’s he know about it?”  And, if his portent proves correct, we come back feeling still more angry against him, and with a vague notion that, somehow or other, he has had something to do with it.
It was too bright and sunny on this especial morning for George’s blood-curdling readings about “Bar. falling,” “atmospheric disturbance, passing in an oblique line over Southern Europe,” and “pressure increasing,” to very much upset us: and so, finding that he could not make us wretched, and was only wasting his time, he sneaked the cigarette that I had carefully rolled up for myself, and went.
Then Harris and I, having finished up the few things left on the table, carted out our luggage on to the doorstep, and waited for a cab.


There seemed a good deal of luggage, when we put it all together.  There was the Gladstone and the small hand-bag, and the two hampers, and a large roll of rugs, and some four or five overcoats and macintoshes, and a few umbrellas, and then there was a melon by itself in a bag, because it was too bulky to go in anywhere, and a couple of pounds of grapes in another bag, and a Japanese paper umbrella, and a frying pan, which, being too long to pack, we had wrapped round with brown paper.
It did look a lot, and Harris and I began to feel rather ashamed of it, though why we should be, I can’t see.  No cab came by, but the street boys did, and got interested in the show, apparently, and stopped.
Biggs’s boy was the first to come round.  Biggs is our greengrocer, and his chief talent lies in securing the services of the most abandoned and unprincipled errand-boys that civilisation has as yet produced.  If anything more than usually villainous in the boy-line crops up in our neighbourhood, we know that it is Biggs’s latest.  I was told that, at the time of the Great Coram Street murder, it was promptly concluded by our street that Biggs’s boy (for that period) was at the bottom of it, and had he not been able, in reply to the severe cross-examination to which he was subjected by No. 19, when he called there for orders the morning after the crime (assisted by No. 21, who happened to be on the step at the time), to prove a complete alibi, it would have gone hard with him.  I didn’t know Biggs’s boy at that time, but, from what I have seen of them since, I should not have attached much importance to that alibi myself.
Biggs’s boy, as I have said, came round the corner.  He was evidently in a great hurry when he first dawned upon the vision, but, on catching sight of Harris and me, and Montmorency, and the things, he eased up and stared.  Harris and I frowned at him.  This might have wounded a more sensitive nature, but Biggs’s boys are not, as a rule, touchy.  He came to a dead stop, a yard from our step, and, leaning up against the railings, and selecting a straw to chew, fixed us with his eye.  He evidently meant to see this thing out.
In another moment, the grocer’s boy passed on the opposite side of the street.  Biggs’s boy hailed him:
“Hi! ground floor o’ 42’s a-moving.”
The grocer’s boy came across, and took up a position on the other side of the step.  Then the young gentleman from the boot-shop stopped, and joined Biggs’s boy; while the empty-can superintendent from “The Blue Posts” took up an independent position on the curb.
“They ain’t a-going to starve, are they?” said the gentleman from the boot-shop.
“Ah! you’d want to take a thing or two with you,” retorted “The Blue Posts,” “if you was a-going to cross the Atlantic in a small boat.”
“They ain’t a-going to cross the Atlantic,” struck in Biggs’s boy; “they’re a-going to find Stanley.”
By this time, quite a small crowd had collected, and people were asking each other what was the matter.  One party (the young and giddy portion of the crowd) held that it was a wedding, and pointed out Harris as the bridegroom; while the elder and more thoughtful among the populace inclined to the idea that it was a funeral, and that I was probably the corpse’s brother.
At last, an empty cab turned up (it is a street where, as a rule, and when they are not wanted, empty cabs pass at the rate of three a minute, and hang about, and get in your way), and packing ourselves and our belongings into it, and shooting out a couple of Montmorency’s friends, who had evidently sworn never to forsake him, we drove away amidst the cheers of the crowd, Biggs’s boy shying a carrot after us for luck.
We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from.  Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it.  The porter who took our things thought it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number one.  The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.
To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man, who said he had seen it at number three platform.  We went to number three platform, but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop.  But they were sure it wasn’t the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn’t they couldn’t say.
Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the high-level platform; said he thought he knew the train.  So we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston.  He said he couldn’t say for certain of course, but that he rather thought he was.  Anyhow, if he wasn’t the 11.5 for Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got there.  We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.
“Nobody will ever know, on this line,” we said, “what you are, or where you’re going.  You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston.”
“Well, I don’t know, gents,” replied the noble fellow, “but I suppose some train’s got to go to Kingston; and I’ll do it.  Gimme the half-crown.”
Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
We learnt, afterwards, that the train we had come by was really the Exeter mail, and that they had spent hours at Waterloo, looking for it, and nobody knew what had become of it.
Our boat was waiting for us at Kingston just below bridge, and to it we wended our way, and round it we stored our luggage, and into it we stepped.
“Are you all right, sir?” said the man.
“Right it is,” we answered; and with Harris at the sculls and I at the tiller-lines, and Montmorency, unhappy and deeply suspicious, in the prow, out we shot on to the waters which, for a fortnight, were to be our home.
CHAPTER VI.
Kingston.—Instructive remarks on early English history.—Instructive observations on carved oak and life in general.—Sad case of Stivvings, junior.—Musings on antiquity.—I forget that I am steering.—Interesting result.—Hampton Court Maze.—Harris as a guide.
It was a glorious morning, late spring or early summer, as you care to take it, when the dainty sheen of grass and leaf is blushing to a deeper green; and the year seems like a fair young maid, trembling with strange, wakening pulses on the brink of womanhood.
The quaint back streets of Kingston, where they came down to the water’s edge, looked quite picturesque in the flashing sunlight, the glinting river with its drifting barges, the wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas on the other side, Harris, in a red and orange blazer, grunting away at the sculls, the distant glimpses of the grey old palace of the Tudors, all made a sunny picture, so bright but calm, so full of life, and yet so peaceful, that, early in the day though it was, I felt myself being dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.
I mused on Kingston, or “Kyningestun,” as it was once called in the days when Saxon “kinges” were crowned there.  Great 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.