THREE MEN IN A BOAT
PART 5
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?
That china
dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white
dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots.
Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of
imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art,
I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my
landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the
circumstance that her aunt gave it to her.
But in 200
years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from
somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold
for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round,
and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour
on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost
no doubt was.
We, in
this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with
it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their
loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china
dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will
have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and
say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand
old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china
dogs.”
The
“sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry
of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs
of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and
sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups;
and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and
“Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back
to Jedo as ancient English curios.
At this
point Harris threw away the sculls, got up and left his seat, and sat on his
back, and stuck his legs in the air. Montmorency howled, and turned a
somersault, and the top hamper jumped up, and all the things came out.
I was
somewhat surprised, but I did not lose my temper. I said, pleasantly
enough:
“Hulloa!
what’s that for?”
“What’s
that for? Why—”
No, on
second thoughts, I will not repeat what Harris said. I may have been to
blame, I admit it; but nothing excuses violence of language and coarseness of
expression, especially in a man who has been carefully brought up, as I know
Harris has been. I was thinking of other things, and forgot, as any one
might easily understand, that I was steering, and the consequence was that we
had got mixed up a good deal with the tow-path. It was difficult to say,
for the moment, which was us and which was the Middlesex bank of the river; but
we found out after a while, and separated ourselves.
Harris,
however, said he had done enough for a bit, and proposed that I should take a
turn; so, as we were in, I got out and took the tow-line, and ran the boat on
past Hampton Court. What a dear old wall that is that runs along by the
river there! I never pass it without feeling better for the sight of
it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old wall; what a charming picture it
would make, with the lichen creeping here, and the moss growing there, a shy
young vine peeping over the top at this spot, to see what is going on upon the
busy river, and the sober old ivy clustering a little farther down! There
are fifty shades and tints and hues in every ten yards of that old wall.
If I could only draw, and knew how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch of
that old wall, I’m sure. I’ve often thought I should like to live at
Hampton Court. It looks so peaceful and so quiet, and it is such a dear
old place to ramble round in the early morning before many people are about.
But,
there, I don’t suppose I should really care for it when it came to actual
practice. It would be so ghastly dull and depressing in the evening, when
your lamp cast uncanny shadows on the panelled walls, and the echo of distant
feet rang through the cold stone corridors, and now drew nearer, and now died
away, and all was death-like silence, save the beating of one’s own heart.
We are
creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life.
That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows more and
more deserted every year. In the sunlight—in the daytime, when Nature is
alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides and the deep woods
well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth has gone to sleep, and
left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome, and we get frightened, like
children in a silent house. Then we sit and sob, and long for the gas-lit
streets, and the sound of human voices, and the answering throb of human
life. We feel so helpless and so little in the great stillness, when the
dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There are so many ghosts about, and
their silent sighs make us feel so sad. Let us gather together in the
great cities, and light huge bonfires of a million gas-jets, and shout and sing
together, and feel brave.
Harris
asked me if I’d ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said he went
in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a map, and
it was so simple that it seemed foolish—hardly worth the twopence charged for
admission. Harris said he thought that map must have been got up as a
practical joke, because it wasn’t a bit like the real thing, and only
misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris took in. He said:
“We’ll
just go in here, so that you can say you’ve been, but it’s very simple.
It’s absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first turning to
the right. We’ll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go and get
some lunch.”
They met
some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had been there for
three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it. Harris told
them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going in, and then
should turn round and come out again. They said it was very kind of him,
and fell behind, and followed.
They
picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they went along,
until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze. People who had given
up all hopes of ever getting either in or out, or of ever seeing their home and
friends again, plucked up courage at the sight of Harris and his party, and
joined the procession, blessing him. Harris said he should judge there
must have been twenty people, following him, in all; and one woman with a baby,
who had been there all the morning, insisted on taking his arm, for fear of
losing him.
Harris
kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his cousin said he
supposed it was a very big maze.
“Oh, one
of the largest in Europe,” said Harris.
“Yes, it
must be,” replied the cousin, “because we’ve walked a good two miles already.”
Harris
began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at last, they
passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris’s cousin swore he had
noticed there seven minutes ago. Harris said: “Oh, impossible!” but the
woman with the baby said, “Not at all,” as she herself had taken it from the child,
and thrown it down there, just before she met Harris. She also added that
she wished she never had met Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was an
impostor. That made Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained
his theory.
“The map
may be all right enough,” said one of the party, “if you know whereabouts in it
we are now.”
Harris
didn’t know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to go back to the
entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part of it there was
not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability of going back to the
entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they turned, and trailed after
Harris again, in the opposite direction. About ten minutes more passed,
and then they found themselves in the centre.
Harris
thought at first of pretending that that was what he had been aiming at; but
the crowd looked dangerous, and he decided to treat it as an accident.
Anyhow,
they had got something to start from then. They did know where they were,
and the map was once more consulted, and the thing seemed simpler than ever,
and off they started for the third time.
And three
minutes later they were back in the centre again.
After
that, they simply couldn’t get anywhere else. Whatever way they turned
brought them back to the middle. It became so regular at length, that
some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take a walk
round, and come back to them. Harris drew out his map again, after a
while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told him to go and
curl his hair with it. Harris said that he couldn’t help feeling that, to
a certain extent, he had become unpopular.
They all
got crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper, and the man came and climbed up
the ladder outside, and shouted out directions to them. But all their
heads were, by this time, in such a confused whirl that they were incapable of
grasping anything, and so the man told them to stop where they were, and he
would come to them. They huddled together, and waited; and he climbed
down, and came in.
He was a
young keeper, as luck would have it, and new to the business; and when he got
in, he couldn’t find them, and he wandered about, trying to get to them, and
then he got lost. They caught sight of him, every now and then,
rushing about the other side of the hedge, and he would see them, and rush to
get to them, and they would wait there for about five minutes, and then he
would reappear again in exactly the same spot, and ask them where they had
been.
They had
to wait till one of the old keepers came back from his dinner before they got
out.
Harris
said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge; and we
agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way back.
To be continued
