THREE MEN IN A BOAT
PART 11
CHAPTER XII.
Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn.—Disadvantages of living in same house with
pair of lovers.—A trying time for the English nation.—A Night search for the
picturesque.—Homeless and houseless.—Harris prepares to die.—An angel comes
along.—Effect of sudden joy on Harris.—A little supper.—Lunch.—High price for
mustard.—A fearful battle.—Maidenhead.—Sailing.—Three fishers.—We are cursed.
I was
sitting on the bank, conjuring up this scene to myself, when George remarked
that when I was quite rested, perhaps I would not mind helping to wash up; and,
thus recalled from the days of the glorious past to the prosaic present, with
all its misery and sin, I slid down into the boat and cleaned out the
frying-pan with a stick of wood and a tuft of grass, polishing it up finally
with George’s wet shirt.
We went
over to Magna Charta Island, and had a look at the stone which stands in the
cottage there and on which the great Charter is said to have been signed;
though, as to whether it really was signed there, or, as some say, on the other
bank at “Runningmede,” I decline to commit myself. As far as my own
personal opinion goes, however, I am inclined to give weight to the popular
island theory. Certainly, had I been one of the Barons, at the time, I
should have strongly urged upon my comrades the advisability of our getting
such a slippery customer as King John on to the island, where there was less
chance of surprises and tricks.
There are
the ruins of an old priory in the grounds of Ankerwyke House, which is close to
Picnic Point, and it was round about the grounds of this old priory that Henry
VIII. is said to have waited for and met Anne Boleyn. He also used to
meet her at Hever Castle in Kent, and also somewhere near St. Albans. It
must have been difficult for the people of England in those days to have found
a spot where these thoughtless young folk were not spooning.
Have you
ever been in a house where there are a couple courting? It is most
trying. You think you will go and sit in the drawing-room, and you march
off there. As you open the door, you hear a noise as if somebody had
suddenly recollected something, and, when you get in, Emily is over by the
window, full of interest in the opposite side of the road, and your friend,
John Edward, is at the other end of the room with his whole soul held in thrall
by photographs of other people’s relatives.
“Oh!” you
say, pausing at the door, “I didn’t know anybody was here.”
“Oh!
didn’t you?” says Emily, coldly, in a tone which implies that she does not
believe you.
You hang
about for a bit, then you say:
“It’s very
dark. Why don’t you light the gas?”
John
Edward says, “Oh!” he hadn’t noticed it; and Emily says that papa does not like
the gas lit in the afternoon.
You tell
them one or two items of news, and give them your views and opinions on the
Irish question; but this does not appear to interest them. All they
remark on any subject is, “Oh!” “Is it?” “Did he?” “Yes,” and “You
don’t say so!” And, after ten minutes of such style of conversation, you
edge up to the door, and slip out, and are surprised to find that the door
immediately closes behind you, and shuts itself, without your having touched
it.
Half an
hour later, you think you will try a pipe in the conservatory. The only
chair in the place is occupied by Emily; and John Edward, if the language of
clothes can be relied upon, has evidently been sitting on the floor. They
do not speak, but they give you a look that says all that can be said in a
civilised community; and you back out promptly and shut the door behind you.
You are
afraid to poke your nose into any room in the house now; so, after walking up
and down the stairs for a while, you go and sit in your own bedroom. This
becomes uninteresting, however, after a time, and so you put on your hat and
stroll out into the garden. You walk down the path, and as you pass the
summer-house you glance in, and there are those two young idiots, huddled up
into one corner of it; and they see you, and are evidently under the idea that,
for some wicked purpose of your own, you are following them about.
“Why don’t
they have a special room for this sort of thing, and make people keep to it?”
you mutter; and you rush back to the hall and get your umbrella and go out.
It must
have been much like this when that foolish boy Henry VIII. was courting his
little Anne. People in Buckinghamshire would have come upon them
unexpectedly when they were mooning round Windsor and Wraysbury, and have
exclaimed, “Oh! you here!” and Henry would have blushed and said, “Yes; he’d
just come over to see a man;” and Anne would have said, “Oh, I’m so glad to see
you! Isn’t it funny? I’ve just met Mr. Henry VIII. in the lane, and
he’s going the same way I am.”
Then those
people would have gone away and said to themselves: “Oh! we’d better get out of
here while this billing and cooing is on. We’ll go down to Kent.”
And they
would go to Kent, and the first thing they would see in Kent, when they got
there, would be Henry and Anne fooling round Hever Castle.
“Oh, drat
this!” they would have said. “Here, let’s go away. I can’t stand
any more of it. Let’s go to St. Albans—nice quiet place, St. Albans.”
And when
they reached St. Albans, there would be that wretched couple, kissing under the
Abbey walls. Then these folks would go and be pirates until the marriage
was over.
From
Picnic Point to Old Windsor Lock is a delightful bit of the river. A
shady road, dotted here and there with dainty little cottages, runs by the bank
up to the “Bells of Ouseley,” a picturesque inn, as most up-river inns are, and
a place where a very good glass of ale may be drunk—so Harris says; and on a
matter of this kind you can take Harris’s word. Old Windsor is a famous
spot in its way. Edward the Confessor had a palace here, and here the
great Earl Godwin was proved guilty by the justice of that age of having
encompassed the death of the King’s brother. Earl Godwin broke a piece of
bread and held it in his hand.
“If I am
guilty,” said the Earl, “may this bread choke me when I eat it!”
Then he
put the bread into his mouth and swallowed it, and it choked him, and he died.
After you
pass Old Windsor, the river is somewhat uninteresting, and does not become
itself again until you are nearing Boveney. George and I towed up past
the Home Park, which stretches along the right bank from Albert to Victoria
Bridge; and as we were passing Datchet, George asked me if I remembered our
first trip up the river, and when we landed at Datchet at ten o’clock at night,
and wanted to go to bed.
I answered
that I did remember it. It will be some time before I forget it.
It was the
Saturday before the August Bank Holiday. We were tired and hungry, we
same three, and when we got to Datchet we took out the hamper, the two bags,
and the rugs and coats, and such like things, and started off to look for
diggings. We passed a very pretty little hotel, with clematis and creeper
over the porch; but there was no honeysuckle about it, and, for some reason or
other, I had got my mind fixed on honeysuckle, and I said:
“Oh, don’t
let’s go in there! Let’s go on a bit further, and see if there isn’t one
with honeysuckle over it.”
So we went
on till we came to another hotel. That was a very nice hotel, too, and it
had honey-suckle on it, round at the side; but Harris did not like the look of
a man who was leaning against the front door. He said he didn’t look a
nice man at all, and he wore ugly boots: so we went on further. We went a
goodish way without coming across any more hotels, and then we met a man, and
asked him to direct us to a few.
He said:
“Why, you
are coming away from them. You must turn right round and go back, and
then you will come to the Stag.”
We said:
“Oh, we
had been there, and didn’t like it—no honeysuckle over it.”
“Well,
then,” he said, “there’s the Manor House, just opposite. Have you tried
that?”
Harris
replied that we did not want to go there—didn’t like the looks of a man who was
stopping there—Harris did not like the colour of his hair, didn’t like his
boots, either.
“Well, I
don’t know what you’ll do, I’m sure,” said our informant; “because they are the
only two inns in the place.”
“No other
inns!” exclaimed Harris.
“None,”
replied the man.
“What on
earth are we to do?” cried Harris.
Then
George spoke up. He said Harris and I could get an hotel built for us, if
we liked, and have some people made to put in. For his part, he was going
back to the Stag.
The
greatest minds never realise their ideals in any matter; and Harris and I
sighed over the hollowness of all earthly desires, and followed George.
We took
our traps into the Stag, and laid them down in the hall.
The
landlord came up and said:
“Good
evening, gentlemen.”
“Oh, good
evening,” said George; “we want three beds, please.”
“Very
sorry, sir,” said the landlord; “but I’m afraid we can’t manage it.”
“Oh, well,
never mind,” said George, “two will do. Two of us can sleep in one bed,
can’t we?” he continued, turning to Harris and me.
Harris
said, “Oh, yes;” he thought George and I could sleep in one bed very easily.
“Very
sorry, sir,” again repeated the landlord: “but we really haven’t got a bed
vacant in the whole house. In fact, we are putting two, and even three
gentlemen in one bed, as it is.”
This
staggered us for a bit.
But
Harris, who is an old traveller, rose to the occasion, and, laughing cheerily,
said:
“Oh, well,
we can’t help it. We must rough it. You must give us a shake-down
in the billiard-room.”
“Very
sorry, sir. Three gentlemen sleeping on the billiard-table already, and
two in the coffee-room. Can’t possibly take you in to-night.”
We picked
up our things, and went over to the Manor House. It was a pretty little
place. I said I thought I should like it better than the other house; and
Harris said, “Oh, yes,” it would be all right, and we needn’t look at the man
with the red hair; besides, the poor fellow couldn’t help having red hair.
Harris
spoke quite kindly and sensibly about it.
The people
at the Manor House did not wait to hear us talk. The landlady met us on
the doorstep with the greeting that we were the fourteenth party she had turned
away within the last hour and a half. As for our meek suggestions of
stables, billiard-room, or coal-cellars, she laughed them all to scorn: all
these nooks had been snatched up long ago.
Did she
know of any place in the whole village where we could get shelter for the
night?
“Well, if
we didn’t mind roughing it—she did not recommend it, mind—but there was a
little beershop half a mile down the Eton road—”
We waited
to hear no more; we caught up the hamper and the bags, and the coats and rugs,
and parcels, and ran. The distance seemed more like a mile than half a
mile, but we reached the place at last, and rushed, panting, into the bar.
The people
at the beershop were rude. They merely laughed at us. There were
only three beds in the whole house, and they had seven single gentlemen and two
married couples sleeping there already. A kind-hearted bargeman, however,
who happened to be in the tap-room, thought we might try the grocer’s, next
door to the Stag, and we went back.
The
grocer’s was full. An old woman we met in the shop then kindly took us
along with her for a quarter of a mile, to a lady friend of hers, who
occasionally let rooms to gentlemen.
This old
woman walked very slowly, and we were twenty minutes getting to her lady
friend’s. She enlivened the journey by describing to us, as we trailed
along, the various pains she had in her back.
Her lady
friend’s rooms were let. From there we were recommended to No. 27.
No. 27 was full, and sent us to No. 32, and 32 was full.
Then we
went back into the high road, and Harris sat down on the hamper and said he
would go no further. He said it seemed a quiet spot, and he would like to
die there. He requested George and me to kiss his mother for him, and to
tell all his relations that he forgave them and died happy.
At that
moment an angel came by in the disguise of a small boy (and I cannot think of
any more effective disguise an angel could have assumed), with a can of beer in
one hand, and in the other something at the end of a string, which he let down
on to every flat stone he came across, and then pulled up again, this producing
a peculiarly unattractive sound, suggestive of suffering.
We asked
this heavenly messenger (as we discovered him afterwards to be) if he knew of
any lonely house, whose occupants were few and feeble (old ladies or paralysed
gentlemen preferred), who could be easily frightened into giving up their beds
for the night to three desperate men; or, if not this, could he recommend us to
an empty pigstye, or a disused limekiln, or anything of that sort. He did
not know of any such place—at least, not one handy; but he said that, if we
liked to come with him, his mother had a room to spare, and could put us up for
the night.
We fell
upon his neck there in the moonlight and blessed him, and it would have made a
very beautiful picture if the boy himself had not been so over-powered by our
emotion as to be unable to sustain himself under it, and sunk to the ground,
letting us all down on top of him. Harris was so overcome with joy that
he fainted, and had to seize the boy’s beer-can and half empty it before he
could recover consciousness, and then he started off at a run, and left George
and me to bring on the luggage.
It was a
little four-roomed cottage where the boy lived, and his mother—good soul!—gave
us hot bacon for supper, and we ate it all—five pounds—and a jam tart
afterwards, and two pots of tea, and then we went to bed. There were two
beds in the room; one was a 2ft. 6in. truckle bed, and George and I slept in
that, and kept in by tying ourselves together with a sheet; and the other was
the little boy’s bed, and Harris had that all to himself, and we found him, in
the morning, with two feet of bare leg sticking out at the bottom, and George
and I used it to hang the towels on while we bathed.
We were
not so uppish about what sort of hotel we would have, next time we went to
Datchet.
To return
to our present trip: nothing exciting happened, and we tugged steadily on to a
little below Monkey Island, where we drew up and lunched. We tackled the
cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we had forgotten to bring any
mustard. I don’t think I ever in my life, before or since, felt I wanted
mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it then. I don’t care for mustard as
a rule, and it is very seldom that I take it at all, but I would have given
worlds for it then.
I don’t
know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who had brought
me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have had them all.
I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can’t get it.
Harris
said he would have given worlds for mustard too. It would have been a
good thing for anybody who had come up to that spot with a can of mustard,
then: he would have been set up in worlds for the rest of his life.
But
there! I daresay both Harris and I would have tried to back out of the
bargain after we had got the mustard. One makes these extravagant offers
in moments of excitement, but, of course, when one comes to think of it, one
sees how absurdly out of proportion they are with the value of the required
article. I heard a man, going up a mountain in Switzerland, once say he
would give worlds for a glass of beer, and, when he came to a little shanty
where they kept it, he kicked up a most fearful row because they charged him
five francs for a bottle of Bass. He said it was a scandalous imposition,
and he wrote to the Times about it.
It cast a
gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in
silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of
the happy days of childhood, and sighed. We brightened up a bit, however,
over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine-apple from the
bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that
life was worth living after all.
We are
very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the
tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a
spoon ready.
Then we
looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in
the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the
bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook
it. There was no tin-opener to be found.
Then
Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut
himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up,
and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I
tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the
hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet
of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.
Then we
all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a
field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out
the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone
against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air,
and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.
It was
George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now
(what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and
the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through,
George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew,
with fresh exaggerations every time.
Harris got
off with merely a flesh wound.
After
that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was
worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.
We beat it
out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to
geometry—but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and
knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness,
that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat
round it on the grass and looked at it.
There was
one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it
drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and
flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses
at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused
till we reached Maidenhead.
Maidenhead
itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell
and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels,
patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls. It is the witch’s kitchen
from which go forth those demons of the river—steam-launches. The London
Journal duke always has his “little place” at Maidenhead; and the heroine
of the three-volume novel always dines there when she goes out on the spree
with somebody else’s husband.
We went
through Maidenhead quickly, and then eased up, and took leisurely that grand
reach beyond Boulter’s and Cookham locks. Clieveden Woods still wore
their dainty dress of spring, and rose up, from the water’s edge, in one long
harmony of blended shades of fairy green. In its unbroken loveliness this
is, perhaps, the sweetest stretch of all the river, and lingeringly we slowly
drew our little boat away from its deep peace.
We pulled
up in the backwater, just below Cookham, and had tea; and, when we were through
the lock, it was evening. A stiffish breeze had sprung up—in our favour,
for a wonder; for, as a rule on the river, the wind is always dead against you
whatever way you go. It is against you in the morning, when you start for
a day’s trip, and you pull a long distance, thinking how easy it will be to
come back with the sail. Then, after tea, the wind veers round, and you
have to pull hard in its teeth all the way home.
When you
forget to take the sail at all, then the wind is consistently in your favour
both ways. But there! this world is only a probation, and man was born to
trouble as the sparks fly upward.
This
evening, however, they had evidently made a mistake, and had put the wind round
at our back instead of in our face. We kept very quiet about it, and got
the sail up quickly before they found it out, and then we spread ourselves
about the boat in thoughtful attitudes, and the sail bellied out, and strained,
and grumbled at the mast, and the boat flew.
I steered.
There is
no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to
flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams. The wings of the rushing
wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer
the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you
are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her
glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your
spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air
are singing to you. The earth seems far away and little; and the clouds,
so close above your head, are brothers, and you stretch your arms to them.
We had the
river to ourselves, except that, far in the distance, we could see a
fishing-punt, moored in mid-stream, on which three fishermen sat; and we
skimmed over the water, and passed the wooded banks, and no one spoke.
I was
steering.
As we drew
nearer, we could see that the three men fishing seemed old and solemn-looking
men. They sat on three chairs in the punt, and watched intently their
lines. And the red sunset threw a mystic light upon the waters, and
tinged with fire the towering woods, and made a golden glory of the piled-up
clouds. It was an hour of deep enchantment, of ecstatic hope and
longing. The little sail stood out against the purple sky, the gloaming
lay around us, wrapping the world in rainbow shadows; and, behind us, crept the
night.
We seemed
like knights of some old legend, sailing across some mystic lake into the
unknown realm of twilight, unto the great land of the sunset.
We did not
go into the realm of twilight; we went slap into that punt, where those three
old men were fishing. We did not know what had happened at first, because
the sail shut out the view, but from the nature of the language that rose up
upon the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of
human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.
Harris let
the sail down, and then we saw what had happened. We had knocked those
three old gentlemen off their chairs into a general heap at the bottom of the
boat, and they were now slowly and painfully sorting themselves out from each
other, and picking fish off themselves; and as they worked, they cursed us—not
with a common cursory curse, but with long, carefully-thought-out, comprehensive
curses, that embraced the whole of our career, and went away into the distant
future, and included all our relations, and covered everything connected with
us—good, substantial curses.
Harris
told them they ought to be grateful for a little excitement, sitting there
fishing all day, and he also said that he was shocked and grieved to hear men
their age give way to temper so.
But it did
not do any good.
George
said he would steer, after that. He said a mind like mine ought not to be
expected to give itself away in steering boats—better let a mere commonplace
human being see after that boat, before we jolly well all got drowned; and he
took the lines, and brought us up to Marlow.
And at
Marlow we left the boat by the bridge, and went and put up for the night at the
“Crown.”
To be
continued after Closing Time
