THREE MEN IN A BOAT
PART 13
CHAPTER XIV.
Wargrave.—Waxworks.—Sonning.—Our stew.—Montmorency is
sarcastic.—Fight between Montmorency and the tea-kettle.—George’s banjo
studies.—Meet with discouragement.—Difficulties in the way of the musical
amateur.—Learning to play the bagpipes.—Harris feels sad after supper.—George
and I go for a walk.—Return hungry and wet.—There is a strangeness about
Harris.—Harris and the swans, a remarkable story.—Harris has a troubled night.
We caught
a breeze, after lunch, which took us gently up past Wargrave and
Shiplake. Mellowed in the drowsy sunlight of a summer’s afternoon,
Wargrave, nestling where the river bends, makes a sweet old picture as you pass
it, and one that lingers long upon the retina of memory.
The
“George and Dragon” at Wargrave boasts a sign, painted on the one side by
Leslie, R.A., and on the other by Hodgson of that ilk. Leslie has depicted
the fight; Hodgson has imagined the scene, “After the Fight”—George, the work
done, enjoying his pint of beer.
Day, the
author of Sandford and Merton, lived and—more credit to the place
still—was killed at Wargrave. In the church is a memorial to Mrs. Sarah
Hill, who bequeathed 1 pound annually, to be divided at Easter, between two
boys and two girls who “have never been undutiful to their parents; who have
never been known to swear or to tell untruths, to steal, or to break
windows.” Fancy giving up all that for five shillings a year! It is
not worth it.
It is
rumoured in the town that once, many years ago, a boy appeared who really never
had done these things—or at all events, which was all that was required or
could be expected, had never been known to do them—and thus won the crown of
glory. He was exhibited for three weeks afterwards in the Town Hall,
under a glass case.
What has
become of the money since no one knows. They say it is always handed over
to the nearest wax-works show.
Shiplake
is a pretty village, but it cannot be seen from the river, being upon the
hill. Tennyson was married in Shiplake Church.
The river
up to Sonning winds in and out through many islands, and is very placid,
hushed, and lonely. Few folk, except at twilight, a pair or two of rustic
lovers, walk along its banks. ’Arry and Lord Fitznoodle have been left
behind at Henley, and dismal, dirty Reading is not yet reached. It is a
part of the river in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and
faces, and things that might have been, but are not, confound them.
We got out
at Sonning, and went for a walk round the village. It is the most
fairy-like little nook on the whole river. It is more like a stage
village than one built of bricks and mortar. Every house is smothered in
roses, and now, in early June, they were bursting forth in clouds of dainty
splendour. If you stop at Sonning, put up at the “Bull,” behind the
church. It is a veritable picture of an old country inn, with green,
square courtyard in front, where, on seats beneath the trees, the old men group
of an evening to drink their ale and gossip over village politics; with low,
quaint rooms and latticed windows, and awkward stairs and winding passages.
We roamed
about sweet Sonning for an hour or so, and then, it being too late to push on
past Reading, we decided to go back to one of the Shiplake islands, and put up
there for the night. It was still early when we got settled, and George
said that, as we had plenty of time, it would be a splendid opportunity to try
a good, slap-up supper. He said he would show us what could be done up
the river in the way of cooking, and suggested that, with the vegetables and
the remains of the cold beef and general odds and ends, we should make an Irish
stew.
It seemed
a fascinating idea. George gathered wood and made a fire, and Harris and
I started to peel the potatoes. I should never have thought that peeling
potatoes was such an undertaking. The job turned out to be the biggest
thing of its kind that I had ever been in. We began cheerfully, one might
almost say skittishly, but our light-heartedness was gone by the time the first
potato was finished. The more we peeled, the more peel there seemed to be
left on; by the time we had got all the peel off and all the eyes out, there
was no potato left—at least none worth speaking of. George came and had a
look at it—it was about the size of a pea-nut. He said:
“Oh, that
won’t do! You’re wasting them. You must scrape them.”
So we
scraped them, and that was harder work than peeling. They are such an
extraordinary shape, potatoes—all bumps and warts and hollows. We worked
steadily for five-and-twenty minutes, and did four potatoes. Then we
struck. We said we should require the rest of the evening for scraping
ourselves.
I never
saw such a thing as potato-scraping for making a fellow in a mess. It
seemed difficult to believe that the potato-scrapings in which Harris and I
stood, half smothered, could have come off four potatoes. It shows you
what can be done with economy and care.
George
said it was absurd to have only four potatoes in an Irish stew, so we washed
half-a-dozen or so more, and put them in without peeling. We also put in
a cabbage and about half a peck of peas. George stirred it all up, and then
he said that there seemed to be a lot of room to spare, so we overhauled both
the hampers, and picked out all the odds and ends and the remnants, and added
them to the stew. There were half a pork pie and a bit of cold boiled
bacon left, and we put them in. Then George found half a tin of potted
salmon, and he emptied that into the pot.
He said
that was the advantage of Irish stew: you got rid of such a lot of
things. I fished out a couple of eggs that had got cracked, and put those
in. George said they would thicken the gravy.
I forget
the other ingredients, but I know nothing was wasted; and I remember that,
towards the end, Montmorency, who had evinced great interest in the proceedings
throughout, strolled away with an earnest and thoughtful air, reappearing, a
few minutes afterwards, with a dead water-rat in his mouth, which he evidently
wished to present as his contribution to the dinner; whether in a sarcastic
spirit, or with a genuine desire to assist, I cannot say.
We had a
discussion as to whether the rat should go in or not. Harris said that he
thought it would be all right, mixed up with the other things, and that every
little helped; but George stood up for precedent. He said he had never
heard of water-rats in Irish stew, and he would rather be on the safe side, and
not try experiments.
Harris
said:
“If you
never try a new thing, how can you tell what it’s like? It’s men such as
you that hamper the world’s progress. Think of the man who first tried
German sausage!”
It was a
great success, that Irish stew. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a meal
more. There was something so fresh and piquant about it. One’s
palate gets so tired of the old hackneyed things: here was a dish with a new
flavour, with a taste like nothing else on earth.
And it was
nourishing, too. As George said, there was good stuff in it. The
peas and potatoes might have been a bit softer, but we all had good teeth, so
that did not matter much: and as for the gravy, it was a poem—a little too
rich, perhaps, for a weak stomach, but nutritious.
We
finished up with tea and cherry tart. Montmorency had a fight with the
kettle during tea-time, and came off a poor second.
Throughout
the trip, he had manifested great curiosity concerning the kettle. He
would sit and watch it, as it boiled, with a puzzled expression, and would try
and rouse it every now and then by growling at it. When it began to
splutter and steam, he regarded it as a challenge, and would want to fight it,
only, at that precise moment, some one would always dash up and bear off his
prey before he could get at it.
To-day he
determined he would be beforehand. At the first sound the kettle made, he
rose, growling, and advanced towards it in a threatening attitude. It was
only a little kettle, but it was full of pluck, and it up and spit at him.
“Ah! would ye!” growled Montmorency, showing
his teeth; “I’ll teach ye to cheek a hard-working, respectable dog; ye
miserable, long-nosed, dirty-looking scoundrel, ye. Come on!”
And he
rushed at that poor little kettle, and seized it by the spout.
Then,
across the evening stillness, broke a blood-curdling yelp, and Montmorency left
the boat, and did a constitutional three times round the island at the rate of
thirty-five miles an hour, stopping every now and then to bury his nose in a
bit of cool mud.
From that
day Montmorency regarded the kettle with a mixture of awe, suspicion, and
hate. Whenever he saw it he would growl and back at a rapid rate, with
his tail shut down, and the moment it was put upon the stove he would promptly
climb out of the boat, and sit on the bank, till the whole tea business was
over.
George got
out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said
he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George
thought the music might do him good—said music often soothed the nerves and
took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris
what it was like.
Harris
said he would rather have the headache.
George has
never learned to play the banjo to this day. He has had too much
all-round discouragement to meet. He tried on two or three evenings,
while we were up the river, to get a little practice, but it was never a
success. Harris’s language used to be enough to unnerve any man; added to
which, Montmorency would sit and howl steadily, right through the
performance. It was not giving the man a fair chance.
“What’s he
want to howl like that for when I’m playing?” George would exclaim indignantly,
while taking aim at him with a boot.
“What do
you want to play like that for when he is howling?” Harris would retort,
catching the boot. “You let him alone. He can’t help howling.
He’s got a musical ear, and your playing makes him howl.”
So George
determined to postpone study of the banjo until he reached home. But he
did not get much opportunity even there. Mrs. P. used to come up and say
she was very sorry—for herself, she liked to hear him—but the lady upstairs was
in a very delicate state, and the doctor was afraid it might injure the child.
Then
George tried taking it out with him late at night, and practising round the
square. But the inhabitants complained to the police about it, and a
watch was set for him one night, and he was captured. The evidence
against him was very clear, and he was bound over to keep the peace for six
months.
He seemed
to lose heart in the business after that. He did make one or two feeble
efforts to take up the work again when the six months had elapsed, but there
was always the same coldness—the same want of sympathy on the part of the world
to fight against; and, after awhile, he despaired altogether, and advertised
the instrument for sale at a great sacrifice—“owner having no further use for
same”—and took to learning card tricks instead.
It must be
disheartening work learning a musical instrument. You would think that
Society, for its own sake, would do all it could to assist a man to acquire the
art of playing a musical instrument. But it doesn’t!
I knew a
young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes, and you would be
surprised at the amount of opposition he had to contend with. Why, not
even from the members of his own family did he receive what you could call
active encouragement. His father was dead against the business from the
beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly on the subject.
My friend
used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had to give that plan
up, because of his sister. She was somewhat religiously inclined, and she
said it seemed such an awful thing to begin the day like that.
So he sat
up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to bed, but that did
not do, as it got the house such a bad name. People, going home late,
would stop outside to listen, and then put it about all over the town, the next
morning, that a fearful murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson’s the night
before; and would describe how they had heard the victim’s shrieks and the
brutal oaths and curses of the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and
the last dying gurgle of the corpse.
So they
let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all the doors shut;
but his more successful passages could generally be heard in the sitting-room,
in spite of these precautions, and would affect his mother almost to tears.
She said
it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed by a shark, poor
man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea—where the connection came in,
she could not explain).
Then they
knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the garden, about quarter of
a mile from the house, and made him take the machine down there when he wanted
to work it; and sometimes a visitor would come to the house who knew nothing of
the matter, and they would forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and
he would go out for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot
of those bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was.
If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere
average intellect it usually sent mad.
There is,
it must be confessed, something very sad about the early efforts of an amateur
in bagpipes. I have felt that myself when listening to my young
friend. They appear to be a trying instrument to perform upon. You
have to get enough breath for the whole tune before you start—at least, so I
gathered from watching Jefferson.
He would
begin magnificently with a wild, full, come-to-the-battle sort of a note, that
quite roused you. But he would get more and more piano as he went on, and
the last verse generally collapsed in the middle with a splutter and a hiss.
You want
to be in good health to play the bagpipes.
Young
Jefferson only learnt to play one tune on those bagpipes; but I never heard any
complaints about the insufficiency of his repertoire—none whatever. This
tune was “The Campbells are Coming, Hooray—Hooray!” so he said, though his
father always held that it was “The Blue Bells of Scotland.” Nobody
seemed quite sure what it was exactly, but they all agreed that it sounded Scotch.
Strangers
were allowed three guesses, and most of them guessed a different tune each
time.
Harris was
disagreeable after supper,—I think it must have been the stew that had upset
him: he is not used to high living,—so George and I left him in the boat, and
settled to go for a mouch round Henley. He said he should have a glass of
whisky and a pipe, and fix things up for the night. We were to shout when
we returned, and he would row over from the island and fetch us.
“Don’t go
to sleep, old man,” we said as we started.
“Not much
fear of that while this stew’s on,” he grunted, as he pulled back to the
island.
Henley was
getting ready for the regatta, and was full of bustle. We met a goodish
number of men we knew about the town, and in their pleasant company the time
slipped by somewhat quickly; so that it was nearly eleven o’clock before we set
off on our four-mile walk home—as we had learned to call our little craft by
this time.
It was a
dismal night, coldish, with a thin rain falling; and as we trudged through the
dark, silent fields, talking low to each other, and wondering if we were going
right or not, we thought of the cosy boat, with the bright light streaming
through the tight-drawn canvas; of Harris and Montmorency, and the whisky, and
wished that we were there.
We
conjured up the picture of ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry; of the
gloomy river and the shapeless trees; and, like a giant glow-worm underneath
them, our dear old boat, so snug and warm and cheerful. We could see ourselves
at supper there, pecking away at cold meat, and passing each other chunks of
bread; we could hear the cheery clatter of our knives, the laughing voices,
filling all the space, and overflowing through the opening out into the
night. And we hurried on to realise the vision.
We struck
the tow-path at length, and that made us happy; because prior to this we had
not been sure whether we were walking towards the river or away from it, and
when you are tired and want to go to bed uncertainties like that worry
you. We passed Skiplake as the clock was striking the quarter to twelve;
and then George said, thoughtfully:
“You don’t
happen to remember which of the islands it was, do you?”
“No,” I
replied, beginning to grow thoughtful too, “I don’t. How many are there?”
“Only
four,” answered George. “It will be all right, if he’s awake.”
“And if
not?” I queried; but we dismissed that train of thought.
We shouted
when we came opposite the first island, but there was no response; so we went
to the second, and tried there, and obtained the same result.
“Oh!
I remember now,” said George; “it was the third one.”
And we ran
on hopefully to the third one, and hallooed.
No answer!
The case
was becoming serious. it was now past midnight. The hotels at Skiplake
and Henley would be crammed; and we could not go round, knocking up cottagers
and householders in the middle of the night, to know if they let
apartments! George suggested walking back to Henley and assaulting a
policeman, and so getting a night’s lodging in the station-house. But
then there was the thought, “Suppose he only hits us back and refuses to lock
us up!”
We could
not pass the whole night fighting policemen. Besides, we did not want to
overdo the thing and get six months.
We
despairingly tried what seemed in the darkness to be the fourth island, but met
with no better success. The rain was coming down fast now, and evidently
meant to last. We were wet to the skin, and cold and miserable. We
began to wonder whether there were only four islands or more, or whether we
were near the islands at all, or whether we were anywhere within a mile of
where we ought to be, or in the wrong part of the river altogether; everything
looked so strange and different in the darkness. We began to understand
the sufferings of the Babes in the Wood.
Just when
we had given up all hope—yes, I know that is always the time that things do
happen in novels and tales; but I can’t help it. I resolved, when I began
to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so I
will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose.
It was
just when we had given up all hope, and I must therefore say so. Just
when we had given up all hope, then, I suddenly caught sight, a little way
below us, of a strange, weird sort of glimmer flickering among the trees on the
opposite bank. For an instant I thought of ghosts: it was such a shadowy,
mysterious light. The next moment it flashed across me that it was our
boat, and I sent up such a yell across the water that made the night seem to
shake in its bed.
We waited
breathless for a minute, and then—oh! divinest music of the darkness!—we heard
the answering bark of Montmorency. We shouted back loud enough to wake
the Seven Sleepers—I never could understand myself why it should take more
noise to wake seven sleepers than one—and, after what seemed an hour, but what
was really, I suppose, about five minutes, we saw the lighted boat creeping
slowly over the blackness, and heard Harris’s sleepy voice asking where we were.
There was
an unaccountable strangeness about Harris. It was something more than
mere ordinary tiredness. He pulled the boat against a part of the bank
from which it was quite impossible for us to get into it, and immediately went
to sleep. It took us an immense amount of screaming and roaring to wake
him up again and put some sense into him; but we succeeded at last, and got
safely on board.
Harris had
a sad expression on him, so we noticed, when we got into the boat. He
gave you the idea of a man who had been through trouble. We asked him if
anything had happened, and he said—
“Swans!”
It seemed
we had moored close to a swan’s nest, and, soon after George and I had gone,
the female swan came back, and kicked up a row about it. Harris had
chivied her off, and she had gone away, and fetched up her old man.
Harris said he had had quite a fight with these two swans; but courage and
skill had prevailed in the end, and he had defeated them.
Half-an-hour
afterwards they returned with eighteen other swans! It must have been a
fearful battle, so far as we could understand Harris’s account of it. The
swans had tried to drag him and Montmorency out of the boat and drown them; and
he had defended himself like a hero for four hours, and had killed the lot, and
they had all paddled away to die.
“How many
swans did you say there were?” asked George.
“Thirty-two,”
replied Harris, sleepily.
“You said
eighteen just now,” said George.
“No, I
didn’t,” grunted Harris; “I said twelve. Think I can’t count?”
What were
the real facts about these swans we never found out. We questioned Harris
on the subject in the morning, and he said, “What swans?” and seemed to think
that George and I had been dreaming.
Oh, how
delightful it was to be safe in the boat, after our trials and fears! We
ate a hearty supper, George and I, and we should have had some toddy after it,
if we could have found the whisky, but we could not. We examined Harris
as to what he had done with it; but he did not seem to know what we meant by
“whisky,” or what we were talking about at all. Montmorency looked as if
he knew something, but said nothing.
I slept
well that night, and should have slept better if it had not been for
Harris. I have a vague recollection of having been woke up at least a
dozen times during the night by Harris wandering about the boat with the
lantern, looking for his clothes. He seemed to be worrying about his
clothes all night.
Twice he
routed up George and myself to see if we were lying on his trousers.
George got quite wild the second time.
“What the
thunder do you want your trousers for, in the middle of the night?” he asked
indignantly. “Why don’t you lie down, and go to sleep?”
I found
him in trouble, the next time I awoke, because he could not find his socks; and
my last hazy remembrance is of being rolled over on my side, and of hearing
Harris muttering something about its being an extraordinary thing where his
umbrella could have got to.
To be continued
