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 Caesar crossed the river
there, and the Roman legions camped upon its sloping uplands. Caesar,
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 Caesar! 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 manoeuvre 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.
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