Three Men in a Boat (9 page)

‘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 bed, 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.

Mrs P. arouses us – George, the sluggard – The ‘weather forecast’s windle – Our luggage – Depravity of the small boy – The people gather around 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 me to get up at six?’

‘So I did,’ I answered. ‘Why didn’t you 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.

‘Wassermarrer?’ 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 tough 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 thunderstorms, 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 the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen today.

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 today’, 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 cockleshells. 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 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. It apped the barometer, and it jumped up and pointed to ‘very dry’. The Boots
¹
stopped as he was passing and said he expected it meant tomorrow. 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 past;
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. today; 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 circumstance 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 mackintoshes, 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 civilization 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,
²
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.