Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)
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.”
[Picture: River scene]
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,