Three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog)
few more hundredweight of provisions; and he got to see it in my light,
and withdrew his opposition to Harris’s bath.
Agreed, finally, that we should take _three_ bath towels, so as not to
keep each other waiting.
For clothes, George said two suits of flannel would be sufficient, as
we could wash them ourselves, in the river, when they got dirty. We
asked him if he had ever tried washing flannels in the river, and he
replied: “No, not exactly himself like; but he knew some fellows who
had, and it was easy enough;” and Harris and I were weak enough to
fancy he knew what he was talking about, and that three respectable
young men, without position or influence, and with no experience in
washing, could really clean their own shirts and trousers in the river
Thames with a bit of soap.
We were to learn in the days to come, when it was too late, that George
was a miserable impostor, who could evidently have known nothing
whatever about the matter. If you had seen these clothes after—but, as
the shilling shockers say, we anticipate.
George impressed upon us to take a change of under-things and plenty
of socks, in case we got upset and wanted a change; also plenty of
handkerchiefs, as they would do to wipe things, and a pair of leather
boots as well as our boating shoes, as we should want them if we got
upset.
CHAPTER IV.
The food question.—Objections to paraffine oil as an
atmosphere.—Advantages of cheese as a travelling companion.—A married
woman deserts her home.—Further provision for getting upset.—I
pack.—Cussedness of tooth-brushes.—George and Harris pack.—Awful
behaviour of Montmorency.—We retire to rest.
Then we discussed the food question. George said:
“Begin with breakfast.” (George is so practical.) “Now for breakfast
we shall want a frying-pan”—(Harris said it was indigestible; but we
merely urged him not to be an ass, and George went on)—“a tea-pot and a
kettle, and a methylated spirit stove.”
“No oil,” said George, with a significant look; and Harris and I agreed.
We had taken up an oil-stove once, but “never again.” It had been like
living in an oil-shop that week. It oozed. I never saw such a thing as
paraffine oil is to ooze. We kept it in the nose of the boat, and, from
there, it oozed down to the rudder, impregnating the whole boat and
everything in it on its way, and it oozed over the river, and saturated
the scenery and spoilt the atmosphere. Sometimes a westerly oily wind
blew, and at other times an easterly oily wind, and sometimes it blew
a northerly oily wind, and maybe a southerly oily wind; but whether it
came from the Arctic snows, or was raised in the waste of the desert
sands, it came alike to us laden with the fragrance of paraffine oil.
And that oil oozed up and ruined the sunset; and as for the moonbeams,
they positively reeked of paraffine.
We tried to get away from it at Marlow. We left the boat by the bridge,
and took a walk through the town to escape it, but it followed us. The
whole town was full of oil. We passed through the church-yard, and it
seemed as if the people had been buried in oil. The High Street stunk
of oil; we wondered how people could live in it. And we walked miles
upon miles out Birmingham way; but it was no use, the country was
steeped in oil.
At the end of that trip we met together at midnight in a lonely field,
under a blasted oak, and took an awful oath (we had been swearing for a
whole week about the thing in an ordinary, middle-class way, but this
was a swell affair)—an awful oath never to take paraffine oil with us
in a boat again-except, of course, in case of sickness.
Therefore, in the present instance, we confined ourselves to methylated
spirit. Even that is bad enough. You get methylated pie and methylated
cake. But methylated spirit is more wholesome when taken into the
system in large quantities than paraffine oil.
For other breakfast things, George suggested eggs and bacon, which were
easy to cook, cold meat, tea, bread and butter, and jam. For lunch, he
said, we could have biscuits, cold meat, bread and butter, and jam—but
_no cheese_. Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself. It wants the
whole boat to itself. It goes through the hamper, and gives a cheesy
flavour to everything else there. You can’t tell whether you are eating
apple-pie or German sausage, or strawberries and cream. It all seems
cheese. There is too much odour about cheese.
I remember a friend of mine, buying a couple of cheeses at Liverpool.
Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred
horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry
three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards. I was in
Liverpool at the time, and my friend said that if I didn’t mind he
would get me to take them back with me to London, as he should not be
coming up for a day or two himself, and he did not think the cheeses
ought to be kept much longer.
“Oh, with pleasure, dear boy,” I replied, “with pleasure.”
I called for the cheeses, and took them away in a cab. It was a
ramshackle affair, dragged along by a knock-kneed, broken-winded
somnambulist, which his owner, in a moment of enthusiasm, during
conversation, referred to as a horse. I put the cheeses on the top,
and we started off at a shamble that would have done credit to the
swiftest steam-roller ever built, and all went merry as a funeral
bell, until we turned the corner. There, the wind carried a whiff from
the cheeses full on to our steed. It woke him up, and, with a snort
of terror, he dashed off at three miles an hour. The wind still blew
in his direction, and before we reached the end of the street he was
laying himself out at the rate of nearly four miles an hour, leaving
the cripples and stout old ladies simply nowhere.
It took two porters as well as the driver to hold him in at the
station; and I do not think they would have done it, even then, had not
one of the men had the presence of mind to put a handkerchief over his
nose, and to light a bit of brown paper.
I took my ticket, and marched proudly up the platform, with my cheeses,
the people falling back respectfully on either side. The train was
crowded, and I had to get into a carriage where there were already
seven other people. One crusty old gentleman objected, but I got in,
notwithstanding; and, putting my cheeses upon the rack, squeezed down
with a pleasant smile, and said it was a warm day.
A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget.
“Very close in here,” he said.
“Quite oppressive,” said the man next him.
And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they
caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and
went out. And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful
that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way,
and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four
passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the
corner, who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong
to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of dead baby; and the
other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time,
and hurt themselves.
[Picture: Railway carriage]
I smiled at the black gentleman, and said I thought we were going to
have the carriage to ourselves; and he laughed pleasantly, and said
that some people made such a fuss over a little thing. But even he
grew strangely depressed after we had started, and so, when we reached
Crewe, I asked him to come and have a drink. He accepted, and we forced
our way into the buffet, where we yelled, and stamped, and waved our
umbrellas for a quarter of an hour; and then a young lady came, and
asked us if we wanted anything.
“What’s yours?” I said, turning to my friend.
“I’ll have half-a-crown’s worth of brandy, neat, if you please, miss,”
he responded.
And he went off quietly after he had drunk it and got into another
carriage, which I thought mean.
From Crewe I had the compartment to myself, though the train was
crowded. As we drew up at the different stations, the people, seeing
my empty carriage, would rush for it. “Here y’ are, Maria; come along,
plenty of room.” “All right, Tom; we’ll get in here,” they would shout.
And they would run along, carrying heavy bags, and fight round the
door to get in first. And one would open the door and mount the steps,
and stagger back into the arms of the man behind him; and they would
all come and have a sniff, and then droop off and squeeze into other
carriages, or pay the difference and go first.
From Euston, I took the cheeses down to my friend’s house. When his
wife came into the room she smelt round for an instant. Then she said:
“What is it? Tell me the worst.”
I said:
“It’s cheeses. Tom bought them in Liverpool, and asked me to bring them
up with me.”
And I added that I hoped she understood that it had nothing to do with
me; and she said that she was sure of that, but that she would speak to
Tom about it when he came back.
My friend was detained in Liverpool longer than he expected; and, three
days later, as he hadn’t returned home, his wife called on me. She said:
“What did Tom say about those cheeses?”
I replied that he had directed they were to be kept in a moist place,
and that nobody was to touch them.
She said:
“Nobody’s likely to touch them. Had he smelt them?”
I thought he had, and added that he seemed greatly attached to them.
“You think he would be upset,” she queried, “if I gave a man a
sovereign to take them away and bury them?”
I answered that I thought he would never smile again.
An idea struck her. She said:
“Do you mind keeping them for him? Let me send them round to you.”
“Madam,” I replied, “for myself I like the smell of cheese, and the
journey the other day with them from Liverpool I shall ever look back
upon as a happy ending to a pleasant holiday. But, in this world, we
must consider others. The lady under whose roof I have the honour of
residing is a widow, and, for all I know, possibly an orphan too. She
has a strong, I may say an eloquent, objection to being what she terms
‘put upon.’ The presence of your husband’s cheeses in her house she
would, I instinctively feel, regard as a ‘put upon’; and it shall never
be said that I put upon the widow and the orphan.”
“Very well, then,” said my friend’s wife, rising, “all I have to say
is, that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those
cheeses are eaten. I decline to live any longer in the same house with
them.”
She kept her word, leaving the place in charge of the charwoman, who,
when asked if she could stand the smell, replied, “What smell?” and
who, when taken close to the cheeses and told to sniff hard, said she
could detect a faint odour of melons. It was argued from this that
little injury could result to the woman from the atmosphere, and she
was left.
The hotel bill came to fifteen guineas; and my friend, after reckoning
everything up, found that the cheeses had cost him eight-and-sixpence
a pound. He said he dearly loved a bit of cheese, but it was beyond
his means; so he determined to get rid of them. He threw them into the
canal; but had to fish them out again, as the bargemen complained.
They said it made them feel quite faint. And, after that, he took them
one dark night and left them in the parish mortuary. But the coroner
discovered them, and made a fearful fuss.
He said it was a plot to deprive him of his living by waking up the
corpses.
My friend got rid of them, at last, by taking them down to a sea-side
town, and burying them on the beach. It gained the place quite a
reputation. Visitors said they had never noticed before how strong the