Three Men in a Boat - Chapter 14

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter fourteen of Three Men in a boat to say
Nothing of the Dog. This LibriVox recording is in the
public domain. Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing
of the Dog by Jerome K.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Jerome.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Chapter fourteen Wargrave Waxworks, sonning Our stew Montmorency is sarcastic
fight between Montmorency and the tea Kettle. George's banjo studies

(00:35):
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

(00:57):
a remarkable story. Harris has a troubled night. We caught
a breeze after lunch, which took us gently up past
Wargrave and ship Lake 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

(01:20):
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

(01:41):
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 Missus Sarah Hill, who bequeathed one pound
annually to be devised at Easter between two boys and

(02:02):
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 rumored in the town that once, many years ago,
a boy appeared who really never had done these things

(02:24):
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 waxworks show. Ship Lake is a pretty village

(02:48):
but it cannot be seen from the river, being upon
the hill. Tennyson was married in ship Lake Church. The
river up to Sonning winds in and out through many islands,
and is very placid, hushed and lonely. Few folk, except
a twilight a pair or two of rustic lovers walk
along its banks. Ari and Lord Fitznoodle have been left

(03:12):
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

(03:33):
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 tainty splendor. If
you stop at Sonning, put up at the bull behind
the church. It is a veritable picture of an old

(03:54):
country inn with green square courtyard in front. Were 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

(04:15):
hour or so, and then, it being too late to
push on past reading, we decided to go back to
one of the ship lake 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

(04:36):
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

(05:00):
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 lightheartedness 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

(05:22):
least none worth speaking of. George came and had to
look at it. It was about the size of a peanut.
He said, oh, that won't do.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
You're wasting them. You must scrape them.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
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.

(05:55):
I never saw such a thing as potato scraping from
making a fellow in a man. Yes, 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

(06:16):
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

(06:37):
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

(06:58):
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

(07:20):
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 rats 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.

(07:40):
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 now try experiments.
Harris said, if you never try a new thing, how
can you tell what it's like. It's meant such as
you that hamper the world's progress. Think of the man
who first tried German sausage. It was a great success

(08:05):
that Irish stew. I don't think I ever enjoyed a
meal more. There was something so fresh and piquant about it.
Once palate gets so tired of old hackney things, here
was a dish with a new flavor, with a taste
like nothing else on earth. It was nourishing too. As
George said, there was good stuff in it. The peas

(08:26):
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 week's stomach, but nutritious.
We finished up with tea and cherry tart. Mount Morency
had a fight with the kettle during tea time and
came off a poor second. Throughout the trip he had

(08:49):
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. Someone would always
dash up and bear off his prey before he could

(09:11):
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.
En it up and spit at him. Oh would ye,

(09:32):
growled Montmorency, showing his teeth. I'll teach you to cheek
a hard work and a respectable dog, you miserable, long nosed,
dirty looking scoundrel. Yo, 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

(09:54):
Montmorency left the boat and did a constitutional three times
round the island at the rate thirty five miles an hour,
stopping every now and then to bury his nose in
a bit of cool mud. From that day, Mount Moorenzi
regarded the kettle with a mixture of awe, suspicion, and hate.
Whenever he saw it, he would growl and back at

(10:14):
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

(10:36):
the music might do him good, said music often soothed
the nerves and took away a headache, and he twang
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 around discouragement to meet.

(10:56):
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 anerve any man, added to which Montmorency would sit
and howl steadily right through the performance. It was not
giving the man a fair chance.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
What's he what a howl like that?

Speaker 1 (11:17):
For when I'm playing? George would exclaim, indignantly, while taking
aim at him with a boot. What did he 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 you're
playing makes him howl. So George determined to postpone study

(11:39):
of the banjo until he reached home, but he did
not get much opportunity. Even there. Missus 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 taking it out

(12:00):
with him late at night and practicing 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

(12:22):
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 a while 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.

(12:47):
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

(13:08):
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 practice, but he had to give

(13:28):
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

(13:49):
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 mister Jefferson's the night before,
and would describe how they had heard the victim 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 practice in the

(14:12):
daytime in the back kitchen with all the doors shut,
but his more successful passages could generally be heard in
his 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

(14:36):
could not explain. Then they knocked up a little place
for him at the bottom of the garden, about a
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 about it and caution him, and he would

(14:57):
go out for a stroll around the garden and suddenly
get with it an 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

(15:18):
the early efforts of an amateur in bagpipes. I have
felt that myself, when listening to my young friend, they
appeared to be a try 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

(15:40):
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 learned to play one tune on those bags pipes,

(16:01):
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 bluebells of Scotland. Nobody seemed quite sure what
it was exactly, but they all agreed that it sounded Scotch.

(16:25):
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 mooch round Henley. He said he
should have a glass of whiskey, in a pipe and

(16:47):
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, much fear of that while
this Stuone's on, he grunted as he pulled back to
the island. Henley was getting ready for the regatta and

(17:08):
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,

(17:30):
with a thin rainfalling, 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 cozy boat, with the bright light streaming through the
tight drawn canvas of Harrison Montmorency, and the whisky, and
wished that we were there. We conjured up the picture

(17:53):
of ourselves inside, tired and a little hungry, of the
gloomy river and the shapeless trees, and I could 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

(18:13):
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 realize the vision. We struck the towpath at length,
and that made us happy, because prior to this we
had not been sure whether we were walking towards the

(18:34):
river or away from it. And when you were tired
and want to go to bed, uncertainties like that worry you.
We passed ship Lake as the clock was striking a
quarter to twelve, and then George said, thoughtfully, you don't
happen to remember which of the islands.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
It was, do you?

Speaker 1 (18:53):
No, I replied, beginning to grow thoughtful too, I don't
how many are there? Only four, answered George.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
It will be all right if he's awake.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
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.

Speaker 2 (19:19):
Oh I remember now, said George. It was the third one.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
And we ran out hopefully to the third one and
hallooed no answer. The case was becoming serious. It was
now past midnight. The hotels at ship Lake 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 led apartments. George suggested walking back

(19:45):
to Henley and assaulting a policeman and so getting a
night's lodging in the station house. But then there was
the thought supposing 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

(20:08):
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, and whether
we were near the islands at all, or whether we

(20:29):
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 the things do happen

(20:49):
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

(21:11):
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

(21:31):
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

(21:54):
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

(22:15):
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 to him, but we succeeded at last and got
safely on board. Harris had a sad expression on him,

(22:37):
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

(22:58):
about it. Harris had chew beat 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,

(23:18):
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 drowned 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.

(23:40):
Thirty two, replied Harris sleepily. You said eighteen just now,
said George, No, I didn't, grunted Harris.

Speaker 2 (23:49):
I said twelve.

Speaker 1 (23:50):
You 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 wat 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,

(24:12):
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 whiskey or what we were
talking about at all. Mam Moranci looked as if he
knew something, but said nothing. I slept well that night,

(24:35):
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

(24:55):
to see if we were lying on his trousers. George
got quite wild the second time.

Speaker 2 (25:01):
What that thunder do you want your trousers for? In
the middle of the.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
Night, he asked, indignantly, why.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Don't you lie down and go to sleep.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
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 end
of chapter fourteen