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."
The "sampler" that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as
"tapestry of the Victorian era," and be almost priceless. The blue-and-
white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked
and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use
them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the
"Presents from Ramsgate," and "Souvenirs of Margate," that may have
escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English
curios.
At this point Harris threw away the sculls, got up and left his seat, and
sat on his back, and stuck his legs in the air. Montmorency howled, and
turned a somersault, and the top hamper jumped up, and all the things
came out.
I was somewhat surprised, but I did not lose my temper. I said,
pleasantly enough:
"Hulloa! what's that for?"
"What's that for? Why - "
No, on second thoughts, I will not repeat what Harris said. I may have
been to blame, I admit it; but nothing excuses violence of language and
coarseness of expression, especially in a man who has been carefully
brought up, as I know Harris has been. I was thinking of other things,
and forgot, as any one might easily understand, that I was steering, and
the consequence was that we had got mixed up a good deal with the tow-
path. It was difficult to say, for the moment, which was us and which
was the Middlesex bank of the river; but we found out after a while, and
separated ourselves.
Harris, however, said he had done enough for a bit, and proposed that I
should take a turn; so, as we were in, I got out and took the tow-line,
and ran the boat on past Hampton Court. What a dear old wall that is
that runs along by the river there! I never pass it without feeling
better for the sight of it. Such a mellow, bright, sweet old wall; what
a charming picture it would make, with the lichen creeping here, and the
moss growing there, a shy young vine peeping over the top at this spot,
to see what is going on upon the busy river, and the sober old ivy
clustering a little farther down! There are fifty shades and tints and
hues in every ten yards of that old wall. If I could only draw, and knew
how to paint, I could make a lovely sketch of that old wall, I'm sure.
I've often thought I should like to live at Hampton Court. It looks so
peaceful and so quiet, and it is such a dear old place to ramble round in
the early morning before many people are about.
But, there, I don't suppose I should really care for it when it came to
actual practice. It would be so ghastly dull and depressing in the
evening, when your lamp cast uncanny shadows on the panelled walls, and
the echo of distant feet rang through the cold stone corridors, and now
drew nearer, and now died away, and all was death-like silence, save the
beating of one's own heart.
We are creatures of the sun, we men and women. We love light and life.
That is why we crowd into the towns and cities, and the country grows
more and more deserted every year. In the sunlight - in the daytime,
when Nature is alive and busy all around us, we like the open hill-sides
and the deep woods well enough: but in the night, when our Mother Earth
has gone to sleep, and left us waking, oh! the world seems so lonesome,
and we get frightened, like children in a silent house. Then we sit and
sob, and long for the gas-lit streets, and the sound of human voices, and
the answering throb of human life. We feel so helpless and so little in
the great stillness, when the dark trees rustle in the night-wind. There
are so many ghosts about, and their silent sighs make us feel so sad.
Let us gather together in the great cities, and light huge bonfires of a
million gas-jets, and shout and sing together, and feel brave.
Harris asked me if I'd ever been in the maze at Hampton Court. He said
he went in once to show somebody else the way. He had studied it up in a
map, and it was so simple that it seemed foolish - hardly worth the
twopence charged for admission. Harris said he thought that map must
have been got up as a practical joke, because it wasn't a bit like the
real thing, and only misleading. It was a country cousin that Harris
took in. He said:
"We'll just go in here, so that you can say you've been, but it's very
simple. It's absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first
turning to the right. We'll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go
and get some lunch."
They met some people soon after they had got inside, who said they had
been there for three-quarters of an hour, and had had about enough of it.
Harris told them they could follow him, if they liked; he was just going
in, and then should turn round and come out again. They said it was very
kind of him, and fell behind, and followed.
They picked up various other people who wanted to get it over, as they
went along, until they had absorbed all the persons in the maze. People
who had given up all hopes of ever getting either in or out, or of ever
seeing their home and friends again, plucked up courage at the sight of
Harris and his party, and joined the procession, blessing him. Harris
said he should judge there must have been twenty people, following him,
in all; and one woman with a baby, who had been there all the morning,
insisted on taking his arm, for fear of losing him.
Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his
cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze.
"Oh, one of the largest in Europe," said Harris.
"Yes, it must be," replied the cousin, "because we've walked a good two
miles already."
Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at
last, they passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris's
cousin swore he had noticed there seven minutes ago. Harris said: "Oh,
impossible!" but the woman with the baby said, "Not at all," as she
herself had taken it from the child, and thrown it down there, just
before she met Harris. She also added that she wished she never had met
Harris, and expressed an opinion that he was an impostor. That made
Harris mad, and he produced his map, and explained his theory.
"The map may be all right enough," said one of the party, "if you know
whereabouts in it we are now."
Harris didn't know, and suggested that the best thing to do would be to
go back to the entrance, and begin again. For the beginning again part
of it there was not much enthusiasm; but with regard to the advisability
of going back to the entrance there was complete unanimity, and so they
turned, and trailed after Harris again, in the opposite direction. About
ten minutes more passed, and then they found themselves in the centre.
Harris thought at first of pretending that that was what he had been
aiming at; but the crowd looked dangerous, and he decided to treat it as
an accident.
Anyhow, they had got something to start from then. They did know where
they were, and the map was once more consulted, and the thing seemed
simpler than ever, and off they started for the third time.
And three minutes later they were back in the centre again.
After that, they simply couldn't get anywhere else. Whatever way they
turned brought them back to the middle. It became so regular at length,
that some of the people stopped there, and waited for the others to take
a walk round, and come back to them. Harris drew out his map again,
after a while, but the sight of it only infuriated the mob, and they told
him to go and curl his hair with it. Harris said that he couldn't help
feeling that, to a certain extent, he had become unpopular.
They all got crazy at last, and sang out for the keeper, and the man came
and climbed up the ladder outside, and shouted out directions to them.
But all their heads were, by this time, in such a confused whirl that
they were incapable of grasping anything, and so the man told them to
stop where they were, and he would come to them. They huddled together,
and waited; and he climbed down, and came in.
He was a young keeper, as luck would have it, and new to the business;
and when he got in, he couldn't find them, and he wandered about, trying
to get to them, and then HE got lost. They caught sight of him, every
now and then, rushing about the other side of the hedge, and he would see
them, and rush to get to them, and they would wait there for about five
minutes, and then he would reappear again in exactly the same spot, and
ask them where they had been.
They had to wait till one of the old keepers came back from his dinner
before they got out.
Harris said he thought it was a very fine maze, so far as he was a judge;
and we agreed that we would try to get George to go into it, on our way
back.
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