<h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
<p class="gutsumm">Mrs. P. arouses us.—George, the
sluggard.—The “weather forecast”
swindle.—Our luggage.—Depravity of the small
boy.—The people gather round 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.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p62b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatleft' alt= "Mrs. Poppets" title= "Mrs. Poppets" src="images/p62s.jpg" /></SPAN>It was Mrs. Poppets that woke me up next morning.</p>
<p>She said:</p>
<p>“Do you know that it’s nearly nine o’clock,
sir?”</p>
<p>“Nine o’ what?” I cried, starting up.</p>
<p>“Nine o’clock,” she replied, through the
keyhole. “I thought you was a-oversleeping
yourselves.”</p>
<p>I woke Harris, and told him. He said:</p>
<p>“I thought you wanted to get up at six?”</p>
<p>“So I did,” I answered; “why didn’t
you wake me?”</p>
<p>“How could I wake you, when you didn’t 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.”</p>
<p>“Um,” I replied, “lucky for you that I
do. If I hadn’t woke you, you’d have lain there
for the whole fortnight.”</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p63b.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "George snoring" title= "George snoring" src="images/p63s.jpg" /></SPAN>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“Wasermarrer?” he observed, sitting up.</p>
<p>“Get up, you fat-headed chunk!” roared
Harris. “It’s quarter to ten.”</p>
<p>“What!” he shrieked, jumping out of bed into the
bath; “Who the thunder put this thing here?”</p>
<p>We told him he must have been a fool not to see the bath.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<p>“Don’t be absurd. How can I go into the City
like this?”</p>
<p>It was certainly rather rough 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.</p>
<p><SPAN href="images/p65.jpg">
<ANTIMG class='floatright' alt= "Two dogs and umbrella" title= "Two dogs and umbrella" src="images/p65.jpg" /></SPAN>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.</p>
<p>Harris said:</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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
thunder-storms, east wind, with general depression over the
Midland Counties (London and Channel). Bar.
falling.”</p>
<p>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 a
the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to
happen to-day.</p>
<p>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 to-day,” 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.</p>
<p>“Ah!” we said, as we stood looking out at them
through the window, “won’t they come home
soaked!”</p>
<p>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 cockle shells. 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.</p>
<p>“Ah! they’ll come in the afternoon, you’ll
find,” we said to each other. “Oh,
<i>won’t</i> those people get wet. What a
lark!”</p>
<p>At one o’clock, the landlady would come in to ask if we
weren’t going out, as it seemed such a lovely day.</p>
<p>“No, no,” we replied, with a knowing chuckle,
“not we. <i>We</i> don’t mean to get
wet—no, no.”</p>
<p>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 the 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. I tapped the barometer, and it jumped up and
pointed to “very dry.” The Boots stopped as he
was passing, and said he expected it meant to-morrow. I
fancied that maybe it was thinking of the week before last, but
Boots said, No, he thought not.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Boots said it was evident that we were going to have a
prolonged spell of grand weather <i>some time</i>, and read out a
poem which was printed over the top of the oracle, about</p>
<blockquote><p>“Long foretold, long last;<br/>
Short notice, soon past.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The fine weather never came that summer. I expect that
machine must have been referring to the following spring.</p>
<p>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. to-day; 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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>“Oh no, sir, I think it will clear up all right.
It will break all right enough, sir.”</p>
<p>“Ah, he knows”, we say, as we wish him
good-morning, and start off; “wonderful how these old
fellows can tell!”</p>
<p>And we feel an affection for that man which is not at all
lessened by the circumstances of its <i>not</i> clearing up, but
continuing to rain steadily all day.</p>
<p>“Ah, well,” we feel, “he did his
best.”</p>
<p>For the man that prophesies us bad weather, on the contrary,
we entertain only bitter and revengeful thoughts.</p>
<p>“Going to clear up, d’ye think?” we shout,
cheerily, as we pass.</p>
<p>“Well, no, sir; I’m afraid it’s settled down
for the day,” he replies, shaking his head.</p>
<p>“Stupid old fool!” we mutter, “what’s
<i>he</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">
<SPAN href="images/p71b.jpg">
<ANTIMG alt= "The luggage" title= "The luggage" src="images/p71s.jpg" /></SPAN></p>
<p>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 macintoshes, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
civilisation 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, 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 <i>alibi</i>, 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 <i>alibi</i> myself.</p>
<p>Biggs’s boy, as I have said, came round the
corner. He was evidently in a great hurry when he first
dawned upon the vision, but, on catching sight of Harris and me,
and Montmorency, and the things, he eased up and stared.
Harris and I frowned at him. This might have wounded a more
sensitive nature, but Biggs’s boys are not, as a rule,
touchy. He came to a dead stop, a yard from our step, and,
leaning up against the railings, and selecting a straw to chew,
fixed us with his eye. He evidently meant to see this thing
out.</p>
<p>In another moment, the grocer’s boy passed on the
opposite side of the street. Biggs’s boy hailed
him:</p>
<p>“Hi! ground floor o’ 42’s
a-moving.”</p>
<p>The grocer’s boy came across, and took up a position on
the other side of the step. Then the young gentleman from
the boot-shop stopped, and joined Biggs’s boy; while the
empty-can superintendent from “The Blue Posts” took
up an independent position on the curb.</p>
<p>“They ain’t a-going to starve, are they?”
said the gentleman from the boot-shop.</p>
<p>“Ah! you’d want to take a thing or two with
<i>you</i>,” retorted “The Blue Posts,”
“if you was a-going to cross the Atlantic in a small
boat.”</p>
<p>“They ain’t a-going to cross the Atlantic,”
struck in Biggs’s boy; “they’re a-going to find
Stanley.”</p>
<p>By this time, quite a small crowd had collected, and people
were asking each other what was the matter. One party (the
young and giddy portion of the crowd) held that it was a wedding,
and pointed out Harris as the bridegroom; while the elder and
more thoughtful among the populace inclined to the idea that it
was a funeral, and that I was probably the corpse’s
brother.</p>
<p>At last, an empty cab turned up (it is a street where, as a
rule, and when they are not wanted, empty cabs pass at the rate
of three a minute, and hang about, and get in your way), and
packing ourselves and our belongings into it, and shooting out a
couple of Montmorency’s friends, who had evidently sworn
never to forsake him, we drove away amidst the cheers of the
crowd, Biggs’s boy shying a carrot after us for luck.</p>
<p>We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five
started from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo
ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a
train when it does start is going to, or anything about it.
The porter who took our things thought it would go from number
two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the
question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number
one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced
it would start from the local.</p>
<p>To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the
traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a
man, who said he had seen it at number three platform. We
went to number three platform, but the authorities there said
that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express,
or else the Windsor loop. But they were sure it
wasn’t the Kingston train, though why they were sure it
wasn’t they couldn’t say.</p>
<p>Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the
high-level platform; said he thought he knew the train. So
we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver,
and asked him if he was going to Kingston. He said he
couldn’t say for certain of course, but that he rather
thought he was. Anyhow, if he wasn’t the 11.5 for
Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for
Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or
somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got
there. We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged
him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.</p>
<p>“Nobody will ever know, on this line,” we said,
“what you are, or where you’re going. You know
the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston.”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t know, gents,” replied the
noble fellow, “but I suppose <i>some</i> train’s got
to go to Kingston; and I’ll do it. Gimme the
half-crown.”</p>
<p>Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western
Railway.</p>
<p>We learnt, afterwards, that the train we had come by was
really the Exeter mail, and that they had spent hours at
Waterloo, looking for it, and nobody knew what had become of
it.</p>
<p>Our boat was waiting for us at Kingston just below bridge, and
to it we wended our way, and round it we stored our luggage, and
into it we stepped.</p>
<p>“Are you all right, sir?” said the man.</p>
<p>“Right it is,” we answered; and with Harris at the
sculls and I at the tiller-lines, and Montmorency, unhappy and
deeply suspicious, in the prow, out we shot on to the waters
which, for a fortnight, were to be our home.</p>
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