To Say Nothing of the Dog

by Connie Willis

  The second time Professor Peddick announced, “Do you see those water lilies? And that swift-moving current near the bank? Perfect for barbel,” and clambered out of the boat before we could stop him.

  “There isn’t time,” Terence said helplessly.

  “Pangbourne,” I reminded him.

  “Pshaw,” he said, and I would have been impressed at yet another Victorian exclamation if I hadn’t had the carpetbag and the fate of the universe to worry about. “There can’t be a more perfect spot than this.”

  Terence took out his pocket watch and looked despairingly at it. What would get him moving? The Battle of Hastings? Salamis? Runnymede?

  “This is how I’ve always pictured Runnymede,” I said, waving my hand at the meadow beside us,“the mist rising from the fields as King John and his men rode in. Where do you think the actual signing took place? Runnymede or Magna Carta Island?”

  “Runnymede,” he said. “The King is proved to have spent the night in Staines and ridden to the field in the morning.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I believe Professor Overforce makes an extremely convincing case for Magna Carta Island.”

  “For Magna Carta Island?” he said disbelievingly.

  “Extremely convincing,” Terence said. “It goes along with his theory of history being the result of natural forces.”

  “Balderdash!” Professor Peddick said and flung the fishing pole down.

  Terence snatched it up and stuck it in the boat.

  “Convincing case?” Professor Peddick steadied. “There is undisputable evidence that the signing took place in Runny-mede.” He climbed in the boat. I grabbed up the rope and cast off. “What sort of convincing case? There were far too many barons and lords to fit on the island, and King John was far too suspicious to let himself be in a situation with no avenue of escape. Natural forces!”

  And so on till we reached Abingdon.

  It was a quarter past nine by the time we got through the lock and up to the village.

  Professor Peddick went off to send his telegram, and Terence went into the village to buy bread and sliced meat so we wouldn’t have to stop and cook lunch.

  “And a bottle of milk,” I called after him. As soon as they were out of sight, I opened the carpetbag and checked on Princess Arjumand.

  Still sleeping. I left the carpetbag open, set it between my knees, and took up the oars. Terence had done all the rowing this far, but he couldn’t keep it up all day, not if we were going to make good time. And rowing was rowing. It couldn’t be all that different from supraskims. Except that the oars were a good deal heavier. And less balanced. When I pulled back on them, nothing happened.

  I sat up straight on the seat, braced my feet, spit on my hands, and yanked back on the oars.

  This time something happened. The right oar came out of the water, the oar handles banged together violently, smashing my knuckles, the left oar came unshipped, and the boat swung around and headed straight for the stone wall of the bridge.

  I scrambled to get the oar back in its oarlock and both of them in the water before we hit the bridge, banging my knuckles together again in the process, and bringing us up against the bank.

  Cyril stood up and waddled over to the bank side of the boat, as if preparing to abandon ship.

  All right, third time’s a charm. I managed to push the boat away from the bank with an oar, get it out in the current, and tried again, watching to make sure the handles didn’t hit me on the knuckles. They didn’t. The left one swung up and hit me on the nose.

  But on the fourth try, I got it, though rather clumsily, and after a few minutes I had mastered the fundamentals. I took the boat out across the current and then under the bridge and back again, rowing smartly and with a good deal of dash.

  “No, no!” Terence said behind me. “Not like that. Throw your weight onto the sculls at the beginning of the stroke.”

  I looked back at him, standing on the bank, and both oars came out of the water and smacked me on the hand.

  “Don’t look back! Watch where you’re going!” Terence shouted, which struck me as a bit unfair. “One hand over the other. Keep the trim. No, no, no!” he shouted, gesticulating with the bread in one hand and the milk bottle in the other. “Get forward. Open your knees. Keep her head out. Remember your seat.”

  There is nothing more helpful than shouted instructions, particularly incomprehensible ones. I did my best to follow the ones I could understand, which consisted of, “Open your knees,” and was rewarded by Terence shouting, “No, no, no! Bring your knees together! Feather! You’ll catch a crab! Head up!”

  But eventually I got the hang of it and, keeping the trim, head up, weight on the sculls, knees open and closed, and keeping my seat fully in mind, I rowed back across to him.

  “Slow and steady,” Terence said as I brought the boat neatly up to the dock. “That’s it. Very good. All you need’s practice.”

  “Which I should have plenty of opportunity to get,” I said, taking the milk bottle from him and sticking it in my pocket. “Let’s go. Where’s Professor Peddick?”

  Terence looked round as if expecting to see him. “He hasn’t come back from the telegraph office?”

  “No,” I said, climbing out and tying up the boat. “We’d best go look for him.”

  “One of us had best stay here with the boat,” Terence said, looking severely at Cyril. “In case he comes back.”

  “Excellent idea,” I said. While he was gone, I could check on the cat again and perhaps let it out.

  “You should be the one to go,” Terence said. “You’re better at history.” He pulled out his pocket watch and looked at it.

  I took advantage of his distraction to pick up the carpetbag and hide it behind my back.“Ten o’clock,” he said, snapping the watch shut savagely. “I should have insisted on taking him home the moment we pulled him in.”

  “There wasn’t time,” I said. “Besides, you said yourself there’s no stopping him if he’s determined.”

  He nodded gloomily. “He’s an unstoppable force. Like William the Conqueror. History is the individual.” He sighed. “By the time we get there, she’ll already be engaged.”

  “Engaged? To whom?” I said, hoping she’d mentioned other suitors and that one of them was the required Mr. C.

  “I don’t know to whom,” he said. “A girl like Tossie—Miss Mering probably gets a dozen proposals a day. Where is he? We’ll never get to Muchings End at this rate.”

  “Of course we will,” I said. “It’s Fate, remember? Romeo and Juliet, Héloïse and Abelard?”

  “Fate,” Terence said. “But what a cruel Fate, that keeps me from her even for a day!” He turned to gaze dreamily downriver, and I escaped with the carpetbag.

  Cyril trotted after me. “You stay here, Cyril,” I said firmly, and the three of us set off into the village.

  I had no idea where the telegraph office might be or what one looked like, but there were only two shops. A greengrocer’s and a shop with fishing gear and flower vases in the window. I tried the fishing shop first. “Where can I send a telegram?” I asked a smiling old woman in a mobcap. She looked just like the sheep in Through the Looking Glass.

  “Out for a trip on the river?” she said. “I’ve lovely plates with views of Iffley Mill painted on them. They’re inscribed, ‘Happy Memories of the Thames.’ Are you heading upriver or down?”

  Neither, I thought. “Down,” I said. “Where is the telegraph office?”

  “Down,” she said delightedly. “Then you’ve already seen it. Lovely, isn’t it?” She handed me a fringed yellow satin pillow with the mill and “Souvenir of Iffley” stencilled on it.

  I handed it back. “Very nice. Where can I send a telegram?”

  “From the postal office, but I always think it’s so much nicer to send a letter, don’t you?” She whipped out writing paper. Each sheet had “Greetings from Abingdon,” inscribed on the top. “Ha’pence a sheet and a penny for the envelope.” />
  “No, thank you. Where did you say the postal office was?”

  “Just down the street. Opposite the abbey gate. Have you seen it? We’ve got a lovely replica of it. Or perhaps you’d like one of our china dogs. Handpainted. Or we’ve some lovely penwipers.”

  I ended up buying a china bulldog that bore no resemblance to Cyril—or to a poodle for that matter—to get away, and sought out the gate and the postal office.

  Professor Peddick wasn’t there, and the mobcapped old woman behind the counter didn’t know if he had been. “My husband’s gone home for his dinner. He’ll be back in an hour. Out for a trip on the river, are you?” she said, and tried to sell me a vase with a picture of Iffley Mill painted on it.

  He hadn’t been in the greengrocer’s either. I bought a souvenir tooth glass inscribed “Holiday Greetings from the River Thames.” “Have you any salmon?” I asked.

  “We do,” yet another mobcapped old woman said and set a tin on the counter.

  “I meant fresh,” I said.

  “You can catch it yourself,” she said. “Abingdon’s got the best fishing on the entire river,” and tried to sell me a pair of rubber fishing waders.

  I came out of the shop and said to Cyril, who had been waiting patiently outside each door, “Where to now?”

  Abingdon had been built around a mediaeval abbey. The ruins, including the granary and a croft, were still there, and they seemed like the likeliest places for Professor Peddick to be, but he wasn’t there. Or in the cloisters.

  Neither was anyone else. I knelt down next to the cloister wall, set the bottle of milk on a stone, and opened the carpetbag.

  Cyril sat down, looking disapproving.

  “Princess Arjumand?” I said, lifting her out. “Want some breakfast?”

  I set her down, and she walked a few feet across the grass and then took off like a shot and disappeared round the corner of a wall.

  I told you so, Cyril said.

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Go after her,” I said.

  Cyril continued sitting.

  He had a point. Our chasing after her in the woods hadn’t been a roaring success. “Well, what do you suggest then?”

  He lay down, his muzzle against the milk bottle, and it wasn’t a bad idea. I got the saucer out of the carpetbag and poured some milk into it. “Here, cat,” I called, setting it out in front of the wall. “Breakfast!”

  As I say, it wasn’t a bad idea. It did not, however, work. Neither did searching the ruins. Or the town square. Or the streets of half-timbered houses.

  “You knew what cats were like,” I said to Cyril. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  But it was my fault. I had let her out, and she was probably on her way to London this morning to meet Gladstone and cause the fall of Mafeking.

  We had come to the outskirts of the village. The road petered out and ended in a hay field crisscrossed with narrow streams.

  “Perhaps she’s gone back to the boat,” I said hopefully to Cyril, but he wasn’t listening. He was looking at a dirt path leading off toward a bridge over a narrow stream.

  And there by the bridge was Professor Peddick, knee-deep in the stream with his trousers rolled up, holding a large net. Behind him on the bank was a tin kettle with water in it and, no doubt, fish. And Princess Arjumand.

  “Stay here,” I said to Cyril. “I mean it,” and crept up on the crouched cat, wishing I’d had the foresight to buy a net.

  Princess Arjumand crept toward the kettle, her white paws silent in the grass, and the professor, as intent as the cat, stooped and lowered the net slowly toward the water. Princess Arjumand peered into the kettle and stuck her paw experimentally into the water.

  I pounced, clapping the open carpetbag over her and scooping her up like the fish she was after. So did Professor Peddick, bringing the net down and up again with a wriggling fish in it.

  “Professor Peddick!” I said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

  “Stickleback,” he said, extracting the fish from the net and tossing it in the kettle. “Excellent pitches for trout along here.”

  “Terence sent me to fetch you,” I said, extending a hand to help him up the bank. “He’s anxious to get on to Pangbourne.”

  “ ‘Qui non vult fieri desidiosus amet,’ ” he said. “Ovid. ‘Let the man who does not wish to be idle, fall in love,’” but he climbed out and sat down on the bank and put his shoes and socks back on. “Pity he never met my niece, Maudie. He’d have liked her.”

  I picked up the tin kettle and the net. It had “Souvenir of the River Thames,” printed on the handle. Cyril was still sitting where I’d told him to stay. “Good boy!” I said, and he galloped over and crashed into my knees. Water slopped out of the kettle.

  Professor Peddick stood up. “Onward. The day’s half over,” he said, and set off briskly for the village.

  “You did send your telegram?” I asked him as we passed the postal office.

  He put his hand inside his coat and pulled out two yellow slips. “The abbey has some small historical interest,” he said, sticking them back inside his coat. “It was pillaged by Cromwell’s men during the Protectorate.” He stopped at the gate. “There’s a Fifteenth-Century gateway here you should see.”

  “I understand Professor Overforce considers the Protectorate a result of natural forces,” I said, and steered him, ranting, down to the dock where an old woman in a mobcap was trying to sell Terence a mug with a picture of Boulter’s Lock on the side.

  “Such a nice reminder of your trip downriver,” she said. “Each time you take your tea, you’ll think of this day.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Terence said, and to me, “Where have you been?”

  “Fishing,” I said. I climbed in the boat, set the carpetbag down, and reached out my hand to help Professor Peddick, who was bent over his kettle of fish, peering at them through his pince-nez.

  “He did send his telegram, didn’t he?” Terence said to me.

  I nodded. “I saw the yellow slips.”

  Cyril had lain down on the quay and was deep in slumber. “Come along, Cyril,” I said. “Professor? Tempus fugit!”

  “Do you know how late it is?” Terence said, waving his pocket watch in front of my nose. “Drat! It’s nearly eleven.”

  I sat down at the oars and put the carpetbag between my knees. “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s all clear sailing from here.”

  “There is nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as

  simply messing about in boats . . ..”

  The Wind in the Willows

  Kenneth Grahame

  CHAPTER 10

  Clear Sailing—A Non-Picturesque Stretch of River—Mystery of Victorians’ Sentimentality Regarding Nature Solved—Importance of Jumble Sales to the Course of History—We See Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog—Cyril vs. Montmorency—The Episode of the Maze—A Traffic Jam—A Teakettle—Importance of Trifles to the Course of History—Another Swan—Shipwreck!—Similarities to the Titanic—A Survivor—A Swoon.

  Amazingly, we did have clear sailing, or, rather, rowing. The river was smooth and empty, with a fresh breeze blowing across it. The sun glittered brightly on the water. I remembered my seat, kept my knees both open and closed, feathered, kept the trim, and pulled strongly, and by noon we were through Clifton Lock and could see the chalk cliff of Clifton Hampden with the church perched atop it.

  The map called this stretch “the least picturesque on the Thames” and suggested we travel by rail to Goring to avoid it. Looking at the lush green meadows, crisscrossed with flowering hedges, the riverbanks lined with tall poplars, it was hard to imagine what the picturesque stretches would look like.

  There were flowers everywhere—buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace and lavender lady’s smock in the meadows, lilies and blue flags growing along the banks, roses and ivy-leaved snapdragons in the lockhouse gardens. There were even flowers in the river. The waterlilies had pi
nk cup-shaped blossoms, and the rushes were topped with nosegays of purple and white. Iridescent blue-green dragonflies darted between them, and monstrous butterflies flitted past the boat and came to rest momentarily on the overbalanced luggage, threatening to topple it over.

  Off in the distance, a spire could be glimpsed rising above a clump of elm trees. The only thing lacking was a rainbow. No wonder the Victorians had waxed sentimental about nature.

  Terence took the oars, and we rowed round a curve in the river, past a thatched cottage decked with morning glories and toward an arched bridge built of golden-tinted stone.

  “Dreadful what’s been done to the river,” Terence said, gesturing at the bridge. “Railway bridges and embankment cuts and gasworks. They’ve completely spoilt the scenery.”

  We passed under the bridge and round the curve. There were scarcely any boats on the river. We passed two men in a fishing punt, moored under a beech tree, and they waved at us and held up an enormous string of fish. I was grateful Professor Peddick was asleep. And Princess Arjumand.

  I’d checked on her when Terence and I changed places, and she was still out cold. Curled up inside the carpetbag with her paws tucked under her furry chin, she didn’t look capable of altering history, let alone destroying the continuum. But then neither had David’s slingshot or Fleming’s moldy petri dish or the barrel full of jumble sale odds and ends Abraham Lincoln had bought for a dollar.

  But in a chaotic system, anything from a cat to a cart to a cold could be significant, and every point was a crisis point. The barrel had held a complete edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, which Lincoln could never have afforded to buy. They had made it possible for him to become a lawyer.

  But a chaotic system has feedforward loops, too, and interference patterns and counterbalances, and the vast majority of actions cancel each other out. Most rainstorms don’t defeat armadas, most tips don’t cause revolutions, and most of the things one buys at a jumble sale don’t do anything but gather dust.