My Life and Times

by Jerome Klapka Jerome

  A little while before the war, I renewed acquaintance with the Russian revolutionary, this time at the house of Prince Kropotkin, in Brighton. Prince Kropotkin himself was a kindly, dapper little gentleman of aristocratic appearance, but his compatriots, who came to visit him, there was no mistaking. The sight of them, as they passed by, struck terror to the stoutest hearts of Kemp Town. There was one gentleman with a beard down to his waist and a voice that shook the ornaments upon the mantelpiece. He belonged to a new religious sect that held it wrong, among other things, to destroy house flies; but was less scrupulous, I gathered, regarding the existence of the petite bourgeoisie. Alas! even the best of us are not always consistent. During the war, I have listened to members of humanitarian societies chortling over the thought that German babies were being starved to death.

  I fancy the At Home has died out. Anyhow one hopes so. It was a tiresome institution. Good women had a special afternoon: “At Home every Thursday.” Sometimes it was every other Thursday, or every first Friday, or third Monday. One's brain used to reel, trying to remember them. Most often, one turned up on the wrong day. Poor ladies would remain in all the afternoon, sitting in the drawing-room in all their best clothes, surrounded by expensive refreshments; and not a soul to speak to. In my mother's day, the morning was the fashionable time for calls. There were always cake and biscuits in a silver basket, and port and sherry on the side-board. They used to talk about the servants, and how things were going from bad to worse.

  Douglas Sladen was the most successful At Home giver that I ever knew. Half “Who's Who” must have come to his receptions at Addison Mansions from ten-thirty to the dawn. He had a wonderful way when he introduced you of summarizing your career, opinions, and general character in half-a-dozen sentences, giving you like information concerning the other fellow—or fellowess. You knew what crimes and follies to avoid discussing, what talents and virtues it would be kind to drag into the conversation.

  Science informs us that another Glacial period is on the way—that sooner or later the now temperate zone will again be buried under ice. But, for the moment, we would seem to be heading the other way. Snow-drifts in the London streets were common in my early winters. Often the bridges were impassable, till an army of sweepers had cleared a passage. I have watched the sleighs, with their jingling bells, racing along the Embankment. One year, we had six weeks of continuous skating. There was quite a fair on the Serpentine, and a man with a dog crossed the Thames on foot at Lambeth. Fogs were something like fogs in those days. One, I remember, lasted exactly a week. Gas flares roared at Charing Cross and Hyde Park Corner. From the other side of the road they looked like distant lighthouses. Link-boys, waving their burning torches, plied for hire; and religious fanatics went to and fro, invisible, proclaiming the end of the world.

  On a morning in 1896, a line of weird-shaped vehicles, the like of which London had never seen before, stood drawn up in Northumberland Avenue outside the Hotel Metropole. They were the new horseless carriages, called automobiles, about which we had heard much talk. Lawson, a company promoter, who claimed to have invented the safety bicycle, had got them together. The law, insisting that every mechanically propelled vehicle should be preceded by a man carrying a red flag, had expired the day before; and at nine o'clock we started for Brighton. I shared a high two-seater with the editor of a financial journal, a gentleman named Duguid. We were fifth in the procession. Our driver, a large man, sat perched up on a dicky just in front of us, and our fear throughout the journey was, lest he should fall backwards, and bury us. An immense crowd had gathered, and until we were the other side of Croydon it was necessary for mounted police to clear a way for us. At Purley the Brighton coach overtook us, and raced us into Reigate. By the time we reached Crawley, half our number had fallen out for repairs and alterations. We were to have been received at Brighton by the Mayor and Corporation and lunched at the Grand Hotel. The idea had been that somewhere between twelve and one the whole twenty-five of us would come sweeping down the Preston road amid enthusiastic cheers. It was half-past three before the first of us appeared. At lengthening intervals some half-a-dozen others straggled in (Duguid and myself were, I think, the last), to be received with sarcasm and jeers. We washed ourselves—a tedious operation—and sat down to an early dinner. Little Lawson made a witty speech. All the Vested Interests of the period—railway companies; livery stable keepers, and horse dealers; the Grand Junction Canal; the Amalgamated Society of Bath-chair Proprietors, and so forth, were, of course, all up in arms against him. One petition, praying Parliament to put its foot down upon the threatened spoiling of the countryside, was signed “Friends of the Horse.” It turned out to be from the Worshipful Company of Whipmakers. Some credit is due to the motorists of those days. It was rarely that one reached one's destination. As a matter of fact, only the incurable optimist ever tried to. The common formula was: “Oh, let's start off, and see what happens.” Generally, one returned in a hired fly. Everywhere along the country roads, one came across them: some drawn up against the grass, others helplessly blocking the way. Beside them, dejected females sitting on a rug. Underneath, a grimy man, blaspheming: another running round and treading on him. Experienced wives took their knitting and a camp stool. Very young men with a mechanical turn of mind got enjoyment out of them, apparently. At the slightest sign of trouble, they would take the whole thing to pieces, and spread it out upon the roadside. Some cheerful old lady, an aunt presumably, would be grovelling on her hands and knees, with her mouth full of screws, looking for more. Passing later in the evening, one would notice the remains piled up against the hedge with a lantern hung on to it. At first, we wore masks and coloured goggles. Horses were terrified when they met us. We had to stop the engine and wait. I remember one old farmer with a very restive filly. Of course we were all watching him. “If you ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “wouldn't mind turning your faces the other way, maybe I'd get her past.”

  They were of strange and awful shapes, at the beginning. There was one design supposed to resemble a swan; but, owing to the neck being short, it looked more like a duck: that is, if it looked like anything. To fill the radiator, you unscrewed its head and poured the water down its neck; and as you drove the screw would work loose, and the thing would turn round and look at you out of one eye. Others were shaped like canoes and gondolas. One firm brought out a dragon. It had a red tongue, and you hung the spare wheel on its tail.

  Flying-machines, properly speaking, came in with the war. We used to have balloon ascents from the Crystal Palace on fine Thursdays. You paid a guinea to go up and took your chance as to where you would come down. Most of them came home the next morning with a cold. Now the journey from London to Paris takes two hours. Thus the wheels go round; and to quote from a once popular poet:

  “Ever the right comes uppermost, and ever is justice done.”

  Chapter VI

  MORE LITERARY REMINISCENCES

  “Three Men in a Boat. To say nothing of the dog,” I wrote at Chelsea Gardens, up ninety-seven stairs. But the view was worth it. We had a little circular drawing-room—I am speaking now as a married man—nearly all window, suggestive of a lighthouse, from which we looked down upon the river, and over Battersea Park to the Surrey hills beyond, with the garden of old Chelsea Hospital just opposite. Fourteen shillings a week we paid for that flat: two reception-rooms, three bedrooms and a kitchen. One was passing rich in those days on three hundred a year: kept one's servant, and sipped one's Hennessy's “Three Star” at four and twopence the bottle. I had known Chelsea Gardens for some time. Rose Norreys, the actress, had a flat there, and gave Sunday afternoon parties. She was playing then at the Court Theatre with Arthur Cecil and John Clayton. Half young Bohemia used to squeeze itself into her tiny drawing-room, and overflow into the kitchen. Bald or grey-headed they are now, those of them that are left. Bernard Partridge and myself were generally the last to leave. One could not help loving her. She was a strange spiritual little creature. Sh
e would have made a wonderful Joan of Arc. She never seemed to grow up. I was rehearsing a play at the Vaudeville Theatre, when a boy slipped into my hand the last letter I had from her. The boy never said whom it was from; and I did not open it till the end of the act, some two hours later. It was written in pencil, begging me to come to her at once. She had rooms in Great Portland Street in a house covered with ivy. A small crowd was round the door when I got there; and I learned she had just been taken away to Colney Hatch asylum. I never could bring myself to go and see her there. She had kind women friends—Mrs. Jopling Rowe, the artist, was one—who watched over her. I pray her forgiveness.

  I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I was a humorist. I never have been sure about it. In the Middle Ages, I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or hanged. There was to be “humorous relief”; but the book was to have been “The Story of the Thames,” its scenery and history. Somehow it would not come. I was just back from my honeymoon, and had the feeling that all the world's troubles were over. About the “humorous relief” I had no difficulty. I decided to write the “humorous relief” first—get it off my chest, so to speak. After which, in sober frame of mind, I could tackle the scenery and history. I never got there. It seemed to be all “humorous relief.” By grim determination I succeeded, before the end, in writing a dozen or so slabs of history and working them in, one to each chapter, and F. W. Robinson, who was publishing the book serially, in Home Chimes, promptly slung them out, the most of them. From the beginning he had objected to the title and had insisted upon my thinking of another. And half-way through I hit upon “Three Men in a Boat,” because nothing else seemed right.

  There wasn't any dog. I did not possess a dog in those days. Neither did George. Nor did Harris. As a boy I had owned pets innumerable. There was a baby water-rat I had caught in a drain. He lived most of his time in my breast pocket. I would take him to school with me; and he would sit with his head poking out between my handkerchief and my coat so that nobody could see him but myself, and look up at me with adoring eyes. Next to my mother, I loved him more than anybody in the world. The other boys complained of him after a time, but I believe it was only jealousy. I never smelt anything. And then there was a squirrel—an orphan—that I persuaded a white rabbit to adopt, until he bit one of his foster-brothers; and a cat that used to come to the station to meet me. But it never ran to a dog. Montmorency I evolved out of my inner consciousness. There is something of the dog, I take it, in most Englishmen. Dog friends that I came to know later have told me he was true to life.

  Indeed, now I come to think of it, the book really was a history. I did not have to imagine or invent. Boating up and down the Thames had been my favourite sport ever since I could afford it. I just put down the things that happened.

  A few years ago I took some American friends, who had been staying with me, to see Oxford. We had left the house at eight o'clock, and had finished up with the Martyrs' Memorial at a quarter to seven. Looking back, I cannot think of anything we missed. I had said good-bye to them at the railway station. They were going on to Stratford. I was too exhausted to remember I had left the motor at the Randolph. There was a train going in the opposite direction to Stratford; and caring about nothing else, I took it. Just as it was starting there shot in a liver-coloured dog, followed by three middle-aged and important-looking gentlemen. The dog, a Chow, took the seat opposite to me. He had a quiet dignity about him. He struck me as more Chinese than dog. The other three spread themselves about. The eldest, and most talkative, was a professor: anyhow that's what they called him; added to which, he looked it. The stoutest of the three I judged to be connected with finance. It appeared that if the “A.G. group” did not put up fourteen millions by Friday, he would have to go to town on Monday, and that would be a nuisance. I could not help overhearing and feeling sorry for him. At the period, I was worried over money matters myself. The third was a simple soul connected with Egyptology and a museum. I was dropping off to sleep, when the train gave a lurch, and the Professor suddenly said “Damn.”

  “Wish I'd never sat down on that corkscrew,” remarked the Professor, while rubbing the place.

  “If it comes to that,” remarked the Financier, “there were one or two things that would have been all the better for your not sitting down upon them: tomatoes, for example.”

  I kept my eyes closed and listened. I learnt that, brain fagged and desiring a new thing, they had hit upon the idea of hiring a boat at Kingston and pulling up the river. They were in reminiscent mood, and it was clear they had had trouble with their packing. They had started with a tent. For the first two nights, they had slept in this tent—at intervals. The tent, it was evident, had shown no more respect for Philosophy and High Finance and Egyptology than for Youth and Folly. It had followed the law of its being; and on the third morning they had deliberately set fire to it and had danced round it while it burnt. They had bathed of mornings; and the Egyptologist, slipping on a banana rind, had dived before he intended and taken his pyjamas with him. They had washed their clothes in the river and afterwards given them away. They had sat hungry round hermetically sealed luxuries, having forgotten the tin-opener. The Chow, whose name it transpired was Confucius, had had a row with a cat, and had scalded himself with the kettle.

  From all of which it would appear that anyone, who had thought of it, could have written “Three Men in a Boat.” Likely enough, some troop of ancient Britons, camping where now the Mother of Parliaments looks down upon old Thames, listened amused while one among them told of the adventures of himself and twain companions in a coracle: to say nothing of the wolf. Allowing for variation in unimportant detail, much the same sort of things must have happened. And in 30,000 A.D.—if Earth's rivers still run—a boat-load of Shaw's “ancients” will, in all probability, be repeating the experiment with similar results, accompanied by a dog five thousand years old.

  George and Harris were likewise founded on fact. Harris was Carl Hentschel. I met him first outside a pit door. His father introduced photo-etching into England. It enabled newspapers to print pictures, and altered the whole character of journalism. The process was a secret then. Young Carl and his father, locking the back kitchen door, and drawing down the blind, would stir their crucibles far on into the night. Carl worked the business up into a big concern; and we thought he was going to end as Lord Mayor. The war brought him low. He was accused of being a German. As a matter of fact he was a Pole. But his trade rivals had got their chance, and took it. George Wingrave, now a respectable Bank Manager, I met when lodging in Newman Street; and afterwards we chummed together in Tavistock Place, handy for the British Museum reading-room: the poor students' club, as it used to be called.

  We three would foregather on Sunday mornings, and take the train to Richmond. There were lovely stretches then between Richmond and Staines, meadowland and cornfields. At first, we used to have the river almost to ourselves; but year by year it got more crowded and Maidenhead became our starting-point. England in those days was still a Sabbath-keeping land. Often people would hiss us as we passed, carrying our hamper and clad in fancy “blazers.” Once a Salvation Army lass dropped suddenly upon her knees in front of us and started praying. Tennis, on Sundays, was played only behind high walls, and golf had not come in. Bicycling was just beginning. I remember the indignation of a village publican, watching some lads just starting for a Sunday outing. “Look at them,” he said, “they'll gad about all day like wooden monkeys on a stick, and won't get home till after closing time. God forgive 'em.”

  Sometimes we would fix up a trip of three or four days or a week, doing the thing in style and camping out. Three, I have always found, make good company. Two grow monotonous, and four or over break up into groups. Later on we same three did a cycle tour through the Black Forest: out of which came “Three Men on the Bummel” (“Three Men on Wheels,” it was called in America). In Germany it was officially adopted as a school reading-book.
Another year we tramped the valley of the Upper Danube. That would have made an interesting book, but I was occupied writing plays at the time. It lingers in my memory as the best walk of all. We seemed to have mounted Wells' “Time Machine,” and slipped back into the Middle Ages. Railways and hotels had vanished. Barefooted friars wandered, crook in hand, shepherding their flocks. Peering into the great barns, we watched the swinging of the iron flails. Yoked oxen drew the creaking wains. Outside the cottage doors, the women ground the corn between the querns. We slept in the great guest room side by side: tired men and women with their children, Jew pedlar, travelling acrobat. A knapsack on one's back and a stout staff in one's hand makes joyous travelling. Your modern motor-car, rushing through history in a cloud of dust, is for Time's rich slaves. Even on the old push bicycle one is too much in a hurry. One sees the beauty after one has passed. One wonders: shall one get off and go back? Meanwhile, one goes on: it is too late. On foot, one leans one's arms upon the gate: the picture has time to print itself upon the memory. One falls into talk with cheery tinker, brother tramp, or village priest. The pleasant byway lures our willing feet: it may lead to mystery, adventure. Another of our excursions was through the Ardennes. But that was less interesting, except for a strange combination of monastery and convent with a sign-post outside it offering accommodation for man and beast, where monks did the cooking, and nuns waited, and the Abbess (at least so I took her to be) made out the bill. It was in the 'nineties. If one asked one's way of the old folk, one spoke in French; but if of the young, one asked in German and was answered cheerfully. On the whole, one gathered that the peasants were nearer to Germany. It was in the towns that one found the French.