by Unknown
“Do you know a man, Scudamour? Reply,” was what Alexander said. I thought of answering that we had met a man of that name when we were in Paris; but after consideration, I replied boldly: “Know no one of name of Scudamour.”
About two months ago I passed Scudamour in Regent Street, and he scowled at me. This I could have borne if there had been no more of Henry; but I knew that Scudamour was now telling everybody about Henry’s wife.
By and by I got a letter from an old friend of Alexander’s asking me if there was any truth in a report that Alexander was going to Bombay. Soon afterward Alexander wrote to me saying he had been told by several persons that I was going to Bombay. In short, I saw that the time had come for killing Henry. So I told Pettigrew that Henry had died of fever, deeply regretted; and asked him to be sure to tell Scudamour, who had always been interested in the deceased’s welfare. Pettigrew afterward told me that he had communicated the sad intelligence to Scudamour. “How did he take it?” I asked. “Well,” Pettigrew said, reluctantly, “he told me that when he was up in Edinburgh he did not get on well with Alexander. But he expressed great curiosity as to Henry’s children.” “Ah,” I said, “the children were both drowned in the Forth; a sad affair — we can’t bear to talk of it.” I am not likely to see much of Scudamour again, nor is Alexander. Scudamour now goes about saying that Henry was the only one of us he really liked.
CHAPTER XV.
HOUSEBOAT “ARCADIA.”
Scrymgeour had a houseboat called, of course, the Arcadia, to which he was so ill-advised as to invite us all at once. He was at that time lying near Cookham, attempting to catch the advent of summer on a canvas, and we were all, unhappily, able to accept his invitation. Looking back to this nightmare of a holiday, I am puzzled at our not getting on well together, for who should be happy in a houseboat if not five bachelors, well known to each other, and all smokers of the same tobacco? Marriot says now that perhaps we were happy without knowing it; but that is nonsense. We were miserable.
I have concluded that we knew each other too well. Though accustomed to gather together in my rooms of an evening in London, we had each his private chambers to retire to, but in the Arcadia solitude was impossible. There was no escaping from each other.
Scrymgeour, I think, said that we were unhappy because each of us acted as if the houseboat was his own. We retorted that the boy — by no means a William John — was at the bottom of our troubles, and then Scrymgeour said that he had always been against having a boy. We had been opposed to a boy at first, too, fancying that we should enjoy doing our own cooking. Seeing that there were so many of us, this should not have been difficult, but the kitchen was small, and we were always striking against each other and knocking things over. We had to break a window-pane to let the smoke out; then Gilray, in kicking the stove because he had burned his fingers on it, upset the thing, and, before we had time to intervene, a leg of mutton jumped out and darted into the coal-bunk. Jimmy foolishly placed our six tumblers on the window-sill to dry, and a gust of wind toppled them into the river. The draughts were a nuisance. This was owing to windows facing each other being left open, and as a result articles of clothing disappeared so mysteriously that we thought there must be a thief or a somnambulist on board.
The third or fourth day, however, going into the saloon unexpectedly, I caught my straw hat disappearing on the wings of the wind. When last seen it was on its way to Maidenhead, bowling along at the rate of several miles an hour. So we thought it would be as well to have a boy. As far as I remember, this was the only point unanimously agreed upon during the whole time we were aboard. They told us at the Ferry Hotel that boys were rather difficult to get in Cookham; but we instituted a vigorous houseto-house search, and at last we ran a boy to earth and carried him off.
It was most unfortunate for all concerned that the boy did not sleep on board. There was, however, no room for him; so he came at seven in the morning, and retired when his labors were over for the day. I say he came; but in point of fact that was the difficulty with the boy. He couldn’t come. He came as far as he could: that is to say, he walked up the towpath until he was opposite the houseboat, and then he hallooed to be taken on board, whereupon some one had to go in the dingy for him. All the time we were in the houseboat that boy was never five minutes late. Wet or fine, calm or rough, 7 A.M. found the boy on the towpath hallooing. No sooner were we asleep than the dewy morn was made hideous by the boy. Lying in bed with the blankets over our heads to deaden his cries, his fresh, lusty young voice pierced woodwork, blankets, sheets, everything. “Ya-ho, ahoy, ya-ho, aho, ahoy!” So he kept it up. What followed may easily be guessed. We all lay as silent as the grave, each waiting for some one else to rise and bring the impatient lad across. At last the stillness would be broken by some one’s yelling out that he would do for that boy. A second would mutter horribly in his sleep; a third would make himself a favorite for the moment by shouting through the wooden partition that it was the fifth’s turn this morning. The fifth would tell us where he would see the boy before he went across for him. Then there would be silence again. Eventually some one would put an ulster over his night-shirt, and sternly announce his intention of going over and taking the boy’s life. Hearing this, the others at once dropped off to sleep. For a few days we managed to trick the boy by pulling up our blinds and so conveying to his mind the impression that we were getting up. Then he had not our breakfast ready when we did get up, which naturally enraged us.
As soon as he got on board that boy made his presence felt. He was very strong and energetic in the morning, and spent the first half-hour or so in flinging coals at each other. This was his way of breaking them; and he was by nature so patient and humble that he rather flattered himself when a coal broke at the twentieth attempt. We used to dream that he was breaking coals on our heads. Often one of us dashed into the kitchen, threatening to drop him into the river if he did not sit quite still on a chair for the next two hours. Under these threats he looked sufficiently scared to satisfy anybody; but as soon as all was quiet again he crept back to the coal-bunk and was at his old games.
It didn’t matter what we did, the boy put a stop to it. We tried whist, and in ten minutes there was a “Hoy, hie, ya-ho!” from the opposite shore. It was the boy come back with the vegetables. If we were reading, “Ya-ho, hie!” and some one had to cross for that boy and the water-can. The boy was on the towpath just when we had fallen into a snooze; he had to be taken across for the milk immediately we had lighted our pipes. On the whole, it is an open question whether it was not even more annoying to take him over than to go for him. Two or three times we tried to be sociable and went into the village together; but no sooner had we begun to enjoy ourselves than we remembered that we must go back and let the boy ashore. Tennyson speaks of a company making believe to be merry while all the time the spirit of a departed one haunted them in their play. That was exactly the effect of the boy on us.
Even without the boy I hardly think we should have been a sociable party. The sight of so much humanity gathered in one room became a nuisance. We resorted to all kinds of subterfuge to escape from each other; and the one who finished breakfast first generally managed to make off with the dingy. The others were then at liberty to view him in the distance, in midstream, lying on his back in the bottom of the boat; and it was almost more than we could stand. The only way to bring him back was to bribe the boy into saying that he wanted to go across to the village for bacon or black lead or sardines. Thus even the boy had his uses.
Things gradually got worse and worse. I remember only one day when as many as four of us were on speaking terms. Even this temporary sociability was only brought about in order that we might combine and fall upon Jimmy with the more crushing force. Jimmy had put us in an article, representing himself as a kind of superior person who was making a study of us. The thing was such a gross caricature, and so dull, that it was Jimmy we were sorry for rather than ourselves. Still, we gathered round him in a body
and told him what we thought of the matter. Affairs might have gone more smoothly after this if we four had been able to hold together. Unfortunately, Jimmy won Marriot over, and next day there was a row all round, which resulted in our division into five parties.
One day Pettigrew visited us. He brought his Gladstone bag with him, but did not stay over night. He was glad to go; for at first none of us, I am afraid, was very civil to him, though we afterward thawed a little. He returned to London and told every one how he found us. I admit we were not prepared to receive company. The houseboat consisted of five apartments — a saloon, three bedrooms, and a kitchen. When he boarded us we were distributed as follows: I sat smoking in the saloon, Marriot sat smoking in the first bedroom, Gilray in the second, Jimmy in the third, and Scrymgeour in the kitchen. The boy did not keep Scrymgeour company. He had been ordered on deck, where he sat with his legs crossed, the picture of misery because he had no coals to break. A few days after Pettigrew’s visit we followed him to London, leaving Scrymgeour behind, where we soon became friendly again.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ARCADIA MIXTURE AGAIN.
One day, some weeks after we left Scrymgeour’s houseboat, I was alone in my rooms, very busy smoking, when William John entered with a telegram. It was from Scrymgeour, and said, “You have got me into a dreadful mess. Come down here first train.”
Wondering what mess I could have got Scrymgeour into, I good-naturedly obeyed his summons, and soon I was smoking placidly on the deck of the houseboat, while Scrymgeour, sullen and nervous, tramped back and forward. I saw quickly that the only tobacco had something to do with his troubles, for he began by announcing that one evening soon after we left him he found that we had smoked all his Arcadia. He would have dispatched the boy to London for it, but the boy had been all day in the village buying a loaf, and would not be back for hours. Cookham cigars Scrymgeour could not smoke; cigarettes he only endured if made from the Arcadia.
At Cookham he could only get tobacco that made him uncomfortable. Having recently begun to use a new pouch, he searched his pockets in vain for odd shreds of the Mixture to which he had so contemptibly become a slave. In a very bad temper he took to his dingy, vowing for a little while that he would violently break the chains that bound him to one tobacco, and afterward, when he was restored to his senses that he would jilt the Arcadia gradually. He had pulled some distance down the river, without regarding the Cliveden Woods, when he all but ran into a blaze of Chinese lanterns. It was a houseboat called — let us change its name to the Heathen Chinee. Staying his dingy with a jerk, Scrymgeour looked up, when a wonderful sight met his eyes. On the open window of an apparently empty saloon stood a round tin of tobacco, marked “Arcadia Mixture.”
Scrymgeour sat gaping. The only sound to be heard, except a soft splash of water under the houseboat, came from the kitchen, where a servant was breaking crockery for supper. The romantic figure in the dingy stretched out his hand and then drew it back, remembering that there was a law against this sort of thing. He thought to himself, “If I were to wait until the owner returns, no doubt a man who smokes the Arcadia would feel for me.” Then his fatal horror of explanations whispered to him, “The owner may be a stupid, garrulous fellow who will detain you here half the night explaining your situation.” Scrymgeour, I want to impress upon the reader, was, like myself, the sort of a man who, if asked whether he did not think “In Memoriam” Mr. Browning’s greatest poem, would say Yes, as the easiest way of ending the conversation. Obviously he would save himself trouble by simply annexing the tin. He seized it and rowed off.
Smokers, who know how tobacco develops the finer feelings, hardly require to be told what happened next. Suddenly Scrymgeour remembered that he was probably leaving the owner of the Heathen Chinee without any Arcadia Mixture. He at once filled his pouch, and, pulling softly back to the houseboat, replaced the tin on the window, his bosom swelling with the pride of those who give presents. At the same moment a hand gripped him by the neck, and a girl, somewhere on deck, screamed.
Scrymgeour’s captor, who was no other than the owner of the Heathen Chinee, dragged him fiercely into the houseboat and stormed at him for five minutes. My friend shuddered as he thought of the explanations to come when he was allowed to speak, and gradually he realized that he had been mistaken for someone else — apparently for some young blade who had been carrying on a clandestine flirtation with the old gentleman’s daughter. It will take an hour, thought Scrymgeour, to convince him that I am not that person, and another hour to explain why I am really here. Then the weak creature had an idea: “Might not the simplest plan be to say that his surmises are correct, promise to give his daughter up, and row away as quickly as possible?” He began to wonder if the girl was pretty; but saw it would hardly do to say that he reserved his defence until he could see her.
“I admit,” he said, at last, “that I admire your daughter; but she spurned my advances, and we parted yesterday forever.”
“Yesterday!”
“Or was it the day before?”
“Why, sir, I have caught you red-handed!”
“This is an accident,” Scrymgeour explained, “and I promise never to speak to her again.” Then he added, as an afterthought, “however painful that may be to me.”
Before Scrymgeour returned to his dingy he had been told that he would be drowned if he came near that houseboat again. As he sculled away he had a glimpse of the flirting daughter, whom he described to me briefly as being of such engaging appearance that six yards was a trying distance to be away from her.
“Here,” thought Scrymgeour that night over a pipe of the Mixture, “the affair ends; though I dare say the young lady will call me terrible names when she hears that I have personated her lover. I must take care to avoid the father now, for he will feel that I have been following him. Perhaps I should have made a clean breast of it; but I do loathe explanations.”
Two days afterward Scrymgeour passed the father and daughter on the river. The lady said “Thank you” to him with her eyes, and, still more remarkable, the old gentleman bowed.
Scrymgeour thought it over. “She is grateful to me,” he concluded, “for drawing away suspicion from the other man, but what can have made the father so amiable? Suppose she has not told him that I am an impostor, he should still look upon me as a villain; and if she has told him, he should be still more furious. It is curious, but no affair of mine.” Three times within the next few days he encountered the lady on the towpath or elsewhere with a young gentleman of empty countenance, who, he saw must be the real Lothario. Once they passed him when he was in the shadow of a tree, and the lady was making pretty faces with a cigarette in her mouth. The houseboat Heathen Chinee lay but a short distance off, and Scrymgeour could see the owner gazing after his daughter placidly, a pipe between his lips.
“He must be approving of her conduct now,” was my friend’s natural conclusion. Then one forenoon Scrymgeour travelled to town in the same compartment as the old gentleman, who was exceedingly frank, and made sly remarks about romantic young people who met by stealth when there was no reason why they should not meet openly. “What does he mean?” Scrymgeour asked himself, uneasily. He saw terribly elaborate explanations gathering and shrank from them.
Then Scrymgeour was one day out in a punt, when he encountered the old gentleman in a canoe. The old man said, purple with passion, that he was on his way to pay Mr. Scrymgeour a business visit. “Oh, yes,” he continued, “I know who you are; if I had not discovered you were a man of means I would not have let the thing go on, and now I insist on an explanation.”
Explanations!
They made for Scrymgeour’s houseboat, with almost no words on the young man’s part; but the father blurted out several things — as that his daughter knew where he was going when he left the Heathen Chinee, and that he had an hour before seen Scrymgeour making love to another girl.
“Don’t deny it!” cried the indignant father; “I recognized you by y
our velvet coat and broad hat.”
Then Scrymgeour began to see more clearly. The girl had encouraged the deception, and had been allowed to meet her lover because he was supposed to be no adventurer but the wealthy Mr. Scrymgeour. She must have told the fellow to get a coat and hat like his to help the plot. At the time the artist only saw all this in a jumble.
Scrymgeour had bravely resolved to explain everything now; but his bewilderment may be conceived when, on entering his saloon with the lady’s father, the first thing they saw was the lady herself. The old gentleman gasped, and his daughter looked at Scrymgeour imploringly.
“Now,” said the father fiercely, “explain.”
The lady’s tears became her vastly. Hardly knowing what he did, Scrymgeour put his arm around her.
“Well, go on,” I said, when at this point Scrymgeour stopped.
“There is no more to tell,” he replied; “you see the girl allowed me to — well, protect her — and — and the old gentleman thinks we are engaged.”
“I don’t wonder. What does the lady say?”
“She says that she ran along the bank and got into my houseboat by the plank, meaning to see me before her father arrived and to entreat me to run away.”
“With her?”
“No, without her.”
“But what does she say about explaining matters to her father?”
“She says she dare not, and as for me, I could not. That was why I telegraphed to you.”
“You want me to be intercessor? No, Scrymgeour; your only honorable course is marriage.”
“But you must help me. It is all your fault, teaching me to like the Arcadia Mixture.”
I thought this so impudent of Scrymgeour that I bade him goodnight at once. All the men on the stair are still confident that he would have married her, had the lady not cut the knot by eloping with Scrymgeour’s double.