An old woman we met in the shop then kindly took
us along with her for a quarter of a mile, to a lady friend of hers, who
occasionally let rooms to gentlemen.
This old woman walked very slowly, and we were twenty minutes getting to
her lady friend's. She enlivened the journey by describing to us, as we
trailed along, the various pains she had in her back.
Her lady friend's rooms were let. From there we were recommended to No.
27. No. 27 was full, and sent us to No. 32, and 32 was full.
Then we went back into the high road, and Harris sat down on the hamper
and said he would go no further. He said it seemed a quiet spot, and he
would like to die there. He requested George and me to kiss his mother
for him, and to tell all his relations that he forgave them and died
happy.
At that moment an angel came by in the disguise of a small boy (and I
cannot think of any more effective disguise an angel could have assumed),
with a can of beer in one hand, and in the other something at the end of
a string, which he let down on to every flat stone he came across, and
then pulled up again, this producing a peculiarly unattractive sound,
suggestive of suffering.
We asked this heavenly messenger (as we discovered him afterwards to be)
if he knew of any lonely house, whose occupants were few and feeble (old
ladies or paralysed gentlemen preferred), who could be easily frightened
into giving up their beds for the night to three desperate men; or, if
not this, could he recommend us to an empty pigstye, or a disused
limekiln, or anything of that sort. He did not know of any such place -
at least, not one handy; but he said that, if we liked to come with him,
his mother had a room to spare, and could put us up for the night.
We fell upon his neck there in the moonlight and blessed him, and it
would have made a very beautiful picture if the boy himself had not been
so over-powered by our emotion as to be unable to sustain himself under
it, and sunk to the ground, letting us all down on top of him. Harris
was so overcome with joy that he fainted, and had to seize the boy's
beer-can and half empty it before he could recover consciousness, and
then he started off at a run, and left George and me to bring on the
luggage.
It was a little four-roomed cottage where the boy lived, and his mother -
good soul! - gave us hot bacon for supper, and we ate it all - five
pounds - and a jam tart afterwards, and two pots of tea, and then we went
to bed. There were two beds in the room; one was a 2ft. 6in. truckle
bed, and George and I slept in that, and kept in by tying ourselves
together with a sheet; and the other was the little boy's bed, and Harris
had that all to himself, and we found him, in the morning, with two feet
of bare leg sticking out at the bottom, and George and I used it to hang
the towels on while we bathed.
We were not so uppish about what sort of hotel we would have, next time
we went to Datchet.
To return to our present trip: nothing exciting happened, and we tugged
steadily on to a little below Monkey Island, where we drew up and
lunched. We tackled the cold beef for lunch, and then we found that we
had forgotten to bring any mustard. I don't think I ever in my life,
before or since, felt I wanted mustard as badly as I felt I wanted it
then. I don't care for mustard as a rule, and it is very seldom that I
take it at all, but I would have given worlds for it then.
I don't know how many worlds there may be in the universe, but anyone who
had brought me a spoonful of mustard at that precise moment could have
had them all. I grow reckless like that when I want a thing and can't
get it.
Harris said he would have given worlds for mustard too. It would have
been a good thing for anybody who had come up to that spot with a can of
mustard, then: he would have been set up in worlds for the rest of his
life.
But there! I daresay both Harris and I would have tried to back out of
the bargain after we had got the mustard. One makes these extravagant
offers in moments of excitement, but, of course, when one comes to think
of it, one sees how absurdly out of proportion they are with the value of
the required article. I heard a man, going up a mountain in Switzerland,
once say he would give worlds for a glass of beer, and, when he came to a
little shanty where they kept it, he kicked up a most fearful row because
they charged him five francs for a bottle of Bass. He said it was a
scandalous imposition, and he wrote to the TIMES about it.
It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef
in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of
the happy days of childhood, and sighed. We brightened up a bit,
however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine-
apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the
boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.
