CHAPTER
VI.
KINGSTON. - INSTRUCTIVE REMARKS ON
EARLY ENGLISH HISTORY. - INSTRUCTIVE
OBSERVATIONS ON CARVED OAK AND LIFE IN
GENERAL. - SAD CASE OF STIVVINGS,
JUNIOR. - MUSINGS ON ANTIQUITY. - I
FORGET THAT I AM STEERING. -
INTERESTING RESULT. - HAMPTON COURT
MAZE. - HARRIS AS A GUIDE.
IT was a glorious morning, late spring or
early summer, as you care to
take it, when the dainty sheen of grass
and leaf is blushing to a deeper
green; and the year seems like a fair
young maid, trembling with strange,
wakening pulses on the brink of
womanhood.
The quaint back streets of Kingston,
where they came down to the water's
edge, looked quite picturesque in the
flashing sunlight, the glinting
river with its drifting barges, the
wooded towpath, the trim-kept villas
on the other side, Harris, in a red and
orange blazer, grunting away at
the sculls, the distant glimpses of the
grey old palace of the Tudors,
all made a sunny picture, so bright but
calm, so full of life, and yet so
peaceful, that, early in the day though
it was, I felt myself being
dreamily lulled off into a musing fit.
I mused on Kingston, or "Kyningestun,"
as it was once called in the days
when Saxon "kinges" were
crowned there. Great Caesar crossed the river
there, and the Roman legions camped upon
its sloping uplands. Caesar,
like, in later years, Elizabeth, seems to
have stopped everywhere: only
he was more respectable than good Queen
Bess; he didn't put up at the
public-houses.
She was nuts on public-houses, was
England's Virgin Queen. There's
scarcely a pub. of any attractions within
ten miles of London that she
does not seem to have looked in at, or
stopped at, or slept at, some time
or other. I wonder now, supposing Harris,
say, turned over a new leaf,
and became a great and good man, and got
to be Prime Minister, and died,
if they would put up signs over the
public-houses that he had patronised:
"Harris had a glass of bitter in
this house;" "Harris had two of Scotch
cold here in the summer of `88;"
"Harris was chucked from here in
December, 1886."
No, there would be too many of them! It
would be the houses that he had
never entered that would become famous.
"Only house in South London that
Harris never had a drink in!" The
people would flock to it to see what
could have been the matter with it.
How poor weak-minded King Edwy must have
hated Kyningestun! The
coronation feast had been too much for
him. Maybe boar's head stuffed
with sugar-plums did not agree with him
(it wouldn't with me, I know),
and he had had enough of sack and mead;
so he slipped from the noisy
revel to steal a quiet moonlight hour
with his beloved Elgiva.
Perhaps, from the casement, standing
hand-in-hand, they were watching the
calm moonlight on the river, while from
the distant halls the boisterous
revelry floated in broken bursts of
faint-heard din and tumult.
Then brutal Odo and St. Dunstan force
their rude way into the quiet room,
and hurl coarse insults at the
sweet-faced Queen, and drag poor Edwy back
to the loud clamour of the drunken brawl.
Years later, to the crash of
battle-music, Saxon kings and Saxon revelry
were buried side by side, and Kingston's
greatness passed away for a
time, to rise once more when Hampton
Court became the palace of the
Tudors and the Stuarts, and the royal
barges strained at their moorings
on the river's bank, and bright-cloaked
gallants swaggered down the
water-steps to cry: "What Ferry, ho!
Gadzooks, gramercy."
Many of the old houses, round about,
speak very plainly of those days
when Kingston was a royal borough, and
nobles and courtiers lived there,
near their King, and the long road to the
palace gates was gay all day
with clanking steel and prancing
palfreys, and rustling silks and
velvets, and fair faces. The large and
spacious houses, with their
oriel, latticed windows, their huge
fireplaces, and their gabled roofs,
breathe of the days of hose and doublet,
of pearl-embroidered stomachers,
and complicated oaths. They were upraised
in the days "when men knew how
to build." The hard red bricks have
only grown more firmly set with
time, and their oak stairs do not creak
and grunt when you try to go down
them quietly.
Speaking of oak staircases reminds me
that there is a magnificent carved
oak staircase in one of the houses in
Kingston. It is a shop now, in the
market-place, but it was evidently once
the mansion of some great
personage. A friend of mine, who lives at
Kingston, went in there to buy
a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless
moment, put his hand in his pocket
and paid for it then and there.
The shopman (he knows my friend) was
naturally a little staggered at
first; but, quickly recovering himself,
and feeling that something ought
to be done to encourage this sort of
thing, asked our hero if he would
like to see some fine old carved oak. My
friend said he would, and the
shopman, thereupon, took him through the
shop, and up the staircase of
the house. The balusters were a superb
piece of workmanship, and the
wall all the way up was oak-panelled,
with carving that would have done
credit to a palace.
From the stairs, they went into the
drawing-room, which was a large,
bright room, decorated with a somewhat
startling though cheerful paper of
a blue ground. There was nothing,
however, remarkable about the
apartment, and my friend wondered why he
had been brought there. The
proprietor went up to the paper, and
tapped it. It gave forth a wooden
sound.
"Oak," he explained. "All
carved oak, right up to the ceiling, just the
same as you saw on the staircase."
"But, great Caesar! man,"
expostulated my friend; "you don't mean to say
you have covered over carved oak with
blue wall-paper?"
"Yes," was the reply: "it
was expensive work. Had to match-board it all
over first, of course. But the room looks
cheerful now. It was awful
gloomy before."
I can't say I altogether blame the man
(which is doubtless a great relief
to his mind). From his point of view,
which would be that of the average
householder, desiring to take life as
lightly as possible, and not that
of the old-curiosity-shop maniac, there
is reason on his side. Carved
oak is very pleasant to look at, and to
have a little of, but it is no
doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for
those whose fancy does not lie
that way. It would be like living in a
church.
No, what was sad in his case was that he,
who didn't care for carved oak,
should have his drawing-room panelled
with it, while people who do care
for it have to pay enormous prices to get
it. It seems to be the rule of
this world. Each person has what he
doesn't want, and other people have
what he does want.
Married men have wives, and don't seem to
want them; and young single
fellows cry out that they can't get them.
Poor people who can hardly
keep themselves have eight hearty
children. Rich old couples, with no
one to leave their money to, die
childless.
Then there are girls with lovers. The
girls that have lovers never want
them. They say they would rather be
without them, that they bother them,
and why don't they go and make love to
Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are
plain and elderly, and haven't got any
lovers? They themselves don't
want lovers. They never mean to marry.
It does not do to dwell on these things;
it makes one so sad.
There was a boy at our school, we used to
call him Sandford and Merton.
His real name was Stivvings. He was the
most extraordinary lad I ever
came across. I believe he really liked
study. He used to get into awful
rows for sitting up in bed and reading
Greek; and as for French irregular
verbs there was simply no keeping him
away from them. He was full of
weird and unnatural notions about being a
credit to his parents and an
honour to the school; and he yearned to
win prizes, and grow up and be a
clever man, and had all those sorts of
weak-minded ideas. I never knew
such a strange creature, yet harmless,
mind you, as the babe unborn.
Well, that boy used to get ill about
twice a week, so that he couldn't go
to school. There never was such a boy to
get ill as that Sandford and
Merton. If there was any known disease
going within ten miles of him, he
had it, and had it badly. He would take
bronchitis in the dog-days, and
have hay-fever at Christmas. After a six
weeks' period of drought, he
would be stricken down with rheumatic
fever; and he would go out in a
November fog and come home with a
sunstroke.
They put him under laughing-gas one year,
poor lad, and drew all his
teeth, and gave him a false set, because
he suffered so terribly with
toothache; and then it turned to
neuralgia and ear-ache. He was never
without a cold, except once for nine
weeks while he had scarlet fever;
and he always had chilblains. During the
great cholera scare of 1871,
our neighbourhood was singularly free
from it. There was only one
reputed case in the whole parish: that
case was young Stivvings.
He had to stop in bed when he was ill,
and eat chicken and custards and
hot-house grapes; and he would lie there
and sob, because they wouldn't
let him do Latin exercises, and took his
German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have
sacrificed ten terms of our school-life
for the sake of being ill for a day, and
had no desire whatever to give
our parents any excuse for being stuck-up
about us, couldn't catch so
much as a stiff neck. We fooled about in
draughts, and it did us good,
and freshened us up; and we took things
to make us sick, and they made us
fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we
could think of seemed to make
us ill until the holidays began. Then, on
the breaking-up day, we caught
colds, and whooping cough, and all kinds
of disorders, which lasted till
the term recommenced; when, in spite of
everything we could manoeuvre to
the contrary, we would get suddenly well
again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are but as grass
that is cut down, and put into the
oven and baked.
To go back to the carved-oak question,
they must have had very fair
notions of the artistic and the
beautiful, our great-great-grandfathers.
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are
only the dug-up commonplaces of
three or four hundred years ago. I wonder
if there is real intrinsic
beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs,
and candle-snuffers that we
prize so now, or if it is only the halo
of age glowing around them that
gives them their charms in our eyes. The
"old blue" that we hang about
our walls as ornaments were the common
every-day household utensils of a
few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds
and the yellow shepherdesses
that we hand round now for all our
friends to gush over, and pretend they
understand, were the unvalued
mantel-ornaments that the mother of the
eighteenth century would have given the
baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will
the prized treasures of to-day
always be the cheap trifles of the day
before? Will rows of our willow-
pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the
chimneypieces of the great in
the years 2000 and odd? Will the white
cups with the gold rim and the
beautiful gold flower inside (species
unknown), that our Sarah Janes now
break in sheer light-heartedness of
spirit, be carefully mended, and
stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by
the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom
of my furnished lodgings. It
is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose
is a delicate red, with spots.
Its head is painfully erect, its
expression is amiability carried to
verge of imbecility. I do not admire it
myself. Considered as a work of
art, I may say it irritates me.
Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even
my landlady herself has no admiration for
it, and excuses its presence by
the circumstance that her aunt gave it to
her.
But in 200 years' time it is more than
probable that that dog will be dug
up from somewhere or other, minus its
legs, and with its tail broken, and
will be sold for old china, and put in a
glass cabinet. And people will
pass i
