To Say Nothing of the Dog (24 page)

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 Graham

C H A P T E R T E N

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 pink 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.

So the chances of the cat changing the course of history, even if she’d been missing four days, were infinitesimal, especially if we continued to make such excellent time.

“I say,” Terence said, unpacking the bread and cheese he’d bought for lunch in Abingdon, “if we’re able to keep this up, we should be able to make Day’s Lock by one,” he said. “There’s nobody on the river.”

Except for a single boat coming up the river toward us with three men in it, all in blazers and mustaches, and with a small dog perched on the bow, looking alertly ahead. As they drew nearer, their voices came to us clearly across the river.

“How much farther before it’s your turn, Jay?” the rower said to the one lying in the bow.

“You’ve only been rowing ten minutes, Harris,” the one in the bow said.

“Well, then, how far to the next lock?”

The third man, who was stouter than the other two, said, “When do we stop for tea?” and picked up a banjo.

The dog caught sight of our boat and began barking. “Stop that, Montmorency,” the bow-lier said. “Barking’s rude.”

“Terence!” I said, half-rising to my feet. “That boat!”

He glanced over his shoulder. “It won’t hit us. Just hold the lines steady.”

The banjo player strummed a few out-of-tune bars and began to sing.

“Oh, don’t sing, George,” rower and bow-lier said in unison.

“And don’t you get any ideas about singing either, Harris.” Jay added.

“Why not?” he said indignantly.

“Because you only think you can sing,” George said.

“Yes,” Jay said. “Remember ‘The Ruler of the Queen’s Navy’?”

“Diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle-dee,” George sang.

“It
is
them!” I said. “Terence, do you know who that is? It’s
Three Men in a Boat, To Say Nothing of the Dog.”

“Dog?” Terence said contemptuously. “You call that a dog?” He looked fondly at Cyril, who was snoring in the bottom of the boat. “Cyril could swallow him in one bite.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “It’s the
Three Men in a Boat.
The tin of pineapple and George’s banjo and the maze.”

“The maze?” Terence said blankly.

“Yes, you know, Harris went in the Hampton Court Maze with this map and all these people followed him and the map didn’t work and they got hopelessly lost and they had to call out for the keeper to come and get them out.”

I leaned out for a better look. There they were, Jerome K. Jerome and the two friends he had immortalized (to say nothing of the dog) on that historic trip up the Thames. They had no idea they were going to be famous a hundred and fifty years from now, that their adventures with the cheese and the steam launch and the swans would be read by countless generations.

“Watch your nose!” Terence said, and I said, “Exactly. I love that bit, where Jerome is going through the lock at Hampton Court and someone calls out, ‘Look at your nose!’ and he thinks they mean his nose and they mean the nose of the boat has gotten caught in the lock!”

“Ned!” Terence said, and the three men in the boat waved and shouted, and Jerome K. Jerome stood up and began gesturing with his outstretched arm.

I waved back. “Have a wonderful trip!” I called. “Watch out for swans!” and pitched over backward.

My feet went up in the air, the oars hit the water with a splash, and the luggage in the bow toppled over. Still on my back, I made a grab for the carpetbag and tried to sit up.

So did Professor Peddick. “What happened?” he said, blinking sleepily.

“Ned
didn’t watch where he was going,” Terence said, grabbing for the Gladstone bag, and I saw that we had hit the bank head-on. Just like Jerome K. Jerome had done in Chapter Six.

I looked over at the other boat. Montmorency was barking, and George and Harris appeared to be doubled over with laughter.

“Are you all right?” Jerome K. Jerome called to me.

I nodded back vigorously, and they waved and rowed on, still laughing, toward the Battle of the Swans and Oxford and history.

“I said, hold the lines steady,” Terence said disgustedly.

“I know. Sorry,” I said, stepping over Cyril, who had slept through the entire thing and who consequently missed his chance to meet a Truly Famous Dog. On the other hand, remembering Montmorency’s proclivity for fights and his sarcastic manner, it was probably just as well.

“I saw someone I knew,” I said, helping him pick up the luggage. “A writer,” and then realized that if they were just now on their way upriver,
Three Men in a Boat
must not have been written yet. I hoped when it came out, Terence wouldn’t read the copyright page.

“Where’s my net?” Professor Peddick said. “These waters are perfect for
Tinca vulgaris.”

It took us till noon to get the luggage stowed and tied down again and to disentangle Professor Peddick from his
Tinca vulgaris,
but after that we made excellent time. We were past Little Wittenbaum before two. If we didn’t have any trouble at Day’s Lock, we could still be to Streatley by dinnertime.

We came through Day’s Lock in record time. And ran bang into a traffic jam.

The reason the river had been so empty before was because the entire armada had gathered here. Punts, canoes, outriggers, double-sculling skiffs, covered rowing boats, eights, barges, rafts, and houseboats jammed the river, all of them heading upstream and none of them in a hurry.

Girls with parasols chattered to girls with parasols in other boats and called to their companions to pull alongside. People on launches strung with banners reading, “Lower Middlesex Musical Society Annual Outing” and “Mothers’ Beanfeast” leaned over the railings to shout to people in pleasure boats below.

Clearly none of them had to be anywhere at a certain time. Middle-aged men on houseboats sat on the decks reading the
Times
while their middle-aged wives, clothespins in their mouths, hung up the washing.

A girl in a sailor dress and a beribboned straw hat poled a flat skiff slowly among them and stood there laughing when the pole stuck in the mud. An artist in a yellow smock stood motionless on a raft in the middle of the melee, painting a landscape on an easel, though how he could see said landscape over the flower-decked hats and parasols and fluttering Union Jacks, I had no idea.