My Life and Times

by Jerome Klapka Jerome

  “They've got more sense than people think,” he added musingly. “They know they'll find a little corn there; and will be safe, poor things—till after Christmas.”

  Riding to hounds would be good sport, if it were not for the fox. So long as the gallant little fellow is running for his life, excitement, one may hope, deadens his fear and pain. But the digging him out is cold-blooded cruelty. He ought to have his chance. How men and women, calling themselves sportsmen, can defend the custom passes my understanding. It is not clean.

  As for the argument about the dogs, that is sheer twaddle. Is anybody going to tell me that my terrier will decline to chase rabbits on Tuesday, because the rabbit he ran after on Monday had the good luck to get away from him! I only wish it were so. Many a half-crown I'd have been saved, in my time.

  I learnt riding with the Life Guards at Knightsbridge barracks. It was a rough school, but thorough. You were not considered finished until you could ride all your paces bareback, with the reins loose; and when the Sergeant-Major got hold of a horse with new tricks, he would put it aside for his favourite pupil.

  “I've got a daisy for you, sir, this afternoon,” he would whisper to you, his honest face illumined with a kindly grin. “As full of play as a litter of kittens. Look at her—she's laughing.”

  You looked. She would be standing with her head stretched out straight, and all her teeth showing. And you would wonder if the Sergeant-Major had noticed that, while he was patting her neck, you had slipped off your spurs and put them in your pocket.

  There used to be a belt of well-kept grass along most country roads; and riding was a pleasant mode of taking a short journey. While for the joy of a stretch gallop on the turf, there were the commons. There was a fine straight course from the top of Nuffield Hill to Heath Bottom, across what are now the Huntercombe golf links. All the commons have been appropriated by the golfers; and the grass-way by the roadside is a tangle of briar and weed: and one comes across the old brown saddle in a corner of the loft, covered with cobwebs, and dreams of days gone by: as old men will.

  The river must have been the mother of sport. Little brown-skinned picaninnies of the Stone Age must have played upon its banks; pushed each other in: splashed and shouted; learnt to swim and dive. Hairy, low-browed Palæolithic gentry must have crouched there with their fishing spears; launched their bark canoes. One day, some blue-eyed, lithe young cave man must have shouted that first challenge to a friendly race. Most of my life, I have dwelt in the neighbourhood of the river. I thank old Father Thames for many happy days. We spent our honeymoon, my wife and I, in a little boat. I knew the river well, its deep pools, and hidden ways, its quiet backwaters, its sleepy towns and ancient villages. It is pleasant to feel tired when evening comes and the lamp is lighted in the low-ceilinged parlour of the inn. We stayed a day at Henley for the Regatta.

  It was King Edward who spoilt Henley Regatta. His coming turned it into a society function, and brought down the swell mob. Before that, it had been a happy, gay affair, simple and quiet. People came in craft of all sorts, and took an interest in the racing. One could count the people on the tow-path: old blues, the townsfolk, with the farmers and their families from round about. The line of house-boats, decked with flowers, stretched from Phyllis Court to the Island, and we all came to know one another. My nephew, Harry Shorland, brought his houseboat up from Staines by easy stages, one year. A pair of swallows had started building on it, and came with him all the way. They finished the nest just in time to take a day off, and watch the finals.

  Goring Regatta was always good fun when Frank Benson, the actor, stage-managed it. He lived at Goring, and was an all-round sportsman. One year, his ambition ran away with him. He planned an aquatic drama. I am a little confused, regarding the details. I was at the time, I remember. The main idea was that a bevy of beauteous damsels—some half a dozen of them—had to be rescued from an island in mid-stream; and that time was the essence of the contract, as we say in the law. The mistake Benson made, in my opinion (and I was not the only one), was in arranging for the rescue to be made in a canoe. Myself, I should have given the young man a fishing punt, or one of those old-fashioned dinghies that ferrymen used to ply. The journey might have taken him longer, but time would have been saved in getting the lady on board and comfortably seated. The first young man dashed off at a terrific pace. His particular damsel was on the bank of the island, waiting for him, holding up her skirts. (They wore them, in those days.) Not a moment was to be lost. The husband—I think he was the husband: of the whole six, if I remember rightly—was already in sight. The gentleman, with one foot in the canoe and one foot on the island, held out his arms; and the lady sprang. Having said this much, I need hardly add that they both sat down in the water. Fortunately, the gentleman's right leg was still in the canoe. With great presence of mind, he dragged the lady on board and, stepping lightly over her, regained the opposite bank: where there was much cheering. The second lady may have been rendered nervous by seeing what had happened to the first. The general opinion was that, if she had kept her head, it might have been avoided; and that after all there are worse things than being soused in the river on a pleasant July afternoon. The remaining four ladies elected to be rescued by the umpire's launch.

  Croquet is an irritating game; but a boon to cripples. I took it up when I was suffering from a broken ankle. The more you try, the worse you play. I know a man who never touches a mallet except once a year, when he enters for the county tournament, and carries off half the prizes. Children, before they are old enough to have known trouble, make good players. What the game seems to require is a thoughtless temperament. My eldest girl, at the age of about twelve, was a demon. She'd just whack round and hit everything. It used to make me mad. I remember being Lady Beresford's partner against Lord Charles and Miss Beresford. Three times that child croquetted her mother to the other end of the lawn, and then Lady Beresford—very properly, as it seemed to me—put an end to the atrocity.

  “You do that again, my girl, and you go straight to bed,” she told the child. Eventually, Lady Beresford and myself won that game.

  Zangwill used to be keen on croquet, but never had the makings of a great player. Wells wasn't bad. Of course, he wanted to alter all the laws and make a new game of his own. I had to abandon my lawn, in the end. I had laid it out in the middle of a paddock where the farmer kept his young bulls. They couldn't resist the sight of the fresh green grass. I had fenced it round with barbed wire, but they made light of that. They would gather into a little group and confabulate, and then suddenly would lower their heads and charge. Sometimes they got through and sometimes they didn't: but it used to distract us. I remember a nightingale that would perch on one of the sticks and sing—often while we were playing. Nightingales love an audience. There was another that had his nest in a garden of ours by Marlow Common. Like the swallows, they return each year to the same loved spot. If one went to the gate and whistled, he would soon appear and, perching on the branch of an old thorn, sing for so long as one remained there, listening.

  Chapter XI

  AMERICA[1]

  “How do you like America?”

  “Oh,” I said, “are we there?”

  “Soon will be,” he answered. “How do you pronounce your name?”

  I told him. He repeated it louder, for the benefit of the others—some dozen of them, grouped around him. They made a note of it.

  “What would you say was the difference between English and American humour?”

  A chill north wind was blowing, and I hadn't had my breakfast. I did my best.

  “These things,” I said, “are a natural growth, springing from the soil. In England, to go no further back than Chaucer——” Nobody was listening. They were all busy writing. I wondered where they had come from. Out of the sea, apparently. I had been pacing the deck, scanning the horizon for my first sight of New York, and suddenly had found myself in the midst of them. Their spokesman was a thick-set, red-haired ge
ntleman. He had a military manner. The rest were a mixed collection. Some of them looked to me to be mere boys.

  “Say, can you tell us a story?” he questioned me.

  I stared at him. “A story?” I repeated. “You want me to tell you a story?”

  “Why, sure,” he answered.

  What on earth did they mean! Did they want me to start off and spin them a yarn, at a quarter to eight in the morning? And if so, was it to be adventure or romance, or just a simple love episode? I had a vision of being, perhaps, expected to sit down in the centre of them, taking the youngest of them on my knee.

  He saw I was bewildered. “Anything happened to you on the voyage,” he suggested, “anything interesting or amusing?”

  I had the feeling of a condemned prisoner, reprieved at the last moment. In gratitude, I tried to think of something interesting and amusing that really might have happened to me. Given time, I could have done it. But they stood there waiting with their pencils poised, and I had to fall back upon the truth. I told them the only thing that had happened—that, three days out, we had sighted an iceberg. It was a silly little iceberg. I had mistaken it, myself, for a portion of a wreck; and a man who had been looking at it through a telescope had pronounced it to be a polar bear. If it had not been for the bartender, none of us would have known it was an iceberg. I made the most of it, describing how we had “run before it,” and speaking highly of the Captain. It appeared in the evening papers under the heading, “The Ice Queen shows her Teeth.”

  We got on better after that. They saw that, at all events, I was trying. I told them how the American woman struck me—or rather how I felt sure she was going to strike me when I saw her; and gave them (by request) my opinion of Christopher Columbus, the American drama, the future of California, President Roosevelt and Elizabeth B. Parker. Who Elizabeth B. Parker was I have never discovered to this day; but that, I take it, is my fault. I gathered her to be one of America's then leading idols (they don't last long); and said that one of my objects in coming to America was to meet her. This seemed to give general satisfaction, and we parted friends.

  I make no charge against the American interviewer. One takes the rough with the smooth. I have been described, within the same period of seven months, as a bald-headed elderly gentleman, with a wistful smile; a curly-haired athletic Englishman, remarkable for his youthful appearance; a rickety cigarette-smoking neurotic; and a typical John Bull. Some of them objected to my Oxford drawl; while others catalogued me as a cockney, and invariably quoted me as dropping my aitches. All of them noticed with unfeigned surprise that I spoke English with an English accent. In the city of Prague, I once encountered a Bohemian ruffian who claimed to be a guide—a Czecho-Slovakian, I suppose he would be called to-day. He had learnt English in New York from a Scotchman. Myself, I could not understand him; but the New York interviewer would, I feel sure, have found in him his ideal Englishman. To anyone visiting America for a rest cure, I can see the American interviewer proving a thorn in the flesh. In pursuit of duty, he makes no bones about awakening you at two o'clock in the morning to ascertain your opinion of the local baseball team; and on arriving at your hotel, after a thirty-six hours' journey, you may find him waiting for you in your bedroom, accompanied by a flashlight photographer. But not many people, I take it, go to America for their health. At Pittsburgh, my wife woke with a sick headache, and I had to leave her behind me for a day or two. In the evening, better but still shaky, she dressed herself and slipped down into the lounge. Little black things were running about the floor. She thought they were kittens and tried to make friends with them, but they none of them would come to her. The place was poorly lighted, but there seemed to be about a score of them; sometimes more and sometimes less. The chambermaid looked in. She was an Irish girl. My wife drew her attention to these black kittens, as she thought them, commenting upon their shyness.

  “Oh, they're not kittens,” explained the chambermaid, “they're rats.”

  It seemed they came up from the kitchen, making use of the air shaft. If you did not interfere with them or tease them, they did you no harm.

  It was a slack time and the girl, at my wife's earnestly expressed wish, brought in her sewing. The girl was full of stories about rats, but doubted their being as intelligent as it was said. Otherwise, so the girl argued, you would hardly find them in Pittsburgh.

  “But you yourself are in Pittsburgh,” said my wife, “and you told me yesterday you had been here six years.”

  The girl explained the seeming riddle. She hoped in another three years to have saved enough to be able to return to Ireland and settle down. She had pigs and a small holding in her mind, not unconnected with one named Dennis. Thousands of Irish girls, she assured my wife, came to America with similar intention. Not all of them, of course, succeeded, but it was long before they lost hope. It is the dream of every “Dago” to return to his native village and open a shop with dollars brought back from America. Nor is it only the hyphenated alien who looks forward to spending abroad money got out of the United States. In travelling about, I have discovered that all the best parts of Europe are inhabited by hundred-per-cent Americans. Sooner or later, it occurs to the English literary man that there is money to be made out of lecturing in America. But without the American interviewer to boom us in advance, and work up the local excitement for us when we arrive, we would return with empty pockets. For what I have received in the way of lecturing fees out of America the Lord make me truly thankful to the American interviewer: and may his sins be forgot.

  The most impressive thing in America is New York. Niagara disappointed me. I had some trouble in finding it. The tram conductor promised to let me know when we came to the proper turning, but forgot; and I had to walk back three blocks. I came across it eventually at the bottom of a tea garden, belonging to a big hotel. My tour did not permit me to visit the Yellowstone Park. But I saw the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, and it struck me as neglected. The Rockies are imposing, but lack human interest. The Prairies are depressing. One has the feeling of being a disembodied spirit, travelling through space, and growing doubtful as to one's destination. To the European, what America suffers from is there being too much of it. In Switzerland, one winter, I met a man from Indianapolis. We were looking out of the window on our way to Grindelwald.

  “This would be quite an extensive country,” he said, “if it were rolled out flat.”

  In America everything seems to have been sacrificed to making an extensive country. In Arizona, they point out to you the mirage; but to the stranger it still looks like salt. The American lakes are seas surrounded by railways. In New Orleans, there are old-world nooks and corners, but these are disappearing. The first thing they do with you in New Orleans is to take you a drive through the cemeteries. There are miles and miles of them. You go in a char-à-banc, and the gentleman with the megaphone draws your attention to the most important tombs. “Seeing New Orleans” they call it.

  California is beautiful (one can forget the “movies”). I was in San Francisco the week before the earthquake. My wife and I were the guests of Bancroft, the historian. I shall never forget the kindness of himself and his sweet wife. He took us drives into the country behind two grand grey horses. He was a splendid whip. One afternoon, he proposed an excursion down into the town: “But we will leave your dear little lady to rest herself,” he said. And, later, I understood and was grateful to him. It was a curious experience. During the war, round Verdun, I came across roads that reminded me of that drive. Every few yards we went down into a hole and often it took the horses all their strength to pull us out. I asked if there had been an earthquake; but my host said no. For years the roads had never been repaired, the mayor and corporation (“Grafters” they are termed in America) having found another use for the money.

  In Florida, one seems to have dropped back into antediluvian times, or, to be more exact, the third day of the Creation, before God had quite finished separating the dry land from the waters,
and creeping things sat about, wondering which they were.

  Virginia has an atmosphere and speaks English; but the new towns in the Middle states, with their painted canvas “Broadways,” suggest a Wild West exhibition at Earl's Court. One looks instinctively for the sign-board, pointing to the switchback. Here and there, New England reminds one of the old country. I forget who it was said he would like to come back and see America when it was finished. One has the fancy that, returning in a thousand years or so, one might find there little cottages standing in gay gardens; pleasant rambling houses amid soft lawns and kindly trees. But there will never rise the clustering chimneys with the blue smoke curling upward. America will still be central-heated. I missed the friendly chimneys. Elsewhere in America, there is no country. There are summer resorts, and garden cities, and health centres; and just outside the great towns long avenues of “homes,” each on its parallelogram of land. The larger ones have verandahs and towers and gables; and the smaller ones are painted red. They told me that the reason why all the houses in America are painted red was that the Trust made red paint only. You can paint your house red or leave it alone, according to your taste and fancy. In America, a man who wants to paint his house any other colour than red is called a radical. America never walks. I am told that now every fifth American owns an automobile and the other four crowd in. In my time, you took a surface car. I used to dream of going for a walk, and when I asked my way, they would direct me to go straight on till I came to nine hundred and ninety-ninth street—or some such number—and there I would find the car.

  “But I want to walk,” I would explain.

  “Well, I'm telling you,” they would reply, “you walk to the end of the block. The car starts from round the corner.”