THREE MEN IN A BOAT
(_TO SAY NOTHING OF THE DOG_).
* * * * *
BY
JEROME K. JEROME
AUTHOR OF
“IDLE THOUGHTS OF AN IDLE FELLOW,”
“STAGE LAND,” ETC.
Illustrations by A. Frederics.
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
BRISTOL
J. W. ARROWSMITH, 11 QUAY STREET
LONDON
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO. LIMITED
* * * * *
1889
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE.
_The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style_,
_or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys_, _as
in its simple truthfulness_. _Its pages form the record of events
that really happened_. _All that has been done is to colour them_;
_and_, _for this_, _no extra charge has been made_. _George and
Harris and Montmorency are not poetic ideals_, _but things of flesh
and blood—especially George_, _who weighs about twelve stone_. _Other
works may excel this in depth of thought and knowledge of human nature:
other books may rival it in originality and size_; _but_, _for hopeless
and incurable veracity_, _nothing yet discovered can surpass it_.
_This_, _more than all its other charms_, _will_, _it is felt_, _make
the volume precious in the eye of the earnest reader_; _and will lend
additional weight to the lesson that the story teaches_.
LONDON, _August_, 1889.
[Picture: Graphic of three men in a rowing boat]
CHAPTER I.
Three invalids.—Sufferings of George and Harris.—A victim to one
hundred and seven fatal maladies.—Useful prescriptions.—Cure for
liver complaint in children.—We agree that we are overworked,
and need rest.—A week on the rolling deep?—George suggests the
River.—Montmorency lodges an objection.—Original motion carried by
majority of three to one.
There were four of us—George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself,
and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about
how bad we were—bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it.
Harris said he felt such extraordinary fits of giddiness come over him
at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said
that _he_ had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what _he_ was
doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of order. I knew it was my
liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent
liver-pill circular, in which were detailed the various symptoms by
which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine
advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am
suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most
virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly
with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
[Picture: Man reading book] I remember going to the British Museum one
day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had
a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all
I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the
leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget
which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating
scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of
“premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got
it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of
despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read
the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it
for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up
St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to
get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom,
and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was
sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about
another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only
in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live
for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I
seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the
twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got
was housemaid’s knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a
sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious
reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed.
I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology,
and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s
knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized
me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been
suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis,
so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.
I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from
a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class!
Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I
was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me,
and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I
felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all
of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed
it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel
my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have
since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there
all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it.
I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my
head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back.
But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I
stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried
to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only
thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before
that I had scarlet fever.
[Picture: Man with walking stick] I had walked into that reading-room a
happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my
pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for
nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn
by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice.
He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of
seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one
or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
“Well, what’s the matter with you?”
I said:
“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the
matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had
finished. But I will tell you what is _not_ the matter with me. I have
not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot
tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else,
however, I _have_ got.”
And I told him how I came to discover it all.
Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist,
and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly
thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the
side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription,
and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.
I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it
in. The man read it, and then handed it back.
He said he didn’t keep it.
I said:
“You are a chemist?”
He said:
“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel
combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers
me.”
I read the prescription. It ran:
“1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
I followed the directions, with the happy result—speaking for
myself—that my life was preserved, and is still going on.
In the present instance, going back to the liver-pill circular, I had
the symptoms, beyond all mistake, the chief among them being “a general
disinclination to work of any kind.”
What I suffer in that way no tongue can tell. From my earliest infancy
I have been a martyr to it. As a boy, the disease hardly ever left
me for a day. They did not know, then, that it was my liver. Medical
science was in a far less advanced state than now, and they used to put
it down to laziness.
“Why, you skulking little devil, you,” they would say, “get up and do
something for your living, can’t you?”—not knowing, of course, that I
was ill.
And they didn’t give me pills; they gave me clumps on the side of the
head. And, strange as it may appear, those clumps on the head often
cured me—for the time being. I have known one clump on the head have
more effect upon my liver, and make me feel more anxious to go straight
away then and there, and do what was wanted to be done, without further
loss of time, than a whole box of pills does now.
You know, it often is so—those simple, old-fashioned remedies are
sometimes more efficacious than all the dispensary stuff.
We sat there for half-an-hour, describing to each other our maladies. I
explained to George and William Harris how I felt when I got up in the
morning, and William Harris told us how he felt when he went to bed;
and George stood on the hearth-rug, and gave us a clever and powerful
piece of acting, illustrative of how he felt in the night.
George _fancies_ he is ill; but there’s never anything really the
matter with him, you know.
At this point, Mrs. Poppets knocked at the door to know if we were
ready for supper. We smiled sadly at one another, and said we supposed
we had better try to swallow a bit. Harris said a little something in
one’s stomach often kept the disease in check; and Mrs. Poppets brought
the tray in, and we drew up to the table, and toyed with a little steak
and onions, and some rhubarb tart.
I must have been very weak at the time; because I know, after the first
half-hour or so, I seemed to take no interest whatever in my food—an
unusual thing for me—and I didn’t want any cheese.
This duty done, we refilled our glasses, lit our pipes, and resumed
the discussion upon our state of health. What it was that was actually
the matter with us, we none of us could be sure of; but the unanimous
opinion was that it—whatever it was—had been brought on by overwork.
“What we want is rest,” said Harris.
“Rest and a complete change,” said George. “The overstrain upon our
brains has produced a general depression throughout the system. Change
of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the
mental equilibrium.”
George has a cousin, who is usually described in the charge-sheet
as a medical student, so that he naturally has a somewhat
family-physicianary way of putting things.
I agreed with George, and suggested that we should seek out some
retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream
away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes—some half-forgotten nook,
hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world—some
quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging
waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.
Harris said he thought it would be humpy. He said he knew the sort of
place I meant; where everybody went to bed at eight o’clock, and you
couldn’t get a _Referee_ for love or money, and had to walk ten miles
to get your baccy.
“No,” said Harris, “if you want rest and change, you can’t beat a sea
trip.”
I objected to the sea trip strongly. A sea trip does you good when you
are going to have a couple of months of it, but, for a week, it is
wicked.
You start on Monday with the idea implanted in your bosom that you
are going to enjoy yourself. You wave an airy adieu to the boys on
shore, light your biggest pipe, and swagger about the deck as if you
were Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake, and Christopher Columbus all
rolled into one. On Tuesday, you wish you hadn’t come. On Wednesday,
Thursday, and Friday, you wish you were dead. On Saturday, you are able
to swallow a little beef tea, and to sit up on deck, and answer with
a wan, sweet smile when kind-hearted people ask you how you feel now.
On Sunday, you begin to walk about again, and take solid food. And on
Monday morning, as, with your bag and umbrella in your hand, you stand
by the gunwale, waiting to step ashore, you begin to thoroughly like it.
I remember my brother-in-law going for a short sea trip once, for the
benefit of his health. He took a return berth from London to Liverpool;
and when he got to Liverpool, the only thing he was anxious about was
to sell that return ticket.
It was offered round the town at a tremendous reduction, so I am told;
and was eventually sold for eighteenpence to a bilious-looking youth
who had just been advised by his medical men to go to the sea-side, and
take exercise.
“Sea-side!” said my brother-in-law, pressing the ticket affectionately
into his hand; “why, you’ll have enough to last you a lifetime; and as
for exercise! why, you’ll get more exercise, sitting down on that ship,
than you would turning somersaults on dry land.”
He himself—my brother-in-law—came back by train. He said the
North-Western Railway was healthy enough for him.
Another fellow I knew went for a week’s voyage round the coast, and,
before they started, the steward came to him to ask whether he would
pay for each meal as he had it, or arrange beforehand for the whole
series.
The steward recommended the latter course, as it would come so much
cheaper. He said they would do him for the whole week at two pounds
five. He said for breakfast there would be fish, followed by a grill.
Lunch was at one, and consisted of four courses. Dinner at six—soup,
fish, entree, joint, poultry, salad, sweets, cheese, and dessert. And a
light meat supper at ten.
My friend thought he would close on the two-pound-five job (he is a
hearty eater), and did so.
Lunch came just as they were off Sheerness. He didn’t feel so hungry
as he thought he should, and so contented himself with a bit of boiled
beef, and some strawberries and cream. He pondered a good deal during
the afternoon, and at one time it seemed to him that he had been eating
nothing but boiled beef for weeks, and at other times it seemed that he
must have been living on strawberries and cream for years.
Neither the beef nor the strawberries and cream seemed happy,
either—seemed discontented like.
At six, they came and told him dinner was ready. The announcement
aroused no enthusiasm within him, but he felt that there was some of
that two-pound-five to be worked off, and he held on to ropes and
things and went down. A pleasant odour of onions and hot ham, mingled
with fried fish and greens, greeted him at the bottom of the ladder;
and then the steward came up with an oily smile, and said:
“What can I get you, sir?”
[Picture: Man feeling ill] “Get me out of this,” was the feeble reply.
And they ran him up quick, and propped him up, over to leeward, and
left him.
For the next four days he lived a simple and blameless life on thin
captain’s biscuits (I mean that the biscuits were thin, not the
captain) and soda-water; but, towards Saturday, he got uppish, and went
in for weak tea and dry toast, and on Monday he was gorging himself on
chicken broth. He left the ship on Tuesday, and as it steamed away from
the landing-stage he gazed after it regretfully.
“There she goes,” he said, “there she goes, with two pounds’ worth of
food on board that belongs to me, and that I haven’t had.”
He said that if they had given him another day he thought he could have
put it straight.
So I set my face against the sea trip. Not, as I explained, upon my
own account. I was never queer. But I was afraid for George. George
said he should be all right, and would rather like it, but he would
advise Harris and me not to think of it, as he felt sure we should
both be ill. Harris said that, to himself, it was always a mystery how
people managed to get sick at sea—said he thought people must do it on
purpose, from affectation—said he had often wished to be, but had never
been able.
Then he told us anecdotes of how he had gone across the Channel when it
was so rough that the passengers had to be tied into their berths, and
he and the captain were the only two living souls on board who were not
ill. Sometimes it was he and the second mate who were not ill; but it
was generally he and one other man. If not he and another man, then it
was he by himself.
It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick—on land. At sea, you
come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them;
but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it
was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors
that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a
mystery.
If most men were like a fellow I saw on the Yarmouth boat one day, I
could account for the seeming enigma easily enough. It was just off
Southend Pier, I recollect, and he was leaning out through one of the
port-holes in a very dangerous position. I went up to him to try and
save him.
“Hi! come further in,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “You’ll be
overboard.”
“Oh my! I wish I was,” was the only answer I could get; and there I had
to leave him.
Three weeks afterwards, I met him in the coffee-room of a Bath hotel,
talking about his voyages, and explaining, with enthusiasm, how he
loved the sea.
“Good sailor!” he replied in answer to a mild young man’s envious
query; “well, I did feel a little queer _once_, I confess. It was off
Cape Horn. The vessel was wrecked the next morning.”
I said:
“Weren’t you a little shaky by Southend Pier one day, and wanted to be
thrown overboard?”
“Southend Pier!” he replied, with a puzzled expression.
“Yes; going down to Yarmouth, last Friday three weeks.”
“Oh, ah—yes,” he answered, brightening up; “I remember now. I did have
a headache that afternoon. It was the pickles, you know. They were the
most disgraceful pickles I ever tasted in a respectable boat. Did _you_
have any?”
For myself, I have discovered an excellent preventive against
sea-sickness, in balancing myself. You stand in the centre of the deck,
and, as the ship heaves and pitches, you move your body about, so as
to keep it always straight. When the front of the ship rises, you lean
forward, till the deck almost touches your nose; and when its back end
gets up, you lean backwards. This is all very well for an hour or two;
but you can’t balance yourself for a week.
George said:
“Let’s go up the river.”
He said we should have fresh air, exercise and quiet; the constant
change of scene would occupy our minds (including what there was of
Harris’s); and the hard work would give us a good appetite, and make us
sleep well.
Harris said he didn’t think George ought to do anything that would
have a tendency to make him sleepier than he always was, as it might
be dangerous. He said he didn’t very well understand how George was
going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only
twenty-four hours in each day, summer and winter alike; but thought
that if he _did_ sleep any more, he might just as well be dead, and so
save his board and lodging.
Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a “T.” I
don’t know what a “T” is (except a sixpenny one, which includes
bread-and-butter and cake _ad lib._, and is cheap at the price, if you
haven’t had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is
greatly to its credit.
It suited me to a “T” too, and Harris and I both said it was a good
idea of George’s; and we said it in a tone that seemed to somehow imply
that we were surprised that George should have come out so sensible.
[Picture: Montmorency] The only one who was not struck with the
suggestion was Montmorency. He never did care for the river, did
Montmorency.
“It’s all very well for you fellows,” he says; “you like it, but _I_
don’t. There’s nothing for me to do. Scenery is not in my line, and I
don’t smoke. If I see a rat, you won’t stop; and if I go to sleep, you
get fooling about with the boat, and slop me overboard. If you ask me,
I call the whole thing bally foolishness.”
We were three to one, however, and the motion was carried.