Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (41 page)

Therefore it is that I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages.

There will be no description of towns, no historical reminiscences, no architecture, no morals.

I once asked an intelligent foreigner what he thought of London.

He said: “It is a very big town.”

I said: “What struck you most about it?”

He replied: “The people.”

I said: “Compared with other towns — Paris, Rome, Berlin, — what did you think of it?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It is bigger,” he said; “what more can one say?”

One anthill is very much like another. So many avenues, wide or narrow, where the little creatures swarm in strange confusion; these bustling by, important; these halting to pow-wow with one another. These struggling with big burdens; those but basking in the sun. So many granaries stored with food; so many cells where the little things sleep, and eat, and love; the corner where lie their little white bones. This hive is larger, the next smaller. This nest lies on the sand, and another under the stones. This was built but yesterday, while that was fashioned ages ago, some say even before the swallows came; who knows?

Nor will there be found herein folk-lore or story.

Every valley where lie homesteads has its song. I will tell you the plot; you can turn it into verse and set it to music of your own.

There lived a lass, and there came a lad, who loved and rode away.

It is a monotonous song, written in many languages; for the young man seems to have been a mighty traveller. Here in sentimental Germany they remember him well. So also the dwellers of the Blue Alsatian Mountains remember his coming among them; while, if my memory serves me truly, he likewise visited the Banks of Allan Water. A veritable Wandering Jew is he; for still the foolish girls listen, so they say, to the dying away of his hoof-beats.

In this land of many ruins, that long while ago were voice-filled homes, linger many legends; and here again, giving you the essentials, I leave you to cook the dish for yourself. Take a human heart or two, assorted; a bundle of human passions — there are not many of them, half a dozen at the most; season with a mixture of good and evil; flavour the whole with the sauce of death, and serve up where and when you will. “The Saint’s Cell,” “The Haunted Keep,” “The Dungeon Grave,” “The Lover’s Leap” — call it what you will, the stew’s the same.

Lastly, in this book there will be no scenery. This is not laziness on my part; it is self-control. Nothing is easier to write than scenery; nothing more difficult and unnecessary to read. When Gibbon had to trust to travellers’ tales for a description of the Hellespont, and the Rhine was chiefly familiar to English students through the medium of
Caesar’s Commentaries
, it behoved every globe-trotter, for whatever distance, to describe to the best of his ability the things that he had seen. Dr. Johnson, familiar with little else than the view down Fleet Street, could read the description of a Yorkshire moor with pleasure and with profit. To a cockney who had never seen higher ground than the Hog’s Back in Surrey, an account of Snowdon must have appeared exciting. But we, or rather the steam-engine and the camera for us, have changed all that. The man who plays tennis every year at the foot of the Matterhorn, and billiards on the summit of the Rigi, does not thank you for an elaborate and painstaking description of the Grampian Hills. To the average man, who has seen a dozen oil paintings, a hundred photographs, a thousand pictures in the illustrated journals, and a couple of panoramas of Niagara, the word-painting of a waterfall is tedious.

An American friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, who loved poetry well enough for its own sake, told me that he had obtained a more correct and more satisfying idea of the Lake district from an eighteenpenny book of photographic views than from all the works of Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth put together. I also remember his saying concerning this subject of scenery in literature, that he would thank an author as much for writing an eloquent description of what he had just had for dinner. But this was in reference to another argument; namely, the proper province of each art. My friend maintained that just as canvas and colour were the wrong mediums for story telling, so word-painting was, at its best, but a clumsy method of conveying impressions that could much better be received through the eye.

As regards the question, there also lingers in my memory very distinctly a hot school afternoon. The class was for English literature, and the proceedings commenced with the reading of a certain lengthy, but otherwise unobjectionable, poem. The author’s name, I am ashamed to say, I have forgotten, together with the title of the poem. The reading finished, we closed our books, and the Professor, a kindly, white-haired old gentleman, suggested our giving in our own words an account of what we had just read.

“Tell me,” said the Professor, encouragingly, “what it is all about.”

“Please, sir,” said the first boy — he spoke with bowed head and evident reluctance, as though the subject were one which, left to himself, he would never have mentioned,—”it is about a maiden.”

“Yes,” agreed the Professor; “but I want you to tell me in your own words. We do not speak of a maiden, you know; we say a girl. Yes, it is about a girl. Go on.”

“A girl,” repeated the top boy, the substitution apparently increasing his embarrassment, “who lived in a wood.”

“What sort of a wood?” asked the Professor.

The first boy examined his inkpot carefully, and then looked at the ceiling.

“Come,” urged the Professor, growing impatient, “you have been reading about this wood for the last ten minutes. Surely you can tell me something concerning it.”

“The gnarly trees, their twisted branches” — recommenced the top boy.

“No, no,” interrupted the Professor; “I do not want you to repeat the poem. I want you to tell me in your own words what sort of a wood it was where the girl lived.”

The Professor tapped his foot impatiently; the top boy made a dash for it.

“Please, sir, it was the usual sort of a wood.”

“Tell him what sort of a wood,” said he, pointing to the second lad.

The second boy said it was a “green wood.” This annoyed the Professor still more; he called the second boy a blockhead, though really I cannot see why, and passed on to the third, who, for the last minute, had been sitting apparently on hot plates, with his right arm waving up and down like a distracted semaphore signal. He would have had to say it the next second, whether the Professor had asked him or not; he was red in the face, holding his knowledge in.

“A dark and gloomy wood,” shouted the third boy, with much relief to his feelings.

“A dark and gloomy wood,” repeated the Professor, with evident approval. “And why was it dark and gloomy?”

The third boy was still equal to the occasion.

“Because the sun could not get inside it.”

The Professor felt he had discovered the poet of the class.

“Because the sun could not get into it, or, better, because the sunbeams could not penetrate. And why could not the sunbeams penetrate there?”

“Please, sir, because the leaves were too thick.”

“Very well,” said the Professor. “The girl lived in a dark and gloomy wood, through the leafy canopy of which the sunbeams were unable to pierce. Now, what grew in this wood?” He pointed to the fourth boy.

“Please, sir, trees, sir.”

“And what else?”

“Toadstools, sir.” This after a pause.

The Professor was not quite sure about the toadstools, but on referring to the text he found that the boy was right; toadstools had been mentioned.

“Quite right,” admitted the Professor, “toadstools grew there. And what else? What do you find underneath trees in a wood?”

“Please, sir, earth, sir.”

“No; no; what grows in a wood besides trees?”

“Oh, please, sir, bushes, sir.”

“Bushes; very good. Now we are getting on. In this wood there were trees and bushes. And what else?”

He pointed to a small boy near the bottom, who having decided that the wood was too far off to be of any annoyance to him, individually, was occupying his leisure playing noughts and crosses against himself. Vexed and bewildered, but feeling it necessary to add something to the inventory, he hazarded blackberries. This was a mistake; the poet had not mentioned blackberries.

“Of course, Klobstock would think of something to eat,” commented the Professor, who prided himself on his ready wit. This raised a laugh against Klobstock, and pleased the Professor.

“You,” continued he, pointing to a boy in the middle; “what else was there in this wood besides trees and bushes?”

“Please, sir, there was a torrent there.”

“Quite right; and what did the torrent do?”

“Please, sir, it gurgled.”

“No; no. Streams gurgle, torrents — ?”

“Roar, sir.”

“It roared. And what made it roar?”

This was a poser. One boy — he was not our prize intellect, I admit — suggested the girl. To help us the Professor put his question in another form:

“When did it roar?”

Our third boy, again coming to the rescue, explained that it roared when it fell down among the rocks. I think some of us had a vague idea that it must have been a cowardly torrent to make such a noise about a little thing like this; a pluckier torrent, we felt, would have got up and gone on, saying nothing about it. A torrent that roared every time it fell upon a rock we deemed a poor spirited torrent; but the Professor seemed quite content with it.

“And what lived in this wood beside the girl?” was the next question.

“Please, sir, birds, sir.”

“Yes, birds lived in this wood. What else?”

Birds seemed to have exhausted our ideas.

“Come,” said the Professor, “what are those animals with tails, that run up trees?”

We thought for a while, then one of us suggested cats.

This was an error; the poet had said nothing about cats; squirrels was what the Professor was trying to get.

I do not recall much more about this wood in detail. I only recollect that the sky was introduced into it. In places where there occurred an opening among the trees you could by looking up see the sky above you; very often there were clouds in this sky, and occasionally, if I remember rightly, the girl got wet.

I have dwelt upon this incident, because it seems to me suggestive of the whole question of scenery in literature. I could not at the time, I cannot now, understand why the top boy’s summary was not sufficient. With all due deference to the poet, whoever he may have been, one cannot but acknowledge that his wood was, and could not be otherwise than, “the usual sort of a wood.”

I could describe the Black Forest to you at great length. I could translate to you Hebel, the poet of the Black Forest. I could write pages concerning its rocky gorges and its smiling valleys, its pine-clad slopes, its rock-crowned summits, its foaming rivulets (where the tidy German has not condemned them to flow respectably through wooden troughs or drainpipes), its white villages, its lonely farmsteads.

But I am haunted by the suspicion you might skip all this. Were you sufficiently conscientious — or weak-minded enough — not to do so, I should, all said and done, succeed in conveying to you only an impression much better summed up in the simple words of the unpretentious guide book:

“A picturesque, mountainous district, bounded on the south and the west by the plain of the Rhine, towards which its spurs descend precipitately. Its geological formation consists chiefly of variegated sandstone and granite; its lower heights being covered with extensive pine forests. It is well watered with numerous streams, while its populous valleys are fertile and well cultivated. The inns are good; but the local wines should be partaken of by the stranger with discretion.”

CHAPTER VI

Why we went to Hanover — Something they do better abroad — The art of polite foreign conversation, as taught in English schools — A true history, now told for the first time — The French joke, as provided for the amusement of British youth — Fatherly instincts of Harris — The road-waterer, considered as an artist — Patriotism of George — What Harris ought to have done — What he did — We save Harris’s life — A sleepless city — The cab-horse as a critic.

We arrived in Hamburg on Friday after a smooth and uneventful voyage; and from Hamburg we travelled to Berlin by way of Hanover. It is not the most direct route. I can only account for our visit to Hanover as the nigger accounted to the magistrate for his appearance in the Deacon’s poultry-yard.

“Well?”

“Yes, sar, what the constable sez is quite true, sar; I was dar, sar.”

“Oh, so you admit it? And what were you doing with a sack, pray, in Deacon Abraham’s poultry-yard at twelve o’clock at night?”

“I’se gwine ter tell yer, sar; yes, sar. I’d been to Massa Jordan’s wid a sack of melons. Yes, sar; an’ Massa Jordan he wuz very ‘greeable, an’ axed me for ter come in.”

“Yes, sar, very ‘greeable man is Massa Jordan. An’ dar we sat a talking an’ a talking—”

“Very likely. What we want to know is what you were doing in the Deacon’s poultry-yard?”

“Yes, sar, dat’s what I’se cumming to. It wuz ver’ late ‘fore I left Massa Jordan’s, an’ den I sez ter mysel’, sez I, now yer jest step out with yer best leg foremost, Ulysses, case yer gets into trouble wid de ole woman. Ver’ talkative woman she is, sar, very—”

“Yes, never mind her; there are other people very talkative in this town besides your wife. Deacon Abraham’s house is half a mile out of your way home from Mr. Jordan’s. How did you get there?”

“Dat’s what I’m a-gwine ter explain, sar.”

“I am glad of that. And how do you propose to do it?”

“Well, I’se thinkin’, sar, I must ha’ digressed.”

I take it we digressed a little.

At first, from some reason or other, Hanover strikes you as an uninteresting town, but it grows upon you. It is in reality two towns; a place of broad, modern, handsome streets and tasteful gardens; side by side with a sixteenth-century town, where old timbered houses overhang the narrow lanes; where through low archways one catches glimpses of galleried courtyards, once often thronged, no doubt, with troops of horse, or blocked with lumbering coach and six, waiting its rich merchant owner, and his fat placid Frau, but where now children and chickens scuttle at their will; while over the carved balconies hang dingy clothes a-drying.