Part 4

In face of this national taste for aquatic pursuits, it is a painfully suggestive reflection that comparatively few Englishmen, and still fewer Englishwomen, possess sufficient knowledge of swimming to save their own lives if they were suddenly plunged into deep water, and were called upon to support themselves for, perhaps, five minutes by their own exertions. No doubt, the power of swimming is a far more common accomplishment amongst men than it was a quarter of a century ago. Swimming has shared in the athletic revival which has marked the period, and has found its devotees amongst the practical adherents of muscular Christianity; but if, as some seem to think, there are not wanting signs that the rage for athletic pursuits has passed its meridian, and has begun its decline, swimming will probably suffer, in common with other sports, from the reaction. No doubt, too, our changeful English climate, our cold waters, are against this particular form of exercise. In the tideless, sun-warmed Mediterranean, in the coral-bound lagoons of the Southern Ocean, or by the grove-clad banks of Burmese rivers, swimming becomes both a luxury and a second nature. Let those testify who remember the untrammelled urchins flinging themselves from the bows of boats in Malta harbour to dive for and secure the coins flung from the deck of some newly arrived vessel, or disporting themselves day after day in the fetid, drain-polluted waters of the Dockyard Creek. Let travellers bear witness who, with possibly some humorous exaggeration, have told us how, in Burmah, toddling infants can swim at least as soon as they can walk; and how a mother, too busy for the time to look after her youngest born, will cheerfully and confidently place it in the river, to amuse itself with its playmates; and then, when she has leisure, will swim about among the gamboling children until she has found her own and brought it to land. In such a case as this there can be but little teaching; swimming must come almost naturally—shall we say from hereditary instinct, developed by the constant calls made upon it, and transmitted from generation to generation?

The lower temperature of the sea, or of fresh water fully exposed to the air, in our latitudes will doubtless always prevent Englishmen, as a nation, from becoming expert swimmers; but the common-sense of a people which prides itself on its possession of the quality should suffice to evade or overcome this natural obstacle so far as to release us from at least a large proportion of the grim death-tribute which we pay every year to our national ignorance. To any one who has noted the characteristic recklessness with which people intrust themselves to frail craft with whose management they are ludicrously unacquainted, it may perhaps be a matter for surprise that this tribute is not more heavy than it is; but certainly not a few of the deaths by drowning that go to swell our annual calendar of disasters can only be properly called accidents if we extend the signification of the word so as to include those misfortunes which, though unforeseen, arise from perfectly preventable causes. The climate of Paris and the north of France is not warmer than that of England, but the proportion of Parisians—perhaps even of Frenchmen in general—who can swim is certainly greater than that of Englishmen. When it was pointed out to the librarian at Boulogne-sur-Mer that the library did not possess a single work on swimming, he replied good-humouredly: ‘Ah! c’est comme ça, Monsieur—on apprend naturellement ici;’ and in Thévenot’s _Art de Nager, démontré par Figures, avec des Avis pour se baigner utilement_, published in Paris in or about 1696, some of the plates represent ladies swimming, and would thus seem to show that with Frenchwomen it has been a custom for centuries. In the year 1859, Miss Powers, the secretary to the Ladies’ National Association for the diffusion of sanitary knowledge, published a twopenny pamphlet entitled, _Why do not Women Swim?—a Voice from many Waters_; but the question thus propounded was not satisfactorily answered, and an Englishwoman who can swim still remains a rarity—how great a one, any one may easily ascertain for himself by watching the small crowd that speedily assembles to watch a lady-swimmer at any seaside resort.

In extenuation of our national ignorance of swimming, we have not even the excuse that the acquisition of the art is difficult. On the contrary, it is one of the most easily acquired of accomplishments. The one secret of it is confidence, though, like most other things, it is best learned young. There is no reason why it should not—on the contrary, on the ground both of health and of saving of life, there is every reason why it should—be made a necessary part of the education of young people of both sexes and of all classes. At Eton and in some other schools, it is systematically taught; but it would be far cheaper and more useful than many of the things for which parents cheerfully pay as ‘extras’ in private establishments; whilst in these days, when we are concerning ourselves so greatly about the education of the masses, and paying such a price for the privilege, swimming would certainly be a far more useful subject to form one of the items of Board School education than many of the things for which the long-suffering ratepayer is now compelled to put his hand in his pocket. As a certain William Woodbridge remarked in a manual published by him in 1864:

To swim with ease and confidence and grace, Should in Great Britain have acknowledged place Of recognition; and by law decreed, Be taught as fully as we’re taught to read; Forming a part in education’s rule In every college and in every school.

This is the merest doggerel. In fact, the recommendation of the book is not its literary merit, for it possesses none, but the fact that it is what it professes to be—in itself a matter of congratulation after the nonsense which, from time to time, it has been sought to palm off upon the public by utilising the names of various prominent swimmers who were far too ignorant to have written a line of the compilations with which their names have been associated—and that the instruction conveyed in it is thoroughly sound, practical, and to the point. Woodbridge died in 1868; and the little manual has, I believe, been long out of print, so that in saying this I may be acquitted of the desire to give any one a gratuitous advertisement. I come back, however, to my point: Why, provided there be water at hand, should not every one be taught to swim during the period of his or her school career; and how can parents reconcile it to their consciences to permit their children to run a perfectly needless risk, by failing to have them taught what they ought to learn as regularly and easily as they learn to walk?

A TALE OF TWO KNAVERIES.

IN FOUR CHAPTERS.—CHAP. II.

Tom and Lucy Wedlake were two young people who had loved one another well enough, and had had sufficient courage to marry on two hundred pounds a year in the teeth of their respective families, both of which were highly respectable, extremely proud, but very poor. Tom was a Civil Service clerk, aged twenty-eight, whose salary had reached the above annual sum; and it was insisted by all their relations that the young people ought to wait until he should get his first class—which he might hope to do about forty—and be in receipt of three hundred a year; that being the smallest income upon which any lady and gentleman could contrive to support existence together. The pair declined to accept this view; so they got married; and Tom took his pretty gentle wife to live in a little house on the north-east of the Regent’s Park, which he had furnished with money lent him, free of interest, by a well-to-do friend. For the rest, they were content to trust to youth, health, and determination to keep from absolute destitution themselves and any little folks who might hereafter come.

They did not, after all, find the struggle so terrible as it had been described to them. They were not blessed—or burdened—with children until they had been some time married, nor until circumstances had put it into their power to maintain and educate them without difficulty; and they had no expensive tastes. They were extremely fond of one another, and lived in great happiness for one year. Then Uncle Franklin took up his abode with them, and their happiness was for a time considerably clouded. Mr Franklin was Lucy’s maternal uncle. In his business—that of a wine-merchant—he had made money, which he had increased by successful speculation. But in proportion as his purse grew bulky, his manners deteriorated. The latter fact was forgiven in consideration of the former; and by the time he retired, the master of a moderate fortune, the family toleration of him had developed into positive affection. Yet he was as we have seen him—rough, harsh, coarse, selfish, and overbearing; faults which were easily overlooked by the half-dozen sets of brothers and sisters, plentifully garnished with nephews and nieces, who remembered only that Uncle Franklin was old, rich, and a bachelor, and forgot the wine-merchant’s business, and the continual snubs and insults which it had always been the old gentleman’s pleasure to inflict upon his affectionate relatives. So that, when he began to lament the loneliness of his age, and to hint at his longings for the comforts and pleasures of family life, quite a number of hospitable doors flew open to him on the instant. Uncle Franklin entered all those doors, and left each of them before many weeks were over, shaking the dust off his feet against the inhabitants. In every house which he honoured with a brief sojourn, he comported himself more like a fiend than a human being. His selfishness, his ill-temper, his insolence, his coarseness, his tyranny, his general powers of exasperation, would have been unendurable by any save possible legatees, whose meekness, however, instead of disarming the old savage, seemed to incite him to yet greater cruelties. The end was the same in every case. He would fasten some perfectly unreasonable quarrel upon his hosts, and fling out of the house in a furious passion; subsequently amusing himself by inditing from his next abode injurious replies to the petitions for pardon and reconciliation which pursued him.

One day a cab drove up to Tom Wedlake’s door, and Uncle Franklin, alighting therefrom, walked into the parlour, plumped himself into the most comfortable armchair, and announced his intention of remaining, adding that his luggage would arrive shortly. Lucy, in consternation, entertained him as well as she could, which did not appear to be very well, until her husband came home and they were able to take counsel together.

Tom was at first entirely opposed to the whole thing; and being himself of a somewhat fiery temper, hinted at forcible expulsion as a means of solving the difficulty. But Lucy begged him to do nothing hastily, and suggested that the self-invited guest might at all events remain for a few days, until they should be able to see for themselves whether he were in reality so black as he had been painted. And whether it was the excellence of the little dinner which Lucy dished up, or the bright though homely comfort around him, or certain indications in Tom’s look and manner, the dreadful uncle, having come in like a lion, seemed disposed to remain in the character of a lamb. He actually tried, in the course of the evening, to pay Lucy a compliment on her good looks, which only missed fire because no one could possibly have understood it.

Before he went to bed, Uncle Franklin repeated his proposal, offering very liberal terms; and he lamented his lonely old age and the evident disposition of all his relatives to quarrel with him, in a way which went to Lucy’s soft heart. Even Tom, than whom there was no better fellow breathing, was taken in so far that he forgot much that he had heard of the woes attending Uncle Franklin’s irruption into any household. It so happened that he had never troubled Lucy’s own family circle, who alone of all his relatives lived at some distance from London. The young couple sat late that night, discussing the matter from all sides, and at last determined to make the trial. Lucy was influenced partly by pity, partly by the hope, which had in it little indeed of the mercenary element, that her uncle might leave her some small legacy, so that her darling husband might not, after all, have an altogether undowered bride. Tom, on his side, thought only of the wife he loved; the additional income would enable her to keep another servant, would relieve her from hard and menial labour, and would even afford her some few little feminine luxuries which had hitherto been beyond her reach. So each, for the other’s sake, was willing to bow the back for the burden.

For a time all went well. The old man seemed to have made a sudden and vast amendment. True, he was generally irritable, always selfish, and sometimes expressed himself in rather odd language. But these, after all, were mere eccentricities, failings of old age, results of a life apart from all refining influences. They were not insupportable by two people who had youth, health, and good spirits to their aid. And it was evident that Uncle Franklin had taken a fancy to his niece. He liked to have her sitting near him at work; and she made an exemplary listener while he fought over again the battles of business, or indulged in tirades against the baseness and ingratitude of mankind in general and his other relations in particular. To Tom he was civil, and even friendly after his fashion; altogether, he was an endurable inmate; and his entertainers began to believe that the tales which they had heard must at least have been highly coloured.

But after a month of this, Tom and Lucy began to discover that very little present advantage was likely to result to them from the arrangement, which was also irksome in many ways. Uncle Franklin paid well; but then his ideas on the subjects of eating and drinking and minor luxuries were on an even more liberal scale. In fact, after his requirements in this way were provided for, and the expense of the necessary additional servant met, there was little or no margin of profit remaining. And the demands upon Lucy’s time and energies were considerable. Uncle Franklin liked attention, and was unsparing in exacting it; he was, in truth, something of an invalid, which perhaps partly accounted for his temper and other peculiarities; so that Tom began to think seriously of hinting to his guest that it was hardly convenient to entertain him longer; when one evening the old man, being alone with his host and in an unusually equable frame of mind, made an explicit declaration of his intentions. Having first anathematised all his other relations in a general but very hearty manner, he vowed that his niece and her husband were so far the only people with whom he had been able to get on; that he found himself more comfortable with them than he had ever been in his life; and that, with their permission, he proposed to end his days in their company. Tom looked a little awkward; but Mr Franklin, as if guessing at what was in his mind, went on to say that on this condition he should make Lucy his sole legatee; there being, as he considered, no one who had a better claim upon him, or to whom he would willingly leave a fraction of his wealth. Of course Tom could only express his grateful acknowledgments. He was too poor, his prospects were too uncertain for him to be justified in standing in the light of his wife and possible children; so Uncle Franklin was given to understand that his proposal was accepted.

Lucy was full of delight when her husband told her what had passed; but Tom himself was by no means disposed to be sanguine.

‘It’s all very well, little woman,’ said he; ‘and so far he has behaved with tolerable decency. But I don’t think he’s exactly a person to be trusted. You see, he is very comfortable here, thanks to you, and he is undeniably selfish. Naturally, he would like to stay; and some men will say or promise anything to get what they want at the moment. Let him stay, by all means; we must not throw away such a chance. But don’t allow yourself to build too much on his promises, my dear. I, for my part, shall not be at all surprised if he gets tired of us, and quarrels with us, as he has with the rest; nor even if we find, after he has ended his days here and got all he can out of us, that his money is left elsewhere.’

Lucy said little, but she could not bring herself to believe in the existence of such duplicity, and in her heart she was convinced of her uncle’s _bona fides_. She even felt a little shocked that her husband, whom she so loved and admired, could entertain such narrow and unworthy suspicions; and she resolved that, so far as it depended on her, the old man should have no just cause to reconsider his testamentary intentions.

But it is to be feared that this attack of amiability, coupled with the repression of the past few weeks, had put a strain upon Uncle Franklin which he was unable to bear. Perhaps he thought that his munificent promise entitled him to relax a little; perhaps he considered that he had now made his footing in the house absolutely safe. However that may have been, within a very few days after this conversation, the old Adam began to appear in him once more. In Tom’s presence, he was still on his good behaviour, having an instinctive fear of him, as one not likely to submit tamely to oppression. But Tom was absent all day at his office; and when Uncle Franklin had no one to withstand him but a woman, and a very timid and gentle one to boot, he began to ‘let himself out.’ His powers of fault-finding were perfectly microscopic; he passed his time in devising vexations and enjoying them with the keenest relish. As for his language, it daily increased in majesty and ornament. He spoke to the servants in such a manner that one of them—the new one—threatened to give warning, and was with difficulty persuaded to remain; and Lucy was obliged to keep them as much as possible from contact with her guest. He would begin with a grumble at some trifle, round which he would gradually crystallise his grievances, and work himself up by their contemplation into a condition of insane rage, in which he would amble about the room like an angry baboon, knocking down chairs and scattering verbal brimstone all around. On these occasions, his liking for Lucy seemed to disappear altogether, and he would indulge in the most unpleasant criticisms on her appearance, her intellect, and her housekeeping abilities. Neither would he spare her husband, whom he was accustomed to sum up with similarly uncomplimentary results, inviting Lucy to report his comments to their object—a course which, he understood very well, nothing would induce her to take.

She bore it all heroically. She knew what the consequence would be if the slightest hint of the treatment to which she was subjected should ever reach Tom’s ears; so she contented herself with uncomplaining good-temper so long as that was possible, and tears—which added fuel to her uncle’s wrath—when endurance was pushed beyond its limits. Of her own profit she thought little; or rather, the loss of her expectations would have seemed to her humble and contented nature but a small price to pay for release from her sufferings. But for Tom’s sake—in the hope of seeing him relieved of that anxiety for her future which she knew to be always present to his mind—for the sake of those who might hereafter cling around her knees—she was prepared to endure silently the worst that Uncle Franklin could do to her.

This state of things, however, came to a sudden end in a manner to her most unwelcome. Her husband came home one afternoon much earlier than usual. He had thought of late that his wife looked rather pale and worn, and had resolved to treat her to a little dinner at a restaurant, and to take her afterwards to the theatre, in the hope that the outing might give her a much-needed fillip. The consequence was that he met her unexpectedly, as she came out of the dining-room. Could she have had a few moments’ time, she would have utilised it in sponging her eyes and generally smoothing down her ruffled plumage, for this was one of the days on which she had given way under Uncle Franklin’s inflictions; her face was all blurred with tears, and she was sobbing so that she could not immediately stop. All that he had heard of the old man rushed into Tom’s mind, and he suspected at once the state of the case. He took her up-stairs, and then and there had it all out of her, with that gentle and perfectly unbending firmness which she could never resist. He said no more than to bid his little wife dry her eyes and be comforted, kissed her, and went down-stairs, quite deaf to her feeble efforts to excuse the offender. Uncle Franklin had a bad half-hour of it that afternoon; he probably heard more solid truth than he had been favoured with for many years. It was never exactly known what Tom said to him; but before bedtime that night, it was quite understood by all the household that their guest was under orders to quit within a week. Uncle Franklin did not utter a word all the evening, but sat in his armchair, blinking furtively at his host, feeling guilty and detected, but yet unrepentant. Before he went to bed, he announced his intention of keeping to his own room for the remainder of his stay, and requested that a fire might be lit there in the morning. Also, he wrote a letter, and sent a servant to post it. This letter it was which occasioned Mr Blackford’s visit.

That worthy solicitor prepared the will, which was very short and simple, with the care demanded by a document of such importance to his own interests. He even took the precaution to fair-copy it for signature himself, so as to pay strict regard to the desire of the testator that no inkling of its purport should leak out prematurely; and with it he next day repaired to Camden Town, taking with him, as requested, two witnesses—his own clerk, and a writer in the employ of his law-stationer.

Mr Franklin chuckled a great deal as he wrote his name. ‘You can take it away and keep it yourself, Blackford,’ said he, after the witnesses had done their part and retired; ‘I’ll warrant you to take good care of it.—By the way, I don’t think the date’s inserted.’

The solicitor began to unbutton the greatcoat, in an inner pocket of which he had buried the precious piece of paper.