IDLE HOURS
It might perhaps be supposed, from the brief account I have given of
myself, that these earlier days were wholly devoted to study and hard
work. This, however, was very far from being the case. At school I had
been an ardent cricketer and a lover of football, and in the holidays
with my second brother, who was as keenly devoted to fishing as I was, I
passed many a happy hour among the hills of Cumberland and in the
Scottish Highlands.
It was in Cumberland that we were first initiated into the mysteries of
the craft by a genial drunkard named Atkinson, who dwelt in a small
cottage close by Wordsworth’s grave in Grasmere churchyard.
My father had been a native of the hills, and his forebears came of that
race of Dalesmen, or small free-holders, owning farms of a hundred acres
or more, whose independence of character Wordsworth so strongly extols,
but whose little properties have been long since absorbed in the great
estates of the Lake District.
My grandfather’s farm was situated at Jonby, midway between Penrith and
the shores of Ullswater, and it was natural, when my father’s resources
sufficed, that our summer outing should be made in the land of his
birth.
I think we all of us inherited his love of the hills, and it was in
those fishing days, while we were staying in a house that stood close
beside Grasmere churchyard, that I renewed and completed my study of
Wordsworth, whom I had first learned to love while I was at school.
How simple must have been my father’s life in those boyish days before
he set forth on his business career is shown in the fact that he was
fond of relating to us that he and his brothers used always to go
barefoot to school, and only put on their shoes and stockings when they
neared the village.
To Scotland my brother and I journeyed mostly alone, combining the
pleasures of a walking tour with the exercise of our favourite sport.
Our means were not very ample for these rambling excursions, and we not
unseldom found ourselves in a tight place before the end of our journey
was reached.
I remember in particular that on one occasion at the close of a
delightful holiday we arrived at Callander with little more than our
third-class return tickets in our pockets. That afternoon we were to
take train for London, but we had walked for many miles and were
desperately hungry. Outside what seemed to us to be the most modest inn
in the town we held a council of war, and at last determined to venture
upon ordering a cold lunch.
The resources of the establishment were meagre, and were fairly
outstripped by our ravenous appetites. Long before the latter were
satisfied, the one cold joint of lamb which the establishment possessed
was exhausted. We called for more, but there was no more, so there was
nothing left for us but to call for the bill, when, to our horror and
dismay, we found that the amount surpassed by two or three shillings the
little hoard that was still left to us.
The situation was critical and called for a Napoleonic remedy. After a
whispered consultation with my brother I boldly summoned the waiter and
demanded to know if the fixed price charged for a cold lunch did not
allow us to have as many helpings as we pleased. The waiter, brought to
bay, had to confess that this was the case, and thereupon, with sudden
audacity, I urged the point that, as he had been unable to satisfy our
just demands, the bill must be proportionately reduced. After
considerable parley, with an occasional reference to a landlady who sat
behind a screen, and who may have been moved by a feeling of pity for
our obvious embarrassment, our plea was allowed, and we walked from the
inn with a sense of triumphant victory in our hearts, and with just
threepence-ha’penny in our pockets to start on our journey to town.
As we were waiting on the platform of Callander station, with no baggage
but our knapsacks and our fishing-rods, I overheard a conversation which
has always seemed to me to throw a lurid light upon certain aspects of
the Scottish character.
Two pawky tradesmen of the district were pacing up and down the platform
in earnest talk, and as they passed me I caught this one sentence, torn
from its context:
“Should I outlive my wife, as I hope to do----” said the elder to the
younger, and then they passed out of hearing.
What was to follow on the realisation of this fond dream I have often
longed to know, but even as the statement stands I have always thought
it forms a notable monument to the caution and foresight of the race.
There are several picturesque sayings of the Highlanders that come back
to me as connected with these annual excursions. We had been staying for
a few days at the little inn at Luib, situated about five miles from
Loch Dochart, where we went daily to fish, and the gillie who used to
row us on the loch had many a pleasant story to tell of his working days
in the years when he had followed the calling of a shepherd.
I remember one evening, as we walked home with our faces turned to one
of those beautiful sunsets that I think are only to be seen in the
Highlands, he was telling us of a favourite sheep-dog that had been for
years his companion on the hills. But the time came when age unfitted
the poor animal for his work, and when the only kindness in the
shepherd’s eyes was to put an end to its life. And then he described how
he had tied it to an apple-tree and got his gun to shoot it.
“An’ I could scarce look at the beast,” he said, “as I fired, for I
loved him well and he had been sae wise.”
The tears rolled down his cheeks as he told the story, and we paused in
our talk as we trudged along the sun-lit road. Then out of the silence
came this further utterance:
“I buried him,” he faltered, “at the foot of the apple-tree”--and then
another pause, and then the final words--“an’ there would be a rare crop
of apples on the tree the year, for there’s naething for an apple-tree
like a dead dog.”
This anecdote has always seemed to me characteristic of the Highland
nature where poetry and prose lie closely side by side, and where the
simple mind that holds them both is quite unconscious of any shock of
feeling in the rapid transition from one to the other.
In this respect I think they show a close resemblance to the peasants of
Northern Italy, in whom there is this same frank avowal of swiftly
changing feeling; and neither in the one nor in the other does there
seem to occur the need, always felt by the Englishman, of forming a
bridge of sentiment from the world of fact to the world of passion.
A great race are these Highland gillies, claiming and according equality
even in a calling in which they are very conscious of their superiority;
never lacking in courtesy, and yet yielding with a certain proud
independence all deference that is rightly due to the temporary relation
of master and servant. In their speech they are sometimes curiously
felicitous, and, using our English language as in a sense a strange
tongue, they sometimes exhibit, for that reason, a purity and delicacy
in the selection of words that a native can hardly command.
There was a very pretty phrase used by an old peasant at Killin with
whom I was chatting one evening outside his cottage door. A pretty girl
passed along on the other side of the road, and, wishing to be as
Scotch as I could in order to ingratiate myself with the old man, who
was vastly entertaining in his stories of the village, I said, “That’s a
bonny lassie!” to which he replied, “Ay, sir, she is, but I’m thinking
maybe she’s just bonnier than she’s better.” How much more delicate in
its inference, how much milder in its condemnation, than our crude
statement, “She’s no better than she should be!”
In those earlier times the “dry fly” as a lure for trout was scarcely
known, and even to this day it is regarded with undisguised scepticism
by the majority of Scotch gillies. It is not many years ago that I
astonished an expert in the older fashion by its successful application
on a little loch on the hills above Glenmuick, where I was staying with
Lord Glenesk. We had ridden for five or six miles to reach our
fishing-ground, and when we arrived it seemed as though we had come upon
a fruitless errand--there was not a ripple upon the water and not a rise
to be seen. The gillie who was with me scanned the surface of the lake
with a melancholy eye. Towards evening, however, the fish began to move,
and as sunset approached they were feeding eagerly. But the absence of
any breeze rendered casting with the wet fly a barren toil. It was then
that I drew from my case a large alder dressed as a floating fly. When I
showed it to the gillie his contempt was unconcealed. “What sort of an
animal might that be?” he inquired, and when I explained its uses to
him, he turned his face towards the sunset with a look of patient and
pitying toleration, merely remarking for my comfort that I “might just
as well throw my bonnet into the loch.” But his scorn quickly changed to
wonder as fish after fish was drawn to the bank, and when we parted at
the close of the day he somewhat sheepishly entreated me to leave him as
a legacy one or two specimens of those same “animals.”
I had a somewhat similar experience in Switzerland a few years later.
The little crater lakes on the summit of the Gothard Pass are well
stocked with trout, and the landlord of the hotel where we lunched
advised me to accept the services of the chef, who was reckoned locally
a very mighty exponent of the piscatorial art. But when my comrade
observed my methods and noted the results, he very speedily returned to
his kitchen: “_Oh! là, là ça, vous savez, je ne comprends pas du tout.
Bon jour, monsieur_,” and so we parted.
I think every sportsman-born has in him something of the poacher.
Certainly one of the keenest and most skilful fishermen of my
acquaintance has made confession to me of occasional lapses into the
most illicit practices when fairer means had failed. In our earlier
essays among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland my brother and I
were frankly unscrupulous, in so far at least as our limited skill
permitted. There was a little pool in the hills above Thirlemere called
Harrop Tarn which was so completely surrounded by a quaking morass that
fishing from the bank was almost impossible. And yet we contrived to
extract many a good trout from that same tarn by the poachers’ device of
cross-lining. Joining our casts together, we were able, by letting out
the line from either rod, to reach the very centre of the sheet of
water, and when a fish was hooked we reeled in and drew him to the one
little bit of firm land on one side or the other where he could be
safely brought to the basket.
I knew nothing of the literature of the art when I first learned to fish
at the age of twelve, and it has often amazed me since to note what
wondrous feats of skill can be performed--in books. How to cast in the
teeth of a facing wind, how to avoid the sagging of the line in a swift
stream, how to clear a spreading bush immediately behind you--there are
exact and precise receipts for all these accomplishments, but they do
not always serve you by the water-side. There was a time when the
written record of such triumphs of skill made me feel that I scarcely
deserved to rank as a fisherman at all, but it has been my fortune
occasionally to see some of these bookmade anglers at their work, and
the result in nearly every case has been to restore to me a measure of
self-esteem.
The truth is that the art of fishing can only be acquired on the banks
of a stream, and is rarely acquired at all unless it has been practised
in boyhood. And even so it lies not within the reach of all, even of
those who ardently desire to succeed. I remember a comrade in one of my
earlier fishing excursions in Scotland who laboured zealously but
fruitlessly to obtain even the most modest degree of proficiency, and as
he stood up in the boat, his line hopelessly entangled for the hundredth
time, the gillie who was rowing us, moved by a spirit of prophecy that
broke down all social reserve, suddenly turned to him and addressing him
by his Christian name: “Frank, Frank,” said he, “you’re a good fellow,
but you’ll _never_ be a fisherman!” And in truth he never was.
And yet, once a measure of mastery is won, fishing remains for those who
love it an abiding passion. Time leaves undisturbed the keen excitement
of the first adventure, and with each return of spring the longing to be
out beside a stream sets the pulses newly beating. One day when we were
trudging through a field of turnips in Fifeshire, the late Sir William
Harcourt, as though pierced by sudden conviction, turned to me with the
remark, “Carr, what a bore sport is!” And of some forms of sport that, I
think, may sometimes be truly said. But your true fisherman is never
bored. He counts no day blank till it is ended, for the last hours, as
he well knows, may restore his broken fortunes and set a goodly brace or
two in the empty basket.
And there is no sport, I think, that sorts so well with the occupations
of a writer. Shooting and stalking need the surrender of the entire day,
and are too exhausting to leave any appetite for intellectual labour.
But with fishing it is not so. The angler who has the good fortune to
dwell beside a stream can divide his energies between work and sport
without neglect of either, and in my own case I have found them go
happily hand in hand. Much of my play of _King Arthur_ was written by
the shores of Rannoch, which I had first known and loved as a boy, and
there is a little cottage in Hertfordshire, unhappily no longer mine,
that enshrines many happy memories wherein work and sport are linked in
close association.
Walking tours have gone out of fashion nowadays; the bicycle and
motor-car have engendered another taste, and have partly ruined the
quiet ways that were once the exclusive property of the pedestrian. But
they were a favourite pastime in the sixties and seventies, and, apart
from the longer sojourn we used to make in the Lake District or in
Scotland, there was scarcely an Easter or a Whitsuntide holiday which
did not find me among the hills of Westmoreland and Cumberland. There,
with a friend of my early years and still a friend to-day, we explored
every hill and dale of the Lake District.
On one of those spring excursions I remember we had made rather a long
day of it, starting from Patterdale in the morning, lunching at
Grasmere, and then making our way by Easedale Tarn to the summit of High
White Stones. It was our intention to descend from that point and to
reach the hotel in Dungeon Ghyll in time for dinner. But on High White
Stones an eerie and impenetrable white mist descended upon us and we
missed our way. For several hours we wandered in the mist until we lost
all count of where we were, but at last, by some strange good fortune,
we found ourselves on the top of Langdale Pikes, a spot which I knew
well from many an earlier excursion.
We both knew that below us lay Stickle Tarn, and that from Stickle Tarn
ran the brook which would finally lead us to our now much-desired inn.
And so in the drenching rain we cautiously descended the hillside till
we got to the shores of the Tarn. Then, by some unexpected error,
instead of turning on our right, which in a few moments would have led
us to the issue of the brook, we took the other direction and were
forced to make the whole circuit of the Tarn, reaching at last, almost
exhausted, the rushing torrent that descends to the valley. In such fear
were we of losing our way again that we determined not to desert the bed
of the stream, and, crawling catlike from boulder to boulder, we found
the village at last, and saw, with a delight that may be easily
imagined, the far-off glimmer in the windows of the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel.
It was half-past ten before we arrived at the door, wet through, and
with our slight stock of change contained in our knapsacks sodden with
rain. But the landlord kindly lent us some strange garments of his own,
and I do not think two men ever enjoyed a meal more than we two as we
fell upon that staple dish of the Lake District, “ham and eggs.”