I was lighting my pipe as I stepped out of the inn at Cockermouth, and
did not raise my head until I was fairly in the street. When I did so,
it flashed upon me that I was in England; the evening sunlight lit up
English houses, English faces, an English conformation of street,—as it
were, an English atmosphere blew against my face. There is nothing
perhaps more puzzling (if one thing in sociology can ever really be more
unaccountable than another) than the great gulf that is set between
England and Scotland—a gulf so easy in appearance, in reality so
difficult to traverse. Here are two people almost identical in blood;
pent up together on one small island, so that their intercourse (one
would have thought) must be as close as that of prisoners who shared one
cell of the Bastille; the same in language and religion; and yet a few
years of quarrelsome isolation—a mere forenoon’s tiff, as one may call
it, in comparison with the great historical cycles—has so separated their
thoughts and ways that not unions, not mutual dangers, nor steamers, nor
railways, nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, seem able to
obliterate the broad distinction. In the trituration of another century
or so the corners may disappear; but in the meantime, in the year of
grace 1871, I was as much in a new country as if I had been walking out
of the Hotel St. Antoine at Antwerp.
I felt a little thrill of pleasure at my heart as I realised the change,
and strolled away up the street with my hands behind my back, noting in a
dull, sensual way how foreign, and yet how friendly, were the slopes of
the gables and the colour of the tiles, and even the demeanour and voices
of the gossips round about me.
Wandering in this aimless humour, I turned up a lane and found myself
following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and
then another, then a third, several couples out love-making in the spring
evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow
upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill—a great, gaunt
promontory of building,—half on dry ground and half arched over the
stream. The road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between
the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden enclosure, with a
small house and a large signboard within its privet hedge. I was pleased
to fancy this an inn, and drew little etchings in fancy of a sanded
parlour, and three-cornered spittoons, and a society of parochial gossips
seated within over their churchwardens; but as I drew near, the board
displayed its superscription, and I could read the name of Smethurst, and
the designation of ‘Canadian Felt Hat Manufacturers.’ There was no more
hope of evening fellowship, and I could only stroll on by the river-side,
under the trees. The water was dappled with slanting sunshine, and
dusted all over with a little mist of flying insects. There were some
amorous ducks, also, whose lovemaking reminded me of what I had seen a
little farther down. But the road grew sad, and I grew weary; and as I
was perpetually haunted with the terror of a return of the tie that had
been playing such ruin in my head a week ago, I turned and went back to
the inn, and supper, and my bed.
The next morning, at breakfast, I communicated to the smart waitress my
intention of continuing down the coast and through Whitehaven to Furness,
and, as I might have expected, I was instantly confronted by that last
and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to introduce
tradition and authority into the choice of a man’s own pleasures. I can
excuse a person combating my religious or philosophical heresies, because
them I have deliberately accepted, and am ready to justify by present
argument. But I do not seek to justify my pleasures. If I prefer tame
scenery to grand, a little hot sunshine over lowland parks and woodlands
to the war of the elements round the summit of Mont Blanc; or if I prefer
a pipe of mild tobacco, and the company of one or two chosen companions,
to a ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely
state these preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish them as
principles. This is not the general rule, however, and accordingly the
waitress was shocked, as one might be at a heresy, to hear the route that
I had sketched out for myself. Everybody who came to Cockermouth for
pleasure, it appeared, went on to Keswick. It was in vain that I put up
a little plea for the liberty of the subject; it was in vain that I said
I should prefer to go to Whitehaven. I was told that there was ‘nothing
to see there’—that weary, hackneyed, old falsehood; and at last, as the
handmaiden began to look really concerned, I gave way, as men always do
in such circumstances, and agreed that I was to leave for Keswick by a
train in the early evening.