CHAPTER II - COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK - A FRAGMENT - 1871
Very much as a painter half closes his eyes so that some salient
unity may disengage itself from among
The crowd of details, and
what he sees may thus form itself into a whole; very much on the
same principle, I may say, I allow a considerable lapse of time to
intervene between any of my little journeyings and the attempt to
chronicle them. I cannot describe a thing that is before me at the
moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before;
I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from
all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to
choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural
selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the
Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I
am obliged to write letters during the course of my little
excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again
find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given
in full length, what in torso, or what merely in profile. This
process of incubation may be unreasonably prolonged; and I am
somewhat afraid that I have made this mistake with the present
journey. Like a bad daguerreotype, great part of it has been
entirely lost; I can tell you nothing about the beginning and
nothing about the end; but the doings of some fifty or sixty hours
about the middle remain quite distinct and definite, like a little
patch of sunshine on a long, shadowy plain, or the one spot on an
old picture that has been restored by the dexterous hand of the
cleaner. I remember a tale of an old Scots minister called upon
suddenly to preach, who had hastily snatched an old sermon out of
his study and found himself in the pulpit before he noticed that
the rats had been making free with his manuscript and eaten the
first two or three pages away; he gravely explained to the
congregation how he found himself situated: 'And now,' said he,
'let us just begin where the rats have left off.' I must follow
the divine's example, and take up the thread of my discourse where
it first distinctly issues from the limbo of forgetfulness.
COCKERMOUTH
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.
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