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.
AN EVANGELIST
Cockermouth itself, on the same authority, was a Place with
'nothing to see'; nevertheless I saw a good deal, and retain a
pleasant, vague picture of the town and all its surroundings. I
might have dodged happily enough all day about the main street and
up to the castle and in and out of byways, but the curious
attraction that leads a person in a strange place to follow, day
after day, the same round, and to make set habits for himself in a
week or ten days, led me half unconsciously up the same, road that
I had gone the evening before. When I came up to the hat
manufactory, Smethurst himself was standing in the garden gate. He
was brushing one Canadian felt hat, and several others had been put
to await their turn one above the other on his own head, so that he
looked something like the typical Jew old-clothes man. As I drew
near, he came sidling out of the doorway to accost me, with so
curious an expression on his face that I instinctively prepared
myself to apologise for some unwitting trespass. His first
question rather confirmed me in this belief, for it was whether or
not he had seen me going up this way last night; and after having
answered in the affirmative, I waited in some alarm for the rest of
my indictment. But the good man's heart was full of peace; and he
stood there brushing his hats and prattling on about fishing, and
walking, and the pleasures of convalescence, in a bright shallow
stream that kept me pleased and interested, I could scarcely say
how. As he went on, he warmed to his subject, and laid his hats
aside to go along the water-side and show me where the large trout
commonly lay, underneath an overhanging bank; and he was much
disappointed, for my sake, that there were none visible just then.
Then he wandered off on to another tack, and stood a great while
out in the middle of a meadow in the hot sunshine, trying to make
out that he had known me before, or, if not me, some friend of
mine, merely, I believe, out of a desire that we should feel more
friendly and at our ease with one another. At last he made a
little speech to me, of which I wish I could recollect the very
words, for they were so simple and unaffected that they put all the
best writing and speaking to the blush; as it is, I can recall only
the sense, and that perhaps imperfectly. He began by saying that
he had little things in his past life that it gave him especial
pleasure to recall; and that the faculty of receiving such sharp
impressions had now died out in himself, but must at my age be
still quite lively and active. Then he told me that he had a
little raft afloat on the river above the dam which he was going to
lend me, in order that I might be able to look back, in after
years, upon having done so, and get great pleasure from the
recollection. Now, I have a friend of my own who will forgo
present enjoyments and suffer much present inconvenience for the
sake of manufacturing 'a reminiscence' for himself; but there was
something singularly refined in this pleasure that the hatmaker
found in making reminiscences for others; surely no more simple or
unselfish luxury can be imagined. After he had unmoored his little
embarkation, and seen me safely shoved off into midstream, he ran
away back to his hats with the air of a man who had only just
recollected that he had anything to do.
I did not stay very long on the raft. It ought to have been very
nice punting about there in the cool shade of the trees, or sitting
moored to an over-hanging root; but perhaps the very notion that I
was bound in gratitude specially to enjoy my little cruise, and
cherish its recollection, turned the whole thing from a pleasure
into a duty. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that I soon
wearied and came ashore again, and that it gives me more pleasure
to recall the man himself and his simple, happy conversation, so
full of gusto and sympathy, than anything possibly connected with
his crank, insecure embarkation.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 28 of 70
Words from 27438 to 28471
of 70588
