You are a traveller in little things - in something very
small - which takes you into the villages and hamlets, where you meet
and converse with small farmers, innkeepers, labourers and their wives,
with other persons who live on the land. In this way you get to hear a
good deal about rent and cost of living, and what the people are able
and not able to do. Now I am out of all that; I never go to a village
nor see a farmer. I am a traveller in something very large. In the
south and west I visit towns like Salisbury, Exeter, Bristol,
Southampton; then I go to the big towns in the Midlands and the North,
and to Glasgow and Edinburgh; and afterwards to Belfast and Dublin. It
would simply be a waste of time for me to visit a town of less than
fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants."
He then gave me some particulars concerning the large thing he
travelled in; and when I had expressed all the interest and admiration
the subject called for, he condescendingly invited me to tell him
something about my own small line.
Now this was wrong of him; it was a distinct contravention of an
unwritten law among "Commercials" that no person must be interrogated
concerning the nature of his business. The big and the little man, once
inside the hostel, which is their club as well, are on an equality. I
did not remind my questioner of this - I merely smiled and said nothing,
and he of course understood and respected my reticence. With a pleasant
nod and a condescending let-us-say-no-more-about-it wave of the hand he
passed on to other matters.
Notwithstanding that I was amused at his mistake, the label he had
supplied me with was something to be grateful for, and I am now finding
a use for it. And I think that if he, my labeller, should see this
sketch by chance and recognise himself in it, he will say with his
pleasant smile and wave of the hand, "Oh, that's his line! Yes, yes, I
described him rightly enough, thinking it haberdashery or floral texts
for cottage bedrooms, or something of that kind; I didn't imagine he
was a traveller in anything quite so small as this."
II
THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION
We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle
years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't
know and didn't believe. The process is too gradual to trouble us; we
can only say, at fifty or sixty or seventy, that it is doubtless the
case that we can't see as far or as well, or hear or smell as sharply,
as we did a decade ago, but that we don't notice the difference.
