Chapter II: 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.”