An Angler at Large

Front matter

AN ANGLER AT LARGE

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AN ANGLER AT LARGE

Dedicatory Letter

D H. T. S.,

It is a commonplace that there are too many books on angling.

My instinct, therefore, is to follow the established custom of authors who write on that subject, and hypocritically to apologise for what I have done.

But gratitude compels me to dedicate the Angler at Large to you, the man the most truly, though perhaps not the most conspicuously, responsible for its appearance. For lacking your encouragements (of which this book is the most direct fruit), very possibly I had been still floundering clueless in the labyrinth of Conveyancing Law, and employing my pen upon the infinitely discreditable labour of storing up trouble for the harmless unborn children of inoffensive clients. You have done more than any twenty men (though less than one woman) to save me from this misery and infamy, and I hold myself bound publicly to testify my obligation.

You are, then, the natural dedicatee of this book.

But if I follow the custom which I have mentioned—if, that is to say, I apologise for adding to our prodigious list of Angling books, what kind of a compliment do I pay you, upon whom responsibility must so seriously fall? I should be slighting your taste most villainously.

I decline, therefore, to follow that custom. I do not apologise for the Angler at Large, I prefer to say that the book is a good book, and that I congratulate the public on its appearance. I do not hesitate to own that it is a book which I am glad to possess; that I am sure it is one which a great number of people ought to buy—if only to give it instantly away. I will even declare that it is a book which should be translated into all polite languages.

I could develop this theme indefinitely, but I find that, while I am putting its proper valuation upon your judgment, I am almost losing sight of that modesty which it still behoves an author in some degree to preserve.

I think enough has been said to show that I am in a very embarrassing situation.

So here is the book for you.

Always yours, William Caine.

Hampstead, 1911.

Note

I the proprietors of the Field, Macmillan's Magazine, and the Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette for their permission to use, in this book, articles which they have published. Those from the Field were originally entitled: The Friendship of the River, A Day with the Keeper, Some Dry-fly Refinements, A Blank Day, The Great Dry-fly Myth, The Purism of Flounder Fishing, The Crackling of Thorns, Fishing Trophies, The Patience of Anglers, The Perfect Thrill, The Trout at the Boundary, Then and Now, The Essential Falsity, Three Days on the Sea-Stream, and A Norwegian Interlude.

To Macmillan's Magazine I am indebted for Isaac on a Chalk Stream, and to the Evening Standard and St. James's Gazette for Mors Janua, in this book called Of Death.

Chapter I

AN ANGLER AT LARGE

A the Valley began to open out my head was always at one window or the other. Because of the luggage the fly was a closed one. It is sinful to drive to Willows in a closed thing, but what would you? To say nothing of the rain, unless people are bound for one of those eccentric restorative establishments in Germany where nudity is compulsory, a few boxes are bound to accompany their migration.

So we had with us:

1. A harp in a harp-case.

2. An American trunk, not quite so large as a Pantechnicon van.

3. A steamer trunk, not quite so large as the last.

4. A telescopic basket.

5. Another telescopic basket.

6. Another telescopic basket.

7. A sausage of green rot-proof canvas.

8. A handbag.

9. A tea-basket (called Grandmama).

10. A fishing-creel.

11. A bundle of fishing-rods and other engines.

12. A roll of rugs.

13. A Rookee chair, in a bag of canvas (rot-proof).

All this crammed to bursting-point.

But no canary and no bicycle. Nor any dog.

Numbers 4 to 13 incommoded us within, or crowded the roof and the box seat. Numbers 2 and 3 travelled behind us in a luggage cart. The harp, in the harp-case, closed the procession on a milk-float.

Few people travel with a harp. This accounts for the prosperity of Mr. Cook, Dr. Lunn and other convenient gentlemen.

Harps are provided in Heaven. Otherwise there would be no orchestra.

The cost of appeasing porters when travelling with one of these instruments explains the dimensions of the Hebrew variety. This is an unworthy sneer at an admirable race. It is the fault of the harp. I am at my worst just after the thing has accompanied me on a journey. To-morrow it will be taken out and strung up and played, and then I shall love it again. In this—in nothing else—it resembles a young child, which, when it has been washed and fed and has slept and has been washed and fed once more, becomes something adorable and entirely different from the curse of yesterday's railway travel.

The harp-case has power to turn smiling, kindly, bearded men into brutal Grobians. They fetch out the trunks with a jest; whistling, load their barrows with sausages and telescopic baskets. "Anything more, sir?" they ask alertly. "There is only," I reply, with my forced smile, "a harp." And the weather changes for the worse. Two, three, four of them bend their enormous muscles to the toil. I see their honest faces redden, grow purple. I hear muttered words which I recognise as popular expressions of hate. While elevating their outrageous fardel to the roof of our conveyance they give themselves permanent strains. They rupture their abdominal walls. They become out-patients at infirmaries and bind themselves in trusses. They lose their situations. Their children starve. Their sticks are sold up. At least, I imagine all these things happening.

And to change these sour-faced, fainting, loathing, blasphemous enemies back into friends, what sums are needful!

I do not mind the loss of money—the harp is ready for the road—but the thought of these men's animosity is very painful to me. For I would go about the world among smiles and kind words. A humble ambition, but not easy to realise.

To-day, however, the business was not so dire as usual. The proprietor of our cottage had sent his milk-float to meet us. Strange prompting of Providence! A milk-float is low, near the earth. You can slide things from a barrow into a milk-float. It is, therefore, the most suitable conveyance imaginable for harps that have arrived at railway stations. The transfer was effected without a suspicion of hernia. But the milk-float was full. Yet—astonishing and mysterious Destiny!—the proprietor of the fly, which I had ordered, had sent also a luggage cart. Thus, owing to our farmer-landlord having provided what must have seemed to him twice the accommodation necessary for our baggage, and to the fly's proprietor (undesired) having furnished a cart which he had, no doubt, thought of quite a reasonable size, we were able, by careful packing of all three vehicles, to get ourselves and our indispensables carried in one journey to our and their destination.

This kind of thing is largely responsible for the widespread belief that Providence is a good person to leave things to. Occasionally Providence, when it is left to him, turns up trumps. These things remain fixed in our memories and obliterate the recollection of those innumerable opportunities which we have afforded to Providence of which no heed has been taken.

I myself leave things to Providence, but not from any confidence I possess in Providence. I think he is a very bad man to leave things to. Quite rightly he does not encourage that sort of thing at all.

But it is less trouble than seeing to things oneself. It is time enough for that when one has to.

Sometimes, moreover, it comes off. And then it is delightful.

And in the case of the harp and the milk-float, remember, I had not left it to Providence at all. In my mind I had provided a railway van for everything. Yes, I was going to send everything out in a railway van. And no railway van would have been available, because the railway tells me that it does not send vans outside the city boundaries. But Providence saw to the matter, and sent me a milk-float and a luggage cart, which was positively noble of Providence.

With this good omen we drove away from the station, and presently the Valley began to open out, and my head began to travel between the windows.

There was Ottley Down on the right. By springing across the fly I was just in time to see the chimneys of Little Ottley House, and, to their left, the White Poplars at the lower end of the water. Here the horse's head got in my way, and in order to catch my first glimpse of the Little Ottley Chalk Pit, I had to tread once more upon my wife's feet, only as they were by this time curled up on the seat beside her, I didn't. In taking my head in from viewing the chalk-pit, so that I might get over to where I could obtain a sight of the Hanging Wood, I knocked my hat off into the mud and the fly had to halt. I recovered my hat, sadly bewrayed, and as I climbed in, "Never mind," said I to my wife, "I won't want it for three months, thank Heaven!" With these words I sat down on the Spanish Jug.

This utensil should have been mentioned in my list. But it is too late now. I give it a place to itself.

14. A Spanish Jug.

The history of the Spanish Jug.

In the Spring of this present year my wife told me that I wished to write a novel whose theatre should be Spain. I was very glad to hear this, because I knew how much she desired to visit that country.

After an interval we were in Madrid.

Next day my wife observed a woman carrying a large earthen jug, twin-spouted, of elegant shape. My wife coveted it. After that she saw nothing but women carrying similar jugs.

Presently I began to feel an influence akin to that experienced by the hypnotic subject. I became aware of a consciousness that I desired one of these jugs. I knew that I did not really want a jug of any kind, because I dislike all jugs. But from time to time I found myself saying, in reply to a question, "Yes, we must certainly take one of those jugs home," or, "Yes, it would look well upon Victoria" (which is the name of our sideboard), or, "Yes, it would be the very thing to keep water in during the hot days." After a week of this I found myself bartering coppers against a Spanish Jug, this very one upon which I sat when I got back into the fly. It was, it is, an enormous jug.

"It is fragile," I said, as I lugged the thing back through Madrid. "And it is too large for the bag. It will only get broken on the journey. Let us give it away to somebody and increase our popularity."

"I will take it to England," said my wife, "if I carry it every step of the way." This emphatic manner of speaking (for we were to travel by train and steamboat) convinced me that what she promised would happen in every particular but one, an important one.

During the journey to London my wife comforted me, whenever I complained of the Spanish Jug's excessive weight, by drawing word-pictures of Victoria adorned with the Spanish Jug and prophesying about the great draughts of cold water which I should, during the hot days, quaff from the Spanish Jug. She said that she would never have let me burden us with the jug if I had not been so mad about it in Madrid, if I had not persuaded her, with all that about Victoria and the coldness of water kept in such jugs, to let me buy it. So, mindful of my past enthusiasm, I, sweating, carried it through innumerable railway stations and customs-houses into steamboats and omnibuses and cabs and restaurants and railway carriages and buffets. For it was too fragile for a porter's clumsy hands.

At last I sat upon it, as I have told. But I did not crush it. It was not fragile enough for that.

Suppose I finish with the Spanish Jug now and for ever. Let me advance this narrative about twenty minutes.

While the harp and the harp-case were earning me the undying hatred of the flyman, the driver of the luggage cart, the driver of the milk-float, and the gardener at our cottage, I, passing through the dining-room, a prey to agitated thoughts, discovered my wife in the act of filling the Spanish Jug with water from a glass vessel of common shape.

"There!" she said, standing back and surveying it fondly, "now wasn't it worth a little trouble? It will always stand here"—and she set it on a shelf—"filled, so that you will have sweet, cold water to drink whenever you want it. And there is a glass to stand beside it." With these words she hurried off to her bedroom to unpack the American trunk.

Ten minutes later, having done my best to allay the detestation of four fellow-creatures, I returned to the dining-room. I was hot and tired. For it was not only by money that I had curried favour with those men. I had helped with the harp-case. I was, I say, hot and tired.

My eye fell upon the Spanish Jug and its attendant glass.

The words "sweet, cold water" recurred to me.

I possessed myself of the Spanish Jug.

I tilted it above its glass.

Nothing happened. I said: "The nozzle is blocked up."

I blew into the nozzle.

A sound resembling the hollow roar of the wind in a sea-cave resulted.

Then I perceived that my hands were wet.

Then I discovered that I was standing in a large pool of water.

Then I knew that the Spanish Jug leaked.

And a great cry broke from me in my agony.

My wife appeared, pallid. "Your jug leaks," I said.

"Tut!" said she, "so it does. What a mess! Well," she rang the bell for sponges and cloths, "it will still look nice on Victoria. And after all that was really what made you buy it."

To resume my broken thread.

All these things—the chimney of little Ottley, the Hanging Wood, the Island Willows, the Green Man (Dwarf it should be, so small is this public-house) and the rest—I found in their places. Each discovery filled me with greater and greater content. Nothing was altered. The Valley was just as I had known it, not a hedge gone, not a gate added, not a—Hold! What is this along the top of Lavender's garden wall? Gods and great Humphrey! Corrugated iron. Oh, John Lavender, John Lavender! Is there never a thatcher left in Clere Vale to save thee from this villainy? Oh, damned utilitarian! Oh, Vandal Lavender! Oh! Oh! and again Oh! Drive fast, good flyman, or I shall be writing in praise of thatch on walls of yellow mud, and never get to the cottage to-night. Let me ignore the presence of the machine-made horror. Let me feast my eyes rather on the brave, new, golden roof with which, Lavender, thou hast positively bought thy pardon. Bravo! A good roof; a haystack house. Excellent John! Thou knowest the merits of the material, cool in hot weather, warm in cold. For its beauty thou givest not a curse. No matter. Pass the wall. The sweet stuff is thick on thy house, and I am obliged to thee and to all good fellows who keep up the thatching trade.

And there is our own roof. What a roof it is! Old thatch mended. You cannot find a brown or a yellow that is not in it. And the tilt of it! And its amplitude! It sits on the house like a cosy on a teapot. Let the sun burn or the wind blow frozen, neither shall find his way through that. It is the only stuff to shelter agriculturists. For to each his appropriate roofing. Slate for the trader, hard, cold, mathematical. And tiles, which are only glorified slates, they are well for the retired soldiers at Eastbourne, who are a cut above business. But for the tiller of the soil, from the soil let his roof be won. For this agriculture is the completest of arts, and can give a man every necessary thing, food, bedding, beer, wool for his back, sport for his leisure, and the house from chimney to cellar.

His daughter's piano? Why, this is the first time I ever heard his daughter's piano numbered among a man's necessities.

Am I an agriculturist? God forbid! I am a man writing for money, and now I have written about thatch and we are at the gate, and the harp, in the harp-case, has to be got into the drawing-room.

Chapter II

I going to fish.

It is true that there is an enormous deal to be done in the house. The unpacking of the American trunk is in itself a day's work. And there is the drawing-room furniture to rearrange.

Wherever we go—and you must know that we are always going somewhere—this ceremony begins our sojourn, because, as my wife would tell you, I have my particular views upon the placing of tables and chairs and the Oriental fabrics which brighten up the dingiest room. I like to see what is called 'the feminine touch' in my habitation. What is good enough for careless bachelors is not good enough, believe her, for me. I can never do anything until I have got the harp out of the harp-case and the harp-case into the back premises out of sight—ugly thing! And if there is no sofa, I will carry a bed down from an upper room and cover it with djidjims and cushions and feign a divan, rather than allow my drawing-room to lack this essentially feminine touch. And when my wife is on it, then and not till then do I feel that the place begins to be habitable. Ask her if this is not so.

And I will work far into the night, long after she has grown exhausted, carrying out her excellent suggestions, lugging great wardrobes across and across the floor till they are in exactly the situation to make right the new adjustment of the large tables and the piano, if there is one.

And I welcome every suggestion she makes (from the couch that used to be a bed), because I know her to have a sound instinct for placing furniture. It is extraordinary how sound it is. We always agree—in the end. How lucky it is that we should be married! Supposing she had wedded a man who detested this kind of hard labour. An unfastidious man. A man such as I used to be before I knew her.

Just now, however, I am going to fish.

The harp I will unpack and the harp-case I will help the gardener to carry away. And I will swab up the leakage of the Spanish Jug, and then I will fish.

For you are to know, sir, that I have not fished in chalk water these three years. It is absolutely necessary for me to angle.

And you are also to know, sir—(No, my wife, no. No tea. Well, a cup—while I get on my waders and put the rod together). You are also, sir, to know that it is six years since I said goodbye to this same river Clere, my companion of five summers. How then shall I shift furniture or empty trunks, when he is all agog to greet me?

Come, let us be off. Will you go with me? The lady of the house is busy, and I am happy and prepared to prattle.

I say, sir, that we grow into friendship with a long-fished river as with a good comrade. The odd days, never repeated, that we have had on other waters are comparable to those single, rare, glorious encounters with the choice spirits, which Circumstance forbids us to improve. At the dinner-table, in a railway train, yea, by the water's edge we meet. Heart goes out to heart; each recognises in the other something of himself. It is a moment pregnant with the excitement of discovery, with all the possibilities that congeniality offers. One thinks, "If I were not going to Australia to-morrow!"; the other, "Would this man awaited me in Archangel! I could love him like a brother." Yet, though we never meet again, we remember, not perhaps the name, not perhaps the features, but something which is independent of these accidents. Friendship is largely a matter of opportunity. That one memory is all the friendship opportunity allows us. So with these rivers of a single day.

But when one has fished a water season after season for five years, then is its friendship a great and living thing. Of that little burn in Mull where one made such hay of the sea-trout one cherishes but a dim picture of dark pools, miniature brown-white cataracts, slate-blue hills, a leaden sky, the calling of the moor-fowl, and a heavy basket. But each feature of the long-fished stream is with one at all times—each curve and vista, each willow and withy-bed, the unguessable hatch-hole, the frank, revealing shallow, and the swelling downs and the distant clumps. These things are a possession that nothing can destroy so long as memory serves. Though paralysis should strike one into a living death, while memory were faithful one should yet wander in one's mind (by no means deliriously) through certain green water-meadows, eye busy with a certain stream where stout fish should always be rising. Other friends, older perhaps, dearer even than the river, should stand by the bedside, grieving at one's insensibility to their presence. Blind, deaf, dumb, feeling nothing, how should one cry to them for comfort? And what comfort could they give? But the river would come at one's unspoken call, and its consolation would never fail.

The winter months and all other times when trout fishing is impossible are in a sense seasons of paralysis. One may be rather more independent of one's river friend than one would be in the unfortunate circumstances which I have just imagined; but, though others claim one's attention, excluding him from one's communication, he bears no malice. He never sulks, thinking himself slighted. If a common friend happens to engage one's attention, and the presence of the river is suggested, he will come cheerfully to make a third, stay as long as the others wish, promoting pleasant talk with all his might, and, at a hint, will fade unostentatiously away. He knows nothing of jealousy, nothing of priorities; he is humble, faithful, always cheerful, always fresh, always the most excellent of company. And one never dreams of despising him for his lack of spirit, which one would surely do—such is man—were he a human being. He is like a dog, without its sycophancy; like a pipe, without its perversity; like the supreme book, without its2He is like the supreme book. Yet the supreme book demands physical effort. Eyes tire even of the supreme book. And the supreme book, too, is shut into outer darkness by paralysis. To an angler the river beloved is really like nothing else.

And when he is by—when, that is, we are by by him—what good times we have! How we vary the sport! His population, I have said, is always rising. Each of those dimples is made by a fish that one has risen, played, and landed. And—this is the peculiar advantage of the situation—always those fishes are ready to be risen, played, and landed again. No day, not even memory's, is long enough to grass the fishes of five seasons. So one picks and one chooses, taking one here, one there, passing others by, reserving them for other occasions. They will not desert their places.

Does our pleasure demand a rise of Mayfly? What fishing we can cram into a couple of hours! Thirty trout, and the balance dips to 70 lb. And we might have done still better, but this is enough for good sportsmen such as we and the river are. Or do we feel that a clear October day would be well spent among the grayling? It is at our service. The woods are bravely decked out in honour of the occasion. The sun is warm; the air is cold. The fish rise foolishly, and our take is colossal. Especially in the long deeps of the Still Reach do the great head-and-tailers break the surface. How they tug and bore! What lengths of the bank we cover and cover as we follow those mighty fishes down the water to net them at last where the deep thins to the broad, gravelly shallow! Or is our fancy for some particular fish, that yellow monster that we got on the half-volley at our very feet as he came sulkily down to us, scared by the fish that we had pricked, the mighty trout that was looking into our eye as we flung the badger hackle at him, the golden giant that we hoped only to hasten, the colossus that we could hardly get into the net—the greatest trout? Do we care to live again through the marvellous moment of his rising? It is just as we please. Or there is the big fellow in the shallow, jungly backwater, that ran straight into a little patch of weed (a willow just above, an ash just below), and the rod being stoutly held up, splashed his way to the top, and so lay on his side, his head out of water, and taught us a new wrinkle for managing a weeded fish by holding him thus until he expires of asphyxiation. What though the wrinkle has never been used again? What though the odds against the possibility of its employment are 20,000 to 1? Let us warm ourselves in the glow of our own self-esteem, that we were able to realise the masterliness of inactivity, and so, ultimately, wade in and net a 2½ pounder, after one rush of six yards and three minutes of holding on. What though, conscience-stricken, we turned him in again? We had him. Let us have him again. Let us turn him in once more, and good luck go with him, slowly, under the willow roots.

Or would we have a few fat brace with the sedge? The feast is spread. We have only to name our dish. Our good friend will see that we are provided. He can meet our every taste. For an epicurean meal of choice morsels, for a great lusty gourmandising, he has the ingredients ready to hand, and his kindly presence will add savour to every mouthful.

Seasons come, perhaps, when we cannot actually meet. Our occasions take us elsewhere. But we are not utterly separated from the river. At any moment we have only to shut our eyes to be on his banks, catching fish. And then our circumstances smile. We are reunited. And as we cross the lowest meadow to where, deep and calm under the protecting copse, our friend awaits us by the boundary fence (there is surely a great trout under the thorn bush), we catch a kindly wink from him far up where he turns westward, and our heart beats its answer to his welcome.

And there he is.

I am going to fish. Now,—at once,—I am going to fish.

Chapter III

T the garden was delicious. The sky was covered with a film of cloud which diffused the light of the moon (in her first quarter) all over the heavens into a soft and radiant blue. She hung just above the greatest of that row of elms which burdens the western sky line. A high branch touched her. The big trees loomed imminent, rather terrible. The great one seemed to crouch there, huge, devilish. In two clear places among its branches there seemed the long slit eyes in the head of a bushy and shapeless demon. It must have been the immense and contrasting peace of the night that put this gruesome idea into my head. The elm-fiend was to the rest of my circumstances like that abominable anticipation of trouble which so often does its best to kill complete happiness. Low among the arms of the smaller, thinner elms to the south, lightning flickered, just above the down. The stars shone very faint, largely luminous. A sigh of breeze stirred rarely. Sounds are never absent in the country, whose silence is made up of a multitude of little noises. Distinct above the rest was the coo of a pigeon from the clump on the flank of the Beacon Down. A cow mooed. The starlings rustled in the thatch above our heads. Somewhere a nightjar sprung its stealthy rattle, and a river bird called once. And four miles away at the station the trains whistled and rolled and puffed, the sound coming loud, caught by the funnel which is this valley, across whose mouth from N.E. to S.W. the railway line runs. Let it run!

And the air, dear God! it seemed to fill one's whole body. We could not drink enough of it.

This is a good place. It always was. But it is better now.

Chapter IV

J tells me that this season there are three men besides myself who are entitled to fish hereabouts.