I Accosted
Them Very Politely In My Capacity Of Stranger, And Requested To Be
Told The Names Of All Manner Of Hills And Woods And Places That I
Did Not Wish To Know, And We Stood Together For A While And Had An
Amusing Little Talk.
The wind, too, made himself of the party,
brought the colour into their faces, and gave them enough to
Do to
repress their drapery; and one of them, amid much giggling, had to
pirouette round and round upon her toes (as girls do) when some
specially strong gust had got the advantage over her. They were
just high enough up in the social order not to be afraid to speak
to a gentleman; and just low enough to feel a little tremor, a
nervous consciousness of wrong-doing - of stolen waters, that gave a
considerable zest to our most innocent interview. They were as
much discomposed and fluttered, indeed, as if I had been a wicked
baron proposing to elope with the whole trio; but they showed no
inclination to go away, and I had managed to get them off hills and
waterfalls and on to more promising subjects, when a young man was
descried coming along the path from the direction of Keswick. Now
whether he was the young man of one of my friends, or the brother
of one of them, or indeed the brother of all, I do not know; but
they incontinently said that they must be going, and went away up
the path with friendly salutations. I need not say that I found
the lake and the moonlight rather dull after their departure, and
speedily found my way back to potted herrings and whisky-and-water
in the commercial room with my late fellow-traveller. In the
smoking-room there was a tall dark man with a moustache, in an
ulster coat, who had got the best place and was monopolising most
of the talk; and, as I came in, a whisper came round to me from
both sides, that this was the manager of a London theatre. The
presence of such a man was a great event for Keswick, and I must
own that the manager showed himself equal to his position. He had
a large fat pocket-book, from which he produced poem after poem,
written on the backs of letters or hotel-bills; and nothing could
be more humorous than his recitation of these elegant extracts,
except perhaps the anecdotes with which he varied the
entertainment. Seeing, I suppose, something less countrified in my
appearance than in most of the company, he singled me out to
corroborate some statements as to the depravity and vice of the
aristocracy, and when he went on to describe some gilded saloon
experiences, I am proud to say that he honoured my sagacity with
one little covert wink before a second time appealing to me for
confirmation. The wink was not thrown away; I went in up to the
elbows with the manager, until I think that some of the glory of
that great man settled by reflection upon me, and that I was as
noticeably the second person in the smoking-room as he was the
first. For a young man, this was a position of some distinction, I
think you will admit. . . .
CHAPTER III - AN AUTUMN EFFECT - 1875
'Nous ne decrivons jamais mieux la nature que lorsque nous nous
efforcons d'exprimer sobrement et simplement l'impression que nous
en avons recue.' - M. ANDRE THEURIET, 'L'Automne dans les Bois,'
Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st Oct. 1874, p.562. {2}
A country rapidly passed through under favourable auspices may
leave upon us a unity of impression that would only be disturbed
and dissipated if we stayed longer. Clear vision goes with the
quick foot. Things fall for us into a sort of natural perspective
when we see them for a moment in going by; we generalise boldly and
simply, and are gone before the sun is overcast, before the rain
falls, before the season can steal like a dial-hand from his
figure, before the lights and shadows, shifting round towards
nightfall, can show us the other side of things, and belie what
they showed us in the morning. We expose our mind to the landscape
(as we would expose the prepared plate in the camera) for the
moment only during which the effect endures; and we are away before
the effect can change. Hence we shall have in our memories a long
scroll of continuous wayside pictures, all imbued already with the
prevailing sentiment of the season, the weather and the landscape,
and certain to be unified more and more, as time goes on, by the
unconscious processes of thought. So that we who have only looked
at a country over our shoulder, so to speak, as we went by, will
have a conception of it far more memorable and articulate than a
man who has lived there all his life from a child upwards, and had
his impression of to-day modified by that of to-morrow, and belied
by that of the day after, till at length the stable characteristics
of the country are all blotted out from him behind the confusion of
variable effect.
I begin my little pilgrimage in the most enviable of all humours:
that in which a person, with a sufficiency of money and a knapsack,
turns his back on a town and walks forward into a country of which
he knows only by the vague report of others. Such an one has not
surrendered his will and contracted for the next hundred miles,
like a man on a railway. He may change his mind at every finger-
post, and, where ways meet, follow vague preferences freely and go
the low road or the high, choose the shadow or the sun-shine,
suffer himself to be tempted by the lane that turns immediately
into the woods, or the broad road that lies open before him into
the distance, and shows him the far-off spires of some city, or a
range of mountain-tops, or a rim of sea, perhaps, along a low
horizon.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 30 of 70
Words from 29520 to 30551
of 70588
