Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 358
“I hear you have some new ale out from England, Mr. Hopkins,” I once said to him. “May I have a glass of it?”
“Sorry, Mr. Leacock,” he said, “I can’t serve it to you — not for another three weeks — not fair to the ale, sir, not fair to the ale.”
To Mr. Hopkins, ale was a living, breathing creature, with rights and sentiments of its own.
Knowing this of hotel atmosphere, I was interested in being able to witness, a couple of summers ago, the very process by which such an atmosphere is brought into being.
I entered the “rotunda” of one of those pleasant little frame hotels, newly built, that dot the inner channel of the Georgian Bay. When I had duly registered, I said to the proprietor, who seemed to be the only person around:
“You have a charming spot here. Do you get a nice class of people?”
“Very nice class of people,” he assured me. “Mostly professional men up from Toronto, men like Judge Barracot who is with us just now.”
“Have you good fishing?” I asked.
“Very good, indeed; our guests generally take a guide and go up toward Parry Sound. Judge Barracot was out this morning.”
“Do they get many?”
“Generally get a very fair catch. Judge Barracot was saying he got a dozen bass this morning.”
From which the proprietor went on to talk of golf and said that the improvised course of nine holes seemed to give excellent satisfaction. Someone, he thought it was Judge Barracot, had gone round yesterday under fifty.
“Will it be possible to get a game of bridge in the evening?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t think that will be any trouble. One of our guests, Judge Barracot, was talking this morning of getting up a table.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “as I’ve an hour or so before supper, you might introduce me to one or two of the guests, if you don’t mind.”
“Why, yes, certainly. Now let me see, I wonder who you’d like to meet. Come with me to the lounge.”
He led me from the rotunda into a side room, where an elderly man was seated reading a paper.
“Judge Barracot,” he said, “I want you to meet Professor Leacock....”
“You’ve been here often before?” I asked the Judge.
“No,” he said. “I just came up from Toronto yesterday. As far as I know you and I are the only guests; the hotel only opened on Monday.”
But at any rate we were not left long as the only guests. Even while we were talking I was aware of the entry of a new guest into the rotunda, and through the open door I could hear our host say:
“Oh, yes; our guests are very largely professional men and college men. We have men like Judge Barracot and men like Professor Leacock...”
Now don’t ask me the nearer address of this little hotel. It would be not good if you did, for it’s all booked for summer, as it deserves to be. Atmosphere has settled on it.
FREEDOM OF THOUGHT
IN THESE DAYS when there is so much discussion of dictatorship and the suppression of free thought, it is well to get any light one can on what free thought and free speech should properly mean.
Now it is generally understood that the people of the Southern States, especially the generation of “the war,” whatever their faults may have been, were at least conspicuous for their chivalrous sense of honour and fair play. So I am glad to be able to contribute to the vexed discussion of free thought a personal testimony as to how they look on it in Arkansas.
There came from that State, to spend the summer in my home town, a gallant old Southerner, at that time Attorney General of Arkansas, and a veteran — an ex-general — of the Confederate Army. It was in my earlier days at McGill and I was lecturing on American history, and, when I met General Morsy, it seemed wonderful to me to talk with a man to whom the Civil War was a vivid personal recollection, and who bore the marks of it, in his stilted walk and his stiffened arm.
I took the General out sailing on Lake Couchiching, and the old man sat on the gunwale of the boat, as easily as on a gun-wagon, but he never saw the waves, and he never felt the wind nor noticed the blue of the cloudless sky, for he was talking of the battle of Shiloh and was telling how Albert Sydney Johnston died. I took him out for a drive — there were no motors then — and he never saw the woods nor noticed the ripening fields of grain, for his talk was of Pemberton’s stand at Vicksburg, and before his eyes, as he spoke, the Mississippi rolled below the bluff.
Now it so happened that that summer I received a suggestion about an appointment to the University of Arkansas — one of those tentative half-offers that whisper in the ears of young college lecturers. Naturally I wanted to know about the place, and whether my opinions, as an economist, would be free, would be my own. So I asked General Morsy about it.
“Sir,” he said, “if you come to our State, as I hope you may, you will find with us the most complete academic freedom. We make it a point of honour. You can think and talk entirely as you like.”
The General paused, and, after a minute’s reflection, he added:
“We shall, of course, take it for granted, sir, that you believe in free silver.”
Simple, isn’t it? Solves the whole problem. After all, if a man’s salary is good enough, surely he can believe in anything.
HIS BETTER SELF
IT IS STRANGE the devious ways in which drink affects different men. Some grow quarrelsome, others optimistic and merry, and others again sentimental and reminiscent.
But the oddest form of “bats” or “jags” I ever knew or heard of were those of my old Toronto classmate, Walter McLellan, whose drunks brought on an access of morality.
I was reading the other night in a book on psychology about what is called the “super-consciousness” or the “super-self.” It is held that in moments of danger, of emergency, some people rise to another and higher self that never comes to the surface in their daily life. It is argued that drink, too, may at times exercise this effect.
This “super-self” must have been what was wrong with Walter.
I would come at times into his office in the morning — Walter had finished Varsity and was trying to practise law — to find him with his head in his hands in a fit of depression.
“I feel awful,” Walter said. “I went into the Dog and Duck last night and had four or five drinks and it started me off.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I took mother up to the Church of the Redeemer to the choir practice; I was full as a fly—”
“And where did you go after the choir practice?”
“Into the rectory with mother for supper,” said Walter with a groan.
“And after supper?”
“Played chess with the rector — full as a bug.”
That was the peculiar nature of Walter’s outbreaks. He took it all in one load, like a camel, and lived on it all evening, without any outward sign at all. He never talked much anyway. He himself knew he was “plastered,” but the rector didn’t.
I remember another afternoon on which Walter went on a terrible bat and took his aunt to the art gallery: and another day when there came to his office a card of invitation from the college to a lecture on palaeontology, and Walter got so full that he went and listened to it.
Xmas always hit him hard. “I made a perfect darn fool of myself with drink yesterday,” he said, in telling me about it the day after.
“What did you do, Walter?” I asked.
“I got an awful skate on quite early in the morning over at Clancy’s.”
“Yes, and what then?”
“I went up to my married sister’s house and went to morning service with her and the children — I certainly was soused — and what did I do but give the three children twenty-five dollars each!”
“That’s all right, Walter,” I said; “it’s fine for them.”
“Oh, I know,” Walter said, “but that wasn’t the whole of it. I signed a subscription for a hundred dollars to rebuild the darn chancel.”
Of course if a man goes downhill like that it can’t last forever. Walter’s law business was getting all shot to pieces with choir practice and taking his aunt to lectures and his mother to the Church of the Redeemer.
It was clear that his “super-self” was driving Walter to ruin.
His last outbreak practically cleaned him out. He was full all day — at a church committee meeting and with his mother at a lecture and ended by giving his sister a cheque to pay the eldest boy’s fees for a year at college.
That ended Walter. He quit his practice and started off for the Yukon in the gold rush of 1898.
Walter got to the Yukon, by the Edmonton trail, safe enough, and within a year we’d heard in Toronto that he had struck it rich and was cleaning up a fortune. But right on the heels of this intelligence came the news that Walter had gone on a terrible bat in Dawson City and lost practically everything in a gift to start a Church of England mission.
After that I heard no more of him. They said he had moved to Colorado or some other mining place.
But in the last number of the magazine of my old college, I saw that under the will of somebody whose name seemed meant for his, the College received a gift of a hundred thousand dollars.
So Walter must have drunk himself to death somewhere.
OH, SLEEP! OH, GENTLE SLEEP!
SLEEP IS A great thing, there’s no doubt of it. And it’s always at its best when you take it at an improper time, as forbidden fruit. That is why sleep is so beautiful during a sermon, and why college students crowd into classes on philosophy.
Sleep is also partly a natural gift.
The most naturally gifted sleeper I ever knew was my classmate of long ago at Toronto, Walter Allen. Walter had such a bright mind that he could sleep for sixteen hours a day and still have mind enough for everything. He took a double course in Greek and metaphysics, impossible for a light sleeper. Later on he rose to eminence on the bench and bar of Illinois. The Americans admired his power of sifting evidence in court with his eyes shut.
But I’m telling now about how Walter went from Toronto to New York for the Yacht Race — the American Cup Race — between the Defender and the Valkyrie. That must have been back in the nineties.
To save money — we were all hard up in the nineties — Walter took no Pullman but sat up awake all night, a thing he hadn’t done since he was born. This economic travel brought him among the first on the tugboat that you took to see the race. It was not to start for an hour, a breezy morn of wind and sun, with sleep in every breath of it. Walter found a huge coil of rope in a sheltered corner astern; just the place for a snooze; time enough to get a good place at the bow later on.
He lay down. Sleep breathed upon him. He had a confused idea of motion, of sea breezes, of trampling feet — and then a man, a deck hand, bent over him and shook him and said:
“You’ll have to get up, please, sir. We’re back at the dock in New York.”
Next morning when he reached Toronto someone asked:
“Who won the Yacht Race, Walter? I forgot to look in the paper.”
“So did I,” said Walter.
EPILOGUE
(It ought to be the privilege of an author to reserve some part of his book as his own, and to put into it whatever he likes. Especially in the present volume, of which the earlier part contains so much that is controversial and might arouse anger and disagreement, is it fitting to end with a discourse on fishing where no anger is and where disagreement is only on the surface — which in fishing is of no account. S.L.)
BASS FISHING ON LAKE SIMCOE WITH JAKE GAUDAUR
AMONG THE PLEASANT memories of my life is the recollection of my fishing days on Ontario’s Lake Simcoe with Jake Gaudaur — little excursions that extended over twenty or twenty-five years. If you don’t know the name of Jake Gaudaur it only means that you were born fifty years too late. Half a century ago Jake was for several years the champion oarsman of the world — a title won on the Thames at Henley. In those days, before motor-cars and aeroplanes, rowing was one of the big interests of the nations, and Jake Gaudaur was a hero to millions who had never seen him. The fact that his name was pronounced exactly as Good-Oar helped to keep it easily in mind.
Jake was of mixed French and Indian descent but belonged in the Lake Simcoe country and English had always been his language — the kind we use up there, not the kind that they use at Oxford. I can talk both, but the Lake Simcoe kind is easier and, for fishing, far better. It cuts out social distinction. Jake was a magnificent figure of a man; he stood nicely over six feet in his stocking feet — the only way we ever measure people up there. He was broad in the shoulders, straight as a lath, and till the time when he died, just short of eighty, he could pick up the twenty-pound anchor of his motor boat and throw it round like a tack-hammer. Jake — standing erect in the bow of his motor boat and looking out to the horizon, his eyes shaded with his hand — might have stood for the figure of Oshkosh, war chief of the Wisconsin Indians.
When Jake’s championship days were over he came back to Canada and “kept hotel” in Sudbury. That was the thing for champions to do; in the unregenerate days of the old bar, thousands of people spent five cents on a drink just to say they had talked with Jake Gaudaur. I wish that retired professors could open up a bar. It must be a great thing to be an ex-champion, or a quintuplet, and never have to work.
So Jake made his modest pile and then came back to our part of the country, the Lake Simcoe district, and set up at the Narrows, at the top end of the lake, as a professional fisherman, taking out parties on the lake for bass fishing.
Now, who hasn’t seen Lake Simcoe has never seen a lake at all. Lake Simcoe on a July morning — the water, ruffled in wavelets of a blue and green and silver, as clear as never was: the sky of the purest blue with great clouds white and woolly floating in it! Just the day for fishing! — every day is, for the enthusiast.
The lake is just right in size to be what a lake ought to be — twenty to thirty miles across in any direction — so that there’s always a part of the horizon open where you can’t see the land. The shore is all irregular with bays and “points” and islands and shoals, so that any roads thereabouts are away back from the water, and the shore line of trees and sand and stone looks much as Champlain saw it three hundred years ago.
Over it in the summer air of July there hovers an atmosphere of unbroken peace. When I think of it I cannot but contrast it with the curse that lies over Europe where mountain lakes are scarped and galleried for guns, and every church steeple on their shores a range and target. I wish I could take Hitler and Mussolini out bass fishing on Lake Simcoe. They’d come back better men — or they’d never come back.
So here we are at ten o’clock in the morning helping Jake load the stuff out of our car into his motor boat! Notice that — ten o’clock. None of that fool stuff about starting off at daylight. You get over that by the time you’re forty. The right time to start off bass fishing is when you’re good and ready to. And when I say ten o’clock, I really mean about ten-thirty. We just call it ten o’clock and when you look at your watch after you’re actually started, it’s always ten-thirty, or not much past it. Anyway there’s no finer time in the day on the water than ten-thirty — still all the freshness of the morning and all the day in front of you — half way between windy and calm with little ruffled waves in the sunlight, and a cool breeze, partly made by the boat itself.
As for the bass, they bite as well at any one time as at any other. The idea that they bite at daylight and don’t bite after lunch is just a myth. They bite when they’re ready to; the only reason they don’t bite after lunch is that the fishermen are asleep till three.
Jake’s boat is no “power” boat, to hit up twenty-five miles an hour. That fool stuff came to our lakes later and is out of keeping with bass fishing. Jake’s is a big roomy open boat with a front part for Jake and a big open part at the back where we sit — a broad stern seat with leather cushions and wicker arm-chairs on a linoleum floor. Solid comfort. No rough stuff for us: we’re not sailors. And no cover to keep off the sun; who cares a darn about the sun when you’re fishing; and nothing to keep off the wind — let it come; and no protection against the rain. It won’t rain. Any man who thinks it’s going to rain shouldn’t go fishing.
“Will it rain, Jake?”
“I don’t think so, Professor; not with that sky.”
We’ve gone through that little opening dialogue, I suppose, a hundred times. That’s the beauty of bass fishing: always doing the same things in the same way, with the same old jokes and the same conversation.
“I was thinking we might go out and try the big rock at McCrae’s point first, Professor,” says Jake.
Seeing that we’ve never done anything else in twenty years, it seems a likely thing to do.
This gives us two miles to go — down from the Narrows to the open lake and then sideways across to the first point. For me this is always the best part of the day — the cool fresh air, the anticipation better than reality, the settling into our wicker chairs and lighting up our pipes, with the stuff all properly stowed around us, the fishing-gear, the lunch and the box with the soda on ice. Not that we take a drink at this time of the day. Oh, no! We’re all agreed that you don’t need a drink on a beautiful fine morning at ten-thirty — unless perhaps just as an exception today because it’s such a damn fine day that you feel so good you’d like a drink. There are two reasons for taking a drink when you’re out bass fishing — one, because you feel so good, and the other — because you don’t feel so good. So perhaps this morning, “Eh what?”
