Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 668
‘Miss Croyden,’ I said, ‘this end of the raft is yours. Here you may sleep in peace.’
‘How kind you are,’ the girl murmured.
‘You will be quite safe from interference,’ I added. ‘I give you my word that I will not obtrude upon you in any way.’
‘How chivalrous you are,’ she said.
‘Not at all,’ I answered, as musically as I could. ‘Understand me, I am now putting my head over this partition for the last time. If there is anything you want, say so now.’
‘Nothing,’ she answered.
‘There is a candle and matches beside you. If there is anything you want in the night, call me instantly. Remember, at any hour I shall be here. I promise it.’
‘Good night,’ she murmured. In a few minutes her soft, regular breathing told me that she was asleep.
I went forward and seated myself in a tar bucket, with my head against the mast, to get what sleep I could.
But for some time — why, I do not know — sleep would not come.
The image of Edith Croyden filled my mind. In vain I told myself that she was a stranger to me; that — beyond her longitude — I knew nothing of her. In some strange way this girl had seized hold of me and dominated my senses.
The night was very calm and still, with great stars in a velvet sky. In the darkness I could hear the water lapping the edge of the raft.
I remained thus in deep thought, sinking further and further into the tar bucket. By the time I reached the bottom of it I realized that I was in love with Edith Croyden.
Then the thought of my wife occurred to me.
But for all the rest of the story and of how Mr. Borus’s wife and Edith Croyden’s husband land on the island, and for the terrific fight between Harold Borus and Croyden as cave-men — dressed in skins on purpose for it — for that I must refer you to the original book itself. It doesn’t cost much; do buy it. But all that I have quoted from it here is just in a scientific way to illustrate a literary thing. That’s all the lecture. Those still here had better go soon, as the light will be put out. You can find some other place to sit just as warm. Good night. Good-bye.
TECHNICAL TERMS
When I presently wrote my essay on the ‘Restoration of Whiskers,’ referred to in the lecture above, and it was published in New York, a cable was sent to me at McGill University from London, ‘Will you sell all British rights on your whiskers for Xmas?’
I was away and the message was given to the janitor of the Arts building. He said it beat him.
It’s pleasant to think that even the humble trade of letters has a little professional technique. The janitor was no wiser when he saw me cable back, ‘Sorry whiskers sold world.’
VII. MY FISHING POND
(I TOLD THIS story so often and so successfully as a story that at last I went and told it to the Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and he told it to all the world. But there is no harm in retelling it here.)
It lies embowered in a little cup of the hills, my fishing pond. I made a last trip to it, just as the season ended, when the autumn leaves of its great trees were turning colour and rustling down to rest upon the still black water. So steep are the banks, so old and high the trees, that scarcely a puff of wind ever ruffles the surface of the pond. All around it, it is as if the world was stilled into silence, and time blended into eternity.
I realized again as I looked at the pond what a beautiful, secluded spot it was, how natural its appeal to the heart of the angler. You turn off a country road, go sideways across a meadow and over a hill and there it lies — a sheet of still water, with high, high banks, grown with great trees. Long years ago someone built a sawmill, all gone now, at the foot of the valley and threw back the water to make a pond, perhaps a quarter of a mile long. At the widest it must be nearly two hundred feet — the most skilful fisherman may make a full cast both ways. At the top end, where it runs narrow among stumps and rushes, there is no room to cast except with direction and great skill.
Let me say at once, so as to keep no mystery about it, that there are no fish in my pond. So far as I know there never have been. But I have never found that to make any difference. Certainly none to the men I bring here — my chance visitors from the outside world — for an afternoon of casting. If there are no fish in the pond, at least they never know it. They never doubt it; they never ask; and I let it go at that.
It is well known hereabouts that I do not take anybody and everybody out to my fish-pond. I only care to invite people who can really fish, who can cast a line — experts, and especially people from a distance to whom the whole neighbourhood is new and attractive, the pond seen for the first time. If I took out ordinary men, especially men near home, they would very likely notice that they got no fish. The expert doesn’t. He knows trout fishing too well. He knows that, even in a really fine pond, such as he sees mine is, there are days when not a trout will rise. He’ll explain it to you himself, and, having explained it, he is all the better pleased if he turns out to be right and they don’t rise. Trout, as everyone knows who is an angler, never rise after a rain, nor before one; it is impossible to get them to rise in the heat, and any chill in the air keeps them down. The absolutely right day is a still, cloudy day, but even then there are certain kinds of clouds that prevent a rising of the trout. Indeed, I have only to say to one of my expert friends, ‘Queer, they didn’t bite!’ and he’s off to a good start with an explanation. There is such a tremendous lot to know about trout-fishing that men who are keen on it can discuss theories of fishing by the hour.
Such theories we generally talk over — my guest of the occasion and I — as we make our preparations at the pond. You see I keep there all the apparatus that goes with fishing — a punt, with lockers in the sides of it — a neat little dock built out of cedar (cedar attracts the trout), and best of all a little shelter house, a quaint little place like a pagoda, close beside the water and yet under the trees. Inside is tackle, all sorts of tackle, hanging round the walls in a mixture of carelessness and order.
‘Look, old man,’ I say, ‘if you like to try a running paternoster, take this one.’ Or, ‘Have you ever seen these Japanese leads? No, they’re not a gut, they’re a sort of floss.’
‘I doubt if I can land one with that,’ he says.
‘Perhaps not,’ I answer. In fact I’m sure he couldn’t; there isn’t any to land.
On pegs in the pagoda hangs a waterproof mackintosh or two — for you never know — you may be caught in a shower just when the trout are starting to rise. With that, of course, a sort of cellarette cupboard with decanters and bottles and ginger snaps, and perhaps an odd pot of anchovy paste — no one wants to quit fishing for mere hunger. Nor does any real angler care to begin fishing without taking just a drop (‘Just a touch; be careful; wo! wo!’) of something to keep out the cold, or to wish good luck for the chances of the day.
I always find, when I bring out one of my friends, that these mere preparatives or preparations, these preliminaries of angling, are the best part of it. Often they take half an hour. There is so much to discuss — the question of weights of tackle, the colour of the fly to use, and broad general questions of theory, such as whether it matters what kind of a hat a man wears. It seems that trout will rise for some hats, and for others not. One of my best guests, who has written a whole book on fly-fishing, is particularly strong on hats and colour.
‘I don’t think I’d wear that hat, old man,’ he says, ‘much too dark for a day like this.’
‘I wore it all last month,’ I said.
‘So you might, old man, but that was August. I wouldn’t wear a dark one in September, and that tie is too dark a blue, old man.’
So I knew that that made it all right. I kept the hat on. We had a grand afternoon; we got no fish.
I admit that the lack of fish in my pond requires sometimes a little tact in management. The guest gets a little restless. So I say to him, ‘You certainly have the knack of casting!’ and he gets so absorbed in casting further and further that he forgets the fish. Or I take him towards the upper end and he gets his line caught on bulrushes — that might be a bite. Or if he still keeps restless, I say suddenly: ‘Hush! Was that a fish jumped?’ That will silence any true angler instantly. ‘You stand in the bow,’ I whisper, ‘and I’ll gently paddle in that direction.’ It’s the whispering that does it. We are still a hundred yards away from any trout that could hear us, even if a trout was there. But that makes no difference. Some of the men I take out begin to whisper a mile away from the pond and come home whispering.
You see, after all, what with frogs jumping, and catching the line in bulrushes, or pulling up a waterlogged chip nearly to the top, they don’t really know — my guests don’t — whether they have hooked something or not. Indeed, after a little lapse of time they think they did; they talk of the ‘big one I lost’ — a thing over which any angler gets sentimental in retrospect. ‘Do you remember,’ they say to me months later at our club in the city, ‘that big trout I lost up on your fish-pond last summer!’
‘Indeed, I do,’ I say.
‘Did you ever get him later on?’
‘No, never,’ I answer. In fact, I’m darned sure I didn’t; neither him nor any other.
Yet the illusion holds good. And besides you never can tell. There might be trout in the pond. Why not? After all, why shouldn’t there be a trout in the pond? You take a pond like that and there ought to be trout in it!
Whenever the sight of the pond bursts on the eyes of a new guest he stands entranced. ‘What a wonderful place for trout!’ he exclaims.
‘Isn’t it?’ I answer.
‘No wonder you’d get trout in a pond like that.’
‘No wonder at all.’
‘You don’t need to stock it at all, I suppose?’
‘Stock it!’ I laugh at the idea! Stock a pond like that! Well, I guess not.
Perhaps one of the best and most alluring touches is fishing out of season — just a day or two after the season has closed. Any fisherman knows how keen is the regret at each expiring term — swallowed up and lost in the glory of the fading autumn. So if a guest turns up just then I say, ‘I know it’s out of season, but I thought you might care to take a run out to the pond anyway and have a look at it.’ He can’t resist. By the time he’s in the pagoda and has a couple of small drinks (‘Careful, not too much; wo! wo!’) he decides there can be no harm in making a cast or two.
‘I suppose,’ he says, ‘you never have any trouble with the inspectors?’
‘Oh, no!’ I answer, ‘they never think of troubling me.’ And with that we settle down to an afternoon of it.
‘I’m glad,’ says the guest at the end, ‘that they weren’t rising. After all we had just the same fun as if they were.’
That’s it — illusion! How much of life is like that. It’s the idea of the thing that counts, not the reality. You don’t need fish for fishing, any more than you need partridge for partridge shooting, or gold for gold mining . . . just the illusion or expectation.
So I am going back now to the city and to my club, where we shall fish all winter, hooking up the big ones, but losing the ones bigger still, hooking two trout at one throw — three at a throw! — and for me behind it all the memory of my fishing pond darkening under the falling leaves. . . . At least it has made my friends happy.
MY LADDERS. A SEQUEL TO MY FISHING POND
Indulgent readers of the Atlantic Monthly will recall the fact that in that esteemed periodical a year ago I wrote an account of My Fishing Pond. I described the beautiful little secluded spot in a woodland hollow in which it lay. I caught, I think, in words something of the autumn glory that fell on it with the falling leaves. I admitted, quite frankly, that as far as I knew there were no fish in it. But that, I explained, I kept to myself; it made no difference to the expert fishermen, my friends who came on a casual visit to cast a fly at my trout. They were all impressed with the wonderful surroundings, had never seen a trout pond of greater promise, and easily explained, over a friendly drink in my pagoda, the failure of a single day.
I realize now that I never should have published this in the Atlantic. The Editor and I must have offended some tributary god of fishing. Nemesis fell upon me. When the winter broke and the ice went, a great flood of water carried away the dam, and flung it, cement, logs, and all, in a wild confusion of debris down the stream. There it lies now, and above it the pond, drained out flat to a bottom of wet weeds and old logs and stranded puddles — a feeble stream trickling through.
And the trout? Gone! washed clean away down the stream! I take my friends out now to the place and they explain it all to me until I can see it like a vision — the beautiful trout hurled away in spring flood and foam! My friends estimate them as anything from two miles of trout to five miles. But do you think those fishermen have lost interest? Not a bit! They are more keen on coming out to look at my pond and give advice about it than they were even in the days when we used, as they recall it, to haul out trout by the puntful.
They explain to me what to do. The miller who ran a little feed mill off the pond is going to rebuild the dam, and my friends tell me to put in ‘ladders’ and the trout will all come back! A trout, it seems, will climb a ladder! I can hardly believe it, but they all tell me that; in fact I have learned to say nothing, just to look utterly disconsolate till the visiting expert says, ‘Have you thought of ladders?’ And then I act the part of a man rescued from despair. They say it will take about three ladders of five feet each. How trout climb a ladder I don’t know; it must be difficult for them to get hold of the rungs. But a man said in Scotland he has seen a trout climb twenty feet. It appears that if you go out in the autumn you can lie on the bank of the dam and watch the trout splashing and climbing in the foam. Quite a lot of my friends are coming up here next autumn just to see them climb. And even if it is out of season, they may throw a hook at them!
Fishermen, in other words, are just unbeatable. Cut them off from fish, and they are just as happy over ‘ladders.’ So we sit now in my little pagoda, and someone says: ‘Talking about ladders, I must tell you — whoa! whoa! not too big a one.’ . . . And away we go, floating off on the Ladders of Imagination.
FISH STORIES
I have always found that after listening to a lecture on The Rise of Modern Democracy’ or ‘The Prospects of International Arbitration,’ the men present like to get together and talk about fishing. Here are one or two — true — fish stories of my own which I used to tell to such gatherings.
No. 1
POOR LUCK
I went out trout fishing the other day with my friend Colonel Morphy that some of you know, and we took a fellow along with us from a garage with a second car, because I had to get home separately, and it was a long way. But naturally we didn’t want him all day round with us on the streams, see? — so I gave him a rod and a packet of fishing tackle, and I said, ‘Now, Joe, you fish round here, not too far away, and about sundown we’ll come back and you can drive me home.’
He said, ‘All right.’
In the evening we came back and I said, ‘Well, Joe, how did you get on?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I didn’t have much luck, Mr. Leacock.’
‘Too bad,’ I said, ‘weren’t they biting?’
‘No,’ Joe said, ‘it wasn’t that. I didn’t have no hook. You didn’t give me none.’
No. 2
OPEN OPPORTUNITY
I was walking out on the road and I met Pete M’Gaw driving up from Beaverton. Pete knows I like bass fishing, so he stopped his horse and said:
‘Say, you’d ought to come down to Beaverton and come out after the bass. There’s the best fishing round Thorah Island that I haven’t seen not in twenty years.’
‘Is that so?’ I said.
‘Yes, sir. Johnny and I was out last night and we must have got a washtub full — dandies!’
‘But,’ I said, ‘the season’s closed, isn’t it?’
‘Well,’ Pete answered, ‘only just — it ain’t only closed last week.’
‘But wouldn’t the inspectors over there be apt to make trouble?’
‘Oh, that’s all right! Johnny and I’s the inspectors.’
No. 3
LINES TO A FELLOW FISHERMAN
Note: All those who are familiar with the conditions of fishing in the rivers of the Canadian bush will understand how easily, under such circumstances, a dignified stock-broker reverts in appearance into a third-class thug. These lines were written on meeting again at a city dinner a friend whom I had last seen on a trout stream:
I see you, neat and debonair,
With Collar tall and plastered Hair,
And ask, Is this the Man
Who cleaned a Trout upon his Pants,
And never, never looked askance
At Fishworms in a Can?
Away this Luxury! I beg,
Give to our Charles a hard-boiled Egg
Or something he can use.
Away the Wine! Go, someone, seek
Some dirty Water from a Creek
And mix it in his Booze.
Oh, Charles, the Time is coming when
Far distant from the Haunts of Men
Together we shall roam,
And somewhere near the Gatineau
The early Flowers of Spring shall blow
And Trout leap in the Foam,
And you and I, Charles, Hand in Hand,
Will journey back unto the Land
Back to the Woods, back Home.
VIII. THE TWO MILORDS
PROLOGUE: A LITTLE Causerie on the Foolishness of Foreign Languages
Every language always sounds foolish to those who speak another one. Have you ever listened to two Frenchmen, talking French? I mean really good French, the kind of French they talk in Paris, for example, as between two French gentlemen seated side by side in a hotel foyer or rotunda? Listen to them. Isn’t it liquid? You’d think they were gargling! Or listen to a Spaniard, whose language is much more guttural; you’d imagine he was going to be sick. Did you ever hear the mournful die-away tones of an Ojibway Indian? What’s he saying, ‘Aneen! Andosh pwagun?’ You’d suppose he’d lost his last friend. No, what he means is, ‘Say, where’s my pipe?’
