# An Angler at Large/Chapter 1

AN ANGLER AT LARGE
As 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.