Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough

by A. G. Gardiner

And so it is with the fur-lined coat. So many things "go with it." It is in this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of paternal weakness—or after a lucky stroke in rubber. The old furniture, which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the presence of this princely affair. You wanted new chairs and rugs and hangings to make the piano accord with its setting. Even the house fell under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a new way of life just beyond your modest means.

If I bought a fur-lined coat I know that I should want to buy a motor-car to keep it company. It is possible, of course, to wear a fur coat in a motor-bus, but if you do you will assuredly have a sense that you are a little over-dressed, a trifle conspicuous, that the fellow-passengers are mentally remarking that such a coat ought to have a carriage of its own. It would provoke the comment that I heard the other night as two ladies in evening dress left a bus in a pouring rain. "Well," said one of the other lady passengers—a little enviously I thought, but still pertinently—"if I could afford to wear such fine clothes I think I would take a Cab." Yes, decidedly, the fur-lined coat would not be complete without the motor-car.

And then consider how it limits your freedom and raises the tariff against you. The tip that would be gratefully received if you were getting into that modest coat that you have discarded would be unworthy of the fur-lined standard that you have deliberately adopted. The recipient would take it frigidly, with a glance at the luxurious garment into which he had helped you—a glance that would cut you to the quick. Your friends would have to be fur-lined, too, and your dinners would no longer be the modest affairs of old, but would soar to the champagne standard. It would not be possible to slip unnoticed into your favourite little restaurant in Soho to take your simple chop, or to go in quest of that wonderful restaurant of Arne's of which "Aldebaran" keeps the secret. The modesty of Arne's would make you blush for your fur-lined coat.

"The genteel thing," said Tony Lumpkin's friend, "is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation according-ly." That is it. The fur-lined coat is a genteel thing; but you have to be "in a concatenation according-ly." And there's the rub. It is not the coat, but its trimmings, so to speak, that give us pause. When you put on the coat you insensibly put off your old way of life. You set up a new standard, and have got to adapt your comings and goings, your habits and your expenditure to it. I once knew a man who had a fur-lined coat presented to him. It was a disaster. He could not live "in a concatenation according-ly." He lost his old friends without getting new ones. And his end … Well, his end confirmed me in the conviction of the unwisdom of wearing a fur-lined coat before you are able, or disposed, to mould your life to the fur-lined standard.

IN PRAISE OF WALKING

I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary consultation over the map—that is enough for the way.

At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way again singing:—

Bed in the bush with the stars to see.
Bread I dip in the river—
There's the life for a man like me.
There's the life for ever.

What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world, you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life—the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep—add to the sense of primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day. There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale, or—yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of "The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out: