And there still were the mountains ahead. Their painful distances of long, white, houseless steeps made the mind suffer the body’s agony of toiling there, of being lost there in storm, of being there on a still, dark night. They bred—by means of natural, human sympathy with the difficulty of life among such heights, by the horror of the distance, the coldness, the whiteness—a languor out of which emerged infinite admiration and awe, a sense of beauty even, and unquestionably a kind of pride in the powers of the human spirit that can dwell upon the earth and be the equal of these things, sharing with them the sunlight and the darkness, enduring like them vicissitudes, decay, violent disaster, and like them disbelieving in the future and in death, except for others. So when at nightfall the snowy hills made a semicircle round the head of an enormous grey estuary, and couched there ten and fifteen and twenty miles away as if the sweep of a puissant arm had made them in clearing a space for the water, they were purely beautiful, while over them a large, simple sunset threw a golden bridge between towering, white, still clouds.
Then, at length, a hamlet on a hill; first, a farmyard on one side of the road and a farmhouse on the other; then four or five stone cottages; lastly an inn where I thought to sleep. Hardly had I sat down than a pedlar came in and sat beside me. He was a tall, grave man of a gritty, brown complexion and big, straight features; from his simple, heroic face, that seemed an animated piece of crag from his native hills, his blue eyes looked at me with that glance, fearless of any return, which the ordinary man gives to a dog or a labourer, but presently became more modest as I looked up and down the blue gaberdine which he wore down to his knees.
The gaberdine was of the stoutest linen, heavy and warm. It opened for about six inches down from the neck, back and front, and was fastened with small bone buttons. On each side of these openings it was smocked in an elaborate pattern nine inches deep; the wide, turn-down collar almost covered the embroidered shoulder straps and was itself adorned with seven rows of feather stitching. The sleeves were smocked both at the shoulders and the wrists, and were finished with broad, feather-stitched cuffs. He wore it because it was decent, and he would always wear one so long as the woman lived who could make it.
I asked him about his trade, and he said that he pursued it among these hills and valleys all the winter, setting it aside for work in the fields during the summer months. He was born in one of the cottages close by; so was his father before him and so were his children after him. They were happy there. Death alone disturbed them now and then; and death, he said, was incurable and to be expected. In the spring he spent less on candles and his orchard bloomed, and there was a marriage or two in the church and the ewes dropped their lambs. In the summer it was warm without fires, and they needed no candles, and he had what he desired—what that was he did not say. In the autumn he remembered that things were coming round again, winter soon and then spring again. In the winter his cottage walls were thick, and if the days were short he had always had a fire and some food, and had never yet refused a beggar something; there were songs also: and as to his trade, of course he liked it, and he did not think people could do without him.
“And now, young man,” he said, “who are you, what have you seen, and what is your country?”
He looked at me with something like the benignity of a child accepting a spoonful of honey; but for that joy and expectancy I might have spoken easily. I hesitated between the truth, which was difficult and perhaps to him unintelligible, my own view of the truth, which would be so confused by reservations and after-thoughts that it could not please, and the picturesque. So I said:—
“I am a poor, modern man”—which was true—“I have seen nothing”—which was my view of the truth—and finally, “the great city of London is my country”—which was picturesque.
“What?” said he, not angrily, not pityingly, but inquiringly, “what do you mean by a ‘poor, modern man,’ and how is it that you have seen nothing?”
A thousand things crowded to my brain and contended on my lips. This was an opportunity, but too great a one, too sudden. I stifled my designs and decided to say nothing. He was kind; he nodded gracefully and continued,—
“Tell me about London.”