第12章

AN OLD MAN OF THE HILLS, AND THE SCHOOLMASTER'S STORYWhile occupying myself with these no doubt wanton reflections on the unfair division of opportunities in human life, I was leisurely crossing the common, and presently I came up with a pedestrian who, though I had little suspected it as I caught sight of him ahead, was destined by a kind providence to make more entertaining talk for me in half an hour than most people provide in a lifetime.

He was an oldish man, turned sixty, one would say, and belonging, to judge from his dress and general appearance, to what one might call the upper labouring class.He wore a decent square felt hat, a shabby respectable overcoat, a workman's knitted waistcoat, and workman's corduroys, and he carried an umbrella.

His upper part might have belonged to a small well-to-do tradesman, while his lower bore marks of recent bricklaying.

Without its being remarkable, he had what one calls a good face, somewhat aquiline in character, with a refined forehead and nose.

His cheeks were shaved, and his whitening beard and moustache were worn somewhat after the fashion of Charles Dickens.This gave a slight touch of severity to a face that was full of quiet strength.

Passing the time of day to each other, we were soon in conversation, I asking him this and that question about the neighbouring country-side, of which I gathered he was an old inhabitant.

"Yes," he said presently, "I was the first to put stick or stone on Whortleberry Common yonder.Fifteen years ago I built my own wood cottage there, and now I'm rebuilding it of good Surrey stone.""Do you mean that you are building it yourself, with your own hands, no one to help you?" I asked.

"Not so much as to carry a pail of water," he replied."I'm my own contractor, my own carpenter, and my own bricklayer, and Ishall be sixty-seven come Michaelmas," he added, by no means irrelevantly.

There was pride in his voice,--pardonable pride, I thought, for who of us would not be proud to be able to build his own house from floor to chimney?

"Sixty-seven,--a man can see and do a good deal in that time,"I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking.In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if we wish to be understood.

"Yes, sir," he said, "I have been about a good deal in my time.I have seen pretty well all of the world there is to see, and sailed as far as ship could take me.""Indeed, you have been a sailor too?"

"Twenty-two thousand miles of sea," he continued, without directly answering my remark."Yes, Vancouver's about as far as any vessel need want to go; and then I have caught seals off the coast of Labrador, and walked my way through the raspberry plains at the back of the White Mountains.""Vancouver," "Labrador," "The White Mountains," the very names, thus casually mentioned on a Surrey heath, seemed full of the sounding sea.Like talismans they whisked one away to strange lands, across vast distances of space imagination refused to span.Strange to think that the shabby little man at my side had them all fast locked, pictures upon pictures, in his brain, and as we were talking was back again in goodness knows what remote latitude.

I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea! sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!"In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years a policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children.

He was now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke of this daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that daughter in service there, one son settled in London and another in the States, with something of a patriarchal pride, with the independent air too of a man who could honestly say to himself that, with few advantages from fortune, having had, so to say, to work his passage, every foot and hour of it, across those twenty-two thousand miles and those sixty-seven years, he had made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.

As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and ever-varying talk of the qualities that had made his success possible.They are always the same qualities!

A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall, scattered by the roadside caught his eye.

"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones lying out there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you, I've made my own boots before to-day.Give me the tops and I'll soon rig up a pair still."And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot, the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller.He had probably seen too much of the world to be either.Yet he had, he said, been too busy all his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale together in the inn which stood at the end of the common.