



Produced by Donald Lainson





FISHERMAN'S LUCK AND SOME OTHER UNCERTAIN THINGS

by Henry van <DW18>


     "Now I conclude that not only in Physicke, but likewise in
     sundry more certaine arts, fortune hath great share in
     them."

     M. DE MONTAIGNE: Divers Events.


DEDICATION TO MY LADY GRAYGOWN


Here is the basket; I bring it home to you. There are no great fish in
it. But perhaps there may be one or two little ones which will be to
your taste. And there are a few shining pebbles from the bed of the
brook, and ferns from the cool, green woods, and wild flowers from the
places that you remember. I would fain console you, if I could, for the
hardship of having married an angler: a man who relapses into his mania
with the return of every spring, and never sees a little river without
wishing to fish in it. But after all, we have had good times together as
we have followed the stream of life towards the sea. And we have passed
through the dark days without losing heart, because we were comrades.
So let this book tell you one thing that is certain. In all the life of
your fisherman the best piece of luck is just YOU.



CONTENTS

   I.  Fisherman's Luck

  II.  The Thrilling Moment

 III.  Talkability

  IV.  A Wild Strawberry

   V.  Lovers and Landscape

  VI.  A Fatal Success

 VII.  Fishing in Books

VIII. A Norwegian Honeymoon

  IX.  Who Owns the Mountains?

   X.  A Lazy, Idle Brook

  XI.  The Open Fire

 XII.  A Slumber Song




FISHERMAN'S LUCK


Has it ever fallen in your way to notice the quality of the greetings
that belong to certain occupations?

There is something about these salutations in kind which is singularly
taking and grateful to the ear. They are as much better than an ordinary
"good day" or a flat "how are you?" as a folk-song of Scotland or the
Tyrol is better than the futile love-ditty of the drawing-room. They
have a spicy and rememberable flavour. They speak to the imagination and
point the way to treasure-trove.

There is a touch of dignity in them, too, for all they are so free and
easy--the dignity of independence, the native spirit of one who takes
for granted that his mode of living has a right to make its own forms of
speech. I admire a man who does not hesitate to salute the world in the
dialect of his calling.

How salty and stimulating, for example, is the sailorman's hail of "Ship
ahoy!" It is like a breeze laden with briny odours and a pleasant dash
of spray. The miners in some parts of Germany have a good greeting for
their dusky trade. They cry to one who is going down the shaft, "Gluck
auf!" All the perils of an underground adventure and all the joys
of seeing the sun again are compressed into a word. Even the trivial
salutation which the telephone has lately created and claimed for its
peculiar use--"Hello, hello"--seems to me to have a kind of fitness
and fascination. It is like a thoroughbred bulldog, ugly enough to be
attractive. There is a lively, concentrated, electric air about it. It
makes courtesy wait upon dispatch, and reminds us that we live in an age
when it is necessary to be wide awake.

I have often wished that every human employment might evolve its own
appropriate greeting. Some of them would be queer, no doubt; but
at least they would be an improvement on the wearisome iteration of
"Good-evening" and "Good-morning," and the monotonous inquiry, "How
do you do?"--a question so meaningless that it seldom tarries for an
answer. Under the new and more natural system of etiquette, when you
passed the time of day with a man you would know his business, and the
salutations of the market-place would be full of interest.

As for my chosen pursuit of angling (which I follow with diligence when
not interrupted by less important concerns), I rejoice with every true
fisherman that it has a greeting all its own and of a most honourable
antiquity. There is no written record of its origin. But it is quite
certain that since the days after the Flood, when Deucalion


     "Did first this art invent
      Of angling, and his people taught the same,"


two honest and good-natured anglers have never met each other by the way
without crying out, "What luck?"

Here, indeed, is an epitome of the gentle art. Here is the spirit of
it embodied in a word and paying its respects to you with its native
accent. Here you see its secret charms unconsciously disclosed. The
attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from the cradle to the
grave, lies in its uncertainty. 'Tis an affair of luck.

No amount of preparation in the matter of rods and lines and hooks
and lures and nets and creels can change its essential character.
No excellence of skill in casting the delusive fly or adjusting the
tempting bait upon the hook can make the result secure. You may reduce
the chances, but you cannot eliminate them. There are a thousand points
at which fortune may intervene. The state of the weather, the height of
the water, the appetite of the fish, the presence or absence of other
anglers--all these indeterminable elements enter into the reckoning of
your success. There is no combination of stars in the firmament by which
you can forecast the piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing, you just
take your chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for anything that
may be going; you try your luck.

There are certain days that are favourites among anglers, who regard
them as propitious for the sport. I know a man who believes that the
fish always rise better on Sunday than on any other day in the week. He
complains bitterly of this supposed fact, because his religious scruples
will not allow him to take advantage of it. He confesses that he has
sometimes thought seriously of joining the Seventh-Day Baptists.

Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, in the Alleghany Mountains, I have found
a curious tradition that Ascension Day is the luckiest in the year
for fishing. On that morning the district school is apt to be thinly
attended, and you must be on the stream very early if you do not wish to
find wet footprints on the stones ahead of you.

But in fact, all these superstitions about fortunate days are idle and
presumptuous. If there were such days in the calendar, a kind and firm
Providence would never permit the race of man to discover them. It
would rob life of one of its principal attractions, and make fishing
altogether too easy to be interesting.

Fisherman's luck is so notorious that it has passed into a proverb.
But the fault with that familiar saying is that it is too short and too
narrow to cover half the variations of the angler's possible experience.
For if his luck should be bad, there is no portion of his anatomy,
from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, that may not be
thoroughly wet. But if it should be good, he may receive an unearned
blessing of abundance not only in his basket, but also in his head and
his heart, his memory and his fancy. He may come home from some obscure,
ill-named, lovely stream--some Dry Brook, or Southwest Branch of
Smith's Run--with a creel full of trout, and a mind full of grateful
recollections of flowers that seemed to bloom for his sake, and birds
that sang a new, sweet, friendly message to his tired soul. He may climb
down to "Tommy's Rock" below the cliffs at Newport (as I have done many
a day with my lady Greygown), and, all unnoticed by the idle, weary
promenaders in the path of fashion, haul in a basketful of blackfish,
and at the same time look out across the shining sapphire waters and
inherit a wondrous good fortune of dreams--


     "Have glimpses that will make him less forlorn;
      Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
      Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."


But all this, you must remember, depends upon something secret and
incalculable, something that we can neither command nor predict. It is
an affair of gift, not of wages. Fish (and the other good things which
are like sauce to the catching of them) cast no shadow before. Water is
the emblem of instability. No one can tell what he shall draw out of
it until he has taken in his line. Herein are found the true charm and
profit of angling for all persons of a pure and childlike mind.

Look at those two venerable gentlemen floating in a skiff upon the
clear waters of Lake George. One of them is a successful statesman, an
ex-President of the United States, a lawyer versed in all the curious
eccentricities of the "lawless science of the law." The other is a
learned doctor of medicine, able to give a name to all diseases from
which men have imagined that they suffered, and to invent new ones
for those who are tired of vulgar maladies. But all their learning is
forgotten, their cares and controversies are laid aside, in "innocuous
desuetude." The Summer School of Sociology is assembled. The Medical
Congress is in session.

But they care not--no, not so much as the value of a single live bait.
The sun shines upon them with a fervent heat, but it irks them not.
The rain descends, and the winds blow and beat upon them, but they
are unmoved. They are securely anchored here in the lee of Sabbath-Day
Point.

What enchantment binds them to that inconsiderable spot? What magic
fixes their eyes upon the point of a fishing-rod, as if it were the
finger of destiny? It is the enchantment of uncertainty: the same
natural magic that draws the little suburban boys in the spring of the
year, with their strings and pin-hooks, around the shallow ponds where
dace and redfins hide; the same irresistible charm that fixes a row of
city gamins, like ragged and disreputable fish-crows, on the end of a
pier where blear-eyed flounders sometimes lurk in the muddy water. Let
the philosopher explain it as he will. Let the moralist reprehend it as
he chooses. There is nothing that attracts human nature more powerfully
than the sport of tempting the unknown with a fishing-line.

Those ancient anglers have set out upon an exodus from the tedious realm
of the definite, the fixed, the must-certainly-come-to-pass. They are on
a holiday in the free country of peradventure. They do not know at this
moment whether the next turn of Fortune's reel will bring up a perch or
a pickerel, a sunfish or a black bass. It may be a hideous catfish or
a squirming eel, or it may be a lake-trout, the grand prize in the Lake
George lottery. There they sit, those gray-haired lads, full of hope,
yet equally prepared for resignation; taking no thought for the morrow,
and ready to make the best of to-day; harmless and happy players at the
best of all games of chance.

"In other words," I hear some severe and sour-complexioned reader say,
"in plain language, they are a pair of old gamblers."

Yes, if it pleases you to call honest men by a bad name. But they
risk nothing that is not their own; and if they lose, they are not
impoverished. They desire nothing that belongs to other men; and if
they win, no one is robbed. If all gambling were like that, it would be
difficult to see the harm in it. Indeed, a daring moralist might even
assert, and prove by argument, that so innocent a delight in the taking
of chances is an aid to virtue.

Do you remember Martin Luther's reasoning on the subject of "excellent
large pike"? He maintains that God would never have created them so good
to the taste, if He had not meant them to be eaten. And for the same
reason I conclude that this world would never have been left so full of
uncertainties, nor human nature framed so as to find a peculiar joy and
exhilaration in meeting them bravely and cheerfully, if it had not been
divinely intended that most of our amusement and much of our education
should come from this source.

"Chance" is a disreputable word, I know. It is supposed by many pious
persons to be improper and almost blasphemous to use it. But I am not
one of those who share this verbal prejudice. I am inclined rather to
believe that it is a good word to which a bad reputation has been
given. I feel grateful to that admirable "psychologist who writes like a
novelist," Mr. William James, for his brilliant defence of it. For what
does it mean, after all, but that some things happen in a certain way
which might have happened in another way? Where is the immorality, the
irreverence, the atheism in such a supposition? Certainly God must be
competent to govern a world in which there are possibilities of various
kinds, just as well as one in which every event is inevitably determined
beforehand. St. Peter and the other fishermen-disciples on the Lake
of Galilee were perfectly free to cast their net on either side of the
ship. So far as they could see, so far as any one could see, it was a
matter of chance where they chose to cast it. But it was not until they
let it down, at the Master's word, on the right side that they had good
luck. And not the least element of their joy in the draft of fishes was
that it brought a change of fortune.

Leave the metaphysics of the question on the table for the present. As
a matter of fact, it is plain that our human nature is adapted to
conditions variable, undetermined, and hidden from our view. We are
not fitted to live in a world where a + b always equals c, and there is
nothing more to follow. The interest of life's equation arrives with the
appearance of x, the unknown quantity. A settled, unchangeable, clearly
foreseeable order of things does not suit our constitution. It tends to
melancholy and a fatty heart. Creatures of habit we are undoubtedly; but
it is one of our most fixed habits to be fond of variety. The man who
is never surprised does not know the taste of happiness, and unless the
unexpected sometimes happens to us, we are most grievously disappointed.

Much of the tediousness of highly civilized life comes from its
smoothness and regularity. To-day is like yesterday, and we think that
we can predict to-morrow. Of course we cannot really do so. The
chances are still there. But we have covered them up so deeply with
the artificialities of life that we lose sight of them. It seems as if
everything in our neat little world were arranged, and provided for,
and reasonably sure to come to pass. The best way of escape from this
TAEDIUM VITAE is through a recreation like angling, not only because it
is so evidently a matter of luck, but also because it tempts us into a
wilder, freer life. It leads almost inevitably to camping out, which is
a wholesome and sanitary imprudence.

It is curious and pleasant, to my apprehension, to observe how many
people in New England, one of whose States is called "the land of Steady
Habits," are sensible of the joy of changing them,--out of doors. These
good folk turn out from their comfortable farm-houses and their snug
suburban cottages to go a-gypsying for a fortnight among the mountains
or beside the sea. You see their white tents gleaming from the
pine-groves around the little lakes, and catch glimpses of their
bathing-clothes drying in the sun on the wiry grass that fringes the
sand-dunes. Happy fugitives from the bondage of routine! They have found
out that a long journey is not necessary to a good vacation. You may
reach the Forest of Arden in a buckboard. The Fortunate Isles are within
sailing distance in a dory. And a voyage on the river Pactolus is open
to any one who can paddle a canoe.

I was talking--or rather listening--with a barber, the other day, in
the sleepy old town of Rivermouth. He told me, in one of those easy
confidences which seem to make the razor run more smoothly, that it had
been the custom of his family, for some twenty years past, to forsake
their commodious dwelling on Anchor Street every summer, and emigrate
six miles, in a wagon to Wallis Sands, where they spent the month of
August very merrily under canvas. Here was a sensible household for
you! They did not feel bound to waste a year's income on a four weeks'
holiday. They were not of those foolish folk who run across the sea,
carefully carrying with them the same tiresome mind that worried them
at home. They got a change of air by making an alteration of life. They
escaped from the land of Egypt by stepping out into the wilderness and
going a-fishing.

The people who always live in houses, and sleep on beds, and walk on
pavements, and buy their food from butchers and bakers and grocers, are
not the most blessed inhabitants of this wide and various earth. The
circumstances of their existence are too mathematical and secure
for perfect contentment. They live at second or third hand. They are
boarders in the world. Everything is done for them by somebody else.

It is almost impossible for anything very interesting to happen to them.
They must get their excitement out of the newspapers, reading of the
hairbreadth escapes and moving accidents that befall people in real
life. What do these tame ducks really know of the adventure of living?
If the weather is bad, they are snugly housed. If it is cold, there is
a furnace in the cellar. If they are hungry, the shops are near at hand.
It is all as dull, flat, stale, and unprofitable as adding up a column
of figures. They might as well be brought up in