An Angler at Large/Chapter 8
I have met Purfling.
A little while ago, coming across Slattery's lawn where it borders the river, I saw a man standing on the wooden bridge at the top of the shallow. I always approach this bridge with hosannahs on my lips; it is in such a very beautiful place. Here the Valley opens out suddenly. Great meadows, among which the river saunters, and great elms and the two downs that close the view—the one round and green, the other capped with its clump and streaked red with plough land—compose the prospect upstream. Beyond the downs, right in the broad V they make, the sun sets on summer evenings, and out of the sunset the red quills float towards one, and in the lit water broad black rings appear. Crab Hatch is just round the corner, and Crab Hatch holds the fathers of the stream.
This is the best bit of the river.
The man on the bridge stood very still. His back was towards me. His accoutrements proclaimed him an angler. I arrived and jovially greeted him.
He returned my salutation; coldly, I thought. I said, "Are you Mr. Purfling?" He admitted that he was. In my own name he appeared to take no interest, so I told it to him. He said, "Ah!"
Now when "Ah!" is all a man has to say about your name, you detest him. I detested Purfling, but I went on being polite. I asked if there was any fly showing yet. He replied that he had seen one female Baetis rhodani, A suspicion entered my mind. I thanked him for the information, and said that it sounded a rather difficult insect to imitate. "For myself," I added, "I generally stick on an Olive Dun here at this time of the morning in May." He smiled indulgently. "I see," he said, "that I ought to have said Olive Dun." "It would have been better," said I. "I am no scholar." I began to grease my line with a piece of ham fat which I had cut off for that purpose at breakfast, having forgotten to bring any vaseline to Willows. When I had smeared it all over the line and my hands and my trousers, I looked up to find him regarding me with obvious contempt.
"Don't you find that rather tiresome every day?" he asked. "If you would dress your line properly in the winter you would never have to mess about with fat and things. A pint of shellac dissolved in ten ounces of beeswax and boiled for three hours with an equal quantity of bear's grease, ketchup, spermaceti, liquorice, and rainwater, strained through butter muslin, and"
"I am no cook," said I, "but it is kind of you to give me the recipe." So it was. People always mean kindly when they teach other people their business. My suspicion grew. To make quite sure, I asked, "Have you done anything yet?" He stiffened. "There has been no fly," he replied, in the voice with which people are put in theit places. Then he went away.
It is even so.
Purfling is a Purist.
I am not a Purist.
The art by which I humbly seek to earn my bread induces, or should induce, the habit of observation. Thus I am an observer of men, and among men of fishermen, and among fishermen of dry-fly fishermen.
Purfling being gone, let us lean together on this wooden bridge—the rail is exactly the most comfortable height—and let me discourse to you awhile of purism and purists and things puristic.
Youth, sir, is proverbially avid of pleasure, and seeks it in a hundred ways, which experience abandons one by one. There was a time when I believed in all honesty that I could gain enjoyment by climbing hills, and in that belief I have struggled to the tops of several mountains. Presently reason triumphed, another illusion was discarded, and I had advanced one further stage in that eliminating process by which human happiness alone can be reached. Now, while in one short summer I mastered the true secret of the hills—that they were made to be admired from below—I also learned another fact about them: that there is always one more summit to be climbed. So with angling.
When, as a child, I threaded my hooks through the unprotesting lips of living minnows in the hope of luring the great chubs of the Kennet, I knew that men far more skilful than I used spinning baits for jack; and I told myself that one day I should be a man and do likewise. Later, promoted to spinning, I lusted ardently to angle with flies for trout. Then, a loch-fisher, I dreamed of chalk-streams and the mysteries of the floating fly. "There," I said, "is the summit, the ne plus ultra, the last rung," and I vowed ere I died to make one of the elect. So when my destiny did indeed bring me to the side of the Darenth with a split cane rod and a floating line (well greased, believe me) and a little bottle of oil at my button and a boxful of assorted duns and a season's permit in my pocket, you may be sure that I was inclined very scornfully to regard the unintelligent horde who, with their clumsy casts of three, lash the waters of the north country. I thought that I had arrived. I had not. From the dizzy heights to which I had mounted I looked backwards and downwards to where the groundlings, whose company I had quitted for ever, plied their dull tasks, and had never a thought, in my ignorance and arrogance, for the cold, clear, distant peaks which lay above my head, whose very existence I did not suspect, to which I now know I shall never climb.
For though I have fished chalk-streams for many years, I am still a bungler, and a bungler I shall live and die. They say that there is always room at the top. This is not the case. To attain the highest in any abstract science, such as dry-fly fishing can become, a man must be made of rarer clay than mine. There is in my nature an ineradicable thirst for the death of fishes which shall for ever exclude me from the company of that esoteric few who practise the utmost refinements.
To come at last to my subject. I seem to discover seven separate degrees of dry-fly angling. The lowest fisherman of this kind is the man who is absolutely learning his art. He is content with little results. A single fish is ample reward for a day's toil. A couple of brace sets him quite above himself, and he boasts all winter of a two-pounder. He carries a steelyard in his pocket, and to its test (that every ounce may tell) he submits every fish instantly on its being taken. He spends more than he can afford on the charming little japanned boxes which the tackle-makers sell. He has many hundreds of flies, and presents each pattern patiently to each rising trout until the list, or the fish, becomes exhausted. This tactless fool asks his masters to let him see the fishes they have caught. He cannot understand their reasons for returning them. A fish to him is a fish, and he is not nice in the matter of its colour, rotundity, or sex. The ideal of three brace of eighteen-inch males would never present itself to his mind. He is not æsthetic at all.
A little higher in the scale is the ordinary angler, such as I am; the man who can take a trout now and then when things are going right; who feels a certain reluctance to kill fishes that are not in the pink of condition, yet at times of scarcity is known to allow his baser nature to get the better of that reluctance; who in the morning nurses an ambition to bring home a heavy basket; who carries no steelyard, but prefers to allow, in stating the weight of his fish, for the ounces which they lose after death; who employs habitually but few patterns, yet will not disdain in obstinate cases to bring out fancy lures. This man is met with everywhere.
Above him is found the three-fly expert. Two shades of olive and a black gnat are enough for him. He will allow himself a Mayfly when it is on the water, but at other seasons he is rigid. He casts each pattern but once, for, so supreme is his skill, what are called "trial casts" are unknown to his fishing. He calls trout "fario," and possesses a secret recipe for the dressing of a line. Such an one I suspect yonder Purfling to be.
I now come to the point where the taint of blood at last ceases to pollute the fair name of dry-fly fishing. The anglers of whom I have spoken still move upon a lower plane. They all try to catch and kill trout. But with my next example the regions of pure science are entered. For it is, or so I believe, this very point of slaughter which marks off the truly great angler from the merely expert. Yet here again are degrees of greater and less perfection. Fourthly, then, I find the man who fishes for the single purpose of successfully deceiving the trout into the belief that he is going to eat a living fly—in other words, he fishes for rises. When he addresses himself to his work he is moved by no wish to see his prey—he seeks no prey—gasping upon the grass. He sits down before none but the oldest and most circumspect of fishes, those fishes which are the despair of other, of lesser anglers. He will pass a summer casting over one of these, and he will count his time well spent can he but persuade it to open its mouth to him once. He is calm in the presence of the loaded creels of his fellows, for he knows that for him are joys of a rarer and more essential quality than any that visit their degraded bosoms.
I am now getting on to very high ground. My fifth angler takes his pleasure through a pair of field-glasses. It is his to watch the trout and their ways. He sits by the stream, purged of every thought save the acquirement of knowledge. It is to him that we owe the priceless information that a trout will rise at other objects than living insects; small twigs, for example, scraps of straw—yes, and the petals of flowers.
Is it possible, you ask, that angling can be carried yet higher? The number seven was mentioned, and here we are fishing through binoculars in five steps. Have patience. These things unfold themselves slowly.
One more stage, and the supereminent is just beyond. Sport is, after all, only the handmaid of natural history. It is good to seek healthy recreation, but it is better to serve humanity. The pursuit of birds, beasts, and fishes is in itself an end to lower natures. Yet there is a savagery about it which must revolt the Thinker. To know—that is the highest object of man's energy; and to know the trout aright we must know on what he feeds. The angler, then, to whom I would now direct your attention, having mastered the things that the fish of his chosen study does, turns his mind to the things that it eats. He moves on by one other degree towards perfection. He catches flies.
Lastly—and here I reach the supreme point to which (so far as I know) the science of dry-fly fishing has attained—lastly is found the all-knowing fisherman who, abandoning rod, creel, waders, trout, flies, and river as matters which no longer concern the investigator, occupies his angling hours in the loving study of the habits of the birds. Beyond this I do not think fishing can go. Yet mathematicians tell us that there is a fourth dimension of existence inconceivable to common minds, only dimly suspected by the rarest, and it may be that there are other and still higher regions to which it is possible for the angler to attain. Who knows?