A Traveller in Little Things | Page 2

you meet and converse with small
farmers, innkeepers, labourers and their wives, with other persons who
live on the land. In this way you get to hear a good deal about rent and
cost of living, and what the people are able and not able to do. Now I
am out of all that; I never go to a village nor see a farmer. I am a
traveller in something very large. In the south and west I visit towns
like Salisbury, Exeter, Bristol, Southampton; then I go to the big towns
in the Midlands and the North, and to Glasgow and Edinburgh; and
afterwards to Belfast and Dublin. It would simply be a waste of time
for me to visit a town of less than fifty or sixty thousand inhabitants."
He then gave me some particulars concerning the large thing he
travelled in; and when I had expressed all the interest and admiration
the subject called for, he condescendingly invited me to tell him
something about my own small line.
Now this was wrong of him; it was a distinct contravention of an
unwritten law among "Commercials" that no person must be
interrogated concerning the nature of his business. The big and the little
man, once inside the hostel, which is their club as well, are on an
equality. I did not remind my questioner of this--I merely smiled and
said nothing, and he of course understood and respected my reticence.
With a pleasant nod and a condescending let-us-say-no-more-about-it
wave of the hand he passed on to other matters.
Notwithstanding that I was amused at his mistake, the label he had

supplied me with was something to be grateful for, and I am now
finding a use for it. And I think that if he, my labeller, should see this
sketch by chance and recognise himself in it, he will say with his
pleasant smile and wave of the hand, "Oh, that's his line! Yes, yes, I
described him rightly enough, thinking it haberdashery or floral texts
for cottage bedrooms, or something of that kind; I didn't imagine he
was a traveller in anything quite so small as this."

II
THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION
We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle
years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't
know and didn't believe. The process is too gradual to trouble us; we
can only say, at fifty or sixty or seventy, that it is doubtless the case
that we can't see as far or as well, or hear or smell as sharply, as we did
a decade ago, but that we don't notice the difference. Lately I met an
extreme case, that of a man well past seventy who did not appear to
know that his senses had faded at all. He noticed that the world was not
what it had been to him, as it had appeared, for example, when he was a
plough-boy, the time of his life he remembered most vividly, but it was
not the fault of his senses; the mirror was all right, it was the world that
had grown dim. I found him at the gate where I was accustomed to go
of an evening to watch the sun set over the sea of yellow corn and the
high green elms beyond, which divide the cornfields from the
Maidenhead Thicket. An old agricultural labourer, he had a grey face
and grey hair and throat-beard; he stooped a good deal, and struck me
as being very feeble and long past work. But he told me that he still did
some work in the fields. The older farmers who had employed him for
many years past gave him a little to do; he also had his old-age pension,
and his children helped to keep him in comfort. He was quite well off,
he said, compared to many. There was a subdued and sombre
cheerfulness in him, and when I questioned him about his early life, he
talked very freely in his slow old peasant way. He was born in a village
in the Vale of Aylesbury, and began work as a ploughboy on a very big

farm. He had a good master and was well fed, the food being bacon,
vegetables, and homemade bread, also suet pudding three times a week.
But what he remembered best was a rice pudding which came by
chance in his way during his first year on the farm. There was some of
the pudding left in a dish after the family had dined, and the farmer said
to his wife, "Give it to the boy"; so he had it, and never tasted anything
so nice in all his life. How he enjoyed that pudding! He remembered it