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Title: The gentle art of tramping
Author: Stephen Graham
Release date: August 4, 2023 [eBook #71340]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1926
Credits: Alan, Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GENTLE ART OF TRAMPING ***
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE GENTLE ART OF
TRAMPING
THE DIVIDING LINE OF
EUROPE
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES
EUROPE-WHITHER BOUND?
THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS
THE QUEST OF THE FACE
RUSSIA IN 1916
PRIEST OF THE IDEAL
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL
ASIA
THE WAY OF MARTHA
AND THE WAY OF MARY
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD
WITH POOR EMIGRANTS
TO AMERICA
WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS
TO JERUSALEM
CHANGING RUSSIA
A TRAMP’S SKETCHES
UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA
A VAGABOND IN THE
CAUCASUS
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXXVI
COPYRIGHT--1926--BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER HEADINGS BY R. H. HULL
CHAPTER PAGE
I WE SET OUT 1
II BOOTS 7
III THE KNAPSACK 15
IV CLOTHES 22
V CARRYING MONEY 32
VI THE COMPANION 38
VII WHITHER AWAY? 47
VIII THE ART OF IDLENESS 78
IX EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING 88
X THE FIRE 97
XI THE BED 103
XII THE DIP 114
XIII DRYING AFTER RAIN 121
XIV MARCHING SONGS 128
XV SCROUNGING 135
XVI SEEKING SHELTER 142
XVII THE OPEN 152
XVIII THE TRAMP AS COOK 160
XIX TOBACCO 173
XX BOOKS 179
XXI LONG HALTS 189
XXII FOREIGNERS 195
XXIII THE ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK 208
XXIV MAPS 233
XXV TRESPASSERS’ WALK 240
XXVI A ZIGZAG WALK 251
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
[Illustration]
CHAPTER ONE
WE SET OUT
It is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live. Manners
makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet your fellow
wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and how to be
active to its wildness and its rigor. Tramping brings one to reality.
If you would have a portrait of Man you must not depict him in high hat
and carrying in one hand a small shiny bag, nor would one draw him in
gnarled corduroys and with red handkerchief about his neck, nor with
lined brow on a high bench watching a hand that is pushing a pen,
nor with pick and shovel on the road. You cannot show him carrying a
rifle, you dare not put him in priest’s garb with conventional cross
on breast. You will not point to King or Bishop with crown or miter.
But most fittingly you will show a man with staff in hand and burden on
his shoulders, striving onward from light to darkness upon an upward
road, shading his eyes with his hand as he seeks his way. You will show
a figure something like that posthumous picture of Tolstoy, called
“Tolstoy pilgrimaging toward eternity.”
So when you put on your old clothes and take to the road, you make
at least a right gesture. You get into your right place in the world
in the right way. Even if your tramping expedition is a mere jest, a
jaunt, a spree, you are apt to feel the benefits of getting into a
right relation toward God, Nature, and your fellow man. You get into an
air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the tacit
assumption of your everyday life.
What a relief to escape from being voter, taxpayer, authority on old
brass, brother of man who is an authority on old brass, author of best
seller, uncle of author of best seller.
What a relief to cease being for a while a grade-three clerk, or
grade-two clerk who has reached his limit, to cease to be identified by
one’s salary or by one’s golf handicap. It is undoubtedly a delicious
moment when Miles the gardener seeing you coming along in tramping
rig omits to touch his hat as you pass. Of course it is part of the
gentle art not to be offended. It is no small part of the gentle art of
tramping to learn to accept the simple and humble rôle and not to crave
respect, honor, obeisance. It is a mistake to take to the wilderness
clad in new plus-fours, sports jacket, West-End tie, jeweled tie pin,
or in gaiters, or carrying a silver-topped cane. One should not carry
visiting cards, but try to forget the three-storied house remembering
Diogenes and his tub.
I suppose one should draw a distinction between professional tramping
and just tramping, especially as this whole book is to be called _The
Gentle Art of Tramping_. I am not writing of the American hobo, nor
of the British casual, nor of railroaders and beach combers or other
enemies of society--“won’t works” and parasites of the charitable.
While among these there are many very strange and interesting
exceptions, yet in general they are not highly estimable people, nor is
their way of life beautiful or worth imitation. They learn little on
their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs
and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be
highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold
up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp
is often misapplied to them.
The tramp is a friend of society; he is a seeker, he pays his way if he
can. One includes in the category “tramp” all true Bohemians, pilgrims,
explorers afoot, walking tourists, and the like. Tramping is a way
of approach, to Nature, to your fellowman, to a nation, to a foreign
nation, to beauty, to life itself. And it is an art, because you do not
get into the spirit of it directly you leave your back door and make
for the distant hill. There is much to learn, there are illusions to be
overcome. There are prejudices and habits to be shaken off.
First of all there is the physical side: you need to study equipment,
care of health, how to sleep out of doors, what to eat, how to cook on
the camp fire. These things you teach yourself. For the rest Nature
becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful
and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you
should go. You relax in the presence of the great healer and teacher,
you turn your back on civilization and most of what you learned in
schools, museums, theaters, galleries. You live on manna vouchsafed to
you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you
yearn toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to
bird’s song and the murmurs of trees and streams. If ever you were
proud or quarrelsome or restless, the inflammation goes down, fanned by
the coolness of humility and simplicity. From day to day you keep your
log, your daybook of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a
mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering
into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to
a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are
learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist’s
joy in creation.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWO
BOOTS
Boots and the Man I sing! For you cannot tramp without boots. The
commonest distress of hoboes is thinness of sole.
_Jog on, jog on the foot-path way
And merrily hint the stile-a
The merry heart goes all the way
The sad tires in a mile-a._
The sad heart, in this case, often has just a thin sole. Two friends
set out last spring to tramp from Bavaria to Venice, luggage in
advance, knapsack on shoulder. But they had not the right sort of
boots, and they lingered in the mountain inns quaffing steins of brown
beer to take their thoughts away from their toes. They are in those
mountains yet.
You should have leather-lined boots with most substantial soles. They
may squeak, they may feel clumsy as sabots when you first put them
on. They may feel like comfortable baskets on your feet. Slight and
elegant boots seldom stand the strain, or, if they do, your feet do
not. I have tramped in little steel-soled boots in the Caucasus, and in
plaited birch-bark boots, _lapti_, in the North, but I do not recommend
novelties in footwear. It is difficult to better a new pair of Army
boots. But the best I ever had were a pair of chrome leather fishing
boots which I once bought in a wayside shop in the Catskill Mountains.
My feet were in a poor state, having got frozen by night and blistered
by day in a disgusting pair of light boots. I got into these capacious
fishing boots one evening and never felt another twinge all the way
to Chicago. As regards Army boots, men suffered on the march because
often they were wearing other men’s boots worn and shaped already to a
different pair of feet and then patched and cobbled. One cannot with
advantage wear dead men’s boots.
Of course, one should go gradually with a really stout pair of boots.
Beware of the zest of the first and second day’s tramping. It is so
easy to cripple oneself on the second day out. You dispose of the first
surface blisters, and then you get the deeper, more painful, blisters,
and those you cannot squeeze. They intend to squeeze you. One should
wear thick woolen socks, or even two pairs of socks at the same time.
When the socks wear out one can even increase the number of pairs to
three, though it is better to discard socks that have worn to hard
shreds. I do not believe in soaping socks, though it does not hurt to
put them on damp. One should try to get a dip every day, in mountain
stream or lake. An ideal combination is sea-bathing and tramping. The
salt-water exercise certainly helps the feet. It takes several days to
get town-nurtured feet into condition. With that in mind one should not
overdo it at the beginning. Mile averages are a curse. So are definite
programs. Like a good cricketer, you should play yourself in before
you begin to score.
Of all tramping the most delightful is in the mountains; the most
trying is along great highways. Both have their place in the ideal
tramp’s life. But experience teaches where the most fun is to be found.
Mountain walking is really much less tiring because, first of all,
there is no dust, then there is more contrast and mental distraction,
and last, not least, one’s feet hit the earth at varying angles,
employing more muscles. The sole does not hit a road with monotonous
regularity upon the same dry spot of blistering skin.
I find that in the mountains a boot of rather lighter sole is
preferable, with either brads or Phillips rubbers. One must
nevertheless beware of shoddy. After the second scramble amid rocks I
have seen the whole sole of a boot part company with the upper. I have
seen the heel come off. Well established lines of workingmen’s boots
are safer than fair-seeming boots for clerks. On the other hand, boots
whose nails come through are a nuisance, digging holes in the soles of
one’s feet. Boots which are letting iron in should be hammered inside
with a stone, but if, as often happens, some sharp nail edge cannot
be smoothed it is as well to put in a certain amount of paper till a
cobbler can be found to right the wrong.
Metal plates, “bradies,” on the outside of the soles are of little
use as they get very smooth and slippery. Brads also wear to be more
slippery than plain leather. The new type of very hard rubber patches
made by Phillips and others are ideal for climbing. It is to be
remembered that tramping across country in the mountains one comes to
steep and dangerous descents, and upon occasion one risks one’s neck on
the grip of one’s feet. That is where the Army type of rubbers comes
in. As an auxiliary it is not a bad plan to have a light pair of tennis
shoes in the pack, as you can get over some obstacles in prehensile
rubber shoes which one could never negotiate in boots. But hard rubber
bars across one’s leather soles are in any case very good. These
rubbers would “draw” your feet on an exposed level road. But in the
mountains one’s feet keep cooler, and the comfort of a safe grip on
slippery rocks is not to be disdained. When in the Rockies with Vachel
Lindsay he had bradded boots, but they got very shiny and smooth, and
he could slide in them. In certain dangerous descents we made I could
see that much-worn bradded boots were clearly at a disadvantage.
It is a good plan on a long tramp to carry a duplicate pair of
boots in the pack. While it adds to the weight carried there is a
counter-balancing pleasure in a change of footgear now and then. It
is moreover possible that in wild country one may wear out one solid
pair of boots in a month or so. Uppers have a way of bursting in the
mountains, especially when one indulges in rushing down great slopes of
silt with myriads of knife-edged little stones. By the way, one should
beware of toasting one’s feet in front of camp fires, or of leaving
one’s boots too near the embers when sleeping out. If not using them as
the foundation of a pillow, it is well to put them in a fresh and airy
place, smearing a little grease on them perhaps, to keep the uppers
soft and pliable. Beware, however, of the grease getting near the
bread.
Boots are, of course, not a poetic subject. Kipling used the word to
express the boredom of route marching:
_I’ve marched six weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
It is not fire, devils, dark or anything
But boots, boots, boots, boots, boots._...
The boot, like the thumbscrew, was an instrument of torture of the
Inquisition. But nevertheless, it must be remembered, old boots bring
good luck. That is why one ties them to the hymeneal coach. On life’s
tramp together, may the blissful pair have the comfort and easy-going
happiness of a well-worn boot.
The tramp gets affectionately attached to his boots when they have
served him long and well, and may even wax patriotic in looking at them
and say, like Dickens in America, “This, sir, is a British boot.”
Poems addressed to boots are hard to find, and one must assume
that poets for the most part do not tramp. For if they tramp there
inevitably comes the pathetic moment when looking upon discarded boots
by starlight the poet says: “Oh, boot, have you not served me well, old
boot, old friend!” There is a lost poetry in boots--“lines addressed
to my favorite boots,” “lines written after taking off my most cruel
boots,” “lines written before putting on my boots.” The last, on the
occasion of putting them on swollen and blistered feet, might be the
occasion of a long, reflective poem.
But enough, we at least have our boots on, and are ready to proceed
with the story of our tramping art.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER THREE
THE KNAPSACK
It is wonderful how much you can carry when it is for pleasure.
Soldiers grumble like camels at the loads put on their shoulders. Under
some one’s orders they shall march with packs on their backs to such a
point to-day, to such another point
_With your best foot first and the road a-sliding past,
An’ every bloomin’ camping ground exactly like the last._
The camel groans, the soldier grouses, but the gay tramp puts ever
something more into his capacious rucksack for pleasure or profit.
There’s a hunk of tobacco, there’s his favorite volume of poems, his
sketchbook--his danger is in putting in too much and not putting in the
right things.
I assume he is to be equipped for sleeping _à la belle étoile_. I
may mention one or two things he might overlook. First, the pack
itself should be well made. I have found in the past that Germans and
Austrians make the best rucksacks, and even the best in London seemed
to be imported from these countries. The one I have now was purchased
some years ago in Vienna, but I think it was the best to be found
there. There were many shoddy ones about. The shopkeeper pretended that
the one I chose was not for sale, and I spent twelve hours getting it.
Not that it is remarkable, but it is a genuinely well made article.
Exterior pockets which will not burst are a necessary; interior pockets
are also useful.
The worst of the interior of a rucksack is that after a while
everything in it gets mixed. Spare boots and linen get sprinkled
with coffee; different foods mingle. Some paper wrapper bursts and
the sugar spills over everything. Then writing papers, books, or
notebooks get greasy. But this is avoided if one provides oneself
with half-a-dozen cotton bags which tie with tapes. If these are not
obtainable at home they are to be found in some sort of form at a
Woolworth’s or a cheap draper’s. It is a small detail, but a matter of
comfort: if you feel so disposed you wash out these little cotton bags
when they get dirty.
Another valuable extra to put in the rucksack is a few yards of
mosquito netting which can be bought quite cheaply, sometimes called
brides’ veil in the shops, sometimes leno, sometimes butter-muslin.
With this you can defy the mosquito at nights, and by day you can
enjoy the luxury of a sun-bath siesta watching the flies which cannot
bite your nose. Apropos of the mosquito netting the choice of hat is
important. Do not take a cap. You need a brim. And do not take a straw
hat. You cannot lie down comfortably with a straw hat on. A tweed hat
is best. The brim has a double use. It shields your eyes from the sun,
but also, when you lie down where flies and mosquitoes abound, you had
best sleep in your hat and use the brim to lift the mosquito net an
inch from your face. N.B.--A tramping hat does not get old enough to
throw away. The old ones are the best. Of course, once you have slept
a night wearing your hat it is not much more use for town wear. It has
become more tramp than you are.
I am in favor of carrying a blanket. It is less cumbersome than
a sleeping sack and more hygienic. If, however, insects are very
troublesome, as in the tropics, and there are “land crabs” and
scorpions and tarantulas and what not about, a light sleeping sack may
be improvised by sewing together three sides of a pair of small sheets.
This I have done: it gets rather airless and smelly. It is best to turn
it inside out in the morning and give it plenty of sun. But a blanket
will do: take a couple if you are chilly. This makes weight on the
back, but it is also a softening comfort and fits the rucksack upon the
shoulders on a long hike.
There is no point whatever in carrying an overcoat, though a waterproof
cape or an oilskin comes in useful. A blanket and a cape form a useful
combination. One can sleep on the cape with the blanket over one.
In one of the little cotton bags you will carry your toilet requisites,
soap and towel and comb. Some men like to let their beard grow on a
long tramp and thus dispense with razor and brush. Still, there are few
things more refreshing than the cold shave at dawn, the rushing stream,
the lather scattering itself on ferns and flowers, the brandishing arm,
the freshening cheek.
A vital consideration at that time in the morning is the coffeepot.
I am in favor of carrying an ordinary metal _cafetière_; some prefer
a kettle, but it bumps too much on the back; others a pail, but the
water in it is apt to get smoky. In the United States there are so many
clean empty cans lying about that it is perhaps unnecessary to carry
anything of the kind. The cowboys never carry anything in the nature
of a coffeepot. They confidently reckon on finding a lard can. Indeed,
if you make camp in the West or South where some have camped before
you, you may find carefully preserved the coffee can used by the last
party. All America is camping out in the summer, so it is a simple
matter to find the black patch of some one else’s erstwhile sleeping
pitch.
However, I dislike the places where people have been before, their
orange peel and biscuit wrappings, their trampled grass and jaded
scrub. Give me a virginal patch of woodland or moorland, or a happy
grassy corner of the long dusty road, and there startle the earwigs and
the birds with the crackle of a first bonfire. Therefore, I consider it
ideal to take a coffeepot with you, a metal one that gets blacker and
blacker as you go along. It can best be carried outside the knapsack,
angling from the center strap and resting in the hollow between the
bulging pockets.
I had forgotten the enamel mug, the knife and the spoon. But you must
not. Do not carry a fork; it is unnecessary. A small enamel plate is
useful. Pepper and salt mixed to taste may be carried in a little bag.
Some sort of safe box for butter is to be recommended. Take plenty of
old handkerchiefs or worst quality new ones; they come in useful.
Remember a glove for taking the coffeepot off the fire. If you do not
you will be burning all your handkerchiefs, your hat, your shirt, or
anything else that you may be tempted to use. There are occasions when
the coffeepot seems to get almost red hot before it boils. There are
giddy moments when it loses its balance and will topple over and spill
its precious contents unless you are ready to dash in with gloved hand
to save it.
For the rest of the contents of your knapsack you will be guided by
your special desires and aims. Loaded and bulging in the morning, it
will gradually feel lighter and look more shapely as movement sorts the
various things into their best positions. At night you turn out many
things and use what remains as a pillow. Some carry a pillow, but it is
too bulky. An air pillow is not to be despised, but it generally seems
to let you down during the night. Your knapsack will grudge being left
in the dew. It will feel happier with your head resting upon it.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FOUR
CLOTHES
1. ATTIRE
“Needy knife grinder,” said the poet, “your hat has got a hole in it,
and so have your breeches.” That was not necessary. You should carry
a housemaid’s tidy, or whatever it may be called, the tiny compendium
of needles and thread sometimes offered upon hotel dressing tables,
and sew up the holes. I fear the knife grinder’s hat was of felt, a
broken billycock hat, but we tramps have nothing to do with felt hats.
The bowlers and the derbys and the trilbys are not our style. There
was a time when men tramped in shovel hats, and I can see Parson Adams
trudging along, his lank locks crowned with this lugubrious headgear.
And Abraham Lincoln walked abroad in his rusty topper. But we have
changed all that. We tramp in tweed hats or caps or without hats at
all. We do not feel superior, but we know we are more comfortable.
Also we no longer wear cravats. In fact, a collar and tie may be
secreted in a pocket of the knapsack to be unwillingly put on when it
is necessary to visit a post office or a bank, a priest, or the police.
But otherwise we go forth with free necks and throats, top button of
shirt preferably undone.
And we do not tramp in spats or gaiters, nor in fancy waistcoats. The
waistcoat is an article of attire which can be cheerfully eliminated as
entirely unwanted. Undervests also are rather _de trop_. There are many
things a man can shed. I am not qualified to say what a woman can do
without, but she needs no hat with feathers, no hatpin. As I think of
her in the wilderness it seems to me she can get rid of everything she
commonly wears with the exception perhaps of a hair net, and then dress
herself afresh in “rational attire.” The green and brown misses in the
“lovely garnish of boys” are now so familiar in the United States that
it is almost superfluous to describe them. A khaki blouse and knickers,
green putties or stockings, and a stout pair of shoes are almost
everything; very simple, very practical, and if one must think of looks
while on tramp, not unbecoming.
Materials are more important than shapes. A homespun, a tweed, a
cord, are better than flannel or serge or shoddy cloth. Tramping is
destructive of material; sun, rain, camp-fire sparks, and hot smoke
seem to reduce the resistance of cloth very rapidly. After a month, a
sort of dry rot will show itself, and as you go through a wood every
rotten stick or tiny thorn you happen to touch will tear a tatter in
your trousers. It can be annoying and amusing. “When I am tired of
looking at the view I look at your trousers,” said Lindsay to me, in
the Rockies, he in the virtuous superiority of green corduroy; I
in old clothes which I thought I might as well wear out on tramp. I
certainly wore them out: in fact, we had to turn from the wilds towards
civilization, and the poet bought me a ready-to-wear pair of cowboy’s
bags.
But workmen’s trousers, suspended by workmen’s braces, are the best.
Braces marked “For Policemen and Firemen” are sold in the United
States. They are undoubtedly stout and will stand the strain of many
jumps. You will have a cosy feeling of nothing defective in your
straps, a feeling akin to that of a good conscience--much to be desired.
What remains? A jacket. It may as well be a tweed one with half-a-dozen
roomy pockets. I once saw a character reader at a fair who said: “Show
me your hat and I will tell you who you are.” He had plenty to guide
him. I gave him mine. He said: “You, sir, are a thinker. Your thoughts
have been oozing out of your head and have spoilt an excellent lining.”
He held my hat up to the crowd. “This is the hat,” said he, “of a man
who buys at the best shop, but wears his hat a very long while. He is
both proud and economical, and is probably a Scotsman.”
Had I taken off my jacket he could probably have told me a good deal
more; made bulgy with books, yet pinched by the clips of fountain pens,
ink-stained, wine-stained, sun-bleached and rain-washed, fretted by
camp-fire sparks, frayed and yet not torn by envious thorns; the whole
well stretched, well slept in, well tramped in. Other parts of one’s
attire wear out, come and go, but the jacket remains, granted a good
sound indestructible jacket.
Such a jacket is warm wear. No, not in the morning, not for some hours
after sunrise; not in the evening, not during the twilight hours.
During the heat of the day if you wish you can take it off and, tying
it into a neat bundle, fix it to the knapsack. It is pleasant to have
the air break fresh on one’s perspiring chest. But the warm jacket is
your friend, and after two days’ out of home you understand it. The
stout jacket stands by you in the hours when you need support. You soon
get used to its weight, and its thickness helps to bed the knapsack
between the shoulders.
Carlyle wrote a book on clothes, the inwardness of which was that man,
the straggling bifurcate animal, discovered in Eden that he was really
ugly and a shame to be seen, and he has been trying to hide himself
ever since, in fig leaves and phrases, phylacteries and philosophies.
That shall provide the tramp’s motto: a fig leaf and a phrase. But, oh,
Sartor, oh, Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, a stout fig leaf!
2. MOTLEY
“_Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind.... Motley’s
the only wear._”
The privilege of the Court Fool is that he can tell the plain ordinary
truth to the King, even with the executioner standing by, ax in hand,
and risk not his head. But he must be wearing his cap and bells. Let
him come but dressed as a courtier and make the same painful jest,
and the headsman will step forth to relieve him of his poor-quality
thinking piece. The Greek who was employed to tell his Alexander
after each glorious triumph that he too must die, must have worn some
shred of motley. You cannot say that sort of thing without the dress
which liberates. It was the same with Diogenes. He got in so many home
truths in an intolerant age because he lived in a tub. That tub was his
motley. Our tramps’ gear is ours.
There are clothes which rob you of your liberty, and other clothes
which give it you again. In the sinister garb called morning dress you
are a close prisoner of civilization; but in the tramp’s morning dress
you do not need to “mind your step.” Oh, the difference between one
who has worn silk in the Temple and the same man lying in a cave in
smoke-scented tweeds. Of course, it takes some time to break him down.
He is still wearing a shadow topper and invisible cutaway coat weeks
after he has started into the wilds. The same with a lady of fashion;
she puts a hat over the glory of her hair to hide the primitive
Eve--she will be still thinking of this false headgear long after she
has changed into a forest nymph.
Motley has a double advantage not used by Shakespeare in his admirable
clownings. It not only perhaps enables a man to jest shrewdly with the
prince; it enables a prince, if he will put it on, to talk freely with
an ordinary poor man. The cat can look at the King and the King can
look at the cat.
Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it
puts barriers between man and man. The man from the first-class cabin
cannot make himself at home in the steerage. He can have conversations
with his fellow man down there, but fellow man will be standing to
attention like private in presence of officer, or standing defiant
like prisoner in presence of a condemnatory court. It is not the fault
of the bottom dog, the proletarian. He scents a manner. Your bearing
cannot be adjusted to equality. You are not on the level with him.
You cannot rid your voice of its kind note. “Damn it, don’t be kind
to me,” say the eyes of the third-class passenger. But you cannot get
rid of that absurd, unwanted, kind look--that “tell me, my dear man”
expression.
_“How are you, aged man,” I said,
“And how is it you live?”
But his answer trickled through my brain
Like water through a sieve._
Yes, whatever he replies will seem a little bit irrelevant, like the
answers to the visiting rector going the round of his parish, he having
the next drag hunt on his mind.
But in the tramps’ motley you can say what you like, ask what questions
you like, free from the taint of class.
It also puts you right with regard to yourself. You see yourself as
others see you, and that is a refreshing grace wafted in upon an
opinionated mind. The freedom of speech and action and judgment which
it gives you will breed that boldness of bearing which, after all, is
better than mere good manners. It allows you to walk on your heels as
well as on your toes, and to eat without a finicking assortment of
forks. It aids your digestion of truth and of food, and aids nutrition
as good air does good porridge. All that highfalutin’ advice which
Kipling wrote in “If” may be left in its glum red lettering pasted on
your bedroom wall, if you will only put on your tramp’s motley.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer to that question
is not adequately stated in that “If” of talking to mobs without losing
your virtue and to Kings without losing the common touch, or in the
“If” of making a heap of all your winnings and staking them in a game
of pitch and toss. The answer of the Evangel is Take up the Cross and
Follow Me, which may be interpreted indulgently for our purpose here:
Take up thy staff and the common burden for thy shoulders, the motley
of the pilgrim and the tramp.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FIVE
CARRYING MONEY
“Put money in thy purse,” is often given to the young man as a jewel
of wisdom. But we give the contrary advice: take it out. The less you
carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will
experience. Of course, if you have a strong enough will to resist
temptation you can carry what you like, but even then you are at the
disadvantage of being worth a robber’s attention.
I sometimes pride myself that I set out for Jerusalem with the Russian
pilgrims having ten pounds, and that I brought back five of the pounds
to Russia. The most I paid for lodging in Jerusalem was three farthings
a day. Had I quit for a hotel I should have lost most of the experience
of the pilgrimage. When I made my study of the emigrants to America I
went steerage and came back steerage. I stayed in a workman’s lodging
house in New York and I tramped to Chicago on less than a dollar a day.
Of course it is very expensive in America, always was, unless you care
to work your way. For my part, I think working one’s way even more
expensive.
A shilling a day ought to be ample for tramping in any part of the
world--if you cook on your own camp fire and sleep out. But America is
an exception. There you will need three-parts of a dollar. In Europe
generally, after the War, one needs to consider the currency situation.
The Tyrol has been a place of cheap food and wine; now it is much
dearer. France and Italy, on the other hand, are cheaper.
It is well to carry notes of low denominations, as it is almost always
difficult to get change in the country. If you have a larger note, a
reserve, to take you, let us say, by boat or train somewhere, at some
point of your adventure, or to bring you home, it is as well to sew it
in your jacket lining. It is a mistake to put it in your knapsack or in
a pocket of a shirt. Once I put a five-pound note in a secret pocket
of a shirt and forgot all about it till after I received my linen one
day, washed and ironed, from a peasant girl. Suddenly I remembered, and
feverishly picked up the shirt and went to the secret pocket, the girl
smiling at me as I did so. The note was there, fresh and crisp. I was
astonished. “You washed and ironed this bit of paper?” I asked. “No,”
she said simply, “I found it in and took it out. But I put it back
after ironing.”
In America it is as well to carry travelers’ checks, as they can be
cashed even in a small village, and they are safer than notes. In
Europe such checks are difficult to cash except in large cities. They
are unfamiliar to the bankers of provincial towns. Even in large towns
you may have to wander from bank to bank seeking a correspondent of the
original bank from which you have taken the traveler’s check.
A good plan is to have five-pound notes sent to you by registered post
by a bank at the time at which you are likely to require them. They can
be sent _poste restante_, but it is unwise to leave the packet too long
unclaimed, as in some countries they send back letters to sender after
a week. Money can be sent by wire in this way. Money can also be sent
by a bank in response to a wire if you have arranged a code signature
before leaving home. This is a very simple matter if you are bad enough
tramp to have a balance intact.
After two months, or less, in the open, living the life of a tramping
hermit, you are likely, upon occasion, to have a joyous reaction
towards excess. And this may express itself in a gay and giddy
week-end, in hotels and restaurants and places of music and dance. You
may spend more on a romp than you do on the tramp. Round and round the
market place the monkey chased the weasel! You are that monkey never
catching that weasel. That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the
weasel!
Oh, that weasel, that weasel of false heart’s desire! Haven’t we chased
it upon occasion!
_I am Memory and Torment, I am Town,
I am all that ever went with evening dress!_
Thus sang the banjo in the wilderness. You lie in the heights of the
mountain under the stars, with empty pockets and empty stomach, and you
look at the many lights, the blent illumination of the Milky Way, and
think--of Broadway, the Great White Way, burning its great stream of
electricity, burning your candle and its own.
The spree is not, however, entirely legitimate to the tramping
expedition. Tramping is first of all a rebellion against housekeeping
and daily and monthly accounts. You may escape from the spending mania,
but first of all you escape from the inhibition, that is the word, the
inhibition of needing to earn a living. In tramping you are not earning
a living, but earning a happiness.
There was a verse of poetry of which Ruskin, in his satirical mood,
was inordinately fond:
_As for the bird in the thicket,
Thrush or ouzel in leafy niche,
She was far too rich
To care for a morning concert to which
She was welcome without a ticket._
Well, ours is the morning concert, without ticket and without program,
without classification of box or stall. You do not pay as you enter,
nor grumble as you go out. Indeed there is a very good reason.
Performers and friends of the performers do not pay. You come as a
friend of the thrush, or you are a thrush yourself. We shall see as we
tramp the woods together which it is. But in any case the thrush never
takes round the hat.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SIX
THE COMPANION
“Give me a companion of my way, be it only to mention how the shadows
lengthen as the sun declines,” wrote Hazlitt. An ideal companion is
ideal. However, we all know that companionship prolonged may be trying
even to good friends. If you live for some time in the same room with
any one you discover that fact. Indeed, you discover a good deal about
your companion that you had not suspected before you were intimate, and
he about you. Eventually a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand becomes a
storm, and you quarrel over what seems afterwards to have been nothing
at all. Even man and wife of ideal choice find that out.
But there is perhaps no greater test of friendship than going on a long
tramp. You discover to one another all the egoisms and selfishnesses
you possess. You may not see your own: you see your companion’s faults.
In truth, if you want to find out about a man, go for a long tramp with
him.
Still there are rewards. If you do not quarrel irreparably and part
on the road you will probably find your friendship greatly increased
by the experience of the wilds together. I like tramping alone, but a
companion is well worth finding. He will add to the experience; perhaps
double it.
You have naturally long conversations. You comment on Nature around
you, and on tramping experiences. You talk of books and pictures,
of poems, of people, but above all, almost inevitably, of yourself.
Tramping makes you self-revelatory. And this is an enormous boon. If
you have patience you will get to see your friend in a new light;
you will fill in the picture which up to then you have but vaguely
sketched. The richest people in life are the good listeners. If,
however, you also must talk, must reveal your life, your heart, your
prejudices and passions, it will often happen that you will express
yourself to yourself, as much as to your friend. Self-confession is
growth of the mind, an enriching of the consciousness. In talk which
seems idle enough you may be reaching out toward the infinite.
The early morning tramp is a striving time, one of reaching out, of
vigorous assertions. The afternoon may mock the morning with jesting,
with ribald songs,
“_Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,_”
as Kipling says. But the evening will make amends. There is a great
poetic time after the camp fire has been lit, the coffee brewed, the
sleeping place laid out. You sit by the embers as the twilight deepens
and talk till the stars shine brightly upon you. That is the time of
confidences, of tenderness, of melancholy, of the “might-have-been” and
the “if only.” You are full of the songs of the birds to which you
have listened all day. Music will come out again.
But there are many types of companionship: the two undergraduates _en
vacance_, the two cronies of the same town, the middle-aged man and his
young disciple, sweethearts, bachelor girls, father and son, man and
wife, friend and friend.
Young athletes will go to the furthest distance; lovers the shortest.
But the lovers may be out the longest time. I am inclined to measure a
tramp by the time taken rather than by the miles. If a hundred miles is
covered in a week it is a longer tramp than if it is rushed in three
days. There is great happiness in taking a month over it. However, it
is hardly possible to walk less than seven miles a day if one sleeps
out of doors.
A point to make sure about in companionship is distribution of kit.
You do not need two coffeepots, two sugar bags--a number of duplicates
can be avoided. See your companion has the right boots. The slower
walker should set the pace. It is absurd for one to walk the other off
his feet just to show what a walker he is. There is great difference
in walking capacity. Some can do forty miles a day without turning a
hair; many can hardly keep up fifteen. If your companion breaks his
feet or turns an ankle you may have to wait some days with him while
he recovers. The first days of tramping are in this respect the most
dangerous. It is so easy to blister the feet if one marches too far in
hot weather. One or two blisters may be remedied, but there comes a
morning when you cannot get your boots on.
The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you
the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves. After
freedom, I enjoy in a companion a well stocked mind, or observant eyes,
or wood lore of any kind. It is nice sometimes to tramp with a living
book.
Of course, one should carry a notebook or diary or some broad-margined
volume of poems. You can annotate Keats from your life on the road. But
whether you do that or merely record the daily life in a page-a-day
journal, you are enriching yourself enormously by what you can write
about.
Lovers, I imagine, will carry no diary. Their impressionable hearts
are the tablets on which they write. Every one has a tendency to write
down the unforgettable: it is obviously unnecessary. Loving pairs,
however, seldom take their staffs and their packs and make for the
wild. Even in our free days they are somewhat afraid of it. But it is
to be recommended as an admirable preparation for married life. It is
a romantic adventure, but it leads to reality. If you have to carry
your beloved, you will probably have to carry her for the rest of your
life. You cannot tell till you’ve spent a night in the rain, or lost
the way in the mountains, and eaten all the food, whether you have both
stout hearts and a readiness for every fate. If not a tramp before
marriage, then a tramp directly after comes not amiss, a honeymoon
spent tramping. It is an ideal way to begin life. For tramping is the
grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar--but it is worth while.
There are few more felicitous proposals of marriage set down in
literature than the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’s, “Will you take
the long road with me?”
Life _à deux_ is much more of an adventure than life _seul_, much more
of a tramping expedition, less of a “carriage forward,” “fragile,”
“lift with care,” and “use no hooks” affair. One, be it the man, be it
the woman, pulls the other from security. It is a more difficult way of
life; it needs learning.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed.
There are those who complain, making each mile seem like three; there
are those who have untapped reserves of cheerfulness, who sing their
companions through the tired hours. But in drawing-rooms, trains,
tennis parties, theater, and dance hall, they would never show either
quality. The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience,
energy, vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things. It is
something to face the first night together under the stars, the fears
of lurking robbers or wild animals, fears of the unnamed.
The first night out together of a man and his wife is a memorable
occasion. You go back to the primitive, but there is something very
cosy and comfortable about it--the only man in the world with the only
woman. Darkness settles down upon you in a stranger way than it does
upon man and man. There is more poetry in the air and in your mind.
More tenderness is enkindled than ceiling and walls of house ever saw,
tenderness of a certain sheltering care which it is luxurious to give.
Night is dark and still and intense, and you can hear two hearts
beating while you look outward and upward, and dimly discern the
passage of bats’ wings in the air.
The first night, however, is seldom without alarm; the cold wet nose
of a hedgehog touching your beloved’s cheek may cause her to rend the
air with a shriek, a field mouse at her toes cause her scarcely less
alarm. It is good to pack her in a really capacious sleeping bag; it
excludes rodents. And if you are not too big you can snuggle into it
yourself, if the lady proves to be nervous and you are on such terms of
fellowship as to make it possible.
A night of murmurings and deepening shadows and freshness, and then,
perhaps, of a gentle rain before dawn, and of glimmerings of new
day and sweetness of wild flowers and birds’ songs before sunrise.
You watch the boles of the great trees grow into stateliness in the
twilight, and the night is over. With an arm round your fair one you go
to the point where in orange and scarlet the great friend of all the
living is lifting himself once more out of the east to show us the way
of life.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHITHER AWAY?
The principle motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity--the desire
to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe
for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a
subconscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on
something very wonderful--beyond the horizon’s rim. The joys of
wandering are often balanced by the pains; but there is something which
is neither joy nor pain which makes the desire to wander or explore
almost incurable in many human beings.
The child experiences his first wander-thrill when he is taken to
places where he has never been before. I remember from the age of nine
a barefoot walk with my mother along the Lincolnshire sands from Sutton
to Skegness, and the romantic and strange sights on the way. What did
we not build out of that adventure? And who does not remember the
pleasurable thrill, the pleasure that’s all but pain, of being lost in
a wood, or in a strange countryside, and meeting some crazy individual
who humored the idea by apostrophizing a little brook in this style: “I
am now marching upon the banks of the mighty Congo”? The imagination
wishes to be stirred with the romance of places, and is stirred. In a
great city like London or New York, even though living there, certainly
I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a
rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick fire by the
roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil.
“Where,” I am asked, “would you go a-tramping now if you were
absolutely fancy-free and passports and Bolsheviks were unknown?” It
would probably be in Russia, where I have vagabondized over thousands
of miles already. I should like to resume my six-thousand-mile journey
southwest to northwest, which was interrupted by the War in August,
1914. But, alas, the Moscow of the Bolsheviks does not encourage
adventure of that kind.
Again, I’d like to buy a boat at Perm and slip down to the Petchora
River, and go with the stream thousands of miles north, selling the
boat to the Samoyedes at the mouth of the river, thence tramping
perhaps by the tundra roads or sledging it to Mesen. What a romance,
what a journey, as it seems to me now, in complete inexperience of it!
Or I’d like to take a party of literary men across the Altai, and in a
verdant valley live for half a year without letters and newspapers, and
each write his own book, express his own peculiar happiness in his own
words.
Or I’d like to plunge south from Verney, in Seven-Rivers-Land, or from
Kashgar, and climb to the mountain passes into India; and as I think
of it a sense of the last poem of Davidson creeps into the memory:
_Alone I climb
The ragged path that leads me out of Time._
So much for Russia. I’d love to tramp the whole length of Japan,
and peer into all the ways of the modern Japanese. There, however,
speaks another interest, and that is not so much to explore strange
lands as to explore strange people. Life teaches the wanderer that
peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times
be irresistible. You long to be familiar with Russians, Frenchmen,
Germans, Chinamen, Arabs, Americans, and the rest. And it takes you
afield, it takes you far, far away from 1, Alpha Villas, or the sweet
shady side of Pall Mall.
I’ve long wished to wander for years in the tents of the nomads of
the Central Mongolian Plain. I came on them accidentally, tramping in
Turkestan; surely among the most interesting peoples in the world, and
the oldest, with customs of the most intense human interest. Nothing
less than a year with them would do; and that means a year without
civilization, for no postman seeks the wandering tents of the Kirghis
and the Kalmouk.
I should like also to pursue a study which I once began of the
monasteries of the Copts, and tramp in the Sahara desert, to follow
the clues of early Christianity up the Nile from Alexandria and the
Thebaid, and I would make some study of Abyssinian Christianity in its
native haunts. Or, on the other side of the world, I’d like to tramp
the communal estate of the Dukhobors, of which I obtained a glimpse
in 1922 in western Canada. Or I’d like just now to tramp as a beggar
through the heart of the new Ireland.
These, and many other fascinating adventures, haunt the mind like
Maeterlinck’s souls of the unborn children in that charming drama of
the ideal--“The Betrothal.” If I don’t do them this time on earth, and
can’t do them, friends are apt to say: “Well, next time.” One lifetime
will hardly suffice to find out all there is to know and to enjoy in
the world and in man.
Vachel Lindsay, with whom I enjoyed a wonderful six weeks when we
crossed Glacier Park, going by compass, and passed the frontier between
the United States and Canada, is eager for a resumption of the trail.
Next time it shall be Mount McKinley in Alaska, or Crater Lake, in the
far northwest of the States. Perhaps some day I’ll go. Only recently
I received from him, by one post, six long letters and a packet of
coffee from Going-to-the-Sun Mountain. “Come at once,” said Vachel. But
I was in Finland at the time. Otherwise I’d have flung off for Alaska
or Crater Lake. The difficulty is to say “No” to such suggestions. It
would be a traveling more with Nature than with man--through enormous
wildernesses. Imagination could draw a wonderful picture of what such
places would be like, but there is one crude unmannerly truth that
the traveler always comes upon in the course of his experience of new
places, and that is, that imagination, though very charming, is nearly
always wrong. Knowledge of living detail shows the world to be full of
the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unimagined.
There is a type of tramping which belongs more to the future; a new
type, and an even more fascinating one, and that is the taking of cross
sections of the world, the cutting across all roads and tracks, the
predispositions of humdrum pedestrians, and making a sort of virginal
way across the world. This can be tried first of all as a haphazard
tramp--a setting out to walk without the name of any place you want
to get to. Hence the zigzag walk, of which I write later. Keep taking
the first turning on the left and the next on the right, and see where
it leads you. In towns this gives you a most alluring adventure. You
get into all manner of obscure courts and alleys you would never have
noticed in the ordinary way. But in the country, _beaucoup zigzag_,
as they say in France, does not work. You get tied up in a hopeless
tangle of lanes which go back upon themselves. As a result of a week’s
tramping you may find yourself only two steps from the place you
started from. You feel like a lost ant that, after infinite trouble,
has got back to the heap. It is dull to be an ant.
In the country a real cross section and haphazard adventurous tramp
is one which can be known as “Trespasser’s Walk.” You take with you a
little compass, decide to go west or east, as fancy favors, and then
keep resolutely to the guidance of the magnetic needle. It takes you
the most extraordinary way, and shows what an enormous amount of the
face of the earth is kept away from the feet of ordinary humanity by
the fact of “private property.” On the other side of the hedge that
skirts the public way is an entirely different atmosphere and company.
In ten minutes in our beautiful Sussex you can find yourself as remote
from ordinary familiar England as if you were in the midst of a great
reservation. And you may tramp a whole day upon occasion without
meeting a single human being.
I want to do it in Russia some time--tramp across her by the compass,
visit the hamlets which are five miles from the road, visit those which
are fifty from the road, a hundred and fifty from the road. In that
way I should find a Russia as yet unknown, unrevealed. It would be a
strange and fantastic quest of happiness.
“There’s no sense in it,” I can hear the stay-at-home repeat. And if
he came with me it would not be long before he parted company and went
back. “There’s no sense in going further.” And he is quite right if he
doesn’t hear the explorer’s whisper in his heart:
_One everlasting whisper, day and night, repeated--so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges--
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”_
The Japanese question to the Polar explorer: “What did you find when
you got to the Pole?” is a foolish one. You may bring nothing back in
your hands from an expedition, but you have garnered within. You have
garnered for yourself and also for others. It is always worth while to
quit for a time the rabbit hutches of civilization and do something
which stay-at-home folk call flying in the face of fortune. “Is it not
comfortable enough where you are?” they ask.
However, tramping, as I am writing of it, is not Polar exploration,
nor footing it along the rocky ways of the mountains to Lhasa. It is a
smaller, gentler, matter. It is merely accepting the call of Nature;
taking those two weeks which Wells described in his Modern Utopia--and
taking more. But it matters greatly where one chooses to go. Some
countries are better than others, some districts better than other
districts.
England cannot be said to be excellent tramping country; very good for
a walking tour where one seeks an inn each night, but not good for
a tramp in which one hopes to sleep _à la belle étoile_. Even when
the weather is fine the dews are heavy. In the occasional dry, hot
summers which occur it is however, delightful to adventure forth in
the West Country or in Cumberland, or even in the Highlands. One or
two jaunts are very attractive, for instance, to tramp the old Roman
Wall from Carlisle to Wallsend at Newcastle, or to tramp the Scottish
border from Berwick to the Solway. One passes over remarkably wild and
desolate country. I think especially of the track from Jedburgh to
Newcastleton, and a forlorn district called, if I remember rightly,
Knot of the Hill, which, however, is very much of the hill. One meets
upon occasion uncouth, friendly mountain shepherds with plenty of
philosophy in them. There are some wild tramps in Wales, especially in
the marches. The Shropshire border is most interesting. If, however,
one dives westward for places such as Dinas Mawddy or Dolgelly, one
should take provisions for a couple of days. It is easy to lose
yourself, and when you come upon people they speak only Welsh, and one
has some trouble in making oneself understood. Dartmoor and western
Ireland and the mountains and coastways of Donegal afford remarkable
scope for adventurers with pack on back.
One ought to be very careful in Great Britain about wayside fires.
Even when one is careful to put them out thoroughly with water before
leaving one is apt to get into trouble with the farmers, the police,
etc. One should also remember that if found sleeping behind haystacks,
or in barns, one is liable to be haled before the justice and charged
with vagrancy. Not that the tramp need be ashamed, when motorists
appear there in strings charged with obstruction and speeding and the
like. As a practical detail, however, it may be mentioned that sleepers
are very rarely discovered.
America is, of course, the tramp’s paradise, a country made by tramps.
I do not mean the hoboes which infest the railroads to-day, but the
Johnny Appleseeds of time past, who went exploring beyond the horizon
and the sunset. The first thing to be said about the New World is
its enormous stretch and variety. Many people have walked the three
thousand miles from New York to San Francisco. I even came across a
woman who had done it in high-heeled boots. It is no novelty. A more
difficult transcontinental jaunt would be the four thousand miles of
the Unguarded Line--the frontier of Canada and the United States. This
is a good literary expedition, and any one who did it and described it
well would make his name. My friend Wilfrid Ewart had it in mind to
do, and he went prospectively over the details of such a vagabondage.
But he was unfortunately killed in Mexico. Such a tramp would not
be confined to frontier posts, but should be crisscross, now in the
Republic, now in the Empire.
Another tramp which has seldom been done, except by laborers, is to
follow the wheat harvest north from Texas. The harvesting starts in
June in the South, and great gangs of harvesters work northward with
the summer. This implies a readiness to work in the fields. It is
arduous, but a great experience. You garner wheat: you garner gold.
If you take lifts when offered you may get all the way to Oregon by
September and find the corn still standing there.
In America, however, the roads are killing. You can only tramp in the
early hours of the morning and the cool of the evening--at least, in
summer. The noontide is too hot, the many cars throw up too much dust.
Cross-country tramping is much happier and provides more adventures.
But the man in the car is much more hospitable in America than in
any other part of the world. When tired of some waterless, treeless
countryside, you can come on to the highway, hail a passing car, and be
taken a long step further forward. The leisured and educated Americans
do not tramp for pleasure and find some difficulty in understanding it.
There is a well-known motto: _Why walk if you can ride?_ And Americans
without automobiles make their more fortunate brothers carry them. A
hand wave from a pedestrian brings a car to a halt and you jump in.
Journeys have been made from New York to Los Angeles, Boston to New
Orleans, “stepping cars,” all the way. It is not to be recommended,
however, as it is an abuse of a delightful hospitality.
Still, unless you are studying American civilization, it is hardly
worth while to tramp from town to town. The wildernesses are so much
more interesting. It is worth while for any one thinking out a novel
walk to apply to the Department of Forests and National Parks at
Washington. A National Park, conventional as it sounds, may easily
prove to be a reserve of territory as extensive as an English county.
They are commonly referred to by propagandists as “vast natural
playgrounds”--but as yet they are but little used. Yellowstone Park
is the only one which is visited by great numbers of people. The
others are in nowise overrun. Indeed, the railway journeys to them are
generally so long that the masses of the eastern cities cannot profit
by them. There are two specially marvelous ones, Sequoia and Yosemite,
notable for their trees; the highest and the oldest trees in the world
are to be found in these primeval wildernesses.
The Grand Canyon can afford at least a week’s walking. It is a mistake
to go down it on horse or mule, and when down in the depths there is
a marvelous journey for the pedestrian along the rocky flank of the
fast-running Colorado River. If at Grand Canyon in August it is well
to visit the Hopi Indians and see the Snake Dance. However, it is
really better to visit the Canyon later in the year. At Christmas it is
delightful. At midsummer it is really too oppressive down below. When I
went down there was snow above and soft vernal airs three thousand feet
under, spring flowers in bloom, and one could sit happily by one’s
wood fire in the afternoon sunshine.
Tramping in the South of the United States is very pleasant in autumn
and spring, especially in Florida and Alabama. In the summer it is too
hot and the mosquitoes unusually thick. A very interesting November
tramp is from Atlanta, the largest city in Georgia, to Savannah on the
coast. In this way you can follow, as I did, the track of Sherman’s
army in its famous march to the sea.
But there are places less far afield than these. There is hardly any
wilder country anywhere than in upper New York State. A tramp through
New England is likely to be congenial to most Englishmen: the people
are so much nearer to the English. Canada also presents enormous fields
for pleasure tramping, or for tramping which is almost exploration. The
far Northwest especially is wild and little traversed.
Europe, however, has equally strong claims on those who tramp, being
even more diversified than is America. The language difficulty is the
chief drawback. There are a hundred or so tongues. Customs and laws are
also bewildering. Still, the best way to see the Pyrenees or the Alps
is pack on back. The charming works of Hilaire Belloc on the “Path to
Rome” and the Pyrenees are memorials of excellent tramping in Europe.
A pilgrimage from inn to inn in France, especially going south through
the wine country, is utterly pleasant. One dispenses with a coffeepot
in these parts, a liter bottle is better. Fill it with the _vin du
pays_ wherever you go; a bottle of Chablis in the village of Chablis,
a bottle of Nuits St. Georges in the village of Nuits St. Georges, a
bottle of Pommard at Pommard, identifying the country by the wine of
wayside inns. It is well to taste and try what any countryside, town,
or hostelry is famous for, be it Creole gumbo or stuffed peppers, be it
even snails, even frogs’ legs. I remember in younger days the disgust
of the waiter in a little hotel opposite Chartres Cathedral when I
rejected a plateful of snails which, with a clatter, he had put before
me--a flagon of red wine, a chunk of bread, and a plateful of Roman
snails. I said “No! Take them away!”
The waiter shrugged his shoulders. _Que diable!_ If I didn’t want
snails why did I come to that hotel? Snails were their specialty.
However, I confess now I have eaten snails. The first time was at Pont
de Vaux, near Mâcon of Burgundy fame. The snails came on as a third
course at the Hôtellerie de la Renaissance, cleverly disguised, and
before I knew it I was saying, “I like these; I wonder what they are!”
They were purveyed upon a silver tray, or nickel, I suppose; they had
been taken out of their shells and put into tiny pots, one snail one
pot. There were a dozen or so tiny pots on the tray, each no more than
half an inch across the top, and in each a snail floated in a little
bath of melted butter and spice. There was a slender two-pronged fork
which looked like a toothpick, and you ate the snail with that.
Very tasty! Very novel! Perhaps that was how the Romans ate them.
Perhaps in ancient Egypt they ate them in that way, and these are the
original fleshpots. Be that as it may, I felt much amused and intrigued
and turned with a friendly gesture to my bottle of local Mâcon. I was
more pro-French after that, having got over a prejudice, I could no
longer say, “Disgusting people; they eat snails!”
France is a delightful country for a spring escapade. Go South and stay
in the country inns, and disenchant the Northern seriousness! It’s a
great idea. Go out from Paris to Fontainebleau, where the birds are
singing in choirs in the silvery lichened trees. You can sprawl at
your length in the sun in May. It is cold sleeping out, but there are
inns. You will walk amid wild daffodils and budding hyacinths. Summer
is coming north to meet you at Joigny or Dijon. You enter the Côte
d’Or country and spectacular stone villages among green hills. From
Dijon by red-earth vineyards whence the well cut vines are sprouting
an elemental eye-placating green. Your eyes need placating after the
dreary North with its cities and industries. The vineyards have low
stone walls which incidentally make excellent seats for the wanderer
on which to munch his bread and Camembert and stand his bottle of
Burgundy. You come to Beaune, a name on a bottle, on a wine list, now a
place well established in your mind and heart. So also Pommard, Volnay,
Mersault, Nuits, Mâcon, to mention but a few.
It is a longish distance, but another journey or a continuation might
be from Lyons along the banks of the Rhône or eastward to Lake Geneva
and Switzerland. It is very hot on the Rhône, but there is an added
interest in the old Roman cities you pass through. Avignon might be
your center, and from Avignon there are delightful pilgrimages to the
fountain of Vaucluse, where Petrarch and Laura met, to Tarascon, the
byword for obscurity in France, to famous Arles and its amphitheater.
But certainly the most wild and delightful tramp would be over the
mountains by compass to Cannes, through untraversed and solitary
Provence. This can be done in later summer. For although it is
extremely hot on the Riviera, the whole way there is at a height, and
one drops down to the coast by a precipitous road from the perfume
factories of Grasse.
Tramping expeditions of even more beauty can be made on the French
side of the Pyrenees, in the country of the Basques. Pious Catholics
may be inclined to make for Lourdes and will encounter the sick in
body going for health, and perhaps coming in the opposite direction,
rejoicing cripples who have been made whole. Whether credulous or
incredulous, the tramp will find Lourdes a religious curiosity well
worth approaching in the spirit of a true pilgrim on foot. A tramp
from Biarritz to Carcassonne, across the ankle of the Franco-Iberian
peninsula holds many picturesque sights of strange people and of feudal
towns. But mountainous Nature will rule the hearts of all those who
come under the influence of the sublime. This is delightful country for
sleeping out, provided mosquito netting be carried. Inns, however, are
not so numerous, and one should be prepared to make one’s own coffee on
one’s own brushwood fire.
Spain, despite some pleasant volumes recording walking tours, is
really untouched. It is a remarkable country, and the people, the most
conservative and delightful in Europe, look somewhat askance upon
Bohemians. There are tens of thousands of beggars who are accepted as
philosophically as flies in summer, but the man in tweeds with knapsack
on his back is regarded as some sort of strange wild animal. One is
almost bound to be called upon to explain oneself to the police, and to
find oneself described officially as a vagrant. Jan and Cora Gordon,
two delightful vagabonds, got over the difficulty by carrying guitars,
and they were understood as itinerant musicians. In the end, because
they played so well, they won over the affections of many somber
Spaniards. Among other tramping friends of mine, I ought to mention Mr.
Forse, the tramping vicar of Southborne, who has made several tours on
foot in Spain and issues his impressions as supplements to his parish
magazine. I often envied him his experiences.
It was my impression in Spain that it is not wise to wear tweeds.
Black is the accepted color for all people. All respectable beggars
wear black. On the other hand, state visits are also made in black.
With regard to the climate of Spain, it is easy to be deceived. It is
much colder than most people think. Northern Spain is mostly elevated
plateau and is exposed to bitter winds in the spring. Andalusia,
however, and the South generally, is serene and warm, hot even, but
subject to unpleasant dust storms. Incidentally, it may be mentioned
that the easiest way to get to Spain is via Southampton and Gibraltar.
The railway journey from France is apt to be very uncomfortable.
After these two countries, northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany
come naturally to mind. Of these, by far the cheapest is northern
Italy, and there is more untrodden ground. It is well to take passports
for Austria as well, so as to be free of the Austrian Tyrol if you
wish to enter. Austria, however, as a result of the War, lost a great
deal of magnificent territory to Italy, and there is plenty of room
in the latter country. Southern Germany is, of course, very fine,
and not inhospitable, though the cost of provisions has gone up
prodigiously. Perhaps that will be remedied--as one remembers Germany
in the old days as one of the cheapest countries for travel in the
world. Bavaria is, however, still Bavaria, and if beer attract, the
brown brau is as good as ever. The Bavarians were the only Germans who
did not _Gott-strafe_ England, America, and the rest, and they are
quite pleasant neighbors. The Germans themselves are good walkers,
love rucksacks, and the tramp will attract no unpleasant curiosity as
in Spain. Switzerland may best be enjoyed afoot. It is common ground
for the walkers of all nationalities--a League of Nations center for
those who love God’s handiwork in Nature. It is, however, a rendezvous
for the lazier type of tourist, and the “lounge lizard” is apt to
set the pace for all. It is dangerous to spend more than one night
consecutively in one of the large hotels or tourist round-ups. It is a
desecration of one’s opportunities to use them for dancing and gentle
promenades. The program of the visitor to Switzerland is apt to be a
little unambitious. People go with heaps of luggage and find themselves
tied to it, returning inevitably to it even from delightful daily
expeditions, like cows from pasture. The end of a happy day should be
the stepping-stone to one still happier. A fortnight or three weeks
spent going continuously with sunset and dawn joined by your resting
place in the hills has a larger content that the equivalent days spent
going out to a certain point and then returning to a hotel.
Czechoslovakia is also a country of athleticism, and one encounters
good will there at every point. There is a good deal of delightful
ground, especially in the Carpathians. It is rougher going than in
France, but the people you meet are simpler. More rations need to be
carried as villages are further apart and are apt to have less in them
than one might imagine. Here are few canned goods. But there is plenty
of good fruit. An expedition well worth making is to Ushorod, in the
long narrow strip of territory inhabited by the Carpathian Russians.
As regards the rest of Southern Europe, conditions are frequently
difficult. The Balkans are bare and sun-beaten, and largely
uncivilized. There is plenty of scope for adventure, especially in
Albania, where an armed guard is usually required. Dalmatia is
extremely interesting, especially the primitive Croats living in
the interior. But the country is mostly treeless and subject to the
southern sun and the Sirocco. Early morning is the best time for
walking. It is often very cool then--but there is little shelter from
the noontide ardor. Spalato and Ragusa are excellent starting points,
especially the former. Montenegro has very interesting people and the
country is obscure enough to please the stoutest adventurer.
I have written considerably in my books concerning tramping in Russia
and Siberia. I have been over many thousands of miles of Russia afoot.
The happiest times were in the Caucasus, by the Gorge of Dariel road,
over the Cross Pass, or by the Rion valley over Mamison, or on the
Caucasian shore of the Black Sea. When it is too hot to live in a
house in a town, it is heaven on the mountains. Since the War, and the
Revolution, the Caucasus has, unfortunately, become much more dangerous
for travelers of all kinds. The tribes are warlike, and have been badly
treated by Bolsheviks and Europeans in general. Robbers are merciless.
Pacification should, however, succeed within the next ten years, and
the Caucasus become open again. Weapons are not of much use to a tramp
in these parts. If he carry a revolver he should be secretive about
it--for a revolver is a great lure. You are almost certain to be robbed
if it is known you have a revolver--for the revolver’s sake. It is best
to go unarmed and match intelligence against force when necessary. The
native horsemen will be found to be of a brow-beating kind, carrying
perchance several mortal weapons. It is best to meet them face to
face--but smiling--never let them get you scared. They may want to turn
you back or force you to work in their fields. But a smiling answer
turneth away wrath, and it is well to keep them talking and watch
for your chance to escape. It should be remarked that the scope for
tramping is not great before the middle of May, or after the middle
of October. The passes, the lowest of which is over nine thousand
feet, fill up with snow; you get into whirling blizzards and lose the
only trail. On Mamison, especially, it is easy to go wrong, as it is
extremely desolate. I crossed once before the snows had melted, an
experience never to be forgotten or to be repeated.
It is better in the Caucasus to provide for sleeping out. There are
inns, _dukhans_, bedless, dirty, and you can obtain hospitality in the
villages. But the guest is scared only as long as he is under the roof.
Next morning, after an hour’s grace wherein to hide his tracks, he may
become the quarry of mine host.
Villages, the native _auli_, may be entered by day, but it is safer to
keep out of them. They do not possess much which cannot be found in the
wayside inn. Provisions are very scarce; such things as tea, sugar,
bread, ham, generally unobtainable. Eggs, and a species of bread baked
from millet seed, are the commonest fare. The latter needs a good deal
of red wine to wash even a small quantity down. It is called _churek_,
and it is good for chickens.
In the summer and autumn wild fruits of many kinds abound;
strawberries, plums, grapes, and a number of species not known or sold
in towns. The _kizil_, with its bloodlike juice, is excellent boiled
with plenty of sugar. Wild grapes make good fruit but are inclined to
blister the lips. There is an endless abundance of grapes upon the
slopes of the Black Sea shore. The wine is heady, and is apt to put you
to sleep in the noontide. It is better enjoyed in the evening. It is
marketed in skins--but is none the less good for coming out of a tight
pig.
The only other parts of Russia to compare with the Caucasus are the
Crimea, the Urals, and the Altai. The delightful Crimea is all too
limited in extent. It is very beautiful, and possessed of marvelously
good air. It is more invigorating in the Crimea than in the Caucasus.
It is also easier and safer tramping. It may take some time to recover
from Bolshevism, but I daresay it is more delightful in desolation than
it was in the days when it was the national pleasure ground of the
Russian middle and upper classes.
The Urals are tame beside the Caucasus, but they have a poetry of
their own. The many lakes and little hills and birch forests make a
welcoming land. One ought to know something of geology and mineralogy
when tramping in the Urals. It is one of the most remarkable parts of
Europe from a geological point of view. Every stone is interesting.
The man who can combine geology and tramping is likely to have a very
interesting experience, and one that might even add to science in its
results. The Ural region, it should be noted, is very extensive, and
is for the most part unprospected--especially northward. The chief
difficulty in tramping becomes ultimately absence of people, and of
food. The gnats also swarm badly at night.
The Altai is also more or less untrodden country; vast majestic
mountain ranges separating Siberia from China, forested and beautiful,
now rather difficult of access, even for a starting point.
Of course, I went to Russia, not merely to tramp for tramping’s sake,
but in order to fill in life, which is limited at home. I found
tramping to be the quickest way to a nation’s heart. Many regions in
which I have tramped I could not recommend for the pleasure--thus,
Archangel to Moscow through the wet and gloomy forests of the North,
or Tashkent to Vernoe, across the Central Asian desert. That sort of
expedition I would call student tramping, and recommend it heartily as
a means of learning the truth about a country. No number of museums
or handbooks or columns of statistics can give you the sum of reality
obtained quite simply and without particular effort, upon the road.
I have not tramped in India or China or Japan, these problematical
countries. But, while there may not be much pleasure in footing it
there, I believe it to be a way toward the understanding of their
peoples.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ART OF IDLENESS
The world is large enough, or is only too small, as takes your fancy or
speaks your experience. But blue sky by day and fretted vault of heaven
by night give you the foil of the infinite, making your petty exploit a
brave adventure. After surveying the map of the world, thinking on this
country and on that with gusto of a Marco Polo, you may modestly decide
to take a little trip in Hertfordshire, like Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who, on
a certain journalistic occasion, set forth to the discovery of Rutland.
Instead of going, like Kennan, into the wilds of Siberia for a year or
so, you may decide to go across the New Forest during the Whitsuntide
week-end, a little _voyage au tour de ma chambre_. There are thrills
unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva. Quality
makes good tramping, not quantity.
The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by
the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you
do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then
a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental. I listen
with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty
miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the
art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the springy
morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist. Life is like a road; you
hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from
hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments,
not in distance run.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be
picked, nests to be looked into, song birds to hear, falcons to be
watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in
the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof
of the mole’s track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in
velvet in his home. The sound of the tapping of the woodpecker shall
guide you to the loose-barked tree where with watchful eye a bird of
beauty is hunting the unmannerly wood louse. You shall approach gently
the deer who, in a group, wait for you with startled eyes. They run
from the crashing and speedy--they can be won by the gentle. Wild
nature is not so wild as we think, or we are wilder--it is not so far
from us, and we are nearer.
You can enter a wider family if you are gentle. The rabbit which tempts
your stones will come and smell at your toes, the birds will hop on you
and sing as you lie in the grass, even the alleged ferocious animals,
such as bears, will come and take bread from your hands--if they feel
you are near to them.
_He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small_
means he liveth best. Pan is indeed more truly our god than Diana. The
chaste Diana, the great huntress, is a romantic figure--but not one of
us. She would not have us with her, we will not have her with us. We
will keep company with wood nymphs and satyrs, and will help to turn
the animals another way when we hear Diana’s horn resounding in the
forest. She shall go on and find the world a wilderness in front of
her--the living and the loving all slipping behind.
Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of
her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking.
The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth
and squeaks to you--you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit
on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl
wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door,
that does not look like a door, opens.
The noontide meal is a siesta which can be very pleasantly prolonged.
It only takes half an hour to make the fire and boil the pot, but you
have left no “back in half an hour” notice in any town; there should
be no “got to be” anywhere at any time, no hotel that you are making
for twenty miles the other side of the range; no rendezvous with a
young cousin or an old man at the crossroads at sundown, but a blessed
insouciance regarding men and things.
The grand desideratum is to have found an agreeable spot. “We can put
in forty minutes here!”--“My friend, _hours_!”
The ants shall carry away the sausage rind and the beetles devour the
cucumber peeling; bees shall sip where sweet coffee has fallen, shy
rodents shall clear earth’s table of crumbs--while the heart wells up
with joyful conversation, or the eyes drowsily settle on their lower
lids. There is a joyous, light-green glittering sleep between the
hours of two and four, hours not lost nor to be missed in the temporal
economy of the tramp.
There arrive light and happy dreams, the soft-stepping _arrières
pensées_ of the tramping life. The whole soul has relaxed, the
mainspring of citizenship has run down, and will ring no alarms.
It means a change in the condition of passivity. You are at home to
fairies and fancies and to the spider of happiness who spins golden
webs. It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not tramp;
you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the primitive,
opening doors, making new connections with the great unity of which you
have been a nonconscious part.
You wake with no headache, but with, instead, a freshness and
eagerness. You do not start at the unfamiliar scene; you know yourself
to be at home. You look upon your companion still sleeping--did you
ever look upon your friend asleep--not in a bed in a hotel, or on a
red sofa after dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train--but
in Nature’s house? There you will feel him nearer, more of a friend,
more kindred. The same wood sprites have hopped on you both while you
slumbered and dreamed.
You continue the way with more _camaraderie_, doing an indolent eight
or nine miles before sundown. The afternoon walk is likely to be
different from the morning one; you are less eager, more passive and
indulgent and sociable. One is on the lookout for a fellow tramp--for
an exchange of thoughts. If you are by yourself, you have at least the
_alter ego_ of your thoughts, and if with another there is his mind.
One should not, however, always be shy of a chance third--the man who
comes out of Nature to meet you.
Things happen _hors de programme_ which we could never put into out
program. That is why programs of coming life should be of the most
general character, none of that “to-day I brew, to-morrow I bake” type
of miscalculation. “To-day I do not know what I shall do; to-morrow I
know less” is better. “Someday or other the Queen’s daughter I take” is
sufficient--if not too much. Leave plenty of room for God--the devil
may use some of the spare room, but no matter, he is only a secondary
character in our affairs.
The tramp carries no wrist watch. He has no zero hour--no zero plus
forty-three at which he must take his section over the top. In his
cave he has no presentation timepiece mounted on lions or mermaids.
As he walks he does not raise his eyes to scan Big Ben through the
gloom--for his life is not parceled out in Parliamentary quantities.
He has no dashed repeater in his pouch, no alarm clock at his ear. The
deathwatch does not sound in the wall of his forest house; he does
not live and sleep beside that coffin on end called a grandfather,
“his life-seconds numbering tick-tock-tick.” He listens for no morning
hooter; he boils his eggs without a measure of sliding sand; he punches
no time clock when he begins his day’s tramp, and at the end the last
trump shall catch him unawares--an irrelevancy.
The most profound philosophers have been engaged for any number of
years trying to explain time, and they are all agreed that it is an
illusion. The universe would go on existing if all human beings were
destroyed, but what we call “time” would not. Time, they are assured,
must be relative. The little beetle which we tread upon feels a pang
as great as when a giant dies. His normal life may be five months
only--but he has as extensive a notion of his life as we have of what
we call the normal span--our fourscore years. The insect which lives
only an hour fits the fourscore years of impressions into it somehow.
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of
distance run”--the insect does it, better than you can.
The fact is, the minutes are not unforgiving. We have to reverse many
of the Grub Street maxims: “Take care of the minutes, Freddy, and the
hours will take care of themselves.” No, take care of the hours and the
minutes can go hang. Take care of your life and your days will be all
right.
Lord Chesterfield’s _Letters to his Son_ and Arnold Bennett’s _How to
Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day_ are of little value to us. We will not
read in our baths, nor memorize French verbs while we fry. Or we will,
if we like, but not upon the compulsion of filling time.
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion;
only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens
your mind. Town makes men contentious; the country smooths out
their souls. The worship of time as a reality is such a powerful
superstition that the mind returns to it often after it has got free.
It returns again and again, reciting its outworn creed: Thou shalt have
one birthday a year and one only; six days shalt thou labor, but only
the seventh is the Lord thy God’s.
The tramp repeats it, and then unpacks his heart with stinging words.
The mood passes. We, too, can be sweet and indulgent about time and
time-tables, bivouacking in eternity. We may even carry a compass clock
and, lying in the grass, holding it in our hands, exclaim facetiously
with Touchstone: “It is ten o’clock, in another hour it will be
eleven”--and moralize equally facetiously, for, “so from year to year
we ripe and ripe and then from year to year we rot and rot--and thereby
hangs a tale.”
[Illustration]
CHAPTER NINE
EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING
The fire is the altar of the open-air life. Its wandering smokes go
upward like men’s thoughts; its sparks are like human lives.
The coffeepot is the emblem of conviviality.
The roughhewn staff, the tramp’s third leg, is the emblem of his will
to jog on.
The knapsack, like Pilgrim’s burden, is the confession of mortality,
and of the load which every son of Adam carried on his shoulders.
Every door and gate which he sees means the _way out_, not the way in.
There are three emblems of life: the first is the open road, the
second is the river, and the third is the wilderness. The road is the
simplest of these emblems--with its milestones for years, its direction
posts to show you the way, its inns for feasting, its churches for
prayer, its crossroads of destiny, its happy corners of love and
meeting, its sad ones of bereavement and farewell; its backward vista
of memory, its forward one of hope.
Life certainly is like a road, or a network of roads; like a highway
for some, like a pleasant country road for others, like a crooked lane
for some, like a path that bends back to its beginnings for most.
There is the narrow way of the Puritans, a passage between walls of
righteousness; there is the broad way of the epicureans, so broad they
mistake the breadth for the length and lose themselves on it. But,
broad or narrow, the road seems inadequate as an emblem of the tramping
life. There shall be roads in our life but our life shall not be always
in roads.
The road smacks rather of duty and purpose, of utility, and of “getting
there.” Our penchant is to get off the road. I do not care to link
tramping with utility. It may be good for the physical health, but that
shall not be its object; it may be good for broadening the mind and
deepening the sources of pleasure, but these are not the goal. Tramping
is a straying from the obvious. Even the crookedest road is sometimes
too straight. You learn that it is artificial, that originally it
was not made for mere tramping. Roads were made for armies and then
for slaves and laborers, and for “transport.” Few have been made for
pleasure.
But was life merely meant for pleasure? Perhaps not. But it was meant
for happiness or for the quest of happiness.
You are more likely to meet your enemies, if you have any, upon the
road than off it. But then also you are more likely to meet friends
there, too. You may seek your friends with success on the road. And if
you wish counsel they are there to help you. “Life is like a road,”
says a Kirghiz proverb. “If you go astray it is not your enemies who
will show you the way, but your friends.”
Still, where the Kirghiz live, in Central Asia, there are few roads
and you cannot go astray on them. The proverb must refer to mountain
tracks. “Life is like a mountain track.” Yes, that is better. Let the
mountain track be our first emblem of life.
For the Sokols and the Scouts, the roads shall mean much more, because
their lives are auxiliary to military efficiency. They learn to be
ready to resist an enemy of their homeland. A good scout becomes a
good volunteer soldier, a good route marcher. But scout and sokol are
transitional. The Scout movement is like a tug to take an ocean-going
ship out of harbor. There comes a point when the ship can make its
destiny under its own steam. The Scout and Guide movement helps boys
and girls out of the rut of home and village, starts them moving, and
once set going, many of them keep moving all their lives and never once
stagnate. On the roads that lead out into the great world they march in
their companies, with scoutmasters and commanders. Then the road is a
glorious symbol of freedom and life.
The second emblem is the river, which, clear and innocent, finds the
easiest and most charming way from birth to eternity. We were born
on an invisible river which keeps gliding and singing and filling
and flowing. We do not know where we go, but we know we are on the
stream. We do not always perceive the movement, but we observe that the
landscape has changed.
So when we look on a river we are affected by its hidden relationship
to our own life. The river interprets our mood. The road suggests God
as a taskmaster who would have us work; the river suggests Him as a
poet who would have us live in poetry. The Creator must be a poet--not
a General or a Judge or a Master Builder; there is so much of pure
poetry in His creation. The river, like a child’s definition of a
parable, is an earthly story with a heavenly meaning.
When we look on a river with a poet’s eyes we see in it the reflection
of an invisible river, the river of Time, the river of man’s life, the
river of Eternity. “Man may come and man may go, but I go on for ever.”
There is a strange and wonderful vigilance about the river which rolls
past us where we sleep in the grass, murmuring and calling the whole
night long, something of the vigilance of the starry sky. You sleep,
but an eternal sleepless sentry paces by all the while.
Then in the morning, when we bathe in the river, we are our own John
the Baptists, out in the wilderness, baptizing ourselves with water,
and saying: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Turn away
from the road for Heaven is near by.” And we eat that wild honey of the
wilderness, which the prophet ate when his baptizing was done.
When we wash in the stream we are washing ourselves with life. When
we swim in the stream, especially against the stream, we are joying
the heart of an unseen Mother who takes pride in us all, knowing that,
although we must at last flow out with the stream, we can triumph over
it for moments.
And, drinking from the stream, we partake of the water which flows from
the mountain of God--Nature’s communion cup.
The third emblem of life is the wilderness--that place to which wise
men and poets and saints are driven in the last resort. “There is a
pleasure in the pathless woods,” wrote Byron. “There is society where
none intrudes.” The wilderness tells you more, when you are attune
to it. That is seldom the experience of the tramp on his first long
divagation from the beaten track. The wilderness tires him, the forests
blind him, the mountains wear him down, the endless plain rises under
him and he smites his feet.
But there comes a point when there is a symmetry even in the wildest
disarray of Nature, when man’s symmetry of parks and garden cities and
roads and rides is a poor joke, a strange aberration of the human mind.
The universe is a most complicated lock with innumerable wards and
windings and combination numbers. If the starry sky at night is a
lock--you would say there is no key in the world to fit it. No key in
the world truly--but in the human heart somewhere there is a wonderful
key. “Have I not in my bosom a key called ‘Promise?’” said Pilgrim.
When you find that key you can plunge it into the cunning aperture of
Nature or Night. But you must know the combination numbers, and even
then it will not turn if you do not first sing a verse of the Song of
the Heart.
Quite a fairy tale. Even so. Life is a fairy tale, one of a series,
like the _Arabian Nights_. And if it is a fairy tale rather than what
Darwin and Herbert Spencer and Einstein have averred, how much more
important to us all the fairy tale becomes.
Fairy tales are begun in the midst of woods, in strange forgotten
glades, and at moments between dawn and the morning, and sunset and
night.
“Fairy tales,” wrote Novalis, “are dreams of our homeland--which is
everywhere and nowhere.” And to be everywhere and nowhere at the same
time means to be in the wilds, and preferably quite lost. The absolute
tramp, whom, I may say, I have never met, is a man with no address,
no card, no reliable passport, no recognizable finger prints. But of
course he is no ape man, no Tarzan, or son of Tarzan. Choice, not
accident, leads him to the wilds.
The starry sky is the emblem of home, the highest roof in the
universe. The sun is the mind, by whose light man seeks his way; the
moon is the reflection of the mind on the heart, and is the emblem of
melancholy and poetry.
However, of all these emblems, the coffeepot is apt to be the most real
and vital. You will be on your knees morning and evening before your
altar fire, abasing your brow and blowing the flames which are beneath
it. Sun, moon, forest, river, road--these pass, but the coffeepot
remains. It is so in life generally, and the tramp, however much a poet
he may be, is a mortal like the rest of us. The moon may be hidden
by a cloud, but that is not nearly so calamitous as having left the
coffeepot at the last camping place.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TEN
THE FIRE
Do not forget the matches! Our dear friends and the girl guides can
imitate the savages, and strike a light by rubbing two sticks together,
or they carry steel and flint and tinder, and are always ready with a
spark. But that is beyond us. It is difficult to light the two sticks.
Remember the odd scraps of dry paper--especially on a wet day. Even a
scoutmaster finds difficulty in making fire with wet sticks.
Making a fire is a considerable diversion.
Unless you are very hungry it should take time. You find the suitable
place, fix your stones, gather the wood, fill the coffeepot, make
yourself at home, and only then strike the match. It is a mistake to
light the fire before the coffeepot is ready.
You will ascertain the direction of the wind, and put down your
knapsack in a position where sparks will not fly on to it. And you will
place your stones or tripod in such a position that the wind will drive
the flames on to it. If your coffeepot is on the wrong side of the wind
it may take a long time to boil.
You must be careful to choose stones which are high enough and ledgy
enough to afford a draught for the fire, and a secure lodgement for the
coffeepot.
To start the fire you need the thinnest and tiniest of bits of
wood--the little dead stems which lurk in the grass. The long dry
stalks of withered wild flowers are even better than wood, and if you
have these you need no paper to start the fire. They burn like dry
stubble--which is, in fact, what they are. Dead grass, however, is of
little good; it burns, burns out, smokes, and gives little heat.
The second line of fuel is the smart little bits of crackling wood to
be found nearly everywhere. The third line is of stout bits of wood.
The fourth, if you feel like it, is the really substantial timber you
may haul to the scene. To boil your pot you do not need this last, but,
remembering you will sit an hour or so by the camp fire, you do well to
have a supply beside you.
The fire laid, lit, crackling, the pot warming and heating, you may
relax your attention, spread out the victuals, take off your boots,
enjoy the beginning of the night’s rest. It is wonderful coffee that
comes out on these occasions. You might not care for it indoors, but
you revel in it as the product of your own camp fire.
You may have difficulty in lighting your fire in the damp, but it can
be got going even in the wettest weather, granted, of course, that
there is suitable fuel. The secret is to possess plenty of paper. You
prepare a number of balls of paper and put them in a dry place until
you have collected fuel. Your fuel will be first of all withered stems
of weeds and bits of perfectly dead wood. If there are trees about
look for dead branches in them. A dead branch in a tree is always
drier and more combustible than a dead branch in the grass. The wet
on it will prove to be surface damp, easily dried off. Be careful to
avoid a very wet base for your fire. A rocky ledge or heap of stones
is better. Having that, then even in drenching rain you may start your
fire, carefully sheltering it with waterproof cape or blanket, while
with the burning paper balls you dry and inflame the withered weeds and
dead wood. Very soon you will have a flaming fire which has the heat
in itself to dry its own fuel, even if it be both substantial and very
wet. Get a big fire going, and you can defy the elements. Should you be
traveling in the vicinity of a railway line you will often find many
bits of coal scattered from locomotives. These are not to be disdained
on a rainy day, as they greatly add to the heat at the bottom of your
furnace. You fight the wet with heat rather than with flame. It is a
pleasant triumph on a rainy day to watch your pot boil on a gay fire,
and to feel the clothes on your back a-drying all the while.
The fire in the rain is a triumph; the night fire in darkness under the
stars is the happiest, but it disputes happiness with the dawn fire.
Remember that on the black patch of your evening fire you will rebuild
the bonfire next morning after your night _à la belle étoile_. It is
commonly more easy to light the fire in the morning. There may be dew,
but you have a dry patch to build on. If you have had forethought you
have covered both the place and some dry fuel to make easy your morning
task. You are less tired, less excited, in the morning, and you know
just where to look for the auxiliary fuel, the stuff that makes the
first little fire burn up well.
I love to see the blue smokes crawling upward in the dawn, while, with
bare legs, one struts about doing the domestic work of morning out of
doors. It is part of the very poetry of the tramping life. You give a
proper affirmative then to Browning’s
_Morning’s at seven
All’s right with the world._
Only morning is apt to be at five, and then the world is even more all
right than at the bourgeois hour of seven.
The good tramp does not spend too long, however, by his morning fire.
It is his best time for being on the move. All Nature’s loveliness
awaits him as, with gossamer in his hair, and light burden on heart
and shoulder, he fares forth for the day. He makes his coffee, and
then carefully puts out the fire, so as to be sure not to start some
conflagration on the waste or in the forest. And he goes onward toward
midday, and that other fire which is midday between the other two. Then
he seeks a shady place, a happy resting spot, viewing the mountains, or
beside a stream for preference. And once more, God’s open-air kitchen
is smoking.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BED
_Rise with the lark and with the lark to bed,
Observe some solemn sentimental owl;
But first, before we make ourselves a fool or fowl,
Let us enquire if the larks have any beds at all._
They have, they have. The tramp is a lark of a kind, and makes a
little nest each night. It is apt to be a pleasant place. There are
few “restless pillows” in the open-air bed. England, of course, is not
the country for it. There is so much rain and dew that the sleeper
out of doors is like to develop fungoid. But in America the ordinary
population is so _épris_ of the fresh, uncovered night, that nearly
everyone outside the great cities sleeps at least on the porch, or in a
garden hammock slung between trees.
I am prejudiced in favor of that kind of tramping where one sleeps
out. Strictly speaking, if one sleeps in hotels or houses, it is not a
tramp but a walking tour. You cannot afford to be divorced from Nature,
and the winds at sundown. The continuity of day and night in the open
is golden gain. The objections against it in a dry healthful climate
are commonly trivial. For instance, danger. Some think it dangerous.
They believe they may be attacked by robbers or by wild beasts. But
robbers do not search the woods and the wilderness for likely victims.
Unless, by your behavior you should attract attention, there is not
the slightest risk of interference on the part of man. I can imagine
some rather rich dandified intemperate pair going singing along the
road from some wayside pothouse when they have incontinently advertised
their intention of sleeping out. The bad lad of the village, or some
local wag, has overheard, and determines on a hold-up. The victims
have themselves to blame.
As evening comes on, the tramp should become more shy. It is a mistake
to choose one’s evening camp in full view of the highway. For one’s own
subsequent peace of mind it is better to have been unobserved. Though
if you are a stout fellow, why worry? I have had midnight visitors
before now, and have stirred up the embers of the fire to make another
pot of coffee, but it has generally been pleasant and interesting, a
diversion.
As regards wild beasts, that is a danger greatly overestimated. If you
are thoroughly wild, the wild beasts will know it and respect you.
They much prefer to bite the white, the soft, the civilized and the
timid. The puma is an unsociable lady but she may generally be reckoned
upon to leave you alone, even if she does resent your sleeping on her
grounds. The bear, with his inquisitive snout, may come snuffing for
your provisions, but he will not attack you unless you are going to
attack him. It should be understood that wild animals have an uncanny
power of sensing your state of mind and your intentions. They know if
you are scared, and they know if you are going to jump up and strike at
them. They know also if you have no fear, and if you are friendly. If
you are calm and easy-going you can often make up to a bear and feed
him. I imagine that was the secret of those early Christians who were
famous for their friendship with the fiercest of animals.
More dangerous, however, are reptiles, and one should avoid lying
down in a basket of snakes. In a snake-swarming country it is as well
to avoid caves, especially those with many ledges. Dry ditches also,
though sometimes attractive hollows for the spreading out of bedding,
are often the home of snakes. You have observed them there by day. They
remain at night. As regards the open, it is easy to beat out the brush
so as to make sure that no rattler is going to be disturbed later on.
Sleeping against walls has also its dangers, not only from snakes but
from scorpions. The scorpion is a loathsome creature; even seeing one
is rather a shock, and the bite is reputed to be specially poisonous.
In tarantula country a sleeping bag or a hammock is preferable to a
bed spread on the ground. But when all hazards have been considered, a
bed out of doors is safer than a bed in a house. The roof will not fall
in; there is no danger of fire.
Experience, however, tells when it comes to choosing a resting place
and making it comfortable. It is not a happy thing to plump down at
the end of the day at random upon feeling tired. You cannot sleep
pleasantly on a heap of stones, or in a marsh, or on a canting surface.
You need to think of the chances of rain, or of mosquitoes, or creeping
damp.
The commonest mistake is that of leaving the choice of a resting place
till too late. It is sometimes fantastically difficult to make oneself
comfortable if one starts about it after nightfall, or in the late
twilight. You need time. Any time after five o’clock in the afternoon,
should you come upon an ideal spot for spending the night, it is better
to give up tramping for the day there and then and take over your
billet.
If it is raining you need the shelter of heavily foliaged trees, or of
a cave, or of an overhanging rock, or of a bridge over a river, or of a
barn. If it is at all likely to rain you need to have such refuges near
you, so that you can decamp readily and easily, and without mislaying
half your kit. Of all these, the overhanging rock is the most pleasant,
and like it, the large slanting tree trunk, or some protruding bank of
earth and turf.
Rain is not such a calamity in the tramp’s night as might appear,
though a long spell of rainy weather may be depressing. Even if one
gets a little wet at night it is not too unpleasant. I have known
pleasure in a soaking night out of doors. One reckons, however, upon
sunshine next morning and the chance of drying off before ten o’clock.
Much discomfort is caused by stones at night.
“Stones Thy pillow, earth Thy bed,” says the Lenten hymn, but earth
thy pillow, stones thy bed, is more in the natural order. The tired
body finds the stones but the hand does not. It is well to make a good
clearance of stones from the natural hollow you have chosen. A goodly
stone may help at the head, but the best pillow is generally one’s
pack, or one’s boots with a softer covering.
If possible, it is better not to settle down to sleep on sloping
ground--for you slide all night and may slide into a much worse
position than that originally chosen. In the mountains, where there
is little level ground, it is better to seek a hole or a hollow
or a natural shelf or recess. If you have to sleep on the edge of
a precipice, it is as well to choose a place which has the chance
barricade of a tree or a bush or a rock. Tramps are much afraid of
rolling; but if proper precautions are taken one can sleep even where
the eagle builds.
In the valleys, it is well to avoid sleeping too low. Inviting dells
are often covered with but a thin carpet of sun-dried earth under which
is bog. Marsh damp creeps upward in the early hours of the morning,
and you wake in an unpleasant fog. Insects and reptiles abound in such
places, and a bad night with them may spoil a good day.
There are so many ideal spots for sleeping the night, and they are so
diverse that it would be folly to catalogue or to enumerate. You see
them as you go along. You get into the habit of spotting them. Even in
the morning you remark as you go along: “Ah, a good place for spending
a night!” It is a little like choosing villas in a locality generally
agreeable. One has this point, the other has this special convenience.
The view counts for a good deal. Night is a visit to the opera. You
want to see all the stars; you want a good stall. The views of the
landscape, of the trees, of the sky--these are charms of residence.
You suit yourself regarding shelter from the wind or exposure to the
wind, southern aspect, and all that. Some like to lie in the wind,
others in the calm. As regards aspect, it is not where the sun shines
at noon that interests you, but from what gap it dawns. Moon aspect
also is not an inconsiderable matter.
As regards mere comfort, much may be done if there is time. You can
make yourself a mattress of wild flowers, and wallow like a tramp in
clover. You can pile up dried weeds under you. You can improve on your
pillow, smooth down your lonely pillow, in fact. You can ingeniously
use various contents of your knapsack to give more warmth or softness.
Those who feel the cold can put in hot rocks.
The hot rock is a cowboy device. You take some fair-sized stones, heat
them in your camp fire, then wrap them up in whatever comes handy and
place at the foot of the bed--this gives a sort of hot-water bottle.
When tramping in high mountains you almost inevitably approach the
snow line at times, and it is cold even in July. The hot rocks come in
useful. Personally, I do not feel cold much, but I have tried hot rocks
and have been surprised to realize that they retain their warmth even
till morning. Their chief drawback is the scorch they may give you if
by chance you undo the wrapping and put your leg on a naked stone. Some
walkers get so enamored of hot rocks that they will sleep hugging a big
one to their bosom.
Of course, one soon discovers that a night in the shelter of a great
rock is warmer than a night in the unprotected open, and a night in a
cave warmer even than that. Caves facing westward over the sea keep the
sun low in them all night; caves on the western sides of mountains do
the same. But this does not apply to profound caves which may be very
cool. A night in a cave is an adventure, but it is likely to be less
pleasant than a night outside. The floor of a cave is uncommonly hard,
and a ridge in the floor may wear you out if you try to sleep across
it. The pleasant part of a cave for sleeping is the mouth of it. It is
just as well, by the way, to make sure that the cave is uninhabited
before establishing yourself for the night.
In more civilized parts I have spent very pleasant nights under
bridges. I cannot recommend railway bridges, as the trains shake down
dirt, but river and road bridges have frequently very sweet natural
homes for wanderers, close in where the first timbers meet the ground.
One should, however, arrive in time to choose a place which has not
been used before you by some domestic animal, since you may find
insects in such places.
In certain countries the hammock is an ideal convenience for sleeping,
but it needs getting used to, and there are some people who always
fall out of them in the night. In the jungles of the tropics or of
subtropical countries, it is the accepted mode. You need enough
mosquito netting to swathe your body three times and, wrapped in that,
you swing in your boat of rope.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE DIP
Some tramps have a groundless fear of water. In Russia they call it
_vodaboyazn_, which means simply “water fright,” and is a better
word than hydrophobia, which means the same thing, but is connected
in the mind with mad dogs. Here, no mad dog is in question. Water: a
liquid recommended for external use, is greatly despised by certain
winebibbers who affect to be afraid that it will get into the wine. The
fact is, most of them have got the water fright. After a stout bottle
of Burgundy and a cigar, what more dreadful torture can be imagined
than sitting under a fountain of water. It is better to sit in an old
leather chair in a Piccadilly window than on a chair in the rocks
under a flowing cascade. “I am for that Piccadilly window,” says the
confirmed lizard--and not a few tramps are at one with the clubman.
However, once you get the water fright it is almost incurable, and
perhaps not worth writing about.
Coldness of the water is a prejudice. The coldest dip in the sea is
easier to take than the ordinary cold bath in a cramped bathroom. The
immediate activity of the body conquers the cold. In a bathroom most
people have to be painfully passive. But truly, in those seasons of
the year when one is able to sleep out of doors one need not fear the
temperature of the water.
The morning swim is such an embellishment of the open-air life that
many are tempted to plan their whole expedition with that in view. Thus
they would rather tramp along the sea-shore or in a region of many
lakes than traverse a region of little rivers and springs, but no water
of depth. The dip means a great deal extra in happiness, health and
vigor. I think I prefer the lake to the sea--that is, after a night out
of doors. It is colder and fresher. Its unruffled gray and silver seems
to have been spread specially for you to plunge into.
It is a different matter to come from an hotel bed out to the margin of
the mere and wade into early morning loveliness. That is good, but it
is not the best. You miss the continuity of experience. A night with
the moon and wild flowers, with fleeting clouds and seeming-fleeting
stars, with cool and warm airs wandering, with wood whispers and the
nightingale’s song, has its fitting _envoi_ in twenty minutes’ plashing
after dawn. Nature learns that the tramp is awake.
You scoop a coffeepot full of water from the same pool wherein you
bathe. You see the coffeepot standing on the bank like a faithful bird
awaiting your return from the water. Mother-naked, you plunge and
strive and indulge in various forms of joyous excess. The gray dawn sky
above is gentle as loving eyes. The blue smoke of your fire has lost
itself and plays with the morning air as you do with the water.
After that, still dripping, you carry the coffeepot to the fire. You
dry as you walk. It may be your pleasure as a man to return to the
lakeside and shave. You stand in the freshness with no one near and
brandish a lathered shaving brush; you may not get all the hair off,
but what more delicious shave than this!
The next item in the program may be the morning wash. You can wash
out a shirt, a pair of socks, a towel, the sugar bag, what you will,
and dry them as the morning sun warms up. This is a necessary matter
now and then. It is not convenient to save up bits of washing for
some village lass to do, or for some town laundry; it means delay in
uncongenial places.
The dip is also associated in the mind with fishing. Dawn is the hour
when they jump, and the angler-tramp loves the dawn shadows of the
morning twilight. He catches his breakfast before he bathes, guts his
fish, gets ready his frying pan--for you do not want to wait too long
for food once you have been in the water.
But it is not only at dawn that one bathes. Any good stream or pool at
any time is a good pretext for a dip. There is some danger of overdoing
it at the beginning, especially when it is sea bathing. The afternoon
bathe is sometimes tiring, if one has bathed also before noon. A good
plan is to bathe morning, noon and night, but not too long at any time.
If you are a thoroughgoing lazy tramp you can sun bathe for an hour
or so also, but of course you will not get far along the coast in the
course of a day. In lake and sea there is the temptation of swimming,
but most commonly, in mountain tramping, swimming is not possible. The
rivers are too tumultuous, the lakes are boggy or shallow. But there is
considerable pleasure. No happier noontide can be imagined than on the
stairs of a cascade where a little river, plunging from a pass, makes
its rocky and foaming descent to gentler levels. You sit well inside a
water-worn slippery armchair, while living crystal comes down on your
head and neck, on shoulders and back. In the Rockies and in the Alps,
in the Caucasus, and in the Carpathians--wherever there are mountains,
there are such places and such delights.
When you reach the snow line there is pleasure enough in snow bathing,
though one should beware of it when the body has got very hot with
arduous climbing. The snow often has a comparatively solid crust,
but when this is broken it is soft underneath. It depends on your
constitution whether you can stand it at a high altitude, but otherwise
it is pleasant sometimes in mid-July to plaster oneself with the
so-unfamiliar snow.
The evening swim, too, is a pleasure, taking the tiredness out of your
limbs and adding to the happiness of your relaxation when, later, you
lie with your blanket over you under the stars. It has not the joy of
the dawn swim, not the _joie de vivre_ of that of noontide. But it has
the peace of an evening hymn or child’s prayer. If you are a Celt or a
Slav, it has melancholy, the poetry of sadness. It tunes the soul to
the night mood and the awakening of the dim stars and the coming on of
that intense silence, that stopped breath of Nature, which one senses
in the first hours of the night.
From baptism comes grace. The spirit of the water has found place in
the bosom of the wanderer. He may be a pagan at heart, but he has come
nearer to being a Christian if he has thus bathed three times a day.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DRYING AFTER RAIN
Wet weather is not the tramp’s worst enemy, but it leaves him with the
problem of drying his clothes. It may not damp his spirits, but will
probably damp his attire. The walk in the rain, or worse than that, the
walk through rain-laden thickets after the rain has ceased, the night
slept in the rain when it begins to drizzle at eleven and you think
naught of it, and to rain steadily at twelve and there is no refuge,
and to pour gently at one and in torrents at two, and it is all the
same because you are already as wet as can be--these are modifications
of Nature’s blessings, pleasant or unpleasant in themselves according
to taste and breeding, but having, as a natural sequence, the common
duty of drying.
The wet dawn peers through the trees; pale morning looks faintly upon
a washed-out camp, and two Rip Van Winkles, feeling a hundred years
older, lift up heavy and rusty limbs, and reflect that it has been a
wet night. The problem is to get dry.
The first means is a fire. Grant the matches have kept dry; or if
they have not been kept in a canister, that one of the tramps happens
to have a _briquet_! With a petrol lighter one is independent of wet
matches. Then the fire must be carefully begun, nursed and nourished.
Perhaps one can find an old ruined and red-rusty bucket on the waste--a
gift of Providence. The fire may be well started in that. If you
feel cold you may bring fuel to the fire spot on the run--dead fuel
of branch and withered weed, heaps of it. One needs to get a good
fire going, a big fire, a drier. “It can be done,” as a millionaire
self-made man used to say. “Can’t must be overcome.”
You know at sight when your fire has got the upper hand of the
surrounding damp. That is your moment for executing a war dance around
it. The longer you dance the quicker you dry. But do not forget
reserves of fuel. You need a fire on which you could roast a sheep. For
you have to dry, not only your clothes, but the blanket, the knapsack,
and your spare linen. You find a corner for your pot. It will boil and
provide coffee while you are engaged with drying.
Somehow or other the blanket has to be hoisted up on to a line. You
need string, which I hope you have brought. If there is a tree or a
telegraph post or any other post, or preferably two convenient trees,
two convenient posts, you can tie up the blanket and let it dry in the
heat of the fire. If these are absent there may be a corner of a wired
enclosure. You must shift your fire to the place where you can rig up
the blanket. It is seldom that absence of uprights of any kind reduces
you to holding the blanket in your own hands in front of the fire and
drying it so.
Indeed, if no convenience offers, you may simply dry off your clothes
and then tramp on till you find a spot better equipped for blanket
drying. You will not, as a rule, have to tramp far.
Clothes, however, do not dry as quickly as expected. Especially the
tweed jacket and its shoulders take an unconscionable time a-drying.
It is not good for one’s health to tramp with a heavy knapsack on wet
shoulders. The weight drives the damp inward, and as the back warms and
perspires it takes potential rheumatism from the steam of the jacket. A
night out in the rain will not give you rheumatism; many nights in the
wet will not give you rheumatism. It is not getting wet which gives you
these pains, it is the way you dry. You are, in fact, safer scampering
naked in the wet than drying slowly in a heap of wet clothes. Perhaps
it is not amiss to remark here that a waterproof worn over wet clothes
is a sure way to cultivate rheumatism. The damp cannot escape
outwards--and so goes inward to your very bones.
Your shirt will dry quickest and easiest. Wearing that, you can dry the
rest of your clothes at the fire, the lightest first. If your boots are
soaked it is better not to try and dry them by a fire. Leather liketh
not fire. There is little harm in wearing wet boots and trusting them
to dry themselves as best they can.
It is a happy occasion, this of drying off. One’s spirits are naturally
exalted by it. It is victory of a kind. The tramp sings as he circles
the fire. There is a music which belongs to the mood, and it is a pity
no great musician has composed “While waiting for my clothes to dry by
an early morning fire.” The musicians have not tramped enough.
However, in this light-hearted frolic, let us not allow our linen to
be ruined. Beware of the long flames which try to lick your trousers
as they hang there in the wind; beware of the scorching heat which
browns and ruins a shirt; beware of the showers of sparks which rise
when you throw a new log on the fire. For some good reason, sparks are
more plentiful after rain than in the dry. Your fire may be sending up
sparks all the while, big, substantial living sparks, which, settling
on your drying blanket, may fret it with holes. I have had a blanket
made holey by this before now. The spark settles on the wool, ignites
it gently, and starts a hole which may be as big as a cigar end before
you notice it. As the blanket gets nearer being perfectly dry you need
to retire it from the intimate ardors of the fire. Your fire, in any
case, has been getting hotter and hotter. You have not noticed that it
is beginning to scorch your clothes and your wraps.
That is the way of drying off. It suits all weathers. But if, while
you are engaged upon it, the sun breaks forth, promising natural heat,
you may relax your energies from the fireside and place your hopes on
the morning warmth. Nothing is more delightful than the sun bath after
rain. You enjoy it, your clothes enjoy it, blanket enjoys it, knapsack
enjoys it, coffee enjoys it. As you are all spread out on the hillside
the butterflies settle on your bare chest trying to take honey from
you, and flit thence to the knapsack which, perchance moistened with
sugar, gives an even pleasanter reaction to the proboscis of a Vanessa.
A third dry-off is in a farmhouse at the kindly hands of a farm wife,
who hangs your blanket and jacket in her kitchen, while her husband
regales you in the parlor with homebrew and a hunk of fruit pie.
There are other less satisfactory ways of drying; using newspapers as
blotting paper and stuffing the legs of your trousers with them. But
first find your dry newspapers. Another method is to get up into a tree
and sit there till you are dry. The last I have tried, but shivered so
steadily that I gave it up, resumed my way, and walked myself dry. It
is part of a genuine tramping outing to get once thoroughly wet--and
dry off.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARCHING SONGS
Man is a singing animal, but civilization has silenced many songs. In
so many places I see exposed the lugubrious mourning card--SILENCE!
Silence in court, silence in the office! How annoyed we can get to feel
when some one begins singing in a carriage of a train. We crave silence
and our newspapers, silence and our pipes. We will not sing or listen
to singing on the way to our work. Indeed, singing is not fitting; we
might rather sing coming home but not going out. But coming home, we
are all in too much of a hurry, and the crowds irritate us, and we
have not had our supper. To tell the truth, we had but a slight lunch
and no wine. We never got into the singing mood.
Our mentors are against singing. “Sing in the morning, you’ll sob
before evening,” says one. “Sing on a Friday, you’ll weep on the
Sunday,” says the Catholic. Children sing naturally and exuberantly
on any and all occasions, but father and mother and elder brother
and uncle and friend cannot bear it. Send them to the garden, send
them to the nursery! We so dislike random singing that we pay street
musicians--to go away, and they have learned that bad singing brings
more coppers than their better efforts. They are professional irritants.
Yet singing is very natural, and when one takes to the road the singing
impulse comes to the bosom. Light-heartedness begets song. We sing as
we walk, we walk as we sing, and the kilometers fall behind. After
a long spell of the forced habit of not singing one finds oneself
accidentally singing, and there is surprise. Good Heavens! I’m singing.
And singing what? Not the latest song, by any means, but something
remembered from childhood and school days, the happy innocent strains
of days gone by. Songs give birth to songs, memories to memories. The
ear and the heart explore the lost repertoire of music. You sing all
the old songs you ever knew, and snatches of this, snatches of that,
still-remembered fragments of melody, tunes heard God knows where.
The voice glides from one thing to another in a rhapsody of open-air
happiness. It is singing of freedom, of escape, of absence of care
and anxiety, of beauty. “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone”--it is
singing that song over and over again on never-tiring ears. “Say, could
that lad be I?”--it is asking the question, and your light heart is
answering, “Yes, yes, that lad was I. The tiresome somber fellow who
worked in a town was not I. I was imprisoned in him. Now I am free and
I sing.”
At first it does not matter what you sing. You sing some old love song
of the heart, some hymn by which your mother once sang you to sleep,
some boy’s song, sung on the way to school or some “Promise of Life,”
some learned song, once lisped over the shoulder of a young girl at the
piano, some haunting ballad or lyric out of the Celtic twilight, or
some lilting country air of an English countryside. Absurdly you stamp
it out as you walk:
_Oh, let the night be ever so dark
And never so wet and wine-dy,
I must have a will and turn back again
To the girl I left behind me._
And while you are going forward you are really going back, and there
is a girl waiting for you ahead on your track--the playmate girl of
Nature whom you did once leave behind. You sing as you go to her. You
drift from old English songs to Negro minstrelsy, and still--it is some
one waiting for you, praying for you. She is waiting for you “there
by the door, in oh-old Singapore.” Somewhere there is a “corn-fed
bride”--where the black-eyed Susans grow. You shift to operetta and to
the reveries of opera, especially in the evenings, to serenades, to
boat songs and songs about stars and fair women’s eyes.
“Sing in the morning and you will sing all day,” say I. “Sing on a
Friday and you will sing better on Sunday.” You shall sing by the camp
fire in the morning, and sing as you dip in the stream, sing as you
climb the rugged mountain road, sing yourself to noontide and the pass,
like a lark rising upward in sheer joy of living. You shall sing of
home as you descend in the afternoon, and sing in the dark under the
night sky by your fading fire. What is a tramping day if it does not
liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.
A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting
poetry, repeating every verse ever conned for love of thought or sound.
This is singing of a kind. Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may
be sweeter. The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by
song. And the inner meaning and sense of a poem becomes one’s own on
the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the
hidden yearnings of one’s own being.
And the two can be combined--poetry and song. There are those who sing
all poetry and call recitation singing. They incant and intone as they
tramp. They are lifted up in an ecstasy which makes them independent of
physical tiredness or difficulties or meannesses or past misfortunes
or ill-treatment. Song and poetry enfranchise you in the universe.
The tramp for moments becomes citizen of the universe and knows all
secrets, all mysteries, all depths, all heights. He comes back to earth
anon, but he has seen and understood.
Such happiness is explored in one’s personal repertoire of poetry and
song that the tramp who makes tramping a great part of his life does
well to add to what he has, taking pains to note down the words of
haunting airs and verses. In Italy, in France, Spain, Germany, and Slav
countries, one inevitably hears melodies one would like to remember.
There is folk music, and it can only be learned in the countries where
it is natural. There is something in the singing of it which escapes
all notation. The ear, the mood of the soul, can alone enable you to
imitate it, to repeat _just_ what you have heard, what moved you. Even
those who know little of music can capture these songs if they will
take the trouble to copy the words and make the native singers repeat
and repeat till the songs come back again truly from your lips.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SCROUNGING
One might call it by a better name; it means getting a meal for nothing
when you can. In certain unspoiled parts of the world there are
outlandish folk who will take the wanderer in, give him meat and drink,
and send him on his way rejoicing. You can still get a swig of milk and
a heaped pile of bannocks in the North. They will fill you with apples
in Hereford and cream in Devon. A good deal depends on your appearance.
It is not always fair, when you have been turned away, to think you
have met with inhospitality. You may have a fearsome appearance. You
have omitted the daily shave; your hat may have a hole in it. Some
one may have been at the house asking ungraciously for something just
before you came.
One should not trade upon hospitality. But it is pleasant now and then
to knock up a farmer for a dinner, or rather, a farmer’s wife, when the
farmer has gone to the fields. For she is much more tender-hearted.
Unfortunately, in America, the professional hobo has spoilt the
field for Nature’s knight-errant. The hobo shamelessly works whole
neighborhoods, leaving nothing to chance or choice, and will bang every
door in a village till he gets what he calls a “hand-out.”
The supposed tramp hieroglyphics are of little value--“Good feed here,”
“’Ware dog; want you to work for it,” etc. You have to make good where
these sharks have failed, and it can be done occasionally by sheer good
humor and high spirits. A hot meal is worth having occasionally, even
if one has to make friends with baby, or rescue the cat or blarney the
farm wife.
A good method of approach is by offering to buy something. One has
always to be buying milk for one’s coffee. The purchase may lead to
a friendly interest and the interest to a seat at the table with the
family, or at least in the kitchen. Generally, speaking, it is better
for the family to have you in their midst. You come from far, you have
stories to tell, you have the record of wild life. The children’s eyes
open as you discourse. The good man drops his fork--but you do not drop
yours.
Thus the tramp may sometimes, for a change, spend a pleasant noontide
or evening at a farm, fill up with a change of food, get some good
drink, and then round it off with a pleasant sleep in a barn.
For this the shoddy make-up of the professional hobo is out of place.
It is of no use imitating his “hard luck” stories, no use to talk
hypocritically of seeking work which it is difficult to get. One should
avoid the skulking look which begets suspicion, and the sneaking round
the kitchen door. A brave and debonair gait pays best. You enter as
a gentleman and cannot afford to be treated as a potential thief
or bandit. So much harm has, alas, been done by cynical and callous
tramps who have abused hospitality where they have found it, cursing,
nevertheless, where it has been denied. One should endeavor to give
something in return--not money--where hospitality has been found, and
so help to restore a good thing in the world.
By one’s manners, by one’s talk, by a little memento or token here and
there, one pays for hospitality received. In return for hospitality of
the body--food or lodging, one should always give hospitality of the
mind or spirit, sympathy, fellow feeling, bonhomie, a readiness to be
at the disposal of your host.
There are, however, accidental modes of scrounging which have no
palliatives. Who, can resist robbing an orchard of a few apples? Oh,
those Ohio apples! I’ve eaten many a one at dawn without paying for
it, big as your fist, streaked with cheek-red, sweet as a kiss. I have
lifted the strawberries, too, from the strawberry beds--the birds were
not always to blame--and I have picked the watched pear which was
growing daily with nectarine. One does not burn everlastingly for this
in the hereafter. All I can say is, that if I settle on the land in my
old age, some tramps may then rob me for my sins.
Another useful gain to the tramp’s kitchen is fish. Unless, however, he
is a fisherman he may find fish difficult to obtain. But upon occasion,
tramping beside lakes and rivers, one may fall in with fishermen who,
as a rule, will gladly part with a portion of the catch, a proletarian
for cash, a gentleman for naught. “Do you eat all you catch?” I once
asked of a tweed-clad angler. “Good heavens, no!” he replied. “I throw
most of what I catch back in the stream.”--“Well, throw a couple in
this frying pan!” One should beware, however, of making seemingly
facetious remarks to the melancholy angler, who has fished all night
and caught nothing. Like the apostles, he needs a miracle to cheer him
up.
When the Indian corn is ripe there is again delightful food for
stealing, and no one will call you thief. Just go into one of those
wonderful bearded fields and select your cobs. Take them to the camp
fire and bake them or boil them. It’s a great addition to dinner or
supper. Have you saved a little butter to melt on the hot cob? What
luxury! This is not a tramp’s life. There are American millionaires
who, could they be clairvoyant in their expensive hotels, would weep
with envy.
The beloved Master of all Christian folk showed us the way when,
walking with his pupils, he plucked the corn. He would have loved corn
on the cob, but Palestine is a sterile place.
You have lifted the corn, you may go further, less legitimately, and
scrounge a small marrow, and again a melon. In certain countries that
means no loss to any one. But let us be diffident of taking the only
melon, the only marrow.
The best fun is, however, amid the wild fruit, the berries, the grapes,
the plums. One lives on the kindly fruits of the earth. You come on a
hillside rusty-brown with little strawberries, and only the birds to
share them with you. One spends hours grazing on strawberries. Wild
grapes, too, one eats with the mouth from the vine without picking
them. Scrounging by and large is not the noblest thing in a tramp’s
life, but it means much to him; there is happiness in it.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEEKING SHELTER
Sometimes, at high altitudes in the Alps, the Rockies, and elsewhere,
one comes upon bleak empty shelters built for protection against wind
and snow. Ordinary tramping is not mountaineering, but, nevertheless,
it leads one upon occasion to wild and desolate exalted regions. There
seems to be no particular danger except that of failing to obtain
provisions after supplies have run out. But there is a danger, often
unforeseen; the coming on of a great storm.
A raging blizzard of snow is sometimes blinding and perishing. All is
veiled in driving whiteness. The wind is piercing. After a few steps
the track, if there is one, is lost; landmarks have disappeared from
view, and it is safer to stop than to go on. Not a few people have met
their deaths in an unexpected snowstorm in the upper Alps. They may be
in fairly safe mountain country, but it is easy to misjudge distance
in such circumstances, and go over a cliffside by a random step in the
snow. Unless you can find some sort of shelter you are changed to a
snow man in a few minutes, and get disgustingly numbed. Even if you lie
down flat in the snow the storm pierces to your bones.
Fortunately, one can generally see a storm coming, and find a rock or
a cave or some sort of kraal or shepherd’s house. The cave is a good
place in which to await the storm and then watch it pass.
Thunderstorms may be almost as perilous as blizzards, and certainly
more frightening. You are up where the clouds meet; the electric
currents surge through you. Something dark comes driving up the wedge
between the ranges, roaring below through the ravine. It is the
oncoming wind and rain. Thunders prodigious and bellowing, break out
upon the right and left. You suddenly find yourself in an island of
pale subdued light, with clouds rolling up to you from below. It is an
experience worth having if you possess the nerve to take it calmly.
The lightnings are sometimes amazingly intimate, wrapping you,
wreathing you, bathing you with fire, almost searing your eyeballs.
Criss-cross, flash, blare, effusion, confusion. The explosions are
dumbfounding and the many echoes confound in one great infernal battle
music. There is an oncoming enemy who always threatens, and never
seems quite to arrive. Or you are in the midst of the mêlée with
torrents battling across and across you. You get soaked, the knapsack
gets soaked, the boots get soaked, the rock under you becomes a water
channel; the cliffs on all sides discharge water against you, to say
nothing of what is raging out of the sky.
Once more, it is better to watch it from a cave. There is the enormous
advantage of keeping relatively dry. In a great storm a certain amount
of rain is bound to blow into any cave, but there is the advantage
of feeling safer, whether one is or not. The lightnings do not play
quite so much about your eyes. You are also out of the way of those
rain-loosened boulders which have a way of detaching themselves in
a storm, and coming violently from above, falling sometimes at your
feet or dashing past your knees to fall another two thousand feet into
the abyss below you. In the cave a falling rock is merely a feature
of interest, while you watch the grand spectacle of a thunderstorm in
the mountains. If the storm last too long, one can generally glean a
coffeepot full of water, light a fire at the mouth of the cave, and
make some coffee or tea.
In like manner one can take shelter from mountain gales which sometimes
spring up with hurricane force and make perilous the passage of some
knife-edge track. It is not wise to brave the elements when one false
step risks your life. Such gales commonly die down before sunset, and
the succeeding calm can be waited for with patience.
These are heroic occasions, but there are others less heroic which bid
us seek shelter. One may be down below in the quiet country, and yet
as devastating a thunderstorm intervene, or heavy drenching rain, or a
bone-searching northeaster. But down below it is easier to find refuge.
There are keepers’ huts in forests, holes dug by animals, hollow trees,
there are deserted houses, barns, outhouses, bridges. There are human
homes, inns, hotels--even railway stations and covered vans. Obtaining
shelter, except on wide and desolate moors, is not so difficult. On
moorland there is nothing for it but to put on one’s waterproof cape,
over knapsack and all, and brave it out. You will find of what enormous
value the waterproof cape can be, not only being your ground sheet at
night, but saving you your provisions and kit, from a deluge of rain.
It sometimes happens that a storm beginning in the afternoon will last
all night. One must judge by the look of the sky. On a shelterless moor
or plateau it is no gain to shut one’s eyes to the dire possibilities
of the situation. It is an occasion when the art of idleness can be put
aside. If it is necessary to walk a steady twenty miles to some place
of shelter for the night, it is as well to set the mind to it. After
the first mile in the rain the tramp becomes pleasant; after five or
ten miles one begins to sing. One generally finishes in the highest of
spirits, even though soaked to the skin. Then shines the opportunity of
the good inn or the farmhouse with kitchen fire. One hangs up all to
dry and, sitting in a pair of mine host’s breeches, makes mirth with
a vast platter of ham and eggs, to say nothing of a chicken stewed in
its own soup, and a bottle of Burgundy, or a deep draught of cider,
or a Yorkshire tea. After that, one burrows deep into the unfamiliar
softness of a feather bed and listens to the rain still pouring on the
just and the unjust outside.
It may happen, however, that this idyllic dénouement is not realized;
you make no house in twenty miles. You are fain at last to get into a
stone breaker’s hut, or a wet cave or a deserted cabin. You come to a
house with only three rafters left of its ruined roof, and you snuggle
somehow into its one dry corner, possibly making a fire in a convenient
place of bits of flooring, and old newspapers. By this you dry off a
little, boil your pot, and make the best of a wet world. After all,
one’s not likely to take cold or feel any ill effects. The open air
gives strength and health to resist cold and damp. The body goes hot as
you lie in the draught of the ruin; it finds its own heat and will dry
your shirt for you as you lie there in the cold and the dark.
You find, however, that it is more cold in a ruined or empty house than
in the open. The less ruined the house, the more cold. In some places
you come upon many empty houses. The owners are far away; the houses
are locked, the windows shut. There is nothing inside; every room gapes
at you from its dreary window. It is always easy to get inside. Owners
leave some door or window free. You get in on to the kitchen sink,
into the dreary kitchen, open its further door and come to the silent
parlor, climb the stairs, half fearing to meet a ghost, and come upon
those weird bedchambers where no one sleeps. It takes some nerve to
settle down there for the night. The wind whistles in the keyholes,
creeps with a knife-edge under the door, searching your cold toes.
You lie and quake, fearing you do not know what--the house imps, the
sprites of dead children, the opening of the dread door in front of you
and the coming in of some ghostly aged grandma, holding a candle in one
hand.
Not a danger, but one feels one would scream, one would rend the roof
of the house with a great yell of horror. I have slept in such places,
but do not recall them with gladness. The best place is to open the
front or the back door and lie down to sleep on the threshold, looking
out upon the free spacious rain-drenched open-air world.
Or the tramp may seem to have better luck. He comes in the water-washed
twilight into view of some lamp-lighted window and makes for it, as a
ship for a harbor--any port in a storm. It is common to buoy oneself
up with unusual hopes about that window and the home behind it. The
tired man thinks of a happy cosy home, joy in welcome, warmth in
hospitality. But too often the light proves to be a will-o’-the-wisp.
The house may be a home, but you are not wanted there. The man of the
house will tell you of a place five miles on where you can stay; he
will tell you of a hearsay inn, and you must trudge on till you see
another light. On such occasions the weary wanderer may feel bitter. He
feels hurt. He feels he had a right to be taken indoors. But he does
not think of his wild looks, his forbidding aspect, his drenched and
perhaps holey breeches. It is getting late. The man in the desolate
house is simply afraid to take him in, fears he may be robbed in the
night, or worse.
In these inhospitable days it is better to use a little stealth--put
one’s foot in the door, so to speak, get a hot supper first, win a few
kind looks from the lady, talk of bed later. It takes half an hour or
so to introduce oneself for a bed. It is only the rare chance where
all seems to have been prepared as for an expected guest, a spare
corner even laid at the table where the family is supping, an occasion
to rejoice over and remember for a long time. I well remember one
such time when I had been a long while in the snow, and landed up at
a desolate ranch. It was as if a long-lost son had arrived. I was at
once in the bosom of the family with a pack of new sisters and young
brothers, to say nothing of a cowboy father and a farm-wife mother.
Very pleasant! Rare!
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE OPEN
_He is blooded to the open and the sky;
He is taken in a snare which shall not fail._
I think of storms and of heavy rain and biting wind as exceptional.
They give feature in the midst of halcyon days and nights. The tramping
life is not in caves and huts and holes and inns, but in the open. The
life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not
diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him.
It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in
with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the
wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man
big, it builds a man within.
The lark sings as it rises, conquering the world; it is sheer joy in
the open which causes that sweet bird breast to heave in music far in
the heavens above. And as we rise, and the earth in its grandeur falls
away to right and left, our being heaves in a life which is joy. Ours
is a bird’s happiness.
It is a joyous moment which delivers us from the control of a narrow
gorge. We wind in and out of the shadow of great rocks. Enormous cliffs
hang over the way. I think, for instance, of the great gorge of Dariel
in the Caucasus. It is interesting, but it is oppressive. You come to
it from the glorious northern plateau, the Terek Steppes, where there
is space and sun for miles of Indian corn. You follow the river into
the gloom of the way it has cut through the range. It is somewhat
enchanting. You come in sight of a shut-off corner, and it calls to
your feet. You must see what is round that corner. But when you get
there you find a road merely to another magnetic shut-off corner. You
must go on. The next corner reveals another corner, always darker,
gloomier. The noise of the rushing river increases as the great walls
enclosing it come nearer together. You feel yourself becoming smaller
and smaller, as if seen from above. You and your friend are a couple
of small animals groveling at the bottom of a pit. On the right you
see the ruins of Queen Tamara’s castle and that fatal window where her
unfortunate guests were hurled into the river--the castle to which the
Demon came. You feel yourself on your guard, as if some mysterious
fate were in store for you. I have slept several times in a recess
below that castle, and experienced an eerie feeling which is not caused
entirely by history and tradition, but by something dreadful in the
actual geography of the place. Thence, however, it is a splendid tramp
up to the slopes of the great Kazbek mountain. You get into an exalted
region, among stars and young clouds, and feel as if you had got away
from the Devil and come nearer to God.
This grand open upper mountain country is continued to Kobi, which is
a little Georgian village, hidden somewhere in a spacious basin of
rose-colored porphyry. An ideal place in many respects. I have often
thought of going there to live for a fair space of time. But since the
War the region has become much more dangerous to strangers.
Of course, it may be urged that for glorious open country, it is hard
to rival Salisbury Plain and the Wiltshire Downs. That is true. It is
fine country for a short tramping expedition. It widens the mind. A
great thing to have a mind as wide and tolerant as the Great Plain, as
healthy as the Downs.
The Steppes, however, make a greater impression--being so vast, so
wild, so untamed, untameable. There is an exuberance of earth which
I would not miss. There is an infinity greater than our domestic
infinities. It will soon strike you when tramping that the word
infinite does not always mean the same: there are grades in infinity
and measures of the immeasurable. Thus there is a further and greater
infinity upon the Steppes, upon the Veldt, upon the Canadian cornlands,
than, for instance, on a clear day in the Fens.
There is also greater measure upward. The tent pole of the sky is
longer. Clearer air gives a greater sense of the upward depth of space.
At night this is especially noticeable. The stars are not pasted on
black canvas, all one level surface. There is depth in the outer sky.
You can see the planets poised; you can see behind the moon.
One may dream of prison in a cave, or gain a morbid fear of the
narrowing walls of a ravine, but open country disenchants the mind.
Freedom, room to breathe, is at least suggested to the senses. The
wind does not attack in storm battalions, but comes equably and
large-heartedly across the plain. The wind is a sane traveler, flicking
the tops of the grasses as you do with your staff. It does not behave
like a madman with a sword; it is not a wild cat springing from tree
to tree. Not that you cannot get the worst of the wildness of a wind
upon the moor--but it has a quality that gives courage, that puts
heart into a man. Hence the Borrovian: “There’s a wind on the heath,
brother!” The wind there is one’s friend.
Traveling on the Central Asian plain I remember a steady wind that blew
all night long, as if it were engaged on the whole-time job of keeping
the starry sky polished and swept. All night the ends of my sleeping
sack flapped in the wind and I looked through trembling eyelashes
at the moonlit snowy peaks of the great mountain wall between the
“Tableland of Fools” and India.
A wind that came all the way out of the heart of China, never ceased
to blow, and yet never raised the desert sand. The great wind of the
old world was blowing, as it has blown for ages. It blew out of the
past, turning the monotonous page of history books, blew out of dreams
and legends of forgotten man, as out of the storybooks of the Caliphs,
a wind which arose God knows where, far beyond the trails of the
caravans, in the heart of the East.
You lie in a marvelous stillness. The stars become your men and women.
You become a man of Chaldea, and the constellations revive. There
steals into your heart, and oh, how you needed it, the sweet influence
of the Pleiades. Spellbound, you watch a ballet, a story up above.
There are men on elephants and men tending camels, long strings of
camels, ropes of camels, gulf streams of camels wending their way
out of the South of the Universe into the bleak North. There are
jeweled queens and striding harlequins and hesitating dwarfs. There
are thirteen-year-old brides, with streaming luminous hair, riding on
high-stepping ponies, riding the ways of the dark sky, till bid for by
the heroes who come striding along the great ways from Arcturus.
The civilized world has been removed like a table that has been
cleared, a table cluttered with papers and dishes. Civilization has
been swept to one side. You cannot see it now; it is far away--indeed,
out of your ken entirely. You are reduced to a child--whatever your
age. You are a petted child of the universe. You shall be all by
yourself in the midst of the world, and the Divine picture book
shall be put in your hands for you to open, to look at, to turn the
marvelous page. So you lie there enthralled, with dilated, excited,
bright-shining eyes; just you, so many feet by so many, and look up at
infinite breadth and infinite depth. What is a cabinet thought about
the stars, a
“_Whoever looked upon them shining
Nor turned to earth without repining._”
compared with the rapturous poetic experience of having lived nights
with them, reading them in the great open chamber of the Universe!
[Illustration]
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE TRAMP AS COOK
_Then did he study some half hour
But as the Comick saith his heart was in the kitchen._
I think Coleridge was annoyed by the man who interrupted him with the
words “Them’s the jockeys for me,” referring to some steak puddings
which had been brought before his eyes. Coleridge was regarding some
choice bit of Scottish scenery, the Falls of Clyde, I think, and a
rough, unlikely-looking fellow had used what Coleridge had considered
absolutely the right adjective concerning them--majestic--and the
poet turned on him to learn more of this verbal grace. Then a toad
leapt from the mouth of the princess who had previously given a pearl.
“Them’s the jockeys for me,” said he, regarding the steak puddings.
It is recorded somewhere in Coleridge’s _Table Talk_. I read it some
twenty or twenty-five years ago, and the two expressions have remained
with me--“majestic” and “them’s the jockeys.” In fact, I adopted the
word majestic as applied to scenery there and then, that, and the
Shakespearian “majestical.” “It seemed I did him wrong, being so
majestical.” It has almost become a vice of style. That, however, is by
the way. The poetry of our life, and of our book, shall be interlarded
with--I may not say puddings; one does not lard with puddings, with the
fatness of cooking and eating.
The dawn stars make one hungry. Noontide makes one hungry, and so does
afternoon. The tramp is loath to tighten his belt.
I have described, in another book, how one should make coffee, and I
will not repeat. But the first thing about it is love, as I wrote in
a verse during my tramp with Vachel Lindsay, “Coffee should be made
with love; that’s the first ingredient,” and “the chief cause of coffee
being just indifferent is your indifference towards the coffee.” I feel
this is also true of the most of cooking. You must bring a loving heart
to the primus or the camp fire. No soured personality can be trusted
to stir the beans, far less make the coffee. I have not examined the
psychology of good cooks, but I imagine few of them are bitter, few
of them are egoists. Watch a thoroughgoing egoist over the camp fire,
cooking for _you_. But I ask too much--take the pan from him, take the
pot away.
He will be saying to you, “I had a very interesting letter from Thomas
Hardy apropos of a letter I wrote to the _Times_, approving entirely
what I said--” Meanwhile the coffeepot has tilted on its stone and
is pouring its goodness to the ants and the beetles. It is a miching
malicho, it means mischief. You must take over from him, let him sit
himself on a rock and pour forth, but not tend the fire and let the
coffeepot pour forth.
Lindsay wrote a reply to my recipe for making coffee. His was a recipe
for making tea. He did not omit love. But as well as tea leaves he
recommended leaves of various books to be put in the pot. I do not
know that I care for this tea from book leaves and, I suppose, old
bindings. I have had it indoors, given me by some dusty recluse, in his
portentous library. Qua tea it was not so excellent, qua soporific, it
was good.
One may put in a little philosophy, however, with both tea and coffee.
“Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” We need a little for our
repast, but we want no soda to bring out the flavor.
Lindsay, being an American, knew little of tea. That is why we traveled
almost exclusively on coffee. In any case, a practical detail to be
noted, it is not wise to make coffee and tea from the same pot. The
flavors adhere even to a very well rinsed vessel and spoil one another.
If there are two of you, each may carry his own pot, one for tea, one
for coffee. But it is simpler to be unanimous as regards the choice of
beverage. In Russia I tramped almost always on tea, because the tea is
so good there and needs no milk. In some districts milk is difficult
to obtain. In America, however, “evaporated” and “condensed” in cans
are obtainable everywhere, and are conveniently carried. You need only
make two tiny perforations in the lid of the condensed milk tin. You
blow through one, and it drives a thin stream of milk out at the other.
You cover these perforations with a leaf or a piece of paper, and thus
sealed, the can is carried safely in the rucksack. Of course, if you
open with a can opener it is likely to be difficult to keep your milk
for more than one meal--or it will make an unpleasant mixture in your
rucksack.
China tea has the advantage that it needs no milk. Indeed, milk spoils
it. It should be made very weak, and it is then more refreshing than
Indian tea. I prefer a good Chinese blend, especially on tramp. It is
not, however, possible to prepare tea in any elegant fashion. There
is no “five o’clock” in the wilds. You brew a pot of tea at any hour
which taste suggests. The luxurious may carry a small teapot and
merely boil the water in the can or coffeepot. But the rougher method
is not without appeal. You can sift two spoonfuls of tea into your
coffeepot when the water is boiling and at once take it off the fire. A
better plan is to cut off a small square from your mosquito netting and
tie the tea in that. Your first mugful will be rather weak, but your
second, third and fourth, progressively stronger unless you are able to
pull out the little bag of swollen tea leaves. Wash the bit of netting,
and it is ready for next time. It will last several weeks if you do not
lose it.
I find you can walk further after tea, but coffee makes you more
sociable. You talk more after coffee. If Mrs. Thrale had made the
great Doctor coffee instead of tea Boswell would have missed much more
of what he said. Though tea indoors is very different from tea out
of doors. As a domestic drink it is productive of high spirits, but
out of doors it enkindles purpose. You walk and think and are silent.
It is good for artists and writers. Forms and ideas rise unbidden
to the mind. What good thinking comes after the morning tea on the
road--whole chapters, whole stories, curious conceits and fancies! But
after coffee you cannot keep anything to yourself, and if you have no
companion you take to singing.
If, however, you are very tired or wet through with rain, coffee has
more power to restore. It is better then to make it without milk. Put
seven or eight lumps of sugar in the pot and heat water and sugar
together, not too much water. When quite hot, sizzling, float a double
portion or even treble portion of coffee on top. Do not, for this
potation, use mosquito netting. The coffee should then be watched--for
it may rise suddenly and become wasted. It is as well to stir it, and
then a useful device is the using of cross sticks. “If you make the
sign of the cross over a pot of coffee it will not boil over,” say
the cowboys. And it is a curious fact that two dead twigs, placed
crosswise over the top of the coffeepot, seem to cast a spell on the
brew. The brew should simmer for a quarter of an hour or more. Then
add a little cold water and stir up. The grouts will go to the bottom,
leaving a fine liquor. Though very strong, this type of coffee is
not bitter. You sip it; it lasts a long while. It is much better than
medicine for you, and will drive out any amount of damp from your
system. I think it better than coffee and rum, or warm damson gin, or
any of the concomitants of aspirin. No tramp should carry aspirin. It
is depressing to mind and soul, and generally causes you to give up
adventures.
Bread and cheese and coffee make a good combination, as of course do
cake and coffee, any sort of coffee and cake. Bread and sardine and
coffee go down very well, to say nothing of fried trout. Directly you
get your fish, scrape it and clean it, a dirty job, but you get used
to it, wash it and fry it. If you can eat it within a quarter of an
hour of its swimming in the stream you get some of the hidden and lost
potentialities of trout, the inner worth of those delightful pink
spots, those scales your color-loving eye is loath to scrape. However,
remember the coffee. It can simmer gently while you fry. Bully beef is
redeemed by coffee, so is Maconochie. Eggs go well, but they must be
fried. Boiled eggs go better with tea. Wash them and then boil them in
the same water from which you will make the tea. It improves the tea.
But be careful of the eggs as they boil that they do not dance together
and crack one another. For in that case your tea water will be spoiled.
In Poland, and in Border States and in Russia there are excellent hard
bannocks which soften when heated. You slit them and insert butter. In
Russia they are called _bubliki_; they sell them in the East End of all
great cities. They go remarkably well with tea.
In Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, there are excellent
oaten and rye cakes. They are delightful with Indian tea and milk; not
so good with China tea.
America, marvelous country, provides the greatest variety of breakfast
foods, cakes, and pies in the world. What can compare with pumpkin pie,
blackberry pie, peach pie? You go into an unromantic-looking “ville” or
“burg,” and surely come away with an unbroken round of pie to civilize
the camp cuisine.
On a long tramping expedition one is bound to study to some degree the
body and its needs. The Army marches on its stomach, so do you. An
attack of indigestion can make a strong man almost too weak to move.
Beware of the cakes of bread sold in the market place in Mohammedan
cities, what in Central Asia the Sarts and Uzbeks bake. They are
difficult to swallow, even with wine, and once inside become a stiff
indigestible mass. Millet bread is also difficult to assimilate. Maize
flour bread is also upon occasion bad to tramp on. On the other hand,
no harm comes from any variety of wheaten and oaten biscuit. One of the
tramp’s temptations is toward wild fruit. He can easily make himself
very unwell by eating unripe or bitter ripe fruit--even when boiled
with sugar. Again, if the coffeepot gets dirty inside and brown curds
adhere to the side you will find you are drinking something rather
upsetting with your coffee. There is no need to scrub the outside of
the coffeepot but cleanliness within should be _de rigueur_. Dried
apricots, when obtainable, are ideal to take on tramp, but they should
be washed before cooking. The stones should be broken and the kernels
thrown in with the flesh of the fruit and some sugar--an ideal dish.
Potatoes are difficult to carry, but when obtained can be easily cooked
under the seemingly dead ashes of your camp fire. They are greatly
enjoyed, as all know who have even on a picnic roasted them and dandled
them timorously in their fingers. It is just as well to hoist them out
of the ashes on the end of a sharpened stick. If the stick will not go
in, the potatoes are probably not yet cooked.
Similarly, various birds, having been plucked of feathers, can be
cooked under the ashes. The fire ought to have been burning an hour or
so, and have accumulated much ember before cooking a bird is tried. But
a hollow may be found for your chicken and the ashes carefully raked
and heaped over it.
Perhaps, however, the best way to cook a young chicken is to fry it.
It is easily fried over the glowing embers and is immensely tasty.
Chicken, with a tang of wood smoke is a feast! One cannot think of
having a chicken every day. But enough has been said to show that the
cuisine of the out-of-door life is not utterly primitive. There is a
variety of good things for those who are not ascetics. And besides all
these good things there enter by chance into the ménage mushrooms, so
shockingly overlooked by town-bred folk; wine, especially the _vin du
pays_, which is sometimes almost a free gift to the wanderer; honey
just taken from the bee; Devonshire cream if you are in the English
West Country, and also bountiful cider. There are good cheeses;
though out of door all cheese is good. You can take your fresh _petit
Suisse_ along with you in France; your Gruyère, your Stilton--there
is some good cheese in every country, and all manner of rough cream
cheeses in the mountains. Goat-milk cheese is apt to make one very
thirsty, so one should have wine to go with it. In America there is the
never-to-be-forgotten strawberry shortcake. You can also get a brick of
ice cream if you carry a chilling box. In Turkish villages you can go
into the restaurants and lift such delicacies as stuffed peppers--even
the thought of them is an appetiser. The _bon viveur_ can carry with
him his _petit verre_. Upon my honor, this tramping business is not
altogether an “eating of roots in the desert.” Still, when provisions
run out and you are far from human habitation, you may be reduced to
eating grass. That is the reverse side of the picture.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TOBACCO
It has been said that whereas a pipe is a man’s wife, a cigarette is
his lady friend. In these terms it is difficult to define a cigar, but
it will be agreed that the cigar is unnecessary on tramp. We have no
afterdinner mood. A pipe will go a long way, the cigarette has to be
cast off and renewed--the cigar does not enter in.
Nevertheless, I shall hear of excellent walkers who carried boxes of
cigars in their rucksacks and lifted the smoke of Havana to the noon
sky. Some fellows even chew an unlighted cigar as they walk.
It has frequently been said to me: “I should think when you got to some
point on your tramps--with great views opening before you, it was a
rare place for a smoke.”
This moved me in my intolerant years to much mirth. How could I share
the beauties of Nature with a pipe! I asked. It seemed to me strange
that one should wish to smoke when the fire of one’s own thoughts was
burning brightly and streaming upward in poetic exhalation.
Even now I cannot go back on my personal experience of years past. One
of the most romantic occasions in tramping that I remember was during
a vagabondage in the Crimea, when I reached the Gate of Baidari and
watched for an hour a marvelous changing sunset far over the Black Sea
and its mountainous shore. It was my busiest hour of the day: I was
soaking in that sunset to the core of my intelligence. What rapture,
what prayerful vigilance was mine then, as in the late twilight,
knapsack on back, I stood on grand platforms over the sea and was, as
it were, alone, the one pilgrim in the universe.
In those days I was a nonsmoker. But even later when, through offering
friends cigarettes, I at last began offering them to myself, I do not
associate tobacco with great moments. It is very delightful when riding
a horse to light a cigarette and smoke as you amble along, and it makes
a difference on a long train journey to have the narcotic of tobacco,
but to me, smoking is not naturally associated with tramping. One very
memorable moment after I had begun to smoke, was when I climbed out of
the jungles of Darien on the ridge where Balboa saw the Pacific for the
first time. It was pure poetry to see the blue triangle of the Southern
Sea far o’er the forests and the hills. But where Balboa and his men
sang a “Te Deum” I did not sit on a stone and light up a pipe.
However, there is no doubt that smoking in company is a social grace.
It gives a sense of unity, and at the same time, it is a source of
some pleasure. We are always warned that our cigarette ends have set
forests afire. But the rest of the cigarette has lighted our faces
and lightened our packs. As the soldier finds the route march more
supportable if he has permission to smoke, so also the tramp, on a long
and arduous hill, can get much help from cigarette or pipe. It gives
patience on the way, and then patience again in camp, while waiting for
the pot to boil. And the final peace pipe at the end of the day settles
all experiences into a harmonious unity and prepares the mind for the
night.
Smoking seems to fill up the empty cells in time--when there is nothing
else to do a man takes out a cigarette. On the other hand, after stress
or strain it soothes and it prepares the mind for artistic work. At the
same time in writing, it seems to me, that as good literary work can be
done without tobacco as with it.
Upon occasion, the cigarette, and more often the cigar, will deaden
one’s sensibilities. The effect is the rising of somber impressions,
rather than bright thinking. Tobacco has had considerable influence on
modern literature, though it would be difficult to show just where the
difference is. It has made some writers tolerant, but others merely
laconic; helped some to be witty, helped others to be merely cynical.
Thousands of cigarettes have gone to the making of a novel, and it
would be amusing, and perhaps also interesting, if one could compute
the numbers that went to the various chapters. That is not entirely
irrelevant here, for it is the custom of many writers to think out
their work while walking. They walk and they smoke, and they think, and
the ideas form.
Curiously enough, I smoked my first cigar on the way to Havana, and
could not finish it. It almost finished me. I used to say that cigars
belonged to a certain later period in a man’s life, when he had
succeeded and could lean back in his chair and view the world at ease.
It is perhaps an English idea. Cigars in England are a luxury. But
it is not so in other parts of the world. In England, when we smoke
a cigar, we smoke largely tax. But in other parts of the world this
choicer weed enjoys more freedom from impost. In Germany, in Austria,
in Holland, in the Indies and Mexico, and in many other places, a cigar
is no more a luxury than a cigarette--as cheap, as popular, and better
to smoke.
Hood could write:
_Honours have passed to men
My junior at the Bar.
No matter, I can wait,
So I have my cigar._
but he could hardly have written--So I have my cigarette. The cigar for
us means Nirvana, release from cares, relaxation of the whole being.
I do not think it either the meet reward or the need of the tramp
after his day’s march. When he has had wordy warfare with the police
concerning the validity of his passport, when he finds that he has lost
all his money and half his kit, when he has proposed to his sweetheart
and been rejected, or refused, he may light up a Havana if he has one.
But I take comfort in the thought that unless he has lately parted
from a rich uncle he is unlikely to have a stock of the commodity, and
will draw rather upon the resources of philosophy which he has somehow
stored within.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY
BOOKS
You need a book, but you cannot carry Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_ with
you, even if you feel the need. The tramp’s library is limited, for
books are heavy. It is best to tramp with one book only. But it is a
missed opportunity not to have one book. For you can gain an intimacy
with a book and an author in that way, which it is difficult to obtain
in a library or in the midst of the rush of the books of the season.
Each will have his choice though many will choose alike. The
inexperienced may pop the latest yellow-back into the rucksack, not
grasping that it will be read through in two lazy afternoons, and that
then he will have no book to fall back upon. In the trenches in France
a happy habit developed of leaving read books upon dry ledges in the
dugouts. One often came upon a treasure trove of the kind. But when
tramping, you cannot leave books for others with much hope of their
being found. And rarely does one find any stray literature unless it be
some tract on the futility of sin.
It is better, therefore, to take with one a whole-time book. It is
good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad margins for
scribblings and extra pages for thoughts, poems, thumb-nail sketches.
After a long tramp it is nice to see a book which has been clothed with
pencilings. It records in a way the spiritual life of the adventure,
and will recall it to you when in later years you turn over the page
again.
It is well to take a book that you do not quite understand, one that
you have already nibbled at but have found difficult. I do not mean an
abstruse work, but one you are just on the verge of understanding and
making your own.
At different stages of development you will have different books. A
boy just beginning to think could do worse than take _The Autocrat
at the Breakfast Table_, or Thoreau’s _Walden_; a little later comes
_Erewhon_ or _Eöthen_. At eighteen Sartor Resartus or Carpenter’s
_Towards Democracy_, or Browning’s “Paracelsus.” A good deal depends on
temperament as to whether a volume of Shelley or Keats will keep you
company all the while. You read and reread a poem that you like until
it begins to sing in your mind. It becomes your possession. There are
marvelous passages lying hidden in a poem like “Paracelsus”:
_Ask the gier-eagle when she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first
Why she not marvels strenuously beating
The silent, boundless regions of the sky!_
It is a poem of a man seeking life, seeking a way. It ought to move
most young men who are on the threshold of life, unless they are dull
or have been infected by cynicism. For my part, I look back loyally to
the time when I was Paracelsus and could say his lines as from my own
heart: “’Tis time new hopes should animate the world,” I whispered as I
walked, and the new hopes were my hopes.
Much of “Paracelsus” should go into the true Tramp’s Anthology, and
with it, not contradicting it, Omar Khayyam and also O’Shaughnessy’s
_We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams_
and then certain delicious lines, untraced in origin, which Algernon
Blackwood is fond of quoting:
_Change is his mistress, Chance his counsellor
Love cannot hold him; Duty forge no chain
The wide seas and the mountains call him
And grey dawns know his camp-fire in the rain._
An ideal book to carry on a tramping expedition is undoubtedly an
anthology of your own compiling, a notebook filled with your favorite
verses.
Other books which I think of as the tramp grows in goodness and in
grace are Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” or “Brand,” preferably “Peer Gynt,” there
is much more in it. “Peer Gynt” is a very remarkable book; you can read
it ten times and still fail to exhaust its poetry, its thought. It is a
great book about life. It is moreover a true tramping book. Peer is a
vagabond wandering about in the world, and it is never the world which
is in question, but the state of his soul. “Brand” is not so much of a
poem as the other, and is not so memorable. But it raises some of the
eternal questions in a powerful way. If you are “sick of towns and men”
“Brand” will rather indulge your mood, for it speaks Ibsen’s impatience
with the petty ways and lives of average men and women.
Socrates’ _Dialogues_ go well in the inner pocket, and so do Horace’s
_Odes_, if you are of a Horatian turn of mind and can read them. There
are many, especially in Scotland, who like to take a Homer, and fancy
themselves on the hills of Greece. For a classical scholar there are
many books of profound and lasting interest; a Plotinus will last you
a long while. For you have not merely to read it, but to resurrect a
being who lived centuries ago in a different civilization. The human
heart was the same, but almost everything else had a difference.
If the mind is just attracted to ancient philosophy, I know few books
to compare with Pater’s _Plato and Platonism_, for inner worth. I do
not, however, think his _Marius_ a good tramping book. Nature rebels
against its cold chaste beauty. It needs, I think, a more artificial
setting for its enjoyment.
Few novels are good tramping books. One gets through the story so
quickly, and if there is no more than story there, the book is finished
with. Still, there are a few knapsack companions worth having, such as
_The Cloister and the Hearth_, _John Inglesant_, _Wilhelm Meister_,
Dostoieffsky’s _The Brothers Karamazoff_. All rather bulky, I am
afraid, for ideas, though they keep other books thin, do swell the
volume of a novel. A few ideas stated in conversation and baited with
picturesque descriptions take three times the space they need in the
essay. It is sometimes easier to understand them, but the expression is
diffuse.
Plays, however, come near to being ideal. They take up little space.
The dramatist has to censor his own work vigorously with a view to
cutting down the excess of verbiage which his ideas naturally claim.
He is forced into paradox and epigram. His work is full of hints and
suggestions which are undeveloped. It is for you to develop them. As
Ibsen said, “I ask the questions; it is for you to answer them.”
A Shakespeare play is a delightful library. I nearly always take one.
A drama like _Richard III_ or _Othello_ can be read over and over
again. _As You Like It_ and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, are the great
open-air plays. You learn more about them with the birds and the stars
to teach you than with the aid of the most genial producer or inspired
professor. You make your camp in a natural theater among the trees,
or in an arena among the rocks. There is an audience not altogether
invisible. It waits, it has its programs, you have the book of the
words and the brain full of moving figures. Sun and moon are working
the limelight from the wings. Your camp fire is the footlights. Enter
Man. Enter Hamlet. Enter Julius Cæsar, the gods, the ghosts. The tramp
becomes an ancient type, a magician, a mystagogue--with a Shakespeare
in his hand, in the midst of the worlds.
If modern drama rouses the fancy, you can take a Pirandello or a Shaw,
and thresh it out--get a real opinion about it. It is worth while when
you have to orientate your mind to certain writers of repute to make
yourself intimate with at least one of their works.
I suppose some may prefer to read a book on the country through which
they are tramping, and in that case a librarian’s aid may be sought.
There are now scores of volumes on almost every country in the world.
It is as well to look over several of them before making a choice--many
prove to be slapdash, ill-informed compositions.
Does one take accounts of travel in lands other than that one is
tramping in? I imagine not. _Unknown Arabia_ is out of place in a
tramp through California. But a tramp’s account of his own life is
interesting reading anywhere, and one naturally thinks of W. H. Davies’
autobiography in this connection. There are few tramp writers. But
probably the best short story of Maxim Gorky’s tells of his tramping
life, and is called “The Fellow Traveller.” Jack London’s _Valley
of the Moon_ contains some tramping episodes. Jack London, Rudyard
Kipling, Cunninghame Graham, Belloc, Chesterton, Carl Sandburg,
Vachel Lindsay, are all delightful writers in the tramping mood and
ask a place in the knapsack. Then there are Harry Franck’s untiring
pedestrian tours in Patagonia, China, and elsewhere, perhaps in too
ponderous a form as yet for field use.
I once met a tramping publisher, _rara avis_, a very black swan; he
began his life as a colporteur of the British and Foreign Bible Society
and spent twenty years on the road, going from Bibles to leaflets,
which he printed himself, and thence to booklets, thence to books and
an office and a vast organization. He had a simple way of business.
I handed him a manuscript; he opened a drawer and handed out a wad of
notes, and the transaction was concluded without a word in writing. But
I suppose that was unusual even in his business. There was a savor of
tramp meeting tramp in the affair.
The Bible colporteur ought, at least, to know one book the better for
his calling. When all is said, there is one book more worth taking than
all the rest; poetry, philosophy, history, fantasy, treatise, novel,
and drama, you have all in one in the Bible, the inexhaustible book of
books. You need not take it all, take the prophecies, the Psalms, the
Gospels. It means much to tramp with one Gospel in the inner pocket of
the coat.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LONG HALTS
If your tramping expedition is long; if you have voted yourself plenty
of time; if, for example, you are taking a wander year, you are under
no compulsion to keep on tramping. One advantage of being a true
Bohemian is that you are under no compulsion except that of the heart.
You stop when you like, you go on when you like. You surely come to
places in which you are tempted to remain--be it only for a few days.
You stay a day, and the place grows on you; you stay longer. And then,
when the spirit moves, you move with it, move on, enriched by your
delay, by your idleness.
There are short halts and long halts. The short ones are simple and
natural; the longer ones more difficult to make, but not to be foregone
on that account. You come at last to the ideally simple, or beautiful,
or alluring village. You ought to stay there a while, make home there
for a while. And you have only your tramping kit and no word to
recommend you. Still, it can be arranged, and the very modesty of your
approach should help you. You come from below, not from above; the
villagers will not hide their life from you. They may be shy of the
stranger, but shyness will wear off as they watch you in their midst.
Do not go to the local priest who, being a responsible person, is
likely to tell you that it is impossible to stay there and to fill
your mind with difficulties. You want to get taken in and hire a room.
You have money to pay for it. You should make your appeal direct at
the house where you would like to stay. You shall be very civil to the
lady, and drink with mine host. It can be arranged. They will even put
themselves to trouble on your behalf.
It is so much better to be in a family than in an inn. Inside the
little family of a home you are inside the bigger family of the
village, and if you are a sociable soul you will soon have many
friends. You will get to know the village characters and gossips, the
village children, the village musicians; the stories of the village,
its legends, its superstitions--and then, its love affairs, its family
entanglements, its coming weddings and fêtes.
All this is worth while in the science of living. It is part of a
true tramping jaunt to come back from Nature to man, not of need to
civilization, but to men and women and children. The village children
will prove as near to the wanderer’s heart as the birds in the
woods--nearer, for they are wood fairies incarnate, trapped on the edge
of the forest and made to live human lives in the villages.
The written pages of your notebook grow in the village, on the long
halt, as do also the unwritten yet unfading memories within. Days and
weeks tramping in the open crystallize in impression, and your past
is like a tapestry on your bedroom wall. There is a space cleared
for human life and love and happiness, for dance and for song, for
sociality and talk.
Here is opportunity for learning new ways of life and new stories and
songs. You may soak in folklore and folk music for weeks. How splendid
for you if, when the time comes to go away and resume your trampings
you can carry away with you drawings you have made, songs you have
learned to sing, stories which you can tell. You will carry that
village with you to the ends of the earth.
And then, of course, a village is not merely a village, not merely
the broad and rutted roads and the cottages planted among the pigs
and fowls. The village has its ways out, its views, its hillsides and
streams, its loveliness on all sides. Your long halt is not a sitting
still in a human settlement, but a starwise tour of all the country
round about.
Going on and on in a line of route has its drawbacks. The world is not
a straight line, not even a crooked line, not even the line of a man’s
steps upon it--it is an area, a broad surface. Length cannot exist
without some measure of breadth, but at the risk of a paradox one may
say the world is breadth without length.
So also man’s life. We think of it in length of years. But that in
a way is error. Life is not length of time, but breadth of human
experience. Life is not a chain of events, but an area-something
spreading out from a hidden center and welling at once towards all
points of the compass.
In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one
has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the
origins of joy and pain--deep down at the heart’s core, the place from
which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and
overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical
shore.
Belike you have a child’s happiness into which you are unwilling to
probe. You ask not whether it is more in one thing than in another.
You tramp and you are happy, and halt and you are happy. Or happiness
is not your word for what you feel, not your vein. You muse, you are
at one with life, you are content, you ask only to go on in the way
in which you are. Or your happiness is to feel a divine melancholy
wherever you are. It is the same for all. The long halt, the dwelling
among strange kindred, the choosing of some spot to be beloved in
preference for a while--that also enters into the art of life, of the
life of the true Bohemian and life-wanderer.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FOREIGNERS
_“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”
“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.
Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”
“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”_
To the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though,
of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you
travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also
are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.”
“He is English?” I have heard it asked. “He’s one of these people who
think they own the earth?” And all too often in Europe one hears of
“vulgar Americans.”
Despite the grand international ideas of this and of preceding ages,
it is just as difficult for foreigners to get on together and esteem
one another and understand one another. This becomes very clear
upon reading modern works of travel, and perhaps clearer still upon
listening to the personal adventures of people who have been traveling
unconventionally in foreign lands. What is strange to us is comic, it
strikes us as a burlesque; if it irks us we think it distasteful, even
wrong. We take the foreigner to task for not behaving “like a perfect
gentleman,” etc.
It is largely a matter of bad manners. If manners could be improved we
should more easily get into sympathy with “foreigners”; if they could
be perfected there would not be any foreigners.
The language difficulty is enormous. Even if we learn to speak a
foreign tongue, we are liable to make mistakes and to have a queer
accent. We are at least as bad as those foreigners who come to us and
say “English as she is spoke.” Mistakes in language are almost always
very malapropos. _Beaucoup_ is “much” in France, but ill-pronounced it
means “little” in Italian (_poco_). The word for Thursday in Serbian is
slang for sixpence in Russian. An American lady wishing to ingratiate
herself with some Germans said she felt as if in Paradise; but the
word paradise in German means tomato, and her friends stared at her.
An acquaintance of mine, not speaking French very well, was dancing
on a Paris boulevard with some _midinettes_. Feeling rather tired he
went up to one of them and whispered in her ear, “_Ma chère danseuse,
je suis en couchant_” so that he seemed to imply a confession that he
was a pig. Two Russian Bolsheviks in London were fumbling for a doorkey
outside a house at midnight. A policeman came up and asked them what
they were doing.
“I have forged a key,” one of them replied. The bobby, however, looked
at them indulgently. “_Forgot_, you mean,” said he emphatically.
But difficulties of this kind are not confined to foreign wanderings.
You can experience them at home, in Scotland, for example, or on the
burring border, or even in Yorkshire. I was tramping across Yorkshire
one summer, and I realized how outlandish my English sounded. They
speak a different language up there. I had to make every one repeat
everything twice. They frequently mistook what I said. They made me say
it twice also. They reckoned I did not come from these parts.
I went into an inn one night and asked for a room.
The landlady, an elderly dame with a huge red face, asked me if I meant
a room.
I said “Yes.” She said, “Ted, this gentleman wants a room.”
“All right,” he exclaimed, “in a minute.”
“Mine will be my usual drop o’ Scotch,” said an old fellow, nudging me
as he went past.
I sat down in the bar parlor.
Presently the young man came and inquired if I’d like water in my room.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I answered patiently.
Then, in a few minutes, the young man Ted came in, mixing as it seemed
to me a cocktail--or what might pass for a cocktail in Yorkshire. He
stood in front of me, wineglass in hand, and poured a clear liquid on
to a brown one, cautiously and professionally.
“Tell me when to stop,” he said.
“That’s not for me?” I queried. And I wondered if it was perhaps a
custom to bring guests an unsolicited cocktail as a ritual of welcome.
Yorkshire has its festive ways.
But the boy stopped stirring and pouring, and looked at me.
“It must have been somebody else,” he remarked, and turned to the
red-faced landlady.
She faced me. “Yes,” she said hoarsely, “you ordered the room.”
Then the truth dawned on me.
“I asked for a room,” said I.
“Well, here it is,” said the young man.
“Not a rum, but a room! Room! Room!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, room,” said the landlady.
“A room for the night, a lodging,” I explained.
“Oh, a bed,” said she, with a chagrined face. “We have no beds. No, no
beds,” and I could see her thinking the matter over in her mind, the
difference between room and rum. She watched to see if I would drink
what had been put before me.
But rum is not my drink, especially after a day’s tramp. I shouldered
my knapsack and pushed out of the inn under the disdainful gaze of the
red-faced landlady and the stare of the man who was sipping his drop of
Scotch.
They say the better educated people of Edinburgh speak the best English
in Great Britain, and I certainly can use my own tongue fairly well.
But judge my amazement when I first went to America, and was told I
did not speak English. I was tramping to Chicago, and men on the road
would say to me, “Say, you haven’t been over here long. You speak the
language broken.”
Prejudices are bred over the difference of saying the word “well”
with the lips and “well” with the throat. Even a national laugh can
be aggravating. “Haw, haw, there’s a merry laugh for you,” says the
American in “So This is London,” “haw-haw--the marmalade hounds.”
Incidentally, that sentence from a clever play points to the other
great cause of irritating difference in ways. The Americans do not take
marmalade for breakfast. We do. It is almost a source of international
misunderstanding.
“The English have such bad table manners,” I used to hear said in
Moscow. And yet you should see Ivanovitch with his soup. We are too
greedy at table. We accept second and third helpings, only intended
to be offered, not intended to be taken. We do not know how to make a
glass of tea and a saucer of jam last fifty minutes. We eye the samovar
when we want more tea. We do not kiss our hostess’s hand after the
repast. Americans eat with their hats on, but with their coats off.
Russians smoke cigarettes between courses. Frenchmen take large towels
into their collars, and pick their teeth with toothpicks while they
talk. All very disgusting. Almost every variation in ways of eating is
distasteful.
The tramp, the wanderer in strange lands, should at least get over
this. I am sure Oliver Goldsmith and George Borrow, two delightful
wanderers, never fell foul of any one for lack of speech or eating
wrongly. They knew how to counteract the effect of their own
foreignness, and how to accept and enjoy differences in others.
But unless the tramp intends to shun men and women altogether he has to
face the problem of liking his fellow man, however unlike to himself.
It is part of the art of tramping to know how to meet your fellow man,
how to greet him, how to know him.
You get a companion who calmly tells you he intends to “pick your
brains” during the tramp. That is very well, though the expression
seems not too kind. It is easier to say “I intend to get to know you
during our wanderings together”--though there, of course, the intention
is towards something very difficult. It takes a long time to know a
man. You may “pick his brains” in half an hour and not get to know him
in a lifetime. It is mawkish for a man to talk of love, except in love,
but it needs a loving heart to know any one really well.
The man you tramp with is not a foreigner, albeit foreign enough in
himself, as you may discover before you discover he is kindred. You
are thrown into intimate contact with him. Even if the two of you are
a couple of egoists strongly self-centered, something is bound to get
across in a long tramp. That is one reason why tramping is such a
healthful spiritual experience. The too-too-solid flesh does melt a
little, the too-too-solid heart does warm somewhat toward an outsider.
But the chance-met is much more difficult to meet, to greet, to
understand. Of course, more difficult for some than for others. There
are genial sympathetic souls who have an aptitude for taking a stranger
at once to the heart. They are bright-eyed people, friendly at once
and friendly for a long while. I have a prejudice in their favor--but,
alas, there are not very many of them. The warmest thing in the world
is human affection; it is the most covetable, and it is the sweetest
thing to give. And it is also the saddest thing to have refused. I
believe the affectionate people take the most blows in life. But also
they get the greater rewards.
Still, there is shyness, timidity, stand-offishness, which commonly
mask the souls of very friendly people. It is difficult to rid oneself
of these defective qualities. Much travel frequently does it, and much
tramping will do it also. Tramping simplifies out many of our foibles.
It makes the artificial people more natural. I have seen a man afraid
almost of his own shadow in town become a bold and smiling boy upon the
road, not afraid to meet any one and hold frank converse with him.
Chance meetings may greatly enrich human experience, especially in a
foreign country where one has so much to learn of the ways of one’s
fellow man. I have found by personal experience that one of the
quickest ways in which to learn the life of a people is by tramping
among them.
The commonest way of attempting to make a study of a new nation is
to arrive at the capital city with a wallet full of introductions to
notable people. You stay at the best hotel, call at the Embassy, make
friends with one of the secretaries, dine with him and learn his
prejudices, go on the morrow to a friend of his, who will tell you “all
you need to know.” Then you may use your introductions, checking off
what the native notabilities say about their country by what you have
already heard.
The visitor of this type does get impressions. That is undoubted. He
feels that he is getting to know the new country very pleasantly, and
yet, when his visit is over and he returns home, if he is frank with
himself he must confess that he has very little real knowledge of the
people. He is obliged to say--Well, I was only there for six weeks; I
cannot pretend that I know much about it. But sixty weeks of that sort
of thing would make little difference.
On the other hand, six weeks tramping gives you unforgettable
impressions of reality. You have the great advantage of facing society
from the outside of its classes. You are at the bottom of the social
system and have the freedom from pride which such a position implies.
_’Tis pride that pulls the country down
Then take thy auld cloak about thee._
You do not need to put on airs, put on side, ape pompous acquaintances,
simper, trim, bowdlerize, change clothes according to time of day,
polish finger nails and balance cake, give the expected smile after
futile remark, avoid contradiction, or read up the secrets of bon ton
at night.
As you come along the road at any time of day everything about you
says, “Here I am, the tramp; take me as I am or not at all.” The Church
covers the friar so that he is immune from pride and taunt, fashion and
convention. He cannot be reproached; for his garments are a token that
he is bearing the reproach of Christ. And Nature covers the tramp in a
similar way. He has the chance to feel and be at home in any place in
the world, under any circumstances and with any people. You are never
ill-dressed in the King’s uniform; you are never ill-dressed in the
tramp’s.
Such stability is great gain, and frees the mind from care and fear
of appearances. You can with a gay heart plunge into converse with
the heir to the kingdom if he comes your way, and he will almost
infallibly say after his long revealing talk with you: “Ah, I wish I
were you!” You cause kings to envy you, but even peasants, who can
be prouder and stiffer than kings, will feel at home with you. You
must also be at home with them. You learn their accent, their special
peasant version of life, their stories, their songs. Quite by accident
you seem to get inside the real life of a nation and you belong to
it for the time. “It is always worth while talking to a clever man,”
says a character in Dostoyevsky. It is always worth while talking to a
stranger.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK
_Holding but lightly to material things,
Happy to stay, yet eager to begone,
He is the poet, though he never writ
A line of metre; he is God’s free man
And has the franchise of Eternity.
Into his soul through every sense there steal
Immortal melodies. This song of praise,
This verdant life, this fragrance, the blue sky,
Those mighty mountains and the distant sea
Are symbols of the everlasting song
Swelling from age to age among the stars._
Self-expression is life, What gives more satisfaction to one’s being
than to have expressed oneself. One builds a house and expresses
himself, another writes a poem and expresses himself, another begets
a large family and expresses himself--and looking back, they can say
“_Vixi_”: “I have lived.”
Some years ago they used to sell on the streets little blue revolving
spheres for a penny; spheres with the continents and seas painted on
them. They were toys. For a penny you could give your baby the world to
play with.
That is what he needs, and what the world was made for. We were
given the world to play with, as blocks with letters on are given to
children, for play and--for expression. The whole object of the world
is to help us to say a few words about ourselves. I think it is Novalis
says: “The world--all nature--is an encyclopædical index of our own
souls.” If you would read the cypher of your soul you must use the
cypher key of Nature. If you would learn and read the language of the
heart, the world, the visible universe, shall be your dictionary.
When Richard Jeffries wrote _The Story of My Heart_ it proved to be
all birds, flowers, bees, grasses, skies and trees and airs. It was
no cinema story, no Tarzan romance. Nor was it booklore. He did not go
to the British Museum to obtain materials for the story of his heart,
did not “mug it up” with the help of great authorities. But in the
wild woods and on the Wiltshire hills he spelt it out with his fingers
letter by letter, like a blind man fingering Braille.
I sometimes think that the gold of all literature and art is
self-expression of this kind, and that after all, the best passages and
the best pictures are “_impressions de voyage_.” After we die we may be
set to write an essay on our life story. It will be “_impressions de
voyage_.” Fifty years in an office will be found shriveled up to a dot,
and a few days in the wilds will expand into the whole essay.
Why do we stare at beautiful things? We see them--is that not enough,
can we not merely glance and pass on? We stop and we stare, at that
mountain side, at that flower, at that dreaming lake. We cannot pass
at once. We seem to be looking intently, stargazing at something
further off and yet more kindred than the stars, but we are not using
our physical eyes. Perhaps we are not using our eyes at all. We are
listening. Nature is trying to tell us something; she is speaking to us
on a long-distance wave.
Your mind is haunted. You have forgotten something, and the flower is
trying to tell you. It is reminding you of a forgotten air. Something
you cannot quite hear, cannot quite make out. Once you belonged to a
kingdom where ... once you knew some one young and fair ... once you
were lost, still lost, always lost.... But you could join us yet, did
you dare ... what is the flower trying to say? What does the mountain
say, and the lone bird on the branch? The heart aches. You lie on the
downs; heaven is alive with birds. The bosom of the sky heaves with
their song. And you, down below on the cropped grass of the hills,
lying on the chalk, shading the eyes with a hand, look up--and the
heart aches. It aches with homesickness, with love for that some one of
whom the flowers speak and the lark sings.
You are camped by the side of a stream, and a boatman goes past in his
boat in the dusk; you are dreaming by your fire in the morning, and
a wild bird comes unbidden to your wrist; you are yourself mirrored
in the water below a rock just before you are about to plunge; you
watch an eagle bridge a chasm with its flight; you see cliffs shaped
like giants and trees like dwarfs. The snake serpentines through the
dust across your path, drawing a line--thus far and no further--which,
however, you overstep. You find yourself treading in primeval forest,
where no step of man has ever been heard before. The trees change into
great armies marching upward in platoons, in serried battalions. You
come to great walls--termini. You overclimb them: death, new life. You
are out of touch with below. It is the great plateau: you can yearn
upward with your hands, you cannot yearn downward to those you have
left below. Lark’s song comes up to you from other people’s heaven.
You are in upper mountain country among glaciers and scarred rocks,
amid frogs, amid storms. You dance in the air with the snowflakes. The
soul plumbs the depth of the world with a sad thought dropped from the
height. Listen--the little avalanches--a crack, a rumble, a thudding, a
whispering. You reach and stand astride the pass between two countries.
God divided up the world, and you are a pair of compasses in His hand.
The first tramp left Eden many years ago. They say he died. But to my
mind he is still wandering. God made him wander. He has wandered so
far his wits are wandering too. He doesn’t remember much about the
garden now. It was a pleasant place. It had a snake in it, however.
Very pleasant: a place in which one could lie down and rest for an
eternity at a time, if it were not for the snakes in the grass. The
devil got loose in it. Still, it was the only place in which one could
feel at home for ever and ever. And outside of it one must wander. Life
is a wandering and a seeking where it was once a sitting still and an
adoring.
So the tramp’s life is a type of existence. I like the symbolism of
the Jewish Passover, the standing dressed for departure into the
wilderness. Man is not man sitting down; he is man on the move. _Le
tramp c’est l’homme._
Even if in small measure the tramp is a pilgrim. His adventure is a
spiritual adventure or it is nothing. The clouds part and Orion is
disclosed. The rude pencilings are erased and the main curve remains,
and the curve of your adventure is a broken arc. “On earth the broken
arc; in heaven the perfect round,” says Browning. But given the arc
the center can be found. We revolve about the sun, but there are
planets revolving around a sun invisible to us. Our souls, I suppose,
revolve about some invisible spiritual sun which we are always thinking
about--a center called God.
So with all our hilarity, our joyous meetings, our madcap doings,
with all the fun of the tramping expedition there is the deeper
interest underlying all. Most people will make the tramp without one
conscious deeper thought. It does not matter. Their nature is getting
something intuitively, although the mind has no knowledge of it. The
gay undergraduate, all vim and no soul, shies at religion and has no
thought except about climbs, leaps, jumps, food, sporting chances,
pedestrian achievement! He may not see this glorious jaunt in a poetic
light until years afterwards. Cunninghame Graham remarks in one of his
clever prefaces that nothing in the present ever seems so good as what
is past. Some years pass, and your present, which is silver to-day,
becomes gold in recollection. You lie in a matter-of-fact mood under
the stars in the midst of the mountains. Your mind is at rest, you ask
for nothing beyond perhaps good sleep, and belike you thank neither God
nor yourself for having got there. But ten years later you look back
with a sigh and say “How wonderful it was, ah, I was happy then!”
The intuitive understanding rises slowly to the mind, like light
traveling from a distant planet to this earth. But you get it at last
and see.
So the experience is kindred for all manner of minds. The poet may
exult too feverishly at first, and grow tired of his own rhapsodies;
the reflective intellectual may become bored by his own meditations.
But neither the poetic rhapsodies nor the intellectual notes record
the measure of the tramp. For it is a measure of hidden honey that is
being stored, and you are seldom allowed by Nature to eat of your own
store day by day. We are bees rather than wasps.
The true beehive of inner experience is in you, and yet, of course,
there are what may be called auxiliary beehives. I believe the
conscious experience of a tramp can be greatly increased in a
pleasurable way by the use of notebooks. It is worth while keeping
a record if only to remind yourself in other years. The details of
your spiritual adventures fade out unless you have a good memory or
an _aide-mémoire_. The whole work of some writers is no more than a
tramp’s notebook, Blake, for instance, a series of marvelously scrawled
hieroglyphics--the story of his journey from one world to another. But
one does not need to be a “writer” as it is called, or an “artist.” It
is a spurious classification. We are all writers and artists from the
day when we scrawl with our toy spades in the wet sand to the day when
we put the seal of death to our wills. Man as such is an artist. Being
public, being printed, being exhibited, are matters connected with the
minor function of being professionally artistic. Giotto drew a perfect
circle to show what he could do. We shall draw imperfect ones and be
more true to Art.
The fact is he has lost a great deal who has not kept a daybook of the
soul. Something very sweet happened to Leigh Hunt one day and he wrote.
_Time you thief who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in._
It was entered in his daybook. Certain happenings make a day worth
while and perhaps forever memorable to you. “To-day I knew that I had
conquered all my doubtings,” wrote Carlyle once in his diary, recording
his transit from scepticism to positive belief. It was an entry in his
daybook.
As a practical detail, I love page-a-day diaries, the new sort used
mostly in America and France. It is a nicely bound thin-paper book with
a whole page for each day in the year and no postal information or cash
columns. Unfortunately in England such books are generally bound to
look like Bibles and have appropriate Scripture references at the head
of each page. One is reminded of the Lessons and the Collects. That
is very well, but we require a minimum of printed matter on our daily
page. It is ours, like our life when we wake up in the morning, free
and open, and we may write there only what is given to us personally to
write. Such a notebook should be free from conventions. If we wish to
draw sketches in it mixed with written notes, we will. If we need to
overstep the limits of a page we will find a less-covered page among
our yesterdays and let to-day spill over to fill out the measure of
time past. If you have had a tramping expedition in the midst of an
otherwise sedentary year how the empty pages will fill up from the more
glorious days!
The artist’s notebook is free for sketches, notes, impressions of
moments, _bon mots_, poems, things overheard, maps and plans, names
of friends and records of their idiosyncrasies, paradoxes, musical
notations, records of folksongs and other songs which you copy in order
that you may sing for years afterwards. But it should not contain
too much banal detail, such as petty accounts, addresses, druggists’
prescriptions, number of season ticket and fire-insurance policy, memos
to send rent. These things are apt to clutter up your book, and when
you come to Old Year’s Night, and sit waiting for the chime of bells
which rings in another year--and you have your daybook before you, and
you go over its pages, you do not want to pause on a scrawled laundry
list or some Falstaffian account of wine and bread consumed at such and
such an inn.
The artist’s daybook is his own living gospel--something coming after
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--and should be sacred to him, if he is
not merely a flippant and cynical fellow seeing life in large part as a
buffonade.
A thought recorded, one that is your own, written down the day when
it occurred, is a mental snapshot, and is at least as valuable as the
photographs you may take on your journey. Yesterday’s thought is worth
considering again, if only as the stepping stone of your dead self.
The thoughts of some people are constant, but of others varying and
contradictory. It is like landscape. Some live their lives in the sight
of a great range of mountains--they live in the presence of certain
ever-abiding thoughts; others change their mental scenery from day to
day, in the shallows and flats of the low country. But we all have our
epochal days, our epochal thoughts. We turn to a page in our notebook
and say: “On this day the thought occurred to me in the light of which
I have lived ever since.” You draw two candles there, with light rays,
to show the thought of the year.
It is much the same if the expression of the thought has been given you
by another. Your thought of the year may take the form of a quotation.
Those who search while they read naturally find in the expression of
others what their souls need. I remember long periods of living with
certain thoughts derived from books--Browning’s:
_He placed thee midst this dance
Of plastic circumstance
This present thou forsooth would’st fain arrest._
and then at another time Richter’s:
“_We are near awakening when we dream that we dream._”
Persistent thoughts on a path of life’s pilgrimage! Morning after
morning one awakens and the thought awakens with one and goes through
the day in company, in communion with one.
Each day Nature puts her magic mirror in our hands. “Oh child, do you
see yourself to-day?”
We look, we look, and answer wistfully, “Not to-day, not to-day.”
Is it that the reflection is dim and vague, or that our eyes have not
yet cleared? Shortsighted people see curious distortions of themselves
in the glass.
But it may even be true that no one has yet seen his own face. You can
never be sure that what you see in a glass is what other people see
in your face. So also in the spiritual mirror of Nature, one seeks
to identify oneself and yet never is satisfied. Cheek and nose are
wandering with the ripples of the lake. Every pool in the marsh has
its star reflections, and as you bend o’er one of them your visage is
broken by the starlight.
On the desolate North Cape, amid ice floes and leaping seals, with the
bleak homeless winds of the Arctic about your ears, you are as near
to your own image as in the warmth of Gibraltar’s opening gates. In
the center of the Great Pyramid your heart turns to dust, but coming
forth it vivifies again and is young as the year of your age. Pharaoh’s
uncovered face is a faded hieroglyphic, but still it asks thousands of
years after death--who am I; whither do I go?
So life’s scroll is full of question marks, pointers, index fingers,
records of bearings, soundings, answers and partial answers to the
question: Where am I? Drake climbs a goodlie and high tree in Darien
and descries afar the Southern Sea. It is a picture in his artist’s
notebook. Such an artistic thing to do, and life made him do it! It was
no pose, his going forth to singe the King of Spain’s beard. It was
more of a pose, I think, when he refused to allow his game of bowls to
be interrupted by the approach of the Armada.
Pose is, unfortunately, a prevalent disease of the quest. Some natures
are betrayed to striking attitudes on the top of molehills. To-day I
conquered the Mendips; henceforth there are no Mendips. But good hard,
earnest living--tramping and seeking, will cure most people of the
false theatrical. Beware of going to Jerusalem in order that you may
come back and tell the world you have been. It spoils all you found
on the way. I do not like the palmers; those who have been and have
come back. Admitted that it is a vice of ourselves, we professional
_littéraires_, we go and then partially spill over when we return,
selling the wine of experience for so much. When it is genuine
experience you well may:
_Wonder what the vintners buy
One half so precious as the goods they sell._
But, of course, one can tell one’s story and yet escape pose. “Make
thyself small,” saith Buddha. Make thyself unobtrusive, lest some one
may think that a very ornate and luxurious loud speaker is responsible
for the music itself. In an old-fashioned phrase so difficult to
stomach nowadays--“Give God the glory.”
The personal diary, however, that daybook of the soul, is not meant for
other gaze. I should imagine oneself shy even of the eyes of one’s most
intimate friend, wife, sweetheart, _alter ego_. There is a delicacy, a
secrecy about the functions of mind and soul. You do not wish others to
see what you have written and blush at the thought of half a line being
read over your shoulder. And the better the diary is kept the more
private and personal it becomes.
I do not consider Pepys’ Diary to be the type of a good daybook, though
it is extremely valuable as a record of the life of the age in which
Pepys lived. It is one of the great curiosities of literature. As after
a lifelong imprisonment one might find the diary of a prisoner, written
to kill time, so after Pepys’ life one finds this astonishing document,
wherein as it were, _all_ is written down. But that all of Pepys’ Diary
is not all. It is all that is immaterial. There is much that escaped
Pepys because he was not on the lookout for it. The chief omissions
are the answers or attempted answers to the questions: “Who was Pepys?
Whom did Pepys think he was?” The answers to these questions covering
the whole of Pepys’ life could well occupy as much space as the famous
diary we have.
But Pepys, perhaps without intention, described his England very well.
He set down so much detail that he provided something resembling cinema
films of daily life. As you read his pages you drop away from your own
century and walk in his. His work is not a selection of phenomena; you
make your selection from it. You can, in fact, make a diary from his
diary. His many pages become one page, or half a page, in your diary.
There was in Russia, up to the Revolution, in which he perished a
Pepysian writer, more selective, it is true, but determined to write
down _all_, everything that occurred to him from day to day through
life. He became naturally voluminous, and put down all manner of
things, discreet and indiscreet, some very shocking to decent minds.
But in one of his later volumes of fragments and thoughts he wrote,
“It may be asked what possible interest is there is these things I am
recording, but that is my affair. For a long while now I have been
writing without reader. If some one reads, that is his lookout; I do
not invite him. One resolution I have made, and will carry out, and
that is to print _all_.” So many of his daybook entries have curious
tags after them, such as “Written on my cuff at Mme. So-and-So’s
reception”; “Written while waiting for the tram on Nevski.”
It is fair to him to say that he only recorded thoughts and
observations. If he was making love to a Captain’s wife at any time
he did not tell of it--but only gave current reflections on love and
what women really are. His whole literary output makes one spiritual
notebook.
Few people however have much persistence. The January mood is familiar;
this year I will keep a diary. The February pages of most diaries
look pale and consumptive. March may pass without a single entry, as
if throughout that glorious month nothing of moment had passed before
one’s eyes or occurred to one’s being. That is not, however, such a
default as may appear. One drops the diary; one resumes it. To-day
I take stock of life and thought and all good things that are mine;
to-morrow I will swing all day on the garden gate singing a nursery
rhyme; the day after I shall put on my silk hat and go to the city and
a company meeting; I shall promenade at night. Something will occur
sooner or later and I shall say, “Hah, my diary, my tablets, my ink
fountain, that I may write down something special and wonderful and
curious that has occurred to me this day.”
Some are so fortunate that their professional and intellectual life
blend--the writer, the artist, the social worker, the barrister,
sometimes the lawyer, the politician, often the doctor. Matters of
deep interest professionally have also a personal spiritual interest.
But whatever the profession or calling all interests become one on an
occasion of travel, on a tramping expedition or visit to a strange
country. Then the daybook rests in the inner pocket, the ready helpmeet
of one’s thoughts.
In visiting foreign countries and studying other peoples, I always
look out for what may be called key phenomena. I like to be able to
record a fact which means so much more than its bare utterance seems
to imply. Such a fact, bursting with brilliant significance is like
a luminary on the page. It may be light on your way for the whole of
the year. A nation reveals its secret in a sentence. Or it may be,
an animal tells its nature by one trait observed. There is a curious
satisfaction of the soul in knowing about the ways of men and of beasts.
Of course, I do not mean that there is any particular satisfaction in
recording trivialities and prejudices. A man once wrote in his diary,
“The Frenchmen eat frogs: I do not like them.” It was not worth his
writing down. But one day, tramping with a hungry American, I was
astonished to hear him exclaim, “I wish I could see a frog; I would
soon have him in the pot.” That rid me of a prejudice, and I sat down
complacently afterwards to a dish of frogs’ legs. It was worth a line
in the diary.
A pilgrim once said to me: “I do not know you; to know a man one
must eat forty pounds of salt.” It was worth a line in my diary.
“_Nitchevo_,” said a Russian peasant servant to Bismarck, when out
hunting they were lost in the snow in the forest. “_Nitchevo_,” and
it lasted Bismarck all his life. He never forgot _Nitchevo_ and
was always fond of saying it. “He is a gentleman; he keeps a gig,”
Carlyle overheard, and it became one of the brevities of his spiritual
life--“gigmanity.” “I am a workingman; I have carried my dinner pail,”
some one else said, defining himself and a workingman at the same time.
Such definitions and explanations, pointers, and street lamps, are
worth keeping.
The diary of this kind is sometimes called a Commonplace book, which,
however, seems to me too modest a title, as one does not inscribe
in it one’s commonplaces. The Dean of St. Paul’s published recently
large extracts from a wonderful series of “Commonplace books,” which
he had kept during most of his life, but I would rather call them
uncommonplace books. Truly, in the Dean’s case these scrapbooks
garnered the fruits of reading rather than of life, and my especial
plea is not for the fruits of reading as for the fruits of life. The
digest of books is the habit of the good student, who sets down in
brevity the content of whatever he reads and so preserves knowledge for
future guidance. But the keeping of the daybook represents a different
habit of mind.
With many it begins in happy school days or school holidays when
natural history diaries were started. The enthusiastic collector of
birds’ eggs, butterflies, or beetles, makes constant expeditions
and delights in chronicling the results. He may do it at length, or
briefly; may describe habits of species and adventures in tracking
them, or merely set down the names of captures and of the localities.
In boyhood one records the marvelous doings of the oak-egger female;
later on one records what man, the insect, is doing.
It is just as much worth while, though so much more difficult, to
describe what people look like as to set down what they say. And then
most people and things are silent to our ears; they speak more to our
eyes. Certain shapes, certain groups, speak at times enormously to our
eyes. But how record them if we do not describe?
It is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist. All
description is art, and in describing an event, an action or a being,
you enter to some extent into the joy of art. You are more than the
mere secretary of life, patiently taking down from dictation, more than
life’s mere scribe; you become its singer, the expresser of the glory
of it. With a verbal description goes also sketching, the thumb-nail
sketch, the vague impression, the pictorial pointer. There is no reason
for being afraid of bad drawing in one’s own personal travel diary; the
main thing is that it be ours and have some relationship to our eyes
and the thing seen.
I have seldom gone on a tramp, or a long vagabondage, without seeing
things that made the heart ache with their beauty or pathos, and other
things that set the mind a-tingle with intellectual curiosity. I do not
refer to great episodes, glimpses of important shows and functions, but
to little things, unexpected visions of life! Some were unforgettable
in themselves and seemingly needed no tablets other than those of
memory, and yet it was a great addition to inner content and happiness
to describe them as they occurred in my daybook of travel.
It is good also, after describing something that has specially affected
one, to add one’s observations, the one line perhaps that records one’s
mind at the time.
For these, and for other reasons, the artist’s notebook, the diary,
the common- and uncommonplace book, the daybook of the soul are to be
placed as part of the equipment of life, when faring forth, be it on
pilgrimage, be it on tramp, or be it merely on the common round of
daily life. Every entry is a shade of self-confession, and the whole
when duly entered is a passage of self-knowledge.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MAPS
Civilization is short of maps. It is not familiar with its own ground
plan. This is due, no doubt, to the common handicap of commercialism.
Maps ought to be free for all. When you ask a man the way, you do not
expect him to charge you for it--“the first on the right and the second
on the left; sixpence, please.” Maps are almost as cheap to print as
wall paper, and could often be used as such. We need to be familiarized
with the look of the chart of the world. It is of good advantage,
especially to children and to young men and women at the gateway of
larger life, to have maps of the world in front of them, in front of
them often.
You have inherited a pretty large estate by being born. You might as
well know something of the plan of the grounds. Stay-at-home natures
are bred by absence of wall maps. An interesting place, the old world,
with some curious corners--but the mapless do not believe in it.
Geranium follows geranium on the bedroom wall, and duck follows duck,
and then in the nursery innumerable Mother Hubbards look in innumerable
empty cupboards for innumerable nonexisting bones, and then in the
study and workroom an endless series of pale violet rails run back and
forth or posies of spoiled forget-me-nots bobble before the eyes. We
break the monotony with illuminated texts, samplers, oleographs of the
battle of Spion Kop, portraits of aged relatives in company with “The
Laughing Cavalier.” We put “God bless our Home” in large letters over
the hearth--and then forget about maps which are full of blessing.
In Paris, even at the kiosks on the boulevards you can buy maps of the
world for a few francs; large separate maps of Europe and Asia and
America, printed in color on paper. You do not need them on canvas. It
is almost worth going to Paris to get supplies of these. Thinking of
getting married: go to Paris and get plenty of maps for the new home.
Atlases are not so good. You have to take them down from a shelf and
consult them. Wall maps spare you the trouble; they consult you.
Atlases are to be consciously studied; wall maps are busy studying you
while you are thinking of other things. You are reading the _Arabian
Nights_ but Arabia is reading you. You are turning over the pages of a
picture book with a child; Siam is looking over your shoulder at the
elephants. You are cooking a curry; India has marked you. As you lie in
bed you see that Czechoslovakia is lying in bed, too, with her toes in
the Carpathians.
Atlases have a serious defect, in that they split up the world as a
butcher does a sheep, and the joints are hanging in an absurd series
on hooks. Separate maps of countries and bits of countries, as for
example, northwest Germany, are not so instructive as large composite
maps. It is better to look at Europe as a whole than at Europe in
detail. Nevertheless, a tiny book-page map of the world or Europe or
America or Asia, is of very little value. There is no merit in the
miniature map. The bigger the map the better--up to a point. It should
not be so large that one needs a ladder to examine Greenland. The atlas
and the pocket map and the revolving sphere are the auxiliaries of the
wall maps--very useful in their place if the first has been provided.
When the inspiration for wandering and tramping has come we realize
what a boon maps are, we come to love them, as inseparable companions.
You put local maps of countries and towns and countrysides in your
pockets, and large folded maps of the Continent in your knapsacks.
You unfold them in the desert; you lie on them, you crawl about with
a magnifying glass examining their small print and the lost names of
villages in smudged mountain ranges. You learn by the scale what the
length of your thumb or little finger means in kilometers and miles.
You survey with a curious joy the dotted line of your peregrinations up
to that point.
Have you seen enough of the world? Are you sure you will rest content
at Kensal Rise or Père la Chaise when the time comes? Take a map of the
world and a blue pencil, go back in memory over the whole of your life,
start the pencil at your birthplace, and begin to draw the line of your
goings to and fro upon the world. How you will rejoice in yourself if
you can conduct that blue pencil chart across a great ocean, across
Atlantic or Pacific! The longer and more bulging and loopy the line
the more you will feel you have lived. In the later years of your life
you will be able to say: “I was born into the world and I have seen
something of it.”
Of course, maps have another function besides that of firing your
imagination, and it would be neglectful to omit a further serious
consideration. They are for helping you to find your way. How to read
maps in detail is a matter of some study, as there is much more
information hidden in a good scientific map of a country than at first
meets the eye. When tramping across forest and mountain it is as well
to carry with one sections of the Government survey, by the aid of
which one can often locate oneself when otherwise hopelessly lost.
You know also where you must make for for provisions, and whether you
are approaching a marshy region which cannot be traversed on foot,
where the fordings and ferries and bridges of a river or stream are
to be found, where a forest ends, where open country is resumed. One
inevitably spends hours of some days with one’s sectional map, trying
to make out what point has been reached, verifying detail and verifying
again.
This sort of map ought to be stoutly mounted, as it comes in for much
use and is entirely in a different category from the large composite
maps suitable for home or for folding within the large inner pocket
of the knapsack. You thumb them so much because almost inevitably you
come upon error, even in the best survey. It is highly difficult to
digest square miles and square inches. Every map has an element of
artistic impressionism, and has to be studied somewhat intuitively.
What you would mark, it omits, because the map maker was of a different
temperament. For that you have to allow, and not lose your patience and
tear up your guide.
At home it is well to have a map cupboard and preserve and put in it
every little map which has ever served you on the road or in foreign
cities. You may help others with your old maps upon occasion, and you
may help yourself when thinking of returning at some time upon an old
track.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TRESPASSERS’ WALK
You are going to be very ill-mannered and stray on to other people’s
property. Granted that fundamental impertinence you must be as nice as
possible about it; graciously lift your hat to the proprietor when you
see him. You should be as careful to do as little damage as possible;
mend the hedge you have broken, put back the hurdle, avert your face if
a lady is swimming in her private pool. In doing the trespassers’ walk
it is as well to forego the happiness of a rigid rule. You take your
compass; you decide, let us say, to go west southwest, and it will
take you over commons, over ploughed land, village greens, graveyards,
gardens, over loosely held but large and idle estates, perhaps through
thickly propertied country. It is enough to do the walk roughly. You
cannot follow a ruled straight line across sown fields and flower beds
and through the lord of the manor’s kitchen. You must frame exceptions
to the ruling of the compass, and be guided by the dictates of the
heart and of good sense. The main idea is to see just what the land of
a given country is like, and to enjoy it. You have the added thrill of
not knowing whom you will meet and on what terms.
Of course, I do not guarantee that you may not come to grief. You
may get on to the grounds of a very peppery squire who, resenting
greatly your trespass on his land, will assail you in person, or set
his keepers on you, or even let loose a fierce dog, or telephone the
police. My experience is that you need not fear these chances unless
you behave badly. Many landowners tacitly allow the neighboring
villagers to wander in their grounds if they do not do damage. The
parvenu comes and tries to clear every one out, and keep his pleasaunce
entirely for himself, but even he, unless he be a Seigneur of a
Channel island will not fire on a stranger at sight. The fact is, that
in England anyway, there is no absolute right to keep strangers off
private property. Formerly, possessed land was much more free to the
use of the people in general than it is now. The tradition remains. No
farmer objects to your walking alongside his cornfields or across his
pastures. It is the people who enclose but do not farm who have most
prejudice against strangers.
No doubt bitternesses over rights of way have hardened owners’
hearts; no doubt the breakdown of feudal relationship between squire
and villager has helped to make the former a recluse; no doubt the
increasing vulgarity and bad manners of people in general have made
them less welcome in the eyes and on the estates of the refined and
well-to-do.
But unless you do damage you are not committing a serious offense by
trespassing. And the trespassers’ walk is so arduous that it can
only be recommended to the few. It is worth while, not merely as an
adventure, but as a means of getting a true notion of your native land.
You can get it hunting; but then, not every one hunts.
One is inclined to think of England as a network of motor roads
interspersed with public houses, placarded by petrol advertisements,
and broken by smoky industrial towns. That England is a fair country
few will deny, because you see beautiful cross sections of her from
trains. But when you get out at a railway station, the vision of the
carriage window is seldom realized. You are guided away from Nature, by
gulleys and deep-cut or hedged roads. England becomes to you a dusty
road, a series of dusty roads.
There are glorious commons here and there, and free woods, but you
must travel to find them. You get tired of thoroughly tamed Sussex and
Surrey and go to the Welsh hills or the Cumberland lakes. But England
is more in Sussex and Surrey than it is in the mountains. Only it is
enclosed, shut away, and marked “private.” Rain-washed notices put up
ages ago tell you that TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. And as we pray
daily in old-fashioned phrase to have our trespasses forgiven we invest
the idea of trespassing with some awe. So we keep to the road, even if
we are out on a mere idle walk and not bent on reaching any given house
or place. Even if you take a stile and leave road for footpath your
pleasure is enhanced, and if you leave footpath for the “trackless”
woods it is even further enhanced.
For the trespassers’ walk you should be lightly clad and shod, for you
have to jump often. You can start at any point you choose, and take the
guidance of the compass, or the sun, or some dominant landmark in the
view. You then take a bee line and see where it leads you. As you are
neither a bee nor a bird you cannot fly over hedges and walls, and you
cannot go so fast. Every field presents its problem, but every field
presents also its pleasure.
You will observe the different way the wild flowers look on the other
side of the hedge that skirts the road; they are sheltered and fresh
and more numerous and altogether more happy. Even that first field is
a more pleasant place than the great highway.
The second hedge is likely to be lighter and more easy to get through
than the first. You come into a broad meadow, and see beyond it the
darkness of a woodland you have never entered. On the fringe of it the
rabbits are playing. In the bushes are more nests, more fluttering of
birds. You enter the wood. It is still and dreaming, apparently utterly
unpopulated. It belongs to some quiet family living in a big secluded
country house a mile away. There is room for a tribe where but five
people and their servants are living. Naturally enough, you meet no
one. You are in woodland which is after all but little visited though
in the midst of crowded England. The berries on the blackberry bushes
rot unpicked. No one comes seeking the many mushrooms. Even the rabbits
are only shot at once a year--to keep their numbers down. You are
treading on last year’s leaves, or the leaves of the year before last,
on the leaf mold of ages past. England is carpeted under your feet. You
delight in your steps, in the rise and fall of the land, in the sunny
clearing and the vetch-covered bank where you sit watching little blue
and brown butterflies fluttering about you.
No one comes to chase you off. At least you are not a trespasser until
some one has seen you. You hear no one moving anywhere. You do not
even hear the motor cars on the road you left. You have disenchanted
the England of those roads. This is the real England, the England into
which you ought to have been born, rather than that of curbed ways and
tarred roads.
From the woods you emerge on to a fair pleasaunce, an upward-reaching
greensward, flanked afar by a white house--the owner’s probably. Your
eyes turn wistfully towards the house and its windows, but there seems
to be no one there, it might be empty. There is not even a smoke from a
chimney. You climb the green slope to another wood, and passing through
it, come unexpectedly to a gap, no, a ditch, no, a country road, a
lane, leading from you do not know where to you do not know what.
You go down into it; you climb up on the other side. You have entered a
different type of property. You are in a turnip field, which you skirt.
In your next field you see a fearsome animal all by himself, grazing at
leisure, and it depends on your courage whether you will face the bull
or make an exception to your rule of the game of the walk.
It is well to have a notebook and record the rules, by-laws, and
exceptions of your walk as you frame them. In this notebook also you
keep a personal record of the England you found the other side of the
hedge.
Upon seeing a bull you decide to pass him in the spirit of an escaping
_torero_, or you make a rule to meet the danger. You take a bearing
by your pocket compass, and ascertain what tree or landmark you are
naturally making for on the other side of the bull’s field. And having
assured yourself of that, you reach it by making a detour.
Then, proceeding with your tramp, you go right through a farmhouse
yard. If the compass directs that you should go right through the
farmhouse you may go in and get some refreshment. You do not avoid
the farmer and his spouse, or farm hands. They are part of your novel
adventure, and are nearly always quite pleased to see you, even if a
bit puzzled at your line of route.
It is just as well not to explain what you are up to. They will not
take to it. They do not mind your walking across the farm with a given
object, but will fail to understand your notion of following the
compass. Assuredly they will think you rogue or mad. It is best to talk
politics to them, talk of that terrible fellow Ramsay MacDonald and the
dreadful doings of Labor; they love that. Your interest in the stock
will not come amiss. You may ask also of land for sale, of estates
falling vacant, and changes of ownership. They will tell you much about
the owners of the land you travel over. The difficulty is in getting
away from a farm and making the crazy exit that your compass dictates.
There again a rule may be framed. You may select a point in view ahead
and get to it conventionally, resuming your bee line across country
there.
You are in for a delightful day or for delightful days of tramping. If
you have a cottage in the country, as I had when doing this, you can
do a few hours of this and then return by road or rail home, resuming,
another day, at the point where you left off. On the other hand, if
the weather is fine, there is no reason why you should not sleep out
and tramp all the way to the sea. Only it will take longer than could
be expected, as getting over hedges and walls and ditches and streams
takes time. And it is more tiring than an ordinary walk on a moor or a
common.
On a long tour of the kind you learn something about English life
which is not easily obtained in a conventional way, and the experience
should be filled out by learning the names and histories of estates
and owners. If you have friends on the way you can have delightful
accidental meetings and enriching conversations. If you are seriously
studying English life there is no reason why you should not frankly
call at the houses you see on the way and get what information you can.
Some people may meet you coldly, a few boorishly, but most will be
polite and friendly enough. Occasionally you will meet people who will
be extremely kind and helpful. It is neither so wicked nor so dangerous
to be a trespasser as might at first appear.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A ZIGZAG WALK
I have mentioned the “zigzag” walk. Did you ever make one? Probably
not, for it is my secret. I invented it. A frequent wish of the
traveler and wanderer is to obtain genuinely chance impressions of
cities and countries. He would trust neither his own choice of road,
nor the guide’s choice, nor the map. But if he goes forth aimlessly he
inevitably finds himself either making for the gayer and better-lighted
places, or returning to his own door. The problem is to let chance
and the town take charge of you, for the world we travel in is more
wonderful than human plan or idle hearts desire.
One day in New York, wishing to explore that great city in a truly
haphazard way I hit on the following device--a zigzag walk. The first
turning to the left is the way of the heart. Take it at random and you
are sure to find something pleasant and diverting. Take the left again
and the piquancy may be repeated. But reason must come to the rescue,
and you must turn to the right in order to save yourself from a mere
uninteresting circle. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning
to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left again,
and so on.
I had a wonderful night’s walking thus in New York, taking cross
sections of that marvelous cosmopolitan city. And many were the
surprises and delights and curiosities that the city unfolded to me
in its purlieus and alleys and highways and quays. That was several
years ago. After New York I saw Paris for the first time, and wandered
that way there. Curiously enough, I started from the conventional
and tourist-stricken Avenue de l’Opéra, and the zigzag plan led me
across the Seine to the Quartier Latin and Bohemian Montparnasse. I
saw more of Paris in a night than many may do in a month. After Paris
I tried the experiment in Cologne. That was after I had marched in
with my regiment from the wilds of the Ardennes and southern Germany.
I explored the city in that way. How unusual and real and satisfactory
were the impressions obtained by going--not the crowd’s way, but the
way of the zigzag, the diagonal between heart and reason.
However, the most charming and delightful associations of my zigzag
walk are not those of the great foreign cities which I have known, but
of our mysterious and crooked-streeted capital, London herself.
It was Christmas time and I said to my wife: “Let us do our shopping on
the zigzag way.” We had not gone forth on such an adventure before, and
were full of excitement, wondering where we should be led. What exactly
we bought on the way I do not wholly remember, but London was generous
to us in its cross section of houses and shops. On this occasion we
started on the road of reason, since we had a definite purpose in view,
and we took the first on the right, and the first on the left, instead
of the first on the left, and the first on the right. It may be thought
that made no difference. Believe me, all the difference in the world!
The first street we knew quite well, the second was an asphalt
alley, where scores of children were playing hop-o’-my-thumb on the
white-scrawled flagstones. The third street was one of the great
film streets of London, with cinema stores from end to end and shop
windows lurid with horror posters. The fourth turning brought us to
the famous market of Pulteney, where all the surplus fruit and job
lots of vegetables from Covent Garden are exhibited on donkey barrows,
and cried by vociferous hawkers. Here we could buy two grapefruit on
occasion for a penny, and the “rare and refreshing fruit” which the
wizard from Wales once offered to the poor as a result of legislation
could here be obtained by chance and in abundance. From the market we
went by a crooked road from Rupert Street to Callard’s cake shop in
Regent Street.
Happy forethought of London! We had coffee and mustard-and-cress
sandwiches in this jolly shop, and bought a cake. Then we crossed
Regent Street, bought two chickens at Louis Gautier’s in Swallow
Street, and plunged for Piccadilly. We came out at St. James’ Church,
and fortune was kind enough to make it possible to visit Hatchards. We
went in and “browsed around” for a while and ordered a copy of _The
Sweet-scented Name_. Our way was then by Duke Street, Jermyn Street
and some others to St. James’ Street with its clubs, and we turned
up St. James’ Place. As we passed Number Five, rat-a-tat-tat, from a
little window; rattling and jumping like the sound of an old-fashioned
motor, went the typing machine of the secretary of the world’s greatest
newspaper chief. We thought we had arrived at a cul-de-sac and that
we should have to retrace our footsteps--one of the natural rules of
the walk--but we found an eye of a needle through which the rich men
have to pass to get to the Paradise of the Green Park. It is always
explained to the rich that the eye of the needle in the Gospel is only
a figure of speech, and that there was a needle gate through which a
camel, without too great a hump, could pass, and the alley from St.
James’ Place will just admit the not too stout.
When we got to the fields beyond, the great city played with us and
led us a comic dance along the paths of the Green Park. Westminster
Cathedral was in view. There was a large balloon overhead in the murk
of the London sky, and many people were looking up at it. Our steps
took us along various grand crescents of pathway, and the intention of
the city with regard to our ultimate destination began to seem very
obscure. There were several knotty points as to which was a turning and
which was not, and when I made an artful decision the companion of my
way said to me, “You want to shape things to your own ends.”
“No,” said I. “I want to be faithful and just.”
A stiff discussion set in and we could not get the matter straight.
However, we eventually found ourselves in St. James’ Park, and there
was an issue for us into Birdcage Walk where, in the barracks beyond,
we saw the soldiers at drill, though little did I think at the time
that I was destined to drill there, and be on sentry there myself in
time to come.
So the walk went on, and we passed the London Soldiers’ Home near
Buckingham Gate, made our last purchase at a little shop in Wilfred
Street, passed Westminster City School, and entered Victoria Street by
Palace Street and took an omnibus home.
Thus ended the first lap of our zigzag walk through London, and we
promised ourselves to return to the point where we had left off and
continue this way of chance as soon as a convenient moment came.
Therefore, one Sunday afternoon, and not long after, we took the
omnibus back to the corner of Palace Street and resumed. Fate allowed
us to miss Victoria Station, and its many lines of rail, and we entered
Flatdom and Belgravia, not the best part of Belgravia, but the sadder
and more faded streets, the streets where the lamps of joy had died
down and guttered out. Then we passed by Moreton Terrace to Lupus
Street (“What a name for a London street!” says G. A. B. Dewar, in
his sad tale of _Letty_--“Is not all London wolfish street for our
Lettys?”), Colchester Street, Chichester Street, Claverton Street,
streets of faded grandeur, the Embankment. Then over the river we go by
Chelsea Bridge and find ourselves in a district hitherto unvisited by
us.
We entered Battersea Park and had such a time in its mazes of paths
that we were obliged to make a second rule for our walks, and that was
that henceforward we should enter no parks. A friend to whom we had
communicated the secret of our street adventure had warned us that
if in the near future we should disappear from London life he would
come in search of us to the Maze at Hampton Court, from which, he was
afraid, once entered, we should never extricate ourselves. So we made a
rule: No parks, no mazes. Incidentally, however, we spent a remarkable
and amusing hour in that artificial wilderness of Battersea. If
zigzagging should ever become fashionable I am afraid that most people
will consider it _de rigueur_ to follow out the mazes and labyrinths
to the last intricacy and the correct issue, and that they will not
have the courage to cut the Gordian knot as we did. And starting
pedantically they will finish pedantically--in the literal sense, for
is not _pes_, _pedis_, a foot. There were many Gordian knots which our
footsteps made in the ins and outs of London.
Having given Battersea Park the go-by, we threaded many typically poor
streets, not slum, just better than that. How deplorable a sight! Very
poor and dirty houses which you feel moving to be worse, with broken
windows here and there, and derelict barrows in the roadway. We passed
under gloomy railway arches, so gloomy, as if crimes had been committed
there, arches where at night spooning couples lurk or solitary bodies
furtively eat fish and chips. So we came to a little house which, in
the course of time, we ought to have visited, but probably would not,
and there we called in our unexpected way--a call not without its
sequence in our after-life. This was all in the realm of Lavender
Walk and Battersea Rise. In one of the streets we came on two demure
villas called Alpha and Omega, and very fitly passed from Battersea to
Wandsworth.
Another day, in full fresh air, we walked along Bolingbroke Grove and
the fringe of the Common and Nightingale Lane, through very respectable
Suburbia, where the houses are just so, and there are plaster angels
in the cemeteries. That day we went home from Earlsfield Station.
Next time we passed St. Barnabas’ Church with the niches left in the
bricks for saints. We made our exit from real London, watching from
a railway arch the mad red caterpillars of tube trains going to and
fro. The houses grew higher and the roads more spacious, and great elm
trees were in the front gardens. With wild wind and rolling sky, ’twixt
Putney Heath and the golf links of Wimbledon, we finished up one jolly
afternoon by coming unexpectedly to tea at the house of another friend
to which without jiggery-pokery the zigzag way had led us.
The next afternoon on which we ventured forth we wandered to sad
Merton and the fringe of outer Suburbia. There were fields, but they
had Destiny’s mark upon them; they were doomed to be imprisoned with
brick by the London which was encroaching, encroaching.
Coming to this pseudo-country we made another rule. When footpaths
occur we have the option whether to take them or no. (In future, as I
have observed, all footpaths will no doubt be _de rigueur_.) A footpath
took us to Lower Morden and another footpath took us through much mud,
to farms, to old houses with meadows in front of them, and fine trees
with many angles. The path degenerated from a rolling series of cart
ruts to a faint track along the margin of a field, and faded away at
last into wormrun grass. A dreadful moment. Presently, spying round, we
saw a faded notice on a board--NO FOOTPATH--but,
_Man is man, and matter of his fate,_
and we made another rule.
In short we cut across the fields to a row of houses protected by
fierce-looking barbed-wire entanglements. We got on to another footpath
and the footpath became a road and the road became a grand drive. I
think we got to Blenheim Road, and that this degenerated to a cart
track, and we were led over fields to the West Barnes Road, where trams
and busses were running and we saw scrawled in front of us in big white
letters--“ETERNITY--IN HEAVEN OR HELL. Vote Now.” We voted. Somehow
we got to Raynes Park, and were much pleased with the front garden of
Carter’s Seed Establishment and the many flowerpots and the ice plants.
Next day we reflected that we had become enmeshed in a net of our own
contrivance. Our little plan didn’t at all fit in with the arrangement
of the district. Suburbia, with crocuses in bloom, got rather on our
nerves. By many circumlocutions we returned to Wimbledon. We did not
know the name of the place was Wimbledon, but when we discovered this
melancholy fact we realized that we had blisters on our feet.
Another day we walked to Malden, where we bought an excellent chicken
which we took home in time for supper. Then by Sycamore Grove we
walked to Poplar Grove, and by Poplar Grove we walked to Lime Grove,
and by Lime Grove to Elm Road, by Elm Road to Beech Grove. We took
the option of a footpath and skidded from this region of trees to the
main highway, where the fine Hampton Court electric cars speed their
handsome way. We went straight into Kingston without any more beating
about the bush. We should ordinarily have gone in by the open highroad,
but an alley forestalled that conventionality, and we entered by a wee
way which took us inside the house of the parish, and we saw all the
children playing everywhere upon the floor. Rather slummy. We passed
Milner Villas (built 1902), we passed The Victoria, The Six Bells, and
The Three Tuns, passed the Kingston Grammar School, where the boys
have scarlet caps, and the Bunyan Baptist Tabernacle where the pastor
had the kenspeckle name of Isaac Stalberg. There was a strong smell of
marmalade from St. James’ Works, and Kingston Station was puffing with
locomotive steam. Night had spread its glamour over everything, and we
walked by several slums down to The Jolly Brewers, along paved passages
and in the purlieus of the gas works, by further passages where were no
houses, to the sight of the greenish mud-colored river and the rusty
coppery railway bridge. The old stone bridge of Kingston also stood
beautifully in our view.
When we returned to Kingston there was a lonely but lovely walk along
Thames side, seeking a bridge to give us a turning on the left, with
sun and wind and rain, and ducks falling through the air with a _ssh_,
and cunning swans sailing forward expecting food, and crying gulls. It
was the towing path toward Teddington Lock. The riverside houses came
down to the water with lawns and landing stages, terraces, gardens,
formal beauties. The Thames is a fair stream; we have made it fair.
Once it was otherwise, and England also--unnamed, unloved, wild, woody,
marshy. Man has made it dear unto himself. In the ever freshening
morning we stood on the bridge at Teddington and looked at the waters
rolling over the dam, and the green park land and the gardens beyond.
We wondered very much how we should depart from the other bank of the
river, what direction Fate would have us take. But we never could
guess in advance. Generally we would say: “I believe to-day we shall
land up somewhere in the neighborhood of this place or that,” but our
prognostications were never justified. Thus, who would have expected
that having passed through Teddington we should arrive at the other
side of Kingston stone bridge and be called upon to return to our
starting point!
We wandered through an area of large houses possessing a certain sort
of pomp and gloom, happy in the summer, not so happy in the winter. And
then an area of little Hope Cottages and May Villas. Somewhere in the
neighborhood of Seymour Road and Lower Teddington Road we came to a
highly disputable loop of roadway which betrayed us to the return over
Kingston Bridge.
We felt highly annoyed when we saw this main plank which we were about
to be forced to walk. I, with Machiavellian cunning, proposed to
return to that fatal loop of roadway and reinterpret its bearing, and
we stood on the triangular refuge in the middle of the roadway, and
discussed the point hotly. This is distinctly not a walk on which to
embark with one’s wife. It reveals points of difference. It brings
out the hidden crookedness of character, confirms all obstinacies and
predeterminations. It is possible to get more excited over a trivial
turning (mark you, trivial, a place where three ways meet) than over
the most portentous decision in real life. I imagine it is always
so. In any case, we stood on the triangle at Kingston and argued the
point. Two stout policemen of the cinema picture type stood over on the
pavement, regarding us and nodding their heads together. “What do you
think is their little game?” one was possibly saying to the other, and
they must have viewed me with a considerable amount of suspicion when I
returned to that loop and obtained a heretical reading of the truth to
suit my purpose.
“My dear Watson,” I hear the arch-detective saying, “the simplest
of crimes are always the most difficult to fathom.” I think it would
have puzzled the smartest of plain-clothes men had he followed us on
our marvelous way from Kingston back to Kingston, or from Kingston the
second time to Hampton Court.
“Onward to Hampton,” said I. “We cannot tell what joys await us there.”
We went into Bushey Park, thus infringing one of our own rules, but
there was an excellent road going through, and we liked to see the
deer grazing near us, like cows. Fortune led us into Hampton, that
gay and lively river town, and from Hampton we wandered among gray
reservoirs and green embankments to Sunbury. Possibly Fate intervened
to punish us for our refusal to pass over Kingston Bridge, for soon
we found ourselves clinging to the Thames. It was March by now. The
blackthorn was in bloom, the japonica and the almond were in blossom,
the celandine was in bud, and birds were singing everywhere. At Ashford
there were lots of daffodils, and I remember we passed the girls of
the High School all walking in crocodile and looking very frisky and
fresh, despite the primness of the teacher.
We came to the pretty and rural village of Laleham, Arnold’s village,
with its old church with thickly ivied tower, ancient yew trees, and
graves of the Arnolds and of the village. There were two goodly inns,
the Turk’s Head, the Three Horseshoes. At the latter we had tea, and
we learned that Arnold’s house had been pulled down and the present
National School had been made with the bricks.
We walked along the towing path once more, but it was now a full,
rushing river and was often in flood, well over the bank. The Thames
had a wild aspect, reflecting livid clouds. An icy gale whipped the
stream. There was a rush of snow, and the storm raged across the
whiteness of the horizon like smoke. We sheltered in the coping of
deserted river houses, and in order to make progress when the storm
abated were obliged to walk on the iron rungs of railings. Even so,
we did not escape many a bootful. In this way we passed Penton Hook,
and reached, fairly and truly, Staines, one of the bright capitals of
Father Thames’ kingdom.
At Staines we took the bridge, or rather the bridge took us over to
the other side of the river where we waded all the way to Runnymede
and Magna Carta Island--the way all Kings evidently have to go. But
we signed no charter of rights. Had we worn crowns we stood in more
likelihood of imitating that other remarkable feat of King John, by
losing our symbols of royalty in the flood. We were slaves of the road,
and the road led us into the water. I think we should have got to
Windsor Castle and might conceivably have called on the King himself,
the latest after King John, but the water gods intervened, or Pan had
other things in view. For I was warped, we were warped away to Egham
and Virginia Water. I was able to call on my artist friend, Helen
Cross, who at that time lived at Egham and was doing the emblems for my
idealistic first novel _Priest of the Ideal_; a joyous surprise visit,
for I could not tell her in advance that I was coming. I did not know
whether the zigzag way led to her gate. However, many nice people and
some others are on the zigzag path in the jig-saw puzzle of life.
We went from Egham to Thorpe Green and Englefield Green. We went down
Prune Hill and to Whitehall Farm and the length of many a longish
country road. It’s a long lane that has no turning; in fact we were
often comforted by that proverb and never found it disproved. All roads
in England, except the horrible cul-de-sacs (which, pray you, avoid)
have turnings to the left or to the right, according to the heart or
consonant to the reason. The crookedest has some reason in it, and even
the worst, though it has a way in, has also a way out.
From Virginia Water the zigzag way leads on to Kennaquhair, and further
to a place which I have sometimes heard called the “back of beyond.” At
the same time, it may be said that you will not know the name of the
place until you get there. You can put no destination label on your
rucksack, and if any one asks where you are going, you may tell him in
confidence, whisper the dreadful fact in his ear--“honestly, you do not
know.” The adventure is not getting there, it’s the on-the-way. It is
not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfillment of prophecy,
but the providence of something better than that prophesied. You are
not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving the world
an even chance to see you.
I am still on that zigzag way, pursuing the diagonal between the
reason and the heart; the chart could be made by drawing lines from
star to star in the night sky, not forgetting many dim, shy, fitfully
glimmering out-of-the-way stars, which one would not purpose visiting.
I said we would not enter a maze, but we have made one and are in one,
a maze of Andalusia and Dalmatia, of Anahuac and Anatolia, of Seven
Rivers Land and Seven Kings. The first to the left, the next to the
right! No blind alleys. A long way. _Beaucoup zigzag, eh!_
THE END
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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