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Title: The gentle art of tramping

Author: Stephen Graham

Release date: August 4, 2023 [eBook #71340]
Most recently updated: September 9, 2024

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

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

[Pg 1]

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[Pg 2] 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,[Pg 3] 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[Pg 4] 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[Pg 5] 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[Pg 6] 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.

[Pg 7]

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[Pg 8] 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[Pg 9] 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[Pg 10] 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[Pg 11] 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[Pg 12] 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.[Pg 13] 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[Pg 14] 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.

[Pg 15]

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.[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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[Pg 18] 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[Pg 19] 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[Pg 20] 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[Pg 21] 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.

[Pg 22]

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[Pg 23] 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[Pg 24] 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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] 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[Pg 27] 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[Pg 28] 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.

[Pg 29]

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.

[Pg 30]

“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[Pg 31] 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.

[Pg 32]

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[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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[Pg 35] 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.[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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.

[Pg 38]

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[Pg 39] 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[Pg 40] 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[Pg 41] 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[Pg 42] 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[Pg 43] 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[Pg 44] 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[Pg 45] 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.

[Pg 46]

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.

[Pg 47]

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.

[Pg 48]

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?”[Pg 49] 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[Pg 50] 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;[Pg 51] 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[Pg 52] 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.

[Pg 53]

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.

[Pg 54]

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[Pg 55] 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.

[Pg 56]

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[Pg 57] 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[Pg 58] 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[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] 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[Pg 61] 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,[Pg 62] 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[Pg 63] 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[Pg 64] 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[Pg 65] 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[Pg 66] 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.

[Pg 67]

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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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.[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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[Pg 72] 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.[Pg 73] 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[Pg 74] 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[Pg 75] 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[Pg 76] 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[Pg 77] 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.

[Pg 78]

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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 80] 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

[Pg 81]

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[Pg 82] 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[Pg 83] 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[Pg 84] 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 our 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[Pg 85] 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[Pg 86] 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[Pg 87] 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.”

[Pg 88]

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[Pg 89] 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[Pg 90] 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[Pg 91] 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[Pg 92] 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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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.[Pg 95] 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[Pg 96] 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.

[Pg 97]

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[Pg 98] 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.

[Pg 99]

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[Pg 100] 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[Pg 101] 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.

[Pg 102]

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.

[Pg 103]

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[Pg 104] 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[Pg 105] 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[Pg 106] 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[Pg 107] 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[Pg 108] 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[Pg 109] 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[Pg 110] 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[Pg 111] 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[Pg 112] 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[Pg 113] 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.

[Pg 114]

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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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,[Pg 120] 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.

[Pg 121]

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[Pg 122] 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[Pg 123] 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[Pg 124] 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[Pg 125] 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[Pg 126] 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[Pg 127] 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.

[Pg 128]

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[Pg 129] 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[Pg 130] 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[Pg 131] 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.

[Pg 132]

“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[Pg 133] 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[Pg 134] 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.

[Pg 135]

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.[Pg 136] 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.

[Pg 137]

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[Pg 138] 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[Pg 139] 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.[Pg 140] 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[Pg 141] 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.

[Pg 142]

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[Pg 143] 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[Pg 144] 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[Pg 145] 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[Pg 146] 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[Pg 147] 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[Pg 148] 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[Pg 149] 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[Pg 150] 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.[Pg 151] 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!

[Pg 152]

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[Pg 153] 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[Pg 154] 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[Pg 155] 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.[Pg 156] 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[Pg 157] 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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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!

[Pg 160]

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[Pg 161] 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[Pg 162] 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.

[Pg 163]

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[Pg 164] 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[Pg 165] 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[Pg 166] 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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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.

[Pg 169]

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.[Pg 170] 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[Pg 171] 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[Pg 172] 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.

[Pg 173]

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[Pg 174] 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[Pg 175] 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[Pg 176] 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[Pg 177] 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.

[Pg 178]

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.

[Pg 179]

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[Pg 180] 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[Pg 181] 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[Pg 182] 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[Pg 183] 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[Pg 184] 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[Pg 185] 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[Pg 186] 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[Pg 187] 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[Pg 188] 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.

[Pg 189]

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[Pg 190] 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[Pg 191] 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[Pg 192] 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[Pg 193] 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[Pg 194] 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.

[Pg 195]

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[Pg 196] 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[Pg 197] 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[Pg 198] 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[Pg 199] 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[Pg 200] 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.”

[Pg 201]

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[Pg 202] 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.

[Pg 203]

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[Pg 204] 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[Pg 205] 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.

[Pg 206]

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,[Pg 207] 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.

[Pg 208]

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[Pg 209] 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,[Pg 210] 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[Pg 211] 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,[Pg 212] 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[Pg 213] 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.

[Pg 214]

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[Pg 215] 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[Pg 216] 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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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[Pg 219] 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.

[Pg 220]

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.

[Pg 221]

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.[Pg 222] 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[Pg 223] 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[Pg 224] 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[Pg 225] 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[Pg 226] 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[Pg 227] 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[Pg 228] 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[Pg 229] 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[Pg 230] 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[Pg 231] 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[Pg 232] 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.

[Pg 233]

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[Pg 234] 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.

[Pg 235]

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[Pg 236] 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[Pg 237] 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[Pg 238] 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[Pg 239] 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.

[Pg 240]

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[Pg 241] 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[Pg 242] 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[Pg 243] 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[Pg 244] 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[Pg 245] 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[Pg 246] 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.

[Pg 247]

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[Pg 248] 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[Pg 249] 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.[Pg 250] 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.

[Pg 251]

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[Pg 252] 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[Pg 253] 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[Pg 254] 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[Pg 255] 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[Pg 256] 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[Pg 257] 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[Pg 258] 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[Pg 259] 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[Pg 260] 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[Pg 261] 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 master of his fate,

and we made another rule.

In short we cut across the fields to a row[Pg 262] 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[Pg 263] 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[Pg 264] 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[Pg 265] 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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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[Pg 268] 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,[Pg 269] 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,[Pg 270] 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[Pg 271] 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:

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.

Perceived typographical errors have been changed.

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