I write of travelling companions in general, and not in particular,
making of them a composite photograph, as it were, and finding what
they have in common and what is their type; and in the first place I
find them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel
without a set companion who goes with them from Charing Cross all over
the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in
this: as Balzac said of marriage, “What a commentary on human life,
that human beings must associate to endure it.” So it is with many who
cannot endure to travel alone: and some will positively advertise for
another to go with them.
In a glade of the Sierra Nevada, which, for awful and, as it were,
permanent beauty seemed not to be of this world, I came upon a man
slowly driving along the trail a ramshackle cart, in which were a few
chairs and tables and bedding. He had a long grey beard and wild eyes;
he was old, and very small like a gnome, but he had not the gnome’s
good-humour. I asked him where he was going, and I slowed down, so as
to keep pace with his ridiculous horse. For some time he would not
answer me, and then he said, “Out of this.” He added, “I am tired of
it.” And when I asked him, “Of what?” his only answer was an
old-fashioned oath. But from further complaints which he made I
gathered that what he was tired of was clearing forests, digging
ground, paying debts, and in general living upon this unhappy earth. He
did not like me very much, and though I would willingly have learned
more, he would tell me nothing further, so when we got to a place where
there was a little stream I went on and left him.
I have never forgotten the sadness of this man. Where he was going, and
what he expected to do, or what opportunities he had, I have never
understood. Though some years after, in quite another place—namely,
Steyning, in Sussex—I came upon just such another, whose quarrel was
with the English climate, the rich and the poor, and the whole
constitution of God’s earth. These are the advantages of travel, that
one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one
feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.
Thus in a village called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no
man has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a
fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of
Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over
and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to
support a priest. “The priests” he assured me, “say the most ridiculous
things. They narrate the most impossible fables. They affirm what
cannot possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science.
If I am ill, can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to
build, or how to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless
and a lying mouth, why should I feed him?”
I questioned this man very closely, and discovered that in his view the
world slowly changed from worse to better, and to accelerate this
process enlightenment alone was needed. “But what do these brutes,” he
said, alluding to his fellow-countrymen, “know of enlightenment? They
do not even make roads, because the priests forbid them.”
I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may
imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a
bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further
found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible
uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His
life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by the
monstrous superstitions of others.
Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man
who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose
politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It
was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old
Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three
thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I
had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness.
I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about
Ulysses, when this man came slouching up, with his hands in the pockets
of his enormous corduroy trousers, and, looking at me with some
contempt from above (for he was standing, I was sitting), he began to
converse with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and
so on to wealth and poverty; and thus it was I came upon his views,
which were that there should be a sort of break up, and houses ought to
be burned, and things smashed, and people killed; and over and above
this, it should be made plain that no one had a right to govern: not
the people, because they were always being bamboozled; obviously not
the rich; least of all, the politicians, to whom he justly applied the
most derogatory epithets. He waved his arm out in the darkness at the
Phoceans, at the half-million of Marseilles, and said, “All that should
disappear.” The constructive side of his politico-economic scheme was
negative. He was a practical man. None of your fine theories for him.
One step at a time. Let there be a Chambardement—that is, a noisy
collapse, and he would think about what to do afterwards.
His was not the narrow, deductive mind. He was objective and concrete.
Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to
prevent people like me, who sit up at night, from doing mischief in the
harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-economic scheme—the
main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could
understand them—we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in
my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic, and would have
no such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the Phenomenon
of the Tides; it was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of
the moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty
or forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently
admitted that that was romantic exaggeration, and that five or six was
the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the
little incident broke up our friendship, and he shuffled away. He did
not like having his leg pulled.
There are many others I remember. Those I have written about elsewhere
I am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburgh, who first expounded to
me how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then
objected to personal questions about his own; the German officer man at
Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute
details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met
upon the Appian Way, who told the most abominable lies; and another man
who met me outside Oxford station during the Vac. and offered to show
me the sights of the town for a consideration, which he did, but I
would not pay him because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a
few searching questions upon the exact site of Bocardo (of which he had
never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the
site of the city. Moreover, he said that Trinity was St. John’s, which
was rubbish.
Then there was another man who travelled with me from Birmingham,
pressed certain tracts upon me, and wanted to charge me sixpence each
at Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few I should
exceed.