THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM
THE GENTLE ART OF
TRAMPING
THE DIVIDING LINE OF
EUROPE
IN QUEST OF EL DORADO
TRAMPING WITH A POET
IN THE ROCKIES
EUROPE-WHITHER BOUND?
THE CHALLENGE OF THE DEAD
CHILDREN OF THE SLAVES
A PRIVATE IN THE GUARDS
THE QUEST OF THE FACE
RUSSIA IN 1916
PRIEST OF THE IDEAL
THROUGH RUSSIAN CENTRAL
ASIA
THE WAY OF MARTHA
AND THE WAY OF MARY
RUSSIA AND THE WORLD
WITH POOR EMIGRANTS
TO AMERICA
WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS
TO JERUSALEM
CHANGING RUSSIA
A TRAMP’S SKETCHES
UNDISCOVERED RUSSIA
A VAGABOND IN THE
CAUCASUS
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
BY
STEPHEN GRAHAM
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
MCMXXVI
COPYRIGHT--1926--BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER HEADINGS BY R. H. HULL
CHAPTER PAGE
I WE SET OUT 1
II BOOTS 7
III THE KNAPSACK 15
IV CLOTHES 22
V CARRYING MONEY 32
VI THE COMPANION 38
VII WHITHER AWAY? 47
VIII THE ART OF IDLENESS 78
IX EMBLEMS OF TRAMPING 88
X THE FIRE 97
XI THE BED 103
XII THE DIP 114
XIII DRYING AFTER RAIN 121
XIV MARCHING SONGS 128
XV SCROUNGING 135
XVI SEEKING SHELTER 142
XVII THE OPEN 152
XVIII THE TRAMP AS COOK 160
XIX TOBACCO 173
XX BOOKS 179
XXI LONG HALTS 189
XXII FOREIGNERS 195
XXIII THE ARTIST’S NOTEBOOK 208
XXIV MAPS 233
XXV TRESPASSERS’ WALK 240
XXVI A ZIGZAG WALK 251
THE GENTLE ART
OF TRAMPING
[Illustration]
CHAPTER ONE
WE SET OUT
It is a gentle art; know how to tramp and you know how to live. Manners
makyth man, and tramping makyth manners. Know how to meet your fellow
wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of Nature and how to be
active to its wildness and its rigor. Tramping brings one to reality.
If you would have a portrait of Man you must not depict him in high hat
and carrying in one hand a small shiny bag, nor would one draw him in
gnarled corduroys and with red handkerchief about his neck, nor with
lined brow on a high bench watching a hand that is pushing a pen,
nor with pick and shovel on the road. You cannot show him carrying a
rifle, you dare not put him in priest’s garb with conventional cross
on breast. You will not point to King or Bishop with crown or miter.
But most fittingly you will show a man with staff in hand and burden on
his shoulders, striving onward from light to darkness upon an upward
road, shading his eyes with his hand as he seeks his way. You will show
a figure something like that posthumous picture of Tolstoy, called
“Tolstoy pilgrimaging toward eternity.”
So when you put on your old clothes and take to the road, you make
at least a right gesture. You get into your right place in the world
in the right way. Even if your tramping expedition is a mere jest, a
jaunt, a spree, you are apt to feel the benefits of getting into a
right relation toward God, Nature, and your fellow man. You get into an
air that is refreshing and free. You liberate yourself from the tacit
assumption of your everyday life.
What a relief to escape from being voter, taxpayer, authority on old
brass, brother of man who is an authority on old brass, author of best
seller, uncle of author of best seller.
What a relief to cease being for a while a grade-three clerk, or
grade-two clerk who has reached his limit, to cease to be identified by
one’s salary or by one’s golf handicap. It is undoubtedly a delicious
moment when Miles the gardener seeing you coming along in tramping
rig omits to touch his hat as you pass. Of course it is part of the
gentle art not to be offended. It is no small part of the gentle art of
tramping to learn to accept the simple and humble rôle and not to crave
respect, honor, obeisance. It is a mistake to take to the wilderness
clad in new plus-fours, sports jacket, West-End tie, jeweled tie pin,
or in gaiters, or carrying a silver-topped cane. One should not carry
visiting cards, but try to forget the three-storied house remembering
Diogenes and his tub.
I suppose one should draw a distinction between professional tramping
and just tramping, especially as this whole book is to be called _The
Gentle Art of Tramping_. I am not writing of the American hobo, nor
of the British casual, nor of railroaders and beach combers or other
enemies of society--“won’t works” and parasites of the charitable.
While among these there are many very strange and interesting
exceptions, yet in general they are not highly estimable people, nor is
their way of life beautiful or worth imitation. They learn little on
their wanderings beyond how to cadge, how to steal, how to avoid dogs
and the police. They are not pilgrims but outlaws, and many would be
highway robbers had they the vitality and the pluck necessary to hold
up wayfarers. Most of them are but poor walkers, so that the word tramp
is often misapplied to them.
The tramp is a friend of society; he is a seeker, he pays his way if he
can. One includes in the category “tramp” all true Bohemians, pilgrims,
explorers afoot, walking tourists, and the like. Tramping is a way
of approach, to Nature, to your fellowman, to a nation, to a foreign
nation, to beauty, to life itself. And it is an art, because you do not
get into the spirit of it directly you leave your back door and make
for the distant hill. There is much to learn, there are illusions to be
overcome. There are prejudices and habits to be shaken off.
First of all there is the physical side: you need to study equipment,
care of health, how to sleep out of doors, what to eat, how to cook on
the camp fire. These things you teach yourself. For the rest Nature
becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn what is beautiful
and who you are and what is your special quest in life and whither you
should go. You relax in the presence of the great healer and teacher,
you turn your back on civilization and most of what you learned in
schools, museums, theaters, galleries. You live on manna vouchsafed to
you daily, miraculously. You stretch out arms for hidden gifts, you
yearn toward the moonbeams and the stars, you listen with new ears to
bird’s song and the murmurs of trees and streams. If ever you were
proud or quarrelsome or restless, the inflammation goes down, fanned by
the coolness of humility and simplicity. From day to day you keep your
log, your daybook of the soul, and you may think at first that it is a
mere record of travel and of facts; but something else will be entering
into it, poetry, the new poetry of your life, and it will be evident to
a seeing eye that you are gradually becoming an artist in life, you are
learning the gentle art of tramping, and it is giving you an artist’s
joy in creation.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWO
BOOTS
Boots and the Man I sing! For you cannot tramp without boots. The
commonest distress of hoboes is thinness of sole.
_Jog on, jog on the foot-path way
And merrily hint the stile-a
The merry heart goes all the way
The sad tires in a mile-a._
The sad heart, in this case, often has just a thin sole. Two friends
set out last spring to tramp from Bavaria to Venice, luggage in
advance, knapsack on shoulder. But they had not the right sort of
boots, and they lingered in the mountain inns quaffing steins of brown
beer to take their thoughts away from their toes. They are in those
mountains yet.
You should have leather-lined boots with most substantial soles. They
may squeak, they may feel clumsy as sabots when you first put them
on. They may feel like comfortable baskets on your feet. Slight and
elegant boots seldom stand the strain, or, if they do, your feet do
not. I have tramped in little steel-soled boots in the Caucasus, and in
plaited birch-bark boots, _lapti_, in the North, but I do not recommend
novelties in footwear. It is difficult to better a new pair of Army
boots. But the best I ever had were a pair of chrome leather fishing
boots which I once bought in a wayside shop in the Catskill Mountains.
My feet were in a poor state, having got frozen by night and blistered
by day in a disgusting pair of light boots. I got into these capacious
fishing boots one evening and never felt another twinge all the way
to Chicago. As regards Army boots, men suffered on the march because
often they were wearing other men’s boots worn and shaped already to a
different pair of feet and then patched and cobbled. One cannot with
advantage wear dead men’s boots.
Of course, one should go gradually with a really stout pair of boots.
Beware of the zest of the first and second day’s tramping. It is so
easy to cripple oneself on the second day out. You dispose of the first
surface blisters, and then you get the deeper, more painful, blisters,
and those you cannot squeeze. They intend to squeeze you. One should
wear thick woolen socks, or even two pairs of socks at the same time.
When the socks wear out one can even increase the number of pairs to
three, though it is better to discard socks that have worn to hard
shreds. I do not believe in soaping socks, though it does not hurt to
put them on damp. One should try to get a dip every day, in mountain
stream or lake. An ideal combination is sea-bathing and tramping. The
salt-water exercise certainly helps the feet. It takes several days to
get town-nurtured feet into condition. With that in mind one should not
overdo it at the beginning. Mile averages are a curse. So are definite
programs. Like a good cricketer, you should play yourself in before
you begin to score.
Of all tramping the most delightful is in the mountains; the most
trying is along great highways. Both have their place in the ideal
tramp’s life. But experience teaches where the most fun is to be found.
Mountain walking is really much less tiring because, first of all,
there is no dust, then there is more contrast and mental distraction,
and last, not least, one’s feet hit the earth at varying angles,
employing more muscles. The sole does not hit a road with monotonous
regularity upon the same dry spot of blistering skin.
I find that in the mountains a boot of rather lighter sole is
preferable, with either brads or Phillips rubbers. One must
nevertheless beware of shoddy. After the second scramble amid rocks I
have seen the whole sole of a boot part company with the upper. I have
seen the heel come off. Well established lines of workingmen’s boots
are safer than fair-seeming boots for clerks. On the other hand, boots
whose nails come through are a nuisance, digging holes in the soles of
one’s feet. Boots which are letting iron in should be hammered inside
with a stone, but if, as often happens, some sharp nail edge cannot
be smoothed it is as well to put in a certain amount of paper till a
cobbler can be found to right the wrong.
Metal plates, “bradies,” on the outside of the soles are of little
use as they get very smooth and slippery. Brads also wear to be more
slippery than plain leather. The new type of very hard rubber patches
made by Phillips and others are ideal for climbing. It is to be
remembered that tramping across country in the mountains one comes to
steep and dangerous descents, and upon occasion one risks one’s neck on
the grip of one’s feet. That is where the Army type of rubbers comes
in. As an auxiliary it is not a bad plan to have a light pair of tennis
shoes in the pack, as you can get over some obstacles in prehensile
rubber shoes which one could never negotiate in boots. But hard rubber
bars across one’s leather soles are in any case very good. These
rubbers would “draw” your feet on an exposed level road. But in the
mountains one’s feet keep cooler, and the comfort of a safe grip on
slippery rocks is not to be disdained. When in the Rockies with Vachel
Lindsay he had bradded boots, but they got very shiny and smooth, and
he could slide in them. In certain dangerous descents we made I could
see that much-worn bradded boots were clearly at a disadvantage.
It is a good plan on a long tramp to carry a duplicate pair of
boots in the pack. While it adds to the weight carried there is a
counter-balancing pleasure in a change of footgear now and then. It
is moreover possible that in wild country one may wear out one solid
pair of boots in a month or so. Uppers have a way of bursting in the
mountains, especially when one indulges in rushing down great slopes of
silt with myriads of knife-edged little stones. By the way, one should
beware of toasting one’s feet in front of camp fires, or of leaving
one’s boots too near the embers when sleeping out. If not using them as
the foundation of a pillow, it is well to put them in a fresh and airy
place, smearing a little grease on them perhaps, to keep the uppers
soft and pliable. Beware, however, of the grease getting near the
bread.
Boots are, of course, not a poetic subject. Kipling used the word to
express the boredom of route marching:
_I’ve marched six weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
It is not fire, devils, dark or anything
But boots, boots, boots, boots, boots._...
The boot, like the thumbscrew, was an instrument of torture of the
Inquisition. But nevertheless, it must be remembered, old boots bring
good luck. That is why one ties them to the hymeneal coach. On life’s
tramp together, may the blissful pair have the comfort and easy-going
happiness of a well-worn boot.
The tramp gets affectionately attached to his boots when they have
served him long and well, and may even wax patriotic in looking at them
and say, like Dickens in America, “This, sir, is a British boot.”
Poems addressed to boots are hard to find, and one must assume
that poets for the most part do not tramp. For if they tramp there
inevitably comes the pathetic moment when looking upon discarded boots
by starlight the poet says: “Oh, boot, have you not served me well, old
boot, old friend!” There is a lost poetry in boots--“lines addressed
to my favorite boots,” “lines written after taking off my most cruel
boots,” “lines written before putting on my boots.” The last, on the
occasion of putting them on swollen and blistered feet, might be the
occasion of a long, reflective poem.
But enough, we at least have our boots on, and are ready to proceed
with the story of our tramping art.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER THREE
THE KNAPSACK
It is wonderful how much you can carry when it is for pleasure.
Soldiers grumble like camels at the loads put on their shoulders. Under
some one’s orders they shall march with packs on their backs to such a
point to-day, to such another point
_With your best foot first and the road a-sliding past,
An’ every bloomin’ camping ground exactly like the last._
The camel groans, the soldier grouses, but the gay tramp puts ever
something more into his capacious rucksack for pleasure or profit.
There’s a hunk of tobacco, there’s his favorite volume of poems, his
sketchbook--his danger is in putting in too much and not putting in the
right things.
I assume he is to be equipped for sleeping _à la belle étoile_. I
may mention one or two things he might overlook. First, the pack
itself should be well made. I have found in the past that Germans and
Austrians make the best rucksacks, and even the best in London seemed
to be imported from these countries. The one I have now was purchased
some years ago in Vienna, but I think it was the best to be found
there. There were many shoddy ones about. The shopkeeper pretended that
the one I chose was not for sale, and I spent twelve hours getting it.
Not that it is remarkable, but it is a genuinely well made article.
Exterior pockets which will not burst are a necessary; interior pockets
are also useful.
The worst of the interior of a rucksack is that after a while
everything in it gets mixed. Spare boots and linen get sprinkled
with coffee; different foods mingle. Some paper wrapper bursts and
the sugar spills over everything. Then writing papers, books, or
notebooks get greasy. But this is avoided if one provides oneself
with half-a-dozen cotton bags which tie with tapes. If these are not
obtainable at home they are to be found in some sort of form at a
Woolworth’s or a cheap draper’s. It is a small detail, but a matter of
comfort: if you feel so disposed you wash out these little cotton bags
when they get dirty.
Another valuable extra to put in the rucksack is a few yards of
mosquito netting which can be bought quite cheaply, sometimes called
brides’ veil in the shops, sometimes leno, sometimes butter-muslin.
With this you can defy the mosquito at nights, and by day you can
enjoy the luxury of a sun-bath siesta watching the flies which cannot
bite your nose. Apropos of the mosquito netting the choice of hat is
important. Do not take a cap. You need a brim. And do not take a straw
hat. You cannot lie down comfortably with a straw hat on. A tweed hat
is best. The brim has a double use. It shields your eyes from the sun,
but also, when you lie down where flies and mosquitoes abound, you had
best sleep in your hat and use the brim to lift the mosquito net an
inch from your face. N.B.--A tramping hat does not get old enough to
throw away. The old ones are the best. Of course, once you have slept
a night wearing your hat it is not much more use for town wear. It has
become more tramp than you are.
I am in favor of carrying a blanket. It is less cumbersome than
a sleeping sack and more hygienic. If, however, insects are very
troublesome, as in the tropics, and there are “land crabs” and
scorpions and tarantulas and what not about, a light sleeping sack may
be improvised by sewing together three sides of a pair of small sheets.
This I have done: it gets rather airless and smelly. It is best to turn
it inside out in the morning and give it plenty of sun. But a blanket
will do: take a couple if you are chilly. This makes weight on the
back, but it is also a softening comfort and fits the rucksack upon the
shoulders on a long hike.
There is no point whatever in carrying an overcoat, though a waterproof
cape or an oilskin comes in useful. A blanket and a cape form a useful
combination. One can sleep on the cape with the blanket over one.
In one of the little cotton bags you will carry your toilet requisites,
soap and towel and comb. Some men like to let their beard grow on a
long tramp and thus dispense with razor and brush. Still, there are few
things more refreshing than the cold shave at dawn, the rushing stream,
the lather scattering itself on ferns and flowers, the brandishing arm,
the freshening cheek.
A vital consideration at that time in the morning is the coffeepot.
I am in favor of carrying an ordinary metal _cafetière_; some prefer
a kettle, but it bumps too much on the back; others a pail, but the
water in it is apt to get smoky. In the United States there are so many
clean empty cans lying about that it is perhaps unnecessary to carry
anything of the kind. The cowboys never carry anything in the nature
of a coffeepot. They confidently reckon on finding a lard can. Indeed,
if you make camp in the West or South where some have camped before
you, you may find carefully preserved the coffee can used by the last
party. All America is camping out in the summer, so it is a simple
matter to find the black patch of some one else’s erstwhile sleeping
pitch.
However, I dislike the places where people have been before, their
orange peel and biscuit wrappings, their trampled grass and jaded
scrub. Give me a virginal patch of woodland or moorland, or a happy
grassy corner of the long dusty road, and there startle the earwigs and
the birds with the crackle of a first bonfire. Therefore, I consider it
ideal to take a coffeepot with you, a metal one that gets blacker and
blacker as you go along. It can best be carried outside the knapsack,
angling from the center strap and resting in the hollow between the
bulging pockets.
I had forgotten the enamel mug, the knife and the spoon. But you must
not. Do not carry a fork; it is unnecessary. A small enamel plate is
useful. Pepper and salt mixed to taste may be carried in a little bag.
Some sort of safe box for butter is to be recommended. Take plenty of
old handkerchiefs or worst quality new ones; they come in useful.
Remember a glove for taking the coffeepot off the fire. If you do not
you will be burning all your handkerchiefs, your hat, your shirt, or
anything else that you may be tempted to use. There are occasions when
the coffeepot seems to get almost red hot before it boils. There are
giddy moments when it loses its balance and will topple over and spill
its precious contents unless you are ready to dash in with gloved hand
to save it.
For the rest of the contents of your knapsack you will be guided by
your special desires and aims. Loaded and bulging in the morning, it
will gradually feel lighter and look more shapely as movement sorts the
various things into their best positions. At night you turn out many
things and use what remains as a pillow. Some carry a pillow, but it is
too bulky. An air pillow is not to be despised, but it generally seems
to let you down during the night. Your knapsack will grudge being left
in the dew. It will feel happier with your head resting upon it.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FOUR
CLOTHES
1. ATTIRE
“Needy knife grinder,” said the poet, “your hat has got a hole in it,
and so have your breeches.” That was not necessary. You should carry
a housemaid’s tidy, or whatever it may be called, the tiny compendium
of needles and thread sometimes offered upon hotel dressing tables,
and sew up the holes. I fear the knife grinder’s hat was of felt, a
broken billycock hat, but we tramps have nothing to do with felt hats.
The bowlers and the derbys and the trilbys are not our style. There
was a time when men tramped in shovel hats, and I can see Parson Adams
trudging along, his lank locks crowned with this lugubrious headgear.
And Abraham Lincoln walked abroad in his rusty topper. But we have
changed all that. We tramp in tweed hats or caps or without hats at
all. We do not feel superior, but we know we are more comfortable.
Also we no longer wear cravats. In fact, a collar and tie may be
secreted in a pocket of the knapsack to be unwillingly put on when it
is necessary to visit a post office or a bank, a priest, or the police.
But otherwise we go forth with free necks and throats, top button of
shirt preferably undone.
And we do not tramp in spats or gaiters, nor in fancy waistcoats. The
waistcoat is an article of attire which can be cheerfully eliminated as
entirely unwanted. Undervests also are rather _de trop_. There are many
things a man can shed. I am not qualified to say what a woman can do
without, but she needs no hat with feathers, no hatpin. As I think of
her in the wilderness it seems to me she can get rid of everything she
commonly wears with the exception perhaps of a hair net, and then dress
herself afresh in “rational attire.” The green and brown misses in the
“lovely garnish of boys” are now so familiar in the United States that
it is almost superfluous to describe them. A khaki blouse and knickers,
green putties or stockings, and a stout pair of shoes are almost
everything; very simple, very practical, and if one must think of looks
while on tramp, not unbecoming.
Materials are more important than shapes. A homespun, a tweed, a
cord, are better than flannel or serge or shoddy cloth. Tramping is
destructive of material; sun, rain, camp-fire sparks, and hot smoke
seem to reduce the resistance of cloth very rapidly. After a month, a
sort of dry rot will show itself, and as you go through a wood every
rotten stick or tiny thorn you happen to touch will tear a tatter in
your trousers. It can be annoying and amusing. “When I am tired of
looking at the view I look at your trousers,” said Lindsay to me, in
the Rockies, he in the virtuous superiority of green corduroy; I
in old clothes which I thought I might as well wear out on tramp. I
certainly wore them out: in fact, we had to turn from the wilds towards
civilization, and the poet bought me a ready-to-wear pair of cowboy’s
bags.
But workmen’s trousers, suspended by workmen’s braces, are the best.
Braces marked “For Policemen and Firemen” are sold in the United
States. They are undoubtedly stout and will stand the strain of many
jumps. You will have a cosy feeling of nothing defective in your
straps, a feeling akin to that of a good conscience--much to be desired.
What remains? A jacket. It may as well be a tweed one with half-a-dozen
roomy pockets. I once saw a character reader at a fair who said: “Show
me your hat and I will tell you who you are.” He had plenty to guide
him. I gave him mine. He said: “You, sir, are a thinker. Your thoughts
have been oozing out of your head and have spoilt an excellent lining.”
He held my hat up to the crowd. “This is the hat,” said he, “of a man
who buys at the best shop, but wears his hat a very long while. He is
both proud and economical, and is probably a Scotsman.”
Had I taken off my jacket he could probably have told me a good deal
more; made bulgy with books, yet pinched by the clips of fountain pens,
ink-stained, wine-stained, sun-bleached and rain-washed, fretted by
camp-fire sparks, frayed and yet not torn by envious thorns; the whole
well stretched, well slept in, well tramped in. Other parts of one’s
attire wear out, come and go, but the jacket remains, granted a good
sound indestructible jacket.
Such a jacket is warm wear. No, not in the morning, not for some hours
after sunrise; not in the evening, not during the twilight hours.
During the heat of the day if you wish you can take it off and, tying
it into a neat bundle, fix it to the knapsack. It is pleasant to have
the air break fresh on one’s perspiring chest. But the warm jacket is
your friend, and after two days’ out of home you understand it. The
stout jacket stands by you in the hours when you need support. You soon
get used to its weight, and its thickness helps to bed the knapsack
between the shoulders.
Carlyle wrote a book on clothes, the inwardness of which was that man,
the straggling bifurcate animal, discovered in Eden that he was really
ugly and a shame to be seen, and he has been trying to hide himself
ever since, in fig leaves and phrases, phylacteries and philosophies.
That shall provide the tramp’s motto: a fig leaf and a phrase. But, oh,
Sartor, oh, Mr. Mallaby-Deeley, a stout fig leaf!
2. MOTLEY
“_Invest me in my motley; give me leave to speak my mind.... Motley’s
the only wear._”
The privilege of the Court Fool is that he can tell the plain ordinary
truth to the King, even with the executioner standing by, ax in hand,
and risk not his head. But he must be wearing his cap and bells. Let
him come but dressed as a courtier and make the same painful jest,
and the headsman will step forth to relieve him of his poor-quality
thinking piece. The Greek who was employed to tell his Alexander
after each glorious triumph that he too must die, must have worn some
shred of motley. You cannot say that sort of thing without the dress
which liberates. It was the same with Diogenes. He got in so many home
truths in an intolerant age because he lived in a tub. That tub was his
motley. Our tramps’ gear is ours.
There are clothes which rob you of your liberty, and other clothes
which give it you again. In the sinister garb called morning dress you
are a close prisoner of civilization; but in the tramp’s morning dress
you do not need to “mind your step.” Oh, the difference between one
who has worn silk in the Temple and the same man lying in a cave in
smoke-scented tweeds. Of course, it takes some time to break him down.
He is still wearing a shadow topper and invisible cutaway coat weeks
after he has started into the wilds. The same with a lady of fashion;
she puts a hat over the glory of her hair to hide the primitive
Eve--she will be still thinking of this false headgear long after she
has changed into a forest nymph.
Motley has a double advantage not used by Shakespeare in his admirable
clownings. It not only perhaps enables a man to jest shrewdly with the
prince; it enables a prince, if he will put it on, to talk freely with
an ordinary poor man. The cat can look at the King and the King can
look at the cat.
Class is the most disgusting institution of civilization, because it
puts barriers between man and man. The man from the first-class cabin
cannot make himself at home in the steerage. He can have conversations
with his fellow man down there, but fellow man will be standing to
attention like private in presence of officer, or standing defiant
like prisoner in presence of a condemnatory court. It is not the fault
of the bottom dog, the proletarian. He scents a manner. Your bearing
cannot be adjusted to equality. You are not on the level with him.
You cannot rid your voice of its kind note. “Damn it, don’t be kind
to me,” say the eyes of the third-class passenger. But you cannot get
rid of that absurd, unwanted, kind look--that “tell me, my dear man”
expression.
_“How are you, aged man,” I said,
“And how is it you live?”
But his answer trickled through my brain
Like water through a sieve._
Yes, whatever he replies will seem a little bit irrelevant, like the
answers to the visiting rector going the round of his parish, he having
the next drag hunt on his mind.
But in the tramps’ motley you can say what you like, ask what questions
you like, free from the taint of class.
It also puts you right with regard to yourself. You see yourself as
others see you, and that is a refreshing grace wafted in upon an
opinionated mind. The freedom of speech and action and judgment which
it gives you will breed that boldness of bearing which, after all, is
better than mere good manners. It allows you to walk on your heels as
well as on your toes, and to eat without a finicking assortment of
forks. It aids your digestion of truth and of food, and aids nutrition
as good air does good porridge. All that highfalutin’ advice which
Kipling wrote in “If” may be left in its glum red lettering pasted on
your bedroom wall, if you will only put on your tramp’s motley.
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The answer to that question
is not adequately stated in that “If” of talking to mobs without losing
your virtue and to Kings without losing the common touch, or in the
“If” of making a heap of all your winnings and staking them in a game
of pitch and toss. The answer of the Evangel is Take up the Cross and
Follow Me, which may be interpreted indulgently for our purpose here:
Take up thy staff and the common burden for thy shoulders, the motley
of the pilgrim and the tramp.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FIVE
CARRYING MONEY
“Put money in thy purse,” is often given to the young man as a jewel
of wisdom. But we give the contrary advice: take it out. The less you
carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will
experience. Of course, if you have a strong enough will to resist
temptation you can carry what you like, but even then you are at the
disadvantage of being worth a robber’s attention.
I sometimes pride myself that I set out for Jerusalem with the Russian
pilgrims having ten pounds, and that I brought back five of the pounds
to Russia. The most I paid for lodging in Jerusalem was three farthings
a day. Had I quit for a hotel I should have lost most of the experience
of the pilgrimage. When I made my study of the emigrants to America I
went steerage and came back steerage. I stayed in a workman’s lodging
house in New York and I tramped to Chicago on less than a dollar a day.
Of course it is very expensive in America, always was, unless you care
to work your way. For my part, I think working one’s way even more
expensive.
A shilling a day ought to be ample for tramping in any part of the
world--if you cook on your own camp fire and sleep out. But America is
an exception. There you will need three-parts of a dollar. In Europe
generally, after the War, one needs to consider the currency situation.
The Tyrol has been a place of cheap food and wine; now it is much
dearer. France and Italy, on the other hand, are cheaper.
It is well to carry notes of low denominations, as it is almost always
difficult to get change in the country. If you have a larger note, a
reserve, to take you, let us say, by boat or train somewhere, at some
point of your adventure, or to bring you home, it is as well to sew it
in your jacket lining. It is a mistake to put it in your knapsack or in
a pocket of a shirt. Once I put a five-pound note in a secret pocket
of a shirt and forgot all about it till after I received my linen one
day, washed and ironed, from a peasant girl. Suddenly I remembered, and
feverishly picked up the shirt and went to the secret pocket, the girl
smiling at me as I did so. The note was there, fresh and crisp. I was
astonished. “You washed and ironed this bit of paper?” I asked. “No,”
she said simply, “I found it in and took it out. But I put it back
after ironing.”
In America it is as well to carry travelers’ checks, as they can be
cashed even in a small village, and they are safer than notes. In
Europe such checks are difficult to cash except in large cities. They
are unfamiliar to the bankers of provincial towns. Even in large towns
you may have to wander from bank to bank seeking a correspondent of the
original bank from which you have taken the traveler’s check.
A good plan is to have five-pound notes sent to you by registered post
by a bank at the time at which you are likely to require them. They can
be sent _poste restante_, but it is unwise to leave the packet too long
unclaimed, as in some countries they send back letters to sender after
a week. Money can be sent by wire in this way. Money can also be sent
by a bank in response to a wire if you have arranged a code signature
before leaving home. This is a very simple matter if you are bad enough
tramp to have a balance intact.
After two months, or less, in the open, living the life of a tramping
hermit, you are likely, upon occasion, to have a joyous reaction
towards excess. And this may express itself in a gay and giddy
week-end, in hotels and restaurants and places of music and dance. You
may spend more on a romp than you do on the tramp. Round and round the
market place the monkey chased the weasel! You are that monkey never
catching that weasel. That’s the way the money goes. Pop goes the
weasel!
Oh, that weasel, that weasel of false heart’s desire! Haven’t we chased
it upon occasion!
_I am Memory and Torment, I am Town,
I am all that ever went with evening dress!_
Thus sang the banjo in the wilderness. You lie in the heights of the
mountain under the stars, with empty pockets and empty stomach, and you
look at the many lights, the blent illumination of the Milky Way, and
think--of Broadway, the Great White Way, burning its great stream of
electricity, burning your candle and its own.
The spree is not, however, entirely legitimate to the tramping
expedition. Tramping is first of all a rebellion against housekeeping
and daily and monthly accounts. You may escape from the spending mania,
but first of all you escape from the inhibition, that is the word, the
inhibition of needing to earn a living. In tramping you are not earning
a living, but earning a happiness.
There was a verse of poetry of which Ruskin, in his satirical mood,
was inordinately fond:
_As for the bird in the thicket,
Thrush or ouzel in leafy niche,
She was far too rich
To care for a morning concert to which
She was welcome without a ticket._
Well, ours is the morning concert, without ticket and without program,
without classification of box or stall. You do not pay as you enter,
nor grumble as you go out. Indeed there is a very good reason.
Performers and friends of the performers do not pay. You come as a
friend of the thrush, or you are a thrush yourself. We shall see as we
tramp the woods together which it is. But in any case the thrush never
takes round the hat.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SIX
THE COMPANION
“Give me a companion of my way, be it only to mention how the shadows
lengthen as the sun declines,” wrote Hazlitt. An ideal companion is
ideal. However, we all know that companionship prolonged may be trying
even to good friends. If you live for some time in the same room with
any one you discover that fact. Indeed, you discover a good deal about
your companion that you had not suspected before you were intimate, and
he about you. Eventually a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand becomes a
storm, and you quarrel over what seems afterwards to have been nothing
at all. Even man and wife of ideal choice find that out.
But there is perhaps no greater test of friendship than going on a long
tramp. You discover to one another all the egoisms and selfishnesses
you possess. You may not see your own: you see your companion’s faults.
In truth, if you want to find out about a man, go for a long tramp with
him.
Still there are rewards. If you do not quarrel irreparably and part
on the road you will probably find your friendship greatly increased
by the experience of the wilds together. I like tramping alone, but a
companion is well worth finding. He will add to the experience; perhaps
double it.
You have naturally long conversations. You comment on Nature around
you, and on tramping experiences. You talk of books and pictures,
of poems, of people, but above all, almost inevitably, of yourself.
Tramping makes you self-revelatory. And this is an enormous boon. If
you have patience you will get to see your friend in a new light;
you will fill in the picture which up to then you have but vaguely
sketched. The richest people in life are the good listeners. If,
however, you also must talk, must reveal your life, your heart, your
prejudices and passions, it will often happen that you will express
yourself to yourself, as much as to your friend. Self-confession is
growth of the mind, an enriching of the consciousness. In talk which
seems idle enough you may be reaching out toward the infinite.
The early morning tramp is a striving time, one of reaching out, of
vigorous assertions. The afternoon may mock the morning with jesting,
with ribald songs,
“_Songs that make you cough and blow your nose,_”
as Kipling says. But the evening will make amends. There is a great
poetic time after the camp fire has been lit, the coffee brewed, the
sleeping place laid out. You sit by the embers as the twilight deepens
and talk till the stars shine brightly upon you. That is the time of
confidences, of tenderness, of melancholy, of the “might-have-been” and
the “if only.” You are full of the songs of the birds to which you
have listened all day. Music will come out again.
But there are many types of companionship: the two undergraduates _en
vacance_, the two cronies of the same town, the middle-aged man and his
young disciple, sweethearts, bachelor girls, father and son, man and
wife, friend and friend.
Young athletes will go to the furthest distance; lovers the shortest.
But the lovers may be out the longest time. I am inclined to measure a
tramp by the time taken rather than by the miles. If a hundred miles is
covered in a week it is a longer tramp than if it is rushed in three
days. There is great happiness in taking a month over it. However, it
is hardly possible to walk less than seven miles a day if one sleeps
out of doors.
A point to make sure about in companionship is distribution of kit.
You do not need two coffeepots, two sugar bags--a number of duplicates
can be avoided. See your companion has the right boots. The slower
walker should set the pace. It is absurd for one to walk the other off
his feet just to show what a walker he is. There is great difference
in walking capacity. Some can do forty miles a day without turning a
hair; many can hardly keep up fifteen. If your companion breaks his
feet or turns an ankle you may have to wait some days with him while
he recovers. The first days of tramping are in this respect the most
dangerous. It is so easy to blister the feet if one marches too far in
hot weather. One or two blisters may be remedied, but there comes a
morning when you cannot get your boots on.
The best companions are those who make you freest. They teach you
the art of life by their readiness to accommodate themselves. After
freedom, I enjoy in a companion a well stocked mind, or observant eyes,
or wood lore of any kind. It is nice sometimes to tramp with a living
book.
Of course, one should carry a notebook or diary or some broad-margined
volume of poems. You can annotate Keats from your life on the road. But
whether you do that or merely record the daily life in a page-a-day
journal, you are enriching yourself enormously by what you can write
about.
Lovers, I imagine, will carry no diary. Their impressionable hearts
are the tablets on which they write. Every one has a tendency to write
down the unforgettable: it is obviously unnecessary. Loving pairs,
however, seldom take their staffs and their packs and make for the
wild. Even in our free days they are somewhat afraid of it. But it is
to be recommended as an admirable preparation for married life. It is
a romantic adventure, but it leads to reality. If you have to carry
your beloved, you will probably have to carry her for the rest of your
life. You cannot tell till you’ve spent a night in the rain, or lost
the way in the mountains, and eaten all the food, whether you have both
stout hearts and a readiness for every fate. If not a tramp before
marriage, then a tramp directly after comes not amiss, a honeymoon
spent tramping. It is an ideal way to begin life. For tramping is the
grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar--but it is worth while.
There are few more felicitous proposals of marriage set down in
literature than the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’s, “Will you take
the long road with me?”
Life _à deux_ is much more of an adventure than life _seul_, much more
of a tramping expedition, less of a “carriage forward,” “fragile,”
“lift with care,” and “use no hooks” affair. One, be it the man, be it
the woman, pulls the other from security. It is a more difficult way of
life; it needs learning.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed.
There are those who complain, making each mile seem like three; there
are those who have untapped reserves of cheerfulness, who sing their
companions through the tired hours. But in drawing-rooms, trains,
tennis parties, theater, and dance hall, they would never show either
quality. The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience,
energy, vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things. It is
something to face the first night together under the stars, the fears
of lurking robbers or wild animals, fears of the unnamed.
The first night out together of a man and his wife is a memorable
occasion. You go back to the primitive, but there is something very
cosy and comfortable about it--the only man in the world with the only
woman. Darkness settles down upon you in a stranger way than it does
upon man and man. There is more poetry in the air and in your mind.
More tenderness is enkindled than ceiling and walls of house ever saw,
tenderness of a certain sheltering care which it is luxurious to give.
Night is dark and still and intense, and you can hear two hearts
beating while you look outward and upward, and dimly discern the
passage of bats’ wings in the air.
The first night, however, is seldom without alarm; the cold wet nose
of a hedgehog touching your beloved’s cheek may cause her to rend the
air with a shriek, a field mouse at her toes cause her scarcely less
alarm. It is good to pack her in a really capacious sleeping bag; it
excludes rodents. And if you are not too big you can snuggle into it
yourself, if the lady proves to be nervous and you are on such terms of
fellowship as to make it possible.
A night of murmurings and deepening shadows and freshness, and then,
perhaps, of a gentle rain before dawn, and of glimmerings of new
day and sweetness of wild flowers and birds’ songs before sunrise.
You watch the boles of the great trees grow into stateliness in the
twilight, and the night is over. With an arm round your fair one you go
to the point where in orange and scarlet the great friend of all the
living is lifting himself once more out of the east to show us the way
of life.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHITHER AWAY?
The principle motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity--the desire
to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe
for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a
subconscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on
something very wonderful--beyond the horizon’s rim. The joys of
wandering are often balanced by the pains; but there is something which
is neither joy nor pain which makes the desire to wander or explore
almost incurable in many human beings.
The child experiences his first wander-thrill when he is taken to
places where he has never been before. I remember from the age of nine
a barefoot walk with my mother along the Lincolnshire sands from Sutton
to Skegness, and the romantic and strange sights on the way. What did
we not build out of that adventure? And who does not remember the
pleasurable thrill, the pleasure that’s all but pain, of being lost in
a wood, or in a strange countryside, and meeting some crazy individual
who humored the idea by apostrophizing a little brook in this style: “I
am now marching upon the banks of the mighty Congo”? The imagination
wishes to be stirred with the romance of places, and is stirred. In a
great city like London or New York, even though living there, certainly
I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a
rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick fire by the
roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil.
“Where,” I am asked, “would you go a-tramping now if you were
absolutely fancy-free and passports and Bolsheviks were unknown?” It
would probably be in Russia, where I have vagabondized over thousands
of miles already. I should like to resume my six-thousand-mile journey
southwest to northwest, which was interrupted by the War in August,
1914. But, alas, the Moscow of the Bolsheviks does not encourage
adventure of that kind.
Again, I’d like to buy a boat at Perm and slip down to the Petchora
River, and go with the stream thousands of miles north, selling the
boat to the Samoyedes at the mouth of the river, thence tramping
perhaps by the tundra roads or sledging it to Mesen. What a romance,
what a journey, as it seems to me now, in complete inexperience of it!
Or I’d like to take a party of literary men across the Altai, and in a
verdant valley live for half a year without letters and newspapers, and
each write his own book, express his own peculiar happiness in his own
words.
Or I’d like to plunge south from Verney, in Seven-Rivers-Land, or from
Kashgar, and climb to the mountain passes into India; and as I think
of it a sense of the last poem of Davidson creeps into the memory:
_Alone I climb
The ragged path that leads me out of Time._
So much for Russia. I’d love to tramp the whole length of Japan,
and peer into all the ways of the modern Japanese. There, however,
speaks another interest, and that is not so much to explore strange
lands as to explore strange people. Life teaches the wanderer that
peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times
be irresistible. You long to be familiar with Russians, Frenchmen,
Germans, Chinamen, Arabs, Americans, and the rest. And it takes you
afield, it takes you far, far away from 1, Alpha Villas, or the sweet
shady side of Pall Mall.
I’ve long wished to wander for years in the tents of the nomads of
the Central Mongolian Plain. I came on them accidentally, tramping in
Turkestan; surely among the most interesting peoples in the world, and
the oldest, with customs of the most intense human interest. Nothing
less than a year with them would do; and that means a year without
civilization, for no postman seeks the wandering tents of the Kirghis
and the Kalmouk.
I should like also to pursue a study which I once began of the
monasteries of the Copts, and tramp in the Sahara desert, to follow
the clues of early Christianity up the Nile from Alexandria and the
Thebaid, and I would make some study of Abyssinian Christianity in its
native haunts. Or, on the other side of the world, I’d like to tramp
the communal estate of the Dukhobors, of which I obtained a glimpse
in 1922 in western Canada. Or I’d like just now to tramp as a beggar
through the heart of the new Ireland.
These, and many other fascinating adventures, haunt the mind like
Maeterlinck’s souls of the unborn children in that charming drama of
the ideal--“The Betrothal.” If I don’t do them this time on earth, and
can’t do them, friends are apt to say: “Well, next time.” One lifetime
will hardly suffice to find out all there is to know and to enjoy in
the world and in man.