you are engaged upon it, the sun breaks forth, promising natural heat,
you may relax your energies from the fireside and place your hopes on
the morning warmth. Nothing is more delightful than the sun bath after
rain. You enjoy it, your clothes enjoy it, blanket enjoys it, knapsack
enjoys it, coffee enjoys it. As you are all spread out on the hillside
the butterflies settle on your bare chest trying to take honey from
you, and flit thence to the knapsack which, perchance moistened with
sugar, gives an even pleasanter reaction to the proboscis of a Vanessa.
A third dry-off is in a farmhouse at the kindly hands of a farm wife,
who hangs your blanket and jacket in her kitchen, while her husband
regales you in the parlor with homebrew and a hunk of fruit pie.
There are other less satisfactory ways of drying; using newspapers as
blotting paper and stuffing the legs of your trousers with them. But
first find your dry newspapers. Another method is to get up into a tree
and sit there till you are dry. The last I have tried, but shivered so
steadily that I gave it up, resumed my way, and walked myself dry. It
is part of a genuine tramping outing to get once thoroughly wet--and
dry off.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MARCHING SONGS
Man is a singing animal, but civilization has silenced many songs. In
so many places I see exposed the lugubrious mourning card--SILENCE!
Silence in court, silence in the office! How annoyed we can get to feel
when some one begins singing in a carriage of a train. We crave silence
and our newspapers, silence and our pipes. We will not sing or listen
to singing on the way to our work. Indeed, singing is not fitting; we
might rather sing coming home but not going out. But coming home, we
are all in too much of a hurry, and the crowds irritate us, and we
have not had our supper. To tell the truth, we had but a slight lunch
and no wine. We never got into the singing mood.
Our mentors are against singing. “Sing in the morning, you’ll sob
before evening,” says one. “Sing on a Friday, you’ll weep on the
Sunday,” says the Catholic. Children sing naturally and exuberantly
on any and all occasions, but father and mother and elder brother
and uncle and friend cannot bear it. Send them to the garden, send
them to the nursery! We so dislike random singing that we pay street
musicians--to go away, and they have learned that bad singing brings
more coppers than their better efforts. They are professional irritants.
Yet singing is very natural, and when one takes to the road the singing
impulse comes to the bosom. Light-heartedness begets song. We sing as
we walk, we walk as we sing, and the kilometers fall behind. After
a long spell of the forced habit of not singing one finds oneself
accidentally singing, and there is surprise. Good Heavens! I’m singing.
And singing what? Not the latest song, by any means, but something
remembered from childhood and school days, the happy innocent strains
of days gone by. Songs give birth to songs, memories to memories. The
ear and the heart explore the lost repertoire of music. You sing all
the old songs you ever knew, and snatches of this, snatches of that,
still-remembered fragments of melody, tunes heard God knows where.
The voice glides from one thing to another in a rhapsody of open-air
happiness. It is singing of freedom, of escape, of absence of care
and anxiety, of beauty. “Sing me a song of a lad that is gone”--it is
singing that song over and over again on never-tiring ears. “Say, could
that lad be I?”--it is asking the question, and your light heart is
answering, “Yes, yes, that lad was I. The tiresome somber fellow who
worked in a town was not I. I was imprisoned in him. Now I am free and
I sing.”
At first it does not matter what you sing. You sing some old love song
of the heart, some hymn by which your mother once sang you to sleep,
some boy’s song, sung on the way to school or some “Promise of Life,”
some learned song, once lisped over the shoulder of a young girl at the
piano, some haunting ballad or lyric out of the Celtic twilight, or
some lilting country air of an English countryside. Absurdly you stamp
it out as you walk:
_Oh, let the night be ever so dark
And never so wet and wine-dy,
I must have a will and turn back again
To the girl I left behind me._
And while you are going forward you are really going back, and there
is a girl waiting for you ahead on your track--the playmate girl of
Nature whom you did once leave behind. You sing as you go to her. You
drift from old English songs to Negro minstrelsy, and still--it is some
one waiting for you, praying for you. She is waiting for you “there
by the door, in oh-old Singapore.” Somewhere there is a “corn-fed
bride”--where the black-eyed Susans grow. You shift to operetta and to
the reveries of opera, especially in the evenings, to serenades, to
boat songs and songs about stars and fair women’s eyes.
“Sing in the morning and you will sing all day,” say I. “Sing on a
Friday and you will sing better on Sunday.” You shall sing by the camp
fire in the morning, and sing as you dip in the stream, sing as you
climb the rugged mountain road, sing yourself to noontide and the pass,
like a lark rising upward in sheer joy of living. You shall sing of
home as you descend in the afternoon, and sing in the dark under the
night sky by your fading fire. What is a tramping day if it does not
liberate a voice, so that you can sing out your soul to the free sky.
A slightly different temperament achieves the same happiness reciting
poetry, repeating every verse ever conned for love of thought or sound.
This is singing of a kind. Songs heard are sweet, but the unheard may
be sweeter. The heart can be lifted up by poetry even more than by
song. And the inner meaning and sense of a poem becomes one’s own on
the march when it lends it rhythms and verbal emotions to express the
hidden yearnings of one’s own being.
And the two can be combined--poetry and song. There are those who sing
all poetry and call recitation singing. They incant and intone as they
tramp. They are lifted up in an ecstasy which makes them independent of
physical tiredness or difficulties or meannesses or past misfortunes
or ill-treatment. Song and poetry enfranchise you in the universe.
The tramp for moments becomes citizen of the universe and knows all
secrets, all mysteries, all depths, all heights. He comes back to earth
anon, but he has seen and understood.
Such happiness is explored in one’s personal repertoire of poetry and
song that the tramp who makes tramping a great part of his life does
well to add to what he has, taking pains to note down the words of
haunting airs and verses. In Italy, in France, Spain, Germany, and Slav
countries, one inevitably hears melodies one would like to remember.
There is folk music, and it can only be learned in the countries where
it is natural. There is something in the singing of it which escapes
all notation. The ear, the mood of the soul, can alone enable you to
imitate it, to repeat _just_ what you have heard, what moved you. Even
those who know little of music can capture these songs if they will
take the trouble to copy the words and make the native singers repeat
and repeat till the songs come back again truly from your lips.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SCROUNGING
One might call it by a better name; it means getting a meal for nothing
when you can. In certain unspoiled parts of the world there are
outlandish folk who will take the wanderer in, give him meat and drink,
and send him on his way rejoicing. You can still get a swig of milk and
a heaped pile of bannocks in the North. They will fill you with apples
in Hereford and cream in Devon. A good deal depends on your appearance.
It is not always fair, when you have been turned away, to think you
have met with inhospitality. You may have a fearsome appearance. You
have omitted the daily shave; your hat may have a hole in it. Some
one may have been at the house asking ungraciously for something just
before you came.
One should not trade upon hospitality. But it is pleasant now and then
to knock up a farmer for a dinner, or rather, a farmer’s wife, when the
farmer has gone to the fields. For she is much more tender-hearted.
Unfortunately, in America, the professional hobo has spoilt the
field for Nature’s knight-errant. The hobo shamelessly works whole
neighborhoods, leaving nothing to chance or choice, and will bang every
door in a village till he gets what he calls a “hand-out.”
The supposed tramp hieroglyphics are of little value--“Good feed here,”
“’Ware dog; want you to work for it,” etc. You have to make good where
these sharks have failed, and it can be done occasionally by sheer good
humor and high spirits. A hot meal is worth having occasionally, even
if one has to make friends with baby, or rescue the cat or blarney the
farm wife.
A good method of approach is by offering to buy something. One has
always to be buying milk for one’s coffee. The purchase may lead to
a friendly interest and the interest to a seat at the table with the
family, or at least in the kitchen. Generally, speaking, it is better
for the family to have you in their midst. You come from far, you have
stories to tell, you have the record of wild life. The children’s eyes
open as you discourse. The good man drops his fork--but you do not drop
yours.
Thus the tramp may sometimes, for a change, spend a pleasant noontide
or evening at a farm, fill up with a change of food, get some good
drink, and then round it off with a pleasant sleep in a barn.
For this the shoddy make-up of the professional hobo is out of place.
It is of no use imitating his “hard luck” stories, no use to talk
hypocritically of seeking work which it is difficult to get. One should
avoid the skulking look which begets suspicion, and the sneaking round
the kitchen door. A brave and debonair gait pays best. You enter as
a gentleman and cannot afford to be treated as a potential thief
or bandit. So much harm has, alas, been done by cynical and callous
tramps who have abused hospitality where they have found it, cursing,
nevertheless, where it has been denied. One should endeavor to give
something in return--not money--where hospitality has been found, and
so help to restore a good thing in the world.
By one’s manners, by one’s talk, by a little memento or token here and
there, one pays for hospitality received. In return for hospitality of
the body--food or lodging, one should always give hospitality of the
mind or spirit, sympathy, fellow feeling, bonhomie, a readiness to be
at the disposal of your host.
There are, however, accidental modes of scrounging which have no
palliatives. Who, can resist robbing an orchard of a few apples? Oh,
those Ohio apples! I’ve eaten many a one at dawn without paying for
it, big as your fist, streaked with cheek-red, sweet as a kiss. I have
lifted the strawberries, too, from the strawberry beds--the birds were
not always to blame--and I have picked the watched pear which was
growing daily with nectarine. One does not burn everlastingly for this
in the hereafter. All I can say is, that if I settle on the land in my
old age, some tramps may then rob me for my sins.
Another useful gain to the tramp’s kitchen is fish. Unless, however, he
is a fisherman he may find fish difficult to obtain. But upon occasion,
tramping beside lakes and rivers, one may fall in with fishermen who,
as a rule, will gladly part with a portion of the catch, a proletarian
for cash, a gentleman for naught. “Do you eat all you catch?” I once
asked of a tweed-clad angler. “Good heavens, no!” he replied. “I throw
most of what I catch back in the stream.”--“Well, throw a couple in
this frying pan!” One should beware, however, of making seemingly
facetious remarks to the melancholy angler, who has fished all night
and caught nothing. Like the apostles, he needs a miracle to cheer him
up.
When the Indian corn is ripe there is again delightful food for
stealing, and no one will call you thief. Just go into one of those
wonderful bearded fields and select your cobs. Take them to the camp
fire and bake them or boil them. It’s a great addition to dinner or
supper. Have you saved a little butter to melt on the hot cob? What
luxury! This is not a tramp’s life. There are American millionaires
who, could they be clairvoyant in their expensive hotels, would weep
with envy.
The beloved Master of all Christian folk showed us the way when,
walking with his pupils, he plucked the corn. He would have loved corn
on the cob, but Palestine is a sterile place.
You have lifted the corn, you may go further, less legitimately, and
scrounge a small marrow, and again a melon. In certain countries that
means no loss to any one. But let us be diffident of taking the only
melon, the only marrow.
The best fun is, however, amid the wild fruit, the berries, the grapes,
the plums. One lives on the kindly fruits of the earth. You come on a
hillside rusty-brown with little strawberries, and only the birds to
share them with you. One spends hours grazing on strawberries. Wild
grapes, too, one eats with the mouth from the vine without picking
them. Scrounging by and large is not the noblest thing in a tramp’s
life, but it means much to him; there is happiness in it.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SEEKING SHELTER
Sometimes, at high altitudes in the Alps, the Rockies, and elsewhere,
one comes upon bleak empty shelters built for protection against wind
and snow. Ordinary tramping is not mountaineering, but, nevertheless,
it leads one upon occasion to wild and desolate exalted regions. There
seems to be no particular danger except that of failing to obtain
provisions after supplies have run out. But there is a danger, often
unforeseen; the coming on of a great storm.
A raging blizzard of snow is sometimes blinding and perishing. All is
veiled in driving whiteness. The wind is piercing. After a few steps
the track, if there is one, is lost; landmarks have disappeared from
view, and it is safer to stop than to go on. Not a few people have met
their deaths in an unexpected snowstorm in the upper Alps. They may be
in fairly safe mountain country, but it is easy to misjudge distance
in such circumstances, and go over a cliffside by a random step in the
snow. Unless you can find some sort of shelter you are changed to a
snow man in a few minutes, and get disgustingly numbed. Even if you lie
down flat in the snow the storm pierces to your bones.
Fortunately, one can generally see a storm coming, and find a rock or
a cave or some sort of kraal or shepherd’s house. The cave is a good
place in which to await the storm and then watch it pass.
Thunderstorms may be almost as perilous as blizzards, and certainly
more frightening. You are up where the clouds meet; the electric
currents surge through you. Something dark comes driving up the wedge
between the ranges, roaring below through the ravine. It is the
oncoming wind and rain. Thunders prodigious and bellowing, break out
upon the right and left. You suddenly find yourself in an island of
pale subdued light, with clouds rolling up to you from below. It is an
experience worth having if you possess the nerve to take it calmly.
The lightnings are sometimes amazingly intimate, wrapping you,
wreathing you, bathing you with fire, almost searing your eyeballs.
Criss-cross, flash, blare, effusion, confusion. The explosions are
dumbfounding and the many echoes confound in one great infernal battle
music. There is an oncoming enemy who always threatens, and never
seems quite to arrive. Or you are in the midst of the mêlée with
torrents battling across and across you. You get soaked, the knapsack
gets soaked, the boots get soaked, the rock under you becomes a water
channel; the cliffs on all sides discharge water against you, to say
nothing of what is raging out of the sky.
Once more, it is better to watch it from a cave. There is the enormous
advantage of keeping relatively dry. In a great storm a certain amount
of rain is bound to blow into any cave, but there is the advantage
of feeling safer, whether one is or not. The lightnings do not play
quite so much about your eyes. You are also out of the way of those
rain-loosened boulders which have a way of detaching themselves in
a storm, and coming violently from above, falling sometimes at your
feet or dashing past your knees to fall another two thousand feet into
the abyss below you. In the cave a falling rock is merely a feature
of interest, while you watch the grand spectacle of a thunderstorm in
the mountains. If the storm last too long, one can generally glean a
coffeepot full of water, light a fire at the mouth of the cave, and
make some coffee or tea.
In like manner one can take shelter from mountain gales which sometimes
spring up with hurricane force and make perilous the passage of some
knife-edge track. It is not wise to brave the elements when one false
step risks your life. Such gales commonly die down before sunset, and
the succeeding calm can be waited for with patience.
These are heroic occasions, but there are others less heroic which bid
us seek shelter. One may be down below in the quiet country, and yet
as devastating a thunderstorm intervene, or heavy drenching rain, or a
bone-searching northeaster. But down below it is easier to find refuge.
There are keepers’ huts in forests, holes dug by animals, hollow trees,
there are deserted houses, barns, outhouses, bridges. There are human
homes, inns, hotels--even railway stations and covered vans. Obtaining
shelter, except on wide and desolate moors, is not so difficult. On
moorland there is nothing for it but to put on one’s waterproof cape,
over knapsack and all, and brave it out. You will find of what enormous
value the waterproof cape can be, not only being your ground sheet at
night, but saving you your provisions and kit, from a deluge of rain.
It sometimes happens that a storm beginning in the afternoon will last
all night. One must judge by the look of the sky. On a shelterless moor
or plateau it is no gain to shut one’s eyes to the dire possibilities
of the situation. It is an occasion when the art of idleness can be put
aside. If it is necessary to walk a steady twenty miles to some place
of shelter for the night, it is as well to set the mind to it. After
the first mile in the rain the tramp becomes pleasant; after five or
ten miles one begins to sing. One generally finishes in the highest of
spirits, even though soaked to the skin. Then shines the opportunity of
the good inn or the farmhouse with kitchen fire. One hangs up all to
dry and, sitting in a pair of mine host’s breeches, makes mirth with
a vast platter of ham and eggs, to say nothing of a chicken stewed in
its own soup, and a bottle of Burgundy, or a deep draught of cider,
or a Yorkshire tea. After that, one burrows deep into the unfamiliar
softness of a feather bed and listens to the rain still pouring on the
just and the unjust outside.
It may happen, however, that this idyllic dénouement is not realized;
you make no house in twenty miles. You are fain at last to get into a
stone breaker’s hut, or a wet cave or a deserted cabin. You come to a
house with only three rafters left of its ruined roof, and you snuggle
somehow into its one dry corner, possibly making a fire in a convenient
place of bits of flooring, and old newspapers. By this you dry off a
little, boil your pot, and make the best of a wet world. After all,
one’s not likely to take cold or feel any ill effects. The open air
gives strength and health to resist cold and damp. The body goes hot as
you lie in the draught of the ruin; it finds its own heat and will dry
your shirt for you as you lie there in the cold and the dark.
You find, however, that it is more cold in a ruined or empty house than
in the open. The less ruined the house, the more cold. In some places
you come upon many empty houses. The owners are far away; the houses
are locked, the windows shut. There is nothing inside; every room gapes
at you from its dreary window. It is always easy to get inside. Owners
leave some door or window free. You get in on to the kitchen sink,
into the dreary kitchen, open its further door and come to the silent
parlor, climb the stairs, half fearing to meet a ghost, and come upon
those weird bedchambers where no one sleeps. It takes some nerve to
settle down there for the night. The wind whistles in the keyholes,
creeps with a knife-edge under the door, searching your cold toes.
You lie and quake, fearing you do not know what--the house imps, the
sprites of dead children, the opening of the dread door in front of you
and the coming in of some ghostly aged grandma, holding a candle in one
hand.
Not a danger, but one feels one would scream, one would rend the roof
of the house with a great yell of horror. I have slept in such places,
but do not recall them with gladness. The best place is to open the
front or the back door and lie down to sleep on the threshold, looking
out upon the free spacious rain-drenched open-air world.
Or the tramp may seem to have better luck. He comes in the water-washed
twilight into view of some lamp-lighted window and makes for it, as a
ship for a harbor--any port in a storm. It is common to buoy oneself
up with unusual hopes about that window and the home behind it. The
tired man thinks of a happy cosy home, joy in welcome, warmth in
hospitality. But too often the light proves to be a will-o’-the-wisp.
The house may be a home, but you are not wanted there. The man of the
house will tell you of a place five miles on where you can stay; he
will tell you of a hearsay inn, and you must trudge on till you see
another light. On such occasions the weary wanderer may feel bitter. He
feels hurt. He feels he had a right to be taken indoors. But he does
not think of his wild looks, his forbidding aspect, his drenched and
perhaps holey breeches. It is getting late. The man in the desolate
house is simply afraid to take him in, fears he may be robbed in the
night, or worse.
In these inhospitable days it is better to use a little stealth--put
one’s foot in the door, so to speak, get a hot supper first, win a few
kind looks from the lady, talk of bed later. It takes half an hour or
so to introduce oneself for a bed. It is only the rare chance where
all seems to have been prepared as for an expected guest, a spare
corner even laid at the table where the family is supping, an occasion
to rejoice over and remember for a long time. I well remember one
such time when I had been a long while in the snow, and landed up at
a desolate ranch. It was as if a long-lost son had arrived. I was at
once in the bosom of the family with a pack of new sisters and young
brothers, to say nothing of a cowboy father and a farm-wife mother.
Very pleasant! Rare!
[Illustration]
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE OPEN
_He is blooded to the open and the sky;
He is taken in a snare which shall not fail._
I think of storms and of heavy rain and biting wind as exceptional.
They give feature in the midst of halcyon days and nights. The tramping
life is not in caves and huts and holes and inns, but in the open. The
life opens us with its very breadth. Is your friend too thin; do not
diet him under a white ceiling, but give him air. Air will fill him.
It is not the air alone that cures and fills, but what you breathe in
with the air. You breathe in the spirit of the open. You breathe in the
wideness of the sky; you reach out to the free horizon. It makes a man
big, it builds a man within.
The lark sings as it rises, conquering the world; it is sheer joy in
the open which causes that sweet bird breast to heave in music far in
the heavens above. And as we rise, and the earth in its grandeur falls
away to right and left, our being heaves in a life which is joy. Ours
is a bird’s happiness.