inexperienced may pop the latest yellow-back into the rucksack, not
grasping that it will be read through in two lazy afternoons, and that
then he will have no book to fall back upon. In the trenches in France
a happy habit developed of leaving read books upon dry ledges in the
dugouts. One often came upon a treasure trove of the kind. But when
tramping, you cannot leave books for others with much hope of their
being found. And rarely does one find any stray literature unless it be
some tract on the futility of sin.
It is better, therefore, to take with one a whole-time book. It is
good to have a book that is full of meat, one with broad margins for
scribblings and extra pages for thoughts, poems, thumb-nail sketches.
After a long tramp it is nice to see a book which has been clothed with
pencilings. It records in a way the spiritual life of the adventure,
and will recall it to you when in later years you turn over the page
again.
It is well to take a book that you do not quite understand, one that
you have already nibbled at but have found difficult. I do not mean an
abstruse work, but one you are just on the verge of understanding and
making your own.
At different stages of development you will have different books. A
boy just beginning to think could do worse than take _The Autocrat
at the Breakfast Table_, or Thoreau’s _Walden_; a little later comes
_Erewhon_ or _Eöthen_. At eighteen Sartor Resartus or Carpenter’s
_Towards Democracy_, or Browning’s “Paracelsus.” A good deal depends on
temperament as to whether a volume of Shelley or Keats will keep you
company all the while. You read and reread a poem that you like until
it begins to sing in your mind. It becomes your possession. There are
marvelous passages lying hidden in a poem like “Paracelsus”:
_Ask the gier-eagle when she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first
Why she not marvels strenuously beating
The silent, boundless regions of the sky!_
It is a poem of a man seeking life, seeking a way. It ought to move
most young men who are on the threshold of life, unless they are dull
or have been infected by cynicism. For my part, I look back loyally to
the time when I was Paracelsus and could say his lines as from my own
heart: “’Tis time new hopes should animate the world,” I whispered as I
walked, and the new hopes were my hopes.
Much of “Paracelsus” should go into the true Tramp’s Anthology, and
with it, not contradicting it, Omar Khayyam and also O’Shaughnessy’s
_We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams_
and then certain delicious lines, untraced in origin, which Algernon
Blackwood is fond of quoting:
_Change is his mistress, Chance his counsellor
Love cannot hold him; Duty forge no chain
The wide seas and the mountains call him
And grey dawns know his camp-fire in the rain._
An ideal book to carry on a tramping expedition is undoubtedly an
anthology of your own compiling, a notebook filled with your favorite
verses.
Other books which I think of as the tramp grows in goodness and in
grace are Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” or “Brand,” preferably “Peer Gynt,” there
is much more in it. “Peer Gynt” is a very remarkable book; you can read
it ten times and still fail to exhaust its poetry, its thought. It is a
great book about life. It is moreover a true tramping book. Peer is a
vagabond wandering about in the world, and it is never the world which
is in question, but the state of his soul. “Brand” is not so much of a
poem as the other, and is not so memorable. But it raises some of the
eternal questions in a powerful way. If you are “sick of towns and men”
“Brand” will rather indulge your mood, for it speaks Ibsen’s impatience
with the petty ways and lives of average men and women.
Socrates’ _Dialogues_ go well in the inner pocket, and so do Horace’s
_Odes_, if you are of a Horatian turn of mind and can read them. There
are many, especially in Scotland, who like to take a Homer, and fancy
themselves on the hills of Greece. For a classical scholar there are
many books of profound and lasting interest; a Plotinus will last you
a long while. For you have not merely to read it, but to resurrect a
being who lived centuries ago in a different civilization. The human
heart was the same, but almost everything else had a difference.
If the mind is just attracted to ancient philosophy, I know few books
to compare with Pater’s _Plato and Platonism_, for inner worth. I do
not, however, think his _Marius_ a good tramping book. Nature rebels
against its cold chaste beauty. It needs, I think, a more artificial
setting for its enjoyment.
Few novels are good tramping books. One gets through the story so
quickly, and if there is no more than story there, the book is finished
with. Still, there are a few knapsack companions worth having, such as
_The Cloister and the Hearth_, _John Inglesant_, _Wilhelm Meister_,
Dostoieffsky’s _The Brothers Karamazoff_. All rather bulky, I am
afraid, for ideas, though they keep other books thin, do swell the
volume of a novel. A few ideas stated in conversation and baited with
picturesque descriptions take three times the space they need in the
essay. It is sometimes easier to understand them, but the expression is
diffuse.
Plays, however, come near to being ideal. They take up little space.
The dramatist has to censor his own work vigorously with a view to
cutting down the excess of verbiage which his ideas naturally claim.
He is forced into paradox and epigram. His work is full of hints and
suggestions which are undeveloped. It is for you to develop them. As
Ibsen said, “I ask the questions; it is for you to answer them.”
A Shakespeare play is a delightful library. I nearly always take one.
A drama like _Richard III_ or _Othello_ can be read over and over
again. _As You Like It_ and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, are the great
open-air plays. You learn more about them with the birds and the stars
to teach you than with the aid of the most genial producer or inspired
professor. You make your camp in a natural theater among the trees,
or in an arena among the rocks. There is an audience not altogether
invisible. It waits, it has its programs, you have the book of the
words and the brain full of moving figures. Sun and moon are working
the limelight from the wings. Your camp fire is the footlights. Enter
Man. Enter Hamlet. Enter Julius Cæsar, the gods, the ghosts. The tramp
becomes an ancient type, a magician, a mystagogue--with a Shakespeare
in his hand, in the midst of the worlds.
If modern drama rouses the fancy, you can take a Pirandello or a Shaw,
and thresh it out--get a real opinion about it. It is worth while when
you have to orientate your mind to certain writers of repute to make
yourself intimate with at least one of their works.
I suppose some may prefer to read a book on the country through which
they are tramping, and in that case a librarian’s aid may be sought.
There are now scores of volumes on almost every country in the world.
It is as well to look over several of them before making a choice--many
prove to be slapdash, ill-informed compositions.
Does one take accounts of travel in lands other than that one is
tramping in? I imagine not. _Unknown Arabia_ is out of place in a
tramp through California. But a tramp’s account of his own life is
interesting reading anywhere, and one naturally thinks of W. H. Davies’
autobiography in this connection. There are few tramp writers. But
probably the best short story of Maxim Gorky’s tells of his tramping
life, and is called “The Fellow Traveller.” Jack London’s _Valley
of the Moon_ contains some tramping episodes. Jack London, Rudyard
Kipling, Cunninghame Graham, Belloc, Chesterton, Carl Sandburg,
Vachel Lindsay, are all delightful writers in the tramping mood and
ask a place in the knapsack. Then there are Harry Franck’s untiring
pedestrian tours in Patagonia, China, and elsewhere, perhaps in too
ponderous a form as yet for field use.
I once met a tramping publisher, _rara avis_, a very black swan; he
began his life as a colporteur of the British and Foreign Bible Society
and spent twenty years on the road, going from Bibles to leaflets,
which he printed himself, and thence to booklets, thence to books and
an office and a vast organization. He had a simple way of business.
I handed him a manuscript; he opened a drawer and handed out a wad of
notes, and the transaction was concluded without a word in writing. But
I suppose that was unusual even in his business. There was a savor of
tramp meeting tramp in the affair.
The Bible colporteur ought, at least, to know one book the better for
his calling. When all is said, there is one book more worth taking than
all the rest; poetry, philosophy, history, fantasy, treatise, novel,
and drama, you have all in one in the Bible, the inexhaustible book of
books. You need not take it all, take the prophecies, the Psalms, the
Gospels. It means much to tramp with one Gospel in the inner pocket of
the coat.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LONG HALTS
If your tramping expedition is long; if you have voted yourself plenty
of time; if, for example, you are taking a wander year, you are under
no compulsion to keep on tramping. One advantage of being a true
Bohemian is that you are under no compulsion except that of the heart.
You stop when you like, you go on when you like. You surely come to
places in which you are tempted to remain--be it only for a few days.
You stay a day, and the place grows on you; you stay longer. And then,
when the spirit moves, you move with it, move on, enriched by your
delay, by your idleness.
There are short halts and long halts. The short ones are simple and
natural; the longer ones more difficult to make, but not to be foregone
on that account. You come at last to the ideally simple, or beautiful,
or alluring village. You ought to stay there a while, make home there
for a while. And you have only your tramping kit and no word to
recommend you. Still, it can be arranged, and the very modesty of your
approach should help you. You come from below, not from above; the
villagers will not hide their life from you. They may be shy of the
stranger, but shyness will wear off as they watch you in their midst.
Do not go to the local priest who, being a responsible person, is
likely to tell you that it is impossible to stay there and to fill
your mind with difficulties. You want to get taken in and hire a room.
You have money to pay for it. You should make your appeal direct at
the house where you would like to stay. You shall be very civil to the
lady, and drink with mine host. It can be arranged. They will even put
themselves to trouble on your behalf.
It is so much better to be in a family than in an inn. Inside the
little family of a home you are inside the bigger family of the
village, and if you are a sociable soul you will soon have many
friends. You will get to know the village characters and gossips, the
village children, the village musicians; the stories of the village,
its legends, its superstitions--and then, its love affairs, its family
entanglements, its coming weddings and fêtes.
All this is worth while in the science of living. It is part of a
true tramping jaunt to come back from Nature to man, not of need to
civilization, but to men and women and children. The village children
will prove as near to the wanderer’s heart as the birds in the
woods--nearer, for they are wood fairies incarnate, trapped on the edge
of the forest and made to live human lives in the villages.
The written pages of your notebook grow in the village, on the long
halt, as do also the unwritten yet unfading memories within. Days and
weeks tramping in the open crystallize in impression, and your past
is like a tapestry on your bedroom wall. There is a space cleared
for human life and love and happiness, for dance and for song, for
sociality and talk.
Here is opportunity for learning new ways of life and new stories and
songs. You may soak in folklore and folk music for weeks. How splendid
for you if, when the time comes to go away and resume your trampings
you can carry away with you drawings you have made, songs you have
learned to sing, stories which you can tell. You will carry that
village with you to the ends of the earth.
And then, of course, a village is not merely a village, not merely
the broad and rutted roads and the cottages planted among the pigs
and fowls. The village has its ways out, its views, its hillsides and
streams, its loveliness on all sides. Your long halt is not a sitting
still in a human settlement, but a starwise tour of all the country
round about.
Going on and on in a line of route has its drawbacks. The world is not
a straight line, not even a crooked line, not even the line of a man’s
steps upon it--it is an area, a broad surface. Length cannot exist
without some measure of breadth, but at the risk of a paradox one may
say the world is breadth without length.
So also man’s life. We think of it in length of years. But that in
a way is error. Life is not length of time, but breadth of human
experience. Life is not a chain of events, but an area-something
spreading out from a hidden center and welling at once towards all
points of the compass.
In the long halt, therefore, one has not stopped living, because one
has ceased going onward. You get poised on your center. You feel the
origins of joy and pain--deep down at the heart’s core, the place from
which something in you is welling up all the while, welling up and
overflowing, flowing away in waves and tides, to break on a mystical
shore.
Belike you have a child’s happiness into which you are unwilling to
probe. You ask not whether it is more in one thing than in another.
You tramp and you are happy, and halt and you are happy. Or happiness
is not your word for what you feel, not your vein. You muse, you are
at one with life, you are content, you ask only to go on in the way
in which you are. Or your happiness is to feel a divine melancholy
wherever you are. It is the same for all. The long halt, the dwelling
among strange kindred, the choosing of some spot to be beloved in
preference for a while--that also enters into the art of life, of the
life of the true Bohemian and life-wanderer.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FOREIGNERS
_“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”
“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.
Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”
“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”_
To the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though,
of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you
travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also
are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.”
“He is English?” I have heard it asked. “He’s one of these people who
think they own the earth?” And all too often in Europe one hears of
“vulgar Americans.”
Despite the grand international ideas of this and of preceding ages,
it is just as difficult for foreigners to get on together and esteem
one another and understand one another. This becomes very clear
upon reading modern works of travel, and perhaps clearer still upon
listening to the personal adventures of people who have been traveling
unconventionally in foreign lands. What is strange to us is comic, it
strikes us as a burlesque; if it irks us we think it distasteful, even
wrong. We take the foreigner to task for not behaving “like a perfect
gentleman,” etc.
It is largely a matter of bad manners. If manners could be improved we
should more easily get into sympathy with “foreigners”; if they could
be perfected there would not be any foreigners.
The language difficulty is enormous. Even if we learn to speak a
foreign tongue, we are liable to make mistakes and to have a queer
accent. We are at least as bad as those foreigners who come to us and
say “English as she is spoke.” Mistakes in language are almost always
very malapropos. _Beaucoup_ is “much” in France, but ill-pronounced it
means “little” in Italian (_poco_). The word for Thursday in Serbian is
slang for sixpence in Russian. An American lady wishing to ingratiate
herself with some Germans said she felt as if in Paradise; but the
word paradise in German means tomato, and her friends stared at her.
An acquaintance of mine, not speaking French very well, was dancing
on a Paris boulevard with some _midinettes_. Feeling rather tired he
went up to one of them and whispered in her ear, “_Ma chère danseuse,
je suis en couchant_” so that he seemed to imply a confession that he
was a pig. Two Russian Bolsheviks in London were fumbling for a doorkey
outside a house at midnight. A policeman came up and asked them what
they were doing.
“I have forged a key,” one of them replied. The bobby, however, looked
at them indulgently. “_Forgot_, you mean,” said he emphatically.
But difficulties of this kind are not confined to foreign wanderings.
You can experience them at home, in Scotland, for example, or on the
burring border, or even in Yorkshire. I was tramping across Yorkshire
one summer, and I realized how outlandish my English sounded. They
speak a different language up there. I had to make every one repeat
everything twice. They frequently mistook what I said. They made me say
it twice also. They reckoned I did not come from these parts.
I went into an inn one night and asked for a room.
The landlady, an elderly dame with a huge red face, asked me if I meant
a room.
I said “Yes.” She said, “Ted, this gentleman wants a room.”
“All right,” he exclaimed, “in a minute.”
“Mine will be my usual drop o’ Scotch,” said an old fellow, nudging me
as he went past.
I sat down in the bar parlor.
Presently the young man came and inquired if I’d like water in my room.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I answered patiently.
Then, in a few minutes, the young man Ted came in, mixing as it seemed
to me a cocktail--or what might pass for a cocktail in Yorkshire. He
stood in front of me, wineglass in hand, and poured a clear liquid on
to a brown one, cautiously and professionally.
“Tell me when to stop,” he said.
“That’s not for me?” I queried. And I wondered if it was perhaps a
custom to bring guests an unsolicited cocktail as a ritual of welcome.
Yorkshire has its festive ways.
But the boy stopped stirring and pouring, and looked at me.
“It must have been somebody else,” he remarked, and turned to the
red-faced landlady.
She faced me. “Yes,” she said hoarsely, “you ordered the room.”
Then the truth dawned on me.
“I asked for a room,” said I.
“Well, here it is,” said the young man.
“Not a rum, but a room! Room! Room!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, room,” said the landlady.
“A room for the night, a lodging,” I explained.
“Oh, a bed,” said she, with a chagrined face. “We have no beds. No, no
beds,” and I could see her thinking the matter over in her mind, the
difference between room and rum. She watched to see if I would drink
what had been put before me.
But rum is not my drink, especially after a day’s tramp. I shouldered
my knapsack and pushed out of the inn under the disdainful gaze of the
red-faced landlady and the stare of the man who was sipping his drop of
Scotch.
They say the better educated people of Edinburgh speak the best English
in Great Britain, and I certainly can use my own tongue fairly well.
But judge my amazement when I first went to America, and was told I
did not speak English. I was tramping to Chicago, and men on the road
would say to me, “Say, you haven’t been over here long. You speak the
language broken.”
Prejudices are bred over the difference of saying the word “well”
with the lips and “well” with the throat. Even a national laugh can
be aggravating. “Haw, haw, there’s a merry laugh for you,” says the
American in “So This is London,” “haw-haw--the marmalade hounds.”
Incidentally, that sentence from a clever play points to the other
great cause of irritating difference in ways. The Americans do not take
marmalade for breakfast. We do. It is almost a source of international
misunderstanding.
“The English have such bad table manners,” I used to hear said in
Moscow. And yet you should see Ivanovitch with his soup. We are too
greedy at table. We accept second and third helpings, only intended
to be offered, not intended to be taken. We do not know how to make a
glass of tea and a saucer of jam last fifty minutes. We eye the samovar
when we want more tea. We do not kiss our hostess’s hand after the
repast. Americans eat with their hats on, but with their coats off.
Russians smoke cigarettes between courses. Frenchmen take large towels
into their collars, and pick their teeth with toothpicks while they
talk. All very disgusting. Almost every variation in ways of eating is
distasteful.
The tramp, the wanderer in strange lands, should at least get over
this. I am sure Oliver Goldsmith and George Borrow, two delightful
wanderers, never fell foul of any one for lack of speech or eating
wrongly. They knew how to counteract the effect of their own
foreignness, and how to accept and enjoy differences in others.
But unless the tramp intends to shun men and women altogether he has to
face the problem of liking his fellow man, however unlike to himself.
It is part of the art of tramping to know how to meet your fellow man,
how to greet him, how to know him.
You get a companion who calmly tells you he intends to “pick your
brains” during the tramp. That is very well, though the expression
seems not too kind. It is easier to say “I intend to get to know you
during our wanderings together”--though there, of course, the intention
is towards something very difficult. It takes a long time to know a
man. You may “pick his brains” in half an hour and not get to know him
in a lifetime. It is mawkish for a man to talk of love, except in love,
but it needs a loving heart to know any one really well.
The man you tramp with is not a foreigner, albeit foreign enough in
himself, as you may discover before you discover he is kindred. You
are thrown into intimate contact with him. Even if the two of you are
a couple of egoists strongly self-centered, something is bound to get
across in a long tramp. That is one reason why tramping is such a
healthful spiritual experience. The too-too-solid flesh does melt a
little, the too-too-solid heart does warm somewhat toward an outsider.
But the chance-met is much more difficult to meet, to greet, to
understand. Of course, more difficult for some than for others. There
are genial sympathetic souls who have an aptitude for taking a stranger
at once to the heart. They are bright-eyed people, friendly at once
and friendly for a long while. I have a prejudice in their favor--but,
alas, there are not very many of them. The warmest thing in the world
is human affection; it is the most covetable, and it is the sweetest
thing to give. And it is also the saddest thing to have refused. I
believe the affectionate people take the most blows in life. But also
they get the greater rewards.
Still, there is shyness, timidity, stand-offishness, which commonly
mask the souls of very friendly people. It is difficult to rid oneself
of these defective qualities. Much travel frequently does it, and much
tramping will do it also. Tramping simplifies out many of our foibles.
It makes the artificial people more natural. I have seen a man afraid
almost of his own shadow in town become a bold and smiling boy upon the
road, not afraid to meet any one and hold frank converse with him.
Chance meetings may greatly enrich human experience, especially in a
foreign country where one has so much to learn of the ways of one’s
fellow man. I have found by personal experience that one of the
quickest ways in which to learn the life of a people is by tramping
among them.
The commonest way of attempting to make a study of a new nation is
to arrive at the capital city with a wallet full of introductions to
notable people. You stay at the best hotel, call at the Embassy, make
friends with one of the secretaries, dine with him and learn his
prejudices, go on the morrow to a friend of his, who will tell you “all
you need to know.” Then you may use your introductions, checking off
what the native notabilities say about their country by what you have
already heard.
The visitor of this type does get impressions. That is undoubted. He
feels that he is getting to know the new country very pleasantly, and
yet, when his visit is over and he returns home, if he is frank with
himself he must confess that he has very little real knowledge of the
people. He is obliged to say--Well, I was only there for six weeks; I
cannot pretend that I know much about it. But sixty weeks of that sort
of thing would make little difference.