however, seems to me too modest a title, as one does not inscribe
in it one’s commonplaces. The Dean of St. Paul’s published recently
large extracts from a wonderful series of “Commonplace books,” which
he had kept during most of his life, but I would rather call them
uncommonplace books. Truly, in the Dean’s case these scrapbooks
garnered the fruits of reading rather than of life, and my especial
plea is not for the fruits of reading as for the fruits of life. The
digest of books is the habit of the good student, who sets down in
brevity the content of whatever he reads and so preserves knowledge for
future guidance. But the keeping of the daybook represents a different
habit of mind.
With many it begins in happy school days or school holidays when
natural history diaries were started. The enthusiastic collector of
birds’ eggs, butterflies, or beetles, makes constant expeditions
and delights in chronicling the results. He may do it at length, or
briefly; may describe habits of species and adventures in tracking
them, or merely set down the names of captures and of the localities.
In boyhood one records the marvelous doings of the oak-egger female;
later on one records what man, the insect, is doing.
It is just as much worth while, though so much more difficult, to
describe what people look like as to set down what they say. And then
most people and things are silent to our ears; they speak more to our
eyes. Certain shapes, certain groups, speak at times enormously to our
eyes. But how record them if we do not describe?
It is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist. All
description is art, and in describing an event, an action or a being,
you enter to some extent into the joy of art. You are more than the
mere secretary of life, patiently taking down from dictation, more than
life’s mere scribe; you become its singer, the expresser of the glory
of it. With a verbal description goes also sketching, the thumb-nail
sketch, the vague impression, the pictorial pointer. There is no reason
for being afraid of bad drawing in one’s own personal travel diary; the
main thing is that it be ours and have some relationship to our eyes
and the thing seen.
I have seldom gone on a tramp, or a long vagabondage, without seeing
things that made the heart ache with their beauty or pathos, and other
things that set the mind a-tingle with intellectual curiosity. I do not
refer to great episodes, glimpses of important shows and functions, but
to little things, unexpected visions of life! Some were unforgettable
in themselves and seemingly needed no tablets other than those of
memory, and yet it was a great addition to inner content and happiness
to describe them as they occurred in my daybook of travel.
It is good also, after describing something that has specially affected
one, to add one’s observations, the one line perhaps that records one’s
mind at the time.
For these, and for other reasons, the artist’s notebook, the diary,
the common- and uncommonplace book, the daybook of the soul are to be
placed as part of the equipment of life, when faring forth, be it on
pilgrimage, be it on tramp, or be it merely on the common round of
daily life. Every entry is a shade of self-confession, and the whole
when duly entered is a passage of self-knowledge.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MAPS
Civilization is short of maps. It is not familiar with its own ground
plan. This is due, no doubt, to the common handicap of commercialism.
Maps ought to be free for all. When you ask a man the way, you do not
expect him to charge you for it--“the first on the right and the second
on the left; sixpence, please.” Maps are almost as cheap to print as
wall paper, and could often be used as such. We need to be familiarized
with the look of the chart of the world. It is of good advantage,
especially to children and to young men and women at the gateway of
larger life, to have maps of the world in front of them, in front of
them often.
You have inherited a pretty large estate by being born. You might as
well know something of the plan of the grounds. Stay-at-home natures
are bred by absence of wall maps. An interesting place, the old world,
with some curious corners--but the mapless do not believe in it.
Geranium follows geranium on the bedroom wall, and duck follows duck,
and then in the nursery innumerable Mother Hubbards look in innumerable
empty cupboards for innumerable nonexisting bones, and then in the
study and workroom an endless series of pale violet rails run back and
forth or posies of spoiled forget-me-nots bobble before the eyes. We
break the monotony with illuminated texts, samplers, oleographs of the
battle of Spion Kop, portraits of aged relatives in company with “The
Laughing Cavalier.” We put “God bless our Home” in large letters over
the hearth--and then forget about maps which are full of blessing.
In Paris, even at the kiosks on the boulevards you can buy maps of the
world for a few francs; large separate maps of Europe and Asia and
America, printed in color on paper. You do not need them on canvas. It
is almost worth going to Paris to get supplies of these. Thinking of
getting married: go to Paris and get plenty of maps for the new home.
Atlases are not so good. You have to take them down from a shelf and
consult them. Wall maps spare you the trouble; they consult you.
Atlases are to be consciously studied; wall maps are busy studying you
while you are thinking of other things. You are reading the _Arabian
Nights_ but Arabia is reading you. You are turning over the pages of a
picture book with a child; Siam is looking over your shoulder at the
elephants. You are cooking a curry; India has marked you. As you lie in
bed you see that Czechoslovakia is lying in bed, too, with her toes in
the Carpathians.
Atlases have a serious defect, in that they split up the world as a
butcher does a sheep, and the joints are hanging in an absurd series
on hooks. Separate maps of countries and bits of countries, as for
example, northwest Germany, are not so instructive as large composite
maps. It is better to look at Europe as a whole than at Europe in
detail. Nevertheless, a tiny book-page map of the world or Europe or
America or Asia, is of very little value. There is no merit in the
miniature map. The bigger the map the better--up to a point. It should
not be so large that one needs a ladder to examine Greenland. The atlas
and the pocket map and the revolving sphere are the auxiliaries of the
wall maps--very useful in their place if the first has been provided.
When the inspiration for wandering and tramping has come we realize
what a boon maps are, we come to love them, as inseparable companions.
You put local maps of countries and towns and countrysides in your
pockets, and large folded maps of the Continent in your knapsacks.
You unfold them in the desert; you lie on them, you crawl about with
a magnifying glass examining their small print and the lost names of
villages in smudged mountain ranges. You learn by the scale what the
length of your thumb or little finger means in kilometers and miles.
You survey with a curious joy the dotted line of your peregrinations up
to that point.
Have you seen enough of the world? Are you sure you will rest content
at Kensal Rise or Père la Chaise when the time comes? Take a map of the
world and a blue pencil, go back in memory over the whole of your life,
start the pencil at your birthplace, and begin to draw the line of your
goings to and fro upon the world. How you will rejoice in yourself if
you can conduct that blue pencil chart across a great ocean, across
Atlantic or Pacific! The longer and more bulging and loopy the line
the more you will feel you have lived. In the later years of your life
you will be able to say: “I was born into the world and I have seen
something of it.”
Of course, maps have another function besides that of firing your
imagination, and it would be neglectful to omit a further serious
consideration. They are for helping you to find your way. How to read
maps in detail is a matter of some study, as there is much more
information hidden in a good scientific map of a country than at first
meets the eye. When tramping across forest and mountain it is as well
to carry with one sections of the Government survey, by the aid of
which one can often locate oneself when otherwise hopelessly lost.
You know also where you must make for for provisions, and whether you
are approaching a marshy region which cannot be traversed on foot,
where the fordings and ferries and bridges of a river or stream are
to be found, where a forest ends, where open country is resumed. One
inevitably spends hours of some days with one’s sectional map, trying
to make out what point has been reached, verifying detail and verifying
again.
This sort of map ought to be stoutly mounted, as it comes in for much
use and is entirely in a different category from the large composite
maps suitable for home or for folding within the large inner pocket
of the knapsack. You thumb them so much because almost inevitably you
come upon error, even in the best survey. It is highly difficult to
digest square miles and square inches. Every map has an element of
artistic impressionism, and has to be studied somewhat intuitively.
What you would mark, it omits, because the map maker was of a different
temperament. For that you have to allow, and not lose your patience and
tear up your guide.
At home it is well to have a map cupboard and preserve and put in it
every little map which has ever served you on the road or in foreign
cities. You may help others with your old maps upon occasion, and you
may help yourself when thinking of returning at some time upon an old
track.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
TRESPASSERS’ WALK
You are going to be very ill-mannered and stray on to other people’s
property. Granted that fundamental impertinence you must be as nice as
possible about it; graciously lift your hat to the proprietor when you
see him. You should be as careful to do as little damage as possible;
mend the hedge you have broken, put back the hurdle, avert your face if
a lady is swimming in her private pool. In doing the trespassers’ walk
it is as well to forego the happiness of a rigid rule. You take your
compass; you decide, let us say, to go west southwest, and it will
take you over commons, over ploughed land, village greens, graveyards,
gardens, over loosely held but large and idle estates, perhaps through
thickly propertied country. It is enough to do the walk roughly. You
cannot follow a ruled straight line across sown fields and flower beds
and through the lord of the manor’s kitchen. You must frame exceptions
to the ruling of the compass, and be guided by the dictates of the
heart and of good sense. The main idea is to see just what the land of
a given country is like, and to enjoy it. You have the added thrill of
not knowing whom you will meet and on what terms.
Of course, I do not guarantee that you may not come to grief. You
may get on to the grounds of a very peppery squire who, resenting
greatly your trespass on his land, will assail you in person, or set
his keepers on you, or even let loose a fierce dog, or telephone the
police. My experience is that you need not fear these chances unless
you behave badly. Many landowners tacitly allow the neighboring
villagers to wander in their grounds if they do not do damage. The
parvenu comes and tries to clear every one out, and keep his pleasaunce
entirely for himself, but even he, unless he be a Seigneur of a
Channel island will not fire on a stranger at sight. The fact is, that
in England anyway, there is no absolute right to keep strangers off
private property. Formerly, possessed land was much more free to the
use of the people in general than it is now. The tradition remains. No
farmer objects to your walking alongside his cornfields or across his
pastures. It is the people who enclose but do not farm who have most
prejudice against strangers.
No doubt bitternesses over rights of way have hardened owners’
hearts; no doubt the breakdown of feudal relationship between squire
and villager has helped to make the former a recluse; no doubt the
increasing vulgarity and bad manners of people in general have made
them less welcome in the eyes and on the estates of the refined and
well-to-do.
But unless you do damage you are not committing a serious offense by
trespassing. And the trespassers’ walk is so arduous that it can
only be recommended to the few. It is worth while, not merely as an
adventure, but as a means of getting a true notion of your native land.
You can get it hunting; but then, not every one hunts.
One is inclined to think of England as a network of motor roads
interspersed with public houses, placarded by petrol advertisements,
and broken by smoky industrial towns. That England is a fair country
few will deny, because you see beautiful cross sections of her from
trains. But when you get out at a railway station, the vision of the
carriage window is seldom realized. You are guided away from Nature, by
gulleys and deep-cut or hedged roads. England becomes to you a dusty
road, a series of dusty roads.
There are glorious commons here and there, and free woods, but you
must travel to find them. You get tired of thoroughly tamed Sussex and
Surrey and go to the Welsh hills or the Cumberland lakes. But England
is more in Sussex and Surrey than it is in the mountains. Only it is
enclosed, shut away, and marked “private.” Rain-washed notices put up
ages ago tell you that TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. And as we pray
daily in old-fashioned phrase to have our trespasses forgiven we invest
the idea of trespassing with some awe. So we keep to the road, even if
we are out on a mere idle walk and not bent on reaching any given house
or place. Even if you take a stile and leave road for footpath your
pleasure is enhanced, and if you leave footpath for the “trackless”
woods it is even further enhanced.
For the trespassers’ walk you should be lightly clad and shod, for you
have to jump often. You can start at any point you choose, and take the
guidance of the compass, or the sun, or some dominant landmark in the
view. You then take a bee line and see where it leads you. As you are
neither a bee nor a bird you cannot fly over hedges and walls, and you
cannot go so fast. Every field presents its problem, but every field
presents also its pleasure.
You will observe the different way the wild flowers look on the other
side of the hedge that skirts the road; they are sheltered and fresh
and more numerous and altogether more happy. Even that first field is
a more pleasant place than the great highway.
The second hedge is likely to be lighter and more easy to get through
than the first. You come into a broad meadow, and see beyond it the
darkness of a woodland you have never entered. On the fringe of it the
rabbits are playing. In the bushes are more nests, more fluttering of
birds. You enter the wood. It is still and dreaming, apparently utterly
unpopulated. It belongs to some quiet family living in a big secluded
country house a mile away. There is room for a tribe where but five
people and their servants are living. Naturally enough, you meet no
one. You are in woodland which is after all but little visited though
in the midst of crowded England. The berries on the blackberry bushes
rot unpicked. No one comes seeking the many mushrooms. Even the rabbits
are only shot at once a year--to keep their numbers down. You are
treading on last year’s leaves, or the leaves of the year before last,
on the leaf mold of ages past. England is carpeted under your feet. You
delight in your steps, in the rise and fall of the land, in the sunny
clearing and the vetch-covered bank where you sit watching little blue
and brown butterflies fluttering about you.
No one comes to chase you off. At least you are not a trespasser until
some one has seen you. You hear no one moving anywhere. You do not
even hear the motor cars on the road you left. You have disenchanted
the England of those roads. This is the real England, the England into
which you ought to have been born, rather than that of curbed ways and
tarred roads.
From the woods you emerge on to a fair pleasaunce, an upward-reaching
greensward, flanked afar by a white house--the owner’s probably. Your
eyes turn wistfully towards the house and its windows, but there seems
to be no one there, it might be empty. There is not even a smoke from a
chimney. You climb the green slope to another wood, and passing through
it, come unexpectedly to a gap, no, a ditch, no, a country road, a
lane, leading from you do not know where to you do not know what.
You go down into it; you climb up on the other side. You have entered a
different type of property. You are in a turnip field, which you skirt.
In your next field you see a fearsome animal all by himself, grazing at
leisure, and it depends on your courage whether you will face the bull
or make an exception to your rule of the game of the walk.
It is well to have a notebook and record the rules, by-laws, and
exceptions of your walk as you frame them. In this notebook also you
keep a personal record of the England you found the other side of the
hedge.
Upon seeing a bull you decide to pass him in the spirit of an escaping
_torero_, or you make a rule to meet the danger. You take a bearing
by your pocket compass, and ascertain what tree or landmark you are
naturally making for on the other side of the bull’s field. And having
assured yourself of that, you reach it by making a detour.
Then, proceeding with your tramp, you go right through a farmhouse
yard. If the compass directs that you should go right through the
farmhouse you may go in and get some refreshment. You do not avoid
the farmer and his spouse, or farm hands. They are part of your novel
adventure, and are nearly always quite pleased to see you, even if a
bit puzzled at your line of route.
It is just as well not to explain what you are up to. They will not
take to it. They do not mind your walking across the farm with a given
object, but will fail to understand your notion of following the
compass. Assuredly they will think you rogue or mad. It is best to talk
politics to them, talk of that terrible fellow Ramsay MacDonald and the
dreadful doings of Labor; they love that. Your interest in the stock
will not come amiss. You may ask also of land for sale, of estates
falling vacant, and changes of ownership. They will tell you much about
the owners of the land you travel over. The difficulty is in getting
away from a farm and making the crazy exit that your compass dictates.
There again a rule may be framed. You may select a point in view ahead
and get to it conventionally, resuming your bee line across country
there.
You are in for a delightful day or for delightful days of tramping. If
you have a cottage in the country, as I had when doing this, you can
do a few hours of this and then return by road or rail home, resuming,
another day, at the point where you left off. On the other hand, if
the weather is fine, there is no reason why you should not sleep out
and tramp all the way to the sea. Only it will take longer than could
be expected, as getting over hedges and walls and ditches and streams
takes time. And it is more tiring than an ordinary walk on a moor or a
common.
On a long tour of the kind you learn something about English life
which is not easily obtained in a conventional way, and the experience
should be filled out by learning the names and histories of estates
and owners. If you have friends on the way you can have delightful
accidental meetings and enriching conversations. If you are seriously
studying English life there is no reason why you should not frankly
call at the houses you see on the way and get what information you can.
Some people may meet you coldly, a few boorishly, but most will be
polite and friendly enough. Occasionally you will meet people who will
be extremely kind and helpful. It is neither so wicked nor so dangerous
to be a trespasser as might at first appear.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A ZIGZAG WALK
I have mentioned the “zigzag” walk. Did you ever make one? Probably
not, for it is my secret. I invented it. A frequent wish of the
traveler and wanderer is to obtain genuinely chance impressions of
cities and countries. He would trust neither his own choice of road,
nor the guide’s choice, nor the map. But if he goes forth aimlessly he
inevitably finds himself either making for the gayer and better-lighted
places, or returning to his own door. The problem is to let chance
and the town take charge of you, for the world we travel in is more
wonderful than human plan or idle hearts desire.
One day in New York, wishing to explore that great city in a truly
haphazard way I hit on the following device--a zigzag walk. The first
turning to the left is the way of the heart. Take it at random and you
are sure to find something pleasant and diverting. Take the left again
and the piquancy may be repeated. But reason must come to the rescue,
and you must turn to the right in order to save yourself from a mere
uninteresting circle. To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning
to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left again,
and so on.
I had a wonderful night’s walking thus in New York, taking cross
sections of that marvelous cosmopolitan city. And many were the
surprises and delights and curiosities that the city unfolded to me
in its purlieus and alleys and highways and quays. That was several
years ago. After New York I saw Paris for the first time, and wandered
that way there. Curiously enough, I started from the conventional
and tourist-stricken Avenue de l’Opéra, and the zigzag plan led me
across the Seine to the Quartier Latin and Bohemian Montparnasse. I
saw more of Paris in a night than many may do in a month. After Paris
I tried the experiment in Cologne. That was after I had marched in
with my regiment from the wilds of the Ardennes and southern Germany.
I explored the city in that way. How unusual and real and satisfactory
were the impressions obtained by going--not the crowd’s way, but the
way of the zigzag, the diagonal between heart and reason.
However, the most charming and delightful associations of my zigzag
walk are not those of the great foreign cities which I have known, but
of our mysterious and crooked-streeted capital, London herself.
It was Christmas time and I said to my wife: “Let us do our shopping on
the zigzag way.” We had not gone forth on such an adventure before, and
were full of excitement, wondering where we should be led. What exactly
we bought on the way I do not wholly remember, but London was generous
to us in its cross section of houses and shops. On this occasion we
started on the road of reason, since we had a definite purpose in view,
and we took the first on the right, and the first on the left, instead
of the first on the left, and the first on the right. It may be thought
that made no difference. Believe me, all the difference in the world!
The first street we knew quite well, the second was an asphalt
alley, where scores of children were playing hop-o’-my-thumb on the
white-scrawled flagstones. The third street was one of the great
film streets of London, with cinema stores from end to end and shop
windows lurid with horror posters. The fourth turning brought us to
the famous market of Pulteney, where all the surplus fruit and job
lots of vegetables from Covent Garden are exhibited on donkey barrows,
and cried by vociferous hawkers. Here we could buy two grapefruit on
occasion for a penny, and the “rare and refreshing fruit” which the
wizard from Wales once offered to the poor as a result of legislation
could here be obtained by chance and in abundance. From the market we
went by a crooked road from Rupert Street to Callard’s cake shop in
Regent Street.