II

I suppose we may say of everyone, that he sooner or later falls a

victim to the desire to travel, with as much truth as we say, far more

often, that he falls a victim to love. However that may be, I claim no

special destiny when I say that I have been mastered by both passions,

except perhaps that they culminated in my case simultaneously.

I must go back to the time when I was some six years old to find the

first faint evidences of the rover in me. At that time we lived almost

at the foot of that interminable thoroughfare, the Finsbury Park Road,

next door to a childless dame whose sole companion was a pug of

surpassing hideousness of aspect, and whose sole recreation was a

morning stroll in Finsbury Park with this pug. How I came to form a

third person in these walks I cannot quite remember but I can imagine.

At the age of six I was a solemn child, unclean in habits, consorting

with "grown-ups," and filled with an unsocial hatred for the baby

whose matutinal ablutions were consummated at the same hour at which

the old lady usually took her walk. I can remember that I was supposed

to assist in some way at those ablutions, probably to hold the

mottled soap, which curiously resembled the infant's limbs when

pinched with cold; and so, I suppose, I would steal out and join the

lady and her dog, walking a little to one side as we drifted slowly up

the dull suburban street into the park. Sometimes we went as far as

the lake, and I have faint memories of a bun, purchased by the dame,

and munched by me as we watched the gardeners trimming the beds. I do

not wish to suggest that this lady was my first love--I have never

carried my senophile proclivities to that extent. She was, to me, the

antithesis of mottled soap and cradle-rocking, and as such she lives

in my memory. I am also grateful to her for giving me my first glimpse

of a world outside the front door; an ugly world, it is true, a world

of raucous bargaining and ill-bred enjoyment, but a world

nevertheless.

Why should I tell of so trivial an incident? Bear with me a moment.

Since I have been at sea I have often reflected upon the fact that

many phases of my life are even now going on, quite heedless of

my absence, quite apathetic of my very existence, in fact. How

marvellous, it seems to me, to know that life at my old school is

proceeding upon exactly the same lines as when I was there! At this

moment I can see, in imagination, the whole routine; and I can tell

at any time what the school is doing. Again, I know precisely the

goings-in and the comings-out of all the staff at my old employer's;

picture to myself with ease what is happening at any instant. More

wonderful still, I know what my friend is doing at this moment. I know

that he is seated in his room at the Institute, talking to our friends

(perchance of me), ere they descend to their lectures at seven

o'clock. At ten, while I am "turned in," he will be leaving the

Institute, and the 'bus will put him down at his favourite hostelry.

At this moment he is smoking a cigarette! But then, of course, he is

always smoking a cigarette!

It is a far cry from a stealthy stroll with an old woman in Finsbury

Park to a twenty-thousand-mile tramp in a freighter, and yet one is

the logical outcome of the other, arrived at by unconscious yet

inevitable steps. Listen again.

At a later period, when I had discovered that tools were a necessary

complement to my intellectual well-being, I brought my insatiable

desire to _make_ something to the assistance of my equally insatiable

desire to _go_ somewhere. From a sugar-box and a pair of perambulator

wheels I fashioned a cart, between the shafts of which I travelled

many leagues into the wilds of Middlesex and Essex. "Leagues" must be

understood in the sense in which Don Quixote would have used the word.

I do not suppose I ever traversed more than eight or ten miles at a

time. But never, while the desire to go out and see is living within

me, shall I forget how, one breathless August day, when the air was

heavy with the aroma of creosoted sleepers, my small brother and I

stared through the gates of a level crossing, and saw Epping Forest in

the blue distance! O phantoms of Cortes, Balboa, and De Soto, wert

thou there? O Sir Francis, hadst thou that thrill when

"_Drake went down to the Horn,

And England was crowned thereby_"?

But I grow magniloquent. My object is attained if I can but show that

when my friend took me under his wing at the Institute long years

agone, when the innocent-looking lad with the fair hair, that might

have had an incipient tonsure superimposed without incongruity,

drifted away from text-books of mechanics, and sat down with Schiller,

Ducoudray, and Carlyle, he little imagined how adventurous a spirit

there boiled under that demure disguise of retiring scholarship--a

spirit fired with an untamable passion for looking over the

back-garden wall!

Even perambulator wheels give out, however. I forget whether the

wheels of my little cart failed before my mother's patience, or the

reverse. I was growing away from those tiny journeys; my head bulged

with loose heaps of intellectual rubbish acquired during long hours of

unsociable communion with a box of books in the lumber room. I knew

the date of Evil Merodach's accession to the Assyrian throne, but I

did not know who killed Cock Robin. I knew more than Keats about the

discovery of the Pacific, but I did not know Keats. I knew exactly how

pig-iron was smelted, but I did not know the iron which enters into

the soul. I knew how to differentiate between living and non-living

matter, but I did not know that I was alive. Then a new heaven and a

new hell opened before me; I was sent away to school.

Concerning school and, after school, apprenticeship, I shall

not speak. Neither mind nor body can wander far in those humane

penitentiaries called schools. I had fed myself with _History_ since I

had learned, painfully enough, to read, and here at school I found I

knew nothing. What did it matter? The joy of knowing the name of the

wife of Darius, of Lucan, of Caesar, was mine alone. I wove stories

about Roxana and Polla, but I doubt if any one ever wove stories about

the Conventicle Act, or the Petition of Rights, or the Supremacy of

the Pope, as told in a school history. I often wonder that boys do not

grow up to hate their country, when they are gorged with the horrible

trash in those yellow volumes.

I once read of a little boy who killed himself after reading "The

Mighty Atom." I believe many people deplored this, and expressed

aversion to the book in consequence. That is proper; but suppose the

school history had related the story of "The Little Princes in the

Tower" with the same power and intensity which Corelli employs in the

"Atom," and suppose the little boy had been so overwhelmed with the

horror and vividness of the historical perspective that he had hanged

himself behind the fourth-form classroom door--well, then, I should

say the remainder of the boys would have learned the reign of Richard

the Third as it has never been learned before or since, and the

unhappy suicide would not have died in vain.

But, as I said, one cannot wander far at school. A schoolmaster once

advised his colleagues to take up some literary hobby--essay writing,

articles for the press, etc.; for, said he, teaching is a narrowing

profession. I wonder if any schoolmaster has ever imagined how

narrowing it is for the boys? Have they never seen the look of abject

boredom creep over the faces of even clever lads as the "lesson"

drones on: "At this period the Gothic style of architecture arose, and

was much used in Northern Europe for ecclesiastical buildings." And

so on, including dates. Whose spirit would not fail? Why not, oh, my

masters, why not use this inborn passion for wandering abroad of

which I write? Why not take that jaded band of youths out across yon

fields, take them to the village church, and _show_ them grinning

gargoyle and curling finial, show them the deep-cut blocks of stone,

show them, on your return, a picture of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge

at Rouen? Would your trade be narrowing then?