tramping
tramping
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE ART OF IDLENESS
THE world is large enough, or is only too small, as takes your fancy or speaks your experience. But blue sky by day and fretted vault of heaven by night give you the foil of the infinite, making your petty exploit a brave adventure. After surveying the map of the world, thinking on this country and on that with gusto of a Marco Polo, you may modestly decide to take a little trip in Hertfordshire, like Mr. Wyndham Lewis, who, on a certain journalistic occasion, set forth to the discovery of Rutland. Instead of going, likeKennan, into the wilds of Siberia for a year or so, you may decide to go across the New Forest during the Whitsuntide week-end, a littlevoyage au tour de ma chambre. There are thrills unspeakable in Rutland, more perhaps than on the road to Khiva. Quality makes good tramping, not quantity.
The virtue to be envied in tramping is that of being able to live by the way. In that indeed does the gentle art of tramping consist. If you do not live by the way, there is nothing gentle about it. It is then a stunt, a something done to make a dull person ornamental. I listen with pained reluctance to those who claim to have walked forty or fifty miles a day. But it is a pleasure to meet the man who has learned the art of going slowly, the man who disdained not to linger in the springy morning hours, to listen, to watch, to exist. Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments, not in distance run.
Fallen trees are to be sat on, laddered trees to climb, flowers to be picked, nests to belooked into, song birds to hear, falcons to be watched. The river invites you to strip. You sit under the cascade in the noontide; you climb into caves to cool and dry. The green roof of the mole’s track is to be followed till you find the gentleman in velvet in his home. The sound of the tapping of the woodpecker shall guide you to the loose-barked tree where with watchful eye a bird of beauty is hunting the unmannerly wood louse. You shall approach gently the deer who, in a group, wait for you with startled eyes. They run from the crashing and speedy—they can be won by the gentle. Wild nature is not so wild as we think, or we are wilder—it is not so far from us, and we are nearer.
You can enter a wider family if you are gentle. The rabbit which tempts your stones will come and smell at your toes, the birds will hop on you and sing as you lie in the grass, even the alleged ferocious animals, such as bears, will come and take bread from your hands—if they feel you are near to them.
He prayeth best who loveth bestAll things both great and small
He prayeth best who loveth bestAll things both great and small
He prayeth best who loveth bestAll things both great and small
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small
means he liveth best. Pan is indeed more truly our god than Diana. The chaste Diana, the great huntress, is a romantic figure—but not one of us. She would not have us with her, we will not have her with us. We will keep company with wood nymphs and satyrs, and will help to turn the animals another way when we hear Diana’s horn resounding in the forest. She shall go on and find the world a wilderness in front of her—the living and the loving all slipping behind.
Nature unfolds herself slowly like a snail if you are still in front of her. You cannot know what you are walking over till you cease walking. The lizard which has eyed you furtively from under a stone comes forth and squeaks to you—you make friends with him, in fact. And as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the shingly beach of a mountain stream, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.
The noontide meal is a siesta which can be very pleasantly prolonged. It only takes half an hour to make the fire and boil the pot, butyou have left no “back in half an hour” notice in any town; there should be no “got to be” anywhere at any time, no hotel that you are making for twenty miles the other side of the range; no rendezvous with a young cousin or an old man at the crossroads at sundown, but a blessed insouciance regarding men and things.
The grand desideratum is to have found an agreeable spot. “We can put in forty minutes here!”—“My friend,hours!”
The ants shall carry away the sausage rind and the beetles devour the cucumber peeling; bees shall sip where sweet coffee has fallen, shy rodents shall clear earth’s table of crumbs—while the heart wells up with joyful conversation, or the eyes drowsily settle on their lower lids. There is a joyous, light-green glittering sleep between the hours of two and four, hours not lost nor to be missed in the temporal economy of the tramp.
There arrive light and happy dreams, the soft-steppingarrières penséesof the tramping life. The whole soul has relaxed, the mainspring of citizenship has run down, and willring no alarms. It means a change in the condition of passivity. You are at home to fairies and fancies and to the spider of happiness who spins golden webs. It is a fallacy to think that during the siesta you do not tramp; you are tramping, wandering in unknown parts, exploring the primitive, opening doors, making new connections with the great unity of which you have been a nonconscious part.
You wake with no headache, but with, instead, a freshness and eagerness. You do not start at the unfamiliar scene; you know yourself to be at home. You look upon your companion still sleeping—did you ever look upon your friend asleep—not in a bed in a hotel, or on a red sofa after dinner, or in the dim corner of a jolting train—but in Nature’s house? There you will feel him nearer, more of a friend, more kindred. The same wood sprites have hopped on you both while you slumbered and dreamed.
You continue the way with morecamaraderie, doing an indolent eight or nine miles before sundown. The afternoon walk is likely to be different from the morning one; you areless eager, more passive and indulgent and sociable. One is on the lookout for a fellow tramp—for an exchange of thoughts. If you are by yourself, you have at least thealter egoof your thoughts, and if with another there is his mind. One should not, however, always be shy of a chance third—the man who comes out of Nature to meet you.
Things happenhors de programmewhich we could never put into our program. That is why programs of coming life should be of the most general character, none of that “to-day I brew, to-morrow I bake” type of miscalculation. “To-day I do not know what I shall do; to-morrow I know less” is better. “Someday or other the Queen’s daughter I take” is sufficient—if not too much. Leave plenty of room for God—the devil may use some of the spare room, but no matter, he is only a secondary character in our affairs.
The tramp carries no wrist watch. He has no zero hour—no zero plus forty-three at which he must take his section over the top. In his cave he has no presentation timepiece mounted on lions or mermaids. As he walks he doesnot raise his eyes to scan Big Ben through the gloom—for his life is not parceled out in Parliamentary quantities. He has no dashed repeater in his pouch, no alarm clock at his ear. The deathwatch does not sound in the wall of his forest house; he does not live and sleep beside that coffin on end called a grandfather, “his life-seconds numbering tick-tock-tick.” He listens for no morning hooter; he boils his eggs without a measure of sliding sand; he punches no time clock when he begins his day’s tramp, and at the end the last trump shall catch him unawares—an irrelevancy.
The most profound philosophers have been engaged for any number of years trying to explain time, and they are all agreed that it is an illusion. The universe would go on existing if all human beings were destroyed, but what we call “time” would not. Time, they are assured, must be relative. The little beetle which we tread upon feels a pang as great as when a giant dies. His normal life may be five months only—but he has as extensive a notion of his life as we have of what we call the normal span—our fourscore years. Theinsect which lives only an hour fits the fourscore years of impressions into it somehow. “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run”—the insect does it, better than you can.
The fact is, the minutes are not unforgiving. We have to reverse many of the Grub Street maxims: “Take care of the minutes, Freddy, and the hours will take care of themselves.” No, take care of the hours and the minutes can go hang. Take care of your life and your days will be all right.
Lord Chesterfield’sLetters to his Sonand Arnold Bennett’sHow to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Dayare of little value to us. We will not read in our baths, nor memorize French verbs while we fry. Or we will, if we like, but not upon the compulsion of filling time.
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion; only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens your mind. Town makes men contentious; the country smooths out their souls. The worship of time as a reality is such apowerful superstition that the mind returns to it often after it has got free. It returns again and again, reciting its outworn creed: Thou shalt have one birthday a year and one only; six days shalt thou labor, but only the seventh is the Lord thy God’s.
The tramp repeats it, and then unpacks his heart with stinging words. The mood passes. We, too, can be sweet and indulgent about time and time-tables, bivouacking in eternity. We may even carry a compass clock and, lying in the grass, holding it in our hands, exclaim facetiously with Touchstone: “It is ten o’clock, in another hour it will be eleven”—and moralize equally facetiously, for, “so from year to year we ripe and ripe and then from year to year we rot and rot—and thereby hangs a tale.”