tramping
tramping
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 gentlemanand 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 pearwhich 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 themouth 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.