tramping
tramping
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
A ZIGZAG WALK
IHAVE 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 wetravel 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 del’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 thisoccasion 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 fromRupert Street to Callard’s cake shop in Regent Street.
Happy forethought of London! We had coffee and mustard-and-cress sandwiches in this jolly shop, and bought a cake. Then we crossed Regent Street, bought two chickens at Louis Gautier’s in Swallow Street, and plunged for Piccadilly. We came out at St. James’ Church, and fortune was kind enough to make it possible to visit Hatchards. We went in and “browsed around” for a while and ordered a copy ofThe Sweet-scented Name. Our way was then by Duke Street, Jermyn Street and some others to St. James’ Street with its clubs, and we turned up St. James’ Place. As we passed Number Five, rat-a-tat-tat, from a little window; rattling and jumping like the sound of an old-fashioned motor, went the typing machine of the secretary of the world’s greatest newspaper chief. We thought we had arrived at a cul-de-sac and that we should have to retrace our footsteps—one of the natural rules of the walk—but we found an eye of a needle through which the rich men have to pass to get to the Paradiseof the Green Park. It is always explained to the rich that the eye of the needle in the Gospel is only a figure of speech, and that there was a needle gate through which a camel, without too great a hump, could pass, and the alley from St. James’ Place will just admit the not too stout.
When we got to the fields beyond, the great city played with us and led us a comic dance along the paths of the Green Park. Westminster Cathedral was in view. There was a large balloon overhead in the murk of the London sky, and many people were looking up at it. Our steps took us along various grand crescents of pathway, and the intention of the city with regard to our ultimate destination began to seem very obscure. There were several knotty points as to which was a turning and which was not, and when I made an artful decision the companion of my way said to me, “You want to shape things to your own ends.”
“No,” said I. “I want to be faithful and just.”
A stiff discussion set in and we could not get the matter straight. However, we eventuallyfound ourselves in St. James’ Park, and there was an issue for us into Birdcage Walk where, in the barracks beyond, we saw the soldiers at drill, though little did I think at the time that I was destined to drill there, and be on sentry there myself in time to come.
So the walk went on, and we passed the London Soldiers’ Home near Buckingham Gate, made our last purchase at a little shop in Wilfred Street, passed Westminster City School, and entered Victoria Street by Palace Street and took an omnibus home.
Thus ended the first lap of our zigzag walk through London, and we promised ourselves to return to the point where we had left off and continue this way of chance as soon as a convenient moment came.
Therefore, one Sunday afternoon, and not long after, we took the omnibus back to the corner of Palace Street and resumed. Fate allowed us to miss Victoria Station, and its many lines of rail, and we entered Flatdom and Belgravia, not the best part of Belgravia, but the sadder and more faded streets, the streets where the lamps of joy had died downand guttered out. Then we passed by Moreton Terrace to Lupus Street (“What a name for a London street!” says G. A. B. Dewar, in his sad tale ofLetty—“Is not all London wolfish street for our Lettys?”), Colchester Street, Chichester Street, Claverton Street, streets of faded grandeur, the Embankment. Then over the river we go by Chelsea Bridge and find ourselves in a district hitherto unvisited by us.
We entered Battersea Park and had such a time in its mazes of paths that we were obliged to make a second rule for our walks, and that was that henceforward we should enter no parks. A friend to whom we had communicated the secret of our street adventure had warned us that if in the near future we should disappear from London life he would come in search of us to the Maze at Hampton Court, from which, he was afraid, once entered, we should never extricate ourselves. So we made a rule: No parks, no mazes. Incidentally, however, we spent a remarkable and amusing hour in that artificial wilderness of Battersea. If zigzagging shouldever become fashionable I am afraid that most people will consider itde rigueurto follow out the mazes and labyrinths to the last intricacy and the correct issue, and that they will not have the courage to cut the Gordian knot as we did. And starting pedantically they will finish pedantically—in the literal sense, for is notpes,pedis, a foot. There were many Gordian knots which our footsteps made in the ins and outs of London.
Having given Battersea Park the go-by, we threaded many typically poor streets, not slum, just better than that. How deplorable a sight! Very poor and dirty houses which you feel moving to be worse, with broken windows here and there, and derelict barrows in the roadway. We passed under gloomy railway arches, so gloomy, as if crimes had been committed there, arches where at night spooning couples lurk or solitary bodies furtively eat fish and chips. So we came to a little house which, in the course of time, we ought to have visited, but probably would not, and there we called in our unexpected way—a call not without its sequence in our after-life. Thiswas all in the realm of Lavender Walk and Battersea Rise. In one of the streets we came on two demure villas called Alpha and Omega, and very fitly passed from Battersea to Wandsworth.
Another day, in full fresh air, we walked along Bolingbroke Grove and the fringe of the Common and Nightingale Lane, through very respectable Suburbia, where the houses are just so, and there are plaster angels in the cemeteries. That day we went home from Earlsfield Station. Next time we passed St. Barnabas’ Church with the niches left in the bricks for saints. We made our exit from real London, watching from a railway arch the mad red caterpillars of tube trains going to and fro. The houses grew higher and the roads more spacious, and great elm trees were in the front gardens. With wild wind and rolling sky, ’twixt Putney Heath and the golf links of Wimbledon, we finished up one jolly afternoon by coming unexpectedly to tea at the house of another friend to which without jiggery-pokery the zigzag way had led us.
The next afternoon on which we venturedforth we wandered to sad Merton and the fringe of outer Suburbia. There were fields, but they had Destiny’s mark upon them; they were doomed to be imprisoned with brick by the London which was encroaching, encroaching.
Coming to this pseudo-country we made another rule. When footpaths occur we have the option whether to take them or no. (In future, as I have observed, all footpaths will no doubt bede rigueur.) A footpath took us to Lower Morden and another footpath took us through much mud, to farms, to old houses with meadows in front of them, and fine trees with many angles. The path degenerated from a rolling series of cart ruts to a faint track along the margin of a field, and faded away at last into wormrun grass. A dreadful moment. Presently, spying round, we saw a faded notice on a board—No Footpath—but,
Man is man, and master of his fate,
Man is man, and master of his fate,
Man is man, and master of his fate,
Man is man, and master of his fate,
and we made another rule.
In short we cut across the fields to a rowof houses protected by fierce-looking barbed-wire entanglements. We got on to another footpath and the footpath became a road and the road became a grand drive. I think we got to Blenheim Road, and that this degenerated to a cart track, and we were led over fields to the West Barnes Road, where trams and busses were running and we saw scrawled in front of us in big white letters—“Eternity—In Heaven or Hell.Vote Now.” We voted. Somehow we got to Raynes Park, and were much pleased with the front garden of Carter’s Seed Establishment and the many flowerpots and the ice plants.
Next day we reflected that we had become enmeshed in a net of our own contrivance. Our little plan didn’t at all fit in with the arrangement of the district. Suburbia, with crocuses in bloom, got rather on our nerves. By many circumlocutions we returned to Wimbledon. We did not know the name of the place was Wimbledon, but when we discovered this melancholy fact we realized that we had blisters on our feet.
Another day we walked to Malden, wherewe bought an excellent chicken which we took home in time for supper. Then by Sycamore Grove we walked to Poplar Grove, and by Poplar Grove we walked to Lime Grove, and by Lime Grove to Elm Road, by Elm Road to Beech Grove. We took the option of a footpath and skidded from this region of trees to the main highway, where the fine Hampton Court electric cars speed their handsome way. We went straight into Kingston without any more beating about the bush. We should ordinarily have gone in by the open highroad, but an alley forestalled that conventionality, and we entered by a wee way which took us inside the house of the parish, and we saw all the children playing everywhere upon the floor. Rather slummy. We passed Milner Villas (built 1902), we passed The Victoria, The Six Bells, and The Three Tuns, passed the Kingston Grammar School, where the boys have scarlet caps, and the Bunyan Baptist Tabernacle where the pastor had the kenspeckle name of Isaac Stalberg. There was a strong smell of marmalade from St. James’ Works, and Kingston Station was puffingwith locomotive steam. Night had spread its glamour over everything, and we walked by several slums down to The Jolly Brewers, along paved passages and in the purlieus of the gas works, by further passages where were no houses, to the sight of the greenish mud-colored river and the rusty coppery railway bridge. The old stone bridge of Kingston also stood beautifully in our view.
When we returned to Kingston there was a lonely but lovely walk along Thames side, seeking a bridge to give us a turning on the left, with sun and wind and rain, and ducks falling through the air with assh, and cunning swans sailing forward expecting food, and crying gulls. It was the towing path toward Teddington Lock. The riverside houses came down to the water with lawns and landing stages, terraces, gardens, formal beauties. The Thames is a fair stream; we have made it fair. Once it was otherwise, and England also—unnamed, unloved, wild, woody, marshy. Man has made it dear unto himself. In the ever freshening morning we stood on the bridge at Teddington and looked at the watersrolling over the dam, and the green park land and the gardens beyond.
We wondered very much how we should depart from the other bank of the river, what direction Fate would have us take. But we never could guess in advance. Generally we would say: “I believe to-day we shall land up somewhere in the neighborhood of this place or that,” but our prognostications were never justified. Thus, who would have expected that having passed through Teddington we should arrive at the other side of Kingston stone bridge and be called upon to return to our starting point!
We wandered through an area of large houses possessing a certain sort of pomp and gloom, happy in the summer, not so happy in the winter. And then an area of little Hope Cottages and May Villas. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Seymour Road and Lower Teddington Road we came to a highly disputable loop of roadway which betrayed us to the return over Kingston Bridge.
We felt highly annoyed when we saw this main plank which we were about to be forcedto walk. I, with Machiavellian cunning, proposed to return to that fatal loop of roadway and reinterpret its bearing, and we stood on the triangular refuge in the middle of the roadway, and discussed the point hotly. This is distinctly not a walk on which to embark with one’s wife. It reveals points of difference. It brings out the hidden crookedness of character, confirms all obstinacies and predeterminations. It is possible to get more excited over a trivial turning (mark you, trivial, a place where three ways meet) than over the most portentous decision in real life. I imagine it is always so. In any case, we stood on the triangle at Kingston and argued the point. Two stout policemen of the cinema picture type stood over on the pavement, regarding us and nodding their heads together. “What do you think is their little game?” one was possibly saying to the other, and they must have viewed me with a considerable amount of suspicion when I returned to that loop and obtained a heretical reading of the truth to suit my purpose.
“My dear Watson,” I hear the arch-detectivesaying, “the simplest of crimes are always the most difficult to fathom.” I think it would have puzzled the smartest of plain-clothes men had he followed us on our marvelous way from Kingston back to Kingston, or from Kingston the second time to Hampton Court.
“Onward to Hampton,” said I. “We cannot tell what joys await us there.” We went into Bushey Park, thus infringing one of our own rules, but there was an excellent road going through, and we liked to see the deer grazing near us, like cows. Fortune led us into Hampton, that gay and lively river town, and from Hampton we wandered among gray reservoirs and green embankments to Sunbury. Possibly Fate intervened to punish us for our refusal to pass over Kingston Bridge, for soon we found ourselves clinging to the Thames. It was March by now. The blackthorn was in bloom, the japonica and the almond were in blossom, the celandine was in bud, and birds were singing everywhere. At Ashford there were lots of daffodils, and I remember we passed the girls of the High School all walking in crocodile and lookingvery frisky and fresh, despite the primness of the teacher.
We came to the pretty and rural village of Laleham, Arnold’s village, with its old church with thickly ivied tower, ancient yew trees, and graves of the Arnolds and of the village. There were two goodly inns, the Turk’s Head, the Three Horseshoes. At the latter we had tea, and we learned that Arnold’s house had been pulled down and the present National School had been made with the bricks.
We walked along the towing path once more, but it was now a full, rushing river and was often in flood, well over the bank. The Thames had a wild aspect, reflecting livid clouds. An icy gale whipped the stream. There was a rush of snow, and the storm raged across the whiteness of the horizon like smoke. We sheltered in the coping of deserted river houses, and in order to make progress when the storm abated were obliged to walk on the iron rungs of railings. Even so, we did not escape many a bootful. In this way we passed Penton Hook, and reached, fairly and truly,Staines, one of the bright capitals of Father Thames’ kingdom.
At Staines we took the bridge, or rather the bridge took us over to the other side of the river where we waded all the way to Runnymede and Magna Carta Island—the way all Kings evidently have to go. But we signed no charter of rights. Had we worn crowns we stood in more likelihood of imitating that other remarkable feat of King John, by losing our symbols of royalty in the flood. We were slaves of the road, and the road led us into the water. I think we should have got to Windsor Castle and might conceivably have called on the King himself, the latest after King John, but the water gods intervened, or Pan had other things in view. For I was warped, we were warped away to Egham and Virginia Water. I was able to call on my artist friend, Helen Cross, who at that time lived at Egham and was doing the emblems for my idealistic first novelPriest of the Ideal; a joyous surprise visit, for I could not tell her in advance that I was coming. I did not know whether the zigzag way led to her gate. However,many nice people and some others are on the zigzag path in the jig-saw puzzle of life.
We went from Egham to Thorpe Green and Englefield Green. We went down Prune Hill and to Whitehall Farm and the length of many a longish country road. It’s a long lane that has no turning; in fact we were often comforted by that proverb and never found it disproved. All roads in England, except the horrible cul-de-sacs (which, pray you, avoid) have turnings to the left or to the right, according to the heart or consonant to the reason. The crookedest has some reason in it, and even the worst, though it has a way in, has also a way out.
From Virginia Water the zigzag way leads on to Kennaquhair, and further to a place which I have sometimes heard called the “back of beyond.” At the same time, it may be said that you will not know the name of the place until you get there. You can put no destination label on your rucksack, and if any one asks where you are going, you may tell him in confidence, whisper the dreadful fact in his ear—“honestly, you do not know.” The adventureis not getting there, it’s the on-the-way. It is not the expected; it is the surprise; not the fulfillment of prophecy, but the providence of something better than that prophesied. You are not choosing what you shall see in the world, but are giving the world an even chance to see you.
I am still on that zigzag way, pursuing the diagonal between the reason and the heart; the chart could be made by drawing lines from star to star in the night sky, not forgetting many dim, shy, fitfully glimmering out-of-the-way stars, which one would not purpose visiting. I said we would not enter a maze, but we have made one and are in one, a maze of Andalusia and Dalmatia, of Anahuac and Anatolia, of Seven Rivers Land and Seven Kings. The first to the left, the next to the right! No blind alleys. A long way.Beaucoup zigzag, eh!
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
Transcriber’s Notes:
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.