humanity, my dear little human race, is at once more difficult to get at and more generally present than you seem to know. you are yourselves human beings, dear people. yet how many have so fully understood their fellows (that is, themselves) that they could exactly say how any man will behave or why any man behaves as he does? but with that i am not to-day concerned. i am concerned with another matter, which is the impossibility of getting away from these brothers of ours, even if we desire to do so.
note you here, humans, that in reality you do not, even the richest of you, try to get away from your brothers. you do not like solitudes; you like sham, theatrical solitudes. you like the highlands on condition that you have driven away the people rooted there, but also on condition that you may have there the wine called champagne. now if you had seen that wine made, the gathering of the apples in the orchards of the rhine and the moselle, the adding of the sugar, the watching of the fermentation, and the corking with a curious machine, you would appreciate that if you insist upon champagne in the highlands, then you are certainly[202] taking humanity with you. if you could follow the thing farther and see them all passing the stuff on, each a little afraid of being found out, then you would know that as you drank your champagne in the most solitary valley you had done far from getting rid of humanity. all the grotesque of man and all his jollity, all his stupidity and all his sin, went with you into your hermitage and it would have gone with you anyhow without the champagne. you cannot make a desert except by staying away from it yourself. all of which leads me to the barber.
first, then, to give you the true framework of that astonishing man. for exactly thirty-six hours there had been nothing at all in the way of men; and if thirty-six hours seems but a short time to you as you read it, it certainly was a mighty long time for me who am writing this. of those thirty-six hours the first few had been enlivened (that is, from five in the morning till about noon) with the sight of a properly made road, of worked stone, of mown grass, and of all that my fellow beings are busily at throughout the world. for though i had not seen a man, yet the marks of men were all around, and at last as i went into the uplands i bade farewell to my kind in the shape of an old rusty pair of rails still united by little iron sleepers, one link of a decauville railway which a generation before had led to a now abandoned mine.
my way over the mountains lay up a gulley which[203] turned as unexpectedly as might the street of a medi?val town; and which was quite as narrow and as enwalled as the street of any city; but instead of houses there were ugly rocks, and instead of people very probably viewless devils. still, though i hated to be away from men i went on because i desired to cross the high ridge which separated me from a dear pastoral people, of whom i had heard from poets and of whom i had read in old books. they were a democracy simple and austere, though a little given to thieving, and every man was a master of his house and a citizen within the state. this curious little place i determined to see, though the approach to it was difficult. there are many such in europe, but this one lies peculiarly alone, and is respected, and i might say in a sense worshipped, by the powerful government to which it is nominally subject.
well, then, i went on up over the ridge and, by that common trick of mountains, the great height and the very long way somehow missed me; it grew dark before i was aware, and when i could have sworn i was about four thousand feet up i was close upon eight thousand. i had hoped to manage the farther valleys before nightfall, but when i found it was impossible what i did was this: i scrambled down the first four or five hundred feet of the far side before it was quite dark, until i came to the beginnings of a stream that leapt from ledge to ledge. it was not large enough to supply a cottage[204] well, but it would do to camp by, for all one needs is water, and there was a little brushwood to burn. next morning with the first of the light i went on my scramble downwards—and it was the old story (which everyone who has wandered in the great mountains of europe knows so well), i was in the wrong valley. i was used to that sort of thing, and i recognised the signs of it at once. i made up my mind for a good day’s effort, which, when one is by oneself, is an exasperating thing; i tried to guess from my map what sort of error i had made (and failed). i knew that if i followed running water i should come at last to men. at about three o’clock in the afternoon i made a good meal of stale bread, wine, and my companion the torrent, which had now grown to be a sort of river and made as much noise as though it were a politician. then i thought i would sleep a little, and did so (you must excuse so many details, they are all necessary). it was five when i rose and took up my journey again. i shouldered the pack and stolidly determined that another night out in these warmer lowlands would not hurt me, when i saw something which is quite unmistakable upon the grass of those particular hills, a worn patch, and another worn patch a yard or two ahead. that meant a road, and a road means men—sooner or later.
sure enough, within half a mile, the worn patches having become now almost continuous, i rounded a big rock and there was a group of huts.
[205]there were perhaps two dozen of them, perhaps more. three-quarters were built of great logs with large, very flat roofs over them held down by stones; one quarter were built of the same rough stones, and there was a tiny church of dirt colour, with two windows; and neither window had glass in it. i had found men. and i had found something more.
for as i went down the main street of this polity (they had “main street” stuck up in their language at the corner of the only possible mud alley of their town) i saw that blessed sight which sings to the heart and is one of the thirteen signs of civilisation, a barber’s pole. it was not very good; it was not planed or polished; the bark was still upon the chestnut wood of it; but there was a spiral of red round it in the orthodox fashion, at the end of it a tuft of red wool, and underneath it in very faded rough letters upon a board the words, “here it is barbered.” more was to follow. i confess that i desired to draw, for beyond the little huts the mountains, once dreadful, now, being so far above me, compelled my attention. but just as i had sat down upon a great stone to draw their outline, there appeared through the disgusting little door under the barber’s pole one of those humans whom i have mentioned so often in these lines.
he was about thirty, but he had never known care; his complexion was pink and white, his eyes were lively, his brown hair was short, curled, trimmed[206] and oily, and some fifteen degrees from the middle of his head to the eastward went a very clear white line which was the parting of his hair. his two little moustaches curled upwards like rams’ horns; his chin was square and firm, but very full and healthy. he was looking out for customers. oh, humanity, my brothers, divine object of the positivists, plaything of the theologians, food of the god of war, great of destiny, victim of experience, doubtful of doom, foreknowing of death, humanity enslaved, exultant, always on the march, never arriving, the only thing yet made that can laugh and can cry, humanity, in fine, which was generously designed as matter for poets, hear! he was looking out for customers! even to the railways of his own land it was nearly a hundred miles; no one read print; beyond latin no foreign language perhaps was known. no vehicle on wheels had ever been into that place, even the maps were wrong, no one therein had seen a metalled road, a ship of any kind, nor perhaps one polished stone. but he was looking out for customers.
he spotted me. he used no subterfuge; he smiled and beckoned with his finger, and i went at once, as men do when the figure appears at the doorway of the feast and beckons some one of the revellers into the darkness. i obeyed. he put a towel round my neck; he lathered my chin; i gazed at the ceiling, and he began to shave.
on the ceiling was an advertisement in the english[207] tongue. i am inured by this time to the inconceivable stupidity of modern commerce, but (as the pwca said to the acorn) “the like of this i never saw.” there most certainly was not a man in the whole place who had ever heard of the english language, nor, i will bet a boot, had anyone been there before me who did, at any rate not since the pilgrimages stopped. yet there was this advertisement staring me in the face, and what it told me to do was to buy a certain kind of bicycle. it gave no evidence in favour of the thing. it asserted. it said that this bicycle was the best. there was a picture of a young man riding on the bicycle, and under it in very small letters in the language of the country an address where such bicycles might be bought. the address was in a town as far away as bristol is from hull, and between it was range upon range of mountains, and never a road.
i watched this advertisement, and the barber all the while talked to me of the things of this world.
he would have it that i was a stranger. he mentioned the place—it was about eighty miles away—from which i came. he said he knew it at once by my accent and my hesitation over their tongue. he asked me questions upon the politics of the place, and when i could not reply he assured me that he meant no harm; he knew that politics were not to be discussed among gentlemen. he recommended to me what barbers always recommend, and i saw that his bottles were from the ends of the earth—some[208] french, some german, some american—at least their labels were. then when he had shaved me he very politely began to whistle a tune.
it was a music-hall tune. i had heard it first eighteen months before in glasgow, but it had come there from new york. it was already beginning to be stale in london—it did not seem very new to the barber, for he whistled it with thorough knowledge, and he added trills and voluntary passages of merit and originality. i asked him how much there was to pay. he named so considerable a sum that i looked at him doubtfully, but he still smiled, and i paid him.
i asked him next how far it might be to the next village down the valley. he said three hours. i went on, and found that he had spoken the truth.
in that next village i slept, and i went forward all the next day and half the next before i came to what you would call a town. but all the while the barber remained in my mind. there are people like this all over the world, even on the edges of eternity. how can one ever be lonely?
