how i came to be a tramp
i brought myself up on carlyle and found him the dearest, gentlest, bravest, noblest man. the life by froude was dearer to me than the gospel of st matthew, or hamlet, or macbeth, and that is saying much if the reader only knew me. carlyle was so near that i saw him in dreams and spoke with him in words that were true, unquestionably. in the vision world of my dream he behaved exactly as he would have done in real life, i am sure of it. he was flesh and blood to me. yet he died and was buried before i was born. how strange! this man who died three years before i was born was a friend closer to me than a lover, one to whom i longed to say caressing words, one whom i longed to embrace and fondle—to kiss even.
he made me work, the dear, irascible, eloquent old 4sage. i worked at his bidding and set myself impossible tasks—impossible! i became a puritan, serious, intolerant and heroic; and in moments of rapture, conscious of the silence of the stars and the graves, i would sing to the night the marching song:
“here eyes do regard you
in eternity’s stillness,
here is all fulness,
ye brave, to reward you,
work and despair not.”
carlyle was a true friend to me, he was not content that he only should be my friend, i had to become the friend of his friends. now, i am one of the great society of his friends. i belong to the fellowship of those that have seen the city. the great society has among its members many children and many jolly tramps. has the reader ever been introduced personally to the great ones long since dead? i think these literary men the great friends of mankind. they allow themselves to be known and cherished—different from military heroes or scientists or explorers. one would as soon love a waxwork as napoleon. yet even the despised and rejected of the literary world are warm and smiling friends to their readers. i, for my part, adored ruskin and browning as a young girl in love with a new history mistress. i obeyed ruskin, bought his works in purple calf and looked up the long words in the dictionary. then rabbi ben ezra entered into 5me so that i spoke with tongues. i learned the poem by heart and recited it to sunsets. i ask myself now how i reconciled “work and despair not” with
“not on the vulgar mass,
called work must sentence pass.”
but of course both sentences are true; one is for one nature, the other for another; i think i must have really belonged to the second category, for have i not become a tramp!
i never felt so humanly close to ruskin as to carlyle. he had a way of stating the truth. he liked to perch on his truths and crow. no, i revered him, but decidedly didn’t like him. browning made friends with me. then came ibsen; and both browning and ibsen confirmed me in the heroism of achieving impossible tasks. has the reader seen the “master builder,” the man who did the impossible twice? “it’s—fearfully thrilling.” in these days i spouted: “life is like the compound eye of the fly. it is full of lives. momentarily we died, momentarily are born again. the old self dies, the new is born; the old life gives way to the new. the selfish man wishes to remain as he is; in his life are fewer lives, fewer changes. but the hero wishes to fulfil every promise written in his being. he dies gladly in each moment to arise the next moment more glorious, nearer to perfection. oh, my friend, pay for the new life with all the old. the life that thou 6hast, was given thee for paying away so that thou mightest obtain something better.”
in myself i believed these words. i worked and read. i worked and threw myself at the impossible. what swinburne wrote is true:
“a joy to the heart of a man
is a goal that he may not reach.”
i wrote lectures in which my style was so infected by the rhetoric of the sage that listeners grumbled that they could not tell when i was quoting and when i was using my own language. that was their defect; they should have known carlyle better! one lecture i specially remember. it was given to some essex folk. it related to hero-worship. all the artillery of carlyle was in play. it was a subject supremely carlylean. work, i praised, and heroic valour. but my message was: “in each of you there is a hero, let him out; in each man there is a hero, see one there,” which is not what carlyle meant when he said: “recognise the hero when you see him and obey.” this was, perhaps, a first divergency. carlyle was looking for a means to govern a nation wisely. i was moving towards my tramp destiny.
that was in the year of the russian revolution and i had been learning russian very sedulously for some time. a literary ambition had possession of me. i had said to myself—one must specialise to get on in the 7world of literature. carlyle specialised german. german things did not interest me. i had long since learned to enjoy turgeniev and gorky and gogol in english translations, and russia had become to me the most interesting country in europe. i determined to specialise on russia.
yes, and when, according to the newspapers, the bombs were flying thick and fast, i took a return ticket for moscow and went out. for luggage i took a camera and a small hand-bag. the tramp has the soberest conscience about luggage. he feels he can always do without. but, of course, i wasn’t a tramp then. i may remark in passing that i lost none of that luggage and had no trouble whatever with it. few travellers manage their first trip to russia without vexatious misadventures. on one occasion, however, when i was taking a snap-shot of a prison, a soldier rushed up to me in terror and rage. he thought my kodak was a bomb.
what an excitement this journey was! i had never even been abroad before. now i went through holland and across the whole of germany and into poland. two days after i had left england i was in russia. i arrived at warsaw on the day the governor was shot. i saw at once there were more soldiers than people in the streets. i took a droshky to a hotel, put down my things and strolled out to see the city. i was arrested at once. fifty yards down marzalkovsky, the piccadilly of warsaw, a soldier stopped me, searched me and 8handed me over to an officer and six armed guards. i was put in the middle and marched off; on each side of me a soldier held a drawn sword and was ready to slash at me if i should attempt to bolt. i am sure the angels wept. internally i collapsed with laughter and at the same time i felt very rich. i was having an experience.
i was released and was arrested again, and a circassian guard punched me in the stomach very hard, “for luck,” i think he said. they gave an account of my arrest in the russ and said i had been nearly beaten to death, but they didn’t know who i was. somehow it came to england as the arrest and flogging of mr foster fraser, the well-known correspondent. poor mr fraser, it must have been awkward explaining to his friends that it was not really he who was flogged.
i was not a correspondent, but i wrote of my adventures, and it was very pleasant to see my words printed in london newspapers. it was very amusing to see myself styled “our own special correspondent,” when, in truth, i was only a free lance and had not even seen the face of a london editor. journalism is a cheap trade! at warsaw i met correspondents of many papers and had surprising glimpses behind the scenes. there was a little american jew there who knew almost every language in europe, who had an eye for every nationality, and who knew the private history of all the women of the city. at one time he had been hotel tout, 9interpreter, guide, but now was correspondent, reporter, supplier of information. he was always hanging about the chief hotel and watching for journalists hard up for copy. there were crowds of english newspaper men who could not speak intelligibly in french, far less in russian. to such the american was a god-send. and lord, what stories they wrote home to england!
i left warsaw for moscow and nizhni. when i left the american was a lonely bachelor. when i returned his wife had found him. she told me her story. she lost her man in new york and had chased him through the states, and through europe. he was always giving her the slip. i think my trembling puritanism rose to the defence of my innocent soul. life is of all colours, but there are some terrible reds and scarlets one doesn’t see in england. warsaw to me was a wicked city. the wonderful beauty of polish girls i had then no eyes for.
i returned to england and was a local lion.
the trip brought me pleasant glory, but it had given me powerful hopes and longings. i had been in the kremlin and in the churches. i had been a vagabond at the fair of nizhni novgorod. i had seen the peasants and their faces and eyes and lives. i learned many things from these peasant faces. i said to myself at moscow: “these people are like what english people were when edward the third was king.” of a face passing i would say to myself: “there are three or four 10hundred years behind that nose and mouth and eyes and chin.” the irresistible question came: “are these peasants not better off than the english clerk or labourer?” as a question i left it.
england again! i returned, for i had an appointment there, comfortable though not literary. life had good things in store for me there—more reading, new acquaintances, a new friend even. i took up russian more seriously and commenced a translation of a novel of dostoievsky. i was learning to know others of that great society, and one day the fates brought me to zarathustra. i was an unruly candidate for a place in the society of the “free, very free spirits,” but a true candidate.
puritanism and intolerance were now to be attacked. a thawing wind began to blow upon the winter of my discontent. “convictions are prisons,” i read. and surely i was imprisoned behind many prison walls. i was in the centre of a labyrinth of convictions and principles. i believed in work and, at the same time, i believed in myself. neitzsche reinforced the belief in myself. i was doing work that was not congenial. i was in work that imprisoned me and that prevented development. i was longing for the new. still in my heart lived the sentences: “do the impossible, pay for the new with all the old.”
i wanted new life, broader horizons, deeper depths, higher heights. i knew these might be purchased by 11giving up my appointment in london and throwing myself into russia. yes, to go to russia and live there, that was my next step. i came to that conclusion one sunday in june. in one little moment i made that big decision. the tiniest seed was sown in time. the fates stood by, the seed lived. to-day that seed is bearing the finest blossoms. may each chapter here be a garland of its flowers exhaling their life perfume.
i shaped my plans to the end.
“‘a yea, a nay
a straight line
a goal’—saith zarathustra.”
my yea was russia; my nay, england; the straight line, the nearest way, my goal, the new life to be paid for with all the old.
in london i had made a russian acquaintance, the son of a deacon of the orthodox church, and just before my departure i received an invitation to spend christmas at lisitchansk, a village some way north of the sea of azov, some miles south of kharkov. russia had seemed dark, enigmatical, terrible, but here at the last minute arms stretched out of the darkness, welcoming me, alluring me.
on what was old year’s night in england, though in russia only the eighteenth of december, i was at dover. the lights of the harbour shone on the placid water. the stars looked down upon my starting, the 12same stars that were at that moment looking down upon my destination also, my stars, the stars that through all my wanderings have shone down. one friend bade me farewell. at dover, on the ship in the harbour in the night, we embraced and parted. england herself grasped my hand and bade me farewell. for a moment, in the stillness, the sea ceased to exist and space was gone—two hands were clasped between the lands.
my life as a wanderer began. i might say my life as a tramp began, for i never worked again. i became, as the philosopher says, “full of malice against the seductions of dependency that lie concealed in houses, money or positions.” whereas i had sold myself to work, i had now bought myself back, i had exchanged dependence upon man for dependence upon god, and had given up my respectable west-end home in “berkeley square,” so that i might take up my abode in the west end of this universe.
perhaps not then, but now i ask: “could anything be more amusing than the modern cry of the right to work? the english are an industrious, restless nation. and the prophets are very censorious of our respectable, though not respected, class. “it is not enough to be industrious,” says thoreau; “so are the ants. the question is, what are you industrious about?” no one questions the use of industry of one kind or another. dear carlyle, my guide, philosopher and friend, i 13wonder if he, in other realms, has learned the value of idleness. perhaps now, after a life-time of nirvana in some eden planet, he has smoothed out his ruffled soul. oh, friends, there are depths of calm and happiness to be found even here, and not autumn stillness but spring calm, the joyful peace of the dove brooding on the waters. i have learned to smooth and compose a rough, tumbled mind until it was like a broad, unsullied mirror reflecting the beauty of the world.
two thousand miles from london there are new silences, pregnant stillness, on the steppes, in the country places, on the skirts of the old forests. no word of the hubbub of democracy need come through; not a hoarding poster flaunts the eye; no burning question of the hour torments the mind. a man is master of himself and may see or hear or consider just what he chooses. that is, if the man be like me.
“you look up at the sky, as you lie under a bush, and it keeps descending, descending to you, as though it wanted to embrace you.... your soul is warm and quietly joyful, you desire nothing, you envy no one.”
“... and so it seems as though on all the earth there were only you and god....”
“all around is silence: only the birds are singing, and this silence is so marvellous that it seems as though the birds were singing in your own breast.” so wrote gorky, the tramp. i almost wish he would write the 14story of his vagabondage instead of being so serious over his revolutionary propaganda.
i have shown how i came to be a wanderer. i will now add to this prologue a word of dedication. the prose of this book is the story of my travels; the poetry, when the reader may discern it, is the story of my heart.
