A Tramp's Sketches

by Stephen Graham

I

Once, possibly, upon the world, man did not know of God; he had not looked to the blank horizon and spoken to the Someone beyond. He had all the need to speak, all the oppression in his soul, all the sorrow and longing pent up in him and the tears unshed, but knew no means of relief, did not even conceive of any one beyond himself. He had no great Father, as we have. A strange, unhappy life he lived upon the world, uncomforted, unfriended. He looked at the stars and comprehended them not; and at the graves, and they said nought. He walked alone under heaven's wide hollowness.

We of later days have God as a heritage, or if we did find Him of ourselves, the road was made easy for us. But some one far away back in human life found God first, and said to Him the first prayer; some hard, untutored savage found out the gentlest and loveliest fact in our religion. A savage came upon the pearl and understood it and fell down in joy. A man one day named God and emptied his heart to Him in prayer. And he told the discovery to his brothers, and men all began to pray. The world lost half its heaviness at once. Men learned that their prayers were nearly all the same, that God heard the same story from thousands and hundreds of thousands of hearts. Thus men came nearer to one another, and knew themselves one in the presence of God, and they prayed together and formed churches. Man, the homeless one, had advanced a step towards his home, for he began to live partly in the beyond.

I am reminded of this by the joy which accompanies the personal discovery of some new rite which brings us into relation with the unseen.

Following that hypothetical first man, how many real first men there have been, each discovering new things about God and the beyond, giving mankind new letters in the Sanscrit, and each discovery accompanied by joy and relief.

The conception of life as part of a journey to the heavenly city was, I think, one of these discoveries; and its rite was the church procession to the altar. In symbolic act man learned to make the journey beyond the blank horizon. He enlarged the church procession to the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and he enlarged the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to the pilgrimage of life itself. In the understanding of life as a pilgrimage, the wanderer and seeker has the world for his church.

We are all on the road to the City of Jerusalem. Those who are consciously on the road may call themselves pilgrims; they have a life of glory in the heart as well as of toiling by the way. They are in a certain definite perspective, and they see all things that happen to them in the light of the pilgrimage. I for my part, directly I definitely set out for Jerusalem, on the very first day, at the sight of the first stranger who crossed my path, exclaimed to myself, "I meet him on the way to Jerusalem; that makes a difference, does it not?"

But not only does the goal of the pilgrimage lend a new significance to the present and the future; it also lights up the past. It makes every idlest step of worth. It makes us so understanding of the past that we would not alter one jot or tittle in it. Our whole life is transfigured. Every deed of our hands, every thought of our minds and word of our lips, every deed of others or of Nature seen, every word of man or sound of Nature heard, is made into one glowing garment—the story of our life-pilgrimage via the present moment to the Heavenly City.

I started on my pilgrimage long ago, so long ago I can hardly tell when. As Jeremy the pilgrim said of Mikhail: "He wished to go when he was a little boy; that means, he began to go then, for whenever you begin to wish you begin the pilgrimage. After that, no matter where you are, you are sure to be on the way." It is a stage in the awakening of consciousness, that wishing to go; the next stage is intending to go, and the next, deciding to go and setting out—but independently of these wishes and intentions and decisions, we were really on the road, and going all the while. By our true wishes we divine our destiny.

Yes, even long ago I wished, and to-day I am still on the way, though I have actually pilgrimaged to Jerusalem in Palestine. My pilgrimage was a pilgrimage within a pilgrimage. It was the drawing of a picture on earth of a journey in heaven. As a day is to a year, and as a year to man's life, so is man's life to that which we do not know, the course of our life beyond Time's blank horizon. If I have often stopped to tell of a little day, or a little hour in the day, it is because I sought there a picture of Eternity, of the whole significance of the pilgrimage.

I suppose I did not know that when I first left England to go to Russia I was turning my face toward Jerusalem. Yet it was so. For I should never have gone direct from London to the Holy Land. If I had attempted such a journey I should probably have failed to reach the great Shrine, for it is only a certain sort of people travelling in a certain sort of way who find admittance easily. By the Russian peasant I was enabled to go. It is strange to think that even when I was journeying northward to Archangel I was winding my way Jerusalem-ward in the sacred labyrinth. And I could not have gone straight southward with the pilgrims without wandering in contrary directions first of all, for it was necessary to come into sympathy and union with the peasant soul. There is a peasant deep down in my soul, or a peasant soul deep down in me, as well as an exterior, sensitive, cultured soul. I had to discover that peasant, to realise myself as one of the poor in spirit to whom is the kingdom.

Christ preached His gospel to the peasant. His is a peasant's gospel, it seems to me, such a gospel as the peasants of Russia would take to themselves to-day if Jesus came preaching to them in the way He did to the common people of the Jews. The cultured would disdain it, until a new St. Paul interpreted it for them in terms that they could understand, so giving it a "vogue". Both the peasants and the cultured would be Christians, but with this difference, that in one case the seed would be growing on the surface, and in the other from the depths. The peasant, of course, has no surface; he is the good black earth all ready for the seed.

There is a way for the cultured: it is to discover the peasant down beneath their culture, the original elemental soil down under the artificial surface, and to allow the sweetness and richness of that soil to give expression on that surface. True culture is thus achieved; that which is not only on the surface but of the depths.

Thereby might every one discover not only the peasant but the pilgrim soul within; each man living on the world might realise himself as on the way to Jerusalem. Such realisation would be the redemption of the present culture of the West. For workers of every kind—not only artists, musicians, novelists, but the handicraftsmen, the shapers of useful things, of churches and houses and laws, even the labourers in the road and the garden—would be living in the strength of a promise and the light of a vision.

* * * * *

The pilgrimage was a carrying of the cross, but it was also a happy wayfaring. It was a hard journey but not comfortless. Many of the pilgrims walked thousands of miles in Russia before finally embarking on the pilgrim boat. They walked solitarily, not in great bands, and they were poor. From village to village, from the Far North, Central Russia and the East, they tramped their way to Odessa and Batoum, and they depended all the way on other men's hospitality. As Jeremy said, "They had no money: instead of which they found other men's charity." They lived night by night in hundreds of peasant homes, and prayed day by day in hundreds of little churches. Not only did they find their daily bread "for the love of God," but in many cases they were furnished even to Jerusalem itself with passage money for the boat journey, and bread to keep the body alive.

Such pilgrims often were illiterate, and it was astonishing how they remembered all the folk they had to pray for at Jerusalem; for every poor peasant who could not leave his native village, but gave threepence or four-pence to the wanderer, asked to be remembered in the land "where God walked". Perhaps there were aids to remembrance. Many people in the villages, wanting to be sure that their prayers and wants would be remembered, wrote their names on slips of paper and thrust them into the pilgrim's hand. Thus in the hostelry at Jerusalem an old wanderer came to me one morning with a sheaf of dirty papers on which were written names, and I read them out for him aloud, thus:—

Maria for health.
Katerina for health.
Rheumatic Gregory for health.
Ivan for the peace of soul of his mother.
For the peace of soul of Prascovia.

And so on; and I sorted them into separate bundles—those who wished prayers for health, and those who wanted peace of soul to the dead.

I, for my part, have walked many a thousand versts from village to village, and have been glad to live the peasant-pilgrim's life. Tramping was hard for me also, as also far from comfortless. I saw sights which amply repaid me, if I wanted repayment, for every verst I tramped. Often, and shamefully, have I looked back and sighed for the town that I had left—its friends, its comforts and its pleasures; but I also found other men's hospitality and the warmth of the stranger's love. Very sweet it was to sit in the strange man's home, to play with his children on the floor, to eat and drink with him, to be blessed by him and by his wife, and sleep at last under the cottage ikons. And though peasants knew the way was hard, "How fortunate you are!" they said. I was more fortunate than they knew, for, being the voice of those who were without voice, I had a life by the way in communion with every common sight and sound. I lived in communion with sunny and rainy days, with the form of mountain and valley, with the cornfield and the forest and the meadow. Not only was man hospitable to the tramp, but Nature also. The stars spoke of my pilgrimage, the sea murmured to me; wild fruit was my food. I slept with the bare world as my house, the sky as my roof, and God as host.

I saw strange happenings in obscure little villages. Wherever I went I saw little pictures, and not only great pageants; I knelt in little wooden churches as well as in the great cathedrals. And I brought all that I met and all that I had experienced to Jerusalem, so that when the chorus of thanksgiving went up in the monastery on the day when we arrived, all my world was singing in it.

Sometimes I met pilgrims, especially at monasteries, and sometimes sojourned with one along the road, but it was not until we reached the pilgrim-boat that we found ourselves many and together. For the greater part of the pilgrim life is necessarily in solitude. A great number of pilgrims starting together and marching along the road is almost unthinkable. The true desire to start takes one by oneself. The pilgrim life is born like a river, far away apart, up in the mountains. It is only when it is reaching its goal that it joins itself to others. When we reached the port of embarkation we were a great band of pilgrims, but the paths by which we had come together were many and diverse, ramifying all over Russia.

We thought, but for the haunting fear of storms, that when we reached the boat the arduous part of our journey would have been accomplished. We should cease our plodding over earth, and should rest on the sea in the sun. We would sing hymns together. Hymns are, of course, principally designed for pilgrims, for man as a pilgrim, who needs to console himself with music on the road. We would talk among ourselves of our life on the way; the days would go past in pleasant converse and the nights in happy slumber. But that was a mistake. The sea journey was worse than any of our tramping; it was the very crown of our suffering.

There were 560 of us packed into the holds of that hulk, the Lazarus, on which we sailed, and there were besides, many Turks, Arabs, and Syrians; of cattle, two score cows and a show bull with two mouths; of beasts, a cage of apes; and, as if to complete pandemonium in storm, there lay bound in his bed on the open deck a raving madman. We were a fortnight on the sea, wandering irrelevantly from port to port of the Levant, discharging a cargo of sugar; and all the while the poor beggar-pilgrims lived on the crusts of which they had sackfuls collected in Russia, crusts of black bread all gone green with mould. I looked at the piles of them heaped on the deck to air in pleasant weather, and was amazed that men could live simply on decay. We had two storms, in one of which our masts were broken down and we were told we should go to the bottom. The peasants rolled over one another in the hold like corpses, and clutched at one another like madmen. In despair some offered all their money, all that they had, to a priest as a votive offering to St. Nicholas, that the storm might abate. The state of the ship I should not dare to depict—the filth, the stench, the vermin. For nearly a thousand passengers there were three lavatories without bolts! Fitly was the boat named Lazarus—Lazarus all sores. What the poor simple peasant men and women suffered none can tell. They had not the thought to take care of themselves as I had, and indeed they would have scorned to save themselves. "It is necessary to suffer," they said.

It was a hard and terrible way, and yet on the last day of the voyage, in the sight of the Holy Land, our hearts all leapt within us with grateful joy. We felt it was worth it, every whit. When I think of this journey as of that of Christian in the Pilgrims Progress, I call this ship and the journey on it the Valley of the Shadow of Death, full of foul pits and hobgoblins; something which must be passed through if Jerusalem is to be attained; the dread gulf which lies between earthly and heavenly life. It was necessary to pass through it, and what was on the other side was infinitely worth the struggle. There is a story in Dostoievsky of a Russian free-thinker whose penance beyond this world was to walk a quadrillion versts. When he finished this walk and saw the Heavenly City at the end of it he fell down and cried out, "It is worth it, every inch; not only would I walk a quadrillion of versts, but a quadrillion of quadrillions raised to the quadrillionth power."