Lovers, I imagine, will carry no diary. Their impressionable hearts are the tablets on which they write. Every one has a tendency to write down the unforgettable: it is obviously unnecessary. Loving pairs, however, seldom take their staffs and their packs and make for the wild. Even in our free days they are somewhat afraid of it. But it is to be recommended as an admirable preparation for married life. It is a romantic adventure, but it leads to reality. If you have to carry your beloved, you will probably have to carry her for the rest of your life. You cannot tell till you’ve spent a night in the rain, or lost the way in the mountains, and eaten all the food, whether you have both stout hearts and a readiness for every fate. If not a tramp before marriage, then a tramp directly after comes not amiss, a honeymoon spent tramping. It is an ideal way to begin life. For tramping is the grammar of living. Few people learn the grammar—but it is worth while.
There are few more felicitous proposals of marriage set down in literature than the Autocrat at the Breakfast Table’s, “Will you take the long road with me?”
Life à deux is much more of an adventure than life seul, much more of a tramping expedition, less of a “carriage forward,” “fragile,” “lift with care,” and “use no hooks” affair. One, be it the man, be it the woman, pulls the other from security. It is a more difficult way of life; it needs learning.
On the road the weak and strong points of character are revealed. There are those who complain, making each mile seem like three; there are those who have untapped reserves of cheerfulness, who sing their companions through the tired hours. But in drawing-rooms, trains, tennis parties, theater, and dance hall, they would never show either quality. The road shows sturdiness, resourcefulness, pluck, patience, energy, vitality, or per contra, the lack of these things. It is something to face the first night together under the stars, the fears of lurking robbers or wild animals, fears of the unnamed.
The first night out together of a man and his wife is a memorable occasion. You go back to the primitive, but there is something very cosy and comfortable about it—the only man in the world with the only woman. Darkness settles down upon you in a stranger way than it does upon man and man. There is more poetry in the air and in your mind. More tenderness is enkindled than ceiling and walls of house ever saw, tenderness of a certain sheltering care which it is luxurious to give.
Night is dark and still and intense, and you can hear two hearts beating while you look outward and upward, and dimly discern the passage of bats’ wings in the air.
The first night, however, is seldom without alarm; the cold wet nose of a hedgehog touching your beloved’s cheek may cause her to rend the air with a shriek, a field mouse at her toes cause her scarcely less alarm. It is good to pack her in a really capacious sleeping bag; it excludes rodents. And if you are not too big you can snuggle into it yourself, if the lady proves to be nervous and you are on such terms of fellowship as to make it possible.
A night of murmurings and deepening shadows and freshness, and then, perhaps, of a gentle rain before dawn, and of glimmerings of new day and sweetness of wild flowers and birds’ songs before sunrise. You watch the boles of the great trees grow into stateliness in the twilight, and the night is over. With an arm round your fair one you go to the point where in orange and scarlet the great friend of all the living is lifting himself once more out of the east to show us the way of life.
CHAPTER SEVEN