WHITHER AWAY?
THE principle motive of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the road, and to probe for oneself the mystery of the names of the places in maps. In a subconscious way the born wanderer is always expecting to come on something very wonderful—beyond the horizon’s rim. The joys of wandering are often balanced by the pains; but there is something which is neither joy nor pain which makes the desire to wander or explore almost incurable in many human beings.
The child experiences his first wander-thrill when he is taken to places where he has never been before. I remember from the age of nine a barefoot walk with my mother along the Lincolnshire sands from Sutton to Skegness, and the romantic and strange sights on the way. What did we not build out of that adventure? And who does not remember the pleasurable thrill, the pleasure that’s all but pain, of being lost in a wood, or in a strange countryside, and meeting some crazy individual who humored the idea by apostrophizing a little brook in this style: “I am now marching upon the banks of the mighty Congo”? The imagination wishes to be stirred with the romance of places, and is stirred. In a great city like London or New York, even though living there, certainly I for one am homesick; not for a home and an armchair, but for a rolling road and a stout pair of boots, and my own stick fire by the roadside at dawn, and the old pot which is slow to boil.
“Where,” I am asked, “would you go a-tramping now if you were absolutely fancy-free and passports and Bolsheviks were unknown?” It would probably be in Russia, where I have vagabondized over thousands of miles already. I should like to resume my six-thousand-mile journey southwest to northwest, which was interrupted by the War in August, 1914. But, alas, the Moscow of the Bolsheviks does not encourage adventure of that kind.
Again, I’d like to buy a boat at Perm and slip down to the Petchora River, and go with the stream thousands of miles north, selling the boat to the Samoyedes at the mouth of the river, thence tramping perhaps by the tundra roads or sledging it to Mesen. What a romance, what a journey, as it seems to me now, in complete inexperience of it!
Or I’d like to take a party of literary men across the Altai, and in a verdant valley live for half a year without letters and newspapers, and each write his own book, express his own peculiar happiness in his own words.
Or I’d like to plunge south from Verney, in Seven-Rivers-Land, or from Kashgar, and climb to the mountain passes into India; and as I think of it a sense of the last poem of Davidson creeps into the memory:
Alone I climb
The ragged path that leads me out of Time.
So much for Russia. I’d love to tramp the whole length of Japan, and peer into all the ways of the modern Japanese. There, however, speaks another interest, and that is not so much to explore strange lands as to explore strange people. Life teaches the wanderer that peoples are extra pages to geography, and the fascination can at times be irresistible. You long to be familiar with Russians, Frenchmen, Germans, Chinamen, Arabs, Americans, and the rest. And it takes you afield, it takes you far, far away from 1, Alpha Villas, or the sweet shady side of Pall Mall.