You continue the way with more camaraderie, doing an indolent eight or nine miles before sundown. The afternoon walk is likely to be different from the morning one; you are less eager, more passive and indulgent and sociable. One is on the lookout for a fellow tramp—for an exchange of thoughts. If you are by yourself, you have at least the alter ego of your thoughts, and if with another there is his mind. One should not, however, always be shy of a chance third—the man who comes out of Nature to meet you.
Things happen hors de programme which we could never put into our program. That is why programs of coming life should be of the most general character, none of that “to-day I brew, to-morrow I bake” type of miscalculation. “To-day I do not know what I shall do; to-morrow I know less” is better. “Someday or other the Queen’s daughter I take” is sufficient—if not too much. Leave plenty of room for God—the devil may use some of the spare room, but no matter, he is only a secondary character in our affairs.
The tramp carries no wrist watch. He has no zero hour—no zero plus forty-three at which he must take his section over the top. In his cave he has no presentation timepiece mounted on lions or mermaids. As he walks he does not raise his eyes to scan Big Ben through the gloom—for his life is not parceled out in Parliamentary quantities. He has no dashed repeater in his pouch, no alarm clock at his ear. The deathwatch does not sound in the wall of his forest house; he does not live and sleep beside that coffin on end called a grandfather, “his life-seconds numbering tick-tock-tick.” He listens for no morning hooter; he boils his eggs without a measure of sliding sand; he punches no time clock when he begins his day’s tramp, and at the end the last trump shall catch him unawares—an irrelevancy.
The most profound philosophers have been engaged for any number of years trying to explain time, and they are all agreed that it is an illusion. The universe would go on existing if all human beings were destroyed, but what we call “time” would not. Time, they are assured, must be relative. The little beetle which we tread upon feels a pang as great as when a giant dies. His normal life may be five months only—but he has as extensive a notion of his life as we have of what we call the normal span—our fourscore years. The insect which lives only an hour fits the fourscore years of impressions into it somehow. “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run”—the insect does it, better than you can.
The fact is, the minutes are not unforgiving. We have to reverse many of the Grub Street maxims: “Take care of the minutes, Freddy, and the hours will take care of themselves.” No, take care of the hours and the minutes can go hang. Take care of your life and your days will be all right.
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son and Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day are of little value to us. We will not read in our baths, nor memorize French verbs while we fry. Or we will, if we like, but not upon the compulsion of filling time.
You will discern that going tramping is at first an act of rebellion; only afterwards do you get free from rebelliousness as Nature sweetens your mind. Town makes men contentious; the country smooths out their souls. The worship of time as a reality is such a powerful superstition that the mind returns to it often after it has got free. It returns again and again, reciting its outworn creed: Thou shalt have one birthday a year and one only; six days shalt thou labor, but only the seventh is the Lord thy God’s.
The tramp repeats it, and then unpacks his heart with stinging words. The mood passes. We, too, can be sweet and indulgent about time and time-tables, bivouacking in eternity. We may even carry a compass clock and, lying in the grass, holding it in our hands, exclaim facetiously with Touchstone: “It is ten o’clock, in another hour it will be eleven”—and moralize equally facetiously, for, “so from year to year we ripe and ripe and then from year to year we rot and rot—and thereby hangs a tale.”
CHAPTER NINE