A Tramp's Sketches - free ebook by Stephen Graham

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A Tramp's Sketches

Stephen Graham

51 chapters

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51 chapters

PREFACE

PREFACE

This book was written chiefly whilst tramping along the Caucasian and Crimean shores of the Black Sea, and on a pilgrimage with Russian peasants to Jerusalem. Most of it was written in the open air, sitting on logs in the pine forests or on bridges over mountain streams, by the side of my morning fire or on the sea sand after the morning dip. It is not so much a book about Russia as about the tramp. It is the life of the wanderer and seeker, the walking hermit, the rebel against modern condition

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I I

I I

The town is one large house of which all the little houses are rooms. The streets are the stairs. Those who live always in the town are never out of doors even if they do take the air in the streets. When I came into the town I found that in my soul were reflected its blank walls, its interminable stairways, and the shadows of hurrying traffic. A thousand sights and impressions, unbidden, unwelcome, flooded through the eye-gate of my soul, and a thousand harsh sounds and noises came to me throug

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I

I

I have been a whole season in the wilds, tramping or idling on the Black Sea shore, living for whole days together on wild fruit, sleeping for the most part under the stars, bathing every morning and evening in the clear warm sea. It is difficult to tell the riches of the life I have had, the significance of the experience. I have felt pulse in my veins wild blood which my instincts had forgotten in the town. I have felt myself come back to Nature. During the first month after my departure from

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II

II

How different was last night, how full of weariness after heavy tramping through leagues of loose stones. I had been tramping from desolate Cape Pitsoonda over miles and miles of sea holly and scrub through a district where were no people. I had been living on crab-apples and sugar the whole day, for I could get no provisions. It is a comic diet. I should have liked to climb up inland to find a resting-place and seek out houses, but I was committed to the seashore, for the cliffs were sheer, and

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III

III

Between these two beds what a glorious Night picture-book, a book telling almost entirely of the doings of the moon. I remember how I slept once under a wild walnut-tree. In front of me rose to heaven forested hills, and the night clothed them in majesty. Presently the moon came gently from her apartments and put out a slender hand, grasped the tree-tops, and pulled herself up over the world. She showed herself to me in all her glory, and then in a minute was gone again; for she entered into a m

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IV

IV

Another night, just after moonrise, a wind arose and drove in front of it the whole night long a great thunderstorm, with lightnings and rollings and grumblings and mutterings, but never a spot of rain. At dawn, when I looked out to sea, I saw the whole dreadful array of the storm standing to leeward like ships that had passed in the night, and as though baulked in pursuit the roll of the thunder came across the sky sullenly, though with a note of defeat. The nights were often cold and wet, and

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V

V

A tremendous thunderstorm took place about a fortnight after I left home. I had built a stick fire and was making tea for myself at the end of a long cloudless summer day, and taking no care, when suddenly I looked up to the sky and saw the evening turning swiftly to night before my eyes. The sun was not due to set, but the western horizon seemed as it were to have risen and gone forth to meet it. A great black bank of cloud had come up out of the west and hidden away the sun before his time. I

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VI

VI

On other nights heavy rain came on unexpectedly, and I discovered how pleasant a bed may be made just under the framework of a bridge. The bridge is a favourite resort of the Russian tramp and pilgrim, and I have often come across their comfortable hay or bracken beds there. Indeed I seldom go across a bridge at night without thinking there may be some such as myself beneath it. When the weather is wet it is much more profitable to sleep in a village—there is hospitality there, and the peasant w

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VII

VII

It is peculiar, the tramp's feeling about night. When the sun goes down he begins to have an awkward feeling, a sort of shame; he wants to hide himself, to put his head somewhere out of sight. He finds his night place, and even begins to fall asleep as he arranges it. He feels heavy, dull. The thoughts that were bright and shapely by day become dark and ill-proportioned like shadows. He tosses a while, and stares at the stars. At last the stars stare at him; his eyes close; he sleeps. Three hour

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III

III

The Lord's Prayer is a very intimate whispering of the soul with God. It is also the perfect child's prayer, and the tramp being much of a child, it is his. Many people have their private interpretations of the prayer, and I have heard preachers examine it clause by clause. It can mean many things. It must mean different things to people of different lives. It is something very precious to the tramp. The tramp is the lonely one: walking along all by himself all day by the side of the sounding wa

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IV

IV

It is because I have been tempered by the coldness of the night that I am not overwhelmed by the heat of the day. Because the night is dark and cool and sweet I see the true colours of the day, and the noon sun does not dazzle me. The tramp's eyes open and then they open again: at midday his eyes are wider than those of indoor folk. He is nearer to the birds because he has slept with them in the bush. They also are nearer to him, for the night has left her mysterious traces upon his face and gar

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V

V

"That's all very well, but don't you often get bored?" asked a sceptic. "I enjoy a weekend in the country, or a good Sunday tramp in Richmond Park or Epping Forest. I take my month on the Yorkshire moors with pleasure, or I spend a season in Switzerland or Spain, and I don't mind sleeping under a bush and eating whatever I can get in shepherds' cottages. I can well appreciate the simple life and the country life, but I'm perfectly sure I should pine away if I had to live it always. I couldn't st

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VI

VI

Rostof on the Don is always beautiful when one leaves it to go south. Nothing can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes b

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VII

VII

The blue-green sea is living velvet, and full of light-rings; it goes out to a distant mauve horizon, near which sea-gulls with white gleaming wings are flying. Many gulls are fluttering on the red buoys in the water. It is late in a December afternoon on the south coast of the Crimea. It is Yalta, beloved of all Russians, and I have come tramping to it—which Russians never do—and I am intending to spend lazy days looking with the gay town and all its white villas at the glorious spectacle of th

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VIII

VIII

It was at the Gate of Baidari in the Crimea on the shortest day of the year that I saw the most wonderful sunset I have ever known, and entered most completely into the spirit of the dark, quiet night. It was another vision of the sea, a presentment of the sea's question in a new light. A mild December afternoon. I had been some days wandering across pleasant tree-brown valleys and immense hollows mountain-walled. In the winter silence there was no murmur of the ocean, not even was there saltnes

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I

I

It is good to live ever in the sight of the sea. I have been tramping two months along seashores, and living a daily life in the presence of the Infinite. From Novorossisk to Batoum, eight hundred and fifty versts, I have explored all that coast of the Black Sea that lies at the feet of the Caucasus—to left of me the snow-peaked mountains shoulder to shoulder under heaven, to right the resplendent, magnificent sea. "The sea cannot be described," wrote Chekhov; "I once read in a child's copy-book

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II

II

At Dzhugba the sea was quiet as a little lake; at Dagomise it was many-crested and thundering in the majesty of storm. At Gudaout the sun rose over it as it might have done on the first morning of the world. Every dawning I bathed, and each bathing was as a new baptism. And in multifarious places it was given to me to bathe; at Dzhugba, where the sun shone fiercely on green water and the dark seaweed washed to and fro on the rocks; at Olginka, the quietest little bay imaginable, where the sea wa

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III

III

At Osipovka, where I spent a whole long summer day sitting on a log on the seashore, I saw a vision of the sea and nymphs—a party of peasant girls came down and bathed. They were very pretty and frolicsome, taking to the water in a very different style from educated women. They were boisterous and wild. They went into the sea backwards, and let the great waves knock them down; they lay down and were buffeted by the surf; they ran about the shore, sang, shouted, yelled, waved their arms; they div

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IV

IV

One night after I had made my bed on a grassy sand-bank above the sea and was waiting, in the thrilling and breathless twilight, to fall asleep, I suddenly heard a sound as of a child weeping somewhere. My heart bounded in horror. I lay scarce daring to breathe, and then when there was silence again, looked up and down the shore for the person who had cried. But I saw no one. I listened—listened, expecting to hear the cry again, but only the waves turned the stones, broke, rolled up, and turned

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V

V

There was my walk to the forlorn and lonely monastery of Pitsoonda on the promontory where the great lighthouse burns. Along the seashore were swamps overgrown with bamboos and giant grasses, twelve feet high. The sea was grey and calm. Lying on the sand, one saw the reflection, or the refracted images, of the grey stones at the bottom of the sea for twenty yards out and more. The sea had no power, it splashed in weak and hopeless waves, sucked itself away inward, came back again with a little r

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VI

VI

I cannot forget this walk of gloom and mystery, and my stay in this strange, sleeping monastery of the Middle Ages. But over and against it stands the bright morning of Gudaout, four days later. Gudaout is encompassed by the highest Caucasus—its only refuge is the sea. It is a place most wonderful in the pageantry of dawn. Picture my life of one evening and morning. I left Gudaout at the dusk, and having bought myself a pound of purple grapes, strolled out along the dusty high road eating them.

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I

I

I imagine that whilst the prodigal son sat at meat with his father and their guests, there may have come to the door a weary tramp begging food and lodging. The elder brother would probably refuse hospitality, saying, "You are not even my sinning brother, and shall I harbour you ?" The father in his wine might cry a welcome—"Let him come in for the sake of my son found this day; he also was a tramp upon the road." The prodigal would say to his steady-going, sober elder, "You say he is not your b

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II

II

Tramping across the Crimean moors I lost my way in the mist near the monastery of St. George, and was conducted by a peasant to the Greek village of Kalon, well known to old campaigners—it is between Sebastopol and Balaklava. The village remains the same to-day as it was in the days of the Crimean War, and the same families as lived there then, or their descendants, live there now. I visited the starosta , and he indicated a home where I might sleep the night. I was taken in by an aged Greek wom

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III

III

When St. Peter said to the beggar, "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee," it is not to be thought that he hadn't a few coppers to spare. He meant, "Silver and gold are not my gifts; I have something other and more precious." Thus the apostle indicated the deeper significance of charity. There is hospitality of the mind as well as of the hand, though both spring from the heart. Hospitality of the hand is having a home with open doors, but that of the mind is having open th

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II

II

On my way to Jerusalem I tramped through a rich residential region where wealthy Armenians, Turks, and Russians dwelt luxuriously in beautiful villas looking over the sea. I had been sleeping out, for the road was high and dry and healthy, but at last, entering a malarial region, I began to seek shelter more from man than from Nature. One cold and cloudy night I came into the village of Ugba and sought hospitality. There were few houses and fewer lights, and some feeling of awkwardness, or perha

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III

III

Dzhugba is an aggregation of cottages and villas round about the estuary of a little river flowing down from the Caucasus to the Black Sea. On the north a long cliff road leads to Novorossisk a hundred miles, and southward the same road goes on to Tuapse, some fifty miles from Maikop and the English oil-fields. I arrived at the little town too late to be sure of finding lodging. The coffee-house was a wild den of Turks, and I would not enter it; most private people were in bed. I walked along th

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IV

IV

I was travelling without a map, never knowing what I was coming to next, what long Caucasian settlement or rushing unbridged river, and I came quite unexpectedly to a town. I had not the remotest idea that a town was near, and when I learned the name of the town I realised that I had never heard of it before—Zugdida. This is no fairy story. Zugdida veritably exists, and may be found marked on large maps. I came into it on a Sunday evening, and found it one of the largest and most lively of all t

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V

V

This is not simply a matter of making pastry, as you shall see. I was tramping along a Black Sea road one night, and was wondering where I should find a shelter, when suddenly a little voice cried out to me from the darkness of the steppe. I stopped and looked and listened. In a minute a little boy in a red shirt and a grey sheepskin hat came careering towards me, and called out: "Do you want a place to sleep? My mother's coffee-house is the best you'll find. The coffee-house down the hill is no

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VI

VI

The charge for driving on Caucasian roads is a penny per horse per mile, so if you ride ten miles and have two horses you pay the driver one shilling and eightpence. But if, as generally happens, the driver's sense of cash has deprived him of a sense of humour, a conversation of this kind commonly arises. "One and eightpence. What's this?" "Ten miles, and two horses at a penny per horse per mile; isn't that correct?" "To the devil with your one and eightpence. Give it to the horses; a penny a mi

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VII

VII

One misty morning in late October I arrived at Batum, pack on back, staff in hand, to all appearances a pilgrim or a tramp, and I drank tea at a farthing a glass in the fair. "Pour it out full and running over," said a chance companion to the owner of the stall. "That's how we workmen like it; not half-full as for gentlefolk." The shopman, a silent and very dirty Turk, filled my glass and the saucer as well. And sipping tea and munching bubliki , we looked out upon all the sights of the bazar .

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VIII

VIII

It sometimes happens that, entering a house, one enters not simply into the presence of a family but into that of a nation. So it was when I was received in a Little-Russian deacon's cottage in a village, on the Christmas Eve on which I first came to Russia. I came not to the deacon but to Russia itself, and when the Christmas musicians came and played before me it was not only Christmas music, or village music, that I heard, but the voice of a whole countryside and the song of a whole national

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I

I

In the Middle Ages, when Christianity was still young, there was much more hospitality than to-day. The crusader and the palmer needed no introduction to obtain entertainment at a strange man's house. The doors of castle or cottage, of monastery or cell, were always on the latch to the wanderer, and not only to those performing sacred dues but to the vagabond, the minstrel, the messenger, the tradesman, even to crabbed Isaac of York. Since those days it has become clear that the thirty pieces of

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II

II

It will be profitable to describe the monastery just as I saw it and felt it to be, on the occasion of my arrival there after five hundred miles tramping in the autumn of 1911. I had overtaken many pilgrims journeying thither, and the nearer I approached the more became their numbers. There were many on foot and many in carts and coaches. Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage—the people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging on behind, squashed in th

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III

III

The monastery bells in pleasant liquid tones struck every quarter of an hour, and at two o'clock in the morning I was awakened by a great jangling, and the sound of steps along the stone corridors. I asked my companions—I was sharing my room with an Armenian and a Russian—what was the reason of the bell, and I learned that it was the call to early prayers. We none of us got up, but I resolved to go next night if it were possible. Next day was one of relaxation after tramping. The Armenian went o

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IV

IV

What struck me particularly on entering Novy Afon was the new tone in the every day. There was less of the barin and servant, officer and soldier feeling, less noisy commandings and scoldings, even less beating of the patient horses that have to carry such heavy loads in Russia. Instead of these, a gentleness and graciousness, something of that which one finds in artistic and mystic communities in Russia, in art and in pictures, but which one seldom meets with in public life. Here at New Athos b

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V

V

Though Novy Afon is new, it is built upon an old site. There was a Christian church there in the second and third centuries, but it was destroyed by the Persian fire-worshippers; it was restored by the Emperor Justinian, but destroyed once more by the Turks. So completely did the Moslem take possession of the country that Christianity entirely lapsed till the Russian monks sailed down there two years before the Russo-Turkish war of 1877. Novy Afon is without Christian traditions. It takes its st

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III I

III I

Up to Christmas we are walking with the kings to the Babe's cradle, to the birth of new life and new hope. High in the heavens, and yet before us over the hard frost-bitten way, gleams the guiding star whose promise we divine. After Christmas we are walking with the spring, with a new, young, whispering child-life in the old heart. Though the winds be cold and snow sweep over the land, we know that winter and death are spent. Whilst the light grows stronger in the sky, something in us that is wo

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II

II

I have known her in summer and in winter—in summer flushed and gorgeous like the wild rose, in winter lily-pale, or grey and haggard as the town she lived in. She was a beautiful daughter of the Earth, a wondrous flower. The summer night was in her dark hair, the south wind in her eyes. Whoever looked upon her in silence knew himself in the presence of the mystery of beauty, of the mystery of an imperious inner beauty. It was because of this, because of some majestic spirit manifest in her, shin

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IV

IV

At New Athos monastery in one of the common hostels there were some hundred peasant men and women, mostly pilgrims. It was after supper; some of the company were melting away to the dormitories, others remained talking. There was one topic of conversation common to all. An old greybeard palmer had broken down that afternoon and died. He had been almost his whole life on the road to Jerusalem, and we all felt sad to think that he had been cut off when he was truly nearing the Holy Land. "He wishe

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I. MY COMPANION

I. MY COMPANION

When star passes star once in a thousand years, or perhaps once in the forever, and does not meet again, what a tale has each to tell! So with tramps and wanderers when two meet upon the road, what a tale of life is due from one to the other. Many tramps have I met in the world. Far from the West I have met those who came far from the East, and men have passed me coming from the South, and men from the North. And sometimes men have suddenly appeared on my way as if they had fallen from the sky,

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II. HOW MY COMPANION FOUND HIMSELF IN A COACH

II. HOW MY COMPANION FOUND HIMSELF IN A COACH

"There is one event in my life that I cannot account for," said my companion, "and it has conditioned all my living, an event psychologically strange. I appear, in a way, to have lost my memory at one era of my existence. I look at the event I am going to relate, and simply stare in perplexed wonder. Somewhere, somewhen, I lost something in my mind! What was that something? "Most people can tell the story of their life as they themselves remember it. Their memory takes them back to their earlies

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III. IRRECONCILABLES

III. IRRECONCILABLES

One long sunny morning we talked of the life of the wanderer, and my companion continued his story and recounted how he had found a brotherhood of men like himself. "When first I found myself thus upon the world, I was full of hope to find an answer to the mystery. But the many fellow-beings I met upon my road were as profitless as my companions in the coach. They could not explain me, they could not explain the world or themselves, and in the midst of teeming knowledges they were obliged to con

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IV. "HOW THE TOWNSMAN TEMPTED ME"

IV. "HOW THE TOWNSMAN TEMPTED ME"

"Once I was tempted by a townsman," said the wanderer, "but instead of converting me with his town, he was himself converted by the country. "For many years I wandered by seashores, asking questions of the sea. When I came to the sea it was singing its melancholy song, the song that it has sung from its birth, and it paused neither to hear nor to answer me. Ever rolling, ever breaking, ever weeping, it continued its indifferent labour. I walked along its far-stretching sands, leaving footprints

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V

V

Once, long ago, when an earthquake rent the hills, and mountains became valleys, and the earth itself opened and divided, letting in the sea, a new island was formed far away upon an unvisited ocean. Out of an inland province of a vast continent this island was made, all the land upon it having been submerged, and all the peoples that dwelt to north and to south, to east and to west, having been drowned. There survived upon the island a few men and women who remained undisputed masters of the la

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I

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

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II

II

At last we arrived at Jerusalem. The onlookers saw a long, jaded-looking flock of poor people toiling up the hilly road from Jaffa, wearing Russian winter garb under the straight-beating sun of the desert, dusty, road-worn, and beaten. We went along the middle of the roadway like a procession, observed of all observers; in one sense scarcely worth looking at, yet in another the most significant spectacle of the day or of the time. We were—religious Europe just arrived at the Heavenly City. Certa

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III

III

We went through the life of Jesus in symbolical procession, journeyed to Bethlehem and kissed the manger where the baby Jesus was laid, that first cradle as opposed to the second, the hollow in the rock. We came as the Kings, saw the shepherds and their flocks, saw the star stop over the house of Mary, and went in to do homage, bringing thither the gifts of our hearts—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. We tramped to the river Jordan, and all in our death shrouds at Bethabara, waded into the stream a

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IV

IV

And I, to use the metaphor of the unvisited island, had in a dream crossed the ocean, had become, through the fulfilling of a rite, more bound to the life which is beyond. Henceforth I have a more credible promise and a more substantial hope. But what then? The journey is ended, the gleam of the vision fades, and we all return to the life we came from. We descend from what the pilgrims call the highest holy place on earth and get back to the ordinary level of life. How can we go back and live th

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VII

VII

The question remains, "Who is the tramp?" Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these rôles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real and true, the product

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SOME PRESS OPINIONS.

SOME PRESS OPINIONS.

DAILY TELEGRAPH .—"A deeply interesting volume that will stimulate in many readers a desire for that fuller work on his trampings which Mr. Graham promises…. He is gifted with rare ability to write of that which he has experienced. It may safely be said that few readers would wish, after taking up this volume and reading one of the sketches at random, to put it aside without having read the rest…. It is always something pertinent, fresh, and interesting that the writer has to tell us." DAILY NEW

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WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM

WITH THE RUSSIAN PILGRIMS TO JERUSALEM

With 38 Illustrations from Photographs by the Author, and a Map. 8vo....

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