The Friendly Road | Page 7

quite another thing to be

accepted by your humankind not as a paid lodger but as a friend.
Always, it seems to me, I have wanted to submit myself, and indeed
submit the stranger, to that test. Moreover, how can any man look for
true adventure in life if he always knows to a certainty where his next
meal is coming from? In a world so completely dominated by goods,
by things, by possessions, and smothered by security, what fine
adventure is left to a man of spirit save the adventure of poverty?
I do not mean by this the adventure of involuntary poverty, for I
maintain that involuntary poverty, like involuntary riches, is a credit to
no man. It is only as we dominate life that we really live. What I mean
here, if I may so express it, is an adventure in achieved poverty. In the
lives of such true men as Francis of Assisi and Tolstoi, that which
draws the world to them in secret sympathy is not that they lived lives
of poverty, but rather, having riches at their hands, or for the very
asking, that they chose poverty as the better way of life.
As for me, I do not in the least pretend to have accepted the final logic
of an achieved poverty. I have merely abolished temporarily from my
life a few hens and cows, a comfortable old farmhouse, and--certain
other emoluments and hereditaments--but remain the slave of sundry
cloth upon my back and sundry articles in my gray bag--including a fat
pocket volume or so, and a tin whistle. Let them pass now. To-morrow
I may wish to attempt life with still less. I might survive without my
battered copy of "Montaigne" or even submit to existence without that
sense of distant companionship symbolized by a postage-stamp, and as
for trousers--
In this deceptive world, how difficult of attainment is perfection!
No, I expect I shall continue for a long time to owe the worm his silk,
the beast his hide, the sheep his wool, and the cat his perfume! What I
am seeking is something as simple and as quiet as the trees or the hills
--just to look out around me at the pleasant countryside, to enjoy a little
of this show, to meet (and to help a little if I may) a few human beings,
and thus to get nearly into the sweet kernel of human life). My friend,
you may or may not think this a worthy object; if you do not, stop here,
go no further with me; but if you do, why, we'll exchange great words
on the road; we'll look up at the sky together, we'll see and hear the
finest things in this world! We'll enjoy the sun! We'll live light in
spring!

Until last Tuesday, then, I was carried easily and comfortably onward
by the corn, the eggs, and the honey of my past labours, and before
Wednesday noon I began to experience in certain vital centres
recognizable symptoms of a variety of discomfort anciently familiar to
man. And it was all the sharper because I did not know how or where I
could assuage it. In all my life, in spite of various ups and downs in a
fat world, I don't think I was ever before genuinely hungry. Oh, I've
been hungry in a reasonable, civilized way, but I have always known
where in an hour or so I could get all I wanted to eat--a condition
accountable, in this world, I am convinced, for no end of stupidity. But
to be both physically and, let us say, psychologically hungry, and not to
know where or how to get anything to eat, adds something to the zest
of life.
By noon on Wednesday, then, I was reduced quite to a point of
necessity. But where was I to begin, and how? I know from long
experience the suspicion with which the ordinary farmer meets the Man
of the Road --the man who appears to wish to enjoy the fruits of the
earth without working for them with his hands. It is a distrust
deep-seated and ages old. Nor can the Man of the Road ever quite
understand the Man of the Fields. And here was I, for so long the
stationary Man of the Fields, essaying the role of the Man of the Road.
I experienced a sudden sense of the enlivenment of the faculties: I must
now depend upon wit or cunning or human nature to win my way, not
upon mere skill of the hand or strength in the bent back. Whereas in my
former life, when I was assailed by a Man of the Road, whether tramp
or peddler or poet, I had only to stand stock-still within my fences