First and Last (Belloc)/Companions of Travel

I write of travelling companions in general, and not in particular, making of them a composite photograph, as it were, and finding what they have in common and what is their type; and in the first place I find them to be chance men. For there are some people who cannot travel without a set companion who goes with them from Charing Cross all over the world and back to Charing Cross again. And there is a pathos in this: as Balzac said of marriage, "What a commentary on human life, that human beings must associate to endure it." So it is with many who cannot endure to travel alone: and some will positively advertise for another to go with them.

In a glade of the Sierra Nevada, which, for awful and, as it were, permanent beauty seemed not to be of this world, I came upon a man slowly driving along the trail a ramshackle cart, in which were a few chairs and tables and bedding. He had a long grey beard and wild eyes; he was old, and very small like a gnome, but he had not the gnome's good-humour. I asked him where he was going, and I slowed down, so as to keep pace with his ridiculous horse. For some time he would not answer me, and then he said, "Out of this." He added, "I am tired of it." And when I asked him, "Of what?" his only answer was an old-fashioned oath. But from further complaints which he made I gathered that what he was tired of was clearing forests, digging ground, paying debts, and in general living upon this unhappy earth. He did not like me very much, and though I would willingly have learned more, he would tell me nothing further, so when we got to a place where there was a little stream I went on and left him.

I have never forgotten the sadness of this man. Where he was going, and what he expected to do, or what opportunities he had, I have never understood. Though some years after, in quite another place - namely, Steyning, in Sussex - I came upon just such another, whose quarrel was with the English climate, the rich and the poor, and the whole constitution of God's earth. These are the advantages of travel, that one meets so many men whom one would otherwise never meet, and that one feeds as it were upon the complexity of mankind.

Thus in a village called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no man has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to support a priest. "The priests" he assured me, "say the most ridiculous things. They narrate the most impossible fables. They affirm what cannot possibly be true. All that they say is in opposition to science. If I am ill, can a priest cure me? No. Can a priest tell me how to build, or how to light my house? He is unable to do so. He is a useless and a lying mouth, why should I feed him?"

I questioned this man very closely, and discovered that in his view the world slowly changed from worse to better, and to accelerate this process enlightenment alone was needed. "But what do these brutes," he said, alluding to his fellow-countrymen, "know of enlightenment? They do not even make roads, because the priests forbid them."

I could write at length upon this man. He was not a Sceptic as you may imagine, nor had he adopted the Lucretian form of Epicureanism. Not a bit of it. He was a hearty Atheist, with Positivist leanings. I further found that he had married a woman older, wealthier, and if possible uglier than himself. She kept the inn, and was very kind to him. His life would have been quite happy had he not been tortured by the monstrous superstitions of others.

Then, again, in the town of Marseilles, only two years ago, I met a man who looked well fed, and had a stalwart, square French face, and whose politico-economic ideal, though it was not mine, greatly moved me. It was just past midnight, and I was throwing little stones into the old Greek harbour, the stench and the glory of which are nearly three thousand years old; I was to be off at dawn upon a tramp steamer, and I had so determined to pass the few hours of darkness.

I was throwing pebbles into the water, I say, and thinking about Ulysses, when this man came slouching up, with his hands in the pockets of his enormous corduroy trousers, and, looking at me with some contempt from above (for he was standing, I was sitting), he began to converse with me. We talked first of ships, then of heat and cold, and so on to wealth and poverty; and thus it was I came upon his views, which were that there should be a sort of break up, and houses ought to be burned, and things smashed, and people killed; and over and above this, it should be made plain that no one had a right to govern: not the people, because they were always being bamboozled; obviously not the rich; least of all, the politicians, to whom he justly applied the most derogatory epithets. He waved his arm out in the darkness at the Phoceans, at the half-million of Marseilles, and said, "All that should disappear." The constructive side of his politico-economic scheme was negative. He was a practical man. None of your fine theories for him. One step at a time. Let there be a Chambardement - that is, a noisy collapse, and he would think about what to do afterwards.

His was not the narrow, deductive mind. He was objective and concrete. Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to prevent people like me, who sit up at night, from doing mischief in the harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-economic scheme - the main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could understand them - we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic, and would have no such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the Phenomenon of the Tides; it was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of the moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty or forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently admitted that that was romantic exaggeration, and that five or six was the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the little incident broke up our friendship, and he shuffled away. He did not like having his leg pulled.

There are many others I remember. Those I have written about elsewhere I am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburgh, who first expounded to me how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then objected to personal questions about his own; the German officer man at Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met upon the Appian Way, who told the most abominable lies; and another man who met me outside Oxford station during the Vac. and offered to show me the sights of the town for a consideration, which he did, but I would not pay him because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a few searching questions upon the exact site of Bocardo (of which he had never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the site of the city. Moreover, he said that Trinity was St. John's, which was rubbish.

Then there was another man who travelled with me from Birmingham, pressed certain tracts upon me, and wanted to charge me sixpence each at Paddington. But if I were to speak of even these few I should exceed.