Part 10
Now the field way passed through the West Lodge Park Gate. This was clearly not far from the Hall. Clara left the breakfast-room at 9.45. She then had to get her hat and meet Crossjay behind the pheasantry, and, on the lodge-keeper’s wife’s statement to De Craye, they were through the gate before ten. We infer that the distance was at most half a mile, leaving two and a half miles to the station. Clara and Crossjay cannot have been through the gate much before ten, and after meeting the tramp and sending Crossjay back, she was still at the station before Vernon--_i.e._ before 10.44. The inference is that in wet clothes and over bad ground--even Vernon found the footpath slippery--she went nearly four miles an hour. In dry clothes and on a good ground, she had to fall into a special kind of trot to keep up with Vernon, reminding him of the Piedmontese Bersaglieri, and that at the end of a nine-and-a-half-hour day. It is clear, therefore, that Vernon’s pace cannot have been much below five miles an hour.
His own timing on the morning of the flight is not very exactly given. The lodge-keeper’s wife told De Craye that he was through the gate half an hour after Clara. If this is accurate, the time would be about 10.25. He then, after meeting Crossjay, timed himself to be at the station at 10.50--twenty-five minutes for two and a half miles. But he clearly intended to run: and although this shows his running pace to be creditable, we cannot safely infer from it to his walking pace.
One further interesting point emerges, namely, that De Craye’s watch, after setting everybody right at breakfast, went hopelessly wrong in the course of the morning. It was ten minutes past eleven by his watch when he left the Park gate: yet he was at the station in time to meet Clara, and, after some discussion, to drive back with her (11.17 or at most 11.21--see above). It is not stated where he picked up Flitch’s cab, but even Flitch can hardly have driven in from five to ten minutes a distance which, with a short piece added, took him forty-two minutes on the return journey. A frivolous observer might suggest that the author was not very careful in his timing: but, apart from the hideous blasphemy, this would invalidate most of the previous argument. We therefore shut our eyes once more, and affirm that De Craye’s watch went wrong.
VII
WALKING EQUIPMENT
ἀδύνατον γὰρ ἢ οὐ ῥᾴδιον τὰ καλὰ πράττειν ἀχορήγητον ὄντα AR. _Eth. Nic._ 1. 9.
VII
WALKING EQUIPMENT
Every one is well aware--if not, it is abundantly clear from the rest of this volume--that controversy of any kind is naturally repugnant to the amiable nature of a walker. It is therefore with some trepidation that he approaches the highly controversial subject of equipment. Writers on walking, and Alpine climbers--neither of them necessarily the same thing as walkers--usually dismiss the subject in a brief and breezy chapter on nailed boots and the back-lining of waistcoats, with a few brilliant paragraphs on goggles and brandy, unaware that they are dancing among the ashes of several by no means extinct volcanoes. Indeed, the subject bristles with controversial points. The structure and fortification of boots; the requisite number of pairs of socks; the rival claims of long trousers and short trousers, with the subvariants of short trousers buckling at the knees, short trousers with box-cloth continuations, and short trousers with homogeneous continuations; the configuration of coats; the shape of hats (if any); the functions of waistcoats; the necessity of ties; the moral value of walking-sticks; all these subjects of controversy meet us before we reach the really fundamental questions of food and drink and knapsacks and their contents. But peace was never won by shutting the eyes and pretending that differences do not exist; and so, with whatever reluctance, we enter the lists.
The nature of the controversy may be illustrated by the discussion at present raging around boots. Heavy nailed boots used to be taken as, in every sense, the foundation of walking equipment--as the axiom which could not be gainsaid. But in this age men will gainsay anything; and a formidable school of shoe-walkers has arisen, who deny the axiom of boots, and are ready to construct a new system on their denial. These Lobatschewskis of footwear do not all go to the lengths of one walker whom I knew, whose habit was to patrol grouse-moors in sandshoes; but in his case there was a special need, since the moors were strictly preserved, and his walking mainly consisted of short and exciting handicaps with the walker on the five-yards mark and a keeper at scratch. But the shoemen are ready to proclaim in the face of the orthodox that their equipment is airier and more comfortable than boots; and this is a controversy which, when once raised, must go forward to its issue.
The bootmen in the first exasperation of outraged orthodoxy will probably say that shoes are effeminate, while boots are the mark of a man; at which the shoemen ask, why it should be effeminate to have a soft and slight covering between the feet and reality and manly to have several layers of bull’s hide clamped with armour-plating; and thus, by a neat allegorical turn, they open the whole feminist question. Somewhat sobered, the bootmen then say that boots support the ankles; to which the shoemen reply that their ankles do not need supporting. This innuendo finally makes the bootmen think, and they issue from their meditations with the unanswerable remark that shoes let stones in and boots do not. The shoemen, if they are wise, admit this, merely adding, that if shoes let stones in they can easily be taken off and shaken; and that if boots keep stones out, they also keep air out. The bootmen then take the aggressive: if air is wanted, why walk at all? Why not stand on your head with your feet out of window? To which the shoemen say, Don’t be silly; and the bootmen say, You have no sense of humour; and the relations of years are dissolved.
There is no need to follow this controversy further, either along its main lines or into its side-tracks, on the questions of nails, laces, and unguents. The issues involved are mainly utilitarian. There is little doubt that boots are better for rough ground and bog, and shoes for roads and level tracks; nails are necessary for rocks and steep grass-slopes, but are a burden on the hard highway. Again, shoes probably leave the feet freer, while boots add mechanically an extra inch or two to the stride. The question may be pursued through all its ramifications; and no doubt those who like quantitative thinking could ultimately produce some sort of determination of the footgear most likely to be suitable to the average man in the average country. Where comfort and utility only are concerned, the vulgar processes of comparing, adding and subtracting are quite sufficient to lead to a conclusion.
But quantitative reasoning, though invaluable in politics, is very poor fun. Life would have little flavour without occasional qualitative excursions into the _a priori_. The very bitterness of feeling aroused by discussions on walking equipment shows, I think, that something more is involved in them than the calculable considerations of comfort and utility. After all, it is mainly a man’s own affair whether his feet are comfortable and whether he slips on a grass slope: and were these the only issues, we should have no more concern with his boots than with his breakfast or banking-account. And the same holds true for most of the doubtful points of walking equipment. The relative comfort and healthiness of hats, caps, and nothing can be easily determined by counting heads and adding up (and cancelling out) medical opinions; the practical aspect of walking-sticks could probably be exhibited by a diagram of the body, a few mechanical equations, and a fatigue-curve or two. But what walker worthy of the name would accept such conclusions if they disagreed with his own views, or would even welcome them if they disagreed with other people’s views? Who would suffer himself to be quantitatively coerced into altering the shape of his hat, or giving up walking-sticks, or adopting or forswearing a tie?
Ties furnish perhaps the clearest instance of the break-down of utilitarianism. They serve no material purpose of any kind. The days are long gone by when the tie added perceptibly to the warmth of the body: even the ties of 1892, which seem ridiculous to-day, cannot have saved a single valetudinarian of that age (as he thought) from a cold in the chest, or (as we now learn) have weakened his capacity to resist chill. No man’s health or bodily comfort would now be affected in the slightest degree by the presence or absence of a tie. Nor, if utilitarians take the rash step of admitting beauty into the system of pleasures, can very much be said for ties. It is true that they sometimes add a desirable touch of colour; but if beauty were our aim in ties, should we stop for a moment within the present limitations of either colour or shape? A large flounced piece of drapery with an elaborate colour scheme, twisted in decorative lines across our chest to a bow on the hips or the small of the back, would be the very least we should put up with. Can any one with a little knot of monochrome peering bashfully from a minute triangular opening in a waste of drab monotony talk seriously about beauty in ties?
The truth is that dress is a paradox. Any one attempting to apply to it the principles of health, comfort, beauty, or even economy, would become an atheist or a suicide in a fortnight. Modern dress is unhealthy, uncomfortable, ugly, and dear. In spite of the passionate denunciations of stiff shirts and collars by the whole medical profession, we and they continue to wear them. Our necks are chafed, our motions are cramped, our skin is slowly vitiated--but we do not rebel. The fabrics which we choose for our clothing tend on the whole to be the ugliest, the most expensive, and the least durable: yet no one dreams of following the elementary laws of utilitarian economics. Thus in the enlightened twentieth century, with all the wealth of the industrial revolution within our grasp, with doctors ready to prescribe the healthiest clothes and artists to design them most beautifully--when, in a word, at a quarter of the present cost and trouble which it takes to make us eyesores we could become dreams of comfort and colour-harmony--then we, the heirs of all the ages, with open eyes and unclouded vision, refuse.
It is due to fashion, no doubt: but what after all is fashion, and why should we obey it? It is only a human creation: it is no law dictated to the world from outside; it is merely something which some men chose and other men, of their free will, agreed to obey. When a person asks, ‘Why do we follow fashion?’ the only answer is, ‘Do you?’ If he says ‘No,’ he is probably a liar: but we can still ask, ‘Do you not find in yourself some instinct urging you to follow fashion?’ Even the most hardened liar will probably say ‘Yes.’ The answer then is, ‘Multiply that instinct by five million, and then think again.’ There is something hidden in each of us which tends to make us follow fashion, which welcomes, that is to say, a law of uniformity in dress quite regardless of its practical and aesthetic consequences, which craves, indeed, for uniformity first and at any cost, and lets the consequences be what they may.
This craving for uniformity is, I think, the fundamental fact that lies behind the paradox of dress. Changes come in dress as in other things: but they come much more slowly and irrationally, and in no perceptible relation to the ordinary desires and impulses of mankind. When they make for comfort or beauty, like the partial supersession of stiff shirts by soft shirts, we accept them gratefully: but there is no evidence that such changes ever coincided with any definite movement in favour of increased comfort or beauty: they came to us, as it were, from outside, unaccountably. We make no conscious efforts towards a change in dress; rather, we shrink from them, lest the growth of a revolutionary movement should shake our treasured uniformity, and leave us some fine morning with the awful prospect of not being quite certain of looking exactly like our neighbours.
This attitude will no doubt be called cowardly and unenterprising, but it is so universal that its morality seems hardly worth arguing. In case, however, any stern moralists wish to denounce this mean compliance with fashion in the name of liberty, I would commend two points to their notice. First, the followers of fashion can claim that they are literally fulfilling Kant’s law; they are acting upon a principle which they can and do will to be law universal. When I put on my tie in the morning, my first and greatest desire is that every other man should do the same. It is not from any malign wish that others should suffer what I suffer: it is rather from a desire that, apart from any considerations of suffering or happiness, humanity, myself included, may be one upon this matter. The champions of liberty probably reply that they also satisfy the Kantian condition on a higher plane: they are ready to act on a universal principle that all men shall be free to dress in the most convenient and beautiful way. To which we answer, on a still higher plane, are you quite sure that this would be real freedom? In our happy youth we were taught to distinguish between the real freedom which only exists in relation to a positive law of which it is conscious, and the mere negative freedom from restraint, which is empty of content and apt to degenerate into caprice. Is it not at least a possibility that our craving for uniformity is no mere cowardice, but rests upon a deep-seated human instinct, warning us that liberty in dress would prove a merely negative liberty, and in fear of this throwing us back to the other extreme, so that we welcome a positive law, however irrational?
Another possibility has sometimes occurred to me, namely, that uniformity in dress is in the nature of a political allegory. Modern costume is a great equaliser; in outward appearance there is no longer any distinction between the aristocracy and the middle ranks of life. Every one has noticed the unducal appearance of eminent men, emphasised as it so often is nowadays by the curious fall which has taken place in the social status of whiskers. Every one, again, is familiar with the difficulty felt in clubs and at evening parties in distinguishing fellow-guests from waiters. The allegory may be interpreted in two ways: it may be taken as a satirical demonstration of the results of equality, or as indicating a generous instinct that one man’s natural advantages shall not cause him to outshine too brightly his less happy neighbours. But at least it seems possible that the dress paradox veils beneath its apparent perversity some lofty meaning: so that when the libertarians start piling up sublimities against us, we can reply with a few of our own.
In the rarefied atmosphere of these moral altitudes, a good many of the quarrels over walking equipment lose their importance: they are seen to be particular illustrations of a far wider question. Ties and hats and waistcoats and trousers--it is no use to argue about any of them as if they were ordinary human creations made in response to a felt desire and adapted to some practical purpose; they are all costume, symbols of something more inscrutable than practical purposes, and not to be judged by ordinary standards. Those who wear waistcoats or hats may, of course, attempt to defend them on practical grounds: they may even say, with some truth, that waistcoats have convenient pockets, and hats keep the sun off. But this is really an afterthought: it is the old human tendency to rationalise impulses after the event. The points cannot be argued singly and on practical grounds, until the paradox of dress has been faced and overcome.
The preceding argument will, I hope, bring consolation and moral support to that large class of walkers who conform to the conventional requirements of dress while walking, but feel an uneasy sense that they ought not to be doing so. They need have no uneasiness; their position is perfectly sound. Unless and until dress becomes solely and directly adapted to practical purposes, with no ulterior or symbolic meaning, it is superfluous to feel uneasy about compliance with ordinary rules. Even inconsistency (in the low practical sense) is perfectly defensible. If those, for instance, who leave their heads bare when alone in the country, but put on their caps to pass through a village, are accused by the libertarians of inconsistency, they can justly claim that all mankind are inconsistent in this matter: unless the libertarians are prepared to act up to their principles, and walk through Dorking on a Sunday morning in sweaters and short breeches (which is probably the most comfortable walking costume) they have no right to talk about inconsistency.
More than this, it can be shown, I think, that walkers above all men, if they belong to the working classes, and consequently have to do most of their walking on Sundays, ought to be very tender in their dealings with convention in all its forms. For they above all owe a debt to convention--to the agreement and common action of men in general. In the first place, convention has set aside for them one whole, free day in the week, so securely buttressed by immemorial tradition, that the wildest efforts of revolutionaries make but little impression upon it. Next, the same convention, for the very reason which forms its ultimate support, keeps the greater part of mankind at home during this day, so that the country is singularly empty and free. The Sunday walker gains, in fact, from convention a weekly bank holiday, attended by none of the inconveniences which make ordinary bank holidays rather bad for walking; the democracy sets him free, while leaving his aristocratic susceptibilities unruffled, and in its great kindliness and tolerance offers no hindrance to him in utilising the holy day in a way which is probably still repugnant to the greater number of Englishmen. He is thus a privileged law-breaker, with all the advantages of the law unimpaired; and it beseems him to be grateful to those who both make the law and allow him to break it.
This being so, if walkers are allowed to their own great benefit to break one convention, they ought to be all the more respectful to the remainder: they should be careful not to shock conventional susceptibilities further than is necessary. When a Sunday walker meets a church parade (which invariably happens in Westcott to those who take the 10.5 to Leatherhead and go for Leith Hill viâ Polesden Lacey and Ranmore Common) he should not swagger by with a conscious air of superior disreputability; rather, his attitude should be one of humble gratitude, and his costume as modest and conventional as he can make it. For (ultimately) it was church parade that both enabled him to take the 10.5, and has prevented Ranmore Common from being a roaring welter of cocoanut shies. Let him therefore abase his eyes and reflect, as he turns up Logmore Lane, that privilege involves obligations.
Apart from the question of Sunday walking, the cult of disreputability for its own sake seems hardly worthy of a walker. It undoubtedly exists, very largely in conversation, less largely in fact; and it is curious that the more refined relatives of disreputable walkers often find a peculiar pleasure in dwelling on the enormities of dear ----’s walking appearance. But it is hard to see in what studied disreputability is better than studied foppery; while unstudied disreputability is only separated by a very narrow line from slovenliness, and by a slightly broader line from dirt. Probably the cult rests on some kind of a vague sentimental yearning after originality, coupled with the universal passion for an imagined aristocratic detachment from the ideals of the bourgeoisie. But neither feeling is worthy of a walker, and neither ought to survive a few days’ proper walking.
* * * * *
If practical purposes are to be introduced, this is better done in another matter coming within the scope of equipment in the full sense--I mean food and drink. But luckily here the whole inquiry has been thrown in confusion by a wicked joke played by the doctors on the public. As far as a layman can understand the matter, it appears that no one really can demonstrate scientifically the effects of different kinds of food and drink, for the simple reason that a living and digesting body cannot be examined like a dead one; all theories on the subject are therefore purely empirical. But the medical profession, with an instinct for fun not suppressed by a long training and an arduous life, have made an unholy conspiracy with the organic chemists; and the result is a catalogue of proteids, phosphates, nitrogenous substances, etc., with equivalent percentages in powers of bone-forming, flesh-building, and heating, which is dangled cunningly before the eyes of the unsuspecting public. The public rises at once; we like our food, and love dogmatising about it; here is a chance to gain the unshakable support of formulae and diagrams and graphic curves. So we plunge into the troubled sea of proteids; and the end of it, as might be expected, is that there is no form of food which cannot be scientifically advocated, from nettles to human flesh.
How futile is the analytic science of food may be shown by its powerlessness in the face of other dogmatisms. Take, for example, that great traditional food-code associated with the training of oarsmen--a dogmatism so reverently guarded and so profoundly lunatic that a walker must treat it with respect. As late as the fifties it was devoutly believed that rowing men ought to drink very little at meals, but ought to have two glasses of port at three in the afternoon. There is still--or was until recently--a firm conviction that beef was better than mutton for training, while bacon and the flesh of swine generally were altogether taboo. It is not known whether the original prophet who dictated this system was in earnest or no; he may have been a simple soul, genuinely anxious that others should share the benefits of the truth which had been revealed to him; he may, on the other hand, have been a cunning student of men, who knew the power of dogmatism and realised that only thus could he persuade men to eat meals of such a stupefying size that they would be mentally incapable of resenting the monotony of rowing. But, however this may be, the remarkable point is that in a matter where food was really important, and a system of well-known and tried futility was in force, the proteid-experts said never a word; there was never even a voice raised to suggest eating the spare man on the day of the race.