going through my name in his wife’s rota umbrarum; but across the room I observed a man fixing an eager eye on me in total disregard of his neighbours. One look was enough. As soon as I had rebuffed the Zoroastrian with a few firmly enunciated prejudices, I moved across to my man and said, ‘Do you know the track above Pickett’s Hole?’ He answered, ‘Yes, but it’s just been ploughed up and wants marking out again.’ So, as Touchstone says, we swore brothers.
The second topic of conversation, which is especially the property of walkers, is the topic of food and drink. This, like the weather, is generally taboo in polite circles; but through our country as a whole it is a popular and almost universal topic, especially the second half of it. Hence the walker’s function in this case is to introduce not so much a new topic as a new treatment. He has to substitute for the levity with which food and drink are usually treated a proper and befitting gravity.
The word ‘levity’ may seem strange to those who are familiar with a certain type of conversations, not rare among our island race, on the subject of food and drink. It is easy for the moralist to draw a terrible picture of bull-necked financiers dining in clubs or City restaurants—men gorged with high living, to whom the past is a memory of business enlightened by eating and drinking, and the future a dear vision of eating and drinking uninterrupted by business. But the real fault of such men’s conversation is its levity. A glutton is only a tenth of a man. When food and drink have begun to occupy the whole area of mental discourse, the human being becomes only a digestive and ruminative apparatus informed by a rudimentary consciousness. The conversation issuing from such a system is mere animal grunt with little human element intermixed; hence, for all its avoirdupois, it has from the standpoint of eternity a very real levity, a very real lightness in the spiritual scales.
Conversations on food and drink between normal persons are far pleasanter to listen to, and have much more real gravity. They start, as a rule, with bald statements of likes and dislikes, which, as dogmas incapable of proof or argumentation, are excellent props to the framework of discourse. But as the general topic of Things I Like begins to particularise itself under the heading of Meals I Have Eaten, the conversation takes a wider range. The great meals of the past are necessarily associated in memory with their surroundings—the walk, the bathe, the scenery, the fine day. Viewed in isolation, a meal is not much; viewed in its relation to the day and the day’s work, it is an interesting, important, even essential element. What walker is there who does not treasure in his inmost heart the memory of some chocolate consumed on a mountain top, some stream drunk dry among the eternal hills, some sandwich eaten in a palpitating shadow-land of shifting mist? Such memories are indeed part of his being: and when they issue forth in conversation they come with no glutton’s levity, but with the gravity of the whole nature of man.
‘All very fine,’ says A Voice at this point; ‘but are walkers the only men who treat the subject of eating and drinking with gravity? What about those French fellows—gourmets, aren’t they called? And, in your beastly antiquity, were there not Epicureans?’ My dear Voice, Epicurus was a simple-hearted old man who lived in a garden on cabbages, was notably kind to children, and disestablished existing systems of religion out of pure conscientiousness and in the interests of geniality and good feeling; his most famous Roman disciple talks of eating and drinking and other things of sense in a way which makes an article in the Medical Encyclopædia seem relatively warm and passionate; and his nearest modern equivalent is Bernard Shaw. No doubt subsequent gluttons called themselves Epicureans: but they have thereby no more claim to philosophic gravity than any half-baked philanderer who talks of Platonic Love. As to gourmets, I dare say they exist, and I am still hoping to meet one, in order to discover what in spite of all the talk on the subject seems very doubtful—that is, whether there can be a real art of eating and drinking in the least worthy of the name, whether the sense of taste is capable of an aesthetic experience even remotely comparable to those of sight and sound.
In the interim, I hold that the last word on the subject was uttered by the gentleman in Punch:—‘Oh, what a ’eavenly dinner we’ve ’ad!’—‘Enough to make yer wish yer was born ’oller.’ The gourmet’s art, in short, operates, if at all, only during the actual process of the deglutition of food; it has no concern with what happens afterwards. (I hope it is unnecessary to apologise for this vulgar but vital distinction.) Food and drink are regarded merely as ticklers of the palate, and not as builders and preservers of the body. Now surely this is once more an error of abstraction. Properly regarded, the sandwich does not cease when it is swallowed; it gives shape and colour to the subsequent pipe: it braces the heart for the afternoon walk; its swan song calls us to tea; last of all, its spirit is linked and welded into the imperishable memories of the day. Can the gourmet say the same of his lobster salad? Is it not, when once its brief domination of the palate is over, at best a fruitless and dissociated memory, at worst a torment and a foe? Once again, the walker by adhering to the concrete view gains sanity and width of vision: the abstract specialist is left with a half-discerned and therefore disordered world.
There is one further cause which tends to set apart the walker’s food and his conversation about it, from that of other men; he usually carries it, at least for the midday meal or meals, on his person. It is thus far more intimately associated with him than the food which issues at stated intervals from the mysterious economy of the home. There is no formal process of sanctification so real and so significant: the gilding of the horns of the sacrificial victim, the solemn procession and the prayer, the incense and meal and sacred fire—these are but vain symbols, compared with the sublimation and even transubstantiation which ensues from carrying food in the pocket. Better a simple marmalade sandwich which has climbed a hill with you firmly stuck to your pouch and your ordnance map, than all the flesh-pots of Egypt, if connected with you only by the extrinsic relation of eating.
To sum up, then, or rather to reiterate, food and drink are to the walker a very vital and central part of his being, of the concrete world without and the concrete man within. Hence, they form very nearly the most intimate and essential part of his conversation. It is sometimes thought that a test of friendship is the ease and frequency of conversation upon lofty and abstract themes. For myself, I set little store by the friendship of two men or women who talk largely of life and death and the beginnings of things: such talk, especially about death, is better kept for one’s enemies. But when two men talk freely about food and drink, then you may be sure that a real intimacy has begun; and when a youth and a maiden talk thus, their feet are on the high road to the great adventure. Recently I overheard Mr. Jones say to Miss Robinson, ‘Hard-boiled eggs are all very well for a family party, but not much good if you mean real business’; to which she answered, ‘I only like them on mountains in the winter.’ Finding that my friends—a deplorable and indeed indefensible practice—were offering seven to two against the engagement, I caused some astonishment by taking the odds. I have not yet been paid, but I saw young Jones in Kensington Gardens the other day beating his sister with a hazel switch.
The third of the walker’s special subjects of conversation, the subject of Places, ought perhaps to be classed under the general head of shop. Places are to the walker what the goal is to the athlete or victory to the election agent—the ultimate and determining elements in his activity to which all the rest is subordinated. We cannot desire the process, but only the object—the actual swoop of the ball into the goal, the triumphant and epoch-making return of Mr. X. So—in the pleasant land of ultimates—we cannot desire walking: we can only desire places. But just as the casual outsider is more interested in the goal than in the brilliant forward combination which produced it; just as he is excited about the announcement of the poll and quite calm about the speaking, pamphleteering, canvassing and other stimuli which led to it; so for the walker places lie nearer than walking to the common interests of man, and may therefore perhaps be regarded as a general subject of conversation.
In the widest sense, of course, topography is one of the safest and most familiar subjects of conversation, and ‘Do you know (somewhere)?’ as a dinner-table opening is as good or better than the classic ‘Do you know (some one)?’ The latter might, perhaps, be compared by a chess player to the orthodox King’s Knight openings—well-tried and well-worn methods which, as the text-books say, generally lead to a solid and instructive game. If so, the places opening is more of a gambit, less safe