CHAPTER VIII

THE FLANNEL-SHIRT LIFE

In The Story of My Heart Richard Jefferies begins his enchanting pages with the expression of that desire which every son of Adam feels at times—­the longing for wild, unartificial life.  “My heart,” he says, “was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge....  A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk.”  Then he goes on to tell of a hill to which he resorted at such moments of intellectual depression, and of the sensations that thrilled him as he moved up the sweet short turf.  The very light of the sun, he says, was whiter and more brilliant there, and standing on the summit his jaded heart revived, and “obtained a wider horizon of feeling.”  Thoreau, too, went to the woods because he wanted to live deliberately, and front only the essential facts of life.  “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

This longing for a return to nature in minds less imaginative than Thoreau’s and Jefferies’ results in globe-trotting or colonisation—­according to circumstances,—­it wakes the gipsy in our blood, be we gentle or simple, and sends us wandering over the waste places of the earth in quest of glory, adventure, or a gold mine—­anything so long as it entails wandering.  When it stirs in the mind of the disciplined soldier it turns him into a scout, and drives him out of the orderly-room, out of the barrack square, to wander in Himalayan passes and ride across the deserts of Africa.  Baden-Powell is a nomad.  The smart cavalry officer who can play any musical instrument, draw amusing pictures, tell delightfully droll stories, sing a good song, stage-manage theatricals—­do everything, in short, that qualifies a man to take his ease in country houses, loves more than any other form of existence the loneliness and the wildness of the scout’s.  Often, he tells us, when he is about the serious business of handing teacups in London drawing-rooms, his mind flies off to some African waste, to some lonely Indian hill, and straightway he longs with all his soul to fling off the trappings of civilised society, and be back again with nature, back again in the dear old flannel-shirt life, living hard, with his life in his hand.

Once, after two months of wandering, he got into a hotel and, after dinner, into a bed.  But it would not do, he says; in a twinkling he had whipped the blankets off the bed and was lying outside on mother earth, with the rain beating upon his face, and deep in refreshing slumber.  The best of beds, according to B.-P., is “the veldt tempered with a blanket and a saddle.”  When he is on his lonely wanderings he always sleeps with his pistol under the “pillow” and the lanyard round his neck.  However soundly he sleeps, if any one comes within ten yards of him, tread he never so softly, Baden-Powell wakes up without fail, and with a brain cleared for action.