LGRIMS' ROAD TO CANTERBURY

FROM THE TABARD INN TO DARTFORD

When I determined to set out once more to traverse and to possess
England of my heart, it was part of my desire first of all to follow,
as far as might be, in the footsteps of Chaucer's pilgrims. Therefore
I sought the Tabard Inn in Southwark.

For true delight, it seems to me, a journey, especially if it be for
love or pleasure, should always have about it something of devotion,
something a little rigid too, and dutiful, at least in its opening
stages; and in thus determining my way I secured this. For I promised
myself that I would start from the place whence they set out so long
ago to visit and to pray at the tomb of the greatest of English
saints, that I would sleep where they slept, find pleasure in the
villages they enjoyed, climb the hills and look on the horizons that
greeted them also so many hundred years ago, till at last I stood by
the "blissful martyr's tomb," that had once made so great a rumour in
the world and now was nothing.

In many ways I came short of all this, as will be seen; but especially
in one thing--the matter of time. Chaucer and his pilgrims are
generally thought to have spent three and a half or four days and
three nights upon the road. It is true they went ahorseback and I
afoot, but nevertheless a man may easily walk the fifty-six miles from
London to Canterbury in four days. I failed because I found so much to
see by the wayside. And to begin with there was London itself, which I
was about to leave.

It was very early on an April morning when I set out from my home,
coming through London on foot and crossing the river by London Bridge.
It was there I lingered first, in the half light, as it were to say
good-bye.

I do not know what it is in London that at long last and in some quite
impersonal way clutches at the heart and receives one's eager
affection. At first, even though you be one of her children, she seems
and for how long like something fallen, calling you with the
monotonous, mighty, complaining voice of a fallen archangel,
ceaselessly through the days, the years, the centuries and the ages.
She is one of the oldest of European cities, she is one of the most
beautiful, of all capitals she is by far the most full of character:
and yet she is not easy to know or to love. Perhaps she does not
belong to us, but is something apart, something in and for herself, a
mighty and a living thing, owing us nothing and r