TRAVEL

A LITTLE old man came into the steamship office where I was buying a ticket. He had mild, kindly eyes, pink cheeks, a vague, white beard and a deferential, rather apologetic manner.

“Have you any new literature to-day?” he inquired of the clerk after some hesitation.

“Sure,” the clerk answered genially, and picked him out a bundle of those prettily and skilfully illustrated pamphlets describing almost every known country on the globe. He also gave him plans of ships, price lists of the various staterooms and dates of sailing.

“He must be something of a traveler,” I suggested when the old man, after many thanks, left the office.

The clerk smiled.

“The old guy and his wife have been almost everywhere,” he answered; “but I don’t think that either of them has ever been out of this town,” he enigmatically added, “and they’re both about a hundred and fifty.”

“Yes?” I said encouragingly.

“He comes in regularly twice a year,” the clerk went on, “and gets all the ‘literature,’ as he calls it, about the summer and winter tours. Then he and his wife take the trips by what I call the Easy Chair Route. They not only know all about the railway trains and ships and stagecoaches, they study up the places, as they go along, out of books they get from the public library. I bet they know a darned sight more about Europe, Arope, Irope and Sirope than most of the people who’ve been there.”

The clerk’s remarks called up for me a charming picture. The old couple would decide on Egypt and the Holy Land for their winter cruise, and in the long, cold, winter evenings, seated at a table near, not a fireplace (I saw at a glance that their little parlor would not contain a fireplace) but one of those high, shining and most comfortable stoves with countless little isinglass windows and a soothing red glow behind them, they would read aloud, consult maps and pictures and time-tables and no doubt disagree very gently here and there as to the proper interpretation of certain passages in the Scriptures. And until the hour arrived for “locking up,” for refilling the stove, for seeing that the cat was comfortable for the night and for going to bed, they would actually be in Egypt or the Holy Land—much more so, as the clerk had shrewdly appreciated, than many of the sojourners at Shepheard’s Hotel, or the renters of steam dahabeahs on the Nile.

It undoubtedly is one way of traveling, and by no means a bad way. In fact I once came across a little paper in the Contributor’s Club of the Atlantic Monthly declaring it to be the best way. But then I am convinced that all the contributions to the Contributor’s Club of the Atlantic Monthly are contributed by very cultivated and cozy, home-loving old maids. Books of travel and portfolios of well-taken photographs are the rails upon which the easy chair glides, the unknown sea upon which it so placidly sails. Everyone has made voyages of this kind and, while many of them are uneventful, some of them are thrilling.

The most memorable one (not counting books of adventure which in this connection don’t count at all) I ever took was long ago to the Island of Barbados. We were in college at the time and one of the requirements of the advanced English course we were studying was that everybody should write a story in seven chapters—plot, locality and treatment being left to our own discretion. The scene of my narrative (it makes me blush when I recall that little masterpiece of fiction) was in and about Boston, and one bitterly cold sleeting afternoon I asked a friend of mine what he was going to write about. We were in his study at the time and, as he was absorbed at his desk in working out an architectural problem, he merely muttered, with his nose wrinkled up, “Barbados.”

“What are they?” I inquired.

“It isn’t they, it’s it,” he replied; “it’s an island.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“I really don’t know,” he said.

“But how can you write about it if you don’t know anything about it?” I pursued.

“Why, doesn’t the mere name convey everything to you?” he demanded.

“It conveys,” I told him, “some sort of vegetable. Do help yourself to some more of the barbados,” I added.

“To me it means—but let’s go over to the library and get a book about it. I’ve meant to all along, just to see if my idea of it was right,” he suggested. So we went to Gore Hall, where the man at the desk found us a book, and that evening, in front of a grate full of hot, red coal, we went to the Island of Barbados, drinking beer and eating crackers on the way, and also during our residence on the exquisite little island where “the sea assumes strange and unexpected tints; it may be violet, with streaks of lettuce green or forget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch of brilliant luster such as shines on a beetle’s back, or may shimmer into a lake of lapis lazuli.” We stayed on the Island of Barbados until half-past two in the morning. Just recently I returned there one evening in a better book, and if anyone wishes this winter to take a cruise to the West Indies without leaving home, I recommend him to take passage at once on Sir Frederick Treve’s recently published “The Cradle of the Deep,” one of the most entrancing and beautifully written books of travel of my acquaintance.

As for actual traveling, the kind that necessitates physical as well as mental activity, one great truth about it has at last dawned upon me. No matter what may be your method of procedure, no matter whether your means be modest or unlimited (here, I confess, I am drawing on my imagination), it is always much more comfortable to stay at home. This may sound like an undue emphasis upon an obvious fact, but judging from the number of persons one everywhere meets who do not seem to have grasped the fact, I don’t believe it is. All over the world, travelers for pleasure continually complain of the hotels, the food, the trains, boats, servants, prices, manners, customs and weather. Almost the entire conversation of a group of fellow countrymen I once met on a steamer consisted of enumerating the things they were going to eat when they arrived in New York. Just recently a friend of mine, who had made a short trip in Mexico, referred with bitterness to that rather primitive country because a bath necessitated going out of his hotel to a bathing establishment. Nothing he saw in Mexico apparently in any way compensated him for this and various other minor discomforts. Without doubt, “be it ever so humble,” there is no place like it, and I have often wondered, this being the case, just why we usually do take a trip whenever the opportunity offers itself. What is the psychology of the desire to travel?

With me, at least, I think it arises from the same impulse that prompts one to get up and take a walk after one has sat too long in the house. The desire to travel is a kind of desire to stretch the mental legs. There is no essential difference of intent between the little journey “down town” and back, and a journey to Italy or India. During a pleasant, objectless stroll on Main street my mind is in much the same state, although perhaps in a lesser degree, that it is in when I,

Sometimes the idea of one’s entire country becomes even as a long occupied chair in a room, and it is then that, circumstances being propitious, people pack up and flit to lands where everything is different. Having voluntarily sought complete change, it always strikes me as ungrateful and childish to quarrel with it when they get it. If almost everything in a foreign land were not different, travel would begin and end with locomotion, and locomotion is the least of travel.

What the most of it is, I have never been able quite to determine. No doubt to each person, or rather to every group of persons who can be classified under the same general head, it is something different. One old gentlemen I knew went through Italy and Greece all but oblivious to the scenery, the aspect of the cities, the costume, the various sounds and the atmospheres that made one country Italian and the other Greek, but he had a thrilling time. His delight was to read and translate every inscription he came across on a monument. He could have found them all in archaeological works at the public library at home, and done the same thing. The intense pleasure, however, lay in doing it on the ground from the original stones. I do not for a moment doubt that the thirty-six young ladies, who recently won a newspaper “popularity contest” and toured the continent with a steamer trunk full of assorted chewing gum, enjoyed Italy quite as much as did my old friend. Some people I know enjoy foreign travel almost solely because of the acquaintances they pick up. Venice spells Smith, Sienna really means Jones; Chartres, Amiens and Beauvais are a confused but pleasant memory of the Robinsons, all of which is a perfectly legitimate manner of finding pleasure in travel.

Some persons enjoy traveling in solitude; the presence of a companion disturbs their susceptibility to receiving valuable “impressions.” Others enjoy it intensely but would be wretched unless they were accompanied by some one capable of supplying them with the impressions they long to have but don’t know how. Many regard travel entirely from an educational angle. They have a tendency to translate everything they see into terms of dates. It pleases them to learn, for instance, that Lucca Delia Robbia was born in 1400, and that “while Botticelli was one of the worst anatomists he was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance,” but they worry a good deal for fear they’ll forget it. In the meanwhile they rather lose sight of Delia Robbia’s “sweet, ethereal and visionary grace,” as well as Botticelli’s anatomy and draughtsmanship; but it’s a comfort to know that they know they’re there. Still others travel in a pleasantly aimless fashion, quietly reveling in their lack of obligation to see or to do anything they do not wish to. One man I know, who belongs to this type, has a genuine love of art and considerable knowledge of it; but although he has been in London several times he has never seen either the National Gallery or the Elgin marbles. When I asked him why not, he said in all sincerity that when he was in London he had never been in the kind of mood that made it a pleasure to look at such things, and he hated to make a duty of what often was so great a pleasure. The pleasure of travel, in a word, depends entirely upon the point of view. Like all the other pleasures of life it depends, to employ the trite, true phrase, upon what we ourselves bring to it.

I may be wrong, but it often seems to me that English people of a certain kind are the best, the ideal, travelers. We all know, of course, that the continent of Europe is infested with the most odious English tourists, who cross the channel for a stay of a week or two and who spend most of their time in disputing hotel bills, in trying to get something for nothing and in despising the various countries they visit because they happen to differ in many respects from the British Isles. One hears much of “vulgar Americans,” and one often sees them; but in my tolerably wide experience none of God’s creatures masquerading as human beings has ever filled me with the same horror that I have in the presence of this type of coarse, brutal, dense, provincial touring English person—man or woman. In America we simply have never invented such an awful type; it is inconceivable to us until we meet it in the form of certain English people on the Continent.

These, naturally, are not the kind of English to whom I refer: the kind who I always feel are the ideal travelers. As travelers they are ideal, because they are (for want of a better term) so “well rounded.” They bring to their travels in foreign lands so much—a quiet enthusiasm, cultivated tastes, thoroughness; a mental and physical vitality that among Americans is very rare. Unlike the American schoolma’am, they never specialize on dates and art criticism; they usually know the dates beforehand, and are capable of discriminating between the good and trashy. They enjoy making agreeable acquaintances, but acquaintances are not the sole object of their travels. They don’t like to miss anything, and, although they are never in a hurry, nothing escapes them. While an American family is taking an exhausted nap or hanging about a hotel wondering what to do, these English people will be tramping five miles to see the sunset and get up an appetite for dinner. There is something admirably complete about them. They enjoy the churches and galleries and appreciate them, but they are also sincerely interested in the life of the people and in nature. The incidents of travel they take calmly as they come, and when they complain it is only because their rights have been infringed upon. Out of traveling they get, it always strikes me, everything there is to get.

That they do, I have begun to believe, is simply because of what they bring to their travels. They bring (to repeat) quiet but unflagging enthusiasm, considerable cultivation, the habit of thoroughness in anything they undertake, excellent digestions and equable tempers. All of which lands us bump up against the inevitable platitude that invariably stands guard at the other end of almost every train of thought. Abstractly considered, travel is at best an uncomfortable activity more often than not: strange beds, strange food, a constant, hideous packing and unpacking of trunks too small to contain conveniently one’s few possessions; long, dreary intervals in railway stations, nightmare scrambles at custom-houses, steamers that bury their noses in the sea and kick their heels in the air, sleeping cars always either too hot or too cold. Such is travel in the abstract. Its pleasant qualities, like the pleasant qualities of almost every other pleasure in life, must be supplied largely by ourselves. If travel did nothing else for us, it would be valuable by reason of its ability to drive home this old truth. In order thoroughly to enjoy travel we must be able to give considerably more than we get.