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TRAVELERS’ TALES

A year or so ago when I was coming over here on the Paris there was a great storm. There was so great a storm that only fifteen of us attended breakfast. In consequence, there seated herself beside me a lady of a certain age whom I had not before noticed. She remarked to me suddenly—this sort of thing happens only to travelers—she remarked to me, then, suddenly with an organ more singularly nasal than any I have hitherto had the good fortune to encounter:

“You kehn’t flirt with Amur’can gels as you ken with English ones. But if she falls in love with you . . . look aout.”

That was all she said, and it is all that I can remember of her, save that she was large, florid, and alarming. And the assault was so unprovoked—for there certainly wasn’t any she to whom the message could apply—it was all so singular in that reeling ship that she remains to me as something supernatural.

If there were here any female figure equivalent to that of our Britannia on the pennies, and if the voice had not been so singularly nasal that the suspicion would be insulting, I should have imagined that the Genius of the land which we were approaching had manifested itself, and that She—right or wrong—felt sufficiently interested in my unworthy self to afford me that warning.

Anyhow, it warned me. For the whole of that visit I walked the streets with my eyes glued to the pavement, for, had I chanced to have had handed to me, as we say, a glad eye, how mightn’t I have had to look out!

I was going somewhat later on the train to somewhere near Danbury. There sat opposite me—I always like riding with my back to the engine—a young woman, masculine in most of the attributes of her attire; that is to say, she wore leather leggings and knee breeches. I looked no higher. Now, although I have been in this country quite often, I had never been in an American slow train before; and although I was quite aware that the tempo of New York is the slowest of any of the great cities of the world, I still harbored the superstition that once you were outside New York things might begin to rush.

Well, that train took hours. Hours and hours and hours. We have a very ancient story as regards our own Southeastern line that once a traveler asked a guard of a train why it had stopped. The guard said there was a cow on the line. An hour afterwards, the train stopping once more, the traveler asked the guard the same question. He received the same reply. On his remarking that there seemed to be a good many cows on the Southeastern, he was told that it was the same cow. Well, my progress to Danbury was like that. I grew so alarmed, so certain that we must have passed Danbury, that we must be approaching Portland, Maine, or even Halifax, Nova Scotia—I grew so alarmed that the one fear outweighed the other, and I asked the young woman—she was really quite plumply feminine and agreeable—whether we hadn’t passed Danbury. She said with animation:

“Oh, why didn’t you speak to me before? It would have been so much more amusing.”

She gave me all the information about railways that it is usual to give a stranger who is traveling for the first time in your country. She told me, I mean, that here trains run upon steel rails, being drawn by locomotives whose propelling-force is steam, that before entering a train you purchase a ticket, that iced water is supplied upon American trains, and that you can have paper cups for nothing—this showing a very high state of civilization. Then she told me that she was going to Kent County Reservation in Connecticut to catch rattlesnakes for the Bronx Park Zoo.

And what is more it was true. Now neither of those things would ever happen to you if you happened to be American and in your own country. But singular oddities have always presented themselves to me whenever I have traveled here. I don’t mean to say that odd things ever happen so long as I bide put in New York, between, that is to say, the Battery and Eighty-fifth Street; nothing odd ever happens or presents itself to me, and I enjoy a relative immunity in Brooklyn or Hoboken; but let me once leave that, as it were home circle, to go into America . . . well, I will tell you how I went to Coney Island.

I wanted to take a Brooklyn rapid-transit line that had lately joined up with the Manhattan Beach Company. I paid the car fare, the statutory five cents. This was more than twenty years ago! At a given point in that journey a uniformed attendant remarked to me, “You hevn’t paid your fare.” I said, “I hev.” He said, “You hevn’t,” so I paid him another five cents. Shortly afterwards a uniformed policeman came along and remarked, “You hevn’t paid your fare.” I said, “I hev.” He said, “You hevn’t,” so he took me by the collar and threw me off the car. The train proceeded, and I observed that it charged into a crowd of mornamillion people. They, standing on the bridge over the river, were mostly precipitated into the stream.

By that time I was slightly discouraged as to my chances of getting to Coney Island by land. I went by water. On the boat I had nothing to smoke. I descended to the bar and asked a white-coated attendant for cigarettes. He said, “What sort of cigarettes?” I said, “What sort of cigarettes do you keep?” He said, “We don’t keep ’em. We sell ’em.” I said, “What sort of cigarettes have you got, anyhow?” He said, “We h’ain’t got no cigarettes, but we carry a fine juicy line of Colorado stogies.” I said, “Where do you carry them to?” and he said, “It’s up to me now.”

That would not have happened to you, neither would what followed. When I arrived at Coney Island I sought a dancing hall where, so I had been told, the entire population of the United States could dance in comfort, and with pleasure. (One does get told things like that when one is a traveler.) In the center of the otherwise completely empty ballroom a gentleman was slowly turning round, both his arms extended, and in each hand was a six-shooter, which he was discharging.

Now it is only to the traveler, by preference to the traveler who is not unlikely to write a book, that the gods vouchsafe such terrible joys. I should have said to myself at that date that nothing could have been more unlikely than that I should write a book about this city. My former visits here have always been either for sheer pleasure or on business, quite unconnected with my own writing; and were that not the case I should hesitate now, however hard I might have been pressed, to record my impressions of the city where people work by the forty-three or more, one on top of the other. For I have always found that if I went to a place on purpose to look at it I could either not write about it at all or only write about it quite badly. My job in life as I have conceived it has always been to record as passionlessly as possible my impressions of my own times and the places in which I have worked. And to say that I have worked in a city is practically the same thing as to say that I have at least liked it, for I have seldom been under the necessity of staying in a place that I did not like and in which I did not feel at home.

So I have always felt that my impressions were happiest when I merely glanced aside from something I was doing. Thus, Carcassonne has for me an extraordinary life because I wrote practically the whole of a book there—and indeed I have written a great many books in the south of France, and that is perhaps why I so much love the Midi, whereas places like Rouen or Tours or even Salem, Massachusetts, which I have visited avowedly merely to look at them, have left on my mind either very little impression at all or else impressions of a disagreeable kind. This is perhaps because the mere job of getting to places is disturbing, or perhaps because I dislike being the stranger anywhere. Thus Salem, to which I went on land and over water from Newport, R. I., comes back to me as a memory almost of detestation. It is possible that Gloucester, Massachusetts, which comes back to me as a memory relatively delightful, may be responsible for my dislike of Salem. That is to say that on the morning we went to Salem we were entertained by hospitable customs-house officers on board their launch—we were entertained with large quantities of raw salt fish which called for the consumption of almost larger quantities of their admirable champagne. Now if you consume large quantities of salt cod and champagne—I don’t say there weren’t also some crackers, but I don’t remember them—if you consume large quantities of such comestibles on a steam launch between seven and ten in the morning, and if at half-past two of the same day after spending four and a half hours in the slowest, most dusty and dilapidated trains the world has ever seen—if after all this you arrive lunchless and with no prospect of lunch or even of a nice, hot cup of tea, at a beauty spot, the probability is that you will dislike that beauty spot almost more than you will dislike places which are called hells on earth. So it was with me and Salem. That journey comes back to me as a memory of intense depression and disgust. For the matter of that, it does not come back to me at all. I can only remember stopping off in atrociously hot weather at a place called Kingston-on-Thames, a railway junction, that was crammed with particularly nauseating French-Canadians. Kingston, as I remember it, consisted of one single shack, like an army hut, which proclaimed itself to be The Star and Garter Restaurant. The Thames was a trickle of yellow water between thirty-foot mud-banks. On our pushing open the gauze doors of The Star and Garter a long table revealed itself as covered with what appeared to be coal-black linoleum. But it wasn’t. That linoleum rose and dissolved into millions of flies. So at half-past two we came to Salem.

Now all over such parts of the United States as I had already visited I had heard rapturous tales of the ancient beauties, of the marvelous old-fashioned hostelry, of the marvelous old-fashioned host of the inn at Salem. Alas, the most unpleasant place in England is called Ancoats, a soot-begrimed, coal-getting, cotton-spinning suburb of Manchester. Well, Salem intimately resembled Ancoats. It was black with soot and over it the skies wept sable tears. The entrance to the inn was a black staircase ascending between two shops selling things that I can’t remember. But they were nasty things. The anteroom of the hotel resembled the most unpleasing of provincial railway-station waiting rooms, nor was there in it any single thing upon which to sit. Behind a counter snored an enormous man, his face covered by an unpleasant-looking handkerchief. We had to wake him to ask if we could have any lunch. He said, “Nope.” We asked him if we could go to our rooms. He said, “Nope.” We asked him if there was anywhere where we could sit down. He said, “Nope.” He was the courtly old-fashioned host.

I may as well remark here that this is the most unpleasant thing I shall say about this country, where, generally, my lines have fallen in pleasant places. Moreover, I am writing about a time, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when American conditions, and particularly American rural conditions, were undoubtedly much rougher than is to-day the case. And I am also attempting to indicate rather how a book written by a foreigner visiting a foreign land should not be written than attempting to make any generalized point out of the oddities that I have recorded. It is obvious, I mean, that if one is about to visit a national shrine for purposes of observation one should not first fill oneself up with raw salt cod and champagne. Nothing could withstand those depressants. Not even Stratford-on-Avon. Or Chartres.

For myself, the first natural gasp of emotion at the sight of the buildings behind the Battery or of the houses on the cliffs of Boulogne once over, I set myself to exhaust international similarities before beginning on the differences. That is perhaps partly a product of contrariety—of that spirit that the French call ergoteur—but it is at least self-consciously due to a profound feeling that those globe-trotters who are volubly outraged because it is difficult to find drinking water in Madrid or because hotels in the United States do not have your boots cleaned for you unless you ask for it—that such unthinking idiots do an immense amount of international harm. One must take into account that Madrid is situated in a country of great aridity and that labor in New York is relatively expensive before starting to cackle in the streets of either capital—and how much more before setting out to record one’s impressions.

It is a curious fact that although we all look for instances confirmatory of the saying that there is no new thing under the sun, we are almost pained if we discover that our neighbor across the nearest frontier has not the habits and point of view of a Choctaw savage. We love it when we discover that the ancient Egyptians in their temples at Memphis had penny-in-the-slot machines that delivered perfume after the insertion of an obol, and enormous delight rewards us when we find in reading Bion or Moschus that the emotions of two women, one holding a baby, and both crushed in a crowd of sightseers watching a procession—that their emotions, gossip, and even their ejaculations are precisely the same as would be those of any two women with a baby watching a procession from the pavements of Broadway two thousand years later. But we are filled with disgust if the first Frenchman we see in a Paris restaurant does not eat his peas with a knife, or the first Englishman we see in Smithfield is not selling his wife with a halter around her neck. For why should we travel if we cannot discover our neighbors to be infinitely inferior to ourselves? Why, indeed?

For myself, having spent a great portion of my life in lands other than that of my birth and a great portion of my time in the study of historical documents, I am inclined to regard international or chronological differences as so slight as to be negligible or so changing as to cause an endless confusion. The inhabitants of the south of France in the thirteenth century spent the greater part of their days in baths or on other methods of perfuming and ablution. On the other hand, Brillat-Savarin, during the early decades of the last century, complained bitterly of the unpleasant smell of the inhabitants of New York, since in those days New Yorkers never bathed themselves and, indeed, the city did not then contain one fixed bath. So that how a traveler’s book should be written I don’t really know; I should never myself think of writing one. The results of migratory observation are so bewildering. The other day at a party an English newspaper correspondent was bewailing the fact that the passengers in New York public conveyances were grossly rough and brutal. He said that, traveling frequently with his wife on subways or in omnibuses, he had been disgusted by finding that if two vacant seats were separated by a third which was already occupied, the occupant of the third seat would never take the trouble to move so that my friend and his wife could sit together. He said that in England, on the other hand, this would always be done. He was interrupted by an American newspaper correspondent who stated that, having spent ten years in London and traveling frequently, he, too, with his wife by bus or tram, he had never once known the occupant of a seat that was between two vacant seats to make room so that a couple could sit together. At the same time I was experiencing an uneasy sensation. In the lounge of an hotel the day before, I had been occupying the middle one of three armchairs when two attractive young ladies came in together and sat one on each side of me. My natural impulse was to offer my place to the one or the other, and had they been elderly or unattractive I should certainly have done so. But I have lived for so long in France, where to offer your seat in a public conveyance to a lady below the age of sixty is apt to be regarded as an attempt to scrape acquaintance, that I refrained from that small act of politeness. What, then, are we to make of these divergent constatations? And, if those two young ladies were English, what did they think of American manners? There is no end to the way in which one is contradicted the moment one attempts any of these generalizations.

Last month I ventured into New England and, arrived at Boston, I delivered a harangue on the superior culture of the inhabitants of France. I said that if you talked to any French tram conductor you would find that he read books, took an interest in literature, and had very interesting views of life. That same afternoon I went by a slow train to a remote part of the state of Massachusetts. The conductor of the train was a benevolent individual, like a kindly, elderly English butler, except that I have never seen an English butler wearing silver-rimmed spectacles. He chatted in a fatherly manner with all the passengers, patted myself on the back, and appeared in every way like an English village patriarch upon an English village green. I almost saw a ghostly smock-frock draping his limbs.

Now one young man of that carload read sedulously in a magazine, and the conductor halted before him shortly after we had passed Fitchburg. The conductor asked the engrossed young man where he was getting off, and the engrossed young man answered that he was going to Fitchburg. The conductor said that he sure wasn’t; that just as bees made honey for other folk to eat, so that young man’s father had cooked his son’s Sunday goose and others would consume it; that the reading of love stories in magazines was an engrossing pursuit but should not be indulged in when one had urgent business on hand. The assistant conductor declared that he had six times announced the name of Fitchburg. They discussed for a long time how that young man was going to return to his father’s goose. He might make the eleven-fifty at the next station; if he didn’t make that he would have to wait until the five-forty-two from somewhere else. Or he might take a trolley to somewhere and there find a motor-bus to within two miles of Fitchburg. That settled, the conductor began a monologue addressed mostly to myself. He said that books were engrossing things. When he took a book he himself would become so engrossed in it as to be completely lost to the world. Once when he was reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he had failed to go on duty altogether. He found love stories even more engrossing than history. Pictures also could engross him. He liked to go to picture galleries alone so as not to be disturbed in his contemplation. He liked the frescos of Puvis de Chavannes in Boston better than most other pictures he had seen. He then addressed the young man directly. The young man must learn from this from what trivial causes great events may arise. He pointed out that on that trolley car or on that bus the young man very possibly might pick up a young woman every whit as beautiful as the heroine of the love story in the magazine. The young man continually protested that he had been reading in that magazine not a love story but an article about Central Africa. The conductor, however, continued benevolently, that the young woman the young man would meet on the trolley would not only be more beautiful than the heroine of the story he had been reading but she would be an admirable helpmeet, a housekeeper of surpassing economy, and a cook beyond praise. Thus, by her savings as by her exhortations that young man would certainly grow to be as rich as my more famous namesake. He then again addressed myself. Life, he said, was like that. It flowed in a placid current for long periods. Then some trivial accident would occur, but accidents never arrive singly. And so on. He concluded by pointing out that that young man would pick up his young woman on the trolley and not on his car, because under his vigilant eyes the sexes feared to make each other’s acquaintance, whereas the conductors of trolleys are less vigilant conservators of the public morals than their brothers of the railway service.

At any rate, after having uttered a panegyric on the Wattmen of France for their interest in books, pictures, and views of life, asserting by implication that no Anglo-Saxon vehicular public servant would be interested in such things, within the hour I had to listen to that monologue upon books, pictures, and life.

So generalizations are futile. They are, nevertheless, inevitable. I read to-day in my newspaper that a certain novel published in Paris concerns itself with “the lost generation of hard-drinking expatriates in Paris.” Now it is my impression that compared with the Americans of New York, American expatriates in Paris are teetotalers. They have to be. Apparently—mind, I say apparently—in this country few people object to your getting far drunker than a lord at any social gathering. But in Paris if you get drunk at a party you are never asked to the house again. I do not think I have ever seen an American expatriate drunk in Paris. I do not mean to say that I have never seen drunken American tourists: I have seen thousands. But then I have seen thousands of drunken tourists of all nationalities in that unfortunate city—British, Swedes, all other Scandinavians, Martinique negroes, but seldom a drunken Frenchman. I do not think I have ever seen more than one Frenchman drunk. Certainly I have never seen a French woman overindulge.

So one generalizes. It can’t be helped. But when one generalizes on international matters one should observe certain rules. One should, as far as possible, accumulate a large number of particular instances before attempting a generalization—and one should attempt to discover the reason that underlies that collection of similar particular instances. I am convinced that American expatriates in Paris, and still more in London, are a particularly sober race, because, as I have said, I cannot remember ever to have seen one of them in a state of intoxication. But my conviction gains immensely as soon as the consideration occurs to me that there is a reason for this sobriety and that that reason is a pretty strong one. And I think that another requisite for the writer of books of international comparison is what I will call the faculty of feeling-at-home-ness. In a beautiful passage in one of his books W. H. Hudson says that there was no place in the world, whether in New England, or in the Banda Orientale, in Patagonia, or on Sussex downs—there was no place in the world where grass grew and where there were birds in which he did not feel himself a son of the soil. And I may make almost the same claim for myself as regards any place in which men and women live. I might be inclined to exclude the nations with which we were lately at war. But even that I don’t know. One of my reasons for disliking the Germans was this: at dinners given by professors in several German university towns where I lectured before the War I used to observe that, whereas the professors at table ate and drank enormously, their wives sat round the walls and knitted, and it appeared to me even at that date that a nation whose intellectual heads behaved in such a way must be in a low scale of the human race. But what was my perturbation the other day to read the following passage in a letter from an English lady who was revisiting Oxford and England after a long interval:

I find, in spite of the cold, that I awfully like the aspects of the English country in winter, and of the towns, too. But what people! Dash and I went to the Magdalen Carol Singing on Christmas Eve and sat shivering in the ladies’ gallery with the most unpresentable collection of completely self-satisfied women I have seen for a long time. The carols were not till midnight so we only stayed for “The Messiah,” which I hate. But the old stones and the old woodwork are so lovely that one does not like them to be in the hands of pedants and frumps. Of course it ought to be a niceish society because there is neither great wealth nor great poverty and no one can much queer the other fellow’s pitch. But it is no place for a woman. The whole concern has been run for the glory of men since the beginning and women can only be domestic hangers-on. I felt that, sitting with the cold wives in the cold gallery of Magdalen Hall, watching their gorgeous husbands dining below with all that swanky simplicity of beer mugs, great fires, and bare tables that distinguishes the city of dreaming spires.

So I presume I must revise my estimate of the place of Germany amongst the nations.

Of course one can palliate the apparent brutality of the Oxford dons in Magdalen Hall by explaining that that is only a traditional game and that Oxford dons, being cultivated gentlemen, do not normally eat while their womenfolk fast; it is a platonic proceeding much as at Yuletide you may see elderly gentlemen of blameless behavior forcibly embrace young virgins under the mistletoe, and no doubt some similar palliation may be found for the behavior of the German professors that I used to find so disagreeable.

The chief requisite, in short, for the writer of books about other countries is that of comprehension—and not only the faculty of comprehension but the determination to apply it to every national or individual manifestation that the writer may witness. Looking through what I have written I find that some explanations are necessary. The old-fashioned host of Salem was no doubt rendered crabbed by being awakened suddenly from post-prandial slumber. I myself can be singularly brutal in similar circumstances, though I fancy you would find me normally bland and kindly. The reason why we could get no hospitality of any sort at that moment was simply that the waiters’ trades union of Salem forbade any activity in hotels between the hours of two and six P.M. And the salt cod and champagne amply explain the desolate aspect of Salem which I believe to be one of the most delightful places imaginable. I quite believe it.

As for the singular instances on the road to Coney Island, it should be explained that those were due to that sturdy love of liberty which distinguishes the population here, native or resident. At that date the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company had just amalgamated with the Manhattan Beach Company and, there being a law to the effect that only one car fare of five cents can be exacted for any single journey, the New York public was determined that it would not pay more than five cents for the journey from New York to Manhattan Beach. The companies had appealed to the law and had obtained from a judge, whose decision was finally reversed, a decree permitting them to exact two car fares for that journey. The judge, moreover, had lent the companies several posses of city police. So the public were up in arms against the injustices of this judge Jeffreys of the twentieth century, and if I chanced to poke my nose in between those contending forces, that was my fault. Foreigners should keep out of revolutions and civil strifes.

The young lady rattlesnake catcher is also explicable. Rattlesnakes will not breed in captivity, so an annual supply is needed for the Bronx Park Zoo if the inhabitants of New York are to be kept instructed as to the habits and aspect of those engaging reptiles. So every year a band of the young friends of the Bronx Park custodians proceeds to Kent County Reservation where the rattlesnake is protected and plentiful. Thus these young people secure for themselves a pleasant holiday whilst doing the state some service. The gentleman who fired off the revolver in the ball-room was not a National Trait. He had merely gone suddenly mad as has happened everywhere else.

The only phenomenon to me inexplicable was the lady on the Paris. I am still inclined to think that she was supernatural. In that case not the United States but an even higher authority must take the responsibility for her.