Читать книгу A Journey of a Jayhawker - W. Y. Morgan - Страница 5

GOING TO EUROPE.

Boston, May 25, 1905.

When one decides to make a European trip he immediately becomes impressed with the importance of his intention, and thinks that everyone else is likewise affected. Of course this is a mistake, but you have to stop and think before you realize it. You go down the street imagining everyone is saying, “There is a man who is going to Europe.” In fact, the other fellow is probably merely wondering whether or not you will pay the two dollars you owe him or stand him off for another thirty days. You are in an exhilarated state. You think over the cherished desires of a lifetime to see London, Paris, Rome, and the places made famous by history. You can’t pick up a paper but you read some reference to a place or thing which you are going to see across the Atlantic, and which ordinarily you would skip as you do a patent-medicine advertisement. You go to reading the accounts of Emperor William’s plans as if you would soon meet William and talk them over with him. You read about the comings and goings of nobility and wonder if the pope knows you are likely to call on him some day in July, and whether the Swiss Guards will realize the honor of a visit from an American citizen by the name of Morgan or Jones. You read of European travel and sights, and, worst of all, you actually get to believe the things. In fact, you work yourself up to a fine point of enthusiasm and in your mind go cavorting around among ancient heroes and crowned heads. As a first guess I would say that probably the most successful part of a trip to the Old World is the one you take in advance.

As soon as I disclosed my European intentions, I began to get advice from friends and old travelers. This is a trying experience. Everybody has ideas as to what should be done, and no two will agree. One of the first questions to be settled is that of clothing. The importance of this is impressed upon the prospective tourist. In the first place I am told to take no baggage except the very simplest that can be carried in the hand. In the second place I am advised that when traveling in Europe, even more than in this country, one should be prepared for all kinds of climate and be ready with the proper clothes to meet every emergency. Every bit of information is absolutely as true as common law or the gospel, for the informant has either made the trip, or his wife’s cousin has, or he knows a man who knows another man who did,—and you are told what happened with all the harrowing details. Clothes do not make the man or the woman, but they help out a lot. So that our friends will realize the difficulties we may meet. I will admit that we are going to the “simple” extreme, taking only light baggage, very little more than a clean collar and a pleasant smile. If royalty wants to call upon us, royalty will not find us prepared with the clothes required by the books of etiquette, unless I can hire a dress suit or borrow one from the head waiter.

I have also discovered that it is going to be difficult to please everybody with our route. Nearly every person has something that just must be seen, and not to do so would make a trip to Europe a flat failure. Most of these important places are dug up by inspiration from the memory of some novel or play. There is the scientific man who urges German universities, the musically inclined who would make Wagnerian objects the great points, the historical student who prescribes battlefields, the sportive gent who urges Monte Carlo, the classical enthusiast who can think of nothing less than a thousand years old, the art-lover who has a list of seventy-seven different styles of Madonnas, the novel-reader who would wander over the country of Scott, the social oracle who would spend the time in London and “Paree,” the enthusiast in civics who is interested in government railroads, the initiative and referendum of Switzerland, and the man whose ideas of a trip abroad are condensed in the parting injunction, “Take one for me at Munich or Heidelberg.” It is shocking to see the disappointed look of the friendly adviser if you do not agree with him that his recommendation is the great thing in Europe. A friend of mine who is an archæologist said: “Of course you are going to Greece?” Now I had not thought of Greece, and ventured to say so. “What, not going to Greece!” was the withering answer in a tone which plainly meant that you were undoubtedly going to throw your opportunity away like an empty sack when the peanuts are gone. Another type of adviser is the man who says: “You must see the Coliseum,” when you know the man would not know the Coliseum if he were to meet it in the road. He has simply heard some one say something about the Coliseum, and takes that word in order to show off his superior knowledge of the sights of Europe. During the weeks of preparation we have made “itineraries” to suit the suggestions of our friends. It is easy to make an itinerary, and no trouble at all to change it the next day when a more profitable route is offered. On a rough estimate I should say that in the last few weeks we have made European itineraries enough to take about seventeen years’ time, and we are intending to be away only about three months. The fact is that while Europe is only a little continent, not near as big as the United States, it has been fought over, scrapped over, built over, written about and has been doing business for so many hundreds of years that there is hardly a pin-point on the map which for some good reason you do not want to visit. It is like taking a newspaper article about seven columns long and condensing it to a small paragraph. You feel you are cutting out all the really good places, and about the extent of your trip is to the points to which you have ordered your mail sent and where you have to go to change trains.

And then there is the friend who can’t go to Europe and who could hardly get to Newton if he had to pay for a round-trip ticket, who comfortingly says: “I wouldn’t go to Europe until I had seen all of my own country.” This remark has been made to me so often in the last few weeks that I have learned to dodge when I see it coming. I have traveled around some in the United States, and as a matter of fact the people in one section are pretty much the same as the people in another, and it is people that I like to see and not mountains or museums. Of course some parts are more so than others. There is no State like Kansas and no people like Kansans. The object of a trip to Europe is to see something different, as different as possible. It is to get the local “color” for the things you read about. It is to learn if the men and women of the Old World are as they are pictured in books, and to compare them with the people whom you associate with every day at home. I am told that in Paris even little children can talk French, and that in Germany the people stand it to have an emperor and never organize any boss-buster movements or bolt the party nominations. I have read about these things all my life, and they may be true. I want to see them. I am not from Missouri, but I have lived near enough to want to be shown.

We sailed from Hutchinson on the Santa Fe. After touching at a few places we reached Boston safely, and unless the police intervene we will embark this afternoon on the White Star steamship Arabic. It is still two hours until we go aboard but I am already seasick, or am imagining how it will feel, which is nearly as bad. I am not afraid of water. I have lived too long on the Arkansas and Cow creek and my boyhood was spent on the shores of the Cottonwood. But nevertheless and notwithstanding, I feel as I think everybody must when he takes his first long ocean voyage. I never noticed so many accounts of wrecks as I have in the last month. If there was an item in a newspaper about the wreck of some ocean steamer or the drowning of a passenger, and I did not see the piece, some friend always did, and brought it to me to comfort me. Statistics prove that it is as safe to travel across the ocean in a steamship as across Kansas in a railroad train. This is comforting, but statistics do not look big and substantial when you contemplate a week’s existence with nothing but a few boards and bolts between yourself and the place where McGinty went. One little man in a little old boat seems mighty small in the middle of a big ocean.