Part 34

It was, therefore, a terrible shock when a letter, forwarded from place to place, overtook us in Northern Syria, informing us that my dear little “sister-daughter,” as she loved to call herself, had died on the night of November 3, 1893—the very night through which the “gruesome” dream had pursued me from midnight until dawn. Christine wrote in reply:

“When we read your letter of that date, Belle’s eyes met mine in silent, awesome questioning. Merely a coincidence? Perhaps, but strange!”

I can add no other comment.

My second eventful incident hinges upon a short severe illness that prostrated me, the third day after we landed in Beirut from the steamer we had taken at Port Saïd. I had already made acquaintance with President Bliss and some of the professors in the American College, crowning one of the heights of the beautiful town, and I sent at once for Doctor Schauffler, whom I had known slightly in Springfield, Massachusetts.

On the fourth day of my illness I asked him, plaintively:

“Do you know there is not a woman-servant in this hotel? The person who ‘does’ my room has a long white beard and wears a skull-cap. Bert calls the photograph he has made of the nondescript: ‘_Le femme de chambre!_’ It is very funny—and rather dreadful!”

“The beloved physician” eyed me in thoughtful compassion.

“We are so used to that sort of thing here that we rarely think of it as out of the way. No decent woman would take a position in a house where she must work with men. She would lose caste and reputation, forthwith. Hence, ‘_le femme de chambre_.’ I can see that it must be intensely disagreeable to you.”

There the matter dropped. I was still in bed when, at four o’clock that afternoon, he paid his second visit. He wasted no time in apology or solicitation. His carriage was at the door, packed with cushions. I must be taken out of bed, rolled up in rugs and shawls, carried down-stairs by my son and my dragoman, deposited in the carriage and driven up to his house.

“Where there are women-servants,” he added, laughingly, “and where a cordial American welcome awaits you. Doctor and Mrs. Webster, of Haifa, are visiting us, and you will be well looked after. And Mrs. Bliss is coming over to drink afternoon tea with you. So, we have no time to lose.”

That was the beginning of ten days of such luxurious rest and continuous petting as I had never expected to find out of my native land and my own home. I rallied fast under the new conditions of invalidism. In two days, I left my bed and lay, for most of the forenoon and all the latter part of the day, upon a luxurious lounge in the square central hall, from which doors led on all sides to the other parts of the house. The ceilings were twenty feet above me; the casements opened down to the tiled floors; palms, and other tall plants rounded the corners of the hall, and vases of cut flowers filled the cooled air with fragrance. As I lay, I could see trees laden with oranges and tangerines in the gardens below; hedges of cactus and geraniums, the latter in the fulness of scarlet bloom, intersecting the grounds of the college and the neighboring dwellings. The colony of President and professors was one united family, and they took me—sick, and a stranger—into the heart of the household. I recall, with pride, that not a day passed that did not bring me a call from Doctor Bliss, the genial and honored head of the noble institution, while Mrs. Bliss’s neighborly attentions were maternally tender. I had not been at the hotel in the lower town for an hour before she appeared, laden with flowers and an offering of “American apples, such as one cannot buy in the East.” The next day, and for every day following, before Doctor Schauffler carried me off with benevolent violence, she sent to me home-made bread, having heard (as was true) that the hotel bread was generally sour.

I looked forward with especial pleasure to the afternoon-tea hour. The gathering about my lounge would have graced any _salon_ where wits do congregate. The silver-haired President never failed to put in an appearance; Doctor Post, the distinguished senior of the medical professors, and his charming daughter, afterward my cicerone in the visits I paid to Syrian women in their own homes; Doctor and Mrs. Eddy, whose daughter was just then surprising the social world of Constantinople by taking her degree in medicine, and with honor; the Jessup brothers and their families, known to all readers of church and charitable literature by their achievements in the mission-field; Doctor and Mrs. Porter, in whose house we had celebrated Thanksgiving Day the evening succeeding our arrival in Beirut, singing, at the close of the joyous festivities, “My country, ’tis of thee,” with all the might of our lungs, and with hearts aglow with patriotism distance and expatriation could not abate—these, with a group of younger professors, tutors, and winsome girls, were the ministering genii that buoyed me speedily back to robust health.

They gave me a concert, a night or two before our parting. The light in the great hall was a pleasant _chiaro-oscuro_, the music-room opening out of it being brilliantly illuminated for the performers upon piano, violin, violoncello, guitar, and flute. From my sofa I had a full view of them all, and through one long window a moon, but four days old, looked at us through the orange-trees.

Is it strange that the chapter in my _Home of the Bible_, headed “_My Friends the Missionaries_,” was penned with grateful memories too tender for speech?

We had in Jerusalem another true, hearty, and affectionate home-welcome. Dr. Selah Merrill, the well-known archæologist and Oriental scholar, had then been United States Consul at Jerusalem for nine years. The change of administration in Washington had put in his place Rev. Edwin Wallace, and we found both consuls still in residence upon our arrival. It was a happy combination for us. The consuls and their wives were settled in the one good hotel in the city—the “Grand New”—to which our incomparable dragoman, David Jamal, conducted us. We fraternized at sight. Doctor Merrill and his successor were upon most amicable terms, the senior and late incumbent doing all in his power to lessen the labors of the novice. The fatherly kindness of one, and the gentle deference of the junior, were beautiful to behold. We two travellers shared the advantages enjoyed by Mr. Wallace in his first visits to memorable places in the new home, of which he has written eloquently in his book—_Jerusalem the Holy_. I shall always esteem as one of the rarest bits of good-fortune which befell us in our wanderings in storied lands, that Doctor Merrill was emphatically our “guide, philosopher, and friend,” during our stay in Southern Syria. He, it was, who made out our itinerary when he could not conduct us personally, as he did in our expeditions in and about Jerusalem.

I reckon the four, who made the City of the Great King home to us, among the friends to whom my obligations are not to be described in words. And what royally “good times” we had together! Had it been in the power of Mrs. Merrill and Mrs. Wallace to spare me every possible inconvenience of tent-life and Eastern transit, I should have been lapped in luxury throughout our tour of village and desert.

Of these I have written elsewhere, and at length.

XLVII

LUCERNE—GOOD SAMARITANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN—A LECTURE TOUR—OHIOAN HOSPITALITY—MR. AND MRS. McKINLEY

OUR homeward journey was performed in a delicious, leisurely fashion. We had worked hard for three months, collecting material for our prospective books. Once and again, when we would fain have had heart and imagination free to take in, at their full value, associations connected with, and emotions excited by, this or that sacred spot—did we remind ourselves of the plaint of the poet, who could never give himself up to the enjoyment of nature, because he saw, stamped upon sea and sky, mountain and river, in huge capitals—“MATERIAL.” Neither of us meant to write up Egypt, Rome, Florence, Switzerland, and the British Isles. With very much the joyous sense of relief with which children scamper home, when school is out, we roamed and lingered to our hearts’ content for the ten weeks that were left of our vacation. We fell in with congenial travelling companions in Egypt, joining parties for the run through Greece and Lower Italy. In Florence, we were reunited to friends with whom we had crossed the ocean, and did not part from them until, in Lucerne, they were summoned to Paris, while we planned a stay of some days in romantic regions endeared to us by former experiences, when the “Boy” of _Loitering in Pleasant Paths_ was too young to appreciate the grandeur of mountain passes, snow-capped heights, azure lakes, and historic cantons.

Anticipation received a cruel blow in the beautiful lakeside city in which we had passed the heart of a memorable summer, fifteen years before. My son was stricken down with appendicitis in Lucerne, and I knew not a human creature beside himself in all Switzerland! By rare good-fortune, I recalled the name of a physician with whom my husband had become acquainted in our former stay here, and sent for him at once. He had retired from the active duties of his profession, resigning his practice to his son, who was, I learned, at the head of the hospital in Lucerne.

To my infinite relief, he informed me that there would be no need of an operation unless more serious symptoms should intervene. I subjoin the addenda to the verdict for the benefit of those whom it may concern:

“You Americans are too fond of the knife! It is not always necessary to cut out an inflamed appendix. In my hospital we have had four hundred cases of appendicitis within the last ten years, and have operated just forty times! The patients recovered without the use of the knife.”

If I had ever leaned, never so slightly, to misanthropic judgment of my fellow-mortals, I must have been shamed out of them by the incidents of the next fortnight of cruel anxiety, and what would have been unutterable loneliness but for the exceeding and abounding charity of the strangers by whom I was surrounded.

“It is my opinion,” pronounced the patient, when, on Easter morning, his chamber was fragrant with flowers and brightened by cards and messages of cheer and sympathy—“my decided and well-grounded conviction—that this Canton is peopled by the posterity of the Good Samaritan. Even the innkeeper has taken a hand in the mission to the traveller on the Jericho Road!”

The last remark was drawn out by the opening of a great box of violets, richly purple, and so freshly gathered that the odor floated into the air, like clouds of incense, with the lifting of the cover.

And, as a sudden thought struck him: “Have the blasted Britishers spoken yet?”

“No! Their conversation is confined to their own party.”

I had brought the like report every day for a week. “The blasted Britishers,” for whom he had no milder name, were a young man, his wife, and sister, who were at the end of my table and my nearest neighbors. The hotel was very full. A fair sprinkling of Americans, a few English, and a mixture of French, Swiss, Germans, and Italians made up a crowd that changed daily in some of its features. From the proprietor down to the porter, there was not an employé or official connected with the house who did not inquire, whenever I showed myself in hall or _salle à manger_, “how the young gentleman was getting on?” and express the hope of his early recovery. The entire working-staff of the Hotel de Cygne was at our feet, and the guests in the house were assiduous in offers of assistance and assurances of sympathy. Strangers inquired across the table as to the patient’s condition, and if there were any way in which they could be of service. The “B. B.’s”—as the object of this kindly solicitude contemptuously abbreviated the appellation—held aloof, apparently ignorant of my existence, much less of the cause of inquiry and response. They chatted together pleasantly, in subdued, refined tones betokening the gentle-folk they were, but, for all the sign they gave of consciousness of the existence of the afflicted Americans, they might have been—to quote again from the indignant youth above-stairs—“priest and Levite, rolled into one mass of incarnate selfishness.”

So matters went on until next to the last day we spent in Lucerne. My patient was on his feet in his room, and had been down-stairs twice to drive for an hour, and test his strength for the journey to Paris, which he was impatient to begin. I had heard that there was a sleeping-car—a “_wagon-au-lit_,” as the Swiss put it—upon one train each day. This I wished to take, if possible, and to break the journey by stopping overnight at least once, in the transit of fifteen hours that separated us from the French capital. It so chanced that the talk of the “B. B.’s” at luncheon that day turned upon this train, and, forgetful, for the moment, of their discourteous reserve, I addressed the man of the party with—“Pardon me! but can you tell me at what hour that train leaves Lucerne, and when it reaches Basle?”

“With great pleasure!” turning an eager face upon me. “But may I ask, first, how your son is to-day? We have inquired constantly of the proprietor, and of the doctor, when we could see him, how he was getting on. We were delighted to hear that he is improving, etc., etc., etcetera”—while I was getting my breath, and rallying my fluttered wits. With this preamble, he proceeded to tell me all he knew of trains that were likely to be of service, volunteering to make direct inquiries at the station that afternoon, and begging to know in what way he could forward my purpose.

When I could escape, I carried a bewildered face and soul up to the convalescent.

Then it was that I made the remark I quoted in a former chapter, apropos of New England “incommunicableness”:

“The ice is broken, and there is warm water under it!”

We had not finished discussing the idiosyncrasies of Old and New England when, half an hour later, there came a gentle tap at the door. I opened it, and nearly swooned with an access of amazement when I saw the young Englishman.

He had a paper in his hand, and began without preface:

“I have made so bold as to look up the trains, don’t you know? And—oh, I say”—breaking off as he espied the figure on the lounge through the half-opened door—“mayn’t I come in and see him? We are both young men, you know!”

He was at the sofa by this time, and shaking hands with the occupant. “Awfully glad to see you are doing so well! Oh, by Jove!” interrupting himself anew, with the frank boyishness that had marked his entrance. “I believe you are taller than I!”

He surveyed the recumbent figure with undisguised admiration.

“Six feet, two-and-a-half, gymnasium measure!” rejoined the other, laughing.

It was impossible to resist the cordial _bonhommie_ of the self-invited guest.

“And I six, three!” complacently. “But a fellow looks longer when he is on his back. May I sit down?” drawing up a chair for me, and one for himself. “And would it tire you to talk a bit about routes and so on? Do you think you are really fit for the jaunt?”

The “bit” of talk lasted an hour, and the invalid brightened with every minute. The “Britisher” was an army man, at home on leave, after ten years in India. He had travelled far and used all his senses while _en route_. He was eloquent in praise of India, and so diligently was the time improved by both the young men that, in leaving, the elder exacted a promise that, when the other should visit India, he would apply to him—the “B. B.”—for letters of introduction to “some fellows” who might be of use to him. He gave us his card, lest he might not see us again. It bore the name of a fashionable London hotel, at which he “hoped to see” his new acquaintance, since he was going to London within the month. He did see us again, calling on the morrow to ask if there were anything he could do to facilitate our departure. He brought, also, the compliments and good wishes of his wife and sister for our safe journey. The schedule of travel he had arranged for us was so carefully drawn up that a fool could not err therein.

We never saw or heard from him again. It was not convenient for Bert to call during the brief stay we made in London, on the very eve of sailing for home. And we have never yet been to India. The “B. B.” seemed not to be able to conceive the possibility that any one who could get to that end of the earth could refrain from going.

I have seen enough of the English since to comprehend that this was not a phenomenal illustration of native reserve, that waits for the initiative from the other party to the meeting, and, like the traveller in the fable of the contest between the wind and sun, throws away the cloak of strangerhood as soon as the first step is taken by another. I have heard other anecdotes descriptive of a characteristic which belies the depth and warmth of the underlying heart, but none that bring it more prominently into view. It is strange—and interesting—to us of a more emotional race, to see the sudden leap of the unsealed fountain.

During the summer and autumn succeeding our return to America, I utilized much of the “material” collected in the East in a series of lectures delivered in seven different States. For two summers preceding my tour abroad, I had, in conjunction with Mrs. Margaret E. Sangster, conducted what we called “Women’s Councils”, in various Summer Schools modelled upon the famous Chautauquan Assemblies. I had hardly settled in the peaceful home-nest when applications from similar organizations began to arrive. Upon former expeditions, my husband, and sometimes our son, and Mrs. Sangster’s nephew, Bert’s classmate and chum, had accompanied us, and when the “Council” adjourned, we made up a jolly party to Mackinac Island (in which beautiful spot I laid the scene of _With the Best Intentions_), to Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, and divers other summer resorts. Mrs. Sangster had no share in my present lecture engagements, and neither my husband nor son could spare the time to accompany me. In the comparatively secluded and carefully sheltered life of to-day, I marvel at the courage that enabled me to journey for thousands of miles, unattended, and to face audiences that numbered from one to two thousand women, with never a misgiving as to my reception, and perfect security from annoyance. Wherever I went, doors and hearts were opened to me. But once, in a series that comprised twenty towns and villages, was I ever allowed to stay at a hotel, and that was for a single night. The friends made then are cherished to this hour.

Time would fail me and the patience of the reader be exhausted, were I to attempt even a catalogue of the localities in which I talked, as woman to woman, of what I had seen and heard in those seven months of wandering and study. If I had never loved women before, and held in especial and tender regard those of my own country, I must have learned the sweet lesson in the unescorted itineraries from Syracuse, N.Y., to Chicago; from Vermont to Michigan; from Richmond, Va., to Cincinnati. And in all the thousands of miles, and in the intercourse with tens of thousands of people whose faces I had never seen before, I had, in the three lecture seasons in which I took part, not one unkind word—received nothing but kindness, and that continually. Hospitality and brotherly (and sisterly) love have had new and deeper meaning to me, ever since. I permit myself the recital of two “happenings” in Ohio, that have historic interest in consideration of subsequent events.

After fulfilling a delightful engagement at Monona Lake—near Madison, Wisconsin—I set out for Lakeview, Ohio, where I was to hold a Women’s Council for the next week, beginning Monday. This was Saturday noon, and I was to travel all night. Dr. T. De Witt Talmage, whom I had seen at Monona Lake, had told me of a branch road connecting the station, at which I was to leave the main line, early Sunday morning, with Lakeview. I would reach that place, he said, by seven o’clock, and have a quiet Sunday to myself. This was preferable to passing it in Chicago or any other large town. In the Madison station I was so fortunate as to meet Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie and Dr. Francis Maurice Egan, at that time Professor of English Literature in the Georgetown (R. C.) University, and, subsequently, United States Minister to Denmark. Both of these distinguished men had been lecturing at Monona Lake Assembly. The rest of the day passed swiftly and brightly. Mr. Mabie left us in Chicago, where we were detained until midnight, on account of some delay in incoming trains. Doctor Egan, whose spirits never flagged, proposed a walk through the illuminated streets, and a supper together, which “lark” we enjoyed with the zest of two school-children. Then we returned to the waiting train, and bade each other “Good-bye.”

The journey had begun so auspiciously that I alighted from the sleeper in the early dawn, feeling, what the sporting Englishman would call “uncommonly fit,” and with no prevision of what lay before me.

For not a symptom of the promised branch line was to be seen, as far as eye could reach. There were two houses at the terminus of my railway journey. One was the usual station and freight-house; the other, a neat cottage a stone’s-throw away, was, I found, the dwelling of the station-agent. He was the one and only human thing in sight. Beyond lay woods and cultivated fields.

The man was very civil, but positive in the declaration that the branch line connecting with the Assembly grounds was ten miles further on; also, that no trains ran over it on Sunday. As at Monona Lake, admission was denied to the public on that day. Otherwise, the ground would be overrun by the rabble of curious sight-seers. There was no hotel within five miles, and no conveyance to take me to it, or to Lakeview.

The predicament was serious, yet it provoked me to mirth. Doctor Talmage’s directions to alight at this particular point (as he “had done not a week ago”); my cheerful confidence that the day would be as yesterday, if not more abundant in enjoyment; the immediate prospect of starvation and discomfort, since all the accommodations I could command were that one room of the country station—made up a picture at which any woman must laugh—or cry. The station-master looked relieved that I did not weep, or whine. When I laughed, he smiled sympathetically:

“If you will sit here for a few minutes,” leading the way into the room behind us, “I’ll step over and talk to my wife.”

From that moment I had no apprehension of further misadventures.

If I had indulged a fleeting misgiving, it would have been dissipated by the sight of the woman to whom I was introduced when I had accepted the invitation to “step over” to the neat cottage a few rods down the road.