Part 4

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.

FELLOW PASSENGERS

The great German steamship companies have developed, one might almost say created, a new type of American. This dawned on me last winter while taking a three months’ cruise to South America and back. The type is that of the retired business man who is enjoying his retirement. There was a time, not so long ago in our history, when he scarcely existed, for the simple reason that he never, or at least rarely, retired. Idleness spelled boredom. If in a misguided moment mother and the girls persuaded him to give up business he found himself confronted by an appalling amount of leisure rather impossible for him to manipulate and make use of.

The Germans in their wonderful way have changed all that. Now when a middle-aged man has made enough money to live on comfortably they offer him something very definite and delightful to do. He can at any season of the year embark on a “floating hotel” and go to some far-away and interesting part of the world with little or no bother to himself. Just this I notice is what in large numbers he has of late years begun to take advantage of. He and a placid, pleasant wife visit the Mediterranean ports during the winter, investigate the Scandinavian countries, including the North Cape, during the summer, encircle the globe during the greater part of a year, and finally decide to go to South America. Everything is made so easy for him. He lives on the ship during the entire voyage except, perhaps, for a day or so here and there when, for a change, the party stays on shore at a hotel. The necessity of constantly ordering food or struggling with cabmen, waiters and shopkeepers in a foreign language he feels himself too old to learn is agreeably eliminated for him. He comes home with new interests, a widened horizon, refreshed in mind and body and usually ready to start out again the next year.

There were many of them on the first South American cruise of last winter, and to me the type was a novel one. For one usually, in a vague sort of a way, thinks of middle-aged Americans traveling in strange countries for the first time as somewhat helpless, often bored, often irritated, uncertain as to where to go and looking forward with relief to the date of sailing homeward. Those I met last winter were anything but that. In a quiet, restful sort of a way they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Their attitude toward it all was one of persons who had placed themselves in the hands of what literally was their creator.

It was interesting for the first few days to stretch out on a chair in the sun and, with complete detachment, examine one’s fellow passengers as they passed by. One always hears that “a ship is such a good place in which to study human nature.” Of course it is. Every place is if one has the eyes and ears with which to see and hear it. But I do not believe a ship is particularly so any more. The day for that has passed. People at the present time travel too much to desire to become deeply intimate on short acquaintance. They are too reserved, too experienced. Lifelong friendships, I am inclined to believe, are not often made any more on ocean steamers.

There were one hundred and eighty-one persons in the party, and as they strolled about the deck I discovered myself lazily picking out those I should like, those I “shouldn’t mind,” those that, through their sheer lack of personality, I should never even see again, and those I should run from. In only a few instances did I make mistakes. One was a bouncing girl with a voice like a symphony of peacocks; she turned out to be agreeable and clever in spite of it. Another was a German who looked like an overfed dachshund and sat opposite me at table; another was an old gentleman who slopped around in carpet slippers (yes, carpet slippers really do still exist). Another was--but why enumerate? Finding out who they all were was the next step.

There was the famous physician; the very grand old dame who held herself much aloof because, before her marriage, she had been one of the Orioles of Baltimore; the lady who cleared about two hundred thousand dollars a year from the sales of a patent fly-paper--or was it a patent flea-powder? I forget--an invention of her late uncle’s; the young man who was being sent on the trip because he drank (he certainly did drink; he was drunk for sixteen thousand sea-miles); the “mysterious pair” who concealed their secret to the end; the woman who had written a book; the melancholy man whose wife had just eloped in New York with the chauffeur; and then the numerous nice, quiet, well-mannered persons who, like happy nations, seemed to have no histories in particular.

By the time we had reached the Island of St. Thomas they had all begun to find themselves as well as one another. It was evident that, unconsciously, little groups were forming; that certain people would ask to be put in the same carriage with certain others; and I think a native drink called a “rum swizzle,” of which almost everybody, “just to see what it was like,” partook during the day, did not in any way retard the growing acquaintanceships. By the time we arrived at Bahia, our first stopping-place in Brazil, the little groups had more or less assumed their final form. It was a beautiful example of birds of a feather doing just what we have always been told they do. The young girls came together, one could clearly see, chiefly because they all seemed to be engaged in the manufacture of silk neckties; four or five middle-aged ladies found the knitting of fluffy white shawls a convenient and congenial ice-pick; similarity of business interests, past or present, was of course instrumental among many of the men. Books, and there was on board an inexhaustible supply of them, were a tremendous factor in the cementing of friendly relations. By merely glancing at a book some one seemed to be enjoying you usually could tell whether or not you could have anything in common. Anybody perusing one of your favorite volumes offered an excuse for stopping and chatting. The insatiable players of bridge were, from the first, so many magnets and poles.

Not among the least important of the passengers were Elizabeth and Peter, the ship’s cats. Peter, to the sorrow of the officers who adored him, apparently found friends on the dock at Buenos Aires and disembarked, but Elizabeth, for family reasons, remained with us. She distinguished herself in various ways and on various occasions, three of them being really notable. One night at about two in the morning (always a somewhat Hibernian method of expression) she entered in the dark the deck stateroom of an excitable man of fifty. A steward sent to find her also entered and, in his search, crawled half way under the bed. The excitable man of fifty hearing, or perhaps feeling, some one under his bed and fearing thieves, leaped to the floor, dragged the steward out and heroically struggled with him. As the steward spoke no English and the man no German, this duel in the dark continued until the strangulated cries of the former and the appeals for help of the latter brought pretty much every one on that deck to the scene and made it possible to throw some light, electric light, on it. In the meanwhile Elizabeth had strolled away to the cabin of a lady from Argentina, where she proceeded to have five kittens. Then at Pernambuco fifty-six of the passengers rushed ashore and returned, each with a large green parrot. Of course most of them got loose in a few days but were allowed to go pigeon-toeing all over the deck until it was discovered that Elizabeth had quietly chewed the heads off three.

In addition to the parrots and hundreds of other tropical birds, the monkeys, the marmosets and the leopards that the passengers in afterwards to be regretted moments of enthusiasm acquired, the super-alimentated German indulged himself to the extent of a boa constrictor. The first time he went down to feed it, the playful little creature wound itself about his waist in several coils and was beginning to constrict in the most successful fashion, when the man’s shrieks brought four sailors to the rescue. It took the strength of all of them to untie the knot, so to speak, and had the reptile been able to find anything around which to twist its tail there would have been for the rest of the voyage a vacant seat opposite me at table. Oh, yes, we had some very agreeable fellow passengers.

It was the parrots, I think, that first caused dissension among them. To get loose was to get mixed, and it was a wise owner who knew his own bird, although, unfortunately for the ship’s peace, many thought they did. There were claims and counterclaims.

“My parrot had a tail,” exclaimed one woman with angry, flashing eyes to another.

“This beastly thing has just bitten my thumb,” declared a second; “my own bird never bites. They have made a mistake and I shall complain about it to the company.” Still another aggrieved one, who had views different from those of the committee chosen to draw up certain resolutions, let it be known that if they did not end by regarding the matter from her point of view she would write to the company saying that the ship was dirty and that the officers had been drinking heavily from beginning to end, which was not only absolutely false but had no relation to the matter in question. It was all very absurd but it also meant that, toward the end of three months on one ship, nerves will be nerves. There were a good many “coolnesses” toward the last, and in the smoking room some angry and bitter words, but on the whole, when we, our parrots and our other “unknown birds of brilliant plumage,” filed down the gang plank at Hoboken we were a tolerably good-natured crowd.

Will any of the little groups ever meet again? I often wonder. It seems like something that happened a century ago in a tropical dream.

PARENTS AND CHILDREN

When I was considerably younger than I am now, I wrote a story in which appeared the following two sentences: “It always seemed to Haydock that men and women, in becoming parents, somehow or other managed to forfeit a great deal of intelligence. He intended some day to ask a psychologist with children, if it was a provision or a perversion of nature.” I wish I had sufficient space in which to reproduce some of the many peevish, sarcastic letters and acrimonious reviews that these two short sentences called forth. For some reason they seemed to hurt feelings and arouse ire (I don’t quite know what “ire” means, but it has always seemed to me to be a most attractive little word; so short, and yet so bristling with importance) from the Atlantic to the Pacific. People wrote to me in the most curiously unrestrained fashion. One man declared I had deliberately insulted my mother and my father. For some time I was considerably appalled. I began to think that perhaps I had said something juvenile, thoughtless and silly, but since then a good many years have passed, a reaction long since set in and I find that now, even if I am not prepared exactly to stand by my original guns, my position in the matter is at least that of an agnostic. Parents may not necessarily forfeit any part of their intelligence, but, on the other hand, so many of them seem to, that one pauses now and then to speculate on whether, from the evidence, one could not with a little effort deduce a law of nature.

Not having children of my own, I of course indulge in much imaginative bringing up, from the earliest years to the time when they “come out” and become engaged, get married and go to live in Alaska, or Brazil, or Chicago. Naturally, my children are much better brought up than are those of people who actually possess them. I admit that in a spectacular sense they don’t strike me as having made a very much greater success of their lives, so far, than have their acquaintances who cannot claim the advantage of having me for a parent. They are not particularly rich, although the boys seem to be able to make a respectable and steady living. Only one of the little tribe has as yet an automobile, and she married it, or rather them, as her husband happens to belong to the kind of American family that collects new kinds of motors very much as some persons collect new kinds of picture postal cards. As she is fond of her husband, I don’t in the least mind confessing that I am glad he has a lot of money. For, self-reliant and independent as I hope to be to the last, her affluence gives me the comfortable feeling that, no matter what happens, I shall never be a charge on the county or a bother to the good Little Sisters of the Poor. Of course they are all crazy about me, because they realize that everything I did was for the best and that I brought them up so remarkably well.

But seriously, to go back to my original contention, why is it that many persons who seemed to be endowed with normal intelligence irrevocably mislay it when they begin to beget offspring? They do. I assert, declare and insist that they do. A few evenings ago I went to a dinner, and at about the time the coffee appeared the conversation turned upon this very topic. One of the men said, with emphasis, that he had certain ideas about the bringing up of children. He thought they were good ideas, but his wife almost always opposed them for what, in his opinion, was the most foolish of reasons. He went on shaking a finger at her half in earnest, half in jest. “She often lets the children do things of which I disapprove, because other parents are everywhere letting their children do these things,” he said. “Now that to me is no reason at all. I don’t care what other parents are allowing their children to do. I know what I want my children to do, and not to do.” The wife smiled sweetly and admiringly, and I knew that, when it came to a crisis, she would always have her own, possibly misguided, way. She would let her young daughter engage in the various activities her little set happened for the moment to be engaged in, and he, to save discussion, would in the end acquiesce. To me there was here a considerable forfeiture of intelligence on the part of both. The man sacrificed principle to peace, the woman allowed herself to be swayed by perhaps idiotic, if not worse, conventions and fashions for which she secretly did not care. I immediately began to wonder what, under the circumstances, I should do myself. This consideration over a good cigar, while all around me the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy was being threshed out and Dr. Cook was sadly and with genuine regret disposed of, took me far away from the dinner table. I began to think of my own bringing up, of the bringing up of various local families who in the press are usually referred to as “prominent.” And the result of the revery seemed to be that although there was no particular scheme of education, no very definite ideas on the subject, children in the end seemed to grow up and, as the English say, “muddle through” somehow. But, I found myself inquiring, couldn’t there be some way less casual, less haphazard, less at the mercy of the trivial and the contemporaneous? Being a bachelor and knowing nothing whatever about it, I of course feel that there could. To a great extent, the parents I know seem to be lacking in standards; they apparently, from day to day, trust to luck. I am convinced that, if I were blessed with progeny, I should evolve a more definite manual to go by; that my children wouldn’t be allowed merely to muddle through as best they could.

In the first place, I should be extremely cautious about their reading. Nothing, after all, is so influential as the printed word. The mere fact that it is printed seems to carry with it a kind of unjustified authority. Why should little boys and little girls have access to our daily papers, full from end to end of horrible crimes, tales of dishonesty in high places and advertisements that cause the mind to reel at their hypocrisy and rottenness? Why should they be permitted, when they wish to read, to take from the Public Library the latest best seller because Sissy Jones has just read it and says it is “great”? I should never allow a child of mine to read the daily papers, and I should never allow it to read the thousand and one maudlin children’s books that are printed every year at Christmas time. There is no reason whatever why, at an early age, children should not be supplied with good literature just as they are fed nourishing food. And yet, how comparatively few parents think of this in time! They buy for their children trivial, prettily illustrated, altogether unimportant little volumes because they come across them on a counter and because other parents are buying the same things. I shouldn’t any more supply a child of mine with this sort of mental slop than I should feed it adulterated milk. Why deliberately give children a taste for the second-rate and third-rate when the first-rate is at hand and they are at an age when they eagerly seize upon anything offered them?