_Narratives of Travel_
For more than six hundred years, Marco Polo has been a name to
conjure with, but if you will turn to a biographical dictionary you
will find only the dates of his birth and death, and the words, “A
Venetian traveler in China.” It is true that travel has grown both
easier and commoner since his day, but the human delight in the
open road, or, lacking that, in another’s account of it, has not
disappeared.
Accounts of travel fall broadly into two classes. The first are
those records of explorations undertaken for the sake of scientific
information. Such accounts are under obligation to be absolutely
accurate in minor as well as in major matters, and are to be
respected first and enjoyed afterward, if, by a rare chance, the
scientist is an artist as well as a geographer.
The second class consists of those accounts of travel which are
read for pleasure and for general information rather than for exact
data, which interest us in the traveler as much as in his travels,
and which are distinctly literary because of the personal comments,
reactions, and reflections of the author. This does not mean that
such books are not accurate within the limits of their purpose, but,
rather, that accuracy alone is not sufficient to qualify a book
for a place on this list. The account must be true to the country
described, but need not haggle over details in the experience of the
writer. To alter geographical facts or details of climate would
make the author ridiculous, but to open with the most picturesque
approach to the spot whether or not that is the way in which he
actually entered it for the first time is to serve the reader as he
has a right to demand. To trail a frowsy party of tourists through
many pages because they dogged the author’s footsteps is unkind, but
to introduce a purely imaginary companion whose comments and store
of information add pleasure is perfectly in keeping with the task in
hand.
It seems almost unnecessary to say that the first requirement for
writing successful travel sketches is to be a good traveler. An
honest pleasure and a swinging readiness in meeting the chances of
the road must somehow become apparent in the writing, not, indeed,
by protestations of delight, but rather through the tone of zestful
appreciation of new flavors in living. A pessimist or a misanthrope
may be endured among the comforts of home, but no one chooses him
as a traveling companion either in the flesh or on paper. The
distinguished foreigner whose record of his experiences with American
trains is a tirade against the inconvenience of shaving on a Pullman
exemplifies the lack of that urbanity, the presence of which so
delights us in Mr. Street’s account of his adjustment to Japanese
customs and conveniences. It is not necessary, of course, that all
discomforts be denied or suppressed for the sake of a Polly-Anna-ish
happiness--such experiences are a part of almost all travel, but they
must be treated with that good grace with which all of us wish to
endure the pin pricks of existence both at home and abroad.
To write well of one’s travels, however, requires more than
mere personal enjoyment, which so often ends in half articulate
ejaculations of pleasure; it requires a gift for seizing upon the
essential characteristics of any place, and a power of comparison and
contrast that will enable one to convey his observations to another.
Some people lack this ability; “They are,” says William McFee, “with
agreeable reservations, very much like those seafarers who sail all
over the world and tarry in magic harbors and beneath the glittering
cupolas of marvelous cities and come home and say there is nothing
in the world to see. They possess admirably incondite minds set upon
trade and concessions and the women whose photographs adorn their
dressing tables.” Once as a child on the treeless, drought burned
prairies, I begged a neighbor to tell me of her girlhood on the rocky
fjords of Norway under the midnight sun, and she answered, “Oh, it
was just about like here.” A good traveler appreciates the innate
character of a place as a good biographer does that of a person, and
strives by every means within his power to set it forth, and so give
to his reader a refreshing sense of a sojourn among new scenes and
new faces.
“It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,
An’ turn another--likely not so good
But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.”
The following suggestions may be helpful:
1. Choose a place which is of interest to you for one definite
characteristic: natural beauty, historical associations,
picturesque squalor, or what you will. Make this point of central
interest in your narrative, but do not neglect other possible
additions. Observe that Mr. Morley’s “Up the Wissahickon” gives
many other items of interest besides the picture of autumn beauty.
2. Limit your narrative to a period brief enough to be readily
presented within the limits of your space. Though you may have
known a place all your life, an account of a single visit may be a
wise selection. A supposed traveler’s story of a day in your home
town or city may reveal unexpected possibilities.
3. Write of pleasant experiences or in a kindly mood. Do not
chronicle the trip you wish you had never taken.
F. del P.
THE DEPARTURE
JULIAN STREET
My last days in Japan were my best days, for I spent them in a
Japanese home, standing amid its own lovely gardens in Mita, a
residential district some twenty minutes by motor from the central
part of Tokyo.
Through the open shoji of my bedroom I could look out in the mornings
to where, beyond the velvet lawns, the flowers and the treetops, the
inverted fan of Fuji’s cone was often to be seen floating white and
spectral in the sky, seventy miles away.
After my bath in a majestic family tub I would breakfast in my room,
wearing a kimono, recently acquired, and feeling very Japanese.
While I was dressing, Yuki sometimes entered, but I had by this
time become accustomed to her matutinal invasions and no longer
found them embarrassing. She was so entirely practical, so useful.
She knew where everything was. She would go to a curious little
cupboard, which was built into the wall and had sliding doors of
lacquer and silk, and get me a shirt, or would retrieve from their
place of concealment a missing pair of trousers, and bring them to me
neatly folded in one of those flat, shallow baskets which, with the
Japanese, seem to take the place of bureau drawers.
Thus, besides being my daughter’s duenna and my wife’s maid, she was
in effect, my valet. Nor did her usefulness by any means end there.
She was our interpreter, dragoman, purchasing-agent; she was our
steward, major domo, seneschal; nay, she was our Prime Minister.
The house had a large staff, and all the servants made us feel
that they were _our_ servants, and that they were glad to have us
there. With the exception of a butler, an English-speaking Japanese
temporarily added to the establishment on our account, all wore
the native dress; and there were among them two men so fine of
feature, so dignified of bearing, so elegant in their silks, that
we took them, at first, for members of the family. One of them
was a white-bearded old gentleman who would have made a desirable
grandfather for anybody. If he had duties other than to decorate the
hall with his presence I never discovered what they were. The other,
a young man, was clerk of the household, and enjoyed the distinction
of being Saki’s husband.
Saki was the housekeeper, young and pretty. She and her husband
lived in a cottage near by, and their home was extensively equipped
with musical instruments, Saki being proficient on the samisen
and koto, and also on an American melodeon which was one of her
chief treasures. She was all smiles and sweetness--a most obliging
person. Indeed it was she who pretended to be asleep in a Japanese
bed, in order that I might make the photograph which is one of the
illustrations in this book.
Four or five coolies, excellent fellows, wearing blue cotton coats
with the insignia of our host’s family upon the backs of them,
worked about the house and grounds; and several little maids were
continually trotting through the corridors, with that pigeon-toed
shuffle in which one comes, when one is used to it, actually to see a
curious prettiness.
Sometimes we felt that the servants were showing us too much
consideration. We dined out a great deal and were often late in
getting home (“Home” was the term we found ourselves using there),
yet however advanced the hour, the chauffeur would sound his horn
on entering the gate, whereupon lights would flash on beneath the
porte-cochère, the shoji at the entrance of the house would slide
open, and three or four domestics would come out, dragging a wide
strip of red velvet carpet, over which we would walk magnificently up
the two steps leading to the hall. But though I urged them to omit
this regal detail, because two or three men had to sit up to handle
the heavy carpet, and also because the production of it made me feel
like a bogus prince, I could never induce them to do so. Always,
regardless of the hour, a little group of servants appeared at the
door when we came home.
Even on the night when, under the ministrations of the all-wise and
all-powerful head porter of the Imperial Hotel, our trunks were
spirited away, to be taken to Yokohama and placed aboard the _Tenyo
Maru_, even then we found it difficult to realize that our last night
in Japan had come.
The realization did not strike me with full force until I went to bed.
I was not sleepy. I lay there, thinking. And the background of my
thoughts was woven out of sounds wafted through the open shoji on the
summer wind: the nocturnal sounds of the Tokyo streets.
I recalled how, on my first night in Tokyo, I had listened to these
sounds and wondered what they signified.
Now they explained themselves to me, as to a Japanese.
A distant jingling, like that of sleigh-bells, informed me that a
newsboy was running with late papers. A plaintive musical phrase
suggestive of Debussy, bursting out suddenly and stopping with
startling abruptness, told me that the Chinese macaroni man was
abroad with his lantern-trimmed cart and his little brass horn. At
last I heard a xylophone-like note, resembling somewhat the sound of
a New York policeman’s club tapping the sidewalk. It was repeated
several times; then there would come a silence; then the sound again,
a little nearer. It was the night watchman on his rounds, guarding
the neighbourhood not against thieves, but against fire, “the Flower
of Tokyo.” In my mind’s eye I could see him hurrying along, knocking
his two sticks together now and then, to spread the news that all was
well.
Then it was that I reflected: “Tomorrow night I shall not hear these
sounds. In their place I shall hear the creaking of the ship, the
roar of the wind, the hiss of the sea. Possibly I shall never again
hear the music of the Tokyo streets.”
My heart was sad as I went to sleep.
Fortunately for our peace of mind, we had learned through the
experience of American friends, visitors in another Japanese home,
how _not_ to tip these well-bred domestics--or rather, how not to
try to tip them. On leaving the house in which they had been guests,
these friends had offered money to the servants, only to have it
politely but positively refused.
Yuki cleared the matter up for us.
“They should put _noshi_ with money,” she explained in response to
our questions. “That make it all right to take. It mean a present.”
Without having previously known noshi by name, we knew immediately
what she meant, for we had received during our stay in Japan enough
presents to fill a large trunk, and each had been accompanied by a
little piece of coloured paper folded in a certain way, signifying a
gift.
In the old days these coloured papers always contained small pieces
of dried _awabi_--abelone--but with the years the dried awabi began
to be omitted, and the little folded papers by themselves came to be
considered adequate.
Fortified with this knowledge I went, on the day before our
departure, to the Ginza, where I bought envelopes on which the noshi
design was printed. Money placed in these envelopes was graciously
accepted by all the servants. Tips they would not have received.
But these were not tips. They were gifts from friend to friend, at
parting.
The code of Japanese courtesy is very exact and very exacting in the
matter of farewells to the departing guest. Callers are invariably
escorted to the door by the host, such members of his family as have
been present, and a servant or two, all of whom stand in the portal
bowing as the visitor drives away.
A house-guest is despatched with even greater ceremony. The entire
personnel of the establishment will gather at the door to speed him
on his way with profound bows and cries of “Sayonara!” Members of the
family, often the entire family, accompany him to the station, where
appear other friends who have carefully inquired in advance as to
the time of departure. The traveller is escorted to his car, and his
friends remain upon the platform until the train leaves, when the
bowing and “Sayonaras” are repeated.
Tokyo people often go to Yokohama with friends who are sailing from
Japan, accompanying them to the ship, and remaining on the dock until
the vessel moves into the bay. How Tokyo men-of-affairs can manage to
go upon these time-consuming seeing-off parties is one of the great
mysteries of Mysterious Japan, for such an excursion takes up the
greater part of a day.
To the American, accustomed in his friendships to take so much for
granted, a Japanese farewell affords a new sensation, and one which
can hardly fail to touch the heart.
Departing passengers are given coils of paper ribbon confetti, to
throw to their friends ashore, so that each may hold an end until
the wall of steel parts from the wall of stone, and the paper strand
strains and breaks. There is something poignant and poetic in that
breaking, symbolizing the vastness of the world, the littleness of
men and ships, the fragility of human contacts.
The last face I recognized, back there across the water, in Japan,
was Yuki’s. She was standing on the dock with the end of a broken
paper ribbon in her hand. The other end trailed down into the water.
She was weeping bitterly.
Wishing to be sure that my wife and daughter had not failed to
discover her in the crowd, I turned to them. But I did not have to
point her out. Their faces told me that they saw her. They too were
weeping.
So it is with women. They weep. As for a man, he merely waves his
hat. I waved mine.
“Sayonara!”
I turned away. There were things I had to see to in my cabin.
Besides, the wind on deck was freshening. It hurt my eyes.
Julian Street, _Mysterious Japan_. Doubleday,
Page & Company, Publishers. By the kind
permission of the author.
UP THE WISSAHICKON
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
The Soothsayer is a fanatical lover of Fairmount Park. His chief
delight is to send his car spinning along the Lincoln Drive about the
time the sun drops toward setting; to halt at a certain hostelry (if
the afternoon be chilly) for what Charles Lamb so winningly describes
as “hot water and its better adjuncts”; and then, his stormy soul for
the moment at armistice with life, to roll in a gentle simmer down
gracious byways while the Park gathers her mantle of dusk about her.
Sometimes he halts his curricle in some favorite nook, climbs back
into the broad, well-cushioned tonneau seat and lies there smoking a
cigarette and watching the lights along the river. The Park is his
favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets
in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at
his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon
Drive is but a few miles away. Wise Soothsayer! He should have been
one of the hermits who came from Germany with Kelpius in 1694 and
lived bleakly on the hillsides of that fairest of streams, waiting
the millennium they expected in 1700.
The Soothsayer had long been urging me to come and help him worship
the Wissahickon Drive, and when luck and the happy moment conspired,
I found myself carried swiftly past the Washington Monument at the
Park entrance and along the margin of the twinkling Schuylkill.
At the first there was nothing of the hermit in the Soothsayer’s
conversation. He was bitterly condemning the handicraft of a certain
garage mechanic who had done something to his “clutch.” He included
this fallacious artisan in the class of those he deems most degraded:
The People Who Don’t Give a Damn. For intellectual convenience, the
Soothsayer tersely ascribes all ills that befall him to Bolshevism.
If the waitress is tardy in delivering his cheese omelet, she is
a bolshevixen. If a motortruck driver skims his polished fender,
he is a bolshevik. In other words, those who Don’t Give a Damn are
bolsheviks.
The Soothsayer lamented that I had not been in the Park with him two
weeks ago, when the autumn foliage was a blaze of glowing color. But
to my eye the tints (it was the first of November) were unsurpassably
lovely. It was a keen afternoon, the air was sharp, the sky flushing
with rose and massed with great banks of cloud the bluish hue of
tobacco smoke. When we neared the corner of Peter’s Island the sun
slid from under a cloudy screen and transfused the thin bronze-yellow
of the trees with a pale glow which sparkled as the few remaining
leaves fluttered in the wind. Most of the leafage had fallen and was
being burnt in bonfires at the side of the road, where the gusts
tossed and flattened the waving flames. But the trees were still
sufficiently clothed to show a rich tapestry of russet and orange and
brown, sharpened here and there by wisps and shreds of yellow. And
where the boughs were wholly stripped (the silver-gray beeches, for
instance) their delicate twigs were clearly traced against the sky. I
think one hears too much of the beauty of October’s gold and scarlet
and not enough of the sober, wistful richness of November buffs and
duns and browns.
The Wissahickon Drive is the last refuge of the foot and the hoof,
for motors are not allowed to follow the trail up the ravine, which
still remains a haunt of ancient peace--much more so, indeed, than in
former years, when there must have been many and many a smart turnout
spanking up the valley for supper at the Lotus Inn. Over the ruins of
this hostelry the Soothsayer becomes sadly eloquent, recalling how in
his salad days he used to drive out from town in a chartered hansom
and sit placidly on a honeysuckled balcony over chicken and waffles
served with the proper flourish by a colored servitor named Pompey.
But we must take things as we see them, and though my conductor
rebuked me for thinking the scene so lovely--I should have been there
not only two weeks ago to see the autumn colors, but ten years ago to
see Pompey and the Lotus Inn--still, I was marvelously content with
the dusky beauty of the glades. The cool air was rich with the damp,
sweet smell of decaying leaves. A tiny murmur of motion rose from the
green-brown pools of the creek, ruffled here and there with a milky
bubble of foam below some boulder. In the feathery tops of evergreen
trees, blackly outlined against the clear arch of fading blue, some
birds were cheeping a lively squabble. We stopped to listen. It was
plainly an argument, of the kind in which each side accuses the other
of partisanship. “Bolshevism!” said the Soothsayer.
It is wonderfully still in the Wissahickon ravine in a pale November
twilight. Overhead the sky darkened; the sherry-brown trees began
to shed something of their rich tint. The soft earth of the roadway
was grateful underfoot to those too accustomed to pavement walking.
Along the drive came the romantic thud of hoofs; a party of girls
on horseback perhaps returning from tea at Valley Green. What a
wonderful sound is the quick drumming of horses’ hoofs! To me it
always suggests highwaymen and Robert Louis Stevenson. We smoked our
pipes leaning over the wooden fence and looking down at the green
shimmer of the Wissahickon, seeing how the pallor of sandy bottom
shone up through the clear water.
And then, just as one is about to sentimentalize upon the beauty of
nature and how it shames the crass work of man, one comes to what is
perhaps the liveliest thing along the Wissahickon--the Walnut Lane
Bridge. Leaping high in air from the very domes of the trees, curving
in a sheer smooth superb span that catches the last western light on
its concrete flanks, it flashes across the darkened valley as nobly
as an old Roman viaduct of southern France. It is a thrilling thing,
and I scrambled up the bank to note down the names of the artists who
planned it. The tablet is dated 1906, and bears the names of George
S. Webster, chief engineer; Henry H. Quimby, assistant engineer;
Reilly & Riddle, contractors. Many poets have written verses both
good and bad about the Wissahickon, but Messers. Reilly & Riddle have
spanned it with a poem that will long endure.
We walked back to the Soothsayer’s bolshevized car, which waited
at the turning of the drive where a Revolutionary scuffle took
place between American troops and a detachment of redcoats under a
commander of the fine old British name of Knyphausen. As we whirred
down to the Lincoln Drive and I commented on the lavender haze that
overhung the steep slopes of the glen, the Soothsayer said: “Ah, but
you should have seen it two weeks ago. The trees were like a cashmere
shawl!”
I shall have to wait fifty weeks before I can see the Wissahickon in
a way that will content the fastidious Soothsayer.
Christopher Morley, _Travels in Philadelphia_. By
permission of the author and David McKay Company.
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I. OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS--FATHER APOLLINARIS
Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new
order. The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across
the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool
hanging out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the
donkey, and, as I began to see, it would insure stability, blow high,
blow low. But it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For
although I had purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was
able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and
scatter my effects along the line of march.
My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of
Vivarais and Gévaudan. The Hills of Gévaudan on the right were a
little more naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the
left, and the former had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that
grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the
shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered
here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated
fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in
Gévaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being
made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready-built
in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The
desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the
sonnet into _patois_: “Mountains and vales and floods, heard Ye that
whistle?”
At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and
follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais,
the modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my
strange destination, the Trappist monastery of our Lady of the Snows.
The sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld
suddenly a fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as
blue as sapphire, closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon
ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the
underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made them at
the first. There was not a sign of man’s hand in all the prospect;
and indeed not a trace of his passage, save where generation after
generation had walked in twisted foot-paths, in and out among the
beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes. The mists, which
had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and fled swiftly
and shone brightly in the sun. I drew a long breath. It was grateful
to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for the
human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest
upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of
my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the
length of twopence every day of my life.
But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate
and inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked
the neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile
beyond, the outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with
every step, a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young
plantation directed the traveller to our Lady of the Snows. Here,
then, I struck leftward, and pursued my way, driving my secular
donkey before me, and creaking in my secular boots and gaiters,
towards the asylum of silence.
I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of
a bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me
at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected
terror than the monastery of our Lady of the Snows. This it is to
have had a Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner,
fear took hold on me from head to foot--slavish superstitious fear;
and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like
a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into
the country of the dead. For there upon the narrow new-made road,
between the stripling pines, was a mediæval friar, fighting with a
barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my childhood I used to study the
_Hermits_ of Marco Sadeler--enchanting prints, full of wood and field
and mediæval landscapes, as large as a county, for the imagination to
go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough, was one of Marco Sadeler’s
heroes. He was robed in white like any spectre, and the hood falling
back, in the instancy of his contention with the barrow, disclosed
a pate as bald and yellow as a skull. He might have been buried any
time these thousand years, and all the lively parts of him resolved
into earth and broken up with the farmer’s barrow.
I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address
a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing
near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence.
He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the
monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?
“No,” I said, “a Scotsman.”
A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me
all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest,
as a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned
with disgust that I could not be received at our Lady of the Snows;
I might get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk
ran on, and it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary
man, who drew landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed
his manner of thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect
persons even in a Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to
ask for the Father Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second
thoughts he determined to go down with me himself; he thought he
could manage for me better. Might he say that I was a geographer?
No; I thought in the interests of truth, he positively might not.
“Very well, then” (with disappointment), “an author.”
It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all
priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed
of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked
me eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had
continued ever since to pray night and morning.
“I thought he was very near the truth,” he said; “and he will reach
it yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.”
He must be a stiff ungodly Protestant who can take anything but
pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the
subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he
found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great
goodwill.
The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had
made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a
corner, and showed us some white buildings a little further on beyond
the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We
were hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my
companion’s name) stopped me.
“I must not speak to you down there,” he said.
“Ask for the Brother Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me
as you go out again through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am
charmed to have made your acquaintance.”
And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying
out twice, “I must not speak, I must not speak!” he ran away in front
of me, and disappeared into the monastery-door.
I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my
terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be
alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast
as Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries,
would permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which
she had not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place
in form, though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father
Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and
spoke with me awhile. I think my sack was the great attraction; it
had already beguiled the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged
me on my life to show it to the Father Prior. But whether it was my
address, or the sack, or the idea speedily published among that part
of the brotherhood who attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar
after all, I found no difficulty as to my reception. Modestine was
led away by a layman to the stables, and I and my pack were received
into our Lady of the Snows.
II. THE MONKS
Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of
thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur
to stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he
listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted
air, like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly when I remember
that I descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have
been by that time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had
so much as broken bread, I can well understand that he would find an
earthly savour in my conversation. But his manner, though superior,
was exquisitely gracious; and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to
Father Michael’s past.
The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery
garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths
and beds of party-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black
statue of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it
four-square, bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and
with no other features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables.
Brothers in white, brothers in brown, passed silently along the
sanded alleys; and when I first came out, three hooded monks were
kneeling on the terrace at their prayers. A naked hill commands the
monastery upon one side, and the wood commands it on the other. It
lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off and on from October to May,
and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if they stood in Eden,
with a climate like heaven’s, the buildings themselves would offer
the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my part, on this wild
September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt chilly in and
out.
When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty
conversable Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have
the liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the
building which is set apart for _MM. les retraitants_. It was clean
and whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix,
a bust of the late Pope, the _Imitation_ in French, a book of
religious meditations, and the _Life of Elizabeth Seton_, evangelist,
it would appear, of North America and of New England in particular.
As far as my experience goes, there is a fair field for some more
evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I
should like to give him a reading of this little work in heaven,
where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already, and
much more, and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and
gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm. Over the table,
to conclude the inventory of the room, hung a set of regulations for
_MM. les retraitants_: what services they should attend, when they
were to tell their beads or meditate, and when they were to rise and
go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: “_Le temps libre est
employé à l’examen de conscience, à la confession, à faire de bonnes
résolutions_,” etc. To make good resolutions, indeed! You might talk
as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.
I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned.
An English boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I
professed my willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young
little Irishman of fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict
canonicals, and wearing on his head what, in default of knowledge,
I can only call the ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years
in retreat at a convent of nuns in Belgium, and now five at our Lady
of the Snows; he never saw an English newspaper; he spoke French
imperfectly, and had he spoken it like a native, there was not much
chance of conversation where he dwelt. With this, he was a man
eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-minded like a child.
If I was pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he was no less
delighted to see an English face and hear an English tongue.
He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries,
Hebrew bibles, and the Waverley novels. Thence he led me to the
cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the
brothers’ gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his
religious name upon a board,--names full of legendary suavity and
interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the
library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand,
and the _Odes et Ballades_, if you please, and even Molière, to
say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of local
and general historians. Thence my good Irishman took me round the
workshops, where brothers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take
photographs; where one superintends a collection of curiosities, and
another a gallery of rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk
has an occupation of his own choice, apart from his religious duties
and the general labours of the house. Each must sing in the choir, if
he has a voice and ear, and join in the haymaking if he has a hand to
stir; but in his private hours, although he must be occupied, he may
be occupied on what he likes. Thus I was told that one brother was
engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris busies himself in
making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding books. It is
not so long since this Abbot was consecrated, by the way; and on that
occasion, by a special grace, his mother was permitted to enter the
chapel and witness the ceremony of consecration. A proud day for her
to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes you glad to think they let her
in.
In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren
fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage
than if we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a
permission to ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement
of the hands, almost like that of a dog’s paws in swimming, or
refused by the usual negative signs, and in either case with lowered
eyelids and a certain air of contrition, as of a man who was steering
very close to evil.
The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two
meals a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which
begins somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during
which they eat but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two
in the afternoon, twelve hours after they have begun the toil and
vigil of the day. Their meals are scanty, but even of these they eat
sparingly; and though each is allowed a small carafe of wine, many
refrain from this indulgence. Without doubt, the most of mankind
grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve not only for support, but
as a hearty and natural diversion from the labour of life. Although
excess may be hurtful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen
defective. And I am astonished, as I look back, at the freshness of
face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld. A happier nor
a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever seen.
As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and with the incessant
occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and death
no infrequent visitor, at our Lady of the Snows. This, at least, was
what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live healthily in
the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour;
and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy
of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general impression
of vivacity and strength.
Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I
can only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a
note, in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended
at the curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper
to monks to speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man
the hospitallers were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my
experience of the monastery, it was easier to begin than to break
off a conversation. With the exception of Father Michael, who was a
man of the world, they showed themselves full of kind and healthy
interest in all sorts of subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my
sleeping-sack--and not without a certain pleasure in the sound of
their own voices.
As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how
they bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from
any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only
in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had
some experience of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a
bacchanalian, character; and seen more than one association easily
formed, and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule,
perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of
women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be formed among
defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; the
dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an
interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional
male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing
accent. And next after this, the tongue is the great divider.
I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious
rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order
appeals to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper
goes upon the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by
quarter, till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day
divided among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for
example, hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room,
or the refectory, all day long; every hour he has an office to sing,
a duty to perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight,
when he returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon
his feet and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know
many persons, worth several thousands in the year, who are not so
fortunate in the disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would
not the note of the monastery-bell, dividing the day into manageable
portions, bring peace of mind and healthful activity of body? We
speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and
permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner.
From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk’s
existence. A long novitiate, and every proof of constancy of mind
and strength of body is required before admission to the order; but
I could not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer’s
studio, which figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye
was attracted by the portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a
private of foot. This was one of the novices, who came of the age
for service, and marched and drilled and mounted guard for the proper
time among the garrison of Algiers. Here was a man who had surely
seen both sides of life before deciding; yet as soon as he was set
free from services he returned to finish his novitiate.
This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the
Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death
as he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and
when the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have
carried him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among
continual chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage,
from the slated belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood
that another soul has gone to God.
At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place
in the gallery to hear compline and _Salve Regina_, with which the
Cistercians bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those
circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry
in the public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the
romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall
the whitewashed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights
alternately occluded and revealed, the strong manly singing, the
silence that ensued, the sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and
then the clear trenchant beating of the bell, breaking in to show
that the last office was over and the hour of sleep had come; and
when I remember, I am not surprised that I made my escape into the
court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered
in the windy starry night.
But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth
Seton’s memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind
among the pines--for my room was on that side of the monastery which
adjoins the woods--disposed me readily to slumber. I was wakened
at black midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the
morning, by the first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were
then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour,
were already beginning the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead
of life--there was a chill reflection. And the words of a French song
came back into my memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:
“Que t’as de belles filles,
Giroflé!
Girofla!
Que t’as de belles filles,
_L’Amour les comptera_:”
And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free
to love.
Robert Louis Stevenson, _Travels with a Donkey_.
By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the
authorized publishers.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVES OF TRAVEL
The editors have found these additional selections very useful in
teaching the writing of travel narratives and sketches:
Brooks, Charles S. _I Ungum the Scholar’s Whiskers_, from _A Thread
of English Road_. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Gerould, Katharine Fullerton. _Our Northwestern States_, in
_Harper’s Magazine_, March 1925; _Reno_, in _Harper’s Magazine_,
June 1925.
Hall, James Norman. _An Autumn Sojourn in Iceland_, in _Harper’s
Magazine_, January 1924; _The Narrative of a Journey_, in _Harper’s
Magazine_, December 1923.
Morley, Christopher. _Travels in Philadelphia_. David McKay Company.
Pratt, Alice D. _The Round-Up_, from _The Homesteader’s Portfolio_.
The Macmillan Company.