the time they could glance up from their bench at the clock on the tower
of the “municipal palace.” After this they parted on two successive days
with the dress-suit cases, then the hats, the clothes and shoes and
shirts and underclothes, one by one. The disposal of two of the razors
gave them for forty-eight hours almost a sense of opulence. Lansing did
not know there was a third razor and Hayward did not tell him of it.
Hayward was an innately neat person, and at the Y. M. C. A., to which he
belonged in New York, he had grown to look upon free soap and unending
hot and cold shower-baths in a light that was spiritual as well as
physical. He was good-looking and he knew it. The thought of becoming an
unshaven thing was abhorrent to him. Starvation, just then, he felt he
could face, but the prospect of a week’s beard revolted him. So he
twisted the razor into a piece of newspaper and secreted it in his
pocket. As long as he and Lansing were together he knew he would not be
able to shave; he could not confess to the possession of anything so
convertible into money without immediately converting it. But the
sensation of guilt was at first dispelled by an anticipatory thrill at
the thought of the day when he could once more look clean and fresh and
pink under his sunburn. He did not work it out in words, but the razor
was to him a tangible symbol of self-respect, and he clung to it,
although it would have bought them both the food they had begun to
need.
“We’ve got to beat it. We’ve got to beat it right away,” he said one
morning, when they awoke to the prospect of a foodless day. “They don’t
want us on the ships, but they’ll have to take us anyhow. We’ll sneak on
board and hide. After they get started they’ll have to keep us. They
can’t throw us overboard, and we’ll work. Gee, how I want to work!”
That day they ate nothing, but in the evening they marvelously succeeded
in smuggling themselves on a steamer bound for New Orleans, and in the
prospect of getting away they forgot that they were hungry. One of the
crew, with whom they struck up an acquaintance on the dock, seemed
impressed by the sincerity with which they swore they would pay him if
he would make it possible for them to return to where they could once
more work. He agreed to help them conditionally; that is, he would get
them on board and stow them away, if he could do it without too much
risk to himself. The attendant conditions had to be just right;
sometimes it was easy enough and sometimes it couldn’t be done at all.
In their case the right conditions were unexpectedly furnished in the
fraction of a second that it takes a cable to snap and drop a large
piece of locomotive from the main deck on a dozen barrels of apples in
the hold below. In the uproar that followed and continued for five or
six minutes, the only cool and competent person was the new friend of
Hayward and Lansing. He had been waiting for something of the kind to
happen, and he took instant advantage of it. While everyone else was
screaming Spanish oaths and peering into the hatchway at the ruins, he
hustled the two on board and hid them. An hour and a half later,
Hayward, dazed and suffocated, was dragged out by the feet and kicked
down the gang plank. Lansing did not reappear. From the dock, Hayward
watched the vessel become first a black speck and then a suggestion of
low-lying smoke in the dusk.
He was all at once horribly alone and lonely, but it did not occur to
him to feel resentful. Lansing’s luck had been good; his own had been
bad. That was all there was to it. He was glad someone had been lucky.
That night he went back to the lodging house and slept in the bed--it
was the last bed he ever slept in--and as he had no money, he in the
morning gave the _patron_ his razor.
Then began for him an existence, the absolute hopelessness of which
appalled and crushed him. At first a ship to New York had seemed to him
the only solution of his predicament; then the idea of a ship to
anywhere had become a vision of paradise; now he saw that ships were an
impossibility. As the season advanced the officers became more and more
vigilant. A shabby, unshaven young man could not go within speaking
distance of a ship. He made the rounds of the hotels and asked for
work--any kind of work--but there was none. He tried to get employment
as a laborer on the dock, but the foreman, who spoke English, laughed
and asked him why he wished to commit suicide.
“An American keeping one of us out of a job would be stabbed in an
hour,” he declared, and refused to hire him. He managed for a time to
keep alive, because one day he remembered that on the little finger of
his left hand he had a gold ring. For years it had been so much a part
of him that it had not occurred to him to sell it. The discovery of it
came as a kind of revelation and made it possible for him to eat,
sparingly, for two days. Then a brisk little American woman, in a white
duck suit, approached him in the Plaza and gave him twenty-five centavos
for delivering hand bills. She was a fortune teller--a “seeress,” and
had recently opened a “Studio of the Occult” in the Hotel Segurança,
across the way. She seemed like a kind, capable little creature and
once, when he had not eaten for two days, he went to the hotel and asked
for her; but as he was unshaven and dazed and rather vague, they assumed
him to be a drunken tramp and drove him away. Then he made the
acquaintance, in the Plaza, of an utterly unreal person of no particular
age, who dragged out of the hotel and in again every afternoon for half
an hour or so, with the aid of a cane. His face was bloated and
discolored, but his body was no more than a semi-upright arrangement of
bones. Hayward at first thought he was an invalid in the last stages,
then felt sure he was a drunkard, and, finally, it came to him that the
man was a slave to some drug. He would occasionally give Hayward the
twenty-five centavos on which he could exist for several days, and then,
after a long silence on a bench, petulantly demand: “What do you do with
all the money I give you? The day before yesterday I gave you three
hundred dollars. I’m afraid you’re extravagant.” In one of his more
lucid intervals, he suggested the American consul, and Hayward went to
the consulate.
“I don’t want to beg, I want to work,” he said when the consul wheeled
from a desk and impatiently eyed him.
“Oh, I hear that twenty times a day. Get out and don’t come back,”
exclaimed the consul wearily. He “got out” and he did not go back.
Something in the man’s dumpy, coarse, dirty-fingernailed personality
told him it would be useless. Then he tried to steal a ride on a
freight train bound for the City of Mexico, and was discovered and
thrown out at the second station, twelve miles away. It merely meant his
walking back to Vera Cruz in the blistering heat over the endless sand
dunes and past the fever-stricken marshes where the mosquitoes devoured
him. He spent as much as he dared of that night on a bench in the Plaza,
but for fear the policemen might begin to think he was sitting too long
in one place, he, from time to time, aroused himself and walked down to
the docks, or to the two railway stations at opposite ends of the town.
The humiliation of it was worse, somehow, than his hunger and his
fatigue. The next night, however, the need of sleep was overpowering,
and he lay down on the beach at the edge of the town. In spite of the
ants that swarmed up under his clothes and stung him from his neck to
his ankles, he slept the sleep of exhaustion. But to sleep on the beach
at Vera Cruz is against the law, and at three o’clock in the morning he
was arrested and thrown into a vile and crowded room under the tower,
whose clock of late had struck for him so many aimless, hopeless hours.
In the morning the judge dismissed him with the reminder (a negro from
Havana translated the ultimatum) that a second offense would mean thirty
days.
Then followed a horrible week--a last nightmare. He heard from a
trainman that there was work at the machine shops of Casa Blanca, forty
miles away, and, in the incredible heat, he walked there, and when he
found the rumor was untrue, he walked back again. On the way, he lived
on poisonous water and a yellow nut that looked like dates and grew on
scrubby palm trees by the roadside. He did not know how long it had
taken him to make the journey. When he once more reached the inevitable
Plaza, he was dizzy with hunger, and as he thought he was going to die,
he reeled over to where the world was dining under the arcade on the
sidewalk. There were fifteen or twenty tables, and after passing them
all he picked out one where five Americans, three men and two women,
had finished eating and were lolling back in their chairs, waiting for
their plates of half-consumed meat to be removed.
“I’m not a beggar,” he began hurriedly, taking off his hat. “I’m not
asking you for money, but I haven’t had anything to eat to-day. Please
let me have some of what you’ve left before the waiter takes it away.”
They might have given it to him, and then again they might not have. He
never knew. The waiter came back just then and authoritatively slapped
him away with a soiled napkin.
“What pretty hair he had,” one of the women reflected. “It grows back
from his forehead in a kind of proud way. Of course he’s a fake.”
“I didn’t notice his hair, but he had perfect teeth,” said the other.
“This country’s just full of tramps.”
Late that night, when a young man skeptically gave him a Mexican dollar
he wished to get rid of, as he was sailing for New York in the morning,
Hayward suddenly burst into tears and, with his head on the back of the
bench, sobbed for half an hour. He lived on the dollar for five days. In
the meantime, the drug fiend died, and the seeress departed for the City
of Mexico.
Hayward had never read “Les Misérables,” but on the sixth day after the
young man had given him the dollar, he remembered that on one of his
teeth was a gold crown, and, without success, he asked a dentist to pull
and buy it. He had nothing to eat that day, and at night the desire to
lie down and sleep instead of hypocritically walking about as if he were
going somewhere became irresistible. So he went again to the beach and
lay down among the ants, and in the morning a policeman scared away the
buzzards that had already begun to hop about him and crane their
hideously naked necks. The American consul, greatly bored (the heat was
frightful), officially glanced at him and then they dumped him into a
hole with an Indian who had been stabbed in a drunken row the night
before.
TRAVEL
A little old man came into the steamship office where I was buying a
ticket. He had mild, kindly eyes, pink cheeks, a vague, white beard and
a deferential, rather apologetic manner.
“Have you any new literature to-day?” he inquired of the clerk after
some hesitation.
“Sure,” the clerk answered genially, and picked him out a bundle of
those prettily and skilfully illustrated pamphlets describing almost
every known country on the globe. He also gave him plans of ships, price
lists of the various staterooms and dates of sailing.
“He must be something of a traveler,” I suggested when the old man,
after many thanks, left the office.
The clerk smiled.
“The old guy and his wife have been almost everywhere,” he answered;
“but I don’t think that either of them has ever been out of this town,”
he enigmatically added, “and they’re both about a hundred and fifty.”
“Yes?” I said encouragingly.
“He comes in regularly twice a year,” the clerk went on, “and gets all
the ‘literature,’ as he calls it, about the summer and winter tours.
Then he and his wife take the trips by what I call the Easy Chair Route.
They not only know all about the railway trains and ships and
stagecoaches, they study up the places, as they go along, out of books
they get from the public library. I bet they know a darned sight more
about Europe, Arope, Irope and Sirope than most of the people who’ve
been there.”
The clerk’s remarks called up for me a charming picture. The old couple
would decide on Egypt and the Holy Land for their winter cruise, and in
the long, cold, winter evenings, seated at a table near, not a fireplace
(I saw at a glance that their little parlor would not contain a
fireplace) but one of those high, shining and most comfortable stoves
with countless little isinglass windows and a soothing red glow behind
them, they would read aloud, consult maps and pictures and time-tables
and no doubt disagree very gently here and there as to the proper
interpretation of certain passages in the Scriptures. And until the hour
arrived for “locking up,” for refilling the stove, for seeing that the
cat was comfortable for the night and for going to bed, they would
actually be in Egypt or the Holy Land--much more so, as the clerk had
shrewdly appreciated, than many of the sojourners at Shepheard’s Hotel,
or the renters of steam dahabeahs on the Nile.
It undoubtedly is one way of traveling, and by no means a bad way. In
fact I once came across a little paper in the Contributor’s Club of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ declaring it to be the best way. But then I am
convinced that all the contributions to the Contributor’s Club of the
_Atlantic Monthly_ are contributed by very cultivated and cozy,
home-loving old maids. Books of travel and portfolios of well-taken
photographs are the rails upon which the easy chair glides, the unknown
sea upon which it so placidly sails. Everyone has made voyages of this
kind and, while many of them are uneventful, some of them are thrilling.
The most memorable one (not counting books of adventure which in this
connection don’t count at all) I ever took was long ago to the Island of
Barbados. We were in college at the time and one of the requirements of
the advanced English course we were studying was that everybody should
write a story in seven chapters--plot, locality and treatment being left
to our own discretion. The scene of my narrative (it makes me blush when
I recall that little masterpiece of fiction) was in and about Boston,
and one bitterly cold sleeting afternoon I asked a friend of mine what
he was going to write about. We were in his study at the time and, as he
was absorbed at his desk in working out an architectural problem, he
merely muttered, with his nose wrinkled up, “Barbados.”
“What are they?” I inquired.
“It isn’t they, it’s it,” he replied; “it’s an island.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I really don’t know,” he said.
“But how can you write about it if you don’t know anything about it?” I
pursued.
“Why, doesn’t the mere name convey everything to you?” he demanded.
“It conveys,” I told him, “some sort of vegetable. _Do_ help yourself to
some more of the barbados,” I added.
“To me it means--but let’s go over to the library and get a book about
it. I’ve meant to all along, just to see if my idea of it was right,” he
suggested. So we went to Gore Hall, where the man at the desk found us a
book, and that evening, in front of a grate full of hot, red coal, we
went to the Island of Barbados, drinking beer and eating crackers on the
way, and also during our residence on the exquisite little island where
“the sea assumes strange and unexpected tints; it may be violet, with
streaks of lettuce green or forget-me-not blue, or may show a stretch
of brilliant luster such as shines on a beetle’s back, or may shimmer
into a lake of lapis lazuli.” We stayed on the Island of Barbados until
half-past two in the morning. Just recently I returned there one evening
in a better book, and if anyone wishes this winter to take a cruise to
the West Indies without leaving home, I recommend him to take passage at
once on Sir Frederick Treve’s recently published “The Cradle of the
Deep,” one of the most entrancing and beautifully written books of
travel of my acquaintance.
As for actual traveling, the kind that necessitates physical as well as
mental activity, one great truth about it has at last dawned upon me. No
matter what may be your method of procedure, no matter whether your
means be modest or unlimited (here, I confess, I am drawing on my
imagination), it is always much more comfortable to stay at home. This
may sound like an undue emphasis upon an obvious fact, but judging from
the number of persons one everywhere meets who do not seem to have
grasped the fact, I don’t believe it is. All over the world, travelers
for pleasure continually complain of the hotels, the food, the trains,
boats, servants, prices, manners, customs and weather. Almost the entire
conversation of a group of fellow countrymen I once met on a steamer
consisted of enumerating the things they were going to eat when they
arrived in New York. Just recently a friend of mine, who had made a
short trip in Mexico, referred with bitterness to that rather primitive
country because a bath necessitated going out of his hotel to a bathing
establishment. Nothing he saw in Mexico apparently in any way
compensated him for this and various other minor discomforts. Without
doubt, “be it ever so humble,” there is no place like it, and I have
often wondered, this being the case, just why we usually do take a trip
whenever the opportunity offers itself. What is the psychology of the
desire to travel?
With me, at least, I think it arises from the same impulse that prompts
one to get up and take a walk after one has sat too long in the house.
The desire to travel is a kind of desire to stretch the mental legs.
There is no essential difference of intent between the little journey
“down town” and back, and a journey to Italy or India. During a
pleasant, objectless stroll on Main street my mind is in much the same
state, although perhaps in a lesser degree, that it is in when I,
With observation and extensive view,
Survey the world from China to Peru.
Sometimes the idea of one’s entire country becomes even as a long
occupied chair in a room, and it is then that, circumstances being
propitious, people pack up and flit to lands where everything is
different. Having voluntarily sought complete change, it always strikes
me as ungrateful and childish to quarrel with it when they get it. If
almost everything in a foreign land were not different, travel would
begin and end with locomotion, and locomotion is the least of travel.
What the most of it is, I have never been able quite to determine. No
doubt to each person, or rather to every group of persons who can be
classified under the same general head, it is something different. One
old gentlemen I knew went through Italy and Greece all but oblivious to
the scenery, the aspect of the cities, the costume, the various sounds
and the atmospheres that made one country Italian and the other Greek,
but he had a thrilling time. His delight was to read and translate every
inscription he came across on a monument. He could have found them all
in archaeological works at the public library at home, and done the same
thing. The intense pleasure, however, lay in doing it on the ground from
the original stones. I do not for a moment doubt that the thirty-six
young ladies, who recently won a newspaper “popularity contest” and
toured the continent with a steamer trunk full of assorted chewing gum,
enjoyed Italy quite as much as did my old friend. Some people I know
enjoy foreign travel almost solely because of the acquaintances they
pick up. Venice spells Smith, Sienna really means Jones; Chartres,
Amiens and Beauvais are a confused but pleasant memory of the Robinsons,
all of which is a perfectly legitimate manner of finding pleasure in
travel.
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.