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?
This is a question for which I can think of no sensible, logical or
respectable answer. Another, to me, absolutely astounding sin of the
modern parent is the fashion in which it lets its little girls and boys
go to the theater, usually to matinées, regardless of what sort of thing
is being performed. The Saturday matinée, apparently, has become an
institution, and the child of fourteen or fifteen who is not permitted
to buy a box of caramels and sit in the parquet considers himself (much
more often herself) a martyr. About six months ago I went to an
afternoon performance of “The Merry Widow,” simply because the whole
world seemed to be talking about it and I had an erroneous idea that I
ought for this reason to hear it. The music I had become sick and tired
of; the book I found, by the end of the first act, to be hopelessly
dull. I had paid two hard-earned dollars for my seat and I stayed to the
end, to the scene at Maxim’s, which, as done in this country, is one of
the most altogether nasty things I have ever sat through in a theater. I
happen to have been at Maxim’s, on various occasions at every hour from
seven in the evening until eight the next morning, but I have never seen
there anything so common, so indecent, so beastly as the sort of debauch
that took place on the stage of our local theaters. Maxim’s, as everyone
knows, is a fashionable brothel, now owned by an English and American
stock company. It pays dividends. But never have I discovered there
anything that remotely resembled the sort of performance I saw in the
Maxim act of our greatly applauded Savage’s “Merry Widow.” I mention it
at all, only because sitting next to me was a girl of fourteen whom I
have known ever since she was born. When the indecency was at its
height, when the orgy had reached a climax, she turned to me and said
with a sweet enthusiasm, “It’s awfully good, isn’t it!” Of course she
had not the remotest idea of what the affair signified, but why should
she have been there in the first place? Why should an American girl of
fourteen be introduced to the representation of a Parisian restaurant
(to put it most conservatively) represented with infinitely more
coarseness than is ever found in the original? She was there because
her friends, her “set,” were there. Mamma, abandoning much of her
original intelligence, let her go because Muriel Smith and Gladys Jones
and Dorothy Robinson always went to the matinée when they wanted to, and
their mothers were all women of considerable social importance.
Positively I am aghast when I pause to think of the almost accidental
fashion in which so many American children are brought up. Their parents
love them and adore them, they do for them everything in the world
except what seems to me to be the right thing. Instead of endeavoring to
lash them to the good old mast, they have such a way of letting them
drift with the contemporary tide! Few things in life are to me at once
so engaging, so pathetic and so repellent as a street-car load of boys
and girls who have just come from the high school; the girls with their
pompadours and their rats, their Latin grammars, their giggling and
their ogling; the boys, nice boys, but with such grotesque trousers,
flashy shoes and absurd hats. Why doesn’t some one in authority give
them less objectionable ideas on the subject of dress, of conduct, of,
in short, life? They are really the most dreadful, trashy, tiresome
little creatures. It is a constant marvel to me that so many of them, in
a few years, without parental or outside aid, abandon their revolting
ways and become perfectly good men and women. I admit with gladness that
we do seem somehow to muddle through.
Wouldn’t it, however, be better if children were brought up as my
suppositious infants are brought up? Or would it in the long run make
any particular difference? In the first place, the mother of my children
doesn’t spend entire days at country clubs or the houses of friends
playing bridge whist. She stays at home a good deal and plays with the
children instead, because she likes to and because they like to have
her. Few sights are more depressing, give one a more nauseating
sensation, cause one to form a lower estimate of humanity, than a
roomful of overdressed American mothers hectically playing bridge; and
it is a sight one may see almost every day in the year from one end of
the country to the other.
In the second place, why should children be allowed to stuff their
little insides with candy merely because they seem to like it? A
southern cousin of mine used to pick out the best pieces in a box of
candy and eat them himself, remarking, “We shall leave the hair-oil and
lip-salve varieties for the children, as all children are natural
scavengers.” This may be true, but I should protest vehemently against
their being allowed to scavenge. That children should be permitted to
ruin their digestions, that they should ever be given any form of food
that isn’t good for them, strikes me as a parental crime. Parents have
the entire matter in their hands; they are, or ought to be, the supreme
court, the law. Why not decide for the best instead of for the slipshod
half way, or the worst?
Thirdly, I endeavor to give the little creatures for whom I am
imaginatively responsible, in addition to robust health, which, after
all, one is often inclined to consider the main, the only thing,
certain intellectual resources that, even should their health fail later
on, they can fall back upon with much enjoyment; resources that later on
it is difficult to acquire for oneself. I like them to have an
acquaintance with the best books and the greatest pictures, to know just
why they are good and great even if they have not actually seen them. I
also endeavor to give them a practical knowledge of at least two
languages not their own. Every child in our high schools makes a futile
stab at French or German. How few make of them a precious possession! As
one grows older there is almost no pleasure greater than the ability to
read with ease a book in a foreign language; to realize that, while the
medium is different, the humanity underlying it is the same. An
understanding of foreign languages, more than anything else, helps on
the universal brotherhood of man.
Fourthly, I never allow my children to go to the theater because Sissy
Jones is allowed to go. Now and then something locally happens that
strikes me as amusing, or instructive or, happily, both. We then all go
and have a grand time. But why should they be allowed to form the habit
of going to everything that comes along? At the dinner to which I have
referred, an Irish woman told me she had never been inside of a theater
until after her marriage, and she is one of the most charming, highly
educated, cultivated women of my acquaintance.
But no doubt my jewels will after all, in spite of me, be the same
source of mixed pleasure and responsibility that most jewelry is.
WHAT IS EDUCATION?