The Emily Emmins Papers. Wells Carolyn
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that never were on sea or land.
That afternoon the Bold-Faced Jig approached me.
“It’s all over,” I said. “I’ve capitulated. I make no plans while I’m on this blessed ocean. It’s wicked to do anything at all but to do nothing.”
“And don’t you want my advice?” she asked, laughing still.
“I don’t care,” I answered. “You can voice your advice if you choose. I sha’n’t listen to it, much less follow it.”
Her girlish laughter rang out again. “That was my advice,” she said. “I was going to tell you not to plan any trip while you are at sea. Just enjoy the days as they come and go; don’t count them; don’t do anything at all but just be.
“I’m not through yet,” she went on. “Don’t write any letters or read any books. Don’t study human nature, and of all things don’t voluntarily make acquaintances. If they happen along, as I did, chat a bit if you choose, and when they pass on, forget them.”
And so I took advice after all. I made no plans, I made no abstruse diagnoses of human character, I made no acquaintances save such as casually happened of themselves. And the days passed in a sort of rose-colored haze, as indefinite as a foggy sunrise, and as satisfying as a painted nocturne of Whistler’s. And so, my first impressions of my first ocean crossing are indeed enviable.
III
“In England – Now!”
The trip from Liverpool to London I found to be a green glimpse of England in the shape of a biograph. But the word green, as we say it in our haste, is utterly inadequate to apply to the color of the English landscape. Though of varying shades, it is always green to the nth power; it is a saturated solution of green; it is a green that sinks into the eye with a sensation of indelibility. And as this green flew by me, I watched it from the window of a car most disappointingly like our own Pullmans.
I had hoped for the humorous absurdities of the compartmented English trains. I had almost expected to see sitting opposite me a gentleman dressed in white paper, and I involuntarily watched for a guard who should look at me through a telescope, and say “You’re travelling the wrong way.”
For my most definite impressions of English railway carriages had been gained from my “Alice,” and I was annoyed to find myself booked for a large arm-chair seat in a parlor car, with my luggage checked to its London destination on “the American plan”!
What, pray, was the use of coming abroad, if one was to have all the comforts of home?
As if to add to the unsatisfactoriness of my first impressions of English travel, I found myself sitting opposite a young American woman.
We faced each other across a small table, covered with what seemed to be green baize, but was more likely the reflection of the insistent landscape.
The lady was one of those hopeless, helpless, newly rich, that affect so strongly the standing of Americans in Europe.
She was blatantly pretty, and began to talk at once, apparently quite oblivious of the self-evident fact that I wanted to absorb in silence that flying green, to which her own nature was evidently quite impervious.
“Your first trip?” she said, though I never knew how she guessed it. “My! it must be quite an event in your life. Now it’s only an incident in mine.”
“You come often, then?” said I, not specially interested.
“Yes; that is, we shall come every summer now. You see, he made a lot of money in copper, – that’s my husband over there, the one with the plaid travelling-cap, – so we can travel as much as we like. We’ve planned a long trip for this year, and we’ve got to hustle, I can tell you. I’m awfully systematic. I’ve bought all the Baedekers, and this year I’m going to see everything that’s marked with a double star. You know those are the ‘sights which should on no account be omitted.’ Then next year we’ll do up the single stars, and after that we can take things more leisurely.”
“You’ve never been over before, then?” I observed.
“No,” she admitted, a little reluctantly; “I went to California last year. I think Americans ought to see their own country first.”
I couldn’t help wishing she had chosen this year for her California trip, but the accumulation of green vision had somehow magicked me into a mood of cooing amiability, and I good-naturedly assisted her to prattle on, by offering an encouraging word now and then.
“He’s so good to me,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “He says he welcomes the coming and speeds the parting dollar. Isn’t that cute? He’s an awfully witty man.”
She described the home he had just built for her in Chicago, and it seemed to be a sort of Liberal Arts Building set in the last scene of a comic opera.
For a moment, I left the green to itself, while I looked at my unrefractive countrywoman with an emotion evenly divided between pity and envy. For had she not reached the ultimate happiness, the apotheosis of content only possible to the wealthy Nitro-Bromide? And what was I that I should depreciate such soul-filling satisfaction? And why should my carping analysis dub it ignorance? Why, indeed!
After a few more green miles, an important-mannered guard, who proved to be also guide, philosopher, and friend, piloted me to a dining-car which might have been a part of the rolling-stock of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Nothing about it suggested the anticipated English discomfort, unless it might be the racks for the glasses, which, after all, relieved one of certain vague apprehensions.
But at dinner it was my good luck to sit in a quartet, the other three members of which were typical English people.
I suppose it is a sort of reflex nervous action that makes people who eat together chummy at once. The fact of doing the same thing at the same time creates an involuntary sympathy which expands with the effects of physical refreshment.
I patted myself on my mental shoulder as I looked at the three pleasant English faces, and I suddenly became aware that, though of a different color, they affected me with exactly the same sensation as the clean, green English scenery.
This, I conclude, was because English people are so essentially a part of their landscape, a statement true of no Americans save the aboriginal Indian tribes.
My table-mates were a perfect specimen of the British matron, her husband, and her daughter. I should describe them as well-bred, but that term seems to imply an effect of acquisition by means of outside influences. They were, rather, well-born, in a sense that implies congenital good-breeding.
Their name was Travers, and we slid into conversation as easily as a launching ship slides down into the water. Naturally I asked them to tell me of London, explaining that it was my first visit there, and I wished to know how to manage it.
“What London do you want to use?” asked Mr. Travers, interestedly. “You know there are many Londons for the entertainment of visitors. We can give you the Baedeker London, or Dickens’s London, or Stevenson’s London, or Bernard Shaw’s London, or Whistler’s London – ”
“Or our own W. D. Howells’s London,” I finished, as he paused in his catalogue.
“I think,” I went on, “the London I want is a composite affair, and I shall compile it as I go along. You know Browning says ‘The world is made for each of us,’ and so I think there’s a London made for each of us, and we have only to pick it out from among the myriad others.”
“That’s quite true,” said Mrs. Travers. “You’ll be using, do you see, many bits of those Londons mentioned, but combining them in such a way as to make an individual London all your own.”
The prospect delighted me, and I mentally resolved to build up such a London as never was on land or sea.
“But,” I observed, “aside from an individually theorized London, there must be a practical side that is an inevitable accompaniment. There must be facts as well as opinions. I should be most glad of any