That they do, I have begun to believe, is simply because of what they bring to their travels. They bring (to repeat) quiet but unflagging enthusiasm, considerable cultivation, the habit of thoroughness in anything they undertake, excellent digestions and equable tempers. All of which lands us bump up against the inevitable platitude that invariably stands guard at the other end of almost every train of thought. Abstractly considered, travel is at best an uncomfortable activity more often than not: strange beds, strange food, a constant, hideous packing and unpacking of trunks too small to contain conveniently one’s few possessions; long, dreary intervals in railway stations, nightmare scrambles at custom-houses, steamers that bury their noses in the sea and kick their heels in the air, sleeping cars always either too hot or too cold. Such is travel in the abstract. Its pleasant qualities, like the pleasant qualities of almost every other pleasure in life, must be supplied largely by ourselves. If travel did nothing else for us, it would be valuable by reason of its ability to drive home this old truth. In order thoroughly to enjoy travel we must be able to give considerably more than we get.
FELLOW PASSENGERS
THE great German steamship companies have developed, one might almost say created, a new type of American. This dawned on me last winter while taking a three months’ cruise to South America and back. The type is that of the retired business man who is enjoying his retirement. There was a time, not so long ago in our history, when he scarcely existed, for the simple reason that he never, or at least rarely, retired. Idleness spelled boredom. If in a misguided moment mother and the girls persuaded him to give up business he found himself confronted by an appalling amount of leisure rather impossible for him to manipulate and make use of.
The Germans in their wonderful way have changed all that. Now when a middle-aged man has made enough money to live on comfortably they offer him something very definite and delightful to do. He can at any season of the year embark on a “floating hotel” and go to some far-away and interesting part of the world with little or no bother to himself. Just this I notice is what in large numbers he has of late years begun to take advantage of. He and a placid, pleasant wife visit the Mediterranean ports during the winter, investigate the Scandinavian countries, including the North Cape, during the summer, encircle the globe during the greater part of a year, and finally decide to go to South America. Everything is made so easy for him. He lives on the ship during the entire voyage except, perhaps, for a day or so here and there when, for a change, the party stays on shore at a hotel. The necessity of constantly ordering food or struggling with cabmen, waiters and shopkeepers in a foreign language he feels himself too old to learn is agreeably eliminated for him. He comes home with new interests, a widened horizon, refreshed in mind and body and usually ready to start out again the next year.
There were many of them on the first South American cruise of last winter, and to me the type was a novel one. For one usually, in a vague sort of a way, thinks of middle-aged Americans traveling in strange countries for the first time as somewhat helpless, often bored, often irritated, uncertain as to where to go and looking forward with relief to the date of sailing homeward. Those I met last winter were anything but that. In a quiet, restful sort of a way they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves. Their attitude toward it all was one of persons who had placed themselves in the hands of what literally was their creator.
It was interesting for the first few days to stretch out on a chair in the sun and, with complete detachment, examine one’s fellow passengers as they passed by. One always hears that “a ship is such a good place in which to study human nature.” Of course it is. Every place is if one has the eyes and ears with which to see and hear it. But I do not believe a ship is particularly so any more. The day for that has passed. People at the present time travel too much to desire to become deeply intimate on short acquaintance. They are too reserved, too experienced. Lifelong friendships, I am inclined to believe, are not often made any more on ocean steamers.
There were one hundred and eighty-one persons in the party, and as they strolled about the deck I discovered myself lazily picking out those I should like, those I “shouldn’t mind,” those that, through their sheer lack of personality, I should never even see again, and those I should run from. In only a few instances did I make mistakes. One was a bouncing girl with a voice like a symphony of peacocks; she turned out to be agreeable and clever in spite of it. Another was a German who looked like an overfed dachshund and sat opposite me at table; another was an old gentleman who slopped around in carpet slippers (yes, carpet slippers really do still exist). Another was—but why enumerate? Finding out who they all were was the next step.
There was the famous physician; the very grand old dame who held herself much aloof because, before her marriage, she had been one of the Orioles of Baltimore; the lady who cleared about two hundred thousand dollars a year from the sales of a patent fly-paper—or was it a patent flea-powder? I forget—an invention of her late uncle’s; the young man who was being sent on the trip because he drank (he certainly did drink; he was drunk for sixteen thousand sea-miles); the “mysterious pair” who concealed their secret to the end; the woman who had written a book; the melancholy man whose wife had just eloped in New York with the chauffeur; and then the numerous nice, quiet, well-mannered persons who, like happy nations, seemed to have no histories in particular.