Chapter VI. La Belle France Being the First Stop
Except eighty or ninety other things the British Channel was the most disappointing thing we encountered in our travels. All my reading on this subject had led me to expect that the Channel would be very choppy and that we should all be very seasick. Nothing of the sort befell. The channel may have been suetty but it was not choppy. The steamer that ferried us over ran as steadily as a clock and everybody felt as fine as a fiddle.
A friend of mine whom I met six weeks later in Florence had better luck. He crossed on an occasion when a test was being made of a device for preventing seasickness. A Frenchman was the inventor and also the experimenter. This Frenchman had spent valuable years of his life perfecting his invention. It resembled a hammock swung between uprights. The supports were to be bolted to the deck of the ship, and when the Channel began to misbehave the squeamish passenger would climb into the hammock and fasten himself in; and then, by a system of reciprocating oscillations, the hammock would counteract the motion of the ship and the occupant would rest in perfect comfort no matter how high she pitched or how deep she rolled. At least such was the theory of the inventor; and to prove it he offered himself as the subject for the first actual demonstration.
The result was unexpected. The sea was only moderately rough; but that patent hammock bucked like a kicking bronco. The poor Frenchman was the only seasick person aboard—but he was sick enough for the whole crowd. He was seasick with a Gallic abandon; he was seasick both ways from the jack, and other ways too. He was strapped down so he could not get out, which added no little to the pleasure of the occasion for everybody except himself. When the steamer landed the captain of the boat told the distressed owner that, in his opinion, the device was not suited for steamer use. He advised him to rent it to a riding academy.
In crossing from Dover to Calais we had thought we should be going merely from one country to another; we found we had gone from one world to another. That narrow strip of uneasy water does not separate two countries—it separates two planets.
Gone were the incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of the race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs dimly visible along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity of those people who manifest emotion only on the occasions when they stand up to sing their national anthem:
God save the King!
The Queen is doing well!
Gone were the green fields of Sussex, which looked as though they had been taken in every night and brushed and dry-cleaned and then put down again in the morning. Gone were the trees that Maxfield Parrish might have painted, so vivid were they in their burnished green-and-yellow coloring, so spectacular in their grouping. Gone was the five-franc note which I had intrusted to a sandwich vender on the railroad platform in the vain hope that he would come back with the change. After that clincher there was no doubt about it—we were in La Belle France all right, all right!
Everything testified to the change. From the pier where we landed, a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing; he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor. At that there came running a fat, kindly looking old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came, who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet dancer's; and a soldier in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty others of all ages and sizes came—and they gathered about that small boy and gave him advice at the top of their voices. And when he yanked out the shining little silver fish there could not have been more animation and enthusiasm and excitement if he had landed a full-grown Presbyterian.
They were still congratulating him when we pulled out and went tearing along on our way to Paris, scooting through quaint, stone-walled cities, each one dominated by its crumbly old cathedral; sliding through open country where the fields were all diked and ditched with small canals and bordered with poplars trimmed so that each tree looked like a set of undertaker's whiskers pointing the wrong way.