“Yes, room,” said the landlady.
“A room for the night, a lodging,” I explained.
“Oh, a bed,” said she, with a chagrined face. “We have no beds. No, no beds,” and I could see her thinking the matter over in her mind, the difference between room and rum. She watched to see if I would drink what had been put before me.
But rum is not my drink, especially after a day’s tramp. I shouldered my knapsack and pushed out of the inn under the disdainful gaze of the red-faced landlady and the stare of the man who was sipping his drop of Scotch.
They say the better educated people of Edinburgh speak the best English in Great Britain, and I certainly can use my own tongue fairly well. But judge my amazement when I first went to America, and was told I did not speak English. I was tramping to Chicago, and men on the road would say to me, “Say, you haven’t been over here long. You speak the language broken.”
Prejudices are bred over the difference of saying the word “well” with the lips and “well” with the throat. Even a national laugh can be aggravating. “Haw, haw, there’s a merry laugh for you,” says the American in “So This is London,” “haw-haw—the marmalade hounds.”
Incidentally, that sentence from a clever play points to the other great cause of irritating difference in ways. The Americans do not take marmalade for breakfast. We do. It is almost a source of international misunderstanding.
“The English have such bad table manners,” I used to hear said in Moscow. And yet you should see Ivanovitch with his soup. We are too greedy at table. We accept second and third helpings, only intended to be offered, not intended to be taken. We do not know how to make a glass of tea and a saucer of jam last fifty minutes. We eye the samovar when we want more tea. We do not kiss our hostess’s hand after the repast. Americans eat with their hats on, but with their coats off. Russians smoke cigarettes between courses. Frenchmen take large towels into their collars, and pick their teeth with toothpicks while they talk. All very disgusting. Almost every variation in ways of eating is distasteful.
The tramp, the wanderer in strange lands, should at least get over this. I am sure Oliver Goldsmith and George Borrow, two delightful wanderers, never fell foul of any one for lack of speech or eating wrongly. They knew how to counteract the effect of their own foreignness, and how to accept and enjoy differences in others.
But unless the tramp intends to shun men and women altogether he has to face the problem of liking his fellow man, however unlike to himself. It is part of the art of tramping to know how to meet your fellow man, how to greet him, how to know him.