I have never been to Essex Junction; but I should like to go there—just to see (in Whitman’s words) what I could do to it. Imagine it upon a windy night of winter, when a hundred discommoded passengers are turned out, grumbling, underneath the stars,—coughing invalids, and kicking infants, and indignant citizens, scrambling haphazard among tottering trunks, and picking their way from train to train. Imagine their faces, their voices, their gesticulations: here, indeed, you will see more than a theatre-full of characters. Or, if human beings do not interest you, imagine the mysterious gleam of yellow windows veiled behind a drift of intermingled smoke and steam. Listen, also, to the clang of bells, the throb and puff of the engines, and the shrill shriek of their whistles. Or peer into the station-shed, made stuffy by the breath of many loiterers; and contrast their death in life with [pg 94]the life in death of those others who loiter through eternity beneath the gravestones of the cemetery. I can imagine being happy with all this (and even writing a paragraph about it afterwards): but, above all, I should like to gather those hundred discommoded passengers upon the station-platform, and to rehearse and lead them in a solemn chant of the refrain of Phelps’s poem. Imagine a hundred voices singing lustily in unison,
“I hope in hell
His soul may dwell
Who first invented Essex Junction,”
under the vast cathedral vaulting of the night, until the adjacent dead should seem to stand up in their graves and join the anthem of anathema…. Who is there so bold to tell me that enjoyment is impossible in such a place as this?
There is very little difference between places, after all: the true difference is between the people who regard them. I should rather read a description of Hoboken by Rudyard Kipling than a description of Florence by some New England schoolmarm. To the poet, all places are poetical; to the adventurous, all places are teeming with adventure: and to experience a lack of joy in any place is merely a sign of sluggish blood in the beholder.
So, at least, it seems to me; for not otherwise can I explain the fact that, like my beloved R.L.S., I have always enjoyed waiting at railway junctions. I love not merely the marching phrases, but also the commas and the semi-colons of a journey,—those mystic moments when “we look before and after” and need not “pine for what is not.” I have never done much waiting in America, which is in the main a country of express trains, that hurl their lighted windows through the night like what Mr. Kipling calls “a damned hotel;” but there is scarcely a country of Europe except Russia whose railway junctions [pg 95]are unknown to me. In many of these little nameless places I have experienced memorable hours: and because the less enthusiastic Baedeker has neglected to star and double-star them, I have always wanted to praise them, in print somewhat larger than his own. Space is lacking in the present article for a complete guide to all the railway junctions of Europe; but I should like to commemorate a few, in gratitude for what befell me there.
There is a junction in Bavaria whose name I have forgotten; but it is very near Rothenburg, the most picturesquely medieval of all German cities. It consists merely of a station and two intersecting tracks. When you enter the station, you observe what seems to be a lunch-counter; but if you step up to it and innocently order food, a buxom girl informs you that no food is ever served there—and then everybody laughs. This pleasant cachinnation attracts your attention to the assembled company. It consists of many peasants, in their native costumes (which any painter would be willing to journey many miles to see), who are enjoying the delicious experience of travel. They are great travelers, these peasants. Once a month they take the train to Rothenburg, and once a month they journey home again, to talk of the experience for thirty days. All of them have heard of Nuremberg [which is actually less than a hundred miles away],—that vast and wonderful metropolis, so far, so very far, beyond the ultimate horizon of their lives. They would like to see it some day—as I should like to see the Taj Mahal—but meanwhile they content themselves with the great adventure of going to Rothenburg,—a city that is really much more interesting, if they could only know. In the very midst of these congregated travelers, I casually set down a suit-case which was plastered over with many labels from many lands; and this suit-case affected them as I might be affected by a messenger from Mars. They spelled out many unfamiliar languages, and a murmur of amazement swept through [pg 96]the entire company when one of them discovered that that suit-case had been to Morocco. Morocco, they assured me, was a place where black men rode on camels; and I had no heart to tell them that it was a country where white men rode on mules. Then another of these travelers—an old man, with a face like one of Albrecht Dürer’s drawings—discovered a label that read “Venezia.” “Is that,” he said, “Venedig?” with a little gasp. “Yes; Venedig,” I responded, “where the streets are water.” Slowly he removed his hat. “Ach, Venedig!” he sighed; and then he stooped down, and, with the uttermost solemnity, he kissed the label…. And then I understood the vast impulsion of that wanderlust which has pushed so many, many Germans southward, to overrun that golden city that is wedded to the sea. I have forgotten the name of that junction, as I said before; but I have never been so happy in Munich as in this lonely station where there is no food.
Speaking of food reminds me of Bobadilla, in southern Spain. Bobadilla sounds as if it ought to be the name of a medieval town, with ghosts of gaunt imaginative knights riding forth to tilt with windmills; but there is no town at all at Bobadilla,—merely two railway restaurants set on either side of several intersecting tracks. For some mysterious reason, passengers from the four quarters of the compass—that is to say, from Cordoba, Granada, Algeciras, or Sevilla—are required to alight here, and eat, and change their trains. I remember Bobadilla as the place where you spend your counterfeit money. Many of the current coins of southern Spain are made of silver; and the rest are made of lead. For leaden five-peseta pieces there is a local name, “Sevillan dollars,” which ascribes their coinage to the crafty artisans of the capital of Andalucia. These pieces, which are plentiful, are just as good as silver dollars—when you can persuade anyone to take them. The currency of any coinage, except gold, depends entirely upon the faith of those who pass and take [pg 97]it and has no reference to its intrinsic value; and, in southern Spain, the leaden dollars serve as counters for just as many commercial transactions as the dollars made of silver. The only difference is that they are commonly accepted only after protest. In every Spanish shop, a slab of marble is built into the counter, and on this slab all proffered coins are slapped before they are accepted by the merchant. The traveler soon learns to fling his change upon the pavement; and many merry arguments ensue regarding the timbre of their ring. I remember how once, in the wondrous town of Ronda, when a beggar had imposed himself upon me as a guide and led me into a church where High Mass was being chanted, I gave him a peseta to get rid of him, and at once he flung it upon the pavement of the church, and chased it, listening, across the nave. Thereafter, he protested loudly that the piece was lead, and disrupted the intoning of the priests. “Very well,” said I, “it is, in any case, a gift; if you don’t want it, I will take it back”: and he accepted it with bows and smiles, and allowed the weary priests to continue their intonings. But Bobadilla is the one place in southern Spain where money is never jingled upon marble. There is no time between trains to quibble over minor matters; and a “Sevillan dollar” accepted from one passenger is blithely handed to another who is traveling in the opposite direction. I discovered this fact on the occasion of my first visit to this interesting junction; and on subsequent occasions I have eaten my fill at one or another of the railway restaurants and settled the account with all the leaden money garnered up from weeks of traveling. There is surely no dishonesty in observing the custom of a country; and Bobadilla may be treasured by all travelers as a clearing-house for counterfeit coins.
Again, in northern France, it was merely by some accident of changing trains that I discovered the lovely little town of Dol. I found myself in Saint Malo, for obvious reasons; and I desired to go to Mont Saint-Michel, for [pg 98]reasons still more obvious—Mother Poulard’s omelettes, and architecture, and the incoming of the tide. Between them—the map told me—was situated Dol. I made inquiries of the porter in the Saint Malo hotel. He responded in English,—the English of Ici on parle anglais. “Dol,” said he, “is a dull place.” He pronounced “Dol” and “dull” in precisely the same manner, and smiled at his sickly pun. I did not like that smile; and I alighted at the town that he despised. It was a little picture-book of a place, with many toy-like medieval houses clustered side by side around a market-place where peasants twisted the tails of cows. I strolled to the cathedral—and found myself mysteriously in England. It was a manly Norman edifice, sane and reticent and strong, set in a veritable English green, with little houses round about, reminding one of Salisbury. I entered the Cathedral; and found the nave to be composed in what is called in England the “decorated” style, and the choir to give hints of “perpendicular.” And then I remembered, with a start, that the ancestors of all that is most beautiful in England had migrated from Normandy, and that here I was visiting them in their antecedent home. “Saxon and Norman and Dane are we;” and all that was Norman in me reached forth with groping hands to grasp the palms of those old builders who reared this little sacrosanct cathedral in the far-off times when one dominion extended to either side of the English Channel.