It was by a similar accident—desiring to transfer myself from Bourges to Auxerre—that I discovered the wonderful junction-town of Nevers, which, despite the guide-books, is more interesting than either of the others. It possesses a Gothic cathedral with an apse at either end, that looks as if two churches had collided and telescoped each other. There is also a Romanesque church at Nevers which is just as simple and as manly as either of the famous abbeys in Caen; and a chateau with rounded towers, which once belonged to Mazarin. But the most amusing [pg 99]feature of this town is that, though Bourges packs itself to bed at ten o’clock, Nevers sits blithely up till twelve, listening to music in cafés, and watching moving-pictures; and this amiable incongruity in a medieval town makes you bless that complication of the time-table which has forced you, against forethought, to stay there over night.
It is difficult for me to remember a railway junction in which there was nothing to do; but perhaps Pyrgos, in Greece, comes nearest to this description. At this point, you change cars on your way from Patras to Olympia. The town is made of mud: that is to say, the single-storied houses are built of unbaked clay. There is nothing to see in Pyrgos. But I amused myself by addressing the inhabitants, in the English language, with an eloquent oration that soon gathered them under my control; and thereafter I set a hundred of them at the pleasant task of trying to push the train for Olympia on its way to take me to the Hermes of Praxiteles. I knew no word of their language, nor did they of mine; but they understood that that train should be started, if human force were sufficient to help the cars upon their way: and finally, when the engine puffed and snorted with a tardily awakened sense of duty, the train was cheered by the entire population as I waved my hand from the rear platform and quoted one of Daniel Webster’s perorations.
Is it—I have often wondered—so difficult as people think, to be happy in an hour “spent waiting at a railway junction”?… The kingdom of happiness is within us; or else there is no truth in our assumption that the will of man is free: and I am inclined to pity a man who, being happy in Amalfi—the loveliest of all the places I have ever seen—cannot also manage to be happy in Pyrgos—or in Essex Junction—and to communicate his happiness to his responsive fellow-travelers.
The true enjoyment of traveling is to enjoy traveling; not to relish merely the places you are going to, but to [pg 100]relish also the adventure of the going. The most difficult train-journey I remember is the twenty-hour trip from Lisbon to Sevilla, with a change of cars in the ghastly early morning at the border-town of Badajoz and another change at noon at the sun-baked, parched, and God-forsaken town of Merida; and yet I relish as red letters on my personal map of Spain a pleasant quarrel over the price of sandwiches at Badajoz and the way a muleteer of Merida flung a colored cloak over his shoulder and posed for an unconscious moment like a painting by Zuloaga.
And this philosophy has a deeper application to life at large: for all life may be figured as a journey, and few there are who are natively equipped for the enjoyment of all the waste and waiting places on the way. The minds of most people are so fixed upon the storied capitals that are featured in those works of fiction known as guidebooks that they are impeded from enjoying the minor stations on their journey. “Hurry me to Sevilla,” cries the traveler—and misses the sight of my muleteer of Merida. In America, our society is crammed with people who fail to enjoy life on five thousand a year because their minds are fixed upon that distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year. And if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either; but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand a year. And this is the essence of their tragedy:—they have not learned to wait with happiness.
Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to “get on”? Louis Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull’s-eye lantern at his belt, than any king upon his throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the living of it; and “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”
How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, [pg 101]we meet a man who sighs, “If only I could have a single day in which there was nothing that I had to do, nothing even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!” and yet this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current life has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are no longer able—like Wordsworth, on his “old gray stone”—to sit upon a trunk at some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the “mighty sum of things forever speaking.”
One of the loveliest women I have ever known—the late Alison Cunningham—told me a little anecdote of the author of The Lantern-Bearers which, so far as I know, has never yet been published. When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there for ten minutes. Then she left the room. At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said, “Time’s up, Master Lou: you may come out now.” But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner. “That’s enough: time’s up,” repeated Cummy. And then the child mystically raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, “Hush…,” he said, “I’m telling myself a story….”
And, in the Christian Morals of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the following passage:—“He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself.”