And then there is the friend who can’t go to Europe and who could hardly get to Newton if he had to pay for a round-trip ticket, who comfortingly says: “I wouldn’t go to Europe until I had seen all of my own country.” This remark has been made to me so often in the last few weeks that I have learned to dodge when I see it coming. I have traveled around some in the United States, and as a matter of fact the people in one section are pretty much the same as the people in another, and it is people that I like to see and not mountains or museums. Of course some parts are more so than others. There is no State like Kansas and no people like Kansans. The object of a trip to Europe is to see something different, as different as possible. It is to get the local “color” for the things you read about. It is to learn if the men and women of the Old World are as they are pictured in books, and to compare them with the people whom you associate with every day at home. I am told that in Paris even little children can talk French, and that in Germany the people stand it to have an emperor and never organize any boss-buster movements or bolt the party nominations. I have read about these things all my life, and they may be true. I want to see them. I am not from Missouri, but I have lived near enough to want to be shown.
We sailed from Hutchinson on the Santa Fe. After touching at a few places we reached Boston safely, and unless the police intervene we will embark this afternoon on the White Star steamship Arabic. It is still two hours until we go aboard but I am already seasick, or am imagining how it will feel, which is nearly as bad. I am not afraid of water. I have lived too long on the Arkansas and Cow creek and my boyhood was spent on the shores of the Cottonwood. But nevertheless and notwithstanding, I feel as I think everybody must when he takes his first long ocean voyage. I never noticed so many accounts of wrecks as I have in the last month. If there was an item in a newspaper about the wreck of some ocean steamer or the drowning of a passenger, and I did not see the piece, some friend always did, and brought it to me to comfort me. Statistics prove that it is as safe to travel across the ocean in a steamship as across Kansas in a railroad train. This is comforting, but statistics do not look big and substantial when you contemplate a week’s existence with nothing but a few boards and bolts between yourself and the place where McGinty went. One little man in a little old boat seems mighty small in the middle of a big ocean.
LEAVING THE LAND.
Steamship Arabic, May 29, 1905.
In spite of the fact that a trip across the Atlantic is not considered dangerous or exceptional, there is always a lot of sentiment which comes up into the throat of the traveler when he goes aboard the ship that is to take him out of his own country and across the ocean to a foreign land. Long before the Arabic was to sail it was filled with passengers and friends who had come to say good-by and wave farewell. The custom is whenever a friend is to start on such a trip to accompany him or her to the dock, send flowers to be placed in the stateroom, and to stand on the wharf and wave a handkerchief until the responding figure on the deck of the ship is no longer recognizable in the distance. Of course, we were so far from home that there was nobody to do these honors for wandering Kansans, so we picked out a few nice-looking people who seemed to be there for curiosity and vigorously shouted and waved good-by to them, and they had the good taste to respond. A Colorado man who had been on the trip before told me afterward that the young fellow who had called so cheerily and waved so vigorously at him as the steamer pulled away from land, was a hotel porter whom he had hired for a half-dollar to come to the wharf and bid him godspeed on his journey.
The Arabic turned away from the dock at 4.30 in the afternoon of May 25, and steamed slowly and majestically down the harbor and out toward the ocean with a half-dozen little pilot-boats and revenue cutters whistling and dancing like a lot of little dogs frisking and playing around a big dog as it walks down the street. The old ship Constitution, heroine of America’s early naval warfare, was passed, the forts and the navy yard with the modern warships and guns, the last island and the last American flag faded into the distance, and a solemn thought of leaving one’s native land and of possible seasickness makes one choke with patriotism and foreboding. It is too late now to back out. There is no chance to get off. For a week the ship will never stop, and there will be no place upon which the eye can rest except water and sky. A flood of sentiment rushes through one and leaks a little at the eyes as the mind turns to those who have been so near and dear and are now to be so far away. That is the feeling experienced by all travelers, and I want to be recorded present and voting on the question, although as a matter of fact while the Arabic was leaving the dock and country I was quarreling with the purser over the stateroom and trying to get the steward to help me handle baggage when he was so full of American liquor that he could do nothing but say “yessir” (hic) and smile.