Chapter X: Narratives of Travel

For more than six hundred years, Marco Polo has been a name to conjure with, but if you will turn to a biographical dictionary you will find only the dates of his birth and death, and the words, “A Venetian traveler in China.” It is true that travel has grown both easier and commoner since his day, but the human delight in the open road, or, lacking that, in another’s account of it, has not disappeared.

Accounts of travel fall broadly into two classes. The first are those records of explorations undertaken for the sake of scientific information. Such accounts are under obligation to be absolutely accurate in minor as well as in major matters, and are to be respected first and enjoyed afterward, if, by a rare chance, the scientist is an artist as well as a geographer.

The second class consists of those accounts of travel which are read for pleasure and for general information rather than for exact data, which interest us in the traveler as much as in his travels, and which are distinctly literary because of the personal comments, reactions, and reflections of the author. This does not mean that such books are not accurate within the limits of their purpose, but, rather, that accuracy alone is not sufficient to qualify a book for a place on this list. The account must be true to the country described, but need not haggle over details in the experience of the writer. To alter geographical facts or details of climate would make the author ridiculous, but to open with the most picturesque approach to the spot whether or not that is the way in which he actually entered it for the first time is to serve the reader as he has a right to demand. To trail a frowsy party of tourists through many pages because they dogged the author’s footsteps is unkind, but to introduce a purely imaginary companion whose comments and store of information add pleasure is perfectly in keeping with the task in hand.

It seems almost unnecessary to say that the first requirement for writing successful travel sketches is to be a good traveler. An honest pleasure and a swinging readiness in meeting the chances of the road must somehow become apparent in the writing, not, indeed, by protestations of delight, but rather through the tone of zestful appreciation of new flavors in living. A pessimist or a misanthrope may be endured among the comforts of home, but no one chooses him as a traveling companion either in the flesh or on paper. The distinguished foreigner whose record of his experiences with American trains is a tirade against the inconvenience of shaving on a Pullman exemplifies the lack of that urbanity, the presence of which so delights us in Mr. Street’s account of his adjustment to Japanese customs and conveniences. It is not necessary, of course, that all discomforts be denied or suppressed for the sake of a Polly-Anna-ish happiness--such experiences are a part of almost all travel, but they must be treated with that good grace with which all of us wish to endure the pin pricks of existence both at home and abroad.

To write well of one’s travels, however, requires more than mere personal enjoyment, which so often ends in half articulate ejaculations of pleasure; it requires a gift for seizing upon the essential characteristics of any place, and a power of comparison and contrast that will enable one to convey his observations to another. Some people lack this ability; “They are,” says William McFee, “with agreeable reservations, very much like those seafarers who sail all over the world and tarry in magic harbors and beneath the glittering cupolas of marvelous cities and come home and say there is nothing in the world to see. They possess admirably incondite minds set upon trade and concessions and the women whose photographs adorn their dressing tables.” Once as a child on the treeless, drought burned prairies, I begged a neighbor to tell me of her girlhood on the rocky fjords of Norway under the midnight sun, and she answered, “Oh, it was just about like here.” A good traveler appreciates the innate character of a place as a good biographer does that of a person, and strives by every means within his power to set it forth, and so give to his reader a refreshing sense of a sojourn among new scenes and new faces.

“It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,
An’ turn another--likely not so good
But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.”

The following suggestions may be helpful:

1. Choose a place which is of interest to you for one definite
characteristic: natural beauty, historical associations,
picturesque squalor, or what you will. Make this point of central
interest in your narrative, but do not neglect other possible
additions. Observe that Mr. Morley’s “Up the Wissahickon” gives
many other items of interest besides the picture of autumn beauty.

2. Limit your narrative to a period brief enough to be readily
presented within the limits of your space. Though you may have
known a place all your life, an account of a single visit may be a
wise selection. A supposed traveler’s story of a day in your home
town or city may reveal unexpected possibilities.

3. Write of pleasant experiences or in a kindly mood. Do not
chronicle the trip you wish you had never taken.

F. del P.

THE DEPARTURE

JULIAN STREET

My last days in Japan were my best days, for I spent them in a Japanese home, standing amid its own lovely gardens in Mita, a residential district some twenty minutes by motor from the central part of Tokyo.

Through the open shoji of my bedroom I could look out in the mornings to where, beyond the velvet lawns, the flowers and the treetops, the inverted fan of Fuji’s cone was often to be seen floating white and spectral in the sky, seventy miles away.

After my bath in a majestic family tub I would breakfast in my room, wearing a kimono, recently acquired, and feeling very Japanese.

While I was dressing, Yuki sometimes entered, but I had by this time become accustomed to her matutinal invasions and no longer found them embarrassing. She was so entirely practical, so useful. She knew where everything was. She would go to a curious little cupboard, which was built into the wall and had sliding doors of lacquer and silk, and get me a shirt, or would retrieve from their place of concealment a missing pair of trousers, and bring them to me neatly folded in one of those flat, shallow baskets which, with the Japanese, seem to take the place of bureau drawers.

Thus, besides being my daughter’s duenna and my wife’s maid, she was in effect, my valet. Nor did her usefulness by any means end there. She was our interpreter, dragoman, purchasing-agent; she was our steward, major domo, seneschal; nay, she was our Prime Minister.

The house had a large staff, and all the servants made us feel that they were _our_ servants, and that they were glad to have us there. With the exception of a butler, an English-speaking Japanese temporarily added to the establishment on our account, all wore the native dress; and there were among them two men so fine of feature, so dignified of bearing, so elegant in their silks, that we took them, at first, for members of the family. One of them was a white-bearded old gentleman who would have made a desirable grandfather for anybody. If he had duties other than to decorate the hall with his presence I never discovered what they were. The other, a young man, was clerk of the household, and enjoyed the distinction of being Saki’s husband.

Saki was the housekeeper, young and pretty. She and her husband lived in a cottage near by, and their home was extensively equipped with musical instruments, Saki being proficient on the samisen and koto, and also on an American melodeon which was one of her chief treasures. She was all smiles and sweetness--a most obliging person. Indeed it was she who pretended to be asleep in a Japanese bed, in order that I might make the photograph which is one of the illustrations in this book.

Four or five coolies, excellent fellows, wearing blue cotton coats with the insignia of our host’s family upon the backs of them, worked about the house and grounds; and several little maids were continually trotting through the corridors, with that pigeon-toed shuffle in which one comes, when one is used to it, actually to see a curious prettiness.

Sometimes we felt that the servants were showing us too much consideration. We dined out a great deal and were often late in getting home (“Home” was the term we found ourselves using there), yet however advanced the hour, the chauffeur would sound his horn on entering the gate, whereupon lights would flash on beneath the porte-cochère, the shoji at the entrance of the house would slide open, and three or four domestics would come out, dragging a wide strip of red velvet carpet, over which we would walk magnificently up the two steps leading to the hall. But though I urged them to omit this regal detail, because two or three men had to sit up to handle the heavy carpet, and also because the production of it made me feel like a bogus prince, I could never induce them to do so. Always, regardless of the hour, a little group of servants appeared at the door when we came home.

Even on the night when, under the ministrations of the all-wise and all-powerful head porter of the Imperial Hotel, our trunks were spirited away, to be taken to Yokohama and placed aboard the _Tenyo Maru_, even then we found it difficult to realize that our last night in Japan had come.

The realization did not strike me with full force until I went to bed.

I was not sleepy. I lay there, thinking. And the background of my thoughts was woven out of sounds wafted through the open shoji on the summer wind: the nocturnal sounds of the Tokyo streets.

I recalled how, on my first night in Tokyo, I had listened to these sounds and wondered what they signified.

Now they explained themselves to me, as to a Japanese.

A distant jingling, like that of sleigh-bells, informed me that a newsboy was running with late papers. A plaintive musical phrase suggestive of Debussy, bursting out suddenly and stopping with startling abruptness, told me that the Chinese macaroni man was abroad with his lantern-trimmed cart and his little brass horn. At last I heard a xylophone-like note, resembling somewhat the sound of a New York policeman’s club tapping the sidewalk. It was repeated several times; then there would come a silence; then the sound again, a little nearer. It was the night watchman on his rounds, guarding the neighbourhood not against thieves, but against fire, “the Flower of Tokyo.” In my mind’s eye I could see him hurrying along, knocking his two sticks together now and then, to spread the news that all was well.

Then it was that I reflected: “Tomorrow night I shall not hear these sounds. In their place I shall hear the creaking of the ship, the roar of the wind, the hiss of the sea. Possibly I shall never again hear the music of the Tokyo streets.”

My heart was sad as I went to sleep.

Fortunately for our peace of mind, we had learned through the experience of American friends, visitors in another Japanese home, how _not_ to tip these well-bred domestics--or rather, how not to try to tip them. On leaving the house in which they had been guests, these friends had offered money to the servants, only to have it politely but positively refused.

Yuki cleared the matter up for us.

“They should put _noshi_ with money,” she explained in response to our questions. “That make it all right to take. It mean a present.”

Without having previously known noshi by name, we knew immediately what she meant, for we had received during our stay in Japan enough presents to fill a large trunk, and each had been accompanied by a little piece of coloured paper folded in a certain way, signifying a gift.

In the old days these coloured papers always contained small pieces of dried _awabi_--abelone--but with the years the dried awabi began to be omitted, and the little folded papers by themselves came to be considered adequate.

Fortified with this knowledge I went, on the day before our departure, to the Ginza, where I bought envelopes on which the noshi design was printed. Money placed in these envelopes was graciously accepted by all the servants. Tips they would not have received. But these were not tips. They were gifts from friend to friend, at parting.

The code of Japanese courtesy is very exact and very exacting in the matter of farewells to the departing guest. Callers are invariably escorted to the door by the host, such members of his family as have been present, and a servant or two, all of whom stand in the portal bowing as the visitor drives away.

A house-guest is despatched with even greater ceremony. The entire personnel of the establishment will gather at the door to speed him on his way with profound bows and cries of “Sayonara!” Members of the family, often the entire family, accompany him to the station, where appear other friends who have carefully inquired in advance as to the time of departure. The traveller is escorted to his car, and his friends remain upon the platform until the train leaves, when the bowing and “Sayonaras” are repeated.

Tokyo people often go to Yokohama with friends who are sailing from Japan, accompanying them to the ship, and remaining on the dock until the vessel moves into the bay. How Tokyo men-of-affairs can manage to go upon these time-consuming seeing-off parties is one of the great mysteries of Mysterious Japan, for such an excursion takes up the greater part of a day.

To the American, accustomed in his friendships to take so much for granted, a Japanese farewell affords a new sensation, and one which can hardly fail to touch the heart.

Departing passengers are given coils of paper ribbon confetti, to throw to their friends ashore, so that each may hold an end until the wall of steel parts from the wall of stone, and the paper strand strains and breaks. There is something poignant and poetic in that breaking, symbolizing the vastness of the world, the littleness of men and ships, the fragility of human contacts.

The last face I recognized, back there across the water, in Japan, was Yuki’s. She was standing on the dock with the end of a broken paper ribbon in her hand. The other end trailed down into the water. She was weeping bitterly.

Wishing to be sure that my wife and daughter had not failed to discover her in the crowd, I turned to them. But I did not have to point her out. Their faces told me that they saw her. They too were weeping.

So it is with women. They weep. As for a man, he merely waves his hat. I waved mine.

“Sayonara!”

I turned away. There were things I had to see to in my cabin. Besides, the wind on deck was freshening. It hurt my eyes.

Julian Street, _Mysterious Japan_. Doubleday,
Page & Company, Publishers. By the kind
permission of the author.

UP THE WISSAHICKON

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

The Soothsayer is a fanatical lover of Fairmount Park. His chief delight is to send his car spinning along the Lincoln Drive about the time the sun drops toward setting; to halt at a certain hostelry (if the afternoon be chilly) for what Charles Lamb so winningly describes as “hot water and its better adjuncts”; and then, his stormy soul for the moment at armistice with life, to roll in a gentle simmer down gracious byways while the Park gathers her mantle of dusk about her. Sometimes he halts his curricle in some favorite nook, climbs back into the broad, well-cushioned tonneau seat and lies there smoking a cigarette and watching the lights along the river. The Park is his favorite relaxation. He carries its contours and colors and sunsets in the spare locker of his brain, and even on the most trying day at his office he is a little happier because he knows the Wissahickon Drive is but a few miles away. Wise Soothsayer! He should have been one of the hermits who came from Germany with Kelpius in 1694 and lived bleakly on the hillsides of that fairest of streams, waiting the millennium they expected in 1700.

The Soothsayer had long been urging me to come and help him worship the Wissahickon Drive, and when luck and the happy moment conspired, I found myself carried swiftly past the Washington Monument at the Park entrance and along the margin of the twinkling Schuylkill. At the first there was nothing of the hermit in the Soothsayer’s conversation. He was bitterly condemning the handicraft of a certain garage mechanic who had done something to his “clutch.” He included this fallacious artisan in the class of those he deems most degraded: The People Who Don’t Give a Damn. For intellectual convenience, the Soothsayer tersely ascribes all ills that befall him to Bolshevism. If the waitress is tardy in delivering his cheese omelet, she is a bolshevixen. If a motortruck driver skims his polished fender, he is a bolshevik. In other words, those who Don’t Give a Damn are bolsheviks.

The Soothsayer lamented that I had not been in the Park with him two weeks ago, when the autumn foliage was a blaze of glowing color. But to my eye the tints (it was the first of November) were unsurpassably lovely. It was a keen afternoon, the air was sharp, the sky flushing with rose and massed with great banks of cloud the bluish hue of tobacco smoke. When we neared the corner of Peter’s Island the sun slid from under a cloudy screen and transfused the thin bronze-yellow of the trees with a pale glow which sparkled as the few remaining leaves fluttered in the wind. Most of the leafage had fallen and was being burnt in bonfires at the side of the road, where the gusts tossed and flattened the waving flames. But the trees were still sufficiently clothed to show a rich tapestry of russet and orange and brown, sharpened here and there by wisps and shreds of yellow. And where the boughs were wholly stripped (the silver-gray beeches, for instance) their delicate twigs were clearly traced against the sky. I think one hears too much of the beauty of October’s gold and scarlet and not enough of the sober, wistful richness of November buffs and duns and browns.

The Wissahickon Drive is the last refuge of the foot and the hoof, for motors are not allowed to follow the trail up the ravine, which still remains a haunt of ancient peace--much more so, indeed, than in former years, when there must have been many and many a smart turnout spanking up the valley for supper at the Lotus Inn. Over the ruins of this hostelry the Soothsayer becomes sadly eloquent, recalling how in his salad days he used to drive out from town in a chartered hansom and sit placidly on a honeysuckled balcony over chicken and waffles served with the proper flourish by a colored servitor named Pompey. But we must take things as we see them, and though my conductor rebuked me for thinking the scene so lovely--I should have been there not only two weeks ago to see the autumn colors, but ten years ago to see Pompey and the Lotus Inn--still, I was marvelously content with the dusky beauty of the glades. The cool air was rich with the damp, sweet smell of decaying leaves. A tiny murmur of motion rose from the green-brown pools of the creek, ruffled here and there with a milky bubble of foam below some boulder. In the feathery tops of evergreen trees, blackly outlined against the clear arch of fading blue, some birds were cheeping a lively squabble. We stopped to listen. It was plainly an argument, of the kind in which each side accuses the other of partisanship. “Bolshevism!” said the Soothsayer.

It is wonderfully still in the Wissahickon ravine in a pale November twilight. Overhead the sky darkened; the sherry-brown trees began to shed something of their rich tint. The soft earth of the roadway was grateful underfoot to those too accustomed to pavement walking. Along the drive came the romantic thud of hoofs; a party of girls on horseback perhaps returning from tea at Valley Green. What a wonderful sound is the quick drumming of horses’ hoofs! To me it always suggests highwaymen and Robert Louis Stevenson. We smoked our pipes leaning over the wooden fence and looking down at the green shimmer of the Wissahickon, seeing how the pallor of sandy bottom shone up through the clear water.

And then, just as one is about to sentimentalize upon the beauty of nature and how it shames the crass work of man, one comes to what is perhaps the liveliest thing along the Wissahickon--the Walnut Lane Bridge. Leaping high in air from the very domes of the trees, curving in a sheer smooth superb span that catches the last western light on its concrete flanks, it flashes across the darkened valley as nobly as an old Roman viaduct of southern France. It is a thrilling thing, and I scrambled up the bank to note down the names of the artists who planned it. The tablet is dated 1906, and bears the names of George S. Webster, chief engineer; Henry H. Quimby, assistant engineer; Reilly & Riddle, contractors. Many poets have written verses both good and bad about the Wissahickon, but Messers. Reilly & Riddle have spanned it with a poem that will long endure.

We walked back to the Soothsayer’s bolshevized car, which waited at the turning of the drive where a Revolutionary scuffle took place between American troops and a detachment of redcoats under a commander of the fine old British name of Knyphausen. As we whirred down to the Lincoln Drive and I commented on the lavender haze that overhung the steep slopes of the glen, the Soothsayer said: “Ah, but you should have seen it two weeks ago. The trees were like a cashmere shawl!”

I shall have to wait fifty weeks before I can see the Wissahickon in a way that will content the fastidious Soothsayer.

Christopher Morley, _Travels in Philadelphia_. By
permission of the author and David McKay Company.

TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

I. OUR LADY OF THE SNOWS--FATHER APOLLINARIS

Next morning (Thursday, 26th September) I took the road in a new order. The sack was no longer doubled, but hung at full length across the saddle, a green sausage six feet long with a tuft of blue wool hanging out of either end. It was more picturesque, it spared the donkey, and, as I began to see, it would insure stability, blow high, blow low. But it was not without a pang that I had so decided. For although I had purchased a new cord, and made all as fast as I was able, I was yet jealously uneasy lest the flaps should tumble out and scatter my effects along the line of march.

My way lay up the bald valley of the river, along the march of Vivarais and Gévaudan. The Hills of Gévaudan on the right were a little more naked, if anything, than those of Vivarais upon the left, and the former had a monopoly of a low dotty underwood that grew thickly in the gorges and died out in solitary burrs upon the shoulders and the summits. Black bricks of fir-wood were plastered here and there upon both sides, and here and there were cultivated fields. A railway ran beside the river; the only bit of railway in Gévaudan, although there are many proposals afoot and surveys being made, and even, as they tell me, a station standing ready-built in Mende. A year or two hence and this may be another world. The desert is beleaguered. Now may some Languedocian Wordsworth turn the sonnet into _patois_: “Mountains and vales and floods, heard Ye that whistle?”

At a place called La Bastide I was directed to leave the river, and follow a road that mounted on the left among the hills of Vivarais, the modern Ardeche; for I was now come within a little way of my strange destination, the Trappist monastery of our Lady of the Snows. The sun came out as I left the shelter of a pine-wood, and I beheld suddenly a fine wild landscape to the south. High rocky hills, as blue as sapphire, closed the view, and between these lay ridge upon ridge, heathery, craggy, the sun glittering on veins of rock, the underwood clambering in the hollows, as rude as God made them at the first. There was not a sign of man’s hand in all the prospect; and indeed not a trace of his passage, save where generation after generation had walked in twisted foot-paths, in and out among the beeches, and up and down upon the channelled slopes. The mists, which had hitherto beset me, were now broken into clouds, and fled swiftly and shone brightly in the sun. I drew a long breath. It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

But if things had grown better to the south, it was still desolate and inclement near at hand. A spidery cross on every hill-top marked the neighbourhood of a religious house; and a quarter of a mile beyond, the outlook southward opening out and growing bolder with every step, a white statue of the Virgin at the corner of a young plantation directed the traveller to our Lady of the Snows. Here, then, I struck leftward, and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me, and creaking in my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence.

I had not gone very far ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a bell, and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror than the monastery of our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have had a Protestant education. And suddenly, on turning a corner, fear took hold on me from head to foot--slavish superstitious fear; and though I did not stop in my advance, yet I went on slowly, like a man who should have passed a bourne unnoticed, and strayed into the country of the dead. For there upon the narrow new-made road, between the stripling pines, was a mediæval friar, fighting with a barrowful of turfs. Every Sunday of my childhood I used to study the _Hermits_ of Marco Sadeler--enchanting prints, full of wood and field and mediæval landscapes, as large as a county, for the imagination to go a-travelling in; and here, sure enough, was one of Marco Sadeler’s heroes. He was robed in white like any spectre, and the hood falling back, in the instancy of his contention with the barrow, disclosed a pate as bald and yellow as a skull. He might have been buried any time these thousand years, and all the lively parts of him resolved into earth and broken up with the farmer’s barrow.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?

“No,” I said, “a Scotsman.”

A Scotsman? Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator. From him I learned with disgust that I could not be received at our Lady of the Snows; I might get a meal, perhaps, but that was all. And then, as our talk ran on, and it turned out that I was not a pedlar, but a literary man, who drew landscapes and was going to write a book, he changed his manner of thinking as to my reception (for I fear they respect persons even in a Trappist monastery), and told me I must be sure to ask for the Father Prior, and state my case to him in full. On second thoughts he determined to go down with me himself; he thought he could manage for me better. Might he say that I was a geographer?

No; I thought in the interests of truth, he positively might not.

“Very well, then” (with disappointment), “an author.”

It appeared he had been in a seminary with six young Irishmen, all priests long since, who had received newspapers and kept him informed of the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. And he asked me eagerly after Dr. Pusey, for whose conversion the good man had continued ever since to pray night and morning.

“I thought he was very near the truth,” he said; “and he will reach it yet; there is so much virtue in prayer.”

He must be a stiff ungodly Protestant who can take anything but pleasure in this kind and hopeful story. While he was thus near the subject, the good father asked me if I were a Christian; and when he found I was not, or not after his way, he glossed it over with great goodwill.

The road which we were following, and which this stalwart father had made with his own two hands within the space of a year, came to a corner, and showed us some white buildings a little further on beyond the wood. At the same time, the bell once more sounded abroad. We were hard upon the monastery. Father Apollinaris (for that was my companion’s name) stopped me.

“I must not speak to you down there,” he said.

“Ask for the Brother Porter, and all will be well. But try to see me as you go out again through the wood, where I may speak to you. I am charmed to have made your acquaintance.”

And then suddenly raising his arms, flapping his fingers, and crying out twice, “I must not speak, I must not speak!” he ran away in front of me, and disappeared into the monastery-door.

I own this somewhat ghastly eccentricity went a good way to revive my terrors. But where one was so good and simple, why should not all be alike? I took heart of grace, and went forward to the gate as fast as Modestine, who seemed to have a disaffection for monasteries, would permit. It was the first door, in my acquaintance of her, which she had not shown an indecent haste to enter. I summoned the place in form, though with a quaking heart. Father Michael, the Father Hospitaller, and a pair of brown-robed brothers came to the gate and spoke with me awhile. I think my sack was the great attraction; it had already beguiled the heart of poor Apollinaris, who had charged me on my life to show it to the Father Prior. But whether it was my address, or the sack, or the idea speedily published among that part of the brotherhood who attend on strangers that I was not a pedlar after all, I found no difficulty as to my reception. Modestine was led away by a layman to the stables, and I and my pack were received into our Lady of the Snows.

II. THE MONKS

Father Michael, a pleasant, fresh-faced, smiling man, perhaps of thirty-five, took me to the pantry, and gave me a glass of liqueur to stay me until dinner. We had some talk, or rather I should say he listened to my prattle indulgently enough, but with an abstracted air, like a spirit with a thing of clay. And truly when I remember that I descanted principally on my appetite, and that it must have been by that time more than eighteen hours since Father Michael had so much as broken bread, I can well understand that he would find an earthly savour in my conversation. But his manner, though superior, was exquisitely gracious; and I find I have a lurking curiosity as to Father Michael’s past.

The whet administered, I was left alone for a little in the monastery garden. This is no more than the main court, laid out in sandy paths and beds of party-coloured dahlias, and with a fountain and a black statue of the Virgin in the centre. The buildings stand around it four-square, bleak, as yet unseasoned by the years and weather, and with no other features than a belfry and a pair of slated gables. Brothers in white, brothers in brown, passed silently along the sanded alleys; and when I first came out, three hooded monks were kneeling on the terrace at their prayers. A naked hill commands the monastery upon one side, and the wood commands it on the other. It lies exposed to wind; the snow falls off and on from October to May, and sometimes lies six weeks on end; but if they stood in Eden, with a climate like heaven’s, the buildings themselves would offer the same wintry and cheerless aspect; and for my part, on this wild September day, before I was called to dinner, I felt chilly in and out.

When I had eaten well and heartily, Brother Ambrose, a hearty conversable Frenchman (for all those who wait on strangers have the liberty to speak), led me to a little room in that part of the building which is set apart for _MM. les retraitants_. It was clean and whitewashed, and furnished with strict necessaries, a crucifix, a bust of the late Pope, the _Imitation_ in French, a book of religious meditations, and the _Life of Elizabeth Seton_, evangelist, it would appear, of North America and of New England in particular. As far as my experience goes, there is a fair field for some more evangelisation in these quarters; but think of Cotton Mather! I should like to give him a reading of this little work in heaven, where I hope he dwells; but perhaps he knows all that already, and much more, and perhaps he and Mrs. Seton are the dearest friends, and gladly unite their voices in the everlasting psalm. Over the table, to conclude the inventory of the room, hung a set of regulations for _MM. les retraitants_: what services they should attend, when they were to tell their beads or meditate, and when they were to rise and go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: “_Le temps libre est employé à l’examen de conscience, à la confession, à faire de bonnes résolutions_,” etc. To make good resolutions, indeed! You might talk as fruitfully of making the hair grow on your head.

I had scarce explored my niche when Brother Ambrose returned. An English boarder, it appeared, would like to speak with me. I professed my willingness, and the friar ushered in a fresh, young little Irishman of fifty, a deacon of the Church, arrayed in strict canonicals, and wearing on his head what, in default of knowledge, I can only call the ecclesiastical shako. He had lived seven years in retreat at a convent of nuns in Belgium, and now five at our Lady of the Snows; he never saw an English newspaper; he spoke French imperfectly, and had he spoken it like a native, there was not much chance of conversation where he dwelt. With this, he was a man eminently sociable, greedy of news, and simple-minded like a child. If I was pleased to have a guide about the monastery, he was no less delighted to see an English face and hear an English tongue.

He showed me his own room, where he passed his time among breviaries, Hebrew bibles, and the Waverley novels. Thence he led me to the cloisters, into the chapter-house, through the vestry, where the brothers’ gowns and broad straw hats were hanging up, each with his religious name upon a board,--names full of legendary suavity and interest, such as Basil, Hilarion, Raphael, or Pacifique; into the library, where were all the works of Veuillot and Chateaubriand, and the _Odes et Ballades_, if you please, and even Molière, to say nothing of innumerable fathers and a great variety of local and general historians. Thence my good Irishman took me round the workshops, where brothers bake bread, and make cartwheels, and take photographs; where one superintends a collection of curiosities, and another a gallery of rabbits. For in a Trappist monastery each monk has an occupation of his own choice, apart from his religious duties and the general labours of the house. Each must sing in the choir, if he has a voice and ear, and join in the haymaking if he has a hand to stir; but in his private hours, although he must be occupied, he may be occupied on what he likes. Thus I was told that one brother was engaged with literature; while Father Apollinaris busies himself in making roads, and the Abbot employs himself in binding books. It is not so long since this Abbot was consecrated, by the way; and on that occasion, by a special grace, his mother was permitted to enter the chapel and witness the ceremony of consecration. A proud day for her to have a son a mitred abbot; it makes you glad to think they let her in.

In all these journeyings to and fro, many silent fathers and brethren fell in our way. Usually they paid no more regard to our passage than if we had been a cloud; but sometimes the good deacon had a permission to ask of them, and it was granted by a peculiar movement of the hands, almost like that of a dog’s paws in swimming, or refused by the usual negative signs, and in either case with lowered eyelids and a certain air of contrition, as of a man who was steering very close to evil.

The monks, by special grace of their Abbot, were still taking two meals a day; but it was already time for their grand fast, which begins somewhere in September and lasts till Easter, and during which they eat but once in the twenty-four hours, and that at two in the afternoon, twelve hours after they have begun the toil and vigil of the day. Their meals are scanty, but even of these they eat sparingly; and though each is allowed a small carafe of wine, many refrain from this indulgence. Without doubt, the most of mankind grossly overeat themselves; our meals serve not only for support, but as a hearty and natural diversion from the labour of life. Although excess may be hurtful, I should have thought this Trappist regimen defective. And I am astonished, as I look back, at the freshness of face and cheerfulness of manner of all whom I beheld. A happier nor a healthier company I should scarce suppose that I have ever seen. As a matter of fact, on this bleak upland, and with the incessant occupation of the monks, life is of an uncertain tenure, and death no infrequent visitor, at our Lady of the Snows. This, at least, was what was told me. But if they die easily, they must live healthily in the meantime, for they seemed all firm of flesh and high in colour; and the only morbid sign that I could observe, an unusual brilliancy of eye, was one that served rather to increase the general impression of vivacity and strength.

Those with whom I spoke were singularly sweet-tempered, with what I can only call a holy cheerfulness in air and conversation. There is a note, in the direction to visitors, telling them not to be offended at the curt speech of those who wait upon them, since it is proper to monks to speak little. The note might have been spared; to a man the hospitallers were all brimming with innocent talk, and, in my experience of the monastery, it was easier to begin than to break off a conversation. With the exception of Father Michael, who was a man of the world, they showed themselves full of kind and healthy interest in all sorts of subjects--in politics, in voyages, in my sleeping-sack--and not without a certain pleasure in the sound of their own voices.

As for those who are restricted to silence, I can only wonder how they bear their solemn and cheerless isolation. And yet, apart from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay phalansteries, of an artistic, not to say a bacchanalian, character; and seen more than one association easily formed, and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch-and-go association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent. And next after this, the tongue is the great divider.

I am almost ashamed to pursue this worldly criticism of a religious rule; but there is yet another point in which the Trappist order appeals to me as a model of wisdom. By two in the morning the clapper goes upon the bell, and so on, hour by hour, and sometimes quarter by quarter, till eight, the hour of rest; so infinitesimally is the day divided among different occupations. The man who keeps rabbits, for example, hurries from his hutches to the chapel, the chapter-room, or the refectory, all day long; every hour he has an office to sing, a duty to perform; from two, when he rises in the dark, till eight, when he returns to receive the comfortable gift of sleep, he is upon his feet and occupied with manifold and changing business. I know many persons, worth several thousands in the year, who are not so fortunate in the disposal of their lives. Into how many houses would not the note of the monastery-bell, dividing the day into manageable portions, bring peace of mind and healthful activity of body? We speak of hardships, but the true hardship is to be a dull fool, and permitted to mismanage life in our own dull and foolish manner.

From this point of view, we may perhaps better understand the monk’s existence. A long novitiate, and every proof of constancy of mind and strength of body is required before admission to the order; but I could not find that many were discouraged. In the photographer’s studio, which figures so strangely among the outbuildings, my eye was attracted by the portrait of a young fellow in the uniform of a private of foot. This was one of the novices, who came of the age for service, and marched and drilled and mounted guard for the proper time among the garrison of Algiers. Here was a man who had surely seen both sides of life before deciding; yet as soon as he was set free from services he returned to finish his novitiate.

This austere rule entitles a man to heaven as by right. When the Trappist sickens, he quits not his habit; he lies in the bed of death as he has prayed and laboured in his frugal and silent existence; and when the Liberator comes, at the very moment, even before they have carried him in his robe to lie his little last in the chapel among continual chantings, joy-bells break forth, as if for a marriage, from the slated belfry, and proclaim throughout the neighbourhood that another soul has gone to God.

At night, under the conduct of my kind Irishman, I took my place in the gallery to hear compline and _Salve Regina_, with which the Cistercians bring every day to a conclusion. There were none of those circumstances which strike the Protestant as childish or as tawdry in the public offices of Rome. A stern simplicity, heightened by the romance of the surroundings, spoke directly to the heart. I recall the whitewashed chapel, the hooded figures in the choir, the lights alternately occluded and revealed, the strong manly singing, the silence that ensued, the sight of cowled heads bowed in prayer, and then the clear trenchant beating of the bell, breaking in to show that the last office was over and the hour of sleep had come; and when I remember, I am not surprised that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night.

But I was weary; and when I had quieted my spirits with Elizabeth Seton’s memoirs--a dull work--the cold and the raving of the wind among the pines--for my room was on that side of the monastery which adjoins the woods--disposed me readily to slumber. I was wakened at black midnight, as it seemed, though it was really two in the morning, by the first stroke upon the bell. All the brothers were then hurrying to the chapel; the dead in life, at this untimely hour, were already beginning the uncomforted labours of their day. The dead of life--there was a chill reflection. And the words of a French song came back into my memory, telling of the best of our mixed existence:

“Que t’as de belles filles,
Giroflé!
Girofla!
Que t’as de belles filles,
_L’Amour les comptera_:”

And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.

Robert Louis Stevenson, _Travels with a Donkey_.
By permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the
authorized publishers.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVES OF TRAVEL

The editors have found these additional selections very useful in teaching the writing of travel narratives and sketches:

Brooks, Charles S. _I Ungum the Scholar’s Whiskers_, from _A Thread
of English Road_. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Gerould, Katharine Fullerton. _Our Northwestern States_, in
_Harper’s Magazine_, March 1925; _Reno_, in _Harper’s Magazine_,
June 1925.

Hall, James Norman. _An Autumn Sojourn in Iceland_, in _Harper’s
Magazine_, January 1924; _The Narrative of a Journey_, in _Harper’s
Magazine_, December 1923.

Morley, Christopher. _Travels in Philadelphia_. David McKay Company.

Pratt, Alice D. _The Round-Up_, from _The Homesteader’s Portfolio_.
The Macmillan Company.