“Fran! Have you any idea how serious this business is?”
“Well, rather more than you have, perhaps!”
“I doubt it! Fran, you’ll either marry him or cut him out, absolutely and completely.”
“My dear Samuel, he might have something to say about that! He’s not one of your meek Revelation secretaries. And I won’t be bullied!”
“Yes, you will! For the first time! God knows you’re getting off easy. Oh, I’m not the kind that would grab a shotgun and start off to get you and your lover—”
“Well, I should hope not!”
“Don’t be so sure! I could turn that way, if you just went on long enough! No, I’m not that kind, especially. But, by God, I’m still less of the complaisant husband who’s going to sit around and watch his wife entertain her lover, as you’ve planned to, this fall—”
“I haven’t admitted that I plan to do any—”
“You’ve admitted it and more! Now you’ll either come away and travel with me, and chuck this fellow and forget him, or I’ll divorce you—for adultery!”
“Ridiculous!”
“Worse than that! Horrible! You can imagine how Brent and Emily will feel!”
Very slowly: “Sam, I never till this moment suspected that—I knew you were stupid and heavy and slow and fond of vulgar people, but I never knew you were simply a bullying rotten cad! No one has ever spoken so to me in all my life!”
“I know it. I’ve baby’d you. You regard yourself, young woman, as the modern American, with fancy European improvements. But I’m a lot more modern than you are. I’m a builder. I don’t have to depend on any title or clothes or social class or anything else to be distinctive. And you’ve never seen it! You’ve just lambasted me because I am slow and clumsy, till you’ve stolen every bit of self-confidence I have. You’ve been the traitor to me in my own home. Criticizing! Not nagging, but just enjoying yourself by being so sweet and superior to me and humbling me. That was worse than your affair with this Israel.”
“Oh, I haven’t done that! Oh, I didn’t mean to! I respect you so!”
“Do you respect me when you want me to sit around and be valet to your lover!”
“Oh no, no, no, I—Oh, I can’t think clearly. I’m all confused. I—Yes, if you want, we’ll leave for Spain tomorrow.”
They did.
XXI
Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative. Actually, it is one of the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globetrotting for special purposes, it merely provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance. The great traveler of the novelists is tall and hawk-nosed, speaking nine languages, annoying all right-thinking persons by constantly showing drawing-room manners. He has “been everywhere and done everything.” He has shot lions in Siberia and gophers in Minnesota, and played tennis with the King at Stockholm. He can give you a delightful evening discoursing on Tut’s tomb and the ethnology of the Maoris.
Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily. He knows all the facts about nineteen countries, except the home-lives, wage-scales, exports, religions, politics, agriculture, history and languages of those countries. He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all. Four hundred pictures all on a wall are four hundred times less interesting than one picture; and no one knows a café till he has gone there often enough to know the names of the waiters.
These are the laws of travel.
If travel were so inspiring and informing a business as the new mode of round-the-world-tour advertisements eloquently sets forth, then the wisest men in the world would be deck hands on tramp steamers, Pullman porters, and Mormon missionaries.
It is the awful toil which is the most distressing phase of travel. If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.
Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives—only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work crossword puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.
These things the Dodsworths discovered, though, like most of the world, they never admitted them.
More than cathedrals or castles, more even than waiters, Sam remembered the Americans he met along the way. Writers speak confidently, usually insultingly, of an animal called “the typical American traveling abroad.” One might as well speak of “a typical human being.” The Americans whom Sam encountered ranged from Bostonian Rhodes scholars to Arkansas farmers, from Riviera tennis players to fertilizer salesmen.
There were Mr. and Mrs. Meece from Ottumwa, Iowa, at a palm-smothered hotel in Italy. Mr. Meece had been a druggist for forty-six years, and his wife looked like two apples set one on top the other. They plodded at sightseeing all day
