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Page 33
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 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.
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 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 caf�s, 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 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.
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