IV
Luggage and the Lady
I write as one pursued through life by the malevolence
of inanimate objects. My singular subjection to things
was never brought so painfully home to me as during
four months in Europe. Of course, my soul had been to
Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I
was taking it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage
for its journey. I chained up my soul and held it
under lock and key while I took counsel with certain
seductive guidebooks. These paternal manuals left no
detail untouched, until there was no fear left for me
of cabs or custom-houses, of money-tables or
time-tables. It was all as simple as bread and milk.
One thing all my guides inveighed against, a
superfluity of baggage; with them I utterly agreed. A
trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign railways:
there stood ready always an army of porters to escort
one's handbags. A lady could travel gayly with a
single change of raiment; after a day's dust and soil,
merely the transformation of a blouse, and behold
a
toilet fit for any table d'hote. Moreover, so
remarkable were foreign laundry facilities that on
tumbling to bed all you had to do was to summon an
obliging maid, deliver, sleep, and on the morrow morn,
behold yourself all crisply washed and ironed. As to
the expense of a trunk and the battalions of porters,
the guidebooks were correct; as to the rest, they lied.
The single blouse theory is all very well if you don't
wear out or tear out by the way; and as to the laundry
fallacy, do I not still see myself roaming the streets
of Antwerp searching vainly for one single
blanchisserie? My conclusion is that one needs
clothes and a right mind about as much on one side of
the Atlantic as on the other.
But I had not reached this conclusion when I bought
my baggage, therefore I limited myself to two
hand-pieces. For the first of these I had not far to
search. It was that frail, slim, dapper thing, a straw
suitcase. It was very light, just how light I was
afterwards to discover, but before embarkation I
regarded it with joy; it seemed to me suitable and
genteel, with its sober gray sides and trim leather
corners. With it I was satisfied, whereas from the
first I felt misgiving about my second article of
impedimenta. There was nothing genteel or ladylike
about this, that was certain,
but perhaps I am not
the first traveler who has yielded to the mendacious
promises of a telescope. It looks as if it would so
obligingly yield to the need either of condensation or
expansion. You may inflate or contract at will, and
it's all the same to the telescope. My telescope was
peculiarly unbeautiful. Its material was a shiny
substance looking like linoleum, called wood fiber, and
having a bright burnt-orange color. Its corners were
strengthened with sheet iron, lacquered black. You
have seen the same in use by rural drummers, but rarely
in a female hand. I don't know why I bought it. It is
part of my quarrel with inanimate objects that they
always exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the shop,
and always excite loathing so soon as they arrive at my
home. In this instance it was both the saleswoman and
the purchase that excited the hypnotism. She was of
that florid, expansive, pompadoured type that always
reduces my mind to feebleness. Moreover, she jumped up
and down on my prospective telescope, bouncing before
my eyes in all her bigness. Now, in my sober senses I
do know that one's primary motive in purchasing a
handbag is not that one may dance upon it; but at that
moment, as I watched her pirouetting as if on a
springboard, I felt that
no piece of luggage was
anything worth unless you could jump upon it. I
bought.
Almost at once that tawny bedemoned box began its
career of naughtiness. The first thing it did on
shipboard was to disappear. It stopped just long
enough to be entered in the agent's book, and then it
leaped down into the hold and hid. I searched; the
purser searched; so did six several stewards and
stewardesses. The stewards searched the staterooms; I
searched the passages; together we searched the hold,
penetrating even the steerage to see if the missing
article were congregating with the motley collection
down there. We were four days out when, in a passage
repeatedly searched, on a ledge near a porthole, behold
my tawny telescope leering at me! My steward was
genuinely superstitious over it. So was I.
It was during my first travels on land that I
discovered that a capacity for being jumped upon, far
from being a recommendation in a piece of luggage, is
distinctly a detraction. I did a great deal of jumping
during three weeks in Scotland. I am sure I shall have
sympathizers when I declare my difficulties in packing
a telescope. In the first place, it is very hard, when
both ends are lying on the floor, supine and gaping, to
distinguish which
is top and which is bottom. It
is only after sad repacking that you discover that
while top will sometimes go over bottom, bottom will
never go over top. Having ascertained which is bottom,
you begin to pack. You soon are even with the edge;
but in a telescope this is nothing. You continue to
pack, up, up into the air, a tremulous mountain of
garments upon which at length you gingerly place top.
Firmly seating yourself at one end, you grasp the
straps that girdle the other, and bravely you seek to
buckle them. Result, while that end of the telescope
on which you are sitting undoubtedly settles under your
weight, from the gaping mouth which you are attempting
to muzzle there is belched forth an array of
petticoats, blouses, collars, postcards. You dismount,
reopen, replace scattered articles, and reseat yourself
on the opposite end. Result, the end which sank under
you before now pops wide, and spouts forth a stream of
Baedekers red as collops. Again you repack all,
replace top. Starting from across the room, with a
running high jump, you aim to land on the very middle
of the thing. Result, the top goes down, it is true,
but from all edges there dips a fringe of garments. In
the privacy of your room, with the assistance of Heaven
and the chambermaid and the Boots,
you may
sometimes contrive to shut a telescope; but I once had
to open and restrap mine, sole and unaided, in the
waiting room of a station. It happened that I had
placed my ticket to London in the toe of one shoe,
placed the shoe in the bottom of the straw suitcase,
locked this, placed the key in the toe of the other
shoe, and placed that in the bottom of my telescope.
Why did I do this? Simply because I had just visited
Melrose Abbey. I frequently suffer from a tendency of
my costume to disruption in moments of stress. At
times of great muscular exertion and mental excitement
my hat tends to take an inebriate lunge, each several
hairpin stands on end, my collar rises rowdyish from
its moorings, impeccable glove fingers gape wantonly.
All these circumstances attended the closing of my
telescope on that occasion. It was immediately after
that I decided upon the necessity of a third piece of
baggage.
I bought it in Edinburgh, on Princes Street, the
wonderful street where you vainly seek to apply
yourself to mundane shopping with Edinburgh Castle ever
filling your vision, standing over there on its craggy
hill, all misty with legend, while a hundred memories
of Mary Queen of Scots come whispering at your ear as
you soberly endeavor to buy gloves. If
my
previous impedimenta had been outrageously American, my
third handbag was Scotch, every inch of him. He was
gentlemanly and distinguished, frank and accommodating.
I have never seen anything like him over here,—shiny
black sides of oilcloth, bound by leather strips,
plentifully studded with tacks, but otherwise strictly
unornamented. But his chief charm was the way he
opened, the whole top flapping easily apart at will,
and afterwards the two sides closing over all as easily
as if his only desire were to please. In capacity he
was unlimited; you could pour into him, on and on, and
always he closed upon his contents smilingly, without
protest.
For a brief space, as I trickled down through
England from cathedral to cathedral, my Scotch
companion was my chiefest comfort, the mere sight of
his black, rising-sunshiny face cheering me as it
looked down upon me from the luggage rack of a
third-class carriage. More and more I came to impose
upon the generosity of his interior, until one day my
confidence in his Scotch integrity was rudely
shattered; for I discovered that the reason he could
hold so much was that he had quietly kicked out his
bottom! He continued to accompany me, it is true, but
thrust from
his high gentlemanly estate, resembling
now rather those bleary, dilapidated Glasgow porters
that greet one's arriving vessel, his frail form, like
theirs, begirt and bandaged in order to support the few
light belongings I now dared to entrust to his
feebleness.
Meanwhile, the strength of my yellow telescope
continued unabated, but so did also its averseness to
accommodating my possessions, which daily, all
unwittingly and unwillingly, increased. My dapper
suitcase had suffered by the way, its neat sides were
bruised and staved in, one leather corner was missing,
another stood up like an attentive ear. It still
smiled, "brave in ragged luck," but its own America
would not have known it. It now appeared that England,
and as it happened, rural Devon, must contribute
another article to my retinue.
Now, ever since I had touched Great Britain, my
unaccustomed eye had been fascinated by a piece of
luggage quite new to me. I mean that most British
thing, the tin trunk. We have nothing like it in
luggage, but we have copied it exactly in cake boxes;
the only difference is that the English original has a
bulge top and a lock and key. In character my British
baggage was much better natured than my American
telescope, but in color it
was much the same,
orange tawny; it had grown very easy for me to spot my
belongings in the miscellany of the luggage van.
These representatives of the American, Scotch, and
English nations followed in my wake from Southampton to
St. Malo, and perhaps their company need never have
been increased on the continent if in Brittany I had
not bought a pair of sabots, life size. Nothing so
unaccommodating as sabots! Seemingly each was big
enough to sleep in, but if I attempted to pack the
inside of one, behold, it would hold nothing at all; it
was built to hold a foot, and if it could n't have a
foot, it would have nothing. In true peasant
insolence, each sabot demanded a whole handbag to
itself, and, once in, refused to accommodate its
substantial bulk to the needs of any of my other
possessions. In much difficulty I managed to get
across France, but once in Paris, especially in view of
certain aristocratic purchases that absolutely refused
to consort with wooden shoes, the need of still a fifth
handpiece was evident.
Paris luggage, like a Paris lady, is built to show
a pleasing exterior. Diversion rather than utility is
its motive. My Paris handbag still preserves its
suggestion of perpetual picnic. It looks as if it were
always just off
for a Sunday in the Bois. It is a
woven wicker thing, exactly like an American
lunch-basket, vastly magnified. The handle must be
grasped from the top, and is not the handy side
appendage of all American grips. I never look at it
without seeing within dozens upon dozens of boiled eggs
and sandwiches. As a matter of fact, it has never held
anything of the sort; rather it carried my new Parisian
costume safely from Paris to New York.
By dint of fast and furious touring through Belgium
I managed not to acquire anything more to pack or to be
packed, but in Holland once again I fell. I was within
a few days of sailing when I visited Alkmaar. There a
tall polyglot young Dutchman showed me through a most
delicious cheese factory. Innocent and round, ruby or
orange, smiled those cheeses down at me from their long
shelves. My guide gave me to eat. Thus it was that
the last thing I bought on the other side was cheeses!
Oh, he assured me, they were perfectly well behaved;
even had they so desired they could not get out of
their strong cases; no more innocent gift to be taken
home to appreciative friends. That Dutchman understood
American credulity better than he did the American
language. Those cheeses did not stay in their cases.
They came out
and performed in all ways after the
manner of cheeses. Now throughout my trip, whatever
inconveniences I might suffer by reason of possessions
acquired, I could never make up my mind to abandon any.
Having bought them, I did not desert my cheeses, but it
became increasingly apparent that they would have to
travel in a home of their own, together with such of my
goods as would not be corrupted by evil communications.
I purchased my last bit of luggage in Rotterdam. It
was a gray canvas bag, in shape like a dachshund
without the appendages. It was capable of as much
lateral expansion as a Marken fisherman. It received
and held the cheeses, but frankly, so that their
contour was clear to the eye. To all appearances I was
taking home a bushel of turnips out of brave little
Holland.
I embarked at Rotterdam, and for ten days sank into
that state of coma to which ocean travel stimulates me.
It was not till we had touched the Hoboken dock that I
became once more acutely alert. I had donned my Paris
traveling dress, had walked through the great shed
until I found my letter X, and then turned about to
wait with the rest for the arrival of my luggage. Then
for the first time realization overwhelmed me. I was
waiting
for my bags,
my bags; those six
disreputable traveling companions would here and now
seek me out and claim my society, right here in
America, with V and W to right of me, Y and Z to left,
my haughty steamer acquaintance, looking on! Over on
the other side one is not known by one's baggage, but
here one is! I had faced many a white continental
porter with nonchalance, but with which one of my
motley collection in my hand could I face the black
Pullman porter of my own country? I cowered with
shame, so slowly they arrived, each several one of the
six, tediously threading its way to X, never losing
itself, never losing me, always hunting me down! The
joy of home-coming was turned to gall. I saw V and W,
Y and Z, turn away their faces. To my eyes each
several hand-piece looked more bizarre than the last.
Which one should I select to accompany me on an
American railroad? Which of the motley crew would
least endanger the respectability of a lady traveling
alone in an American car? Through the crowd my
Parisian lunch-basket came mincing up to me, still
ready for perpetual picnic. Silly chit! I would n't
travel with her. My Rotterdam purchase, bulging and
redolent with cheeses, came waddling up, respectable
perhaps, but with it I should have been as
conspicuous as with one of the Marken imps in copious
trousers that it so much resembled. My former pride of
Scotch travel was now so fallen away that he looked as
if he were in the last stages of his native whiskey,
and as if his physique would hardly have supported the
weight of a hairpin. No help to be had in him! My
American suitcase, in May so trig and debonair, had
been punched and pounded out of all semblance to
anything belonging either to America or a suitcase. My
British cakebox had suffered likewise, and in its
decrepitude supported the loss of a lock, and appeared
to my horrified eyes carefully roped with clothesline
by a friendly steward. Even though I promptly sat down
upon it, spreading my Paris skirt wide, I could not
conceal that yellow cake-box from the fashionable
steamer folk that swarmed about me. Suitcase and tin
trunk both had lost all distinction of nation; they
both belonged now to the international species, tramp.
There remained to me only my evil genius, the
orange-tawny telescope. Foreign labels had but
scantily subdued the natural aggressiveness of his
demeanor. He was possible—perhaps. Then I considered
how he had flouted me, scorned me, spilled out at me,
jeered at me in my helplessness. I pictured opening
and shutting
him in the berth of a sleeping car;
then quietly, inconspicuously, and virulently, I kicked
him.
I fastened the last strap the customs officers had
loosened. Just one moment I hesitated, regarding my
rakish European retinue, then I fell upon the waiting
baggage-agent. "Check them all," I cried, "all!"
Free as a bird, as a gypsy, as an American, I traveled
from New York to Chicago, a lady luggage-less.
