tramping
tramping
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
FOREIGNERS
“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”
“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”
“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”
“You are not taking up with a dirty foreigner?”
“He’s quite a decent fellow, though he is a foreigner.
Why do you say ‘dirty foreigner’?”
“All foreigners are dirty foreigners.”
TO the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though, of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.”
“He is English?” I have heard it asked. “He’s one of these people who think they ownthe earth?” And all too often in Europe one hears of “vulgar Americans.”
Despite the grand international ideas of this and of preceding ages, it is just as difficult for foreigners to get on together and esteem one another and understand one another. This becomes very clear upon reading modern works of travel, and perhaps clearer still upon listening to the personal adventures of people who have been traveling unconventionally in foreign lands. What is strange to us is comic, it strikes us as a burlesque; if it irks us we think it distasteful, even wrong. We take the foreigner to task for not behaving “like a perfect gentleman,” etc.
It is largely a matter of bad manners. If manners could be improved we should more easily get into sympathy with “foreigners”; if they could be perfected there would not be any foreigners.
The language difficulty is enormous. Even if we learn to speak a foreign tongue, we are liable to make mistakes and to have a queer accent. We are at least as bad as those foreigners who come to us and say “Englishas she is spoke.” Mistakes in language are almost always very malapropos.Beaucoupis “much” in France, but ill-pronounced it means “little” in Italian (poco). The word for Thursday in Serbian is slang for sixpence in Russian. An American lady wishing to ingratiate herself with some Germans said she felt as if in Paradise; but the word paradise in German means tomato, and her friends stared at her. An acquaintance of mine, not speaking French very well, was dancing on a Paris boulevard with somemidinettes. Feeling rather tired he went up to one of them and whispered in her ear, “Ma chère danseuse, je suis en couchant” so that he seemed to imply a confession that he was a pig. Two Russian Bolsheviks in London were fumbling for a doorkey outside a house at midnight. A policeman came up and asked them what they were doing.
“I have forged a key,” one of them replied. The bobby, however, looked at them indulgently. “Forgot, you mean,” said he emphatically.
But difficulties of this kind are not confinedto foreign wanderings. You can experience them at home, in Scotland, for example, or on the burring border, or even in Yorkshire. I was tramping across Yorkshire one summer, and I realized how outlandish my English sounded. They speak a different language up there. I had to make every one repeat everything twice. They frequently mistook what I said. They made me say it twice also. They reckoned I did not come from these parts.
I went into an inn one night and asked for a room.
The landlady, an elderly dame with a huge red face, asked me if I meant a room.
I said “Yes.” She said, “Ted, this gentleman wants a room.”
“All right,” he exclaimed, “in a minute.”
“Mine will be my usual drop o’ Scotch,” said an old fellow, nudging me as he went past.
I sat down in the bar parlor.
Presently the young man came and inquired if I’d like water in my room.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I answered patiently.
Then, in a few minutes, the young man Ted came in, mixing as it seemed to me a cocktail—orwhat might pass for a cocktail in Yorkshire. He stood in front of me, wineglass in hand, and poured a clear liquid on to a brown one, cautiously and professionally.
“Tell me when to stop,” he said.
“That’s not for me?” I queried. And I wondered if it was perhaps a custom to bring guests an unsolicited cocktail as a ritual of welcome. Yorkshire has its festive ways.
But the boy stopped stirring and pouring, and looked at me.
“It must have been somebody else,” he remarked, and turned to the red-faced landlady.
She faced me. “Yes,” she said hoarsely, “you ordered the room.”
Then the truth dawned on me.
“I asked for a room,” said I.
“Well, here it is,” said the young man.
“Not a rum, but a room! Room! Room!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, room,” said the landlady.
“A room for the night, a lodging,” I explained.
“Oh, a bed,” said she, with a chagrined face. “We have no beds. No, no beds,” and I couldsee her thinking the matter over in her mind, the difference between room and rum. She watched to see if I would drink what had been put before me.
But rum is not my drink, especially after a day’s tramp. I shouldered my knapsack and pushed out of the inn under the disdainful gaze of the red-faced landlady and the stare of the man who was sipping his drop of Scotch.
They say the better educated people of Edinburgh speak the best English in Great Britain, and I certainly can use my own tongue fairly well. But judge my amazement when I first went to America, and was told I did not speak English. I was tramping to Chicago, and men on the road would say to me, “Say, you haven’t been over here long. You speak the language broken.”
Prejudices are bred over the difference of saying the word “well” with the lips and “well” with the throat. Even a national laugh can be aggravating. “Haw, haw, there’s a merry laugh for you,” says the American in “So This is London,” “haw-haw—the marmalade hounds.”
Incidentally, that sentence from a clever play points to the other great cause of irritating difference in ways. The Americans do not take marmalade for breakfast. We do. It is almost a source of international misunderstanding.
“The English have such bad table manners,” I used to hear said in Moscow. And yet you should see Ivanovitch with his soup. We are too greedy at table. We accept second and third helpings, only intended to be offered, not intended to be taken. We do not know how to make a glass of tea and a saucer of jam last fifty minutes. We eye the samovar when we want more tea. We do not kiss our hostess’s hand after the repast. Americans eat with their hats on, but with their coats off. Russians smoke cigarettes between courses. Frenchmen take large towels into their collars, and pick their teeth with toothpicks while they talk. All very disgusting. Almost every variation in ways of eating is distasteful.
The tramp, the wanderer in strange lands, should at least get over this. I am sure OliverGoldsmith and George Borrow, two delightful wanderers, never fell foul of any one for lack of speech or eating wrongly. They knew how to counteract the effect of their own foreignness, and how to accept and enjoy differences in others.
But unless the tramp intends to shun men and women altogether he has to face the problem of liking his fellow man, however unlike to himself. It is part of the art of tramping to know how to meet your fellow man, how to greet him, how to know him.
You get a companion who calmly tells you he intends to “pick your brains” during the tramp. That is very well, though the expression seems not too kind. It is easier to say “I intend to get to know you during our wanderings together”—though there, of course, the intention is towards something very difficult. It takes a long time to know a man. You may “pick his brains” in half an hour and not get to know him in a lifetime. It is mawkish for a man to talk of love, except in love, but it needs a loving heart to know any one really well.
The man you tramp with is not a foreigner, albeit foreign enough in himself, as you may discover before you discover he is kindred. You are thrown into intimate contact with him. Even if the two of you are a couple of egoists strongly self-centered, something is bound to get across in a long tramp. That is one reason why tramping is such a healthful spiritual experience. The too-too-solid flesh does melt a little, the too-too-solid heart does warm somewhat toward an outsider.
But the chance-met is much more difficult to meet, to greet, to understand. Of course, more difficult for some than for others. There are genial sympathetic souls who have an aptitude for taking a stranger at once to the heart. They are bright-eyed people, friendly at once and friendly for a long while. I have a prejudice in their favor—but, alas, there are not very many of them. The warmest thing in the world is human affection; it is the most covetable, and it is the sweetest thing to give. And it is also the saddest thing to have refused. I believe the affectionate people take the mostblows in life. But also they get the greater rewards.
Still, there is shyness, timidity, stand-offishness, which commonly mask the souls of very friendly people. It is difficult to rid oneself of these defective qualities. Much travel frequently does it, and much tramping will do it also. Tramping simplifies out many of our foibles. It makes the artificial people more natural. I have seen a man afraid almost of his own shadow in town become a bold and smiling boy upon the road, not afraid to meet any one and hold frank converse with him.
Chance meetings may greatly enrich human experience, especially in a foreign country where one has so much to learn of the ways of one’s fellow man. I have found by personal experience that one of the quickest ways in which to learn the life of a people is by tramping among them.
The commonest way of attempting to make a study of a new nation is to arrive at the capital city with a wallet full of introductions to notable people. You stay at the best hotel, call at the Embassy, make friends with one ofthe secretaries, dine with him and learn his prejudices, go on the morrow to a friend of his, who will tell you “all you need to know.” Then you may use your introductions, checking off what the native notabilities say about their country by what you have already heard.
The visitor of this type does get impressions. That is undoubted. He feels that he is getting to know the new country very pleasantly, and yet, when his visit is over and he returns home, if he is frank with himself he must confess that he has very little real knowledge of the people. He is obliged to say—Well, I was only there for six weeks; I cannot pretend that I know much about it. But sixty weeks of that sort of thing would make little difference.
On the other hand, six weeks tramping gives you unforgettable impressions of reality. You have the great advantage of facing society from the outside of its classes. You are at the bottom of the social system and have the freedom from pride which such a position implies.
’Tis pride that pulls the country downThen take thy auld cloak about thee.
’Tis pride that pulls the country downThen take thy auld cloak about thee.
’Tis pride that pulls the country downThen take thy auld cloak about thee.
’Tis pride that pulls the country down
Then take thy auld cloak about thee.
You do not need to put on airs, put on side, ape pompous acquaintances, simper, trim, bowdlerize, change clothes according to time of day, polish finger nails and balance cake, give the expected smile after futile remark, avoid contradiction, or read up the secrets of bon ton at night.
As you come along the road at any time of day everything about you says, “Here I am, the tramp; take me as I am or not at all.” The Church covers the friar so that he is immune from pride and taunt, fashion and convention. He cannot be reproached; for his garments are a token that he is bearing the reproach of Christ. And Nature covers the tramp in a similar way. He has the chance to feel and be at home in any place in the world, under any circumstances and with any people. You are never ill-dressed in the King’s uniform; you are never ill-dressed in the tramp’s.
Such stability is great gain, and frees the mind from care and fear of appearances. You can with a gay heart plunge into converse with the heir to the kingdom if he comes your way,and he will almost infallibly say after his long revealing talk with you: “Ah, I wish I were you!” You cause kings to envy you, but even peasants, who can be prouder and stiffer than kings, will feel at home with you. You must also be at home with them. You learn their accent, their special peasant version of life, their stories, their songs. Quite by accident you seem to get inside the real life of a nation and you belong to it for the time. “It is always worth while talking to a clever man,” says a character in Dostoyevsky. It is always worth while talking to a stranger.