A WIFE ON HER TRAVEL S.—I.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.'1
Bale, August 31, 1867. Sin,—Will you allow a feminine convert to those views so subtly expounded in your issue of the 24th August on the advantages of foreign as compared with English travel, to occupy a few of your columns at this dull season of the year with an account of (I hope) the complete success of an experiment for the trial of which she is indebted to your amusing common sense and epigram- matic illustrations ? I certainly had intended till last Saturday (this day week) to take my husband only to Margate or Rams- gate for a few weeks, which I thought, before your paper appeared, a very much more sensible and economical mode of recruiting for a family not very much burdened with means, than the more expensive one of foreign travel. There would have been further this advantage about the plan,—that I should not have been obliged to leave my little ones, who, though strong enough in health, are but too likely to get into scrapes when my eye is removed. My eldest is a great romp of be- tween nine and ten, whom I cannot cure of the habit of rush- ing out of our back gate fer a frolic on our common, where she is by no means so popular as I could wish, as she is a wild thing with a good deal of mischief in her, and disposed to play tricks to those against whom she takes an aversion. My second is a little trot of four, who has a slight tendency to croup, which, as you know, is a very anxious complaint, and never more dangerous than in the summer. My youngest, Colin, is only three, but full of noise and spirits, and apt to weary out the care of even the kindest of attendants. Still, I know that my first duty is to my husband, and poor Edward, who has, I think, been breaking a little of late, seemed to take the suggestion of Margate with so much resignation and so little sign of enjoyment, that I had been a little uneasy even before I read your impressive paper as to the correctness of my usually sound judgment. Luckily for me, good Mrs. Shrim- paty, whose lodgings I had written to engage, had both her first floor and ground floor engaged, and as we sat at breakfast on that memorable Sunday morning, the 25th August, Edward, I am sorry to say, had to wait for his second cup of tea, while I was absorbed in your opportune paper. Edward's leave was to com- mence the next day, and it certainly grieved me to see him look so limp, as it were, and spiritless at the thought of our sixth visit to Margate ;—he had jaundice there as a child, which he always says was due to the mingled smell of shrimps and Dunn's penny chocolate [" requires no boiling ; one pennyworth will make a breakfast cup of the finest flavour ; as a sweetmeat for children it is wholesome and nutritious "], and I fear he contracted some dislike to the place, which he never expresses, however, in any form but resignation, and now and then a word or two in favour of Dover, which I won't hear of, on account of the dangerous cliffs for our little ones. So, as I poured out his second cup of tea, I said, " What do you say, dear, to going to Switzerland this year, as Mrs. Shrimpaty cannot have us, and leaving the little ones, under our good Hannah's care, at home ? There is your friend W., of the Alpine Club, would tell you where to go, only I won't have you going into dangerous places, and falling into crevasses, or down precipices, or anything of that sort. What do you say?" Then, Sir, I saw the real weight of your argument. Poor Edward, who had been looking as if the change from Wandsworth to Margate were something like the change from cold mutton to water gruel, immediately brightened up, and was, indeed, transfigured for the moment into his old self. He suggested faintly, " Do you think, dear, you could boar to leave the little ones for five weeks?" To which I returned a manful rather than a strictly true answer (for at that moment the Swiss abysses, glaciers, and crevasses seemed to be swallowing me up from my little ones, and I was, as Mr. Carlyle says, " shooting Niagara " with a very dubious feeling indeed as to that suggestive "and after ?" of his). Then Edward began dis- cussing possible routes so eagerly that I felt sure, Sir, your remarks were full of truth and wisdom, at least for the male sex. I can't say that even yet I am a convert on my own account. But men are curious, fanciful creatures, and require a good deal of study and management, and I am convinced women would understand them better than they do, if they would read more of what they say for themselves in the newspapers when they are quite unembarrassed by domestic considerations.
However, Sir, I have given you preface enough. My object is to verify your remarkable exposition by showing in detail what it has been that has seemed to freshen poor Edward up so much, so I will not tell you of my many injunctions to Hannah, my bitter part- ing with the little ones, our mulligatawny soup at Charing Cross, or of our rapid journey to Folkestone, but will begin with our touch- ing foreign soil. Poor Edward, who has really been anything but himself for weeks, had rather relapsed after the first stimulus of settling a Continental journey, and he met a friend in the railway to Folkestone who would talk to him of Administrative Reform, just what the head of his department is always boring him with when- ever he sends for Edward to verify a doubtful item in the accounts. So administrative reform made my husband look duller than ever. But he had scarcely touched shore when he began snuffing, and said, " Ah! this is delightful ; there is that close, perfumed scent again which one almost always smells in foreign cities, and never in England. I wonder do they spice the streets ?" I said I per- ceived it, but did not much like it. "No more do I," he replied, " in itself. But it's very delightful, for all that." Then, as we went to the railway, we saw two little dumpy French girls, with blue shawls over their white jackets, and nothing particular on their heads—such figures !—trotting on before us into one of the Boulogne shops, where they appeared to reside. Edward was en- chanted. " What grotesque little figures !" he said. Grotesque they were, indeed, as grotesque as gargoyles, and there was an end of the matter. But Edward was already beginning to verify that remarkable saying of yours, that it is something if you only have " the gutters in a different place." His walk, latterly so listless, began to resume its old jerky movement. I pressed for the source of his pleasure iu everything foreign, for I was deter-
mined to verify your philosophy as well as your result, if I could, and must have said, 1 suppose, in something like Wordsworth's
words,—
"There surely must some reason be Why you would change sweet Liswyn farm For Kilve by the green sea,"
—for he was as obstinate as little Edward Wordsworth, and would only reply with a laughing reference to these lines, which I had for- gotten, accompanied by a sort of elderly caper, by parodying,—
" At Kilve there was no weathercock,— And that's the reason why," At home there were no perfumed streets,— And that's the reason why.
1 could see he was already drinking in a tonic that I fear shrimps and Margate jetty would have failed to give. So I sighed a deep inward wish that Hannah might not be letting the little ones go to bed in a draught that hot evening, and declared to myself that
after all I had done right. When they brought us a fowl and via ordinaire, and salt without salt spoons, in the Boulogne restaura- tion, before the train left for Paris, Edward was gayer and more dogmatic than I had seen him for months. I had provided myself with private salt, for the only time I was ever abroad before, when I went with my dear sister Sophy and Mamma to Prague and Dresden, a year before I was married, neither Sophy nor I could eat our dinners for the horrid spectacle of salt in a state of complete liquefaction,—the liquefaction being due to the moisture on scores of knives plunged into it by voracious Germans, after reiterated previous immersion in that natural cavity which they call their Mund. (E. says Mund, from immundus, like laces a non lucendo, at which an Englishman near laughed very much, but I had to have it explained to me.) Edward was not sorry for my private salt, but said his " heart bounded " at the sight of the nasty public stuff, at which expression your great " gutter " illustration came back to me very forcibly indeed.
However, I must not linger so much, or how shall I ever get you to Bile, which is, they tell me, at least five hundred miles from my little darlings, and nearly five days in time from our start? Neither of us had ever been in Paris, ttnd even I was as pleased as Edward at the pretty shops in the Rue Rivoli, at the plea- sant, neat, dressy air of all the shopwomen, at the vivacity of every face we met, at the gay Tuileries gardens, with the bright tubs of
orange trees and splendid gladioles—we saw an old priest there enjoying like a child the spectacle of a bird-enchanter who called sparrows and pigeons round him in flocks at will, and made them perch on his finger; and the old priest smiled at us, and we smiled at the old priest, and we felt quite happy together—at the Parisians eating their breakfasts and drinking their coffee in the streets out- side the shop doors, at the brilliant jewellers' shops and dear little brooches, some of them like little daisies, costing only a franc, and in as good taste as if they were worth a guinea, and at the sweetest little embroidered neck ribbons you ever saw, some of the prettiest only a couple of francs each, which I thought old Lady Waldegrave might have very gracefully distributed to her Cumberland girls after that lecture of hers on cheap finery, on which you commented so admirably a few weeks ago. Why, such a neck ribbon, with the daisy brooch I have spoken of, would be a pretty ornament for a princess, and not an ambitious or vulgar one for a village girl. In fact, we were delighted with everything in Paris except the Exhibition, which as far as it was good we did not understand, and as far as we understood it—the showy, glaring, amusing part—was as vulgar and as unlike Paris as anything could be. I can't say that our country- men in Paris were a pleasing spectacle, though they were nevertheless really entertaining now and then. I overheard two who had just arrived in Paris discussing how many meals they had had since leaving England, and their merits. The triumph of one of them over his companion for not having lunched in Amiens, where the peas, he said, had been very fine, was almost insolent ; and the mixture of regret, and self-respect, and the air of having deserved success, though without achieving it, with which the other old gentleman replied that he was not hungry at Amiens, and had therefore " only " eaten a piece of sweet cake without wanting it, and could do no more, was quite a new study in modest self-assertion. My husband said that even his country- men were new to him ; seen thus, in the midst of another nation, they were as different as a mounted painting from the same painting before it is mounted ; or, he said, raising his image, they stood out in strong relief " against the brighter sky of foreign
manners," which I thought was doing a little more than justice to foreign manners ; but I knew it must be due to the champagne of thorough change working in these mercurial men's heads.
From Paris we came to Bale in one day, and, tame as was the scenery to that which we hope to see, I remember nothing more lovely in its way than the pretty valley of Bar sur Aube, and the winding little green Aube, which we passed about the middle of our journey, in the very heart of France. But Edward said it was just like one of the green streams in Wales, and he cared more for the quaint little towns and new manners. At Vesoul we were offered one of those " hat [hot] meals " in bad English and conical baskets to which one of your correspondents has recently referred, and which are described in llfugby Junction, but, as far as I can hear, Vesoul is nearly the only railway station on the Conti- nent which has reached this stage of civilization. I was quite sorry I was not hungry enough for dinner, for I saw afterwards that Edward had evidently longed both physically and morally for this new species of refreshment, and when a bashful German who had ordered one, and supposed that so much as one basket contained must be meant for division amongst us all, requested us to fall to, the disappointment with which my husband replied that the whole wicker cone was intended for the German's own private and particu- lar consumption was quite moving. There were four courses, fish, fowl, chop, and dessert, with a bottle of wine, and a bottle of water, and all for three francs. The delighted diner called his feast " ganz erhaben," " quite sublime," and E., who had been watching him voraciously through the dwindling pile, turned to me and, point- ing out three old washerwomen who were beating the clothes of their district with atones in the stream that ran by the railway, began moralizing on the curious contrast of the two extremes of civilization,—the savage want of ingenuity which beats soft linen with stones, and the elevated thought which invented for hun- gry railway passengers those elegant wickerworks of grateful viands, and which uses the telegraph to get as many of these pyramids of nutrition prepared for the train's arrival as there are passengers with appetites equal to the occasion. Before we got to Bale even I was sorry that we had not had a "hat meal " between Vesoul and Lure. But appetite will never consent to forecast its wants. Here we are at last, with the great Rhine racing past our windows with the force of a torrent, and the lights of the hotels flashing in its broad waters, in the very place where that shilly- shally Alice Vavasour first fell away from her allegiance to John Gray, and induced Mr. Trollope to ask us all whether we could forgive her. Stuff and nonsense about forgiving ! But why didn't the tiresome thing know her own mind ?
You will never print my letters, even in September, if I ran on like this, and as I wish to give a lesson to wives, I must atop for the present. I suppose it wouldn't be a pleasant change to you to spend Sunday at Wandsworth with my little ones, and tell me how Hannah manages. (My lock of Colin's hair is already, as Lord Houghton beautifully observes, "blistered by repeated tears ;" but that won't move you.) I wish the whim might take you, as then I should be not only an admiring reader, but doubly grateful,— grateful in a second capacity, as well as in that of,— A WIFE ON HER TRAVELS.
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