Liz and Nellie

by Shonna Slayton

  Before his words were translated to me, I understood that on this map he had, with a blue pencil, traced out the course of his hero, Phileas Fogg, before he started him in fiction to travel around the world in eighty days. With a pencil he marked on the map, as we grouped about him, the places where my line of travel differed from that of Phileas Fogg.

  “How wonderful,” I murmured. This pleased me more than anything else. To think Jules Verne was plotting my trip on his map. It gave me courage to know that the author has drawn it down and thus, creatively at least, has made it so.

  Down in the room where we had been before, we found wine and biscuits on the little table, and M. Jules Verne explained that, contrary to his regular rules, he intended to take a glass of wine, that we might have the pleasure of drinking together to the success of my strange undertaking.

  We clinked our glasses and they wished me Godspeed.

  "If you do it in seventy-nine days, I shall applaud with both hands," Jules Verne said, and then I knew he doubted the possibility of my doing it in seventy-five, as I had promised.

  In compliment to me, he endeavored to speak to me in English, and did succeed in saying, as his glass tipped mine, something close to: “Good luck, Nellie Bly.”

  10

  In Which Elizabeth Bisland Suffers From Seasickness

  THE PACIFIC OCEAN is a foaming flood of emerald that roars past my porthole, making a dull green twilight within. I see only this and the slats of the upper berth as I lie paralyzed with seasickness.

  There are six of these slats. Of this I am unwaveringly sure – though I am not usually accurate about figures – because I counted them several thousand times.

  Every plank in the ship creaks and groans and shrieks without once pausing to take breath. I lie on my berth watching my most treasured possessions toboggan around the room.

  What are the fleeting things of this world to one whose suffering death must soon put a period? My last will and testament is already made, which is comforting. But I hate the idea of burial at sea. It is such an unnecessarily tragic end to this ridiculous wild-goose chase.

  11

  In Which Nellie Bly Says Goodbye To Her Correspondent And Wishes To Be Attacked By Bandits

  THE DRIVER HAD been told to make the best speed back to the station, but here we were rolling along without concern. I stared anxiously out the window at the slowly passing scenery, faintly lit by the gas lights.

  “I feel as if we are out for a Sunday stroll,” I complained to my correspondent – and continued to complain until Mr. Greaves finally said something to the unhurried coachman, who picked up the pace. We reached the station in plenty of time before the train, and I ignored the pointed looks Mr. Greaves gave me. I was too tired to try to please everyone.

  Apparently, the train which was to carry us to Calais was the pride of France. It was called the Club train and was similar to the new vestibule trains in America, which meant you could walk comfortably from car to car without risking life and limb trying to cross an open platform while soot rained down from above.

  When Mr. Greaves went to check on the time (or get a breath away from me), I turned to the closest gentleman and asked, “Why is it called a Club train?” I was uncomfortable with the idea of traveling with some men’s club even though I was going a short distance.

  He shook his head and cleared his throat. “I don’t know,” he finally answered in English. “But it is the finest equipped train in Europe.”

  After we boarded, I noticed the car in which we sat contained some women, which put me at ease, but it was liberally filled with male passengers. Shortly after we left Amiens, a porter made an announcement I was eager to hear.

  “Dinner is being served in the dining car.”

  Everybody filed forward into a front car. There must have been two dining cars because despite the seating arranged around tables, there was enough room for us all. After we had our cheese and salad, we returned to our drawing room car, where we were served with coffee, the men having the privilege of smoking along with it.

  My correspondent raised his eyebrows, wondering my opinion, since I had shown him my low thoughts about English trains.

  “I am pleased,” I gave him. “This is an improvement over our own system and quite worthy of adoption.”

  There. I would leave him with an impression of my gracious nature.

  At Calais, we found I had two hours and more to spend in waiting. The train I intended to take for Brindisi, Italy was a weekly mail train that ran to accommodate the mails and not the passengers. It starts from London at eight o’clock Friday evening of each week. The rule is that the person desiring to travel on it must buy their tickets twenty-four hours in advance of the time of its departure. The mail and passengers are carried across the channel, and the train leaves Calais at 1:30 in the morning.

  “Well, let’s take a look around,” I said to Mr. Greaves, not wanting to spend the time staring at my shoes. His duty to me was over as soon as he placed me on that train, and I wondered if he was as eager to be rid of me as I was of him. If I were to travel the world as a lone single woman, I needed to lose my tiresome escort.

  We walked along the near-empty pier and looked at the lighthouse rising thin and white out of the water.

  A heavily bearded man, one of the few people awake at this hour, noticed us looking at his building and opened a conversation. “This is one of the most perfect in the world,” he boasted in excellent English. “It can throw its light farther away than any other.”

  Indeed, the revolving light threw out long rays that seemed so little above our heads, but lit up the sky.

  “Do the people of Calais ever see the moon or stars?” I mused.

  He merely laughed, and we moved on.

  We waited in a restaurant until the announcement came that the boat from England had arrived. The be-bundled and be-baggaged passengers came ashore and boarded the train, which was waiting alongside.

  One thousand bags of mail were quickly transferred to the train, and then I bade my correspondent goodbye at last. I sped away from Calais, alone once again.

  There was but one passenger coach on this train, a Pullman Palace sleeping car with accommodation for twenty-two passengers, one reserved for the guard. When I entered my stateroom at the extreme end of the car, I found it occupied by a pretty English girl with the rosiest cheeks and the greatest wealth of golden-brown hair I ever saw.

  “Oh, hello,” she said in her smart English accent.

  I smiled back to be friendly, but was so tired I hoped she wouldn’t be expecting to stay up late getting to know one another.

  “I’m Rose. My father and I are going to Egypt for the rest of winter and the spring time. He is an invalid and feels better when we get out of the damp weather. And what about you?” she asked as she began to arrange her bed to her liking.

  “Going to Brindisi,” I answered shortly. I didn’t want to open the Pandora’s Box of my entire trip. Perhaps at the proper time in the morning we could go over it all. Thankfully, she seemed to sense my mood and doused the light.

  When I woke to the gentle rocking of the train, the room was empty. Hopefully the girl hadn’t run to the porter wondering if I were dead like they teased me on the Augusta. Truly, didn’t anyone else enjoy a good sleeping-in? Hoping I wasn’t the last one to wake, I left so the porter could make up our stateroom.

  I was surprised at the strange appearance of the interior of the car. All the head and foot boards were left in place, with the bed portions tucked away to allow for day seating. This gave the impression that the coach was divided into a series of small boxes.

  As I walked down the car looking into these “boxes,” I found them all occupied by unsocial-looking men. Some of them were drinking, some playing cards, and all were smoking until the air was stifling.

  When I reached the middle of the car, my little English roommate, who was sitting with her father, saw me.

  “Miss Bly!” she moved over. �
��Please, sit with us.”

  She introduced me to her father, a cultured, broad-minded man, who, it turned out, had a wonderful sense of humor.

  “You must be the one who is going around the world,” he started out.

  “I tried to tell him you were only going to Italy,” the girl broke in.

  “Last night, that was as far as I could think,” I said, which made them laugh.

  “You did sleep in quite a long time,” she said, wide-eyed, but with a smile.

  “I am determined, in an undertaking such as this, to get as much sleep as I can and as much food as I can, when I can.”

  The father nodded at my wisdom. “We have some time to spend now,” he said. “Would you tell us about your adventure thus far?” At this, he broke off into a racking cough that shook his thin frame as though he had the ague.

  Once he had caught a breath, I determined to entertain them with my travels across the sea. When another racking cough hit, I stared determinately at any smoking man who would meet my eye. I never object to cigar smoke when there is some little ventilation, but when it gets so thick that one feels as if it is molasses instead of air that one is inhaling, then I mildly protest.

  I wondered what would happen in America, the land of boasted freedom, if a car was thus filled with smoke. But then I concluded it was due to freedom that we do not suffer from such things. Women travelers in America command as much consideration as men.

  “Father,” the little English-girl said in a clear, musical voice, “the vicar sent you his prayer book just before our departure, and I put it in your bag.” She took out a rather bulky book and hugged it to her chest.

  “Did you pick out the largest one you could find?”

  Her expression formed into a hard, determined light.

  “My daughter is very thoughtful,” he said to me, then, turning to her, he added with a smile in his eye, “Please take the first opportunity to return the prayer book to the vicar, and tell him, with my compliments, that he might have saved himself that trouble; that I was grieved to deprive him of his book for so long.”

  The young girl’s face settled into a look that spoke disapproval of her father’s words and a determination not to return the prayer book.

  Their discussion was interrupted when the conductor, or the “guard,” as they called him, served our mid-day meal. The father explained that the train picked up food while stopped for coal or water, but that in the evening a dining car would be attached to the train for us.

  “Won’t that be nice?” I commented, remembering my meal in the dining car coming out of Amiens.

  He shook his head. “It’s not the thing for women to eat in a public car with men. You two will be served in your state room.”

  That seemed hardly fair, but I supposed if I waited for a fully-equipped passenger train to take me where I needed to go, I would never beat Phileas Fogg. This was a minor inconvenience, though it did nothing to improve my opinion of this portion of my trip.

  In the course of the afternoon, we passed some high and picturesque mountains covered with a white frost, though I might have seen more of France if the car windows had been clean. From their appearance, I judged that they had never been washed. One would think that with the extra insulation of dirt, the cold couldn’t get in, but I found that, even wearing my Ulster and wrapped in a rug, I was none too warm.

  My little roommate helped me pass the time trying to implant the seeds of her faith in my mind, and I listened, thinking from her words that if she was not the original Catherine Eslmere, she at least could not be more like that interesting character.

  In everything else, she was the sweetest, most gentle girl I ever met, but her religion was of the hard, uncompromising kind that condemns everything, forgives nothing, and swears the heathen is forever damned because he was not born to know the religion of her belief.

  About eight o’clock in the morning, we reached Modena. The baggage was examined there, and all the passengers were notified in advance to be prepared to get out and unlock the boxes that belonged to them.

  “Miss Bly, are you certain you have no more than your handbag?” the conductor asked me for the third time.

  “Yes, quite certain. I packed it myself.” I needed to keep track how many men were flabbergasted with my lack of luggage on this trip. Was it really that hard to believe a woman could travel with less than a complete suite of bags?

  “If any boxes are found unlocked, with no owner to open them, they will be detained by custom inspectors.” He gave me a serious look.

  “I can show them my handbag. It is quite unlocked.”

  He waved his hands to indicate no need. “No one will bother to inspect your handbag.”

  Half an hour later, we were in Italy.

  I was anxiously waiting to see that balmy, sunny land, but though I pressed my face close to the frosty window pane, bleak night denied me even one glimpse of sunny Italy and its dusky people. I went to bed early.

  It was so very cold that I could not keep warm out of bed, and I cannot say that I got much warmer in bed. The berths were provided with only one blanket each. It was as bad an economy as at the madhouse, where the patients were refused warm clothing to save expenses, and only given one blanket. Were it not for my newspaper articles exposing the horrors, those women would still be teeth-chattering, sitting on those cold chairs all the day long.

  I piled all my clothing on the berth and spent half the night lying awake.

  “The passengers last week were more fortunate than us on this stretch,” I complained in the dark to my little roommate.

  “The ones who were attacked by bandits?” she exclaimed. “How could you say such a thing?”

  “If they felt the scarcity of blankets as we do, they at least had some excitement to make their blood circulate.”

  She laughed, and that was the last I heard from her until morning.

  When I got awake, I hastily threw up the window shade and eagerly looked out. I fell back in surprise, wondering, if for once in my life I had made a mistake and woken up early.

  I could not see any more than I had the night before on account of a heavy gray fog that completely hid everything more than a yard away.

  Looking at my watch, I found that it was ten o’clock, so I dressed with some haste, determined to find the guard and demand an explanation of him. At this rate, I would go around the world and yet see nothing of it!

  “It is a most extraordinary thing,” he said to me, “I never saw such a fog in Italy before.”

  All day I traveled through Italy – “sunny Italy” along the Adriatic Sea. The fog still hung a heavy cloud over the earth, and only once did I get a glimpse of the land I had heard so much about. It was evening, just at the hour of sunset, when we stopped at some station.

  I went out on the platform, and the fog seemed to lift for an instant. On one side was a beautiful beach. Its bay was dotted with boats bearing oddly-shaped sails of red, yellow, green, which somehow looked to me like mammoth butterflies dipping, dipping about in search of honey. Most of the sails were red, and as the sun kissed them with renewed warmth, the sails looked as if they were composed of brilliant fire.

  I sighed contentedly. Now that was what I was expecting of Italy.

  A high rugged mountain was on the other side of the train, and I became dizzy looking up at the white buildings perched on the perpendicular side. The road that went in a winding line up the hill had been built with a stone wall on the oceanside; as adventurous as I was, I would not care to travel up it.

  To top off everything, we arrived at Brindisi two hours late.

  12

  In Which Nellie Bly Becomes In Danger Of Missing Her Ship

  WHEN THE TRAIN stopped in Brindisi, our car was surrounded with men wanting to carry us as well as our baggage to the boats. Their making no mention of hotels led me to wonder if people always passed through Brindisi without stopping. All these men spoke English very well, but the guard intervened and cor
ralled the women together.

  “I will get one omnibus and escort the two English women, the invalid man and his daughter, and Miss Bly to their boats,” he said. “I will see to it that you are not charged more than the right fare.”

  We drove first to the boat bound for Alexandria. My roommate hugged me goodbye, and her father wished me luck. Then we drove to the boat that the rest of us expected to sail on. It was an English vessel, part of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, the P. & O line, which traversed boldly through the British Empire.

  I alighted from the omnibus and followed my sleepy companions up the gangplank. As seemed to be my lot in these travels, my transfer took place at one in the morning. I earnestly hoped everyone would be in bed as I dreaded meeting English people with their much-talked of prejudices. I was anxious what they would do to an American onboard.

  The crowds of men on the deck dispelled my fond hope. I think every man on board was up waiting to see the new passengers. They must have felt but ill-paid for their loss of sleep, for besides the men who came on board, there were only the two large English women and my own plain, uninteresting self.

  As the women were among their own people, I waited for them to take the lead. But after we had stood at the foot of the stairs for some time, being gazed at by the men, and no one came forward to attend to our wants, which were few and simple, I realized these women were more helpless than I, and I gently spoke up.

  “Is this the usual manner of receiving passengers on English boats?”

  They quietly answered back, “It is strange, very strange. A steward or someone should come to our assistance.”