Liz and Nellie

by Shonna Slayton

  “The blind are taught massage bathing. They are the only ones allowed to do so, and thus they develop a trade with which to live.”

  Still, I don’t know that I would like a blind man bathing me from head to toe. I wondered how much of a living he was able to make.

  At Uyeno Park, where they point out a tree planted by General Grant when on his tour around the world, I saw a most amusing monkey which belonged to the very interesting menagerie.

  It was very large and had a scarlet face and gray fur. It was chained to the fence, and when Henry went up and talked to him, the monkey looked very sagacious and wise. In the little crowd that gathered around, quite out of the monkey's reach, was a young Japanese man, who, in a spirit of mischief, tossed a pebble at the red-faced mystery, who turned with a grieved and inquiring air to my friend.

  “Go for him,” my friend Henry responded, sympathetically, to the look, and the monkey turned and with its utmost strength endeavored to free itself so it could obey the bidding.

  The surprised man made his escape, and the monkey quieted down, looking expressively at the place where the young man had stood and then at Henry for approval, which he obtained.

  The keeper brought out dinner for the monkey, which consisted of two large boiled sweet potatoes. Henry broke one in two and the monkey greedily ate the inside, placing the remainder with the other potato on the fence between his feet. Suddenly he looked up, and as quick as a flash, he flung with his entire force which was something terrific, the remaining potato at the head of someone in the crowd.

  There was some loud screaming and a scattering, but the potato, missing all heads, went crashing with such force against a board fence that every particle of it remained sticking there in one shapeless splotch.

  The young Japanese man who had tossed the pebble at the monkey, and so earned his enmity, quietly shrunk away with a whitened face. He had returned unnoticed by all except the monkey, who tried to revenge himself with the potato. I admired the monkey's cleverness so much that I would have tried to buy him if I had not already owned one.

  At the end of the day, we took the train back to our hotel, pleased at all the sights we had seen, and still chuckling over the clever monkey.

  My last day in Yokohama was spent at a pleasant luncheon given for me on the Omaha, the American war vessel lying at Yokohama. Then I went with Mr. Clark’s group to the Hundred Steps, at the top of which lives a Japanese belle, Oyuchisan, who is the theme for artist and poet and the admiration of tourists. These wooden stairs provide a narrow passageway between the area reserved for Europeans and the land for the natives of Yokohama. The view at the top looks out over the canal and tiled rooftops all the way to the bay. I meant to count the steps as we went down, but then someone asked me a question and I quite lost my place. I didn’t think of it again until I stood on the bridge over the canal and looked back at the way we had come.

  The prettiest sight in Japan, I think, is the native streets in the afternoons. Men, women, and children turn out to play shuttle-cock and fly kites. What an enchanting sight it is to see pretty women with cherry lips, black bright eyes, ornamented, glistening hair, exquisitely graceful gowns, tidy white-stockinged feet thrust into wooden sandals, dimpled cheeks, dimpled arms, dimpled baby hands, lovely, innocent, artless, happy, playing shuttlecock in the streets of Yokohama?

  Japanese children are unlike any other children I ever saw at play. They always look happy and never seem to quarrel or cry. Little Japanese girls, elevated on wooden sandals and with babies almost as large as themselves tied on their backs, play shuttle-cock with an abandon that is terrifying until one grows confident of the fact that they move with as much agility as they could if their little backs were free from nursemaid burdens.

  Japanese babies are such comical little fellows. They wear such wonderfully padded clothing that they are as shapeless as a feather pillow. Others may think, as I did, that the funny little shaven spots on their heads was a queer style of ornamentation, but it is not. I am assured the spots are shaven to keep their baby heads cool.

  The Japanese are not only pretty and artistic but most obliging. Mr. Clark had his Kodak, and whenever we came upon an interesting group, he was always taking snap shots. No one objected, and especially were the children pleasant about being photographed. When he placed them in position, or asked them to stand as they were, they would pose like little drum-majors until he gave them permission to move.

  I ate rice and eel. I visited the curio shops, one of which is built in imitation of a Japanese house, and was charmed with the exquisite art I saw there; in short, I found nothing but what delighted the finer senses while in Japan.

  If I loved and married, I would say to my mate: “Come, I know where Eden is,” and like editor and poet Edwin Arnold, desert the land of my birth for Japan, the land of love–beauty–poetry–cleanliness.

  38

  In Which Storms Cause Nellie Delay While Crossing The Pacific

  IT WAS A BRIGHT sunny morning when I left Yokohama. A number of new friends in launches escorted me to the Oceanic, and when we hoisted anchor, the steam launches blew loud blasts upon their whistles in farewell to me, and the band upon the Omaha played “Home, Sweet Home,” “Hail Columbia,” and “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” in my honor. I was grateful they were excited for me, and I waved my handkerchief so long after they were out of sight that I knew my arms would be sore for days.

  Everything promised well for a pleasant and rapid voyage. Anticipating this, Chief-engineer Allen ordered to be written over the engines and throughout the engine room, this date and couplet:

  For Nellie Bly,

  We’ll win or die.

  January 20, 1890.

  It was their motto and was all very sweet to me.

  The runs were marvelous until the third day out, and then a storm came upon us.

  “Don’t worry. It will only last today,” everyone said at table.

  But the next day found it worse, and it continued, never abating a moment; head winds, head sea, wild rolling, frightful pitching, until I fretfully waited for noon when I would slip off to the dining room to see the run, hoping that it would have gained a few miles on the day before, and always being disappointed. And they were all so good to me. Bless them for it. If possible, they suffered more over the prospect of my failure than I did.

  “If I fail, I will never return to New York,” I said despondently. “I would rather go in dead and successful than alive and behind time.”

  “Don’t talk that way,” Chief Allen said, “I will do anything for you in my power. I have worked the engines as they never were worked before; I have sworn at this storm until I have no words left; I have even prayed – I haven’t prayed before for years – but I prayed that this storm may pass over and that we may get you in on time.”

  “I know that I am not a sinner,” I laughed hysterically. “Day and night my plea has been, ‘Be merciful to me, a sinner,’ and as the mercy has not been forthcoming, the natural conclusion is that I’m not a sinner. It’s hopeless, it’s hopeless!”

  At last a rumor spread that there was a Jonah on board the ship. It was thought over and talked over and, much to my dismay, I was told that the sailors said monkeys were Jonahs.

  “Monkeys bring bad weather to ships,” said the stewardess, whose scratched arms looked healed. “As long as the monkey is on board, we will have storms.” She walked ominously away, having cast her seed of doubt in my brain.

  39

  In Which Elizabeth Bisland Receives Word That She Will Not Make A Vital Connection

  A DIM AND LURID sunset ends the day, and when night comes, we are anchored off the town of Port Said – a wretched little place, dusty, dirty, and flaring with cheap vice – all the flotsam of four nations whirling about in an eddy of coarse pleasures.

  The shopkeepers are wolfish-looking, and bargain vociferously. Almost every other door opens into a gambling and concert hall. One of these gambling places boasts an opera. At
the tables stand amid the crowd two handsome young Germans – blond, but with none of the ruddy warmth of the English blond; pale and flaxen, with deep-blue eyes and haughty of manner. Not nice faces; high-bred, but cold and brutal. They are officers from Prince Henry of Prussia's ship, the Irene, lying now in the harbor.

  In the concert hall, Traviata is being sung by a fourth-rate French troupe, and the audience sits about at little tables, drinking, and eating ices. I ask for something native – Turkish – to drink, and they bring me a stuff that to all the evidences of sight, taste, and smell cries out that it is a mixture of paregoric and water, and one sip contents me. We are glad to go away.

  The Mediterranean is cold and not smooth, but here there comes upon one a sense of historical association. In India, nature is so tremendous she swallows up all memory of man; in Aden, one remembers only the Bible; but nearing Greece, the past takes shape and meaning, and history begins to have a new vividness and significance. Here man has been “lord of the visible earth,” has dominated and adorned her. She has been but the stage and background against which he played out the tragedies and comedies of humanity.

  One morning at sunrise, the stewardess taps at the door. “The first officer's compliments, miss, and will you please get up and look out of the scuttle.”

  I wrap myself in my kimono – treasure-trove from Japan – and thrust head and shoulders through the wide porthole. Directly before me is Candia – abrupt mountains rising sharply from the sea and crowned with snow. Among them are trailing clouds looping long scarves of mist from peak to peak, at their feet Homer's “wine-dark sea,” furrowed by a thousand keels: Greek galleys, Roman triremes, fighting vessels from Carthage, merchant and battle ships from Venice, Genoa, and Turkey, the fleets of Spain, men-o'-war with the English lions at the peak, and, lastly, the world's peaceful commerce, sailing serenely over the bones and rotting hulls that lie below.

  The sun comes up gloriously out of the sea, deepening it to a winy purple in its light. Suddenly the mountaintops take fire; the snow flushes softly, deepens rosily in hue, grows crimson with splendor; the sleeping mists begin to stir and heave, to lighten into gold, to float and rise into the warming blue above. Then the dressing gong clangs noisily through the ship, and the colors pale into the common day.

  Next morning, we are fast to the docks at Brindisi, and but one more stage of the journey remains to be made.

  It is a vividly bright day in January 1890 – the 16th. There is a tingling crispness in the air as if it were early autumn – a slight frostiness that chills the skin, but does not penetrate the veins. Rather the deep breaths of this keen, pure sea ozone make the blood pulse with a swift, delicious warmth, like a plunge into cold water.

  We are anchored at Brindisi, Italy – the ancient Brundusium of the Romans – a town more than twenty-five centuries old, but which does not by any means look its age. It does not appear particularly attractive either from the wharves, and I am more than ever certain – as I always have been certain – that I could never agree with the haughty provincial who preferred to be first in Brundusium rather than second in Rome.

  Indeed, all efforts now are bent on being first out of Brundusium, as the train leaves within the hour. The Britannia goes on and around to Portsmouth, but the English government runs a train down through France and Italy to meet the P. and O. steamers, and thus gain five days in the arrival of the Indian and Australian mails.

  This mail train carries one passenger coach for the benefit of personages from the colonies who may be in haste to reach home; and if there are not a sufficient number of these distinguished servants of the empire to fill the car, more ordinary travelers can occupy the vacant berths by cabling ahead and securing them.

  I had taken this precaution at Ceylon and find there will be no difficulty in the matter, provided I can get my luggage through the customs in time. And this, dependent upon my careful packing.

  Various necessary additions to my wardrobe during the voyage have enlarged the contents of my little box. I have arranged and rearranged the items several ways, and still I cannot close it, even when I lean my weight on it. Hands on hips, I frown at my predicament, doubting that Nellie Bly is having any trouble with her gripsack.

  I poke my head into the hallway and catch the attention of the stewardess. “Excuse, me. Miss? Would you help me with my luggage?”

  She nods, and when I give her the word, plops herself down in the most emphatic manner. With the weight of the two of us, I barely manage to close the box and secure it.

  “Thank you,” I say, tucking a stray hair back under my bonnet.

  The whole ship is in an uproar, and it is almost impossible to get anything done. Mails and luggage are being disembarked. Many passengers are leaving for a tour through Italy before finally returning to England, fearful of the winter fogs and of the influenza raging there. Italians, with cocked hats and imperial importance of manner, are bullying everyone and getting things into a hopeless tangle.

  My luggage is finally marked as passed; a porter is hired to transport it; I go off to attend to the purchase of tickets, dispatching of cables, and other minor matters, and arrive ten minutes before the advertised departure of the train.

  No luggage! I fling out of the car, rush back again to the ship, and discover the missing possessions in the hands of a pig-headed Italian who insists they have not been properly examined. “Give me your keys,” he demands.

  “But it goes under seal and bond straight through to England!” I say in exasperation.

  Still, he insists upon opening it and strewing my garments about the deck.

  I hope I did not forget the dignity a gentlewoman should preserve under the most trying of circumstances, but I fancy that my tones, while low, were concentrated, and that the little American I used was “frequent and fluent and free,” for the man turned pale and wavered.

  I snatched up my belongings, flung them in pell-mell, jumped upon the box, snapped to the hasp, and ran off with a porter towards the train, blank despair in my heart.

  Happily, Italian trains are not bound down by narrow interpretations of time-tables, and I do succeed in catching it, with the luggage and some few tattered remnants of a once-nice temper.

  It is very destructive of the mental equilibrium to lose the temper so thoroughly, especially if one is out of practice, and it is fully an hour before the exceeding beauty of the country through which we are passing begins to have its soothing effect and to make me fain to forgive the Italians because of Italy!

  On our right is the Adriatic, blue as lapis-lazuli and dotted with flocking sails. Here and there lie little snow-white towns along its shores, and between are the gray olive orchards that have something strangely human in their gnarled grotesqueness.

  Even in flying by, one sees flashes of fantastic gargoyle-like resemblances to persons one has known caricatured in bark. It is not difficult to comprehend how people who lived among olive groves developed dryad superstitions and created legends of flying women transformed into trees.

  The English government pays the Italian government a large subsidy for this train and the swift passage of the mails, but the ubiquitous person who attends to all our needs – is porter, guard, steward, cook, and brakeman in one – has his own ideas on the subject of haste and acts accordingly.

  When we reach a town where he has friends, he goes out, quietly winds us up like a Waterbury watch, dismounts, and is received with affectionate enthusiasm by a little crowd on the platform. He inquires solicitously after each one's kin unto the fourth and fifth generation, gives his careful attention to all the local gossip, and retails the news he has been gathering all along the line. When he can no longer hear or tell some new thing, he remembers our existence, climbs once more upon his perch, lets us run down with a sudden whir, and we go on our way.

  At mealtimes, he retires into a tiny den amidships, and from a space but little larger than a matchbox produces delightful soups and salads, excellent coffee, well-cooked g
ame, baskets of twisted Italian bread, wine, and oranges.

  At night he arranges our sleeping-berths, and I think would perform barber duties and assist with our toilets if called upon to do so. He is a fatigued and blasé personage who looks as if chronically deprived of his due allowance of sleep, and he evidently regards the traveling public as a helpless, nervous creature always in a peevishly ridiculous hurry.

  We begin to climb into the mountains, and it grows very cold. Oddly-angled vineyards hang precariously to the steep sides of the heights, propped into place by dams of stone that keep the soil from sliding down hill. Queer villages are tucked into clefts, with streets that are merely narrow stairs. Now and again we flash by the bold outlines of a ruined castle crowning a crag: the site always chosen with so much discretion that one wonders not only how enemies ever got in, but how the owners themselves ever emerged – unless they fell out.

  A film of snow appears here and there, and the cold intensifies. We all pull out traveling rugs and extra clothing to ward the chill. To think only a short time ago I was wearing my thinnest shirtwaist in the tropics and complaining of the heat!

  Suddenly we catch a glimpse of white heights outlined against the blue.

  “It’s the Alps!” someone exclaims. “Mount Cenis tunnel is coming up.”

  A space of darkness, of thundering, clattering echoes – and then France!

  Everything is quite different all at once. A fine new fortress commands the tunnel; the station is better built, larger, and in better repair than those we have seen in Italy. The customs officer, a well-set-up and good-looking Frenchman in a smart uniform, inquires politely if we have anything to declare, and when we answer in the negative, sets his heels together, gives a profound salutation, and vexes us no more.

  I am delighted to use my French in its native country. The last time I spoke the language was in New Orleans. I’m glad now for the occasional French novel I’ve worked through to keep my vocabulary sharp.