Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/337

Rh frequently unrecognizable. The thing for which we have been long preparing, either so eagerly or so reluctantly, turns out quite another thing. The Europe of our intentions, whether unvisited or revisited, is a different Europe from that of our ignorant or instructed forecast. It is not a less significant or important Europe; but in our protracted preparation it has had time to change from the hemisphere of our hopes or memories into a thing of custom, so that when we arrive it is like any other part of the voyage. It is merely land, more or less akin to the land we left. It is merely going ashore instead of going aboard; it is no more of a climax. The steamer stops as the steamer started; a gangway is run out to a tender as a gangway had been run out to a wharf. You slip down its incline, and rejoin your baggage, say at Plymouth, with the very same anxiety with which you parted from it in New York. You are the same and it is the same. The same language is about you with a little different accent. The cable blank that you ask for has changed in name to a cable form; and when you get it, eager to launch your message at the first instant from the shore, it may turn out to be an inland telegraph form. But you get the right form on shore, and launch your message, not instantly, but after due preparation of an hour or two; not tinglingly, in contact with the operator, but deliberately, after agreement with the hotel porter, who sends it by a subordinate to the nearest postal station where you impersonally despatch it. After all, it will reach home five hours sooner than you send it, and that is something. As you sit down to dinner, you can say, "Well, they are just finishing lunch, and they will get my cablegram probably before they leave the table."

Probably they will not, but that is a detail. What is certain is that one fact has been accomplished and you are in the midst of preparation for accomplishing another. You have come to Europe, but now what are you going to do there? You thought you knew before you started, but having arrived you have to educate yourself in all the how and when of it, and this takes time, it takes mind, it takes everything that constitutes preparation. As before, the eternal question of getting ready to do crowds the question of doing to the precipicial verge over which the deed drops lifeless into the gulf of accomplished fact.

After all, getting ready to go is only a form of getting ready to go back. When you leave home for whatever prospective destination your real objective is home, and when you reach England with its many common memories and usages, you might fancy you had reached America, if it were not for the customs examination. Here we perceive, if we have the historical sense, that we Americans, and not the actual English, inherit the past, with our medieval restrictions upon travel and commerce. They are, a large party of them, trying to get back to their tradition, but in the mean time we have immensely that disadvantage of them. A common-place of the transatlantic voyager is the widely different treatment he meets in England and in America at the hands of the officials whose sad duty it is to suspect him a smuggler, but it is always a surprise when you arrive in a country where you are not sworn to your honesty, and then used as if you were a perjurer. If with a vivid sense of your last experience in New York, you make haste to get out your keys, and offer to open all your pieces of baggage, so that you may have your trial and punishment quickly over, the porter lifts a warning voice, and bids you open nothing that the inspector does not require. Then the inspector asks if you have any tobacco or perfumery—these seem to be the articles chiefly forbidden by the English customs—and upon your protestation of innocence, says, "Open this 'ere, please,"'" [sic] choosing some small, meek Benjamin of its tribe. Then glancing at its contents with an air of feeling it an indelicacy to have forced this confidence, he begs you to close it again, and chalks it and all your other pieces, as not guilty, and you bear them away with renewed self-respect.

In this matter we are more medievally English than the actual English, and, as we have said, they are, some of them, beginning to envy us our inferiority, but we fancy these hardly include any great number of transatlantic travellers. No sum of preparation can fortify them for encountering the rigors of our law, which