The inspection at last completed, Bisland gathered up her belongings, tossed them into the trunk pell-mell, jumped on it while she snapped the hasp, and ran off with a porter to the train with “blank despair” in her heart, as she knew that she had been detained longer than ten minutes. Fortunately she discovered that Italian trains were not bound by overly narrow interpretations of timetables, and she did manage at last to board the India mail along with “the luggage and some few tattered remnants of a once nice temper.”
With her traveling bag and shawl strap safely stowed on the rack above her, Bisland settled back into her seat. She was not used to losing her temper, found it in fact deeply unsettling, and fully an hour passed before the beauty of the countryside began to have its soothing effect on her; she would, she decided, forgive the Italians because of Italy. Outside the window the Adriatic Sea was as blue as lapis lazuli and flecked with white sails. Little cottages perched as delicately as seabirds along the shore. The train rode past gray olive orchards, the trees strangely human in their gnarled grotesqueness; it was not hard for her to imagine how people who lived among olive groves had created a dryad mythology and legends of flying women transformed into trees.
In addition to the engineer and a British postal official in charge of the mails, there was one railroad employee on board, a conductor in an old blue uniform with silver buttons who attended to all the needs of the passengers, serving as porter, steward, cook, and brakeman all in one; at night he also arranged their sleeping berths, and Bisland supposed that he would perform barber duties and assist with their toilets if ever called upon to do so. At mealtimes he retired into a little galley kitchen, and from a space not much larger than a telephone box emerged with delicious soups and salads, well-cooked game, baskets of twisted Italian bread, wine, oranges, and excellent coffee. The British government, Bisland knew, subsidized the Italian government to ensure the rapid passage of the mails, but the conductor apparently had his own ideas on the matter, for at each stop along the route a little crowd of townspeople received him with affectionate enthusiasm; with an unexpected burst of animation he inquired—Bisland imagined—“after each one’s kin unto the fourth and fifth generation,” gave his careful attention to all the local gossip, and in turn related the information he had gathered at the previous stations. When all of the news had been disseminated he said his warm goodbyes and the train was off again.
In the afternoon of the second day the train began to climb into the mountains, and the car grew much colder. Here vineyards clung precariously to the steep hillsides, propped into place by stone dams that kept the soil from sliding downhill; villages were tucked at impossible angles into clefts in the hills. Before long a pale film of snow appeared on the ground: in scarcely more than a week she had traveled from summer to winter. She caught a glimpse of white heights outlined against blue sky and realized happily that they were approaching the Alps. Suddenly the world became black, the air filled with thundering, clattering echoes—they were passing through the Mont Cenis tunnel—and when they re-emerged into daylight they were in France.
Elizabeth Bisland’s plan was to take the India mail train to its stop at Villeneuve–St. Georges, a suburb less than ten miles from Paris, and there change trains for the short ride into the city. In Paris she would board another train bound for Le Havre, where the fast steamship La Champagne of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (the “French Line”) was scheduled to depart the following morning, Saturday, at six o’clock. Unfortunately, the India mail train was now running behind time, and unless the French Line would agree to delay the departure of La Champagne there was no use in trying to reach Le Havre by then. In that event, A. D. Wilson had devised an alternate route by which Bisland would continue on with the India mail to Calais, then ferry across the English Channel to meet the Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship Ems, which would be sailing from Southampton on Sunday, January 19. There was still a chance, however, that La Champagne would wait for her, and sometime after two o’clock that night the train conductor woke Bisland to deliver a telegram instructing her to be ready at four A.M. to board the train for Paris when the India mail arrived in Villeneuve. In Paris a special train had been arranged to take her the 142 miles to Le Havre; the Western Railroad of France estimated that its chartered train could cover the distance in three hours, about twice as fast as a regular train. If the French Line could be induced to hold La Champagne for even an hour, Bisland would have a real chance of making the connection. Bisland rose from her sleeping berth and dressed quietly, so as not to disturb her fellow passengers; she wrote notes of farewell to those who had been “especially courteous” and then found her seat in the darkness of the car. At four o’clock she was waiting with her veil and gloves on when the train stopped at Villeneuve–St. Georges.
The train station was nearly deserted. As Elizabeth Bisland stepped down onto the platform a young Frenchman appeared. He was, he told her, an agent from Thomas Cook and Son. He had come from Paris to meet her. He had bad news.
THE THOMAS COOK TRAVEL AGENCY had begun in 1841 when Thomas Cook, an English printer and occasional author of temperance pamphlets, organized a railway excursion from Leicester to Loughborough, having gotten the idea that travel would provide the working class with an invigorating and wholesome alternative to the evils of ale. The excursion proved a rousing success, with hundreds of paying customers, and Cook was encouraged to continue; before long he was devoting all of his time to the travel business, arranging tourist trips first throughout Great Britain, then to continental Europe, and, beginning in the 1870s, around the world. By the time of Thomas Cook’s death in 1892 his company had grown into the world’s largest travel agency, earning for itself the grandiose title “Booking Clerk to the Empire,” an honorific that was borne out in spectacular fashion in 1884, when the company managed to transport eighteen thousand British and Egyptian troops up the Nile to relieve the besieged forces of General Charles Gordon in Khartoum, for a contractually agreed-upon price of twenty-one pounds per soldier. This, of course, was a highly unusual venture; mostly Thomas Cook & Son (as the company became known after Thomas’s son John joined it in 1871) arranged group and individual tours, a service for which it became so famous that the phrase “Cook’s tour” was adopted into the language. Cook & Son had offices in cities around the world that offered a wealth of services to travelers: they booked steamship and railway tickets (the tickets enclosed in a leather or cloth case with COOK’S TOURIST TICKETS embossed on the cover); arranged hotel reservations; provided accident insurance, foreign exchange, traveler’s checks, and letters of credit; sold guidebooks and timetables; and gave sightseeing advice. Cook & Son opened its first Paris office in 1874, moving to larger quarters in August 1889; the office was managed by a M. Georges Lemoinne and had a staff of four employees. Presumably it was one of these men (the Cook’s agent never identified himself) who met Elizabeth Bisland at the Villeneuve–St. Georges train station.
The steamship La Champagne, the agent told Bisland, would not wait for her. He had done everything he could to get the ship to wait, but the French government simply would not allow it. La Champagne was a mail ship and had to keep to its schedule. He was very sorry. Having delivered his message he bade her farewell and good luck, and disappeared.
Elizabeth Bisland had no reason to doubt the agent’s word. After all, Thomas Cook & Son was the world’s most well-known and reliable travel agency—when John Brisben Walker needed a westbound trip around the globe to be arranged at a moment’s notice he went to Cook & Son, just as the editors of The World had earlier gone to them for Nellie Bly’s eastbound trip. But in fact none of what the Cook’s agent had said was true: the steamship did wait for her.
As Elizabeth Bisland was making her way across Italy on the India mail train, John Brisben Walker had been frantically cabling the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique to request a delay in the departure of La Champagne. After some negotiation the French Line agreed to hold the ship for a price
of $2,000; however, as the French government paid for the use of the steamer as a mail ship, the company could not actually do so without the consent of the French minister of posts and telegraphs. At that point Walker cabled the American Legation in Paris, hoping that some of the officials might exert their influence with the French minister. The diplomatic mission apparently met with success, for La Champagne waited in Le Havre harbor for more than three hours that morning, and when the low tide made it necessary for the ship to cross the bar it remained off the coast for an additional half-hour, in the hopes that Elizabeth Bisland might still arrive.
Back in Paris, John Brisben Walker had invited several members of the American Legation to meet Bisland and accompany her on the special train to Le Havre—chartered from the Western Railroad at a cost of $300—with breakfast included and all other amenities fully provided for. Walker, as a longtime Cosmopolitan editor once remarked, was “a czar in his own world,” who was “firm that his orders should be carried out.” So it is not difficult to imagine his astonishment and distress when he received a cable from one of the Paris welcoming party informing him that Elizabeth Bisland had not gone to Paris after all, that La Champagne had waited at Le Havre until ten A.M. and had finally sailed without her, and that she was now apparently on her way to London.
Later, upon Bisland’s return to New York, there would be rumors, accusations, threats of lawsuits. Elizabeth Bisland herself wrote only, “The cause of this false information was never satisfactorily explained.”
JANUARY 18–19, 1890
Villeneuve–St. Georges, France, to Queenstown, Ireland
At half past four in the morning Elizabeth Bisland returned to the India mail train. She was already dressed, too confused and jangled to go back to sleep, so there was nothing to do but throw herself down on her seat and wait for the coming of day. When next the sun went down, she told herself, she would be in London. From London it was but a five-hour train ride to Southampton, where she could catch the fast steamship Ems the next day; the Ems was due into New York on January 27, making for an around-the-world trip of just under seventy-four days. Outside the sky slowly turned from black to gray. Here and there a thin plume of smoke curled up against the sky from the chimney of a thatched cottage. Peasants who seemed to have stepped out of a Millet canvas trudged along the road in heavy boots and homespun clothing, carrying sticks or baskets of potatoes and turnips. A cart full of milk jugs was being pulled, incongruously, by a large dog, while a woman wearing a cap and tucked-up skirts walked alongside, blowing on her fingers to keep them warm.
It was ten o’clock when the train reached Calais. The ferry for Dover had just left and the next would not leave until one o’clock, so she had time to eat breakfast—a lucky break, as things turned out, for she would not eat again for another forty-eight hours. As she set out on the afternoon ferry the Channel was gray and stormy, the wind brisk, a spatter of rain splashing down every now and again. Some of the passengers, defying the rain, spread themselves out in chaise longues; others turned up the collars of their long coats, thrust their hands in the pockets, and strode along the rolling deck. Later the sun broke through the clouds, turning the sea a stormy gray-green—and there before her, appearing through the mists, were the cliffs of Dover. For a moment she stood transfixed, dazzled by the unexpected whiteness of the stone. The chalk cliffs jutted straight up from the water, as solid and immovable as the sea was restless and shifting, grand and dignified as any national monument. Nothing on this trip had moved her quite as much as that sight; it was worth a journey around the world, she told herself, just to have seen it. Two months earlier she had started out from a continent that English people had claimed as their own, where the English language, English laws and customs reigned from sea to sea; as far as she traveled she had heard that same language, seen the same laws, found the same people. Now at last she was seeing the tiny island that had sprung, as she thought of it, this race of kings. “It fills my soul with a passion of pride,” she wrote, “that I, too, am an Anglo-Saxon.”
Disembarking from the ferry in Dover, Elizabeth Bisland set foot at last on what she thought of as “the mother soil.” Once again she was immediately hurried onto a train, and before she knew it she was sitting in a first-class carriage the pale blue of a lady’s boudoir. The train pulled away from the docks, rode through a cleft in the chalk hills, and descended into the English countryside. Here was Kent, the venerable Saxon county, Shakespeare’s “civil’st place of all this isle.” The scene reminded her of the American South—the neat farms with their carefully hedged borders, churchyards shaded by tall oak trees, ancestral homesteads, red-brick villages nestled into the green hillsides, everything compact, solid, durable. It was a landscape she felt she already knew from books; riding through it she was not learning but remembering. The land seemed to swarm with phantoms from history, poems, stories. They tramped across the fields, peered over the hedges, looked out from every window; she could hear the clang of their armor, their horses’ hoofbeats, their voices ringing out a call of welcome in the frosty winter air.
By late afternoon darkness had begun to fall. In the distance Bisland could see a dull bluish haze reflected off the low clouds, indicating the presence of a great gaslit city. The train drove past endless miles of houses, and then suddenly, in a blur, London center flashed past: a huge, shadowy half-globe looming against the sky—the dome of St. Paul’s; the vast bulk of the Houses of Parliament; towers and delicate spires with windows shaped like lances; then long serpentine gleams of yellow on black water. That was the river Thames, and a moment later, with a great screeching of wheels and a final exhalation of smoke, the train pulled into Charing Cross Station.
Climbing down from the train, Bisland found a porter for her bags and with the other passengers entered the station. It was an immense space, seemingly far larger than Grand Central Depot in New York. The Saturday evening crowd streamed around her. Porters wheeled trucks piled impossibly high with luggage. “By your leave!” they shouted. “By your leave!” On every side of the station were cloak rooms, refreshment rooms, luggage rooms, waiting rooms, and it was all she could do just to locate the booking office for the next leg of her journey. Bisland had planned to remain overnight in London and the next morning take a train to Southampton to meet the fast Norddeutscher Lloyd steamship Ems. But now, in Charing Cross, she was shocked to learn that the Ems had been suddenly withdrawn and would not sail again until later in the week. It was, she acknowledged later, “a bitter disappointment.” After all this time, having crossed the United States, the Pacific Ocean, the whole of Asia and Europe, she had reached the final leg of her trip, and she could not bear the thought of failing now, not when the end point seemed close enough to touch. New York was right there on the other side of the ocean, just over the horizon; she needed only to find a ship to take her there.
Her last remaining option was to take the night mail train to Holyhead, on the northwest coast of Wales, and from there cross the Irish Sea to meet the Cunard steamship that sailed Sunday from Queenstown, on Ireland’s southern coast. Here, too, she received bad news. The Cunard steamer Etruria was normally scheduled to leave from Queenstown; the Etruria was a sleek modern vessel, so fast that in June of 1888 it had won the Blue Ribbon for the Queenstown to New York run, making the crossing in only six days and five hours. Cunard, though, had pulled the Etruria off the line and replaced it with the Bothnia, a much slower ship. Indeed, with a cruising speed of under thirteen knots, the Bothnia was perhaps the slowest vessel in the entire Cunard fleet. But now it was her only chance.
Charing Cross Station had a telegraph office, but there was no time to send a cable to The Cosmopolitan and await instructions. The Holyhead train was scheduled to leave in an hour and a half from Euston Station. She had never been to London before and did not know where Euston was. This station had a bewildering number of platforms, with trains headed seemingly to every town in England. Some were names she recognized, but others, in her ex
haustion, broke down into nonsense syllables: Strood, Dorking, Dartford, Wookey. All around her a thousand voices merged into a single roaring chorus. Dimly she registered hurry, clatter, confusion, everyone offering different suggestions and directions. Fortunately a fellow passenger on the India mail train, seeing her difficulties, stepped in with an offer of help. Later, in an essay for solitary woman travelers, Elizabeth Bisland would write, “The woman who knows how to accept a favor frankly and without tiresome protest, and is at the same time gratefully aware that the service is a favor and not a duty, makes every travelling man her faithful servitor.” He arranged for her to have dinner at the nearby Grand Hotel with two other train passengers, Sir William Lewis and his daughter; meanwhile he would attend to her new travel schedule.
The Grand Hotel’s dining room had marble walls, electric lights in the gilt chandeliers, and carpeting so thick that a piece of cutlery, if accidentally dropped, would make no sound. The food was lavish in the French style, but Bisland was too tired and distraught to eat and only sipped at her wine and absentmindedly crumbled her bread. A reporter from the Paris News Association came to the table to talk to her. Elizabeth Bisland, he would later write, “was very much annoyed to learn that the fast steamer, Ems, which she had expected to meet at Southampton for home, had been taken off. Otherwise she would have been sure that her voyage would be a success. Now the Bothnia, at Queenstown, is the only boat available and, as it is a very slow one, she fears she will arrive in New York too late.” When dinner was over, her helpful friend from the India mail train arrived to accompany her to the Euston station, where the train for Holyhead was scheduled to depart at 8:20. He had brought with him traveling rugs and cushions, a spice cake in case she became hungry, and a stack of books and newspapers; on the train he made sure that her foot warmer was filled with hot water and directed the guard to give her his best care and attention. “There is a vast amount of chivalry and tenderness distributed in the hearts of men,” Bisland wrote in that same travel essay, “and while the woman who goes guarded may be quite unaware of it, because nothing in her case calls it forth, the chivalry is there, and ready for almost unlimited draughts upon its patience, devotion, and sympathy.”
Eighty Days Page 34