Eighty Days

by Matthew Goodman

  In the decades since the Civil War, the United States had been transformed from a largely agricultural society to a largely industrial one. Over the span of some thirty years, production of wheat rose by 256 percent, steel rails by 523 percent, and coal by an incredible 800 percent; by 1890 the United States had become the leading consumer of energy in the world. That same year Congress approved the funding for the nation’s first three battleships. In May 1890 a U.S. Navy captain and War College lecturer by the name of Alfred Thayer Mahan published an enormously influential book with the deceptively narrow title The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. Mahan, an unabashed imperialist, believed that a modern nation should seek power and wealth through foreign expansion made possible by a strong navy. That navy, in turn, would require numerous overseas bases and coaling stations; not incidentally, the colonies that supported those bases would also provide cheap raw materials as well as markets for products exported from home. In a review in The Atlantic Monthly, a young Washington civil service commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt declared, “Captain Mahan has written distinctly the best and most important, and also by far the most interesting book on naval history which has been produced on either side of the water for many a long year.”

  A strong navy, a string of overseas bases and coaling stations, colonies providing raw materials and foreign markets: this was, of course, the model presented by Great Britain, which was well on its way to creating the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known. On their race around the world, Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland had traversed that empire from Hong Kong in the east to Britain itself in the west, sailing on British ships and stopping at British coaling stations along the route, where they slept in British hotels, sent cables from British telegraph stations, and took carriage rides past British cliffside villas overlooking native huts. Elizabeth Bisland (who in one of her letters described herself as “not unduly pro-American”) deeply admired the grandeur, tradition, and culture of Great Britain, which she referred to as “the mother soil”; for her part, Nellie Bly despised the British but envied the power of their empire, not to mention the sense of national pride that it bestowed on the citizens of the home country. The two ideas would be neatly combined by Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana, who proclaimed, two days before the United States declared war on Spain: “The trade of the world must and shall be ours. And we will get it as our mother England has told us how.”

  By the 1890s Americans had also begun to travel to Europe in much larger numbers—though often, in imperial fashion, they seemed to want to bring their own country with them. In Liverpool they could stay at the Hotel Washington, in Florence at the Hôtel du New York, and in Paris at the Hôtel États-Unis and Hôtel de l’Oncle Tom. Everywhere concierges, waiters, and carriage drivers learned English in order to communicate with American tourists who insisted on speaking only their own language. Throughout Europe, hotels installed extra baths and elevators in the American fashion, and restaurants began offering such American favorites as ice cream and soda; still, it was reported, American travelers often complained when they could not find fried ham or pork and beans on the menu. These were the tourists Henry James dismissed as “vulgar, vulgar, vulgar,” who could easily be recognized by their enormous bags, bad French, and demands for pale ale. Henry Adams decried the typical American traveler, “bored, patient, helpless, indulgent to an extreme,” who was to be found “in every railway station in Europe carefully explaining to every listener that the happiest day of his life would be the day he should land on the pier in New York.” (Nellie Bly herself had told a reporter in Kansas, “There is really not so much for Americans to see in foreign lands. We’ve got the best of everything here; we lack in nothing; then when you go over there you must be robbed, you get nothing fit to eat and you see nothing that America cannot improve upon wonderfully.”) The writer Mary Cadwalader Jones felt obliged to begin her book European Travel for Women: Notes and Suggestions by remarking that “unless travellers are willing to leave national prejudices behind them, and ready to see whatever is characteristic and excellent in a foreign country, without finding fault because it is unfamiliar, they had better remain at home.

  “Americans,” she pointedly added, “are among the worst offenders in this regard.”

  IN 1892 ELIZABETH BISLAND and Charles Wetmore moved from the city to an estate they had built in Oyster Bay, Long Island. They called the house Applegarth, because it lay nestled between an ancient apple orchard on one side and an equally venerable pear orchard on the other. The design of the house had been adapted to the surrounding trees, “wound and looped between these irreplaceable treasures,” Bisland wrote in an article about Applegarth, “pushing out a porch here, or a window there … and stepping up and down to rooms of different levels as the grade of the land required, so that roots need not be cut nor branches lopped”; they had not wanted to commit, as she put it, “the too common crime of arboricide.” Applegarth was designed in the Tudor style, made of brick, half-timbering, and stucco, with multiple gables and chimneys, leaded windows, and doorways framed in limestone. Inside, many of the rooms had oak-beamed ceilings and walls finished in oak paneling. The stone fireplace in the drawing room was modeled on one belonging to Queen Elizabeth I (whom Bisland had long admired as having “rejected the whole theory of feminine subordination”); in the dining room, the decorated ceiling was adapted from the one in Queen Elizabeth’s bedroom at Knole, and the furniture was copied from pieces in the Cluny Museum in Paris and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  Elizabeth Bisland and Charles Wetmore never had any children, and they lived, with Bisland’s sister Melanie, at Applegarth until 1909; subsequently they moved to Washington, D.C., where Wetmore—who had left the law to become president of a utility company called the North American Company—served on the boards of directors of a number of public utilities. The years at Applegarth had been very productive ones for Bisland. During that time she edited the two-volume Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, for which she wrote a long and sensitive remembrance of her old friend from New Orleans. She also wrote a highly regarded autobiographical novel, A Candle of Understanding, and two essay collections in which she celebrated the pleasures of literature and forcefully decried the domination of women by men. (“The oldest of all empires is that of man; no royal house is so ancient as his,” wrote Bisland. “The Emperors of Japan are parvenus of the vulgarest modernity in comparison, and the claims of long descent of every sovereign in Europe shrivel into absurdity beside the magnificent antiquity of this potentate.”) Her collection At the Sign of the Hobby Horse, published in 1910, contained essays on literary subjects as varied as garden books, contemporary poetry, and children’s stories. The book’s opening essay, “The Morals of the Modern Heroine,” discussed what Bisland called “the contradictory attitude in the mind of the male—until recently almost the exclusive maker of literature—toward his female.” As portrayed in books written by men, female characters had long been reduced to two main types: “the passionless goddess and the greedy child … and, tucked in between these extremes of virtues and vices on the heroic scale, an endless chain of rosy, smiling, comfortable young persons, with the morals of rabbits and the mentality of butterflies.”

  The New York Times, reviewing At the Sign of the Hobby Horse, pronounced Elizabeth Bisland’s essays “so sane and so charmingly written … that the reviewer is tempted to quote from every page. They are wholesome and fresh, striking a distinct note of insistence on the desirability of making the most of life and art, of enjoying a world which is not, on the whole, such a bad place.” Bisland’s own world, however, would soon darken considerably, and her next essay collection would not appear for another seventeen years.

  About 1910, Charles Wetmore was stricken with an illness of some sort; Elizabeth Bisland herself never identified it in any of her essays or letters, noting only that it affected the nerves and “cruelly attacked mind as well as body.” It was an ill
ness, as well, for which there was no obvious cure, and in the face of the suddenly uncertain future, Wetmore put aside his work and the two traveled together for a year, from April 1911 to April 1912, through Japan, China, Singapore, Ceylon, and India, revisiting many of the sites Bisland had first seen during her race against Nellie Bly. Much of that year they spent in Japan, their favorite part of the world; they reveled in early-morning strolls through the hills, stopping often to rest amid boughs flowered with crimson, lemon, and white. In the evenings they ate fish and bamboo shoots and salt pickle, and boiled rice in red-lacquered bowls, watching the sun go down over the purple mountains and the little lights sparkling in the dusk of the city below as from frail-looking wooden temples silvery with age bells rang out in single notes, with long vibrations that lingered on the air. The Japanese landscape, Bisland later wrote, is “a heaped mass of green velvet with the rice valleys shining like lakes of intensest emerald between and the cloud shadows race and run in every possible tone of blue and amethyst across, and then it all begins over again and yet is never quite the same.” One morning in Yokohama they stood on a rock high among the trees, “breathing the moist saltness of the sea air mingled with faint almond perfumes of the cherry blooms. The mounting sun had burned away the mists of the night, and in the blue, floating far above a gulf of azure vapor, hung a vast shining cone of silver—a ghostly crest like a white flame.” It was Fujiyama again, just as she had seen it the first time, on a December morning twenty-two years before.

  Elizabeth Bisland was, as she put it, looking for the Japan of the Japanese, “light, fine, frail, with a touch of whimsey; of gay fancifulness; of soft, delicate fairness and flowery quiet.” That Japan, though, was becoming increasingly difficult to find; the new trains brought swarms of tourists, and the streets were lined with the modern hotels and teahouses that catered to them. “One wouldn’t begrudge the tourist so if he seemed to enjoy it, but his perspiring pervasiveness apparently derives nothing but fatigue from the effort, and one can’t but wish he’d leave the places of beauty alone to the few who do get comfort out of them,” Bisland wrote from Tokyo to her brother Pressley in New York, adding, “I think China and Japan are the only two countries remaining not utterly destroyed by our loathsome Occidental ‘improvements.’ ”

  An older Elizabeth Bisland, in an undated family photograph (Illustration Credit epl.1)

  By the following year, Charles Wetmore’s illness had become serious enough that he was forced into retirement at the age of fifty-nine. In 1913 the couple moved to England, taking a home in the village of West Byfleet in Surrey, southwest of London; there, far from the pressures of work, amid the peaceful English countryside, they hoped that Wetmore might rest and recuperate. Not long afterward, though, on August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany, and almost immediately innumerable thousands of young men were returning home blinded and broken. For more than a year Bisland did volunteer work in the local hospitals. From the very beginning she bitterly hated the war and would continue to be haunted by it; caring for those wounded soldiers, she would recall later, “especially those first gassed victims—gave me a sense of its intolerable abominations that never left me waking or sleeping.”

  With no rest to be found in England, the couple returned to Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Bisland’s face was still youthful, her pale skin smooth and her eyes as clear as ever, but her long, wavy hair, formerly chestnut-colored, was now liberally streaked with gray. “Ever since the war began my spirit has been crushed as beneath a huge stone by the horrors and the suffering of this unhappy world,” she wrote to Charles Hutson, a poet and editor whom she had befriended back in New Orleans. In April 1917 the United States entered the war, and Bisland threw herself into work for the National Salvage Society, organizing drives in several states to collect tinfoil, cork, paper, rags, leather, and glass to sell for the benefit of the Red Cross. The following year she was diagnosed with anemia, a condition that she attributed to “seven years of stress and strain and long nursing”; though her doctors counseled rest, she was not willing, as she put it, to “forget about war-work and housekeeping and stay in bed mornings and generally be a superfluous slug just when one wishes to be useful to one’s country.” Instead, she intensified her pace: as she had in England, she began volunteering to help care for the sick and wounded, this time at Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital.

  She had a patient to look after at home as well, one whose condition, despite all her efforts, seemed only to worsen. Finally, on Christmas Eve 1918, the situation had deteriorated to the point that Charles Wetmore was admitted to a nearby sanitarium. The doctors there insisted that Bisland not visit him, having determined, unaccountably, that her presence would be a hindrance to his recovery. Yet at the same time she felt bound to remain nearby, as “he might need me suddenly and I wish to be where it would be possible to reach him at once.” For months Elizabeth Bisland lived in an agony of waiting and worrying. She was, she wrote to Hutson, “wading deep waters.”

  My poor husband has had to go to a sanitarium at last. For ten years I have been fighting his malady by every means that affection or science could suggest, and am defeated and helpless in the end. With such loss and suffering everywhere one doesn’t like to make too much outcry over one’s own, but if it had been a sacrifice in a great cause one could bear it with grace. This seems like such a futile, wanton blow—achieving no end. And one asks why with all his gifts and graces and talents this black drop should be squeezed into the cup to poison it.

  In her sorrow Bisland turned to gardening for relief. The previous fall she had planted daffodils, jonquils, crocus bulbs, in the fervent hope that a show of blossoms might celebrate peace in the spring; spring came with still no peace, but the blossoms at least had arrived. In the grounds near her house she created a wildflower sanctuary; up early every morning, she worked the soil with basket and spade. Hard work at the beginning of the day, she had found, brought better sleep at the end, and in the meantime it kept her from thinking too much about her own sorrows and those of the wider world. She read every night, turning out the light only reluctantly at midnight, resentful at not being able to plunge into the next chapter. Reading had always been for her a doorway into another world, but now it became something more, an anodyne that dulled aches, an opiate that stilled the incessant turning over of questions that had no answers. She described herself, in those days, as a clock with a broken mainspring. “If you shake me hard I tick for a few moments, but soon relapse into silence and uselessness.”

  On June 1, 1919, Charles Wetmore died inside the sanitarium; Elizabeth Bisland had not laid eyes on him since Christmas Eve. With her husband’s death Bisland plunged into a deep depression. “It seems to me the world grows every day ghastlier and vaguer and more like a dream, in which one moves about doing the accustomed things mechanically,” she wrote to her old friend Charles Hutson on stationery bordered in black. “My only comfort now is that he clung to me for help and I was able to help and comfort him along his dark road. But now that he no longer needs me—will never need me—all the meaning and purpose have gone out of life.”

  She sat in her quiet house with empty hands, the constant, insistent duties of years having suddenly come to an end. Charles had been both husband and, later, child to her, and with his passing she felt she had lost an entire family. Her only consolation was that her husband’s death had brought to an end ten years of suffering—suffering that he had borne, Bisland wrote, “with a patience and gallantry that only made him a thousand times more dear and touching.”

  For months she made no plans; nothing seemed worthwhile, nothing appealing. She and Charles had been together for almost thirty years; it was the sort of long intimacy that sews together the fibers of two separate lives, so that when one is taken the other is left torn and broken. Her friends did what they could to console her; it was for the best, they said, and someday the two would meet again. These were, Bisland thought, little more than pious conventionalities,
but people who were otherwise helpless meant to express sympathy by them, and for that she was grateful. Still, she could see no recourse but to try to bear her sorrows with whatever dignity and courage she was capable of. Her friends reminded her, too, that charitable activities could be a help, as a way of stepping outside oneself, and over time Bisland resumed her longtime work as president of the Women’s Evening Clinic. Paid for by private donations, it was the first clinic of its kind in Washington, providing affordable medical treatment for women who worked during the day; in 1920 the Women’s Evening Clinic opened another facility, the Good Health Home, for which Elizabeth Bisland had raised much of the funds. In a letter she admitted, “For these ailing women and girls I have been working very hard, hoping that would bring some sense of reality, but sorrowful as their sufferings are they continue to seem just as shadowy as everything else does.” But still she continued her efforts: support for working women was a cause that she had cared about at least as far back as 1884, when she had founded the New Orleans Women’s Club.

  In 1922, now past sixty, Bisland closed up her house in Washington and set off by herself for a seven-month tour of Japan and China; she felt that the rigors of such a long journey would soon be beyond her, and she wanted one more look at that beloved part of the world. She took long solitary walks through mountain forests, visited ancient temples, sought out the company of poets and painters, abbots and musicians. She returned to Washington invigorated by her long immersion in the East, though she confessed that she was “terribly bored at having to fit myself into Western life again. I always did like the Orient best ever since I first laid eyes on it so many years ago.”