Egypt -- Description and travel -- Humor; London (England) -- Description and travel -- Humor; Voyages and travels -- Humor
Take some captain of industry who resides in a large city of the Middle
West. At home he is unquestionably IT. Everyone knows the size of his
bank account, and when he rides down to business in the morning the
conductor of the trolley holds the car for him. His fellow passengers
are delighted to get a favouring nod from him. When he sails into the
new office building the elevator captain gives him a cheery but
deferential "good morning." In his private office he sits at a $500
roll top desk from Grand Rapids, surrounded by push buttons, and when
he gives the word someone is expected to hop. At noon he goes to his
club for luncheon. The head waiter jumps over two chairs to get at him
and relieve him of his hat and then leads him to the most desirable
table and hovers over him even as a mother hen broods over her first
born.
This Distinguished Citizen, director of the First National Bank,
trustee of the Cemetery Association, member of the Advisory Committee
of the Y.M.C.A., president of the Saturday Night Poker Club, head of
the Commercial Club, and founder of the Wilson County Trotting
Association, is a whale when he is seated on his private throne in the
corn belt. He rides the whirlwind and commands the storm. The local
paper speaks of him in bated capital letters, and he would be more or
less than human if he failed to believe that he was a very large gun.
Take this same Business Behemoth and set him down in Paris or Rome or
Naples. With a red guide book clutched helplessly in his left hand and
his right hand free, so that he can dig up the currency of the realm
every thirty seconds, he sets forth to become acquainted with mediaeval
architecture and the work of the old masters. He is just as helpless
and apprehensive as a country boy at Coney Island. The guides and
cabmen bullyrag him. Newsboys and beggars pester him with impunity.
Children in the street stop to laugh at his Kansas City hat known to
the trade as a Fedora. When he goes into a shop the polite brigand
behind the showcase charges him two prices and gives him bad money for
change.
[Illustration: _Stop to laugh at his Kansas City hat_]
Why? Because he is in a strange man's town, stripped of his local
importance and battling with a foreign language. The man who cannot
talk back immediately becomes a weakling.
What is the chief terror to travel? It is the lonesomeness of feeling
that one cannot adapt himself to the unfamiliar background and
therefore is sure to attract more or less attention as a curio. And in
what city does this feeling of lonesomeness become most overwhelming?
In London.
The American must go to England in order to learn for a dead certainty
that he does not speak the English language. On the Continent if he
kicks on the charges and carries a great deal of hand luggage and his
clothes do not fit him any too well he may be mistaken for an
Englishman. This great joy never awaits him in London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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