4 For young women of wealth, it was common to travel after graduating from college. Gertrude’s family encouraged her to see Europe, and she finally agreed with a vague plan of visiting the sites where her ancestors had lived in England and Holland. Like most young American women from wealthy families, she was accompanied by a traveling companion: her aunt.
Once aboard a steamship, Gertrude became captivated by the idea of her passage through time and across the sea without having to meet the expectations of others. The water hissing beneath the hull of the ship soothed her, and the moon reflecting off the Atlantic felt romantic. Gertrude doubted she would ever marry. Her speech impediment would see to that. She agreed with Vreeland that perhaps her speech problems were inherited, and she thought it would not be a good thing to bring another stuttering child into the world. Besides, she felt undesirable, and she avoided the young men who tried to approach her on the ship. She would keep on traveling, keep ahead of the pain that human beings brought into her life. She liked creatures, plants, and trees better than humans, anyway.
Traveling companions, also known as a lady’s companion, existed until as late as the mid-20th century. A companion was usually someone from the same upper social strata as the woman she was paid to accompany. She was expected to make conversation and be sociable. She was not a servant but rather served as a chaperone and was assumed to be someone who could intervene in case of unwanted male attention.
For example, in the 1908 novel A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, Miss Bartlett was Lucy Honeychurch’s cousin and was enlisted to accompany her on a trip abroad.
In London she found herself part of a group of tourists from the ship that clung together like a herd of sheep, hurrying from cathedral to cathedral. After visiting Kensington Gardens on a cold and gloomy day, she felt depressed and restricted by the group. The garden visit had given her an idea, stimulating her courage to see things she had read about at Ambler.
Early the next day she and her aunt quietly slipped away from their hotel. By midday they had crossed the English Channel on a boat. They took a train from Calais to Paris, where Gertrude immediately fell in love with the elegant gardens that graced the City of Light. She strolled in the Garden of the Royal Palace. She was enchanted by the tiny Square du Vert-Galant near Notre-Dame. She spent her days marveling at the gardens of the Tuileries and Versailles, as well as the Luxembourg Gardens. “She fell in love with all of it,” said her sister Elizabeth.
One of her subjects at Ambler had been Renaissance gardens, and her fascination with them led her south to Italy. The gardens of Italy enchanted her. She sketched for hours, admiring the symmetry, the clever designs in stone and greenery, the subtle glow of opening flowers, the cascading water, the precise stonework that harmonized with the water features. She took notes, moving each day to a different garden, feeling rich with new knowledge and experience.
Sometimes a garden’s owners would see the young American scratching away in her notebook, and frequently she was asked to have tea or dine with them. Often the locals provided a history of the gardens that she would never have gotten from her textbooks. She gained a new confidence and rapidly picked up Italian—stutter-free. That was another benefit of travel: she never stuttered in a foreign language. In Rome she visited the Vatican Gardens, the decaying estates of Maxentius’s country house on the Appian Way, and the expansive Villa Borghese gardens.
The Roman Forum stunned her with its ancientness. She liked these ruined gardens best, the ancient remnants of pillars—some tumbled, some broken—on which sprouted grasses and shrubs. She sat beneath a wisteria, marveling at its huge and ancient trunk, the way its purple and pink blossoms entwined the columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Perhaps she heard the echo of the ancient Roman voices. She may have felt sad for Emperor Claudius, also a stutterer, as she gazed on the crumbling House of Livia, dedicated to his cunning and probably murderous stepmother.
She marveled at the scarlet profusion of poppies rising along the Italian railroad tracks and sent a sketch of the poppies to her sister. She stayed a few days in Venice, her artist’s eye no doubt admiring the lemon-hued sky created by the lagoon’s reflection. Later, Gertrude trekked along the Amalfi Coast to admire the terraced farms of olive and orange trees. She loved the Italian people but was critical of their leader, Benito Mussolini. During the time Gertrude was in Italy, Mussolini was conducting aerial bombing on Ethiopia.
She was intoxicated with the heady mix of nature and history, and she was determined to continue her journeys. She lived in the moment while traveling, and the past and the future did not seem to exist.
For the next several years Gertrude was on the move, crisscrossing the Atlantic on ships. She loved the fjords of Norway. In Copenhagen she watched the streets turn to rivers of people riding bicycles. In the Netherlands she visited Haarlem, where Vreeland’s ancestors had lived before leaving for America. She toured Germany. She took a boat up the Rhine and marveled at the ancient castles and the estates.
She returned to France and visited vineyards. On impulse one sunny fall afternoon, she left her guide and joined grape pickers in the vineyard. She spent the afternoon with the workers, laughing and picking grapes, sharing jokes in French, which sometimes had to be explained to her.
Am I avoiding the person who I must become? Gertrude frequently asked herself this question, according to Elizabeth. By traveling she could stay ahead of her self-doubt and set aside her anxiety about the future.
Somewhere in Switzerland she met a woman goatherd who introduced her to a breed of goat called Saanen, named after the Saanen Valley in that country. Gertrude was so fascinated by this breed that she became determined to raise goats when she returned to the United States.