Bella’s world tour

Bella Baxter’s world tour begins as Godwin Baxter’s carefully designed alternative to school and becomes an education no single guardian can control. Across an itinerary spanning several continents, Bella gathers languages, relationships, and experiences, while the contrast between her worldly reach and her exuberantly childlike speech remains unmistakable. Recounted by Archibald McCandless, the journey is both a literal passage through distant places and a test of who gets to direct Bella’s development.

A journey planned as education and protection

Godwin Baxter proposes taking Bella around the world rather than sending her to school. He intends to stay longest in places she enjoys, trusting conversation with people she meets to teach her about the world. In his account, travel will also protect her from being treated as an oddity: among other British travellers, he expects her to appear charmingly natural beside her companion. The plan is practical and paternal, but it gives Godwin unusual control over Bella’s company and surroundings.

Archibald McCandless objects that such a journey could leave Bella dependent on Godwin and beyond the protection of public opinion. He interprets the plan as a form of abduction, fearing that Godwin means to possess an innocent and dependent mind in a grown woman’s body. His resistance gives the proposed tour a second meaning: it is not merely a curriculum in place of school, but a struggle over Bella’s freedom and the authority to decide what experiences she may have. The narrative later shows that the journey does take place, though Bella’s own account of it exceeds the protective design her guardian described.

A traveller’s expanding world

When Bella and Godwin meet Archibald again after an interval of seventy weeks, Bella presents herself as a citizen of Glasgow, a native of Scotland, and a subject of the British Empire who has become a woman of the world. She says that French, German, Italian, Spanish, African, Asian, and American men, as well as some women from north and south, have kissed her hand and other parts. Her list compresses a vast range of encounters into a deliberately expansive declaration of experience. The hand she offers Archibald, and then raises playfully above her head, connects this new cosmopolitan identity to her memory of their earlier intimacy.

Bella’s travels are not narrated as a tidy sequence of destinations and lessons. They surface in anecdotes: she recalls an encounter with two petty officers devoted to one another on a boat leaving Nagasaki, and says that she sometimes had sex with each of them six times a day. She distinguishes this from what she does with men when she wants pleasure without pregnancy, explaining that she does more with women if she likes their appearance. Her account makes her sexual choices part of the experience of travel, not a moral lesson supplied by Godwin or Archibald. It also exposes the gap between Godwin’s aim of removing her from a potentially romantic attachment and the far wider range of relationships Bella has pursued on her own.

Companions, memory, and encounters

Miss MacTavish accompanies Bella as teacher, escort, governess, and friend until their relationship breaks down in San Francisco. Bella credits her with teaching words and poetry before that final fracture. The list of roles Bella gives her suggests how much of the journey’s formal education depends on personal companionship rather than a schoolroom. Yet the tour’s relationships are not stable simply because they are educational: Miss MacTavish leaves Bella’s company, and Bella later remembers a woman in San Francisco who ran away when Bella’s advances frightened her.

The journey also leads Bella toward the past she cannot remember. She tells Archibald that a collision destroyed all memory of her own childhood, and describes herself as a collector of childhoods. When Archibald recounts his parents and admits that he cannot recall where his mother is buried, Bella begins to cry before saying that the loss is shared. She remembers trying to visit her parents’ grave in Buenos Aires, only to learn that the railway company that paid for the burial had placed them in a graveyard at the edge of a canyon. In her account, eruptions of Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, or Popocatapetl brought down the cemetery, reducing headstones, coffins, and skeletons to dust. Instead of visiting the grave, Godwin took her to the house where he said she had lived with her parents: a dusty courtyard, a cracked water tank, chickens, and an old caretaker who called her Bella Señorita. She could not remember him. Travel thus brings her to the physical traces of a family history that remains emotionally powerful but inaccessible to her memory.

Return, intimacy, and the limits of the plan

At the reunion, Bella is dressed in crimson silk and sky-blue velvet, with a purple hat, white gloves, and a brightly coloured parasol. Her display makes her look, in Archibald’s recollection, like a rainbow made solid; beside her, Godwin’s familiar bulk and heavy outdoor clothing appear darker still. The contrast is not simply between a colourful traveller and a sombre guardian. Godwin’s face now seems to Archibald to show a grave absence, while Bella is eager to renew her connection with Archibald and insists on taking him for a walk.

Five children accompany Bella and Godwin. Archibald reads their presence as a clue to Bella’s continuing mental development, estimating her mental age at twelve or thirteen; the estimate is his interpretation, not a measure supplied by Bella. Before setting off with Archibald, she gives each child a large gobstopper and arranges for them to stand guard around Godwin on a crowded bench. The small practical scene brings her playful command and her attachment to Godwin together: she leaves him behind, but makes sure he is watched, promising that she will reappear. Her world tour has taken her far beyond the local protection Godwin first imagined, yet the reunion preserves the ties and childlike performances that complicate any simple account of her becoming worldly. The journey’s decisive result is not that Bella has been remade according to a guardian’s plan, but that she returns with experiences, appetites, and memories of her own.