During our scientific explorations in the Eastern Hemisphere, we met two guides who had served the late Samuel L. Clemens, one who had served the late J. Pierpont Morgan, and one who had acted as courier to ex-President Theodore Roosevelt. After inquiry among persons who were also lately abroad, I have come to the conclusion that my experience in this regard was remarkable, not because I met so many as four of the guides who had attended these distinguished Americans, but because I met so few as four of them. One man with whom I discussed the matter told of having encountered, in the course of a brief scurry across Europe, five members in good standing of the International Association of Former Guides to Mark Twain. All of them had union cards to prove it too. Others said that in practically every city of any size visited by them there was a guide who told of his deep attachment to the memory of Mr. Morgan, and described how Mr. Morgan had hired him without inquiring in advance what his rate for professional services a day would be; and how—lingering with wistful emphasis on the words along here and looking meaningly the while at the present patron—how very, very generous Mr. Morgan had been in bestowing gratuities on parting.
Our first experience with guides was at Westminster Abbey. As it happened, this guide was one of the Mark Twain survivors. I think, though, he was genuine; he had documents of apparent authenticity in his possession to help him in proving up his title. Anyhow, he knew his trade. He led us up and down those parts of the Abbey which are free to the general public and brought us finally to a wicket gate, opening on the royal chapels, which was as far as he could go. There he turned us over to a severe-looking dignitary in robes—an archbishop, I judged, or possibly only a canon—who, on payment by us of a shilling a head, escorted our party through the remaining inclosures, showing us the tombs of England's queens and kings, or a good many of them anyway; and the Black Prince's helmet and breastplate; and the exquisite chapel of Henry the Seventh, and the ancient chair on which all the kings sat for their coronations, with the famous Scotch Stone of Scone under it.
The chair itself was not particularly impressive. It was not nearly so rickety and decrepit as the chairs one sees in almost any London barber shop. Nor was my emotion particularly excited by the stone. I would engage to get a better-looking one out of the handiest rock quarry inside of twenty minutes. This stone should not be confused with the ordinary scones, which also come from Scotland and which are by some regarded as edible.
What did seem to us rather a queer thing was that the authorities of Westminster should make capital of the dead rulers of the realm and, except on certain days of the week, should charge an admission fee to their sepulchers. Later, on the Continent, we sustained an even more severe shock when we saw royal palaces—palaces that on occasion are used by the royal proprietors—with the quarters of the monarchs upstairs and downstairs novelty shops and tourist agencies and restaurants, and the like of that. I jotted down a few crisp notes concerning these matters, my intention being to comment on them as evidence of an incomprehensible thrift on the part of our European kins-people; but on second thought I decided to refrain from so doing. I recalled the fact that we ourselves are not entirely free from certain petty national economies. Abroad we house our embassies up back streets, next door to bird and animal stores; and at home there is many a public institution where the doormat says WELCOME! in large letters, but the soap is chained and the roller towel is padlocked to its little roller.
Guides are not particularly numerous in England. Even in the places most frequented by the sightseer they do not abound in any profusion. At Madame Tussaud's, for example, we found only one guide. We encountered him just after we had spent a mournful five minutes in contemplation of ex-President Taft. Friends and acquaintances of Mr. Taft will be shocked to note the great change in him when they see him here in wax. He does not weigh so much as he used to weigh by at least one hundred and fifty pounds; he has lost considerable height too; his hair has turned another color and his eyes also; his mustache is not a close fit any more, either; and he is wearing a suit of English-made clothes.
On leaving the sadly altered form of our former Chief Executive we descended a flight of stone steps leading to the Chamber of Horrors. This department was quite crowded with parents escorting their children about. Like America, England appears to be well stocked with parents who make a custom of taking their young and susceptible offspring to places where the young ones stand a good chance of being scared into connipshun fits. The official guide was in the Chamber of Horrors. He was piloting a large group of visitors about, but as soon as he saw our smaller party he left them and came directly to us; for they were Scotch and we were Americans, citizens of the happy land where tips come from. Undoubtedly that guide knew best.
With pride and pleasure he showed us a representative assortment of England's most popular and prominent murderers. The English dearly love a murderer. Perhaps that is because they have fewer murderers than we have, and have less luck than we do in keeping them alive and in good spirits to a ripe old age. Almost any American community of fair size can afford at least two murderers—one in jail, under sentence, receiving gifts of flowers and angel cake from kind ladies, and waiting for the court above to reverse the verdict in his case because the indictment was shy a comma; and the other out on bail, awaiting his time for going through the same procedure. But with the English it is different.
We rarely hang anybody who is anybody, and only occasionally make an issue of stretching the neck of the veriest nobody. They will hang almost anybody Haman-high, or even higher than that. They do not exactly hang their murderer before they catch him, but the two events occur in such close succession that one can readily understand why a confusion should have arisen in the public mind on these points. First of all, though, they catch him; and then some morning between ten and twelve they try him. This is a brief and businesslike formality. While the judge is looking in a drawer of his desk to see whether the black cap is handy the bailiffs shoo twelve tradesmen into the jury box. A tradesman is generally chosen for jury service because he is naturally anxious to get the thing over and hurry back to his shop before his helper goes to lunch. The judge tells the jurors to look on the prisoner, because he is going away shortly and is not expected back; so they take full advantage of the opportunity, realizing it to be their last chance. Then, in order to comply with the forms, the judge asks the accused whether he is guilty or not guilty, and the jurors promptly say he is. His Worship, concurring heartily, fixes the date of execution for the first Friday morning when the hangman has no other engagements. It is never necessary to postpone this event through failure of the condemned to be present. He is always there; there is no record of his having disappointed an audience. So, on the date named, rain or shine, he is hanged very thoroughly; but after the hanging is over they write songs and books about him and revere his memory forevermore.
Our guide was pleased to introduce us to the late Mr. Charles Pease, as done in paraffin, with creped hair and bright, shiny glass eyes. Mr. Pease was undoubtedly England's most fashionable murderer of the past century and his name is imperishably enshrined in the British affections. The guide spoke of his life and works with deep and sincere feeling. He also appeared to derive unfeigned pleasure from describing the accomplishments of another murderer, only slightly less famous than the late Mr. Pease. It seemed that this murderer, after slaying his victim, set to dismembering the body and boiling it. They boil nearly everything in England. But the police broke in on him and interrupted the job.
Our attention was directed to a large chart showing the form of the victim, the boiled portions being outlined in red and the unboiled portions in black. Considered as a murderer solely this particular murderer may have been deserving of his fame; but when it came to boiling, that was another matter. He showed poor judgment there. It all goes to show that a man should stick to his own trade and not try to follow two or more widely dissimilar callings at the same time. Sooner or later he is bound to slip up.
We found Stratford-upon-Avon to be the one town in England where guides are really abundant. There are as many guides in Stratford as there are historic spots. I started to say that there is at least one guide in Stratford for every American who goes there; but that would be stretching real facts, because nearly every American who goes to England manages to spend at least a day in Stratford, it being a spot very dear to his heart. The very name of it is associated with two of the most conspicuous figures in our literature. I refer first to Andrew Carnegie; second to William Shakspere. Shakspere, who wrote the books, was born here; but Carnegie, who built the libraries in which to keep the books, and who has done some writing himself, provided money for preserving and perpetuating the relics.
We met a guide in the ancient schoolhouse where the Bard—I am speaking now of William, not of Andrew—acquired the rudiments of his education; and on duty at the old village church was another guide, who for a price showed us the identical gravestone bearing the identical inscription which, reproduced in a design of burnt wood, is to-day to be found on the walls of every American household, however humble, whose members are wishful of imparting an artistic and literary atmosphere to their home. A third guide greeted us warmly when we drove to the cottage, a mile or two from the town, where the Hathaway family lived. Here we saw the high-backed settle on which Shakspere sat, night after night, wooing Anne Hathaway. I myself sat on it to test it. I should say that the wooing could not have been particularly good there, especially for a thin man. That settle had a very hard seat and history does not record that there was a cushion. Shakspere's affections for the lady must indeed have been steadfast. Or perhaps he was of stouter build than his pictures show him to have been.
Guides were scattered all over the birthplace house in Stratford in the ratio of one or more to each room. Downstairs a woman guide presided over a battery of glass cases containing personal belongings of Shakspere's and documents written by him and signed by him. It is conceded that he could write, but he certainly was a mighty poor speller. This has been a failing of many well-known writers. Chaucer was deficient in this regard; and if it were not for a feeling of personal modesty I could apply the illustration nearer home.
Two guides accompanied us as we climbed the stairs to the low-roofed room on the second floor where the creator of Shylock and Juliet was born—or was not born, if you believe what Ignatius Donnelly had to say on the subject. But would it not be interesting and valued information if we could only get the evidence on this point of old Mrs. Shakspere, who undoubtedly was present on the occasion? A member of our party, an American, ventured to remark as much to one of the guides; but the latter did not seem to understand him. So the American told him just to keep thinking it over at odd moments, and that he would be back again in a couple of years, if nothing happened, and possibly by that time the guide would have caught the drift of his observation. On second thought, later on, he decided to make it three years—he did not want to crowd the guide, he said, or put too great a burden on his mentality in a limited space of time.
If England harbors few guides the Continent is fairly glutted with them. After nightfall the boulevards of Paris are so choked with them that in places there is standing room only. In Rome the congestion is even greater. In Rome every other person is a guide—and sometimes twins. I do not know why, in thinking of Europe, I invariably associate the subject of guides with the subject of tips. The guides were no greedier for tips than the cabmen or the hotel helpers, or the railroad hands, or the populace at large. Nevertheless this is true. In my mind I am sure guides and tips will always be coupled, as surely as any of those standard team-word combinations of our language that are familiar to all; as firmly paired off as, for example, Castor and Pollux, or Damon and Pythias, or Fair and Warmer, or Hay and Feed. When I think of one I know I shall think of the other. Also I shall think of languages; but for that there is a reason.
Tipping—the giving of tips and the occasional avoidance of giving them—takes up a good deal of the tourist's time in Europe. At first reading the arrangement devised by the guidebooks, of setting aside ten per cent of one's bill for tipping purposes, seems a better plan and a less costly one than the indiscriminate American system of tipping for each small service at the time of its performance. The trouble is that this arrangement does not work out so well in actual practice as it sounds in theory. On the day of your departure you send for your hotel bill. You do not go to the desk and settle up there after the American fashion. If you have learned the ropes you order your room waiter to fetch your bill to you, and in the privacy of your apartment you pore over the formidable document wherein every small charge is fully specified, the whole concluding with an impressive array of items regarding which you have no prior recollection whatsoever. Considering the total, you put aside an additional ten per cent, calculated for division on the basis of so much for the waiter, so much for the boots, so much for the maid and the porter, and the cashier, and the rest of them. It is not necessary that you send for these persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them; they will be waiting for you in the hallways. No matter how early or late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a long and serried rank.
You distribute bills and coins until your ten per cent is exhausted, and then you are pained to note that several servitors yet remain, lined up and all expectant, owners of strange faces that you do not recall ever having seen before, but who are now at hand with claims, real or imaginary, on your purse. Inasmuch as you have a deadly fear of being remembered afterward in this hotel as a piker, you continue to dip down and to fork over, and so by the time you reach the tail end of the procession your ten per cent has grown to twelve or fifteen per cent, or even more.
As regards the tipping of guides for their services, I hit on a fairly satisfactory plan, which I gladly reveal here for the benefit of my fellow man. I think it is a good idea to give the guide, on parting, about twice as much as you think he is entitled to, which will be about half as much as he expects. From this starting point you then work toward each other, you conceding a little from time to time, he abating a trifle here and there, until you have reached a happy compromise on a basis of fifty-fifty; and so you part in mutual good will.
The average American, on the eve of going to Europe, thinks of the European as speaking each his own language. He conceives of the Poles speaking Polar; of the Hollanders talking Hollandaise; of the Swiss as employing Schweitzer for ordinary conversations and yodeling when addressing friends at a distance; and so on. Such, however, is rarely the case. Nearly every person with whom one comes in contact in Europe appears to have fluent command of several tongues besides his or her own. It is true this does not apply to Italy, where the natives mainly stick to Italian; but then, Italian is not a language. It is a calisthenic.
Between Rome and Florence, our train stopped at a small way station in the mountains. As soon as the little locomotive had panted itself to a standstill the train hands, following their habit, piled off the cars and engaged in a tremendous confab with the assembled officials on the platform. Immediately all the loafers in sight drew cards. A drowsy hillsman, muffled to his back hair in a long brown cloak, and with buskins on his legs such as a stage bandit wears, was dozing against the wall. He looked as though he had stepped right out of a comic opera to add picturesqueness to the scene. He roused himself and joined in; so did a bearded party who, to judge by his uniform, was either a Knight of Pythias or a general in the army; so did all the rest of the crowd. In ten seconds they were jammed together in a hard knot, and going it on the high speed with the muffler off, fine white teeth shining, arms flying, shoulders shrugging, spinal columns writhing, mustaches rising and falling, legs wriggling, scalps and ears following suit. Feeding hour in the parrot cage at the zoo never produced anything like so noisy and animated a scene. In these parts acute hysteria is not a symptom; it is merely a state of mind.
A waiter in soiled habiliments hurried up, abandoning chances of trade at the prospect of something infinitely more exciting. He wanted to stick his oar into the argument. He had a few pregnant thoughts of his own craving utterance, you could tell that. But he was handicapped into a state of dumbness by the fact that he needed both arms to balance a tray of wine and sandwiches on his head. Merely using his voice in that company would not have counted. He stood it as long as he could, which was not very long, let me tell you. Then he slammed his tray down on the platform and, with one quick movement, jerked his coat sleeves back to his elbows, and inside thirty seconds he had the floor in both hands, as it were. He conversed mainly with the Australian crawl stroke, but once in a while switched to the Spencerian free-arm movement and occasionally introduced the Chautauqua salute with telling effect.
On the Continent guides, as a class, excel in the gift of tongues—guides and hotel concierges. The concierge at our hotel in Berlin was a big, upstanding chap, half Russian and half Swiss, and therefore qualified by his breeding to speak many languages; for the Russians are born with split tongues and can give cards and spades to any talking crow that ever lived; while the Swiss lag but little behind them in linguistic aptitude. It seemed such a pity that this man was not alive when the hands knocked off work on the Tower of Babel; he could have put the job through without extending himself. No matter what the nationality of a guest might be—and the guests were of many nationalities—he could talk with that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest might fancy. I myself was sorely tempted to try him on Coptic and early Aztec; but I held off. My Coptic is not what it once was; and, partly through disuse and partly through carelessness, I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly these last few months.
All linguistic freakishness is not confined to the Continent. The English, who are popularly supposed to use the same language we ourselves use, sometimes speak with a mighty strange tongue. A great many of them do not speak English; they speak British, a very different thing. An Englishwoman of breeding has a wonderful speaking voice; as pure as a Boston woman's and more liquid; as soft as a Southern woman's and with more attention paid to the R's. But the Cockney type—Wowie! During a carriage ride in Florence with a mixed company of tourists I chanced to say something of a complimentary nature about something English, and a little London-bred woman spoke up and said: "Thenks! It's vurry naice of you to sezzo, 'm sure." Some of them talk like that—honestly they do!
Though Americo-English may not be an especially musical speech, it certainly does lend itself most admirably to slang purposes. Here again the Britishers show their inability to utilize the vehicle to the full of its possibilities. England never produced a Billy Baxter or a George Ade, and I am afraid she never will. Most of our slang means something; you hear a new slang phrase and instantly you realize that the genius who coined it has hit on a happy and a graphic and an illuminating expression; that at one bound he rose triumphant above the limitations of the language and tremendously enriched the working vocabulary of the man in the street. Whereas an Englishman's idea of slinging slang is to scoop up at random some inoffensive and well-meaning word that never did him any harm and apply it in the place of some other word, to which the first word is not related, even by marriage. And look how they deliberately mispronounce proper names. Everybody knows about Cholmondeley and St. John. But take the Scandinavian word fjord. Why, I ask you, should the English insist on pronouncing it Ferguson?
At Oxford, the seat of learning, Magdalen is pronounced Maudlin, probably in subtle tribute to the condition of the person who first pronounced it so. General-admission day is not the day you enter, but the day you leave. Full term means three-quarters of a term. An ordinary degree is a degree obtained by a special examination. An inspector of arts does not mean an inspector of arts, but a student; and from this point they go right ahead, getting worse all the time. The droll creature who compiled the Oxford glossary was a true Englishman.
When an Englishman undertakes to wrestle with American slang he makes a fearful hash of it. In an English magazine I read a short story, written by an Englishman who is regarded by a good many persons, competent to judge, as being the cleverest writer of English alive today. The story was beautifully done from the standpoint of composition; it bristled with flashing metaphors and whimsical phrasing. The scene of the yarn was supposed to be Chicago and naturally the principal figure in it was a millionaire. In one place the author has this person saying, "I reckon you'll feel pretty mean," and in another place, "I reckon I'm not a man with no pull."
Another character in the story says, "I know you don't cotton to the march of science in these matters," and speaks of something that is unusual as being "a rum affair." A walled state prison, presumably in Illinois, is referred to as a "convict camp"; and its warden is called a "governor" and an assistant keeper is called a "warder"; while a Chicago daily paper is quoted as saying that "larrikins" directed the attention of a policeman to a person who was doing thus and so.
The writer describes a "mysterious mere" known as Pilgrim's Pond, "in which they say"—a prison official is supposed to be talking now—"our fathers made witches walk until they sank." Descendants of the original Puritans who went from Plymouth Rock, in the summer of 1621, and founded Chicago, will recall this pond distinctly. Cotton Mather is buried on its far bank, and from there it is just ten minutes by trolley to Salem, Massachusetts. It is stated also in this story that the prairies begin a matter of thirty-odd miles from Chicago, and that to reach them one must first traverse a "perfect no man's land." Englewood and South Chicago papers please copy.
Getting back again to guides, I am reminded that our acquaintanceship with the second member of the Mark Twain brotherhood was staged in Paris. This gentleman wished himself on us one afternoon at the Hotel des Invalides. We did not engage him; he engaged us, doing the trick with such finesse and skill that before we realized it we had been retained to accompany him to various points of interest in and round Paris. However, we remained under his control one day only. At nightfall we wrested ourselves free and fled under cover of darkness to German soil, where we were comparatively safe.
I never knew a man who advanced so rapidly in a military way as he did during the course of that one day. Our own national guard could not hold a candle to him. He started out at ten A.M. by being an officer of volunteers in the Franco-Prussian War; but every time he slipped away and took a nip out of his private bottle, which was often, he advanced in rank automatically. Before the dusk of evening came he was a corps commander, who had been ennobled on the field of battle by the hand of Napoleon the Third.
He took us to Versailles. We did not particularly care to go to Versailles that day, because it was raining; but he insisted and we went. In spite of the drizzle we might have enjoyed that wonderful place had he not been constantly at our elbows, gabbling away steadily except when he excused himself for a moment and stepped behind a tree, to emerge a moment later wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Then he would return to us, with an added gimpiness in his elderly legs, an increased expansion of the chest inside his tight and shiny frock coat, and a fresh freight of richness on his breath, to report another deserved promotion.
After he had eaten luncheon—all except such portions of it as he spilled on himself—the colonel grew confidential and chummy. He tried to tell me an off-color story and forgot the point of it, if indeed it had any point. He began humming the Marseillaise hymn, but broke off to say he expected to live to see the day when a column of French troops, singing that air, would march up Unter den Linden to stack their arms in the halls of the Kaiser's palace. I did not take issue with him. Every man is entitled to his own wishes in those matters. But later on, when I had seen something of the Kaiser's standing army, I thought to myself that when the French troops did march up Unter den Linden they would find it tolerably rough sledding, and if there was any singing done a good many of them probably would not be able to join in the last verse.
Immediately following this, our conductor confided to me that he had once had the honor of serving Mr. Clemens, whom he referred to as Mick Twine. He told me things about Mr. Clemens of which I had never heard. I do not think Mr. Clemens ever heard of them either. Then the brigadier—it was now after three o'clock, and between three and three-thirty he was a brigadier—drew my arm within his.
"I, too, am an author," he stated. "It is not generally known, but I have written much. I wrote a book of which you may have heard—'The Wandering Jew.'" And he tapped himself on the bosom proudly.
I said I had somehow contracted a notion that a party named Sue—Eugene Sue—had something to do with writing the work of that name.
"Ah, but you are right there, my friend," he said. "Sue wrote 'The Wandering Jew' the first time—as a novel, merely; but I wrote him much better—as a satire on the anti-Semitic movement."
I surrendered without offering to strike another blow and from that time on he had his own way with us. The day, as I was pleased to note at the time, had begun mercifully to draw to a close; we were driving back to Paris, and he, sitting on the front seat, had just attained the highest post in the army under the regime of the last Empire, when he said:
"Behold, m'sieur! We are now approaching a wine shop on the left. You were most gracious and kind in the matter of luncheon. Kindly permit me to do the honors now. It is a very good wine shop—I know it well. Shall we stop for a glass together, eh?"
It was the first time since we landed at Calais that a native-born person had offered to buy anything, and, being ever desirous to assist in the celebration of any truly notable occasion, I accepted and the car was stopped. We were at the portal of the wine shop, when he plucked at my sleeve, offering another suggestion:
"The chauffeur now—he is a worthy fellow, that chauffeur. Shall we not invite the chauffeur to join us?"
I was agreeable to that, too. So he called the chauffeur and the chauffeur disentangled his whiskers from the steering gear and came and joined us. The chauffeur and I each had a small glass of light wine, but the general took brandy. Then ensued a spirited dialogue between him and the woman who kept the shop. Assuming that I had no interest in the matter, I studied the pictures behind the bar. Presently, having reduced the woman to a state of comparative silence, he approached me.
"M'sieur," he said, "I regret that this has happened. Because you are a foreigner and because you know not our language, that woman would make an overcharge; but she forgot she had me to deal with. I am on guard! See her! She is now quelled! I have given her a lesson she will not soon forget. M'sieur, the correct amount of the bill is two-francs-ten. Give it to her and let us begone!"
I still have that guide's name and address in my possession. At parting he pressed his card on me and asked me to keep it; and I did keep it. I shall be glad to loan it to any American who may be thinking of going to Paris. With the card in his pocket, he will know exactly where this guide lives; and then, when he is in need of a guide he can carefully go elsewhere and hire a guide.
I almost failed to mention that before we parted he tried to induce us to buy something. He took us miles out of our way to a pottery and urged us to invest in its wares. This is the main purpose of every guide: to see that you buy something and afterward to collect his commission from the shopkeeper for having brought you to the shop. If you engage your guide through the porter at your hotel you will find that he steers you to the shops the hotel people have already recommended to you; but if you break the porter's heart by hiring your guide outside, independently, the guide steers you to the shops that are on his own private list.
Only once I saw a guide temporarily stumped, and that was in Venice. The skies were leaky that day and the weather was raw; and one of the ladies of the party wore pumps and silk stockings. For the protection of her ankles she decided to buy a pair of cloth gaiters; and, stating her intention, she started to go into a shop that dealt in those articles. The guide hesitated a moment only, then threw himself in her path. The shops hereabout were not to be trusted—the proprietors, without exception, were rogues and extortioners. If madame would have patience for a few brief moments he would guarantee that she got what she wanted at an honest price. He seemed so desirous of protecting her that she consented to wait.
In a minute, on a pretext, he excused himself and dived into one of the crooked ways that thread through all parts of Venice and make it possible for one who knows their windings to reach any part of the city without using the canals. Two of us secretly followed him. Beyond the first turning he dived into a shoe shop. Emerging after a while he hurried back and led the lady to that same shop, and stood by, smiling softly, while she was fitted with gaiters. Until now evidently gaiters had not been on his list, but he had taken steps to remedy this; and, though his commission on a pair of sixty-cent gaiters could not have been very large yet, as some philosopher has so truly said, every little bit added to what you have makes just a modicum more. Indeed, the guide never overlooks the smallest bet. His whole mentality is focused on getting you inside a shop. Once you are there, he stations himself close behind you, reenforcing the combined importunities of the shopkeeper and his assembled staff with gentle suggestions. The depths of self-abasement to which a shopkeeper in Europe will descend in an effort to sell his goods surpasses the power of description. The London tradesman goes pretty far in this direction. Often he goes as far as the sidewalk, clinging to the hem of your garment and begging you to return for one more look. But the Continentals are still worse.
A Parisian shopkeeper would sell you the bones of his revered grandmother if you wanted them and he had them in stock; and he would have them in stock too, because, as I have stated once before, a true Parisian never throws away anything he can save. I heard of just one single instance where a customer desirous of having an article and willing to pay the price failed to get it; and that, I would say, stands without a parallel in the annals of commerce and barter.
An American lady visiting her daughter, an art student in the Latin Quartier, was walking alone when she saw in a shop window a lace blouse she fancied. She went inside and by signs, since she knew no French, indicated that she wished to look at that blouse. The woman in charge shook her head, declining even to take the garment out of the window. Convinced now, womanlike, that this particular blouse was the blouse she desired above all other blouses the American woman opened her purse and indicated that she was prepared to buy at the shopwoman's own valuation, without the privilege of examination. The shopwoman showed deep pain at having to refuse the proposition, but refuse it she did; and the would-be buyer went home angry and perplexed and told her daughter what had happened.
"It certainly is strange," the daughter said. "I thought everything in Paris, except possibly Napoleon's tomb, was for sale. This thing will repay investigation. Wait until I pin my hat on. Does my nose need powdering?"
Her mother led her back to the shop of the blouse and then the puzzle was revealed. For it was the shop of a dry cleanser and the blouse belonged to some patron and was being displayed as a sample of the work done inside; but undoubtedly such a thing never before happened in Paris and probably never will happen again.
In Venice not only the guides and the hotel clerks and porters but even the simple gondolier has a secret understanding with all branches of the retail trade. You get into a long, snaky, black gondola and fee the beggar who pushes you off, and all the other beggars who have assisted in the pushing off or have merely contributed to the success of the operation by being present, and you tell your gondolier in your best Italian or your worst pidgin English where you wish to go. It may be you are bound for the Rialto; or for the Bridge of Sighs, which is chiefly distinguished from all the other bridges by being the only covered one in the lot; or for the house of the lady Desdemona. The lady Desdemona never lived there or anywhere else, but the house where she would have lived, had she lived, is on exhibition daily from nine to five, admission one lira. Or perchance you want to visit one of the ducal palaces that are so numerous in Venice. These palaces are still tenanted by the descendants of the original proprietors; one family has perhaps been living in one palace three or four hundred years. But now the family inhabits the top floor, doing light housekeeping up there, and the lower floor, where the art treasures, the tapestries and the family relics are, is in charge of a caretaker, who collects at the door and then leads you through.
Having given the boatman explicit directions you settle back in your cushion seat to enjoy the trip. You marvel how he, standing at the stern, with his single oar fitted into a shallow notch of his steering post, propels the craft so swiftly and guides it so surely by those short, twisting strokes of his. Really, you reflect, it is rowing by shorthand. You are feasting your eyes on the wonderful color effects and the groupings that so enthuse the artist, and which he generally manages to botch and boggle when he seeks to commit them to canvas; and betweenwhiles you are wondering why all the despondent cats in Venice should have picked out the Grand Canal as the most suitable place in which to commit suicide, when—bump!—your gondola swings up against the landing piles in front of a glass factory and the entire force of helpers rush out and seize you by your arms—or by your legs, if handier—and try to drag you inside, while the affable and accommodating gondolier boosts you from behind. You fight them off, declaring passionately that you are not in the market for colored glass at this time. The hired hands protest; and the gondolier, cheated out of his commission, sorrows greatly, but obeys your command to move on. At least he pretends to obey it; but a minute later he brings you up broadside at the water-level doors of a shop dealing in antiques, known appropriately as antichitas, or at a mosaic shop or a curio shop. If ever you do succeed in reaching your destination it is by the exercise of much profanity and great firmness of will.
The most insistent and pesky shopkeepers of all are those who hive in the ground floors of the professedly converted palaces that face on three sides of the Square of Saint Mark's. You dare not hesitate for the smallest fractional part of a second in front of a shop here. Lurking inside the open door is a husky puller-in; and he dashes out and grabs hold of you and will not let go, begging you in spaghettified English to come in and examine his unapproachable assortment of bargains. You are not compelled to buy, he tells you; he only wants you to gaze on his beautiful things. Believe him not! Venture inside and decline to purchase and he will think up new and subtle Italian forms of insult and insolence to visit on you. They will have brass bands out for you if you invest and brass knuckles if you do not.
There is but one way to escape from their everlasting persecutions, and that is to flee to the center of the square and enjoy the company of the pigeons and the photographers. They—the pigeons, I mean—belong to the oldest family in Venice; their lineage is of the purest and most undefiled. For upward of seven hundred years the authorities of the city have been feeding and protecting the pigeons, of which these countless blue-and-bronze flocks are the direct descendants. They are true aristocrats; and, like true aristocrats, they are content to live on the public funds and grow fat and sassy thereon, paying nothing in return.
No; I take that part back—they do pay something in return; a full measure. They pay by the beauty of their presence, and they are surely very beautiful, with their dainty mincing pink feet and the sheen on the proudly arched breast coverts of the cock birds; and they pay by giving you their trust and their friendship. To gobble the gifts of dried peas, which you buy in little cornucopias from convenient venders for distribution among them, they come wheeling in winged battalions, creaking and cooing, and alight on your head and shoulders in that perfect confidence which so delights humans when wild or half-wild creatures bestow it on us, though, at every opportunity, we do our level best to destroy it by hunting and harrying them to death.
At night, when the moon is up, is the time to visit this spot. Standing here, with the looming pile of the Doge's Palace bulked behind you, and the gorgeous but somewhat garish decorations of the great cathedral softened and soothed into perfection of outline and coloring by the half light, you can for the moment forget the fallen state of Venice, and your imagination peoples the splendid plaza for you with the ghosts of its dead and vanished greatnesses. You conceive of the place as it must have looked in those old, brave, wicked days, filled all with knights, with red-robed cardinals and clanking men at arms, with fair ladies and grave senators, slinking bravos and hired assassins—and all so gay with silk and satin and glittering steel and spangling gems.
By the eye of your mind you see His Illuminated Excellency, the frosted Christmas card, as he bows low before His Eminence, the pink Easter egg; you see, half hidden behind the shadowed columns of the long portico, an illustrated Sunday supplement in six colors bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his best friend stabbed in the back before morning; you see giddy poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-painted valentines; you catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and scent the plotting; you are an eyewitness to a slice out of the life of the most sinister, the most artistic, and the most murderous period of Italian history.
But by day imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, stops a hole to keep the wind away; and the wild ass of the ninety-day tour stamps his heedless hoofs over the spot where sleeps the dust of departed grandeur. By day the chug of the motor boat routs out old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins; the burnished golden frescoes of Saint Mark's blare at you as with brazen trumpets; every third medieval church has been turned into a moving-picture place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. It should be the tapeworm.
In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated guide shall be a violent Socialist and therefore rampingly anticlerical in all his views. We were in Rome during the season of pilgrimages. From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary and Spain and Tyrol, and even from France, groups of peasants had come to Rome to worship in their mother church and be blessed by the supreme pontiff of their faith. At all hours of the day they were passing through the streets, bound for Saint Peter's or the Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their breasts.
At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frocked village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted. A man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City, praying as they went. Some of them had been saving up all their lives, I imagine, against the coming of this great day; but our guide—and we tried three different ones—never beheld this sight that he did not sneer at it; and not once did he fail to point out that most of the pilgrims were middle-aged or old, taking this as proof of his claim that the Church no longer kept its hold on the younger people, even among the peasant classes. The still more frequent spectacle of a marching line of students of one of the holy colleges, with each group wearing the distinctive insignia of its own country—purple robes or green sashes, or what not—would excite him to the verge of a spasm.
But then he was always verging on a spasm anyway—spasms were his normal state.
Our guide in Vienna was the most stupid human being I ever saw. He was profoundly ignorant on a tremendously wide range of subjects; he had a most complete repertoire of ignorance. He must have spent years of study to store up so much interesting misinformation. This guide was much addicted to indulgence of a peculiar form of twisted English and at odd moments given to the consumption of a delicacy of strictly Germanic origin, known in the language of the Teutons as a rollmops. A rollmops consists of a large dilled cucumber, with a pickled herring coiled round it ready to strike, in the design of the rattlesnake-and-pinetree flag of the Revolution, the motto in both instances being in effect: "Don't monkey with the buzz saw!" He carried his rollmops in his pocket and frequently, in art galleries or elsewhere, would draw it out and nibble it, while disseminating inaccuracies touching on pictures and statues and things.
Among other places, he took us to the oldest church in Vienna. As I now recollect it was six hundred years old. No; on second thought I will say it must have been older than that. No church could possibly become so moldy and mangy looking as that church in only six hundred years. The object in this church that interested me most was contained in an ornate glass case placed near the altar and alongside the relics held to be sacred. It did not exactly please me to gaze at this article; but the thing had a fascination for me; I will not deny that.
It seems that a couple of centuries ago there was an officer in Vienna, a captain in rank and a Frenchman by birth, who, in the midst of disorders and licentiousness, lived so godly and so sanctified a life that his soldiers took it into their heads that he was really a saint, or at least had the making of a first-rate saint in him, and, therefore, must lead a charmed life. So—thus runs the tale—some of them laid a wager with certain Doubting Thomases, also soldiers, that neither by fire nor water, neither by rope nor poison, could he take harm to himself. Finally they decided on fire for the test. So they waited until he slept—those simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps—and then they slipped in with a lighted torch and touched him off.
Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal of any small-town theater that ever was built—with one exit. He was practically a total loss and there was no insurance.
They still have him, or what is left of him, in that glass case. He did not exactly suffer martyrdom—though probably he personally did not notice any very great difference—and so he has not been canonized; nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In all Europe I only saw one sight to match him, and that was down in the crypt under the Church of the Capuchins, in Rome, where the dissected cadavers of four thousand dead—but not gone—monks are worked up into decorations. There are altars made of their skulls, and chandeliers made of their thigh bones; frescoes of their spines; mosaics of their teeth and dried muscles; cozy corners of their femurs and pelves and tibiae. There are two classes of travelers I would strongly advise not to visit the crypt of the Capuchins' Church—those who are just about to have dinner and want to have it, and those who have just had dinner and want to keep on having it.
At the royal palace in Vienna we saw the finest, largest, and gaudiest collection of crown jewels extant. That guide of ours seemed to think he had done his whole duty toward us and could call it a day and knock off when he led us up to the jewel collections, where each case was surrounded by pop-eyed American tourists taking on flesh at the sight of all those sparklers and figuring up the grand total of their valuation in dollars, on the basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many hundred dollars a carat, until reason tottered on her throne—and did not have so very far to totter, either.
The display or all those gems, however, did not especially excite me. There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue Kimberley in a hotel clerk's shirtfront or a pigeonblood ruby on a faro dealer's little finger might hold my attention and win my admiration; but where jewels are piled up in heaps like anthracite in a coal bin they thrill me no more than the anthracite would. A quart measure of diamonds of the average size of a big hailstone does not make me think of diamonds but of hailstones. I could remain as calm in their presence as I should in the presence of a quart of cracked ice; in fact, calmer than I should remain in the presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where there is not that much ice, cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucketful of ice would be worth traveling miles to see. You could sell tickets for it.
In one of the smaller rooms of the palace we came on a casket containing a necklace of great smoldering rubies and a pair of bracelets to match. They were as big as cranberries and as red as blood—as red as arterial blood. And when, on consulting the guidebook, we read the history of those rubies the sight of them brought a picture to our minds, for they had been a part of the wedding dowry of Marie Antoinette. Once on a time this necklace had spanned the slender white throat that was later to be sheared by the guillotine, and these bracelets had clasped the same white wrists that were roped together with an ell of hangman's hemp on the day the desolated queen rode, in her patched and shabby gown, to the Place de la Revolution.
I had seen paintings in plenty and read descriptions galore of that last ride of the Widow Capet going to her death in the tumbril, with the priest at her side and her poor, fettered arms twisted behind her, and her white face bared to the jeers of the mob; but the physical presence of those precious useless baubles, which had cost so much and yet had bought so little for her, made more vivid to me than any picture or any story the most sublime tragedy of The Terror—the tragedy of those two bound hands.