Title: As Seen By Me
Author: Bell, Lilian
Language: English
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As Seen By Me

by Lilian Bell

1900


Contents

 Chapter I. FIRST LETTER—ON THE WAY
 Chapter II. LONDON
 Chapter III. PARIS
 Chapter IV. ON BOARD THE YACHT “HELA”
 Chapter V. VILNA, RUSSIA
 Chapter VI. ST. PETERSBURG
 Chapter VII. RUSSIA
 Chapter VIII. MOSCOW
 Chapter IX. CONSTANTINOPLE
 Chapter X. CAIRO
 Chapter XI. THE NILE
 Chapter XII. GREECE
 Chapter XIII. NAPLES
 Chapter XIV. ROME

[Illustration: THE FAMOUS RELIEF OF CLEOPATRA AT TEMPLE OF DENDERAH]

By LILIAN BELL

THE INSTINCT OF STEP-FATHERHOOD. A Novel. 16mo, Cloth, $1.25.
A LITTLE SISTER TO THE WILDERNESS. A Novel. 16mo, Cloth, $1.25.
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF AN OLD MAID. 16mo, Cloth, $1.25.
THE UNDER SIDE OF THINGS. 16mo, Cloth, $1.25.
FROM A GIRL’S POINT OF VIEW. 16mo, Cloth, $1.25.


TO

THAT MOST INTERESTING SPECK OF HUMANITY, ALL PERPETUAL MOTION AND
KINDLING INTELLIGENCE AND SWEETNESS UNSPEAKABLE, MY LITTLE NEPHEW

BILLY

ABSENCE FROM WHOM RACKED MY SPIRIT WITH ITS MOST UNAPPEASABLE PANGS OF
HOMESICKNESS, AND WHOSE CONSTANT PRESENCE IN MY STUDY SINCE MY RETURN
HAS SPARED THE PUBLIC NO SMALL AMOUNT OF PAIN



AUTHOR’S APOLOGY


The frank conceit of the title to this book will, I hope, not prejudice
my friends against it, and will serve not only to excuse my being my
own Boswell, but will fasten the blame of all inaccuracies, if such
there be, upon the offender—myself. This is not a continuous narrative
of a continuous journey, but covers two years of travel over some
thirty thousand miles, and presents peoples and things, not as you saw
them, perhaps, or as they really are, but only As Seen By Me.



I
FIRST LETTER—ON THE WAY


In this day and generation, when everybody goes to Europe, it is
difficult to discover the only person who never has been there. But I
am that one, and therefore the stir it occasioned in the bosom of my
amiable family when I announced that I, too, was about to join the vast
majority, is not easy to imagine. But if you think that I at once
became a person of importance it only goes to show that you do not know
the family. My mother, to be sure, hovered around me the way she does
when she thinks I am going into typhoid fever. I never have had typhoid
fever, but she is always on the watch for it, and if it ever comes it
will not catch her napping. She will meet it half-way. And lest it
elude her watchfulness, she minutely questions every pain which assails
any one of us, for fear, it may be her dreaded foe. Yet when my
sister’s blessed lamb baby had it before he was a year old, and after
he had got well and I was not afraid he would be struck dead for my
wickedness, I said to her, “Well, mamma, you must have taken solid
comfort out of the first real chance you ever had at your pet fever,”
she said I ought to be ashamed of myself.

My father began to explain international banking to me as his share in
my preparations, but I utterly discouraged him by asking the difference
between a check and a note. He said I reminded him of the juryman who
asked the difference between plaintiff and defendant. I soothed him by
assuring him that I knew I would always find somebody to go to the bank
with me.

“Most likely ’twill be Providence, then, as He watches over children
and fools,” said my cousin, with what George Eliot calls “the brutal
candor of a near relation.”

My brother-in-law lent me ten Baedekers, and offered his hampers and
French trunks to me with such reckless generosity that I had to get my
sister to stop him so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings by refusing.

My sister said, “I am perfectly sure, mamma, that if I don’t go with
her, she will go about with an ecstatic smile on her face, and let
herself get cheated and lost, and she would just as soon as not tell
everybody that she had never been abroad before. She has no pride.”

“Then you had better come along and take care of me and see that I
don’t disgrace you,” I urged.

“Really, mamma, I do think I had better go,” said my sister. So she
actually consented to leave husband and baby in order to go and take
care of me. I do assure you, however, that I have bought all the
tickets, and carried the common purse, and got her through the
custom-houses, and arranged prices thus far. But she does pack my
trunks and make out the laundry lists—I will say that for her.

My brother’s contribution to my comfort was in this wise: He said, “You
must have a few more lessons on your wheel before you go, and I’ll take
you out for a lesson to-morrow if you’ll get up and go at six o’clock
in the morning—that is, if you’ll wear gloves. But you mortify me half
to death riding without gloves.”

“Nobody sees me but milkmen,” I said, humbly.

“Well, what will the milkmen think?” said my brother.

“Mercy on us, I never thought of that,” I said. “My gloves are all
pretty tight when one has to grip one’s handle-bars as fiercely as I
do. But I’ll get large ones. What tint do you think milkmen care the
most for?”

He sniffed.

“Well, I’ll go and I’ll wear gloves,” I said, “but if I fall off,
remember it will be on account of the gloves.”

“You always do fall off,” he said, with patient resignation. “I’ve seen
you fall off that wheel in more different directions than it has
spokes.”

“I don’t exactly fall,” I explained, carefully. “I feel myself going
and then I get off.”

I was ready at six the next morning, and I wore gloves.

“Now, don’t ride into the holes in the street”—one is obliged to give
such instructions in Chicago—“and don’t look at anything you see. Don’t
be afraid. You’re all right. Now, then! You’re off!”

“Oh, Teddy, don’t ride so close to me,” I quavered.

“I’m forty feet away from you,” he said.

“Then double it,” I said. “You’re choking me by your proximity.”

“Let’s cross the railroad tracks just for practice,” he said, when it
was too late for me to expostulate. “Stand up on your pedals and ride
fast, and—”

“Hold on, please do,” I shrieked. “I’m falling off. Get out of my way.
I seem to be turning—”

He scorched ahead, and I headed straight for the switchman’s hut,
rounded it neatly, and leaned myself and my wheel against the side of
it, helpless with laughter.

A red Irish face, with a short black pipe in its mouth, thrust itself
out of the tiny window just in front of me, and a voice with a rich
brogue exclaimed:

“As purty a bit of riding as iver Oi see!”

“Wasn’t it?” I cried. “You couldn’t do it.”

“Oi wouldn’t thry! Oi’d rather tackle a railroad train going at full
spheed thin wan av thim runaway critturs.”

“Get down from there,” hissed my brother so close to my ear that it
made me bite my tongue.

I obediently scrambled down. Ted’s face was very red.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself to enter into immediate
conversation with a man like that. What do you suppose that man thought
of you?”

“Oh, perhaps he saw my gloves and took me for a lady,” I pleaded.

Ted grinned and assisted me to mount.

When I successfully turned the corner by making Ted fall back out of
sight, we rode away along the boulevard in silence for a while, for my
conversation when I am on a wheel is generally limited to shrieks,
ejaculations, and snatches of prayer. I never talk to be amusing.

“I say,” said my brother, hesitatingly, “I wear a No. 8 glove and a No.
10 stocking.”

“I’ve always thought you had large hands and feet,” I said, ignoring
the hint.

He giggled.

“No, now, really. I wish you’d write that down somewhere. You can get
those things so cheap in Paris.”

“You are supposing the case of my return, or of Christmas intervening,
or—a present of some kind, I suppose.”

“Well, no; not exactly. Although you know I am always broke—”

“Don’t I, though?”

“And that I am still in debt—”

“Because papa insists upon your putting some money in the bank every
month—”

“Yes, and the result is that I never get my head above water. I owe you
twenty now.”

“Which I never expect to recover, because you know I always get silly
about Christmas and ‘forgive thee thy debts.’”

“You’re awful good—” he began.

“But I’ll be better if I bring you gloves and silk stockings.”

“I’ll give you the money!” he said, heroically. “Will you borrow it of
me or of mamma?” I asked, with a chuckle at the family financiering
which always goes on in this manner.

“Now don’t make fun of me! _You_ don’t know what it is to be hard up.”

“Don’t I, though?” I said, indignantly. “Oh—oh! Catch me!”

He seized my handle-bar and righted me before I fell off.

“See what you did by saying I never was hard up,” I said. “I’ll tell
you what, Teddy. You needn’t give me the money. I’ll bring you some
gloves and stockings!”

“Oh, I say, honest? Oh, but you’re the right kind of a sister! I’ll
never forget that as long as I live. You do look so nice on your wheel.
You sit so straight and—”

I saw a milkman coming. We three were the only objects in sight, yet I
headed for him.

“Get out of my way,” I shrieked at him. “I’m a beginner. Turn off!”

He lashed his horse and cut down a side street.

“What a narrow escape,” I sighed. “How glad I am I happened to think of
that.”

I looked up pleasantly at Ted. He was biting his lips and he looked
raging.

“You are the most hopeless girl I ever saw!” he burst out. “I wish you
didn’t own a wheel.”

“I don’t,” I said. “The wheel owns me.”

“You haven’t the manners of—”

“Stockings,” I said, looking straight ahead. “Silk stockings with polka
dots embroidered on them, No. 10.”

Ted looked sheepish.

“I ride so well,” I proceeded. “I sit up so straight and look so nice.”

No answer.

“Gloves,” I went on, still without looking at him. “White and pearl
ones for evening, and russet gloves for the street, No. 8.”

“Oh, quit, won’t you? I’m sorry I said that. But if you only knew how
you mortify me.”

“Cheer up, Tedcastle. I am going away, you know. And when I come back
you will either have got over caring so much or I will be more of a
lady.”

“I’m sorry you are going,” said my brother. “But as you are going,
perhaps you will let me use your rooms while you are gone. Your bed is
the best one I ever slept in, and your study would be bully for the
boys when they come to see me.”

I was too stunned to reply. He went on, utterly oblivious of my
consternation:

“And I am going to use your wheel while you are gone, if you don’t
mind, to take the girls out on. I know some awfully nice girls who can
ride, but their wheels are last year’s make, and they won’t ride them.
I’d rather like to be able to offer them a new wheel.”

“I am not going to take all my party dresses. Have you any use for
them?” I said.

“Why, what’s the matter? Won’t you let me have your rooms?”

“Merciful heavens, child! I should say not!”

“Why, I haven’t asked you for much,” said my small, modest brother.
“You offered.”

“Well, just wait till I offer the rest. But I’ll tell you what I will
do, Ted. If you will promise not to go into my rooms and rummage once
while I am gone, and not to touch my wheel, I’ll buy you a tandem, and
then you can take the girls on that.”

“I’d rather have you bring me some things from Europe,” said my
shrinking brother.

“All right. I’ll do that, but let me off this thing. I am so tired I
can’t move. You’ll have to walk it back and give me five cents to ride
home on the car.”

I crawled in to breakfast more dead than alive.

“What’s the matter, dearie? Did you ride too far?” asked mamma.

“I don’t know whether I rode too far or whether it was Ted’s asking if
he couldn’t use my rooms while I was gone, but something has made me
tired. What’s that? Whom is papa talking to over the telephone?”

Papa came in fuming and fretting.

“Who was it this time?” I questioned, with anticipation. Inquiries over
the telephone were sure to be interesting to me just now.

“Somebody who wanted to know what train you were going on, but would
not give his name. He was inquiring for a friend, he said, and wouldn’t
give his friend’s name either.”

“Didn’t you tell him?” I cried, in distress.

“Certainly not. I told him nobody but an idiot would withhold his
name.”

Papa calls such a variety of men idiots.

“Oh, but it was probably only flowers or candy. Why didn’t you tell
him? Have you no sentiment?”

“I won’t have you receiving anonymous communications,” he retorted,
with the liberty fathers have a little way of taking with their
daughters.

“But flowers,” I pleaded. “It is no harm to send flowers without a
card. Don’t you see?” Oh, how hard it is to explain a delicate point
like that to one’s father—in broad daylight! “I am supposed to know who
sent them!”

“But would you know?” asked my practical ancestor.

“Not—not exactly. But it would be almost sure to be one of them.”

Ted shouted. But there was nothing funny in what I said. Boys are so
silly.

“Anyway, I am sorry you didn’t tell him,” I said.

“Well, I’m not,” declared papa.

The rest of the day fairly flew. The last night came, and the baby was
put to bed. I undressed him, which he regarded as such a joke that he
worked himself into a fever of excitement. He loves to scrub like
Josie, the cook. I had bought him a little red pail, and I gave it to
him that night when he was partly undressed, and he was so enchanted
with it that he scampered around hugging it, and saying, “Pile! pile!”
like a little Cockney. He gave such squeals of ecstasy that everybody
came into the nursery to find him scrubbing his crib with a nail-brush
and little red pail.

“Who gave you the pretty pail, Billy?” asked Aunt Lida, who was sitting
by the crib.

“Tattah,” said Billy, in a whisper. He always whispers my name.

“Then go and kiss dear auntie. She is going away on the big boat to
stay such a long time.”

Billy’s face sobered. Then he dropped his precious pail, and came and
licked my face like a little dog, which is his way of kissing.

I squeezed him until he yelled.

“Don’t let him forget me,” I wailed. “Talk to him about me every day.
And buy him a toy out of my money often, and tell him Tattah sent it to
him. Oh, oh, he’ll be grown up when I come home!”

“Don’t cry, dearie,” said Aunt Lida, handing me her handkerchief. “I’ll
see that your grave is kept green.”

My sister appeared at the door. She was all ready to start. She even
had her veil on.

“What do you mean by exciting Billy so at this time of night?” she
said. “Go out, all of you. We’ll lose the train. Hush, somebody’s at
the telephone. Papa’s talking to that same man again.” I jumped up and
ran out.

“Let me answer it, papa dear! Yes, yes, yes, certainly. To-night on the
Pennsylvania. You’re quite welcome. Not at all.” I hung up the
telephone.

I could hear papa in the nursery:

“She actually told him—after all I said this morning! I never heard of
anything like it.”

Two or three voices were raised in my defence. Ted slipped out into the
hall.

“Bully for you,” he whispered. “You’ll get the flowers all right at the
train. Who do you s’pose they’re from? Another box just came for you.
Say, couldn’t you leave that smallest box of violets in the silver box?
I want to give them to a girl, and you’ve got such loads of others.”

“Don’t ask her for those,” answered my dear sister, “they are the most
precious of all!”

“I can’t give you any of mine,” I said, “but I’ll buy you a box for
her—a small box,” I added hastily.

“The carriages have come, dears,” quavered grandmamma, coming out of
the nursery, followed by the family, one after the other.

“Get her satchels, Teddy. Her hat is upstairs. Her flowers are in the
hall. She left her ulster on my bed, and her books are on the
window-sill,” said mamma. She wouldn’t look at me. “Remember, dearie,
your medicines are all labelled, and I put needles in your work-box all
threaded. Don’t sit in draughts and don’t read in a dim light. Have a
good time and study hard and come back soon. Good—bye, my girlie. God
bless you!”

By this time no handkerchief would have sufficed for my tears. I
reached out blindly, and Ted handed me a towel.

“I’ve got a sheet when you’ve sopped that,” he said. Boys are such
brutes.

Aunt Lida said, “Good-bye, my dearest. You are my favorite niece. You
know I love you the best.”

I giggled, for she tells my sister the same thing always.

“Nobody seems to care much that I am going,” said Bee, mournfully.

“But you are coming back so soon, and she is going to stay so long,”
exclaimed grandmamma, patting Bee.

“I’ll bet she doesn’t stay a year,” cried Ted.

“I’ll expect her home by Christmas,” said papa.

“I’ll bet she is here to eat Thanksgiving dinner,” cried my
brother-in-law.

“No, she is sure to stay as long as she has said she would,” said
mamma.

Mothers are the brace of the universe. The family trailed down to the
front door. Everybody was carrying something. There were two carriages,
for they were all going to the station with us.

“For all the world like a funeral, with loads of flowers and everybody
crying,” said my brother, cheerfully.

I never shall forget that drive to the station; nor the last few
moments, when Bee and I stood on the car-steps and talked to those who
were on the platform of the station. Can anybody else remember how she
felt at going to Europe for the first time and leaving everybody she
loved at home? Bee grieved because there were no flowers at the train
after all. But the next morning they appeared, a tremendous box,
arranged as a surprise.

Telegrams came popping in at all the big stations along the way,
enlivening our gloom, and at the steamer there were such loads of
things that we might almost have set up as a florist, or fruiterer, or
bookseller. Such a lapful of steamer letters and telegrams! I read a
few each morning, and some of them I read every morning!

I don’t like ocean travel. They sent grapefruit and confections to my
state-room, which I tossed out of the port-hole. You know there are
some people who think you don’t know what you want. I travelled
horizontally most of the way, and now people roar when I say I wasn’t
ill. Well, I wasn’t, you know. We—well, Teddy would not like me to be
more explicit. I own to a horrible headache which never left me. I deny
everything else. Let them laugh. I was there, and I know.

The steamer I went on allows men to smoke on all the decks, and they
all smoked in my face. It did not help me. I must say that I was
unspeakably thankful to get my foot on dry ground once more. When we
got to the dock a special train of toy cars took us through the
greenest of green landscapes, and suddenly, almost before we knew it,
we were at Waterloo Station, and knew that London was at our door.



II
LONDON


People said to me, “What are you going to London for?” I said, “To get
an English point of view.” “Very well,” said one of the knowing ones,
who has lived abroad the larger part of his life, “then you must go to
‘The Insular,’ in Piccadilly. That is not only the smartest hotel in
London, but it is the most typically British. The rooms are let from
season to season to the best country families. There you will find
yourself plunged headlong into English life with not an American
environment to bless yourself with, and you will soon get your English
point of view.”

“Ah-h,” responded the simpleton who goes by my name, “that is what we
want. We will go to ‘The Insular.’”

We wrote at once for rooms, and then telegraphed for them from
Southampton.

The steamer did not land her passengers until the morning of the ninth
day, which shows the vast superiority of going on a fast boat, which
gets you in fully as much as fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of the
slow ones.

Our luggage would not go on even a four-wheeler, so we took a dear
little private bus and proceeded to put our mountainous American trunks
on it. We filled the top of this bus as full as it would hold, and put
everything else inside. After stowing ourselves in there would not have
been room even for another umbrella.

In this fashion we reached “The Insular,” where we were received by
four or five gorgeous creatures in livery, the head one of whom said,
“Miss Columbia?” I admitted it, and we were ushered in, where we were
met by more belonging to this tribe of gorgeousness, another of whom
said, “Miss Columbia?”

“Yes,” I said, firmly, privately wondering if they were trying to trip
me into admitting that I was somebody else.

“The housekeeper will be here presently,” said this person. “She is
expecting you.”

Forth came the housekeeper.

“Miss Columbia?” she said.

Once again I said “Yes,” patiently, standing on my other foot.

“If you will be good enough to come with me I will show you your
rooms.”

A door opened outward, disclosing a little square place with two
cane-bottomed chairs. A man bounced out so suddenly that I nearly
annihilated my sister, who was back of me. I could not imagine what
this little cubbyhole was, but as there seemed to be nowhere else to
go, I went in. The others followed, then the man who had bounced out.
He closed the door and shut us in, where we stood in solemn silence.
About a quarter of an hour afterwards I thought I saw something through
the glass moving slowly downward, and then an infinitesimal thrill in
the soles of my feet led me to suspect the truth.

“Is this thing an elevator?” I whispered to my sister.

“No, they call it a lift over here,” she whispered back.

“I know that,” I murmured, impatiently. “But is this thing it? Are we
moving? Are we going anywhere?”

“Why, of course, my dear. They are slower than ours, that’s all.”

I listened to her with some misgivings, for her information is not
always to be wholly trusted, but this time it happened that she was
right, for after a while we came to the fourth floor, where our rooms
were.

I wish you could have seen the size of them. I shall not attempt to
describe them, for you would not believe me. I had engaged “two rooms
and a bath.” The two rooms were there. “Where is the bath?” I said. The
housekeeper lovingly, removed a gigantic crash towel from a hideous tin
object, and proudly exposed to my vision that object which is next
dearest to his silk hat to an Englishman’s heart—a hip-bath tub. Her
manner said, “Beat that if you can.”

My sister prodded me in the back with her umbrella, which in our sign
language means, “Don’t make a scene.”

“Very well,” I said, rather meekly. “Have our trunks sent up.”

“Very good, madam.”

She went away, and then we rang the bell and began to order what were
to us the barest necessities of life. We were tired and lame and sleepy
from a night spent at the pier landing the luggage, and we wanted
things with which to make ourselves comfortable.

There was a pocket edition of a fireplace, and they brought us a hatful
of the vilest soft coal, which peppered everything in the rooms with
soot.

We climbed over our trunks to sit by this imitation of a fire, only to
find that there was nothing to sit on but the most uncompromising of
straight-backed chairs.

We groaned as we took in the situation. To our poor, racked frames a
coal-hod would not have suggested more discomfort. We dragged up our
hampers, packed with steamer-rugs and pillows, and my sister sat on
hers while I took another turn at the bell. While the maid is answering
this bell I shall have plenty of time to tell you what we afterwards
discovered the process of bell-ringing in an English hotel to be.

We rang our bell. Presently we heard the most horrible gong, such as we
use on our patrol wagons and fire-engines at home. This clanged four
times. Then a second bell down the hall answered it. Then feet flew by
our door. At this juncture my sister and I prepared to let ourselves
down the fire-escape. But we soon discovered that those flying feet
belonged to the poor maid, whom that gong had signalled that she was
wanted on the fourth floor. She flew to a speaking-tube and asked who
on the fourth floor wanted her. She was then given the number of our
room, when she rang a bell to signify that our call was answered, by
which time she was at liberty, and knocked at our door, saying, in her
soft English voice, “Did you ring, miss?”

We told her we wanted rocking-chairs. She said there was not one in the
house. Then easy-chairs, we said, or anything cushioned or low or
comfortable. She said the housekeeper had no easier chairs.

We sat down on our hampers, and my sister leaned against the corner of
the wardrobe with a pillow at her back to keep from being cut in two. I
propped my back against the wash-stand, which did very well, except
that the wash-stand occasionally slid away from me.

“This,” said my sister, impressively, “is England.”

We had been here only half an hour, but I had already got my point of
view.

“Let’s go out and look up a hotel where they take Americans,” I said.
“I feel the need of ice-water.”

Our drinking-water at “The Insular” was on the end of the wash-stand
nearest the fire.

So, feeling a little timid and nervous, but not in the least homesick,
we went downstairs. One of our gorgeous retinue called a cab and we
entered it.

“Where shall we go?” asked my sister.

“I feel like saying to the first hotel we see,” I said.

Just then we raised our eyes and they rested simultaneously upon a
sign, “The Empire Hotel for Cats and Dogs.” This simple solution of our
difficulty put us in such high good humor that we said we wouldn’t look
up a hotel just yet—we would take a drive.

Under these circumstances we took our first drive down Piccadilly, and
Europe to me dates from that moment. The ship, the landing, the
custom-house, the train, the hotel—all these were mere preliminaries to
the Europe, which began then. People told me in America how my heart
would swell at this, and how I would thrill at that, but it was not so.
My first real thrill came to me in Piccadilly. It went all over me in
little shivers and came out at the ends of my fingers, and then began
once more at the base of my brain and did it all over again.

But what is the use of describing one’s first view of London streets
and traffic to the initiated? Can they, who became used to it as
children, appreciate it? Can they look back and recall how it struck
them? No. When I try to tell Americans over here they look at me
curiously and say, “Dear me, how odd!” The way they say it leaves me to
draw any one of three conclusions: either they are not impressionable,
and are therefore honest in denying the feeling; or they think it
vulgar to admit it; or I am the only grown person in America who never
has been to Europe before.

But I am indifferent to their opinion. People are right in saying this
great tremendous rush of feeling can come but once. It is like being in
love for the first time. You like it and yet you don’t like it. You
wish it would go away, yet you fear that it will go all too soon. It
gets into your head and makes you dizzy, and you want to shut your
eyes, but you are afraid if you do that you will miss something. You
cannot eat and you cannot sleep, and you feel that you have two
consciousnesses: one which belongs to the life you have lived hitherto,
and which still is going on, somewhere in the world, unmindful of you,
and you unmindful of it; and the other is this new bliss which is
beating in your veins and sounding in your ears and shining before your
eyes, which no one knows and no one dreams of, but which keeps a smile
on your lips—a smile which has in it nothing of humor, nothing from the
great without, but which-comes from the secret recesses of your own
inner consciousness, where the heart of the matter lies.

I remember nothing definite about that first drive. I, for my part, saw
with unseeing eyes. My sister had seen it all before, so she had the
power of speech. Occasionally she prodded me and cried, “Look, oh! look
quickly.” But I never swerved. “I can’t look. If I do I shall miss
something. You attend to your own window and I’ll attend to mine.
Coming back I will see your side.”

When we got beyond the shops I said to the cabman:

“Do you know exactly the way you have come?”

“Yes, miss,” he said.

“Then go back precisely the same way.”

“Have you lost something, miss?” he inquired.

“Yes,” I said, “I have lost an impression, and I must look till I find
it.”

“Very good, miss,” he said.

If I had said, “I have carelessly let fall my cathedral,” or, “I have
lost my orang-outang. Look for him!” an imperturbable British cabby
would only touch his cap and say, “Very good, miss!”

So we followed our own trail back to “The Insular.” “In this way,” I
said to my sister, “we both get a complete view. To-morrow we will do
it all over again.”

But we found that we could not wait for the morrow. We did it all over
again that afternoon, and that second time I was able in a measure to
detach myself from the hum and buzz and the dizzying effect of foreign
faces, and I began to locate impressions. My first distinct
recollections are of the great numbers of high hats on the men, the
ill-hanging skirts and big feet of the women, the unsteadying effect of
all those thousands of cabs, carriages, and carts all going to the
left, which kept me constantly wishing to shriek out, “Go to the right
or we’ll all be killed,” the absolutely perfect manner in which traffic
was managed, and the majestic authority of the London police.

I have seen the Houses of Parliament and the Tower and Westminster
Abbey, and the World’s Fair, but the most impressive sight I ever
beheld is the upraised hand of a London policeman. I never heard one of
them speak except when spoken to. But let one little blue-coated man
raise his forefinger and every vehicle on wheels stops, and stops
instantly; stops in obedience to law and order; stops without swearing
or gesticulating or abuse; stops with no underhanded trying to drive
out of line and get by on the other side; just stops, that is the end
of it. And why? Because the Queen of England is behind that raised
finger. A London policeman has more power than our President.

Even the Queen’s coachmen obey that forefinger. Not long ago she
dismissed one who dared to drive even the royal carriage on in defiance
of it. Understanding how to obey, that is what makes liberty.

I am the most flamboyant of Americans, the most hopelessly addicted to
my own country, but I must admit that I had my first real taste of
liberty in England.

I will tell you why. In America nobody obeys anybody. We make our laws,
and then most industriously set about studying out a plan by which we
may evade them. America is suffering, as all republics must of
necessity suffer, from liberty in the hands of the multitude. The
multitude are ignorant, and liberty in the hands of the ignorant is
always license.

In America, the land of the free, whom do we fear? The President? No,
God bless him. There is not a true American in the world who would not
stand up as a man or a woman and go into his presence without fear. Are
we afraid of our Senators, our chief rulers? No. But we are afraid of
our servants, of our street-car conductors. We are afraid of
sleeping-car porters, and the drivers of huge trucks. We are afraid
they will drive over us in the streets, and if we dare to assert our
rights and hold them in check we are afraid of what they will say to
us, in the name of liberty, and of the way they will look at us, in the
name of liberty.

English servants, I have discovered, have no more respect for Americans
than the old-time negro of the Southern aristocracy has for
Northerners. I once asked an old black mammy in Georgia why the negroes
had so little respect for the white ladies of the North. “Case dey don’
know how to treat black folks, honey.” “Why don’t they?” I persisted.
“Are they not kind to you?” “Umph,” she responded (and no one who has
never heard a fat old negress say “Umph” knows the eloquence of it).
“Umph. Dat’s it. Dey’s too kin’. Dey don’ know how to mek us min’.” And
that is just the trouble with Americans here. An English servant takes
orders, not requests.

I had such a time to learn that. We could not understand why we were
obeyed so well at first, and presently, without any outward disrespect,
our wants were simply ignored until all the English people had been
attended to.

My sister had told me I was too polite, but one never believes one’s
sister, so I questioned our sweet English friends, and they, with much
delicacy and many apologies, and the prettiest hesitation in the
world—considering the situation—told us the reason.

“But,” I gasped, “if I should speak to our servants in that manner they
would leave. They would not stay over night.” Our English friends tried
not to smile in a superior way, and they succeeded, only I knew the
smile was there, and said, “Oh, no, our servants never leave us. They
apologize for having done it wrong.”

On the way home I plucked up courage. “I am going to try it,” I said,
firmly. My sister laughed in derision.

“Now I could do it,” she said, complaisantly. And so she could. My
sister never plumes herself on a quality she does not possess.

“Are you going to use the tone and everything?” I said, somewhat
timidly.

“You wait and see.”

She hesitated some time, I noticed, before she rang the bell, and she
looked at herself in the glass and cleared her throat. I knew she was
bracing herself.

“I’ll ring the bell if you like,” I said, politely.

She gave one look at me and then rang the bell herself with a firm
hand.

“And I’ll get behind you with a poker in One hand and a pitcher of hot
water in the other. Speak when you need either.”

“You feel very funny when you don’t have to do it yourself,” she said,
witheringly.

“You’ll never put it through. You’ll back down and say ‘please’ before
you have finished,” I said, and just then the maid knocked at the door.

I never heard anything like it. My sister was superb. I doubt if
Bernhardt at her best ever inspired me with more awe. How that maid
flew around. How humble she was. How she apologized. And how, every
time my sister said, “Look sharp, now,” the maid said, “Thank you.” I
thought I should die. I was so much interested in the dramatic
possibilities of my cherished sister that when the door closed behind
the maid we simply looked at each other a moment, then simultaneously
made a bound for the bed, where we choked with laughter among the
pillows. Presently we sat up with flushed faces and rumpled hair. I
reached over and shook hands with her.

“How was that?” she asked.

“’Twas grand,” I said. “The Queen couldn’t have done it more to the
manner born.”

My sister accepted my compliments complaisantly, as one who should say,
“’Tis no more than my deserts.”

“How firm you were,” I said, admiringly.

“Wasn’t I, though?”

“How humble she was.”

“Wasn’t she?”

“You were quite as disagreeable and determined as a real Englishwoman
would have been.”

“So I was.”

A pause full of intense admiration on my part. Then she said, “You
couldn’t have done it.”

“I know that.”

“You are so deadly civil.”

“Not to everybody, only to servants.” I said this apologetically.

“You never keep a steady hand. You either grovel at their feet or snap
their heads off.”

“Quite true,” I admitted, humbly.

“But it was grand, wasn’t it?” she said.

“Unspeakably grand.”

And for Americans it was.

We were still at “The Insular,” when one day I took up a handful of
what had once been a tight bodice, and said to my sister:

“See how thin I’ve grown! I believe I am starving to death.”

“No wonder,” she answered, gloomily, “with this awful English cooking!
I’m nearly dead from your experiment of getting an English point of
view. I want something to eat—something that I _like_. I want a
beefsteak, with mushrooms, and some potatoes _au gratin_, like those we
have in America. I hate the stuff we get here. I wish I could never see
another chop as long as I live.”

“‘The Insular’ is considered very good,” I remarked, pensively.

“Considered!” cried she. “Whose consideration counts, I should like to
know, when you are always hungry for something you can’t get?”

“I know it; and we are paying such prices, too. Who, except ostriches,
could eat their nasty preserves for breakfast when they are having
grape-fruit at home? And then their vile aspic jellies and potted meats
for luncheon, which look like sausage congealed in cold gravy, and
which taste like gum arabic.”

“Let’s move,” said my sister. “Not into another hotel—that wouldn’t be
much better. But lot’s take lodgings. I’ve heard that they were lovely.
Then we can order what we like. Besides, it will be very much cheaper.”

“I didn’t come over here to economize,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t say a word if we were getting anything for our money,
but we are not. Besides, when you get to Paris you will wish you hadn’t
been so extravagant here.”

“Are the Paris shops more fascinating than those in Regent Street?” I
asked.

“Much more.”

“More alluring, than Bond Street?”

“More so than any in the world,” she affirmed, with the religious
fervor which always characterizes her tone when she speaks of Paris.
The very leather of her purse fairly squeaks with ecstasy when she
thinks of Paris.

“Heavens!” I murmured, with awe, for whenever she won’t go to Du
Maurier’s grave with me, and when I won’t do the crown jewels in the
Tower with her, we always compromise amiably on Bond Street, and come
home beaming with joy.

“We might go now just to look,” I said. “I have the addresses of some
very good lodgings.”

“We’ll take a cab by the hour,” said she, putting her hat on before the
mirror, and turning her head on one side to view her completed
handiwork.

“Now take off that watch and that belt and that chatelaine if you don’t
want these harpies to think we are ‘rich Americans’ (how I have come to
hate that phrase over here!), because they will charge accordingly.”

She looked at me with genuine admiration.

“Do you know, dear, you are really clever at times?”

I colored with pleasure. It is so seldom that she finds anything
practical in me to praise.

“Now mind, we are just going to look,” she cautioned, as we rang a
bell. “We must not do anything in a hurry.”

We came out half an hour afterwards and got into the cab without
looking at each other.

“It was very unbusinesslike,” said she, severely. “You never do
anything right.”

“But it was so gloriously impudent of us,” I urged. “First, we wanted
lodgings. This was a boarding-house. Second, we wanted two bed-rooms
and a drawing-room. They had only one drawing-room in the house; could
we have that? Yes, we could. So we took their whole first floor, and
made them promise to serve our breakfasts in bed, and our other meals
in their best drawing-room, and turned a boarding-house into a
lodging-house, all inside of half an hour. It was lovely!”

“It was bad business,” said she. “We could have got it for less, but
you are always in such a hurry. If you like a thing, and anybody says
you may have it for fifty, you always say, ‘I’ll give you
seventy-five,’ You’re so afraid to think a thing over.”

“Second thoughts are never as much fun as first thoughts,” I urged.
“Second thoughts are always so sensible and reasonable and approved
of.”

“How do you know?” asked my sister, witheringly. “You never waited for
any.”

The next day we moved. Everybody said our rooms were charming, and that
they were cheap, for I told how much we paid, much to my sister’s
disgust. She is _such_ a lady.

“We have cut down our expenses so much,” I said, looking around on the
drab walls and the dun-colored carpets, “don’t you think we might have
a few flowers?”

“I believe you took this place for the balcony, so that you could put
daisies around the edge and in the window-boxes!” she cried.

“No, I didn’t. But the houses in London are so pretty with their
flowers. Don’t you think we might have a few?”

“Well, go and get them. I’ve got to write the home letter to-day if it
is to catch the Southampton boat.”

I came home with six huge palms, two June roses, some pink heather, a
jar of marguerites, and I had ordered the balcony and window-boxes
filled. My sister helped me to place them, but when her back was turned
I arranged them over again. I can’t tie a veil on the way she can, but
I can arrange flowers to look—well, I won’t boast.

Our landladies were two middle-aged, comfortable sisters. We called
them “The Tabbies,” meaning no disrespect to cats, either. I thought
they took rather too violent an interest in our affairs, but I said
nothing until one day after we had been settled nearly a week. I was
seated in my own private room trying to write. My sister came in,
evidently disturbed by something.

“Do you know,” she said, “that our landlady just asked me how much you
paid for those strawberries? And when I told her she said that that
made them come to fourpence apiece, and that they were very dear. Now,
how did she know that they were strawberries, or how many were in each
box, I’d like to know?”

“Probably she opened the package,” I said.

“Exactly what I think. Now I won’t stand that. And then she asked me
not to set things on the mahogany tables. It’s just because we are
Americans! She never would dare treat English people that way. She has
not sufficient respect for us.”

“Then tell her to be more respectful; tell her we are very highly
thought of at home.”

“She wouldn’t care for that.”

“Then tell her we have a few rich relations and quite a number of
influential friends.”

“Pooh!”

“And if that does not fetch her, there is nothing left to do but to be
quite rude to her, and then she will know that we belong to the very
highest society. But what do you care what a middle-class landlady
thinks, just so she lets you alone?”

My sister meditated, and I added:

“If you would just snub her once, in your most ladylike way, it would
settle her. As for me, I am satisfied to think we are paying much less,
and we are twice as comfortable as we were at the hotel; and we get
such good things to eat that our skeletons are filling out, and once
more our clothes fit.”

“That is so,” said she, letting her thoughts wander to the number of
hooks in her closet. “We do have more room, and I think our
drawing-room with its palms and flowers will look lovely to-morrow.”

“Do you think it was wise,” she added, “to ask all those men to come at
once?”

“Oh yes; let them all come together, then we can weed them out
afterwards. You never can have too many men.”

“I am glad you have asked in a few women.”

“Why?” I demanded. “Are you insinuating that we are not equal to a
handful of Englishmen? Recall the Boston tea-party. We will give them
the first strawberries of the season, and plenty of tea. Feed them;
that’s the main thing,” I said, firmly, taking up my pen and looking
steadily at her.

“I’ll go,” she said, hastily. “Do you have to go to the bank to-day?
You know to-morrow we must pay our weekly bill.”

“It won’t be much,” I said, cheerfully; “I am sure I have enough.”

The next day the bill came. Our landlady sent it up on the
breakfast-tray. I opened it, then shrieked for my sister. It covered
four pages of note-paper.

“For heaven’s sake! what is the matter?” she cried. “Has anything
happened to Billy?”

“Billy! This thing is not an American letter. It is the bill for our
cheap lodgings. Look at it! Look at the extras—gas, coals, washing
bed—linen, washing table—linen, washing towels, kitchen fires, service,
oil for three lamps, afternoon tea, and three shillings for sundries on
the fourth page! What can sundries include? She hasn’t skipped anything
but pew-rent.”

My sister looked at the total, and buried her face in the pillows to
smother a groan.

“Ring the bell,” I said; “I want the maid.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find out what ‘sundries’ are.”

She gave the bell-cord such a pull that she broke the wire, and it fell
down on her head.

“That, too, will go in the bill. Wrap your handkerchief around your
hand and give the wire a jerk. Give it a good one. I don’t care if it
brings the police.”

The maid came.

“Martha, present my compliments to Mrs. Black, and ask her what
‘sundries’ include.”

Martha came back smiling.

“Please, miss, Mrs. Black’s compliments, and ‘sundries’ means that you
complained that the coffee was muddy, and after that she cleared it
with an egg. ‘Sundries’ means the eggs.”

“Martha,” I said, weakly, “give me those Crown salts. No, no, I forgot;
those are Mrs. Black’s salts. Take them out and tell her I only smelled
them once.”

“Martha,” said my sister, dragging my purse out from under my pillow,
“here is sixpence not to tell Mrs. Black anything.” Then when Martha
disappeared she said, “How often have I told you not to jest with
servants?”

“I forgot,” I said, humbly. “But Martha has a sense of humor, don’t you
think?”

“I never thought anything about it. But what are you going to do about
that bill?”

“I’m going to argue about it, and declare I won’t pay it, and then pay
it like a true American. Would you have me upset the traditions? But
I’ve got to go to the bank first.”

I did just as I said. I argued to no avail. Mrs. Black was quite
haughty, and made me feel like a chimney-sweep. I paid her in full, and
when I came up I said:

“You are quite right. She has a poor opinion of us. When I asked her
how long it would take to drive to a house in West End, she said, ‘Why
do you want to know?’ I said I ‘wanted to see the house.’”

“Didn’t you tell her we were _invited_ there?” asked my sister,
scandalized.

“No; I said I had heard a good deal about the house, and she said it
was open to the public on Fridays. So I said we’d go then.”

“I think you are horrid!” cried Bee. “The insolence of that woman! And
you actually think it is funny! You think _everything_ is funny.”

I soothed her by pointing out some of the things which I considered
sad, notably English people trying to enjoy themselves. Then the men
began to drop in for tea, and that succeeded in making her forget her
troubles.

Reggie and the Duke arrived together. My sister at once took charge of
the Duke, while Reggie said to me, “I say, what sort of creature is the
old girl below?”

“Not a very good sort, I am afraid. Why? What has she done now?”

“Why, she stopped Abingdon and me and asked us to wipe our shoes.”

“She asked the Duke of Abingdon to wipe his shoes?” I gasped, in a
whisper.

“Yes; and Freddie, who was just ahead of us, turned back and said, ‘My
good woman, was the cab very dirty, do you think?’”

“Oh, don’t tell my sister! She has almost died of Mrs. Black already
to-day; this would finish her completely.”

“Well, you must give your woman a talking to—a regular going over, d’ye
know? Tell her you’ll be the mistress of the whole blooming house or
you’ll tear it to pieces. That’s the way to talk to ’em. I told my
landlady in Edinburgh once that I’d chuck her out of the window if she
spoke to me until she was spoken to. She came up and rapped on the door
one Saturday night at ten o’clock, when I had some fellows there, and
told me to send those men home and go to bed.”

“Then she isn’t taking advantage of us because we are Americans, the
way the cabmen do?”

“Oh yes, I dare say she is; but you must stand up to her. They’re a set
of thieves, the whole of ’em. I say, that’s a pretty picture you’ve got
pinned up there.”

“That’s to hide a hole in the lace curtain,” I explained, gratuitously.
Then I remembered, and glanced apprehensively at my sister, but
fortunately she had not heard me. “That is one of the pictures from
_Truth_, an American magazine. I always save the middle picture when it
is pretty, and pin it up on the wall.”

“That is one thing where the States are away ahead of us—in their
illustrated magazines.”

“Don’t say ‘the States!’ I’ve told you before. I didn’t know you ever
admitted that anything was better in America.”

Reggie only smiled affably. He ignored my offer of battle, and said:

“Abingdon is asking your sister to dine. I’m asked, and Freddie and his
wife, and I think you will enjoy it.”

When they were all gone I marched downstairs to Mrs. Black without
saying a word to any one. When I came up I found my sister hanging over
the banisters.

“What is the matter? What have you done? I knew you were angry by the
way you looked.”

“It was lovely!” I said. “I sent for Mrs. Black, and said, ‘Mrs. Black,
do you know the name of the gentleman whom you asked to wipe his shoes
to-day?’ ‘No,’ said she. ‘It was the Duke of Abingdon,’ I said,
sternly, well knowing the unspeakable reverence which the middle-class
English have for a title. She turned purple. She fell back against the
wall, muttering, ‘The Duke of Abingdon! The Duke of Abingdon!’ I
believe she is still leaning up against the wall muttering that holy
name. A title to Mrs. Black!”

The next day both the Tabbies were curtsying in the hall when we
started out. We were going on a coach to Richmond with Julia and her
husband, and another American girl, and then Julia’s husband was going
to row us up the Thames to Hampton Court for tea, and they were all
going to dine with us at Scott’s when we got home.

It was a lovely day. The trees were a mass of bloom, and everybody
ought to have enjoyed himself. We were having a very good time of it
among ourselves reading the absurd signs, until we noticed the three
girls who sat opposite to us. They had serious faces, and long,
consumptive teeth, which they never succeeded in completely hiding. I
knew just how they would look when they were dead; I knew that those
two long front teeth would still— They listened to all we said without
a flicker of the eyelashes. Occasionally they looked down at the size
of the American girl’s little feet and then involuntarily drew their
own back out of sight.

Presently I espied a sign, “Funerals, for this week only, at half
price.” I seized Julia’s hand. “Stop, oh, stop the coach and let’s get
a funeral! We may never have an opportunity to get a bargain in
funerals again. And the sale lasts only one week. Everybody told me
before I came away to get what I wanted at the moment I saw it; not to
wait, thinking I would come back. So unless we order one now we may
have to pay the full price. And a funeral would be such a good
investment; it would keep forever. You’d never feel like using it
before you actually needed it. Do let me get one now!”

Of course, Julia, my sister, and Julia’s husband were in gales of
laughter; but what finished me off was to see three serious creatures
opposite rise as if pulled by one string, look in an anxious way at me
and then at the sign, while the teeth began to say to each other: “What
did she say? What does she mean? What does she want a funeral for?”

We had a lovely day, but everybody we met on the river looked very
unhappy, and nobody seemed to be at all glad that we were there or that
we were rising to the occasion. When we got home I was too tired to
notice things, but my sister, who sees everything, whispered:

“I verily believe they’ve put down a new stair-carpet to-day.”

The next morning such a sight met our astonished eyes. There was a new
carpet on the hall. There were new curtains in our drawing-room. All
the covers had been removed from their sacred furniture. Brass andirons
replaced the old ones. The piano had a new cover. There was a
rocking-chair for each (we had only one before), and while we were
still speechless with amazement Mrs. Black came in with our bill.

“I have been thinking this over since yesterday, and I have decided
that as long as you did not understand about the extras, it would be no
more than right that I should take them off. So I owe you this.”

I took the money, and it dropped from my nerveless fingers. Mrs. Black
picked it up and put it on the table—the mahogany table.

“You see I propped your palms for you in your absence, and I repotted
four of them. I thought they would grow better. Here are some
periodicals I sent to the library for, thinking you might like to look
at them, and I put my new calendar over your writing-desk. Now, is
there any little delicacy you would like for your luncheon?”

While Bee was getting rid of her I made a few rapid mental
calculations.

“Bee,” I said, “we are going to stay over here two years. Let’s buy the
Duke and take him with us.”


The reaction has come. I knew it would. It always does. It is a
mortification to be obliged to admit it in the face of London, and all
that we have had done for us, but the fact is we are
homesick—wretchedly, bitterly homesick. I remember how, when other
people have been here and written that they were homesick, I have
sniffed with contempt and have said to myself, “What poor taste! Just
wait until _my_ turn comes to go to Europe! I’ll show them what it is
to enjoy every moment of my stay!”

But now—dear me, I can remember that I have made invidious remarks
about New York, and have objected to the odors in Chicago, and have
hated the Illinois Central turnstiles. But if I could be back in
America I would not mind being caught in a turnstile all day. Dear
America! Dear Lake Michigan! Dear Chicago!

I have talked the matter over with my sister, and we have decided that
it must be the people, for certainly the novelty is not yet worn off of
this marvellous London. We like individually nearly every one whom we
have met, but as a nation the English are to me an acquired taste—just
like olives and German opera.

To explain. My friendly, volatile American feelings are constantly
being shocked at the massed and consolidated indifference of English
men and women to each other. They care for nobody but themselves. In a
certain sense this indifference to other people’s opinions is very
satisfactory. It makes you feel that no matter how outrageous you
wanted to be you could not cause a ripple of excitement or
interest—unless Royalty noticed your action. Then London would tread
itself to death in its efforts to see and hear you. But if an
Englishman entered a packed theatre on his hands with his feet in the
air, and thus proceeded to make the rounds of the house, the audience
would only give one glance, just to make sure that it was nothing more
abnormal than a man in evening dress, carrying his crush-hat between
his feet and walking on his hands, and then they would return to their
exciting conversation of where they were “going to show after the
play.” Even the maids who usher would not smile, but would stoop and
put his programme between his teeth for him, and turn to the next
comer.

The English mind their own business, and we Americans are so used to
interfering with each other, and minding everybody’s business as well
as our own, it makes us very homesick indeed, to find that we can do
precisely as we please and be let entirely alone.

The English who have been in America, or those who have a single
blessed drop of Irish or Scotch blood in their veins, will quite
understand what I mean. Fortunately for us we have found a few of these
different sorts, and they have kept us from suicide. They warned us of
the differences we would find. One man said to me: “We English do not
understand the meaning of the word hospitality compared to you
Americans. Now in the States—”

“Stop right there, if you please,” I begged, “and say ‘America.’ It
offends me to be called ‘the States’ quite as much as if you called me
‘the Colonies’ or ‘the Provinces!’”

“You speak as if you were America,” he said.

“I am,” I replied.

“Now that is just it. You Americans come over here nationally. We
English travel individually.”

I was so startled at this acute analysis from a man whom I had always
regarded as an Englishman that I forgot my manners and I said, “Good
heavens, you are not all English, are you?”

“My father was Irish,” he said.

“I knew it!” I cried with joy. “Please shake hands with me again. I
knew you weren’t entirely English after that speech!”

He laughed.

“I will shake hands with you, of course. But I am a typical Britisher.
Please believe that.”

“I shall not. You are not typical. That was really a clever distinction
and quite true.”

He looked as if he were going to argue the point with me, so I hurried
on. I always get the worst of an argument, so I tried to take his mind
off his injury. “Now please go on,” I urged. “It sounded so
interesting.”

“Well, I was only going to say that in America you are, as hosts, quite
sincere in wishing us to enjoy ourselves and to like America. Here we
will only do our duty by you if you bring letters to us, and we don’t
care a hang whether you like England or not. We like it, and that’s
enough.”

“I see,” I said, with cold chills of aversion for England as a nation
creeping over my enthusiasm.

“Now in America,” he proceeded, “your host sends his carriage for you,
or calls for you, takes you with him, stays by you, introduces you to
the people he thinks you would most care to meet, and tells them who
and what you are; sees that you have everything that’s going, and that
you see everything that’s going, and then takes you back to your club.”

“Then he asks you if you have had a good time, and if you like
America!” I supplemented.

“Oh, Lord, yes! He asks you that all the time, and so does everybody
else,” he said, with a groan.

“Now, you were unkind if you didn’t tell him all he wanted you to, for
I do assure you it was pure American kindness of heart which made him
take all that trouble for you. I know, too, without your telling me,
that he introduced you to all the prettiest girls, and gave you a
chance to talk to each of them, and only hovered around waiting to take
you on to the next one, as soon as he could catch you with ease.”

“He did just that. How did you know?”

“Because he was a typical American host, God bless him, and that is the
way we do things over there.”

“Now here,” he went on, “we consider our duty done if we take a man to
dine, and then to some reception, where we turn him loose after one or
two introductions.”

“What a hateful way of doing!” I said, politely.

“It is. It must seem barbarous to you.”

“It does.”

“Or if you are a woman we send our carriages to let you drive where you
like. Or we send you invitations to go to needlework exhibitions where
you have to pay five shillings admission.”

I said nothing, and he laughed.

“I know they have done that to you,” he exclaimed. “Haven’t they?”

“I have been delightfully entertained at luncheons and dinners and
teas, and I have been introduced to as charming people in London as I
ever hope to meet anywhere,” I said, stolidly.

“But you won’t tell about the needlework. Oh, I say, but that’s jolly!
Fancy what you said when you began to get those beastly things!” And he
laughed again.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said. Then he roared. Yet he claimed to be a
“typical Britisher.”

“We mean kindly,” he went on. “You mustn’t lay it up against us.”

“Oh, we don’t. We are having a lovely time.”

There are times when the truth would be brutal.

Then this oasis of a man, this “typical Britisher,” went away, and my
sister and I dressed for the theatre. A friend had sent us her box, and
assured us that it was perfectly proper for us to go alone. So we went.
Up to this time we had not hinted to each other that we were homesick.
The play was most amusing, yet we couldn’t help watching the audience.
Such a bored-looking set, the women with frizzled hair held down by
invisible nets, mingling with their eyebrows, and done hideously in the
back. Low-necked gowns, exhibiting the most beautiful shoulders in the
world. Gorgeous jewels in their hair and gleaming all over their
bodices, but among half a dozen emerald, turquoise, and diamond
bracelets there would appear a silver-watch bracelet which cost not
over ten dollars, and spoiled the effect of all the others.

English women as a race are the worst-dressed women in the world. I saw
thousands of them in Piccadilly and Regent Street, and at Church Parade
in the Park, with high, French-heeled slippers over colored stockings.
And as to sizes, I should say nines were the average. There are some
smaller, but the most are larger.

The Prince of Wales was in the box opposite to ours, and when we were
not looking at him we gazed at the impassive faces of the audience.
They never smiled. They never laughed. The subtlest points in the play
went unnoticed, yet it is one which has had a record run and bids fair
to keep the boards for the rest of the season.

Suddenly my sister, although we had not spoken of the homesickness that
was weighing us down, touched my arm and said, “Look quick! There’s
one!”

“Where? Where?”

“Down there just in front of the pit, talking to that bald-headed idiot
with the monocle.”

“Do you think she is American?” I said, dubiously. I couldn’t see her
feet. “She might be French. She talks all over.”

“No. She is an American girl. See how thin she is. The French are short
and fat.”

“Look at her face,” I said, enviously. “How animated it is. See how it
seems to stand out among all the other faces.”

“Yet she is only amusing herself. See how stolid that creature looks
that she is wasting all her vitality on.”

“She has told him some joke and she is laughing at it. He has put his
monocle in his other eye in his effort to see the point. He will get it
by the next boat. Wish she’d come and tell that joke to me. I’d laugh
at it.”

My sister eyed me critically.

“You don’t look as if you could laugh,” she said.

“I wonder what would happen if I should fall dead and drop over into
the lap of that fat elephant in pink silk with the red neck,” I said,
musingly.

“She wouldn’t even wink,” said my sister, laughingly. “But if you
struck her just right you would bounce clear up here again and I could
catch you.”

“It is just four o’clock in Chicago,” I said.

My sister promptly turned her back on me.

“And Billy has just wakened from his nap, and Katy is giving him his
food,” I went on. (Billy is my sister’s baby.) “And then mamma will
come into the nursery presently and take him while Katy gets his
carriage out, and she will show him my picture and ask him who it is
(because she wrote me she always did it at this time), and then he will
say, ‘Tattah,’ which is the sweetest baby word for ‘Auntie’ I ever
heard from mortal lips, and then he will kiss it of his own accord.
Mamma wrote that he had blistered it with his kisses, and it’s one of
the big ones, but I don’t care; I’ll order a dozen more if he will
blister them all. And then she will say, ‘Where did mamma and Tattah
go?’ and he will wave his precious little square hand and say, ‘Big
boat,’ and she says he tries to say, ‘Way off’—and, oh, dear, we are
‘way off’—”

“Stop talking, you fiend,” said my sister, from the depths of her
handkerchief. “You know I look like a fright when I cry.”

“Boo-hoo,” was my only reply. And once started, I couldn’t stop. That
deadly English atmosphere of indifference—and, oh—and everything!

Have you ever been homesick when you couldn’t get home? Have you ever
wanted to see your mother so that every bone in your body ached? Have
you ever been in the state where to see the baby for five minutes you
would give everything on earth you had? That was the way I felt about
Billy that grewsome night at this amusing play in an English theatre. I
had on my best clothes, but after my handkerchief ceased to avail the
tears slopped down on my satin gown, and the blisters will remain as a
lasting tribute to the contagion of a company of English people out
enjoying themselves.

My sister’s stern sense of decorum caused her to contain herself until
she got home, but I am free to confess that after I once loosed my hold
over myself and found what a relief it was, I realized the truth of
what our old negro cook used to say when I was a child in the South,
and asked her why she howled and cried in such an alarming manner when
she “got religion.” She used to say, “Lawd, chile, you don’t know how
soovin’ it is to jest bust out awn ’casions lake dese!”

Happy negroes! Happy children, who can “bust out” when their feelings
get the better of them! Civilization robs us of many of our acutest
pleasures.

That night on the way home from the theatre I learned something. Nobody
had ever told me that it is the custom to give the cabby an extra
sixpence when one takes a cab late at night, so, on alighting in front
of our flower-trimmed lodgings, I reached up, deposited my shilling in
his hand, and was turning away, when my footsteps were arrested by my
cabby’s voice.

Turning, I saw him tossing the despised shilling in his curved palm and
saying:

“A shillin’! Twelve o’clock at night! Two ladies in evenin’ dress!
_You_ ought to ’a’ gone in a ’bus! A cab’s too expensive for _you_! _I_
wish you’d ’a’ _walked_ and I wish it had _rained_!”

With that parting shot he gathered up the lines and drove off, while I
leaned up against the door shaking with a laughter which my sister in
no wise shared with me. Poor Bee! Things like that jar her so that she
can’t get any amusement out of them. To her it was terrifying
impudence. To me it was a heart-to-heart talk with a London cabby!

Oh, the sweet viciousness of that “_I_ wish it had _rained_!” I wonder
if that man beats his wife, or if he just converses with her as he does
with a recreant fare! Anyway, I loved him.

But if I have discovered nothing else in the brief time since I left my
native land, it is worth while to realize the truth of all the poetry
and song written on foreign shores about home.

To one accustomed to travel only in America, and to feel at home with
all the different varieties of one’s countrymen, such sentiments are no
more than _vers de société_. _But_ now I know what _Heimweh_ is—the
home-pain. I can understand that the Swiss really die of it sometimes.
The home-pain! Neuralgia, you know, and most other acute pains, attack
only one set of nerves. But _Heimweh_ hurts all over. There is not a
muscle of the body, nor the most remote fibre of the brain, nor a
tissue of the heart that does not ache with it. You can’t eat. You
can’t sleep. You can’t read or write or talk. It begins with the
protoplasm of your soul—and reaches forward to the end of time, and
aches every step of the way along. You want to hide your face in a
pillow away from everybody and do nothing but weep, but even that does
not cure. It seems to be too private to help materially. The only thing
I can recommend is to “bust out.”

Homesickness is an inexplicable thing. I have heard brides relate how
it attacked them unmercifully and without cause in the midst of their
honeymoon. Girl students, whose sole aim in life has been to come
abroad to study, and who, in finally coming, have fondly dreamed that
the gates of Paradise had swung open before their delighted eyes, have
been among its earliest and most acutely afflicted victims. No success,
no realized ambitions ward it off. Like death, it comes to high and low
alike. One woman, whose name became famous with her first concert, told
me that she spent the first year over here in tears. Nothing that
friends can do, no amount of kindness or hospitality avails as a
preventive. You can take bromides and cure insomnia. You can take
chloroform, and enough of it will prevent seasickness, but nothing
avails for _Heimweh_. And like pride, “let him that thinketh he
standeth take heed lest he fall.” I have been in the midst of an
animated, recital of how homesick I had been the day before, ridiculing
myself and my malady with unctuous freedom, when suddenly Billy’s
little face would seem to rise out of the flowers on the dinner-table,
or the patter of his little flying feet as they used to sound in my ear
as he fluttered down the long hall to my study, or the darling way he
used to ran towards me when I held out my arms and said, “Come, Billy,
let Tattah show you the doves,” with such an expectant face, and that
little scarlet mouth opened to kiss me—oh, it is nothing to anybody
else, but it is home to me, and I was only recalled to London and my
dinner party when a fresh attack was made on America, and I was called
once more to battle for my country.

I have “fought, bled, and died” for home and country more times than I
can count since I have been here. I ought to come home with honorable
scars and the rank of field-marshal, at least. I never knew how many
objectionable features America presented to Englishmen until I became
their guest and broke bread at their tables. I cannot eat very much at
their dinner parties—I am too busy thinking how to parry their attacks
on my America, and especially my Chicago, and my West generally. The
English adore Americans, but they loathe America, and I, for one, will
not accept a divided allegiance. “Love me, love my dog,” is my motto. I
go home from their dinners as hungry as a wolf, but covered with
Victoria crosses. I am puzzled to know if they really hate Chicago more
than any other spot on earth, or if they simply love to hear me fight
for it, or if their manners need improving.

I myself may complain of the horrors of our filthy streets, or of the
way we tear up whole blocks at once (here in London they only mend a
teaspoonful of pavement at a time), or of our beastly winds which tear
your soul from your body, but I hope never to sink so low as to permit
a lot of foreigners to do it. For even as a Parisian loves his Paris,
and as a New Yorker loves his London, so do I love my Chicago.



III
PARIS


It was a fortunate thing, after all, that I went to London first, and
had my first great astonishment there. It broke Paris to me gently.

For a month I have been in this city of limited republicanism; this
extraordinary example of outward beauty and inward uncleanness; this
bewildering cosmopolis of cheap luxuries and expensive necessities;
this curious city of contradictions, where you might eat your breakfast
from the streets—they are so clean—but where you must close your eyes
to the spectacles of the curbstones; this beautiful, whited sepulchre,
where exists the unwritten law, “Commit any offence you will, provided
you submerge it in poetry and flowers”; this exponent of outward
observances, where a gentleman will deliberately push you into the
street if he wishes to pass you in a crowd, but where his action is
condoned by his inexpressible manner of raising his hat to you, and the
heartfelt sincerity of his apology; where one man will run a mile to
restore a lost franc, but if you ask him to change a gold piece he will
steal five; where your eyes are ravished with the beauty, and the
greenness, and the smoothness and apparent ease of living of all its
inhabitants; where your mind is filled with the pictures, the music,
the art, the general atmosphere of culture and wit; where the cooking
is so good but so elusive, and where the shops are so bewitching that
you have spent your last dollar without thinking, and you are obliged
to cable for a new letter of credit from home before you know it—this
is Paris.

Paris is very educational. I can imagine its influence broadening some
people so much that their own country could never be ample enough to
cover them again. I can imagine it narrowing others so that they would
return to America more of Puritans than ever. It is amusing, it is
fascinating, it is exciting, it is corrupting. The French must be the
most curious people on earth. How could even heavenly ingenuity create
a more uncommon or bewildering contradiction and combination? Make up
your mind that they are as simple as children when you see their
innocent picnicking along the boulevards and in the parks with their
whole families, yet you dare not trust yourself to hear what they are
saying. Believe that they are cynical, and _fin de siècle_, and
skeptical of all women when you hear two men talk, and the next day you
hear that one of them has shot himself on the grave of his sweetheart.
Believe that politeness is the ruling characteristic of the country
because a man kisses your hand when he takes leave of you. But marry
him, and no insult as regards other women is too low for him to heap
upon you. Believe that the French men are sympathetic because they
laugh and cry openly at the theatre. But appeal to their chivalry, and
they will rescue you from one discomfort only to offer you a worse. The
French have sentimentality, but not sentiment. They have gallantry, but
not chivalry. They have vanity, but not pride. They have religion, but
not morality. They are a combination of the wildest extravagance and
the strictest parsimony. They cultivate the ground so close to the
railroad tracks that the trains almost run over their roses, and yet
they leave a Place de la Concorde in the heart of the city.

You can buy the wing of a chicken at a butcher’s and take it home to
cook it. But your bill at a restaurant will appall you. Water is the
most precious and exclusive drink you can order in Paris. Imagine
that—you who let the water run to cool it! In Paris they actually pay
for water in their houses by the quart.

Artichokes, and truffles, and mushrooms, and silk stockings, and kid
gloves are so cheap here that it makes you blink your eyes. But eggs,
and cream, and milk are luxuries. Silks and velvets are bewilderingly
inexpensive. But cotton stuffs are from America, and are extravagances.
They make them up into “costumes,” and trim them with velvet ribbon.
Never by any chance could you be supposed to send cotton frocks to be
washed every week. The luxury of fresh, starched muslin dresses and
plenty of shirt-waists is unknown.

I never shall overcome the ecstasies of laughter which assail me when I
see varieties of coal exhibited in tiny shop windows, set forth in high
glass dishes, as we exploit chocolates at home. But well they may
respect it, for it is really very much cheaper to freeze to death than
to buy coal in Paris.

The reason of all this is the city tax on every chicken, every carrot,
every egg brought into Paris. Every mouthful of food is taxed. This
produces an enormous revenue, and this is why the streets are so clean;
it is why the asphalt is as smooth as a ballroom floor; it is why the
whole of Paris is as beautiful as a dream.

In fact, the city has ideas of cleanliness which its middle-class
inhabitants do not share. On a rainy day in Paris the absurdly hoisted
dresses will expose to your view all varieties of trimmed, ruffled, and
lace petticoats, which would undeniably be benefited by a bath. All the
_lingerie_ has ribbons in it, and sometimes I think they are never
intended to be taken out.

When I was at the château of a friend not long ago she overheard her
maid apologizing to two sisters of charity, for the presence of a
bath-tub in her mistress’s dressing-room: “You must not blame madame la
marquise for bathing every day. She is not more untidy than I, and I,
God knows, wash myself but twice a year. It is just a habit of hers
which she caught from the English.”

My friend called to her sharply, and told her she need not apologize
for her bathing, to which the maid replied, in a tone of meek
justification, “But if madame la marquise only knew how she was
regarded by the people for this habit of hers!”

I like the way the French take their amusements. At the theatre they
laugh and applaud the wit of the hero and hiss the villain. They shout
their approval of a duel and weep aloud over the death of the aged
mother. When they drive in the Bois they smile and have an air of
enjoyment quite at variance with the bored expression of English and
Americans who have enough money to own carriages. We drove in Hyde Park
in London the day before we came to Paris, and nearly wept with
sympathy for the unspoken grief in the faces of the unfortunate rich
who were at such pains to enjoy themselves.

The second day from that we had a delightful drive in the Bois in
Paris.

“How glad everybody seems to be we have come!” I said to my sister.
“See how pleased they all look.”

I was enchanted at their gay faces. I felt like bowing right and left
to them, the way queens and circus girls do.

I never saw such handsome men as I saw in London. I never saw such
beautiful women as I see in Paris.

The Bois has never been so smart as it was the past season, for the
horrible fire of the Bazar de la Charité put an end to the Paris
season, and left those who were not personally bereaved no solace but
the Bois. Consequently, the costumes one saw between five and seven on
that one beautiful boulevard were enough to set one wild. I always
wished that my neck turned on a pivot and that I had eyes set like a
coronet all around my head. My sister and I were in a constant state of
ecstasy and of clutching each other’s gowns, trying to see every one
who passed. But it was of no use. Although they drove slowly on purpose
to be seen, if you tried to focus your glance on each one it seemed as
if they drove like lightning, and you got only astigmatism for your
pains. I always came home from the Bois with a headache and a stiff
neck.

I never dreamed of such clothes even in my dreams of heaven. But the
French are an extravagant race. There was hardly a gown worn last
season which was not of the most delicate texture, garnished with
chiffon and illusion and tulle—the most crushable, airy, inflammable,
unserviceable material one can think of. Now, I am a utilitarian. When
I see a white gown I always wonder if it will wash. If I see lace on
the foot ruffle of a dress I think how it will sound when the wearer
steps on it going up-stairs. But anything would be serviceable to wear
driving in a victoria in the Bois between five and seven, and as that
is where I have seen the most beautiful costumes I have no right to
complain, or to thrust at them my American ideas of usefulness. This
rage of theirs for beauty is what makes a perpetual honeymoon for the
eyes of every inch of France. The way they study color and put greens
together in their landscape gardening makes one think with horror of
our prairies and sagebrush.

The eye is ravished with beauty all over Paris. The clean streets, the
walks between rows of trees for pedestrians, the lanes for bicyclists,
the paths through tiny forests, right in Paris, for equestrians, and on
each side the loveliest trees—trees everywhere except where there are
fountains—but what is the use of trying to describe a beauty which has
staggered braver pens than mine, and which, after all, you must see to
appreciate?

The Catholic observances one sees everywhere in Paris are most
interesting. When a funeral procession passes, every man takes off his
hat and stands watching it with the greatest respect.

In May the streets are full of sweet-faced little girls on their way to
their first communion. They were all in white, bareheaded, except for
their white veils, white shoes, white gloves, and the dearest look of
importance on their earnest little faces. It was most touching.

In all months, however, one sees the comical sight of a French bride
and bridegroom, in all the glory of their bridal array—white satin,
veil, and orange blossoms—driving through the streets in open cabs, and
hugging and kissing each other with an unctuous freedom which is apt to
throw a conservative American into a spasm of laughter. Indeed, the
frank and candid way that love-making goes on in public among the lower
classes is so amazing that at first you think you never in this world
will become accustomed to it, but you get accustomed to a great many
strange sights in Paris. If a kiss explodes with unusual violence in a
cab near mine it sometimes scares the horse, but it no longer disturbs
me in the least. My nervousness over that sort of thing has entirely
worn off.

I have had but one adventure, and that was of a simple and primitive
character, which seemed to excite no one but myself. They say that
there is no drunkenness in France. If that is so then this cabman of
mine had a fit of some kind. Perhaps, though, he was only a beast. Most
of the cabmen here are beasts. They beat their poor horses so
unmercifully that I spend quite a good portion of my time standing up
in the cab and arguing with them. But the only efficacious argument I
have discovered is to tell them that they will get no _pourboire_ if
they beat the horse. That seems to infuse more humanity into them than
any number of Scripture texts.

On this occasion my cabman, for no reason whatever, suddenly began to
beat his horse in the hatefulest way, leaning down with his whip and
striking the horse underneath, as we were going downhill on the Rue de
Freycinet. I screamed at him, but he pretended not to hear. The cab
rocked from side to side, the horse was galloping, and this brute
beating him like a madman. It made me wild. I was being bounced around
like corn in a popper and in imminent danger of being thrown to the
pavement.

People saw my danger, but nobody did anything—just looked, that was
all. I saw that I must save myself if there was any saving going to be
done. So with one last trial of my lungs I shrieked at the cabman, but
the cobblestones were his excuse, and he kept on. So I just stood up
and knocked his hat off with my parasol!—his big, white, glazed hat. It
was glorious! He turned around in a fury and pulled up his horse, with
a torrent of French abuse and impudence which scared me nearly to
death. I thought he might strike me.

So I pulled my twitching lips into a distortion which passed muster
with a Paris cabman for a smile, and begged his pardon so profusely
that he relented and didn’t kill me.

I often blush for the cheap Americans with loud voices and provincial
speech, and general commonness, whom one meets over here; but with all
their faults they cannot approach the vulgarities at table which I have
seen in Paris. In all America we have no such vulgar institution as
their _rince-bouche_—an affair resembling a two-part finger-bowl, with
the water in a cup in the middle. At fashionable tables, men and women
in gorgeous clothes, who speak four or five languages, actually rinse
their mouths and gargle at the table, and then slop the water thus used
back into these bowls. The first time I saw this I do assure you I
would not have been more astonished if the next course had been stomach
pumps.

And as for the toothpick habit! Let no one ever tell me that that
atrocity is American! Here it goes with every course, and without the
pretended decency of holding one’s _serviette_ before one’s mouth,
which, in my opinion, is a mere affectation, and aggravates the
offence.

But the most shameless thing in all Europe is the marriage question. To
talk with intelligent, clever, thinking men and women, who know the
secret history of all the famous international marriages, as well as
the high contracting parties, who will relate the price paid for the
husband, and who the intermediary was, and how much commission he or
she received, is to make you turn faint and sick at the mere thought,
especially if you happen to come from a country where they once fought
to abolish the buying and selling of human beings. But our black slaves
were above buying and selling themselves or their children. It remains
for civilized Europe of our time to do this, and the highest and
proudest of her people at that.

It is not so shocking to read about it in glittering generalities. I
knew of it in a vague way, just as I knew the history of the massacre
of Saint Bartholomew. I thought it was too bad that so many people were
killed, and I also thought it a pity that Frenchmen never married
without a _dot_. But when it comes to meeting the people who had thus
bargained, and the moment their gorgeous lace and satin backs were
turned to hear some one say, “You are always so interested in that sort
of thing, have you heard what a scandal was caused by the marriage of
those two?”—then it ceases to be history; then it becomes almost a
family affair.

“How could a marriage between two unattached young people cause a
scandal?” I asked, with my stupid, primitive American ideas.

“Oh, the bride’s mother refused to pay the commission to the
intermediary,” was the airy reply. “It came near getting into the
papers.”

At the Jubilee garden party at Lady Monson’s I saw the most beautiful
French girl I have seen in Paris. She was superb. In America she would
have been a radiant, a triumphant beauty, and probably would have
acquired the insolent manners of some of our spoiled beauties. Instead
of that, however, she was modest, even timid-looking, except for her
queenly carriage. Her gown was a dream, and a dream of a dress at a
Paris garden party means something.

“What a tearing beauty!” I said to my companion. “Who is she?”

“Yes, poor girl!” he said. “She is the daughter of the Comtesse N——.
One of the prettiest girls in Paris. Not a sou, however; consequently
she will never marry. She will probably go into a convent.”

“But why? Why won’t she marry? Why aren’t all the men crazy about her?
Why don’t you marry her?”

“Marry a girl without a _dot_? Thank you, mademoiselle. I am an expense
to myself. My wife must not be an additional encumbrance.”

“But surely,” I said, “somebody will want to marry her, if no nobleman
will.”

“Ah, yes, but she is of noble blood, and she must not marry beneath
her. No one in her own class will marry her, so”—a shrug—“the convent!
See, her chances are quite gone. She has been out five years now.”

I could have cried. Every word of it was quite true. I thought of the
dozens of susceptible and rich American men I knew who would have gone
through fire and water for her, and who, although they have no title to
give her, would have made her adoring and adorable husbands, and I
seriously thought of offering a few of them to her for consideration!
But alas, there are so many ifs and ands, and—well, I didn’t.

I only sighed and said, “Well, I suppose such things are common in
France, but I do assure you such things are impossible in America.”

“Such things as what, mademoiselle?”

“This cold-blooded bartering,” I said. “American men are above it.”

“Are American girls above selling themselves, mademoiselle? Do you see
that poor, pitifully plain little creature there, in that dress which
cost a fortune? Do you see how ill she carries it? Do you see her
unformed, uncertain manner? Her husband is the one I just had the honor
of presenting to you, who is now talking to the beauty you so much
admire.”

“He shows good taste in spite of his marriage,” I said.

“Certainly. But his wife is your countrywoman. That is the last famous
international marriage, and the most vulgar of the whole lot. Listen,
mademoiselle, and I will tell you the exact truth of the whole affair.

“She came over here with letters to Paris friends, and when it became
known that one of the richest heiresses in America was here, naturally
all the mammas with marriageable sons were anxious to see her. She was
invited everywhere, but as she could not speak French, and as she was
as you see her, her success could not be said to be great. No, but that
made no difference. The Duchesse de Z—— was determined that her son
should marry the rich heiress. As she expected to remain here a year or
more, and the young Duc de Z—— made a wry face, she did not press the
matter. Then the heiress went into a convent to learn French, and the
Duchesse went to see her very often and took her to drive, and did her
son’s part as well as she could.

“Suddenly, to the amazement of everybody, the heiress sailed for
America without a word of warning. The Duchesse was furious. ‘You must
follow her,’ she said to her son. ‘We cannot let so much money escape.’
The son said he would be hanged if he went to America, or if he would
marry such a monkey, and as for her money, she could go anywhere she
pleased with it, or words to that effect. So that ended the affair of
the Duc de Z——. When the other impecunious young nobles heard that the
Duchesse no longer had any claims upon the American’s money they got
together and said, ‘Somebody must marry her and divide with the rest.
We can’t all marry her, but we can all have a share from whoever does.
Now we will draw lots to see who must go to America and marry her.’ The
lot fell to the Baron de X——, but he had no money for the journey. So
all the others raised what money they could and loaned it to him, and
took his notes for it, with enormous interest, payable after his
marriage. He sailed away, and within eight months he had married her,
but he has not paid those notes because his wife won’t give him the
money! And these gentlemen are furious! Good joke, I call it.”

“What a shameful thing!” I said. “I wonder if that girl knew how she
was being married!”

“Of course she knew! At least, she might have known. She was rich and
she was plain. How could she hope to gain one of the proudest titles in
France without buying it?”

“I wonder if she could have known!” I said, again.

“It would not have prevented the marriage, would it, mademoiselle, if
she had?”

“Indeed it would!” I said (but I don’t know whether it would or not).
He shrugged his shoulders.

“America is very different from Europe, then, mademoiselle. Here it
would have made no difference. When a great amount of money is to be
placed, one must not have too many scruples.”

“If she did know,” I said, with a fervor which was lost upon him,
“believe this, whether you can understand it or not: she was not a
typical American girl.”

I had, as usual, many more words which he deserved to have had said to
him, but education along this line takes too much time. I ought to have
begun this great work with his great-grandparents.


What any one can see about Dinard to like is a mystery to me! Is it
possible that one who has spent a month there could ever be lured back
again? There is a beautiful journey from Paris across France
southwesterly to the coast, through odd little French villages,
vineyards, poppy-fields, and rose-gardens, across shining rivulets and
through an undulating landscape, all so lovely that it is no wonder
that one expects all this beauty to lead up to a climax. But what a
disappointment Dinard is to one’s enthusiastic anticipations! This
famous watering-place has to my mind not one solitary redeeming
feature. It has no excuse for being famous. It has not even one happy
accident about it as a peg to hang its fame upon, like some writers’
first novels. Dinard simply goes on being famous, nobody knows why. And
to go there, after reading pages about it in the papers and hearing
people speak of Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of Mecca, is
like meeting celebrities. You wonder what under the sun—what in the
world—how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid, uninteresting,
heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are allowed to become
famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence! I have met many
celebrities, and I have been to Dinard. I have had my share of
disappointments.

To begin with, Dinard is not sufficiently picturesque. There are but
one or two pretty vistas and three or four points of view. Then it is
not typically French. It is inhabited partly by English families who
cross the Channel yearly from Southampton and Portsmouth, and who take
with them their nine uninteresting daughters, with long front teeth and
ill-hanging duck skirts, and partly by Americans who go to Dinard as
they go to the Eiffel Tower; not that either is particularly
interesting, but they had heard of these places before they came over.
The only really interesting thing within five miles of Dinard is that,
off St. Malo, on the island of Grand Bé, Châteaubriand is buried. But
as this really belongs more to the attractions of St. Malo than to
Dinard, and nobody who spends summers at Dinard ever mentioned
Châteaubriand in my presence, or honored his tomb by a visit, it is
pure charity on my part to ascribe this solitary point of real interest
to Dinard. For, after all, Châteaubriand does not belong to it. Which
logic reminds me forcibly of the plea entered by the defence in a suit
for borrowing a kettle: “In the first place, I never borrowed his
kettle; in the second place, it was whole when I returned it; and, in
the third place, it was cracked when I got it.”

So with Châteaubriand and Dinard. Then Dinard has none of the dash and
go of other watering-places. There is nothing to do except to bathe
mornings and watch the people win or lose two francs at _petits
chevaux_ in the evenings. Not wildly exciting, that. Consequently, you
soon begin to stagnate with the rest.

You grow more and more stupid as the weeks pass, and at the end of a
month you cease to think. From that time on you do not have such a bad
time—that is to say, you do not suffer so acutely, because you have now
got down to the level of the people who go back to Dinard the next
year.

We came away. The hotels are among the worst on earth—musty,
old-fashioned, and villainously expensive—and one of the happiest
moments in my life was the day when I left Dinard for Mont St. Michel.
Mont St. Michel is one of the most out-of-the-way, un-get-at-able
places I found in all Europe; but, oh, how it rewards one who arrives!

Mont St. Michel is too well known to need a description. But to go from
Dinard requires, first of all, that one must go by boat over to St.
Malo, thence by train; change cars, and alight finally at a lonely
little station, behind which stands a sort of vehicle—a cross between a
London omnibus and a hay-wagon. You scramble to the top of this as best
you may. Nobody helps you. The Frenchman behind you crowds forward and
climbs up ahead of you and holds you back with his umbrella while he
hauls his fat wife up beside him. Then you clamber up by the hub of the
wheel and by sundry awkward means which remind you of climbing a stone
wall when you were a child. You take any seat left, which the Frenchmen
do not want, the horses are put to, and away you go over a smooth sandy
road for eleven miles, with the sea crawling up on each side of you
over the dunes.

Suddenly, without warning, you come squarely upon Mont St. Michel,
rising solidly five hundred feet from nowhere. There is a whole town in
this fortress, built upon this rock, street above street, like a flight
of stairs, and house piled up behind house, until on the very top there
is one of the most famous cathedrals in the world; and as you thread
its maze of vaulted chambers and dungeons and come to its gigantic
tower you are lost in absolute wonder at the building of it.

Where did they get the material? And when got, what human ingenuity
could raise those enormous blocks of stone to that vast height? How
those cannon swept all approach by land or sea as far as the eye could
reach! It would require superb courage in an enemy to come within reach
of that grim sentinel of France, manned by her warrior monks. What
secrets those awful dungeons might relate! Here political crimes were
avenged with all the cruelty of Siberian exile. Here prisoners wore
their lives away in black solitude, no ray of light penetrating their
darkness.

The story is told that one poor wretch was eaten alive by gigantic
rats, and they have a ghastly reproduction of it in wax, which makes
you creepy for a week after you have seen it. Nowhere in all Europe did
I see a place which impressed its wonder and its history of horror upon
me as did the cathedral dungeon of Mont St. Michel. Its situation was
so impregnable, its capacity so vast, its silence and isolation from
the outer world so absolute.

All Russia does not boast a situation so replete with possible and
probable misery and anguish such as were suggested to my mind here.

But the wonder and charm of the compact little town which clings like a
limpet to its base are more than can be expressed on the written page.
It is like climbing the uneven stairs of some vast and roofless ancient
palace, upon each floor of which dwell families who have come in and
roofed over the suites of rooms and made houses out of them. The stairs
lead you, not from floor to floor, but from bakery to carpenter-shop,
from the blacksmith’s to the telegraph-office.

The streets are paved with large cobblestones, to prevent cart-wheels
from slipping, and are so narrow that I often had to stand up at
afternoon tea with my cup in one hand and my chair in the other, to let
a straining, toiling little donkey pass me, gallantly hauling his load
of fagots up an incline of forty-five degrees.

The famous inn here is kept by Madame Poularde, who can cook so
marvellously that she is one of the wonders of Normandy. Her kitchen
faces the main street; you simply step over the threshold as you hear
the beating of eggs, and there, over an immense open fire, which roars
gloriously up the chimney, are the fowls twirling on their strings and
dripping deliciously into the pans which sizzle complainingly on the
coals beneath.

Presently the roaring ceases, the fresh coals are flattened down, and
into a skillet, with a handle five feet long, is dropped the butter,
which melts almost instantly. A fat little red-faced boy pushes the
skillet back and forth to keep the butter from burning. The frantic
beating of eggs comes nearer and nearer. The shrill voice of Madame
Poularde screams voluble French at her assistants. She boxes somebody’s
ears, snatches the eggs, gives them one final puffy beating, which
causes them to foam up and overflow, and at that exciting moment out
they bubble into the smoking skillet, the handle of which she seizes at
the identical moment that she lets go of the empty bowl with one hand
and pushes the red-faced boy over backward with the other. It is
legerdemain! But then, _how_ she manages that skillet! How her red
cheeks flush, her black eyes sparkle, and her plump hands guide that
ship of state!

We are all so excited that we get horribly in her way and almost fall
into the fire in our anxiety. She stirs and coaxes and coquettes with
the lovely foamy mass until it becomes as light as the yellow down on a
fledgling’s wings. She calls it an omelette, but she is scrambling
those eggs! Then when it is almost done she screams at us to take our
places. The red-faced boy rings a huge bell, and we all tumble madly up
the narrow stairs to the dining-room, where a score of assorted
tourists are seated. _They_ get that first omelette because they
behaved better than we did, and were more orderly. There are half a
dozen little maids who attend us. They give us bread and bring our wine
and get our plates all ready, for, behold, we can hear below the
beating of the eggs and the sizzling of the butter, and presently
Madame Poularde’s scream and slap, and we know that our omelette is on
the way!

There were scores of bridal parties there when we were, for Mont St.
Michel seems to be the Niagara of France, and really one could hardly
imagine a more charming place for a honeymoon. Indeed, for a newly
married couple, for boy and girl, for spinsters and bachelors, ay, even
for Darby and Joan, Mont St. Michel has attractions. All sorts and
conditions of men here find the most romantic and interesting spot to
be found in the whole of France.

While here we got telegrams telling us of the assembling of our friends
at a house-party at a château in the south of France which once had
belonged to Charles VII. So without waiting for anything more we wired
a joyful acceptance and set out. We did, however, stop over a few hours
at Blois, in order to see the château there. We really did Blois in a
spirit of Baedeker, for we were crazy to see Velor, in order not to
miss an inch of the good times which we knew would riot there. But
virtue was its own reward, for as we were looking into the depths of
the first real oubliette which I ever had seen, and I was just
shivering with the vision of that fiendish Catharine de’ Medici who
used to drop people into these holes every morning before breakfast,
just as an appetizer, we heard a most blood-curdling shriek, and there
stood that wretched Jimmie watching us from an open door, waving his
Baedeker at us, with Mrs. Jimmie’s lovely Madonna smile seen over his
shoulder.

No one who has not felt the awful pangs of homesickness abroad has any
idea of the joy with which one greets intimate friends in Europe. I
believe that travel in Europe has done more toward the riveting of
lukewarm American friendships than any other thing in the world.

The Jimmies have often appeared upon my pathway like angels of light,
and at Blois we simply loved them, for Blois is not only gloomy, but it
has a most ghastly history. The murder of the Duc de Guise and his
brother, by order of King Henry III., took place here. They show one
the rooms where the murder was committed, the door through which the
murderer entered, and the private _cabinet de travail_ where the king
waited for the news.

Here, also, Margaret of Valois married Henry of Navarre, and Charles,
Duc d’Alençon, married Margaret of Anjou. But one hardly ever thinks of
the weddings which occurred here for the horrors which overshadow them.
How fitting that Marie de’ Medici should have been imprisoned here, and
my ancient enemy, Catharine, that queen-mother who perched her children
on thrones as carelessly and as easily as did Napoleon and Queen Louise
of Denmark—that Catharine should have died here, “unregretted and
unlamented,” was too lovely!

Then we left the magnificent old castle and took the train for
Port-Boulet, where the Marquise met us with her little private omnibus,
holding eight, drawn by handsome American horses. They were new horses
and young, and the Marquise said that Charles found them quite
unmanageable. Jimmie watched him drive them around a moment or two
before they could be made to stand, then he broke out laughing. The
Marquise was so disgusted at the way they see-sawed that she said she
was going to sell them.

“Sell them!” cried Jimmie. “Why, all in the world that’s the matter
with those poor brutes is that they don’t speak French! Let _me_ drive
them!”

So the Marquise saved Charles’s vanity by saying that monsieur wished
to try the new horses. Jimmie climbed upon the box, and gathered up the
reins, saying, “So, old boy, you don’t like the dratted language any
better than I do. Steady now, boy! _Giddap_!” Whereat the pretty
creatures pricked up their ears, pranced a little, then sprang into
their collars, and we were off along the lovely river road at a
spanking pace and with as smooth and even a gait as the most
experienced roadsters.

We could hear Charles’s polite compliments to Jimmie on his driving,
and Jimmie’s awful French, as he assured Charles that the horses were
all right, “_très gentils_” and “_très jolis_.” “_Ne dites jamais
‘doucement’ aux chevaux américains. Dites ‘whoa,’ et ils arrêteront, et
quand vous dites ‘Giddap,’ ils marcheront bien. Savez?_” At which
Charles obediently practised “Whoa!” and “Giddap!” while we felt
ourselves pulled up and started off, as the object-lesson demanded, but
amid shrieks of laughter which quite upset Charles’s dignity.

Finally, we whirled in across the moat and under the great gate to the
château, and found ourselves in the billiard-room of Velor, with a big
open fire, in front of which lay a pile of dogs and around which we all
gathered shiveringly, for the day was chilly.

That charming billiard-room at Velor! It is not so grand as the rest of
the château, but everybody loves it best of all. It is on the ground
floor, and it has a writing-desk and two or three little work-tables
and several sofas and heaps of easy-chairs, and here everybody came to
read or write or sew or play billiards. And as to afternoon tea! Not
one of us could have been hired to drink it in the salons up-stairs. In
fact, so many of us insisted upon being in the billiard-room that there
never was room for a free play of one’s cue, for somebody was always in
the way, and it was rather discouraging to hear a woman doing
embroidery say, “Don’t hit this ball. Take some other stroke, can’t
you? Your cue will strike me in the eye.”

Dunham, the eighteen-year-old son of the Marquise, was teaching me
billiards, but his manners were so beautiful that he always pretended
that to stick to one’s own ball was a mere arbitrary rule of the game,
so he permitted me to play with either ball, which made it easiest for
me, or which caused least discomfort to those sitting uncomfortably
near the table. A dear boy, that Dunham! He had but one fault, and that
was that he _would_ wear cerise and scarlet cravats, and his hair was
red—so uncompromisingly red, of such an obstinate and determined red,
that his mother often said, “Come here, Dunham, dear, and light up this
corner of the room with your sunny locks. It is too dark to see how to
thread my needle!” Such was his amiability that I am sure he enjoyed
it, for he always went promptly, and called her “_Mon amour_,” and
slyly kissed her when he thought we were not looking.

All our remarks upon his red ties fell upon unheeding ears, until one
day I bribed his man to bring me every one of them. These I distributed
among the women guests, and when, the next morning, Dunham came in
complaining that he couldn’t find any of his red ties, lo! every woman
in the room was wearing one; and to our credit be it spoken that he
failed to get any of them back, and never, to my knowledge at least,
wore a scarlet tie again.

Velor is historic. After it passed out of the hands of Charles VII.—I
have slept in his room, but I must say that he was unpleasantly short
if that bed fitted him!—it was bought by the old miser Nivelau, whose
daughter, Eugénie Belmaison, was the girl Balzac wished to marry. In a
rage at being rejected by her father he wrote _Eugénie Grandet_, and
several of the articles, such as her work-box, of which Balzac makes
mention, are in the possession of the Marquise.

Every available room in the Velor was filled with our party. Each day
we drove in the brake to visit some ancient château, such as
Azay-le-Rideau, Islette, Chinon, or the Abbey of Fontevreault, finding
the roads and scenery in Touraine the most delightful one can imagine.

Fontevreault was originally an abbey, and a most powerful one, being
presided over by daughters of kings or women of none but the highest
rank, and these noble women held the power of life and death over all
the country which was fief to Fontevreault.

Velor was once fief to Fontevreault, but the abbey is now turned into a
prison.

They took away our cameras before they allowed us to enter, but we saw
some of the prisoners, of whom there were one thousand. The real object
of our visit, however, was to see the tombs of Henry II. and of my
beloved Richard the Lion-hearted, who are both buried at Fontevreault.
To go to Fontevreault, we were obliged to cross the river Vienne on the
most curious little old ferry, which was only a raft with the edges
turned up. Charles drove the brake on to this raft, but we preferred,
after one look into the eyes of the American horses, to climb down and
trust to our own two feet.

We gave and attended breakfasts with the owners of neighboring
châteaux, drove into Saumur to the theatre or to dine with the officers
of the regiment stationed there, and had altogether a perfect visit. I
have made many visits and have been the guest of many hostesses, most
of them charming ones, hence it is no discourtesy to them and but a
higher compliment to the Marquise when I assert that she is one of the
most perfect hostesses I ever met.

A thorough woman of the world, having been presented at three courts
and speaking five languages, yet her heart is as untouched by the taint
of worldliness, her nature as unembittered by her sorrows, as if she
were a child just opening her eyes to society. One of the cleverest of
women, she is both humorous and witty, with a gift of mimicry which
would have made her a fortune on the stage.

Her servants idolize her, manage the château to suit themselves, which
fortunately means to perfection, and look upon her as a beloved child
who must be protected from all the minor trials of life. She has
rescued the most of them from some sort of discomfort, and their
gratitude is boundless. Like the majority of the nobility, the peasants
of France are royalists. The middle class, the _bourgeoisie_, are the
backbone of the republic.

The servants are stanch Catholics and long for a monarchy again. The
Marquise apologized to them for our being heretics, and told them that
while we were not Christians (Catholics), yet we tried to be good, and
in the main turned out a fair article, but she entreated their clemency
and their prayers for her guests. So we had the satisfaction of being
ardently prayed for all the time we were there, and of being
complimented occasionally by her maid, Marie, an old Normandie peasant
seventy years old, for an act on our part now and then which savored of
real Christianity. And once when we had private theatricals, and I
dressed as a nun, Marie never found out for half the evening that I was
not one of the Sisters who frequently came to the château, but kept
crossing herself whenever she saw me; and when she discovered me she
told me, with tears in her eyes, it really was a thousand pities that I
would not renounce the world and become a Christian, because I looked
so much like a “religieuse.”

We went in oftenest to Chinon—always on market day; some of us on
horseback, some on wheels, while the rest drove. Chinon is the fortress
château where Jeanne d’Arc came to see Charles VII. to try to interest
him in her plans. Its ruins stand high up on a bluff overlooking the
town, and beneath it in an open square is the very finest and most
spirited equestrian statue I ever saw. It is of Jeanne d’Arc, and I
only regret that the photograph I took of it is too small to show its
fire and spirit and the mad rush of the horse, and the glorious,
generous pose of the noble martyr’s outstretched arms, as she seems to
be in the act of sacrificing her life to her country. There is the
divinest patriotism in every line of it.

We saw it on a beautiful crisp day in November. It was our Thanksgiving
day at home. We drove along the lovely river-road from Chinon to Velor,
and upon our arrival we discovered that the Marquise had arranged an
American Thanksgiving dinner for us, sending even to America for
certain delicacies appropriate to the season. It was a most gorgeous
Thanksgiving dinner, for, aside from the turkey, lo! there appeared a
peacock in all its magnificent plumage, sitting there looking so dressy
with all his feathers on that we quite blushed for the state of the
turkey.

A month of Paris, and then I long for fresh fields and pastures new. Of
course there is nowhere like Paris for clothes or to eat. But when one
has got all the clothes one can afford and is no longer hungry, having
acquired a chronic indigestion from too intimate a knowledge of
Marguery’s and Ledoyen’s, what is there to do but to leave?

Paris is essentially a holiday town, but I get horribly tired of too
long a holiday, and after the newness is worn off one discovers that it
is the superficiality of it all that palls. The people are superficial;
their amusements are feathery—even the beauty of it all is “only skin
deep.”

Therefore, after one glimpse of Poland, the pagan in my nature called
me to the East, and six months of Paris have only intensified my
longing to get away—to get to something solid; to find myself once more
with the serious thinkers of the world.

In the mean time Bee has deserted me for the more interesting society
of Billy, and now she writes me long letters so filled with his sayings
and doings that I must move on or I shall die of homesickness. I have
decided on Russia and the Nile, taking intermediate countries by the
way. This is entirely Billy’s fault.

When I first decided to go to Russia, I supposed, of course, that I
could induce the Jimmies to go with me, but, to my consternation, they
revolted, and gently but firmly expressed their determination to go to
Egypt by way of Italy. So I have taken a companion, and if all goes
well we shall meet the Jimmies on the terrace of Shepheard’s in
February.

I packed three trunks in my very best style, only to have Mrs. Jimmie
regard my work with a face so full of disapproval that it reminded me
of Bee’s. She then proceeded to put “everything any mortal could
possibly want” into one trunk, with what seemed to me supernatural
skill and common-sense, calmly sending the other two to be stored at
Munroe’s. I don’t like to disparage Mrs. Jimmie’s idea of what I need,
but it does seem to me that nearly everything I have wanted here in
Berlin is “stored at Munroe’s.”

My companion and I, with faultless arithmetic, calculated our expenses
and drew out what we considered “plenty of French money to get us to
the German frontier.” Then Jimmie took my companion and Mrs. Jimmie
took me to the train.

Their cab got to the station first, and when we came up Jimmie was
grinning, and my companion looked rather sheepish.

“I didn’t have enough money to pay the extra luggage,” she whispered.
“I had to borrow of Mr. Jimmie.”

“That’s just like you,” I said, severely. “Now _I_ drew more than you
did.”

Just then Jimmie came up with _my_ little account.

“Forty-nine francs extra luggage,” he announced.

“What?” I gasped, “on that _one_ trunk?” How grateful I was at that
moment for the two stored at Munroe’s!

“Oh, Jimmie,” I cried, “I haven’t got _near_ enough! You’ll _have_ to
lend me twenty francs!”

My companion smiled in sweet revenge, and has been almost impossible to
travel with since then, but we are one in our rage against paying extra
luggage. Just think of buying your clothes once and then paying for
them over and over again in every foreign country you travel through!
Our clothes will be priceless heirlooms by the time we get home. We can
never throw them away. They will be too valuable.

The Jimmies have been so kind to us that we nearly choked over leaving
them, but we consoled ourselves after the train left, and proceeded to
draw the most invidious comparisons between French sleeping-cars and
the rolling palaces we are accustomed to at home. I am ashamed to think
that I have made unpleasant remarks upon the discomforts of travel in
America. Oh, how ungrateful I have been for past mercies!

My companion is very patient, as a rule, but I heard her restlessly
tossing around in her berth, and I said, “What’s the matter?”

“Oh, nothing much. But don’t you think they have arranged the knobs in
these mattresses in very curious places?”

Well, it _was_ a little like sleeping on a wood-pile during a
continuous earthquake. But that was nothing compared to the news broken
to us about eleven o’clock that our luggage would be examined at the
German frontier at five o’clock in the morning. That meant being
wakened at half past four. But it was quite unnecessary, for we were
not asleep.

It was cold and raining. I got up and dressed for the day. But my
companion put her seal-skin on over her dressing-gown, and perched her
hat on top of that hair of hers, and looked ready to cope with Diana
herself.

“They’ll ruin my things if they unpack them,” I said.

“You just keep still and let me manage things,” she answered. So I did.
I made myself as small as possible and watched her. She selected her
victim and smiled on him most charmingly. He was tearing open the trunk
of a fat American got up in gray flannel and curl-papers. He dropped
her tray and hurried up to my companion.

“Have you anything to declare, madam?” he asked.

“Tell him absolutely nothing,” she whispered to me. I obeyed, but he
never took his eyes from her. She was tugging at the strap of her trunk
in apparently wild eagerness to get it open. She frowned and panted a
little to show how hard it was, and he bounded forward to help her.
Then she smiled at him, and he blinked his eyes and tucked the strap in
and chalked her trunk, with a shrug. He hadn’t opened it. She kept her
eye on him and pointed to my trunk, and he chalked that. Then seven
pieces of hand luggage, and he chalked them all. Then she smiled on him
again, and I thanked him, but he didn’t seem to hear me, and she nodded
her thanks and pulled me down a long stone corridor to the dining-room
where we could get some coffee.

At the door I looked back. The customs officer was still looking after
my companion, but she never even saw it.

The dining-room was full of smoke, but the coffee and my first taste of
zwieback were delicious. Then we went out through a narrow doorway to
the train, where we were jostled by Frenchmen with their habitual
“_Pardon!_” (which partially reconciles you to being walked on), and
knocked into by monstrous Germans, who sent us spinning without so much
as a look of apology, and both of whom puffed their tobacco smoke
directly in our faces. It was still dark and the rain was whimpering
down on the car-roof, and, take it all in all, the situation was far
from pleasant, but we are hard to depress, and our spirits remain
undaunted.

It was so stuffy in our compartment that I stood in the doorway for a
few moments near an open window. My companion was lying down in my
berth. We still had nineteen hours of travel before us with no prospect
of sleep, for sleep in those berths and over such a rough road was
absolutely out of the question.

Near me (and spitting in the saddest manner out of the open window)
stood the meek little American husband of the gray flannel and
curl-papers, whose fury at my companion for her quick work with the
customs officer knew no bounds.

The gray flannel had gone to bed again in the compartment next to ours.

The precision of this gentleman’s aim as he expectorated through the
open window, and the marvellous rapidity with which he managed his
diversion, led me to watch him. He looked tired and cold and ill. It
was still dark outside, and the jolting of the train was almost
unbearable. He had not once looked at me, but with his gaze still on
the darkness he said, slowly,

“They can have the whole blamed country for all of me! _I_ don’t want
it.”

It was so exactly the way I felt that even though he said something
worse than “blamed,” I gave a shriek of delight, and my companion
pounded the pillow in her cooperation of the sentiment.

“You are an American and you are Southern,” I said.

“Yes’m. How did you know?”

“By your accent.”

“Yes’m, I was born in Virginia. I was in the Southern army four years,
and I love my country. I hate these blamed foreigners and their blamed
churches and their infernal foreign languages. I am over here for my
health, my wife says. But I have walked more miles in picture-galleries
than I ever marched in the army. I’ve seen more pictures by Raphael
than he could have painted if he’d ’a’ had ten arms and painted a
thousand years without stopping to eat or sleep. I’ve seen more ‘old
masters,’ as they call ’em, but _I_ call ’em _daubs_, all varnished
till they are so slick that a fly would slip on ’em and break his neck.
And the stone floors are so cold that I get cold clean up to my knees,
and I don’t get warm for a week. Yet I am over here for my health! Then
the way they rob you—these blamed French! Lord, if I ever get back to
America, where one price includes everything and your hotel bill isn’t
sent in on a ladder, and where I can keep warm, won’t I just be _too_
thankful.”

Just then the gray-flannel door banged open and a hand reached out and
jerked the poor little old man inside, and we heard him say, “But I was
only blaming the French. I ain’t happy over here.” And a sharp voice
said, “Well, you’ve said enough. Don’t talk any more at all.” Then she
let him out again, but he did not find me in the corridor. He found his
open window, and he leaned against our closed door and again aimed at
the flying landscape, as he pondered over the disadvantages of Europe.

The sun was just rising over the cathedral as we reached Cologne.

“Let’s get out here and have our breakfast comfortably, see the
cathedral, and take the next train to Berlin,” I said to my companion.

She is the courier and I am the banker. She hastily consulted her
_indicateur_ and assented. We only had about two seconds in which to
decide.

“Let’s throw these bags out of the window,” she said. “I’ve seen other
people do it, and the porters catch them.”

“Don’t _throw_ them,” I urged. “You will break my toilet bottles. Poke
them out gently.”

She did so, and we hopped off the train just at daybreak, perfectly
delighted at doing something we had not planned.

A more lovely sight than the Cologne cathedral, with the rising sun
gilding its numerous pinnacles and spires, would be difficult to
imagine. The narrow streets were still comparatively dark, and when we
arrived we heard the majestic notes of the organ in a Bach fugue, and
found ourselves at early mass, with rows of humble worshippers kneeling
before the high altar, and the twinkle of many candles in the soft
gloom. As we stood and watched and listened, the smell of incense
floated down to us, and gradually the first rays of the sun crept
downward through the superb colored-glass windows and stained the
marble statues in their niches into gorgeous hues of purple and scarlet
and amber.

And as the priests intoned and the fresh young voices of an invisible
choir floated out and the magnificent rumble of the organ shook the
very foundation of the cathedral, we forgot that we were there to visit
a sight of Cologne, we forgot our night of discomfort, we forgot
everything but the spirit of worship, and we came away without
speaking.


From Cologne to Dresden is stupid. We went through a country punctuated
with myriads of tall chimneys of factories, which reminded us why so
many things in England and America are stamped “Made in Germany.”

We arrived at Dresden at five o’clock, and decided to stop there and go
to the opera that night. The opera begins in Dresden at seven o’clock
and closes at ten. The best seats are absurdly cheap, and whole
families, whole schools, whole communities, I should say, were there
together. I never saw so many children at an opera in my life. Coming
straight from Paris, from the theatrical, vivacious, enthusiastic
French audiences, with their abominable _claqueurs_, this first German
audience seemed serious, thoughtful, appreciative, but unenthusiastic.
They use more judgment about applause than the French. They never
interrupt a scene or even a musical phrase with misplaced applause
because the soprano has executed a flamboyant cadenza or the tenor has
reached a higher note than usual. Their appreciation is slow but hearty
and always worthily disposed. The French are given to exaggerating an
emotion and to applauding an eccentricity. Even their subtlety is
overdone.

The German drama is much cleaner than the French, the family tie is
made more of, sentiment is encouraged instead of being ridiculed, as it
too often is in America; but the German point of view of Americans is
quite as much distorted as the French. That statement is severe, but
true. For instance, it would be utterly impossible for the American
girl to be more exquisitely misunderstood than by French and German
men.

Berlin is so full of electric cars that it seemed much more familiar at
first sight than Paris. It is a lovely city, although we ought to have
seen it before Paris in order fully to appreciate it. Its Brandenburg
Gate is most impressive, and I wanted to make some demonstration every
time we drove under it and realized that the statue above it has been
returned. Their statue of Victory in the Thiergarten is so hideous,
however, that I was reminded of General Sherman’s remark when he saw
the Pension Office in Washington, “And they tell me the —— thing is
fireproof!”

The streets are filled with beautiful things, mostly German officers.
The only trouble is that they themselves seem to know it only too well,
and as they will not give us any of the sidewalk, we are obliged to
admire them from the gutters. The only way you can keep Germans from
knocking you into the middle of the street is to walk sideways and
pretend you are examining the shop windows.

In the eyes of men, women are of little account in England compared to
the way we are treated in America; of less in France; and of still less
in Germany. We have not got to Russia yet.

Paris seems a city of leisure, Berlin a city of war. The streets of
Paris are quite as full of soldiers as Berlin, but French soldiers look
to me like mechanical toys. I have sent Billy a box of them for
Christmas—of mechanical soldiers, I mean. The chief difference I
noticed was that Billy’s were smaller than the live ones, although
French soldiers are small enough. That portion of the French army which
I have seen—at Longchamps, Châlons-sur-Marne, Saumur, and at various
other places—are, as a rule, undersized, badly dressed, and badly
groomed. They do not look neat, nor even clean, if you want the truth.
The uniform is very ugly, and was evidently designed for men thirteen
feet high; so that on those comical little toy Frenchmen it is
grotesque in the extreme.

Their trousers are always much too long, and so ample in width that
they seem to need only a belt at the ankle to turn them into perfect
Russian blouses. But English and German soldiers not only appear, but
_are_, in perfect condition, as though they could go to war at a
moment’s notice, and would be glad of the chance.

I am keeping my eyes open to see how America bears comparison with
other nations in all particulars. In point of appearance the English
army stands first, the German second, the American third, and the
French fourth. I put the American third only because our uniforms are
less impressive. In everything else, except in numbers, they might
easily stand first. But uniforms and gold lace, and bright scarlet and
waving plumes, make a vast difference in appearance, and every country
in the world recognizes this, except America. I wish that everybody in
the United States who boasts of democracy and Jeffersonian simplicity
could share my dissatisfaction in seeing our ambassadors at Court balls
and diplomatic receptions in deacons’ suits of modest black, without
even a medal or decoration of any kind, except perhaps that gorgeous
and overpowering insignia known as the Loyal Legion button, while every
little twopenny kingdom of a mile square sends a representative in a
uniform as brilliant as a peony and stiff with gold embroidery.

No matter how magnificent a man, personally, our ambassador may be, no
matter how valuable his public services, no matter how unimpeachable
his private character, I wish you could see how small and miserable and
mean is the appearance he presents at Court functions, where every man
there, except the representative of seventy millions of people, is in
some sort of uniform. If it really were Thomas Jefferson whose
administration inaugurated the disgusting simplicity which goes by his
name, I wish the words had stuck in his throat and strangled him.
“Jeffersonian simplicity!” How I despise it! Thomas Jefferson, I
believe, was the first Populist. We had had gentlemen for Presidents
before him, but he was the first one who rooted for votes with the
common herd by catering to the gutter instead of to the skyline, and
the tail end of his policy is to be seen in the mortifying appearance
of our highest officials and representatives. _Hinc illae lachrymae_!

I looked at the servant who announced our names in Paris at General
Porter’s first official reception, and even he was much more gorgeous
in dress than the master of the house, the Ambassador Extraordinary and
Minister Plenipotentiary representing seventy millions of people! Not
even in his uniform of a general! The only man in the room in plain
black. The United States ought to treat her representatives better.
When Mr. White at Berlin was received by the Emperor, he, too, was the
only man in plain black.

No wonder we are taken no account of socially when we don’t even give
our ambassador a house, as all the other countries do, and when his
salary is so inadequate. Every other ambassador except the American has
a furnished house given him, and a salary sufficient to entertain as
becomes the representative of a great country. All except _ours_! Yet
none of them is obliged to entertain as continuously as our ambassador,
because _only_ Americans travel unremittingly, and _only_ Americans
expect their ambassador to be their host.

O wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!”


Of course I notice such things immensely more in Berlin than in Paris,
because the glory of a Court is much more than the twinkle of a
republic.

I have worked myself into such a towering rage over this subject that
there is no getting down to earth gracefully or gradually. I have not
polished off the matter by any manner of means. I have only just
started in, but a row of stars will cool me off.


Before I came to Berlin I heard so much about Unter den Linden, that
magnificent street of the city, that I could scarcely wait to get to
it. I pictured it lined on both sides with magnificent linden-trees,
gigantic, imposing, impressive. I had had no intimate acquaintance with
linden-trees—and I wouldn’t know one now if I should see it—but I had
an idea from the name—linden, linden—that it was grand and waving; not
so grand as an oak nor so waving as a willow, but a cross between the
two. I knew that I should see these great monarchs making a giant arch
over this broad avenue and mingling their tossing branches overhead.

What I found when I arrived was a broad, handsome street. But those
lindens! They are consumptive, stunted little saplings without
sufficient energy to grow into real trees. They are set so far apart
that you have time to forget one before you come to another, and as to
their appearance—we have some just like them in Chicago where there is
a leak in the gas-pipes near their roots.

On the day before Christmas we felt very low in our minds. We had the
doleful prospect ahead of us of eating Christmas dinner alone in a
strange country, and in a hotel at that, so we started out shopping.
Not that we needed a thing, but it is our rule, “When you have the
blues, go shopping.” It always cures you to spend money.

Berlin shop-windows are much more fascinating even than those of Paris,
because in Berlin there are so many more things that you can afford to
buy that Paris seems expensive in comparison. We became so much
interested in the Christmas display that we did not notice the flight
of time. When we had bought several heavy things to weigh our trunks
down a little more and to pay extra luggage on, I happened to glance at
the sun, and it was just above the horizon. It looked to be about four
o’clock in the afternoon, and we had had nothing to eat since nine
o’clock, and even then only a cup of coffee. I felt myself suddenly
grow faint and weak. “Heavens!” I said, “see what time it is! We have
shopped all day and we have forgotten to get our luncheon.”

My companion glanced at her watch.

“It’s only half past eleven o’clock by my watch. I couldn’t have wound
it last night. No, it is going.”

“Perhaps the hands stick. They do on mine. Whenever I wind it, I have
to hit it with the hair-brush to start it; and even then it loses time
every day.”

“Let’s take them both to a jeweller,” she said. “We can’t travel with
watches which act this way.”

So we left them to be repaired, and as we came out, I said, “It will
take us half an hour to get back to the hotel. Don’t you think we ought
to go in somewhere and get just a little something to sustain us?”

“Of course we ought,” she said, in a weak voice. So we went in and got
a light luncheon. Then we went back to the hotel, intending to lie down
and rest after such an arduous day.

“We must not do this again,” I said, firmly. “Mamma told me
particularly not to overdo.”

My companion did not answer. She was looking at the clock. It was just
noon.

“Why, _that_ clock has stopped too,” she said.

But as we looked into the reading-room _that_ clock struck twelve. Then
it dawned on me, and I dropped into a chair and nearly had hysterics.

“It’s because we are so far _north_!” I cried. “Our watches were all
right and the sun’s all right. That is as high as it can get!”

She was too much astonished to laugh.

“And you had to go in and get luncheon because you felt so faint,” she
said, in a tone of gentle sarcasm.

“Well, you confessed to a fearful sense of goneness yourself.”

“Don’t tell anybody,” she said.

“I should think not!” I retorted, with dignity. “I hope I have _some_
pride.”

“Have you presented your letter to the ambassador?” she asked.

“Yes, but it’s so near Christmas that I suppose he won’t bother about
two waifs like us until after it’s over.”

“My! but you _are_ blue,” she said. “I never heard you refer to
yourself as a waif before.”

“I am a worm of the dust. I wish there wasn’t such a thing as
Christmas! I wonder what Billy will say when he sees his tree.”

“You might cable and find out,” she said. “It only costs about three
marks a word. ‘What did Billy say when he saw his tree?’—nine words—it
would cost you about eight dollars, without counting the address.”

Dead silence. I didn’t think she was at all funny.

“Don’t you think we ought to have champagne to-morrow?” she asked.

“What for? I hate the stuff. It makes me ill. Do _you_ want it?”

“No, only I thought that, being Christmas, and very expensive, perhaps
it would do you good to spend—”

A knock on the door made us both jump.

“His Excellency the Ambassador of the United States to see the American
ladies!”

It was, indeed, Mr. White and Mrs. White, and Lieutenant Allen, the
Military Attaché!

“Oh, those blessed angels!” I cried, buckling my belt and dashing for
the wash-stand, thereby knocking the comb and hand-glass from the grasp
of my companion.

They had come within an hour of the presentation of my letter, and they
brought with them an invitation from Mrs. Allen for us to join them at
Christmas dinner the next day, as Mrs. White said they could not bear
to think of our dining alone.

I had many beautiful things done for me during my thirty thousand miles
travel in Europe, but nothing stands out in my mind with more
distinctness than the affectionate welcome I received into the homes of
our representatives in Berlin. And, in passing, let me say this, I am
distinctly proud of them, one and all. I say this because one hears
many humiliating anecdotes of the mistakes made by the men and women
sent to foreign Courts, appointed because they had earned some
recognition for political services. Those of us who have strong
national pride and a sense of the eternal fitness of things, are
obliged to hear such things in shamed silence, and offer no retort, for
there can be no possible excuse for mortifying lapses of etiquette. And
these things will continue until our government establishes a school of
diplomacy and makes a diplomatic career possible to a man.

As long as it is possible for an ex-coroner or sheriff to be appointed
to a secretaryship of a foreign legation—a man who does not speak the
language and whose wife understands better how to cope with croup and
measles than with wives of foreign diplomats who have been properly
trained for this vocation, just so long shall we be obliged to bear the
ridicule heaped upon us over here, which our government never hears,
and wouldn’t care if it did!

Imagine the relief with which I met our Berlin representatives! At the
end of four years there will be no sly anecdotes whispered behind fans
at _their_ expense, for they have all held the same office before and
are well equipped by training, education, and native tact to bear
themselves with a proud front at one of the most difficult Courts of
Europe. I look back upon that little group of Americans with feelings
of unmixed pride.

Mr. White invited us to go with him that afternoon to see the tombs of
the kings at Charlottenburg; and when his gorgeous-liveried footman
came to announce his presence, the hotel proprietor and about forty of
his menials nearly crawled on their hands and knees before us, so great
is their deference to pomp and power.

I wish to associate Berlin with this beautiful mausoleum. It is
circular in shape, and the light falls from above through lovely
colored-glass windows upon those recumbent marble statues. The dignity,
the still, solemn beauty of those pale figures lying there in their
eternal repose, fill the soul with a sense of the great majesty of
death.

When we got back to the hotel we found that the same good fortune which
had attended us so far had ordained that the American mail should
arrive that day, and behold! there were all our Christmas letters timed
as accurately as if they had only gone from Chicago to New York.

Christmas letters! How they go to the heart when one is five thousand
miles away! How we tore up to our rooms, and oh! how long it seemed to
get the doors unlocked and the electric light turned up, and to plant
ourselves in the middle of the bed to read and laugh and cry and
interrupt each other, and to read out paragraphs of Billy’s funny
baby-talk!

While we were still discussing them, the proprietor came up to announce
to us that there was to be a Christmas Eve entertainment in the main
dining-room that evening, and would the American ladies do him the
honor to come down? The American ladies would.

When we went down we found that the enormous dining-room was packed
with people, all standing around a table which ran around two sides of
the room. A row of Christmas trees, covered with cotton to represent
snow, occupied the middle of the room, and at one end was a space
reserved for the lady guests, and in each chair was a handsome bouquet
of violets and lilies-of-the-valley.

This entertainment was for the servants of the hotel, of whom there
were three hundred and fifty.

First they sang a Lutheran hymn, very slowly, as if it were a dirge.
Then there was a short sermon. Then another hymn. Then the manager made
a little speech and called, for three cheers for the proprietor, and
they gave them with a fervor that nearly split the ears of the
groundlings.

Then a signal was given, and in less than one minute three hundred and
fifty paper bags were produced, and three hundred and fifty plates full
of oranges, apples, buns, and sweetened breads were emptied into them.
The table looked as if a plague of grasshoppers had swept over it.

Then each servant presented a number and received a present from the
tree, and that ended the festivity. But so typical of the fatherland,
so paternal, so like one great family!

Participating in this simple festival brought a little of the Christmas
feeling home to us and made us almost happy. We knew that our American
parcels would not be delivered until the next day, so we had but just
time to reread our precious letters when the clock struck twelve, and
with much solemnity my companion and I presented each other with our
modest Christmas present—which each had announced that she wanted and
had helped to select! But, then, who would not rather select one’s own
Christmas presents, and so be sure of getting things that one wants?

On Christmas morning registered packages began to arrive for both of
us. The first ten presents to arrive for my companion were
pocket-handkerchiefs. My first ten were all books. Evidently the dear
family had thought that American books would be most acceptable over
here, and I could see, with a feeling that warmed my heart, how
carefully they had consulted my taste, and had tried to remember to
send those I wanted. But I am of a frugal mind, and thoughts of the
extra luggage to be paid on bound books would intrude themselves.
However, I made no remark over the first ten, but before the day was
over I had received twenty-two books and one pen-wiper, and my
vocabulary was exhausted. My companion continued to receive
handkerchiefs until the room was full of them. Take it all together,
there was a good deal of sameness about our presents, but they have
been useful as dinner anecdotes ever since. Now that I have sent all
mine to be stored at Munroe’s, together with all my other necessities,
I feel lighter and more buoyant both in mind and trunk.

A Christmas dinner in a foreign land, in the midst of the diplomatic
corps, is the most undiplomatic thing in the world, for that is the one
time when you can cease to be diplomatic and dare to criticise the
government and make personal remarks to your heart’s content.

It was a beautiful dinner, and after it was over we were all invited to
the children’s entertainment at Mrs. Squiers’s. She had gathered about
fifty of the American colony for Christmas carols and a tree.
Immediately after the ambassador arrived the children marched in and
recited in chorus the verses about the birth of Christ, beginning, “Now
in the days of Herod the King.” Then they sang their carols, and then
“Stille Nacht,” and they sang them beautifully, in their sweet,
childish voices.

After these exercises the doors were thrown open, and the most
beautiful Christmas-tree I ever beheld burst upon the view of those
children, who nearly went wild with delight.

After everybody had gone home except “the diplomatic family,” which for
the time being included us, we picnicked on the remains of the
Christmas turkey for supper, and there was as little ceremony about it
as if it had been at an army post on the frontier. We had a beautiful
time, and everybody seemed to like everybody very much and to be
excellent friends.

Then Mr. and Mrs. White escorted us back to our hotel, which wasn’t at
all necessary, but which illustrates the way in which they treated us
all the time we were there.

This ended a truly beautiful Christmas, for, aside from being
unexpected and in striking contrast to the forlornness we had
anticipated, we had been taken into the families of beautiful people,
whose home life was an honor and an inspiration to share.

On New Year’s day we started early and went to Potsdam to visit the
palace of Sans Souci.

A most curious and interesting little old man who had been a guide
there for thirty years showed us through the grounds, where the King’s
greyhounds are buried, and where he pleaded to be buried with them. The
guide had no idea that he possessed a certain dramatic genius for
pathos, for, parrot-like, he was repeating the story he had told
perhaps a thousand times before. But when he showed us the graves of
the greyhounds which ate the poisoned food which had been prepared for
the King, he said:

“And they lie here. Not there with the other dogs, the favorites of the
King, but here, alone, disgraced, without even a headstone. Without
even their names, although they saved the great King from death and
gave their lives for his. Yet they lie here, and the others lie there.
It is the way of the world, ladies.”

Then he took us to the top of the terrace facing the palace, and,
pointing to the entrance, he said:

“In the left wing were the chambers of the King’s guests. In the right
wing were his own. Therefore, he placed a comma between those two words
‘Sans’ and ‘Souci,’ to indicate that those at the left were ‘without,’
while with himself was—‘Care.’”

While we were there the Emperor drove by and spoke to our cabman,
saying, “How is business?” Seeing how much pleasure it gave the poor
fellow to repeat it, we kept asking him to tell vis what the Kaiser
said to him.

First my companion would say:

“When was it and what happened?”

And when he had quite finished, I would say:

“It wasn’t the Emperor himself, was it? It must have been the coachman
who spoke to you.”

“No, not so, ladies. It was the great Kaiser himself. He said to me—”
And then we would get the whole thing over again. It was charming to
see his pleasure.

When we returned home we entered the hotel between rows of palms, and
we dropped money into each of them. It seemed to me that fifty servants
were between me and the elevators. However, it was New Year’s, and we
tried not to be bored by it.

People talk so much of the expense of foreign travel, but to my mind
the greatest expenditures are in paying for extra luggage and in fees.
Otherwise, I fancy that travel is much the same if one travels
luxuriously, and that in the long run things would be about equal. The
great difference is that in America all travel luxuries are given to
you for the price of your ticket, and here you pay for each separate
necessity, to say nothing of luxury, and your ticket only permits you
to breathe. But the annoyance of this continuous habit of feeing makes
life a burden. One pays for everything. It is the custom of the
country, and no matter if you arrange to have “service included,” it is
in the air, in the eyes of the servants, in the whole mental
atmosphere, and you fee, you fee, you fee until you are nearly dead
from the bother of it. In Germany they raise their hats and rise to
their feet every time you pass, even if you pass every seven minutes,
and when the time comes for you to go, you have to pay for the wear and
tear of these hats.

In Paris, at the theatre, you fee the woman who shows you to your seat,
you fee the woman who opens the door and the woman who takes your
wraps. One night in midsummer we stepped across from the Grand Hôtel to
the opera without even a scarf for a wrap, and the woman was so
disappointed that we were handed from one attendant to another some
half dozen times as “three ladies without wraps.” And the next one
would look us over from head to foot and repeat the words, “Three
ladies without wraps,” until we laughed in their faces.

French servants are the cleverest in the world if you want versatility,
but they are absolutely shameless in their greed, and look at the size
of your coin before they thank you. In fact, the words in which they
thank you indicate whether your fee was not enough, only modest, or
handsome.

“It is not too much, madam,” or “thanks, madam,” or “I thank you a
thousand times” show your status in their estimation.

If you are an American they reserve the right to rob you by the
impudence of their demands, until rather than have a scene, you give
them all they ask. I have followed in the footsteps of a French woman
and given exactly what she did, and had my money flung in derision upon
the pavement.

German servants seem to have more self-respect, for while they expect
it quite as much, they smile and thank you and never look at the coin
before your eyes. Perhaps they know from the feeling of it, but even if
you place it upon the table behind them they thank you and never look
at it or take it until you turn away.

However, you fee unmercifully here too. You fee the man at the bank who
cashes your checks, you fee the street-car conductor who takes your
fare, you fee every uniformed hireling of the government, whether he
has done anything for you or not.

The only persons whom I have neglected to fee so far are the
ambassadors.

But then, they do not wear uniforms!



IV
ON BOARD THE YACHT “HELA”


I am just able to sit up, and I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to
eat if I thought a week. I came on this yachting trip because my
friends begged me to. They said it would be an experience for me. It
has been.

The _Hela_ started out with a party of ten on board, who were on
pleasure bent. We have come up the English Channel from Dinard to
Ostend, but before we had been out an hour we struck a gale, to which
veterans on seasickness will refer for many a long day as “that fearful
time on the Channel.”

On the whole, I don’t know but that I myself might be considered a
veteran on seasickness. I have averaged crossing the Channel once a
month ever since I’ve been over here. I have got into the habit of
crossing the Channel, and I can’t seem to stop. It always appears that
I am in the wrong place for whatever is going on, for just as sure as I
go to London somebody sends for me to come to Paris, and I rush for the
Channel, and I have no sooner unpacked my trunks in Paris, and
bargained that service and electric lights shall be included, than
somebody discovers that I am imperatively needed in England, and I make
for the Channel again. The Channel is like Jordan. It always rolls
between.

But even in crossing the Channel there is everything in knowing how. I
have discarded the private state-room. It is too expensive, and I am
not a bit less uncomfortable than when occupying six feet of the settee
in the ladies’ cabin, with my feet in the flowers of another woman’s
hat. In fact, I prefer the latter. The other woman is always too ill to
protest or to move. I have now, by long and patient practice, proved to
my own satisfaction what serves me best in case of seasickness. I will
not stay on deck. I will not eat or drink anything to cure it. I will
not take anything to prevent it. I will not sit up, and I will not keep
my hat on. When I go on board of a Channel steamer my first act is to
shake hands with my friends and to go below. There I present the
stewardess with a modest testimonial of my regard. I also give her my
ticket. Then I select the most desirable portion of the settee, near a
port-hole, from which I can get fresh air. I take off my hat and lie
down. The steamer may not start for an hour. No matter. There I am, and
there I stay. The Channel may be as smooth as glass, but I travel
better flat. Like manuscript, I am not to be rolled. Sometimes I am not
ill at all, but I freely confess that those times are infrequent and
disappointing.

Now, of course, this is always to be expected in crossing the Channel,
but my friends said in going up the Channel we would not get those
choppy waves, and that I would find that the _Hela_ swam like a duck.

In analyzing that statement since, with a view to classifying it as
truth or otherwise, I have studied my recollections of ducks, and I
have come to the conclusion that in a rough sea a duck has every right
to be seasick, for she wobbles like everything else that floats. For
real comfort, give me something that’s anchored. Nevertheless, I was
persuaded to join the party.

Everybody came down at Dinard to see us off, and quite a number even
went over to St. Malo with us in the electric launch, for the _Hela_
drew too much water to enter the harbor at Dinard at low tide.

We were a merry party for the first hour on board the _Hela_—until we
struck the gale. It has seemed to me since that our evil genius was
hovering over us from the first, and simply waited until it would be
out of the question to turn back before emptying the vials of her wrath
on our devoted heads. It did not rain. The sun kept a malevolent eye
upon us all the time. It simply blew just one straight, unrelenting,
unswerving gale. And it came so suddenly. We were all sitting on deck
as happy as angels, when, without a word of warning, the _Hela_ simply
turned over on her side and threw us all out of our chairs. I caught at
a mast as I went by and clung like a limpet. There was tar on the mast.
It isn’t there any more. It is on the front of my new white serge
yachting dress. Jimmie coasted across the deck, and landed on his hands
and knees against the gunwale. If he had persisted in standing up he
would have gone overboard. The women all shrieked and remained in a
tangled heap of chairs, and rugs, and petticoats, waiting for the yacht
to right herself, and for the men to come and pick them up. But the
yacht showed no intention of righting herself. She continued to careen
in the position of a cab going round Piccadilly Circus on one wheel.
The sailors were all running around like ants on an ant-hill, and the
captain was shouting orders, and even lending a hand with the ropes
himself. I don’t know the nautical terms, but they were taking down the
middle sail—the mainsail, that’s it. It did not look dangerous, because
the sun kept shining, and I never thought of being frightened. I just
clung to the mast, watching the other people right themselves, and
laughing, when suddenly everything ceased to be funny. The decks of the
_Hela_ took on a wavy motion, and I blinked my eyes in order to see
better, for everything was getting very indistinct, and there were
green spots on the sun. Suddenly I realized that I was a long way from
home, and that I was even a long way from my state-room. I only had
just about sense enough left to remember that the mast was my very best
friend and that I must cling there.

After that, I remember that somebody came up behind me and pried my
hands loose from the mast.

The doctor’s voice said, “Can you walk?”

I smiled feebly and said, “I used to know how.” But evidently my
efforts were not highly successful, for he picked me up, white serge,
tar, green spots on the sun, and all, and carried me below, a limp and
humiliated bit of humanity.

Mrs. Jimmie and Commodore Strossi followed with more anxiety than the
occasion warranted.

Then Mrs. Jimmie sent the men away, and I felt pillows under my head,
and camphor under my nose, and hot-water bags about me; and I must have
gone to sleep or died, or something, for I don’t remember anything more
until the next day.

They were very nice to me, for I was such a cheerful invalid. It seemed
to surprise them that I could even pretend to be happy. I knew that it
must be an uncommon gale from the way Commodore Strossi studied the
charts, and because even his wife, for whom the yacht was named, was
ill, and she had spent half her life on the sea. The poor little French
cabin-boy was ill, too, and went around, with a Nile-green countenance,
waiting on people, before he was obliged to retire from active service.

The pitching of the yacht was something so terrible that it got to be
hysterically funny. It couldn’t seem dangerous with the sun streaming
down the companion-way and past my state-room windows. About five
o’clock on the second day they began to tack, and then I heard shrieks
of laughter and the crash of china, and groans from the saloon settee,
where young Bashforth was lying ghastly ill.

At the first lurch my trunk tipped over, and all the bottles on the
wash-stand bounded across to the bed, and most of them struck me on the
head. It frightened me so that I shrieked, and Jimmie came running down
to see if I was killed.

As I raised my head I saw his horrified gaze fairly riveted to my face,
and I felt something softly trickling down. I touched it, and then
looked at my hand and discovered that it was wet and red.

“Good heavens, your face is all cut open,” gasped Jimmie, in a voice
that revealed his terror.

Mrs. Jimmie was just behind him, and I saw her turn pale. In a flash I
saw myself disfigured for life, and probably having to be sewed up. The
pain in my face became excruciating, and I began to think yachting
rather serious business.

“Run for the doctor, Jimmie,” said his wife. Jimmie obediently ran.

“Does it hurt very much, dear?” she said, sitting on the edge of the
bed.

“Awfully,” I murmured.

The doctor came, followed by François, with a basin of hot water and
sponges, and a nasty-looking little case of instruments. Mrs. Jimmie
held my hand. They turned on the electric lights and opened the
windows. Jimmie had my salts. The doctor carefully wet a sponge and
tenderly bathed my cheek, and I held my breath ready to shriek if he
hurt me. Commodore Strossi stood at the door with an anxious face.
Suddenly the doctor reached for a broken bottle half hidden under my
pillow.

“Oh, what is it, doctor?” asked Mrs. Jimmie. “What makes you look so
queer?”

“This is iodine on her face. Her bottle has emptied itself. That is
all.”

We gazed at each other for a moment or two, then I nearly went into
hysterics. Jimmie’s face was a study.

“You said it was blood, Jimmie,” I said.

“Well, you said it hurt,” he retorted.

“Well, it did. When you said I was covered with blood it hurt awfully.”

The doctor went out much chagrined that he had not been called upon to
sew up a wound. I had a relapse, brought on by young Bashforth’s
jeering remarks as he frantically clung to the handles of the locker
which formed the back of the settee where he lay prostrate.

I was too utterly done up to reply, for two days’ violent seasickness
rather takes the mental ginger out of one’s make-up. But Fate avenged
me in this wise. The door of my state-room opened into the dining-room,
and my bed faced the door. Opposite to me was the settee on which
Bashforth was coiled, and back of him was the locker for the tinned
mushrooms, sardines, lobster, shrimp, caviar, deviled ham, and all the
things which well people can eat. This locker had brass handles let
into the mahogany, and to these handles the poor fellow clung when the
yacht lurched.

His cruel words of derision had hardly left his pale lips before they
tacked again. He was not holding on, but he hastily snatched at the
handles. He was too late, however, for he was tossed from the settee to
the legs of the dining-room table (which, fortunately, were anchored)
without touching the floor at all. He described a perfect parabola. It
was just the way I should have tossed him had I been Destiny. He
gripped the table-legs like a vise, coiling himself around them like a
poor navy-blue python with a green face. He thought the worst was over,
but in his last clutch at the locker he had accidentally opened it, and
at the next lurch of the yacht all the cans bounded out and battered
his unprotected back like a shower of grape-shot. The yacht lurched
again and the cans rolled back. She pitched forward, and again the
mushrooms and deviled ham aimed for him. The noise brought everybody,
and at first nobody tried to help him. They just couldn’t see because
of the tears in their eyes from laughing. As for me, I managed to crawl
to the foot of the bed and cling to a post, so weak I couldn’t wipe the
tears away, but laying up an amount of enjoyment which will enrich my
old age.

Finally, Jimmie got sorry for him, and went and tried to pick him up.
But he was laughing so, he dropped him.

“Oh, Jimmie,” I pleaded. “Don’t drop anybody who is seasick. Drop well
people if you must. But put him on the settee carefully.”

“I’ll put him there,” said Jimmie, wiping his eyes on his coat-sleeve.
“But I don’t say I’ll do it the first time I try. I’ll get him there by
dinner-time—I hope.”

It was dangerous to ridicule anybody in that gale, for the doctor in
the companion-way was leaning in at my window and laughing in his big
English voice, when the _Hela_ lurched and pitched him half-way into my
state-room. There he balanced with his hands on my trunk.

He was rather a tight fit, which interested Jimmie more than young
Bashforth, so he left the boy and came around and pried the doctor back
into the companion-way.

The _Hela_ was a fickle jade, for no sooner would she shake us up in
such an alarming manner than she would seem to regret her violence, and
would skim like a bird for an hour or so, with no perceptible motion.
She would not even flap her big white wings, but she cut through the
water with a whir and a rush which exhilarated me as flying must stir
the heart of a sea-gull.

She behaved so well after five o’clock that they decided to try to eat
dinner from the dinner-table—a thing they had not done since we
started. There were only four of them able to appear—Mr. and Mrs.
Jimmie, the doctor, and the Commodore.

They put the racks up and took every precaution. The only mistake they
made was in using the yacht’s lovely china, which bore the Strossi
crest under the _Hela’s_ private flag.

Jimmie and his wife sat opposite each other. I put three pillows under
my head, the better to watch them, when suddenly the yacht tilted Mrs.
Jimmie and her chair over backward. Jimmie saw her going and reached to
save her. But he forgot to set down his soup-plate. The result was that
she got Jimmie’s soup in her face, and that he slid clear across the
table on his hands and knees, taking china and table-cloth with him,
and they all landed on top of poor Mrs. Jimmie (who, even as I write,
is in her stateroom having her hair washed).

Her chief wail, when she could speak, was not that her head ached from
the blow, or that she was half strangled with tepid soup, but that
Jimmie had broken all the china. She could not be comforted until the
Commodore proved that some of the china had been broken previously, by
showing her the fragments wrecked on the first day out.

That last catastrophe has apparently settled things. Everybody has
turned in to repair damages, and, perhaps, afterwards to sleep.

The Commodore is studying the charts on the dining-room table, and the
captain, an American, has just put his head in at the door and said:

“She’s sailing twelve knots an hour under just the fores’l, sir, and
she’s running like a scairt dog.”


Americans are so accustomed to outrageous distances that a journey of
fifty hours is mere play. But I sincerely believe that no other trait
of ours causes the European to regard our nation with such suspicion as
our utter unconcern of long journeys. Nothing short of accession to a
title or to escape being caught by the police would induce the
Continental to travel over a few hours. So when I decided to go to
Poland in order to be a member of a gorgeous house-party, I might as
well have robbed a bank and given my friends something to be suspicious
of. They never believed that I would do such a fatiguing and unheard-of
thing until I really left.

But Poland has always beckoned me like a friend—a friend which combined
all the poetry, romance, fascination, nobility, and honor of a first
love. If the Pole is proud, he has something to be proud of. His honor
has dignity. His country’s sorrows touch the heart. Polish literature
has sentiment, her music has fire, her men of genius stand out like
heroes, her women are adorable. Balzac describes not only one but a not
infrequent type when he dedicates _Modeste Mignon_ “To a Polish Lady”
in the most exquisite apostrophe which ever graced the entrance-hall to
one of the noblest novels of this inimitable master.

“Daughter of an enslaved land, angel through love, witch through fancy,
child by faith, aged by experience, man in brain, woman in heart, giant
by hope, mother through sorrow, poet in thy dreams, to Thee belongs
this book, in which thy love, thy fancy, thy experience, thy sorrow,
thy hope, thy dreams, are the warp through which is shot a woof less
brilliant than the poesy of thy soul, whose expression when it shines
upon thy countenance is, to those who love thee, what the characters of
a lost language are to scholars.”

Such a tribute as this would of itself be sufficient to turn the heart
expectantly towards Poland, to say nothing of the interest her history
has for the brain. The history of Poland is one long struggle for home
and country. The Pole is a patriot by inheritance. His patriotism, goes
deeper than his love.

His country comes first in his soul, and for that reason the Poles have
in me an enthusiastic ally, an ardent admirer, and a sympathetic
friend.

In speaking of the story of Poland with a cold-blooded reader of
history I expressed my appreciation of the noble proportions of their
struggles and my sympathy for their present unfortunate plight, to
which she replied: “Yes, but it is so entirely their own fault. They
are so fiery, so precipitate, so romantic. They got _themselves_ into
it! Their poesy and romance and folly make them charming as
individuals, but ridiculous as a nation. I like the Poles, but I have
no patience with Poland.” How exactly the world’s verdict on the
artistic temperament! There is a round hole, and, lo and behold! all
squares must be forced into it!

Suppose that everything resolved itself into the commonplace; where
would be your imagination, your fancy, your rich experience of the
heart and soul? Poland furnishes just this element in history. Her
struggles are so romantic, her follies so charmingly natural to a
high-strung nation, her despair so profound, her frequent revolutions
so buoyant in hope, that she reminds me of a brilliant woman striving
to make dull women understand her, and failing as persistently and
completely as the artistic temperament always fails.

A frog spat at a glowworm. “Why do you spit at me?” said the glowworm.
“Why do you shine so?” said the frog.

Poland’s singers have voices so piercingly sweet; her novelists have
pens touched with such divine fire; her actors portray so much of the
soul; her patriots have always shown such reckless and inspiring
bravery; and now, in her desolation and subjection, there is still so
much pride, such noble dignity under her losses, that of all the
countries in the world Poland holds both the heart and mind by a
fascination of which she herself is unconscious, marking a noble
simplicity of soul which is in itself an added indication of her
queenly inheritance.

Julia Marlowe in her _Countess Valeska_ is a Pole to her finger-tips.
Her acting is superb. Cleopatra herself never felt nor inspired a
diviner passion than Valeska; but when it came to a question of her
love or her country she rose above self with an almost superhuman
effort and saved her country at the expense of her love.

No American who has not the same awful passion of patriotism; no one
who is not a lover of his country above home or friends or wife or
children; who does not love his America second only to his God; whose
blood does not prickle in his veins at the sound of “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” and whose eyes do not fill with tears at the sight of “Old
Glory” floating anywhere, can understand of what patriotism the Pole is
capable.

Nor can one who has not the foolish, romantic, nervous, high-strung,
artistic temperament understand from within Poland’s national history.
For that reason one is apt to find famous places in Europe which have
only an historical significance somewhat disappointing. One fails to
find in a battle fought for the sake of conquest by an overweening
ambition such soul-stirring pathos as in the leading of a forlorn hope
from the spirit of patriotism, or of a woman’s pleadings where a man’s
arguments have failed. For that reason Austerlitz touches one not so
nearly as the struggle around Memel. As we drew near Memel things began
to look lonely and foreign and queer, and its picturesque features were
enhanced by recollection of Napoleon and Queen Louise.

Memel is near Tilsit, and the river Niemen, or Memel, empties into the
Baltic just below here. The conference on the raft appeals to me as one
of the most thrilling and yet pitiably human events in all history.

Its sickening anticlimax to poor Queen Louise was so exactly in keeping
with the smaller disappointments which assail her more humble sister
women in every walk of life that it takes on the air of a heart
tragedy. I tried to imagine the feelings of the Queen when _she_
journeyed to Memel to hold her famous interview with Napoleon. How her
pride must have suffered at the thought of lowering herself to plead
for her husband and her country at Napoleon’s hands! How she hated him
before she saw him! How she more than hated him after she left him! How
she must have scorned the beauty upon which Napoleon commented so idly
when a nation’s honor was at stake! A typical act of the emperor of the
French nation! Napoleon proved by that one episode that he was more
French than Corsican.

In the Queen’s illness at Memel she was so poorly housed that long
lines of snow sifted in through the roof and fell across her bed. But
that was as nothing to her mental disquiet while the fate of her
beloved Prussia hung in the balance.

There is a bridge across the Memel at the exact spot where the famous
raft conference is said to have taken place. As we crossed this bridge
it seemed so far removed from those stormy days of strife that it was
difficult to imagine the magnificent spectacle of the immense armies of
Napoleon and Alexander drawn up on either bank, while these two
powerful monarchs were rowed out to the raft to decide the fate of
Frederick William and his lovely queen.

And although to them Prussia was the issue of the hour, how like the
history of individual lives was this conference! For Prussia’s fate was
almost ignored, while the conversation originally intended to consume
but a few moments lengthened into hours, and Napoleon and Alexander,
having sworn eternal friendship, proceeded to divide up Europe between
them, and parted with mutual expressions of esteem and admiration,
having quite forgotten a trifle like the King and Queen of Prussia and
their rage of anxiety.

But all these memories of Napoleon and Prussia gave way before the
vital fact that we were to visit a lovely Polish princess and see some
of her charming home life. I had been duly informed by my friends of
the various ceremonies which I would encounter, and which, I must
confess, rendered me rather timid. I only hoped my wits would not
desert me at the crucial moment.

For instance, if the archbishop were there I must give him my hand and
then lean forward and kiss his sleeve just below the shoulder. I only
hoped my chattering teeth would not meet in his robe. So when I saw the
state carriage of the princess at the station of Memel, drawn by four
horses, and with numbers of servants in such queer liveries to attend
to my luggage, I simply breathed a prayer that I would get through it
all successfully; and if not, that they would lay any lapses at the
door of my own eccentricities, and not to the ignorance of Americans in
general, for I never wish to disgrace my native land.

The servants wore an odd flat cap, like a tam-o’-shanter with a visor.
Their coats were of bright blue, with the coat-of-arms of the princess
on the brass buttons. This coat reached nearly to their feet, and in
the back it was gathered full and stiffened with canvas, for all the
world like a woman’s pannier. I thought I should die the first time I
got a side view of those men.

It was late Friday afternoon when we left the train, and we drove at a
tremendous pace through lonely forests which we were only too happy to
leave behind us. Suddenly we came upon the little village of Kretynga,
whose streets were paved with cobblestones the size of a man’s two
fists.

To drive slowly over cobblestones is not a joy, but to drive four
Russian horses at a gallop over such cobblestones as those was
something to make you bite your tongue and to break your teeth and to
shake your very soul from its socket.

The town is inhabited by Polish Jews, and a filthy, greasy, nauseating
set they are, both men and women. The men wear two or three long, oily,
tight curls in front of their ears. Their noses are hooked like a
parrot’s. Their countenances are sinister, and I believe they have not
washed since the Flood. The women, when they marry, shave their heads.
Then they either wear huge wigs, which they use to wipe their hands on
without the ceremony of washing them first, or else they wear a black
or white or gray satin hood-piece with a line to imitate the parting of
the hair embroidered on it.

Nothing is clean about them. I no longer wonder that Jews are expelled
from Russia. It makes one rather respect Russia as a clean country. As
it was Friday night, one window-sill in each house was filled with a
row of lighted candles representing each member of the family who was
either absent or dead.

Being so far away from home myself, this appealed to me as such a
touching custom that it made my eyes smart.

Presently a clearing in the forest revealed the famous monastery of
Kretynga—a monastery famous for being peopled with priests and monks
whom the Tzar has exiled because they took too much interest in
politics for his nerves. Then soon after passing this monastery we
entered the grounds of the castle. Still the longest part of the drive
lay before us, for this one of the many estates of the Princess lies
between the Memel and the Baltic Sea, and covers a large territory.

But finally, after driving through an avenue of trees which are worth a
dictionary of words all to themselves, we came to the castle, a huge
structure, which seemed to spread out before us interminably, for it
was too dark to see anything but its majestic outlines.

The Princess in her own home was even lovelier than she had been in
Paris, and charitably allowed us to have one night’s rest before
meeting the family.

About three o’clock in the morning I was awakened by a mournful chant,
all in minor, which began beneath my windows and receded, growing
fainter and fainter, until at last it died away. It was the hymn which
the peasants always sing as they go forth to their work in the fields;
but its mournful cadence haunted me. The next morning the largeness of
the situation dawned upon me. The size of the rooms and their majestic
furnishings were almost barbaric in their splendor. The tray upon which
my breakfast was served was of massive silver. The coffee-pot,
sugar-bowl, and plates were of repoussé silver, exquisitely wrought,
but so large that one could hardly lift them.

In a great openwork basket of silver were any number of sweetened
breads and small cakes and buns, all made by the baker in the castle,
who all day long does nothing but bake bread and pastry. They do not
serve hot milk with coffee, for which I blessed them from the bottom of
my soul, but they have little brown porcelain jugs which they fill with
cream so thick that you have to take it out with a spoon—it won’t
pour,—and these they heat in ovens, and so serve you hot cream for your
coffee.

I call the gods from Olympus to testify to the quality of the nectar
this combination produces. Some of those little porcelain jugs are
going on their travels soon.

Meeting the various members of the Princess’s charming family and
remembering their titles was not an ordeal at all—at least it was not
after it was over. They were quite like other people, except that their
manners were unusually good. There was to be a hunt that morning—an
amusing, luxurious sort of hunt quite in my line; one where I could go
in a carriage and see the animals caught, but where I need not see them
killed.

They were to hunt a mischievous little burrowing animal something like
our badger, which is as great a pest to Poland as the rabbits are to
Australia. They destroy the crops by eating their roots, so every
little while a hunt is organized to destroy them in large numbers. The
foresters had been sent out the night before to discover a favorite
haunt of theirs, and to fill up all the entrances to their burrows; so
all that we had to do was to drive to the scene of action.

It sounds simple enough, but I most solemnly assure you that it was
anything but a simple drive to one fresh from the asphalt of Paris,
for, like Jehu, they drove furiously.

Their horses are all wild, runaway beasts, and they drive them at an
uneven gallop resembling the gait of our fire-engine horses at home,
except that ours go more slowly. Sometimes the horses fall down when
they drive across country, as they stop only for stone walls or moats.
The carriages must be built of iron, for the front wheels drop a few
feet into a burrow every now and then, and at such times an unwary
American is liable to be pitched over the coachman’s head. “Hold on
with both hands, shut your eyes, and keep your tongue from between your
teeth,” would be my instructions to one about to “take a drive” in
Poland.

When we came to the place we found the foresters watching the
_dachshunde_. These I discovered to be long, flat, shallow dogs with
stumpy legs—a dog which an American has described as “looking as if he
was always coming out from under a bureau.” Very cautiously here and
there the foresters uncovered a burrow, and a _dachshund_ disappeared.
Then from below ground came the sounds of fighting. The _dachshunde_
had found their prey. The foresters ran about, stooping to locate the
sound. When they discovered the spot a dozen of them at once began to
dig as fast as they could.

Presently a writhing, rolling, barking bunch of fur and flying sand
came into view, when a forester with a long forked stick caught the
animal just back of its head and flung it into a coarse sack, which was
then tied up and thrown aside, and the hunt went on. After we all went
home the foresters gathered up these bags and killed the poor little
animals somehow—mercifully, I hope.

The dinner, which came at two o’clock, was so much of a function, on
account of the number of guests in the house, that it impressed itself
upon my memory.

First in the salon there were small tables set, containing _hors
d’oeuvres_. There were large decanters containing _vodke_, a liquor
something like Chinese rice-brandy. There were smoked goose, smoked
bear, and salmon, white and black bread, all sorts of sausages,
anchovies and caviar, of course. After these had been tasted largely by
the guests who were not Americans, and who knew that a formidable
dinner yet had to be discussed, we were all seated at a table in the
grand dining-room.

There were a hundred of us, and the table held enough for twice that
many. We began with a hot soup made of fermented beet-juice. This we
found to be delicious, but I seemed to be eating transparent red ink
with parsley in it. This was followed by a cold soup made of sour cream
and cucumbers, with _écrevisse_, a small and delicious lobster. There
was ice in this.

Cucumbers and sour cream! Let me see, wasn’t it President Taylor who
died of eating cherries and milk?

Then came a salad of chicken and lettuce, and then huge roasts
garnished with exquisite French skill.

After the sweets came the fruit, such fruits as even our own California
cannot produce, with white raspberries of a size and taste quite
indescribable. When dinner is over comes a very pretty custom. The
hostess, whose seat is nearest the door, rises, and each guest kisses
her hand or her arm as he passes out, and thanks her in a phrase for
her hospitality. Sometimes it is only “Thank you, princess”; sometimes
“Many thanks for your beautiful dinner,” or anything you like. They
speak Polish to each other and to their servants, but they are such
wonderful linguists that they always address a guest in his own
language. To their peasants, however, who speak an unlearnable dialect,
they are obliged always to have an interpreter.

At six o’clock came tea from samovars four feet high and of the most
gorgeous repoussé silver. Melons, fruit, and all sorts of bread are
served with this. Then at eight a supper, very heavy, very sumptuous,
very luxurious.

The whole day had been charming, exhilarating, different from anything
we had ever seen before; but there was to follow something which
impressed itself upon my excitable nerves with a fascination so
bewildering that I can think of but one thing which would give me the
same amount of heavenly satisfaction. This would be to have Theodore
Thomas conduct the Chicago orchestra in the “Tannhäuser” overture in
the Court of Honor at the World’s Fair some night with a full moon.

But to return. The Princess excused herself to her Protestant guests
after supper, and then her family, with the servants and all the guests
who wished, assembled in the winter garden to sing hymns to the Virgin.
The winter garden is like a gigantic conservatory four stories high. It
connects the two wings of the castle on the ground floor, and all the
windows and galleries of the floors above overlook it.

It is the most beautiful spot even in the daytime that I ever saw
connected with any house built for man. But at night to look down upon
its beauty, with its palms, its tall ferns, its growing, climbing,
waving vines and flowering shrubs, with its divine odors and fragrances
and sweet dampnesses from mosses and lovely, moist, green, growing
things, is to have one’s soul filled with a poetry undreamed of on the
written page.

The candles dotting the soft gloom, the spray from the fountains
blowing in the air and tinkling into their marble basins, the tones of
the grand organ rumbling and soaring up to us, the moonlight pouring
through the great glass dome and filtering through the waving green
leaves, dimpling on the marble statues and making trembling shades and
shadows upon the earnest faces of the worshippers, the penetrating
sadness of their minor hymns—all the sights and sounds and fragrances
of this winter garden made of that hour “one to be forever marked with
a white stone.”



V
VILNA, RUSSIA


We met our first real discourtesy in Berlin at the hands of a German,
and although he was only the manager of an hotel, we lay it up against
him and cannot forgive him for it. It happened in this wise:

My companion, being the courier, bought our tickets straight through to
St. Petersburg, with the privilege of stopping a week in Vilna, where
we were to be the guests of a Polish nobleman. When she sent the porter
to check our trunks she told him in faultless German to check them only
to Vilna on those tickets. But as her faultless German generally brings
us soap when she orders coffee, and hot water when she calls for ice, I
am not so severe upon the stupidity of the porter as she is. However,
when he came back and asked for fifty-five marks extra luggage to St.
Petersburg we gave a wail, and explained to the manager, who spoke
English, that we were not going to St. Petersburg, and that we were not
particularly eager to pay out fifty-five marks for the mere fun of
spending money. If the choice were left to us we felt that we could
invest it more to our satisfaction in belts and card-cases.

He was very big and handsome, this German, and doubtless some meek
_fräulein_ loves him, but we do not, and, moreover, we pity her,
whoever and wherever she may be, for we know by experience that if they
two are ever to be made one he will be that one. He said he was sorry,
but that, doubtless, when we got to the Russian frontier we could
explain matters and get our trunks. But we could not speak Russian, we
told him, and we wanted things properly arranged then and there. He
clicked his heels together and bowed in a superb manner, and we were
sure our eloquence and our distress had fetched him, so to speak, when
to our amazement he simply reiterated his statements.

“But surely you are not going to let two American women leave your
hotel all alone at eleven o’clock at night with their luggage checked
to the wrong town?” I said, in wide-eyed astonishment.

Again he clicked those heels of his. Again that silk hat came off.
Again that superb bow. He was very sorry, but he could do nothing.
Doubtless we could arrange things at the frontier. It was within ten
minutes of train time, and we were surrounded by no fewer than thirty
German men—guests, porters, hall-boys—who listened curiously, and
offered no assistance.

I looked at my companion, and she looked at me, and ground her teeth.

“Then you absolutely refuse us the courtesy of walking across the
street with us and mending matters, do you?” I said.

Again those heels, that hat, that bow. I could have killed him. I am
sorry now that I didn’t. I missed a glorious opportunity.

So off we started alone at eleven o’clock at night for Poland, with our
trunks safely checked through to St. Petersburg, and fifty-five marks
lighter in pocket.

My companion kept saying, “Well, I never!” A pause. And again, “Well, I
never!” And again, “Did you ever in all your life!” Yet there was no
sameness in my ears to her remarks, for it was all that I, too, wanted
to say. It covered the ground completely.

I was speechless with surprise. It kept recurring to my mind that my
friends in America who had lived in Germany had told me that I need
expect nothing at the hands of German men on account of being a woman.
I couldn’t seem to get it through my head. But now that it had happened
to me—now that a man had deliberately refused to cross the street—no
farther, mind you!—to get us out of such a mess! Why, in America, there
isn’t a man from the President to a chimney-sweep, from a major-general
to the blackest nigger in the cotton fields, who wouldn’t do ten times
that much for _any_ woman!

I shall never get over it.

With the courage of despair I accosted every man and woman on the
platform with the words, “Do you speak English?” But not one of them
did. Nor French either. So with heavy hearts we got on the train, feed
the porter four marks for getting us into this dilemma (and
incidentally carrying our hand-luggage), and when he had the
impertinence to demand more I turned on him and assured him that if he
dared to speak another word to us we would report him to His Excellency
the American Ambassador, who was on intimate terms with the Kaiser; and
that I would use my influence to have him put in prison for life. He
fled in dismay, although I know he did not understand one word. My
manner, however, was not affable. Then I cast myself into my berth in a
despairing heap, and broke two of the wings in my hat.

My companion was almost in tears. “Never mind,” she said. “It was all
my fault. But we may get our trunks, anyway. And if not, perhaps we can
get along without them.”

“Impossible!” I said. “How can we spend a week as guests in a house
without a change of clothes?”

In order not to let her know how worried I was, I told her that if we
couldn’t get our trunks off the train at Vilna we would give up our
visit and telegraph our excuses and regrets to our expectant hostess,
or else come back from St. Petersburg after we had got our precious
trunks once more within our clutches.

All the next day we tried to find some one who spoke English or French,
but to no avail. We spent, therefore, a dreary day. By letting my
companion manage the customs officers in patomime we got through the
frontier without having to unlock anything, although it is considered
the most difficult one in Europe.

The trains in Russia fairly crawl. Instead of coal they use wood in
their engines, which sends back thousands of sparks like the tail of a
comet. It grew dark about two o’clock in the afternoon, and we found
ourselves promenading through the bleakest of winter landscapes. Tiny
cottages, emitting a bright red glow from infinitesimal windows,
crouched in the snow, and silent fir-trees silhouetted themselves
against the moonlit sky. It only needed the howl of wolves to make it
the loneliest picture the mind could conceive.

When we were within an hour of Vilna I heard in the distance my
companion’s familiar words, “Pardon me, sir, but do you speak English?”
And a deep voice, which I knew without seeing him came from a big man,
replied in French, “For the first time in my life I regret that I do
not.”

At the sound of French I hurried to the door of our compartment, and
there stood a tall Russian officer in his gray uniform and a huge
fur-lined pelisse which came to his feet.

When my companion wishes to be amusing she says that as soon as I found
that the man spoke French I whirled her around by the arm and sent her
spinning into the corner among the valises. But I don’t remember even
touching her. I only remembered that here was some one to whom I could
talk, and in two minutes this handsome Russian had untangled my
incoherent explanations, had taken our luggage receipt, and had assured
us that he himself would not pause until he had seen our trunks taken
from the train at Vilna. If I should live a thousand years I never
shall forget nor cease to be grateful to that superb Russian. He was so
very much like an American gentleman.

We were met at the station by our Polish friends, our precious trunks
were put into sledges, we were stowed into the most comfortable of
equipages, and in an hour we were installed in one of the most
delightful homes it was ever my good fortune to enter.

I never realized before what people can suffer at the hands of a
conquering government, and were it not that the young Tzar of Russia
has done away, either by public ukase or private advice, with the worst
of the wrongs his father permitted to be put upon the Poles, I could
not bear to listen to their recitals.

Politics, as a rule, make little impression upon me. Guide-books are a
bore, and histories are unattractive, they are so dry and accurate. My
father’s grief at my lack of essential knowledge is perennial and
deep-seated. But, somehow, facts are the most elusive things I have to
contend with. I can only seem to get a firm grasp on the imaginary. Of
course, I know the historical facts in this case, but it does not sound
personally pathetic to read that Russia, Prussia, and Austria divided
Poland between them.

But to be here in Russia, in what was once Poland, visiting the
families of the Polish nobility; to see their beautiful home-life,
their marvellous family affection, the respect they pay to their women;
to feel all the charm of their broad culture and noble sympathy for all
that makes for the general good, and then to hear the story of their
oppression, is to feel a personal ache in the heart for their national
burdens.

It does not sound as if a grievous hardship were being put upon a
conquered people to read in histories or guide-books that Prussia is
colonizing her part of Poland with Germans—selling them land for almost
nothing in order to infuse German blood, German language, German
customs into a conquered land. It does not touch one’s sympathies very
much to know that Austria is the only one of the three to give Poland
the most of her rights, and in a measure to restore her self-respect by
allowing her representation in the Reichstag and by permitting Poles to
hold office.

But when you come to Russian Poland and know that in the province of
Lithuania—which was a separate and distinct province until a prince of
Lithuania fell in love with and married a queen of Poland, and the two
countries were joined—Poles are not allowed to buy one foot of land in
the country where they were born and bred, are not permitted to hold
office even when elected, are prohibited from speaking their own
language in public, are forbidden to sing their Polish hymns, or to
take children in from the streets and teach them in anything but
Russian, and that every one is taught the Greek religion, then this
colonization becomes a burning question. Then you know how to
appreciate America, where we have full, free, and unqualified liberty.

The young Tzar has greatly endeared himself to his Polish subjects by
several humane and generous acts. One was to remove the tax on all
estates (over and above the ordinary taxes), which Poles were obliged
to pay annually to the Russian government. Another was to release
school-children from the necessity of attending the Greek church on all
Russian feast-days. These two were by public ukase, and as the Poles
are passionately grateful for any act of kindness, one hears nothing
but good words for the Tzar, and there is the utmost feeling of loyalty
to him among them. I hear it constantly said that if he continue in
this generous policy Russia need never apprehend another Polish
revolution. And while by a revolution they could never hope to
accomplish anything, there being now but fourteen million Poles to
contend against these three powerful nations, still, as long as they
have one about every thirty-five years, perhaps it is a wise precaution
on the part of the young Tzar to begin with his kindness promptly, as
it is about time for another one!

Another recent thing which the Poles attribute to the Tzar was the
removal from the street corners, the shops, the railroad stations, and
the clubs, of the placards forbidding the Polish language to be spoken
in public.

Thus the Poles hope much from the young Tzar in the future, and believe
that he would do more were he not held back by Russian public opinion.
For example, the other day two Russians were overheard in the train to
say: “For thirty years we have tried to force our religion on the
Poles, our language on the Poles, and our customs on the Poles, but now
here comes ‘The Little Colonel’ (the young Tzar), and in a moment he
sweeps away all the progress we had made.”

To call him “The Little Colonel” is a term of great endearment, and the
name arose from the fact that by some strange oversight he was never
made a General by his father, but remained at the death of the late
Tzar only a Colonel. When urged by his councillors to make himself
General, as became a Tzar of all the Russias, he said: “No. The power
which should have made me a General is no more. Now that I am at the
head of the government I surely could not be so conceited as to promote
myself.”

The misery among the poor in Poland is almost beyond belief, yet all
charities for them must be conducted secretly, for the government
stills forbids the establishment of kindergartens or free schools where
Polish children would be taught in the Polish language. I have been
questioned very closely about our charities in America, especially in
Chicago, and I have given them all the working plans of the college
settlements, the kindergartens, and the sewing-schools. The Poles are a
wonderfully sympathetic and warm-hearted people, and are anxious to
ameliorate the bitter poverty which exists here to an enormous extent.
They sigh in vain for the freedom with which we may proceed, and regard
Americans as seated in the very lap of a luxurious government because
we are at liberty to give our money to any cause without being
interfered with.

One of the noblest young women I have ever met is a Polish countess,
wealthy, beautiful, and fascinating, who has turned her back upon
society and upon the brilliant marriage her family had hoped for her,
and has taken a friend who was at the head of a London training-school
for nurses to live with her upon her estates, and these two have
consecrated their lives to the service of the poor. They will educate
Polish nurses to use in private charity. With no garb, no creed, no
blare of trumpet, they have made themselves into “Little Sisters of the
Poor.”

I could not fail to notice the difference in the young girls as soon as
I crossed the Russian frontier and came into the land of the Slav. Here
at once I found individuality. Polish girls are more like American
girls. If you ask a young English girl what she thinks of Victor Hugo
she tells you that her mamma does not allow her to read French novels.
If you ask a French girl how she likes to live in Paris she tells you
that she never went down town alone in her life.

But the Polish girls are different. They are individual. They all have
a personality. When you have met one you never feel as if you had met
all. In this respect they resemble American girls, but only in this
respect, for whereas there is a type of Polish young girl—and a
charming type she is—I never in my life saw what I considered a really
typical American girl. You cannot typify the psychic charm of the young
American girl. It is altogether beyond you.

These Polish girls who have titles are as simple and unaffected as
possible. I had no difficulty in calling their mothers Countess and
Princess, etc., but I tripped once or twice with the young girls,
whereat they begged me in the sweetest way to call them by their first
names without any prefix. They were charming. They taught us the Polish
mazurka—a dance which has more go to it than any dance I ever saw. It
requires the Auditorium ball-room to dance it in, and enough breath to
play the trombone in an orchestra. The officers dance with their spurs
on, which jingle and click in an exciting manner, and to my surprise
never seem to catch in the women’s gowns.

The home life of the Poles is very beautiful; and, in particular, the
deference paid to the father and mother strikes my American
sensibilities forcibly. I never tire of watching the entrance into the
salon of the married sons of the Countess when each comes to pay his
daily visit to his mother. They are all four tall, impressive, and
almost majestic, with a curious hawk-like quality in their glance,
which may be an inheritance from their warrior forefathers. Count
Antoine comes in just before going home to dine, while we are all
assembled and dressed for dinner. He flings the door open, and makes
his military bow to the room, then making straight for his mother’s
chair, he kneels at her feet, kisses her hand and then her brow, and
sometimes again her hand. Then he passes the others, and kisses his
sister on the cheek, and after thus saluting all the members of his
family, he turns to us, the guests, and speaks to us.

The Poles are the most individual and interesting people I have yet
encountered. The men in particular are fascinating, and a man who is
truly fascinating in the highest sense of the word; one whose character
is worth study, and whose friendship would repay cultivating as
sincerely as many of the Poles I know, is a boon to thank God for.

Before I came to Poland it always surprised me to realize that so many
men and women of world-wide genius came from so small a nation. But now
that I have had the opportunity of knowing them intimately and of
studying their characteristics, both nationally and individually, I see
why.

Poland is the home of genius by right. Her people, even if they never
write or sing or act or play, have all the elements in their character
which go to make up that complex commodity known as genius, whether it
ever becomes articulate or not. You feel that they could all do things
if they tried. They are a sympathetic, interesting, interested, and,
above all, a magnetic people. This forms the top soil for a nation
which has put forth so much of wonder and sweetness to enrich the
world, but the reason which lies deep down at the root of the matter
for the _soul_ which thrills through all this melody of song and story
is in the sorrowful and tragic history of this nation.

The Poles are a race of burning patriots. To-day they are as keen over
national sufferings and national wrongs as on that unfortunate clay
when they went into a fiercely unwilling and resentful captivity. Their
pride, their courage, their bitterness of spirit, their longing for
revenge now no longer find an outlet on the battlefield. Yet it
smoulders continually in their innermost being. You must crush the
heart, you must subdue a people, you must be no stranger to anguish and
loss if you would discover the singer and the song. And so Poland’s
fierce and unrelenting patriotism has placed the divine spark of a
genius which thrills a world in souls whose sweetest song is a cry
wrung from a patriot’s heart.



VI
ST. PETERSBURG


It behooves one to be good in Russia, for no matter how excellent your
reputation at home, no matter how long you have been a member in good
and regular standing of the most orthodox church, no matter how
innocent your heart may be of anarchy, nihilism, or murder, you travel,
you rest, you eat, sleep, wake, or dream, tracked by the Russian
police.

They snatch your passport the moment you arrive at a hotel, and
register you, and if you change your hotel every day, every day your
passport is taken, and you are requested to fill out a blank with your
name, age, religion, nationality, and the name and hotel of the town
where you were last.

When we entered our Russian hotel—when we had entirely entered, I mean,
for we passed through six or eight swinging doors with moujiks to open
and shut each one, and bow and scrape at our feet—we found ourselves in
a stiflingly hot corridor, where the odor was a combination of smoke
and people whose furs needed airing.

It would be an excellent idea if Americans who live in cold climates
dressed as sensibly as Russians do. They keep their houses about as
warm as we keep ours, but they wear thin clothing indoors and put on
their enormous furs for the street. On entering any house, church,
shop, or theatre, the chuba and overshoes are removed, and although
they spend half their lives putting them on and taking them off, yet
the other half is comfortable.

The women seem to have no pride about the appearance of their feet, for
now the doctors are ordering them to wear the common gray felt boot of
the peasants, with the top of it reaching to the knee. It is without
doubt the most hideous and unshapely object the mind can conceive,
being all made of one piece and without any regard to the shape of the
foot.

St. Petersburg can hardly be called a typical Russian city. It is too
near other countries, but to us, before we had seen Moscow and Kiev, it
was Russia itself. We arrived one bitterly cold day, and went first to
the hotel to which we had been recommended by our friends.

I shall never forget the wave of longing for home and country which
settled down upon me as we saw our rooms in this hotel. It must have
been built in Peter the Great’s time. No electric lights; not even
lamps. Candles! Now, if there is one thing more than another which
makes me frantic with homesickness, it is the use of candles. I would
rather be in London on Sunday than to dress by the light of candles.

Even an excellent luncheon did not raise my spirits. Our rooms were as
dark and gloomy and silent as a mausoleum. Indeed, many a mausoleum I
have seen has been much more cheerful. It was at the time of year also
when we had but three hours of daylight—from eleven until two. Our
salon was furnished in a dreary drab, with a gigantic green stove in
the corner which reached to the ceiling. Then we entered what looked
like a long, narrow corridor, down which we blindly felt our way, and
at the extreme end of which were hung dark red plush curtains, as if
before a shrine. We pulled aside these trappings of gloom, and there
were two iron cots, not over a foot and a half wide, about the shape
and feeling of an ironing-board, covered with what appeared to be gray
army blankets, I looked to see “U.S.” stamped on them. I have seen them
in museums at home.

I gazed at my companion in perfect dismay. “I shall not present a
single letter of introduction,” I wailed. “I’m going to Moscow
to-morrow.”

Instead of going to Moscow in the morning, we went out and decided to
present just the one letter to our ambassador. He was at the Hôtel
d’Europe, and we went there. Behold! electric lights everywhere. Heaps
of Americans. And the entire Legation there. My companion and I simply
looked at each other, and our whole future grew brighter. We would not
go to Moscow, but we would move at once. We would introduce electricity
into our sombre lives, and look forward with hope into the great
unknown. We rushed around and presented all the rest of our letters,
and went back to spend a wretched evening with eight candles and a
smoky lamp.

The next day we called for our bill and prepared to move. To my
disgust, I found an item of two rubles for the use of that lamp. I had
serious thoughts of opening up communication with the Standard Oil
Company by cable. But we were so delighted with our new accommodations
in prospect that we left the hotel in a state of exhilaration that
nothing could dampen.

To our great disappointment we found a number of Americans leaving St.
Petersburg for Moscow because the Hermitage was closed. Now, the
Hermitage and the ceremony of the Blessing of the Waters of the Neva
were what I most wished to see, but we were informed at the Legation
that we could have neither wish gratified. However, my spirit was
undaunted. It was only the American officials who had pronounced it
impossible. My lucky star had gone with me so far, and had opened so
many unaccustomed doors, that I did not despair. I said I would see
what our letters of introduction brought forth.

We did not have to wait long. No sooner had we presented our letters
than people came to see us, and placed themselves at our disposal for
days and even weeks at a time. Their kindness and hospitality were too
charming for mere words to express.

Although the Winter Palace was closed to visitors, preparatory to the
arrival on the next day of the Tzar and Tzarina, it was opened for us
through the influence of the daughter of the Commodore of the late
Tzar’s private yacht, Mademoiselle de Falk, who took us through it. It
was simply superb, and was, of course, in perfect readiness for the
arrival of the imperial family, with all the gorgeous crimson velvet
carpets spread, and the plants and flowers arranged in the Winter
Garden.

Then, through this same influential friend, the Hermitage—the second
finest and the very richest museum in all Europe—was opened for us,
and—well, I kept my head going through the show palaces in London, and
Paris, and Berlin, and Dresden, and Potsdam, but I lost it completely
in the Hermitage. Then and there I absolutely went crazy. A whole
guide-book devoted simply to the Hermitage could give no sort of idea
of the barbaric splendor of its belongings. Its riches are beyond
belief. Even the presents given by the Emir of Bokhara to the Tzar are
splendid enough to dazzle one like a realization of the Arabian Nights.
But to see the most valuable of all, which are kept in the Emperor’s
private vaults, is to be reduced to a state of bewilderment bordering
on idiocy.

It is astonishing enough, to one who has bought even one Russian belt
set with turquoise enamel, to think of all the trappings of a
horse—bit, bridle, saddle-girth, saddlecloth, and all, made of cloth of
gold and set in solid turquoise enamel; with the sword hilt, scabbard,
belts, pistol handle and holster made of the same. Well, these are
there by the dozen. Then you come to the private jewels, and you see
all these same accoutrements made of precious stones—one of solid
diamonds; another of diamonds, emeralds, topazes, and rubies. And the
size of these stones! Why, you never would believe me if I should tell
you how large they are. Many of them are uncut and badly set, from an
English stand-point. But in quantity and size—well, I was glad to get
back to my three-ruble-a-day room and to look at my one trunk, and to
realize that my own humble life would go on just the same, and my
letter of credit would not last any longer for all the splendors which
exist for the Tzar of all the Russias.

The churches in St. Petersburg are so magnificent that they, too, go to
your head. We did nothing but go to mass on Christmas Eve and Christmas
Day, for although we spent our Christmas in Berlin, we arrived in St.
Petersburg in time for the Russian Christmas, which comes twelve days
later than ours. St. Isaac’s, the Kazan, and Sts. Peter and Paul dazed
me. The icons or images of the Virgin are set with diamonds and
emeralds worth a king’s ransom. They are only under glass, which is
kept murky from the kisses which the people press upon the hands and
feet.

The interiors of the cathedrals, with their hundreds of silver
_couronnes_, and battle-flags, and trophies of conquests, look like
great bazaars. Every column is covered clear to the dome. The tombs of
the Tzars are always surrounded by people, and candles burn the year
round. Upon the tomb of Alexander II., under glass, is the exquisite
laurel wreath placed there by President Faure. It is of gold, and was
made by Falize, one of the most famous carvers of gold in Europe.

The famous mass held on Christmas Eve in the cathedral of St. Isaac was
one of the most beautiful services I ever attended. In the first place,
St. Isaac’s is the richest church in all Russia. It has, too, the most
wonderful choir, for the Tzar loves music, and wherever in all his
Empire a beautiful voice is found, the boy is brought to St. Petersburg
and educated by the State to enter the Emperor’s choir. When we entered
the church the service had been in progress for five hours. That
immense church was packed to suffocation. In the Greek church every one
stands, no matter how long the service. In fact, you cannot sit down
unless you sit on the floor, for there are no seats.

By degrees we worked our way towards the space reserved for the
Diplomatic Corps, where we were invited to enter. Our wraps were taken
and chairs were given to us. We found ourselves on the platform with
the priest, just back of the choir. What heavenly voices! What
wonderful voices! The bass holds on to the last note, and the rumble
and echo of it rolls through those vaulted domes like the tones of an
organ. The long-haired priest, too, had a wonderful resonant voice for
intoning. He passed directly by us in his gorgeous cloth of gold
vestments, as he went out.

The instant he had finished, the little choir boys began to pinch each
other and thrust their tapers in each other’s faces, and behaved quite
like ordinary boys. The great crowd scattered and huge ladders were
brought in to put out the hundreds of candles in the enormous
chandeliers. Religion was over, and the world began again.

The other art which is maintained at the government expense is the
ballet. We went several times, and it was very gorgeous. It is all
pantomime—not a word is spoken—but so well done that one does not tire
of it.

Every one sympathized so with us because we could not see the ceremony
of the Blessing of the Waters of the Neva, and our ambassador
apologized for not being able to arrange it, and we said, “Not at all,”
and “Pray, do not mention it,” at the same time secretly hoping that
our Russian friends, who were putting forth strenuous efforts on our
behalf, would be able to manage it.

On the morning of the 18th of January a note came from a Russian
officer who was on duty at the Winter Palace, saying that Baron Elsner,
the Secretary of the Prefect of Police, would call for us with his
carriage at ten o’clock, and we would be conducted to the private space
reserved just in front of the Winter Palace, where the best view of
everything could be obtained. My companion and I fell into each other’s
arms in wild delight, for it had been most difficult to manage, and we
had not been sure until that very moment.

Now, the person of the Tzar is so sacred that it is forbidden by law
even to represent him on the stage, and as to photographing him—a
Russian faints at the mere thought. Nevertheless, we wished very much
to photograph this pageant, so we determined, if possible, to take our
camera. Everything else that we wanted had been done for us ever since
we started, and our faith was strong that we would get this. At first
the stout heart of Baron Elsner quailed at our suggestion. Then he said
to take the camera with us, which we did with joy. His card parted the
crowd right and left, and our carriage drove through long lines of
soldiers, and between throngs of people held in check by mounted
police, and by rows of infantry, who locked arms and made of themselves
a living wall, against which the crowd surged.

To our delight we found our places were not twenty feet from the
entrance to the Winter Palace. We noticed Baron Elsner speaking to
several officials, and we heard the word “Americanski,” which had so
often opened hearts and doors to us, for Russia honestly likes America,
and presently the Baron said, in a low tone, “When the Emperor passes
out you may step down here; these soldiers will surround you, and you
may photograph him.”

I could scarcely believe my ears. I was so excited that I nearly
dropped the camera.

The procession moves only about one hundred feet—a crimson carpet being
laid from the entrance of the Winter Palace, across the street, and up
into a pavilion which is built out over the Neva.

First came the metropolitans and the priests; then the Emperor’s
celebrated choir of about fifty voices; then a detachment of picked
officers bearing the most important battle-flags from the time of Peter
the Great, which showed the marks of sharp conflict; then the Emperor’s
suite, and then—the Emperor himself. They all marched with bared heads,
even the soldiers.

My companion had the opera-glasses, I had the camera. “Tell me when,” I
gasped. They passed before me in a sort of haze. I heard the band in
the Winter Palace and the singing of the choir. I heard the splash of
the cross which the Archbishop plunged into the opening that had been
cut in the ice. I heard the priests intone, and the booming of the guns
firing the imperial salute. I saw that the wind was blowing the candles
out. Then came a breathless pause, and then she said, “Now!” A little
click. It was done; I had photographed Nicholas II., the Tzar of all
the Russias!



VII
RUSSIA


Yesterday we had our first Russian experience in the shape of a troika
ride. Russians, as a rule, do not troika except at night. In fact, from
my experience, they reverse the established order of things and turn
night into day.

A troika is a superb affair. It makes the tiny sledges which take the
place of cabs, and are used for all ordinary purposes, look even more
like toys than usual. But the sledges are great fun, and so cheap that
it is an extravagance to walk. A course costs only twenty kopecks—ten
cents. The sledges are set so low that you can reach out and touch the
snow with your hand, and they are so small that the horse is in your
lap and the coachman in your pocket. He simply turns in his seat to
hook the fur robe to the back of your seat—only it has no back. If you
fall, you fall clear to the ground.

The horse is far, far above you in your humble position, and there is
so little room that two people can with difficulty stow themselves in
the narrow seat. If a brother and sister or a husband and wife drive
together, the man, in sheer self-defence, is obliged to put his arm
around the woman, no matter how distasteful it may be. Not that she
would ever be conscious of whether he did it or not, for the amount of
clothes one is obliged to wear in Russia destroys any sense of touch.

The idvosjik, or coachman, is so bulky from this same reason that you
cannot see over him. You are obliged to crane your neck to one side.
His head is covered with a Tartar cap. He wears his hair down to his
collar, and then chopped off in a straight line. His pelisse is of a
bluish gray, fits tightly to the waist, and comes to the feet. But the
skirt of it is gathered on back and front, giving him an irresistibly
comical pannier effect, like a Dolly Varden polonaise. The Russian
idvosjik guides his horse curiously. He coaxes it forward by calling it
all sorts of pet names—“doushka,” darling, etc. Then he beats it with a
toy whip, which must feel like a fly on its woolly coat, for all the
little fat pony does is to kick up its heels and fly along like the
wind, missing the other sledges by a hair’s-breadth. It is ghostly to
see the way they glide along without a sound, for the sledges wear no
bells.

One may drive with perfect safety at a breakneck pace, for they all
drive down on one side of the street and up on the other. Nor will an
idvosjik hesitate to use his whip about the head and face of another
idvosjik who dares to turn without crossing the street.

He stops his horse with a guttural trill, as if one should say
“Tr-r-r-r-r” in the back of the throat. It sounds like a gargle.

The horses are sharp-shod, but in a way quite different from ours. The
spikes on their shoes are an inch long, and dig into the ice with
perfect security, but it makes the horses look as if they wore French
heels. Even over ice like sheer glass they go at a gallop and never
slip. It is wonderful, and the exhilaration of it is like driving
through an air charged with champagne, like the wine-caves of Rintz.

Our troika was like a chariot in comparison with these sledges. It was
gorgeously upholstered in red velvet, and held six—three on each seat.
The robes also were red velvet, bordered and lined with black bear fur.
There were three horses driven abreast. The middle horse was much
larger than the other two, and wore a high white wooden collar, which
stood up from the rest of the harness, and was hung with bells and
painted with red flowers and birds.

To my delight the horses were wild, and stood on their hind legs and
bit each other, and backed us off the road, and otherwise acted like
Tartar horses in books. It seemed almost too good to be true. It was
like driving through the Black Forest and seeing the gnomes and the
fairies one has read about. I told my friends very humbly that I had
never done anything in my life to deserve the good fortune of having
those beautiful horses act in such a satisfactory and historical
manner. We had to get out twice and let the idvosjik calm them down.
But even when ploughing my way out of snow up to my knees I breathed an
ecstatic sigh of gratitude and joy. I could not understand the men’s
annoyance. It was too ideal to complain about.

We drove out to the Island for luncheon, and on the way we stopped and
coasted in a curious Russian sledge from the top of a high place,
something like our toboggan-slides, only this sledge was guided from
behind by a peasant on skates.

A Russian meal always begins with a side-table of _hors d’oeuvres_,
called “zakouska.” That may not be spelled right, but no Russian would
correct me, because the language is phonetic, and they spell the same
word in many different ways. Their alphabet has thirty-eight letters in
it, besides the little marks to tell you whether to make a letter hard
or soft.

Even proper names take on curious oddities of spelling, and a husband
and wife or two brothers will spell their name differently when using
the Latin letters. If you complain about it, and ask which is correct,
they make that famous Russian reply which Bismarck once had engraved in
his ring, and which he believed brought him such good luck, “Neechy
voe,” “It is nothing,” or “Never mind.” You can spell with your eyes
shut in Russian, and you simply cannot make a mistake, for the Russians
spell with all the abandonment of French dancing.

This zakouska is so delicious and so varied and so tempting that one
not accustomed to it eats too much without realizing. At a dinner an
American looked at my loaded plate and said, with delicious
impertinence, “Confidentially, I don’t mind telling you that dinner is
_coming_.”

As we came back, the full delight of troika-riding came over us, for
driving in the country we could not tell how fast we were going. But in
town, whizzing past other carriages, hearing the shouts of the
idvosjik, “Troika!” and seeing the people scatter and the sledges turn
out (for a troika has the right of way), we realized at what a pace we
were going. We dashed across the frozen Neva, with its tramway built
right on the ice; past the Winter Palace, along the quai, where all the
embassies are, into the Grand Morskaia, and from there into the Nevski,
with the snow flying and our bells ringing, and the middle horse
trotting and the outer horses galloping, sending clouds of steam from
their heaving flanks and palpitating nostrils, and the biting air
making our blood tingle, and the reiterated shout of the idvosjik,
“Troika! troika!” taking our breath away.

We had one more excitement before we reached home, which was seeing a
Russian fire-engine. We passed it in a run. The engine was on one
sledge, and following it were five other sledges carrying hogsheads of
water.

I am glad we came to Russia in winter, for by so doing we have met the
Russian people, the most fascinating that any country can boast, with
the charm of the French, the courage of the English, the sentiment of
the Germans, the sincerity and hospitality of the Americans. Their
courtesy to each other is a never-ending pleasure to me. Poles and
Russians treat their women more nearly the way our American men treat
us than any nation we have encountered so far. They are the most
marvellous linguists in the world. We have met no one in Russia who
speaks fewer than three languages, and we have met several who speak
twelve. They are not arrogant even concerning their military strength.
They are quite modest about their learning and their not inconsiderable
literary and artistic achievements, and they hold themselves, both
nationally and individually, in the plastic state where they are
willing to learn from any nation or any master who can teach what they
wish to know. There is a marvellous future for Russia, for their riches
and resources are as vast and inestimable as their possessions. They
themselves do not realize how mighty they are.

Here is France grovelling at their feet, spending millions of francs to
entertain the Tzar—France, a nation which must see a prospect of double
her money returned before she parts with a sou; with the cathedrals
filled with _couronnes_ sent by the French press; with no compliment to
Russia too fulsome for French gallantry to invent finding space in the
foremost French newspapers; hoping, praying, beseeching the help of
Russia, when Germany makes up her mind to gobble France, yet dealing
Russian achievement a backhanded slap by hinting what a compliment it
is for a cultivated, accomplished, over-cultured race like the French
to beg the assistance of a barbarous country like Russia.

I believe that Russia is the only country in the world which feels
nationally friendly and individually interested in America. I used to
think France was, and I held Lafayette firmly and proudly in my memory
to prove it. But I was promptly undeceived as to their individual
interest, and when I still clung to Lafayette as a proof of the former
I was laughed to scorn and told that France as a nation had nothing to
do with that; that Lafayette went to America as a soldier of fortune.
He would just as soon have gone to Madagascar or Timbuctoo, but America
was accommodating enough to have a war on just in time to serve his
ambition. If that is true, I wish they had not told me. I would like to
come home with a few ideals left—if they will permit me.

When I was in Berlin I asked our ambassador, Mr. White, what Germany
thought of America. He replied, “Just what Thackeray thought of Tupper.
When some one asked Thackeray what he thought of Tupper, he replied, ‘I
don’t think of him at all.’”

But in Russia I have a sore throat all the time from answering
questions about America. I think I am not exaggerating when I say I
have answered a million in a single evening. My companion at first was
disgusted with my wearing myself out in such a manner, but I said, “I
am so grateful to them for _caring_, after the indifference of all
these other self-sufficient countries, that I am willing to sacrifice
myself at it if necessary.”

We never realized how little we knew about America until we discovered
the Russian capacity for asking unexpected questions. I bought an
American history in Russia, and sat up nights trying to remember what
my father had tried to instil into my sieve-like brain. After a week of
witnessing my feverish enthusiasm, even my companion’s dormant national
pride was roused. She, too, was ashamed to say, “I don’t know,” when
they asked us these terrible questions. When we get into the clutches
of a party of women we trust to luck that they cannot remember our
statistics long enough to tell their husbands and brothers (I have a
horror of men’s accuracy in figures), and we calmly guess at the
answers when our exact knowledge gives out.

One night they attacked my companion on the school question. Now, she
does not know one solitary thing about the public-school system, but,
to my utter amazement, I heard her giving the number of children
between the ages of eight and ten who were in the public schools in the
State of Illinois, and then running them off by counties. I was afraid
she would soon begin to call the roll of their names from memory, so I
rescued her and took her home. I suppose we must have an air of
intelligence which successfully masks our colossal ignorance of occult
facts and defunct dates, because they rely on us to inform them
off-hand concerning everything social, political, historical, sacred
and profane, spirituous and spiritual, from the protoplasm of the
cliff-dwellers to the details of the Dingley bill, not skipping
accurate information on the process of whiskey-making in Kentucky, a
crocodile-hunt in Florida, suffrage in Wyoming, a lynching-bee in
Texas, polygamy in Utah, prune-drying in California, divorces in
Dakota, gold-mining in Colorado, cotton-spinning in Georgia,
tobacco-raising in Alabama, marble-quarrying in Tennessee, the number
of Quakers in Philadelphia, one’s sensations while being scalped by
Sioux, how marriages are arranged, what a man says when he proposes,
the details of a camp-meeting, a description of a negro baptism, and
the main arguments on the silver question.

They get some curious ideas in their heads concerning us, but they are
so amazingly well informed about America that their specific
misinformation never irritated me. The small use they have for their
English sometimes accounts for the queer things they say.

The official costume for men who have no particular uniform is
regulation evening dress, which they are obliged to wear all day. They
become so tired of it that this is the reason, they tell me, why so
many men, even in smart society, go to the opera or even dinners in
frock-coats. One one occasion a most intelligent man said to me, “I am
told that in America the ladies always wear décolleté costumes at
dinners, and the men are always in night-dress.”

For one hysterical moment my mind’s eye pictured a dinner-table on
Prairie Avenue with alternately a low-necked gown and a pair of
pajamas, and I choked. Then I happened to think that he meant “evening
dress,” and I recovered sufficiently to explain.

The Tzarina has made English the Court language, and since her
coronation no state balls take place on Sunday.

Russian hospitality is delightful. We could remain a year in Russia and
not exhaust our invitations to visit at their country-houses. Russia
must be beautiful in summer, but if you wish to go into society, to
know the best of the people, to see their sweet home life, and to
understand how they live and enjoy themselves, you must go in the
winter. I cannot think what any one would find of national life in
summer in Russia, for everybody has a country-house and everybody goes
to it and leaves the city to tourists.

Russia, in spite of her vast riches, has not arrived at
supercivilization, where there is corruption in the very atmosphere.
She is an undeveloped and a young country, and while the Tzar is wise
and kind and beneficent, and an excellent Tzar as Tzars go, still
Russians, even the best and most enlightened of them, are slaves. I
have met a number of the gentlest and cleverest men who had been exiled
to Siberia, and pardoned. Their picture-galleries bear witness to this
underlying sadness of knowing that in spite of everything they are not
_free_. All their actions are watched, their every word listened to,
spies are everywhere, the police are omnipresent, and over all their
gayety and vivacity and mirth and spontaneity there is the constant
fear of the awful hand in whose complete power they are. His clemency,
his fatherhood to his people, his tremendous responsibility for their
welfare are all appreciated, but the thought is in every mind, “When
will this kindness fail? Upon whose head will the lightning descend
next?”

Title and gentle birth and the long and faithful service of one’s
ancestors to the Tzars are of small avail if the evidence should go
against one in Russia. I have heard princes say less than I have said
here, but say it in whispers and with furtive looks at the nearest man
or woman. I have seen their starts of surprise at the frank impudence
of our daring to criticise our administration in their midst, and I
felt as if I were in danger of being bombarded from the back.

In Russia you may spell as you please, but you must have a care how you
criticise the government. In America you may criticise the government
as you will, but you must have a care how you spell.



VIII
MOSCOW


I thought St. Petersburg interesting, but it is modern compared to
Moscow. Everything is so strange and curious here. The churches, the
chimes, the palace, the coronation chapel, and the street scenes are
enough to drive one mad with interest.

Moscow is said to have sixteen hundred churches, and I really think we
did not skip one. They are almost as magnificent as those in St.
Petersburg, and they impressed—overpowered us, in fact, with the same
unspeakable riches of the Greek Church.

The name of our hotel was so curious that I cannot forbear repeating
it, “The Slavansky Bazaar,” and they call their smartest restaurant
“The Hermitage.” I felt as if I could be sold at auction in “The
Bazaar,” and as if I ought to fast and pray in “The Hermitage.”

“The Slavansky Bazaar” was one of the dirtiest hotels it ever was my
lot to see. The Russians of the middle class—to say nothing of the
peasants, who are simply unspeakable—are not a clean set, so one cannot
blame a hotel for not living above the demands of its _clientèle_.
There were some antique specimens of cobwebs in our rooms, which made
restful corner ornaments with dignified festoons, which swung slowly to
and fro with such fascinating solemnity that I could not leave off
looking at them. The hotel is built up hill and down dale, and each
corridor smells more musty than the other. It has a curious arrangement
for supplying water in the rooms which I never can recall with any
degree of pleasure. One evening after I had dressed I went to the
wash-stand and discovered that there was no water. I was madly ringing
for the chambermaid when my companion called from her room, and said,
“Put your foot on that brass thing. There is plenty of water.”

I looked down, and near the floor was a brass pedal, like that of a
piano. Sure enough, there was a reservoir above and a faucet with the
head of a dragon on it peering up into my face, which I never had
noticed before. Now, the pedal of my piano works hard, so I bent all my
strength to this one, and lo! from that impudent dragon’s mouth I got a
mighty stream of water straight in my unconscious face, and enough to
put out a fire. I fell back with a shriek of astonishment and
indignation, and my companion laughed—nay, she roared. She laughs until
she cries even now every time she thinks of it, although I had to
change my gown. How was _I_ going to know that I was leaning over a
waterspout, I should like to know!

In this same hotel when I asked for a blotter they brought me a box of
sand. I tried to use it, but my hand was not very steady, and none of
it went on the letter. Some got in my shoe, however.

But our environments were more than compensated for by the exceeding
kindness that we received from the most delightful people that it ever
was my good fortune to meet, and their attentions to us were so
charming that we shall remember them as long as we live.

Americans, even though we are as hospitable as any nation on earth,
might well take a lesson from the Russians in regard to the respect
they pay to a letter of introduction. The English send word when you
can be received, and you pay each other frosty formal calls, and then
are asked to five-o’clock tea or some other wildly exciting function of
similar importance. The French are great sticklers for etiquette, but
they are more spontaneous, and you are asked to dine at once. After
that it is your own fault if you are not asked again. But in Russia it
is different. I think that the men must have accompanied my messenger
home, and the women to whom I presented letters early in the afternoon
were actually waiting for me when I returned from presenting the last
ones. In Moscow they came and waited hours for my return. I was
mortified that there were not four of me to respond to all the beauties
of their friendship, for hospitality in Russia includes even that.

They placed themselves, their carriages, their servants, at our
disposal for whatever we had to do—sight-seeing, shopping, or idling.
Mademoiselle Yermoloff, lady-in-waiting to the two empresses, simply
took us upon her hands to show us Russian society life. She came with
her sledge in the morning, and kept us with her all day long, taking us
to see the most interesting people and places in Moscow. She showed us
the coronation-robes, the embroideries upon which were from her own
beautiful designs. The Empress presented her with an emerald and
diamond brooch in recognition of this important service, for
undoubtedly the coronation-robe of the present Tzarina is much
handsomer and in better taste than any of the others. The designs are
so artistically sketched that they all have a special significance.

Here we visited the charming Princess Golitzine, a most beautiful and
accomplished woman. Her house, we were told, De Lesseps, the father of
the Suez De Lesseps, used as his headquarters during the French
occupation of Moscow.

Mademoiselle Yermoloff’s sledge was a very beautiful one, but it was
quite as low-set as all the others, and her footman stood behind. As
there was no back to the seat of her sledge, and her horses were rather
fiery and unmanageable, every time they halted without warning this
solemn flunky pitched forward into our backs, a performance which would
have upset the dignity of an English footman, but which did not seem to
disturb him in the least.

Mademoiselle Yermoloff took us to see Madame Chabelskoi, whose
contributions to the World’s Fair were of so much value. I never saw a
private collection of anything so rich, so varied, and of such
historical value as her collection of all the provincial costumes of
the peasants of Finland and Big and Little Russia. In addition to these
she has the fête-day toilets as well. The Kokoshniks are all
embroidered in seed-pearls and gold ornaments, and if she were not a
fabulously rich woman she could never have got all these, for each one
is authentic and has actually been worn. They are not copies.

But Moscow seems to take a peculiar national pride in preserving the
historical monuments of her country. There is a museum there, with a
complete set of all these costumes on wax figures, and they range all
the way from the grotesque to the lovely.

Madame Chabelskoi is now doing a very pretty as well as a valuable and
historical work. She has two accomplished daughters, and these young
girls spend all their time in selecting peasant women with typical
features, dressing them in these costumes, photographing them, and then
coloring these photographs in water-colors. They are making ten copies
of each, to make ten magnificent albums, which are to be presented to
the ten greatest museums in the world. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg
is to have one, the British Museum another, and so on. Only one was to
go to America, and to my metropolitan dismay I found that it was _not_
to go to Chicago. I shall not say where it was intended to go; I shall
only say that with characteristic modesty I asked, in my most timid
voice, why she did not present it to a museum in the city which she had
already benefited so royally with her generosity, and which already
held her name in affectionate veneration. It seemed to strike her for
the first time that Chicago _was_ the proper city in which to place
that album, so she promised it to us! I thanked her with sincere
gratitude, and retired from the field with a modest flush of victory on
my brow. I cannot forbear a wicked chuckle, however, when I think of
that other museum!

We dined many times at “The Hermitage,” which is one of the smartest
restaurants in Europe. The costumes of the waiters were too
extraordinary not to deserve a passing mention. They consisted of a
white cotton garment belted at the waist, with no collar, and a pair of
flapping white trousers. They are always scrupulously clean—which is a
wonder for Russian peasants—for they are made to change their clothes
twice a day. They have a magnificent orchestrion instead of an
orchestra here, and I could scarcely eat those beautiful dinners for
listening to the music. We became so well acquainted with the
répertoire that our friends, knowing our taste, ordered the music to
match the courses. So instead of sherry with the soup, they ordered the
intermezzo from “Cavalleria Rusticana.” With the fish we had the
overture to “William Tell.” With the _entrecôte_ we had a pot-pourri
from “Faust.” With the fowl we had “Demon and Tamar,” the Russian
opera. With the rest we began on Wagner and worked up to that thrilling
“Tannhäuser” overture, until I was ready to go home a nervous wreck
from German music, as I always am.

A very interesting incident occurred while we were in Moscow. The Tzar
decorated a non-commissioned officer for an act of bravery which well
deserved it. He was in charge of the powder-magazines just outside of
Moscow, and from the view I had of them I should say that the gunpowder
is stored in pits in the ground.

Something caught fire right on top of one of these pits, and this young
officer saw it. He had no time to send for water, and if he delayed, at
any moment the whole magazine might explode; one pit would communicate
with another, and perhaps the whole city would be endangered; so
without a second’s hesitation he and his men sprang into the fire and
literally trod it out with their feet, running the risk of an explosion
by concussion, as well as by a spark of fire. It was a superb act of
courage, and the Tzar decorated this young sergeant with the order of
Vladimir—one of the rarest decorations in all Russia. I am told that
not over six living men possess it to-day. It was a beautiful thing for
the Tzar thus to recognize this heroic deed.

When we left Moscow we were having our first real taste of Russian
winter, for, strange to say, although so much farther south, the
climate is much more severe than that of St. Petersburg.

My companion complained bitterly that we were not seeing anything of
Russia because we came down from St. Petersburg at night, so we
abandoned the courier train, and took the slow day-train for Kiev, the
old capital of Russia, that she might see more of the country.

But now I come to my reward and her chagrin. Between Moscow and Kiev we
were snowed in for sixteen hours. It was between stations, the food
gave out—I mean it gave out because we did not have any to start
with—the train became bitterly cold, and we came near freezing and
starving to death. That made our Russian experiences quite complete. We
had foolishly started without even fruit, and there was nothing to be
had on board the train except the tea which the conductors make in a
samovar and serve to you at the slightest provocation. But even the tea
was exhausted at last, and then the fire gave out, because all the wood
had been used up.

There we were, penned up, wrapped in our seal-skins and steamer-rugs
and with nubias over our heads, so cold that our teeth chattered, and
so hungry we could have eaten anything. The conductor came and spoke to
us several times, but whether he was inviting us to lunch or quoting
Scripture we could never tell. There was no one on the train who spoke
English or French, and nobody else in our car to speak anything at
all—owing to our having come on this particular train, in order for my
companion to “see Russia.” I am delighted to record the fact that not
only the outside but the inside windows were frosted so thickly that
they had to light the sickly tallow candle in a tin box over the door
of the compartment, so she never got a peep at Russia or anything else
the whole way.

We consoled each other and kept up our spirits as best we could all
day, but we arrived at Kiev so exhausted with cold and hunger that
although we were received at the train by one of the most charming men
I ever met, we both cried with relief at the sight of a friendly face
and some one to whom we could speak and tell our woes. I have since
wondered what he thought to be met by two forlorn women in tears!
Whatever he thought, like all the Russians, he was courtesy itself, and
we were soon whisked away to the inexpressible comfort of being thawed
and fed.

Such a beautiful city as this is! Whitelaw Reid has declared Kiev to be
one of the four picturesque cities in Europe; certainly it lies in a
heavenly place, all up and down hills, with such vistas down the
streets to where a mosque raises its gilded dome, or where an historic
bronze statue stands out against the horizon. If Kiev had been planned
by the French, it could not be more utterly beautiful. The domes of the
cathedrals are blue, studded with gold stars; or else pale green or all
gold, and the most exquisite churches in all Russia are in Kiev. A
terrible monastery, where you take candles and go down into the bowels
of the earth to see where monks martyred themselves, is here; and poor
simple-minded pilgrims walk many hundred miles to kiss these tombs.
Their devotion is pathetic. We had to walk in a procession of them, and
I know that each of them had his own particular disease and his own
special brand of dirt. The beggars surrounding the gate of this
monastery are too awful to mention, yet it is reputed to be the richest
monastery in all Russia.

In Kiev we heard “Hamlet” in Russian, and the man who played Hamlet was
wonderfully good, surprisingly good. You don’t know how strange it
sounded to hear “To be or not to be” in Russian! The acting was so
familiar, the words so strange. The audience went crazy over him, as
Russian audiences always do. We watched him come out and bow
thirty-nine times, and when we came away the noise was still deafening.

They make a sort of candy in Kiev which goes far and away above any
sweets I ever have seen. It is a sort of candied rose. The whole rose
is there. It is a solid soft pink mass, and it tastes just as a
tea-rose smells. It is simply celestial.

We dearly love Kiev, it is so hauntingly beautiful. You can’t forget
it. Your mind keeps returning to it, but it is the sort of beauty that
you can’t describe satisfactorily. It is like your mother’s face. You
can see the beauty for yourself, but no one else can see it as you do,
for the love which is behind it.

In Odessa we began to leave Russia behind us. Odessa is all sorts of a
place. It is commercial, and not beautiful, but, as usual, our Russian
friends made us forget the town and its sights, and remember only their
sweet hospitality and friendliness.

We wished to catch the Russian steamer for Constantinople, but we were
told that the police would not permit us to leave on such short notice.
We felt that this was hard, for we had tried so consistently to be good
in Russia that I was determined to go if possible. So I took an
interpreter and drove to the police headquarters myself. To my
amazement and delight my man told me that it could all be arranged by
the payment of a few rubles. But that “few rubles” mounted up into many
before I got my passports duly viséd. I discovered that our American
police are not so _very_ different from Russian police after all, even
if they _are_ Irish!

We caught the steamer—the dear, clean, lovely _Nickolai II._, with the
stewardess a Greek named Aspasia, and I persisted in calling the
steward Pericles, just to have things match.

Then we crunched our way out of the harbor through the ice into the
Black Sea, and sailed away for Constantinople.



IX
CONSTANTINOPLE


Constantinople had three different effects upon me. The first was to
make me utterly despise it for its sickening dirt; the second was when
I forgot all about the mud and garbage, and went crazy over its
picturesque streets with their steep slopes, odd turns, and bewitching
vistas, and the last was to make me dread Cairo for fear it would seem
tame in comparison, for Constantinople is enchanting. If I were a
painter I would never leave off painting its delights and spreading its
fascinations broadcast; and then I would take all the money I got for
my pictures and spend it in the bazaars, and if I regretted my
purchases I would barter them for others, because Constantinople is the
beginning of the Orient, and if you remain long you become thoroughly
metamorphosed, and you bargain, trade, exchange, and haggle until you
forget that you ever were a Christian. The hour of our arrival in
Constantinople was an accident. The steamer _Nickolai II._ was late,
and as no one may land there after sunset, we were forced to lie in the
Bosphorus all night.

It was dark when we sighted the city, but it was one of those clear
darks where without any apparent light you can see everything. _Surely_
no other city in the world has so beautiful an approach! Our great
black steamer threaded her way between men-of-war, sail-boats, and all
sorts of shipping, and if there were a thousand lights twinkling in the
water there were a million from the city. It lies on a series of hills
curved out like a monster amphitheatre, and it stretches all the way
around. I looked up into the heavens, and it seemed to me that I never
had seen so many stars in my life. Our sky at home has not so many. Yet
there were no more than the yellow points of flame which flickered in
every part of that sleeping city. Three tall minarets pierced above the
horizon, and each of these wore circles of light which looked like
necklaces and girdles of fire. Patches of black now and then showed
where there were trees or marked a graveyard. Occasionally we heard a
shrill cry or the barking of dogs, but these sounds came faintly, and
seemed a part of the fairy-picture. It looked so much like a scene from
an opera that I half expected to see the curtain go down and the lights
flare up, and I feared the applause which always spoils the dream.

But nothing spoiled this dream. All night we lay in the beautiful
Bosphorus, and all night at intervals I looked out of my porthole at
that lovely sleeping princess. It never grew any less lovely. Its
beauty and charm increased.

But in the morning everything was changed. A band of howling,
screaming, roaring, fighting pirates came alongside in dirty row-boats,
and to our utter consternation we found these bloodthirsty brigands
were to row us to land. Not one word could we understand in all that
fearful uproar. We were watching them in a terror too abject to
describe, when, to our joy, an English voice said, “I am the guide for
the two American ladies, and here is the kavass which the American
minister sent down to meet you. The consul at Odessa cabled your
arrival.”

Oh, how glad we were! We loaded them with thanks and hand-luggage, and
scrambled down the stairway at the side of the steamer. A dozen dirty
hands were stretched out to receive us. We clutched at their sleeves
instead, and pitched into the boat, and our trunks came tumbling after
us, and away we went over the roughest of seas, which splashed us and
made us feel a little queer; and then we landed at the dirtiest,
smelliest quay, and picked our way through a filthy custom-house,
where, in spite of bribery and corruption, they opened my trunk and
examined all the photographs of the family, which happened to be on
top, and made remarks about them in Turkish which made the other men
laugh. The mud came up over our overshoes as we stood there, so that
altogether we were quite heated in temper when we found ourselves in an
alley outside, filled with garbage which had been there forever, and
learned that this alley was a street, and a very good one for
Constantinople, too.

The porters in Turkey are marvels of strength. They wear a sort of
cushioned saddle on their backs, and to my amazement two men tossed my
enormous trunk on this saddle. I saw it leave their hands before it
reached his poor bent back; he staggered a little, gave it a hitch to
make it more secure, then started up the hill on a trot.

I never saw so much mud, such unspeakably filthy streets, and so many
dogs as Constantinople can boast. You drive at a gallop up streets
slanting at an angle of forty-five degrees, and you nearly fall out of
the back of the carriage. Then presently you come to the top of that
hill and start down the other side, still at a gallop, and you brace
your feet to keep from pitching over the driver’s head. You would
notice the dogs first were it not for the smells. But as it is, you
cannot even see until you get your salts to your nose. The odors are so
thick that they darken the air. You are disappointed in the dogs,
however. There are quite as many of them as you expected. You have not
been misled as to the number of them, but nowhere have I seen them
described in a satisfactory way—so that you knew what to expect, I
mean. In the first place, they hardly look like dogs. They have woolly
tails like sheep. Their eyes are dull, sleepy, and utterly devoid of
expression. Constantinople dogs have neither masters nor brains. No
brains because no masters. Perhaps no masters because no brains. Nobody
wants to adopt an idiot. They are, of course, mongrels of the most
hopeless type. They are yellowish, with thick, short, woolly coats, and
much fatter than you expect to find them. They walk like a funeral
procession. Never have I seen one frisk or even wag his tail. Everybody
turns out for them. They sleep—from twelve to twenty of them—on a
single pile of garbage, and never notice either men or each other
unless a dog which lives in the next street trespasses. Then they eat
him up, for they are jackals as well as dogs, and they are no more
epicures than ostriches. They never show interest in anything. They are
_blasé_. I saw some mother dogs asleep, with tiny puppies swarming over
them like little fat rats, but the mothers paid no attention to them.
Children seem to bore them quite as successfully as if they were women
of fashion.

We went sailing up the Golden Horn to the Skutari cemetery, one of the
loveliest spots of this thrice-fascinating Constantinople. As we were
descending that steep hill upon which it is situated we met a darling
little baby Turk in a fez riding on a pony which his father was
leading. This child of a different race, and six thousand miles away,
looked so much like our Billy that I wanted to eat him up—dirt and all.
I contented myself with giving him backsheesh, while my companion
photographed him. Such an afternoon as that was on that lovely golden
river, with the sun just setting, and our picturesque boatmen sending
the boat through thousands upon thousands of sea-gulls just to make
them fly, until the air grew dark with their wings, and the sunlight on
their white breasts looked like a great glistening snow-storm!

One night we went to a masked ball given for the benefit of a new
hospital which is situated upon the Golden Horn. It was given by Mr.
Levy, one of the Turkish Commissioners at the World’s Fair, and the
decorations were something marvellous. The walls were hung with
embroideries which drove us the next day to the bazaars and nearly
bankrupted us. Every street of Constantinople looks like a masked ball,
so this one merely continued the illusion. We could distinguish the
Mohammedan women from the others because they all went home before
midnight without unmasking.

This ball is interesting because it is called “The Engagement Ball.” We
were told that only at a subscription ball given for a charity in which
their parents are interested and feel under moral obligation to support
by their presence are the young people of Constantinople allowed to
meet each other. The fathers and mothers occupy the boxes, and thus,
under their very eyes, and masked, can love affairs be brought to a
conclusion. During the week which followed no fewer than ten important
engagements were duly heralded in the columns of the newspapers.

The most exciting things in Constantinople are the earthquakes. We were
afraid they would not have any while we were there, but they
accommodated us with a very satisfactory one! It upset my ink-bottle
and broke the lamp and rattled everything in the room until I was
delighted. When my companion came in she was indignant to think that I
had enjoyed the earthquake all to myself, for she was in the rooms of
the American Bible Society, and being thus protected, did not feel it.
But I told her that that was her punishment for trying to prove that a
missionary had cheated her, for she was not in that place for a godly
purpose.

At another time, however, we met with better success in obtaining a
sensation of a different sort. We visited, in company with our Turkish
friend, a small but wonderfully beautiful mosque not often seen by
ordinary tourists, and afterwards went up on Galata tower to get the
fine view of Constantinople which may be had there. It was just before
sunset again, and I am quite unable to make you see the utter
loveliness of it. We crawled out on the narrow ledge which surrounds
the top, and I had just got a capital picture of my companion as she
clutched the Turk to prevent being blown off, for the wind was
something terrible, when suddenly the keepers rushed to the windows and
jabbered excitedly in Turkish and ran up a flag, and behold, there was
a fire! Galata tower is the fire observatory. By the flags they hoist
you can tell where the fire is. I never was at a fire in my life. Even
when our stables burned down I was away from home. So here was my
opportunity. The way we drove down those narrow streets was enough to
make one think that we were the fire department itself. But when we
arrived we found to our grief that it was our dear little mosque which
was burning. Undoubtedly we were the last visitors to enter it.

We went back to the hotel for dinner, and about nine o’clock, hearing
that the fire was spreading, we drove down again with our Turk, who
regarded it as no unusual thing to take American women to two fires in
the same day. We found the tenement-houses burning. Our carriage gave
us no vantage-ground, so our friend, who speaks twelve languages,
obtained permission to enter a house and go up on the roof. We never
stopped to think that we might catch all sorts of diseases; we were so
pleased at the courtesy of the poor souls. They had all their poor
belongings packed ready to remove if the fire crept any nearer, but
they ran ahead and lighted us up the dark stairway with candles, and
told us in Turkish what an honor we were doing their house, all of
which touched me deeply. I wondered how many people I would have
assisted up to _our_ roof if _my_ clothes were tied up in sheets in the
hall, with the fire not a square away!

Fortunately, it came no nearer, and from that high, flat roof we
watched the seething mass of yellow flames grow less and less and then
go completely under control. It was Providence which did it, however,
and not the Constantinople fire department, with its little streams of
water the size of slate-pencils!

The dogs were one of the sights we were anxious to see; the Sultan was
the other. We found the bazaars more fascinating than either. But we
wanted to photograph the Sultan—chiefly, I think, because it was
forbidden. I have an ever-present unruly desire to do everything which
these foreign countries absolutely forbid. But everybody said we could
not. So we very meekly went to see him go to prayers, and left our
cameras with the kavass. We had, with our customary good fortune, a
window directly in front of the Sultan’s gate, not twenty feet from the
door of the mosque.

“If I had that camera here I could get him, and _nobody_ would know!” I
declared.

“But there are so many spies,” our Turkish friend said. “It would be
too dangerous.”

We waited, and waited, and waited. Never have the hours seemed so
mortally long as they seemed to us as we watched the hands of the clock
crawl past luncheon-time, hours and hours later than the Sultan was
announced to pray, and still no Sultan. His little six-and seven-year
old sons, in the uniform of colonels, were mounted on superb Arabian
horses. These horses had tails so long that servants held them up going
through the mud, as if they were ladies’ trains. The children were dear
things, with clear olive complexions and soft, dark eyes—Italian eyes.
Then they grew tired of waiting, and dismounted, and came up to where
we were, and shook hands in the sweetest manner. My companion was for
coaxing the little one into her lap, but she looked somewhat staggered
when I reminded her that she would be trotting the colonel of the
regiment on her knee.

Then more cavalry came, and more bands, playing a little the worst of
any that I ever heard, and we impatiently thrust our heads out of the
window, thinking, of course, the Sultan was coining, but he was not.
Then some infantry with white leggings and stiff knee-joints, with
coils of green gas-pipe on their heads, like our student-lamps, marched
by with a gait like a battalion of horses with the string-halt, and we
shrieked with laughter. Our friend said they called that the German
step. Germany would declare war with Turkey if she ever heard that.

By this time we were so tired and hungry and disgusted that we were
about to go home and give up the Sultan when we saw no fewer than fifty
men come toiling up the hill with carpet-bags, as if they had brought
their clothes, and intended to see the Sultan if it took a week. I do
not know who or what they were, and I do not want to know. They served
their purpose with us in that they put us into instantaneous good
humor, and just then there was a commotion, and everybody straightened
up and craned their necks; and then, preceded by his body-guard, the
Sultan drove slowly down, looked directly up at our window (and we
groaned), and then turned in at the gate. Opposite to him sat Osman
Pasha, the hero of Plevna. The ladies of the harem were driven into the
court-yard surrounded by eunuchs, the horses were taken from their
carriages, and there the ladies sat, guarded like prisoners, until the
Sultan came out again. He then mounted into a superb gold chariot drawn
by two beautiful white horses, and he himself drove out. Everybody
salaamed, and he raised his hand in return as if it was all the
greatest possible bore.

While he was driving into the court-yard the priest came out on the
minaret and called men to prayer, and an English girl who sat at the
next window informed her mother that he was announcing the names of the
important persons in the procession! Her mother trained her glasses on
him—a mere speck against the sky—and said, “Fancy!”

The Sultan is not a beauty. If he were in America his sign would be
that of the three golden balls.

We went to see the mosques, and the officials and priests and boatmen
were so cross and surly on account of the fast of Ramazan that they
would not let us take photographs without a fight. During Ramazan they
neither eat nor drink between sunrise and sunset.

On the fifteenth day of Ramazan the Sultan goes to the mosque of Eyoob
to buckle on the sword of Mohammed in order to remind himself that the
power of that sword has descended to himself. He does not announce his
route, therefore the whole city is in a commotion, and they spread
miles of streets with sand for fear he might take it into his head to
go by some unusual way. It passes my comprehension why they should ever
put any more dirt in the streets even for a Sultan. But sand is a mark
of respect in Russia and Turkey, and it really cleans the streets a
little. At least it absorbs the mud. Just as we were about to start for
a balcony beneath which he was almost sure to pass, our Turkish friend
whispered to us that if we wore capes we might take our cameras.
Imagine our delight, for it was so dangerous. But the capes! Ours were
not half long enough to conceal the camera properly. It was growing
late. So in a perfect frenzy I dragged out my long pale blue _sortie du
bal_, ripped the white velvet capes from it, pinned a short sable cape
to the top of it with safety-pins, and enveloped myself in this
gorgeousness at eleven o’clock in the morning. We made a curious trio.
Our Turk was in English tweeds with a fez. My companion wore a smart
tailor gown, and I was got up as if for a fancy-dress ball, but in the
streets of Constantinople no one gave me a second glance. I was in
mourning compared to some of the others.

On the balcony with us were two small boys with projecting ears, of
whom I stood in deadly terror, for if their boyish interest centred in
that camera of mine I was lost. Presently, however, with a tremendous
clatter, the Sultan’s advance-guard came galloping down the street. I
got them, turned the film, and was ready for the next—the carriages of
the state officials. I aimed well, and got them, but I was growing
nervous. The boys writhed closer. I shoved them a little when their
mother was not looking.

“Don’t try to take so many,” said our Turk. “Here comes the Sultan. Aim
low, and don’t fire until you see the whites of his eyes.”

Again he looked up directly at us, and I snapped the shutter promptly.
It was done. I had succeeded in photographing the Sultan! To be sure,
it was an offense against the state, punishable by fine and
imprisonment, but nobody had caught me. The little boy next to me, who
had walked on my dress and ground his elbows into me, craned his neck
and stared at the Sultan with round eyes. He had been in my way ever
since we arrived, but in an exuberance of tenderness I patted his head.

But when we had those negatives developed I discovered to my disgust
that instead of the Sultan I had taken an excellent photograph of that
wretched little boy’s ear.



X
CAIRO


I need not have been afraid that the charms of Constantinople would
spoil Cairo for me, although at first I was disappointed. Most places
have to be lived up to, especially one like Cairo, whose attractions
are vaunted by every tourist, every woman of fashion, every scholar,
every idle club-man, everybody, either with brains or without. I
wondered how it _could_ be all things to all men. I simply thought it
was the fashion to rave about it, and I was sick of the very sound of
its name before I came. It was too perfect. It aroused the spirit of
antagonism in me.

First of all, when you arrive in Cairo you find that it is very, very
fashionable. You can get everything here, and yet it is practically the
end of the world. Nearly everybody who comes here turns around and goes
back. Few go on. Even when you go up the Nile you must come back to
Cairo. There is really nowhere else to go.

You drive through smart English streets, and when you find yourself at
Shepheard’s you are at the most famous hotel in the world; yet, strange
to say, in spite of its size, in spite of the thousands of learned,
famous, titled, and distinguished people who have been here, in spite
of its smartness and fashion, it is the most homelike hotel I ever was
in. Everybody seems to know about you and to take an interest in what
you are doing, and all the servants know your name and the number of
your room, and when you go out into the great corridor, or when you sit
on the terrace, there is not a trace of the supercilious scrutiny which
takes a mental inventory of your clothes and your looks and your letter
of credit, which so often spoils the sunset for you at similar hotels.

Ghezireh Palace is even more fashionable than Shepheard’s. Here we have
baronets and counts and a few earls. But there they have dukes and
kings and emperors, yet there is a gold-and-alabaster mantelpiece which
takes your mind even from royalty, it is so beautiful. Ghezireh is
situated on the Nile, half an hour’s drive away, so that in spite of
its royal atmosphere it never will take the place of Shepheard’s. Here
you see all the interesting people you have heard of in your life. You
trip over the easels of famous artists in an angle of the narrow
street, and many famous authors, scientists, archaeologists, and
scholars are here working or resting.

Yesterday I was told that four Americans who stood talking together on
the terrace represented two hundred millions of dollars. At dinner the
red coats of the officers make brilliant spots of color among all the
black of the other men, and at first sight it does seem too odd to see
evening dress consist of black trousers and a bright-red coat which
stops off short at the waist. But if you think that looks odd, what
will you say to the officers of the Highland regiments? _Their_ full
dress is almost as immodest in a different way as that of some women,
and one of the most exquisite paradoxes of British custom is that a
Highland undress uniform consists of the addition of long-trousers—more
clothes than they wear in dress uniform.

Cairo is cosmopolitan. You may ride a smart cob, a camel, or a donkey,
and nobody will even look twice at you. You will see harem carriages
with closed blinds; coupés with the syces running before them (and
there is nothing in Cairo more beautiful than some of these men and the
way they run); you will see the Khedive driving with his body-guard of
cavalry; you will see fat Egyptian nurses out in basket phaëton with
little English children; you will see tiny boys, no bigger than our
Billy, in a fever of delight over riding on a live donkey, and attended
by a syce; you will see emancipated Egyptian women trying to imitate
European dress and manners, and making a mess of it; you will see
gamblers, adventurers, and savants all mixed together, with all the
hues of the rainbow in their costumes; you will see water-carriers
carrying drinking-water in nasty-looking dried skins, which still
retain the outlines of the animals, only swollen out of shape, and
unspeakably revolting; you will see native women carrying their babies
astride their shoulders, with the little things resting their tiny
brown hands on their mothers’ heads, and often laying their little
black heads down, too, and going fast to sleep, while these women walk
majestically through the streets with only their eyes showing; you will
see all sorts of hideous cripples, and more blind and cross-eyed people
than you ever saw in all your life before; you will see venders of
fly-brushes, turquoises, amber, ostrich-feathers, bead necklaces from
Nubia, scarabaei and antiquities which bear the hall-marks of the
manufacturers as clearly as if stamped “Made in Germany”; you will see
sore-eyed children sitting in groups in doorways, with numberless flies
on each eye, making no effort to dislodge them; and you will visit
mosques and bazaars which you feel sure call for insect-powder; you
will see Arabian men knitting stockings in the street, and thinking it
no shame; you will see countless eunuchs with their coal-black,
beardless faces, their long, soft, nerveless hands, long legs, and the
general make-up of a mushroom-boy who has outgrown his strength; you
will hear the cawing of countless rooks and crows, and if you leave
your window open these rascals will fly in and eat your fruit and
sweets; you will see and hear the picturesque lemonade-vendor selling
his vile-tasting acid from a long, beautiful brass vessel of irregular
shape, and you never can get away from the horrible jangling noise he
makes from two brass bowls to call attention to his wares; you will see
tiny boys in tights doing acrobatic feats on the sidewalk, walking on
their hands in front of you for a whole square as you take your
afternoon stroll, and then pleading with you for backsheesh; you will
see hideous monkeys of a sort you never saw before, trained to do the
same thing, so that you cannot walk out in Cairo without being attended
with some sort of a bodyguard, either monkey, acrobat, cripple, or the
beggar-girls with their sweet, plaintive voices, their pretty smiles,
and their eternal hunger, to coax the piasters from your open purse.
But you accept these sights and sounds as a part of this wonderful old
city, and each day the fascination will grow on you until you will be
obliged to go to a series of afternoon teas in order to cool your
enthusiasm.

In passing, the flies of Egypt deserve a tribute to their peculiar
qualities. A plague of American flies would be a luxury compared to the
visit of one fly from Egypt. For untold centuries they have been in the
habit of crawling over thick-skinned faces and bodies, and not being
dislodged. They can stay all day if they like. Consequently, if they
see an American eye, and they light on it, not content with that, they
try to crawl in. You attempt to brush them off, but they only move
around to the other side, until you nearly go mad with nervousness from
their sticky feet. If they find out your ear they crawl in and walk
around. You cannot discourage them. They craze you with their
infuriating persistence. If _I_ had been the Egyptians, the Israelites
would have been escorted out of the country in state at the arrival of
the first fly.

England has done a marvellous good to Egypt by her training. She has
taken a lot of worthless rascals and educated them to work at
something, no matter if it does take five of them to call a cab. She
has trained them to make good soldiers, well drilled because drilled by
English officers, and making a creditable showing. She has made fairly
dependable policemen of them, but their legs are the most wabbly and
crooked of any that ever were seen. These policemen are armed. One
carries a pistol and the other the cartridges. If they happened to be
together they could be very dangerous to criminals. She has developed
all the resources of the country, and made it fat and productive, but
she never can give the common people brains.

It poured rain this morning, and there is no drainage; consequently,
rivers of water were rushing down the gutters, making crossings
impassable and traffic impossible. They called out the fire-engines to
pump the water up in the main thoroughfare, but on a side street I
stopped the carriage for half an hour and watched four Arabs working at
the problem. One walked in with a broom and swept the water down the
gutter to another man who had a dust-pan. With this dustpan he scooped
up as much as a pint of water at a time, and poured it into a tin pail,
which gave occupation to the third Arab, who stood in a bent position
and urged him on. The fourth Arab then took this pail of water, ran
out, and emptied it into the middle of the street, and the water beat
him running back to the gutter. I said to them, “Why don’t you use a
sieve? It would take longer.” And they said, “No speak English.”

I watched them until I grew tired, and then I went to the ostrich-farm
as a sort of distraction, and I really think that an ostrich has more
brains than an Arab.

This farm is very large, and the ostrich-pens are built of mud. I never
had seen ostriches before, and I had no idea how hideous, how big, and
how enchanting they are. They have the most curious agate-colored
eyes—colorless, cold, yet intelligent eyes. But they are the eyes of a
bird without a conscience. They have no soul, as camels have. An
ostrich looks as if he would really enjoy villainy, as if he could
commit crime after crime from pure love of it, and never know remorse;
yet there is a fascination about the old birds, and they have their
good points. The father is domestic in spite of looking as if he
belonged to all the clubs, and, much to my delight, I saw one sitting
on the eggs while the mother walked out and took the air. Ostriches and
Arabs do women’s work with an admirable disregard of Mrs. Grundy.
Ostriches have an irresistible way of waving their lovely plumy wings,
and one old fellow twenty-five years old actually imitates the
dervishes. The keeper says to him, “Dance,” and although he is about
ten feet tall, he sits down with his scaly legs spread out on each side
of him, and, shutting his eyes, he throws his long, ugly red neck from
side to side, making a curious grunting noise, and waving his wings in
billowy line like a skirt-dancer. It was too wonderful to see him, and
it was almost as revolting as a real dervish.

We saw these dervishes once; nothing could persuade us to go twice—they
were too nasty. The night the Khedive goes to the Citadel, to the
mosque of Mohammed Ali, to pray for his heart’s desire (for on that
night all prayers of the faithful are sure to be answered), the
dervishes in great numbers are performing their rites. They are called
the howling dervishes, but they do not howl; they only make a horrible
grunting noise. They have long, dirty, greasy hair, and as they throw
their bodies backward and forward this hair flies, and sometimes
strikes the careless observer in the face. They work themselves up to a
perfect passion of religious ecstasy to the monotonous sound of Arab
music, and never have I heard or seen anything more revolting. The
negroes in the South when they “get the power” are not nearly so
repulsive.

It is England’s wise policy in all her colonies to have her army take
part in the national religious ceremonies, so when the Sacred Carpet
started from the Citadel on its journey to Mecca there was a
magnificent military display.

It is an odd thing to call it a carpet, for it not only is not a carpet
in itself, but it is not the shape of a carpet, it is not used for a
carpet, and does not look like a carpet.

We were among the fortunate ones who were invited to the private view
of it the night before, when the faithful were dedicating it. They sat
on the floor, these Mohammedans, rocking themselves back and forth, and
chanting the Koran. I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked
legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when
one uses one’s legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit
in the sun, too, and that must bake them into their crookedness.

The “carpet” is a black velvet embroidered solidly in silver and gold.
It is shaped like an old-fashioned Methodist church, only there are
minarets at the four corners. It looks like a pall. Every year they
send a new one to Mecca, and then the old one is cut into tiny bits and
distributed among the faithful, who wear it next their hearts.

This carpet was about six feet long, and was railed in so that no one
could touch it. A man stood by and sprayed attar of roses on you as you
passed, but I do not know what he did it for, unless it was to turn
sensitive women faint with the heaviness of the perfume.

But the next morning the procession formed, and amid the wildest
enthusiasm, the bowing and salaaming of the men, and the shouting and
running of the children, and the singing of the Arabs who bore the
carpet, it was placed upon the most magnificent camel I ever saw, which
was covered from head to foot with cloth of gold, and whose very gait
seemed more majestic because of his sacred burden, and thus, led by
scores of enthusiastic Arabs, he moved slowly down the street,
following the covering for the tomb, and in turn being followed by one
scarcely less magnificent destined to cover the sacred carpet in its
camel journey to Mecca. That was absolutely all there was to it, yet
the Khedive was there with a fine military escort, and all Cairo turned
out at the unearthly hour of eight o’clock in the morning to see it.

As we drove back we saw the streets for blocks around a certain house
hung with colored-glass lanterns, and thousands upon thousands of small
Turkey-red banners with white Arabic letters on them strung on wires on
each side of the street. These we knew were the decorations for the
famous wedding which was to occur that night, and to which we had
fortunately been bidden. It was in very smart society. The son of a
pasha was to marry the daughter of a pasha, and the presents were said
to be superb.

We wore our best clothes. We had ordered our bouquets beforehand, for
one always presents the bride with a bouquet, and they were really very
beautiful. It was a warm night, with no wind, and the heavens were
twinkling with millions of stars. Such big stars as they have in Egypt!

When we arrived we were taken in charge by a eunuch so black that I had
to feel my way up-stairs. There were, perhaps, fifty other eunuchs
standing guard in the ante-chamber, and our dragoman took the men who
brought us around to another door, where all the men had to wait while
we women visited the bride.

A motley throng of women were in the outer room—fat black women with
waists two yards around, canary-colored women laced into low-cut
European evening dresses, brown women in native dress; a babel of
voices, chattering in curious French, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek. All
the women were terribly out of shape from every point of view, and not
a pretty one among them. One attendant snatched my bouquet without even
a “Thank you” (I had been wondering to whom I should give it, but I
need not have worried), and patted me on the back as she pushed me into
the room where the bride sat on a throne amid piles upon piles of
bouquets. She had a heavy, pale face covered with powder, eyes and
eyebrows blackened, nails stained with henna, and a figure much too
fat. She wore a garment made of something which looked like
mosquito-netting heavily embroidered in gold, which hung like a rag.
Her jewels were magnificent, but the effect of all this gorgeousness
was rather spoiled to the artistic eye by her grotesque surroundings.

After we had visited the bride we were approached by a little yellow
woman in blue satin, who asked me in French if I would not like to see
the _chambre à coucher_, and I said I would. We were then conducted to
a room all hung in blue satin embroidered in red. Lambrequins,
chair-covers, bed-covers, pillows, bed-hangings—all the careful work of
the bride. Then we were invited to inspect the presents in another
room, which were all in glass cabinets. Dozens of amber and jewelled
cigarette-holders and ornaments of every description, most magnificent,
but of no earthly use—as wedding presents sometimes are.

Then we came down-stairs, and had all sorts of things at a banquet, and
heard Arab music, and sat around in the room, where our men met us, and
feeling rather bored, we decided to go home. There we were wise, for we
met quite by accident the procession of the bridegroom. He was escorted
through the streets by a band, and two rows of young men carrying
candelabra under glass shades. We turned and drove along beside him and
watched him, but he was so nervous we felt that it was rather a mean
thing to do. He was a handsome fellow, but never have I seen a man who
looked so unhappy and ill at ease. When he entered the house he
proceeded to the door of the bride’s room, where he threw down silver
and gold as backsheesh until her women were satisfied; then he was
permitted to enter.

As we drove away for the second time I remembered that they were having
“torchlight tattoo” at the barracks, and we decided to stop for a
moment.

“It won’t seem bad to see some soldiers who can march, for the English
soldiers are magnificently trained,” I said, as we stopped to buy our
tickets. A young officer whom I had met heard my remark, and smiled and
saluted.

“The English soldiers _are_ the best in the world, _aren’t_ they?” he
said, teasingly.

“Undoubtedly,” I replied, tranquilly.

He looked a little staggered. He had encountered my belligerent spirit
before, and he did not expect me to agree with him.

“You—you, an American, admit _that_?” he said.

“Surely,” I replied. “But why?” he persisted, most unwisely, for it
gave me my chance.

“Because the Americans are the only ones who ever whipped them!
American soldiers can beat even the best!”

It is now six weeks since I said that, but as yet he has made no reply.



XI
THE NILE


In travelling abroad there are some things which you wish to do more
than others. There are certain treasures you particularly desire to
see, certain scenes your mind has pictured, until the dream has almost
become a reality. The ascent of the Nile was one of my Meccas, and now
that it is over the reality has almost become a dream.

In Egypt the weather is so nearly perfect during the season that it was
no surprise to find the day of our departure a cloudless one. I seldom
worry myself to arrange beforehand for the creature comforts of a
journey, trusting to the beneficent star which seems to hover over the
unworthy to shine upon my pathway. But this time I had so dreamed of
and brooded over and longed for the Nile that I went so far as to
investigate the different lines of boats, and we chose the moonlight
time of the month, and we hurried through Russia and Turkey and Greece
with but one aim in view, and that was to have our feet on the deck of
the _Mayflower_ on the 19th of February. And we succeeded.

Ah, it was a dream well worth realizing! Twenty-one days of rest. Three
glorious weeks of smooth sailing over calm waters. Three weeks of
warmth and sunshine by day, and of poetry and starlight by night. Three
weeks of drifting in the romance which surrounds the name of that great
sorceress, that wonderful siren, that consummate coquette, that most
fascinating woman the world has ever known. Three weeks of steeping
one’s soul in the oldest, most complete and satisfactory ruins on the
face of the earth. Here, in delving into the past, we would have no use
for the comparative word “hundreds.” We could boldly use the
superlative word “thousands.” What memories! what dreams! what
fragments of half-forgotten history and romance came floating through
the brain! I have, generally, little use for guide-books except,
afterwards, to verify what I have seen. But I admit that I had an
especial longing to reach the temple of Denderah, which was said to
contain the most famous relief of Cleopatra extant. I was anxious to
see if her beauty or her charm or anything which accounted for her
sorceries were reproduced. “If Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, the
whole history of the world would have been changed.” How far away she
seemed! How near she would become!

On the terrace at Shepheard’s the morning of our departure you could
see by people’s faces how they were going to make this journey. Some
had Stanley helmets on, and were laden with cushions and steamer-chairs
and fruits as if for an ocean voyage. Others were clutching their
Baedeker, and their Amelia Edwards, and their “Kismet,” and their
note-books, and wore a do-or-die expression of countenance. One or two
others floated around aimlessly, with dreamy eyes, as if they were
already lost in the past which now pressed so closely at hand. Then the
coach from the Gehzireh Palace rolled by in a cloud of dust, and people
hurried down the steps of Shepheard’s and took their places in _our_
coach, and the dragomans in their gorgeous costumes followed with
wraps, and the porters bustled about stowing away hand-luggage, and
Arabs crowded near, thrusting their violets and roses and amber
necklaces and beaded fly-brushes into your very face, and the old man
who sells turquoises made his last effort to sell you a set for
shirt-studs, and the Egyptians and East-Indians from the bazaars
opposite came to the door and looked on with the perennial interest and
friendliness of the Orient, and a swarm of beggars pleaded, with the
excitement of a last chance, for backsheesh, and there was a babel of
tongues—French, English, Italian, German, and Arabic, all hurtling
about your ears like so many verbal bullets in a battle, when suddenly
the door slammed, the driver cracked his whip, the coach lurched
forward, the children scattered—and we were off.

Everybody knows when a boat starts up the Nile, and everybody is
interested and nods and waves to everybody else. There was a short
drive to the river amid polite calls of “good-bye” and “_bon voyage_,”
and there lay the _Mayflower_, like a great white bird with comfortably
folded wings. Nobody seemed to hurry much, for a Nile boat does not
start until her passengers are all on board. An hour or so makes no
difference.

You go down the bank of the Nile to go on board a boat upon steps cut
in the earth, and if your hands are full and you cannot hold up your
dress, you sweep some three inches of fine yellow dust after you. But
you don’t care. The man ahead scuffed his dust in your face, and the
woman behind you is sneezing in yours, and everything and everybody are
a little yellowish from it, but nobody stops to brush it off. It is too
exciting to hurry up on deck and place your steamer-chair and fling
your things into your stateroom and rush out again for fear that you
will miss something. There were Italians, French, English, Poles,
Swedes, and Americans on board. Some of them had titles. Some had only
bad manners, with nothing to excuse them. But, after all, everybody was
nice, I got through the whole three weeks without hating anybody and
with only wanting to drown one passenger. What better record of
amiability could you ask?

But one thing marred the start. This Anglo-American line of boats is
the only line in Egypt which flies the American flag. That was the
final inducement they offered which decided my choice of the
_Mayflower_. But while we knew that she was obliged to fly the British
flag also, we were indignant beyond words to see a huge Union Jack
floating at the top of the forward flagstaff and beneath it a toy
American flag about the size of a cigar-box. _Beneath_ the English
flag! I nearly wept with rage. The owner of the line was at hand, and I
did not wait to draw up a petition or to consult my fellow-Americans. I
just said: “Have the goodness to haul down that infant American flag,
will you? I have no objection to sailing under both, but I do object to
such an insulting disparity in size. Besides that, you seem to have
forgotten that the American flag never flies _below_ any other flag on
God’s green earth!”

He made some apologies, and gave the order at once. The baby was hauled
down amid the smiles of the English passengers. But at Assiout we were
avenged when an enormous American flag arrived by rail and was hoisted
to the main flagstaff, twenty feet higher than the British. When I came
out on deck that Sunday morning, and saw that blessed flag waving above
me, everything blurred before my eyes, and I do assure you that it was
the most beautiful sight I saw in all of that European continent. You
may talk about your temples and your ruins and your old masters! Have
_you_ ever seen “Old Glory” flying straight out from a flagstaff in a
foreign country seven thousand miles away from home?

The Nile is much broader than I expected to find it, and, like the
Missouri and the Golden Horn, it is always muddy. The _Mayflower_
carries only fifty passengers, which is of the greatest advantage for
donkey-rides and for seeing the ruins, a larger party being unwieldy.
She draws but two feet of water, having been built expressly for Nile
service, so we had the proud satisfaction of seeing one of the big
Rameses boats stuck on a sand-bank for eighteen hours, while we tooted
past her blowing whistles of defiance and derision. Whenever we felt
ourselves going aground on a sand-bank we just reversed the engines and
backed off again, or else put on extra steam and ground our way through
it. In the whole three weeks we were not aground five minutes, although
we passed one wreck settling in the water, with the bedding and stores
piled up on the bank, and the passengers sailing away in the
swallow-winged feluccas, which had swooped down to their rescue like so
many compassionate birds.

Afternoon tea on the Nile is an unforgetable function. Everybody comes
on deck and sits under the awning and watches the sun go down. Each day
the sunsets grow more beautiful. Each day they differ from all the
rest. Such yellows and purples! Such violet shadows on the golden
water! Such a marvellously sudden sinking of the sun in a crimson flame
behind the flat brown hills! And then the stillness of the Nile in the
opal aftermath! Those sunsets are something to carry in the memory
forever and a day.

At night the sailors lower the side awnings, crawling along the
railings with their naked prehensile feet. The captain, a Nubian, on a
salary of eighty-five cents a day, selects a suitable spot on the bank
where the boat may remain all night. Then the bow of the boat heads for
the shore and digs her nose in the soft mud. The sailors pitch the
stakes and mallets out on to the bank and spring ashore. Then with Arab
songs which they always sing when rowing, hauling ropes, scrubbing the
decks, or doing any sort of work, the stern is gradually hauled
alongside the bank, and there we stay until morning in a stillness so
absolute that even the cry of the jackals seems in harmony with the
loneliness of it.

I dreaded the first excursion. It was to Memphis and Sakhara, eighteen
miles in all, and I never had been on a donkey in my life. I am not
afraid of horses, but donkeys are so much like mules. My friends
encouraged me all they could. They said that I would have a donkey-boy
all to myself, that the donkey never went out of a walk, and wound up
by the cheerful assurance that if he did pitch me over his head I would
not have far to fall.

The donkey-boys of the Nile deserve a book all to themselves. Such
craft! Such flattery! Such knowledge of human nature! With unerring
sagacity they discover your nationality and give your donkey names
famous in your own country. Never will an Englishman find himself
astride “Yankee Doodle” or “Uncle Sam,” or an American upon “John
Bull.” They pick you up in their arms to put you on or take you from
your donkey as if you were a baby. They run beside you holding your
umbrella with one hand, and with the other arm holding you on if you
are timid. Staid, dignified women who teach Sunday-school classes at
home, who would not permit a white manservant to touch them, lean on
their donkey-boys as if they were human balustrades.

My first donkey-boy was an enchanting rascal. He looked like a handsome
bronze statue. My donkey was a pale, drab little beast, woolly and
dejected. He looked as though if you hurled contemptuous epithets at
him for a week they would all fit his case. My companion’s was more
jaunty. He had been clipped in patterns. His legs were all done in
hieroglyphics, and he held his ears up while mine trailed his in the
sand.

Nevertheless, I was so deadly afraid of him that I saw my forty-nine
fellow-passengers leave me, one after the other, while I still
hesitated and eyed him suspiciously. Perhaps I never would have mounted
had not Imam, the dragoman, with the frank unceremoniousness of the
East, caught me up in his arms and landed me on my donkey before I
could protest. And in the face of his childish smile of confidence I
could only gasp. We moved off with the majesty of a funeral procession.

“What’s the name of my donkey?” asked my companion.

“Cleveland,” came the answer like a flash.

We were enchanted.

“And what’s the name of mine?” I asked.

“McKinley!”

Then we shouted. You have no idea how funny it sounded to hear those
two familiar names in such strange surroundings. We nearly tumbled off
in our delight, and so quick are those clever little donkey-boys to
watch your face and divine your mood that in a second they gave that
Weird, long-drawn donkey call, “Oh-h-ah-h!” and my companion’s donkey
swung into a gentle trot, with her donkey-boy running behind, beating
him with a stick and pinching him in the legs.

At that McKinley, not to be outdone by any Democratic donkey, pricked
up his ears. I heard a terrific commotion behind me. The string of
bells around McKinley’s neck deafened me, and I remember then and there
losing all confidence in the administration, for McKinley was a Derby
winner. He was a circus donkey. He broke into a crazy gallop, then into
a mad run. I shrieked but my donkey-boy thought it was a sound of joy,
and only prodded him the more. In less than two minutes I had shot past
every one of the party; and for the whole day McKinley and I headed the
procession. I only saw my companion at a distance through a cloud of
dust, and she does not trust me any more. Thus have I to bear the sins
of Mohammed Ali, my perfidious donkey-boy, who forced me to lead the
van on that dreadful first day at Sakhara.

Everywhere you go you hear the insistent, importunate cry for
backsheesh. Old men, women, children, dragomans, guides, merchants, and
street-venders—all sorts and conditions of men beg for it. They teach
even babies to take hold of your dress and cry for it. And to toss
backsheesh over to the crowd on the bank as the steamer moves away is
to see every one of them roll over in the dirt and fight and scratch
like cats over half a piaster. There is no such thing as self-respect
among the natives. They are governed by blows and curses, and even the
eyes of sheiks and native police glisten at the word “backsheesh.”

At Assiout one night we heard some one calling from the bank in
English: “Lady, lady, give me some English books. I am a Christian. I
can read English. Give me a Bible. I go to the American college. I want
to be a preacher.” I leaned over the railing and discerned a very black
boy, whose name, he said, was Solomon. I was so surprised to hear
“Bible” instead of “backsheesh” that I investigated. He said his mother
and father were dead; that he had only been to college a year; that he
wanted to be a preacher, and that he would pray God for me if I would
give him a Bible. I was touched. He spelled America, and I gave him
backsheesh. He told me the population of the United States, and I gave
him more backsheesh. He sang “Upidee” with an accent which threw me
into such ecstasies that it brought the whole boat to hear him, and we
all gave him backsheesh. But his piety was what captivated us. I heard
afterwards that no fewer than ten of us privately resolved to give him
Bibles. He begged us to visit the college; so the next day eight of us
gave up the tombs and went to the American college, which was floating
the Stars and Stripes because it was Washington’s birthday. We spoke to
Dr. Alexander, the president, of our friend Solomon. He told us that he
was an absolute fraud, but one of the cleverest boys in the college. He
was not an orphan. His father took a new wife every year, and his
mother also had an assorted collection of husbands. He had been to
school five years instead of one. He had no end of Bibles. People gave
them to him and he sold them. He had been in jail for stealing, and on
the whole his showing was not such as to encourage us to help him to
preach. Such was Solomon, a typical Egyptian, an equally accurate type
of the Arab. They are the cleverest and most consummate liars in the
world. I wonder that the noble men and women who are giving their lives
to teaching in that wonderful mission college have the courage to go on
with it, the material is so unpromising. Yet Arabic acuteness makes it
interesting, after all. A pretty little water-carrier named Fatima, who
wore a blue bead in the hole bored in her nose, and only one other
garment besides, ran beside me at Denderah, calling me “beautiful
princess,” and kissing my hand until she made my glove sticky. None of
us were too old or too hideous in our Nile costumes to be called
beautiful and good. My donkey-boy at Karnak assured me that I was his
father and his mother. He touched his forehead to my hand, then showed
me how his dress was “broken,” and begged his new father-and-mother to
give him a new one.

They are creatures of a different race. You treat them as you would
treat affectionate dogs. You beat them if they pick your pockets, as
they do every chance they get, and then they offer to show you the boy
who did it. I never got to the point of personally beating mine, but
Imam beat a few of them every day. On one occasion my donkey-boy,
Hassan, was angry with me because I would not let him buy feed for the
donkey, Ammon Ra, and refused to bring him up when I wanted to mount. I
called to the dragoman, and said:

“Imam, Hassan won’t bring up my donkey.”

Imam looked at him a moment in silence, then with a lightning slap on
the cheek he laid him flat in the sand. I was horrified. But to my
amazement Hassan hopped up and began to kiss my sleeve and to
apologize, saying, “Very good lady. Bad donkey-boy. Hassan sorry. Very
good lady.”

We have had three Christmases this year. The first was in Berlin, the
second in Russia, and the third on the Nile—the day after the fast of
Ramazan is ended. Ramazan lasts only thirty days instead of forty, like
our Lent. The thirty-first is a holiday. They present each other with
gifts, do no work, and picnic in the graveyards.

Between Esneh and Luxor we passed a steamer with some English officers
on board, and their steamer was towing two flat-boats containing their
regiments, all going to Kitchener in the Soudan. I used the field-glass
on-them, while my companion photographed them. We waved to them, and
they waved to us and swung their hats and saluted. At Edfou they caught
up with us, and passed so close to our boat that the gentlemen talked
to them and asked what their regiments were. They said the Twenty-first
Lancers and the Seaforth and Cameron Highlanders. Then their boat was
gone. How could we know that those gallant officers of the Twenty-first
Lancers would so soon lead that daring cavalry charge at Omdurman, and
possibly one of those who saluted so gayly was the one killed on the
awful day? It touched us very much, however, to think that they might
be going to their death, and we were glad they did not belong to us,
little dreaming that the blowing-up of the _Maine_, of which we had
just heard, would so soon plunge our own dear country into war, and
that our own fathers and brothers and friends would be marching and
sailing away to defend that same “Old Glory” whose stars and stripes
were floating over our heads, and whose gallant colors would succor the
oppressed and avenge insult with equal promptness and equal dignity.

The temple of Denderah is not, to my mind, more beautiful than those of
Luxor and Karnak; in fact, both of those are more majestic, but the
mural decorations of Denderah are in a state of marvellous
preservation. I own, after seeing that in some places even the original
colors remained, that I quite held my breath as we approached the
famous figure of Cleopatra. The sorceress of the Nile! The favorite of
the goddess Hathor herself! The siren who could tempt an emperor to
forsake his empire or a general to renounce fame and honor more easily
than a modern woman could persuade a man to break an engagement to dine
with her rival! Queen of the Lotus! Empress of the Pyramids! What
grace, what charm I anticipated! I wondered if she would be portrayed
floating down to meet Antony, with her purple and perfumed sails, her
cloth of gold garments, her peacocks, her ibex, her lotus-blooms, and
if all her mysterious fascinations would be spread before the delighted
gaze of her humble worshipper.

What I found is shown in the frontispiece to this volume. Beauty
unadorned with a vengeance! From this time on I shall question the
taste of Antony. I only wish he could have lived to see some American
girls I know.

We saw Karnak and Philae by moonlight, and we lunched in the tombs of
the kings, with hieroglyphics thousands of years old looking down upon
our pickled onions and cold fowl, and we ploughed through the sands at
Assouan and saw the naked Nubians, with a silver ear-ring in the top of
their left ear, shoot the rapids of the first cataract. We stood, too,
in the temple of Luxor, before the altar of Hathor, with the sunset on
one side and the moonrise on the other, and heard what her votaries say
to the Goddess of Beauty. It was so mystical that we almost joined in
the worship of the Egyptian Venus Aphrodite. It was so still, so
majestic, so aloof from everything modern and new.

The Nile is essentially a river of silence and mystery. The ibis is
always to be seen, standing alone, seemingly absorbed in meditation.
The camels turn their beautiful soft eyes upon you as if you were
intruding upon their silence and reserve. Never were the eyes in a
human head so beautiful as a camel’s. There is a limpid softness, an
appealing plaintiveness in their expression which drags at your
sympathies like the look in the eyes of a hunchback. It means that,
with your opportunities, you might have done more with your life. Your
mother looks at you that way sometimes in church, when the sermon
touches a particularly raw nerve in your spiritual make-up. I always
feel like apologizing when a camel looks at me.

One moonlight night was so bright that our boat started about three
o’clock instead of waiting for daylight, and the start swung my
state-room door open. It was so warm that I let it remain, and lay
there hearing the gentle swish of the water curling against the side of
the steamer, and seeing the soft moonlight form a silver pathway from
the yellow bank across the river to my cabin door. The machinery made
no noise. There was no more vibration than on a sail-boat. And there
was the whole panorama of the Nile spread before my eyes, with all its
romance and all its mystery bathed in an enchanting radiance.
Occasionally a raven croaked. Sometimes a jackal howled. An obelisk
made an exclamation-point against the sky, or the ruins of a temple
fretted the horizon. It was the land of Ptolemy, of Rameses, of Hathor,
of Horus, of Isis and Osiris, of Herodotus and Cleopatra, of Pharaoh’s
daughter and Moses. It was the silence of the ages which fell upon me,
and then and there, in that hour of absolute stillness and solitude and
beauty unspeakable, all my dreams of the Nile came true.



XII
GREECE


After our ship left Smyrna, where the camels are the finest in the
world, and where the rugs set you crazy, we came across to the Piraeus,
and arrived so late that very few of the passengers dared to land for
fear the ship would sail without them. It was blowing a perfect gale,
the sea was rough, and the captain too cross to tell us how long we
would have on shore. I looked at my companion and she looked at me. In
that one glance we decided that we would see the Acropolis or die in
the attempt. A Cook’s guide was watching our indecision with hungry
eyes. We have since named him Barabbas, for reasons known to every
unfortunate who ever fell into his hands. But he was clever. He said
that we might cut his head off if he did not get us back to the boat in
time. We assured him that we would gladly avail ourselves of his
permission if that ship sailed without us. Then we scuttled down the
heaving stairway at the ship’s side, and away we went over (or mostly
through) the waves to the Piraeus. There we took a carriage, and at the
maddest gallop it ever was my lot to travel we raced up that lovely
smooth avenue, between rows of wild pepper-trees which met overhead, to
Athens; through Athens at a run, and reached the Acropolis, blown
almost to pieces ourselves, and with the horses in a white foam.

Up to that time the Acropolis had been but a name to me. I landed
because it was a sight to see, and I thought an hour or so would be
better than to miss it altogether. But when I climbed that hill and set
my foot within that majestic ruin, something awful clutched at my
heart. I could not get my breath. The tears came into my eyes, and all
at once I was helpless in the grasp of the most powerful emotion which
ever has come over me in all Europe. I could not understand it, for I
came in an idle mood, no more interested in it than in scores of other
wonders I was thirsting to see; Luxor, Karnak, Philae, Denderah—all of
those invited me quite as much as the Acropolis, but here I was
speechless with surprise at my own emotion, I can imagine that such
violence of feeding might turn a child into a woman, a boy into a man.
All at once I saw the whole of Greek art in its proper setting. The
Venus of Milo was no longer in the Louvre against its red background,
where French taste has placed it, the better to set it off. Its cold,
proud beauty was here again in Greece; the Hermes at Olympia; the
Wingless Victory from the temple of Niké Apteros, made wingless that
victory might never depart from Athens; the lovelier Winged Victory
from the Louvre, with her electric poise, the most exhilarating, the
most inspiring, the most intoxicating Victory the world has ever known,
was loosed from her marble prison, and was again breathing the pure air
of her native hills. Their white figures came crowding into my mind.

The learning of the philosophers of Greece; the “plain living and high
thinking” they taught; the unspeakable purity of her art; the ineffable
manner in which her masters reproduced the idea of the stern, cold
pride of aloofness in these sublime types of perfect men, wrung my
heart with a sense of personal loss. I can imagine that Pygmalion felt
about Galatea as I felt that first hour in the Acropolis. I can imagine
that a woman who had loved with the passion of her life a man of
matchless integrity, of superb pride, of lofty ideals, and who had lost
that love irretrievably through a fault of her own, whose gravity she
first saw through his eyes when it was too late, might have felt as I
felt in that hour. All the agony of a hopeless love for an art which
never can return; all the sense of personal loss for the purity which I
was completely realizing for the first time when it was too late; all
the intense longing to have the dead past live again, that I might
prove myself more worthy of it, assailed me with as mighty a force as
ever the human heart could experience and still continue to beat. The
piteous fragments of this lost art which remained—a few columns, the
remnants of an immortal frieze, the long lines of drapery from which
the head and figure were gone, the cold brow of the Hermes, the purity
of his profile, the proud curve of his lips, the ineffable wanness of
his smile—I could have cast myself at the foot of the Parthenon and
wept over the personal disaster which befell me in that hour of
realization.

I never again wish to go through such an agony of emotion. The
Acropolis made the whole of Europe seem tawdry. I felt ashamed of the
gorgeous sights I had seen, of the rich dinners I had eaten, of the
luxuries I had enjoyed. I felt as if I would like to have the whole of
my past life fall away from me as a cast-off garment, and that if I
could only begin over I could do so much better with my life. I could
have knelt and beat my hands together in a wild, impotent prayer for
the past to be given into my keeping for just one more trial, one more
opportunity to live up to the beauty and holiness and purity I had
missed. When I looked up and saw the naked columns of the Parthenon
silhouetted against the sky, bereft of their capitals, ragged, scarred,
battered with the war of wind and weather and countless ages, all about
me the ruins seemed to say, “Your appreciation is in vain; it is too
late, too late!”

I have an indistinct recollection of stumbling into the carriage, of
driving down a steep road, of having the Pentelikon pointed out to me,
of knowing that near that mountain lay Marathon, of seeing the statue
of “Greece crowning Byron,” but I heard with unhearing ears, I saw with
unseeing eyes. I had left my heart and all my senses in the Acropolis.
I believe that one who had left her loved one in the churchyard, on the
way home for the first time to her empty house, has felt that dazed,
unrealizing yet dumb heartache that I felt for days after leaving the
Parthenon.

It grew worse the farther I went away from it, and for two months I
have longed for Athens, Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis. I wanted to
stand and feast my soul upon the glories which were such living
memories, All through Egypt and up the Nile my one wish was to live
long enough and for the weeks to fly fast enough for me to get back to
Athens. Now I am here for the second time, and for as long as I wish to
remain.

We came sailing into the harbor just at sunset. Such a sunset! Such
blue in the Mediterranean! Such a soft haze on the purple hills! How
the gods must have loved Athens to place her in the garden spot of all
the earth; to pour into her lap such treasures of art, and to endow her
masters with power to create such an art! The approach is so beautiful.
Our big black Russian ship cut her way in utter silence through the
bluest of blue seas, with scarcely a ripple on the sunlit waters,
between amethyst islands studded with emerald fields, making straight
for that which was at one time the bravest, noblest, most courageous,
most beautiful country on earth.

The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
    Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
    Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all except their sun is set.”


Byron’s statue stands in the square, surrounded by evergreens; his
picture is in the École Polytechnique, and his memory and his songs are
revered throughout all Greece. How her beauty tore at his soul! How her
love for freedom met with an echo in his own heart! No wonder he sang,
with such a theme! It was enough to give a stone song and the very
rocks utterance.

It was Sunday, and as we drove through the clean, white streets,
feeling absolutely hushed with the beauty which assailed us on every
side, suddenly we heard the sound of music, mournful as a dirge—a
martial dirge. And presently we saw approaching us the saddest, most
touching yet awful procession I ever beheld. It was a military funeral.
First came the band; then came two men bearing aloft the cover to the
casket, wreathed in flowers and streaming with crape. Then, borne in an
open coffin by four young officers of his staff, with bands of crape on
their arms and knots of crape on their swords, was the dead officer, an
old, gray-haired general, dressed in the full uniform of the Greek
army, with his browned, wrinkled, deep-lined hands crossed over his
sword. The casket was shallow, and thus he was exposed to the view of
the gaping multitude, without even a glass lid to cover his bronzed
face, and with the glaring sun beating down upon his closed eyes and
noble gray head. Just behind him they led his riderless black horse,
with his master’s boots reversed in the stirrups and the empty saddle
knotted with crape. It was at once majestic, heartrending, and
terrible. It unnerved me, and yet it was not surprising to have such a
moving spectacle greet me on my return to Greece.

We drove over the same road from the Piraeus to Athens, but in the two
months of our absence they had mended a worn place in this road and had
unearthed a most beautiful sarcophagus, which they placed in the
national museum. The cement which held it on its pedestal was not yet
dry when we saw it. They do not know its date, nor the hand of the
sculptor who carved it, yet it needs no name to proclaim its beauty.

I have now seen Athens as I wanted to see it. I have seen it
consecutively. It was beautiful to begin with the Acropolis and to take
all day to examine just the frieze of the Parthenon. We had to have
written permission, which we received through the American minister, to
allow us to climb up on the scaffolding and get a near view of it. But
we did it, and we were close enough to touch it, to lay our hands on
it, and we waited hours for the sun to sink low enough to creep between
the giant beams and touch the metopes so that we could photograph them.
Of course, we could have bought photographs of them, but it seemed more
like possessing them to take them with our own little cameras.

The central metope is the most beautiful and in the best state of
preservation of all this marvel from the hand of Phidias; yet the work
of destruction goes on, as only last year the head of the rider fell
and broke into a thousand pieces, so that only the horse, the figure,
and the electric splendor of his wind-blown garments floating out
behind him remain. There is so little of this frieze left that it
requires the full scope of the imagination, as one stands and looks at
it, to picture this triumphal procession of Pan-Athenians which every
four years formed at the Acropolis and wound majestically down through
the Sacred Way to the Temple of Mysteries to sacrifice to the goddess
in honor of Marathon and Salamis.

But we followed this road ourselves. We, too, took the Sacred Way. On
the loveliest day imaginable we drove along this smooth white road; we
saw the Bay of Salamis; we wound around the sweetheart curve of her
shore; the purple hills forming the cup which holds her translucent
waters are the background to this famous battle-ground; and beyond, set
on the brow of one of these hills like a diadem, is all that remains of
the Temple of Mysteries. Broken columns are there, pedestals, fragments
of proud arches, now shattered and trodden under foot. Its majesty is
that of a sleeping goddess, so still, so tranquil, proud even, in its
ruins; yet in such utter silence it lies. In the cracks of the marble
floors, in the crannies of the walls, springing from beneath the broken
statue, voiceless yet persistent, grow scarlet poppies—the sleep
flowers of the world, yielding to this yellowing Temple of Mysteries
the quieting influence of their presence.

The next day, almost in the spirit of worship, we went to Marathon. If
Salamis was my Holy Grail, then Marathon was my Mecca. We started out
quite early in the morning, with relays of horses to meet us on the
way. It tried to rain once or twice, but it seemed not to have the
heart to spoil my crusade, for presently the sun struggled through the
ragged clouds and shed a hazy half light through their edges, which
completely destroyed the terrible, blinding glare and made the day
simply perfect.

The road to Marathon led through orchards of cherry-trees white with
blossoms, through green vineyards, past groves of olive-trees which
look old enough to have seen the Persian hosts, through groups of
cypress-trees, such noble sentinels of deathless evergreen; through
fields of wild-cabbage blooms, making the air as sweet as the
alfalfa-fields of the West; across the Valanaris by a little bridge,
and suddenly an isolated farmhouse with a wine-press, and
then—Marathon!

The mountains look on Marathon,
    And Marathon looks on the sea,
And musing there an hour alone,
    I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
For standing by the Persian’s grave,
I could not deem myself a slave!”


Marathon is only a vast plain, but what a plain! It has only a small
mound in the centre to break its smoothness, but what courage, what
patriotism, what nobility that mound covers! It was there, many
authorities say, that all the Athenians were buried who fell at
Marathon, although Byron claims that it covers the Persian dead.

How Greece has always loved freedom! In the École Polytechnique are
three Turkish battle-flags and some shells and cannon-balls from a war
so recent that the flags have scarcely had time to dry or the shells to
cool. What a pity, what an unspeakable pity, that all the glory of
Greece lies in the past, and that the time of her power has gone
forever! Nothing but her brave, undaunted spirit remains, and never can
she live again the glories of her Salamis, her Marathon, her
Thermopylae.

We have seen Athens in all her guises, the Acropolis in all her moods,
at sunrise, in a thunder-storm, in the glare of mid-day, at sunset, and
yet we saved the best for the climax. On the last night we were in
Athens we saw the Acropolis by moonlight. We nearly upset the whole
Greek government to accomplish this, for the King has issued an edict
that only one night in the month may visitors be admitted, and that is
the night of the full moon. But I had returned to Athens with this one
idea in my mind, and if I had been obliged to go to the King myself I
would have done so, and I know that I would have come away victorious.
He never could have had the heart to refuse me.

It is impossible. I utterly abandon the idea of making even my nearest
and dearest see what I saw and hear what I heard and think what I
thought on that matchless night. There was just a breath of wind. The
mountains and hills rose all around us, Lykabettos, Kolonos—the home of
Sophocles—Hymettos, and Pentelikon with its marble quarries, made an
undulating line of gray against the horizon, while away at the left was
the Hill of Mars. How still it was! How wonderful! The rows of lights
from the city converged towards the foot of the Acropolis like the
topaz rays in a queen’s diadem. The blue waters of the harbor glittered
in the pale light. A chime of bells rang out the hour, coming faintly
up to us like an echo. And above us, bathed, shrouded, swimming in
silver light, was the Parthenon. The only flowers that grow at the foot
of the Parthenon are the marguerites, the white-petaled, golden-hearted
daisies, and even in the moonlight these starry flowers bend their
tender gaze upon their god.

I leaned against one of the caryatides of the Erechtheion and looked
beyond the Parthenon to the Hill of Mars, where Paul preached to the
Athenians, and I believe that he must have seen the Acropolis by
moonlight when he wrote, “Wherefore, when we could no longer forbear,
we thought it good to be left in Athens _alone_!”

What a week we have had in Athens! If I were obliged to go home
to-morrow, if Greece ended Europe for me, I could go home satisfied,
filled too full of bliss to complain or even to tell what I felt. I
have lived out the fullest enjoyment of my soul; I have reached the
limit of my heart’s desire. Athens is the goddess of my idolatry. I
have turned pagan and worshipped.

In all my travels I have divided individual trips into two
classes—those which would make ideal wedding journeys and those which
would not. But the greatest difficulty I have encountered is how to get
my happy wedded pair over here in order to _begin_. I have not the
heart to ask them to risk their happiness by crossing the ocean, for
the Atlantic, even by the best of ships, is ground for divorce (if you
go deep enough) in itself. I have not yet tried the Pacific, but I am
told that, like most people who are named Theodosia and Constance and
Winifred, the Pacific does not live up to its name. However, if I could
transport my people, chloroformed and by rapid transit, to Greece, I
would beg of them to journey from Athens to Patras by rail; and if that
exquisite experience did not smooth away all trifling difficulties and
make each wish to be the one to apologize first, then I would mark them
as doomed from the beginning, by their own insensate and unappreciative
natures, as destined to finish their honeymoon by separate maintenance
and alimony.

How I hate descriptions of scenery! How murderous I feel when the
conventional novelist interrupts the most impassioned love-scene to
tell how the moonlight filtered through the ragged clouds, or how the
wind sighed through the naked branches of the trees, just as if anybody
cared what nature was doing when human nature held the stage! And yet
so marvellous is the fascination of Greece, so captivating the scenes
which meet the eye from the uninviting window of a plain little foreign
railroad train, that I cannot forbear to risk similar maledictions by
saying that it is too heavenly for common words to express.

Now, I abominate railroads and I loathe ships. The only things I really
enjoy are a rocking-chair and a book. But much as I detest the smell of
car-smoke, and to find my face spotted with soot, and ill as it makes
me to ride backward, I would willingly travel every month of the year
over the road from Athens to Patras. The mountains are not so high as
to startle, the gulf not so vast as to shock. But with gentleness you
are drawn more and more into the net of its fascination until the tears
well to your eyes and there is a positive physical ache in your heart.

Greece is considerate. I have seen landscapes so continuously and
overpoweringly beautiful that they bored me. I know how to sympatize
with Alfred Vargrave when he says to the Duc de Luvois:

Nature is here too pretentious; her mien
Is too haughty. One likes to be coaxed, not compelled,
To the notice such beauty resents if withheld.
She seems to be saying too plainly, ‘Admire me;’
And I answer, ‘Yes, madam, I do; but you tire me.’”


Not so with Greece, for when you become almost intoxicated with her
wonderful blues and greens and purples, and you move your head
restlessly and beg a breathing-space, she compassionately recognizes
your mood and lowers a silver veil over her brilliant beauty, so that
you see her through a gauzy mist, which presently tantalizes you into
blinking your tired eyes and wondering what she is so deftly
concealing. It is like the feeling which assails you when you see a
veiled statue. You long for the sculptor to chisel away the marble
gauze and reveal the features. And when the craving becomes
intolerable, lo! Greece, the past mistress of the art of beauty, grants
your desire, and with the regal gift of a goddess brings your soul into
its fruition. Cleopatra would have tantalized and left your heart to
eat itself out in hopeless longing. But Cleopatra was only a queen;
Venus was a goddess.

Names which were but names to you before become living realities now.
We are crossing the Attic plain, and from that we find ourselves in the
Thracian plain. What girl has not heard her brother spout concerning
these names, famous in Greek history? Then we are in Megara, on the
lovely blue Bay of Salamis. From Megara the Bay of Salamis becomes
Saronic Gulf, and after an hour or two of its unspeakable beauty we
cross over to Corinth and find, if possible, that the blues of the Gulf
of Corinth are even more sapphire, that its purples are even more
amethyst, that its greens are more emerald than the blues and purples
and greens of Salamis.

From Corinth the road skirts the sea, and all these white plains are
devoted to the drying of currants. At Sikyon, called “cucumber town,”
but originally, with the mystic beauty of the ancient Greeks, called
“poppy town,” the American school at Athens has made some wonderful
excavations. It has discovered the supports of the stage of the famous
theatre there. Then, still with the sea before us, we are at Aegium, a
name full of memories of ancient Greece. It has olive, currant, grape,
and mulberry plantations, and lies shrouded and bedded in beauty and
romance. There, over a high iron bridge, we cross a rushing mountain
torrent and are at Patras, in the moonlight, with our big ship waiting
to take us across the Adriatic Sea to Brindisi.

It was with real pain that we left Greece. I would like to go back
to-morrow. But there were reasons for reaching Italy without further
delay, and we hurried through Corfu with only a day there to see its
loveliness, instead of a week, as we would have liked. The Empress of
Austria’s villa lies tucked up on a hill-side, in a mass of orange,
lemon, cypress, and magnolia trees. Such an enchanting picture as it
presents, and such wonderful beauty as it encloses. But all that is
modern. What fascinates me in Corfu is that opposite the entrance to
the old Hyllaean harbor lies the isle of Pontikonisi (Mouse Island),
with a small chapel and clergy-house. Tradition says that it is the
Phaeacian ship which brought Ulysses to Ithaka, and which was
afterwards turned into stone by the angry Poseidon (Neptune). The brook
Kressida at the point where it enters the lake is also pointed out as
the spot where Ulysses was cast ashore and met the Princess Nausicaa. A
seasick sort of name, that!

I feel an inexplicable delight in letting my imagination run riot in
the Greek traditions of their gods and goddesses. Their heroes are more
real to me than Caesar and Xerxes and Alexander. And Hermes and Venus
and the dwellers of Olympus have been such intimate friends since my
childhood that the scenes of their exploits are of much more moment to
me than Waterloo and Austerlitz. I cannot forbear laughing at myself,
however, for my holy rage over Greek mythology, as founded upon no
better ground than that upon which Mark Twain apologized for his
admiration for Fenimore Cooper’s Indians, for he admitted that they
were a defunct race of beings which never had existed!

We arrived at Brindisi at four o’clock in the morning. Brindisi at four
o’clock in the morning is not pleasant, nor would any other city be on
the face of this green footstool. We were in quarantine, and we had to
cope with a cross stewardess, who declared that we demanded too much
service, and that she would _not_ bring us our coffee in bed, and who
then went and did it like an angel, so that we patted her on the back
and told her in French that she was “well amiable,” although at that
hour in the morning we would have preferred to throttle her for her
impertinence, and then to throw her in the Adriatic Sea as a neat
little finish. Such, however, is our diplomatic course of travel.

We walked in line under the doctor’s eye, and he pronounced us sanitary
and permitted us to land. We were four hours late, but we scalded
ourselves with a second cup of coffee and tried for the six-o’clock
train for Naples, missed it, sent a telegram to Cook to send our
letters to the train to meet us, and then went back to the ship to
endure with patience and commendable fortitude the jeers of our
fellow-passengers. Virtue was its own reward, however, for soon, under
the rays of the rising sun, which we did not get up to see, and did not
want to see, there steamed into the harbor alongside of us the P. & O.
ship _Sutly_, six hours ahead of time (did you ever hear of such a
thing?), bearing our belated friends, the Jimmies, from Alexandria.
They had been booked for the _China_, which was wrecked, so the _Sutly_
took her passengers. The Jimmies had bought their passage for Venice,
but we teased them to throw it up and come with us, and such is our
fascination that they yielded. The love which reaches the purse is love
indeed. So in a fever of joy we all caught the nine-o’clock train for
Naples.

They have a sweet little way on Italian railroads of making no
provision for you to eat. We did not know this, and our knowledge of
Italian was limited to _Quanto tempo?_ (How much time?) and _Quanto
costa?_ (How much is it?) So we punctuated the lovely journey among the
Italian hills, and between their admirable waterways, by hopping off
the train for coffee every time they said “Cinque minuti.” It was like
a picnic train. Half the passengers were from the P. & O., and knew the
Jimmies, and the other half were from our Austrian Lloyd, and knew us,
so it was perfectly delicious to see every compartment door fly open
and everybody’s friend appear with tea-kettles for hot water in one
hand and tea-caddies in the other, and to see people who hated boiled
eggs buying them, because they were about all that looked clean; and to
see staid Englishmen in knickerbockers and monocles with loops of
Italian bread over each tweed arm, and in both hands flasks of cheap
red Italian wine—oh, so good! and only costing fifty centimes, but put
up in those lovely straw-woven decanters which cost us a real pang to
fling out of the window after they were emptied. And it was anything
but conventional to hear one friend shout to another, “Don’t pay a lira
for those mandarins; I got twice that many from this pirate!” And then
the five minutes would be up, and the guard would come along and call
“Pronto,” which is much prettier than “All aboard,” but which means
about the same thing; and then two ear-splitting whistles and a
jangling of bells, and the doors would slam, and we were off again.

It was moonlight when we skirted the Bay of Naples—the same moonlight
which lighted the Acropolis for us at Athens, which shed its silver
loveliness upon the Adriatic Sea, where we had no one whose soul shared
its beauty with us, and which we found again glittering upon the Bay of
Naples. We stood at the car-window and watched it for an hour, for all
that time our train was winding its way around the shore into Naples.

That curve of the shore, that sheet of rippling sapphire, the glint of
the moon on the water, the train trailing its slow length around the
bay, are associated in my mind with one of those emotional upheavals
which travellers must often experience in passing from one phase of
civilization to another. It marks one of the mile-stones in my inner
life. I was leaving the East, the pagan East, with its mysterious
influence, and I was getting back to Cooks’ tourists and Italy. My mind
was in a whirl. Which was best? Why should I so love one, and why did
the other bore me? I was afraid to follow the yearnings of my own soul,
and yet I knew that only there lay happiness. To make up one’s mind to
be true to one’s love—even if it be only the love of beauty—requires
courage. And the trial of my bravery came to me on that curve of the
Bay of Naples. I dared. I am daring now. I am still true to the Orient.

As I look back I remember that the phrase, “See Naples and die,” gave
me the hazy idea that it must be very beautiful, but just how I did not
know, and did not particularly care. I knew the bay would be lovely; I
only hoped it would be as lovely as I expected. Celebrated beauties are
so apt to be disappointing. I imagined that all Neapolitan boys wore
their shirt-collars open and that a wavy lock of coal-black hair was
continually blowing across their brown foreheads. That eternal
porcelain miniature has maddened me with its omnipresence ever since I
was a child. But aside from these half-thoughts and dim expectations I
had no hopes at all. I was prepared to be gently and tranquilly
pleased; not wildly excited, but satisfied; not happy, but contented
with its beauty. But I have found more. The bay is more lovely than I
anticipated, and I have discovered that Italian hair is not coal-black;
it begins to be black at the roots, and evidently had every intention
of being black when it started out, but it grew weary of so much
energy, and ended in sundry shades of russet brown and sunburned tans.
It generally has these two colors, black and tan, like the silky coat
of a fine terrier, and it waves in lovely little tendrils, and is much
prettier than hair either all black or all brown.

But I am ahead of my narrative. I am trying to decide whether Naples is
more beautifully situated than Constantinople. Constantinople, being
Oriental, fascinates me more. Western Europe begins to seem a little
tame and conventional to me, because the pagan in my nature is so
highly developed. I detest civilization except for my own selfish
bodily comfort. When I eat and sleep I want the creature comforts.
Otherwise I love those thieving Arab servants in Cairo (who would steal
the very shoes off your feet if you dropped off for your forty winks)
because of their uncivilization and unconventionality. Civilization has
not yet spoiled them. I bought rugs in Cairo, and often when I went
unexpectedly into my room I found my Arab man-servant on his knees
studying their patterns and feeling their silkiness. I had everything
locked up, or perhaps he would have made worse use of his time; but
somehow the childishness of the East appeals to me.

Constantinople is so delightfully dirty and old. Mrs. Jimmie sniffs at
me because I can stop the peasants who lead their cows through the
streets of Naples, and because I can drink a glass of warm milk; Mrs.
Jimmie wants hers strained. But if I can eat “Turkish Delight” in
Constantinople, buying it in the bazaars, seeing it cut off the huge
sticky mass with rusty lamp-scissors, perhaps dropped on the
dirt-floor, and in a moment of abstraction polished off on the Turk’s
trousers and rolled in soft sugar to wrap the real in the ideal—if I
can cope with _that_ problem, surely a trifle like drinking unstrained
milk, with the consoling satisfaction of stopping the carriage in an
adorable spot, with the blue waters of the bay curling up on its shore
down below on the right, and a sheer cliff covered with moss and
clinging vines and surmounted by a superb villa on the left, is
nothing. For to eat or to drink amid such romantic surroundings, even
if it were unstrained milk, was an experience not to be despised.

Yet here are two cities situated like amphitheatres upon the convex
curve of two ideally beautiful harbors. How do you compare them? Each
according to your own temper and humor. You have seen hundreds of
colored photographs both of Naples and Constantinople. But of the two
you will find only Naples exactly like the pictures. Everybody agrees
about Naples. People disagree delightfully about Constantinople. Some
can never get beyond the dirt and smells and thievery. Some never get
used to the delicious thrills of surprise which every turn and every
corner and every vista and every night and every morning hold for the
beauty-lover. Nothing could be more heterodox, more _bizarre_, more
unconventional than Constantinople scenes. Nothing could be more
orthodox than the views of Naples. To be sure, poets have written reams
of poetry about it, travellers have sent home pages of rhapsodies about
it, tourists have conscientiously “done” the town, with their heads
cocked on one side and their forefingers on a paragraph in Baedeker;
but just _because_ of this, _because_ everybody on earth who ever has
been to Naples—man or woman, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or
free—_has_ wept and gurgled and had hysteria over its mild and placid
beauty, is one reason why I find it somewhat tame. Italian scenery
seems to me laid out by a landscape-gardener. Its beauty is absolutely
conventional. Nobody will blame you if you admire it. To rave over it
is like going to church—it is the proper thing to do. People will raise
their eyebrows if you don’t, and watch what you eat, and speculate on
your ancestry, and wonder about your politics.

The beauty of Italy is so proper and Church of England that you are
looked upon as a dissenter if you do not rhapsodize about it. But it
disappoints me to feel obliged to follow the multitude like a flock of
sheep and to take the dust of those feeble-minded tourists who have
preceded me and set the pace. There is nothing in the scenery of all
Italy to shock your love of beauty from the staid to the original.
There is nothing to give your sensitive soul little shivers of
surprise. There is nothing to make you hesitate for fear you ought not
to admire; you _know_ you ought. You feel obliged to do so because
everybody has done it before you, and you will be thought queer if you
don’t. There is a gentle, pretty-pretty haze of romance over Italian
scenery which is like reading fairy-tales after having devoured
Carlyle. It is like hearing Verdi after Wagner. The East has my real
love. I find that I cannot rave over a pink and white china shepherdess
when I have worshipped the Venus of Milo.



XIII
NAPLES


The point of view is always the pivot of recollection. How ought one to
remember a place? There are a dozen ways of enjoying Naples, and twenty
ways of being miserable in America. Or turn it the other way, it makes
no difference. It depends upon one’s self and the state of the spleen.
Before I came to Europe I remember often to have been disgusted with
persons who recalled Germany by its beer and Spain by its fleas, or
those who said: “Cologne! Oh yes; I remember we got such a good
breakfast there.”

Ah, ha! It is so easy to sniff when one is mooning in imagination over
cathedrals, but I have since taken back all those sniffs. I did not
realize then the misery of standing on one foot all the morning in
tombs, and on the other all the afternoon in museums, and then of going
home to sleep on an ironing-board. Now I, too, think gratefully of the
Bay of Naples as being near that good bed, and of the Pyramids as being
near the excellent table of Shepheard’s. Why not? Can one rave over
Vesuvius on an empty stomach, or get all the beauty out of Sorrento
with a backache? One must be well and have good spirits when one
travels. It is not so essential merely to be comfortable, although that
helps wonderfully. But even to get soaking wet could not utterly spoil
the road to Posilipo. What a heavenly drive! Although I think with more
fondness of scaling the heights of Capri in a trembling little Italian
cab, not because both views were not divinely beautiful, but because
when in Capri my clothes were not damply sticking to me, and I had no
puddle of water in each shoe. As I look back I believe I could write
specific directions from personal experience on “How to be Happy when
Miserable.” Jimmie always bewails the fact that the American girl lives
on her nerves. “Goes on her uppers” is his choice phrase. Nevertheless,
it pulled us through many a mental bog while travelling so
continuously.

Therefore, from a dozen different recollections of Naples, eleven of
which you may read in your red-covered Baedeker, or _Recollections of
Italy_, or _Leaves from my Note-Book_, or _Memories of Blissful Hours_,
and similar productions, I have most poignantly to remember our
shopping experiences in Naples. But before launching my battleship I
owe an apology to the worshippers of Italy. I can appreciate their
rapturous memories. I share in a measure their enthusiasm. To a certain
temper Italy would be adorable for a honeymoon or to return to a second
or a fifth time. But it is not in human nature, after having come from
Russia, Egypt, and Greece, to have one’s pristine enthusiasm to pour
out in torrents over the ladylike beauty of Italy, because these other
countries are so much more unfrequented, more pagan, and more
fascinating. But in daring to say that, I again pull my forelock to
Italy’s worshippers.

To begin with, we were robbed all through Italy; not robbed in a common
way, but, to the honor of the Italians let me say, robbed in a highly
interesting and somewhat exciting manner.

Somebody has said, “What a beautiful country Italy would be if it were
not for the Italians!” We are used to having our things stolen, and to
being overcharged for everything just because we are Americans, but we
are not used to the utter brigandage of Italy. On the Russian ship
coming from Odessa to Constantinople some of the second-cabin
passengers got into our state-rooms during dinner and went through our
hand-baggage, which we had left unlocked, and stole my ulster. And, of
course, in Constantinople they warned us not to trust the Greeks, for
it is their form of comparison to say, “He lies like a Greek,” while in
Greece the worst thing they can say is that “He steals like a Turk.” In
Cairo it was not necessary to warn us, for everybody knows what liars
and thieves Arabs are. Not a day went by on those donkey excursions on
the Nile that the men did not have their pockets picked. The passengers
on the _Mayflower_ lost enough silk handkerchiefs to start a
haberdasher’s shop, and every woman lost money. In Cairo, whether you
go to the bazaars or to a mosque to see the faithful at their prayers,
your dragoman tells you not to have anything of value in your pockets,
and not to carry your purse in your hand.

But we had not even got through the custom-house at Brindisi, when
Gaze’s man recommended us to have our trunks corded and sealed, for
they are sometimes broken open on the train. We thought this rather a
useless precaution, but Jimmie has travelled so much that he made us do
it. It seems that the King has admitted that he is powerless to stop
these outrages, and so he begs foreign travellers to protect
themselves, inasmuch as he is unable to protect them.

We stayed at the smartest hotel in Naples, but we had not been there
two days before Jimmie’s valises were broken open, and all his studs
and forty pounds in money were stolen. That frightened us almost to
death, but something worse happened. One day at three o’clock in the
afternoon my companion was sitting in her room writing a letter, and
she happened to look up just in time to see the handle of the door turn
slowly and softly.

Then the door opened a crack, still without a sound, and a man with a
black beard put in his head. As he met her eyes fixed squarely upon him
he closed the door as silently as a shadow. She hurried after him and
looked out, and ran up the corridor peering into every possible corner,
but no man could she see. He had disappeared as completely as if he had
been a ghost. She reported it to the proprietor, but he shrugged his
shoulders, and said, “Madam must have imagined it!”

By this time we were all feeling rather creepy. However, as Jimmie says
when we are all tired out and hungry and cross, “Cheer up. The worst is
yet to come.”

One day my companion and Mrs. Jimmie and I went to one of the best
shops in all Italy, to buy a ring. Mrs. Jimmie was getting it for her
husband’s birthday.

Now, Mrs. Jimmie’s own rings are extremely beautiful, and her very
handsomest consists of a band of blue-white matched diamonds which
exactly fills the space between her two fingers, and is so heavy and so
fine that only Tiffany could duplicate it. The band of the ring is
merely a fine wire. To try on Jimmie’s ring, Mrs. Jimmie took off all
hers and laid them on the counter. Now, mind you, this was a famous
jeweller’s where this happened. But when she had decided to take the
new ring, and turned to put on her own again, lo! this especial ring
was gone. We searched everywhere. We told the clerk, but he said she
had not worn such a ring. This was the first thing which made us
suspect that something was wrong. We insisted, and he reiterated.
Finally, I made up my mind. I said to my companion: “You stand at the
front door and have Mrs. Jimmie stand at the side door. Don’t you
permit any one either to enter or leave, while I rush around to Cook’s
office and find out what can be done.” Both women turned pale, but
obeyed me. One clerk started for the back door, but we called him and
told him that no one was to move until we could get the police there.
Then such a scurrying and _such_ a begging as there was! Would madam
wait just one moment? Would madam permit them to call the proprietor?
(Anybody would have thought it was _my_ ring, for Mrs. Jimmie’s calm
was not even ruffled, while _I_ was in a white heat, and all their
impassioned appeals were addressed to me!) I said they could call the
proprietor if they could call him without leaving the room. They called
him in Italian. He came, a little, smooth, brown man, with black,
shoe-button eyes. We explained to him just what had taken place, Mrs.
Jimmie with her back against one door, and my companion braced against
the side door, like Ajax defying the lightning.

He rubbed his hands, and listened to a torrent of excited Italian from
no fewer than ten crazy clerks. Then I stated the case in English. The
proprietor turned to Mrs. Jimmie, and said if madam was so sure that
she had worn a ring, which all his clerks assured him she had not worn,
then, for the honor of his house, he must beg madam to choose another
ring, of whatever value she liked, and it should be a present from him!

Now, Mrs. Jimmie is a very Madonna of calmness, but at that she
ignited. She told him that Tiffany had been six months matching those
stones, and that not in all his shop—not in the whole of Italy—could he
find a duplicate. At that another search took place, and I, just to
make things pleasant, started for the American ambassador’s. (I had
risen a peg from Cook’s!) Such pleading! Such begging! Two of the
clerks actually wept—Italian tears. When lo! a shout of triumph, and
from a remote corner of the shop, quite forty feet from us, in a place
where we had not been, under a big vase, they found that ring! If it
had had the wings of a swallow it could not have flown there. If it had
had the legs of a centipede it could not have crawled there. The
proprietor was radiant in his unctuous satisfaction. “It had rolled
there!” Rolled! That ring! It had no more chance of rolling than a
loaded die! We all sniffed, and sniffed publicly. Mrs. Jimmie, I regret
to say, was weak enough to buy the ring she had ordered for Jimmie in
spite of this occurrence. But I think I don’t blame her. I am weak
myself about buying things. But _that_ is a sample of Italian honesty,
and in a shop which would rank with our very best in New York or
Chicago. Heaven help Italy!

Italian politeness is very cheap, very thin-skinned, and, like the
French, only for the surface. They pretend to trust you with their
whole shop; they shower you with polite attentions; you are the Great
and Only while you are buying. But I am of the opinion that you are
shadowed by a whole army of spies if you owe a cent, and that for lack
of plenty of suspicion and prompt action to recover I am sure that
neither the Italians nor the French ever lost a sou.

We went into the best tortoise-shell shop in all Naples to buy one
dozen shell hair-pins, but such was the misery we experienced at
leaving any of the treasures we encountered that we bought three
hundred dollars’ worth before we left, and of course did not have
enough money to pay for them. So we said to lay the things aside for
us, and we would draw some money at our banker’s, and pay for them when
we came to fetch them.

Not for the world, declared this Judas Iscariot, this Benedict Arnold
of an Italian Jew! We must take the things with us. Were we not
Americans, and by Americans did he not live? Behold, he would take the
articles with his own hands to our carriage. And he did, despite our
protests. But the villain drew on us through our banker before we were
out of bed the next morning! I felt like a horse-thief.

However, I confess to a weakness for the overwhelmingly polite
attentions one receives from Italian and French shopkeepers. One gets
none of it in Germany, and in America I am always under the deepest
obligations if the haughty “sales-ladies” and “sales-gentlemen” will
wait on the men and women who wish to buy. I am accustomed to the
ignominy of being ignored, and to the insult of impudence if I protest;
but why, oh, why, do politeness and honesty so seldom go together?

There is a decency about Puritan America which appeals to me quite as
much as the rugged honesty of American shopkeepers. The unspeakable
street scenes of Europe would be impossible in America. In Naples all
the mysteries of the toilet are in certain quarters of the city public
property, and the dressing-room of children in particular is bounded by
north, east, south, and west, and roofed by the sky.

I have seen Italians comb their beards over their soup at dinner. I
have seen every Frenchman his own manicure at the opera. I have seen
Germans take out their false teeth at the _table d’hôte_ and rinse them
in a glass of water, but it remains for Naples to cap the climax for
Sunday-afternoon diversions.

A curious thing about European decency is that it seems to be forced on
people by law, and indulged in only for show. The Gallic nations are
only veneered with decency. They have, almost to a man, none of it
naturally, or for its own sake. Take, for example, the sidewalks of
Paris after dark. The moment public surveillance wanes or the sun goes
down the Frenchman becomes his own natural self.

The Neapolitan’s acceptation of dirt as a portion of his inheritance is
irresistibly comic to a pagan outsider. To drive down the Via di Porto
is to see a mimic world. All the shops empty themselves into the
street. They leave only room for your cab to drive through the maze of
stalls, booths, chairs, beds, and benches. At nightfall they light
flaring torches, which, viewed from the top of the street, make the
descent look like a witch scene from an opera.

It is the street of the very poor, but one is struck by the excellent
diet of these same very poor. They eat as a staple roasted artichokes—a
great delicacy with us. They cook macaroni with tomatoes in huge iron
kettles over charcoal fires, and sell it by the plateful to their
customers, often hauling it out of the kettles with their hands, like a
sailor’s hornpipe, pinching off the macaroni if it lengthens too much,
and blowing on their fingers to cool them. They have roasted chestnuts,
fried fish, boiled eggs, and long loops of crisp Italian bread strung
on a stake. There are scores of these booths in this street, the
selling conducted generally by the father and grown sons, while the
wife sits by knitting in the smoke and glare of the torches, screaming
in peasant Italian to her neighbor across the way, commenting quite
openly upon the people in the cabs, and wondering how much their hats
cost. The bambinos are often hung upon pegs in the front of the house,
where they look out of their little black, beady eyes like pappooses. I
unhooked one of these babies once, and held it awhile. Its back and
little feet were held tightly against a strip of board so that it was
quite stiff from its feet to its shoulders. It did not seem to object
or to be at all uncomfortable, and as it only howled while I was
holding it I have an idea that, except when invaded by foreigners, the
bambino’s existence is quite happy. Babies seem to be no trouble in
Italy, and one cannot but be struck by the number of them. One can
hardly remember seeing many French babies, for the reason that there
are so few to remember—so few, indeed, that the French government has
put a premium upon them; but in Naples the pretty mothers with their
pretty babies, playing at bo-peep with each other like charming
children, are some of the most delightful scenes in this fascinating
Street of the Door.

These bambinos hooked against the wall look down upon curious scenes.
Their mothers bring their wash-tubs into the street, wash the clothes
in plain view of everybody, hang them on clothes-lines strung between
two chairs, while a diminutive charcoal-stove, with half a dozen irons
leaning against its sides, stands in the doorway ready to perform its
part in the little scene. I saw a boy cooking two tiny smelts over a
tailor’s goose. The handle was taken off, and the fish were frying so
merrily over the glowing coals, and they looked so good, and the odor
which steamed from them was so ravishing, that I wanted to ask him if I
might not join him and help him cook two more.

In point of fact, Naples seems like a holiday town, with everybody
merely playing at work, or resting from even that pretence. The
Neapolitans are so essentially an out-of-door people and a leisurely
people that it seems a crime to hurry. The very goats wandering
aimlessly through the streets, nibbling around open doorways, add an
element of imbecile helplessness to a childish people.

Did you ever examine a goat’s expression of face? For utter asininity a
donkey cannot approach him. Nothing can, except, perhaps, an Irish
farce-comedian.

Beautiful cows are driven through the streets, often attended by the
owner’s family. The mother milks for the passing customers, the father
fetches it all lovely and foaming and warm to your cab, and the pretty,
big-eyed children caper around you, begging for a “macaroni” instead of
a “pourboire.”

Then, instead of dining at your smart hotel, it is so much more
adorable to drop in at some charming restaurant with tables set in the
open air, and to hear the band play, and to eat all sorts of delicious
unknowable dishes, and to drink a beautiful golden wine called
“Lachrima Christi” (the tears of Christ), and to watch the people—the
people—the people!



XIV
ROME


On Easter Sunday I had my first view of Rome, my first view of St.
Peter’s. The day was as soft and mild as one of our own spring days,
and there was even that little sharp tang in the air which one feels in
the early spring in America. The wind was sweet and balmy, yet now and
then it had a sharp edge to it as it cut around a curve, as if to
remind one that the frost was not yet all out of the ground, and that
the sun was still only the heir-apparent to the throne and had not yet
been crowned king. It was the sort of day that one has at home a little
later, when one still likes the feel of the fur around the neck, while
the trees are still bare, when the eager spring wind brings a tingle to
the blood and the smell of rich, black earth and early green springing
things to the nostrils; when the eye is ravished with the sight of
purple hyacinths thrusting their royal chalices up through the
reluctant soil; when the sun-colored jonquil and the star-eyed
narcissus lift their scented heads above the sombre ground, as if
unconscious of the patches of snow here and there, forming one of the
contradictions of life, but a contradiction always welcome, because it
is in itself a promise of better things to come.

Not in the full fruition of a rose-laden June or in the golden days of
Indian summer or the ruddy autumn or the white holiness of
Christmas-tide—not in the beauties of the whole year is there anything
so exhilarating, so thrilling, so intoxicating as these first days of
spring, which always come with a delicious shock of surprise, before
one suspects their approach or has time to grow weary with waiting.
Nothing, nothing in the world smells like a spring wind! It is full of
youth and promise and inspiration. One forgets all the falseness of its
promises last year, all the disappointment of the past summer, and,
charged with its bewildering electricity, one builds a thousand
air-castles as to what _this_ year will bring forth, based on no surer
a foundation than the smell of melting snow and fresh black earth and
yellow and purple spring flowers which are blown across one’s
ever-hopeful soul by a breath of eager, tingling spring wind.

I shall never forget that first drive in Rome on such a day as this,
which brought my own beloved country so forcibly to my mind. There were
rumors of war in the air, and my heart was heavy for my country, but I
forgot all my forebodings as we drew up before the majestic steps of
St. Peter’s, for I felt that something would happen to avert disaster
from our shores and keep my country safe and victorious.

St. Peter’s had a curious effect upon me. It was too big and too
secular and too boastful for a church, too poor in art treasures for a
successful museum, the music too inadequate to suit me with the echoes
of the Tzar’s choir still ringing in my ears, and the lack of pomp
compared to the Greek churches left me with a longing to hunt up more
gold lace and purple velvet. There was nothing like the devoutness of
the Russians in the worshippers I saw in Rome. I stood a long time by
the statue of the Pope. His toe was nearly kissed off, but every one
carefully wiped off the last kiss before placing his or her own,
thereby convincing me of the universal belief in the microbe theory.
The whole attitude of the Roman mind is different. Here it is a
religious duty. In Russia it is a sacrament.

There were thousands of people in St. Peter’s, many of whom—the
best-dressed and the worst-behaved—were Americans. It seemed very
homelike and intimate to hear my own language spoken again, even if it
were sometimes sadly mutilated. But I remember St. Peter’s that Easter
Sunday chiefly because I had with me a sympathetic companion; one who
knew that St. Peter’s was not a place to talk; one who knew enough to
absorb in silence; one, in fact, who understood! Such comprehensive
silence was to my ragged spirit balm and healing.

Beware, oh, beware with whom you travel! One uncongenial person in the
party—one man who sneers at sentiment, one woman whose point of view is
material—can ruin the loveliest journey and dampen one’s heavenliest
enthusiasm.

In order to travel properly, one ought to be in vein. It is as bad to
begin a journey with a companion who gets on one’s nerves as it is to
sit down to a banquet and quarrel through the courses. The effect is
the same. One can digest neither. People seem to select travelling
companions as recklessly as they marry. They generally manage to start
with the wrong one. I often shudder to hear two women at a luncheon
say, “Why not arrange to go to Europe together next year?” And yet I
solace myself with the thought, “Why not? If you considered! your list
of friends for a month, and selected the most desirable, you would
probably make even a worse mistake, for travelling develops hatred more
than any other one thing I know of; so, in addition to spoiling your
journey, you would also lose your friend—or wish you _could_ lose her!”

George Eliot has said that there was no greater strain on friendship
than a dissimilarity of taste in jests. But I am inclined to believe
George Eliot never travelled extensively, else, without disturbing that
statement, she would have added, “or a dissimilarity in point of view
with one’s travelling companion.”

It makes no difference which one’s view is the loftier. It is the
dissimilarity which rasps and grates. Doubtless the material is as much
irritated by the spiritual as the poetic is fretted by the prosaic. It
is worse than to be at a Wagner matinee with a woman who cares only for
Verdi. One wishes to nudge her arm and feel a sympathetic pressure
which means, “Yes, yes, so do I!” It is awful not to be able to nudge!
Speech is seldom imperative, but understanding signals is as necessary
to one’s soul-happiness as air to the lungs. So Greece with one who has
but a Baedeker knowledge of art, or Rome to one who remembers her
history vaguely as something that she “took” at school, is simply
maddening to one who forgets the technicalities of dates and formulas,
and rapturously breathes it in, scarcely knowing whence came the love
or knowledge of it, but realizing that one has at last come into one’s
kingdom.

I was singularly fortunate from time to time in discovering these
kindred, sympathetic spirits. I met one party of three in Egypt, and
found them again in Greece, and crossed to Italy with them. It was a
mother and son and a lovely girl. They will never know, unless they
happen across this page, how much they were to me on the Adriatic, and
what a void they filled in Athens.

I found another such at Capri and Pompeii, and those beautiful days
stand out in my mind more for the company I was in than even the
wonders we went to see. That statement is strong but true. Yet my
various other fellow-travellers who were lacking in the one essential
of soul would never believe it, inasmuch as a person without a soul
cannot miss what she never had, and will not believe what she cannot
comprehend. I met one ill-assorted couple of that kind once. They were
two young women—sisters. One had imagination, soul, fire, poetry, and
all that goes to make up genius; but lacking as she did executive
ability and perseverance, her genius was inarticulate. The impersonal
world would never know her beauties, but her friends were rich in her
acquaintance. Her sister was a walking Baedeker—red cover, gold
letters, and all. She was “doing Europe.” She read her guide-book, she
saw nothing beyond, and the only time that she really blossomed was
when dressing for _table d’hôte_ dinners. I found them at the Grand
Hôtel at Rome—one of the most beautiful and well-kept hotels, and one
admirably adapted to display the tourist who tours on principle.

This gorgeous hotel on Easter week is a sight for gods and men. We
engaged our rooms here while we were on the Nile, two months before,
and reminded them once a week all during that time that we were coming;
otherwise, on account of its extreme popularity in the fashionable
world, they might not have been able to hold them for us. We reached
there late on the Saturday evening before Easter, and dined in our own
apartments. But the next day, and indeed until war broke out and we
fled from Rome, the Grand Hôtel was as delightful as it was possible to
make a gorgeous, luxurious, and fashionable hotel. The palm-room, where
the band plays for afternoon tea, and where one always comes for one’s
coffee, is between the entrance and the grand dining-room, so that on
entering the hotel one comes upon a most beautiful vista of a series of
huge glass doors and lovely green waving palms, with nothing but a
glass roof between one and the blue Italian sky.

Most of the smart Americans go there, and a very beautiful front they
presented. I had not seen any American clothes for a year, but on
Easter Sunday at luncheon I saw the most bewitching array of smart
street-gowns worn by the inimitable American woman, who is as far
beyond the women of every other race on earth in her selection of
clothes and the way she holds up her head and her shoulders back and
walks off in them as grand opera is above a hand-organ. Even the French
woman does not combine the good sense with good taste as the American
does. And there I found these sisters, each lovely in her own way—the
pretty one listening to the raptures of the poetic one with a palpable
sneer which said plainly: “I not only have no part in these vain
imaginings, but I do not think that you yourself believe them. You are
posing for the world, and I am the only one who knows it. Have I not
been with you everywhere, and have I, with my two eyes, which certainly
are as good as yours—have I seen these things you describe?” It was
pathetic, for the muse of the poet soon felt the mire in which it daily
trod. The fire faded from the girl’s eye, her radiance disappeared, her
noble enthusiasms paled, her fantastic and brilliant imagination
dulled, and soon she sat listlessly in our midst, a tired, patient
smile upon her delicate face, while her sister discoursed volubly upon
clothes. Alas, the old fable of the iron pot and the porcelain kettle
drifting down the stream together! At the end of the journey the iron
pot had not even a scratch upon its thick sides, but the porcelain was
broken to pieces. How I longed to take that wounded imagination, that
whimsical wit, under my wing and explore Rome with her! But
circumstances held the two together, and I took instead my guide,
Seraphino Malespina. Seraphino deserves a chapter by himself. His
observations upon human nature were of much more value to me than his
knowledge of Rome, accurate and worthy as that was. He was the best
guide I ever had. I had heard of him, so when we arrived I simply wrote
to him and engaged him by the week. He took us everywhere, never wasted
our money (which is a wonder in a guide), and, while I may forget some
of his dates and statistics, I shall never forget his shrewdness in
understanding human nature. His disquisitions on the ordinary tourist,
and his acute analysis of the two sisters I have described, were so
accurate that I determined then and there that Seraphino was a
philosopher. The interest I took in his narratives pleased him to such
an extent that he was unwearied in searching out interesting material.
I taught him to use the camera, and he photographed us in the Colosseum
and in front of the Arch of Constantine.

He persuaded me to coax the poet away from her sister one day and to
take her with me instead of my companion. I did so, and to this day I
thank my guide for his wisdom, for once out from under the sister’s
depressing influence, that whimsical genius, worthy of being classed
with the most famous of wits, blossomed under my appreciative laughter
like a rose in the sunlight.

We saw, too, the magnificent statue of Garibaldi—a superb thing, which
overlooks the whole city of Rome. We tossed pennies into the fountain
of the Trevi, and drank some of the water, which is a sure sign, if you
wish it at the time you drink, that you will return to Rome.

It was on the day that we went to Tivoli that I heard the first war
news from America which I regarded final. We were on the Nile when the
_Maine_ was blown up, and all through Egypt and Greece news was slow to
travel. When we got to Italy we were dependent upon London for
despatches. I waited until I received my own papers before I knew the
truth. Finally, on our departure for Tivoli, my American mail was
handed to me, and I found what preparations were being made—that my
brother was going! I remember Tivoli as in a haze of war-clouds.
America arming herself for war once more! Some of my family—my very
own—preparing to go! How much do you think I cared for the Emperor
Hadrian and his villa, which was a whole town in itself, and his
waterfalls and his wonderful objects of art?

At any other time how I would have revelled in the idea of his two
theatres, his schools, his libraries, his statues pillaged from my
beautiful Greece, his philosopher’s wall—a huge wall built only for
shade, so that his friends who came to discourse philosophy with him
could walk in its west shadow mornings, and in its east shadow
afternoons; all these things would have driven me wild with enthusiasm.
But on that day I saw instead the Flying Squadron in Hampton Roads,
painted black. I saw the President and his secretaries, with anxious
faces, consulting with their generals; I saw how awful must be the
sacrifice to the country in every way—money, commerce, health, the very
lives of the dear soldiers of _our_ army, who fight from choice, and
not because law compels their enlistment. My companion ridiculed my
anxiety and rallied me on my inattention to Hadrian. Hadrian! What was
Hadrian to me when I thought of the volunteers in America?

Not two days later war was formally declared, and although Rome was yet
practically unexplored, although we had been there only three weeks, we
rushed post-haste to Paris, spent one day gathering up our trunks from
Munroe’s, and left that same night for London.

Once in London, however, we found ourselves blocked. The American Line
steamships had been requisitioned by the government, and were no longer
at our disposal. With changed names they were turned into war vessels,
and few, indeed, were the women who would go aboard them in the near
future. The North German Lloyd promised us the new _Kaiser Friedrich_,
and every place was taken. We went to the Cecil Hotel and waited. Day
after day passed, and the sailing-day was postponed once, then twice. I
was frantic with impatience. The truth was the _Kaiser Friedrich_ was
not quite finished. Evidently it is the same with a ship as with
dress-makers. They promise to finish your gown and send it home for
Thanksgiving, whereas you are in luck if you get it by Christmas.

The only thing that consoled me was being at the Cecil. To be sure, it
was filled with Americans, but I was not avoiding them then. I had
finished my journeyings. I had got my point of view. I was going HOME!

How I wished for poor Bee! What an awful time she had with me at “The
Insular”! (which, of course, is not its real name; but I dare not tell
it, because it is so smart, and I would shock its worshippers). How she
hated our lodgings! Now she will not believe me when I tell her that
the Cecil is as good as an American hotel; that its elevators (lifts)
really move; that its cuisine is as delicious as Paris; that its
service is excellent. Bee is polite but incredulous. To be sure, I tell
her that the hotel is as ugly as _only_ an English architect could make
it; that the blue tiles in the dining-room would make of it a fine
natatorium, if they would only shut the doors and turn in the
water—nothing convinces her that English hotels are not jellied
nightmares. But as for me, I recall the Cecil with feelings of the
liveliest appreciation. I was comfortable there, for the first time in
England. If it had not been for the war I would have been happy.

The hotels in London which the English consider the best I consider the
worst. If an American wishes to be comfortable let him eschew all other
gods and cleave to the Cecil. The Cecil! I wish my cab was turning in
at the entrance this very minute!

Finally the _Kaiser Friedrich_ burst something important in her
interior, and they gave her up and put on the _Trave_. Instantly there
was a maddened rush for the Liverpool steamer. The Cunard office was
besieged. Within two hours after the North German Lloyd bulletined the
_Trave_ every berth was taken on the _Etruria_. I arrived too late, so,
in company with the most of the _Kaiser Friedrich’s_ passengers, I
resigned myself to the _Trave_.

We were eight days at sea, and some of those I remained in my berth. I
was happier there, and yet in spite of private woes I still think of
that delightful captain and that darling stewardess with affection. The
steamship company literally outdid themselves in their efforts to
console their disappointed passengers. They put the town of Southampton
at our disposal, and the _Trave’s_ steady and spinster-like behavior
did the rest.

I held receptions in my state-room every day. The captain called every
morning, and so did the charming wife of the returning German
Ambassador, Mr. Uhl. The girls came down and sat on my steamer-trunk,
and told me of the flirtations going on on deck. And every night that
dear stewardess would come and tuck me in, and turn out the light, and
say, “Good-night, fräulein; I hope you feel to-morrow better.”

When the pilot reached us we were at luncheon, and every man in the
dining-room bolted. American newspapers after eight days of suspense!
One man stood up and read the news aloud. Dewey and the battle of
Manila Bay! We did not applaud. It was too far off and too unreal. But
we women wept.

As we drove through the streets of New York I said to the people who
came to meet me, “For Heaven’s sake, what are all these flags out for?
Is it Washington’s birthday? I have lost count of time!”

My cousin looked at me pityingly.

“My poor child,” she said, “I am glad you have come back to God’s
country, where you can learn something. We have a war on!”

I gave a gasp. That shows how unreal the war seemed to me over there. I
never saw so many flags as I saw in Jersey City and New York. I was
horrified to find Chicago, nay, even my own house, lacking in that
respect.

But I am proud to relate that two hours after my return—directly I had
done kissing Billy, in fact—the largest flag on the whole street was
floating from my study window.

THE END





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