_Personal and Practical._
I HAVE alluded to the intense blaze of the sun upon the day of our
tryst with the newly-arrived travelers. Until then we had not suffered
from heat in Switzerland. Our _pension_ was a stone building, with
spacious, high-ceiled rooms, in which the breeze from lake and icy
mountains was ever astir, and we were rarely abroad excepting at
morning and evening.
On our way home the next afternoon, after a delightful sail to Fluelen
and back, and a visit to Altorf, we met Boy and nurse at the gate of
the public park where he and I went daily for the “milk-cure.” Three
or four cows and twice as many goats were driven into the enclosure at
five o’clock and tethered at the door of a rustic pavilion. There they
were milked, and invalids and children drank the liquid warm from great
tumblers like beer-glasses. Goats’ milk had been prescribed for me, and
I could endure the taste when it was fresh. When cold, the flavor was
peculiar and unpleasant. Boy usually relished his deep draught of cows’
milk, but to-day he would not touch it. He had a grievance, too, that
had tried temper and pride.
“Things bother me so, mamma! The people here are so foolish! A woman
had some fruit to sell down there by the Schweizerhof and said a long
nonsense to me. I said—‘_Non capisco Tedeseo!_’ and everybody laughed.
It’s good Italian, and means—‘I don’t understand a word of your horrid
old Dutch!’”
He began to sob. Papa picked him up and carried him to our carriage.
When we were in our rooms, the Invaluable had her story to tell. Boy
had taken a long walk with his sister in the forenoon and had come
home complaining of headache and violent nausea. Seeming better toward
evening, he had insisted upon going for his milk, and she had hoped the
cooler air would refresh him.
“I want to go back where people have sense and can understand me!”
moaned the little fellow. “I’m not a bit sick! I’m _discouraged_!”
The fever ran high all night. The following day we summoned Dr.
Steiger, the best physician in Lucerne. There are few better anywhere.
For the next fortnight—the saddest of our exile—his visits were the
brightest gleams in the chamber shadowed by such wild fears as we
hardly dared avow to one another. Cheerful, intelligent, kindly, the
doctor would have been welcome had his treatment of our stricken child
been less manifestly skillful.
“He is a sick boy. But you are brave?” looking around at us from his
seat at the pillow of the delirious patient. “I will tell you the
truth. He has had a _coup de soleil_. He is likely to have a long
fever. It is not typhoid yet, but it may be, by and by. Strangers
unused to the sun in Switzerland are often seriously affected by it.
When he gets well, you will be careful of him for one, two, three
years. Now—we will do our best for him. I have four boys of my own.
And—”a quick glance at me—“I know what is the mother’s heart!”
I would not review, even in thought, the three weeks succeeding this
decision, were it not that I cannot bring myself to withhold the
tribute of grateful hearts—then so heavy! to the abundant goodness
of the stranger-physician whose name we had never heard until our
boy’s illness, and to the sympathy and active kindness that were
our portion from every boarder in a house filled with English and
Americans. Jellies, ices, fruit, flowers, toys, were handed in at Boy’s
door, with tender inquiries, from hour to hour, as to his condition.
Music-loving girls who had scarcely left the piano silent for fifteen
minutes during the day and evening, now closed it lest the sufferer
should be disturbed by the sound, his chamber being directly over the
_salon_. Every foot trod softly upon the polished floor of the upper
hall and the stairs, and offers of personal service were as earnest and
frequent as if we had dwelt among our own people. I write it down with
a swelling heart that presses the tears to my eyes. For Heaven knows
how sore was our need of friendly offices and Good Samaritans at that
juncture! The house was handsome, well-furnished and kept beautifully
clean. Well people fared comfortably enough. But, for sickness we
found, as we had everywhere else—notably at Cadenabbia—no provision
whatever, and with regard to dietetic cookery, depths of ignorance that
confounded us.
I could not for money—much less for love or pity’s sake—get a cup of
gruel or beef-tea made in the kitchen. When Boy was convalescent and
his life depended upon the judicious administration of nourishment, I
tried to have some oatmeal porridge cooked, according to directions,
below stairs, paying well for the privilege. There were two pounds of
oatmeal in the package. I ordered half-a-cupful to be boiled a long
time in a given quantity of water, stirred up often from the bottom and
slightly salted. The cook—a professed _cordon bleu_—cooked it all at
once and sent it up in a prodigious tureen,—a gallon of soft, grayish
paste, seasoned with pepper, salt, lemon-peel and chopped garlic!
I did give the landlady credit for an inexplicable fit of motherly
kindness when, at length, fish and birds, nicely broiled, came up,
every day or two, to brighten the pale little face laid against the
cushions of his lounge; thanked her for them heartily and with emotion.
“It is not’ing!” she said, beaming (as when was she not?) “I only wis’
to know dat de beautiful child ees better. I t’ought he could taste de
feesh.”
I was grateful and unsuspicious for a week, recanting, repentantly,
the hard things I had said of continental human nature, and admitting
Madame to the honorable list of exceptions, headed—far above hers—by
Dr. Steiger’s name. Then, chancing to come down-stairs one day, shod
with the “shoes of silence” I wore in the sick-room, I trod upon the
heels of a handsome young Englishman, almost a stranger to me, who
was spending the honeymoon with his bride in Switzerland. He had been
three weeks in this house, and we had not exchanged ten sentences with
him or his wife. He stood now in the hall, his back toward me, in
close conference with Madame, our hostess. He was in sporting-costume,
fishing-rod on shoulder. Madame held a fine fish, just caught, and was
receiving his instructions delivered in excellent French:
“You will see that it is broiled—with care—you know, and sent, as you
have done the others, to the little sick boy in No. 10. And this is for
the cook!”
There was the chink of coin. The cook! whom I had feed generously and
regularly for preparing the game and fish so acceptable to my child!
I stepped forward. “It is you, then, Mr. N——, whom I should thank!”
with a two-edged glance that meant confusion to Madame, acknowledgment
and apology to the real benefactor.
The young Briton blushed as if detected in a crime. Madame smiled,
without blushing, and bustled off to the kitchen.
Happily, Americans are not without “contrivances” even on the
Continent. A summary of ours while the fever-patient needed delicate
food such as American nurses and mothers love to prepare, may be useful
to other wayfarers on the “road to Jericho.” We carried our spirit-lamp
and kettle with us everywhere. Besides these, I bought a small tin
saucepan with a cover and a tin plate; made a gridiron of a piece of
stout wire, and set up a hospital kitchen in one of our rooms at an
open window that took smoke and odor out of the way. Here, for a month,
we made beef-tea, broiled birds and steak and chops—the meat bought
by ourselves in the town; cooked omelettes, gruel, arrowroot jelly,
custards, and boiled the water for our “afternoon tea.” Cream-toast
was another culinary success, but the bread was toasted down-stairs by
the Invaluable when she could get—as she phrased it—“a chance at the
kitchen-fire.” Cream and butter were heated in the covered tin-cup over
our lamp.
For fifteen days, the fever ran without intermission, sometimes so
fiercely that the brain raged into frenzied wanderings; for three
weeks, our Swiss doctor came morning, afternoon or evening—sometimes
all three; for a month, our boy was a prisoner to his own room, and
we attended upon his convalescence before daring to strike camp and
move northward into Germany. And all in consequence of that long walk,
without shade of trees or umbrella, under the treacherous Swiss sun! We
had had our lesson. I pass it on to those who may be willing to profit
thereby.
But for this unfortunate break in our plans we would have had a happy
month in Lucerne. We could not stir out of doors without meeting
friends from over the sea, and, every day, cards, inscribed with
familiar names, were brought in to us. All the American traveling-world
goes to the Swiss lakes and crosses the Passes in the short summer.
Lucerne is picturesque in itself and environs. The lake ranks next to
Como in beauty; the drives and walks in and about it are attractive in
scenery and associations. Of the healthfulness of those portions of the
town lying along the quay we had grave doubts. The cellars are flooded
after every heavy rain, and copious rains are a feature of the climate.
Our morning walk for our letters lay past one of the largest hotels,
patronized extensively by English and Americans. A rainy night or day
was sure to be followed by an opening of the rear basement windows,
and a pumping into the gutter of hogsheads of muddy water. The rapid
evaporation of the surplus moisture under the mid-day heats must have
filled the atmosphere with noxious exhalations.
The evening-scene on the quay was brilliant. Hundreds of strollers
thronged the broad walks beneath the trees; the great fountain threw
a column of spray fifty feet into the air. A fine band played until
ten o’clock before the Hôtel National; pleasure-boats shot to and fro
upon the water; the lamps of the long bridge sparkled—a double row—in
the glassy depths. Upon certain evenings, the Lion held levees, being
illuminated by colored lights thrown upon the massive limbs that seemed
to quiver under their play, and upon the roll of honor of those who
died for their queen and for their oath’s sake.
Lucerne is very German in tongue and character—a marked and unpleasant
change to those who enter Switzerland from the Italian side. Ears used
to the flowing numbers of the most musical language spoken by man, are
positively pained by the harsh jargon that responds to his effort to
make himself intelligible. The English and French of the shopkeepers
and waiters, being filtered through the same foul medium, is equally
detestable. Our friend, Dr. Steiger, spoke all three languages well
and with a scholarly intelligence that made his English a model
of conciseness and perspicuity. Our experiences and difficulties
with other of the native residents would make a long chapter of
cross-purposes.
Three times a week the fruit-market is held in the arcades of the old
town. One reaches them by crooked streets and flights of stone steps,
beginning in obscure corners and zigzagging down to the green Reuss,
swirling under its bridges and foaming past the light-house tower to
its confluence with the Lake. The summer fruits were, to our ideas, an
incongruous array. Strawberries—the small, dark-red “Alpine,” conical
in shape, spicily sweet in flavor; raspberries, white, scarlet and
yellow; green and purple figs; nectarines; plums in great variety and
abundance; apples, peaches and pears; English medlars and gooseberries;
Italian _nespoli_ and early grapes were a tempting variety. We had
begun to eat strawberries in April in Rome. We had them on our
dessert-table in Geneva in November.
The second time I went to the fruit-market, I took Prima as
interpreter. The peasant-hucksters were obtuse to the pantomime I had
practised successfully with the Italians. The shine of coin in the
left palm while the right hand designated fruit and weight—everything
being sold from the scales—elicited only a stolid stare and gruff
“_Nein_,” the intonation of which was the acme of dull indifference.
Thick of tongue and slow of wit, they cared as little for what we
said as for what we were. Intelligence and curiosity may not always
go hand-in-hand, but where both are absent, what the Yankees call “a
trade,” is a disheartening enterprise. Having at my side a young
lady who “knew” German, I advanced boldly into the aisle between the
stalls of the sellers, and said—“Ask this woman the price of those
gooseberries.” Big, red and hairy as Esau, they were a lure to American
eyes and palates. Prima put the question with a glibness truly pleasing
to the maternal heart, however the gutturals might grate upon the ear.
The vender’s countenance did not light up, but she answered readily, if
monotonously. Prima stared at her, disconcerted.
“What does she say? That is not German!”
Italian and French were tried. The woman gazed heavily at the
Wasserthurm, the quaint tower rising from the middle of the river near
the covered bridge of the Capelbrücke, and remained as unmoved as that
antique land-mark.
“This has ceased to be amusing!” struck in Caput, imperatively, and
turning about, made proclamation in the market-place—“Is there nobody
here who can _speak English_?”
A little man peeped from a door behind the stall. “I can!”
The two monosyllables were the “Open Sesame” to the fruity wealth that
had been Tantalus apples and a Barmecide banquet and whatever else
typifies unfulfilled desire to us, up to the moment of his appearing.
“How odd that the woman should understand me when I did not comprehend
a word _she_ said!” meditated our discomfited interpreter, aloud.
The enigma was solved at lunch, where the story was told and the
ridiculous element made the most of. A pretty little Russian lady
was my _vis-à-vis_. The Russians we met abroad were, almost without
exception, accomplished linguists. They are compelled they say,
jestingly, to learn the tongues of other peoples, since few have the
courage and patience to master theirs. My neighbor’s English caused us
to fall in love with our own language. Her speech with her children was
in French, and she conversed with German gentlemen at the table with
equal facility.
“Your daughter is quite correct in her description of the Lucerne
dialect,” she said, rounding each syllable with slow grace that was
not punctiliousness. “It is a vile mongrel of which the inhabitants
may well be ashamed. I have much difficulty in comprehending their
simplest phrases, and I lived in Germany five years. The Germans would
disown the _patois_. It is a provincial composite. The better classes
understand, but will not speak it.”
I take occasion to say here, having enumerated the summer-delicacies
offered for sale in the Lucerne market, that those of our countrypeople
who visit Europe with the hope of feasting upon such products of
orchard and garden as they leave behind them, are doomed to sore
disappointment. Years ago, I heard Dr. E. D. G. Prime of the “_New York
Observer_,” in his delightful lecture, “All Around the World,” assert
that “the finest fruit-market upon the globe is New York City.” We
smiled incredulously, thinking of East Indian pine-apples and mangoes,
Seville oranges and Smyrna grapes. We came home from our briefer
pilgrimage, wiser, and thankfully content. We murmured, not marveled
at the pitiful display of open-air fruit in England, remembering the
Frenchman’s declaration that _baked_ apples were the only ripe fruit
he had tasted in that cloudy isle. Plums and apricots there are of
fair quality, the trees being trained upon sunny walls, but the prices
of these are moderate only by contrast with those demanded for other
things. Peaches are sixpence—(twelve-and-a-half cents) _each_. Grapes
are reared almost entirely in hot-houses, and sell in Covent Garden
market at two and three dollars a pound. Pears, comparable to the
Bartlett, Seckel or Flemish Beauty are nowhere to be had, and, in the
same celebrated market of fruit and flowers, “American apples” were
pressed upon us as the finest, and, therefore, costliest of their
kind. Gooseberries are plentiful and quite cheap, as are cherries
and currants. Pine-apples in England—“pines”—bring a guinea or a
half-guinea apiece, being also, hot-house products.
“Do the poor eat no fruit?” I asked our Leamington fruiterer, an
intelligent man whose wares were choice and varied—for that latitude.
“They are permitted to pick blackberries and sloes in the edges. Of
course, pines and peaches are forbidden luxuries to people in their
station.”
He might have added—“And plums at two cents, apricots at four, pears at
five cents apiece, and strawberries”—charged against us by our landlady
at half-a-dollar per quart in the height of the season. Tomatoes ranged
from six to twelve cents _apiece_! asparagus was scarce and frightfully
dear; green peas, as a spring luxury, were likewise intended for rich
men’s tables. For Indian corn, sweet potatoes, egg-plants, Lima and
string-beans, summer squash and salsify we inquired in vain. Nor had
any English people to whom we named these ever seen them in their
country. Many had never so much as heard that such things were, and
asked superciliously—“And are they really tolerable—eatable, you know?”
Our English boarders in Lucerne smiled, indulgent of our national
peculiarities,—but very broadly—at seeing us one day at the
_pension_-table, eat raw tomatoes as salad, with oil, vinegar, pepper
and salt. They were set in the centre of the board as a part of the
dessert, but our instructions to the waiters broke up the order of
their serving. Madame and daughters confessed, afterward, that they
were not certain where they belonged, but had heard that Americans
liked tomatoes, and so procured them.
Matters mended, in these respects, as we moved southward. When the
weather is too hot, and the climate too unwholesome for foreigners
to tarry in Southern France and Italy, the natives revel in berries,
peaches and melons. We ate delicious grapes in Florence as late as
the first of December, and a few in Rome. By New Year’s Day, not a
bunch of fresh ones was exhibited in shops, at this time, filled with
sour oranges, sweet, aromatic _mandarini_, mediocre apples and drying
_nespoli_ and medlars. The _nespoli_, let me remark, is a hybrid
between the date and plum, with an added cross of the persimmon.
Indeed, it resembles this last in color and shape, also, in the
acerbity that mingles with the acid of the unripe fruit. When fully
matured they are very good, when partially dried, not unlike dates in
appearance and flavor. Medlars are popular in England, and in request
in Paris. To us, they were from first to last, disagreeable. To be
candid, the taste and texture of the pulp were precisely those of
rotten apples. We thought them decayed, until told that they were only
fully ripe. In these circumstances how tantalizing were reminiscences
of Newtown and Albemarle pippins, of Northern Spy and Seek-no-further!
We could have sat us down on the pavement of the Piazza di Spagna,
and, hidden by mountains of intolerably tart oranges, plained as did
the mixed multitude at Taberah, that our souls were dried away in
remembering the winter luxuries of which we did eat freely in our own
land; the Catawba, Isabella and Diana grapes, close packed in purple
layers in neat boxes for family use, late pears and all-the-year-round
sweet oranges; plump, paly-green Malaga and amethyst Lisbon grapes,
retailed at thirty and twenty-five cents per pound. Were we not now
upon the same side of the ocean with Lisbon and Malaga? It was nearly
impossible to credit the scarcity of these sun bright lands in what we
had so long received and enjoyed as everyday mercies to people of very
moderate means.
As to bananas, we did not see a dozen in two years. I did not taste one
in all that time. Desiccated tomatoes and mushrooms are sold in Italian
cities by the string. Canned vegetables are an American “notion.”
Brown, in the Via della Croce in Rome, had fresh oysters—American—for
eighty cents a can. As the daintiest canned peas and the useful
_champignons_ are imported by United States grocers direct from
France, it was odd that we could not have them, for the asking, in
Switzerland and Italy. Esculents for salad grow there out of doors all
winter, including several varieties not cultivated with us. Potatoes,
spinach, rice, celery,—cooked and raw—onions, cabbage, cauliflower,
macaroni, a root known as “dog-fennel,” and,—leading them all in
the frequency of its appearing, but not, to most people’s taste, in
excellence,—artichokes—are the vegetable bill-of-fare. If there are
eight courses at dinner, the probability is that but two of them will
be vegetables. An eight-course dinner on the Continent may be a very
plain affair, important as it sounds, and the diner-out be hardly able
to satisfy a healthy appetite ‘though he partake of each dish. Soup is
the first course;—sometimes, nourishing and palatable,—as often, thin
and poor. Fish succeeds. If it be salmon, whitebait, whitings, soles or
fresh sardines, it is usually good. But, beyond Paris, we were rarely
served on the Continent with any of these, except the last-named, that
could be truthfully called, “fresh.” The sardines of Naples and Venice,
just from the water, are simply delicious.
Meat comes next—a substantial dish, and an _entrée_ of some sort. These
are separated by a course consisting of a single vegetable, potatoes
or stewed celery or macaroni _au gratin_, or, perhaps, cauliflower with
_sauce tartare_. Another vegetable precedes the first meat-course.
Salad follows the second. Then, we have pastry or some other sweet,
and dessert, meaning fruit, nuts and _bon-bons_. Finally, coffee. The
dinner is _à la Russe_, no dishes being set upon the table, excepting
the dessert. The carving is done in another room and the guests are not
tempted to gluttony by the amount served to each.
“If they would only give me a potato with my boiled fish!” lamented
an American to me, once. “Or serve the green peas with the lamb!
And mutton-chops and tomato-sauce are as naturally conjoined in the
educated mind as the English _q_ and _u_!”
On the Continent the exception to the rule he objurgated is the serving
of chicken and salad—lettuce, endive or chervil,—together upon a _hot_
plate. The vinegar and oil cool the chicken. The heated plate wilts
and toughens the salad. Common sense might have foretold the result.
But chicken-and-salad continue to hold their rank in the culinary
succession, and are eaten without protest by those who are loudest in
ridicule and condemnation of transatlantic solecisms.