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