La Belle France Being the First Stop
Except eighty or ninety other things the British Channel was the most
disappointing thing we encountered in our travels. All my reading on
this subject had led me to expect that the Channel would be very choppy
and that we should all be very seasick. Nothing of the sort befell. The
channel may have been suetty but it was not choppy. The steamer that
ferried us over ran as steadily as a clock and everybody felt as fine as
a fiddle.
A friend of mine whom I met six weeks later in Florence had better luck.
He crossed on an occasion when a test was being made of a device for
preventing seasickness. A Frenchman was the inventor and also the
experimenter. This Frenchman had spent valuable years of his life
perfecting his invention. It resembled a hammock swung between uprights.
The supports were to be bolted to the deck of the ship, and when the
Channel began to misbehave the squeamish passenger would climb into the
hammock and fasten himself in; and then, by a system of reciprocating
oscillations, the hammock would counteract the motion of the ship
and the occupant would rest in perfect comfort no matter how high she
pitched or how deep she rolled. At least such was the theory of the
inventor; and to prove it he offered himself as the subject for the
first actual demonstration.
The result was unexpected. The sea was only moderately rough; but that
patent hammock bucked like a kicking bronco. The poor Frenchman was the
only seasick person aboard--but he was sick enough for the whole crowd.
He was seasick with a Gallic abandon; he was seasick both ways from the
jack, and other ways too. He was strapped down so he could not get out,
which added no little to the pleasure of the occasion for everybody
except himself. When the steamer landed the captain of the boat told
the distressed owner that, in his opinion, the device was not suited for
steamer use. He advised him to rent it to a riding academy.
In crossing from Dover to Calais we had thought we should be going
merely from one country to another; we found we had gone from one world
to another. That narrow strip of uneasy water does not separate two
countries--it separates two planets.
Gone were the incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of the
race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs dimly visible
along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity of those people
who manifest emotion only on the occasions when they stand up to sing
their national anthem:
God save the King!
The Queen is doing well!
Gone were the green fields of Sussex, which looked as though they had
been taken in every night and brushed and dry-cleaned and then put down
again in the morning. Gone were the trees that Maxfield Parrish might
have painted, so vivid were they in their burnished green-and-yellow
coloring, so spectacular in their grouping. Gone was the five-franc note
which I had intrusted to a sandwich vender on the railroad platform
in the vain hope that he would come back with the change. After that
clincher there was no doubt about it--we were in La Belle France all
right, all right!
Everything testified to the change. From the pier where we landed, a
small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing;
he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative tug on his line he
set up a shrill clamor. At that there came running a fat, kindly looking
old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came,
who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet
dancer's; and a soldier in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty
others of all ages and sizes came--and they gathered about that small
boy and gave him advice at the top of their voices. And when he yanked
out the shining little silver fish there could not have been more
animation and enthusiasm and excitement if he had landed a full-grown
Presbyterian.
They were still congratulating him when we pulled out and went tearing
along on our way to Paris, scooting through quaint, stone-walled cities,
each one dominated by its crumbly old cathedral; sliding through open
country where the fields were all diked and ditched with small canals
and bordered with poplars trimmed so that each tree looked like a set of
undertaker's whiskers pointing the wrong way.
And in these fields were peasants in sabots at work, looking as
though they had just stepped out of one of Millet's pictures. Even the
haystacks and the scarecrows were different. In England the haystacks
had been geometrically correct in their dimensions--so square and firm
and exact that sections might be sliced off them like cheese, and doors
and windows might be carved in them; but these French haystacks were
devil-may-care haystacks wearing tufts on their polls like headdresses.
The windmills had a rakish air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens
were debonair and cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the
better to enjoy the view and fluttering their ragged vestments in a most
jaunty fashion. The land though looked poor--it had a driven, overworked
look to it.
Presently, above the clacking voice of our train, we heard a whining
roar without; and peering forth we beheld almost over our heads a big
monoplane racing with us. It seemed a mighty, winged Thunder Lizard that
had come back to link the Age of Stone with the Age of Air. On second
thought I am inclined to believe the Thunder Lizard did not flourish in
the Stone Age; but if you like the simile as much as I like it we will
just let it stand.
Three times on that trip we saw from the windows of our train aviators
out enjoying the cool of the evening in their airships; and each time
the natives among the passengers jammed into the passageway that flanked
the compartments and speculated regarding the identity of the aviators
and the make of their machines, and argued and shrugged their shoulders
and quarreled and gesticulated. The whole thing was as Frenchy as tripe
in a casserole.
I was wrong, though, a minute ago when I said there remained nothing to
remind us of the right little, tight little island we had just quit; for
we had two Englishmen in our compartment--fit and proper representatives
of a certain breed of Englishman. They were tall and lean, and had the
languid eyes and the long, weary faces and the yellow buck teeth of
weary cart-horses, and they each wore a fixed expression of intense
gloom. You felt sure it was a fixed expression because any person with
such an expression would change it if he could do so by anything short
of a surgical operation. And it was quite evident they had come mentally
prepared to disapprove of all things and all people in a foreign clime.
Silently, but none the less forcibly, they resented the circumstance
that others should be sharing the same compartment with them--or sharing
the same train, either, for that matter. The compartment was full, too,
which made the situation all the more intolerable: an elderly English
lady with a placid face under a mid-Victorian bonnet; a young, pretty
woman who was either English or American; the two members of my party,
and these two Englishmen.
And when, just as the train was drawing out of Calais, they discovered
that the best two seats, which they had promptly preempted, belonged
to others, and that the seats for which they held reservations
faced rearward, so that they must ride with their backs to the
locomotive--why, that irked them sore and more. I imagine they wrote a
letter to the London Times about it afterward.
As is the pleasing habit of traveling Englishmen, they had brought with
them everything portable they owned. Each one had four or five large
handbags, and a carryall, and a hat box, and his tea-caddy, and his
plaid blanket done up in a shawlstrap, and his framed picture of the
Death of Nelson--and all the rest of it; and they piled those things in
the luggage racks until both the racks were chock-full; so the rest of
us had to hold our baggage in our laps or sit on it. One of them was
facing me not more than five or six feet distant. He never saw me
though. He just gazed steadily through me, studying the pattern of the
upholstery on the seat behind me; and I could tell by his look that he
did not care for the upholstering--as very naturally he would not, it
being French.
We had traveled together thus for some hours when one of them began to
cloud up for a sneeze. He tried to sidetrack it, but it would not be
sidetracked. The rest of us, looking on, seemed to hear that sneeze
coming from a long way off. It reminded me of a musical-sketch team
giving an imitation of a brass band marching down Main Street playing
the Turkish Patrol--dim and faint at first, you know, and then growing
louder and stronger, and gathering volume until it bursts right in your
face.
Fascinated, we watched his struggles. Would he master it or would it
master him? But he lost, and it was probably a good thing he did. If he
had swallowed that sneeze it would have drowned him. His nose jibed and
went about; his head tilted back farther and farther; his countenance
expressed deep agony, and then the log jam at the bend in his nose went
out with a roar and he let loose the moistest, loudest kerswoosh! that
ever was, I reckon.
He sneezed eight times. The first sneeze unbuttoned his waistcoat, the
second unparted his hair, and the third one almost pulled his shoes off;
and after that they grew really violent, until the last sneeze shifted
his cargo and left him with a list to port and his lee scuppers awash.
It made a ruin of him--the Prophet Isaiah could not have remained
dignified wrestling with a sneezing bee of those dimensions--but oh, how
it did gladden the rest of us to behold him at the mercy of the elements
and to note what a sodden, waterlogged wreck they made of him!
It was not long after that before we had another streak of luck.
The train jolted over something and a hat fell down from the topmost
pinnacle of the mountain of luggage above and hit his friend on the
nose. We should have felt better satisfied if it had been a coal
scuttle; but it was a reasonably hard and heavy hat and it hit him brim
first on the tenderest part of his nose and made his eyes water, and we
were grateful enough for small blessings. One should not expect too much
of an already overworked Providence.
The rest of us were still warm and happy in our souls when, without any
whistle-tooting or bell-clanging or station-calling, we slid silently,
almost surreptitiously, into the Gare du Nord, at Paris. Neither in
England nor on the mainland does anyone feel called on to notify you
that you have reached your destination.
It is like the old formula for determining the sex of a pigeon--you give
the suspected bird some corn, and if he eats it he is a he; but if she
eats it she is a she. In Europe if it is your destination you get off,
and if it is not your destination you stay on. On this occasion we
stayed on, feeling rather forlorn and helpless, until we saw that
everyone else had piled off. We gathered up our belongings and piled off
too.
By that time all the available porters had been engaged; so we took up
our luggage and walked. We walked the length of the trainshed--and then
we stepped right into the recreation hall of the State Hospital for the
Criminal Insane, at Matteawan, New York. I knew the place instantly,
though the decorations had been changed since I was there last. It was
a joy to come on a home institution so far from home--joysome, but a
trifle disconcerting too, because all the keepers had died or gone on
strike or something; and the lunatics, some of them being in uniform
and some in civilian dress, were leaping from crag to crag, uttering
maniacal shrieks.
Divers lunatics, who had been away and were just getting back, and
sundry lunatics who were fixing to go away and apparently did not expect
ever to get back, were dashing headlong into the arms of still other
lunatics, kissing and hugging them, and exchanging farewells and
sacre-bleuing with them in the maddest fashion imaginable. From time to
time I laid violent hands on a flying, flitting maniac and detained him
against his will, and asked him for some directions; but the persons to
whom I spoke could not understand me, and when they answered I could not
understand them; so we did not make much headway by that. I could not
get out of that asylum until I had surrendered the covers of our ticket
books and claimed our baggage and put it through the customs office. I
knew that; the trouble was I could not find the place for attending to
these details. On a chance I tried a door, but it was distinctly the
wrong place; and an elderly female on duty there got me out by employing
the universal language known of all peoples. She shook her skirts at me
and said Shoo! So I got out, still toting five or six bags and bundles
of assorted sizes and shapes, and tried all the other doors in sight.
Finally, by a process of elimination and deduction, I arrived at the
right one. To make it harder for me they had put it around a corner
in an elbow-shaped wing of the building and had taken the sign off the
door. This place was full of porters and loud cries. To be on the safe
side I tendered retaining fees to three of the porters; and thus by
the time I had satisfied the customs officials that I had no imported
spirits or playing cards or tobacco or soap, or other contraband goods,
and had cleared our baggage and started for the cabstand, we amounted
to quite a stately procession and attracted no little attention as we
passed along. But the tips I had to hand out before the taxi started
would stagger the human imagination if I told you the sum total.
There are few finer things than to go into Paris for the first time on a
warm, bright Saturday night. At this moment I can think of but one finer
thing--and that is when, wearied of being short-changed and bilked and
double-charged, and held up for tips or tribute at every step, you are
leaving Paris on a Saturday night--or, in fact, any night.
Those first impressions of the life on the boulevards are going to stay
in my memory a long, long time--the people, paired off at the tables
of the sidewalk cafes, drinking drinks of all colors; a little shopgirl
wearing her new, cheap, fetching hat in such a way as to center public
attention on her head and divert it from her feet, which were shabby;
two small errand boys in white aprons, standing right in the middle of
the whirling, swirling traffic, in imminent peril of their lives, while
one lighted his cigarette butt from the cigarette butt of his friend; a
handful of roistering soldiers, singing as they swept six abreast
along the wide, rutty sidewalk; the kiosks for advertising, all thickly
plastered over with posters, half of which should have been in an art
gallery and the other half in a garbage barrel; a well-dressed pair,
kissing in the full glare of a street light; an imitation art student,
got up to look like an Apache, and--no doubt--plenty of real Apaches
got up to look like human beings; a silk-hatted gentleman, stopping
with perfect courtesy to help a bloused workman lift a baby-laden
baby carriage over an awkward spot in the curbing, and the workingman
returning thanks with the same perfect courtesy; our own driver,
careening along in a manner suggestive of what certain East Side friends
of mine would call the Chariot Race from Ben Hirsch; and a stout lady of
the middle class sitting under a cafe awning caressing her pet mole.
To the Belgian belongs the credit of domesticating the formerly
ferocious Belgian hare, and the East Indian fakir makes a friend and
companion of the king cobra; but it remained for those ingenious people,
the Parisians, to tame the mole, which other races have always regarded
as unbeautiful and unornamental, and make a cunning little companion of
it and spend hours stroking its fleece. This particular mole belonging
to the stout middle-aged lady in question was one of the largest moles
and one of the curliest I ever saw. It was on the side of her nose.
You see a good deal of mole culture going on here. Later, with the
reader's permission, we shall return to Paris and look its inhabitants
over at more length; but for the time being I think it well for us to be
on our travels. In passing I would merely state that on leaving a Paris
hotel you will tip everybody on the premises.
Oh, yes--but you will!
Let us move southward. Let us go to Sunny Italy, which is called Sunny
Italy for the same reason that the laughing hyena is called the laughing
hyena--not because he laughs so frequently, but because he laughs so
seldom. Let us go to Rome, the Eternal City, sitting on her Seven Hills,
remembering as we go along that the currency has changed and we no
longer compute sums of money in the franc but in the lira. I regret the
latter word is not pronounced as spelled--it would give me a chance to
say that the common coin of Italy is a lira, and that nearly everybody
in Rome is one also.