Thence On and On to Verbotenland
Ah, Rome--the Roma of the Ancients--the Mistress of the Olden World--the
Sacred City! Ah, Rome, if only your stones could speak! It is customary
for the tourist, taking his cue from the guidebooks, to carry on like
this, forgetting in his enthusiasm that, even if they did speak, they
would doubtless speak Italian, which would leave him practically where
he was before. And so, having said it myself according to formula, I
shall proceed to state the actual facts:
If, coming forth from a huge and dirty terminal, you emerge on a
splendid plaza, miserably paved, and see a priest, a soldier and a
beggar; a beautiful child wearing nothing at all to speak of, and a
hideous old woman with the eyes of a Madonna looking out of a tragic
mask of a face; a magnificent fountain, and nobody using the water, and
a great, overpowering smell--yes, you can see a Roman smell; a cart
mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten
cents' worth on him; a palace like a dream of stone, entirely surrounded
by nightmare hovels; a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and
shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the
playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted
laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church
that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold
and gems and porphyry and onyx within; a wide and handsome avenue
starting from one festering stew of slums and ending in another
festering stew of slums; a grimed and broken archway opening on a lovely
hidden courtyard where trees are green and flowers bloom, and in the
center there stands a statue which is worth its weight in minted silver
and which carries more than its weight in dirt--if in addition everybody
in sight is smiling and good-natured and happy, and is trying to sell
you something or wheedle you out of something, or pick your pocket of
something--you need not, for confirmatory evidence, seek the vast dome
of St. Peter's rising yonder in the distance, or the green tops of the
cedars and the dusky clumps of olive groves on the hillsides beyond--you
know you are in Rome.
To get the correct likeness of Naples we merely reduce the priests by
one-half and increase the beggars by two-thirds; we richen the color
masses, thicken the dirt, raise the smells to the Nth degree, and set
half the populace to singing. We establish in every second doorway a
mother with her offspring tucked between her knees and forcibly held
there while the mother searches the child's head for a flea; anyhow, it
is more charitable to say it is a flea; and we add a special touch of
gorgeousness to the street pictures.
For here a cart is a glory of red tires and blue shafts, and green hubs
and pink body and purple tailgate, with a canopy on it that would have
suited Sheba's Queen; and the mule that draws the cart is caparisoned in
brass and plumage like a circus pony; and the driver wears a broad red
sash, part of a shirt, and half of a pair of pants--usually the front
half. With an outfit such as that, you feel he should be peddling aurora
borealises, or, at the very least, rainbows. It is a distinct shock to
find he has only chianti or cheeses or garbage in stock.
In Naples, also, there is, even in the most prosaic thing, a sight to
gladden your eye if you but hold your nose while you look on it. On the
stalls of the truckvenders the cauliflowers and the cabbages are racked
up with an artistic effect we could scarcely equal if we had roses and
orchids to work with; the fishmonger's cart is a study in still life,
and the tripe is what artists call a harmonious interior.
Nearly all the hotels in Italy are converted palaces. They may have
been successes as palaces, but, with their marble floors and their
high ceilings, and their dank, dark corridors, they distinctly fail to
qualify as hotels. I should have preferred them remaining unsaved and
sinful. I likewise observed a peculiarity common to hotelkeepers in
Italy--they all look like cats. The proprietor of the converted palace
where we stopped in Naples was the very image of a tomcat we used to
own, named Plutarch's Lives, which was half Maltese and half Mormon.
He was a cat that had a fine carrying voice--though better adapted for
concert work than parlor singing--and a sweetheart in every port. This
hotelkeeper might have been the cat's own brother with clothes on--he
had Plute's roving eye and his bristling whiskers and his sharp white
teeth, and Plute's silent, stealthy tread, and his way of purring softly
until he had won your confidence and then sticking his claw into you.
The only difference was, he stuck you with a bill instead of a claw.
Another interesting idiosyncrasy of the Italian hotelkeeper is that he
invariably swears to you his town is the only honest town in Italy, but
begs you to beware of the next town which, he assures you with his hand
on the place where his heart would be if he had a heart, is full of
thieves and liars and counterfeit money and pickpockets. Half of what he
tells you is true--the latter half.
The tourist agencies issue pamphlets telling how you may send money or
jewelry by registered mail in Italy, and then append a footnote warning
you against sending money or jewelry by registered mail in Italy.
Likewise you are constantly being advised against carrying articles
of value in your trunk, unless it is most carefully locked, bolted and
strapped. It is good advice too.
An American I met on the boat coming home told me he failed to take such
precautions while traveling in Italy; and he said that when he reached
the Swiss border his trunk was so light he had to sit on it to keep it
from blowing off the bus on the way from the station to the hotel, and
so empty that when he opened it at both ends the draft whistling through
it gave him a bad cold. However, he may have exaggerated slightly.
If you can forget that you are paying first-class prices for fourth-rate
accommodations--forget the dirt in the carriages and the smells in the
compartments--a railroad journey through the Italian Peninsula is a
wonderful experience. I know it was a wonderful experience for me.
I shall not forget the old walled towns of stone perched precariously on
the sloping withers of razorbacked mountains--towns that were old when
the Saviour was born; or the ancient Roman aqueducts, all pocked and
pecked with age, looping their arches across the land for miles on
miles; or the fields, scored and scarified by three thousand years of
unremitting, relentless, everlasting agriculture; or the wide-horned
Italian cattle that browsed in those fields; or yet the woman who darted
to the door of every signal-house we passed and came to attention, with
a long cudgel held flat against her shoulder like a sentry's musket.
I do not know why a woman should exhibit an overgrown broomstick when
an Italian train passes a flag station, any more than I know why, when a
squad of Paris firemen march out of the engine house for exercise, they
should carry carbines and knapsacks. I only know that these things are
done.
In Tuscany the vineyards make a fine show, for the vines are trained
to grow up from the ground and then are bound into streamers and draped
from one fruit tree or one shade tree to another, until a whole hillside
becomes one long, confusing vista of leafy festoons. The thrifty owner
gets the benefit of his grapes and of his trees, and of the earth below,
too, for there he raises vegetables and grains, and the like. Like
everything else in this land, the system is an old one. I judge it was
old enough to be hackneyed when Horace wrote of it:
Now each man, basking on his slopes,
Weds to his widowed tree the vine;
Then, as he gayly quaffs his wine,
Salutes thee god of all his hopes.
Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to
a guide book, don't you think?
In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the
American as being most curious--one is the amazing prevalence of family
washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife. To himself
the traveler says:
"What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family
apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this
country? Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it
after it is washed. And what has become of all the birds?"
For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer
to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the town and sees
spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and
finches exposed for sale. An Italian will cook and eat anything he can
kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary to a katydid.
Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just
in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the
canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the
red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the
earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct. And I felt
that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian brother's eye I
must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own; so I decided, in view of
those things, to collect myself and endeavor to remain perfectly calm.
We came into Venice at the customary hour--to wit, eleven P.M.--and had
a real treat as our train left the mainland and went gliding far out,
seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to where the beaded
lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the withered throat of a
long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of her moldered wedding finery
for a bridegroom who comes not.
Better even than this was the journey by gondola from the terminal
through narrow canals and under stone bridges where the water lapped
with little mouthing tongues at the walls, and the tall, gloomy
buildings almost met overhead, so that only a tiny strip of
star-buttoned sky showed between. And from dark windows high up came the
tinkle of guitars and the sound of song pouring from throats of silver.
And so we came to our hotel, which was another converted palace; but
baptism is not regarded as essential to salvation in these parts.
On the whole, Venice did not impress me as it has impressed certain
other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those Ohio
Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental every year
or two. In my youth I had passed through several of these visitations,
when the family would take the family plate and the family cow, and
other treasures, and retire to the attic floor to wait for the spring
rise to abate; and when really the most annoying phase of the situation
for a housekeeper, sitting on the top landing of his staircase watching
the yellow wavelets lap inch by inch over the keys of the piano, and
inch by inch climb up the new dining-room wallpaper, was to hear a
knocking at a front window upstairs and go to answer it and find that
Moscoe Burnett had come in a john-boat to collect the water tax.
The Grand Canal did not stir me as it has stirred some--so far back as
'84 I could remember when Jefferson Street at home looked almost exactly
like that.
Going through the Austrian Tyrol, between Vienna and Venice, I met two
old and dear friends in their native haunts--the plush hat and the hot
dog. When such a thing as this happens away over on the other side of
the globe it helps us to realize how small a place this world is after
all, and how closely all peoples are knitted together in common bonds of
love and affection. The hot dog, as found here, is just as we know
him throughout the length and breadth of our own land--a dropsical
Wienerwurst entombed in the depths of a rye-bread sandwich, with a dab
of horse-radish above him to mark his grave; price, creation over, five
cents the copy.
The woolly plush hat shows no change either, except that if anything
it is slightly woollier in the Alps than among us. As transplanted,
the dinky little bow at the back is an affectation purely--but in these
parts it is logical and serves a practical and a utilitarian purpose,
because the mountain byways twist and turn and double, and the local
beverages are potent brews; and the weary mountaineer, homeward-bound
afoot at the close of a market day, may by the simple expedient of
reaching up and fingering his bow tell instantly whether he is going or
coming.
This is also a great country for churches. Every group of chalets that
calls itself a village has at least one long-spired gray church in its
midst, and frequently more than one. In one sweep of hillside view from
our car window I counted seven church steeples. I do not think it was a
particularly good day for churches either; I wished I might have passed
through on a Sunday, when they would naturally be thicker.
Along this stretch of railroad the mountaineers come to the stations
wearing the distinctive costume of their own craggy and slabsided
hills--the curling pheasant feather in the hatbrim; the tight-fitting
knee-breeches; the gaudy stockings; and the broad-suspendered belt with
rows of huge brass buttons spangling it up and down and crosswise. Such
is your pleasure at finding these quaint habiliments still in use
amid settings so picturesque that you buy freely of the fancy-dressed
individual's wares--for he always has something to sell.
And then as your train pulls out, if by main force and awkwardness you
jam a window open, as I did, and cast your eyes rearward for a farewell
peek, as I did, you will behold him, as I did, pulling off his parade
clothes and climbing into the blue overalls and the jean jumpers of
prosaic civilization, to wait until the next carload lot of foreign
tourists rolls in. The European peasant is indeed a simple, guileless
creature--if you are careless about how you talk.
In this district and on beyond, the sight of women doing the bulk of
the hard and dirty farmwork becomes common. You see women plowing; women
hoeing; women carrying incredibly huge bundles of fagots and fodder
on their heads; women hauling heavy carts, sometimes with a straining,
panting dog for a teammate, sometimes unaccompanied except by a stalwart
father or husband, or brother or son, who, puffing a china-bowled pipe,
walks alongside to see that the poor human draft-animals do not shirk or
balk, or shy over the traces.
To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand against
a woman--except, of course, in self-defense--this is indeed a startling
sight to see; but worse is in store for him when he reaches Bohemia,
on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In Bohemia, if there is a
particularly nasty and laborious job to be done, such as spading up
manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beets out of the half-frozen earth,
they wish it on the dear old grandmother. She always seemed to me to be
a grandmother--or old enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the
life they lead, and not the years, that bends the backs of these women
and thickens their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into
clods and their hands into swollen, red monstrosities.
Surely the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, had Germany in mind when he
said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings--because Germany
certainly does lead the known world in those two commodities. Everywhere
in Germany you see them--the cabbages by the millions and the billions,
growing rank and purple in the fields and giving promise of the time
when they will change from vegetable to vine and become the fragrant and
luscious trailing sauerkraut; but the kings, in stone or bronze, stand
up in the marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment,
or just back of the brewery, in every German city and town along the
route.
By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler would
know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the custom house
on the border; or the crossing watchman in trim uniform jumping to
attention at every road-crossing; or the beautifully upholstered,
handswept state forests; or the hedges of willow trees along the
brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so many disreputable
hearth-brooms; or the young grain stretching in straight rows
crosswise of the weedless fields and looking, at a distance, like
fair green-printed lines evenly spaced on a wide brown page. Also, one
observes everywhere surviving traces that are unmistakable of the
reign of that most ingenious and wideawake of all the earlier rulers of
Germany, King Verboten the Great.
In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler is
told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here. It would
seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of Europe to learn
the value of keeping his name constantly before the reading public.
Rameses the Third of Egypt--that enterprising old constant advertiser
who swiped the pyramids of all his predecessors and had his own name
engraved thereon--had been dead for many centuries and was forgotten
when Verboten mounted the throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not
be born for many centuries yet to come; so the idea must have occurred
to King Verboten spontaneously, as it were. Therefore he took counsel
with himself, saying:
"I shall now erect statues to myself. Dynasties change and wars rage,
and folks grow fickle and tear down statues. None of that for your Uncle
Dudley K. Verboten! No; this is what I shall do: On every available site
in the length and breadth of this my realm I shall stick up my name;
and, wherever possible, near to it I shall engrave or paint the names
of my two favorite sons, Ausgang and Eingang--to the end that, come what
may, we shall never be forgotten in the land of our birth."
And then he went and did it; and it was a thorough job--so thorough a
job that, to this good year of our Lord you may still see the name of
that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany--on railroad stations and
in railroad trains; on castle walls and dead walls and brewery walls,
and the back fence of the Young Ladies' High School. And nearly always,
too, you will find hard by, over doors and passageways, the names of
his two sons, each accompanied or underscored by the heraldic emblem of
their house--a barbed and feathered arrow pointing horizontally.
And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in the
fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his wives,
his children and his courtiers; and all of them sorrowed greatly and
wept, but the royal signpainter sorrowed most of all.
I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this
passage of history; they will claim Verboten means in our tongue
Forbidden, and that Ausgang means Outgoing, and Eingang means
Incoming--or, in other words, Exit and Entrance; but surely this could
not be so. If so many things were forbidden, a man in Germany would be
privileged only to die--and probably not that, unless he died according
to a given formula; and certainly no human being with the possible
exception of the comedian who used to work the revolving-door trick
in Hanlon's Fantasma, could go out of and come into a place so often
without getting dizzy in the head. No--the legend stands as stated.
Even as it is, there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate all
things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems an
irksome arrangement--this posting of rules and orders and directions and
warnings everywhere--but he finds that everyone, be he high or low, must
obey or go to jail; there are no exceptions and no evasions; so that
what is a duty on all is a burden on none.
Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the Continent the
railroads are state-owned and state-run, but only in Germany are they
properly run. True, there are so many uniformed officials aboard
a German train that frequently there is barely room for the paying
travelers to squeeze in; but the cars are sanitary and the schedule
is accurately maintained, and the attendants are honest and polite and
cleanly of person--wherein lies another point of dissimilarity between
them and those scurvy, musty, fusty brigands who are found managing and
operating trains in certain nearby countries.
I remember a cup of coffee I had while going from Paris to Berlin. It
was made expressly for me by an invalided commander-in-chief of the
artillery corps of the imperial army--so I judged him to be by his
costume, air and general deportment--who was in charge of our carriage
and also of the small kitchen at the far end of it.
He came into our compartment and bowed and clicked his heels together
and saluted, and wanted to know whether I would take coffee. Recklessly
I said I would. He filled in several blanks of a printed form, and went
and cooked the coffee and brought it back, pausing at intervals as he
came along to fill in other blanks. Would I take cream in my coffee? I
would; so he filled in a couple of blanks. Would I take sugar? I said I
would take two lumps. He put in two lumps and filled in another blank.
I really prefer my coffee with three lumps in it; but I noticed that
his printed form was now completely filled in, and I hated to call for
a third lump and put him to the trouble of starting his literary labors
all over again. Besides, by that time the coffee would be cold. So I
took it as it was--with two lumps only--and it was pretty fair coffee
for European coffee. It tasted slightly of the red tape and the chicory,
but it was neatly prepared and promptly served.
And so, over historic streams no larger than creeks would be in America,
and by castles and cabbages and kings and cows, we came to Berlin;
and after some of the other Continental cities Berlin seemed a mighty
restful spot to be in, and a good one to tarry in awhile. It has few
historical associations, has Berlin, but we were loaded to the gills
with historical associations by now. It does not excel greatly in
Old Masters, but we had already gazed with a languid eye upon several
million Old Masters of all ages, including many very young ones. It has
no ancient monuments and tombs either, which is a blessing. Most of the
statuary in Berlin is new and shiny and provided with all the modern
conveniences--the present kaiser attended competently to that detail.
Wherever, in his capital, there was space for a statue he has stuck up
one in memory of a member of his own dynasty, beginning with a statue
apiece for such earlier rulers as Otho the Oboe-Player, and Joachim,
surnamed the Half-a-Ton--let some one correct me if I have the names
wrong--and finishing up with forty or fifty for himself. That is, there
were forty or fifty of him when I was there. There are probably more
now.
In its essentials Berlin suggests a progressive American city, with
Teutonic trimmings. Conceive a bit of New York, a good deal of Chicago,
a scrap of Denver, a slice of Hoboken, and a whole lot of Milwaukee;
conceive this combination as being scoured every day until it shines;
conceive it as beautifully though somewhat profusely governed, and
laid out with magnificent drives, and dotted with big, handsome public
buildings, and full of reasonably honest and more than reasonably kindly
people--and you have Berlin.
It was in Berlin that I picked up the most unique art treasure I found
anywhere on my travels--a picture of the composer Verdi that looked
exactly like Uncle Joe Cannon, without the cigar; whereas Uncle Joe
Cannon does not look a thing in the world like Verdi, and probably
wouldn't if he could.
I have always regretted that our route through the German Empire took
us across the land of the Hessians after dark, for I wanted to see those
people. You will recollect that when George the Third, of England, first
put into actual use the doctrine of Hands Across the Sea he used the
Hessians.
They were hired hands.