They have been many and of a widely various character. We tried them in
England, in France, in Italy; we tried them likewise in Germany, Sweden,
and Spain, but the result of that trying was, in these last-named
countries, far more trying to our digestions and tempers than rich in
such recollections as would add to the interest of this paper.
Our first European _pension_ was, naturally, a London one. It was one of
the innumerable host in the pale realms of Bloomsbury. Like others of
its kind in that region, it prided itself upon its "connexion,"--or,
less euphemistically, its _custom_,--and made a specialty of an
Australian "connexion," as the next number upon the right made a
specialty of Germans, the one upon the left of South Americans and
Spaniards, the one opposite of Russians, and uncounted ones all over
London of our countrymen. Although our house was largely frequented by
Australians, it did by no means confine its privileges to them. Like
every other London boarding-house, it was a perfect caravansary of
foreigners of almost every nation and every shade of color. At one time,
with a Danish landlord and an Irish landlady, we were Norwegians,
Swedes, Russians, Spaniards, Germans, Italians, and East Indians. Also
we were several Americans, as was proved one notable day. That day we
heard the arrival of new-comers in the hall below. We saw not their hue,
but we recognized their cry as that of our countrypeople. We are not
madly enamoured of our countryman in foreign climes. There his least
adorable qualities--his bumptiousness, his provincialism, his strident
tones and "_costume de Yank_"--are always more strikingly conspicuous
than the chivalry toward women and the self-respecting manliness we
always recognize so emphatically in him when we return to our own land
after a prolonged absence. Hence we panted not for the dinner-hour, that
should show us the faces whose voices we recognized as to our own manner
born. That hour came, however, as all hours come to those who know how
to wait. We descended to the showy table, with its floral decorations of
paper, muslin, and gay paint, the ladies in the evening dress of
flowers, trains, and _decolletee_ bodices which is the absurd custom of
pretentious London _pensions_. We glanced along the table to note the
new-comers. They were there, neatly and stylishly dressed in
walking-costumes. They were three quiet gentlemanly and lady-like
persons, but their faces were Medusa-like to almost every American who
gazed upon them. The foreigners looked intensely amused at this collapse
of the American contingent,--all save our Danish landlord, who stared
with amazement. Next day our new-comers disappeared.
"How in the world did you _congedier_ them?" somebody asked.
"I told them my Americans admire enough coppery Turks, South Americans,
Japanese, and East Indians, but they turn to stone at sight of niggers,"
answered Mr. Nodskou.
The line was certainly not drawn at color, for our Parsees were dusky
enough, goodness knows, and them our maidens found very captivating.
Several of them spoke no English, and it was the fascinating pastime of
our English, Australian, and American girls to teach them our common
language. But the result was, alas, not a little confusing to our
Parsees.
"Don't fancy you are learning English from those Americans," warned
Britannia. "Their accent is horrible: they say the weather is 'fair'
when they mean 'fine,' they call their luggage 'baggage,' and when they
speak of their travelling-boxes talk of their 'trunks,' like
elephants!"
"Don't be fooled by English English," advised Columbia: "the accent is
like a mouthful of pudding, and when they mean to say the weather is bad
they say it is 'nawsty;' they call their rubbers 'galoshes,' their
depots 'stations,' and when they start on a journey they get their
'boxes' together, like sweet-biscuit-peddlers."
"Don't mind what either of them say," quoth Miss Melbourne. "Both are
wrong. It is only we Australians, living between the two branches of the
language, as it were, who select the best and gobble it."
"What must it to say when I have such a fear, _such_ a fear, that I
speak not?" asked one of the Parsees.
"Say you're dickey on your pins," laughed Australia.
"Say you feel all of a goneness," spoke up Columbia.
"No; that is Americanese," flouted Britannia: "say you're in a beastly
funk!"
That our Parsees improved under such tuition was somewhat remarkable.
The lingual advance of one of them was quite startling. Our young ladies
had striven to teach him "good-by." One day, therefore, as the ladies
were departing from the dining-room, leaving the gentlemen to their
wine, our Parsee opened the door with grave, Oriental courtesy, and,
bowing to the rustling covey, said solemnly, "By god, ladies, by god!"
During a political discussion in which English and Australians took
chief parts, a Melbourne girl exclaimed excitedly, "Thank goodness,
_I'm_ not English!"
"Not Engleesh!" exclaimed her neighboring Parsee. "What are you but the
small little brat of the mother-country?"
Not until we laughed did our grave Oriental remember that "brat" and
"child" are not strictly synonymous.
Said one of our English girls afterward to me, with tact and taste
pre-eminently British, "_She_ glad she is not English! Really, _I'd_
almost as soon be American as Australian."
Our Parsees were not our only peculiar people. We Americans found quite
as much food for sly laughter in the queerness of our English _habitues_
as they did in ours. Our English contingent was largely feminine,
therefore, as goes without saying, very High-Church, very _devote_, and
excessively Tory, worshipping the English aristocracy vastly more than
that of celestial courts. Everybody knows the two diseases that
virulently assail young Englishwomen,--"scarlet fever" and "black
vomit,"--maladies provoked by association with red-coated officers and
black-coated curates.
One of our fair Britons had the darker malady. She fasted regularly on
Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her _jours maigres_ by the
quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before
dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly
coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de
Ninon, to dine, _a la_ Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a
few lentils or a lettuce-leaf.
One Sunday somebody asked this fair devotee to give us a certain popular
but profane piano-arrangement. She was shocked beyond measure. A few
moments' temptation, however, brought her to a compromise.
"I think there will be no harm if I play it slowly and make it as solemn
as possible."
We smiled at the aesthetic piety of our Saint Catherine. But she did more
than smile at our national practicality when, one evening, from the gay
drawing-room we heard the clamor of a feminine arrival below:
"I won't see any rooms till I know your price. I won't stir a peg till I
know what's to pay. I've come from Chicago, where folks know what's
what, and I'm going to do Yoorup on the cheap!"
Saint Catherine worshipped her country's aristocracy. One day Jonathan
happened to be putting on his coat in the hall, when somebody knocked at
the front door. Forgetting that the act, so natural to an American, is
ungentlemanly and menial in England, he opened the door himself. A
couple of young swells inquired for Saint Catherine.
"I just saw her go out," answered Jonathan.
"Tell her that the brothers of Lord Verisopht called," said the
spokesman.
"I'll tell her," spoke Jonathan; "but, good heavens, young man, don't
lords' brothers have any names of their own in this country?"
Another day came a gorgeous individual with a bouquet to the door.
"What skion of the British nobility is that?" asked Jonathan.
"That is Lord Blank's footman," replied Saint Catherine.
"My! Well, whose footman is _that_?" continued her interlocutor,
pointing to a less gorgeous person holding the reins.
"That is Lord Blank," answered Saint Catherine loftily.
"Sakes alive! Does that goose of a lord think he will stand any chance
with the girls when he takes such a howling swell as _that_ around with
him?" asked simple Jonathan.
To this question Saint Catherine deigned no reply, having, perhaps,
remarked the wicked twinkle of Jonathan's eye.
One of our _pensionnaires_ objected very much to the American language.
"It is principally slang," she said. This lady, no longer young, had
been three times upon the eve of marriage, had had three bridal dresses,
had countermanded three wedding-feasts. She was heiress at that time to
the fifty thousand pounds she has since inherited, and the persistent
failure of her matrimonial endeavors surprised us all.
"It is because Monsieur mon Pere is perfectly addled on the matter of
settlements, and rowed with every one of my _fiances_," she explained.
She said one day, "The gov'nor has done me out of a guinea of my
allowance this week. He's a first-class _Do_!"
Another time, "The mater and I prefer to live in our own house, but the
gov'nor won't hear to it. He prefers 'diggin's' where he can always have
his whist."
Some time after our sojourn in Bloomsbury "diggin's" we found ourselves
in a Continental _pension_, the very reverse of this in every respect.
It was a Parisian _pension bourgeoise_, but one entirely away from every
haunt of foreigners as well as from foreign influences,--a _pension_ as
French as French could be, where we were not merely the only foreigners
present, but the only ones who had ever penetrated there.
It was a large white house, standing in its own grounds, not far from
the Bois de Vincennes, pre-eminently a _pension bourgeoise_, and without
pretensions higher than the widows of shopkeepers and the relicts of
small government employees that formed its support. Not counting
ourselves, there were twenty Relicts and one Maiden, all with handsome
incomes and diamonds, but with the habit of running far and wide upon
the open boulevard in caps, loose sacques, and list slippers, and of
boasting of the cheap bargains they made in stockings and gowns. Their
toilets were always _tout ce qu'il y a de plus bourgeois_, their
conversation ran upon public scandals, private gossip, and fluctuations
of trade (almost all of them had kept shop with their departed
consorts), their reading was Paul de Kock's novels and the _feuilletons_
of "Le Petit Journal." The youngest widow was fifty, the Maiden
ninety-and-nine. The latter was daughter of a man who had been
_concierge_ of the Tuileries during the reign of Charles X. She was
dusky and shrivelled as any daughter of the Pharaohs, but her faculties
were marvellously preserved and her memory rich with interesting
personal gossip of a former period. We Americans should have delighted
to draw upon that memory, but one thing hindered us: that was the
insatiable, indomitable, unparalleled coquetry of our ancient Maiden.
She would never talk with any woman when any man was in the room. She
descended to the stuffy little _salon_ only in the evening, when the
Relicts were gathered to their gambling for sous and the atmosphere was
an imitation of the Black Hole of Calcutta. She descended _en grande
tenue_, the grandest ever seen there, frizzled, jewelled, and muffled
to the throat in fleecy clouds of white wool. She came all quirks and
quivers, all flutters and smiles, for there she met our only
Monsieur,--Monsieur Boulanger, our landlord. She invariably took her
seat beside him, and devoted quirks and quivers exclusively to him,
tapping him with her fan, calling him "_Mechant! mechant!_" "_farceur_,"
or "_quel diable d'homme!_" twittering and carolling in her old broken
voice, like a senile canary dreaming of its far-off youth. M. Boulanger
was of peasant origin and appearance, gray-bearded and gray-haired, and
clumping always in _sabots_ over the stone floors, except in the _salon_
in the evening. But her eyes were only for him; and the only occasion on
which any of her own uninteresting sex had her attention was when Madame
Boulanger pouted and pretended to be jealous, or some Relict showed
pique that our only Monsieur was monopolized by our only Maiden. Then
she smiled archly, cooed sweetly, and arched her ancient neck with
visible triumph.
Before we left the _pension bourgeoise_ our front door was hung with
heavy black curtains, and our Maiden passed forth into the broad day for
the first time in ten years. She went out unsmiling, uncooing, without
flutter or quirk, and no date upon her pine coffin, for with her last
breath she had forbidden it.
"Nobody need know that I have lived more than fifty years," she
murmured; "and don't let Monsieur Boulanger look at me when I am dead."
One of our widows--Madame Notte--was almost stone-deaf. She was a
dwarfish creature, passionately fond of cards, waxing into terrible
tempers over them, and with only one interest in life,--worshipful love
of her only son, a not too beautiful _citoyen_ of fifty. This son fell
ill and died. Poor Madame Notte knew of his illness, but not of its
danger and final end. It was thought best to keep from her the knowledge
that she was childless, lest the shock should be too great for her frail
strength. She was told he had gone to Italy for his health; and when
his widow and daughters came twice each week to visit her, they left
their weeds at home, came in a close carriage in their gayest attire,
and laughed and talked to her blithely with heavy hearts. All about the
poor old mother we talked openly and freely of her loss and our pity,
and she sat as unwitting as stone of it all. But when we put our mouths
to her ear and asked for her son, a beautiful change always dawned upon
the leaden countenance. "He has gone away," she invariably
smiled,--"gone to a better country, where it is always summer. When I
see him again he will be well, quite well." She, too, passed under the
heavy black curtains that winter; and from our hearts we prayed that all
was well with them in that better country where it is always summer.
One of our Relicts prided herself upon her English, and criticised ours.
"They speak English fairly well: I can _understand_ them," I once heard
her say of us to a group of Relicts in the garden; "but of course they
speak only a _patois_: they are Americans."
"Why say you always to your infant, 'Hurry, my darling'?" she asked one
day. "The pure Englishes says always, ''Urry, me darlink.'" Madame had
acquired her English from her defunct lord, a commercial traveller from
Lancashire.
One day, glancing at an envelope I had just addressed, she remarked,
"_Eh bien!_ you Americans are very like English, after all. In England
the last name of almost every monsieur is 'Esq.'!"