“Very well, then; here is an order from the Admiralty which will admit
you on board Her Majesty’s ship _Lively_, now lying at Ostend, and you
can return in her day after to-morrow.”
That was all. That was the end of it. Without stopping to think, I had
in a manner taken upon myself to bring the Shah of Persia to England. I
could not otherwise regard the conversation I had just held with the
London representative of the New York _Herald_. The amount of discomfort
I endured for the next two or three hours cannot be set down in words. I
could not eat, sleep, talk, smoke with any satisfaction. The more I
thought the thing over the more oppressed I felt. What was the Shah to
me, that I should go to all this worry and trouble on his account? Where
was there the least occasion for taking upon myself such a
responsibility? If I got him over all right, well. But if I lost him? if
he died on my hands? if he got drowned? It was depressing, any way I
looked at it. In the end I said to myself, “If I get this Shah over here
safe and sound I never will take charge of another one.” And yet, at the
same time I kept thinking: “This country has treated me well, stranger
as I am, and this foreigner is the country’s guest--that is enough, I
will help him out; I will fetch him over; I will land him in London, and
say to the British people, ‘Here is your Shah; give me a receipt.’”
I felt easy in my mind now, and was about to go to bed, but something
occurred to me. I took a cab and drove downtown and routed out that
_Herald_ representative.
“Where is Belgium?” said I.
“Where is Belgium? I never heard such a question!”
“That doesn’t make any difference to me. If I have got to fetch this
Shah I don’t wish to go to the wrong place. Where is Belgium? Is it a
shilling fare in a cab?”
He explained that it was in foreign parts--the first place I have heard
of lately which a body could not go to in a cab for a shilling.
I said I could not go alone, because I could not speak foreign languages
well, could not get up in time for the early train without help, and
could not find my way. I said it was enough to have the Shah on my
hands; I did not wish to have everything piled on me. Mr. Blank was then
ordered to go with me. I do like to have somebody along to talk to when
I go abroad.
When I got home I sat down and thought the thing all over. I wanted to
go into this enterprise understandingly. What was the main thing? That
was the question. A little reflection informed me. For two weeks the
London papers had sung just one continual song to just one continual
tune, and the idea of it all was “how to impress the Shah.” These papers
had told all about the St. Petersburg splendors, and had said at the end
that splendors would no longer answer; that England could not outdo
Russia in that respect; therefore some other way of impressing the Shah
must be contrived. And these papers had also told all about the Shahstic
reception in Prussia and its attendant military pageantry. England could
not improve on that sort of thing--she could not impress the Shah with
soldiers; something else must be tried. And so on. Column after column,
page after page of agony about how to “impress the Shah.” At last they
had hit upon a happy idea--a grand naval exhibition. That was it! A man
brought up in Oriental seclusion and simplicity, a man who had never
seen anything but camels and such things, could not help being surprised
and delighted with the strange novelty of ships. The distress was at an
end. England heaved a great sigh of relief; she knew at last how to
impress the Shah.
My course was very plain, now, after that bit of reflection. All I had
to do was to go over to Belgium and impress the Shah. I failed to form
any definite plan as to the process, but I made up my mind to manage it
somehow. I said to myself, “I will impress this Shah or there shall be a
funeral that will be worth contemplating.”
I went to bed then, but did not sleep a great deal, for the
responsibilities were weighing pretty heavily upon me. At six o’clock in
the morning Mr. Blank came and turned me out. I was surprised at this,
and not gratified, for I detest early rising. I never like to say severe
things, but I was a good deal tried this time. I said I did not mind
getting up moderately early, but I hated to be called day before
yesterday. However, as I was acting in a national capacity and for a
country that I liked, I stopped grumbling and we set out. A grand naval
review is a good thing to impress a Shah with, but if he would try
getting up at six o’clock in the morning--but no matter; we started.
We took the Dover train and went whistling along over the housetops at
the rate of fifty miles an hour, and just as smoothly and pleasantly,
too, as if we were in a sleigh. One never can have anything but a very
vague idea of what speed is until he travels over an English railway.
Our “lightning” expresses are sleepy and indolent by comparison. We
looked into the back windows of the endless ranks of houses abreast and
below us, and saw many a homelike little family of early birds sitting
at their breakfasts. New views and new aspects of London were about me;
the mighty city seemed to spread farther and wider in the clear morning
air than it had ever done before. There is something awe-inspiring about
the mere look of the figures that express the population of London when
one comes to set them down in a good large hand--4,000,000! It takes a
body’s breath away, almost.
We presently left the city behind. We had started drowsy, but we did not
stay so. How could we, with the brilliant sunshine pouring down, the
balmy wind blowing through the open windows, and the Garden of Eden
spread all abroad? We swept along through rolling expanses of growing
grain--not a stone or a stump to mar their comeliness, not an unsightly
fence or an ill-kept hedge; through broad meadows covered with fresh
green grass as clean swept as if a broom had been at work there--little
brooks wandering up and down them, noble trees here and there, cows in
the shade, groves in the distance and church spires projecting out of
them; and there were the quaintest old-fashioned houses set in the midst
of smooth lawns or partly hiding themselves among fine old forest trees;
and there was one steep-roofed ancient cottage whose walls all around,
and whose roof, and whose chimneys, were clothed in a shining mail of
ivy leaves!--so thoroughly, indeed, that only one little patch of roof
was visible to prove that the house was not a mere house of leaves, with
glass windows in it. Imagine those dainty little homes surrounded by
flowering shrubs and bright green grass and all sorts of old trees--and
then go on and try to imagine something more bewitching.
By and by we passed Rochester, and, sure enough, right there, on the
highest ground in the town and rising imposingly up from among
clustering roofs, was the gray old castle--roofless, ruined, ragged, the
sky beyond showing clear and blue through the glassless windows, the
walls partly clad with ivy--a time-scarred, weather-beaten old pile, but
ever so picturesque and ever so majestic, too. There it was, a whole
book of English history. I had read of Rochester Castle a thousand
times, but I had never really believed there was any such building
before.
Presently we reached the sea and came to a stand far out on a pier; and
here was Dover and more history. The chalk cliffs of England towered up
from the shore and the French coast was visible. On the tallest hill sat
Dover Castle, stately and spacious and superb, looking just as it has
always looked any time these ten or fifteen thousand years--I do not
know its exact age, and it does not matter, anyway.
We stepped aboard the little packet and steamed away. The sea was
perfectly smooth, and painfully brilliant in the sunshine. There were no
curiosities in the vessel except the passengers and a placard in French
setting forth the transportation fares for various kinds of people. The
lithographer probably considered that placard a triumph. It was printed
in green, blue, red, black, and yellow; no individual line in one color,
even the individual letters were separately colored. For instance, the
first letter of a word would be blue, the next red, the next green, and
so on. The placard looked as if it had the smallpox or something. I
inquired the artist’s name and place of business, intending to hunt him
up and kill him when I had time; but no one could tell me. In the list
of prices first-class passengers were set down at fifteen shillings and
four pence, and dead bodies at one pound ten shillings and eight
pence--just double price! That is Belgian morals, I suppose. I never say
a harsh thing unless I am greatly stirred; but in my opinion the man who
would take advantage of a dead person would do almost any odious thing.
I publish this scandalous discrimination against the most helpless class
among us in order that people intending to die abroad may come back by
some other line.
We skimmed over to Ostend in four hours and went ashore. The first
gentleman we saw happened to be the flag lieutenant of the fleet, and he
told me where the _Lively_ lay, and said she would sail about six in the
morning. Heavens and earth. He said he would give my letter to the
proper authority, and so we thanked him and bore away for the hotel.
Bore away is good sailor phraseology, and I have been at sea portions of
two days now. I easily pick up a foreign language.
Ostend is a curious, comfortable-looking, massively built town, where
the people speak both the French and the Flemish with exceeding fluency,
and yet I could not understand them in either tongue. But I will write
the rest about Ostend in to-morrow’s letter.
We idled about this curious Ostend the remainder of the afternoon and
far into the long-lived twilight, apparently to amuse ourselves, but
secretly I had a deeper motive. I wanted to see if there was anything
here that might “impress the Shah.” In the end I was reassured and
content. If Ostend could impress him, England could amaze the head clear
off his shoulders and have marvels left that not even the trunk could be
indifferent to.
These citizens of Flanders--Flounders, I think they call them, though I
feel sure I have eaten a creature of that name or seen it in an aquarium
or a menagerie, or in a picture or somewhere--are a thrifty, industrious
race, and are as commercially wise and farsighted as they were in Edward
the Third’s time, and as enduring and patient under adversity as they
were in Charles the Bold’s. They are prolific in the matter of children;
in some of the narrow streets every house seemed to have had a freshet
of children, which had burst through and overflowed into the roadway.
One could hardly get along for the pack of juveniles, and they were all
soiled and all healthy. They all wore wooden shoes, which clattered
noisily on the stone pavements. All the women were hard at work; there
were no idlers about the houses. The men were away at labor, no doubt.
In nearly every door women sat at needlework or something of that
marketable nature--they were knitting principally. Many groups of women
sat in the street, in the shade of walls, making point lace. The lace
maker holds a sort of pillow on her knees with a strip of cardboard
fastened on it, on which the lace pattern has been punctured. She sticks
bunches of pins in the punctures and about them weaves her web of
threads. The numberless threads diverge from the bunch of pins like the
spokes of a wheel, and the spools from which the threads are being
unwound form the outer circle of the wheel. The woman throws these
spools about her with flying fingers, in and out, over and under one
another, and so fast that you can hardly follow the evolutions with your
eyes. In the chaos and confusion of skipping spools you wonder how she
can possibly pick up the right one every time, and especially how she
can go on gossiping with her friends all the time and yet never seem to
miss a stitch. The laces these ingenious Flounders were making were very
dainty and delicate in texture and very beautiful in design.
Most of the shops in Ostend seemed devoted to the sale of sea shells.
All sorts of figures of men and women were made of shells; one sort was
composed of grotesque and ingenious combinations of lobster claws in the
human form. And they had other figures made of stuffed frogs--some
fencing, some barbering each other, and some were not to be described at
all without indecent language. It must require a barbarian nature to be
able to find humor in such nauseating horrors as these last. These
things were exposed in the public windows where young girls and little
children could see them, and in the shops sat the usual hairy-lipped
young woman waiting to sell them.
There was a contrivance attached to the better class of houses which I
had heard of before, but never seen. It was an arrangement of mirrors
outside the window, so contrived that the people within could see who
was coming either up or down the street--see all that might be going on,
in fact--without opening the window or twisting themselves into
uncomfortable positions in order to look.
A capital thing to watch for unwelcome (or welcome) visitors with, or to
observe pageants in cold or rainy weather. People in second and third
stories had, also, another mirror which showed who was passing
underneath.
The dining room at our hotel was very spacious and rather gorgeous. One
end of it was composed almost entirely of a single pane of plate glass,
some two inches thick--for this is the plate-glass manufacturing region,
you remember. It was very clear and fine. If one were to enter the place
in such a way as not to catch the sheen of the glass, he would suppose
that the end of the house was wide open to the sun and the storms. A
strange boyhood instinct came strongly upon me, and I could not really
enjoy my dinner, I wanted to break that glass so badly. I have no doubt
that every man feels so, and I know that such a glass must be simply
torture to a boy.
This dining room’s walls were almost completely covered with large oil
paintings in frames.
It was an excellent hotel; the utmost care was taken that everything
should go right. I went to bed at ten and was called at eleven to “take
the early train.” I said I was not the one, so the servant stirred up
the next door and he was not the one; then the next door and the
next--no success--and so on till the reverberations of the knocking were
lost in the distance down the hall, and I fell asleep again. They called
me at twelve to take another early train, but I said I was not the one
again, and asked as a favor that they would be particular to call the
rest next time, but never mind me. However, they could not understand my
English; they only said something in reply to signify that, and then
went on banging up the boarders, none of whom desired to take the early
train.
When they called me at one, it made my rest seem very broken, and I said
if they would skip me at two I would call myself--not really intending
to do it, but hoping to beguile the porter and deceive him. He probably
suspected that and was afraid to trust me, because when he made his
rounds at that hour he did not take any chances on me, but routed me out
along with the others. I got some more sleep after that, but when the
porter called me at three I felt depressed and jaded and greatly
discouraged. So I gave it up and dressed myself. The porter got me a cup
of coffee and kept me awake while I drank it. He was a good,
well-meaning sort of Flounder, but really a drawback to the hotel, I
should think.
Poor Mr. Blank came in then, looking worn and old. He had been called
for all the different trains, too, just as I had. He said it was a good
enough hotel, but they took too much pains. While we sat there talking
we fell asleep and were called again at four. Then we went out and dozed
about town till six, and then drifted aboard the _Lively_.
She was trim and bright, and clean and smart; she was as handsome as a
picture. The sailors were in brand-new man-of-war costume, and plenty of
officers were about the decks in the state uniform of the
service--cocked hats, huge epaulettes, claw-hammer coats lined with
white silk--hats and coats and trousers all splendid with gold lace. I
judged that these were all admirals, and so got afraid and went ashore
again. Our vessel was to carry the Shah’s brother, also the Grand
Vizier, several Persian princes, who were uncles to the Shah, and other
dignitaries of more or less consequence. A vessel alongside was to carry
the luggage, and a vessel just ahead (the _Vigilant_) was to carry
nobody but just the Shah and certain Ministers of State and servants and
the Queen’s special ambassador, Sir Henry Rawlinson, who is a Persian
scholar and talks to the Shah in his own tongue.
I was very glad, for several reasons, to find that I was not to go in
the same ship with the Shah. First, with him not immediately under my
eye I would feel less responsibility for him; and, secondly, as I was
anxious to impress him, I wanted to practice on his brother first.