ADIEU TO THE STAGE.
Going up the Mississippi from Cairo, we passed, one Sunday, the old
French town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and its Roman Catholic college
on the river-bank. The boys were out on the lawn under the trees, and I
became as envious of their lot as I ever had been before of a man who
worked on a steamboat or who danced “in the minstrels.” I suddenly
resolved that I would go to that college.
We did not stop at Cape Girardeau till our return down the river, some
weeks afterward. Then I went boldly up, and sought an interview with the
president of the institution. I found him to be a kindly-mannered
priest, who encouraged me in my ambition. He told me it would be well to
save up more money than I then had, and that he would do all he could
for me. I returned to the Palace, and immediately gave warning that I
purposed to leave as soon as some one could be got to fill my place.
It struck me as somewhat odd that it was six months from that date
before I could get away. It has been explained to me since. The fact is,
I received what, as a boy, I thought a good salary, but nothing like
what I earned. It took two men afterwards to fill my place. I have been
told since, that more than a year before that time, and prior to this
last engagement, the late E. P. Christy had written for me from New
York, but that the letter had been intercepted by those whose interest
it then was that I should not know my own value in the “profession.”
I used to see that my name was larger than almost any other on the
bills, but was led to believe that it was because I was a boy, and not
likely to excite the jealousy of the other members of the company. It
may not be very soothing to my vanity, but, dwelling upon these things
dispassionately, I have my honest doubts now whether I was not always a
greater success as an advertisement than as a performer.
I was promised at New Orleans that, if I would go over to Galveston,
Texas, with the minstrel troupe, I should certainly be allowed to
retire from public life. So we left the Palace and the Raymond at the
levee of the former city, and took passage in the regular steamship,
crossing the Gulf to Galveston. We performed there two or three weeks
with great success. Few minstrels then had wandered that way, and thus
it happened that my farewell appearance as a dancer was greeted with a
crowded house. Except as a poor lecturer, I have never been on the stage
since I left Galveston.
* * * * *
Still resolved to go to college at Cape Girardeau, I returned to New
Orleans, and took passage to Cairo on the steamer L. M. Kennett. Barney
Williams and his wife were on board during the tedious voyage; but I
suppose they have long since forgotten all about the urchin who
surprised and bored them with his minute knowledge of the early history
of the country through which we passed.
The river above Cairo, very much to my sorrow, was frozen over, for it
was midwinter. There was no alternative for me but to proceed to Cape
Girardeau by land,--a long, difficult, and expensive journey in those
times. After a great deal of trouble and some danger, I arrived at the
gates of the College, and proceeded directly to the room of the
president.
The kindly face that I remembered so well again beamed upon me, as I
stood before him and said that I had come to stay a year, at least, at
his school. At his good-natured question as to how much money I had, I
emptied my pocket of just thirty-five dollars in gold. That was the sum
to which the unforeseen expenses of my long journey had reduced me.
The president, being aware that the river was frozen,--so that I could
not get away even if I had had money enough to go with,--and having much
greater discretionary power than the presidents of our Protestant
colleges, told me that I might stay.
At the end of my year the river was again frozen, and the good president
was again prevailed upon to keep me till the close of that college term,
which would be in the middle of the ensuing summer. So I was for sixteen
months in all a student in St. Vincent’s College.
Most of the students were the sons of French planters of Louisiana, and
the institution was more French than English. Things were ordered very
much as they are in the religious houses of Europe. We slept in large
dormitories, and ate in a refectory, some one reading aloud the while
from an English or French book. The College had its own tailors and
shoemakers; and by the favor of the president, who seemed to take a
great liking to me, my credit was made good for anything I wanted, and I
was provided for as well as the richest of them.
The instructors were all priests, and generally good men. They never
required me to change my religion, or to conform more than externally to
their worship. I applied myself so zealously to study that, at the
expiration of my sixteen months, I was nearly prepared to enter Kenyon
College, in which I spent the next four years.
The president of St. Vincent’s, Father Stephen V. Ryan, has since met
the recognition which his piety and abilities so justly deserved. He is
now the venerable Roman Catholic Bishop of Buffalo; and it is with no
little pride that I still class him among my most valued and constant
friends.
When I came to leave St. Vincent’s I drew out a deposit which I had in a
bank in Toledo, and gave it into the hands of the College treasurer,
reserving for myself only what I thought would be enough to take me back
to Ohio.
As good luck would have it, the little steamer Banjo, a show-boat
belonging to Dr. Spaulding, the manager of the Floating Palace, was
advertised to be at Cape Girardeau the week in which I purposed to leave
there. Seeing the names of some of my old comrades on the bills, I
waited to meet them. They generously made me bring my trunk on board,
and have a free ride to St. Louis, or, if I chose, to Alton, where I was
to take the cars for Chicago.
The remembrance of this trip up the river with these jovial, reckless
souls has made it my duty always to defend my old associates when I hear
the censure heaped on them by inconsiderate ignorance or blind
prejudice. And I can take my final leave of the show business and of
show people in no better way, I think, than in relating an incident
which occurred on this little steamer.
On the afternoon before our arrival at Alton, as I was sitting on the
deck by the side of one of the performers, Mr. Edwin Davis, who had
been a member of our company on the Floating Palace, he asked me to let
him see my money, adding that I might have had imposed upon me some of
the “wild-cat” bills then afloat. Taking out all I had, I placed it in
his hands. He counted it, and scrutinized it thoroughly, and, folding it
up carefully, returned it to me with the remark that my bills were all
good.
I had no occasion to use my money till I came to pay my railway fare at
Alton, when I discovered that my wealth had increased by nearly half. He
had, indeed, been a better judge than myself of my necessities; for,
with his generous addition, I had barely enough to take me to my
destination.
* * * * *
I met Mr. Davis in New York, years afterward, and offered him the sum he
had added to mine, but could not prevail upon him to take it. And this
is the way he stated his reason: “No; it does not belong to me. Keep it
you, till you see some poor fellow as much in need of it as you were
then on the Mississippi, and give it to him.”
BOOK III.
THE TOUR OF EUROPE FOR $181 IN CURRENCY.
ÆT. 20-22.
CHAPTER I.
STARTING ON A CATTLE-TRAIN.
I cannot tell when the idea of going abroad first came into my mind,
but, in a little journal kept in my thirteenth year while travelling
with the minstrels, I find the fact that I was going to Europe alluded
to as a matter of which there was not the shadow of a doubt.
There is a jolly sort of beggar in San Francisco who says hope is worth
twenty-five dollars a month. It must be that I shared with him his
principal income during the four years of college life which almost
immediately succeeded my wanderings as a minstrel, and which launched me
again on the world at twenty. What else besides the hope of Continental
travel sustained me during those four years I cannot now say. My
pecuniary resources for that whole period were so small that they have
tapered entirely out of my remembrance.
Leaving college, I had served, I recollect, but a few months in the
post-office of Toledo, Ohio, when I took a deliberate account of my
savings one morning, and was gratified. I found in my possession too
large a sum to permit of deferring the realization of my long-cherished
dream another day.
Counting my money over and over, I could make no less of it than one
hundred and eighty-one dollars, in new United States treasury-notes; and
I resigned “mine office,” not with the heartbroken feeling of Richelieu,
in the play, but still, like him, with the lingering cares of Europe on
my mind.
* * * * *
Not the smallest fraction of this vast sum, I had resolved, should be
squandered on the ephemeral railroads of our younger civilization. My
treasury-notes were to be dedicated, green, votive offerings, on the
older shrines of our race. But the city of Toledo is situated about
seven hundred miles from the sea, and it now became an interesting
question how this distance was to be compassed for--nothing.
To a good-natured friend of mine in one of the railroad offices I
explained, at considerable length, and with no lack, I flatter myself,
of boyish eloquence, the great advantage that would accrue to me from a
residence in Europe which the liberality of the companies, in the matter
of furnishing passes, would tend to prolong.
I think he became my convert, for he came to me, several hours
afterward, with a long face, and gave me to understand that the railroad
officials were in the habit of building no dreams of æsthetics that were
not founded on a groundplan of dollars and cents.
At this I became--I do not know which to say--desperately vindictive or
vindictively desperate. Anyway, the unfeeling conduct of those
corporations induced, then and there, a state of mind which led me into
an adventure the least calculated, probably, of any in this history to
establish my claims as a moral hero. The next morning I brought my trunk
down to the depot and had it checked through to New York. The rules seem
not to have been so strictly observed then as they are now. The
baggage-master in this instance, at least, taking for granted that I
had already secured my ticket, did not ask me to show it; and I was at
liberty to stroll about the station all day, listlessly.
Just before dusk a cattle-train arrived from the West and brought with
it a lucky thought. I scanned the faces of the drovers till I found one
that looked benevolent, and the owner of it I engaged in conversation.
He was going on East with his cattle the next morning, and I made a
plain statement of my case to him. When I had done, he patted me on the
back in such a cordial and stalwart manner, that--as soon as I could get
my breath--I took it all as a good augury. And so it was.
I wish I could reproduce more of the dialogue which took place between
this honest Westerner and myself, at that first interview. Some of it,
at least, I never shall forget, it impressed me as so extraordinary at
the time. I can, however, convey no idea of the contrast between his
mild kindly face and his harsh bovine voice. It may help you to a kind
of silhouette view of the situation, if you will take the pains to
imagine the frequent excursions of my puzzled attention from his face to
his voice, during the scene which immediately followed.
He had given me to understand that he had eight car-loads of live stock,
and that he was entitled to a drover’s pass for every four car-loads.
Then he suddenly paused, thrust both hands into the pockets of his
long-skirted coat, and, feeling about in those spacious alcoves for a
silent moment as if in search of something, he asked, in an abrupt bass
which seemed to issue from the depths of the coat-tails themselves,--
“How air you--on cattle?”
That was before the days of Mr. Bergh and his excellent society; but,
having consulted the speaker’s benevolent face and not his voice, as the
last authority on the meaning of his question, I answered that I was
very kind to cattle as a general thing.
That, he assured me, was not exactly what he meant; he wanted to know
whether I had ever done any “droving.” On my intimating that, although I
had not had much experience, I was perfectly willing to be of service,
“Never mind, never mind,” he said; “but can you play cards?”
“No,” was my ingenuous reply.
“Now that’s bad,” and he scratched his head vigorously. “Can you smoke,
then?”
“A little,” faltered I.
My new-made friend seemed much pleased by this response, and
continued,--
“All right; you jist git a lot of clay pipes and some tobaccy, and I’ll
git you a pass!”
As I was turning in utter bewilderment to have his strange prescription
filled, “I say, look a here,” he said; “take off all that nice harness,
or you can’t pass for no cattle-man! I’ll lend you some old clothes and
a pair of big boots. These stock conductors is right peert, they air.
You’ll have to smoke a heap, and lay around careless in the caboose, or
they’ll find you out.”
* * * * *
The next morning I took my seat in what he called the “caboose,”--a sort
of passenger-car at the end of the train. When we had been under way
about an hour, the burden of my own conscience, or of my friend’s boots,
or the contemplation of my unsightly disguise, or the amount of tobacco
I had smoked, made me deathly sick,--which, on the whole, was rather a
fortunate circumstance. It explained to the conductor why I did not get
out at the way-stations to tend my cattle, and it also enabled me to
hide my face from the conductor, to whom I happened to be known.
I found, as most boys do, that I could smoke better the farther I got
from home. What with stopping to let our cattle rest and other delays,
it took us nearly a week to reach New York; but before three days had
passed I could perform the astonishing feat of putting my friend’s boots
out of the car window, and of smoking serenely the while, without
touching my pipe with my hands.
All the hotels at which we stopped along the route seemed, like the
crèmeries of Paris, to exult in the importance of a _spécialité_; and
that was that they were supported almost entirely by drovers, and
assumed, without a single exception that I can call to mind, the device
and title of “The Bull’s Head.”
There was a smack of old times in the homely comforts as well as in the
moderate charges of these quiet taverns. My expenses on the whole
journey from Toledo to the sea were, if I recollect aright, a little
over three dollars.
CHAPTER II.
TAKING TO EUROPEAN WAYS.
At New York I found that I should be obliged to pay 130 for exchange on
my money. This I did, after buying a through third-class ticket to
London for thirty-three dollars in currency.
My memories of a steerage passage across the Atlantic are rather vivid
than agreeable. Among all my fellow-passengers in that unsavory precinct
I found only one philosopher. He was a British officer who took a
third-class ticket that he might spend the difference between that and a
cabin fare for English porter, which he imbibed from morning to night.
He announced as his firm belief, after much observation upon the high
cheekbones of our countrymen, that the Americans in a few years would
degenerate to Indians,--the natural human types of this continent.
It was during the World’s Fair that I arrived in London. My whole life
there might be written down under the general title of “The Adventures
of a Straw Hat,” for the one which I wore was the signal for all the
sharpers of that great city to practise their arts upon me. They took me
for some country youth come up to see the Exhibition, and the number of
skittle-alleys and thief dens into which they enticed me was, to say the
least, remarkable.
Through the friendly advice of a police detective, I was finally
prevailed upon to purchase a new English hat, and with this, as a sort
of ægis, I passed out of the British dominions, without being
robbed,--and, indeed, without much of which to be robbed.
At Paris I witnessed the magnificent _fêtes_ of the Emperor, and took
the third-class cars for Strasbourg and Heidelberg. At this latter city,
with a sum equal to nearly eighty dollars in gold, I proposed for an
indefinite series of years, to become a student of the far-famed
Karl-Rupert University.
I was not happy in Heidelberg, therefore, till I had experienced the
mystery of academic matriculation. All I can recall of that long
ceremony now is, that I had the honor of shaking hands--_sancte dataque
dextra pollicitus est_ is the language in which my diploma speaks of me,
commemorating, I believe, that impressive moment--over my passport with
a large-moustached German official; and that I furthermore had the
privilege of paying a fee of eleven guldens and twenty-six kreutzers,--a
little over four and a half dollars.
After much search and many unintelligible appeals in bad German, through
wellnigh every dingy street of Heidelberg, I finally secured a room for
two guldens--eighty cents--a month: and such a room! It was on the story
next to the clouds. It seemed to be cut into the high gable of the gray
old German house by some freak or afterthought of the architect. It was
reached by interminable staircases and through a long hall, or
passage-way, whose unplastered walls were hung with the rubbish of many
generations. It was just large enough to permit of my turning round,
after furnishing nooks and corners for a bed, bookcase, wash-stand, and
small, semicircular table; but all was neat and clean, for my room was
subject, like the rest of the German world, to the regular Saturday’s
inundation of soap and water.
Directly opposite, on the other side of the narrow street, but far, far
below, was the shop of a sausage-maker. If I had been an enthusiast in
mechanics, I should have found much consolation in this fact, as well as
a great deal “to lead hope on”; because a sausage-maker’s apprentice is
really, if not perpetual motion itself, a strong inductive argument in
favor of its future discovery. The one to whom I have alluded kept up a
continual hacking, day and night, week-day and Sunday. The sound of his
meat-axe met my ears the first thing in the morning and the last thing
at night; it was, in fact, my matin and my angelus bell.
But, by a principle of compensation, which is one of the kindliest
things in nature, this little nook had advantages of which prouder
apartments could not boast. I never had, before or since, a room in
which I could apply myself to study so assiduously or with so great a
zest. It seemed to be haunted with the great spirits of those who have
trimmed their lamps in garrets and left the world better for their
toils.
This may have been a boyish hallucination, but I shall always believe
that the most glorious view of the famous Heidelberg castle, the
Molkenkur, and the lofty peak of the Kaiserstuhl, is to be had from the
one narrow window of my aerial niche in the dark German gable.
The old castle frowned down upon me from the brow of the mountain just
above my head; and often of an evening have I leaned upon my little
window-sill, and gazed up at its ruined battlements and ivy-mantled
towers. As they grew dimmer and grayer in the waning light, the rents
and seams of centuries disappeared, and the palace of the old Electors
used to stand before me in its ancient pride.
It may not be generally known that the day-laborer of America has better
food and more of it than many a wealthy burgher of Central Europe. Only
the very few, in Germany, can indulge in beefsteaks for breakfast. I
soon learned to conform myself to the cup of coffee and piece of dry
bread of the German’s morning repast.
But as I became better acquainted, and gradually more impecunious, I
left the _café_ where I had before partaken of these luxuries, and
betook myself to a baker’s shop, where a breakfast of the same kind was
furnished me, in company with market-women and others, for four
kreutzers,--about three cents. If I could sometimes have wished for a
more liberal allowance of sugar in my coffee, in this humble refectory,
I never could complain of a lack of sweetness in the morning gossip of
the baker’s red-cheeked daughter.
* * * * *
The search for the very cheapest place to get my dinner was not the work
of one day, or unattended with some difficulty and much skirmishing. I
bethought myself of my sausage-making friend across the way. Indeed, it
was a long while before I became so used to the _staccato_ music of his
meat-axe as to keep from thinking of him most of the time. Engaged as he
was in the active production of food, he must certainly, I argued, know
something of cheap dinners. I therefore made a descent on the meat-shop
one day.
No notice whatever was taken of my knock; so, pushing the door open, I
stood before a dwarfed, long-aproned, pale-faced boy, who turned his
hungry eyes upon me, but did not cease his hacking. I launched forth in
the kind--I may say, the peculiar kind--of colloquial German I had
learned in my three weeks’ sojourn in his country. After I had talked
some time, the boy, giving no rest to his meat-axe, but every once in a
while looking furtively over his shoulder, asked,--
“Do you want any _Wurst_?”
“Sausage? No, no.”
And I began again, in my original German, and explained at greater
length that I was in search of a place to get a cheap dinner. The boy
laid down his meat-axe, eyed me a few seconds in awful silence, then
glanced apprehensively over his shoulder, took up his meat-axe again,
and went to work more lustily than ever.
There was this much about it: either the boy was deaf, or we stood
somewhat in the relation of the two English girls in Hood’s story,--he
could speak German and did not understand it, and I could understand
German and not speak it. Still, rather pleased than otherwise at such a
chance to air my newly acquired speech, and on the whole not a little
gratified with my quick mastery of the language, I began in a higher
key, and, approaching nearer and nearer, demanded in the sausage-maker’s
ear whether he knew of a place to get a cheap dinner.
Down went the meat-axe again, and, with eyes and mouth wide open, the
boy stood speechless before me.
Thus we were both inanely staring at each other when the back door flew
open, and a burly lump of tumid humanity stumbled through it with a
curse, wanting to know why the boy was not at work. The poor apprentice
caught up his cleaver again, and I faced the man who had just entered.
“Do you want any Wurst?” he asked.
“No, no.” And I went over the whole story once more with such
perspicuity as shipwrecked patience would naturally inspire in a person
thoroughly at sea in a language. In the thick of my oration I detected a
cloudy gleam of intelligence spreading itself over the red face of my
hearer. My eloquence had touched him at last. I had not quite reached my
peroration when--
“_Doch!_” interrupted my fat friend, as he pulled me briskly to the
door. “You see that shop, three houses farther down the street?”
“Yes,” said I.
“You are sure you see the right one?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, you go right down there. There is a Frenchman down there. His
wife is from Italy. I think, maybe, he can understand the Russian
language: _I_ can’t!”
It was at that moment, I think, I learned to make the distinction
between the degrees of benefit one derives from a book-knowledge of a
language: it may help you to understand others, but it can hardly be
said to help others to understand you.
* * * * *
While on this subject I may be pardoned, I hope, for telling of the more
expeditious way I adopted to acquire the other modern tongues, which my
subsequent poverty rather than any extraordinary ambition induced me to
learn, in order to preserve the disguise of which I shall tell you
presently.
On going into an unfamiliar country for the first time, I shut myself up
in some cheap garret, with a grammar, for a couple of weeks. Then I
sallied forth with a pocket-dictionary, and captured some worthless
young fellow without friends or employment. To this luckless person I
cleaved without mercy. I followed him--if I could not make him follow
me--everywhere, and talked at him and made him talk. I argued with him
over his three sous’ worth of chocolate, if we were in France, or over
his boiled beans and olive-oil, if we were in Italy.
I asked him questions about everything, if we walked together in the
streets; and, by the way, is it not truly wonderful how much one has to
say when he has a difficulty in saying it? You may have noticed that a
man who stutters, or has a hair-lip, is always talking. He who learns a
new language is invariably troubled with the same fruitful
suggestiveness, and often, too, with a more distressful execution.
If, therefore, the patience of my friendless tutor would sometimes flag,
I would attempt to make him understand my glowing accounts of the
comparative wealth of such vagrants as he was in my own prosperous, poor
man’s country, advising him to immigrate. This occasionally would have
the effect of restoring him to a feeble interest in life.
But if he would still persist in his low spirits, and find himself on
the verge of asking me why I did not myself go back to my Eldorado of
good-for-nothings, where he, no doubt, heartily wished me, then, at
that last critical stage of his gloom, I would soothe and cheer him with
a penny cigar. Generally speaking, this will not fail thoroughly to
overcome your Old World vagabond. He will talk, and even listen, after
that. The only difficulty is to know just when to administer to him the
cigar: he must not be pampered or spoiled by undue indulgence and
luxury.
At first, when I commenced my experiments on these unfortunate beings,
and I could see them wince under my laceration of their helpless
mother-tongue, I had slight qualms of conscience. Learning to quiet
these at last, however, I fastened myself on the most intelligent
vagrant at hand, with an almost faultless pre-calculation of my man, and
subjected him to my tortures with a triumphant sense of virtue in the
act, far transcending, I fancy, that experienced by your enthusiastic
_savant_ when substantiating some pet theory on a living criminal.
Nothing, I am sure, ever before impressed me so highly with the modest
merit that may lie concealed in vagrancy. It would be positively
surprising to any one who has not enjoyed the advantage of this
desperate method of mastering the colloquial speech of a country, if I
should tell how soon I was enabled by it to drop my humble tutor, and,
moving out of his neighborhood to some other city in the same state, to
utilize and practise upon more pretending persons, in a higher grade of
society.
CHAPTER III.
STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS.
But I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will
not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners
because the search for one which should be the _ultima Thule_ of
cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last,
where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private
family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,--a fraction
over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a _Gasthaus_, in company
with some theological students, at the cost of about four cents.
Many of my countrymen, who have spent large sums in endeavoring to live
cheaply in the same city, will of course believe nothing of this. They
have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their
experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak our language,
and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in
golden letters, “ENGLISH SPOKEN.” They have, in reality, paid the
teacher who taught these waiters and those shop-keepers to murder our
own vernacular.
By matriculating at the great University of Heidelberg, I became endowed
with all the time-honored privileges of students. I could not be
arrested or taken through the streets, if I had been guilty of an
ordinary crime; I could not be confined in a common prison or go to a
common hospital, the University having those institutions for its own
particular benefit.
And poverty seemed there to have lost its curse. The very fact of my
being a student put me on a social scale above that of the wealthy
merchant. This, however, may have been only in the estimation of the
collegians themselves.
A fellow-student thought some of going to America, and propounded the
following question: “But when I arrive, I shall not have any money, and
I shall know nothing of the language of the country; what shall I do?”
“Go to work!” said I.
“What? manual labor! I am too aristocratic!”
That young man, let me add, was then living on an income of one hundred
and ten dollars a year.
* * * * *
The German student must have his pipe, his beer, and a life of pleasure
at whatever sacrifice. If he is rich, he pays some attention to his
personal appearance. You will see him adorned with boots of immense
length; _corps_ caps and ribbons; the number of his duels scored on his
red face in ungainly sword-scars; and followed by a retinue of
sinecurists, in the shape of great ugly worthless dogs. _His_ life is a
continued sacrifice to the merry gods. He is rarely seen at lectures.
Indeed, there is one society or club at the University, the first
article of whose constitution reads, “No member shall at any time, or on
any pretence whatever, after matriculation, be seen in the University
building.”
On the other hand, if the student is poor, he pays very slight attention
to what he wears. He does not the less, however, devote a great portion
of his time to beer, tobacco, and the pursuit of pleasure. You will see
him at the most frequented beer-houses every night. If you go to the
opera, you will observe him also stalking thither, shiveringly, through
the wind, his tight pantaloons striking his crane-like legs about
midships between his feet and knees, and his shoulders shrugged up in
the vain attempt to get more warmth out of an extremely short coat. He
looks more like the impersonation of Famine, striding about among men,
than the good, honest-hearted fellow that he is.
For with all his faults, as our more Puritanical education may lead us
to call them, the German student _is_ an honest, generous, noble-hearted
fellow. He sees beyond the smoke of his own pipe, and has deeper
thoughts than those inspired by beer. His heart swells beyond the bounds
of his petty state. His sympathies are as broad as the old German
Empire.
It is too true, perhaps, that when, in maturer manhood, he becomes
_angestellt_ in some life-office in the gift of his little prince, his
liberalism slumbers or dies out; but that does not affect the sincerity
of his youthful sentiment. I am sure that I never spoke with one of
them, on the subject, who had not some dream of a great united Germany.
There was no more interested watcher of our late civil strife than the
German student. He felt that the battle then waging for the right of
self-government had a connection with his hopes for the future of his
own severed land. Germany’s wrongs and the sigh for universal liberty
are the burden of his many songs. No higher and no more appropriate
eulogy on the German student can be pronounced than to say that, in his
university days at least, he is true to the spirit of one of his most
beautiful and most popular melodies, “To the bold deed, the free word,
the generous action, woman’s love, and the fatherland.”
* * * * *
By the laws of German universities, a matriculated student is not
obliged to pay for more than the lectures of one professor during a
semester,--that is, six months. I managed, therefore, to pay for the
cheapest, and attended as many more as I liked; so about ten dollars a
year were my collegiate expenses.
To confess the truth, my calendar and that of the University did not
always agree. I often took vacations in session time, in the shape of
long excursions on foot, and sometimes disappeared from Heidelberg for
weeks together. My _Hausfrau_--she that received the princely income of
eighty cents a month for my room--at first showed symptoms of anxiety
about me; but she soon learned to be surprised at no wild freak of her
aerial lodger.
By these tours on foot,--the only philosophical way of travelling,--and
by the occasional aid of the cheap third-class cars of that country, I
visited all parts of Germany, and learned more of the language,
character, and habits of its odd, warm-souled people than I ever could
have learned at the great hotels and in the first-class railway
carriages. During the long vacations, and especially after leaving
Heidelberg altogether, I extended my explorations into remoter
parts,--into the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, and France.
I travelled in a way in which probably no American has ever travelled
before or since, namely, disguised as a Handwerksbursche,--a wandering
tradesman. Any one who has been in Europe will not ask why a stranger in
that land should need to pass himself off as a poor native, if he wants
to save money. On the Continent, as a general rule, a man in broadcloth,
not personally known to the shop or hotel keeper, pays two prices;
whereas a person speaking English, even if clad in fustian, pays three
prices; and I should like to see him help himself. The English language
has come to be mistaken for a gold-mine all through Europe.
These wandering tradesmen, these Handwerksburschen, let me say,--for
they are unknown to nations under free, constitutional governments,--are
a sort of fossil remains of feudalism. They are young fellows, half
journeymen, half apprentices, who are obliged to wander for two or three
years from city to city, working at their trades. They finally return to
their homes, weary and poor; having learned little but the rough side of
the world,--to make what is called their “masterpiece.” If this pass
muster, they are entitled to style themselves masters of their trades.
They grow out of that old illiberal principle which compels the son to
follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather. Yet, for all
the narrow-minded enactments and regulations to crush their spirit and
make them miserable, they always walk on the sunny side of nature. They
are a jovial set of vagabonds, who have rarely the chance to be
dishonest, if they had the inclination.
Disguised in the blouse of their class,--something like our Western
“warmus,” except that it is of thin blue stuff,--I have spent many a
happy hour, toiling along the same road with them, listening to their
stories and merry songs. If I meet one of them on the highway, he stops,
offers me his hand, and exchanges a kindly word. He takes out his pipe,
asks me to fill mine from his tobacco-pouch, and tells me all he knows
of the road passed over.
He never lodges in a city, unless he has work there. The village inn is
his castle; here he obtains his bed at night and his breakfast in the
morning for seven kreutzers,--not quite five cents; and trudges on,
smoking and singing, through all Europe. This is the Handwerksbursche,
poor, but merry; the knight-errant of the bundle and staff; the
troubadour and minnesinger of the nineteenth century.
In Switzerland, for instance, where almost every one travels as a
pedestrian, and where hundreds of our countrymen every year blister
their inexperienced feet at the rates of from ten to thirty francs a
day, I have journeyed sumptuously--thanks to my disguise--for thirty
sous. When addressed in French, if my broken speech was noticed, it was
supposed that I was from one of the German cantons; and, in the same
manner, if my bad German was detected, I was set down as from one of the
French cantons.
This gratuitous naturalization on one day and expatriation on the next
had no bad effect whatever on my health, whereas it had the best
possible result on my purse.
My blouse was a protection, not only to the respectable suit of clothes
which I wore under it, but against all the impositions practised upon
travellers. When I arrived at a large city or watering-place, I
generally hired a little room for a week, found a cheap place to get my
meals, and, after settling prices for everything in advance, divested
myself of my disguise, and “did” the galleries and promenades, to the
accompaniment of kid gloves and immaculate linen.
But the glory of pedestrianism is not in cities; it is in the broad
highway, on the banks of mighty rivers, or in the narrow footpath
winding over mountains. There is such pleasure and pride in the
consciousness that one can go where and when one will, without waiting
on coaches or trains. Thirty, forty, or fifty good miles left behind in
one day, by the means of locomotion nature has given to every one, are
not only a consolation to sleep upon at a village inn, but make the
sleep sounder and sweeter. I defy any man not to be proud of his
strength, when he finds--as almost every one will, after a little
practice--that he can make thirty miles on foot, day after day, with
perfect ease.
It is, however, just to state that village inns are not always
paradises. The hostess sometimes has more lodgers in her beds than she
receives money for; but a practised eye generally detects such places at
a glance, and rarely exposes the body to their perils. Every village has
at least one respectable inn. Before my personal history had taught me
this wisdom by excruciating example, I had good reason to believe that
the tortures of the Vehmgericht, the old secret tribunal of Germany,
were not the things of the past which the world thought them. I had
frequent occasion, too, for what might be called an equanimity of
stomach.
I arrived one evening, for instance, at a small desolate village in the
remote eastern part of Bavaria, near the Austrian border. I was weary
and hungry, but before mine host of the inn would have anything to do
with me, he sent me on a wild chase through innumerable narrow, crooked
alleys, in search of the burgomaster to deliver my passport into his
hands and obtain his gracious permission to remain over night in the
place.
The entrance to the mansion of that dignitary was through a cattle-yard.
He had probably never before in his life heard of the language of my
passport, but that did not prevent his looking at it with an official
air of infinite wisdom. I returned to the inn at last, fortified with
the requisite credentials.
The hostess now appeared, and asked me what I would eat, addressing me
familiarly in the second person singular. Her long lank frame was
attired in the abominable costume of the Bavarian peasantry. I could
compare her to nothing but a giant specimen of the Hungarian heron,
which I need hardly say is not a pretty bird.
The same room served as parlor and kitchen. I sat patiently and watched
her kindling the fire in the great earthen stove, indulging my mind as
hungry people are wont to do, with rich visions of imaginary banquets.
What was my horror to see her take the eggs, which I had ordered, break
them one by one into her greasy leathern apron, and commence beating
them vigorously with a pewter spoon!
As soon as I recovered my presence of mind, I considered the folly of
remonstrating with her, and, with a great effort, I mildly remarked that
she had misunderstood me; I wanted my eggs boiled. By this stratagem, I
preserved my disguise and achieved a cleanly meal in defiance of the
leathern apron.
CHAPTER IV.
A FIGHT WITH FAMINE.
In the mean time, the condition of my finances was becoming hourly more
desperate. I had written to innumerable American newspapers, offering to
produce a letter a day for five dollars a week, and making all sorts of
struggling tenders of brain-work, from which, as a general rule, I heard
nothing at all.
At last Christmas came, and found me back at Heidelberg, utterly
penniless; over five thousand miles from home, in a country where for a
stranger to obtain work was simply hopeless; since the boys in that
densely populated land have to pay for the privilege of learning to
carry bundles,--a pursuit which is there for three years a necessary
introduction to becoming a salesman of the smallest wares. To obtain a
situation as beggar was still more hopeless, the competition of native
dwarfs and cripples being altogether too powerful for an able-bodied
alien.
So here was the end of my one hundred and eighty-one dollars in
currency. I had made what is called the tour of Europe; and I now had
the prospect of immediate starvation for my pains.
* * * * *
And yet that Christmas day was, by all odds, the happiest day of my
life. For, just at fifteen minutes past eleven o’clock, A.M., the
postman knocked at the door and handed me very unexpectedly a letter,
containing about twenty-five dollars in our money. It came from an
American paper, to which I had written, at least, twenty letters for
publication, and twenty-five letters asking for money; so it was
undoubtedly the twenty-five dunning letters that were paid for. And I
shall never be so rich or happy again.
So much has been written about the holidays in Germany, that I cannot be
expected to say anything new on the subject. It may, however, have been
forgotten by some that the _Weinachten_ of the fatherland commence on
what we call “Christmas eve.” This is the great night for children. It
is their feast. It is the time they have been looking forward to with
such wild, glad, gorgeous anticipation. It is the night of the
Christmas-tree; and, in all Germany there is no child so poor as not to
get something from its green boughs.
Besides this night, Christmas has two whole days, to which respectively
there seems to be a logical apportionment of two very important kinds of
enjoyment. The first day is assigned to boundless eating, and the
second--mildly speaking--to getting drunk; and it is due to the zeal of
the Southern Germans, at least, to say that they observe this order of
ceremonies with scrupulous exactness.
Now, it may be sentimental, or something worse, but I confess I like to
dwell upon the time when twenty-five dollars made me perfectly happy.
Memory, you may have observed, has a way of painting frescos with the
clouds of distant skies that are even prettier than the lay-figures and
life-forms which served for the real models. It was, for instance, a
quiet little scene of domestic joy, that Christmas of my student life in
Germany; yet, somehow, it has grouped itself in my remembrance, like
the masterpiece of Cornelius, the largest fresco of them all.
Frau Hirtel was the domestic little body of whom I rented my airy
apartment. Fräulein Anna was her rosy daughter, and this little sunbeam
in the house was the only child of the family that I had ever seen;
though many and many a time, the name of Karl, the only son and brother,
was upon their lips. Karl was a Handwerksbursche,--one of those
houseless tradesmen, before dwelt upon; and on this Christmas Karl was
expected home from his long, long wanderings.
The illuminated tree on the night before had been laden with many a gift
of affectionate remembrance for the absent Karl. As we sat down to the
Christmas dinner, there was a vacant place at the table, and in the
hearts of the disappointed mother and sister. They could not touch a
morsel.
“Are you sure he will come, mamma?” asked the little Anna, after a long
silence.
“Yes, my child, unless something has happened; for the way is long from
Frankfort, and the poor boy’s feet must be sore with his long, long
journey.”
“What, mamma, if he shouldn’t come?”
Frau Hirtel’s face became very pale, whether at the little Anna’s
question or at the sudden ringing of the shop-bell, as the door swung
open and shut. The next instant Karl was in the middle of the room. His
pack and staff fell at his feet, and Frau Hirtel and the Fräulein Anna
sprang into his arms.
It was not the merry dinner that succeeded, or the _Glühwein_ that made
the evening glad, but this one picture which dwells most in my memory.
The joy that shone on the careworn and dust-stained face of the returned
wanderer, reflected in those of his mother and sister as they stood in
that long embrace, has no parallel that I know of in the history of the
return of exiled kings.
* * * * *
With my twenty-five dollars I lived cheaper than ever, and for some
months longer continued my studies at the University. But one morning I
received a letter from the same generous American newspaper, enclosing a
draft for fifty dollars, together with a very earnest request that the
editor should hear no more from me on any account whatever.
This good fortune was too much for my mental equilibrium. Heidelberg was
too small for me. I started the next day for a trip down the Rhine, deck
passage.
At Rotterdam I betook myself again to the third-class cars, and
occasionally to the bundle and staff. Thus I went through Holland and
Belgium, walking leisurely one day over the historic dead of Waterloo.
Arriving finally at Paris, I resolved there to take up my residence. By
means of a cheap lodging in the old Latin Quarter, and of a cheaper
restaurant on the Boulevard Sevastopol, I managed to subsist for several
months.
It was here in Paris that I first met my good friend, George Alfred
Townsend, the well-known war-correspondent. To him I was afterward
indebted for a short, romantic sketch of my life, in which he says, I
believe, among other complimentary things, that the faculty of
Heidelberg gave me my tuition for nothing, but that I would not stay
with them and study, because I thought it too dear!
But, seriously, I owe Mr. Townsend a real debt of gratitude, for it was
he who suggested that I should write an account of certain of my
experiences for one of the London magazines. After the questionable
success of my multifarious attempts with American newspapers, I trembled
at the temerity of the idea. Yet my money was becoming daily and by no
means beautifully less. Neither Mr. Townsend nor anybody else but myself
was aware that, at the time of his suggestion, my cash capital consisted
of one gold napoleon, a silver five-franc piece, and some three or four
sous; and even this sum had dwindled considerably before I could muster
courage to make the attempt.
At last, in a fit of desperation, I sat down one morning, with the
equivalent of about two dollars in my pocket, and commenced my article.
In three days more it was on its way to London with an enclosure of
British stamps, enough to pay for the letter which should tell me
whether it was accepted or rejected.
I shall not dwell longer than I can help upon the painful suspense of
the succeeding five or six days; though I do not remember now my
grounds for expecting an answer in so short a period.
Up to that time I will venture to say there was not a happier person in
the gay capital of France than I had been; for it is one of the peculiar
charms of Paris that it affords abundant amusement for him who spends
forty francs a month, as I did, or forty thousand a month, as some do.
I cannot explain now, any more than you can believe in, my happiness
then. I know only that the beautiful city was delightful, and that I was
delighted. The palaces, the galleries, the gardens, the parks, the
music, and the wonderful diorama of the evening Boulevards were
free,--as free to me, the vagabond stranger, as they were to the
greatest prince; and I had the additional, though not necessarily
comfortable, assurance that I always carried away from them a better
appetite for the next meal than did even his inscrutable majesty, the
Emperor himself.
But now that I had the growing cares of authorship on my mind, it dwelt
more and more upon the waning disks of my franc-pieces, as they swelled
for a time illusively into sous, and then tapered into centimes and
disappeared from my gaze forever.
At this period I found myself occasionally strolling down to the Seine,
and looking over from Pont Neuf at the flood below, swollen with the
late rains, and listening to the strange sound it made in the wake of
the old stone arches, as it rushed on toward the Morgue,--the famous
dead-house, where hundreds of suicides are displayed every year.
Have you ever heard the last “bubbling groan” of a drowning man? If you
have, you will understand the feeling with which, after listening long
and steadily to the low rumble of the eddying water, I have received the
impression more than once on that old bridge, that I heard the same
fatal gurgling sound in the river beneath; and you will understand the
feeling, also, I think, with which, at such times, I cast a hasty glance
at the Morgue, not far distant, and hurried on to the more cheerful
neighborhood of the garden of the Tuileries.
I would not have you believe that the idea of suicide ever crossed my
mind. I merely went and looked into the Seine, on that queer,
unexplained principle which impels miserable people, the world over, to
haunt wharves and bridges, and to gaze listlessly into water. I have
sometimes thought, when I saw servant-girls and others out of employ
looking, for instance, from the bridge of boats at Manheim into the
Rhine, as into the window of an intelligence-office,--I have sometimes
thought, I say, that if dogs do go mad from gazing into water, as I
think was once believed, they are very miserable dogs, and very much
disgusted with the world, before they do it.
One day,--the fourth of my suspense, if I remember,--when I was more
despondent and hungry than usual, I went and looked in through the
grating of the Morgue itself. If I had ever had the least thought of
throwing myself into the Seine, this horrible sight would have cured me
as thoroughly of it as it did of my appetite for the rest of that day.
I feel some diffidence about mentioning a plan--happily abandoned, as
you shall see, before put into further execution--which suggested itself
to my mind during that hungry week, namely, to visit the Morgue once a
day for purposes of economy; but, luckily, I discovered about this time
that the smoking of cigarettes made of cheap French tobacco would
perform the same service of taking away the appetite, and I adopted the
latter more agreeable means to that end.
The fifth and sixth days after sending my article I did scarcely
anything but wait about the office for my letter. Finally, a note
arrived from Paternoster Row, with just one line of the worst penmanship
in it that has ever yet met my eyes; and the painful suspense was only
intensified. The writer evidently said something about my article, but
what I despaired of making out.
I took the note to my friends, and they were divided about it; some said
that the article was rejected, and some that it was accepted. The
majority, however, favored the latter opinion, to which, at last, myself
was brought, and I was happy.
Not long afterward I received a draft from the publishers for a sum
which seemed to me at that time almost fabulous, for the amount of work
done. After a hearty meal, and as soon as I had time to think, I
considered my fortune made. I was now arrived at the appalling dignity
of magazinist,--contributor to the widest-circulated periodical in the
language.
I packed my trunk immediately, and started for Italy.
CHAPTER V.
THE CONCLUSION.
I stayed at Florence all winter, living on the cheapest of food, indeed,
but with the very best of company. I haunted the galleries and studios
so much that the artists took me for a devotee of art, and never asked
me how I lived.
At dusk it was my custom to steal away toward my dinner, passing Michael
Angelo’s David, forever about to throw the stone across the famous old
Piazza, and gliding down a by-street till I came to the market. There,
in a little cook-shop, amid the filth and noise of the very raggedest of
Florence, I partook of my macaroni, or, if I was fastidious, of my
boiled beans and olive-oil, for seven centesimi,--one cent and two
fifths of a cent; my bread made of chestnuts for two centesimi,--two
fifths of a cent; and my half-glass of wine for seven centesimi,--my
dinner, with a scrap of meat, averaging five cents, and rarely exceeding
ten.
My glass of wine may be considered an extravagance. It was not. I could
stand the bustle, the uncleanliness, and even the staring at a passably
well-dressed person in such an unaccustomed place; but I could not stand
the positive amazement expressed by young men and old women, old men and
young women, beggars and organ artists, the day when I omitted wine. It
was too much for endurance. Public opinion was against me. I pretended
to have forgotten to order my wine, and turned off the whole affair with
a laugh.
Many and many a time I have seen a poor old creature, who was often my
next neighbor at table, pay two centesimi for bread and seven centesimi
for wine, and that was her whole meal.
This experience has always helped me to believe the account of that
strange incident in the history of the Florentines, given, I think, by
Macchiavelli, in which it is related that during the Republican days of
Florence, when there was a hostile army making an inroad on their
territories, the doughty republicans, having gone out to meet it, lay
encamped some time not far from Lucca; and that, suddenly, when the
enemy was almost upon them, they revolted, turned around, and marched
home again, to let their territory and the fortunes of their city take
care of themselves, because the Florentine army had unfortunately got
out of wine!
Sometimes I spent my evenings at the _café_, where I always took my
breakfast, and where for three soldi,--three cents,--invested in coffee
or chocolate, I could sit as long as I liked, reading the papers, or
listening to the talk of my artist friends. It was always cheaper for me
to go to the opera--taking a very high seat, by the way--than to have a
light and a fire in my room. I have seen an opera with a hundred or more
people on the stage at a time, in a theatre as large as, and some say
larger than, there is in London or Paris, and all it cost me was eight
cents.
* * * * *
Thus I lived on in the city of art and olives. When my money began to
give out again, I thought I would condescend to transmit another article
to the London magazine which had made my fortune before. I transmitted
another article; and at the time when I ought to have heard from it I
was reduced to the sum of forty francs.
Receiving, at last, an envelope with the Paternoster mark upon it, I
restrained my joy, and opened it leisurely, making merely the mental
resolution that I would dine in state that day; for this was a longer
article than the first one, and the sum which it would bring must be
simply enormous. Then I proceeded to read the following letter:--
“DEAR SIR,--Your article entitled ---- is respectfully declined”!
This time starvation was sure; but I had set my heart on seeing Rome. I
thought there would be a sort of melancholy satisfaction in having
visited the capital of the ancient world before going to any other new
one. I therefore took the next open-topped car for the sea-shore, having
previously put my first rough draft of my unfortunate article into a new
wrapper, and shipped it off to the editor of a less pretending
periodical, published at Edinburgh.
I do not remember how or why, but the night after I left Florence I had
to lie over at Pisa, where I came near being robbed of what little money
I had at a miserable, cheap _trattoria_, not far from the famous Leaning
Tower. I found a fierce-moustached bandit of a fellow in my room in the
middle of the night, stealthily approaching the head of my bed, and
scared him away, I shall always believe, by the bad Anglo-Italian in
which I expressed my sense of surprise and concern at his untimely and
extraordinary conduct.
Two days afterward I took a fourth-class, that is, deck passage on the
French steamer, sailing down the Mediterranean from Leghorn. I stayed a
week at Rome, and came very near staying much longer. It was, indeed, by
a miraculous chance that I ever left the Eternal City. I had not money
enough to pay the Pontifical tax on departing travellers.
It is too long a story to tell here, but I slipped through the fingers
of the police, and, arriving at Leghorn again, I had not the ten cents
to pay the boatman to take me ashore from the steamer.
My trunk, by the way, I had left at Leghorn before starting for Rome; so
that was out of danger, and came properly to hand afterward.
As my lucky star would have it, an American bark was lying at anchor in
the bay. It was the first time I had seen the “star-spangled banner” for
two years, and I flew to it for protection. I directed the boatman to
take me to the American ship.
Standing in the bow of the smaller craft, as soon as she reached the
greater one I sprang up the side, and the boatman sprang after me. He
detained half of my coat, but I reached the deck, where I kept him at
bay with a belaying-pin till some one on the ship was roused; for it was
early in the morning. The ten cents were paid over to the clamorous
Italian by a hearty tar, who was moved to see an American in distress,
“with his mainsail carried away,”--I think that is the way the tar
phrased it.
The captain of the ship was a warm-hearted old fellow from down in
Maine. He offered to take me home before I asked him. I had a boyish
love of independence, and proposed to work. He said he wouldn’t be
bothered with me; he would take me as his only passenger. We settled the
matter at last by my contracting grandly to owe him fifty dollars in
“greenbacks.”
Our vessel was about twenty years old, and laden with rags and great
blocks of marble. We had a terrible storm in the Mediterranean, in which
we came near going down. The old craft seemed, however, to have some
secret understanding with fate; for, having shifted her cargo, she
floated, wellnigh on her beam-ends, the rest of that desolate ten weeks
through the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic.
I arrived at Boston finally, without a cent. I had directed that all
letters should be forwarded from my address at Florence to the care of
the merchant to whom our ship was consigned. What was my surprise, then,
to be handed by that gentleman an envelope enclosing a draft on London,
in pay for the almost-forgotten article which I had sent in sheer
desperation, if not in comprehensive revenge, to that Edinburgh
magazine!
Greenbacks were then at their heaviest discount, and English exchange at
its highest premium. And thus it happened that I sold my draft for
American money enough to pay the good-hearted captain and the patriotic
tar, and to take me back to Toledo, my starting-place, after an absence
of over two years, at the total expense of a little more than three
hundred dollars.
* * * * *
Here, at the proper end of my pilgrimage and of this book, while I am
figuratively taking off my sandal shoon and hanging up my pilgrim staff,
let me say that, although I did not set out with any higher purpose than
to tell just such a story as I might tell under oath, still I think I
discern in these European adventures what I may term an _ex post facto_
moral. Let not the reader, however, practise and amuse his ingenuity by
attempting to detect this in the earlier chapters of the present work,
or by any manner of means in the pilgrim himself; for, personally, he
feels as free from a moral as any pilgrim _he_ has ever seen has been
free from superfluous linen.
While, therefore, I would not advise any young man to follow directly in
my footsteps, yet I hope I have shown that there are means and modes of
travel unknown to the guide-books; that there are cheap ways for the
student and man of limited means to see and learn much for little money.
The sight of a sunrise from the Righi is certainly more than
compensation for putting up with a poor breakfast. And the candid
traveller, however light his purse, needs never return dyspeptic or
misanthropic. Pure air and hearty exercise in the Alps and on the Danube
cannot fail to do him physical good; while he will find in the human
nature with which he comes in contact in every land the sum of the good
invariably preponderating over that of the evil.
THE END.
Cambridge: Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company.