A Voyage of Consolation Part 33

"I found Miss Callis anxious to be informed without delay," said Mr.

Mafferton, with a slightly rebuking accent. "She has a very open mind,"

he went on musingly.

"Oh, wonderfully," I said.

"And a highly retentive memory. It seems she was shown over our place in Surrey last summer. She described it to me in the most perfect detail.

She must be very observant."

"She's as observant as ever she can be," I remarked. "I expect she could describe you in the most perfect detail too, if she tried." I sweetened this with an exterior smile, but I felt extremely rude inside.

"Oh, I fear I could not flatter myself--but how interesting that would be! One has always had a desire to know the impression one makes as a whole, so to speak, upon a fresh and unsophisticated young intelligence like that."

"Well," I said, "there isn't any reason why you shouldn't find out at once." For the Count had melted away, and Miss Callis was not nearly so much occupied with her novel as she appeared to be.

Mr. Mafferton rose, and again stroked his moustache, with a quizzical disciplinary air.

"Oh woman, in your hours of ease Uncertain, coy, and hard to please!"

He quoted. "You are a very whimsical young lady, but since you send me away I must abandon you."

"Thanks so much!" I said. "I mean--I have myself to blame, I know," and as Mr. Mafferton dropped into the seat opposite Miss Callis I saw Mrs.

Portheris regard him austerely, as one for whom it was possible to make too much allowance.

In connection with Heidelberg I wish there were something authentic to say about Perkeo; but n.o.body would believe the quant.i.ty of wine he is supposed to have drunk in a day, which is the statement oftenest made about him, so it is of no consequence that I have forgotten the number of bottles. He isn't the patron saint of Heidelberg, because he only lived about a hundred and fifty years ago, and the first qualification for a patron saint is antiquity. As poppa says, there may be elderly gentlemen in Heidelberg now whose grandfathers have warned them against the personal habits of Perkeo from actual observation. Also we know that he was a court jester, and the pages of the Calendar, for some reason, are closed to persons in that walk of life. Judging by the evidences of his popularity that survive on all sides, Mr. Malt declared that he was probably worth more to the town in attracting residents and investors than half-a-dozen patron saints, and in this there may have been more truth than reverence. The Elector Charles Philip, whose court he jested for, certainly made no such mark upon his town and time as Perkeo did, and in that, perhaps, there is a moral for sovereigns, although the Senator advises me not to dwell upon it. At all events, one writes of Heidelberg but one thinks of Perkeo, as he swings from the sign-boards of the Haupt-Stra.s.se, and stands on the lids of the beer mugs, and smiles from the extra-mural decoration of the wine shops, and lifts his gla.s.s, in eternally good wooden fellows.h.i.+p, beside the big Tun in the Castle cellar. There is a Hotel Perkeo, there must be Clubs Perkeo, probably a suburb and steamboats of the same name, and the local oath "Per Perkeo!" has a harmless sound, but nothing could be more binding in Heidelberg. Momma thought his example a very unfortunate one for a University town, but the rest of us were inclined to admire Perkeo as a self-made man and a success. As d.i.c.ky protested he had made the fullest use of the capacities Nature had given him, it was evident from his figure that he had even developed them, and what more profitable course should the German youth follow? He was cheerful everywhere--as the forerunner of the comic paper one supposes he had to be--but most impressive in his effigy by his master's wine vat, in the perpetual aroma that most inspired him, where, by a mechanical arrangement inside him, he still makes a joke of sorts, in somewhat graceless aspersion of the methods of the professional humorists. Emmeline found him very like her father, and confided her impression to Mrs. Malt. "But of course,"

she added condoningly, "poppa was different when you married him."

Perkeo was not so sentimental as the Trumpeter of Sakkingen, and the Trumpeter of Sakkingen was not so sentimental as the Heidelberg University student. The Heidelberg University student was as a rule very round and very young, and he seemed to give up the whole of his spare time to imitating the pa.s.sion which I hope has not been permitted to enter too largely into this book of travels.

d.i.c.ky and I agreed that it was a mere imitation; that is, d.i.c.ky said it was and I agreed. It could not possibly amount to anything more, for it consisted wholly in walking up and down in front of the house in which its object lived. We saw it being done, and it looked so uninteresting that we failed to realise what it meant until we inquired. Mrs.

Portheris's nephew, Mr. Jarvis Portheris, who was acquiring German in Heidelberg, told us about it. Mrs. Portheris's nephew was just fourteen and small of his age, but he, too, had selected the lady of his admiration, and was taking regular daily pedestrian exercise in front of her residence. He pointed out the residence, and observed with an enormous frown that "another man" had usurped the pavement in his absence, and was doing it in quick step doubtless to show his ardour.

"He's a beastly German too," said Mrs. Portheris's nephew, "so I can't challenge him, but I'll jolly well punch his head."

"Come on," said d.i.c.ky, "you'd better steady your nerves," and treated him liberally to ginger-beer and currant buns; but we were not allowed to see the encounter, which Mr. Jarvis Portheris, gratefully satiate, a.s.sured us must be conducted on strict lines of etiquette, with formal preliminaries. He was so very young, and obviously knew so little about what he was doing, that we questioned him with some delicacy, but we discovered that the practice had no parallel, as d.i.c.ky put it, for lack of incident. It was accompanied in some cases by the writing of poetry, "German poetry, of course," said Mrs. Portheris's nephew ineffably, but even that was more likely to be exhibited as evidence of the writer's fervid state of mind than to be sent to its object, who plaited her hair and attended to her domestic duties as if n.o.body were in the street but the fishmonger. In Mr. Jarvis Portheris's case he did not know the colour of her eyes, or the number of her years; he had selected her, it seemed, at a venture, in church, from a rear view, sitting; and had never seen her since. d.i.c.ky, whose predilections of this sort have always been very active, asked him seriously why he adhered to such a hollow mockery, and he said regretfully that a fellow more or less had to; it was one of the beastly nuisances of being educated abroad. But from what we saw of the German temperament generally we were convinced that as a native demonstration it was sincere, and that its idiocy arose only, as d.i.c.ky expressed it, from the remarkable lack in foreigners of business capacity.

We all congratulated ourselves on seeing Heidelberg while the University was in session, and we could observe the large fat students in flat blue and pink and green club caps, swaggering about the town accompanied by dogs of almost equal importance. The largest and fattest, I thought, wore white caps, and, though Mr. Jarvis Portheris said that white was the most aristocratic club's colour, they looked remarkably like bakers.

The Senator had an object in Heidelberg, as he had in so many places, and that object was to investigate the practice of duelling, which everybody understands to prevail to a deadly extent among the students.

It was plain from their appearance that personal a.s.sault at all events was regrettably common, for nearly everyone of them wore traces of it in their faces, wore them as if they were particularly becoming. Every variety of scar that could well be imagined was represented, some healed, some healing, and some freshly gory. The youth with the most scars, we observed, gave himself the most airs, and the really vainglorious were, more or less, obscured in cotton-wool, evidently just from the hands of the surgeon. The Senator examined them individually as they pa.s.sed, with an inquisitiveness which they plainly enjoyed, and was much impressed with their fighting qualities as a race, until Mr. Jarvis Portheris happened to explain that the scars were very carefully given and received with an almost exclusive view to personal adornment. Mr.

Mafferton appeared to have known this before; but that was an irritating way he had--none of the rest of us did. The Senator regarded the next youth he met, who had elongated his mouth to run up into his ear without adding in the least to his charms of appearance, with barely disguised contempt, and when Mr. Jarvis Portheris proceeded to explain how the doctors pulled open the cuts if they promised to heal without leaving any sign of valour, poppa's impatience with the n.o.ble army of duellists grew so great that he could hardly remain in Heidelberg till the train was ready to take him away.

"But don't they ever by _accident_ do themselves any harm?" inquired my disappointed parent.

"There's one case on record," said Mr. Jarvis Portheris, "and everybody here says it's true. One fellow that was fighting happened to have a dog, and the dog was allowed in. Well, the other fellow, by accident, sliced off the end of the fellow that had the dog's nose--I don't mean the dog's nose, you know, but the fellow's. That was going a bit far, you know; they don't generally go so far. Well, the doctor said that would be all right, they could easily make it grow on again; but when they looked for the nose--_the dog had eaten it!_ They never allow dogs in now."

It was a simple little story, and it bore marks of unmistakable age and many aliases, but it did much to reconcile the Senator to the University student of Heidelberg, and especially to his dog.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Emmeline had childlike lapses; she rejoiced greatly, for instance, at seeing a Strasbourg stork. She confessed, when she saw it, to having read Hans Andersen when she was a little girl, and was happy in the resemblance of the tall chimneys he stood on, and the high-pitched red roofs he surveyed, to the pictures she remembered. But, for that matter, so were we all. We had an hour and a half at Strasbourg, and we drove, of course, to the Cathedral; but it was the stork that we saw, and that each of us privately considered the really valuable impression. He stood beside his nest with his chin sunk in his neck, looking immensely lucky and wise, and one quite agreed with Emmeline that it must be lovely to live under him.

We lunched at the station, and, as the meal progressed, saw again how widespread and sincere is the German sentiment to which I alluded, perhaps too lightly, in the last chapter. Our waitresses were all that could be desired, until there came between us and them a youth from parts without. He was sallow, and the waitresses were buxom; he might have been a student of law or medicine, they were naturally of much lower degree. But they frankly forsook us and sat down beside him in terms of devotion and an open aspect of radiant happiness. When one went to draw his lager beer he put an unrepelled arm round the waist of the other, and when the first came back he chucked her under the chin with undisguised affection, the while we looked on and starved, none knowing the language except Isabel, who thought of nothing but blus.h.i.+ng. As Mr.

Malt said, if the young man could only have made up his mind, we might have been able to get along with the rejected one; but, apparently, he was not in the least embarra.s.sed by numbers, sending a large and beguiling smile to yet a further hand-maiden, who pa.s.sed enviously through the _speise-salle_ with a basin of soup. It was only when d.i.c.ky stalked across to the old woman who sold sausages and biscuits behind a counter, and pointed indignantly to the person who held all the available table service of the Strasbourg railway station on his knees, that we obtained redress. The old woman laughed as if it were amusing, and called the maidens shrilly; but even then they came with reluctance, as if we had been mere schnapps instead of ten complete luncheons, one soup, and a bread and cheese, as d.i.c.ky said. The bread and cheese was the Count, and one gathered from it that the improvement in his immediate prospects was not yet a.s.sured, that the arrangimento was still in futuro.

We had become such a large party, that it is impossible to relate the whole of our experiences even in the half hour during which we dawdled round the Strasbourg waiting-room until the train should start. I know it was then, for instance, that Mrs. Portheris took d.i.c.ky aside and told him how deeply she sympathised with him in his trying position, and bade him only be faithful to the dictates of his own heart and all would come right in time. I know d.i.c.ky promised faithfully to do so, but I must not dwell upon it. Nor is the opportunity adequate to express the indignation we all felt, and not Mr. Mafferton merely, at the insufficient personal impression we made upon the German railway officials. They were so completely preoccupied with their magnificent selves and their vast business that they were unable even to look at us when we asked them questions, and their sole conception of a reply was an order, in terms that sounded brutal to a degree. They were objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number of b.u.t.tons and straps upon their uniforms. As Mr. Mafferton said, they utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as humble servants, b.u.t.toned only to be made more agreeable to the eye.

One such person trampled upon us to such an extent that I have never been able to satisfy myself that the Senator was sincere in making his little mistake. We were sitting in dejected rows, with a number of other foreigners who had been similarly reduced, when this official entered the waiting-room, advanced to the middle of it, posed with great majesty, and emitted several bars of a kind of chant or chime. It was delivered with too much vigour, and it stopped too abruptly, to be entirely enjoyable; but there was no doubt about the musical intention.

It was not even intoning; it was singing, beginning with moderation, going on stronger with indignation, and ending suddenly in a crescendo of denunciation.

We smiled in difficult self-restraint as he went away, and d.i.c.ky remarked that he supposed we were in their hands, we couldn't object to anything they did to us. In five minutes he came back to exactly the same spot and sang again the same words, in the same key, with the same unction. "Encore!" exclaimed Mr. Malt boldly, but cowered under the glare that was turned upon him, and utterly fell away when we reminded him of the punishments attached in Germany to the charge of _lese majeste_. Precisely five minutes more pa.s.sed away, and Bawlinb.u.t.tons, as Miss Callis called him, entered again. Then occurred the Senator's little mistake. In the midst of the second bar, the indignant one, Bawlinb.u.t.tons stopped short, petrified by poppa, who had advanced and was holding out copper coins whose usefulness we had left behind us, to the value of about fifteen cents.

"Here's the collection," said poppa benevolently--for an instant or two he was quite audible--"but unless you know some other tune the company wish me to say that they won't trouble you any further."

There are misunderstandings that are never rectified, sometimes because a train draws up at the platform as in this case, and sometimes for other reasons, and it was natural enough that poppa should fail to comprehend Bawlinb.u.t.tons' indignant shouts to the effect that a Kaiser should never be mistaken for an organ-grinder, merely because his tastes are musical. Neither is it likely that the various Teutons who were waiting for the information will ever understand why the announcement that the train for Saarburg, Nancy, Frankfort, and Mayence would leave at ten o'clock precisely was never completed for the third time, according to the regulation. But we have often wondered since what Bawlinb.u.t.tons did with the coppers.

We divided up on the way to Mayence, and Mr. and Mrs. Malt came into the compartment with the Senator, momma, and me. Mr. Malt was unsatisfied with poppa's revenge on Bawlinb.u.t.tons, and proposed to make things awkward further for the guard. He said it could be done very simply, by a disagreement between himself and the Senator as to whether the windows should be open or shut. He said he had heard of a German guard put to the most enjoyable misery by such a dispute, not knowing the language of the disputants and being forced to arbitrate upon their respective demands. Mr. Malt had laughed at the Senator's joke, so the Senator, of course, had to a.s.sist at Mr. Malt's, and they began to work themselves up, as Mr. Malt said, into the spirit of it. Mr. Malt was to insist that the windows should be shut, he said he _had_ got a trifling cold, and the Senator was to require them open in the interests of ventilation. They rehea.r.s.ed their arguments, and momma putting her head out of the window at the first small station cried, "Be quick and change your expressions--he's coming!"

In the presence of the guard Mr. Malt rose with dignity and closed the windows. The Senator, with a well-simulated scowl, at once opened them both.

"Stranger!" said Mr. Malt, while momma fumbled for her ticket, "I shut those windows."

"Sir," responded poppa, "if you had not done so I shouldn't have been obliged to open them."

"I can't die of pneumonia, sir," said Mr. Malt, again closing the window, "to oblige _you_."

"Nor do I feel compelled," returned the Senator furiously, "to asphyxiate my family to make it comfortable for you!" and the window fell with a bang.

The guard, holding out a ma.s.sive hand for my ticket, took no notice whatever.

"Put it up again," said Mrs. Malt, who was more anxious than any of us to avenge herself upon the German railway system, "and try to break the gla.s.s."

"Attract his attention, Alexander," said momma. "Pull one of his silly b.u.t.tons off."

The guard gave no sign--he was replacing the elastic round my book of coupons after detaching the green one on which was printed, "Strasburg nach Mainz."

Poppa and Mr. Malt were sitting opposite each other in the middle of the carriage.

"I tell you I've got bronchial trouble, and I won't be manslaughtered,"

cried Mr. Malt, hurling himself upon the strap, while poppa seized the guard by the arm and pointed to the closed window. The only foreign language with which poppa is acquainted is that used by the Indians on the banks of the Saguenay river, a few words of which he acquired while salmon fis.h.i.+ng there two years ago. These he poured forth upon the guard--they were the only ones that occurred to him, he said--at the same time threatening with his disengaged fist bodily a.s.sault upon Mr.

Malt.

"That ought to draw him," said Mrs. Malt.

It did draw him.

"Leave go!" he said to poppa, and his air of authority was such that poppa left go. "Is this here a lunatic party, or a young menagerie, or what? Now look here," he continued, taking Mr. Malt by the elbow and seating him with some violence in a corner seat and shutting the window.