Europe Revised Part 17

"M'sieur," he said, "I regret that this has happened. Because you are a foreigner and because you know not our language, that woman would make an overcharge; but she forgot she had me to deal with. I am on guard!

See her! She is now quelled! I have given her a lesson she will not soon forget. M'sieur, the correct amount of the bill is two-francs-ten. Give it to her and let us begone!"

I still have that guide's name and address in my possession. At parting he pressed his card on me and asked me to keep it; and I did keep it. I shall be glad to loan it to any American who may be thinking of going to Paris. With the card in his pocket, he will know exactly where this guide lives; and then, when he is in need of a guide he can carefully go elsewhere and hire a guide.

I almost failed to mention that before we parted he tried to induce us to buy something. He took us miles out of our way to a pottery and urged us to invest in its wares. This is the main purpose of every guide: to see that you buy something and afterward to collect his commission from the shopkeeper for having brought you to the shop. If you engage your guide through the porter at your hotel you will find that he steers you to the shops the hotel people have already recommended to you; but if you break the porter's heart by hiring your guide outside, independently, the guide steers you to the shops that are on his own private list.

Only once I saw a guide temporarily stumped, and that was in Venice. The skies were leaky that day and the weather was raw; and one of the ladies of the party wore pumps and silk stockings. For the protection of her ankles she decided to buy a pair of cloth gaiters; and, stating her intention, she started to go into a shop that dealt in those articles.

The guide hesitated a moment only, then threw himself in her path.

The shops hereabout were not to be trusted--the proprietors, without exception, were rogues and extortioners. If madame would have patience for a few brief moments he would guarantee that she got what she wanted at an honest price. He seemed so desirous of protecting her that she consented to wait.

In a minute, on a pretext, he excused himself and dived into one of the crooked ways that thread through all parts of Venice and make it possible for one who knows their windings to reach any part of the city without using the ca.n.a.ls. Two of us secretly followed him. Beyond the first turning he dived into a shoe shop. Emerging after a while he hurried back and led the lady to that same shop, and stood by, smiling softly, while she was fitted with gaiters. Until now evidently gaiters had not been on his list, but he had taken steps to remedy this; and, though his commission on a pair of sixty-cent gaiters could not have been very large yet, as some philosopher has so truly said, every little bit added to what you have makes just a modic.u.m more. Indeed, the guide never overlooks the smallest bet. His whole mentality is focused on getting you inside a shop. Once you are there, he stations himself close behind you, reenforcing the combined importunities of the shopkeeper and his a.s.sembled staff with gentle suggestions. The depths of self-abas.e.m.e.nt to which a shopkeeper in Europe will descend in an effort to sell his goods surpa.s.ses the power of description. The London tradesman goes pretty far in this direction. Often he goes as far as the sidewalk, clinging to the hem of your garment and begging you to return for one more look. But the Continentals are still worse.

A Parisian shopkeeper would sell you the bones of his revered grandmother if you wanted them and he had them in stock; and he would have them in stock too, because, as I have stated once before, a true Parisian never throws away anything he can save. I heard of just one single instance where a customer desirous of having an article and willing to pay the price failed to get it; and that, I would say, stands without a parallel in the annals of commerce and barter.

An American lady visiting her daughter, an art student in the Latin Quartier, was walking alone when she saw in a shop window a lace blouse she fancied. She went inside and by signs, since she knew no French, indicated that she wished to look at that blouse. The woman in charge shook her head, declining even to take the garment out of the window.

Convinced now, womanlike, that this particular blouse was the blouse she desired above all other blouses the American woman opened her purse and indicated that she was prepared to buy at the shopwoman's own valuation, without the privilege of examination. The shopwoman showed deep pain at having to refuse the proposition, but refuse it she did; and the would-be buyer went home angry and perplexed and told her daughter what had happened.

"It certainly is strange," the daughter said. "I thought everything in Paris, except possibly Napoleon's tomb, was for sale. This thing will repay investigation. Wait until I pin my hat on. Does my nose need powdering?"

Her mother led her back to the shop of the blouse and then the puzzle was revealed. For it was the shop of a dry cleanser and the blouse belonged to some patron and was being displayed as a sample of the work done inside; but undoubtedly such a thing never before happened in Paris and probably never will happen again.

In Venice not only the guides and the hotel clerks and porters but even the simple gondolier has a secret understanding with all branches of the retail trade. You get into a long, snaky, black gondola and fee the beggar who pushes you off, and all the other beggars who have a.s.sisted in the pus.h.i.+ng off or have merely contributed to the success of the operation by being present, and you tell your gondolier in your best Italian or your worst pidgin English where you wish to go. It may be you are bound for the Rialto; or for the Bridge of Sighs, which is chiefly distinguished from all the other bridges by being the only covered one in the lot; or for the house of the lady Desdemona. The lady Desdemona never lived there or anywhere else, but the house where she would have lived, had she lived, is on exhibition daily from nine to five, admission one lira. Or perchance you want to visit one of the ducal palaces that are so numerous in Venice. These palaces are still tenanted by the descendants of the original proprietors; one family has perhaps been living in one palace three or four hundred years. But now the family inhabits the top floor, doing light housekeeping up there, and the lower floor, where the art treasures, the tapestries and the family relics are, is in charge of a caretaker, who collects at the door and then leads you through.

Having given the boatman explicit directions you settle back in your cus.h.i.+on seat to enjoy the trip. You marvel how he, standing at the stern, with his single oar fitted into a shallow notch of his steering post, propels the craft so swiftly and guides it so surely by those short, twisting strokes of his. Really, you reflect, it is rowing by shorthand. You are feasting your eyes on the wonderful color effects and the groupings that so enthuse the artist, and which he generally manages to botch and boggle when he seeks to commit them to canvas; and betweenwhiles you are wondering why all the despondent cats in Venice should have picked out the Grand Ca.n.a.l as the most suitable place in which to commit suicide, when--b.u.mp!--your gondola swings up against the landing piles in front of a gla.s.s factory and the entire force of helpers rush out and seize you by your arms--or by your legs, if handier--and try to drag you inside, while the affable and accommodating gondolier boosts you from behind. You fight them off, declaring pa.s.sionately that you are not in the market for colored gla.s.s at this time. The hired hands protest; and the gondolier, cheated out of his commission, sorrows greatly, but obeys your command to move on. At least he pretends to obey it; but a minute later he brings you up broadside at the water-level doors of a shop dealing in antiques, known appropriately as antichitas, or at a mosaic shop or a curio shop. If ever you do succeed in reaching your destination it is by the exercise of much profanity and great firmness of will.

The most insistent and pesky shopkeepers of all are those who hive in the ground floors of the professedly converted palaces that face on three sides of the Square of Saint Mark's. You dare not hesitate for the smallest fractional part of a second in front of a shop here. Lurking inside the open door is a husky puller-in; and he dashes out and grabs hold of you and will not let go, begging you in spaghettified English to come in and examine his unapproachable a.s.sortment of bargains. You are not compelled to buy, he tells you; he only wants you to gaze on his beautiful things. Believe him not! Venture inside and decline to purchase and he will think up new and subtle Italian forms of insult and insolence to visit on you. They will have bra.s.s bands out for you if you invest and bra.s.s knuckles if you do not.

There is but one way to escape from their everlasting persecutions, and that is to flee to the center of the square and enjoy the company of the pigeons and the photographers. They--the pigeons, I mean--belong to the oldest family in Venice; their lineage is of the purest and most undefiled. For upward of seven hundred years the authorities of the city have been feeding and protecting the pigeons, of which these countless blue-and-bronze flocks are the direct descendants. They are true aristocrats; and, like true aristocrats, they are content to live on the public funds and grow fat and sa.s.sy thereon, paying nothing in return.

No; I take that part back--they do pay something in return; a full measure. They pay by the beauty of their presence, and they are surely very beautiful, with their dainty mincing pink feet and the sheen on the proudly arched breast coverts of the c.o.c.k birds; and they pay by giving you their trust and their friends.h.i.+p. To gobble the gifts of dried peas, which you buy in little cornucopias from convenient venders for distribution among them, they come wheeling in winged battalions, creaking and cooing, and alight on your head and shoulders in that perfect confidence which so delights humans when wild or half-wild creatures bestow it on us, though, at every opportunity, we do our level best to destroy it by hunting and harrying them to death.

At night, when the moon is up, is the time to visit this spot. Standing here, with the looming pile of the Doge's Palace bulked behind you, and the gorgeous but somewhat garish decorations of the great cathedral softened and soothed into perfection of outline and coloring by the half light, you can for the moment forget the fallen state of Venice, and your imagination peoples the splendid plaza for you with the ghosts of its dead and vanished greatnesses. You conceive of the place as it must have looked in those old, brave, wicked days, filled all with knights, with red-robed cardinals and clanking men at arms, with fair ladies and grave senators, slinking bravos and hired a.s.sa.s.sins--and all so gay with silk and satin and glittering steel and spangling gems.

By the eye of your mind you see His Illuminated Excellency, the frosted Christmas card, as he bows low before His Eminence, the pink Easter egg; you see, half hidden behind the shadowed columns of the long portico, an ill.u.s.trated Sunday supplement in six colors bargaining with a stick of striped peppermint candy to have his best friend stabbed in the back before morning; you see giddy poster designs carrying on flirtations with hand-painted valentines; you catch the love-making, overhear the intriguing, and scent the plotting; you are an eyewitness to a slice out of the life of the most sinister, the most artistic, and the most murderous period of Italian history.

But by day imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, stops a hole to keep the wind away; and the wild a.s.s of the ninety-day tour stamps his heedless hoofs over the spot where sleeps the dust of departed grandeur.

By day the chug of the motor boat routs out old sleepy echoes from cracked and crannied ruins; the burnished golden frescoes of Saint Mark's blare at you as with brazen trumpets; every third medieval church has been turned into a moving-picture place; and the shopkeeping parasites buzz about you in vermin swarms and bore holes in your pocketbook until it is all one large painful welt. The emblem of Venice is the winged lion. It should be the tapeworm.

In Rome it appears to be a standing rule that every authenticated guide shall be a violent Socialist and therefore rampingly anticlerical in all his views. We were in Rome during the season of pilgrimages. From all parts of Italy, from Bohemia and Hungary and Spain and Tyrol, and even from France, groups of peasants had come to Rome to wors.h.i.+p in their mother church and be blessed by the supreme pontiff of their faith. At all hours of the day they were pa.s.sing through the streets, bound for Saint Peter's or the Vatican, the women with kerchiefs over their heads, the men in their Sunday best, and all with badges and tokens on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

At the head of each straggling procession would be a black-frocked village priest, at once proud and humble, nervous and exalted. A man might be of any religion or of no religion at all, and yet I fail to see how he could watch, unmoved, the uplifted faces of these people as they clumped over the cobbles of the Holy City, praying as they went. Some of them had been saving up all their lives, I imagine, against the coming of this great day; but our guide--and we tried three different ones--never beheld this sight that he did not sneer at it; and not once did he fail to point out that most of the pilgrims were middle-aged or old, taking this as proof of his claim that the Church no longer kept its hold on the younger people, even among the peasant cla.s.ses. The still more frequent spectacle of a marching line of students of one of the holy colleges, with each group wearing the distinctive insignia of its own country--purple robes or green sashes, or what not--would excite him to the verge of a spasm.

But then he was always verging on a spasm anyway--spasms were his normal state.

Chapter XX

The Combustible Captain of Vienna

Our guide in Vienna was the most stupid human being I ever saw. He was profoundly ignorant on a tremendously wide range of subjects; he had a most complete repertoire of ignorance. He must have spent years of study to store up so much interesting misinformation. This guide was much addicted to indulgence of a peculiar form of twisted English and at odd moments given to the consumption of a delicacy of strictly Germanic origin, known in the language of the Teutons as a rollmops. A rollmops consists of a large dilled cuc.u.mber, with a pickled herring coiled round it ready to strike, in the design of the rattlesnake-and-pinetree flag of the Revolution, the motto in both instances being in effect: "Don't monkey with the buzz saw!" He carried his rollmops in his pocket and frequently, in art galleries or elsewhere, would draw it out and nibble it, while disseminating inaccuracies touching on pictures and statues and things.

Among other places, he took us to the oldest church in Vienna. As I now recollect it was six hundred years old. No; on second thought I will say it must have been older than that. No church could possibly become so moldy and mangy looking as that church in only six hundred years. The object in this church that interested me most was contained in an ornate gla.s.s case placed near the altar and alongside the relics held to be sacred. It did not exactly please me to gaze at this article; but the thing had a fascination for me; I will not deny that.

It seems that a couple of centuries ago there was an officer in Vienna, a captain in rank and a Frenchman by birth, who, in the midst of disorders and licentiousness, lived so G.o.dly and so sanctified a life that his soldiers took it into their heads that he was really a saint, or at least had the making of a first-rate saint in him, and, therefore, must lead a charmed life. So--thus runs the tale--some of them laid a wager with certain Doubting Thomases, also soldiers, that neither by fire nor water, neither by rope nor poison, could he take harm to himself. Finally they decided on fire for the test. So they waited until he slept--those simple, honest, chuckle-headed chaps--and then they slipped in with a lighted torch and touched him off.

Well, sir, the joke certainly was on those soldiers. He burned up with all the spontaneous enthusiasm of a celluloid comb. For qualities of instantaneous combustion he must have been the equal of any small-town theater that ever was built--with one exit. He was practically a total loss and there was no insurance.

They still have him, or what is left of him, in that gla.s.s case. He did not exactly suffer martyrdom--though probably he personally did not notice any very great difference--and so he has not been canonized; nevertheless, they have him there in that church. In all Europe I only saw one sight to match him, and that was down in the crypt under the Church of the Capuchins, in Rome, where the dissected cadavers of four thousand dead--but not gone--monks are worked up into decorations. There are altars made of their skulls, and chandeliers made of their thigh bones; frescoes of their spines; mosaics of their teeth and dried muscles; cozy corners of their femurs and pelves and tibiae. There are two cla.s.ses of travelers I would strongly advise not to visit the crypt of the Capuchins' Church--those who are just about to have dinner and want to have it, and those who have just had dinner and want to keep on having it.

At the royal palace in Vienna we saw the finest, largest, and gaudiest collection of crown jewels extant. That guide of ours seemed to think he had done his whole duty toward us and could call it a day and knock off when he led us up to the jewel collections, where each case was surrounded by pop-eyed American tourists taking on flesh at the sight of all those sparklers and figuring up the grand total of their valuation in dollars, on the basis of so many hundreds of carats at so many hundred dollars a carat, until reason tottered on her throne--and did not have so very far to totter, either.

The display or all those gems, however, did not especially excite me.

There were too many of them and they were too large. A blue Kimberley in a hotel clerk's s.h.i.+rtfront or a pigeonblood ruby on a faro dealer's little finger might hold my attention and win my admiration; but where jewels are piled up in heaps like anthracite in a coal bin they thrill me no more than the anthracite would. A quart measure of diamonds of the average size of a big hailstone does not make me think of diamonds but of hailstones. I could remain as calm in their presence as I should in the presence of a quart of cracked ice; in fact, calmer than I should remain in the presence of a quart of cracked ice in Italy, say, where there is not that much ice, cracked or otherwise. In Italy a bucketful of ice would be worth traveling miles to see. You could sell tickets for it.

In one of the smaller rooms of the palace we came on a casket containing a necklace of great smoldering rubies and a pair of bracelets to match.

They were as big as cranberries and as red as blood--as red as arterial blood. And when, on consulting the guidebook, we read the history of those rubies the sight of them brought a picture to our minds, for they had been a part of the wedding dowry of Marie Antoinette. Once on a time this necklace had spanned the slender white throat that was later to be sheared by the guillotine, and these bracelets had clasped the same white wrists that were roped together with an ell of hangman's hemp on the day the desolated queen rode, in her patched and shabby gown, to the Place de la Revolution.

I had seen paintings in plenty and read descriptions galore of that last ride of the Widow Capet going to her death in the tumbril, with the priest at her side and her poor, fettered arms twisted behind her, and her white face bared to the jeers of the mob; but the physical presence of those precious useless baubles, which had cost so much and yet had bought so little for her, made more vivid to me than any picture or any story the most sublime tragedy of The Terror--the tragedy of those two bound hands.

Chapter XXI

Old Masters and Other Ruins

It is naturally a fine thing for one, and gratifying, to acquire a thorough art education. Personally I do not in the least regret the time I gave and the study I devoted to acquiring mine. I regard those two weeks as having been well spent.

I shall not do it soon again, however, for now I know all about art. Let others who have not enjoyed my advantages take up this study. Let others scour the art galleries of Europe seeking masterpieces. All of them contain masterpieces and most of them need scouring. As for me and mine, we shall go elsewhere. I love my art, but I am not fanatical on the subject. There is another side of my nature to which an appeal may be made. I can take my Old Masters or I can leave them be. That is the way I am organized--I have self-control.

I shall not deny that the earlier stages of my art education were fraught with agreeable little surprises. Not soon shall I forget the flush of satisfaction which ran through me on learning that this man Dore's name was p.r.o.nounced like the first two notes in the music scale, instead of like a Cape Cod fis.h.i.+ng boat. And lingering in my mind as a fragrant memory is the day when I first discovered that Spagnoletto was neither a musical instrument nor something to be served au gratin and eaten with a fork. Such acquirements as these are very precious to me.

But for the time being I have had enough. At this hour of writing I feel that I am stocked up with enough of Bouguereau's sorrel ladies and t.i.tian's chestnut ones and Rubens' bay ones and Velasquez's pintos to last me, at a conservative estimate, for about seventy-five years. I am too young as a theatergoer to recall much about Lydia Thompson's Blondes, but I have seen sufficient of Botticelli's to do me amply well for a spell. I am still willing to walk a good distance to gaze on one of Rembrandt's portraits of one of his kinfolks, though I must say he certainly did have a lot of mighty homely relatives; and any time there is a first-rate Millet or Corot or Meissonier in the neighborhood I wish somebody would drop me a line, giving the address. As for pictures by Tintoretto, showing Venetian Doges hobn.o.bbing informally with members of the Holy Family, and Raphael's angels, and Michelangelo's lost souls, and Guidos, and Murillos, I have had enough to do me for months and months and months. Nor am I in the market for any of the dead fish of the Flemish school. Judging by what I have observed, practically all the Flemish painters were devout churchmen and painted their pictures on Friday.

There was just one drawback to my complete enjoyment of that part of our European travels we devoted to art. We would go to an art gallery, hire a guide and start through. Presently I would come to a picture that struck me as being distinctly worth while. To my untutored conceptions it possessed unlimited beauty. There was, it seemed to me, life in the figures, reality in the colors, grace in the grouping. And then, just when I was beginning really to enjoy it, the guide would come and s.n.a.t.c.h me away.

He would tell me the picture I thought I admired was of no account whatsoever--that the artist who painted it had not yet been dead long enough to give his work any permanent value; and he would drag me off to look at a cracked and crumbling canvas depicting a collection of saints of lacquered complexions and hardwood expressions, with cast-iron trees standing up against cotton batting clouds in the background, and a few extra halos floating round indiscriminately, like sun dogs on a showery day, and, up above, the family entrance into heaven hospitably ajar; and he would command me to bask my soul in this magnificent example of real art and not waste time on inconsequential and trivial things. Guides have the same idea of an artist that a Chinaman entertains for an egg.

A fresh egg or a fresh artist will not do. It must have the perfume of antiquity behind it to make it attractive.

At the Louvre, in Paris, on the first day of the two we spent there, we had for our guide a tall, educated Prussian, who had an air about him of being an ex-officer of the army. All over the Continent you are constantly running into men engaged in all manner of legitimate and dubious callings, who somehow impress you as having served in the army of some other country than the one in which you find them. After this man had been chaperoning us about for some hours and we had stopped to rest, he told a good story. It may not have been true--it has been my experience that very few good stories are true; but it served aptly to ill.u.s.trate a certain type of American tourist numerously encountered abroad.

"There were two of them," he said in his excellent English, "a gentleman and his wife; and from what I saw of them I judged them to be very wealthy. They were interested in seeing only such things as had been recommended by the guidebook. The husband would tell me they desired to see such and such a picture or statue. I would escort them to it and they would glance at it indifferently, and the gentleman would take out his lead pencil and check off that particular object in the book; and then he would say: 'All right--we've seen that; now let's find out what we want to look at next.' We still serve a good many people like that--not so many as formerly, but still a good many.