<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1>DIARY OF A PILGRIMAGE</h1>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">by</span><br/>
JEROME K. JEROME</p>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">author
of</span><br/>
“<span class="smcap">the idle thoughts of an idle
fellow</span>,” “<span class="smcap">stageland</span>”<br/>
“<span class="smcap">three men in a boat</span>,”
<span class="smcap">etc.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">Illustrations by <span class="smcap">g. g. fraser</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center">BRISTOL<br/>
<span class="smcap">J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd.</span>, <span class="smcap">Quay Street</span><br/>
LONDON<br/>
<span class="smcap">Simpkin</span>, <span class="smcap">Marshall</span>, <span class="smcap">Hamilton</span>, <span class="smcap">Kent & Co.
Limited</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center"><i>First Edition</i>, <i>April</i>,
1891.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>June</i>, 1891.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>December</i>, 1891.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>February</i>, 1892.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>February</i>, 1895.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>September</i>, 1896.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>December</i>, 1897.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>January</i>, 1899.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>September</i>, 1900.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>October</i>, 1902.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>October</i>, 1903.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>January</i>, 1904.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>October</i>, 1905.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>March</i>, 1907.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>February</i>, 1909.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>February</i>, 1910.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>November</i>, 1911.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>February</i>, 1914.<br/>
<i>Reprinted</i>, <i>December</i>, 1916.<br/>
<i>Second Edition</i>, <i>December</i>, 1919.</p>
<h2>PREFACE</h2>
<p>Said a friend of mine to me some months ago: “Well now,
why don’t you write a <i>sensible</i> book? I should
like to see you make people think.”</p>
<p>“Do you believe it can be done, then?” I
asked.</p>
<p>“Well, try,” he replied.</p>
<p>Accordingly, I have tried. This is a sensible
book. I want you to understand that. This is a book
to improve your mind. In this book I tell you all about
Germany—at all events, all I know about Germany—and
the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play. I also tell you about other
things. I do not tell you all I know about all these other
things, because I do not want to swamp you with knowledge.
I wish to lead you gradually. When you have learnt this
book, you can come again, and I will tell you some more. I
should only be defeating my own object did I, by making you think
too much at first, give you a perhaps, lasting dislike to the
exercise. I have purposely put the matter in a light and
attractive form, so that I may secure the attention of the young
and the frivolous. I do not want them to notice, as they go
on, that they are being instructed; and I have, therefore,
endeavoured to disguise from them, so far as is practicable, that
this is either an exceptionally clever or an exceptionally useful
work. I want to do them good without their knowing
it. I want to do you all good—to improve your minds
and to make you think, if I can.</p>
<p><i>What</i> you will think after you have read the book, I do
not want to know; indeed, I would rather not know. It will
be sufficient reward for me to feel that I have done my duty, and
to receive a percentage on the gross sales.</p>
<p><span class="smcap">London</span>, <i>March</i>, 1891.</p>
<h2>MONDAY, 19TH</h2>
<p>My Friend B.—Invitation to the Theatre.—A Most
Unpleasant Regulation.—Yearnings of the Embryo
Traveller.—How to Make the Most of One’s Own
Country.—Friday, a Lucky Day.—The Pilgrimage Decided
On.</p>
<p>My friend B. called on me this morning and asked me if I would
go to a theatre with him on Monday next.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes! certainly, old man,” I replied.
“Have you got an order, then?”</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<p>“No; they don’t give orders. We shall have
to pay.”</p>
<p>“Pay! Pay to go into a theatre!” I answered,
in astonishment. “Oh, nonsense! You are
joking.”</p>
<p>“My dear fellow,” he rejoined, “do you think
I should suggest paying if it were possible to get in by any
other means? But the people who run this theatre would not
even understand what was meant by a ‘free list,’ the
uncivilised barbarians! It is of no use pretending to them
that you are on the Press, because they don’t want the
Press; they don’t think anything of the Press. It is
no good writing to the acting manager, because there is no acting
manager. It would be a waste of time offering to exhibit
bills, because they don’t have any bills—not of that
sort. If you want to go in to see the show, you’ve
got to pay. If you don’t pay, you stop outside;
that’s their brutal rule.”</p>
<p>“Dear me,” I said, “what a very unpleasant
arrangement! And whereabouts is this extraordinary
theatre? I don’t think I can ever have been inside
it.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think you have,” he replied;
“it is at Ober-Ammergau—first turning on the left
after you leave Ober railway-station, fifty miles from
Munich.”</p>
<p>“Um! rather out of the way for a theatre,” I
said. “I should not have thought an outlying house
like that could have afforded to give itself airs.”</p>
<p>“The house holds seven thousand people,” answered
my friend B., “and money is turned away at each
performance. The first production is on Monday next.
Will you come?”</p>
<p>I pondered for a moment, looked at my diary, and saw that Aunt
Emma was coming to spend Saturday to Wednesday next with us,
calculated that if I went I should miss her, and might not see
her again for years, and decided that I would go.</p>
<p>To tell the truth, it was the journey more than the play that
tempted me. To be a great traveller has always been one of
my cherished ambitions. I yearn to be able to write in this
sort of strain:—</p>
<p>“I have smoked my fragrant Havana in the sunny streets
of old Madrid, and I have puffed the rude and not sweet-smelling
calumet of peace in the draughty wigwam of the Wild West; I have
sipped my evening coffee in the silent tent, while the tethered
camel browsed without upon the desert grass, and I have quaffed
the fiery brandy of the North while the reindeer munched his
fodder beside me in the hut, and the pale light of the midnight
sun threw the shadows of the pines across the snow; I have felt
the stab of lustrous eyes that, ghostlike, looked at me from out
veil-covered faces in Byzantium’s narrow ways, and I have
laughed back (though it was wrong of me to do so) at the saucy,
wanton glances of the black-eyed girls of Jedo; I have wandered
where ‘good’—but not too good—Haroun
Alraschid crept disguised at nightfall, with his faithful Mesrour
by his side; I have stood upon the bridge where Dante watched the
sainted Beatrice pass by; I have floated on the waters that once
bore the barge of Cleopatra; I have stood where Cæsar fell;
I have heard the soft rustle of rich, rare robes in the
drawing-rooms of Mayfair, and I have heard the teeth-necklaces
rattle around the ebony throats of the belles of Tongataboo; I
have panted beneath the sun’s fierce rays in India, and
frozen under the icy blasts of Greenland; I have mingled with the
teeming hordes of old Cathay, and, deep in the great pine forests
of the Western World, I have lain, wrapped in my blanket, a
thousand miles beyond the shores of human life.”</p>
<p>B., to whom I explained my leaning towards this style of
diction, said that exactly the same effect could be produced by
writing about places quite handy. He said:—</p>
<p>“I could go on like that without having been outside
England at all. I should say:</p>
<p>“I have smoked my fourpenny shag in the sanded bars of
Fleet Street, and I have puffed my twopenny Manilla in the gilded
balls of the Criterion; I have quaffed my foaming beer of Burton
where Islington’s famed Angel gathers the little thirsty
ones beneath her shadowing wings, and I have sipped my tenpenny
<i>ordinaire</i> in many a garlic-scented salon of Soho. On
the back of the strangely-moving ass I have urged—or, to
speak more correctly, the proprietor of the ass, or his agent,
from behind has urged—my wild career across the sandy
heaths of Hampstead, and my canoe has startled the screaming
wild-fowl from their lonely haunts amid the sub-tropical regions
of Battersea. Adown the long, steep slope of One Tree Hill
have I rolled from top to foot, while laughing maidens of the
East stood round and clapped their hands and yelled; and, in the
old-world garden of that pleasant Court, where played the
fair-haired children of the ill-starred Stuarts, have I wandered
long through many paths, my arm entwined about the waist of one
of Eve’s sweet daughters, while her mother raged around
indignantly on the other side of the hedge, and never seemed to
get any nearer to us. I have chased the lodging-house
Norfolk Howard to his watery death by the pale lamp’s
light; I have, shivering, followed the leaping flea o’er
many a mile of pillow and sheet, by the great Atlantic’s
margin. Round and round, till the heart—and not only
the heart—grows sick, and the mad brain whirls and reels,
have I ridden the small, but extremely hard, horse, that may, for
a penny, be mounted amid the plains of Peckham Rye; and high
above the heads of the giddy throngs of Barnet (though it is
doubtful if anyone among them was half so giddy as was I) have I
swung in highly-coloured car, worked by a man with a rope.
I have trod in stately measure the floor of Kensington’s
Town Hall (the tickets were a guinea each, and included
refreshments—when you could get to them through the crowd),
and on the green sward of the forest that borders eastern Anglia
by the oft-sung town of Epping I have performed quaint ceremonies
in a ring; I have mingled with the teeming hordes of Drury Lane
on Boxing Night, and, during the run of a high-class piece, I
have sat in lonely grandeur in the front row of the gallery, and
wished that I had spent my shilling instead in the Oriental halls
of the Alhambra.”</p>
<p>“There you are,” said B., “that is just as
good as yours; and you can write like that without going more
than a few hours’ journey from London.”</p>
<p>“We will discuss the matter no further,” I
replied. “You cannot, I see, enter into my
feelings. The wild heart of the traveller does not throb
within your breast; you cannot understand his longings. No
matter! Suffice it that I will come this journey with
you. I will buy a German conversation book, and a
check-suit, and a blue veil, and a white umbrella, and suchlike
necessities of the English tourist in Germany, this very
afternoon. When do you start?”</p>
<p>“Well,” he said, “it is a good two
days’ journey. I propose to start on
Friday.”</p>
<p>“Is not Friday rather an unlucky day to start on?”
I suggested.</p>
<p>“Oh, good gracious!” he retorted quite sharply,
“what rubbish next? As if the affairs of Europe were
going to be arranged by Providence according to whether you and I
start for an excursion on a Thursday or a Friday!”</p>
<p>He said he was surprised that a man who could be so sensible,
occasionally, as myself, could have patience to even think of
such old-womanish nonsense. He said that years ago, when he
was a silly boy, he used to pay attention to this foolish
superstition himself, and would never upon any consideration
start for a trip upon a Friday.</p>
<p>But, one year, he was compelled to do so. It was a case
of either starting on a Friday or not going at all, and he
determined to chance it.</p>
<p>He went, prepared for and expecting a series of accidents and
misfortunes. To return home alive was the only bit of
pleasure he hoped for from that trip.</p>
<p>As it turned out, however, he had never had a more enjoyable
holiday in his life before. The whole event was a
tremendous success.</p>
<p>And after that, he had made up his mind to <i>always</i> start
on a Friday; and he always did, and always had a good time.</p>
<p>He said that he would never, upon any consideration, start for
a trip upon any other day but a Friday now. It was so
absurd, this superstition about Friday.</p>
<p>So we agreed to start on the Friday, and I am to meet him at
Victoria Station at a quarter to eight in the evening.</p>
<h2>THURSDAY, 22ND</h2>
<p>The Question of Luggage.—First Friend’s
Suggestion.—Second Friend’s Suggestion.—Third
Friend’s Suggestion.—Mrs. Briggs’
Advice.—Our Vicar’s Advice.—His Wife’s
Advice.—Medical Advice.—Literary
Advice.—George’s Recommendation.—My
Sister-in-Law’s Help.—Young Smith’s
Counsel.—My Own Ideas.—B.’s Idea.</p>
<p>I have been a good deal worried to-day about the question of
what luggage to take with me. I met a man this morning, and
he said:</p>
<p>“Oh, if you are going to Ober-Ammergau, mind you take
plenty of warm clothing with you. You’ll need all
your winter things up there.”</p>
<p>He said that a friend of his had gone up there some years ago,
and had not taken enough warm things with him, and had caught a
chill there, and had come home and died. He said:</p>
<p>“You be guided by me, and take plenty of warm things
with you.”</p>
<p>I met another man later on, and he said:</p>
<p>“I hear you are going abroad. Now, tell me, what
part of Europe are you going to?”</p>
<p>I replied that I thought it was somewhere about the
middle. He said:</p>
<p>“Well, now, you take my advice, and get a calico suit
and a sunshade. Never mind the look of the thing. You
be comfortable. You’ve no idea of the heat on the
Continent at this time of the year. English people will
persist in travelling about the Continent in the same stuffy
clothes that they wear at home. That’s how so many of
them get sunstrokes, and are ruined for life.”</p>
<p>I went into the club, and there I met a friend of mine—a
newspaper correspondent—who has travelled a good deal, and
knows Europe pretty well. I told him what my two other
friends had said, and asked him which I was to believe. He
said:</p>
<p>“Well, as a matter of fact, they are both right.
You see, up in those hilly districts, the weather changes very
quickly. In the morning it may be blazing hot, and you will
be melting, and in the evening you may be very glad of a flannel
shirt and a fur coat.”</p>
<p>“Why, that is exactly the sort of weather we have in
England!” I exclaimed. “If that’s all
these foreigners can manage in their own country, what right have
they to come over here, as they do, and grumble about our
weather?”</p>
<p>“Well, as a matter of fact,” he replied,
“they haven’t any right; but you can’t stop
them—they will do it. No, you take my advice, and be
prepared for everything. Take a cool suit and some thin
things, for if it’s hot, and plenty of warm things in case
it is cold.”</p>
<p>When I got home I found Mrs. Briggs there, she having looked
in to see how the baby was. She said:—</p>
<p>“Oh! if you’re going anywhere near Germany, you
take a bit of soap with you.”</p>
<p>She said that Mr. Briggs had been called over to Germany once
in a hurry, on business, and had forgotten to take a piece of
soap with him, and didn’t know enough German to ask for any
when he got over there, and didn’t see any to ask for even
if he had known, and was away for three weeks, and wasn’t
able to wash himself all the time, and came home so dirty that
they didn’t know him, and mistook him for the man that was
to come to see what was the matter with the kitchen boiler.</p>
<p>Mrs. Briggs also advised me to take some towels with me, as
they give you such small towels to wipe on.</p>
<p>I went out after lunch, and met our Vicar. He said:</p>
<p>“Take a blanket with you.”</p>
<p>He said that not only did the German hotel-keepers never give
you sufficient bedclothes to keep you warm of a night, but they
never properly aired their sheets. He said that a young
friend of his had gone for a tour through Germany once, and had
slept in a damp bed, and had caught rheumatic fever, and had come
home and died.</p>
<p>His wife joined us at this point. (He was waiting for
her outside a draper’s shop when I met him.) He
explained to her that I was going to Germany, and she said:</p>
<p>“Oh! take a pillow with you. They don’t give
you any pillows—not like our pillows—and it’s
<i>so</i> wretched, you’ll never get a decent night’s
rest if you don’t take a pillow.” She said:
“You can have a little bag made for it, and it
doesn’t look anything.”</p>
<p>I met our doctor a few yards further on. He said:</p>
<p>“Don’t forget to take a bottle of brandy with
you. It doesn’t take up much room, and, if
you’re not used to German cooking, you’ll find it
handy in the night.”</p>
<p>He added that the brandy you get at foreign hotels was mere
poison, and that it was really unsafe to travel abroad without a
bottle of brandy. He said that a simple thing like a bottle
of brandy in your bag might often save your life.</p>
<p>Coming home, I ran against a literary friend of mine. He
said:</p>
<p>“You’ll have a goodish time in the train old
fellow. Are you used to long railway journeys?”</p>
<p>I said:</p>
<p>“Well, I’ve travelled down from London into the
very heart of Surrey by a South Eastern express.”</p>
<p>“Oh! that’s a mere nothing, compared with what
you’ve got before you now,” he answered.
“Look here, I’ll tell you a very good idea of how to
pass the time. You take a chessboard with you and a set of
men. You’ll thank me for telling you that!”</p>
<p>George dropped in during the evening. He said:</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you one thing you’ll have to take
with you, old man, and that’s a box of cigars and some
tobacco.”</p>
<p>He said that the German cigar—the better class of German
cigar—was of the brand that is technically known over here
as the “Penny Pickwick—Spring Crop;” and he
thought that I should not have time, during the short stay I
contemplated making in the country, to acquire a taste for its
flavour.</p>
<p>My sister-in-law came in later on in the evening (she is a
thoughtful girl), and brought a box with her about the size of a
tea-chest. She said:</p>
<p>“Now, you slip that in your bag; you’ll be glad of
that. There’s everything there for making yourself a
cup of tea.”</p>
<p>She said that they did not understand tea in Germany, but that
with that I should be independent of them.</p>
<p>She opened the case, and explained its contents to me.
It certainly was a wonderfully complete arrangement. It
contained a little caddy full of tea, a little bottle of milk, a
box of sugar, a bottle of methylated spirit, a box of butter, and
a tin of biscuits: also, a stove, a kettle, a teapot, two cups,
two saucers, two plates, two knives, and two spoons. If
there had only been a bed in it, one need not have bothered about
hotels at all.</p>
<p>Young Smith, the Secretary of our Photographic Club, called at
nine to ask me to take him a negative of the statue of the dying
Gladiator in the Munich Sculpture Gallery. I told him that
I should be delighted to oblige him, but that I did not intend to
take my camera with me.</p>
<p>“Not take your camera!” he said. “You
are going to Germany—to Rhineland! You are going to
pass through some of the most picturesque scenery, and stay at
some of the most ancient and famous towns of Europe, and are
going to leave your photographic apparatus behind you, and you
call yourself an artist!”</p>
<p>He said I should never regret a thing more in my life than
going without that camera.</p>
<p>I think it is always right to take other people’s advice
in matters where they know more than you do. It is the
experience of those who have gone before that makes the way
smooth for those who follow. So, after supper, I got
together the things I had been advised to take with me, and
arranged them on the bed, adding a few articles I had thought of
all by myself.</p>
<p>I put up plenty of writing paper and a bottle of ink, along
with a dictionary and a few other books of reference, in case I
should feel inclined to do any work while I was away. I
always like to be prepared for work; one never knows when one may
feel inclined for it. Sometimes, when I have been away, and
have forgotten to bring any paper and pens and ink with me, I
have felt so inclined for writing; and it has quite upset me
that, in consequence of not having brought any paper and pens and
ink with me, I have been unable to sit down and do a lot of work,
but have been compelled, instead, to lounge about all day with my
hands in my pockets.</p>
<p>Accordingly, I always take plenty of paper and pens and ink
with me now, wherever I go, so that when the desire for work
comes to me I need not check it.</p>
<p>That this craving for work should have troubled me so often,
when I had no paper, pens, and ink by me, and that it never, by
any chance, visits me now, when I am careful to be in a position
to gratify it, is a matter over which I have often puzzled.</p>
<p>But when it does come I shall be ready for it.</p>
<p>I also put on the bed a few volumes of Goethe, because I
thought it would be so pleasant to read him in his own
country. And I decided to take a sponge, together with a
small portable bath, because a cold bath is so refreshing the
first thing in the morning.</p>
<p>B. came in just as I had got everything into a pile. He
stared at the bed, and asked me what I was doing. I told
him I was packing.</p>
<p>“Great Heavens!” he exclaimed. “I
thought you were moving! What do you think we are going to
do—camp out?”</p>
<p>“No!” I replied. “But these are the
things I have been advised to take with me. What is the use
of people giving you advice if you don’t take
it?”</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<p>“Oh! take as much advice as you like; that always comes
in useful to give away. But, for goodness sake, don’t
get carrying all that stuff about with you. People will
take us for Gipsies.”</p>
<p>I said:</p>
<p>“Now, it’s no use your talking nonsense.
Half the things on this bed are life-preserving things. If
people go into Germany without these things, they come home and
die.”</p>
<p>And I related to him what the doctor and the vicar and the
other people had told me, and explained to him how my life
depended upon my taking brandy and blankets and sunshades and
plenty of warm clothing with me.</p>
<p>He is a man utterly indifferent to danger and
risk—incurred by other people—is B. He
said:</p>
<p>“Oh, rubbish! You’re not the sort that
catches a cold and dies young. You leave that co-operative
stores of yours at home, and pack up a tooth-brush, a comb, a
pair of socks, and a shirt. That’s all you’ll
want.”</p>
<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
<p>I have packed more than that, but not much. At all
events, I have got everything into one small bag. I should
like to have taken that tea arrangement—it would have done
so nicely to play at shop with in the train!—but B. would
not hear of it.</p>
<p>I hope the weather does not change.</p>
<h2>FRIDAY, 23RD</h2>
<p>Early Rising.—Ballast should be Stowed Away in the Hold
before Putting to Sea.—Annoying Interference of Providence
in Matters that it Does Not Understand.—A Socialistic
Society.—B. Misjudges Me.—An Uninteresting
Anecdote.—We Lay in Ballast.—A Moderate
Sailor.—A Playful Boat.</p>
<p>I got up very early this morning. I do not know why I
got up early. We do not start till eight o’clock this
evening. But I don’t regret it—the getting up
early I mean. It is a change. I got everybody else up
too, and we all had breakfast at seven.</p>
<p>I made a very good lunch. One of those seafaring men
said to me once:</p>
<p>“Now, if ever you are going a short passage, and are at
all nervous, you lay in a good load. It’s a good load
in the hold what steadies the ship. It’s them
half-empty cruisers as goes a-rollin’ and a-pitchin’
and a-heavin’ all over the place, with their stern
up’ards half the time. You lay in ballast.”</p>
<p>It seemed very reasonable advice.</p>
<p>Aunt Emma came in the afternoon. She said she was so
glad she had caught me. Something told her to change her
mind and come on Friday instead of Saturday. It was
Providence, she said.</p>
<p>I wish Providence would mind its own business, and not
interfere in my affairs: it does not understand them.</p>
<p>She says she shall stop till I come back, as she wants to see
me again before she goes. I told her I might not be back
for a month. She said it didn’t matter; she had
plenty of time, and would wait for me.</p>
<p>The family entreat me to hurry home.</p>
<p>I ate a very fair dinner—“laid in a good stock of
ballast,” as my seafaring friend would have said; wished
“Good-bye!” to everybody, and kissed Aunt Emma;
promised to take care of myself—a promise which, please
Heaven, I will faithfully keep, cost me what it may—hailed
a cab and started.</p>
<p>I reached Victoria some time before B. I secured two
corner seats in a smoking-carriage, and then paced up and down
the platform waiting for him.</p>
<p>When men have nothing else to occupy their minds, they take to
thinking. Having nothing better to do until B. arrived, I
fell to musing.</p>
<p>What a wonderful piece of Socialism modern civilisation has
become!—not the Socialism of the so-called
Socialists—a system modelled apparently upon the methods of
the convict prison—a system under which each miserable
sinner is to be compelled to labour, like a beast of burden, for
no personal benefit to himself, but only for the good of the
community—a world where there are to be no men, but only
numbers—where there is to be no ambition and no hope and no
fear,—but the Socialism of free men, working side by side
in the common workshop, each one for the wage to which his skill
and energy entitle him; the Socialism of responsible, thinking
individuals, not of State-directed automata.</p>
<p>Here was I, in exchange for the result of some of my labour,
going to be taken by Society for a treat, to the middle of Europe
and back. Railway lines had been laid over the whole 700 or
800 miles to facilitate my progress; bridges had been built, and
tunnels made; an army of engineers, and guards, and signal-men,
and porters, and clerks were waiting to take charge of me, and to
see to my comfort and safety. All I had to do was to tell
Society (here represented by a railway booking-clerk) where I
wanted to go, and to step into a carriage; all the rest would be
done for me. Books and papers had been written and printed;
so that if I wished to beguile the journey by reading, I could do
so. At various places on the route, thoughtful Society had
taken care to be ready for me with all kinds of refreshment (her
sandwiches might be a little fresher, but maybe she thinks new
bread injurious for me). When I am tired of travelling and
want to rest, I find Society waiting for me with dinner and a
comfortable bed, with hot and cold water to wash in and towels to
wipe upon. Wherever I go, whatever I need, Society, like
the enslaved genii of some Eastern tale, is ready and anxious to
help me, to serve me, to do my bidding, to give me enjoyment and
pleasure. Society will take me to Ober-Ammergau, will
provide for all my wants on the way, and, when I am there, will
show me the Passion Play, which she has arranged and rehearsed
and will play for my instruction; will bring me back any way I
like to come, explaining, by means of her guide-books and
histories, everything upon the way that she thinks can interest
me; will, while I am absent, carry my messages to those I have
left behind me in England, and will bring me theirs in return;
will look after me and take care of me and protect me like a
mother—as no mother ever could.</p>
<p>All that she asks in return is, that I shall do the work she
has given me to do. As a man works, so Society deals by
him.</p>
<p>To me Society says: “You sit at your desk and write,
that is all I want you to do. You are not good for much,
but you can spin out yards of what you and your friends, I
suppose, call literature; and some people seem to enjoy reading
it. Very well: you sit there and write this literature, or
whatever it is, and keep your mind fixed on that. I will
see to everything else for you. I will provide you with
writing materials, and books of wit and humour, and paste and
scissors, and everything else that may be necessary to you in
your trade; and I will feed you and clothe you and lodge you, and
I will take you about to places that you wish to go to; and I
will see that you have plenty of tobacco and all other things
practicable that you may desire—provided that you work
well. The more work you do, and the better work you do, the
better I shall look after you. You write—that is all
I want you to do.”</p>
<p>“But,” I say to Society, “I don’t like
work; I don’t want to work. Why should I be a slave
and work?”</p>
<p>“All right,” answers Society, “don’t
work. I’m not forcing you. All I say is, that
if you don’t work for me, I shall not work for you.
No work from you, no dinner from me—no holidays, no
tobacco.”</p>
<p>And I decide to be a slave, and work.</p>
<p>Society has no notion of paying all men equally. Her
great object is to encourage brain. The man who merely
works by his muscles she regards as very little superior to the
horse or the ox, and provides for him just a little better.
But the moment he begins to use his head, and from the labourer
rises to the artisan, she begins to raise his wages.</p>
<p>Of course hers is a very imperfect method of encouraging
thought. She is of the world, and takes a worldly standard
of cleverness. To the shallow, showy writer, I fear, she
generally pays far more than to the deep and brilliant thinker;
and clever roguery seems often more to her liking than honest
worth. But her scheme is a right and sound one; her aims
and intentions are clear; her methods, on the whole, work fairly
well; and every year she grows in judgment.</p>
<p>One day she will arrive at perfect wisdom, and will pay each
man according to his deserts.</p>
<p>But do not be alarmed. This will not happen in our
time.</p>
<p>Turning round, while still musing about Society, I ran against
B. (literally). He thought I was a clumsy ass at first, and
said so; but, on recognising me, apologised for his
mistake. He had been there for some time also, waiting for
me. I told him that I had secured two corner seats in a
smoking-carriage, and he replied that he had done so too.
By a curious coincidence, we had both fixed upon the same
carriage. I had taken the corner seats near the platform,
and he had booked the two opposite corners. Four other
passengers sat huddled up in the middle. We kept the seats
near the door, and gave the other two away. One should
always practise generosity.</p>
<p>There was a very talkative man in our carriage. I never
came across a man with such a fund of utterly uninteresting
anecdotes. He had a friend with him—at all events,
the man was his friend when they started—and he talked to
this friend incessantly, from the moment the train left Victoria
until it arrived at Dover. First of all he told him a long
story about a dog. There was no point in the story
whatever. It was simply a bald narrative of the dog’s
daily doings. The dog got up in the morning and barked at
the door, and when they came down and opened the door there he
was, and he stopped all day in the garden; and when his wife (not
the dog’s wife, the wife of the man who was telling the
story) went out in the afternoon, he was asleep on the grass, and
they brought him into the house, and he played with the children,
and in the evening he slept in the coal-shed, and next morning
there he was again. And so on, for about forty minutes.</p>
<p>A very dear chum or near relative of the dog’s might
doubtless have found the account enthralling; but what possible
interest a stranger—a man who evidently didn’t even
know the dog—could be expected to take in the report, it
was difficult to conceive.</p>
<p>The friend at first tried to feel excited, and murmured:
“Wonderful!” “Very strange,
indeed!” “How curious!” and helped the
tale along by such ejaculations as, “No, did he
though?” “And what did you do then?” or,
“Was that on the Monday or the Tuesday, then?”
But as the story progressed, he appeared to take a positive
dislike to the dog, and only yawned each time that it was
mentioned.</p>
<p>Indeed, towards the end, I think, though I trust I am
mistaken, I heard him mutter, “Oh, damn the dog!”</p>
<p>After the dog story, we thought we were going to have a little
quiet. But we were mistaken; for, with the same breath with
which he finished the dog rigmarole, our talkative companion
added:</p>
<p>“But I can tell you a funnier thing than
that—”</p>
<p>We all felt we could believe that assertion. If he had
boasted that he could tell a duller, more uninteresting story, we
should have doubted him; but the possibility of his being able to
relate something funnier, we could readily grasp.</p>
<p>But it was not a bit funnier, after all. It was only
longer and more involved. It was the history of a man who
grew his own celery; and then, later on, it turned out that his
wife was the niece, by the mother’s side, of a man who had
made an ottoman out of an old packing-case.</p>
<p>The friend glanced round the carriage apologetically about the
middle of this story, with an expression that said:</p>
<p>“I’m awfully sorry, gentlemen; but it really is
not my fault. You see the position I’m in.
Don’t blame me. Don’t make it worse for me to
bear than it is.”</p>
<p>And we each replied with pitying, sympathetic looks that
implied:</p>
<p>“That’s all right, my dear sir; don’t you
fret about that. We see how it is. We only wish we
could do something to help you.”</p>
<p>The poor fellow seemed happier and more resigned after
that.</p>
<p>B. and I hurried on board at Dover, and were just in time to
secure the last two berths in the boat; and we were glad that we
had managed to do this because our idea was that we should, after
a good supper, turn in and go comfortably to sleep.</p>
<p>B. said:</p>
<p>“What I like to do, during a sea passage, is to go to
sleep, and then wake up and find that I am there.”</p>
<p>We made a very creditable supper. I explained to B. the
ballast principle held by my seafaring friend, and he agreed with
me that the idea seemed reasonable; and, as there was a fixed
price for supper, and you had as much as you liked, we determined
to give the plan a fair trial.</p>
<p>B. left me after supper somewhat abruptly, as it appeared to
me, and I took a stroll on deck by myself. I did not feel
very comfortable. I am what I call a moderate sailor.
I do not go to excess in either direction. On ordinary
occasions, I can swagger about and smoke my pipe, and lie about
my Channel experiences with the best of them. But when
there is what the captain calls “a bit of a sea on,”
I feel sad, and try to get away from the smell of the engines and
the proximity of people who smoke green cigars.</p>
<p>There was a man smoking a peculiarly mellow and unctuous cigar
on deck when I got there. I don’t believe he smoked
it because he enjoyed it. He did not look as if he enjoyed
it. I believe he smoked it merely to show how well he was
feeling, and to irritate people who were not feeling very
well.</p>
<p>There is something very blatantly offensive about the man who
feels well on board a boat.</p>
<p>I am very objectionable myself, I know, when I am feeling all
right. It is not enough for me that I am not ill. I
want everybody to see that I am not ill. It seems to me
that I am wasting myself if I don’t let every human being
in the vessel know that I am not ill. I cannot sit still
and be thankful, like you’d imagine a sensible man
would. I walk about the ship—smoking, of
course—and look at people who are not well with mild but
pitying surprise, as if I wondered what it was like and how they
did it. It is very foolish of me, I know, but I cannot help
it. I suppose it is the human nature that exists in even
the best of us that makes us act like this.</p>
<p>I could not get away from this man’s cigar; or when I
did, I came within range of the perfume from the engine-room, and
felt I wanted to go back to the cigar. There seemed to be
no neutral ground between the two.</p>
<p>If it had not been that I had paid for saloon, I should have
gone fore. It was much fresher there, and I should have
been much happier there altogether. But I was not going to
pay for first-class and then ride third—that was not
business. No, I would stick to the swagger part of the
ship, and feel aristocratic and sick.</p>
<p>A mate, or a boatswain, or an admiral, or one of those sort of
people—I could not be sure, in the darkness, which it
was—came up to me as I was leaning with my head against the
paddle-box, and asked me what I thought of the ship. He
said she was a new boat, and that this was her first voyage.</p>
<p>I said I hoped she would get a bit steadier as she grew
older.</p>
<p>He replied: “Yes, she is a bit skittish
to-night.”</p>
<p>What it seemed to me was, that the ship would try to lie down
and go to sleep on her right side; and then, before she had given
that position a fair trial, would suddenly change her mind, and
think she could do it better on her left. At the moment the
man came up to me she was trying to stand on her head; and before
he had finished speaking she had given up this attempt, in which,
however, she had very nearly succeeded, and had, apparently,
decided to now play at getting out of the water altogether.</p>
<p>And this is what he called being a “bit
skittish!”</p>
<p>Seafaring people talk like this, because they are silly, and
do not know any better. It is no use being angry with
them.</p>
<p>I got a little sleep at last. Not in the bunk I had been
at such pains to secure: I would not have stopped down in that
stuffy saloon, if anybody had offered me a hundred pounds for
doing so. Not that anybody did; nor that anybody seemed to
want me there at all. I gathered this from the fact that
the first thing that met my eye, after I had succeeded in clawing
my way down, was a boot. The air was full of boots.
There were sixty men sleeping there—or, as regards the
majority, I should say <i>trying</i> to sleep there—some in
bunks, some on tables, and some under tables. One man
<i>was</i> asleep, and was snoring like a hippopotamus—like
a hippopotamus that had caught a cold, and was hoarse; and the
other fifty-nine were sitting up, throwing their boots at
him. It was a snore, very difficult to locate. From
which particular berth, in that dimly-lighted, evil-smelling
place, it proceeded nobody was quite sure. At one moment,
it appeared to come, wailing and sobbing, from the larboard, and
the next instant it thundered forth, seemingly from the
starboard. So every man who could reach a boot picked it
up, and threw it promiscuously, silently praying to Providence,
as he did so, to guide it aright and bring it safe to its desired
haven.</p>
<p>I watched the weird scene for a minute or two, and then I
hauled myself on deck again, and sat down—and went to sleep
on a coil of rope; and was awakened, in the course of time, by a
sailor who wanted that coil of rope to throw at the head of a man
who was standing, doing no harm to anybody, on the quay at
Ostend.</p>
<h2>SATURDAY, 24TH</h2>
<p>Arrival at Ostend.—Coffee and Rolls.—Difficulty of
Making French Waiters understand German.—Advantages of
Possessing a Conscience That Does Not Get Up Too
Early.—Villainy Triumphant.—Virtue Ordered
Outside.—A Homely English Row.</p>
<p>When I say I was “awakened” at Ostend, I do not
speak the strict truth. I was not awakened—not
properly. I was only half-awakened. I never did get
fairly awake until the afternoon. During the journey from
Ostend to Cologne I was three-parts asleep and one-part partially
awake.</p>
<p>At Ostend, however, I was sufficiently aroused to grasp the
idea that we had got somewhere, and that I must find my luggage
and B., and do something or other; in addition to which, a
strange, vague instinct, but one which I have never yet known
deceive me, hovering about my mind, and telling me that I was in
the neighbourhood of something to eat and drink, spurred me to
vigour and action.</p>
<p>I hurried down into the saloon and there found B. He
excused himself for having left me alone all night—he need
not have troubled himself. I had not pined for him in the
least. If the only woman I had ever loved had been on
board, I should have sat silent, and let any other fellow talk to
her that wanted to, and that felt equal to it—by explaining
that he had met a friend and that they had been talking. It
appeared to have been a trying conversation.</p>
<p>I also ran against the talkative man and his companion.
Such a complete wreck of a once strong man as the latter looked I
have never before seen. Mere sea-sickness, however severe,
could never have accounted for the change in his appearance
since, happy and hopeful, he entered the railway-carriage at
Victoria six short hours ago. His friend, on the other
hand, appeared fresh and cheerful, and was relating an anecdote
about a cow.</p>
<p>We took our bags into the Custom House and opened them, and I
sat down on mine, and immediately went to sleep.</p>
<p>When I awoke, somebody whom I mistook at first for a
Field-Marshal, and from force of habit—I was once a
volunteer—saluted, was standing over me, pointing
melodramatically at my bag. I assured him in picturesque
German that I had nothing to declare. He did not appear to
comprehend me, which struck me as curious, and took the bag away
from me, which left me nothing to sit upon but the floor.
But I felt too sleepy to be indignant.</p>
<p>After our luggage had been examined, we went into the
buffet. My instinct had not misled me: there I found hot
coffee, and rolls and butter. I ordered two coffees with
milk, some bread, and some butter. I ordered them in the
best German I knew. As nobody understood me, I went and got
the things for myself. It saves a deal of argument, that
method. People seem to know what you mean in a moment
then.</p>
<p>B. suggested that while we were in Belgium, where everybody
spoke French, while very few indeed knew German, I should stand a
better chance of being understood if I talked less German and
more French.</p>
<p>He said:</p>
<p>“It will be easier for you, and less of a strain upon
the natives. You stick to French,” he continued,
“as long as ever you can. You will get along much
better with French. You will come across people now and
then—smart, intelligent people—who will partially
understand your French, but no human being, except a
thought-reader, will ever obtain any glimmering of what you mean
from your German.”</p>
<p>“Oh, are we in Belgium,” I replied sleepily;
“I thought we were in Germany. I didn’t
know.” And then, in a burst of confidence, I added,
feeling that further deceit was useless, “I don’t
know where I am, you know.”</p>
<p>“No, I thought you didn’t,” he
replied. “That is exactly the idea you give
anybody. I wish you’d wake up a bit.”</p>
<p>We waited about an hour at Ostend, while our train was made
up. There was only one carriage labelled for Cologne, and
four more passengers wanted to go there than the compartment
would hold.</p>
<p>Not being aware of this, B. and I made no haste to secure
places, and, in consequence, when, having finished our coffee, we
leisurely strolled up and opened the carriage door we saw that
every seat was already booked. A bag was in one space and a
rug in another, an umbrella booked a third, and so on.
Nobody was there, but the seats were gone!</p>
<p>It is the unwritten law among travellers that a man’s
luggage deposited upon a seat, shall secure that seat to him
until he comes to sit upon it himself. This is a good law
and a just law, and one that, in my normal state, I myself would
die to uphold and maintain.</p>
<p>But at three o’clock on a chilly morning one’s
moral sensibilities are not properly developed. The average
man’s conscience does not begin work till eight or nine
o’clock—not till after breakfast, in fact. At
three a.m. he will do things that at three in the afternoon his
soul would revolt at.</p>
<p>Under ordinary circumstances I should as soon have thought of
shifting a man’s bag and appropriating his seat as an
ancient Hebrew squatter would have thought of removing his
neighbour’s landmark; but at this time in the morning my
better nature was asleep.</p>
<p>I have often read of a man’s better nature being
suddenly awakened. The business is generally accomplished
by an organ-grinder or a little child (I would back the latter,
at all events—give it a fair chance—to awaken
anything in this world that was not stone deaf, or that had not
been dead for more than twenty-four hours); and if an
organ-grinder or a little child had been around Ostend station
that morning, things might have been different.</p>
<p>B. and I might have been saved from crime. Just as we
were in the middle of our villainy, the organ-grinder or the
child would have struck up, and we should have burst into tears,
and have rushed from the carriage, and have fallen upon each
other’s necks outside on the platform, and have wept, and
waited for the next train.</p>
<p>As it was, after looking carefully round to see that nobody
was watching us, we slipped quickly into the carriage, and,
making room for ourselves among the luggage there, sat down and
tried to look innocent and easy.</p>
<p>B. said that the best thing we could do, when the other people
came, would be to pretend to be dead asleep, and too stupid to
understand anything.</p>
<p>I replied that as far as I was concerned, I thought I could
convey the desired impression without stooping to deceit at all,
and prepared to make myself comfortable.</p>
<p>A few seconds later another man got into the carriage.
He also made room for himself among the luggage and sat down.</p>
<p>“I am afraid that seat’s taken, sir,” said
B. when he had recovered his surprise at the man’s
coolness. “In fact, all the seats in this carriage
are taken.”</p>
<p>“I can’t help that,” replied the ruffian,
cynically. “I’ve got to get to Cologne some
time to-day, and there seems no other way of doing it that I can
see.”</p>
<p>“Yes, but so has the gentleman whose seat you have taken
got to get there,” I remonstrated; “what about
him? You are thinking only of yourself!”</p>
<p>My sense of right and justice was beginning to assert itself,
and I felt quite indignant with the fellow. Two minutes
ago, as I have explained, I could contemplate the taking of
another man’s seat with equanimity. Now, such an act
seemed to me shameful. The truth is that my better nature
never sleeps for long. Leave it alone and it wakens of its
own accord. Heaven help me! I am a sinful, worldly man, I
know; but there is good at the bottom of me. It wants
hauling up, but it’s there.</p>
<p>This man had aroused it. I now saw the sinfulness of
taking another passenger’s place in a railway-carriage.</p>
<p>But I could not make the other man see it. I felt that
some service was due from me to Justice, in compensation of the
wrong I had done her a few moments ago, and I argued most
eloquently.</p>
<p>My rhetoric was, however, quite thrown away. “Oh!
it’s only a vice-consul,” he said;
“here’s his name on the bag. There’s
plenty of room for him in with the guard.”</p>
<p>It was no use my defending the sacred cause of Right before a
man who held sentiments like that; so, having lodged a protest
against his behaviour, and thus eased my conscience, I leant back
and dozed the doze of the just.</p>
<p>Five minutes before the train started, the rightful owners of
the carriage came up and crowded in. They seemed surprised
at finding only five vacant seats available between seven of
them, and commenced to quarrel vigorously among themselves.</p>
<p>B. and I and the unjust man in the corner tried to calm them,
but passion ran too high at first for the voice of Reason to be
heard. Each combination of five, possible among them,
accused each remaining two of endeavouring to obtain seats by
fraud, and each one more than hinted that the other six were
liars.</p>
<p>What annoyed me was that they quarrelled in English.
They all had languages of their own,—there were four
Belgians, two Frenchmen, and a German,—but no language was
good enough for them to insult each other in but English.</p>
<p>Finding that there seemed to be no chance of their ever
agreeing among themselves, they appealed to us. We
unhesitatingly decided in favour of the five thinnest, who,
thereupon, evidently regarding the matter as finally settled, sat
down, and told the other two to get out.</p>
<p>These two stout ones, however—the German and one of the
Belgians—seemed inclined to dispute the award, and called
up the station-master.</p>
<p>The station-master did not wait to listen to what they had to
say, but at once began abusing them for being in the carriage at
all. He told them they ought to be ashamed of themselves
for forcing their way into a compartment that was already more
than full, and inconveniencing the people already there.</p>
<p>He also used English to explain this to them, and they got out
on the platform and answered him back in English.</p>
<p>English seems to be the popular language for quarrelling in,
among foreigners. I suppose they find it more
expressive.</p>
<p>We all watched the group from the window. We were amused
and interested. In the middle of the argument an early
gendarme arrived on the scene. The gendarme naturally
supported the station-master. One man in uniform always
supports another man in uniform, no matter what the row is about,
or who may be in the right—that does not trouble him.
It is a fixed tenet of belief among uniform circles that a
uniform can do no wrong. If burglars wore uniform, the
police would be instructed to render them every assistance in
their power, and to take into custody any householder attempting
to interfere with them in the execution of their business.
The gendarme assisted the station-master to abuse the two stout
passengers, and he also abused them in English. It was not
good English in any sense of the word. The man would
probably have been able to give his feelings much greater variety
and play in French or Flemish, but that was not his object.
His ambition, like every other foreigner’s, was to become
an accomplished English quarreller, and this was practice for
him.</p>
<p>A Customs House clerk came out and joined in the babel.
He took the part of the passengers, and abused the station-master
and the gendarme, and <i>he</i> abused <i>them</i> in
English.</p>
<p>B. said he thought it very pleasant here, far from our native
shores, in the land of the stranger, to come across a little
homely English row like this.</p>
<h2>SATURDAY, 24TH—CONTINUED</h2>
<p>A Man of Family.—An Eccentric Train.—Outrage on an
Englishman.—Alone in Europe.—Difficulty of Making
German Waiters Understand Scandinavian.—Danger of Knowing
Too Many Languages.—A Wearisome Journey.—Cologne,
Ahoy!</p>
<p>There was a very well-informed Belgian in the carriage, and he
told us something interesting about nearly every town through
which we passed. I felt that if I could have kept awake,
and have listened to that man, and remembered what he said, and
not mixed things up, I should have learnt a good deal about the
country between Ostend and Cologne.</p>
<p>He had relations in nearly every town, had this man. I
suppose there have been, and are, families as large and as
extensive as his; but I never heard of any other family that made
such a show. They seemed to have been planted out with
great judgment, and were now all over the country. Every
time I awoke, I caught some such scattered remark as:</p>
<p>“Bruges—you can see the belfry from this
side—plays a polka by Haydn every hour. My aunt lives
here.” “Ghent—Hôtel de Ville, some
say finest specimen of Gothic architecture in Europe—where
my mother lives. You could see the house if that church
wasn’t there.” “Just passed
Alost—great hop centre. My grandfather used to live
there; he’s dead now.” “There’s the
Royal chateau—here, just on this side. My sister is
married to a man who lives there—not in the palace, I
don’t mean, but in Laeken.” “That’s
the dome of the Palais de Justice—they call Brussels
‘Paris in little’—I like it better than Paris,
myself—not so crowded. I live in
Brussels.” “Louvain—there’s Van de
Weyer’s statue, the 1830 revolutionist. My
wife’s mother lives in Louvain. She wants us to come
and live there. She says we are too far away from her at
Brussels, but I don’t think so.”
“Leige—see the citadel? Got some cousins at
Leige—only second ones. Most of my first ones live at
Maestricht”; and so on all the way to Cologne.</p>
<p>I do not believe we passed a single town or village that did
not possess one or more specimens of this man’s
relatives. Our journey seemed, not so much like a tour
through Belgium and part of Northern Germany, as a visit to the
neighbourhood where this man’s family resided.</p>
<p>I was careful to take a seat facing the engine at
Ostend. I prefer to travel that way. But when I awoke
a little later on, I found myself going backwards.</p>
<p>I naturally felt indignant. I said:</p>
<p>“Who’s put me over here? I was over there,
you know. You’ve no right to do that!”</p>
<p>They assured me, however, that nobody had shifted me, but that
the train had turned round at Ghent.</p>
<p>I was annoyed at this. It seemed to me a mean trick for
a train to start off in one direction, and thus lure you into
taking your seat (or somebody else’s seat, as the case
might be) under the impression that you were going to travel that
way, and then, afterwards, turn round and go the other way.
I felt very doubtful, in my own mind, as to whether the train
knew where it was going at all.</p>
<p>At Brussels we got out and had some more coffee and
rolls. I forget what language I talked at Brussels, but
nobody understood me. When I next awoke, after leaving
Brussels, I found myself going forwards again. The engine
had apparently changed its mind for the second time, and was
pulling the carriages the other way now. I began to get
thoroughly alarmed. This train was simply doing what it
liked. There was no reliance to be placed upon it
whatever. The next thing it would do would be to go
sideways. It seemed to me that I ought to get up and see
into this matter; but, while pondering the business, I fell
asleep again.</p>
<p>I was very sleepy indeed when they routed us out at
Herbesthal, to examine our luggage for Germany. I had a
vague idea that we were travelling in Turkey, and had been
stopped by brigands. When they told me to open my bag, I
said, “Never!” and remarked that I was an Englishman,
and that they had better be careful. I also told them that
they could dismiss any idea of ransom from their minds at once,
unless they were prepared to take I.O.U.’s, as it was
against the principles of our family to pay cash for
anything—certainly not for relatives.</p>
<p>They took no notice of my warning, and caught hold of my
Gladstone. I resisted feebly, but was over-powered, and
went to sleep again.</p>
<p>On awakening, I discovered myself in the buffet. I have
no recollection of going there. My instinct must have
guided me there during my sleep.</p>
<p>I ordered my usual repast of coffee and rolls. (I must
have been full of coffee and rolls by this time.) I had got
the idea into my head now that I was in Norway, and so I ordered
them in broken Scandinavian, a few words of which I had picked up
during a trip through the fiords last summer.</p>
<p>Of course, the man did not understand; but I am accustomed to
witnessing the confusion of foreigners when addressed in their
native tongue, and so forgave him—especially as, the
victuals being well within reach, language was a matter of
secondary importance.</p>
<p>I took two cups of coffee, as usual—one for B., and one
for myself—and, bringing them to the table, looked round
for B. I could not see him anywhere. What had become
of him? I had not seen him, that I could recollect, for
hours. I did not know where I was, or what I was
doing. I had a hazy knowledge that B. and I had started off
together—whether yesterday or six months ago, I could not
have said to save my life—with the intention, if I was not
mistaken, of going somewhere and seeing something. We were
now somewhere abroad—somewhere in Norway was my idea;
though why I had fixed on Norway is a mystery to me to this
day—and I had lost him!</p>
<p>How on earth were we ever to find each other again? A
horrible picture presented itself to my mind of our both
wandering distractedly up and down Europe, perhaps for years,
vainly seeking each other. The touching story of Evangeline
recurred to me with terrible vividness.</p>
<p>Something must be done, and that immediately. Somehow or
another I must find B. I roused myself, and summoned to my
aid every word of Scandinavian that I knew.</p>
<p>It was no good these people pretending that they did not
understand their own language, and putting me off that way.
They had got to understand it this time. This was no mere
question of coffee and rolls; this was a serious business.
I would make that waiter understand my Scandinavian, if I had to
hammer it into his head with his own coffee-pot!</p>
<p>I seized him by the arm, and, in Scandinavian that must have
been quite pathetic in its tragic fervour, I asked him if he had
seen my friend—my friend B.</p>
<p>The man only stared.</p>
<p>I grew desperate. I shook him. I said:</p>
<p>“My friend—big, great, tall, large—is he
where? Have you him to see where? Here?”</p>
<p>(I had to put it that way because Scandinavian grammar is not
a strong point with me, and my knowledge of the verbs is as yet
limited to the present tense of the infinitive mood.
Besides, this was no time to worry about grace of style.)</p>
<p>A crowd gathered round us, attracted by the man’s
terrified expression. I appealed to them generally. I
said:</p>
<p>“My friend B.—head, red—boots, yellow,
brown, gold—coat, little squares—nose, much,
large! Is he where? Him to
see—anybody—where?”</p>
<p>Not a soul moved a hand to help me. There they stood and
gaped!</p>
<p>I repeated it all over again louder, in case anybody on the
outskirts of the mob had not heard it; and I repeated it in an
entirely new accent. I gave them every chance I could.</p>
<p>They chatted excitedly among themselves, and, then a bright
idea seemed to strike one of them, a little more
intelligent-looking than the rest, and he rushed outside and
began running up and down, calling out something very loudly, in
which the word “Norwegian” kept on occurring.</p>
<p>He returned in a few seconds, evidently exceedingly pleased
with himself, accompanied by a kindly-looking old gentleman in a
white hat.</p>
<p>Way was made in the crowd, and the old gentleman pressed
forward. When he got near, he smiled at me, and then
proceeded to address to me a lengthy, but no doubt kindly meant,
speech in Scandinavian.</p>
<p>Of course, it was all utterly unintelligible to me from
beginning to end, and my face clearly showed this. I can
grasp a word or two of Scandinavian here and there, if pronounced
slowly and distinctly; but that is all.</p>
<p>The old gentleman regarded me with great surprise. He
said (in Scandinavian, of course):</p>
<p>“You speak Norwegian?”</p>
<p>I replied, in the same tongue:</p>
<p>“A little, a very little—<i>very</i>.”</p>
<p>He seemed not only disappointed, but indignant. He
explained the matter to the crowd, and they all seemed
indignant.</p>
<p><i>Why</i> everybody should be indignant with me I could not
comprehend. There are plenty of people who do not
understand Scandinavian. It was absurd to be vexed with me
because <i>I</i> did not. I do know a little, and that is
more than some people do.</p>
<p>I inquired of the old gentleman about B. He did
understand me. I must give him credit for that. But
beyond understanding me, he was of no more use than the others;
and why they had taken so much trouble to fetch him, I could not
imagine.</p>
<p>What would have happened if the difficulty had continued much
longer (for I was getting thoroughly wild with the lot of them) I
cannot say. Fortunately, at this moment I caught sight of
B. himself, who had just entered the room.</p>
<p>I could not have greeted him more heartily if I had wanted to
borrow money of him.</p>
<p>“Well, I <i>am</i> glad to see you again!” I
cried. “Well, this <i>is</i> pleasant! I
thought I had lost you!”</p>
<p>“Why, you are English!” cried out the old
gentleman in the white hat, in very good Saxon, on hearing me
speak to B.</p>
<p>“Well, I know that,” I replied, “and
I’m proud of it. Have you any objection to my being
English?”</p>
<p>“Not in the least,” he answered, “if
you’d only talk English instead of Norwegian.
I’m English myself;” and he walked away, evidently
much puzzled.</p>
<p>B. said to me as we sat down:</p>
<p>“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you,
J.—you know too many languages for this continent.
Your linguistic powers will be the ruin of us if you don’t
hold them in a bit. You don’t know any Sanscrit or
Chaldean, do you?”</p>
<p>I replied that I did not.</p>
<p>“Any Hebrew or Chinese?”</p>
<p>“Not a word.”</p>
<p>“Sure?”</p>
<p>“Not so much as a full stop in any of them.”</p>
<p>“That’s a blessing,” said B., much
relieved. “You would be trying to palm off one or
other of them on some simple-minded peasant for German, if you
did!”</p>
<p>It is a wearisome journey, through the long, hot hours of the
morning, to Cologne. The carriage is stifling.
Railway travellers, I have always noticed, regard fresh air as
poison. They like to live on the refuse of each
other’s breath, and close up every window and ventilator
tight. The sun pours down through glass and blind and
scorches our limbs. Our heads and our bodies ache.
The dust and soot drift in and settle on our clothes, and grime
our hands and face. We all doze and wake up with a start,
and fall to sleep again upon each other. I wake, and find
my neighbour with his head upon my shoulder. It seems a
shame to cast him off; he looks so trustful. But he is
heavy. I push him on to the man the other side. He is
just as happy there. We roll about; and when the train
jerks, we butt each other with our heads. Things fall from
the rack upon us. We look up surprised, and go to sleep
again. My bag tumbles down upon the head of the unjust man
in the corner. (Is it retribution?) He starts up,
begs my pardon, and sinks back into oblivion. I am too
sleepy to pick up the bag. It lies there on the
floor. The unjust man uses it for a footstool.</p>
<p>We look out, through half-closed eyes, upon the parched,
level, treeless land; upon the little patchwork farms of corn and
beetroot, oats and fruit, growing undivided, side by side, each
looking like a little garden dropped down into the plain; upon
the little dull stone houses.</p>
<p>A steeple appears far away upon the horizon. (The first
thing that we ask of men is their faith: “What do you
believe?” The first thing that they show us is their
church: “<i>This</i> we believe.”) Then a tall
chimney ranges itself alongside. (First faith, then
works.) Then a confused jumble of roofs, out of which, at
last, stand forth individual houses, factories, streets, and we
draw up in a sleeping town.</p>
<p>People open the carriage door, and look in upon us. They
do not appear to think much of us, and close the door again
quickly, with a bang, and we sleep once more.</p>
<p>As we rumble on, the country slowly wakes. Rude V-shaped
carts, drawn by yoked oxen, and even sometimes by cows, wait
patiently while we cross the long, straight roads stretching bare
for many a mile across the plain. Peasants trudge along the
fields to work. Smoke rises from the villages and
farm-houses. Passengers are waiting at the wayside
stations.</p>
<p>Towards mid-day, on looking out, we see two tiny spires
standing side by side against the sky. They seem to be
twins, and grow taller as we approach. I describe them to
B., and he says they are the steeples of Cologne Cathedral; and
we all begin to yawn and stretch, and to collect our bags and
coats and umbrellas.</p>
<h2>HALF OF SATURDAY 24TH, AND SOME OF SUNDAY, 25TH</h2>
<p>Difficulty of Keeping this Diary.—A Big Wash.—The
German Bed.—Its Goings On.—Manners and Customs of the
German Army.—B.’s Besetting Sin.—Cologne
Cathedral.—Thoughts Without Words.—A Curious
Custom.</p>
<p>This diary is getting mixed. The truth is, I am not
living as a man who keeps a diary should live. I ought, of
course, to sit down in front of this diary at eleven
o’clock at night, and write down all that has occurred to
me during the day. But at eleven o’clock at night, I
am in the middle of a long railway journey, or have just got up,
or am just going to bed for a couple of hours. We go to bed
at odd moments, when we happen to come across a bed, and have a
few minutes to spare. We have been to bed this afternoon,
and are now having another breakfast; and I am not quite sure
whether it is yesterday or to-morrow, or what day it is.</p>
<p>I shall not attempt to write up this diary in the orthodox
manner, therefore; but shall fix in a few lines whenever I have
half-an-hour with nothing better to do.</p>
<p>We washed ourselves in the Rhine at Cologne (we had not had a
wash since we had left our happy home in England). We
started with the idea of washing ourselves at the hotel; but on
seeing the basin and water and towel provided, I decided not to
waste my time playing with them. As well might Hercules
have attempted to tidy up the Augean stables with a squirt.</p>
<p>We appealed to the chambermaid. We explained to her that
we wanted to wash—to clean ourselves—not to blow
bubbles. Could we not have bigger basins and more water and
more extensive towels? The chambermaid (a staid old lady of
about fifty) did not think that anything better could be done for
us by the hotel fraternity of Cologne, and seemed to think that
the river was more what we wanted.</p>
<p>I fancied that the old soul was speaking sarcastically, but B.
said “No;” she was thinking of the baths alongside
the river, and suggested that we should go there. I
agreed. It seemed to me that the river—the
Rhine—would, if anything could, meet the case. There
ought to be plenty of water in it now, after the heavy spring
rains.</p>
<p>When I saw it, I felt satisfied. I said to B.:</p>
<p>“That’s all right, old man; that’s the sort
of thing we need. That is just the sized river I feel I can
get myself clean in this afternoon.”</p>
<p>I have heard a good deal in praise of the Rhine, and I am glad
to be able to speak well of it myself. I found it most
refreshing.</p>
<p>I was, however, sorry that we had washed in it
afterwards. I have heard from friends who have travelled
since in Germany that we completely spoiled that river for the
rest of the season. Not for business purposes, I do not
mean. The barge traffic has been, comparatively speaking,
uninterfered with. But the tourist trade has suffered
terribly. Parties who usually go up the Rhine by steamer
have, after looking at the river, gone by train this year.
The boat agents have tried to persuade them that the Rhine is
always that colour: that it gets like that owing to the dirt and
refuse washed down into it during its course among the
mountains.</p>
<p>But the tourists have refused to accept this
explanation. They have said:</p>
<p>“No. Mountains will account for a good deal, we
admit, but not for all <i>that</i>. We are acquainted with
the ordinary condition of the Rhine, and although muddy, and at
times unpleasant, it is passable. As it is this summer,
however, we would prefer not to travel upon it. We will
wait until after next year’s spring-floods.”</p>
<p>We went to bed after our wash. To the
<i>blasé</i> English bed-goer, accustomed all his life to
the same old hackneyed style of bed night after night, there is
something very pleasantly piquant about the experience of trying
to sleep in a German bed. He does not know it is a bed at
first. He thinks that someone has been going round the
room, collecting all the sacks and cushions and antimacassars and
such articles that he has happened to find about, and has piled
them up on a wooden tray ready for moving. He rings for the
chambermaid, and explains to her that she has shown him into the
wrong room. He wanted a bedroom.</p>
<p>She says: “This <i>is</i> a bedroom.”</p>
<p>He says: “Where’s the bed?”</p>
<p>“There!” she says, pointing to the box on which
the sacks and antimacassars and cushions lie piled.</p>
<p>“That!” he cries. “How am I going to
sleep in that?”</p>
<p>The chambermaid does not know how he is going to sleep there,
never having seen a gentleman go to sleep anywhere, and not
knowing how they set about it; but suggests that he might try
lying down flat, and shutting his eyes.</p>
<p>“But it is not long enough,” he says.</p>
<p>The chambermaid thinks he will be able to manage, if he tucks
his legs up.</p>
<p>He sees that he will not get anything better, and that he must
put up with it.</p>
<p>“Oh, very well!” he says. “Look sharp
and get it made, then.”</p>
<p>She says: “It is made.”</p>
<p>He turns and regards the girl sternly. Is she taking
advantage of his being a lonely stranger, far from home and
friends, to mock him? He goes over to what she calls the
bed, and snatching off the top-most sack from the pile and
holding it up, says:</p>
<p>“Perhaps you’ll tell me what this is,
then?”</p>
<p>“That,” says the girl, “that’s the
bed!”</p>
<p>He is somewhat nonplussed at the unexpected reply.</p>
<p>“Oh!” he says. “Oh! the bed, is
it? I thought it was a pincushion! Well, if it is the
bed, then what is it doing out here, on the top of everything
else? You think that because I’m only a man, I
don’t understand a bed!”</p>
<p>“That’s the proper place for it,” responds
the chambermaid.</p>
<p>“What! on top?”</p>
<p>“Yes, sir.”</p>
<p>“Well, then where are the clothes?”</p>
<p>“Underneath, sir.”</p>
<p>“Look here, my good girl,” he says; “you
don’t understand me, or I don’t understand you, one
or the other. When I go to sleep, I lie on a bed and pull
the clothes over me. I don’t want to lie on the
clothes, and cover myself with the bed. This isn’t a
comic ballet, you know!”</p>
<p>The girl assures him that there is no mistake about the matter
at all. There is the bed, made according to German notions
of how a bed should be made. He can make the best of it and
try to go to sleep upon it, or he can be sulky and go to sleep on
the floor.</p>
<p>He is very much surprised. It looks to him the sort of
bed that a man would make for himself on coming home late from a
party. But it is no use arguing the matter with the
girl.</p>
<p>“All right,” he says; “bring me a pillow,
and I’ll risk it!”</p>
<p>The chambermaid explains that there are two pillows on the bed
already, indicating, as she does so, two flat cushions, each one
a yard square, placed one on top of the other at one end of the
mixture.</p>
<p>“These!” exclaims the weary traveller, beginning
to feel that he does not want to go to bed at all.
“These are not pillows! I want something to put my
head on; not a thing that comes down to the middle of my
back! Don’t tell me that I’ve got to sleep on
these things!”</p>
<p>But the girl does tell him so, and also implies that she has
something else to do than to stand there all day talking
bed-gossip with him.</p>
<p>“Well, just show me how to start,” he says,
“which way you get into it, and then I won’t keep you
any longer; I’ll puzzle out the rest for myself.”</p>
<p>She explains the trick to him and leaves, and he undresses and
crawls in.</p>
<p>The pillows give him a good deal of worry. He does not
know whether he is meant to sit on them or merely to lean up
against them. In experimenting upon this point, he bumps
his head against the top board of the bedstead. At this, he
says, “Oh!” and shoots himself down to the bottom of
the bed. Here all his ten toes simultaneously come into
sharp contact with the board at the bottom.</p>
<p>Nothing irritates a man more than being rapped over the toes,
especially if he feels that he has done nothing to deserve
it. He says, “Oh, damn!” this time, and
spasmodically doubles up his legs, thus giving his knees a
violent blow against the board at the side of the bed. (The
German bedstead, be it remembered, is built in the form of a
shallow, open box, and the victim is thus completely surrounded
by solid pieces of wood with sharp edges. I do not know
what species of wood it is that is employed. It is
extremely hard, and gives forth a curious musical sound when
struck sharply with a bone.)</p>
<p>After this he lies perfectly still for a while, wondering
where he is going to be hit next. Finding that nothing
happens, he begins to regain confidence, and ventures to gently
feel around with his left leg and take stock of his position.</p>
<p>For clothes, he has only a very thin blanket and sheet, and
beneath these he feels decidedly chilly. The bed is warm
enough, so far as it goes, but there is not enough of it.
He draws it up round his chin, and then his feet begin to
freeze. He pushes it down over his feet, and then all the
top part of him shivers.</p>
<p>He tries to roll up into a ball, so as to get the whole of
himself underneath it, but does not succeed; there is always some
of him left outside in the cold.</p>
<p>He reflects that a “boneless wonder” or a
“man serpent” would be comfortable enough in this
bed, and wishes that he had been brought up as a
contortionist. If he could only tie his legs round his
neck, and tuck his head in under his arm, all would yet be
well.</p>
<p>Never having been taught to do any really useful tricks such
as these, however, he has to be content to remain spread out,
warming a bit of himself at a time.</p>
<p>It is, perhaps, foolish of him, amid so many real troubles, to
allow a mere æsthetical consideration to worry him, but as
he lies there on his back, looking down at himself, the sight
that he presents to himself considerably annoys him. The
puffed-up bed, resting on the middle of him, gives him the
appearance of a man suffering from some monstrous swelling, or
else of some exceptionally well-developed frog that has been
turned up the wrong way and does not know how to get on to its
legs again.</p>
<p>Another vexation that he has to contend with is, that every
time he moves a limb or breathes extra hard, the bed (which is
only of down) tumbles off on to the floor.</p>
<p>You cannot lean out of a German bed to pick up anything off
the floor, owing to its box-like formation; so he has to scramble
out after it, and of course every time he does this he barks both
his shins twice against the sides of the bed.</p>
<p>When he has performed this feat for about the tenth time, he
concludes that it was madness for him, a mere raw amateur at the
business, to think that he could manage a complicated, tricky bed
of this sort, that must take even an experienced man all he knows
to sleep in it; and gets out and camps on the floor.</p>
<p>At least, that is what I did. B. is accustomed to German
beds, and doubled himself up and went off to sleep without the
slightest difficulty.</p>
<p>We slept for two hours, and then got up and went back to the
railway-station, where we dined. The railway
refreshment-room in German towns appears to be as much patronised
by the inhabitants of the town as by the travellers passing
through. It is regarded as an ordinary restaurant, and used
as such by the citizens. We found the dining-room at
Cologne station crowded with Cologneists.</p>
<p>All classes of citizens were there, but especially
soldiers. There were all sorts of soldiers—soldiers
of rank, and soldiers of rank and file; attached soldiers (very
much attached, apparently) and soldiers unattached; stout
soldiers, thin soldiers; old soldiers, young soldiers. Four
very young soldiers sat opposite us, drinking beer. I never
saw such young soldiers out by themselves before. They each
looked about twelve years old, but may have been thirteen; and
they each looked, also, ready and willing to storm a battery, if
the order were given to them to do it. There they sat,
raising and lowering their huge mugs of beer, discussing military
matters, and rising every now and again to gravely salute some
officer as he passed, and to receive as gravely his grave salute
in return.</p>
<p>There seemed to be a deal of saluting to be gone
through. Officers kept entering and passing through the
room in an almost continual stream, and every time one came in
sight all the military drinkers and eaters rose and saluted, and
remained at the salute until the officer had passed.</p>
<p>One young soldier, who was trying to eat a plate of soup near
us, I felt quite sorry for. Every time he got the spoon
near his mouth an officer invariably hove in view, and down would
have to go the spoon, soup and all, and up he would have to
rise. It never seemed to occur to the silly fellow to get
under the table and finish his dinner there.</p>
<p>We had half-an-hour to spare between dinner and the starting
of our train, and B. suggested that we should go into the
cathedral. That is B.’s one weakness, churches.
I have the greatest difficulty in getting him past a
church-door. We are walking along a street, arm in arm,
talking as rationally and even as virtuously as need be, when all
at once I find that B. has become silent and abstracted.</p>
<p>I know what it is; he has caught sight of a church. I
pretend not to notice any change in him, and endeavour to hurry
him on. He lags more and more behind, however, and at last
stops altogether.</p>
<p>“Come, come,” I say to him, encouragingly,
“pull yourself together, and be a man. Don’t
think about it. Put it behind you, and determine that you
<i>won’t</i> be conquered. Come, we shall be round
the corner in another minute, where you won’t be able to
see it. Take my hand, and let’s run!”</p>
<p>He makes a few feeble steps forward with me, and then stops
again.</p>
<p>“It’s no good, old man,” he says, with a
sickly smile, so full of pathos that it is impossible to find it
in one’s heart to feel anything but pity for him.
“I can’t help it. I have given way to this sort
of thing too long. It is too late to reform now. You
go on and get a drink somewhere; I’ll join you again in a
few minutes. Don’t worry about me; it’s no
good.”</p>
<p>And back he goes with tottering steps, while I sadly pass on
into the nearest café, and, over a glass of absinthe or
cognac, thank Providence that I learnt to control my craving for
churches in early youth, and so am not now like this poor B.</p>
<p>In a little while he comes in, and sits down beside me.
There is a wild, unhealthy excitement in his eye, and, under a
defiant air of unnatural gaiety, he attempts to hide his
consciousness of guilt.</p>
<p>“It was a lovely altar-cloth,” he whispers to me,
with an enthusiasm that only makes one sorrow for him the more,
so utterly impossible does it cause all hope of cure to
seem. “And they’ve got a coffin in the north
crypt that is simply a poem. I never enjoyed a sarcophagus
more in all my life.”</p>
<p>I do not say much at the time; it would be useless. But
after the day is done, and we are standing beside our little
beds, and all around is as silent as one can expect it to be in
an hotel where people seem to be arriving all night long with
heavy luggage, and to be all, more or less, in trouble, I argue
with him, and gently reprove him. To avoid the appearance
of sermonising as much as possible, I put it on mere grounds of
expediency.</p>
<p>“How are we to find time,” I say, “to go to
all the places that we really ought to go to—to all the
cafés and theatres and music-halls and beer-gardens and
dancing-saloons that we want to visit—if you waste half the
precious day loafing about churches and cathedrals?”</p>
<p>He is deeply moved, and promises to swear off. He vows,
with tears in his voice, that he will never enter a church-door
again. But next morning, when the temptation comes, all his
good resolutions are swept away, and again he yields. It is
no good being angry with him, because he evidently does really
try; but there is something about the mere odour of a church that
he simply cannot withstand.</p>
<p>Not knowing, then, that this weakness of his for churches was
so strong, I made no objection to the proposed visit to Cologne
Cathedral, and, accordingly, towards it we wended our way.
B. has seen it before, and knows all about it. He tells me
it was begun about the middle of the thirteenth century, and was
only completed ten years ago. It seems to me that there
must have been gross delay on the part of the builder. Why,
a plumber would be ashamed to take as long as that over a
job!</p>
<p>B. also asserts that the two towers are the highest church
towers in the world. I dispute this, and deprecate the
towers generally. B. warmly defends them. He says
they are higher than any building in Europe, except the Eiffel
Tower.</p>
<p>“Oh, dear no!” I say, “there are many
buildings higher than they in Europe—to say nothing of Asia
and America.”</p>
<p>I have no authority for making this assertion. As a
matter of fact, I know nothing whatever about the matter. I
merely say it to irritate B. He appears to take a sort of
personal interest in the building, and enlarges upon its beauties
and advantages with as much fervour as if he were an auctioneer
trying to sell the place.</p>
<p>He retorts that the towers are 512 feet high.</p>
<p>I say:</p>
<p>“Nonsense! Somebody has imposed upon you, because
they see you are a foreigner.”</p>
<p>He becomes quite angry at this, and says he can show me the
figures in the guide-book.</p>
<p>“The guide-book!” I reply, scornfully.
“You’ll believe a newspaper next!”</p>
<p>B. asks me, indignantly, what height I should say they are,
then. I examine them critically for a few minutes, and then
give it as my opinion that they do not exceed 510 feet at the
very outside. B. seems annoyed with me, and we enter the
church in silence.</p>
<p>There is little to be said about a cathedral. Except to
the professional sightseer, one is very much like another.
Their beauty to me lies, not in the paintings and sculpture they
give houseroom to, nor in the bones and bric-à-brac piled
up in their cellars, but in themselves—their echoing
vastness, their deep silence.</p>
<p>Above the little homes of men, above the noisy teeming
streets, they rise like some soft strain of perfect music,
cleaving its way amid the jangle of discordant notes. Here,
where the voices of the world sound faint; here, where the
city’s glamour comes not in, it is good to rest for a
while—if only the pestering guides would leave one
alone—and think.</p>
<p>There is much help in Silence. From its touch we gain
renewed life. Silence is to the Soul what his Mother Earth
was to Briareus. From contact with it we rise healed of our
hurts and strengthened for the fight.</p>
<p>Amid the babel of the schools we stand bewildered and
affrighted. Silence gives us peace and hope. Silence
teaches us no creed, only that God’s arms are around the
universe.</p>
<p>How small and unimportant seem all our fretful troubles and
ambitions when we stand with them in our hand before the great
calm face of Silence! We smile at them ourselves, and are
ashamed.</p>
<p>Silence teaches us how little we are—how great we
are. In the world’s market-places we are tinkers,
tailors, apothecaries, thieves—respectable or otherwise, as
the case may be—mere atoms of a mighty machine—mere
insects in a vast hive.</p>
<p>It is only in Silence that it comes home to us that we are
something much greater than this—that we are <i>men</i>,
with all the universe and all eternity before us.</p>
<p>It is in Silence we hear the voice of Truth. The temples
and the marts of men echo all night and day to the clamour of
lies and shams and quackeries. But in Silence falsehood
cannot live. You cannot float a lie on Silence. A lie
has to be puffed aloft, and kept from falling by men’s
breath. Leave a lie on the bosom of Silence, and it
sinks. A truth floats there fair and stately, like some
stout ship upon a deep ocean. Silence buoys her up lovingly
for all men to see. Not until she has grown worn-out and
rotten, and is no longer a truth, will the waters of Silence
close over her.</p>
<p>Silence is the only real thing we can lay hold of in this
world of passing dreams. Time is a shadow that will vanish
with the twilight of humanity; but Silence is a part of the
eternal. All things that are true and lasting have been
taught to men’s hearts by Silence.</p>
<p>Among all nations, there should be vast temples raised where
the people might worship Silence and listen to it, for it is the
voice of God.</p>
<p>These fair churches and cathedrals that men have reared around
them throughout the world, have been built as homes for mere
creeds—this one for Protestantism, that one for Romanism,
another for Mahomedanism. But God’s Silence dwells in
all alike, only driven forth at times by the tinkling of bells
and the mumbling of prayers; and, in them, it is good to sit
awhile and have communion with her.</p>
<p>We strolled round, before we came out. Just by the
entrance to the choir an official stopped me, and asked me if I
wanted to go and see a lot of fal-lal things he had got on
show—relics and bones, and old masters, and such-like
Wardour-street rubbish.</p>
<p>I told him, “No”; and attempted to pass on, but he
said:</p>
<p>“No, no! You don’t pay, you don’t go
in there,” and shut the gate.</p>
<p>He said this sentence in English; and the precision and
fluency with which he delivered it rather suggested the idea that
it was a phrase much in request, and one that he had had a good
deal of practice in.</p>
<p>It is very prevalent throughout Germany, this custom of not
allowing you to go in to see a thing unless you pay.</p>
<h2>END OF SATURDAY, 24TH, AND BEGINNING OF SUNDAY, 25TH—CONTINUED</h2>
<p>The Rhine!—How History is Written.—Complicated
Villages.—How a Peaceful Community Was Very Much
Upset.—The German Railway Guard.—His Passion for
Tickets.—We Diffuse Comfort and Joy Wherever We Go,
Gladdening the Weary, and Bringing Smiles to Them that
Weep.—“Tickets, Please.”—Hunting
Experiences.—A Natural Mistake.—Free Acrobatic
Performance by the Guard.—The Railway Authorities’
Little Joke.—Why We Should Think of the Sorrows of
Others.</p>
<p>We returned to the station just in time to secure comfortable
seats, and at 5.10 steamed out upon our fifteen hours’ run
to Munich. From Bonn to Mayence the line keeps by the side
of the Rhine nearly the whole of the way, and we had a splendid
view of the river, with the old-world towns and villages that
cluster round its bank, the misty mountains that make early
twilight upon its swiftly rolling waves, the castled crags and
precipices that rise up sheer and majestic from its margin, the
wooded rocks that hang with threatening frown above its sombre
depths, the ruined towers and turrets that cap each point along
its shores, the pleasant isles that stud like gems its broad
expanse of waters.</p>
<p>Few things in this world come up to expectation, especially
those things of which one has been led to expect much, and about
which one has heard a good deal. With this philosophy
running in my head, I was prepared to find the Rhine a much
over-rated river.</p>
<p>I was pleasantly disappointed. The panorama which
unfolded itself before our eyes, as we sped along through the
quiet twilight that was deepening into starry night, was
wonderfully beautiful, entrancing and expressive.</p>
<p>I do not intend to describe it to you. To do justice to
the theme, I should have to be even a more brilliant and powerful
writer than I am. To attempt the subject, without doing it
justice, would be a waste of your time, sweet reader, and of
mine—a still more important matter.</p>
<p>I confess it was not my original intention to let you off so
easily. I started with the idea of giving you a rapid but
glowing and eloquent word-picture of the valley of the Rhine from
Cologne to Mayence. For background, I thought I would
sketch in the historical and legendary events connected with the
district, and against this, for a foreground, I would draw, in
vivid colours, the modern aspect of the scene, with remarks and
observations thereon.</p>
<p>Here are my rough notes, made for the purpose:—</p>
<p>Mems. for Chapter on Rhine: “Constantine the Great used
to come here—so did Agrippa. (N.B.—Try and find
out something about Agrippa.) Cæsar had a good deal
to do with the Rhine—also Nero’s mother.”</p>
<p>(To the reader.—The brevity of these memoranda renders
their import, at times, confusing. For instance, this means
that Cæsar and Nero’s mother both had a good deal to
do with the Rhine; not that Cæsar had a good deal to do
with Nero’s mother. I explain this because I should
be sorry to convey any false impression concerning either the
lady or Cæsar. Scandal is a thing abhorrent to my
nature.)</p>
<p>Notes continued: “The Ubii did something on the right
bank of the Rhine at an early period, and afterwards were found
on the other side. (Expect the Ubii were a tribe; but make
sure of this, as they might be something in the fossil
line.) Cologne was the cradle of German art. Talk
about art and the old masters. Treat them in a kindly and
gentle spirit. They are dead now. Saint Ursula was
murdered at Cologne, with eleven thousand virgin
attendants. There must have been quite a party of
them. Draw powerful and pathetic imaginary picture of the
slaughter. (N.B.—Find out who murdered them
all.) Say something about the Emperor Maximilian.
Call him ‘the mighty Maximilian.’ Mention
Charlemagne (a good deal should be made out of Charlemagne) and
the Franks. (Find out all about the Franks, and where they
lived, and what has become of them.) Sketch the various
contests between the Romans and the Goths. (Read up
‘Gibbon’ for this, unless you can get enough out of
<i>Mangnall’s Questions</i>.) Give picturesque
account—with comments—of the battles between the
citizens of Cologne and their haughty archbishops.
(N.B.—Let them fight on a bridge over the Rhine, unless it
is distinctly stated somewhere that they didn’t.)
Bring in the Minne-singers, especially Walter von Vogelweid; make
him sing under a castle-wall somewhere, and let the girl
die. Talk about Albert Dürer. Criticise his
style. Say it’s flat. (If possible, find out if
it <i>is</i> flat.) “The rat tower on the
Rhine,” near Bingen. Describe the place and tell the
whole story. Don’t spin it out too long, because
everybody knows it. “The Brothers of
Bornhofen,” story connected with the twin castles of
Sterrenberg and Liebenstein, Conrad and
Heinrich—brothers—both love Hildegarde. She was
very beautiful. Heinrich generously refuses to marry the
beautiful Hildegarde, and goes away to the Crusades, leaving her
to his brother Conrad. Conrad considers over the matter for
a year or two, and then <i>he</i> decides that he won’t
marry her either, but will leave her for his brother Heinrich,
and <i>he</i> goes off to the Crusades, from whence he returns, a
few years later on, with a Grecian bride. The beautiful H.,
muddled up between the pair of them, and the victim of too much
generosity, gets sulky (don’t blame her), and shuts herself
up in a lonely part of the castle, and won’t see anybody
for years. Chivalrous Heinrich returns, and is wild that
his brother C. has not married the beautiful H. It does not
occur to him to marry the girl even then. The feverish
yearning displayed by each of these two brothers, that the other
one should marry the beloved Hildegarde, is very touching.
Heinrich draws his sword, and throws himself upon his brother C.
to kill him. The beautiful Hildegarde, however, throws
herself between them and reconciliates them, and then, convinced
that neither of them means business, and naturally disgusted with
the whole affair, retires into a nunnery. Conrad’s
Grecian bride subsequently throws herself away on another man,
upon which Conrad throws himself on his brother H.’s
breast, and they swear eternal friendship. (Make it
pathetic. Pretend you have sat amid the ruins in the
moonlight, and give the scene—with ghosts.)
“Rolandseck,” near Bonn. Tell the story of
Roland and Hildegunde (see <i>Baedeker</i>, p. 66).
Don’t make it too long, because it is so much like the
other. Describe the funeral? The “Watch Tower
on the Rhine” below Audernach. Query, isn’t
there a song about this? If so, put it in. Coblentz
and Ehrenbreitstein. Great fortresses. Call them
“the Frowning Sentinels of the State.” Make
reflections on the German army, also on war generally. Chat
about Frederick the Great. (Read Carlyle’s history of
him, and pick out the interesting bits.) The
Drachenfels. Quote Byron. Moralise about ruined
castles generally, and describe the middle ages, with your views
and opinions on same.”</p>
<p>There is much more of it, but that is sufficient to let you
see the scheme I had in my head. I have not carried out my
scheme, because, when I came to reflect upon the matter, it
seemed to me that the idea would develop into something that
would be more in the nature of a history of Europe than a chapter
in a tourist’s diary, and I determined not to waste my time
upon it, until there arose a greater public demand for a new
History of Europe than there appears to exist at present.</p>
<p>“Besides,” I argued to myself, “such a work
would be just the very thing with which to beguile the tedium of
a long imprisonment. At some future time I may be glad of a
labour of this magnitude to occupy a period of involuntary
inaction.”</p>
<p>“This is the sort of thing,” I said to myself,
“to save up for Holloway or Pentonville.”</p>
<p>It would have been a very enjoyable ride altogether, that
evening’s spin along the banks of the Rhine, if I had not
been haunted at the time by the idea that I should have to write
an account of it next day in my diary. As it was, I enjoyed
it as a man enjoys a dinner when he has got to make a speech
after it, or as a critic enjoys a play.</p>
<p>We passed such odd little villages every here and there.
Little places so crowded up between the railway and the river
that there was no room in them for any streets. All the
houses were jumbled up together just anyhow, and how any man who
lived in the middle could get home without climbing over half the
other houses in the place I could not make out. They were
the sort of villages where a man’s mother-in-law, coming to
pay him a visit, might wander around all day, hearing him, and
even now and then seeing him, yet never being able to get at him
in consequence of not knowing the way in.</p>
<p>A drunken man, living in one of these villages, could never
hope to get home. He would have to sit down outside, and
wait till his head was clear.</p>
<p>We witnessed the opening scenes of a very amusing little
comedy at one of the towns where the train drew up. The
chief characters were played by an active young goat, a small
boy, an elderly man and a woman, parents of the small boy and
owners of the goat, and a dog.</p>
<p>First we heard a yell, and then, from out a cottage opposite
the station, bounded an innocent and happy goat, and gambolled
around. A long rope, one end of which was fastened to his
neck, trailed behind him. After the goat (in the double
sense of the phrase) came a child. The child tried to catch
the goat by means of the rope, caught itself in the rope instead,
and went down with a bump and a screech. Whereupon a stout
woman, the boy’s mother apparently, ran out from the
cottage, and also made for the goat. The goat flew down the
road, and the woman flew after it. At the first corner, the
woman trod on the rope, and then <i>she</i> went down with a bump
and a screech. Then the goat turned and ran up the street,
and, as it passed the cottage, the father ran out and tried to
stop it. He was an old man, but still seemed to have plenty
of vigour in him. He evidently guessed how his wife and
child had gone down, and he endeavoured to avoid the rope and to
skip over it when it came near him. But the goat’s
movements were too erratic for him. His turn came, and he
trod on the rope, and went down in the middle of the road,
opposite his own door, with a thud that shook us all up against
each other as we stood looking out of the carriage-window, and
sat there and cursed the goat. Then out ran a dog, barking
furiously, and he went for the goat, and got the end of the rope
in his teeth and held on to it like grim death. Away went
the goat, at his end of the rope, and, with him, the dog at the
other end. Between them, they kept the rope about six
inches above the ground, and with it they remorselessly mowed
down every living thing they came across in that once peaceful
village. In the course of less than half a minute we
counted fourteen persons sitting down in the middle of the
road. Eight of them were cursing the goat, four were
cursing the dog, and two of them were cursing the old man for
keeping the goat, one of these two, and the more violent one,
being the man’s own wife.</p>
<p>The train left at this juncture. We entreated the
railway officials to let us stop and see the show out. The
play was becoming quite interesting. It was so full of
movement. But they said that we were half-an-hour late as
it was, and that they dared not.</p>
<p>We leaned out of the window, and watched for as long as we
could; and after the village was lost to view in the distance, we
could still, by listening carefully, hear the thuds, as one after
another of the inhabitants sat down and began to swear.</p>
<p>At about eleven o’clock we had some beer—you can
generally obtain such light refreshment as bottled beer and
coffee and rolls from the guard on a through long-distance train
in Germany—took off our boots, and saying
“Good-night” to each other, made a great show of
going to sleep. But we never succeeded in getting
there. They wanted to see one’s ticket too often for
one to get fairly off.</p>
<p>Every few minutes, so it seemed to me, though in reality the
intervals may perhaps have been longer, a ghostly face would
appear at the carriage-window, and ask to see our tickets.</p>
<p>Whenever a German railway-guard feels lonesome, and does not
know what else to do with himself, he takes a walk round the
train, and gets the passengers to show him their tickets, after
which he returns to his box cheered and refreshed. Some
people rave about sunsets and mountains and old masters; but to
the German railway-guard the world can show nothing more
satisfying, more inspiring, than the sight of a
railway-ticket.</p>
<p>Nearly all the German railway officials have this same craving
for tickets. If only they get somebody to show them a
railway-ticket, they are happy. It seemed a harmless
weakness of theirs, and B. and I decided that it would be only
kind to humour them in it during our stay.</p>
<p>Accordingly, whenever we saw a German railway official
standing about, looking sad and weary, we went up to him and
showed him our tickets. The sight was like a ray of
sunshine to him; and all his care was immediately
forgotten. If we had not a ticket with us at the time, we
went and bought one. A mere single third to the next
station would gladden him sufficiently in most cases; but if the
poor fellow appeared very woe-begone, and as if he wanted more
than ordinary cheering up, we got him a second-class return.</p>
<p>For the purpose of our journey to Ober-Ammergau and back, we
each carried with us a folio containing some ten or twelve
first-class tickets between different towns, covering in all a
distance of some thousand miles; and one afternoon, at Munich,
seeing a railway official, a cloak-room keeper, who they told us
had lately lost his aunt, and who looked exceptionally dejected,
I proposed to B. that we should take this man into a quiet
corner, and both of us show him all our tickets at once—the
whole twenty or twenty-four of them—and let him take them
in his hand and look at them for as long as he liked. I
wanted to comfort him.</p>
<p>B., however, advised against the suggestion. He said
that even if it did not turn the man’s head (and it was
more than probable that it would), so much jealousy would be
created against him among the other railway people throughout
Germany, that his life would be made a misery to him.</p>
<p>So we bought and showed him a first-class return to the next
station but one; and it was quite pathetic to watch the poor
fellow’s face brighten up at the sight, and to see the
faint smile creep back to the lips from which it had so long been
absent.</p>
<p>But at times, one wishes that the German railway official
would control his passion for tickets—or, at least, keep it
within due bounds.</p>
<p>Even the most kindly-hearted man grows tired of showing his
ticket all day and night long, and the middle of a wearisome
journey is not the proper time for a man to come to the
carriage-window and clamour to see your “billet.”</p>
<p>You are weary and sleepy. You do not know where your
ticket is. You are not quite sure that you have got a
ticket; or if you ever had one, somebody has taken it away from
you. You have put it by very carefully, thinking that it
would not be wanted for hours, and have forgotten where.</p>
<p>There are eleven pockets in the suit you have on, and five
more in the overcoat on the rack. Maybe, it is in one of
those pockets. If not, it is possibly in one of the
bags—somewhere, or in your pocket-book, if you only knew
where that was, or your purse.</p>
<p>You begin a search. You stand up and shake
yourself. Then you have another feel all over. You
look round in the course of the proceedings; and the sight of the
crowd of curious faces watching you, and of the man in uniform
waiting with his eye fixed severely upon you, convey to you, in
your then state of confusion, the momentary idea that this is a
police-court scene, and that if the ticket is found upon you, you
will probably get five years.</p>
<p>Upon this you vehemently protest your innocence.</p>
<p>“I tell you I haven’t got it!” you
exclaim;—“never seen the gentleman’s
ticket. You let me go! I—”</p>
<p>Here the surprise of your fellow-passengers recalls you to
yourself, and you proceed on your exploration. You overhaul
the bags, turning everything out on to the floor, muttering
curses on the whole railway system of Germany as you do so.
Then you feel in your boots. You make everybody near you
stand up to see if they are sitting upon it, and you go down on
your knees and grovel for it under the seat.</p>
<p>“You didn’t throw it out of the window with your
sandwiches, did you?” asks your friend.</p>
<p>“No! Do you think I’m a fool?” you
answer, irritably. “What should I want to do that
for?”</p>
<p>On going systematically over yourself for about the twentieth
time, you discover it in your waistcoat pocket, and for the next
half-hour you sit and wonder how you came to miss it on the
previous nineteen occasions.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, during this trying scene, the conduct of the guard
has certainly not tended to allay your anxiety and
nervousness. All the time that you have been looking for
your ticket, he has been doing silly tricks on the step outside,
imperilling his life by every means that experience and ingenuity
can suggest.</p>
<p>The train is going at the rate of thirty miles an hour, the
express speed in Germany, and a bridge comes in sight crossing
over the line. On seeing this bridge, the guard, holding on
by the window, leans his body as far back as ever it will
go. You look at him, and then at the rapidly-nearing
bridge, and calculate that the arch will just take his head off
without injuring any other part of him whatever, and you wonder
whether the head will be jerked into the carriage or will fall
outside.</p>
<p>When he is three inches off the bridge, he pulls himself up
straight, and the brickwork, as the train dashes through, kills a
fly that was trespassing on the upper part of his right ear.</p>
<p>Then, when the bridge is passed, and the train is skirting the
very edge of a precipice, so that a stone dropped just outside
the window would tumble straight down 300 feet, he suddenly lets
go, and, balancing himself on the foot-board without holding on
to anything, commences to dance a sort of Teutonic cellar-flap,
and to warm his body by flinging his arms about in the manner of
cabmen on a cold day.</p>
<p>The first essential to comfortable railway travelling in
Germany is to make up your mind not to care a rap whether the
guard gets killed in the course of the journey or not. Any
tender feeling towards the guard makes railway travelling in the
Fatherland a simple torture.</p>
<p>At five a.m. (how fair and sweet and fresh the earth looks in
the early morning! Those lazy people who lie in bed till
eight or nine miss half the beauty of the day, if they but knew
it. It is only we who rise early that really enjoy Nature
properly) I gave up trying to get to sleep, and made my way to
the dressing-room at the end of the car, and had a wash.</p>
<p>It is difficult to wash in these little places, because the
cars shake so; and when you have got both your hands and half
your head in the basin, and are unable to protect yourself, the
sides of the room, and the water-tap and the soap-dish, and other
cowardly things, take a mean advantage of your helplessness to
punch you as hard as ever they can; and when you back away from
these, the door swings open and slaps you from behind.</p>
<p>I succeeded, however, in getting myself fairly wet all over,
even if I did nothing else, and then I looked about for a
towel. Of course, there was no towel. That is the
trick. The idea of the railway authorities is to lure the
passenger, by providing him with soap and water and a basin, into
getting himself thoroughly soaked, and then to let it dawn upon
him that there is no towel. That is their notion of
fun!</p>
<p>I thought of the handkerchiefs in my bag, but to get to them I
should have to pass compartments containing ladies, and I was
only in early morning dress.</p>
<p>So I had to wipe myself with a newspaper which I happened to
have in my pocket, and a more unsatisfactory thing to dry oneself
upon I cannot conceive.</p>
<p>I woke up B. when I got back to the carriage, and persuaded
him to go and have a wash; and in listening to the distant sound
of his remarks when he likewise discovered that there was no
towel, the recollection of my own discomfiture passed gently
away.</p>
<p>Ah! how true it is, as good people tell us, that in thinking
of the sorrows of others, we learn to forget our own!</p>
<p>For fifty miles before one reaches Munich, the land is flat,
stale, and apparently very unprofitable, and there is little to
interest the looker-out. He sits straining his eyes towards
the horizon, eagerly longing for some sign of the city to come in
sight.</p>
<p>It lies very low, however, and does all it can to escape
observation; and it is not until he is almost within its streets
that he discovers it.</p>
<h2>THE REST OF SUNDAY, THE 25TH</h2>
<p>We Seek Breakfast.—I Air My German.—The Art of
Gesture.—The Intelligence of the Première
Danseuse.—Performance of English Pantomime in the
Pyrenees.—Sad Result Therefrom.—The “German
Conversation” Book.—Its Narrow-minded View of Human
Wants and Aspirations.—Sunday in Munich.—Hans and
Gretchen.—High Life v. Low Life.—“A
Beer-Cellar.”</p>
<p>At Munich we left our luggage at the station, and went in
search of breakfast. Of course, at eight o’clock in
the morning none of the big cafés were open; but at
length, beside some gardens, we found an old-fashioned looking
restaurant, from which came a pleasant odour of coffee and hot
onions; and walking through and seating ourselves at one of the
little tables, placed out under the trees, we took the bill of
fare in our hands, and summoned the waiter to our side.</p>
<p>I ordered the breakfast. I thought it would be a good
opportunity for me to try my German. I ordered coffee and
rolls as a groundwork. I got over that part of my task very
easily. With the practice I had had during the last two
days, I could have ordered coffee and rolls for forty. Then
I foraged round for luxuries, and ordered a green salad. I
had some difficulty at first in convincing the man that it was
not a boiled cabbage that I wanted, but succeeded eventually in
getting that silly notion out of his head.</p>
<p>I still had a little German left, even after that. So I
ordered an omelette also.</p>
<p>“Tell him a savoury one,” said B., “or he
will be bringing us something full of hot jam and
chocolate-creams. You know their style.”</p>
<p>“Oh, yes,” I answered. “Of
course. Yes. Let me see. What is the German for
savoury?”</p>
<p>“Savoury?” mused B. “Oh! ah!
hum! Bothered if I know! Confound the thing—I
can’t think of it!”</p>
<p>I could not think of it either. As a matter of fact, I
never knew it. We tried the man with French. We
said:</p>
<p>“<i>Une omelette aux fines herbes</i>.”</p>
<p>As he did not appear to understand that, we gave it him in bad
English. We twisted and turned the unfortunate word
“savoury” into sounds so quaint, so sad, so
unearthly, that you would have thought they might have touched
the heart of a savage. This stoical Teuton, however,
remained unmoved. Then we tried pantomime.</p>
<p>Pantomime is to language what marmalade, according to the
label on the pot, is to butter, “an excellent (occasional)
substitute.” But its powers as an interpreter of
thought are limited. At least, in real life they are
so. As regards a ballet, it is difficult to say what is not
explainable by pantomime. I have seen the bad man in a
ballet convey to the <i>première danseuse</i> by a subtle
movement of the left leg, together with some slight assistance
from the drum, the heartrending intelligence that the lady she
had been brought up to believe was her mother was in reality only
her aunt by marriage. But then it must be borne in mind
that the <i>première danseuse</i> is a lady whose
quickness of perception is altogether unique. The
<i>première danseuse</i> knows precisely what a gentleman
means when he twirls round forty-seven times on one leg, and then
stands on his head. The average foreigner would, in all
probability, completely misunderstand the man.</p>
<p>A friend of mine once, during a tour in the Pyrenees, tried to
express gratitude by means of pantomime. He arrived late
one evening at a little mountain inn, where the people made him
very welcome, and set before him their best; and he, being
hungry, appreciated their kindness, and ate a most excellent
supper.</p>
<p>Indeed, so excellent a meal did he make, and so kind and
attentive were his hosts to him, that, after supper, he felt he
wanted to thank them, and to convey to them some idea of how
pleased and satisfied he was.</p>
<p>He could not explain himself in language. He only knew
enough Spanish to just ask for what he wanted—and even to
do that he had to be careful not to want much. He had not
got as far as sentiment and emotion at that time.
Accordingly he started to express himself in action. He
stood up and pointed to the empty table where the supper had
been, then opened his mouth and pointed down his throat.
Then he patted that region of his anatomy where, so scientific
people tell us, supper goes to, and smiled.</p>
<p>He has a rather curious smile, has my friend. He himself
is under the impression that there is something very winning in
it, though, also, as he admits, a touch of sadness. They
use it in his family for keeping the children in order.</p>
<p>The people of the inn seemed rather astonished at his
behaviour. They regarded him, with troubled looks, and then
gathered together among themselves and consulted in whispers.</p>
<p>“I evidently have not made myself sufficiently clear to
these simple peasants,” said my friend to himself.
“I must put more vigour into this show.”</p>
<p>Accordingly he rubbed and patted that part of himself to which
I have previously alluded—and which, being a modest and
properly brought-up young man, nothing on earth shall induce me
to mention more explicitly—with greater energy than ever,
and added another inch or two of smile; and he also made various
graceful movements indicative, as he thought, of friendly feeling
and contentment.</p>
<p>At length a ray of intelligence burst upon the faces of his
hosts, and they rushed to a cupboard and brought out a small
black bottle.</p>
<p>“Ah! that’s done it,” thought my
friend. “Now they have grasped my meaning. And
they are pleased that I am pleased, and are going to insist on my
drinking a final friendly bumper of wine with them, the good old
souls!”</p>
<p>They brought the bottle over, and poured out a wineglassful,
and handed it to him, making signs that he should drink it off
quickly.</p>
<p>“Ah!” said my friend to himself, as he took the
glass and raised it to the light, and winked at it wickedly,
“this is some rare old spirit peculiar to the
district—some old heirloom kept specially for the favoured
guest.”</p>
<p>And he held the glass aloft and made a speech, in which he
wished long life and many grand-children to the old couple, and a
handsome husband to the daughter, and prosperity to the whole
village. They could not understand him, he knew; but he
thought there might be that in his tones and gestures from which
they would gather the sense of what he was saying, and understand
how kindly he felt towards them all. When he had finished,
he put his hand upon his heart and smiled some more, and then
tossed the liquor off at a gulp.</p>
<p>Three seconds later he discovered that it was a stringent and
trustworthy emetic that he had swallowed. His audience had
mistaken his signs of gratitude for efforts on his part to
explain to them that he was poisoned, or, at all events, was
suffering from acute and agonising indigestion, and had done what
they could to comfort him.</p>
<p>The drug that they had given him was not one of those common,
cheap medicines that lose their effect before they have been in
the system half-an-hour. He felt that it would be useless
to begin another supper then, even if he could get one, and so he
went to bed a good deal hungrier and a good deal less refreshed
than when he arrived at the inn.</p>
<p>Gratitude is undoubtedly a thing that should not be attempted
by the amateur pantomimist.</p>
<p>“Savoury” is another. B. and I very nearly
did ourselves a serious internal injury, trying to express
it. We slaved like cab-horses at it—for about five
minutes, and succeeded in conveying to the mind of the waiter
that we wanted to have a game at dominoes.</p>
<p>Then, like a beam of sunlight to a man lost in some dark,
winding cave, came to me the reflection that I had in my pocket a
German conversation book.</p>
<p>How stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Here
had we been racking our brains and our bodies, trying to explain
our wants to an uneducated German, while, all the time, there lay
to our hands a book specially written and prepared to assist
people out of the very difficulty into which we had
fallen—a book carefully compiled with the express object of
enabling English travellers who, like ourselves, only spoke
German in a dilettante fashion, to make their modest requirements
known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out of the country
alive and uninjured.</p>
<p>I hastily snatched the book from my pocket, and commenced to
search for dialogues dealing with the great food question.
There were none!</p>
<p>There were lengthy and passionate “Conversations with a
laundress” about articles that I blush to remember.
Some twenty pages of the volume were devoted to silly dialogues
between an extraordinarily patient shoemaker and one of the most
irritating and constitutionally dissatisfied customers that an
unfortunate shop-keeper could possibly be cursed with; a customer
who, after twaddling for about forty minutes, and trying on,
apparently, every pair of boots in the place, calmly walks out
with:</p>
<p>“Ah! well, I shall not purchase anything to-day.
Good-morning!”</p>
<p>The shopkeeper’s reply, by-the-by, is not given.
It probably took the form of a boot-jack, accompanied by phrases
deemed useless for the purposes of the Christian tourist.</p>
<p>There was really something remarkable about the exhaustiveness
of this “conversation at the
shoemaker’s.” I should think the book must have
been written by someone who suffered from corns. I could
have gone to a German shoemaker with this book and have talked
the man’s head off.</p>
<p>Then there were two pages of watery chatter “on meeting
a friend in the street”—“Good-morning, sir (or
madam).” “I wish you a merry
Christmas.” “How is your mother?”
As if a man who hardly knew enough German to keep body and soul
together, would want to go about asking after the health of a
foreign person’s mother.</p>
<p>There were also “conversations in the railway
carriage,” conversations between travelling lunatics,
apparently, and dialogues “during the passage.”
“How do you feel now?” “Pretty well as
yet; but I cannot say how long it will last.”
“Oh, what waves! I now feel very unwell and shall go
below. Ask for a basin for me.” Imagine a
person who felt like that wanting to know the German for it.</p>
<p>At the end of the book were German proverbs and
“Idiomatic Phrases,” by which latter would appear to
be meant in all languages, “phrases for the use of
idiots”:—“A sparrow in the hand is better than
a pigeon on the roof.”—“Time brings
roses.”—“The eagle does not catch
flies.”—“One should not buy a cat in a
sack,”—as if there were a large class of consumers
who habitually did purchase their cats in that way, thus enabling
unscrupulous dealers to palm off upon them an inferior cat, and
whom it was accordingly necessary to advise against the
custom.</p>
<p>I skimmed through all this nonsense, but not a word could I
discover anywhere about a savoury omelette. Under the head
of “Eating and Drinking,” I found a short vocabulary;
but it was mainly concerned with “raspberries” and
“figs” and “medlars” (whatever they may
be; I never heard of them myself), and “chestnuts,”
and such like things that a man hardly ever wants, even when he
is in his own country. There was plenty of oil and vinegar,
and pepper and salt and mustard in the list, but nothing to put
them on. I could have had a hard-boiled egg, or a slice of
ham; but I did not want a hard-boiled egg, or a slice of
ham. I wanted a savoury omelette; and that was an article
of diet that the authors of this “Handy Little
Guide,” as they termed it in their preface, had evidently
never heard of.</p>
<p>Since my return home, I have, out of curiosity, obtained three
or four “English-German Dialogues” and
“Conversation Books,” intended to assist the English
traveller in his efforts to make himself understood by the German
people, and I have come to the conclusion that the work I took
out with me was the most sensible and practical of the lot.</p>
<p>Finding it utterly hopeless to explain ourselves to the
waiter, we let the thing go, and trusted to Providence; and in
about ten minutes the man brought us a steaming omelette, with
about a pound of strawberry jam inside, and powdered sugar all
over the outside. We put a deal of pepper and salt on it to
try and counteract the flavour of the sweets, but we did not
really enjoy it even then.</p>
<p>After breakfast we got a time-table, and looked out for a
train to Ober-Ammergau. I found one which started at
3.10. It seemed a very nice train indeed; it did not stop
anywhere. The railway authorities themselves were evidently
very proud of it, and had printed particulars of it in extra
thick type. We decided to patronise it.</p>
<p>To pass away the time, we strolled about the city.
Munich is a fine, handsome, open town, full of noble streets and
splendid buildings; but in spite of this and of its hundred and
seventy thousand inhabitants, an atmosphere of quiet and
provincialism hovers over it. There is but little traffic
on ordinary occasions along its broad ways, and customers in its
well-stocked shops are few and far between. This day being
Sunday, it was busier than usual, and its promenades were
thronged with citizens and country folk in holiday attire, among
whom the Southern peasants, wearing their quaint, centuries-old
costume, stood out in picturesque relief. Fashion, in its
world-wide crusade against variety and its bitter contest with
form and colour, has recoiled, defeated for the present from the
mountain fastnesses of Bavaria. Still, as Sunday or
gala-day comes round, the broad-shouldered, sunburnt shepherd of
the Oberland dons his gay green-embroidered jacket over his snowy
shirt, fastens his short knee-breeches with a girdle round his
waist, claps his high, feather-crowned hat upon his waving curls,
and with bare legs, shod in mighty boots, strides over the
hill-sides to his Gretchen’s door.</p>
<p>She is waiting for him, you may be sure, ready dressed; and a
very sweet, old-world picture she makes, standing beneath the
great overhanging gables of the wooden châlet. She,
too, favours the national green; but, as relief, there is no lack
of bonny red ribbons, to flutter in the wind, and, underneath the
ornamented skirt, peeps out a bright-hued petticoat. Around
her ample breast she wears a dark tight-fitting bodice, laced
down the front. (I think this garment is called a
stomacher, but I am not sure, as I have never liked to
ask.) Her square shoulders are covered with the whitest of
white linen. Her sleeves are also white; and being very
full, and of some soft lawnlike material, suggest the idea of
folded wings. Upon her flaxen hair is perched a saucy round
green hat. The buckles of her dainty shoes, the big eyes in
her pretty face, are all four very bright. One feels one
would like much to change places for the day with Hans.</p>
<p>Arm-in-arm, looking like some china, but exceedingly
substantial china, shepherd and shepherdess, they descend upon
the town. One rubs one’s eyes and stares after them
as they pass. They seem to have stepped from the pictured
pages of one of those old story-books that we learnt to love,
sitting beside the high brass guard that kept ourselves and the
nursery-fire from doing each other any serious injury, in the
days when the world was much bigger than it is now, and much more
real and interesting.</p>
<p>Munich and the country round about it make a great exchange of
peoples every Sunday. In the morning, trainload after
trainload of villagers and mountaineers pour into the town, and
trainload after trainload of good and other citizens steam out to
spend the day in wood and valley, and upon lake and
mountain-side.</p>
<p>We went into one or two of the beer-halls—not into the
swell cafés, crowded with tourists and Munich masherdom,
but into the low-ceilinged, smoke-grimed cellars where the life
of the people is to be seen.</p>
<p>The ungenteel people in a country are so much more interesting
than the gentlefolks. One lady or gentleman is painfully
like every other lady or gentleman. There is so little
individuality, so little character, among the upper circles of
the world. They talk like each other, they think and act
like each other, they dress like each other, and look very much
like each other. We gentlefolks only play at living.
We have our rules and regulations for the game, which must not be
infringed. Our unwritten guide-books direct us what to do
and what to say at each turn of the meaningless sport.</p>
<p>To those at the bottom of the social pyramid, however, who
stand with their feet upon the earth, Nature is not a curious
phenomenon to be looked down at and studied, but a living force
to be obeyed. They front grim, naked Life, face to face,
and wrestle with it through the darkness; and, as did the angel
that strove with Jacob, it leaves its stamp upon them.</p>
<p>There is only one type of a gentleman. There are five
hundred types of men and women. That is why I always seek
out and frequent the places where the common people congregate,
in preference to the haunts of respectability. I have to be
continually explaining all this to my friends, to account to them
for what they call my love of low life.</p>
<p>With a mug of beer before me, and a pipe in my mouth, I could
sit for hours contentedly, and watch the life that ebbs and flows
into and out of these old ale-kitchens.</p>
<p>The brawny peasant lads bring in their lasses to treat them to
the beloved nectar of Munich, together with a huge onion.
How they enjoy themselves! What splendid jokes they
have! How they laugh and roar and sing! At one table
sit four old fellows, playing cards. How full of character
is each gnarled face. One is eager, quick, vehement.
How his eyes dance! You can read his every thought upon his
face. You know when he is going to dash down the king with
a shout of triumph on the queen. His neighbour looks calm,
slow, and dogged, but wears a confident expression. The
game proceeds, and you watch and wait for him to play the winning
cards that you feel sure he holds. He must intend to
win. Victory is written in his face. No! he
loses. A seven was the highest card in his hand.
Everyone turns to him, surprised. He laughs—A
difficult man to deal with, that, in other matters besides
cards. A man whose thoughts lie a good deal below his
skin.</p>
<p>Opposite, a cross-looking old woman clamours for sausages,
gets them, and seems crosser than ever. She scowls round on
everyone, with a malignant expression that is quite
terrifying. A small dog comes and sits down in front of
her, and grins at her. Still, with the same savage
expression of hatred towards all living things, she feeds him
with sausage at the end of a fork, regarding him all the while
with an aspect of such concentrated dislike, that one wonders it
does not interfere with his digestion. In a corner, a stout
old woman talks incessantly to a solemn-looking man, who sits
silent and drinks steadily. It is evident that he can stand
her conversation just so long as he has a mug of beer in front of
him. He has brought her in here to give her a treat.
He will let her have her talk out while he drinks. Heavens!
how she does talk! She talks without movement, without
expression; her voice never varies, it flows on, and on, and on,
like a great resistless river. Four young artisans come
clamping along in their hob-nailed boots, and seating themselves
at one of the rude wooden tables, call for beer. With their
arms round the waist of the utterly indifferent Fraulein, they
shout and laugh and sing. Nearly all the young folks here
are laughing—looking forward to life. All the old
folks are talking, remembering it.</p>
<p>What grand pictures some of these old, seared faces round us
would make, if a man could only paint them—paint all that
is in them, all the tragedy—and comedy that the great
playwright, Life, has written upon the withered skins! Joys
and sorrows, sordid hopes and fears, child-like strivings to be
good, mean selfishness and grand unselfishness, have helped to
fashion these old wrinkled faces. The curves of cunning and
kindliness lurk round these fading eyes. The lines of greed
hover about these bloodless lips, that have so often been
tight-pressed in patient heroism.</p>
<h2>SUNDAY, 25TH—CONTINUED</h2>
<p>We Dine.—A Curious Dish.—“A Feeling of
Sadness Comes O’er Me.”—The German
Cigar.—The Handsomest Match in Europe.—“How
Easy ’tis for Friends to Drift Apart,” especially in
a place like Munich Railway Station.—The Victim of
Fate.—A Faithful Bradshaw.—Among the
Mountains.—Prince and Pauper.—A Modern
Romance.—Arrival at Oberau.—Wise and Foolish
Pilgrims.—An Interesting Drive.—Ettal and its
Monastery.—We Reach the Goal of our Pilgrimage.</p>
<p>At one o’clock we turned into a restaurant for
dinner. The Germans themselves always dine in the middle of
the day, and a very substantial meal they make of it. At
the hotels frequented by tourists <i>table d’hôte</i>
is, during the season, fixed for about six or seven, but this is
only done to meet the views of foreign customers.</p>
<p>I mention that we had dinner, not because I think that the
information will prove exciting to the reader, but because I wish
to warn my countrymen, travelling in Germany, against undue
indulgence in Liptauer cheese.</p>
<p>I am fond of cheese, and of trying new varieties of cheese; so
that when I looked down the cheese department of the bill of
fare, and came across “liptauer garnit,” an article
of diet I had never before heard of, I determined to sample
it.</p>
<p>It was not a tempting-looking cheese. It was an
unhealthy, sad-looking cheese. It looked like a cheese that
had seen trouble. In appearance it resembled putty more
than anything else. It even tasted like putty—at
least, like I should imagine putty would taste. To this
hour I am not positive that it was not putty. The
garnishing was even more remarkable than the cheese. All
the way round the plate were piled articles that I had never
before seen at a dinner, and that I do not ever want to see there
again. There was a little heap of split-peas, three or four
remarkably small potatoes—at least, I suppose they were
potatoes; if not, they were pea-nuts boiled soft,—some
caraway-seeds, a very young-looking fish, apparently of the
stickleback breed, and some red paint. It was quite a
little dinner all to itself.</p>
<p>What the red paint was for, I could not understand. B.
thought that it was put there for suicidal purposes. His
idea was that the customer, after eating all the other things in
the plate, would wish he were dead, and that the restaurant
people, knowing this, had thoughtfully provided him with red
paint for one, so that he could poison himself off and get out of
his misery.</p>
<p>I thought, after swallowing the first mouthful, that I would
not eat any more of this cheese. Then it occurred to me
that it was a pity to waste it after having ordered it, and,
besides, I might get to like it before I had finished. The
taste for most of the good things of this world has to be
acquired. <i>I</i> can remember the time when I did not
like beer.</p>
<p>So I mixed up everything on the plate all together—made
a sort of salad of it, in fact—and ate it with a
spoon. A more disagreeable dish I have never tasted since
the days when I used to do Willie Evans’s
“dags,” by walking twice through a sewer, and was
subsequently, on returning home, promptly put to bed, and made to
eat brimstone and treacle.</p>
<p>I felt very sad after dinner. All the things I have done
in my life that I should not have done recurred to me with
painful vividness. (There seemed to be a goodish number of
them, too.) I thought of all the disappointments and
reverses I had experienced during my career; of all the injustice
that I had suffered, and of all the unkind things that had been
said and done to me. I thought of all the people I had
known who were now dead, and whom I should never see again, of
all the girls that I had loved, who were now married to other
fellows, while I did not even know their present addresses.
I pondered upon our earthly existence, upon how hollow, false,
and transient it is, and how full of sorrow. I mused upon
the wickedness of the world and of everybody in it, and the
general cussedness of all things.</p>
<p>I thought how foolish it was for B. and myself to be wasting
our time, gadding about Europe in this silly way. What
earthly enjoyment was there in travelling—being jolted
about in stuffy trains, and overcharged at uncomfortable
hotels?</p>
<p>B. was cheerful and frivolously inclined at the beginning of
our walk (we were strolling down the Maximilian Strasse, after
dinner); but as I talked to him, I was glad to notice that he
gradually grew more serious and subdued. He is not really
bad, you know, only thoughtless.</p>
<p>B. bought some cigars and offered me one. I did not want
to smoke. Smoking seemed to me, just then, a foolish waste
of time and money. As I said to B.:</p>
<p>“In a few more years, perhaps before this very month is
gone, we shall be lying in the silent tomb, with the worms
feeding on us. Of what advantage will it be to us then that
we smoked these cigars to-day?”</p>
<p>B. said:</p>
<p>“Well, the advantage it will be to me now is, that if
you have a cigar in your mouth I shan’t get quite so much
of your chatty conversation. Take one, for my
sake.”</p>
<p>To humour him, I lit up.</p>
<p>I do not admire the German cigar. B. says that when you
consider they only cost a penny, you cannot grumble. But
what I say is, that when you consider they are dear at six a
half-penny, you can grumble. Well boiled, they might serve
for greens; but as smoking material they are not worth the match
with which you light them, especially not if the match be a
German one. The German match is quite a high art
work. It has a yellow head and a magenta or green stem, and
can certainly lay claim to being the handsomest match in
Europe.</p>
<p>We smoked a good many penny cigars during our stay in Germany,
and that we were none the worse for doing so I consider as proof
of our splendid physique and constitution. I think the
German cigar test might, with reason, be adopted by life
insurance offices.—Question: “Are you at present, and
have you always been, of robust health?” Answer:
“I have smoked a German cigar, and still live.”
Life accepted.</p>
<p>Towards three o’clock we worked our way round to the
station, and began looking for our train. We hunted all
over the place, but could not find it anywhere. The central
station at Munich is an enormous building, and a perfect maze of
passages and halls and corridors. It is much easier to lose
oneself in it, than to find anything in it one may happen to
want. Together and separately B. and I lost ourselves and
each other some twenty-four times. For about half an hour
we seemed to be doing nothing else but rushing up and down the
station looking for each other, suddenly finding each other, and
saying, “Why, where the dickens have you been? I have
been hunting for you everywhere. Don’t go away like
that,” and then immediately losing each other again.</p>
<p>And what was so extraordinary about the matter was that every
time, after losing each other, we invariably met again—when
we did meet—outside the door of the third-class refreshment
room.</p>
<p>We came at length to regard the door of the third-class
refreshment room as “home,” and to feel a thrill of
joy when, in the course of our weary wanderings through far-off
waiting-rooms and lost-luggage bureaus and lamp depots, we saw
its old familiar handle shining in the distance, and knew that
there, beside it, we should find our loved and lost one.</p>
<p>When any very long time elapsed without our coming across it,
we would go up to one of the officials, and ask to be directed to
it.</p>
<p>“Please can you tell me,” we would say, “the
nearest way to the door of the third-class refreshment
room?”</p>
<p>When three o’clock came, and still we had not found the
3.10 train, we became quite anxious about the poor thing, and
made inquiries concerning it.</p>
<p>“The 3.10 train to Ober-Ammergau,” they
said. “Oh, we’ve not thought about that
yet.”</p>
<p>“Haven’t thought about it!” we exclaimed
indignantly. “Well, do for heaven’s sake wake
up a bit. It is 3.5 now!”</p>
<p>“Yes,” they answered, “3.5 in the afternoon;
the 3.10 is a night train. Don’t you see it’s
printed in thick type? All the trains between six in the
evening and six in the morning are printed in fat figures, and
the day trains in thin. You have got plenty of time.
Look around after supper.”</p>
<p>I do believe I am the most unfortunate man at a time-table
that ever was born. I do not think it can be stupidity; for
if it were mere stupidity, I should occasionally, now and then
when I was feeling well, not make a mistake. It must be
fate.</p>
<p>If there is one train out of forty that goes on
“Saturdays only” to some place I want to get to, that
is the train I select to travel by on a Friday. On Saturday
morning I get up at six, swallow a hasty breakfast, and rush off
to catch a return train that goes on every day in the week
“except Saturdays.”</p>
<p>I go to London, Brighton and South Coast Railway-stations and
clamour for South-Eastern trains. On Bank Holidays I forget
it is Bank Holiday, and go and sit on draughty platforms for
hours, waiting for trains that do not run on Bank Holidays.</p>
<p>To add to my misfortunes, I am the miserable possessor of a
demon time-table that I cannot get rid of, a Bradshaw for August,
1887. Regularly, on the first of each month, I buy and
bring home with me a new Bradshaw and a new A.B.C. What
becomes of them after the second of the month, I do not
know. After the second of the month, I never see either of
them again. What their fate is, I can only guess. In
their place is left, to mislead me, this wretched old 1887
corpse.</p>
<p>For three years I have been trying to escape from it, but it
will not leave me.</p>
<p>I have thrown it out of the window, and it has fallen on
people’s heads, and those people have picked it up and
smoothed it out, and brought it back to the house, and members of
my family—“friends” they call
themselves—people of my own flesh and blood—have
thanked them and taken it in again!</p>
<p>I have kicked it into a dozen pieces, and kicked the pieces
all the way downstairs and out into the garden, and
persons—persons, mind you, who will not sew a button on the
back of my shirt to save me from madness—have collected the
pieces and stitched them carefully together, and made the book
look as good as new, and put it back in my study!</p>
<p>It has acquired the secret of perpetual youth, has this
time-table. Other time-tables that I buy become
dissipated-looking wrecks in about a week. This book looks
as fresh and new and clean as it did on the day when it first
lured me into purchasing it. There is nothing about its
appearance to suggest to the casual observer that it is not this
month’s Bradshaw. Its evident aim and object in life
is to deceive people into the idea that it is this month’s
Bradshaw.</p>
<p>It is undermining my moral character, this book is. It
is responsible for at least ten per cent. of the bad language
that I use every year. It leads me into drink and
gambling. I am continually finding myself with some three
or four hours to wait at dismal provincial railway
stations. I read all the advertisements on both platforms,
and then I get wild and reckless, and plunge into the railway
hotel and play billiards with the landlord for threes of
Scotch.</p>
<p>I intend to have that Bradshaw put into my coffin with me when
I am buried, so that I can show it to the recording angel and
explain matters. I expect to obtain a discount of at least
five-and-twenty per cent. off my bill of crimes for that
Bradshaw.</p>
<p>The 3.10 train in the morning was, of course, too late for
us. It would not get us to Ober-Ammergau until about 9
a.m. There was a train leaving at 7.30 (I let B. find out
this) by which we might reach the village some time during the
night, if only we could get a conveyance from Oberau, the nearest
railway-station. Accordingly, we telegraphed to
Cook’s agent, who was at Ober-Ammergau (we all of us sneer
at Mr. Cook and Mr. Gaze, and such-like gentlemen, who kindly
conduct travellers that cannot conduct themselves properly, when
we are at home; but I notice most of us appeal, on the quiet, to
one or the other of them the moment we want to move abroad), to
try and send a carriage to meet us by that train; and then went
to an hotel, and turned into bed until it was time to start.</p>
<p>We had another grand railway-ride from Munich to Oberau.
We passed by the beautiful lake of Starnberg just as the sun was
setting and gilding with gold the little villages and pleasant
villas that lie around its shores. It was in the lake of
Starnberg, near the lordly pleasure-house that he had built for
himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig, the late King of
Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him
everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing,
and that was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for
striking balances. I knew a little shoeblack once who used
to follow his profession at the corner of Westminster
Bridge. Fate gave him an average of sixpence a day to live
upon and provide himself with luxuries; but she also gave him a
power of enjoying that kept him jolly all day long. He
could buy as much enjoyment for a penny as the average man could
for a ten-pound note—more, I almost think. He did not
know he was badly off, any more than King Ludwig knew he was well
off; and all day long he laughed and played, and worked a
little—not more than he could help—and ate and drank,
and gambled. The last time I saw him was in St.
Thomas’s Hospital, into which he had got himself owing to
his fatal passion for walking along outside the stone coping of
Westminster Bridge. He thought it was “prime,”
being in the hospital, and told me that he was living like a
fighting-cock, and that he did not mean to go out sooner than he
could help. I asked him if he were not in pain, and he said
“Yes,” when he “thought about it.”</p>
<p>Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a
“fighting-cock” for three days more. Then he
died, cheerful up to the last, so they told me, like the plucky
little English game-cock he was. He could not have been
more than twelve years old when he crowed his last. It had
been a short life for him, but a very merry one.</p>
<p>Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have
gone into partnership, and so have shared between them the
shoeblack’s power of enjoying and the king’s stock of
enjoyments, what a good thing it would have been for both of
them—especially for King Ludwig. He would never have
thought of drowning himself then—life would have been too
delightful.</p>
<p>But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh
at men, and to make of life a paradox. To the one, she
played ravishing strains, having first taken the precaution to
make him stone-deaf. To the other, she piped a few poor
notes on a cracked tin-whistle, and he thought it was music, and
danced!</p>
<p>A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig
threw back to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat
foolish young lovers ended their disappointments, and, finding
they could not be wedded together in life, wedded themselves
together in death. The story, duly reported in the
newspapers as an item of foreign intelligence, read more like
some old Rhine-legend than the record of a real occurrence in
this prosaic nineteenth century.</p>
<p>He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most
German Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers
will when proposed to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law,
refused his consent. The Count then went abroad to try and
make, or at all events improve, his fortune. He went to
America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came
back, tolerably rich—to find, however, that he was too
late. His lady, persuaded of his death, had been urged into
a marriage with a rich somebody else. In ordinary life, of
course, the man would have contented himself with continuing to
make love to the lady, leaving the rich somebody else to pay for
her keep. This young couple, however, a little lighter
headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever
it may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which
the air around them seemed filled, went down one stormy night
together to the lake, and sobered droll Fate for an instant by
turning her grim comedy into a somewhat grimmer tragedy.</p>
<p>Soon after losing sight of Starnberg’s placid waters, we
plunged into the gloom of the mountains, and began a long,
winding climb among their hidden recesses. At times,
shrieking as if in terror, we passed some ghostly hamlet,
standing out white and silent in the moonlight against the
shadowy hills; and, now and then, a dark, still lake, or mountain
torrent whose foaming waters fell in a long white streak across
the blackness of the night.</p>
<p>We passed by Murnau in the valley of the Dragon, a little town
which possessed a Passion Play of its own in the olden times, and
which, until a few years ago, when the railway-line was pushed
forward to Partenkirchen, was the nearest station to
Ober-Ammergau. It was a tolerably steep climb up the road
from Murnau, over Mount Ettal, to Ammergau—so steep,
indeed, that one stout pilgrim not many years ago, died from the
exertion while walking up. Sturdy-legged mountaineer and
pulpy citizen both had to clamber up side by side, for no horses
could do more than drag behind them the empty vehicle.</p>
<p>Every season, however, sees the European tourist more and more
pampered, and the difficulties and consequent pleasure and
interest of his journey more and more curtailed and spoilt.
In a few years’ time, he will be packed in cotton-wool in
his own back-parlour, labelled for the place he wants to go to,
and unpacked and taken out when he gets there. The railway
now carries him round Mount Ettal to Oberau, from which little
village a tolerably easy road, as mountain roadways go, of about
four or five English miles takes him up to the valley of the
Ammer.</p>
<p>It was midnight when our train landed us at Oberau station;
but the place was far more busy and stirring than on ordinary
occasions it is at mid-day. Crowds of tourists and pilgrims
thronged the little hotel, wondering, as also did the landlord,
where they were all going to sleep; and wondering still more,
though this latter consideration evidently did not trouble their
host, how they were going to get up to Ober-Ammergau in the
morning in time for the play, which always begins at 8 a.m.</p>
<p>Some were engaging carriages at fabulous prices to call for
them at five; and others, who could not secure carriages, and who
had determined to walk, were instructing worried waiters to wake
them at 2.30, and ordering breakfast for a quarter-past three
sharp. (I had no idea there were such times in the
morning!)</p>
<p>We were fortunate enough to find our land-lord, a worthy
farmer, waiting for us with a tumble-down conveyance, in
appearance something between a circus-chariot and a bath-chair,
drawn by a couple of powerful-looking horses; and in this, after
a spirited skirmish between our driver and a mob of twenty or so
tourists, who pretended to mistake the affair for an omnibus, and
who would have clambered into it and swamped it, we drove
away.</p>
<p>Higher and higher we climbed, and grander and grander towered
the frowning moon-bathed mountains round us, and chillier and
chillier grew the air. For most of the way we crawled
along, the horses tugging us from side to side of the steep road;
but, wherever our coachman could vary the monotony of the pace by
a stretch-gallop—as, for instance, down the precipitous
descents that occasionally followed upon some extra long and
toilsome ascent—he thoughtfully did so. At such times
the drive became really quite exciting, and all our weariness was
forgotten.</p>
<p>The steeper the descent, the faster, of course, we could
go. The rougher the road, the more anxious the horses
seemed to be to get over it quickly. During the gallop, B.
and I enjoyed, in a condensed form, all the advantages usually
derived from crossing the Channel on a stormy day, riding on a
switchback railway, and being tossed in a blanket—a hard,
nobbly blanket, full of nasty corners and sharp edges. I
should never have thought that so many different sensations could
have been obtained from one machine!</p>
<p>About half-way up we passed Ettal, at the entrance to the
Valley of the Ammer. The great white temple, standing,
surrounded by its little village, high up amid the mountain
solitudes, is a famous place of pilgrimage among devout
Catholics. Many hundreds of years ago, one of the early
Bavarian kings built here a monastery as a shrine for a
miraculous image of the Virgin that had been sent down to him
from Heaven to help him when, in a foreign land, he had stood
sore in need, encompassed by his enemies. Maybe the stout
arms and hearts of his Bavarian friends were of some service in
the crisis also; but the living helpers were forgotten. The
old church and monastery, which latter was a sort of ancient
Chelsea Hospital for decayed knights, was destroyed one terrible
night some hundred and fifty years ago by a flash of lightning;
but the wonder-working image was rescued unhurt, and may still be
seen and worshipped beneath the dome of the present much less
imposing church which has been reared upon the ruins of its
ancestor.</p>
<p>The monastery, which was also rebuilt at the same time, now
serves the more useful purpose of a brewery.</p>
<p>From Ettal the road is comparatively level, and, jolting
swiftly over it, we soon reached Ober-Ammergau. Lights were
passing to and fro behind the many windows of the square stone
houses, and dark, strange-looking figures were moving about the
streets, busy with preparations for the great business that would
commence with the dawn.</p>
<p>We rattled noisily through the village, our driver roaring out
“Good Night!” to everyone he passed in a voice
sufficient to wake up everybody who might be sleeping within a
mile, charged light-heartedly round half-a-dozen corners, trotted
down the centre path of somebody’s front garden, squeezed
our way through a gate, and drew up at an open door, through
which the streaming light poured out upon two tall, comely
lasses, our host’s daughters, who were standing waiting for
us in the porch. They led us into a large, comfortably
furnished room, where a tempting supper of hot veal-chops (they
seem to live on veal in Germany) and white wine was standing
ready. Under ordinary circumstances I should have been
afraid that such a supper would cause me to be more eager for
change and movement during the ensuing six hours than for sleep;
but I felt that to-night it would take a dozen half-baked
firebricks to keep me awake five seconds after I had got my head
on the pillow—or what they call a pillow in Germany; and
so, without hesitation, I made a very satisfactory meal.</p>
<p>After supper our host escorted us to our bedroom, an airy
apartment adorned with various highly-coloured wood-carvings of a
pious but somewhat ghastly character, calculated, I should say,
to exercise a disturbing influence upon the night’s rest of
a nervous or sensitive person.</p>
<p>“Mind that we are called at proper time in the
morning,” said B. to the man. “We don’t
want to wake up at four o’clock in the afternoon and find
that we have missed the play, after coming all this way to see
it.”</p>
<p>“Oh! that will be all right,” answered the old
fellow. “You won’t get much chance of
oversleeping yourself. We shall all be up and about, and
the whole village stirring, before five; and besides, the band
will be playing at six just beneath the window here, and the
cannon on the Kofel goes off at—”</p>
<p>“Look here,” I interrupted, “that
won’t do for me, you know. Don’t you think that
I am going to be woke up by mere riots outside the window, and
brass-band contests, and earthquakes, and explosions, and those
sort of things, because it can’t be done that way.
Somebody’s got to come into this room and haul me out of
bed, and sit down on the bed and see that I don’t get into
it again, and that I don’t go to sleep on the floor.
That will be the way to get me up to-morrow morning.
Don’t let’s have any nonsense about stirring villages
and guns and German bands. I know what all that will end
in, my going back to England without seeing the show. I
want to be roused in the morning, not lulled off to sleep
again.”</p>
<p>B. translated the essential portions of this speech to the
man, and he laughed and promised upon his sacred word of honour
that he would come up himself and have us both out; and as he was
a stalwart and determined-looking man, I felt satisfied, and
wished him “Good-night,” and made haste to get off my
boots before I fell asleep.</p>
<h2>TUESDAY, THE 27TH</h2>
<p>A Pleasant Morning.—What can one Say about the Passion
Play?—B. Lectures.—Unreliable Description of
Ober-Ammergau.—Exaggerated Description of its
Weather.—Possibly Untruthful Account of how the Passion
Play came to be Played.—A Good Face.—The Cultured
Schoolboy and his Ignorant Relations.</p>
<p>I am lying in bed, or, to speak more truthfully, I am sitting
up on a green satin, lace-covered pillow, writing these
notes. A green satin, lace-covered bed is on the floor
beside me. It is about eleven o’clock in the
morning. B. is sitting up in his bed a few feet off,
smoking a pipe. We have just finished a light repast
of—what do you think? you will never guess—coffee and
rolls. We intend to put the week straight by stopping in
bed all day, at all events until the evening. Two English
ladies occupy the bedroom next to ours. They seem to have
made up their minds to also stay upstairs all day. We can
hear them walking about their room, muttering. They have
been doing this for the last three-quarters of an hour.
They seem troubled about something.</p>
<p>It is very pleasant here. An overflow performance is
being given in the theatre to-day for the benefit of those people
who could not gain admittance yesterday, and, through the open
windows, we can hear the rhythmic chant of the chorus.
Mellowed by the distance, the wailing cadence of the plaintive
songs, mingled with the shrill Haydnistic strains of the
orchestra, falls with a mournful sweetness on our ears.</p>
<p>We ourselves saw the play yesterday, and we are now discussing
it. I am explaining to B. the difficulty I experience in
writing an account of it for my diary. I tell him that I
really do not know what to say about it.</p>
<p>He smokes for a while in silence, and then, taking the pipe
from his lips, he says:</p>
<p>“Does it matter very much what you say about
it?”</p>
<p>I find much relief in that thought. It at once lifts
from my shoulders the oppressive feeling of responsibility that
was weighing me down. After all, what does it matter what I
say? What does it matter what any of us says about
anything? Nobody takes much notice of it, luckily for
everybody. This reflection must be of great comfort to
editors and critics. A conscientious man who really felt
that his words would carry weight and influence with them would
be almost afraid to speak at all. It is the man who knows
that it will not make an ounce of difference to anyone what he
says, that can grow eloquent and vehement and positive. It
will not make any difference to anybody or anything what I say
about the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play. So I shall just say
what I want to.</p>
<p>But what do I want to say? What can I say that has not
been said, and said much better, already? (An author must
always pretend to think that every other author writes better
than he himself does. He does not really think so, you
know, but it looks well to talk as though he did.) What can
I say that the reader does not know, or that, not knowing, he
cares to know? It is easy enough to talk about nothing,
like I have been doing in this diary hitherto. It is when
one is confronted with the task of writing about
<i>some</i>thing, that one wishes one were a respectable
well-to-do sweep—a sweep with a comfortable business of his
own, and a pony—instead of an author.</p>
<p>B. says:</p>
<p>“Well, why not begin by describing
Ober-Ammergau.”</p>
<p>I say it has been described so often.</p>
<p>He says:</p>
<p>“So has the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Derby
Day, but people go on describing them all the same, and
apparently find other people to read their descriptions.
Say that the little village, clustered round its mosque-domed
church, nestles in the centre of a valley, surrounded by great
fir-robed hills, which stand, with the cross-crowned Kofel for
their chief, like stern, strong sentinels guarding its old-world
peace from the din and clamour of the outer world. Describe
how the square, whitewashed houses are sheltered beneath great
overhanging gables, and are encircled by carved wooden balconies
and verandahs, where, in the cool of the evening, peasant
wood-carver and peasant farmer sit to smoke the long Bavarian
pipe, and chat about the cattle and the Passion Play and village
politics; and how, in gaudy colours above the porch, are painted
glowing figures of saints and virgins and such-like good folk,
which the rains have sadly mutilated, so that a legless angel on
one side of the road looks dejectedly across at a headless
Madonna on the other, while at an exposed corner some unfortunate
saint, more cruelly dealt with by the weather than he ever was
even by the heathen, has been deprived of everything that he
could call his own, with the exception of half a head and a pair
of extra-sized feet.</p>
<p>“Explain how all the houses are numbered according to
the date they were built, so that number sixteen comes next to
number forty-seven, and there is no number one because it has
been pulled down. Tell how unsophisticated visitors,
informed that their lodgings are at number fifty-three, go
wandering for days and days round fifty-two, under the not
unreasonable impression that their house must be next door,
though, as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the other
end of the village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting
on the doorstep of number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of
nursery rhymes, and trying to plat their toes into door-mats, and
are taken up and carried away screaming, to end their lives in
the madhouse at Munich.</p>
<p>“Talk about the weather. People who have stayed
here for any length of time tell me that it rains at
Ober-Ammergau three days out of every four, the reason that it
does not rain on the fourth day being that every fourth day is
set apart for a deluge. They tell me, also, that while it
will be pouring with rain just in the village the sun will be
shining brightly all round about, and that the villagers, when
the water begins to come in through their roofs, snatch up their
children and hurry off to the nearest field, where they sit and
wait until the storm is over.”</p>
<p>“Do you believe them—the persons that you say tell
you these tales?” I ask.</p>
<p>“Personally I do not,” he replies. “I
think people exaggerate to me because I look young and innocent,
but no doubt there is a ground-work of truth in their
statements. I have myself left Ober-Ammergau under a steady
drenching rain, and found a cloudless sky the other side of the
Kofel.</p>
<p>“Then,” he continues, “you can comment upon
the hardihood of the Bavarian peasant. How he or she walks
about bare-headed and bare-footed through the fiercest showers,
and seems to find the rain only pleasantly cooling. How,
during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and
stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest
notice of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and
running from their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the
boards; and how the audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of
the theatre, sit with equal stoicism, watching them, no one ever
dreaming even of putting up an umbrella—or, if he does
dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude awakening from the
sticks of those behind.”</p>
<p>B. stops to relight his pipe at this point, and I hear the two
ladies in the next room fidgeting about and muttering worse than
ever. It seems to me they are listening at the door (our
room and theirs are connected by a door); I do wish that they
would either get into bed again or else go downstairs. They
worry me.</p>
<p>“And what shall I say after I have said all that?”
I ask B. when at last he has started his pipe again.</p>
<p>“Oh! well, after that,” he replies, “you can
give the history of the Passion Play; how it came to be
played.”</p>
<p>“Oh, but so many people have done that already,” I
say again.</p>
<p>“So much the better for you,” is his reply.
Having previously heard precisely the same story from half a
dozen other sources, the public will be tempted to believe you
when you repeat the account. Tell them that during the
thirty year’s war a terrible plague (as if half a dozen
different armies, marching up and down their country, fighting
each other about the Lord only knows what, and living on them
while doing it, was not plague enough) swept over Bavaria,
devastating each town and hamlet. Of all the highland
villages, Ober-Ammergau by means of a strictly enforced
quarantine alone kept, for a while, the black foe at bay.
No soul was allowed to leave the village; no living thing to
enter it.</p>
<p>“But one dark night Caspar Schuchler, an inhabitant of
Ober-Ammergau, who had been working in the plague-stricken
neighbouring village of Eschenlohe, creeping low on his belly,
passed the drowsy sentinels, and gained his home, and saw what
for many a day he had been hungering for—a sight of his
wife and bairns. It was a selfish act to do, and he and his
fellow-villagers paid dearly for it. Three days after he
had entered his house he and all his family lay dead, and the
plague was raging through the valley, and nothing seemed able to
stay its course.</p>
<p>“When human means fail, we feel it is only fair to give
Heaven a chance. The good people who dwelt by the side of
the Ammer vowed that, if the plague left them, they would, every
ten years, perform a Passion Play. The celestial powers
seem to have at once closed with this offer. The plague
disappeared as if by magic, and every recurring tenth year since,
the Ober-Ammergauites have kept their promise and played their
Passion Play. They act it to this day as a pious
observance. Before each performance all the characters
gather together on the stage around their pastor, and, kneeling,
pray for a blessing upon the work then about to commence.
The profits that are made, after paying the performers a wage
that just compensates them for their loss of
time—wood-carver Maier, who plays the Christ, only receives
about fifty pounds for the whole of the thirty or so performances
given during the season, to say nothing of the winter’s
rehearsals—is put aside, part for the temporal benefit of
the community, and the rest for the benefit of the Church.
From burgomaster down to shepherd lad, from the Mary and the
Jesus down to the meanest super, all work for the love of their
religion, not for money. Each one feels that he is helping
forward the cause of Christianity.”</p>
<p>“And I could also speak,” I add, “of grand
old Daisenberger, the gentle, simple old priest, ‘the
father of the valley,’ who now lies in silence among his
children that he loved so well. It was he, you know, that
shaped the rude burlesque of a coarser age into the impressive
reverential drama that we saw yesterday. That is a portrait
of him over the bed. What a plain, homely, good face it
is! How pleasant, how helpful it is to come across a good
face now and then! I do not mean a sainted face, suggestive
of stained glass and marble tombs, but a rugged human face that
has had the grit, and rain, and sunshine of life rubbed into it,
and that has gained its expression, not by looking up with
longing at the stars, but by looking down with eyes full of
laughter and love at the human things around it.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” assented B. “You can put in
that if you like. There is no harm in it. And then
you can go on to speak of the play itself, and give your
impressions concerning it. Never mind their being
silly. They will be all the better for that. Silly
remarks are generally more interesting than sensible
ones.”</p>
<p>“But what is the use of saying anything about it at
all?” I urge. “The merest school-boy must know
all about the Ober-Ammergau Passion Play by this time.”</p>
<p>“What has that to do with you?” answers B.
“You are not writing for cultured school-boys. You
are writing for mere simple men and women. They will be
glad of a little information on the subject, and then when the
schoolboy comes home for his holiday they will be able, so far as
this topic, at all events, is concerned, to converse with him on
his own level and not appear stupid.</p>
<p>“Come,” he says, kindly, trying to lead me on,
“what did you think about it?”</p>
<p>“Well,” I reply, after musing for a while,
“I think that a play of eighteen acts and some forty
scenes, which commences at eight o’clock in the morning,
and continues, with an interval of an hour and a half for dinner,
until six o’clock in the evening, is too long. I
think the piece wants cutting. About a third of it is
impressive and moving, and what the earnest student of the drama
at home is for ever demanding that a play should be—namely,
elevating; but I consider that the other two-thirds are
tiresome.”</p>
<p>“Quite so,” answers B. “But then we
must remember that the performance is not intended as an
entertainment, but as a religious service. To criticise any
part of it as uninteresting, is like saying that half the Bible
might very well have been omitted, and that the whole story could
have been told in a third of the space.”</p>
<h2>TUESDAY, THE 27TH—CONTINUED</h2>
<p>We talk on.—An Argument.—The Story that
Transformed the World.</p>
<p>“And now, as to the right or wrong of the performance as
a whole. Do you see any objection to the play from a
religious point of view?”</p>
<p>“No,” I reply, “I do not; nor do I
understand how anybody else, and least of all a really believing
Christian, can either. To argue as some do, that
Christianity should be treated as a sacred mystery, is to argue
against the whole scheme of Christianity. It was Christ
himself that rent the veil of the Temple, and brought religion
down into the streets and market-places of the world.
Christ was a common man. He lived a common life, among
common men and women. He died a common death. His own
methods of teaching were what a Saturday reviewer, had he to deal
with the case, would undoubtedly term vulgar. The roots of
Christianity are planted deep down in the very soil of life, amid
all that is commonplace, and mean, and petty, and everyday.
Its strength lies in its simplicity, its homely humanness.
It has spread itself through the world by speaking to the hearts,
rather than to the heads of men. If it is still to live and
grow, it must be helped along by such methods as these peasant
players of Ober-Ammergau employ, not by high-class essays and the
learned discussions of the cultured.</p>
<p>“The crowded audience that sat beside us in the theatre
yesterday saw Christ of Nazareth nearer than any book, however
inspired, could bring him to them; clearer than any words,
however eloquent, could show him. They saw the sorrow of
his patient face. They heard his deep tones calling to
them. They saw him in the hour of his so-called triumph,
wending his way through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, the
multitude that thronged round him waving their branches of green
palms and shouting loud hosannas.</p>
<p>“What a poor scene of triumph!—a poor-clad,
pale-faced man, mounted upon the back of a shuffling, unwilling
little grey donkey, passing slowly through the byways of a city,
busy upon other things. Beside him, a little band of worn,
anxious men, clad in thread-bare garments—fishermen, petty
clerks, and the like; and, following, a noisy rabble, shouting,
as crowds in all lands and in all times shout, and as dogs bark,
they know not why—because others are shouting, or
barking. And that scene marks the highest triumph won while
he lived on earth by the village carpenter of Galilee, about whom
the world has been fighting and thinking and talking so hard for
the last eighteen hundred years.</p>
<p>“They saw him, angry and indignant, driving out the
desecrators from the temple. They saw the rabble, who a few
brief moments before had followed him, shouting
‘Hosanna,’ slinking away from him to shout with his
foes.</p>
<p>“They saw the high priests in their robes of white, with
the rabbis and doctors, all the great and learned in the land,
sitting late into the night beneath the vaulted roof of the
Sanhedrin’s council-hall, plotting his death.</p>
<p>“They saw him supping with his disciples in the house of
Simon. They saw poor, loving Mary Magdalen wash his feet
with costly ointment, that might have been sold for three hundred
pence, and the money given to the poor—‘and
us.’ Judas was so thoughtful for the poor, so eager
that other people should sell all they had, and give the money to
the poor—‘and us.’ Methinks that, even in
this nineteenth century, one can still hear from many a tub and
platform the voice of Judas, complaining of all waste, and
pleading for the poor—‘and us.’</p>
<p>“They were present at the parting of Mary and Jesus by
Bethany, and it will be many a day before the memory of that
scene ceases to vibrate in their hearts. It is the scene
that brings the humanness of the great tragedy most closely home
to us. Jesus is going to face sorrow and death at
Jerusalem. Mary’s instinct tells her that this is so,
and she pleads to him to stay.</p>
<p>“Poor Mary! To others he is the Christ, the
Saviour of mankind, setting forth upon his mighty mission to
redeem the world. To loving Mary Mother, he is her son: the
baby she has suckled at her breast, the little one she has
crooned to sleep upon her lap, whose little cheek has lain
against her heart, whose little feet have made sweet music
through the poor home at Bethany: he is her boy, her child; she
would wrap her mother’s arms around him and hold him safe
against all the world, against even heaven itself.</p>
<p>“Never, in any human drama, have I witnessed a more
moving scene than this. Never has the voice of any actress
(and I have seen some of the greatest, if any great ones are
living) stirred my heart as did the voice of Rosa Lang, the
Burgomaster’s daughter. It was not the voice of one
woman, it was the voice of Motherdom, gathered together from all
the world over.</p>
<p>“Oliver Wendell Holmes, in <i>The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table</i>, I think, confesses to having been bewitched
at different times by two women’s voices, and adds that
both these voices belonged to German women. I am not
surprised at either statement of the good doctor’s. I
am sure if a man did fall in love with a voice, he would find, on
tracing it to its source, that it was the voice of some
homely-looking German woman. I have never heard such
exquisite soul-drawing music in my life, as I have more than once
heard float from the lips of some sweet-faced German Fraulein
when she opened her mouth to speak. The voice has been so
pure, so clear, so deep, so full of soft caressing tenderness, so
strong to comfort, so gentle to soothe, it has seemed like one of
those harmonies musicians tell us that they dream of, but can
never chain to earth.</p>
<p>“As I sat in the theatre, listening to the wondrous
tones of this mountain peasant-woman, rising and falling like the
murmur of a sea, filling the vast sky-covered building with their
yearning notes, stirring like a great wind stirs Æolian
strings, the thousands of trembling hearts around her, it seemed
to me that I was indeed listening to the voice of the
‘mother of the world,’ of mother Nature herself.</p>
<p>“They saw him, as they had often seen him in pictures,
sitting for the last time with his disciples at supper. But
yesterday they saw him, not a mute, moveless figure, posed in
conventional, meaningless attitude, but a living, loving man,
sitting in fellowship with the dear friends that against all the
world had believed in him, and had followed his poor fortunes,
talking with them for the last sweet time, comforting them.</p>
<p>“They heard him bless the bread and wine that they
themselves to this day take in remembrance of him.</p>
<p>“They saw his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, the
human shrinking from the cup of pain. They saw the false
friend, Judas, betray him with a kiss. (Alas! poor
Judas! He loved Jesus, in a way, like the rest did.
It was only his fear of poverty that made him betray his
Master. He was so poor—he wanted the money so
badly! We cry out in horror against Judas. Let us
pray rather that we are never tempted to do a shameful action for
a few pieces of silver. The fear of poverty ever did, and
ever will, make scamps of men. We would like to be
faithful, and noble, and just, only really times are so bad that
we cannot afford it! As Becky Sharp says, it is so easy to
be good and noble on five thousand a year, so very hard to be it
on the mere five. If Judas had only been a well-to-do man,
he might have been Saint Judas this day, instead of cursed
Judas. He was not bad. He had only one
failing—the failing that makes the difference between a
saint and a villain, all the world over—he was a coward; he
was afraid of being poor.)</p>
<p>“They saw him, pale and silent, dragged now before the
priests of his own countrymen, and now before the Roman Governor,
while the voice of the people—the people who had cried
‘Hosanna’ to him—shouted ‘Crucify him!
crucify him!’ They saw him bleeding from the crown of
thorns. They saw him, still followed by the barking mob,
sink beneath the burden of his cross. They saw the woman
wipe the bloody sweat from off his face. They saw the last,
long, silent look between the mother and the son, as, journeying
upward to his death, he passed her in the narrow way through
which he once had ridden in brief-lived triumph. They heard
her low sob as she turned away, leaning on Mary Magdalen.
They saw him nailed upon the cross between the thieves.
They saw the blood start from his side. They heard his last
cry to his God. They saw him rise victorious over
death.</p>
<p>“Few believing Christians among the vast audience but
must have passed out from that strange playhouse with their
belief and love strengthened. The God of the Christian, for
his sake, became a man, and lived and suffered and died as a man;
and, as a man, living, suffering, dying among other men, he had
that day seen him.</p>
<p>“The man of powerful imagination needs no aid from
mimicry, however excellent, however reverent, to unroll before
him in its simple grandeur the great tragedy on which the curtain
fell at Calvary some eighteen and a half centuries ago.</p>
<p>“A cultivated mind needs no story of human suffering to
win or hold it to a faith.</p>
<p>“But the imaginative and cultured are few and far
between, and the peasants of Ober-Ammergau can plead, as their
Master himself once pleaded, that they seek not to help the
learned but the lowly.</p>
<p>“The unbeliever, also, passes out into the village
street full of food for thought. The rude sermon preached
in this hillside temple has shown to him, clearer than he could
have seen before, the secret wherein lies the strength of
Christianity; the reason why, of all the faiths that Nature has
taught to her children to help them in their need, to satisfy the
hunger of their souls, this faith, born by the Sea of Galilee,
has spread the farthest over the world, and struck its note the
deepest into human life. Not by his doctrines, not even by
his promises, has Christ laid hold upon the hearts of men, but by
the story of his life.”</p>
<h2>TUESDAY, THE 27TH—CONTINUED</h2>
<p>We Discuss the Performance.—A Marvellous Piece of
Workmanship.—The Adam Family.—Some Living
Groups.—The Chief Performers.—A Good Man, but a Bad
Judas.—Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.—An
Alarm!</p>
<p>“And what do you think of the performance <i>as</i> a
performance?” asks B.</p>
<p>“Oh, as to that,” I reply, “I think what
everyone who has seen the play must think, that it is a
marvellous piece of workmanship.</p>
<p>“Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the
tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers’ ends,
find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred
in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that
looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down
paupers waiting for soup.</p>
<p>“At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and
representative householders, who have probably never, any one of
them, been inside the walls of a theatre in their lives, dealing
with peasants who have walked straight upon the stage from their
carving benches and milking-stools, produce swaying multitudes
and clamouring mobs and dignified assemblages, so natural and
truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that you
feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.</p>
<p>“It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily
overtake and pass mere training and technical skill. The
object of the Ober-Ammergau ‘super’ is, not to get
outside and have a drink, but to help forward the success of the
drama.</p>
<p>“The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself
and in the various tableaux that precede each act, are such as I
doubt if any artist could improve upon. The tableau showing
the life of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden makes a
beautiful picture. Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned,
clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe
the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and
happy—though I suppose she ought not to,—sits
spinning and watching the children playing at ‘helping
father.’ The chorus from each side of the stage
explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result
of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very
contented, and I found myself wondering, in my common, earthly
way, whether, with a little trouble to draw them closer together,
and some honest work to keep them from getting into mischief,
Adam and Eve were not almost better off than they would have been
mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.</p>
<p>“In the tableau representing the return of the spies
from Canaan, some four or five hundred men, women and children
are most effectively massed. The feature of the foreground
is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the shoulders of two men,
which the spies have brought back with them from the promised
land. The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told,
astonished the children of Israel. I can quite understand
its doing so. The picture of it used to astonish me, too,
when <i>I</i> was a child.</p>
<p>“The scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem
surrounded by the welcoming multitude, is a wonderful
reproduction of life and movement, and so also is the scene,
towards the end, showing his last journey up to Calvary.
All Jerusalem seems to have turned out to see him pass and to
follow him, the many laughing, the few sad. The people fill
the narrow streets to overflowing, and press round the spears of
the Roman Guard.</p>
<p>“They throng the steps and balconies of every house,
they strain to catch a sight of Christ above each other’s
heads. They leap up on each other’s backs to gain a
better vantage-ground from which to hurl their jeers at
him. They jostle irreverently against their priests.
Each individual man, woman, and child on the stage acts, and acts
in perfect harmony with all the rest.</p>
<p>“Of the chief members of the cast—Maier, the
gentle and yet kingly Christ; Burgomaster Lang, the stern,
revengeful High Priest; his daughter Rosa, the sweet-faced,
sweet-voiced Virgin; Rendl, the dignified, statesman-like Pilate;
Peter Rendl, the beloved John, with the purest and most beautiful
face I have ever seen upon a man; old Peter Hett, the rugged,
loving, weak friend, Peter; Rutz, the leader of the chorus (no
sinecure, his post); and Amalie Deschler, the Magdalen—it
would be difficult to speak in terms of too high praise.
Themselves mere peasants—There are those two women again,
spying round our door; I am sure of it!” I exclaim,
breaking off, and listening to the sounds that come from the next
room. “I wish they would go downstairs; I am
beginning to get quite nervous.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I don’t think we need worry,” answers
B. “They are quite old ladies, both of them. I
met them on the stairs yesterday. I am sure they look
harmless enough.”</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t know,” I reply.
“We are all by ourselves, you know. Nearly everyone
in the village is at the theatre, I wish we had got a
dog.”</p>
<p>B. reassures me, however, and I continue:</p>
<p>“Themselves mere peasants,” I repeat, “they
represent some of the greatest figures in the world’s
history with as simple a dignity and as grand a bearing as could
ever have been expected from the originals themselves.
There must be a natural inborn nobility in the character of these
highlanders. They could never assume or act that manner
<i>au grand seigneur</i> with which they imbue their parts.</p>
<p>“The only character poorly played was that of
Judas. The part of Judas is really <i>the</i> part of the
piece, so far as acting is concerned; but the exemplary
householder who essayed it seemed to have no knowledge or
experience of the ways and methods of bad men. There seemed
to be no side of his character sufficiently in sympathy with
wickedness to enable him to understand and portray it. His
amateur attempts at scoundrelism quite irritated me. It
sounds conceited to say so, but I am convinced I could have given
a much more truthful picture of the blackguard myself.</p>
<p>“‘Dear, dear me,’ I kept on saying under my
breath, ‘he is doing it all wrong. A downright
unmitigated villain would never go on like that; he would do so
and so, he would look like this, and speak like that, and act
like the other. I know he would. My instinct tells me
so.’</p>
<p>“This actor was evidently not acquainted with even the
rudiments of knavery. I wanted to get up and instruct him
in them. I felt that there were little subtleties of
rascaldom, little touches of criminality, that I could have put
that man up to, which would have transformed his Judas from
woodenness into breathing life. As it was, with no one in
the village apparently who was worth his salt as a felon to teach
him, his performance was unconvincing, and Judas became a figure
to laugh rather than to shudder at.</p>
<p>“With that exception, the whole company, from Maier down
to the donkey, seemed to be fitted to their places like notes
into a master’s melody. It would appear as though, on
the banks of the Ammer, the histrionic artist grew
wild.”</p>
<p>“They are real actors, all of them,” murmurs B.
enthusiastically, “the whole village full; and they all
live happily together in one small valley, and never try to kill
each other. It is marvellous!”</p>
<p>At this point, we hear a sharp knock at the door that
separates the before-mentioned ladies’ room from our
own. We both start and turn pale, and then look at each
other. B. is the first to recover his presence of
mind. Eliminating, by a strong effort, all traces of
nervousness from his voice, he calls out in a tone of wonderful
coolness:</p>
<p>“Yes, what is it?”</p>
<p>“Are you in bed?” comes a voice from the other
side of the door.</p>
<p>“Yes,” answers B. “Why?”</p>
<p>“Oh! Sorry to disturb you, but we shall be so glad
when you get up. We can’t go downstairs without
coming through your room. This is the only door. We
have been waiting here for two hours, and our train goes at
three.”</p>
<p>Great Scott! So that is why the poor old souls have been
hanging round the door, terrifying us out of our lives.</p>
<p>“All right, we’ll be out in five minutes. So
sorry. Why didn’t you call out before?”</p>
<h2>FRIDAY, 30TH, OR SATURDAY, I AM NOT SURE WHICH</h2>
<p>Troubles of a Tourist Agent.—His Views on
Tourists.—The English Woman Abroad.—And at
Home.—The Ugliest Cathedral in Europe.—Old Masters
and New.—Victual-and-Drink-Scapes.—The German
Band.—A “Beer Garden.”—Not the Women to
Turn a Man’s Head.—Difficulty of Dining to
Music.—Why one should Keep one’s Mug Shut.</p>
<p>I think myself it is Saturday. B. says it is only
Friday; but I am positive I have had three cold baths since we
left Ober-Ammergau, which we did on Wednesday morning. If
it is only Friday, then I have had two morning baths in one
day. Anyhow, we shall know to-morrow by the shops being
open or shut.</p>
<p>We travelled from Oberau with a tourist agent, and he told us
all his troubles. It seems that a tourist agent is an
ordinary human man, and has feelings just like we have.
This had never occurred to me before. I told him so.</p>
<p>“No,” he replied, “it never does occur to
you tourists. You treat us as if we were mere Providence,
or even the Government itself. If all goes well, you say,
what is the good of us, contemptuously; and if things go wrong,
you say, what is the good of us, indignantly. I work
sixteen hours a day to fix things comfortably for you, and you
cannot even look satisfied; while if a train is late, or a hotel
proprietor overcharges, you come and bully <i>me</i> about
it. If I see after you, you mutter that I am officious; and
if I leave you alone, you grumble that I am neglectful. You
swoop down in your hundreds upon a tiny village like
Ober-Ammergau without ever letting us know even that you are
coming, and then threaten to write to the <i>Times</i> because
there is not a suite of apartments and a hot dinner waiting ready
for each of you.</p>
<p>“You want the best lodgings in the place, and then, when
at a tremendous cost of trouble, they have been obtained for you,
you object to pay the price asked for them. You all try and
palm yourselves off for dukes and duchesses, travelling in
disguise. You have none of you ever heard of a second-class
railway carriage—didn’t know that such things were
made. You want a first-class Pullman car reserved for each
two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus in the
distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To
suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is
to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover
from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in
livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you,
must have the most expensive places in the theatre. The
eight-mark and six-mark places are every bit as good as the
ten-mark seats, of which there are only a very limited number;
but you are grossly insulted if it is hinted that you should sit
in anything but the dearest chairs. If the villagers would
only be sensible and charge you ten marks for the eight-mark
places you would be happy; but they won’t.”</p>
<p>I must candidly confess that the English-speaking people one
meets with on the Continent are, taken as a whole, a most
disagreeable contingent. One hardly ever hears the English
language spoken on the Continent, without hearing grumbling and
sneering.</p>
<p>The women are the most objectionable. Foreigners
undoubtedly see the very poorest specimens of the female kind we
Anglo-Saxons have to show. The average female English or
American tourist is rude and self-assertive, while, at the same
time, ridiculously helpless and awkward. She is intensely
selfish, and utterly inconsiderate of others; everlastingly
complaining, and, in herself, drearily uninteresting. We
travelled down in the omnibus from Ober-Ammergau with three
perfect specimens of the species, accompanied by the usual
miserable-looking man, who has had all the life talked out of
him. They were grumbling the whole of the way at having
been put to ride in an omnibus. It seemed that they had
never been so insulted in their lives before, and they took care
to let everybody in the vehicle know that they had paid for
first-class, and that at home they kept their own carriage.
They were also very indignant because the people at the house
where they had lodged had offered to shake hands with them at
parting. They did not come to Ober-Ammergau to be treated
on terms of familiarity by German peasants, they said.</p>
<p>There are many women in the world who are in every way much
better than angels. They are gentle and gracious, and
generous and kind, and unselfish and good, in spite of
temptations and trials to which mere angels are never
subjected. And there are also many women in the world who,
under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the title of a
lady, wear the heart of an underbred snob. Having no
natural dignity, they think to supply its place with
arrogance. They mistake noisy bounce for self-possession,
and supercilious rudeness as the sign of superiority. They
encourage themselves in sleepy stupidity under the impression
that they are acquiring aristocratic “repose.”
They would appear to have studied “attitude” from the
pages of the <i>London Journal</i>, coquetry from
barmaids—the commoner class of barmaids, I mean—wit
from three-act farces, and manners from the
servants’-hall. To be gushingly fawning to those
above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below
them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their
position, whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally
indifferent to the rights and feelings of everybody else in the
world is, in their opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth.</p>
<p>They are the women you see at private views, pushing
themselves in front of everybody else, standing before the
picture so that no one can get near it, and shouting out their
silly opinions, which they evidently imagine to be brilliantly
satirical remarks, in strident tones: the women who, in the
stalls of the theatre, talk loudly all through the performance;
and who, having arrived in the middle of the first act, and made
as much disturbance as they know how, before settling down in
their seats, ostentatiously get up and walk out before the piece
is finished: the women who, at dinner-party and “At
Home”—that cheapest and most deadly uninteresting of
all deadly uninteresting social functions—(You know the
receipt for a fashionable “At Home,” don’t
you? Take five hundred people, two-thirds of whom do not
know each other, and the other third of whom cordially dislike
each other, pack them, on a hot day, into a room capable of
accommodating forty, leave them there to bore one another to
death for a couple of hours with drawing-room philosophy and
second-hand scandal; then give them a cup of weak tea, and a
piece of crumbly cake, without any plate to eat it on; or, if it
is an evening affair, a glass of champagne of the
you-don’t-forget-you’ve-had-it-for-a-week brand, and
a ham-sandwich, and put them out into the street again)—can
do nothing but make spiteful remarks about everybody whose name
and address they happen to know: the women who, in the penny
’bus (for, in her own country, the lady of the new school
is wonderfully economical and business-like), spreads herself out
over the seat, and, looking indignant when a tired little
milliner gets in, would leave the poor girl standing with her
bundle for an hour, rather than make room for her—the women
who write to the papers to complain that chivalry is dead!</p>
<p>B., who has been looking over my shoulder while I have been
writing the foregoing, after the manner of a <i>Family Herald</i>
story-teller’s wife in the last chapter (fancy a man having
to write the story of his early life and adventures with his wife
looking over his shoulder all the time! no wonder the tales lack
incident), says that I have been living too much on sauerkraut
and white wine; but I reply that if anything has tended to
interfere for a space with the deep-seated love and admiration
that, as a rule, I entertain for all man and woman-kind, it is
his churches and picture-galleries.</p>
<p>We have seen enough churches and pictures since our return to
Munich to last me for a very long while. I shall not go to
church, when I get home again, more than twice a Sunday, for
months to come.</p>
<p>The inhabitants of Munich boast that their Cathedral is the
ugliest in Europe; and, judging from appearances, I am inclined
to think that the claim must be admitted. Anyhow, if there
be an uglier one, I hope I am feeling well and strong when I
first catch sight of it.</p>
<p>As for pictures and sculptures, I am thoroughly tired of
them. The greatest art critic living could not dislike
pictures and sculptures more than I do at this moment. We
began by spending a whole morning in each gallery. We
examined each picture critically, and argued with each other
about its “form” and “colour” and
“treatment” and “perspective” and
“texture” and “atmosphere.” I
generally said it was flat, and B. that it was out of
drawing. A stranger overhearing our discussions would have
imagined that we knew something about painting. We would
stand in front of a canvas for ten minutes, drinking it in.
We would walk round it, so as to get the proper light upon it and
to better realise the artist’s aim. We would back
away from it on to the toes of the people behind, until we
reached the correct “distance,” and then sit down and
shade our eyes, and criticise it from there; and then we would go
up and put our noses against it, and examine the workmanship in
detail.</p>
<p>This is how we used to look at pictures in the early stages of
our Munich art studies. Now we use picture galleries to
practise spurts in.</p>
<p>I did a hundred yards this morning through the old
Pantechnicon in twenty-two and a half seconds, which, for fair
heel-and-toe walking, I consider very creditable. B. took
five-eighths of a second longer for the same distance; but then
he dawdled to look at a Raphael.</p>
<p>The “Pantechnicon,” I should explain, is the name
we have, for our own purposes, given to what the Munichers prefer
to call the Pinakothek. We could never pronounce Pinakothek
properly. We called it “Pynniosec,”
“Pintactec,” and the “Happy Tack.”
B. one day after dinner called it the “Penny Cock,”
and then we both got frightened, and agreed to fix up some
sensible, practical name for it before any mischief was
done. We finally decided on “Pantechnicon,”
which begins with a “P,” and is a dignified,
old-established name, and one that we can both pronounce.
It is quite as long, and nearly as difficult to spell, before you
know how, as the other, added to which it has a homely
sound. It seemed to be the very word.</p>
<p>The old Pantechnicon is devoted to the works of the old
masters; I shall not say anything about these, as I do not wish
to disturb in any way the critical opinion that Europe has
already formed concerning them. I prefer that the art
schools of the world should judge for themselves in the
matter. I will merely remark here, for purposes of
reference, that I thought some of the pictures very beautiful,
and that others I did not care for.</p>
<p>What struck me as most curious about the exhibition was the
number of canvases dealing with food stuffs. Twenty-five
per cent. of the pictures in the place seem to have been painted
as advertisements for somebody’s home-grown seeds, or as
coloured supplements to be given away with the summer number of
the leading gardening journal of the period.</p>
<p>“What could have induced these old fellows,” I
said to B., “to choose such very uninteresting
subjects? Who on earth cares to look at the life-sized
portrait of a cabbage and a peck of peas, or at these no doubt
masterly representations of a cut from the joint with bread and
vegetables? Look at that ‘View in a ham-and-beef
shop,’ No. 7063, size sixty feet by forty. It must
have taken the artist a couple of years to paint. Who did
he expect was going to buy it? And that Christmas-hamper
scene over in the corner; was it painted, do you think, by some
poor, half-starved devil, who thought he would have something to
eat in the house, if it were only a picture of it?”</p>
<p>B. said he thought that the explanation was that the ancient
patrons of art were gentry with a very strong idea of the fitness
of things. For “their churches and cathedrals,”
said B., “they had painted all those virgins and martyrs
and over-fed angels that you see everywhere about Europe.
For their bedrooms, they ordered those—well, those bedroom
sort of pictures, that you may have noticed here and there; and
then I expect they used these victual-and-drink-scapes for their
banqueting halls. It must have been like a gin-and-bitters
to them, the sight of all that food.”</p>
<p>In the new Pantechnicon is exhibited the modern art of
Germany. This appeared to me to be exceedingly poor
stuff. It seemed to belong to the illustrated Christmas
number school of art. It was good, sound, respectable work
enough. There was plenty of colour about it, and you could
tell what everything was meant for. But there seemed no
imagination, no individuality, no thought, anywhere. Each
picture looked as though it could have been produced by anyone
who had studied and practised art for the requisite number of
years, and who was not a born fool. At all events, this is
my opinion; and, as I know nothing whatever about art, I speak
without prejudice.</p>
<p>One thing I have enjoyed at Munich very much, and that has
been the music. The German band that you hear in the square
in London while you are trying to compose an essay on the
civilising influence of music, is not the sort of band that you
hear in Germany. The German bands that come to London are
bands that have fled from Germany, in order to save their
lives. In Germany, these bands would be slaughtered at the
public expense and their bodies given to the poor for
sausages. The bands that the Germans keep for themselves
are magnificent bands.</p>
<p>Munich of all places in the now united Fatherland, has, I
suppose, the greatest reputation for its military bands, and the
citizens are allowed, not only to pay for them, but to hear
them. Two or three times a day in different parts of the
city one or another of them will be playing <i>pro bono
publico</i>, and, in the evening, they are loaned out by the
authorities to the proprietors of the big beer-gardens.</p>
<p>“Go” and dash are the chief characteristics of
their method; but, when needed, they can produce from the
battered, time-worn trumpets, which have been handed down from
player to player since the regiment was first formed, notes as
soft and full and clear as any that could start from the strings
of some old violin.</p>
<p>The German band in Germany has to know its business to be
listened to by a German audience. The Bavarian artisan or
shopkeeper understands and appreciates good music, as he
understands and appreciates good beer. You cannot impose
upon him with an inferior article. A music-hall audience in
Munich are very particular as to how their beloved Wagner is
rendered, and the trifles from Mozart and Haydn that they love to
take in with their sausages and salad, and which, when performed
to their satisfaction, they will thunderously applaud, must not
be taken liberties with, or they will know the reason why.</p>
<p>The German beer-garden should be visited by everyone who would
see the German people as well as their churches and
castles. It is here that the workers of all kinds
congregate in the evening. Here, after the labours of the
day, come the tradesman with his wife and family, the young clerk
with his betrothed and—also her mother, alack and
well-a-day!—the soldier with his sweetheart, the students
in twos and threes, the little grisette with her cousin, the
shop-boy and the workman.</p>
<p>Here come grey-haired Darby and Joan, and, over the mug of
beer they share between them, they sit thinking of the
children—of little Lisa, married to clever Karl, who is
pushing his way in the far-off land that lies across the great
sea; of laughing Elsie, settled in Hamburg, who has grandchildren
of her own now; of fair-haired Franz, his mother’s pet, who
fell in sunny France, fighting for the fatherland. At the
next table sits a blushing, happy little maid, full of haughty
airs and graces, such as may be excused to a little maid who has
just saved a no doubt promising, but at present somewhat
awkward-looking, youth from lifelong misery, if not madness and
suicide (depend upon it, that is the alternative he put before
her), by at last condescending to give him the plump little hand,
that he, thinking nobody sees him, holds so tightly beneath the
table-cloth. Opposite, a family group sit discussing
omelettes and a bottle of white wine. The father contented,
good-humoured, and laughing; the small child grave and solemn,
eating and drinking in business-like fashion; the mother smiling
at both, yet not forgetting to eat.</p>
<p>I think one would learn to love these German women if one
lived among them for long. There is something so sweet, so
womanly, so genuine about them. They seem to shed around
them, from their bright, good-tempered faces, a healthy
atmosphere of all that is homely, and simple, and good.
Looking into their quiet, steadfast eyes, one dreams of white
household linen, folded in great presses; of sweet-smelling
herbs; of savoury, appetising things being cooked for supper; of
bright-polished furniture; of the patter of tiny feet; of little
high-pitched voices, asking silly questions; of quiet talks in
the lamp-lit parlour after the children are in bed, upon
important questions of house management and home politics, while
long stockings are being darned.</p>
<p>They are not the sort of women to turn a man’s head, but
they are the sort of women to lay hold of a man’s
heart—very gently at first, so that he hardly knows that
they have touched it, and then, with soft, clinging tendrils that
wrap themselves tighter and tighter year by year around it, and
draw him closer and closer—till, as, one by one, the false
visions and hot passions of his youth fade away, the plain homely
figure fills more and more his days—till it grows to mean
for him all the better, more lasting, true part of
life—till he feels that the strong, gentle mother-nature
that has stood so long beside him has been welded firmly into his
own, and that they twain are now at last one finished whole.</p>
<p>We had our dinner at a beer-garden the day before
yesterday. We thought it would be pleasant to eat and drink
to the accompaniment of music, but we found that in practice this
was not so. To dine successfully to music needs a very
strong digestion—especially in Bavaria.</p>
<p>The band that performs at a Munich beer-garden is not the sort
of band that can be ignored. The members of a Munich
military band are big, broad-chested fellows, and they are not
afraid of work. They do not talk much, and they never
whistle. They keep all their breath to do their duty
with. They do not blow their very hardest, for fear of
bursting their instruments; but whatever pressure to the square
inch the trumpet, cornet, or trombone, as the case may be, is
calculated to be capable of sustaining without permanent injury
(and they are tolerably sound and well-seasoned utensils), that
pressure the conscientious German bandsman puts upon each square
inch of the trumpet, cornet, or trombone, as the case may be.</p>
<p>If you are within a mile of a Munich military band, and are
not stone deaf, you listen to it, and do not think of much
else. It compels your attention by its mere noise; it
dominates your whole being by its sheer strength. Your mind
has to follow it as the feet of the little children followed the
playing of the Pied Piper. Whatever you do, you have to do
in unison with the band. All through our meal we had to
keep time with the music.</p>
<p>We ate our soup to slow waltz time, with the result that every
spoonful was cold before we got it up to our mouth. Just as
the fish came, the band started a quick polka, and the
consequence of that was that we had not time to pick out the
bones. We gulped down white wine to the
“Blacksmith’s Galop,” and if the tune had
lasted much longer we should both have been blind drunk.
With the advent of our steaks, the band struck up a selection
from Wagner.</p>
<p>I know of no modern European composer so difficult to eat
beefsteak to as Wagner. That we did not choke ourselves is
a miracle. Wagner’s orchestration is most trying to
follow. We had to give up all idea of mustard. B.
tried to eat a bit of bread with his steak, and got most
hopelessly out of tune. I am afraid I was a little flat
myself during the “Valkyries’ Ride.” My
steak was rather underdone, and I could not work it quickly
enough.</p>
<p>After getting outside hard beefsteak to Wagner, putting away
potato salad to the garden music out of <i>Faust</i> was
comparatively simple. Once or twice a slice of potato stuck
in our throat during a very high note, but, on the whole, our
rendering was fairly artistic.</p>
<p>We rattled off a sweet omelette to a symphony in G—or F,
or else K; I won’t be positive as to the precise letter;
but it was something in the alphabet, I know—and bolted our
cheese to the ballet music from <i>Carmen</i>. After which
we rolled about in agonies to all the national airs of
Europe.</p>
<p>If ever you visit a German beer-hall or garden—to study
character or anything of that kind—be careful, when you
have finished drinking your beer, to shut the cover of the mug
down tight. If you leave it with the cover standing open,
that is taken as a sign that you want more beer, and the girl
snatches it away and brings it back refilled.</p>
<p>B. and I very nearly had an accident one warm night, owing to
our ignorance of this custom. Each time after we had
swallowed the quart, we left the pot, standing before us with the
cover up, and each time it was, in consequence, taken away, and
brought back to us, brimming full again. After about the
sixth time, we gently remonstrated.</p>
<p>“This is very kind of you, my good girl,” B. said,
“but really I don’t think we <i>can</i>. I
don’t think we ought to. You must not go on doing
this sort of thing. We will drink this one now that you
have brought it, but we really must insist on its being the
last.”</p>
<p>After about the tenth time we expostulated still more
strongly.</p>
<p>“Now, you know what I told you four quarts ago!”
remarked B., severely. “This can’t go on for
ever. Something serious will be happening. We are not
used to your German school of drinking. We are only
foreigners. In our own country we are considered rather
swagger at this elbow-raising business, and for the credit of old
England we have done our best. But now there must be an end
to it. I simply decline to drink any more. No, do not
press me. Not even another gallon!”</p>
<p>“But you both sit there with both your mugs open,”
replies the girl in an injured tone.</p>
<p>“What do you mean, ‘we sit with our mugs
open’?” asks B. “Can’t we have our
mugs open if we like?”</p>
<p>“Ah, yes,” she explains pathetically; “but
then I think you want more beer. Gentlemen always open
their mugs when they want them filled with beer.”</p>
<p>We kept our mugs shut after that.</p>
<h2>MONDAY, JUNE 9TH</h2>
<p>A Long Chapter, but happily the Last.—The
Pilgrims’ Return.—A Deserted
Town.—Heidelberg.—The Common, or Bed, Sheet,
Considered as a Towel.—B. Grapples with a Continental Time
Table.—An Untractable Train.—A Quick
Run.—Trains that Start from Nowhere.—Trains that
Arrive at Nowhere.—Trains that Don’t Do
Anything.—B. Goes Mad.—Railway Travelling in
Germany.—B. is Taken Prisoner.—His
Fortitude.—Advantages of Ignorance.—First Impressions
of Germany and of the Germans.</p>
<p>We are at Ostend. Our pilgrimage has ended. We
sail for Dover in three hours’ time. The wind seems
rather fresh, but they say that it will drop towards the
evening. I hope they are not deceiving us.</p>
<p>We are disappointed with Ostend. We thought that Ostend
would be gay and crowded. We thought that there would be
bands and theatres and concerts, and busy
table-d’hôtes, and lively sands, and thronged
parades, and pretty girls at Ostend.</p>
<p>I bought a stick and a new pair of boots at Brussels on
purpose for Ostend.</p>
<p>There does not seem to be a living visitor in the place
besides ourselves—nor a dead one either, that we can
find. The shops are shut up, the houses are deserted, the
casino is closed. Notice-boards are exhibited outside the
hotels to the effect that the police have strict orders to take
into custody anybody found trespassing upon or damaging the
premises.</p>
<p>We found one restaurant which looked a little less like a
morgue than did the other restaurants in the town, and rang the
bell. After we had waited for about a quarter of an hour,
an old woman answered the door, and asked us what we
wanted. We said a steak and chipped potatoes for two, and a
couple of lagers. She said would we call again in about a
fortnight’s time, when the family would be at home?
She did not herself know where the things were kept.</p>
<p>We went down on to the sands this morning. We had not
been walking up and down for more than half an hour before we
came across the distinct imprint of a human foot. Someone
must have been there this very day! We were a good deal
alarmed. We could not imagine how he came there. The
weather is too fine for shipwrecks, and it was not a part of the
coast where any passing trader would be likely to land.
Besides, if anyone has landed, where is he? We have been
able to find no trace of him whatever. To this hour, we
have never discovered who our strange visitant was.</p>
<p>It is a very mysterious affair, and I am glad we are going
away.</p>
<p>We have been travelling about a good deal since we left
Munich. We went first to Heidelberg. We arrived early
in the morning at Heidelberg, after an all-night journey, and the
first thing that the proprietor of the Royal suggested, on seeing
us, was that we should have a bath. We consented to the
operation, and were each shown into a little marble bath-room, in
which I felt like a bit out of a picture by Alma Tadema.</p>
<p>The bath was very refreshing; but I should have enjoyed the
whole thing much better if they had provided me with something
more suitable to wipe upon than a thin linen sheet. The
Germans hold very curious notions as to the needs and
requirements of a wet man. I wish they would occasionally
wash and bath themselves, and then they would, perhaps, obtain
more practical ideas upon the subject. I have wiped upon a
sheet in cases of emergency, and so I have upon a pair of socks;
but there is no doubt that the proper thing is a towel. To
dry oneself upon a sheet needs special training and unusual
agility. A Nautch Girl or a Dancing Dervish would, no
doubt, get through the performance with credit. They would
twirl the sheet gracefully round their head, draw it lightly
across their back, twist it in waving folds round their legs,
wrap themselves for a moment in its whirling maze, and then
lightly skip away from it, dry and smiling.</p>
<p>But that is not the manner in which the dripping, untaught
Briton attempts to wipe himself upon a sheet. The method he
adopts is, to clutch the sheet with both hands, lean up against
the wall, and rub himself with it. In trying to get the
thing round to the back of him, he drops half of it into the
water, and from that moment the bathroom is not big enough to
enable him to get away for an instant from that wet half.
When he is wiping the front of himself with the dry half, the wet
half climbs round behind, and, in a spirit of offensive
familiarity, slaps him on the back. While he is stooping
down rubbing his feet, it throws itself with delirious joy around
his head, and he is black in the face before he can struggle away
from its embrace. When he is least expecting anything of
the kind, it flies round and gives him a playful flick upon some
particularly tender part of his body that sends him springing
with a yell ten feet up into the air. The great delight of
the sheet, as a whole, is to trip him up whenever he attempts to
move, so as to hear what he says when he sits down suddenly on
the stone floor; and if it can throw him into the bath again just
as he has finished wiping himself, it feels that life is worth
living after all.</p>
<p>We spent two days at Heidelberg, climbing the wooded mountains
that surround that pleasant little town, and that afford, from
their restaurant or ruin-crowned summits, enchanting,
far-stretching views, through which, with many a turn and twist,
the distant Rhine and nearer Neckar wind; or strolling among the
crumbling walls and arches of the grand, history-logged wreck
that was once the noblest castle in all Germany.</p>
<p>We stood in awed admiration before the “Great
Tun,” which is the chief object of interest in
Heidelberg. What there is of interest in the sight of a big
beer-barrel it is difficult, in one’s calmer moments, to
understand; but the guide book says that it is a thing to be
seen, and so all we tourists go and stand in a row and gape at
it. We are a sheep-headed lot. If, by a
printer’s error, no mention were made in the guide book of
the Colosseum, we should spend a month in Rome, and not think it
worth going across the road to look at. If the guide book
says we must by no means omit to pay a visit to some famous
pincushion that contains eleven million pins, we travel five
hundred miles on purpose to see it!</p>
<p>From Heidelberg we went to Darmstadt. We spent
half-an-hour at Darmstadt. Why we ever thought of stopping
longer there, I do not know. It is a pleasant enough town
to live in, I should say; but utterly uninteresting to the
stranger. After one walk round it, we made inquiries as to
the next train out of it, and being informed that one was then on
the point of starting, we tumbled into it and went to Bonn.</p>
<p>From Bonn (whence we made one or two Rhine excursions, and
where we ascended twenty-eight “blessed steps” on our
knees—the chapel people called them “blessed
steps;” <i>we</i> didn’t, after the first fourteen)
we returned to Cologne. From Cologne we went to Brussels;
from Brussels to Ghent (where we saw more famous pictures, and
heard the mighty “Roland” ring “o’er
lagoon and lake of sand”). From Ghent we went to
Bruges (where I had the satisfaction of throwing a stone at the
statue of Simon Stevin, who added to the miseries of my
school-days, by inventing decimals), and from Bruges we came on
here.</p>
<p>Finding out and arranging our trains has been a fearful
work. I have left the whole business with B., and he has
lost two stone over it. I used to think at one time that my
own dear native Bradshaw was a sufficiently hard nut for the
human intellect to crack; or, to transpose the simile, that
Bradshaw was sufficient to crack an ordinary human nut. But
dear old Bradshaw is an axiom in Euclid for stone-wall
obviousness, compared with a through Continental
time-table. Every morning B. has sat down with the book
before him, and, grasping his head between his hands, has tried
to understand it without going mad.</p>
<p>“Here we are,” he has said. “This is
the train that will do for us. Leaves Munich at 1.45; gets
to Heidelberg at 4—just in time for a cup of
tea.”</p>
<p>“Gets to Heidelberg at 4?” I exclaim.
“Does the whole distance in two and a quarter hours?
Why, we were all night coming down!”</p>
<p>“Well, there you are,” he says, pointing to the
time-table. “Munich, depart 1.45; Heidelberg, arrive
4.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” I say, looking over his shoulder;
“but don’t you see the 4 is in thick type? That
means 4 in the morning.”</p>
<p>“Oh, ah, yes,” he replies. “I never
noticed that. Yes, of course. No! it can’t be
that either. Why, that would make the journey fourteen
hours. It can’t take fourteen hours. No, of
course not. That’s not meant for thick type, that
4. That’s thin type got a little thick, that’s
all.”</p>
<p>“Well, it can’t be 4 this afternoon,” I
argue. “It must be 4 to-morrow afternoon!
That’s just what a German express train would like to
do—take a whole day over a six hours’ job!”</p>
<p>He puzzles for a while, and then breaks out with:</p>
<p>“Oh! I see it now. How stupid of me!
That train that gets to Heidelberg at 4 comes from
Berlin.”</p>
<p>He seemed quite delighted with this discovery.</p>
<p>“What’s the good of it to us, then?” I
ask.</p>
<p>That depresses him.</p>
<p>“No, it is not much good, I’m afraid,” he
agrees. “It seems to go straight from Berlin to
Heidelberg without stopping at Munich at all. Well then,
where does the 1.45 go to? It must go somewhere.”</p>
<p>Five minutes more elapse, and then he exclaims:</p>
<p>“Drat this 1.45! It doesn’t seem to go
anywhere. Munich depart 1.45, and that’s all.
It must go somewhere!”</p>
<p>Apparently, however, it does not. It seems to be a train
that starts out from Munich at 1.45, and goes off on the
loose. Possibly, it is a young, romantic train, fond of
mystery. It won’t say where it’s going
to. It probably does not even know itself. It goes
off in search of adventure.</p>
<p>“I shall start off,” it says to itself, “at
1.45 punctually, and just go on anyhow, without thinking about
it, and see where I get to.”</p>
<p>Or maybe it is a conceited, headstrong young train. It
will not be guided or advised. The traffic superintendent
wants it to go to St. Petersburg or to Paris. The old
grey-headed station-master argues with it, and tries to persuade
it to go to Constantinople, or even to Jerusalem if it likes that
better—urges it to, at all events, make up its mind where
it <i>is</i> going—warns it of the danger to young trains
of having no fixed aim or object in life. Other people,
asked to use their influence with it, have talked to it like a
father, and have begged it, for their sakes, to go to Kamskatka,
or Timbuctoo, or Jericho, according as they have thought best for
it; and then, finding that it takes no notice of them, have got
wild with it, and have told it to go to still more distant
places.</p>
<p>But to all counsel and entreaty it has turned a deaf ear.</p>
<p>“You leave me alone,” it has replied; “I
know where I’m going to. Don’t you worry
yourself about me. You mind your own business, all of
you. I don’t want a lot of old fools telling me what
to do. I know what I’m about.”</p>
<p>What can be expected from such a train? The chances are
that it comes to a bad end. I expect it is recognised
afterwards, a broken-down, unloved, friendless, old train,
wandering aimless and despised in some far-off country, musing
with bitter regret upon the day when, full of foolish pride and
ambition, it started from Munich, with its boiler nicely oiled,
at 1.45.</p>
<p>B. abandons this 1.45 as hopeless and incorrigible, and
continues his search.</p>
<p>“Hulloa! what’s this?” he exclaims.
“How will this do us? Leaves Munich at 4, gets to
Heidelberg 4.15. That’s quick work. Something
wrong there. That won’t do. You can’t get
from Munich to Heidelberg in a quarter of an hour. Oh! I
see it. That 4 o’clock goes to Brussels, and then on
to Heidelberg afterwards. Gets in there at 4.15 to-morrow,
I suppose. I wonder why it goes round by Brussels,
though? Then it seems to stop at Prague for ever so
long. Oh, damn this timetable!”</p>
<p>Then he finds another train that starts at 2.15, and seems to
be an ideal train. He gets quite enthusiastic over this
train.</p>
<p>“This is the train for us, old man,” he
says. “This is a splendid train, really. It
doesn’t stop anywhere.”</p>
<p>“Does it <i>get</i> anywhere?” I ask.</p>
<p>“Of course it gets somewhere,” he replies
indignantly. “It’s an express!
Munich,” he murmurs, tracing its course through the
timetable, “depart 2.15. First and second class
only. Nuremberg? No; it doesn’t stop at
Nuremberg. Wurtzburg? No. Frankfort for
Strasburg? No. Cologne, Antwerp, Calais? Well,
where does it stop? Confound it! it must stop
somewhere. Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen?
No. Upon my soul, this is another train that does not go
anywhere! It starts from Munich at 2.15, and that’s
all. It doesn’t do anything else.”</p>
<p>It seems to be a habit of Munich trains to start off in this
purposeless way. Apparently, their sole object is to get
away from the town. They don’t care where they go to;
they don’t care what becomes of them, so long as they
escape from Munich.</p>
<p>“For heaven’s sake,” they say to themselves,
“let us get away from this place. Don’t let us
bother about where we shall go; we can decide that when we are
once fairly outside. Let’s get out of Munich;
that’s the great thing.”</p>
<p>B. begins to grow quite frightened. He says:</p>
<p>“We shall never be able to leave this city. There
are no trains out of Munich at all. It’s a plot to
keep us here, that’s what it is. We shall never be
able to get away. We shall never see dear old England
again!”</p>
<p>I try to cheer him up by suggesting that perhaps it is the
custom in Bavaria to leave the destination of the train to the
taste and fancy of the passengers. The railway authorities
provide a train, and start it off at 2.15. It is immaterial
to them where it goes to. That is a question for the
passengers to decide among themselves. The passengers hire
the train and take it away, and there is an end of the matter, so
far as the railway people are concerned. If there is any
difference of opinion between the passengers, owing to some of
them wishing to go to Spain, while others want to get home to
Russia, they, no doubt, settle the matter by tossing up.</p>
<p>B., however, refuses to entertain this theory, and says he
wishes I would not talk so much when I see how harassed he
is. That’s all the thanks I get for trying to help
him.</p>
<p>He worries along for another five minutes, and then he
discovers a train that gets to Heidelberg all right, and appears
to be in most respects a model train, the only thing that can be
urged against it being that it does not start from anywhere.</p>
<p>It seems to drop into Heidelberg casually and then to stop
there. One expects its sudden advent alarms the people at
Heidelberg station. They do not know what to make of
it. The porter goes up to the station-master, and says:</p>
<p>“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a strange train in
the station.”</p>
<p>“Oh!” answers the station-master, surprised,
“where did it come from?”</p>
<p>“Don’t know,” replies the man; “it
doesn’t seem to know itself.”</p>
<p>“Dear me,” says the station-master, “how
very extraordinary! What does it want?”</p>
<p>“Doesn’t seem to want anything particular,”
replies the other. “It’s a curious sort of
train. Seems to be a bit dotty, if you ask me.”</p>
<p>“Um,” muses the station-master, “it’s
a rum go. Well, I suppose we must let it stop here a bit
now. We can hardly turn it out a night like this. Oh,
let it make itself comfortable in the wood-shed till the morning,
and then we will see if we can find its friends.”</p>
<p>At last B. makes the discovery that to get to Heidelberg we
must go to Darmstadt and take another train from there.
This knowledge gives him renewed hope and strength, and he sets
to work afresh—this time, to find trains from Munich to
Darmstadt, and from Darmstadt to Heidelberg.</p>
<p>“Here we are,” he cries, after a few
minutes’ hunting. “I’ve got
it!” (He is of a buoyant disposition.)
“This will be it. Leaves Munich 10, gets to Darmstadt
5.25. Leaves Darmstadt for Heidelberg 5.20, gets
to—”</p>
<p>“That doesn’t allow us much time for changing,
does it?” I remark.</p>
<p>“No,” he replies, growing thoughtful again.
“No, that’s awkward. If it were only the other
way round, it would be all right, or it would do if our train got
there five minutes before its time, and the other one was a
little late in starting.”</p>
<p>“Hardly safe to reckon on that,” I suggest; and he
agrees with me, and proceeds to look for some more fitable
trains.</p>
<p>It would appear, however, that all the trains from Darmstadt
to Heidelberg start just a few minutes before the trains from
Munich arrive. It looks quite pointed, as though they tried
to avoid us.</p>
<p>B.’s intellect generally gives way about this point, and
he becomes simply drivelling. He discovers trains that run
from Munich to Heidelberg in fourteen minutes, by way of Venice
and Geneva, with half-an-hour’s interval for breakfast at
Rome. He rushes up and down the book in pursuit of demon
expresses that arrive at their destinations forty-seven minutes
before they start, and leave again before they get there.
He finds out, all by himself, that the only way to get from South
Germany to Paris is to go to Calais, and then take the boat to
Moscow. Before he has done with the timetable, he
doesn’t know whether he is in Europe, Asia, Africa, or
America, nor where he wants to get to, nor why he wants to go
there.</p>
<p>Then I quietly, but firmly, take the book away from him, and
dress him for going out; and we take our bags and walk to the
station, and tell a porter that, “Please, we want to go to
Heidelberg.” And the porter takes us one by each
hand, and leads us to a seat and tells us to sit there and be
good, and that, when it is time, he will come and fetch us and
put us in the train; and this he does.</p>
<p>That is my method of finding out how to get from one place to
another. It is not as dignified, perhaps, as B.’s,
but it is simpler and more efficacious.</p>
<p>It is slow work travelling in Germany. The German train
does not hurry or excite itself over its work, and when it stops
it likes to take a rest. When a German train draws up at a
station, everybody gets out and has a walk. The
engine-driver and the stoker cross over and knock at the
station-master’s door. The station-master comes out
and greets them effusively, and then runs back into the house to
tell his wife that they have come, and she bustles out and also
welcomes them effusively, and the four stand chatting about old
times and friends and the state of the crops. After a
while, the engine-driver, during a pause in the conversation,
looks at his watch, and says he is afraid he must be going, but
the station-master’s wife won’t hear of it.</p>
<p>“Oh, you must stop and see the children,” she
says. “They will be home from school soon, and
they’ll be so disappointed if they hear you have been here
and gone away again. Lizzie will never forgive
you.”</p>
<p>The engine-driver and the stoker laugh, and say that under
those circumstances they suppose they must stop; and they do
so.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the booking-clerk has introduced the guard to his
sister, and such a very promising flirtation has been taking
place behind the ticket-office door that it would not be
surprising if wedding-bells were heard in the neighbourhood
before long.</p>
<p>The second guard has gone down into the town to try and sell a
dog, and the passengers stroll about the platform and smoke, or
partake of a light meal in the refreshment-room—the poorer
classes regaling themselves upon hot sausage, and the more dainty
upon soup. When everybody appears to be sufficiently
rested, a move onward is suggested by the engine-driver or the
guard, and if all are agreeable to the proposal the train
starts.</p>
<p>Tremendous excitement was caused during our journey between
Heidelberg and Darmstadt by the discovery that we were travelling
in an express train (they called it an “express:” it
jogged along at the rate of twenty miles an hour when it could be
got to move at all; most of its time it seemed to be half asleep)
with slow-train tickets. The train was stopped at the next
station and B. was marched off between two stern-looking
gold-laced officials to explain the matter to a stern-looking
gold-laced station-master, surrounded by three stern-looking
gold-laced followers. The scene suggested a drum-head
court-martial, and I could see that B. was nervous, though
outwardly calm and brave. He shouted back a light-hearted
adieu to me as he passed down the platform, and asked me, if the
worst happened, to break it gently to his mother.</p>
<p>However, no harm came of it, and he returned to the carriage
without a stain upon his character, he having made it clear to
the satisfaction of the court—firstly, That he did not know
that our tickets were only slow-train tickets; secondly, That he
was not aware that we were not travelling by a slow train; and
thirdly, That he was ready to pay the difference in the
fares.</p>
<p>He blamed himself for having done this last, however,
afterwards. He seemed to think that he could have avoided
this expense by assuming ignorance of the German language.
He said that two years ago, when he was travelling in Germany
with three other men, the authorities came down upon them in much
the same way for travelling first-class with second-class
tickets.</p>
<p>Why they were doing this B. did not seem able to explain very
clearly. He said that, if he recollected rightly, the guard
had told them to get into a first-class, or else they had not had
time to get into a second-class, or else they did not know they
were not in a second-class. I must confess his explanation
appeared to me to be somewhat lame.</p>
<p>Anyhow, there they were in a first-class carriage; and there
was the collector at the door, looking indignantly at their
second-class tickets, and waiting to hear what they had to say
for themselves.</p>
<p>One of their party did not know much German, but what little
he did know he was very proud of and liked to air; and this one
argued the matter with the collector, and expressed himself in
German so well that the collector understood and disbelieved
every word he said.</p>
<p>He was also, on his part, able, with a little trouble, to
understand what the collector said, which was that he must pay
eighteen marks. And he had to.</p>
<p>As for the other three, two at all events of whom were
excellent German scholars, they did not understand anything, and
nobody could make them understand anything. The collector
roared at them for about ten minutes, and they smiled pleasantly
and said they wanted to go to Hanover. He went and fetched
the station-master, and the station-master explained to them for
another ten minutes that, if they did not pay eighteen shillings
each, he should do the German equivalent for summonsing them; and
they smiled and nodded, and told him that they wanted to go to
Hanover. Then a very important-looking personage in a
cocked-hat came up, and was very angry; and he and the
station-master and the collector took it in turns to explain to
B. and his two friends the state of the law on the matter.</p>
<p>They stormed and raged, and threatened and pleaded for a
quarter of an hour or so, and then they got sick, and slammed the
door, and went off, leaving the Government to lose the fifty-four
marks.</p>
<p>We passed the German frontier on Wednesday, and have been in
Belgium since.</p>
<p>I like the Germans. B. says I ought not to let them know
this, because it will make them conceited; but I have no fear of
such a result. I am sure they possess too much common-sense
for their heads to be turned by praise, no matter from whom.</p>
<p>B. also says that I am displaying more energy than prudence in
forming an opinion of a people merely from a few weeks’
travel amongst them. But my experience is that first
impressions are the most reliable.</p>
<p>At all events, in my case they are. I often arrive at
quite sensible ideas and judgments, on the spur of the
moment. It is when I stop to think that I become
foolish.</p>
<p>Our first thoughts are the thoughts that are given to us; our
second thoughts are the thoughts that we make for
ourselves. I prefer to trust to the former.</p>
<p>The Germans are a big, square-shouldered, deep-chested
race. They do not talk much, but look as though they
thought. Like all big things, they are easy-going and
good-tempered.</p>
<p>Anti-tobacconists, teetotallers, and such-like faddists, would
fare badly in Germany. A German has no anti-nature notions
as to its being wicked for him to enjoy his life, and still more
criminal for him to let anybody else enjoy theirs. He likes
his huge pipe, and he likes his mug of beer, and as these become
empty he likes to have them filled again; and he likes to see
other people like <i>their</i> pipe and <i>their</i> mug of
beer. If you were to go dancing round a German, shrieking
out entreaties to him to sign a pledge that he would never drink
another drop of beer again as long as he lived, he would ask you
to remember that you were talking to a man, not to a child or an
imbecile, and he would probably impress the request upon you by
boxing your ears for your impertinence. He can conduct
himself sensibly without making an ass of himself. He can
be “temperate” without tying bits of coloured ribbon
all about himself to advertise the fact, and without rushing up
and down the street waving a banner and yelling about it.</p>
<p>The German women are not beautiful, but they are lovable and
sweet; and they are broad-breasted and broad-hipped, like the
mothers of big sons should be. They do not seem to trouble
themselves about their “rights,” but appear to be
very contented and happy even without votes. The men treat
them with courtesy and tenderness, but with none of that
exaggerated deference that one sees among more petticoat-ridden
nations. The Germans are women lovers, not women
worshippers; and they are not worried by any doubts as to which
sex shall rule the State, and which stop at home and mind the
children. The German women are not politicians and mayors
and county councillors; they are housewives.</p>
<p>All classes of Germans are scrupulously polite to one another;
but this is the result of mutual respect, not of snobbery.
The tramcar conductor expects to be treated with precisely the
same courtesy that he tenders. The Count raises his hat to
the shopkeeper, and expects the shopkeeper to raise his hat to
him.</p>
<p>The Germans are hearty eaters; but they are not, like the
French, fussy and finicky over their food. Their stomach is
not their God; and the cook, with his sauces and
<i>pâtés</i> and <i>ragoûts</i>, is not their
High Priest. So long as the dish is wholesome, and there is
sufficient of it, they are satisfied.</p>
<p>In the mere sensuous arts of painting and sculpture the
Germans are poor, in the ennobling arts of literature and music
they are great; and this fact provides a key to their
character.</p>
<p>They are a simple, earnest, homely, genuine people. They
do not laugh much; but when they do, they laugh deep down.
They are slow, but so is a deep river. A placid look
generally rests upon their heavy features; but sometimes they
frown, and then they look somewhat grim.</p>
<p>A visit to Germany is a tonic to an Englishman. We
English are always sneering at ourselves, and patriotism in
England is regarded as a stamp of vulgarity. The Germans,
on the other hand, believe in themselves, and respect
themselves. The world for them is not played out.
Their country to them is still the
“Fatherland.” They look straight before them
like a people who see a great future in front of them, and are
not afraid to go forward to fulfil it.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">GOOD-BYE, SIR (OR MADAM).</p>
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