Europe Revised Part 6

To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand against a woman--except, of course, in self-defense--this is indeed a startling sight to see; but worse is in store for him when he reaches Bohemia, on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In Bohemia, if there is a particularly nasty and laborious job to be done, such as spading up manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beets out of the half-frozen earth, they wish it on the dear old grandmother. She always seemed to me to be a grandmother--or old enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the life they lead, and not the years, that bends the backs of these women and thickens their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into clods and their hands into swollen, red monstrosities.

Surely the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, had Germany in mind when he said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings--because Germany certainly does lead the known world in those two commodities. Everywhere in Germany you see them--the cabbages by the millions and the billions, growing rank and purple in the fields and giving promise of the time when they will change from vegetable to vine and become the fragrant and luscious trailing sauerkraut; but the kings, in stone or bronze, stand up in the marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment, or just back of the brewery, in every German city and town along the route.

By these surface indications alone the most inexperienced traveler would know he had reached Germany, even without the halt at the custom house on the border; or the crossing watchman in trim uniform jumping to attention at every road-crossing; or the beautifully upholstered, handswept state forests; or the hedges of willow trees along the brooks, sticking up their stubby, twiggy heads like so many disreputable hearth-brooms; or the young grain stretching in straight rows crosswise of the weedless fields and looking, at a distance, like fair green-printed lines evenly s.p.a.ced on a wide brown page. Also, one observes everywhere surviving traces that are unmistakable of the reign of that most ingenious and wideawake of all the earlier rulers of Germany, King Verboten the Great.

In connection with the life and works of this distinguished ruler is told an interesting legend well worthy of being repeated here. It would seem that King Verboten was the first crowned head of Europe to learn the value of keeping his name constantly before the reading public.

Rameses the Third of Egypt--that enterprising old constant advertiser who swiped the pyramids of all his predecessors and had his own name engraved thereon--had been dead for many centuries and was forgotten when Verboten mounted the throne, and our own Teddy Roosevelt would not be born for many centuries yet to come; so the idea must have occurred to King Verboten spontaneously, as it were. Therefore he took counsel with himself, saying:

"I shall now erect statues to myself. Dynasties change and wars rage, and folks grow fickle and tear down statues. None of that for your Uncle Dudley K. Verboten! No; this is what I shall do: On every available site in the length and breadth of this my realm I shall stick up my name; and, wherever possible, near to it I shall engrave or paint the names of my two favorite sons, Ausgang and Eingang--to the end that, come what may, we shall never be forgotten in the land of our birth."

And then he went and did it; and it was a thorough job--so thorough a job that, to this good year of our Lord you may still see the name of that wise king everywhere displayed in Germany--on railroad stations and in railroad trains; on castle walls and dead walls and brewery walls, and the back fence of the Young Ladies' High School. And nearly always, too, you will find hard by, over doors and pa.s.sageways, the names of his two sons, each accompanied or underscored by the heraldic emblem of their house--a barbed and feathered arrow pointing horizontally.

And so it was that King Verboten lived happily ever after and in the fullness of time died peacefully in his bed, surrounded by his wives, his children and his courtiers; and all of them sorrowed greatly and wept, but the royal signpainter sorrowed most of all.

I know that certain persons will contest the authenticity of this pa.s.sage of history; they will claim Verboten means in our tongue Forbidden, and that Ausgang means Outgoing, and Eingang means Incoming--or, in other words, Exit and Entrance; but surely this could not be so. If so many things were forbidden, a man in Germany would be privileged only to die--and probably not that, unless he died according to a given formula; and certainly no human being with the possible exception of the comedian who used to work the revolving-door trick in Hanlon's Fantasma, could go out of and come into a place so often without getting dizzy in the head. No--the legend stands as stated.

Even as it is, there are rules enough in Germany, rules to regulate all things and all persons. At first, to the stranger, this seems an irksome arrangement--this posting of rules and orders and directions and warnings everywhere--but he finds that everyone, be he high or low, must obey or go to jail; there are no exceptions and no evasions; so that what is a duty on all is a burden on none.

Take the trains, for example. Pretty much all over the Continent the railroads are state-owned and state-run, but only in Germany are they properly run. True, there are so many uniformed officials aboard a German train that frequently there is barely room for the paying travelers to squeeze in; but the cars are sanitary and the schedule is accurately maintained, and the attendants are honest and polite and cleanly of person--wherein lies another point of dissimilarity between them and those scurvy, musty, fusty brigands who are found managing and operating trains in certain nearby countries.

I remember a cup of coffee I had while going from Paris to Berlin. It was made expressly for me by an invalided commander-in-chief of the artillery corps of the imperial army--so I judged him to be by his costume, air and general deportment--who was in charge of our carriage and also of the small kitchen at the far end of it.

He came into our compartment and bowed and clicked his heels together and saluted, and wanted to know whether I would take coffee. Recklessly I said I would. He filled in several blanks of a printed form, and went and cooked the coffee and brought it back, pausing at intervals as he came along to fill in other blanks. Would I take cream in my coffee? I would; so he filled in a couple of blanks. Would I take sugar? I said I would take two lumps. He put in two lumps and filled in another blank.

I really prefer my coffee with three lumps in it; but I noticed that his printed form was now completely filled in, and I hated to call for a third lump and put him to the trouble of starting his literary labors all over again. Besides, by that time the coffee would be cold. So I took it as it was--with two lumps only--and it was pretty fair coffee for European coffee. It tasted slightly of the red tape and the chicory, but it was neatly prepared and promptly served.

And so, over historic streams no larger than creeks would be in America, and by castles and cabbages and kings and cows, we came to Berlin; and after some of the other Continental cities Berlin seemed a mighty restful spot to be in, and a good one to tarry in awhile. It has few historical a.s.sociations, has Berlin, but we were loaded to the gills with historical a.s.sociations by now. It does not excel greatly in Old Masters, but we had already gazed with a languid eye upon several million Old Masters of all ages, including many very young ones. It has no ancient monuments and tombs either, which is a blessing. Most of the statuary in Berlin is new and shiny and provided with all the modern conveniences--the present kaiser attended competently to that detail.

Wherever, in his capital, there was s.p.a.ce for a statue he has stuck up one in memory of a member of his own dynasty, beginning with a statue apiece for such earlier rulers as Otho the Oboe-Player, and Joachim, surnamed the Half-a-Ton--let some one correct me if I have the names wrong--and finishing up with forty or fifty for himself. That is, there were forty or fifty of him when I was there. There are probably more now.

In its essentials Berlin suggests a progressive American city, with Teutonic tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. Conceive a bit of New York, a good deal of Chicago, a sc.r.a.p of Denver, a slice of Hoboken, and a whole lot of Milwaukee; conceive this combination as being scoured every day until it shines; conceive it as beautifully though somewhat profusely governed, and laid out with magnificent drives, and dotted with big, handsome public buildings, and full of reasonably honest and more than reasonably kindly people--and you have Berlin.

It was in Berlin that I picked up the most unique art treasure I found anywhere on my travels--a picture of the composer Verdi that looked exactly like Uncle Joe Cannon, without the cigar; whereas Uncle Joe Cannon does not look a thing in the world like Verdi, and probably wouldn't if he could.

I have always regretted that our route through the German Empire took us across the land of the Hessians after dark, for I wanted to see those people. You will recollect that when George the Third, of England, first put into actual use the doctrine of Hands Across the Sea he used the Hessians.

They were hired hands.

Chapter VIII

A Tale of a String-bean

It was at a small dinner party in a home out in Pa.s.sy--which is to Paris what Flatbush is to Brooklyn--that the event hereinafter set forth came to pa.s.s. Our host was an American who had lived abroad a good many years; and his wife, our hostess, was a French woman as charming as she was pretty and as pretty as she could be.

The dinner was going along famously. We had hors-d'oeuvres, the soup and the hare--all very tasty to look on and very soothing to the palate.

Then came the fowl, roasted, of course--the roast fowl is the national bird of France--and along with the fowl something exceedingly appetizing in the way of hearts of lettuce garnished with b.r.e.a.s.t.s of hothouse tomatoes cut on the bias.

When we were through with this the servants removed the debris and brought us hot plates. Then, with the air of one conferring a real treat on us, the butler bore around a tureen arrangement full of smoking-hot string-beans. When it came my turn I helped myself--copiously--and waited for what was to go with the beans. A pause ensued--to my imagination an embarra.s.sed pause. Seeking a cue I glanced down the table and back again. There did not appear to be anything to go with the beans. The butler was standing at ease behind his master's chair--ease for a butler, I mean--and the other guests, it seemed to me, were waiting and watching. To myself I said:

"Well, sir, that butler certainly has made a J. Henry Fox Pa.s.s of himself this trip! Here, just when this dinner was getting to be one of the notable successes of the present century, he has to go and derange the whole running schedule by serving the salad when he should have served the beans, and the beans when he should have served the salad.

It's a sickening situation; but if I can save it I'll do it. I'll be well bred if it takes a leg!"

So, wearing the manner of one who has been accustomed all his life to finishing off his dinner with a mess of string-beans, I used my putting-iron; and from the edge of the fair green I holed out in three.

My last stroke was a dandy, if I do say it myself. The others were game too--I could see that. They were eating beans as though beans were particularly what they had come for. Out of the tail of my eye I glanced at our hostess, sitting next to me on the left. She was placid, calm, perfectly easy. Again addressing myself mentally I said:

"There's a thoroughbred for you! You take a woman who got prosperous suddenly and is still acutely suffering from nervous culture, and if such a shipwreck had occurred at her dinner table she'd be utterly prostrated by now--she'd be down and out--and we'd all be standing back to give her air; but when they're born in the purple it shows in these big emergencies. Look at this woman now--not a ripple on the surface--balmy as a summer evening! But in about one hour from now, Central European time, I can see her accepting that fool butler's resignation before he's had time to offer it!"

After the beans had been cleared off the right-of-way we had the dessert and the cheese and the coffee and the rest of it. And, as we used to say in the society column down home when the wife of the largest advertiser was entertaining, "at a suitable hour those present dispersed to their homes, one and all voting the affair to have been one of the most enjoyable occasions among like events of the season." We all knew our manners--we had proved that.

Personally I was very proud of myself for having carried the thing off so well but after I had survived a few tables d'hote in France and a few more in Austria and a great many in Italy, where they do not have anything at the hotels except tables d'hote, I did not feel quite so proud. For at this writing in those parts the slender, sylphlike string-bean is not playing a minor part, as with us. He has the best spot on the evening bill--he is a headliner. So is the cauliflower; so is the Brussels sprout; so is any vegetable whose function among our own people is largely scenic.

Therefore I treasured the memory of this incident and brought it back with me; and I tell it here at some length of detail because I know how grateful my countrywomen will be to get hold of it--I know how grateful they always are when they learn about a new gastronomical wrinkle. Mind you, I am not saying that the notion is an absolute novelty here. For all I know to the contrary, prominent hostesses along the Gold Coast of the United States--Bar Harbor to Palm Beach inclusive--may have been serving one lone vegetable as a separate course for years and years; but I feel sure that throughout the interior the disclosure will come as a pleasant surprise.

The directions for executing this coup are simple and all the deadlier because they are so simple. The main thing is to invite your chief opponent as a smart entertainer; you know the one I mean--the woman who scored such a distinct social triumph in the season of 1912-13 by being the first woman in town to serve tomato bisque with whipped cream on it.

Have her there by all means. Go ahead with your dinner as though naught sensational and revolutionary were about to happen. Give them in proper turn the oysters, the fish, the entree, the bird, the salad. And then, all by itself, alone and unafraid, bring on a dab of string-beans.

Wait until you see the whites of their eyes, and aim and fire at will. Settle back then, until the first hushed shock has somewhat abated--until your dazed and suffering rival is glaring about in a well-bred but fl.u.s.tered manner, looking for something to go with the beans. Hold her eye while you smile a smile that is compounded of equal parts--superior wisdom, and gentle contempt for her ignorance--and then slowly, deliberately, dip a fork into the beans on your plate and go to it.

Believe me, it cannot lose. Before breakfast time the next morning every woman who was at that dinner will either be sending out invitations for a dinner of her own and ordering beans, or she will be calling up her nearest and best friend on the telephone to spread the tidings. I figure that the intense social excitement occasioned in this country a few years ago by the introduction of Russian salad dressing will be as nothing in comparison.

This stunt of serving the vegetable as a separate course was one of the things I learned about food during our flittings across Europe, but it was not the only thing I learned--by a long shot it was not. For example I learned this--and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either--that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of. And, quality and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for bite, than it costs there.

Food in Germany is cheaper than anywhere else almost, I reckon; and, selected with care and discrimination, a German dinner is an excellently good dinner. Certain dishes in England--and they are very certain, for you get them at every meal--are good, too, and not overly expensive.

There are some distinctive Austrian dishes that are not without their attractions either. Speaking by and large, however, I venture the a.s.sertion that, taking any first-rate restaurant in any of the larger American cities and balancing it off against any establishment of like standing in Europe, the American restaurant wins on cuisine, service, price, flavor and attractiveness.

Centuries of careful and constant press-agenting have given French cookery much of its present fame. The same crafty processes of publicity, continued through a period of eight or nine hundred years, have endowed the European scenic effects with a glamour and an impressiveness that really are not there, if you can but forget the advertising and consider the proposition on its merits.

Take their rivers now--their historic rivers, if you please. You are traveling--heaven help you--on a Continental train. Between spells of having your ticket punched or torn apart, or otherwise mutilated; and getting out at the border to see your trunks ceremoniously and solemnly unloaded and unlocked, and then as ceremoniously relocked and reloaded after you have conferred largess on everybody connected with the train, the customs regulations being mainly devised for the purpose of collecting not tariff but tips--between these periods, which const.i.tute so important a feature of Continental travel--you come, let us say, to a stream.

It is a puny stream, as we are accustomed to measure streams, boxed in by stone walls and regulated by stone dams, and frequently it is mud-colored and, more frequently still, runs between muddy banks. In the West it would probably not even be dignified with a regular name, and in the East it would be of so little importance that the local congressman would not ask an annual appropriation of more than half a million dollars for the purposes of dredging, deepening and diking it. But even as you cross it you learn that it is the Tiber or the Arno, the Elbe or the Po; and, such is the force of precept and example, you immediately get all excited and worked up over it.

English rivers are beautiful enough in a restrained, well-managed, landscape-gardened sort of way; but Americans do not enthuse over an English river because of what it is in itself, but because it happens to be the Thames or the Avon--because of the distinguished characters in history whose names are a.s.sociated with it.

Hades gets much of its reputation the same way.

I think of one experience I had while touring through what we had learned to call the Dachshund District. Our route led us alongside a most inconsequential-looking little river. Its contents seemed a trifle too liquid for mud and a trifle too solid for water. On the nearer bank was a small village populated by short people and long dogs. Out in midstream, making poor headway against the semi-gelid current, was a little flutter-tailed steamboat panting and puffing violently and kicking up a lather of lacy spray with its wheelbuckets in a manner to remind you of a very warm small lady fanning herself with a very large gauze fan, and only getting hotter at the job.

In America that stream would have been known as Mink Creek or Ca.s.sidy's Run, or by some equally poetic t.i.tle; but when I found out it was the Danube--no less--I had a distinct thrill. On closer examination I discovered it to be a counterfeit thrill; but nevertheless, I had it.

What applies in the main to the scenery applies in the main to the food.

France has the reputation of breeding the best cooks in the world--and maybe she does; but when you are calling in France you find most of them out. They have emigrated to America, where a French chef gets more money in one year for exercising his art--and gets it easier--than he could get in ten years at home--and is given better ingredients to cook with than he ever had at home.

The hotel in Paris at which we stopped served good enough meals, all of them centering, of course, round the inevitable poulet roti; but it took the staff an everlastingly long time to bring the food to you. If you grew reckless and ordered anything that was not on the bill it upset the entire establishment; and before they calmed down and relayed it in to you it was time for the next meal. Still, I must say we did not mind the waiting; near at hand a fascinating spectacle was invariably on exhibition.