A Tramp Abroad

M >> Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) >> A Tramp Abroad


However, I must not be frittering away the reader's time with these
details. I did not intend to go into any detail at all, at first, but
it is the failing of the true ceramiker, or the true devotee in any
department of brick-a-brackery, that once he gets his tongue or his pen
started on his darling theme, he cannot well stop until he drops from
exhaustion. He has no more sense of the flight of time than has any
other lover when talking of his sweetheart. The very "marks" on the
bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering
ecstasy; and I could forsake a drowning relative to help dispute about
whether the stopple of a departed Buon Retiro scent-bottle was genuine
or spurious.

Many people say that for a male person, bric-a-brac hunting is about as
robust a business as making doll-clothes, or decorating Japanese pots
with decalcomanie butterflies would be, and these people fling mud at
the elegant Englishman, Byng, who wrote a book called THE BRIC-A-BRAC
HUNTER, and make fun of him for chasing around after what they choose to
call "his despicable trifles"; and for "gushing" over these trifles;
and for exhibiting his "deep infantile delight" in what they call his
"tuppenny collection of beggarly trivialities"; and for beginning his
book with a picture of himself seated, in a "sappy, self-complacent
attitude, in the midst of his poor little ridiculous bric-a-brac junk
shop."

It is easy to say these things; it is easy to revile us, easy to despise
us; therefore, let these people rail on; they cannot feel as Byng and
I feel--it is their loss, not ours. For my part I am content to be a
brick-a-bracker and a ceramiker--more, I am proud to be so named. I am
proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately in the presence of a
rare jug with an illustrious mark on the bottom of it, as if I had
just emptied that jug. Very well; I packed and stored a part of my
collection, and the rest of it I placed in the care of the Grand Ducal
Museum in Mannheim, by permission. My Old Blue China Cat remains there
yet. I presented it to that excellent institution.

I had but one misfortune with my things. An egg which I had kept back
from breakfast that morning, was broken in packing. It was a great pity.
I had shown it to the best connoisseurs in Heidelberg, and they all said
it was an antique. We spent a day or two in farewell visits, and then
left for Baden-Baden. We had a pleasant trip to it, for the Rhine valley
is always lovely. The only trouble was that the trip was too short. If
I remember rightly it only occupied a couple of hours, therefore I judge
that the distance was very little, if any, over fifty miles. We
quitted the train at Oos, and walked the entire remaining distance to
Baden-Baden, with the exception of a lift of less than an hour which
we got on a passing wagon, the weather being exhaustingly warm. We came
into town on foot.

One of the first persons we encountered, as we walked up the street,
was the Rev. Mr. ------, an old friend from America--a lucky encounter,
indeed, for his is a most gentle, refined, and sensitive nature, and his
company and companionship are a genuine refreshment. We knew he had been
in Europe some time, but were not at all expecting to run across
him. Both parties burst forth into loving enthusiasms, and Rev. Mr.
------said:

"I have got a brimful reservoir of talk to pour out on you, and an empty
one ready and thirsting to receive what you have got; we will sit up
till midnight and have a good satisfying interchange, for I leave here
early in the morning." We agreed to that, of course.

I had been vaguely conscious, for a while, of a person who was walking
in the street abreast of us; I had glanced furtively at him once or
twice, and noticed that he was a fine, large, vigorous young fellow,
with an open, independent countenance, faintly shaded with a pale and
even almost imperceptible crop of early down, and that he was clothed
from head to heel in cool and enviable snow-white linen. I thought I had
also noticed that his head had a sort of listening tilt to it. Now about
this time the Rev. Mr. ------ said:

"The sidewalk is hardly wide enough for three, so I will walk behind;
but keep the talk going, keep the talk going, there's no time to lose,
and you may be sure I will do my share." He ranged himself behind us,
and straightway that stately snow-white young fellow closed up to the
sidewalk alongside him, fetched him a cordial slap on the shoulder with
his broad palm, and sung out with a hearty cheeriness:

"AMERICANS for two-and-a-half and the money up! HEY?"

The Reverend winced, but said mildly:

"Yes--we are Americans."

"Lord love you, you can just bet that's what _I_ am, every time! Put it
there!"

He held out his Sahara of his palm, and the Reverend laid his diminutive
hand in it, and got so cordial a shake that we heard his glove burst
under it.

"Say, didn't I put you up right?"

"Oh, yes."

"Sho! I spotted you for MY kind the minute I heard your clack. You been
over here long?"

"About four months. Have you been over long?"

"LONG? Well, I should say so! Going on two YEARS, by geeminy! Say, are
you homesick?"

"No, I can't say that I am. Are you?"

"Oh, HELL, yes!" This with immense enthusiasm.

The Reverend shrunk a little, in his clothes, and we were aware, rather
by instinct than otherwise, that he was throwing out signals of distress
to us; but we did not interfere or try to succor him, for we were quite
happy.

The young fellow hooked his arm into the Reverend's, now, with the
confiding and grateful air of a waif who has been longing for a friend,
and a sympathetic ear, and a chance to lisp once more the sweet accents
of the mother-tongue--and then he limbered up the muscles of his mouth
and turned himself loose--and with such a relish! Some of his words were
not Sunday-school words, so I am obliged to put blanks where they occur.

"Yes indeedy! If _I_ ain't an American there AIN'T any Americans, that's
all. And when I heard you fellows gassing away in the good old American
language, I'm ------ if it wasn't all I could do to keep from hugging
you! My tongue's all warped with trying to curl it around these
------ forsaken wind-galled nine-jointed German words here; now I TELL
you it's awful good to lay it over a Christian word once more and kind
of let the old taste soak it. I'm from western New York. My name is
Cholley Adams. I'm a student, you know. Been here going on two years.
I'm learning to be a horse-doctor! I LIKE that part of it, you know, but
------ these people, they won't learn a fellow in his own language, they
make him learn in German; so before I could tackle the horse-doctoring I
had to tackle this miserable language.

"First off, I thought it would certainly give me the botts, but I don't
mind now. I've got it where the hair's short, I think; and dontchuknow,
they made me learn Latin, too. Now between you and me, I wouldn't give a
------ for all the Latin that was ever jabbered; and the first thing _I_
calculate to do when I get through, is to just sit down and forget it.
'Twon't take me long, and I don't mind the time, anyway. And I tell
you what! the difference between school-teaching over yonder and
school-teaching over here--sho! WE don't know anything about it! Here
you're got to peg and peg and peg and there just ain't any let-up--and
what you learn here, you've got to KNOW, dontchuknow--or else you'll
have one of these ------ spavined, spectacles, ring-boned, knock-kneed
old professors in your hair. I've been here long ENOUGH, and I'm getting
blessed tired of it, mind I TELL you. The old man wrote me that he was
coming over in June, and said he'd take me home in August, whether I was
done with my education or not, but durn him, he didn't come; never said
why; just sent me a hamper of Sunday-school books, and told me to
be good, and hold on a while. I don't take to Sunday-school books,
dontchuknow--I don't hanker after them when I can get pie--but I READ
them, anyway, because whatever the old man tells me to do, that's the
thing that I'm a-going to DO, or tear something, you know. I buckled
in and read all those books, because he wanted me to; but that kind of
thing don't excite ME, I like something HEARTY. But I'm awful homesick.
I'm homesick from ear-socket to crupper, and from crupper to hock-joint;
but it ain't any use, I've got to stay here, till the old man drops the
rag and give the word--yes, SIR, right here in this ------ country I've
got to linger till the old man says COME!--and you bet your bottom
dollar, Johnny, it AIN'T just as easy as it is for a cat to have twins!"

At the end of this profane and cordial explosion he fetched a prodigious
"WHOOSH!" to relieve his lungs and make recognition of the heat, and
then he straightway dived into his narrative again for "Johnny's"
benefit, beginning, "Well, ------ it ain't any use talking, some of
those old American words DO have a kind of a bully swing to them; a man
can EXPRESS himself with 'em--a man can get at what he wants to SAY,
dontchuknow."

When we reached our hotel and it seemed that he was about to lose the
Reverend, he showed so much sorrow, and begged so hard and so earnestly
that the Reverend's heart was not hard enough to hold out against the
pleadings--so he went away with the parent-honoring student, like a
right Christian, and took supper with him in his lodgings, and sat in
the surf-beat of his slang and profanity till near midnight, and then
left him--left him pretty well talked out, but grateful "clear down
to his frogs," as he expressed it. The Reverend said it had transpired
during the interview that "Cholley" Adams's father was an extensive
dealer in horses in western New York; this accounted for Cholley's
choice of a profession. The Reverend brought away a pretty high opinion
of Cholley as a manly young fellow, with stuff in him for a useful
citizen; he considered him rather a rough gem, but a gem, nevertheless.



CHAPTER XXI [Insolent Shopkeepers and Gabbling Americans]

Baden-Baden sits in the lap of the hills, and the natural and artificial
beauties of the surroundings are combined effectively and charmingly.
The level strip of ground which stretches through and beyond the town is
laid out in handsome pleasure grounds, shaded by noble trees and adorned
at intervals with lofty and sparkling fountain-jets. Thrice a day a fine
band makes music in the public promenade before the Conversation
House, and in the afternoon and evening that locality is populous with
fashionably dressed people of both sexes, who march back and forth past
the great music-stand and look very much bored, though they make a
show of feeling otherwise. It seems like a rather aimless and stupid
existence. A good many of these people are there for a real purpose,
however; they are racked with rheumatism, and they are there to stew it
out in the hot baths. These invalids looked melancholy enough, limping
about on their canes and crutches, and apparently brooding over all
sorts of cheerless things. People say that Germany, with her damp stone
houses, is the home of rheumatism. If that is so, Providence must have
foreseen that it would be so, and therefore filled the land with the
healing baths. Perhaps no other country is so generously supplied with
medicinal springs as Germany. Some of these baths are good for one
ailment, some for another; and again, peculiar ailments are conquered
by combining the individual virtues of several different baths. For
instance, for some forms of disease, the patient drinks the native hot
water of Baden-Baden, with a spoonful of salt from the Carlsbad springs
dissolved in it. That is not a dose to be forgotten right away.

They don't SELL this hot water; no, you go into the great Trinkhalle,
and stand around, first on one foot and then on the other, while two or
three young girls sit pottering at some sort of ladylike sewing-work
in your neighborhood and can't seem to see you--polite as three-dollar
clerks in government offices.

By and by one of these rises painfully, and "stretches"--stretches fists
and body heavenward till she raises her heels from the floor, at the
same time refreshing herself with a yawn of such comprehensiveness that
the bulk of her face disappears behind her upper lip and one is able to
see how she is constructed inside--then she slowly closes her
cavern, brings down her fists and her heels, comes languidly forward,
contemplates you contemptuously, draws you a glass of hot water and sets
it down where you can get it by reaching for it. You take it and say:

"How much?"--and she returns you, with elaborate indifference, a
beggar's answer:

"NACH BELIEBE" (what you please.)

This thing of using the common beggar's trick and the common beggar's
shibboleth to put you on your liberality when you were expecting a
simple straightforward commercial transaction, adds a little to your
prospering sense of irritation. You ignore her reply, and ask again:

"How much?"

--and she calmly, indifferently, repeats:

"NACH BELIEBE."

You are getting angry, but you are trying not to show it; you resolve
to keep on asking your question till she changes her answer, or at least
her annoyingly indifferent manner. Therefore, if your case be like mine,
you two fools stand there, and without perceptible emotion of any kind,
or any emphasis on any syllable, you look blandly into each other's
eyes, and hold the following idiotic conversation:

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

"How much?"

"NACH BELIEBE."

I do not know what another person would have done, but at this point I
gave up; that cast-iron indifference, that tranquil contemptuousness,
conquered me, and I struck my colors. Now I knew she was used to
receiving about a penny from manly people who care nothing about the
opinions of scullery-maids, and about tuppence from moral cowards; but
I laid a silver twenty-five cent piece within her reach and tried to
shrivel her up with this sarcastic speech:

"If it isn't enough, will you stoop sufficiently from your official
dignity to say so?"

She did not shrivel. Without deigning to look at me at all, she
languidly lifted the coin and bit it!--to see if it was good. Then she
turned her back and placidly waddled to her former roost again, tossing
the money into an open till as she went along. She was victor to the
last, you see.

I have enlarged upon the ways of this girl because they are typical;
her manners are the manners of a goodly number of the Baden-Baden
shopkeepers. The shopkeeper there swindles you if he can, and insults
you whether he succeeds in swindling you or not. The keepers of baths
also take great and patient pains to insult you. The frowsy woman who
sat at the desk in the lobby of the great Friederichsbad and sold bath
tickets, not only insulted me twice every day, with rigid fidelity
to her great trust, but she took trouble enough to cheat me out of a
shilling, one day, to have fairly entitled her to ten. Baden-Baden's
splendid gamblers are gone, only her microscopic knaves remain.

An English gentleman who had been living there several years, said:

"If you could disguise your nationality, you would not find any
insolence here. These shopkeepers detest the English and despise the
Americans; they are rude to both, more especially to ladies of your
nationality and mine. If these go shopping without a gentleman or a
man-servant, they are tolerably sure to be subjected to petty insolences
--insolences of manner and tone, rather than word, though words that
are hard to bear are not always wanting. I know of an instance where
a shopkeeper tossed a coin back to an American lady with the remark,
snappishly uttered, 'We don't take French money here.' And I know of a
case where an English lady said to one of these shopkeepers, 'Don't
you think you ask too much for this article?' and he replied with the
question, 'Do you think you are obliged to buy it?' However, these
people are not impolite to Russians or Germans. And as to rank, they
worship that, for they have long been used to generals and nobles. If
you wish to see what abysses servility can descend, present yourself
before a Baden-Baden shopkeeper in the character of a Russian prince."

It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery,
but the baths are good. I spoke with many people, and they were all
agreed in that. I had the twinges of rheumatism unceasingly during three
years, but the last one departed after a fortnight's bathing there,
and I have never had one since. I fully believe I left my rheumatism in
Baden-Baden. Baden-Baden is welcome to it. It was little, but it was
all I had to give. I would have preferred to leave something that was
catching, but it was not in my power.

There are several hot springs there, and during two thousand years they
have poured forth a never-diminishing abundance of the healing water.
This water is conducted in pipe to the numerous bath-houses, and is
reduced to an endurable temperature by the addition of cold water. The
new Friederichsbad is a very large and beautiful building, and in it one
may have any sort of bath that has ever been invented, and with all
the additions of herbs and drugs that his ailment may need or that the
physician of the establishment may consider a useful thing to put into
the water. You go there, enter the great door, get a bow graduated to
your style and clothes from the gorgeous portier, and a bath ticket and
an insult from the frowsy woman for a quarter; she strikes a bell and
a serving-man conducts you down a long hall and shuts you into a
commodious room which has a washstand, a mirror, a bootjack, and a sofa
in it, and there you undress at your leisure.

The room is divided by a great curtain; you draw this curtain aside, and
find a large white marble bathtub, with its rim sunk to the level of the
floor, and with three white marble steps leading down to it. This tub
is full of water which is as clear as crystal, and is tempered to 28
degrees Re'aumur (about 95 degrees Fahrenheit). Sunk into the floor, by
the tub, is a covered copper box which contains some warm towels and a
sheet. You look fully as white as an angel when you are stretched out
in that limpid bath. You remain in it ten minutes, the first time,
and afterward increase the duration from day to day, till you reach
twenty-five or thirty minutes. There you stop. The appointments of the
place are so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate,
and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself adoring the
Friederichsbad and infesting it.

We had a plain, simple, unpretending, good hotel, in Baden-Baden--the
Hôtel de France--and alongside my room I had a giggling, cackling,
chattering family who always went to bed just two hours after me and
always got up two hours ahead of me. But this is common in German
hotels; the people generally go to bed long after eleven and get up
long before eight. The partitions convey sound like a drum-head, and
everybody knows it; but no matter, a German family who are all kindness
and consideration in the daytime make apparently no effort to moderate
their noises for your benefit at night. They will sing, laugh, and talk
loudly, and bang furniture around in a most pitiless way. If you knock
on your wall appealingly, they will quiet down and discuss the matter
softly among themselves for a moment--then, like the mice, they fall to
persecuting you again, and as vigorously as before. They keep cruelly
late and early hours, for such noisy folk.

Of course, when one begins to find fault with foreign people's ways, he
is very likely to get a reminder to look nearer home, before he gets far
with it. I open my note-book to see if I can find some more information
of a valuable nature about Baden-Baden, and the first thing I fall upon
is this:

"BADEN-BADEN (no date). Lot of vociferous Americans at breakfast
this morning. Talking AT everybody, while pretending to talk among
themselves. On their first travels, manifestly. Showing off. The usual
signs--airy, easy-going references to grand distances and foreign
places. 'Well GOOD-by, old fellow--if I don't run across you in Italy,
you hunt me up in London before you sail.'"

The next item which I find in my note-book is this one:

"The fact that a band of 6,000 Indians are now murdering our
frontiersmen at their impudent leisure, and that we are only able
to send 1,200 soldiers against them, is utilized here to discourage
emigration to America. The common people think the Indians are in New
Jersey."

This is a new and peculiar argument against keeping our army down to a
ridiculous figure in the matter of numbers. It is rather a striking
one, too. I have not distorted the truth in saying that the facts in
the above item, about the army and the Indians, are made use of to
discourage emigration to America. That the common people should be
rather foggy in their geography, and foggy as to the location of the
Indians, is a matter for amusement, maybe, but not of surprise.

There is an interesting old cemetery in Baden-Baden, and we spent
several pleasant hours in wandering through it and spelling out the
inscriptions on the aged tombstones. Apparently after a man has laid
there a century or two, and has had a good many people buried on top
of him, it is considered that his tombstone is not needed by him any
longer. I judge so from the fact that hundreds of old gravestones have
been removed from the graves and placed against the inner walls of the
cemetery. What artists they had in the old times! They chiseled angels
and cherubs and devils and skeletons on the tombstones in the most
lavish and generous way--as to supply--but curiously grotesque and
outlandish as to form. It is not always easy to tell which of the
figures belong among the blest and which of them among the opposite
party. But there was an inscription, in French, on one of those old
stones, which was quaint and pretty, and was plainly not the work of any
other than a poet. It was to this effect:

Here Reposes in God, Caroline de Clery, a Religieuse
of St. Denis aged 83 years--and blind. The light
was restored to her in Baden the 5th of January, 1839

We made several excursions on foot to the neighboring villages, over
winding and beautiful roads and through enchanting woodland scenery.
The woods and roads were similar to those at Heidelberg, but not
so bewitching. I suppose that roads and woods which are up to the
Heidelberg mark are rare in the world.

Once we wandered clear away to La Favorita Palace, which is several
miles from Baden-Baden. The grounds about the palace were fine; the
palace was a curiosity. It was built by a Margravine in 1725, and
remains as she left it at her death. We wandered through a great many
of its rooms, and they all had striking peculiarities of decoration.
For instance, the walls of one room were pretty completely covered
with small pictures of the Margravine in all conceivable varieties of
fanciful costumes, some of them male.

The walls of another room were covered with grotesquely and elaborately
figured hand-wrought tapestry. The musty ancient beds remained in the
chambers, and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated with
curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed with historical
and mythological scenes in glaring colors. There was enough crazy and
rotten rubbish in the building to make a true brick-a-bracker green with
envy. A painting in the dining-hall verged upon the indelicate--but
then the Margravine was herself a trifle indelicate.

It is in every way a wildly and picturesquely decorated house, and
brimful of interest as a reflection of the character and tastes of that
rude bygone time.

In the grounds, a few rods from the palace, stands the Margravine's
chapel, just as she left it--a coarse wooden structure, wholly barren
of ornament. It is said that the Margravine would give herself up to
debauchery and exceedingly fast living for several months at a time,
and then retire to this miserable wooden den and spend a few months in
repenting and getting ready for another good time. She was a devoted
Catholic, and was perhaps quite a model sort of a Christian as
Christians went then, in high life.

Tradition says she spent the last two years of her life in the strange
den I have been speaking of, after having indulged herself in one final,
triumphant, and satisfying spree. She shut herself up there, without
company, and without even a servant, and so abjured and forsook the
world. In her little bit of a kitchen she did her own cooking; she wore
a hair shirt next the skin, and castigated herself with whips--these
aids to grace are exhibited there yet. She prayed and told her beads,
in another little room, before a waxen Virgin niched in a little box
against the wall; she bedded herself like a slave.

In another small room is an unpainted wooden table, and behind it sit
half-life-size waxen figures of the Holy Family, made by the very worst
artist that ever lived, perhaps, and clothed in gaudy, flimsy drapery.
[1] The margravine used to bring her meals to this table and DINE WITH
THE HOLY FAMILY. What an idea that was! What a grisly spectacle it must
have been! Imagine it: Those rigid, shock-headed figures, with corpsy
complexions and fish glass eyes, occupying one side of the table in the
constrained attitudes and dead fixedness that distinguish all men that
are born of wax, and this wrinkled, smoldering old fire-eater occupying
the other side, mumbling her prayers and munching her sausages in the
ghostly stillness and shadowy indistinctness of a winter twilight. It
makes one feel crawly even to think of it.