A Tramp Abroad

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


She was a brand-new bride, innocent, girlish, happy in herself and her
grave and worshiping stripling of a husband; she was about eighteen,
just out of school, free from affections, unconscious of that
passionless multitude around her; and the very first time she smote
that old wreck one recognized that it had met its destiny. Her stripling
brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room--for this bride
went "heeled," as you might say--and bent himself lovingly over and got
ready to turn the pages.

The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end of the keyboard
to the other, just to get her bearings, as it were, and you could see
the congregation set their teeth with the agony of it. Then, without
any more preliminaries, she turned on all the horrors of the "Battle of
Prague," that venerable shivaree, and waded chin-deep in the blood of
the slain. She made a fair and honorable average of two false notes in
every five, but her soul was in arms and she never stopped to correct.
The audience stood it with pretty fair grit for a while, but when the
cannonade waxed hotter and fiercer, and the discord average rose to
four in five, the procession began to move. A few stragglers held their
ground ten minutes longer, but when the girl began to wring the true
inwardness out of the "cries of the wounded," they struck their colors
and retired in a kind of panic.

There never was a completer victory; I was the only non-combatant left
on the field. I would not have deserted my countrywoman anyhow, but
indeed I had no desires in that direction. None of us like mediocrity,
but we all reverence perfection. This girl's music was perfection in its
way; it was the worst music that had ever been achieved on our planet by
a mere human being.

I moved up close, and never lost a strain. When she got through, I
asked her to play it again. She did it with a pleased alacrity and a
heightened enthusiasm. She made it ALL discords, this time. She got an
amount of anguish into the cries of the wounded that shed a new light on
human suffering. She was on the war-path all the evening. All the time,
crowds of people gathered on the porches and pressed their noses against
the windows to look and marvel, but the bravest never ventured in.
The bride went off satisfied and happy with her young fellow, when her
appetite was finally gorged, and the tourists swarmed in again.

What a change has come over Switzerland, and in fact all Europe, during
this century! Seventy or eighty years ago Napoleon was the only man in
Europe who could really be called a traveler; he was the only man who
had devoted his attention to it and taken a powerful interest in it; he
was the only man who had traveled extensively; but now everybody goes
everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited
and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing
hive of restless strangers every summer. But I digress.

In the morning, when we looked out of our windows, we saw a wonderful
sight. Across the valley, and apparently quite neighborly and close at
hand, the giant form of the Jungfrau rose cold and white into the clear
sky, beyond a gateway in the nearer highlands. It reminded me, somehow,
of one of those colossal billows which swells suddenly up beside one's
ship, at sea, sometimes, with its crest and shoulders snowy white, and
the rest of its noble proportions streaked downward with creamy foam.


I took out my sketch-book and made a little picture of the Jungfrau,
merely to get the shape. [Figure 9]

I do not regard this as one of my finished works, in fact I do not rank
it among my Works at all; it is only a study; it is hardly more than
what one might call a sketch. Other artists have done me the grace to
admire it; but I am severe in my judgments of my own pictures, and this
one does not move me.

It was hard to believe that that lofty wooded rampart on the left which
so overtops the Jungfrau was not actually the higher of the two, but it
was not, of course. It is only two or three thousand feet high, and of
course has no snow upon it in summer, whereas the Jungfrau is not much
shorter of fourteen thousand feet high and therefore that lowest verge
of snow on her side, which seems nearly down to the valley level, is
really about seven thousand feet higher up in the air than the summit
of that wooded rampart. It is the distance that makes the deception.
The wooded height is but four or five miles removed from us, but the
Jungfrau is four or five times that distance away.

Walking down the street of shops, in the fore-noon, I was attracted by
a large picture, carved, frame and all, from a single block of
chocolate-colored wood. There are people who know everything. Some of
these had told us that continental shopkeepers always raise their prices
on English and Americans. Many people had told us it was expensive to
buy things through a courier, whereas I had supposed it was just the
reverse. When I saw this picture, I conjectured that it was worth more
than the friend I proposed to buy it for would like to pay, but still it
was worth while to inquire; so I told the courier to step in and ask
the price, as if he wanted it for himself; I told him not to speak in
English, and above all not to reveal the fact that he was a courier.
Then I moved on a few yards, and waited.

The courier came presently and reported the price. I said to myself, "It
is a hundred francs too much," and so dismissed the matter from my
mind. But in the afternoon I was passing that place with Harris, and the
picture attracted me again. We stepped in, to see how much higher
broken German would raise the price. The shopwoman named a figure just
a hundred francs lower than the courier had named. This was a pleasant
surprise. I said I would take it. After I had given directions as to
where it was to be shipped, the shopwoman said, appealingly:

"If you please, do not let your courier know you bought it."

This was an unexpected remark. I said:

"What makes you think I have a courier?"

"Ah, that is very simple; he told me himself."

"He was very thoughtful. But tell me--why did you charge him more than
you are charging me?"

"That is very simple, also: I do not have to pay you a percentage."

"Oh, I begin to see. You would have had to pay the courier a
percentage."

"Undoubtedly. The courier always has his percentage. In this case it
would have been a hundred francs."

"Then the tradesman does not pay a part of it--the purchaser pays all
of it?"

"There are occasions when the tradesman and the courier agree upon a
price which is twice or thrice the value of the article, then the two
divide, and both get a percentage."

"I see. But it seems to me that the purchaser does all the paying, even
then."

"Oh, to be sure! It goes without saying."

"But I have bought this picture myself; therefore why shouldn't the
courier know it?"

The woman exclaimed, in distress:

"Ah, indeed it would take all my little profit! He would come and demand
his hundred francs, and I should have to pay."

"He has not done the buying. You could refuse."

"I could not dare to refuse. He would never bring travelers here again.
More than that, he would denounce me to the other couriers, they would
divert custom from me, and my business would be injured."

I went away in a thoughtful frame of mind. I began to see why a courier
could afford to work for fifty-five dollars a month and his fares. A
month or two later I was able to understand why a courier did not have
to pay any board and lodging, and why my hotel bills were always larger
when I had him with me than when I left him behind, somewhere, for a few
days.

Another thing was also explained, now, apparently. In one town I had
taken the courier to the bank to do the translating when I drew some
money. I had sat in the reading-room till the transaction was finished.
Then a clerk had brought the money to me in person, and had been
exceedingly polite, even going so far as to precede me to the door and
holding it open for me and bow me out as if I had been a distinguished
personage. It was a new experience. Exchange had been in my favor ever
since I had been in Europe, but just that one time. I got simply the
face of my draft, and no extra francs, whereas I had expected to get
quite a number of them. This was the first time I had ever used the
courier at the bank. I had suspected something then, and as long as he
remained with me afterward I managed bank matters by myself.

Still, if I felt that I could afford the tax, I would never travel
without a courier, for a good courier is a convenience whose value
cannot be estimated in dollars and cents. Without him, travel is a
bitter harassment, a purgatory of little exasperating annoyances, a
ceaseless and pitiless punishment--I mean to an irascible man who has no
business capacity and is confused by details.

Without a courier, travel hasn't a ray of pleasure in it, anywhere; but
with him it is a continuous and unruffled delight. He is always at hand,
never has to be sent for; if your bell is not answered promptly--and it
seldom is--you have only to open the door and speak, the courier will
hear, and he will have the order attended to or raise an insurrection.
You tell him what day you will start, and whither you are going--leave
all the rest to him. You need not inquire about trains, or fares, or car
changes, or hotels, or anything else. At the proper time he will put you
in a cab or an omnibus, and drive you to the train or the boat; he has
packed your luggage and transferred it, he has paid all the bills. Other
people have preceded you half an hour to scramble for impossible places
and lose their tempers, but you can take your time; the courier has
secured your seats for you, and you can occupy them at your leisure.

At the station, the crowd mash one another to pulp in the effort to get
the weigher's attention to their trunks; they dispute hotly with these
tyrants, who are cool and indifferent; they get their baggage billets,
at last, and then have another squeeze and another rage over the
disheartening business of trying to get them recorded and paid for, and
still another over the equally disheartening business of trying to get
near enough to the ticket office to buy a ticket; and now, with their
tempers gone to the dogs, they must stand penned up and packed together,
laden with wraps and satchels and shawl-straps, with the weary wife and
babies, in the waiting-room, till the doors are thrown open--and then
all hands make a grand final rush to the train, find it full, and have
to stand on the platform and fret until some more cars are put on. They
are in a condition to kill somebody by this time. Meantime, you have
been sitting in your car, smoking, and observing all this misery in the
extremest comfort.

On the journey the guard is polite and watchful--won't allow anybody to
get into your compartment--tells them you are just recovering from the
small-pox and do not like to be disturbed. For the courier has made
everything right with the guard. At way-stations the courier comes to
your compartment to see if you want a glass of water, or a newspaper,
or anything; at eating-stations he sends luncheon out to you, while the
other people scramble and worry in the dining-rooms. If anything breaks
about the car you are in, and a station-master proposes to pack you and
your agent into a compartment with strangers, the courier reveals to him
confidentially that you are a French duke born deaf and dumb, and the
official comes and makes affable signs that he has ordered a choice car
to be added to the train for you.

At custom-houses the multitude file tediously through, hot and
irritated, and look on while the officers burrow into the trunks and
make a mess of everything; but you hand your keys to the courier and sit
still. Perhaps you arrive at your destination in a rain-storm at ten
at night--you generally do. The multitude spend half an hour verifying
their baggage and getting it transferred to the omnibuses; but the
courier puts you into a vehicle without a moment's loss of time, and
when you reach your hotel you find your rooms have been secured two or
three days in advance, everything is ready, you can go at once to bed.
Some of those other people will have to drift around to two or three
hotels, in the rain, before they find accommodations.

I have not set down half of the virtues that are vested in a good
courier, but I think I have set down a sufficiency of them to show that
an irritable man who can afford one and does not employ him is not a
wise economist. My courier was the worst one in Europe, yet he was a
good deal better than none at all. It could not pay him to be a better
one than he was, because I could not afford to buy things through him.
He was a good enough courier for the small amount he got out of his
service. Yes, to travel with a courier is bliss, to travel without one
is the reverse.

I have had dealings with some very bad couriers; but I have also had
dealings with one who might fairly be called perfection. He was a young
Polander, named Joseph N. Verey. He spoke eight languages, and seemed
to be equally at home in all of them; he was shrewd, prompt, posted,
and punctual; he was fertile in resources, and singularly gifted in the
matter of overcoming difficulties; he not only knew how to do everything
in his line, but he knew the best ways and the quickest; he was handy
with children and invalids; all his employer needed to do was to take
life easy and leave everything to the courier. His address is, care of
Messrs. Gay & Son, Strand, London; he was formerly a conductor of Gay's
tourist parties. Excellent couriers are somewhat rare; if the reader is
about to travel, he will find it to his advantage to make a note of this
one.



CHAPTER XXXIII [We Climb Far--by Buggy]

The beautiful Giesbach Fall is near Interlaken, on the other side of
the lake of Brienz, and is illuminated every night with those gorgeous
theatrical fires whose name I cannot call just at this moment. This was
said to be a spectacle which the tourist ought by no means to miss. I
was strongly tempted, but I could not go there with propriety, because
one goes in a boat. The task which I had set myself was to walk over
Europe on foot, not skim over it in a boat. I had made a tacit contract
with myself; it was my duty to abide by it. I was willing to make boat
trips for pleasure, but I could not conscientiously make them in the way
of business.

It cost me something of a pang to lose that fine sight, but I lived down
the desire, and gained in my self-respect through the triumph. I had
a finer and a grander sight, however, where I was. This was the mighty
dome of the Jungfrau softly outlined against the sky and faintly
silvered by the starlight. There was something subduing in the influence
of that silent and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the
immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel
the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply
by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding
contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice--a spirit
which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a
million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a
million more--and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable,
after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant
desolation.

While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it,
toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the
Alps, and in no other mountains--that strange, deep, nameless influence,
which, once felt, cannot be forgotten--once felt, leaves always
behind it a restless longing to feel it again--a longing which is like
homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning which will plead, implore,
and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative
and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far
countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year--they could
not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity,
because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they
could not help it, and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for
the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but
it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them. Others came nearer
formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and
peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and
chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the
Alps; the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace upon their
hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base
thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of
God.

Down the road a piece was a Kursaal--whatever that may be--and we
joined the human tide to see what sort of enjoyment it might afford.
It was the usual open-air concert, in an ornamental garden, with
wines, beer, milk, whey, grapes, etc.--the whey and the grapes being
necessaries of life to certain invalids whom physicians cannot repair,
and who only continue to exist by the grace of whey or grapes. One of
these departed spirits told me, in a sad and lifeless way, that there
is no way for him to live but by whey, and dearly, dearly loved whey, he
didn't know whey he did, but he did. After making this pun he died--that
is the whey it served him.

Some other remains, preserved from decomposition by the grape system,
told me that the grapes were of a peculiar breed, highly medicinal in
their nature, and that they were counted out and administered by the
grape-doctors as methodically as if they were pills. The new patient,
if very feeble, began with one grape before breakfast, took three
during breakfast, a couple between meals, five at luncheon, three in the
afternoon, seven at dinner, four for supper, and part of a grape just
before going to bed, by way of a general regulator. The quantity was
gradually and regularly increased, according to the needs and capacities
of the patient, until by and by you would find him disposing of his one
grape per second all the day long, and his regular barrel per day.

He said that men cured in this way, and enabled to discard the grape
system, never afterward got over the habit of talking as if they were
dictating to a slow amanuensis, because they always made a pause between
each two words while they sucked the substance out of an imaginary
grape. He said these were tedious people to talk with. He said that men
who had been cured by the other process were easily distinguished from
the rest of mankind because they always tilted their heads back, between
every two words, and swallowed a swig of imaginary whey. He said it was
an impressive thing to observe two men, who had been cured by the two
processes, engaged in conversation--said their pauses and accompanying
movements were so continuous and regular that a stranger would think
himself in the presence of a couple of automatic machines. One finds
out a great many wonderful things, by traveling, if he stumbles upon the
right person.

I did not remain long at the Kursaal; the music was good enough, but it
seemed rather tame after the cyclone of that Arkansaw expert. Besides,
my adventurous spirit had conceived a formidable enterprise--nothing
less than a trip from Interlaken, by the Gemmi and Visp, clear to
Zermatt, on foot! So it was necessary to plan the details, and get ready
for an early start. The courier (this was not the one I have just been
speaking of) thought that the portier of the hotel would be able to tell
us how to find our way. And so it turned out. He showed us the whole
thing, on a relief-map, and we could see our route, with all its
elevations and depressions, its villages and its rivers, as clearly as
if we were sailing over it in a balloon. A relief-map is a great thing.
The portier also wrote down each day's journey and the nightly hotel on
a piece of paper, and made our course so plain that we should never be
able to get lost without high-priced outside help.

I put the courier in the care of a gentleman who was going to Lausanne,
and then we went to bed, after laying out the walking-costumes and
putting them into condition for instant occupation in the morning.

However, when we came down to breakfast at 8 A.M., it looked so much
like rain that I hired a two-horse top-buggy for the first third of the
journey. For two or three hours we jogged along the level road which
skirts the beautiful lake of Thun, with a dim and dreamlike picture of
watery expanses and spectral Alpine forms always before us, veiled in
a mellowing mist. Then a steady downpour set in, and hid everything but
the nearest objects. We kept the rain out of our faces with umbrellas,
and away from our bodies with the leather apron of the buggy; but the
driver sat unsheltered and placidly soaked the weather in and seemed
to like it. We had the road to ourselves, and I never had a pleasanter
excursion.

The weather began to clear while we were driving up a valley called the
Kienthal, and presently a vast black cloud-bank in front of us dissolved
away and uncurtained the grand proportions and the soaring loftiness of
the Blumis Alp. It was a sort of breath-taking surprise; for we had not
supposed there was anything behind that low-hung blanket of sable cloud
but level valley. What we had been mistaking for fleeting glimpses of
sky away aloft there, were really patches of the Blumis's snowy crest
caught through shredded rents in the drifting pall of vapor.

We dined in the inn at Frutigen, and our driver ought to have dined
there, too, but he would not have had time to dine and get drunk
both, so he gave his mind to making a masterpiece of the latter, and
succeeded. A German gentleman and his two young-lady daughters had been
taking their nooning at the inn, and when they left, just ahead of us,
it was plain that their driver was as drunk as ours, and as happy
and good-natured, too, which was saying a good deal. These rascals
overflowed with attentions and information for their guests, and with
brotherly love for each other. They tied their reins, and took off
their coats and hats, so that they might be able to give unencumbered
attention to conversation and to the gestures necessary for its
illustration.

The road was smooth; it led up and over and down a continual succession
of hills; but it was narrow, the horses were used to it, and could
not well get out of it anyhow; so why shouldn't the drivers entertain
themselves and us? The noses of our horses projected sociably into the
rear of the forward carriage, and as we toiled up the long hills our
driver stood up and talked to his friend, and his friend stood up and
talked back to him, with his rear to the scenery. When the top was
reached and we went flying down the other side, there was no change
in the program. I carry in my memory yet the picture of that forward
driver, on his knees on his high seat, resting his elbows on its back,
and beaming down on his passengers, with happy eye, and flying hair, and
jolly red face, and offering his card to the old German gentleman while
he praised his hack and horses, and both teams were whizzing down a
long hill with nobody in a position to tell whether we were bound to
destruction or an undeserved safety.

Toward sunset we entered a beautiful green valley dotted with chalets, a
cozy little domain hidden away from the busy world in a cloistered nook
among giant precipices topped with snowy peaks that seemed to float like
islands above the curling surf of the sea of vapor that severed them
from the lower world. Down from vague and vaporous heights, little
ruffled zigzag milky currents came crawling, and found their way to the
verge of one of those tremendous overhanging walls, whence they plunged,
a shaft of silver, shivered to atoms in mid-descent and turned to an air
puff of luminous dust. Here and there, in grooved depressions among the
snowy desolations of the upper altitudes, one glimpsed the extremity of
a glacier, with its sea-green and honeycombed battlements of ice.

Up the valley, under a dizzy precipice, nestled the village of
Kandersteg, our halting-place for the night. We were soon there, and
housed in the hotel. But the waning day had such an inviting influence
that we did not remain housed many moments, but struck out and followed
a roaring torrent of ice-water up to its far source in a sort of little
grass-carpeted parlor, walled in all around by vast precipices and
overlooked by clustering summits of ice. This was the snuggest little
croquet-ground imaginable; it was perfectly level, and not more than a
mile long by half a mile wide. The walls around it were so gigantic, and
everything about it was on so mighty a scale that it was belittled, by
contrast, to what I have likened it to--a cozy and carpeted parlor. It
was so high above the Kandersteg valley that there was nothing between
it and the snowy-peaks. I had never been in such intimate relations with
the high altitudes before; the snow-peaks had always been remote and
unapproachable grandeurs, hitherto, but now we were hob-a-nob--if one
may use such a seemingly irreverent expression about creations so august
as these.