A Tramp Abroad

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


THE LEGEND

In the Middle Ages, a couple of young dukes, brothers, took opposite
sides in one of the wars, the one fighting for the Emperor, the other
against him. One of them owned the castle and village on top of the
mound which I have been speaking of, and in his absence his brother
came with his knights and soldiers and began a siege. It was a long and
tedious business, for the people made a stubborn and faithful defense.
But at last their supplies ran out and starvation began its work;
more fell by hunger than by the missiles of the enemy. They by and
by surrendered, and begged for charitable terms. But the beleaguering
prince was so incensed against them for their long resistance that he
said he would spare none but the women and children--all men should be
put to the sword without exception, and all their goods destroyed. Then
the women came and fell on their knees and begged for the lives of their
husbands.

"No," said the prince, "not a man of them shall escape alive; you
yourselves shall go with your children into houseless and friendless
banishment; but that you may not starve I grant you this one grace,
that each woman may bear with her from this place as much of her most
valuable property as she is able to carry."

Very well, presently the gates swung open and out filed those women
carrying their HUSBANDS on their shoulders. The besiegers, furious at
the trick, rushed forward to slaughter the men, but the Duke stepped
between and said:

"No, put up your swords--a prince's word is inviolable."

When we got back to the hotel, King Arthur's Round Table was ready for
us in its white drapery, and the head waiter and his first assistant, in
swallow-tails and white cravats, brought in the soup and the hot plates
at once.

Mr. X had ordered the dinner, and when the wine came on, he picked up
a bottle, glanced at the label, and then turned to the grave, the
melancholy, the sepulchral head waiter and said it was not the sort of
wine he had asked for. The head waiter picked up the bottle, cast his
undertaker-eye on it and said:

"It is true; I beg pardon." Then he turned on his subordinate and calmly
said, "Bring another label."

At the same time he slid the present label off with his hand and laid it
aside; it had been newly put on, its paste was still wet. When the new
label came, he put it on; our French wine being now turned into German
wine, according to desire, the head waiter went blandly about his other
duties, as if the working of this sort of miracle was a common and easy
thing to him.

Mr. X said he had not known, before, that there were people honest
enough to do this miracle in public, but he was aware that thousands
upon thousands of labels were imported into America from Europe every
year, to enable dealers to furnish to their customers in a quiet and
inexpensive way all the different kinds of foreign wines they might
require.

We took a turn around the town, after dinner, and found it fully as
interesting in the moonlight as it had been in the daytime. The streets
were narrow and roughly paved, and there was not a sidewalk or a
street-lamp anywhere. The dwellings were centuries old, and vast enough
for hotels. They widened all the way up; the stories projected further
and further forward and aside as they ascended, and the long rows
of lighted windows, filled with little bits of panes, curtained with
figured white muslin and adorned outside with boxes of flowers, made
a pretty effect. The moon was bright, and the light and shadow very
strong; and nothing could be more picturesque than those curving
streets, with their rows of huge high gables leaning far over toward
each other in a friendly gossiping way, and the crowds below drifting
through the alternating blots of gloom and mellow bars of moonlight.
Nearly everybody was abroad, chatting, singing, romping, or massed in
lazy comfortable attitudes in the doorways.

In one place there was a public building which was fenced about with a
thick, rusty chain, which sagged from post to post in a succession of
low swings. The pavement, here, was made of heavy blocks of stone. In
the glare of the moon a party of barefooted children were swinging on
those chains and having a noisy good time. They were not the first ones
who have done that; even their great-great-grandfathers had not been the
first to do it when they were children. The strokes of the bare feet
had worn grooves inches deep in the stone flags; it had taken many
generations of swinging children to accomplish that. Everywhere in the
town were the mold and decay that go with antiquity, and evidence of it;
but I do not know that anything else gave us so vivid a sense of the old
age of Heilbronn as those footworn grooves in the paving-stones.



CHAPTER XIII [My Long Crawl in the Dark]

When we got back to the hotel I wound and set the pedometer and put
it in my pocket, for I was to carry it next day and keep record of the
miles we made. The work which we had given the instrument to do during
the day which had just closed had not fatigued it perceptibly.

We were in bed by ten, for we wanted to be up and away on our tramp
homeward with the dawn. I hung fire, but Harris went to sleep at once.
I hate a man who goes to sleep at once; there is a sort of indefinable
something about it which is not exactly an insult, and yet is an
insolence; and one which is hard to bear, too. I lay there fretting
over this injury, and trying to go to sleep; but the harder I tried, the
wider awake I grew. I got to feeling very lonely in the dark, with no
company but an undigested dinner. My mind got a start by and by, and
began to consider the beginning of every subject which has ever been
thought of; but it never went further than the beginning; it was touch
and go; it fled from topic to topic with a frantic speed. At the end of
an hour my head was in a perfect whirl and I was dead tired, fagged out.

The fatigue was so great that it presently began to make some head
against the nervous excitement; while imagining myself wide awake, I
would really doze into momentary unconsciousness, and come suddenly out
of it with a physical jerk which nearly wrenched my joints apart--the
delusion of the instant being that I was tumbling backward over a
precipice. After I had fallen over eight or nine precipices and thus
found out that one half of my brain had been asleep eight or nine times
without the wide-awake, hard-working other half suspecting it, the
periodical unconsciousnesses began to extend their spell gradually over
more of my brain-territory, and at last I sank into a drowse which grew
deeper and deeper and was doubtless just on the very point of being a
solid, blessed dreamless stupor, when--what was that?

My dulled faculties dragged themselves partly back to life and took a
receptive attitude. Now out of an immense, a limitless distance, came
a something which grew and grew, and approached, and presently was
recognizable as a sound--it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before.
This sound was a mile away, now--perhaps it was the murmur of a storm;
and now it was nearer--not a quarter of a mile away; was it the muffled
rasping and grinding of distant machinery? No, it came still nearer; was
it the measured tramp of a marching troop? But it came nearer still,
and still nearer--and at last it was right in the room: it was merely
a mouse gnawing the woodwork. So I had held my breath all that time for
such a trifle.

Well, what was done could not be helped; I would go to sleep at once and
make up the lost time. That was a thoughtless thought. Without intending
it--hardly knowing it--I fell to listening intently to that sound, and
even unconsciously counting the strokes of the mouse's nutmeg-grater.
Presently I was deriving exquisite suffering from this employment, yet
maybe I could have endured it if the mouse had attended steadily to
his work; but he did not do that; he stopped every now and then, and I
suffered more while waiting and listening for him to begin again than
I did while he was gnawing. Along at first I was mentally offering a
reward of five--six--seven--ten--dollars for that mouse; but toward
the last I was offering rewards which were entirely beyond my means. I
close-reefed my ears--that is to say, I bent the flaps of them down
and furled them into five or six folds, and pressed them against the
hearing-orifice--but it did no good: the faculty was so sharpened
by nervous excitement that it was become a microphone and could hear
through the overlays without trouble.


My anger grew to a frenzy. I finally did what all persons before me have
done, clear back to Adam,--resolved to throw something. I reached down
and got my walking-shoes, then sat up in bed and listened, in order to
exactly locate the noise. But I couldn't do it; it was as unlocatable as
a cricket's noise; and where one thinks that that is, is always the very
place where it isn't. So I presently hurled a shoe at random, and with
a vicious vigor. It struck the wall over Harris's head and fell down on
him; I had not imagined I could throw so far. It woke Harris, and I was
glad of it until I found he was not angry; then I was sorry. He soon
went to sleep again, which pleased me; but straightway the mouse began
again, which roused my temper once more. I did not want to wake Harris
a second time, but the gnawing continued until I was compelled to
throw the other shoe. This time I broke a mirror--there were two in the
room--I got the largest one, of course. Harris woke again, but did not
complain, and I was sorrier than ever. I resolved that I would suffer
all possible torture before I would disturb him a third time.

The mouse eventually retired, and by and by I was sinking to sleep, when
a clock began to strike; I counted till it was done, and was about to
drowse again when another clock began; I counted; then the two great
RATHHAUS clock angels began to send forth soft, rich, melodious blasts
from their long trumpets. I had never heard anything that was so lovely,
or weird, or mysterious--but when they got to blowing the quarter-hours,
they seemed to me to be overdoing the thing. Every time I dropped
off for the moment, a new noise woke me. Each time I woke I missed my
coverlet, and had to reach down to the floor and get it again.

At last all sleepiness forsook me. I recognized the fact that I was
hopelessly and permanently wide awake. Wide awake, and feverish and
thirsty. When I had lain tossing there as long as I could endure it, it
occurred to me that it would be a good idea to dress and go out in the
great square and take a refreshing wash in the fountain, and smoke and
reflect there until the remnant of the night was gone.

I believed I could dress in the dark without waking Harris. I had
banished my shoes after the mouse, but my slippers would do for a summer
night. So I rose softly, and gradually got on everything--down to one
sock. I couldn't seem to get on the track of that sock, any way I could
fix it. But I had to have it; so I went down on my hands and knees, with
one slipper on and the other in my hand, and began to paw gently around
and rake the floor, but with no success. I enlarged my circle, and went
on pawing and raking. With every pressure of my knee, how the floor
creaked! and every time I chanced to rake against any article, it seemed
to give out thirty-five or thirty-six times more noise than it would
have done in the daytime. In those cases I always stopped and held
my breath till I was sure Harris had not awakened--then I crept along
again. I moved on and on, but I could not find the sock; I could not
seem to find anything but furniture. I could not remember that there was
much furniture in the room when I went to bed, but the place was alive
with it now--especially chairs--chairs everywhere--had a couple of
families moved in, in the mean time? And I never could seem to GLANCE on
one of those chairs, but always struck it full and square with my head.
My temper rose, by steady and sure degrees, and as I pawed on and on, I
fell to making vicious comments under my breath.

Finally, with a venomous access of irritation, I said I would leave
without the sock; so I rose up and made straight for the door--as I
supposed--and suddenly confronted my dim spectral image in the unbroken
mirror. It startled the breath out of me, for an instant; it also showed
me that I was lost, and had no sort of idea where I was. When I realized
this, I was so angry that I had to sit down on the floor and take hold
of something to keep from lifting the roof off with an explosion of
opinion. If there had been only one mirror, it might possibly have
helped to locate me; but there were two, and two were as bad as a
thousand; besides, these were on opposite sides of the room. I could see
the dim blur of the windows, but in my turned-around condition they were
exactly where they ought not to be, and so they only confused me instead
of helping me.

I started to get up, and knocked down an umbrella; it made a noise
like a pistol-shot when it struck that hard, slick, carpetless floor;
I grated my teeth and held my breath--Harris did not stir. I set the
umbrella slowly and carefully on end against the wall, but as soon as
I took my hand away, its heel slipped from under it, and down it came
again with another bang. I shrunk together and listened a moment in
silent fury--no harm done, everything quiet. With the most painstaking
care and nicety, I stood the umbrella up once more, took my hand away,
and down it came again.

I have been strictly reared, but if it had not been so dark and solemn
and awful there in that lonely, vast room, I do believe I should have
said something then which could not be put into a Sunday-school book
without injuring the sale of it. If my reasoning powers had not been
already sapped dry by my harassments, I would have known better than to
try to set an umbrella on end on one of those glassy German floors in
the dark; it can't be done in the daytime without four failures to one
success. I had one comfort, though--Harris was yet still and silent--he
had not stirred.

The umbrella could not locate me--there were four standing around the
room, and all alike. I thought I would feel along the wall and find the
door in that way. I rose up and began this operation, but raked down
a picture. It was not a large one, but it made noise enough for a
panorama. Harris gave out no sound, but I felt that if I experimented
any further with the pictures I should be sure to wake him. Better give
up trying to get out. Yes, I would find King Arthur's Round Table once
more--I had already found it several times--and use it for a base of
departure on an exploring tour for my bed; if I could find my bed I
could then find my water pitcher; I would quench my raging thirst and
turn in. So I started on my hands and knees, because I could go faster
that way, and with more confidence, too, and not knock down things. By
and by I found the table--with my head--rubbed the bruise a little, then
rose up and started, with hands abroad and fingers spread, to balance
myself. I found a chair; then a wall; then another chair; then a sofa;
then an alpenstock, then another sofa; this confounded me, for I had
thought there was only one sofa. I hunted up the table again and took a
fresh start; found some more chairs.

It occurred to me, now, as it ought to have done before, that as the
table was round, it was therefore of no value as a base to aim from; so
I moved off once more, and at random among the wilderness of chairs and
sofas--wandering off into unfamiliar regions, and presently knocked a
candlestick and knocked off a lamp, grabbed at the lamp and knocked
off a water pitcher with a rattling crash, and thought to myself,
"I've found you at last--I judged I was close upon you." Harris shouted
"murder," and "thieves," and finished with "I'm absolutely drowned."

The crash had roused the house. Mr. X pranced in, in his long
night-garment, with a candle, young Z after him with another candle; a
procession swept in at another door, with candles and lanterns--landlord
and two German guests in their nightgowns and a chambermaid in hers.

I looked around; I was at Harris's bed, a Sabbath-day's journey from my
own. There was only one sofa; it was against the wall; there was only
one chair where a body could get at it--I had been revolving around it
like a planet, and colliding with it like a comet half the night.

I explained how I had been employing myself, and why. Then the
landlord's party left, and the rest of us set about our preparations for
breakfast, for the dawn was ready to break. I glanced furtively at my
pedometer, and found I had made 47 miles. But I did not care, for I had
come out for a pedestrian tour anyway.



CHAPTER XIV [Rafting Down the Neckar]

When the landlord learned that I and my agents were artists, our party
rose perceptibly in his esteem; we rose still higher when he learned
that we were making a pedestrian tour of Europe.

He told us all about the Heidelberg road, and which were the best places
to avoid and which the best ones to tarry at; he charged me less than
cost for the things I broke in the night; he put up a fine luncheon
for us and added to it a quantity of great light-green plums, the
pleasantest fruit in Germany; he was so anxious to do us honor that he
would not allow us to walk out of Heilbronn, but called up Goetz von
Berlichingen's horse and cab and made us ride.

I made a sketch of the turnout. It is not a Work, it is only what
artists call a "study"--a thing to make a finished picture from. This
sketch has several blemishes in it; for instance, the wagon is not
traveling as fast as the horse is. This is wrong. Again, the person
trying to get out of the way is too small; he is out of perspective,
as we say. The two upper lines are not the horse's back, they are the
reigns; there seems to be a wheel missing--this would be corrected in a
finished Work, of course. This thing flying out behind is not a flag,
it is a curtain. That other thing up there is the sun, but I didn't get
enough distance on it. I do not remember, now, what that thing is that
is in front of the man who is running, but I think it is a haystack or a
woman. This study was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879, but did not
take any medal; they do not give medals for studies. [Figure 3]

We discharged the carriage at the bridge. The river was full of
logs--long, slender, barkless pine logs--and we leaned on the rails
of the bridge, and watched the men put them together into rafts. These
rafts were of a shape and construction to suit the crookedness and
extreme narrowness of the Neckar. They were from fifty to one hundred
yards long, and they gradually tapered from a nine-log breadth at their
sterns, to a three-log breadth at their bow-ends. The main part of the
steering is done at the bow, with a pole; the three-log breadth there
furnishes room for only the steersman, for these little logs are not
larger around than an average young lady's waist. The connections of the
several sections of the raft are slack and pliant, so that the raft
may be readily bent into any sort of curve required by the shape of the
river.

The Neckar is in many places so narrow that a person can throw a dog
across it, if he has one; when it is also sharply curved in such places,
the raftsman has to do some pretty nice snug piloting to make the turns.
The river is not always allowed to spread over its whole bed--which is
as much as thirty, and sometimes forty yards wide--but is split into
three equal bodies of water, by stone dikes which throw the main
volume, depth, and current into the central one. In low water these neat
narrow-edged dikes project four or five inches above the surface, like
the comb of a submerged roof, but in high water they are overflowed. A
hatful of rain makes high water in the Neckar, and a basketful produces
an overflow.

There are dikes abreast the Schloss Hotel, and the current is violently
swift at that point. I used to sit for hours in my glass cage, watching
the long, narrow rafts slip along through the central channel, grazing
the right-bank dike and aiming carefully for the middle arch of the
stone bridge below; I watched them in this way, and lost all this time
hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck itself sometime
or other, but was always disappointed. One was smashed there one
morning, but I had just stepped into my room a moment to light a pipe,
so I lost it.

While I was looking down upon the rafts that morning in Heilbronn, the
daredevil spirit of adventure came suddenly upon me, and I said to my
comrades:

"_I_ am going to Heidelberg on a raft. Will you venture with me?"

Their faces paled a little, but they assented with as good a grace as
they could. Harris wanted to cable his mother--thought it his duty to
do that, as he was all she had in this world--so, while he attended to
this, I went down to the longest and finest raft and hailed the captain
with a hearty "Ahoy, shipmate!" which put us upon pleasant terms at
once, and we entered upon business. I said we were on a pedestrian tour
to Heidelberg, and would like to take passage with him. I said this
partly through young Z, who spoke German very well, and partly through
Mr. X, who spoke it peculiarly. I can UNDERSTAND German as well as the
maniac that invented it, but I TALK it best through an interpreter.

The captain hitched up his trousers, then shifted his quid thoughtfully.
Presently he said just what I was expecting he would say--that he had no
license to carry passengers, and therefore was afraid the law would be
after him in case the matter got noised about or any accident happened.
So I CHARTERED the raft and the crew and took all the responsibilities
on myself.

With a rattling song the starboard watch bent to their work and hove
the cable short, then got the anchor home, and our bark moved off with a
stately stride, and soon was bowling along at about two knots an hour.

Our party were grouped amidships. At first the talk was a little gloomy,
and ran mainly upon the shortness of life, the uncertainty of it, the
perils which beset it, and the need and wisdom of being always prepared
for the worst; this shaded off into low-voiced references to the dangers
of the deep, and kindred matters; but as the gray east began to redden
and the mysterious solemnity and silence of the dawn to give place
to the joy-songs of the birds, the talk took a cheerier tone, and our
spirits began to rise steadily.

Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful, but nobody
has understood, and realized, and enjoyed the utmost possibilities of
this soft and peaceful beauty unless he has voyaged down the Neckar on
a raft. The motion of a raft is the needful motion; it is gentle,
and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish
activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under
its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that
harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm,
a deep and tranquil ecstasy. How it contrasts with hot and perspiring
pedestrianism, and dusty and deafening railroad rush, and tedious
jolting behind tired horses over blinding white roads!

We went slipping silently along, between the green and fragrant banks,
with a sense of pleasure and contentment that grew, and grew, all the
time. Sometimes the banks were overhung with thick masses of willows
that wholly hid the ground behind; sometimes we had noble hills on one
hand, clothed densely with foliage to their tops, and on the other hand
open levels blazing with poppies, or clothed in the rich blue of
the corn-flower; sometimes we drifted in the shadow of forests, and
sometimes along the margin of long stretches of velvety grass, fresh and
green and bright, a tireless charm to the eye. And the birds!--they were
everywhere; they swept back and forth across the river constantly, and
their jubilant music was never stilled.

It was a deep and satisfying pleasure to see the sun create the new
morning, and gradually, patiently, lovingly, clothe it on with splendor
after splendor, and glory after glory, till the miracle was complete.
How different is this marvel observed from a raft, from what it is when
one observes it through the dingy windows of a railway-station in some
wretched village while he munches a petrified sandwich and waits for the
train.



CHAPTER XV Down the River [Charming Waterside Pictures]

Men and women and cattle were at work in the dewy fields by this time.
The people often stepped aboard the raft, as we glided along the grassy
shores, and gossiped with us and with the crew for a hundred yards or
so, then stepped ashore again, refreshed by the ride.

Only the men did this; the women were too busy. The women do all kinds
of work on the continent. They dig, they hoe, they reap, they sow, they
bear monstrous burdens on their backs, they shove similar ones long
distances on wheelbarrows, they drag the cart when there is no dog or
lean cow to drag it--and when there is, they assist the dog or cow. Age
is no matter--the older the woman the stronger she is, apparently.
On the farm a woman's duties are not defined--she does a little of
everything; but in the towns it is different, there she only does
certain things, the men do the rest. For instance, a hotel chambermaid
has nothing to do but make beds and fires in fifty or sixty rooms, bring
towels and candles, and fetch several tons of water up several flights
of stairs, a hundred pounds at a time, in prodigious metal pitchers. She
does not have to work more than eighteen or twenty hours a day, and
she can always get down on her knees and scrub the floors of halls and
closets when she is tired and needs a rest.