Europe Revised

I >> Irvin S. Cobb >> Europe Revised

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Europe Revised
by Irvin S. Cobb

To My Small Daughter

Who bade me shed a tear at the tomb of Napoleon, which I was very
glad to do, because when I got there my feet certainly were hurting
me.

Note

The picture on page 81 purporting to show the undersigned leaping
head first into a German feather-bed does the undersigned a
cruel injustice. He has a prettier figure than that--oh, oh, much
prettier!

The reader is earnestly entreated not to look at the picture on
page 81. It is the only blot on the McCutcheon of this book.

Respectfully,

The Author.

Chapter I

We Are Going Away From Here

Foreword.--It has always seemed to me that the principal drawback
about the average guidebook is that it is over-freighted with
facts. Guidebooks heretofore have made a specialty of facts--have
abounded in them; facts to be found on every page and in every
paragraph. Reading such a work, you imagine that the besotted
author said to himself, "I will just naturally fill this thing
chock-full of facts"--and then went and did so to the extent of a
prolonged debauch.

Now personally I would be the last one in the world to decry facts
as such. In the abstract I have the highest opinion of them. But
facts, as someone has said, are stubborn things; and stubborn
things, like stubborn people, are frequently tiresome. So it
occurred to me that possibly there might be room for a guidebook
on foreign travel which would not have a single indubitable fact
concealed anywhere about its person. I have even dared to hope
there might be an actual demand on the part of the general public
for such a guidebook. I shall endeavor to meet that desire--if
it exists.

While we are on the subject I wish to say there is probably not a
statement made by me here or hereafter which cannot readily be
controverted. Communications from parties desiring to controvert
this or that assertion will be considered in the order received.
The line forms on the left and parties will kindly avoid crowding.
Triflers and professional controverters save stamps.

With these few introductory remarks we now proceed to the first
subject, which is The Sea: Its Habits and Peculiarities, and the
Quaint Creatures Found upon Its Bosom.

From the very start of this expedition to Europe I labored under
a misapprehension. Everybody told me that as soon as I had got
my sea legs I would begin to love the sea with a vast and passionate
love. As a matter of fact I experienced no trouble whatever in
getting my sea legs. They were my regular legs, the same ones I
use on land. It was my sea stomach that caused all the bother.
First I was afraid I should not get it, and that worried me no
little. Then I got it and was regretful. However, that detail
will come up later in a more suitable place. I am concerned now
with the departure.

Somewhere forward a bugle blares; somewhere rearward a bell jangles.
On the deck overhead is a scurry of feet. In the mysterious
bowels of the ship a mighty mechanism opens its metal mouth and
speaks out briskly. Later it will talk on steadily, with a measured
and a regular voice; but now it is heard frequently, yet intermittently,
like the click of a blind man's cane. Beneath your feet the ship,
which has seemed until this moment as solid as a rock, stirs the
least little bit, as though it had waked up. And now a shiver
runs all through it and you are reminded of that passage from
Pygmalion and Galatea where Pygmalion says with such feeling:

She starts; she moves; she seems to feel the thrill of life along
her keel.

You are under way. You are finally committed to the great adventure.
The necessary good-bys have already been said. Those who in the
goodness of their hearts came to see you off have departed for
shore, leaving sundry suitable and unsuitable gifts behind. You
have examined your stateroom, with its hot and cold decorations,
its running stewardess, its all-night throb service, and its windows
overlooking the Hudson--a stateroom that seemed so large and
commodious until you put one small submissive steamer trunk and
two scared valises in it. You are tired, and yon white bed, with
the high mudguards on it, looks mighty good to you; but you feel
that you must go on deck to wave a fond farewell to the land you
love and the friends you are leaving behind.

You fight your way to the open through companionways full of
frenzied persons who are apparently trying to travel in every
direction at once. On the deck the illusion persists that it is
the dock that is moving and the ship that is standing still. All
about you your fellow passengers crowd the rails, waving and
shouting messages to the people on the dock; the people on the
dock wave back and shout answers. About every other person is
begging somebody to tell auntie to be sure to write. You gather
that auntie will be expected to write weekly, if not oftener.

As the slice of dark water between boat and dock widens, those who
are left behind begin running toward the pierhead in such numbers
that each wide, bright-lit door-opening in turn suggests a flittering
section of a moving-picture film. The only perfectly calm person
in sight is a gorgeous, gold-laced creature standing on the outermost
gunwale of the dock, wearing the kind of uniform that a rear admiral
of the Swiss navy would wear--if the Swiss had any navy--and holding
a speaking trumpet in his hand. This person is not excited, for
he sends thirty-odd-thousand-ton ships off to Europe at frequent
intervals, and so he is impressively and importantly blase about
it; but everybody else is excited. You find yourself rather that
way. You wave at persons you know and then at persons you do not
know.

You continue to wave until the man alongside you, who has spent
years of his life learning to imitate a siren whistle with his
face, suddenly twines his hands about his mouth and lets go a
terrific blast right in your ear. Something seems to warn you
that you are not going to care for this man.

The pier, ceasing to be a long, outstretched finger, seems to fold
back into itself, knuckle-fashion, and presently is but a part
of the oddly foreshortened shoreline, distinguishable only by the
black dot of watchers clustered under a battery of lights, like a
swarm of hiving bees. Out in midstream the tugs, which have been
convoying the ship, let go of her and scuttle off, one in this
direction and one in that, like a brace of teal ducks getting out
of a walrus' way.

Almost imperceptibly her nose straightens down the river and soon
on the starboard quarter--how quickly one picks up these nautical
terms!--looming through the harbor mists, you behold the statue
of Miss Liberty, in her popular specialty of enlightening the
world. So you go below and turn in. Anyway, that is what I did;
for certain of the larger ships of the Cunard line sail at midnight
or even later, and this was such a ship.

For some hours I lay awake, while above me and below me and all
about me the boat settled down to her ordained ship's job, and
began drawing the long, soothing snores that for five days and
nights she was to continue drawing without cessation. There were
so many things to think over. I tried to remember all the
authoritative and conflicting advice that hadbeen offered to me
by traveled friends and well-wishers.

Let's see, now: On shipboard I was to wear only light clothes,
because nobody ever caught cold at sea. I was to wear the heaviest
clothes I had, because the landlubber always caught cold at sea.
I was to tip only those who served me. I was to tip all hands in
moderation, whether they served me or not. If I felt squeamish I
was to do the following things: Eat something. Quit eating. Drink
something. Quit drinking. Stay on deck. Go below and lie perfectly
flat. Seek company. Avoid same. Give it up. Keep it down.

There was but one point on which all of them were agreed. On no
account should I miss Naples; I must see Naples if I did not see
another solitary thing in Europe. Well, I did both--I saw Naples;
and now I should not miss Naples if I never saw it again, and I
do not think I shall. As regards the other suggestions these
friends of mine gave me, I learned in time that all of them were
right and all of them were wrong.

For example, there was the matter of a correct traveling costume.
Between seasons on the Atlantic one wears what best pleases one.
One sees at the same time women in furs and summer boys in white
ducks. Tweed-enshrouded Englishmen and linen-clad American girls
promenade together, giving to the decks that pleasing air of variety
and individuality of apparel only to be found in southern California
during the winter, and in those orthodox pictures in the book of
Robinson Crusoe, where Robinson is depicted as completely wrapped
up in goatskins, while Man Friday is pirouetting round as nude as
a raw oyster and both of them are perfectly comfortable. I used
to wonder how Robinson and Friday did it. Since taking an ocean
trip I understand perfectly. I could do it myself now.

There certainly were a lot of things to think over. I do not
recall now exactly the moment when I ceased thinking them over.
A blank that was measurable by hours ensued. I woke from a dream
about a scrambled egg, in which I was the egg, to find that morning
had arrived and the ship was behaving naughtily.

Here was a ship almost as long as Main Street is back home, and
six stories high, with an English basement; with restaurants and
elevators and retail stores in her; and she was as broad as a
courthouse; and while lying at the dock she had appeared to be
about the most solid and dependable thing in creation--and yet in
just a few hours' time she had altered her whole nature, and was
rolling and sliding and charging and snorting like a warhorse. It
was astonishing in the extreme, and you would not have expected it
of her.

Even as I focused my mind on this phenomenon the doorway was
stealthily entered by a small man in a uniform that made him look
something like an Eton schoolboy and something like a waiter in a
dairy lunch. I was about to have the first illuminating experience
with an English manservant. This was my bedroom steward, by name
Lubly--William Lubly. My hat is off to William Lubly--to him and
to all his kind. He was always on duty; he never seemed to sleep;
he was always in a good humor, and he always thought of the very
thing you wanted just a moment or two before you thought of it
yourself, and came a-running and fetched it to you. Now he was
softly stealing in to close my port. As he screwed the round,
brass-faced window fast he glanced my way and caught my apprehensive
eye.

"Good morning, sir," he said, and said it in such a way as to
convey a subtle compliment.

"Is it getting rough outside?" I said--I knew about the inside.
"Thank you," he said; "the sea 'as got up a bit, sir--thank you,
sir."

I was gratified--nay more, I was flattered. And it was so delicately
done too. I really did not have the heart to tell him that I was
not solely responsible--that I had, so to speak, collaborators;
but Lubly stood ready always to accord me a proper amount of
recognition for everything that happened on that ship. Only the
next day, I think it was, I asked him where we were. This occurred
on deck. He had just answered a lady who wanted to know whether
we should have good weather on the day we landed at Fishguard and
whether we should get in on time. Without a moment's hesitation
he told her; and then he turned to me with the air of giving credit
where credit is due, and said:

"Thank you, sir--we are just off the Banks, thank you."

Lubly ran true to form. The British serving classes are ever like
that, whether met with at sea or on their native soil. They are
a great and a noble institution. Give an English servant a kind
word and he thanks you. Give him a harsh word and he still thanks
you. Ask a question of a London policeman--he tells you fully and
then he thanks you. Go into an English shop and buy something--the
clerk who serves you thanks you with enthusiasm. Go in and fail
to buy something--he still thanks you, but without the
enthusiasm.

One kind of Englishman says Thank you, sir; and one kind--the
Cockney who has been educated--says Thenks; but the majority brief
it into a short but expressive expletive and merely say: Kew. Kew
is the commonest word in the British Isles. Stroidinary runs it
a close second, but Kew comes first. You hear it everywhere.
Hence Kew Gardens; they are named for it.

All the types that travel on a big English-owned ship were on ours.
I take it that there is a requirement in the maritime regulations
to the effect that the set must be complete before a ship may put
to sea. To begin with, there was a member of a British legation
from somewhere going home on leave, for a holiday, or a funeral.
At least I heard it was a holiday, but I should have said he was
going home for the other occasion. He wore an Honorable attached
to the front of his name and carried several extra initials behind
in the rumble; and he was filled up with that true British reserve
which a certain sort of Britisher always develops while traveling
in foreign lands. He was upward of seven feet tall, as the crow
flies, and very thin and rigid.

Viewing him, you got the impression that his framework all ran
straight up and down, like the wires in a bird cage, with barely
enough perches extending across from side to side to keep him from
caving in and crushing the canaries to death. On second thought
I judge I had better make this comparison in the singular number
--there would not have been room in him for more than one canary.

Every morning for an hour, and again every afternoon for an hour,
he marched solemnly round and round the promenade deck, always
alone and always with his mournful gaze fixed on the far horizon.
As I said before, however, he stood very high in the air, and it
may have been he feared, if he ever did look down at his feet, he
should turn dizzy and be seized with an uncontrollable desire to
leap off and end all; so I am not blaming him for that.

He would walk his hour out to the sixtieth second of the sixtieth
minute and then he would sit in his steamer chair, as silent as a
glacier and as inaccessible as one. If it were afternoon he would
have his tea at five o'clock and then, with his soul still full
of cracked ice, he would go below and dress for dinner; but he
never spoke to anyone. His steamer chair was right-hand chair to
mine and often we practically touched elbows; but he did not see
me once.

I had a terrible thought. Suppose now, I said to myself--just
suppose that this ship were to sink and only we two were saved;
and suppose we were cast away on a desert island and spent years
and years there, never knowing each other's name and never mingling
together socially until the rescue ship came along--and not even
then unless there was some mutual acquaintance aboard her to
introduce us properly! It was indeed a frightful thought! It made
me shudder.

Among our company was a younger son going home after a tour of the
Colonies--Canada and Australia, and all that sort of bally rot.
I believe there is always at least one younger son on every
well-conducted English boat; the family keeps him on a remittance
and seems to feel easier in its mind when he is traveling. The
British statesman who said the sun never sets on British possessions
spoke the truth, but the reporters in committing his memorable
utterance to paper spelt the keyword wrong--undoubtedly he meant
the other kind--the younger kind.

This particular example of the species was in every way up to grade
and sample. A happy combination of open air, open pores and open
casegoods gave to his face the exact color of a slice of rare roast
beef; it also had the expression of one. With a dab of English
mustard in the lobe of one ear and a savory bit of watercress stuck
in his hair for a garnish, he could have passed anywhere for a
slice of cold roast beef.

He was reasonably exclusive too. Not until the day we landed did
he and the Honorable member of the legation learn--quite by chance
--that they were third cousins--or something of that sort--to one
another. And so, after the relationship had been thoroughly
established through the kindly offices of a third party, they
fraternized to the extent of riding up to London on the same
boat-train, merely using different compartments of different
carriages. The English aristocrat is a tolerably social animal
when traveling; but, at the same time, he does not carry his
sociability to an excess. He shows restraint.

Also, we had with us the elderly gentleman of impaired disposition,
who had crossed thirty times before and was now completing his
thirty-first trip, and getting madder and madder about it every
minute. I saw him only with his clothes on; but I should say,
speaking offhand, that he had at least fourteen rattles and a
button. His poison sacs hung 'way down. Others may have taken
them for dewlaps, but I knew better; they were poison sacs.

It was quite apparent that he abhorred the very idea of having to
cross to Europe on the same ocean with the rest of us, let alone
on the same ship. And for persons who were taking their first
trip abroad his contempt was absolutely unutterable; he choked at
the bare mention of such a criminal's name and offense. You would
hear him communing with himself and a Scotch and soda.

"Bah!" he would say bitterly, addressing the soda-bottle. "These
idiots who've never been anywhere talking about this being rough
weather! Rough weather, mind you! Bah! People shouldn't be allowed
to go to sea until they know something about it. Bah!"

By the fourth day out his gums were as blue as indigo, and he was
so swelled up with his own venom he looked dropsical. I judged
his bite would have caused death in from twelve to fourteen minutes,
preceded by coma and convulsive rigors. We called him old Colonel
Gila Monster or Judge Stinging Lizard, for short.

There was the spry and conversational gentleman who looked like
an Englishman, but was of the type commonly denominated in our own
land as breezy. So he could not have been an Englishman. Once
in a while there comes along an Englishman who is windy, and
frequently you meet one who is drafty; but there was never a breezy
Englishman yet.

With that interest in other people's business which the close
communion of a ship so promptly breeds in most of us, we fell to
wondering who and what he might be; but the minute the suspect
came into the salon for dinner the first night out I read his
secret at a glance. He belonged to a refined song-and-dance team
doing sketches in vaudeville. He could not have been anything
else--he had jet buttons on his evening clothes.

There was the young woman--she had elocutionary talents, it turned
out afterward, and had graduated with honors from a school of
expression--who assisted in getting up the ship's concert and then
took part in it, both of those acts being mistakes on her part,
as it proved.

And there was the official he-beauty of the ship. He was without
a wrinkle in his clothes--or his mind either; and he managed to
maneuver so that when he sat in the smoking room he always faced
a mirror. That was company enough for him. He never grew lonely
or bored then. Only one night he discovered something wrong about
one of his eyebrows. He gave a pained start; and then, oblivious
of those of us who hovered about enjoying the spectacle, he spent
a long time working with the blemish. The eyebrow was stubborn,
though, and he just couldn't make it behave; so he grew petulant
and fretful, and finally went away to bed in a huff. Had it not
been for fear of stopping his watch, I am sure he would have slapped
himself on the wrist.

This fair youth was one of the delights of the voyage. One felt
that if he had merely a pair of tweezers and a mustache comb and
a hand glass he would never, never be at a loss for a solution of
the problem that worries so many writers for the farm journals--a
way to spend the long winter evenings pleasantly.

Chapter II

My Bonny Lies over the Ocean--Lies and Lies and Lies

Of course, we had a bridal couple and a troupe of professional
deep-sea fishermen aboard. We just naturally had to have them.
Without them, I doubt whether the ship could have sailed. The
bridal couple were from somewhere in the central part of Ohio and
they were taking their honeymoon tour; but, if I were a bridal
couple from the central part of Ohio and had never been to sea
before, as was the case in this particular instance, I should take
my honeymoon ashore and keep it there. I most certainly should!
This couple of ours came aboard billing and cooing to beat the
lovebirds. They made it plain to all that they had just been
married and were proud of it. Their baggage was brand-new, and
the groom's shoes were shiny with that pristine shininess which,
once destroyed, can never be restored; and the bride wore her
going-and-giving-away outfit.

Just prior to sailing and on the morning after they were all over
the ship. Everywhere you went you seemed to meet them and they
were always wrestling. You entered a quiet side passage--there
they were, exchanging a kiss--one of the long-drawn, deep-siphoned,
sirupy kind. You stepped into the writing room thinking to find
it deserted, and at sight of you they broke grips and sprang apart,
eyeing you like a pair of startled fawns surprised by the cruel
huntsman in a forest glade. At all other times, though, they had
eyes but for each other.

A day came, however--and it was the second day out--when they were
among the missing. For two days and two nights, while the good
ship floundered on the tempestuous bosom of the overwrought ocean,
they were gone from human ken. On the afternoon of the third day,
the sea being calmer now, but still sufficiently rough to satisfy
the most exacting, a few hardy and convalescent souls sat in a
shawl-wrapped row on the lee side of the ship.

There came two stewards, bearing with them pillows and blankets
and rugs. These articles were disposed to advantage in two steamer
chairs. Then the stewards hurried away; but presently they
reappeared, dragging the limp and dangling forms of the bridal
couple from the central part of Ohio. But oh, my countrymen, what
a spectacle! And what a change from what had been!

The going-away gown was wrinkled, as though worn for a period of
time by one suddenly and sorely stricken in the midst of health.
The bride's once well-coifed hair hung in lank disarray about a
face that was the color of prime old sage cheese--yellow, with a
fleck of green here and there--and in her wan and rolling eye was
the hunted look of one who hears something unpleasant stirring a
long way off and fears it is coming this way.

Side by side the stewards stretched them prone on their chairs and
tucked them in. Her face was turned from him. For some time
both of them lay there without visible signs of life--just two
muffled, misery-stricken heaps. Then, slowly and languidly, the
youth stretched forth an arm from his wrappings and fingered the
swaddling folds that enveloped the form of his beloved.

It may have been he thought it was about time to begin picking the
coverlid, or it may have been the promptings of reawakened romance,
once more feebly astir within his bosom. At any rate, gently and
softly, his hand fell on the rug about where her shoulder ought
to be. She still had life enough left in her to shake it off--and
she did. Hurt, he waited a moment, then caressed her again. "Stop
that!" she cried in a low but venomous tone. "Don't you dare touch
me!"

So he touched her no more, but only lay there mute and motionless;
and from his look one might plumb the sorrows of his soul and know
how shocked he was, and how grieved and heartstricken! Love's
young dream was o'er! He had thought she loved him, but now he
knew better. Their marriage had been a terrible mistake and he
would give her back her freedom; he would give it back to her as
soon as he was able to sit up. Thus one interpreted his
expression.

On the day we landed, however, they were seen again. We were
nosing northward through a dimpled duckpond of a sea, with the
Welsh coast on one side and Ireland just over the way. People who
had not been seen during the voyage came up to breathe, wearing
the air of persons who had just returned from the valley of the
shadow and were mighty glad to be back; and with those others came
our bridal couple.

I inadvertently stumbled on them in an obscure companionway. Their
cheeks again wore the bloom of youth and health, and they were in
a tight clinch; it was indeed a pretty sight. Love had returned
on roseate pinions and the honeymoon had been resumed at the point
where postponed on account of bad weather.

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