by Mark Twain
And then there is painting. What a red rag is to a bull, Turner’s “Slave Ship” was to me, before I studied Art. Mr. Ruskin is educated in art up to a point where that picture throws him into as mad an ecstacy of pleasure as it used to throw me into one of rage, last year, when I was ignorant. His cultivation enables him,—and me, now,—to see water in that glaring yellow mud, and natural effects in those lurid explosions of mixed smoke and flame, and crimson sunset glories; it reconciles him,—and me, now,—to the floating of iron cable-chains and other unfloatable things; it reconciles us to fishes swimming around on top of the mud,—I mean the water. The most of the picture is a manifest impossibility,—that is to say, a lie; and only rigid cultivation can enable a man to find truth in a lie. But it enabled Mr. Ruskin to do it, and it has enabled me to do it, and I am thankful for it. A Boston newspaper reporter went and took a look at the Slave Ship floundering about in that fierce conflagration of reds and yellows, and said it reminded him of a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes. In my then uneducated state, that went home to my non-cultivation, and I thought here is a man with an unobstructed eye. Mr. Ruskin would have said: This person is an ass. That is what I would say, now.12
However, our business in Baden-Baden this time, was to join our courier. I had thought it best to hire one, as we should be in Italy, by and by, and we did not know that language. Neither did he. We found him at the hotel, ready to take charge of us. I asked him if he was “all fixed.” He said he was. That was very true. He had a trunk, two small satchels, and an umbrella. I was to pay him $55 a month and railway fares. On the continent the railway fare on a trunk is about the same it is on a man. Couriers do not have to pay any board and lodging. This seems a great saving to the tourist,—at first. It does not occur to the tourist that somebody pays that man’s board and lodging. It occurs to him by and by, however, in one of his lucid moments.
CHAPTER XXV
NEXT MORNING WE left in the train for Switzerland, and reached Lucerne about ten o’clock at night. The first discovery I made was that the beauty of the lake had not been exaggerated. Within a day or two I made another discovery. This was, that the lauded chamois is not a wild goat; that it is not a horned animal; that it is not shy; that it does not avoid human society; and that there is no peril in hunting it. The chamois is a black or brown creature no bigger than a mustard seed; you do not have to go after it, it comes after you; it arrives in vast herds and skips and scampers all over your body, inside your clothes; thus it is not shy, but extremely sociable; it is not afraid of man, on the contrary it will attack him; its bite is not dangerous, but neither is it pleasant; its activity has not been overstated,—if you try to put your finger on it, it will skip a thousand times its own length at one jump, and no eye is sharp enough to see where it lights. A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about the Swiss chamois and the perils of hunting it, whereas the truth is that even women and children hunt it, and fearlessly; indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is going on all the time, day and night, in bed and out of it. It is poetic foolishness to hunt it with a gun; very few people do that; there is not one man in a million who can hit it with a gun. It is much easier to catch it than it is to shoot it, and only the experienced chamois hunter can do either. Another common piece of exaggeration is that about the “scarcity” of the chamois. It is the reverse of scarce. Droves of 100,000,000 chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress up the chamois hunter, in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all. The article of commerce called chamois-skin is another fraud; nobody could skin a chamois, it is too small. The creature is a humbug in every way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimental exaggeration. It was no pleasure to me to find the chamois out, for he had been one of my pet illusions; all my life it had been my dream to see him in his native wilds some day, and engage in the adventurous sport of chasing him from cliff to cliff. It is no pleasure to me to expose him, now, and destroy the reader’s delight in him and respect for him, but still it must be done, for when an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.
Lucerne is a charming place. It begins at the water’s edge, with a fringe of hotels, and scrambles up and spreads itself over two or three sharp hills in a crowded, disorderly, but picturesque way, offering to the eye a heaped-up confusion of red roofs, quaint gables, dormer windows, toothpick steeples, with here and there a bit of ancient embattled wall bending itself over the ridges, worm-fashion, and here and there an old square tower of heavy masonry. And also here and there a town clock with only one hand,—a hand which stretches straight across the dial and has no joint in it; such a clock helps out the picture, but you cannot tell the time of day by it. Between the curving line of hotels and the lake is a broad avenue with lamps and a double rank of low shade trees. The lake front is walled with masonry like a pier, and has a railing, to keep people from walking overboard. All day long the vehicles dash along the avenue, and nurses, children and tourists sit in the shade of the trees, or lean on the railing and watch the schools of fishes darting about in the clear water or gaze out over the lake at the stately border of snow-hooded mountain peaks. Little pleasure steamers, black with people, are coming and going all the time; and everywhere one sees young girls and young men paddling about in fanciful row-boats, or skimming along by the help of sails when there is any wind. The front rooms of the hotels have little railed balconies, where one may take his private luncheon in calm cool comfort and look down upon this busy and pretty scene and enjoy it without having to do any of the work connected with it.
Most of the people, both male and female, are in walking costume, and carry alpenstocks. Evidently it is not considered safe to go about in Switzerland, even in town, without an alpenstock. If the tourist forgets, and comes down to breakfast without his alpenstock, he goes back and gets it, and stands it up in the corner. When his touring in Switzerland is finished, he does not throw that broomstick away, but lugs it home with him, to the far corners of the earth, although this costs him more trouble and bother than a baby or a courier could. You see, the alpenstock is his trophy; his name is burned upon it; and if he has climbed a hill, or jumped a brook, or traversed a brickyard with it, he has the names of those places burned upon it, too. Thus it is his regimental flag, so to speak, and bears the record of his achievements. It is worth three francs when he buys it, but a bonanza could not purchase it after his great deeds have been inscribed upon it. There are artisans all about Switzerland whose trade it is to burn these things upon the alpenstock of the tourist. And observe, a man is respected in Switzerland according to his alpenstock. I found I could get no attention there, while I carried an unbranded one. However, branding is not expensive, so I soon remedied that. The effect upon the next detachment of tourists was very marked. I felt repaid for my trouble.
Half of the summer horde in Switzerland is made up of English people; the other half is made up of many nationalities, the Germans leading and the Americans coming next. The Americans were not as numerous as I had expected they would be.
The 7.30 table d’hote at the great Schweitzerhof furnished a mighty array and variety of nationalities, but it offered a better opportunity to observe costumes than people, for the multitude sat at immensely long tables, and therefore the faces were mainly seen in perspective; but the breakfasts were served at small round tables, and then if one had the fortune to get a table in the midst of the assemblage he could have as many faces to study as he could desire. We used to try to guess out the nationalities, and generally succeeded tolerably well. Sometimes we tried to guess people’s names; but that was a failure; that is a thing which probably requires a good deal of practice. We presently dropped it and gave our effort
s to less difficult particulars. One morning I said,—
“There is an American party.”
Harris said,—
“Yes,—but name the State.”
I named one State, Harris named another. We agreed upon one thing, however,—that the young girl with the party was very beautiful, and very tastefully dressed. But we disagreed as to her age. I said she was eighteen, Harris said she was twenty. The dispute between us waxed warm and I finally said, with a pretense of being in earnest,—
“Well, there is one way to settle the matter,—I will go and ask her.”
Harris said, sarcastically, “Certainly, that is the thing to do. All you need to do is to use the common formula over here: go and say, ‘I’m an American!’ Of course she will be glad to see you.”
Then he hinted that perhaps there was no great danger of my venturing to speak to her.
I said, “I was only talking,—I didn’t intend to approach her, but I see that you do not know what an intrepid person I am. I am not afraid of any woman that walks. I will go and speak to this young girl.”
The thing I had in my mind was not difficult. I meant to address her in the most respectful way and ask her to pardon me if her strong resemblance to a former acquaintance of mine was deceiving me; and when she should reply that the name I mentioned was not the name she bore, I meant to beg pardon again, most respectfully, and retire. There would be no harm done. I walked to her table, bowed to the gentleman, then turned to her and was about to begin my little speech when she exclaimed, —
“I knew I wasn’t mistaken,—I told John it was you! John said it probably wasn’t, but I knew I was right. I said you would recognize me presently and come over; and I’m glad you did, for I shouldn’t have felt much flattered if you had gone out of this room without recognizing me. Sit down, sit down,—how odd it is,—you are the last person I was ever expecting to see again.”
This was a stupefying surprise. It took my wits clear away, for an instant. However, we shook hands cordially all around, and I sat down. But truly this was the tightest place I ever was in. I seemed to vaguely remember the girl’s face, now, but I had no idea where I had seen it before, or what name belonged with it. I immediately tried to get up a diversion about Swiss scenery, to keep her from launching into topics that might betray that I did not know her, but it was of no use, she went right along upon matters which interested her more:
“O dear, what a night that was, when the sea washed the forward boats away,—do you remember it?”
“O, don’t I!” said I,—but I didn’t. I wished the sea had washed the rudder and the smoke-stack and the captain away, —then I could have located this questioner.
“And don’t you remember how frightened poor Mary was, and how she cried?”
“Indeed I do!” said I. “Dear me, how it all comes back!”
I fervently wished it would come back,—but my memory was a blank. The wise way would have been to frankly own up; but I could not bring myself to do that, after the young girl had praised me so for recognizing her; so I went on, deeper and deeper into the mire, hoping for a chance clue but never getting one. The Unrecognizable continued, with vivacity,—
“Do you know, George married Mary, after all?”
“Why, no! Did he?”
“Indeed he did. He said he did not believe she was half as much to blame as her father was, and I thought he was right. Didn’t you?”
“Of course he was. It was a perfectly plain case. I always said so.”
“Why no you didn’t!—at least that summer.”
“Oh, no, not that summer. No, you are perfectly right about that. It was the following winter that I said it.”
“Well, as it turned out, Mary was not in the least to blame, —it was all her father’s fault,—at least his and old Darley’s.”
It was necessary to say something,—so I said,—
“I always regarded Darley as a troublesome old thing.”
“So he was, but then they always had a great affection for him, although he had so many eccentricities. You remember that when the weather was the least cold, he would try to come into the house.”
I was rather afraid to proceed. Evidently Darley was not a man,—he must be some other kind of animal,—possibly a dog, maybe an elephant. However, tails are common to all animals, so I ventured to say,—
“And what a tail he had!”
“One! He had a thousand!”
This was bewildering. I did not quite know what to say, so I only said,—
“Yes, he was rather well fixed in the matter of tails.”
“For a negro, and a crazy one at that, I should say he was,” said she.
It was getting pretty sultry for me. I said to myself, “Is it possible she is going to stop there, and wait for me to speak? If she does, the conversation is blocked. A negro with a thousand tails is a topic which a person cannot talk upon fluently and instructively without more or less preparation. As to diving rashly into such a vast subject,—”
But here, to my gratitude, she interrupted my thought by saying,—
“Yes, when it came to tales of his crazy woes, there was simply no end to them if anybody would listen. His own quarters were comfortable enough, but when the weather was cold, the family were sure to have his company,—nothing could keep him out of the house. But they always bore it kindly because he had saved Tom’s life, years before. You remember Tom?”
“O, perfectly. Fine fellow he was, too.”
“Yes he was. And what a pretty little thing his child was!”
“You may well say that. I never saw a prettier child.”
“I used to delight to pet it and dandle it and play with it.”
“So did I.”
“You named it. What was that name? I can’t call it to mind.”
It appeared to me that the ice was getting pretty thin, here. I would have given something to know what the child’s sex was. However, I had the good luck to think of a name that would fit either sex,—so I brought it out,—
“I named it Frances.”
“From a relative, I suppose? But you named the one that died, too,—one that I never saw. What did you call that one?”
I was out of neutral names, but as the child was dead and she had never seen it, I thought I might risk a name for it and trust to luck. Therefore I said,—
“I called that one Thomas Henry.”
She said, musingly,—
“That is very singular . . . . . . very singular.”
I sat still and let the cold sweat run down. I was in a good deal of trouble, but I believed I could worry through if she wouldn’t ask me to name any more children. I wondered where the lightning was going to strike next. She was still ruminating over that last child’s title, but presently she said,—
“I have always been sorry you were away at the time,—I would have had you name my child.”
“Your child! Are you married?”
“I have been married thirteen years.”
“Christened, you mean.”
“No, married. The youth by your side is my son.”
“It seems incredible,—even impossible. I do not mean any harm by it, but would you mind telling me if you are any over eighteen?—that is to say, will you tell me how old you are?”
“I was just nineteen the day of the storm we were talking about. That was my birth-day.”
That did not help matters much, as I did not know the date of the storm. I tried to think of some non-committal thing to say, to keep up my end of the talk and render my poverty in the matter of reminiscences as little noticeable as possible, but I seemed to be about out of non-committal things. I was about to say, “You haven’t changed a bit since then,”—but that was risky. I thought of saying “You have improved ever so much since then,”—but that wouldn’t answer, of course. I was about to try a shy at the weather, for a saving change, when the girl slipped in ahead of me and said,—
“How I have enjoyed this talk o
ver those happy old times, —haven’t you?” “I never have spent such a half hour in all my life before!” said I, with emotion; and I could have added, with a near approach to truth, “and I would rather be scalped than spend another one like it.” I was holily grateful to be through with the ordeal, and was about to make my good-byes and get out, when the girl said,—
“But there is one thing that is ever so puzzling to me.”
“Why what is that?”
“That dead child’s name. What did you say it was?”
Here was another balmy place to be in: I had forgotten the child’s name; I hadn’t imagined it would be needed again. However, I had to pretend to know, anyway, so I said,—
“Joseph William.”
The youth at my side corrected me, and said,—
“No,—Thomas Henry.”
I thanked him,—in words,—and said, with trepidation,—
“O yes,—I was thinking of another child that I named,—I have named a great many, and I get them confused,—this one was named Henry Thompson,—”
“Thomas Henry,” calmly interposed the boy.
I thanked him again,—strictly in words,—and stammered out,—
“Thomas Henry,—yes, Thomas Henry was the poor child’s name. I named him for Thomas,—er,—Thomas Carlyle, the great author, you know,—and Henry—er,—er,—Henry the Eighth. The parents were very grateful to have a child named Thomas Henry.”
“That makes it more singular than ever,” murmured my beautiful friend.
“Does it? Why?”
“Because when the parents speak of that child now, they always call it Susan Amelia.”
That spiked my gun. I could not say anything. I was entirely out of verbal obliquities; to go further would be to lie, and that I would not do; so I simply sat still and suffered,—sat mutely and resignedly there, and sizzled,—for I was being slowly fried to death in my own blushes. Presently the enemy laughed a happy laugh and said,—