A Tramp Abroad
“I don't know; it never occurred to me to ask.”
“Well I know. They meant an asylum--an IDIOT asylum, do you understand?
So they DO think there's a pair of us, after all. Now what do you think
of yourself?”
“Well, I don't know. I didn't know I was doing any harm; I didn't MEAN
to do any harm. They were very nice people, and they seemed to like me.”
Harris made some rude remarks and left for his bedroom--to break some
furniture, he said. He was a singularly irascible man; any little thing
would disturb his temper.
I had been well scorched by the young woman, but no matter, I took it
out on Harris. One should always “get even” in some way, else the sore
place will go on hurting.
CHAPTER XXVI
[The Nest of the Cuckoo-clock]
The Hofkirche is celebrated for its organ concerts. All summer long the
tourists flock to that church about six o'clock in the evening, and pay
their franc, and listen to the noise. They don't stay to hear all of
it, but get up and tramp out over the sounding stone floor, meeting late
comers who tramp in in a sounding and vigorous way. This tramping
back and forth is kept up nearly all the time, and is accented by
the continuous slamming of the door, and the coughing and barking and
sneezing of the crowd. Meantime, the big organ is booming and crashing
and thundering away, doing its best to prove that it is the biggest and
best organ in Europe, and that a tight little box of a church is the
most favorable place to average and appreciate its powers in. It is
true, there were some soft and merciful passages occasionally, but the
tramp-tramp of the tourists only allowed one to get fitful glimpses of
them, so to speak. Then right away the organist would let go another
avalanche.
The commerce of Lucerne consists mainly in gimcrackery of the souvenir
sort; the shops are packed with Alpine crystals, photographs of
scenery, and wooden and ivory carvings. I will not conceal the fact that
miniature figures of the Lion of Lucerne are to be had in them. Millions
of them. But they are libels upon him, every one of them. There is a
subtle something about the majestic pathos of the original which the
copyist cannot get. Even the sun fails to get it; both the photographer
and the carver give you a dying lion, and that is all. The shape is
right, the attitude is right, the proportions are right, but that
indescribable something which makes the Lion of Lucerne the most
mournful and moving piece of stone in the world, is wanting.
The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff--for
he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal,
his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking
in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France.
Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream
trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the
smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.
Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered,
reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion--and
all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite
pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of
Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where
he is.
Martyrdom is the luckiest fate that can befall some people. Louis XVI
did not die in his bed, consequently history is very gentle with him;
she is charitable toward his failings, and she finds in him high virtues
which are not usually considered to be virtues when they are lodged in
kings. She makes him out to be a person with a meek and modest spirit,
the heart of a female saint, and a wrong head. None of these qualities
are kingly but the last. Taken together they make a character which
would have fared harshly at the hands of history if its owner had had
the ill luck to miss martyrdom. With the best intentions to do the right
thing, he always managed to do the wrong one. Moreover, nothing could
get the female saint out of him. He knew, well enough, that in national
emergencies he must not consider how he ought to act, as a man, but how
he ought to act as a king; so he honestly tried to sink the man and be
the king--but it was a failure, he only succeeded in being the female
saint. He was not instant in season, but out of season. He could not be
persuaded to do a thing while it could do any good--he was iron, he was
adamant in his stubbornness then--but as soon as the thing had reached a
point where it would be positively harmful to do it, do it he would, and
nothing could stop him. He did not do it because it would be harmful,
but because he hoped it was not yet too late to achieve by it the good
which it would have done if applied earlier. His comprehension was
always a train or two behindhand. If a national toe required amputating,
he could not see that it needed anything more than poulticing; when
others saw that the mortification had reached the knee, he first
perceived that the toe needed cutting off--so he cut it off; and he
severed the leg at the knee when others saw that the disease had reached
the thigh. He was good, and honest, and well meaning, in the matter of
chasing national diseases, but he never could overtake one. As a private
man, he would have been lovable; but viewed as a king, he was strictly
contemptible.
His was a most unroyal career, but the most pitiable spectacle in it was
his sentimental treachery to his Swiss guard on that memorable 10th of
August, when he allowed those heroes to be massacred in his cause, and
forbade them to shed the “sacred French blood” purporting to be flowing
in the veins of the red-capped mob of miscreants that was raging around
the palace. He meant to be kingly, but he was only the female saint once
more. Some of his biographers think that upon this occasion the spirit
of Saint Louis had descended upon him. It must have found pretty cramped
quarters. If Napoleon the First had stood in the shoes of Louis XVI that
day, instead of being merely a casual and unknown looker-on, there would
be no Lion of Lucerne, now, but there would be a well-stocked Communist
graveyard in Paris which would answer just as well to remember the 10th
of August by.
Martyrdom made a saint of Mary Queen of Scots three hundred years ago,
and she has hardly lost all of her saintship yet. Martyrdom made a saint
of the trivial and foolish Marie Antoinette, and her biographers
still keep her fragrant with the odor of sanctity to this day, while
unconsciously proving upon almost every page they write that the only
calamitous instinct which her husband lacked, she supplied--the instinct
to root out and get rid of an honest, able, and loyal official, wherever
she found him. The hideous but beneficent French Revolution would have
been deferred, or would have fallen short of completeness, or even
might not have happened at all, if Marie Antoinette had made the unwise
mistake of not being born. The world owes a great deal to the French
Revolution, and consequently to its two chief promoters, Louis the Poor
in Spirit and his queen.
We did not buy any wooden images of the Lion, nor any ivory or ebony
or marble or chalk or sugar or chocolate ones, or even any photographic
slanders of him. The truth is, these copies were so common, so
universal, in the shops and everywhere, that they presently became as
intolerable to the wearied eye as the latest popular melody usually
becomes to the harassed ear. In Lucerne, too, the wood carvings of
other sorts, which had been so pleasant to look upon when one saw them
occasionally at home, soon began to fatigue us. We grew very tired
of seeing wooden quails and chickens picking and strutting around
clock-faces, and still more tired of seeing wooden images of the alleged
chamois skipping about wooden rocks, or lying upon them in family
groups, or peering alertly up from behind them. The first day, I would
have bought a hundred and fifty of these clocks if I had the money--and
I did buy three--but on the third day the disease had run its course,
I had convalesced, and was in the market once more--trying to sell.
However, I had no luck; which was just as well, for the things will be
pretty enough, no doubt, when I get them home.
For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock; now here I was, at
last, right in the creature's home; so wherever I went that distressing
“HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo! HOO'hoo!” was always in my ears. For a nervous man,
this was a fine state of things. Some sounds are hatefuler than others,
but no sound is quite so inane, and silly, and aggravating as the
“HOO'hoo” of a cuckoo clock, I think. I bought one, and am carrying it
home to a certain person; for I have always said that if the opportunity
ever happened, I would do that man an ill turn.
What I meant, was, that I would break one of his legs, or something of
that sort; but in Lucerne I instantly saw that I could impair his mind.
That would be more lasting, and more satisfactory every way. So I bought
the cuckoo clock; and if I ever get home with it, he is “my meat,” as
they say in the mines. I thought of another candidate--a book-reviewer
whom I could name if I wanted to--but after thinking it over, I didn't
buy him a clock. I couldn't injure his mind.
We visited the two long, covered wooden bridges which span the green and
brilliant Reuss just below where it goes plunging and hurrahing out
of the lake. These rambling, sway-backed tunnels are very attractive
things, with their alcoved outlooks upon the lovely and inspiriting
water. They contain two or three hundred queer old pictures, by old
Swiss masters--old boss sign-painters, who flourished before the
decadence of art.
The lake is alive with fishes, plainly visible to the eye, for the water
is very clear. The parapets in front of the hotels were usually fringed
with fishers of all ages. One day I thought I would stop and see a
fish caught. The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly, a
circumstance which I had not thought of before for twelve years. This
one:
THE MAN WHO PUT UP AT GADSBY'S
When my odd friend Riley and I were newspaper correspondents in
Washington, in the winter of '67, we were coming down Pennsylvania
Avenue one night, near midnight, in a driving storm of snow, when the
flash of a street-lamp fell upon a man who was eagerly tearing along in
the opposite direction. “This is lucky! You are Mr. Riley, ain't you?”
Riley was the most self-possessed and solemnly deliberate person in the
republic. He stopped, looked his man over from head to foot, and finally
said:
“I am Mr. Riley. Did you happen to be looking for me?”
“That's just what I was doing,” said the man, joyously, “and it's the
biggest luck in the world that I've found you. My name is Lykins. I'm
one of the teachers of the high school--San Francisco. As soon as I
heard the San Francisco postmastership was vacant, I made up my mind to
get it--and here I am.”
“Yes,” said Riley, slowly, “as you have remarked ... Mr. Lykins ... here
you are. And have you got it?”
“Well, not exactly GOT it, but the next thing to it. I've brought a
petition, signed by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and all
the teachers, and by more than two hundred other people. Now I want you,
if you'll be so good, to go around with me to the Pacific delegation,
for I want to rush this thing through and get along home.”
“If the matter is so pressing, you will prefer that we visit the
delegation tonight,” said Riley, in a voice which had nothing mocking in
it--to an unaccustomed ear.
“Oh, tonight, by all means! I haven't got any time to fool around. I
want their promise before I go to bed--I ain't the talking kind, I'm the
DOING kind!”