A Tramp Abroad
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