The Innocents Abroad
He brought his family with him. I observed that carpets were spread
from the pier-head to his carriage for him to walk on, though I have
seen him walk there without any carpet when he was not on business. I
thought may be he had what the accidental insurance people might call an
extra-hazardous polish (“policy” joke, but not above mediocrity,) on his
boots, and wished to protect them, but I examined and could not see that
they were blacked any better than usual. It may have been that he had
forgotten his carpet, before, but he did not have it with him, anyhow.
He was an exceedingly pleasant old gentleman; we all liked him,
especially Blucher. When he went away, Blucher invited him to come
again and fetch his carpet along.
Prince Dolgorouki and a Grand Admiral or two, whom we had seen yesterday
at the reception, came on board also. I was a little distant with these
parties, at first, because when I have been visiting Emperors I do not
like to be too familiar with people I only know by reputation, and whose
moral characters and standing in society I can not be thoroughly
acquainted with. I judged it best to be a little offish, at first. I
said to myself, Princes and Counts and Grand Admirals are very well, but
they are not Emperors, and one can not be too particular about who he
associates with.
Baron Wrangel came, also. He used to be Russian Ambassador at
Washington. I told him I had an uncle who fell down a shaft and broke
himself in two, as much as a year before that. That was a falsehood, but
then I was not going to let any man eclipse me on surprising adventures,
merely for the want of a little invention. The Baron is a fine man, and
is said to stand high in the Emperor's confidence and esteem.
Baron Ungern-Sternberg, a boisterous, whole-souled old nobleman, came
with the rest. He is a man of progress and enterprise--a representative
man of the age. He is the Chief Director of the railway system of
Russia--a sort of railroad king. In his line he is making things move
along in this country He has traveled extensively in America. He says he
has tried convict labor on his railroads, and with perfect success. He
says the convicts work well, and are quiet and peaceable. He observed
that he employs nearly ten thousand of them now.
This appeared to be another call on my resources. I was equal to the
emergency. I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the
railways in America--all of them under sentence of death for murder in
the first degree. That closed him out.
We had General Todtleben (the famous defender of Sebastopol, during the
siege,) and many inferior army and also navy officers, and a number of
unofficial Russian ladies and gentlemen. Naturally, a champagne luncheon
was in order, and was accomplished without loss of life. Toasts and
jokes were discharged freely, but no speeches were made save one thanking
the Emperor and the Grand Duke, through the Governor-General, for our
hospitable reception, and one by the Governor-General in reply, in which
he returned the Emperor's thanks for the speech, etc., etc.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
We returned to Constantinople, and after a day or two spent in exhausting
marches about the city and voyages up the Golden Horn in caiques, we
steamed away again. We passed through the Sea of Marmora and the
Dardanelles, and steered for a new land--a new one to us, at least--Asia.
We had as yet only acquired a bowing acquaintance with it, through
pleasure excursions to Scutari and the regions round about.
We passed between Lemnos and Mytilene, and saw them as we had seen Elba
and the Balearic Isles--mere bulky shapes, with the softening mists of
distance upon them--whales in a fog, as it were. Then we held our course
southward, and began to “read up” celebrated Smyrna.
At all hours of the day and night the sailors in the forecastle amused
themselves and aggravated us by burlesquing our visit to royalty. The
opening paragraph of our Address to the Emperor was framed as follows:
“We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply
for recreation--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial
state--and, therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting
ourselves before your Majesty, save the desire of offering our
grateful acknowledgments to the lord of a realm, which, through good
and through evil report, has been the steadfast friend of the land
we love so well.”
The third cook, crowned with a resplendent tin basin and wrapped royally
in a table-cloth mottled with grease-spots and coffee stains, and bearing
a sceptre that looked strangely like a belaying-pin, walked upon a
dilapidated carpet and perched himself on the capstan, careless of the
flying spray; his tarred and weather-beaten Chamberlains, Dukes and Lord
High Admirals surrounded him, arrayed in all the pomp that spare
tarpaulins and remnants of old sails could furnish. Then the visiting
“watch below,” transformed into graceless ladies and uncouth pilgrims, by
rude travesties upon waterfalls, hoopskirts, white kid gloves and
swallow-tail coats, moved solemnly up the companion way, and bowing low,
began a system of complicated and extraordinary smiling which few
monarchs could look upon and live. Then the mock consul, a
slush-plastered deck-sweep, drew out a soiled fragment of paper and
proceeded to read, laboriously:
“To His Imperial Majesty, Alexander II., Emperor of Russia:
“We are a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for
recreation,--and unostentatiously, as becomes our unofficial state--and
therefore, we have no excuse to tender for presenting ourselves before
your Majesty--”
The Emperor--“Then what the devil did you come for?”
--“Save the desire of offering our grateful acknowledgments to the lord
of a realm which--”
The Emperor--“Oh, d--n the Address!--read it to the police.
Chamberlain, take these people over to my brother, the Grand Duke's, and
give them a square meal. Adieu! I am happy--I am gratified--I am
delighted--I am bored. Adieu, adieu--vamos the ranch! The First Groom
of the Palace will proceed to count the portable articles of value
belonging to the premises.”
The farce then closed, to be repeated again with every change of the
watches, and embellished with new and still more extravagant inventions
of pomp and conversation.
At all times of the day and night the phraseology of that tiresome
address fell upon our ears. Grimy sailors came down out of the foretop
placidly announcing themselves as “a handful of private citizens of
America, traveling simply for recreation and unostentatiously,” etc.; the
coal passers moved to their duties in the profound depths of the ship,
explaining the blackness of their faces and their uncouthness of dress,
with the reminder that they were “a handful of private citizens,
traveling simply for recreation,” etc., and when the cry rang through the
vessel at midnight: “EIGHT BELLS!--LARBOARD WATCH, TURN OUT!” the
larboard watch came gaping and stretching out of their den, with the
everlasting formula: “Aye-aye, sir! We are a handful of private citizens
of America, traveling simply for recreation, and unostentatiously, as
becomes our unofficial state!”
As I was a member of the committee, and helped to frame the Address,
these sarcasms came home to me. I never heard a sailor proclaiming
himself as a handful of American citizens traveling for recreation, but I
wished he might trip and fall overboard, and so reduce his handful by one
individual, at least. I never was so tired of any one phrase as the
sailors made me of the opening sentence of the Address to the Emperor of
Russia.
This seaport of Smyrna, our first notable acquaintance in Asia, is a
closely packed city of one hundred and thirty thousand inhabitants, and,
like Constantinople, it has no outskirts. It is as closely packed at its
outer edges as it is in the centre, and then the habitations leave
suddenly off and the plain beyond seems houseless. It is just like any
other Oriental city. That is to say, its Moslem houses are heavy and
dark, and as comfortless as so many tombs; its streets are crooked,
rudely and roughly paved, and as narrow as an ordinary staircase; the
streets uniformly carry a man to any other place than the one he wants to
go to, and surprise him by landing him in the most unexpected localities;
business is chiefly carried on in great covered bazaars, celled like a
honeycomb with innumerable shops no larger than a common closet, and the
whole hive cut up into a maze of alleys about wide enough to accommodate
a laden camel, and well calculated to confuse a stranger and eventually
lose him; every where there is dirt, every where there are fleas, every
where there are lean, broken-hearted dogs; every alley is thronged with
people; wherever you look, your eye rests upon a wild masquerade of
extravagant costumes; the workshops are all open to the streets, and the
workmen visible; all manner of sounds assail the ear, and over them all
rings out the muezzin's cry from some tall minaret, calling the faithful
vagabonds to prayer; and superior to the call to prayer, the noises in
the streets, the interest of the costumes--superior to every thing, and
claiming the bulk of attention first, last, and all the time--is a
combination of Mohammedan stenches, to which the smell of even a Chinese
quarter would be as pleasant as the roasting odors of the fatted calf to
the nostrils of the returning Prodigal. Such is Oriental luxury--such is
Oriental splendor! We read about it all our days, but we comprehend it
not until we see it. Smyrna is a very old city. Its name occurs several
times in the Bible, one or two of the disciples of Christ visited it, and
here was located one of the original seven apocalyptic churches spoken of
in Revelations. These churches were symbolized in the Scriptures as
candlesticks, and on certain conditions there was a sort of implied
promise that Smyrna should be endowed with a “crown of life.” She was to
“be faithful unto death”--those were the terms. She has not kept up her
faith straight along, but the pilgrims that wander hither consider that
she has come near enough to it to save her, and so they point to the fact
that Smyrna to-day wears her crown of life, and is a great city, with a
great commerce and full of energy, while the cities wherein were located
the other six churches, and to which no crown of life was promised, have
vanished from the earth. So Smyrna really still possesses her crown of
life, in a business point of view. Her career, for eighteen centuries,
has been a chequered one, and she has been under the rule of princes of
many creeds, yet there has been no season during all that time, as far as
we know, (and during such seasons as she was inhabited at all,) that she
has been without her little community of Christians “faithful unto
death.” Hers was the only church against which no threats were implied
in the Revelations, and the only one which survived.
With Ephesus, forty miles from here, where was located another of the
seven churches, the case was different. The “candlestick” has been
removed from Ephesus. Her light has been put out. Pilgrims, always
prone to find prophecies in the Bible, and often where none exist, speak
cheerfully and complacently of poor, ruined Ephesus as the victim of
prophecy. And yet there is no sentence that promises, without due
qualification, the destruction of the city. The words are:
“Remember, therefore, from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and
do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will
remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.”