Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (494 page)

I would not care to live the whole of my youth over again; but I would like to take that trip once more, with the clock just where it was then.

The following year we bestowed our patronage upon Boulogne; and ferreting about for ourselves unearthed a small hotel in the Haute-Ville, where they did us well for seven francs a day
en pension
. Étaples had just been discovered by the English artists. Dudley Hardy was one of the first to see the beauty of its low-lying dunes and pools of evening light. I became an habitué of the Continent. I discovered that with a smattering of the language, enabling one to venture off the beaten tracks, one could spend a holiday abroad much cheaper than in England. Ten shillings a day could be made to cover everything. Zangwill once told me that he travelled through Turkey in comfort on twenty sentences, carefully prepared beforehand, and a pocket dictionary. A professor of languages I met at Freiburg estimated the entire vocabulary of the Black Forest peasant at three hundred words. Of course, if you want to argue, more study is needful; but for all the essentials of a quiet life, a working knowledge of twenty verbs and a hundred nouns, together with just a handful of adjectives and pronouns, can be made to serve. I knew a man who went to Sweden on a sketching tour, knowing nothing but the numbers up to ten; and before he had been there a month, got engaged to a Swedish girl who could not speak a word of English. Much may be accomplished with economy. At Ostend, in the season, one can enjoy oneself for eleven francs a day; but to do so one should avoid the larger hotels upon the front. It was the smell of them, and of the people dining in them, that first inclined my youthful mind to Socialism.

Paris is a much over-rated city, and half the Louvre ought to be cleared out and sent to a rummage sale. On a rainy day with an east wind blowing, it isn’t even gay; and its streets are much too wide and straight: well adapted, no doubt, to the shooting down of citizens, with which idea in mind they were planned, but otherwise uninteresting. All the roads in France are much too straight. I remember a walking tour in Brittany. All day long, the hot, treeless road stretched a straight white line before us. We never moved; or so it seemed. Always we were seven miles from the horizon, with nothing else to look at. There must have been villages and farmsteads scattered somewhere around, but like the events of a Greek drama one had to imagine them. The natives were proud of this road. They boasted that an army corps could march along it thirty abreast without ever shifting a foot to right or left. But they did not use it much themselves. From morn to eve, we met less than a score of people; and half of them were mending it. A motoring friend of mine told me that touring in France was ruination. A tyre burst every day. It was the pace that did it. “But must you go so fast?” I suggested. “My dear boy,” he answered, “have you seen the roads? You don’t want to linger on them.”

The best things about Paris are its suburbs. I am sorry they are rebuilding Montmartre. I never grew tired of the view, and one lodged there cheaply. The huge lumbering omnibus drawn by three mighty stallions served one for getting about Paris when I first knew it. And for playing the grand Seigneur there was the
petit fiacre
at one franc fifty the course; or two francs by the hour, with a
pour-boire
of twenty cents. But the drivers were cruel to their half-starved horses.

Provence is the most interesting part of France. The best way is through Blois and the region of the great châteaux. With a Dumas in one’s pocket, one can dream oneself back in the days of the Grande Monarque; and when one reaches Orange, and has forgotten the railway, one hears the marching of the legions. I never succeeded in finding Tartarin’s house at Tarascon, but King René still holds his court there, in the twilight. They were repairing the Palace of the Popes at Avignon when I first visited the town, some thirty-five years ago, and they were still repairing it when I was there last, the year before the war. They did not seem to me to have got much further. Maybe the British workman does not take so disproportionate a share of the cake for leisureliness as he is supposed to do. But everything goes slow, or else stands still, in sunny, sleepy Provence. I used to like it in the summer time before the tourists came. We English get accustomed to extremes. I remember, after
déjeuner
in a cool cellar, strolling through Les Beaux. The houses are hewn out of the rock on which the town stands: so much of it as still remains. From one of the massive doors a little child ran out, evidently with the idea of joining me upon my walk. And next moment came its mother, screaming. She snatched up the child and turned on me a look of terror.

“Mon Dieu!” she exclaimed. “To promenade here in the heat for pleasure! You must surely be Monsieur the Devil himself. Or else an Englishman.”

Another time, at St. Petersburg on a mild winter’s morning (as it seemed to me), I went out without a greatcoat; and made a sensation in the Nevski Prospect.

A curious thing once occurred to me in Russia, persuading me of the possibility of thought transference. I was staying with my friends the Jarintzoffs. General Jarintzoff had been the first governor of Port Arthur, and Madame, most fortunately for me, had constituted herself my translator; and had made my name fairly well known in Russia. A friend had dropped in, and the talk had turned on politics. Madame Jarintzoff was repeating, in Russian, a conversation I had had with her the day before on India. Suddenly she stopped and stared at me.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I must have misunderstood you. But how on earth did you know what I was saying?”

Unconsciously, I had interrupted her, and corrected a statement she had made. I knew hardly a word of Russian, except a few sentences she had taught me, enabling me to go out by myself. Her voice could have conveyed nothing to me, but the thought behind it I had grasped. I may, of course, have gathered it from her expression.

The Russians are a demonstrative people. On stepping out of the train at St. Petersburg, I found a deputation waiting to receive me. The moment they spotted me, the whole gang swooped down upon me with a roar. A bearded giant snatched me up in his arms and kissed me on both cheeks; and then light-heartedly threw me to the man behind him, who caught me only just in time. They all kissed me. There seemed to be about a hundred of them: it may have been less. They would have started all over again, if Madame Jarintzoff had not rushed in among them and scattered them. Since then, my sympathies have always been with the baby. I knew it was affection; but in another moment I should have burst out crying. I never got used to it.

There used to be a special breed of fox-terrier popular in Russia, employed on bear-hunting expeditions. Being very small and very courageous, they would contrive to get behind the bear, when sheltering in his cave, and by biting at his heels drive him out. Some friends at Zarskoe Selo made me a present of one of these dogs. He was eleven weeks old at the time, but grew up to be quite the smallest and quite the fiercest animal that I have ever lived with. His name — I forget the Russian for it — signified “Seven Devils,” but for short I called him Peter. He was useful on the way back from St. Petersburg to Berlin. He saw to it that we had the compartment to ourselves; and were both able to lie down and get some sleep. There were complaints, of course. But in Russia, in those days, there was a fixed tariff for officials. Railway guards and ticket-inspectors cost a rouble; station-masters two; and Divisional Superintendents, with sword, sometimes as much as five.

My wife met me at the station. Peter was lying curled up in a nest I had made him inside my fur coat. He was then nine inches long, pure white with blue eyes. He looked half asleep: that was one of his tricks. Before I could warn her, my wife stooped to kiss him. Fortunately she was quick, and saved her nose by a hair’s breadth. I remember her delight, two years later, when she ran back into the bedroom to tell me that Peter had let her kiss him. I would not believe it until I had seen it myself.

Yet he was an affectionate little beggar, in his cranky way. He would sit on my desk while I worked; and would never go to sleep unless he was lying on something belonging to one or another of us. One of the girls’ hats would do as well as anything. He would take it on to a chair and curl himself up inside it; and his one answer to all their storming and raving was: “What I have, I hold; what I take, I keep.” Well, it taught them not to leave their things about. He would keep close enough to me in the country; but the town always confused him; and often I would lose him. He would make no attempt to find me, but would just sit down in the middle of the street where he had last noticed me, and howl. In Munich, he came to be known as: “The English dog that for his master screams.” Policemen would knock at my door to inform me that he was screaming in such and such a street; and that I must come immediately and fetch him home. His chief trouble was that big dogs, as a rule, would not fight him; and for little dogs he had too much contempt. I suppose it was inherited instinct. Something about the size of a bear was his idea of a worthy antagonist. One day at Freiburg, in the Black Forest, he succeeded in persuading a great Dane to take some notice of him. So long as Peter merely leapt about in front of him and tried to reach his throat to kill him, the Dane just walked on. Peter ran after him and bit his leg. He bit it hard; and the Dane turned. Peter’s every hair bristled with delight. At last, he had found a gentleman willing to oblige him. But life brings disappointments both to dogs and men. The Dane was quicker than Peter had expected. He made a sudden dive and seized Peter by the scruff of the neck. I overtook them just as the Dane, with Peter cursing and kicking, reached the middle of a bridge crossing a small stream. The Dane put his front paws on the parapet and looked over. All was clear. So he dropped Peter into the middle of the stream, waited to see Peter’s head come up again, and then trotted off.

The stream flowed between walls, and Peter had to swim quite a quarter of a mile before he found a landing-place. He was still looking for that great Dane when we left Freiburg for Dresden, some six months later.

Taking summer and winter together, Dresden is perhaps the most comfortable town to live in of all Europe. Before the war, quite a large English colony resided there. We had a club; and a church of our own, with debt and organ fund just as at home. A
gemütliche
town, as the Germans say, and cheap. One went to the opera, the finest in Europe, in a tramcar. It didn’t land you in the mud a quarter of a mile away, but put you down outside the door. And when you came out at ten, in time for a cosy supper and so home to bed by twelve, it was waiting there for you. For the best seats you paid six marks. You did not have to get yourself up. Nobody did, except the King’s relations. (A kindly old gentleman. He sent a special messenger round to me one morning to tell how much he had enjoyed my “Three Men on the Bummel.”) You just got up from the tea-table, and went. The only dress restriction was that ladies must take off their hats. You had no call to tap her on the shoulder, beg her with tears in your eyes to do so, and wonder if she would. The gentleman at the door, in a uniform suggestive of a Field-Marshal, had seen to all that. She was not bound to take off her hat. She could keep it on and go home again. It was only if she wanted to get in to hear the opera that she had to take it off, and leave it in the Garde-robe. But then the Garde-robe cost twopence, and was surrounded with looking-glasses. They think of these things, in Germany. Another Hunnish law that always shocked the English visitor at first, was one forbidding him to scatter dirty paper in the street. I once asked a Turkish celebrity I was interviewing for a newspaper what had most impressed him on his first arrival in England. We always asked them that. Generally they said it was the beauty of our women, or the greenness of our grass, or something of that sort. This ruffian was new to the business and answered without a moment’s hesitation, “Dirty paper.”

A kindly, simple folk, the Saxons. We spent two years in Dresden and made many friends. On Sunday evenings we had music at each other’s houses. Students from the great music
schule
would drop in, armed with their favourite instrument; also full-fledged members of the orchestra. Marie Hall was a student there — a shy, diffident little girl; and Mischa Elman.

The Military were gods, and everybody feared and loved them. Gaudy officers, with clanking swords, would walk the pavements two or three abreast, sweeping men, women and children into the gutter. But indoors, they could be quite human. We had a visit from the Kaiser, during the manœuvres. He was not popular in Saxony; and that year made himself still less so. The first-floor window of a country villa commanded a good view of the operations. It was five o’clock in the morning. The Kaiser would not wait a moment. A door was forced open and the Kaiser stamped upstairs, marched into the bedroom, and threw open the window. The Gnädiger Herr with his Gnädigen Frau were in bed. Both were furiously indignant, but had to lie there till it pleased the Kaiser to tramp out again, without so much as even an apology. He must always have been a tactless fool.

There was good skating at Dresden in the winter. Every night the lake in the Grosser Garten would be swept and flooded. In the afternoon a military band would play, and there was a comfortable restaurant in which one took one’s tea and cakes. The Crown Princess would generally be there. She was a lovely woman. She mingled freely with the people, and was popular with all classes, except her own. She saw me waltzing one day, and sent for me; and after that I often skated with her. She was a born Bohemian, with, perhaps, the artist’s love of notoriety. The ponderous respectability of the Saxon Court must have weighed upon her like a nightmare. But there is no need to believe all the stories that were told against her. A man I knew well, an Irish doctor, got himself mixed up with the business; and was given forty-eight hours to clear out of Dresden, taking all his belongings, including his family, with him. He was in good practice there, and it ruined him. It transpired afterward that he was guiltless of all; except maybe of having talked too much. But the court had got its dander up, and was hitting out all round. His name was O’Brien. He was aware of his national failing. I asked him once to support me in a resolution I was putting to the club.