And so we came to our hotel, which was another
converted palace; but baptism is not regarded as essential to
salvation in these parts.
On the whole, Venice did not impress me as it has impressed certain
other travelers. You see, I was born and raised in one of those
Ohio Valley towns where the river gets emotional and temperamental
every year or two. In my youth I had passed through several of
these visitations, when the family would take the family plate and
the family cow, and other treasures, and retire to the attic floor
to wait for the spring rise to abate; and when really the most
annoying phase of the situation for a housekeeper, sitting on the
top landing of his staircase watching the yellow wavelets lap inch
by inch over the keys of the piano, and inch by inch climb up the
new dining-room wallpaper, was to hear a knocking at a front window
upstairs and go to answer it and find that Moscoe Burnett had come
in a john-boat to collect the water tax.
The Grand Canal did not stir me as it has stirred some - so far
back as '84 I could remember when Jefferson Street at home looked
almost exactly like that.
Going through the Austrian Tyrol, between Vienna and Venice, I met
two old and dear friends in their native haunts - the plush hat and
the hot dog. When such a thing as this happens away over on the
other side of the globe it helps us to realize how small a place
this world is after all, and how closely all peoples are knitted
together in common bonds of love and affection. The hot dog, as
found here, is just as we know him throughout the length and breadth
of our own land - a dropsical Wienerwurst entombed in the depths
of a rye-bread sandwich, with a dab of horse-radish above him to
mark his grave; price, creation over, five cents the copy.
The woolly plush hat shows no change either, except that if anything
it is slightly woollier in the Alps than among us. As transplanted,
the dinky little bow at the back is an affectation purely - but in
these parts it is logical and serves a practical and a utilitarian
purpose, because the mountain byways twist and turn and double, and
the local beverages are potent brews; and the weary mountaineer,
homeward-bound afoot at the close of a market day, may by the simple
expedient of reaching up and fingering his bow tell instantly whether
he is going or coming.
This is also a great country for churches. Every group of chalets
that calls itself a village has at least one long-spired gray
church in its midst, and frequently more than one. In one sweep
of hillside view from our car window I counted seven church steeples.
I do not think it was a particularly good day for churches either;
I wished I might have passed through on a Sunday, when they would
naturally be thicker.
Along this stretch of railroad the mountaineers come to the stations
wearing the distinctive costume of their own craggy and slabsided
hills - the curling pheasant feather in the hatbrim; the tight-fitting
knee-breeches; the gaudy stockings; and the broad-suspendered belt
with rows of huge brass buttons spangling it up and down and
crosswise. Such is your pleasure at finding these quaint habiliments
still in use amid settings so picturesque that you buy freely of
the fancy-dressed individual's wares - for he always has something
to sell.
And then as your train pulls out, if by main force and awkwardness
you jam a window open, as I did, and cast your eyes rearward for
a farewell peek, as I did, you will behold him, as I did, pulling
off his parade clothes and climbing into the blue overalls and the
jean jumpers of prosaic civilization, to wait until the next carload
lot of foreign tourists rolls in. The European peasant is indeed
a simple, guileless creature - if you are careless about how you
talk.
In this district and on beyond, the sight of women doing the bulk
of the hard and dirty farmwork becomes common. You see women
plowing; women hoeing; women carrying incredibly huge bundles of
fagots and fodder on their heads; women hauling heavy carts,
sometimes with a straining, panting dog for a teammate, sometimes
unaccompanied except by a stalwart father or husband, or brother
or son, who, puffing a china-bowled pipe, walks alongside to see
that the poor human draft-animals do not shirk or balk, or shy
over the traces.
To one coming from a land where no decent man raises his hand
against a woman - except, of course, in self-defense - this is indeed
a startling sight to see; but worse is in store for him when he
reaches Bohemia, on the upper edge of the Austrian Empire. In
Bohemia, if there is a particularly nasty and laborious job to be
done, such as spading up manure in the rain or grubbing sugar-beets
out of the half-frozen earth, they wish it on the dear old
grandmother. She always seemed to me to be a grandmother - or old
enough for one anyway. Perhaps, though, it is the life they lead,
and not the years, that bends the backs of these women and thickens
their waists and mats their hair and turns their feet into clods
and their hands into swollen, red monstrosities.
Surely the Walrus, in Alice in Wonderland, had Germany in mind
when he said the time had come to speak of cabbages and kings
- because Germany certainly does lead the known world in those two
commodities.
