On Second Thought, Later On,
He Decided To Make It Three Years - He Did Not Want To Crowd The
Guide, He Said, Or Put Too Great A Burden On His Mentality In A
Limited Space Of Time.
If England harbors few guides the Continent is fairly glutted with
them.
After nightfall the boulevards of Paris are so choked with
them that in places there is standing room only. In Rome the
congestion is even greater. In Rome every other person is a guide
- and sometimes twins. I do not know why, in thinking of Europe,
I invariably associate the subject of guides with the subject of
tips. The guides were no greedier for tips than the cabmen or the
hotel helpers, or the railroad hands, or the populace at large.
Nevertheless this is true. In my mind I am sure guides and tips
will always be coupled, as surely as any of those standard team-word
combinations of our language that are familiar to all; as firmly
paired off as, for example, Castor and Pollux, or Damon and Pythias,
or Fair and Warmer, or Hay and Feed. When I think of one I know
I shall think of the other. Also I shall think of languages; but
for that there is a reason.
Tipping - the giving of tips and the occasional avoidance of giving
them - takes up a good deal of the tourist's time in Europe. At
first reading the arrangement devised by the guidebooks, of setting
aside ten per cent of one's bill for tipping purposes, seems a
better plan and a less costly one than the indiscriminate American
system of tipping for each small service at the time of its
performance. The trouble is that this arrangement does not work
out so well in actual practice as it sounds in theory. On the day
of your departure you send for your hotel bill. You do not go to
the desk and settle up there after the American fashion. If you
have learned the ropes you order your room waiter to fetch your
bill to you, and in the privacy of your apartment you pore over
the formidable document wherein every small charge is fully specified,
the whole concluding with an impressive array of items regarding
which you have no prior recollection whatsoever. Considering the
total, you put aside an additional ten per cent, calculated for
division on the basis of so much for the waiter, so much for the
boots, so much for the maid and the porter, and the cashier, and
the rest of them. It is not necessary that you send for these
persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them;
they will be waiting for you in the hallways. No matter how early
or late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a
long and serried rank.
You distribute bills and coins until your ten per cent is exhausted,
and then you are pained to note that several servitors yet remain,
lined up and all expectant, owners of strange faces that you do
not recall ever having seen before, but who are now at hand with
claims, real or imaginary, on your purse. Inasmuch as you have a
deadly fear of being remembered afterward in this hotel as a piker,
you continue to dip down and to fork over, and so by the time you
reach the tail end of the procession your ten per cent has grown
to twelve or fifteen per cent, or even more.
As regards the tipping of guides for their services, I hit on a
fairly satisfactory plan, which I gladly reveal here for the
benefit of my fellow man. I think it is a good idea to give the
guide, on parting, about twice as much as you think he is entitled
to, which will be about half as much as he expects. From this
starting point you then work toward each other, you conceding a
little from time to time, he abating a trifle here and there,
until you have reached a happy compromise on a basis of fifty-fifty;
and so you part in mutual good will.
The average American, on the eve of going to Europe, thinks of the
European as speaking each his own language. He conceives of the
Poles speaking Polar; of the Hollanders talking Hollandaise; of
the Swiss as employing Schweitzer for ordinary conversations and
yodeling when addressing friends at a distance; and so on. Such,
however, is rarely the case. Nearly every person with whom one
comes in contact in Europe appears to have fluent command of several
tongues besides his or her own. It is true this does not apply
to Italy, where the natives mainly stick to Italian; but then,
Italian is not a language. It is a calisthenic.
Between Rome and Florence, our train stopped at a small way station
in the mountains. As soon as the little locomotive had panted
itself to a standstill the train hands, following their habit,
piled off the cars and engaged in a tremendous confab with the
assembled officials on the platform. Immediately all the loafers
in sight drew cards. A drowsy hillsman, muffled to his back hair
in a long brown cloak, and with buskins on his legs such as a stage
bandit wears, was dozing against the wall. He looked as though
he had stepped right out of a comic opera to add picturesqueness
to the scene. He roused himself and joined in; so did a bearded
party who, to judge by his uniform, was either a Knight of Pythias
or a general in the army; so did all the rest of the crowd. In
ten seconds they were jammed together in a hard knot, and going
it on the high speed with the muffler off, fine white teeth shining,
arms flying, shoulders shrugging, spinal columns writhing, mustaches
rising and falling, legs wriggling, scalps and ears following suit.
Feeding hour in the parrot cage at the zoo never produced anything
like so noisy and animated a scene.
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