Europe Revised — 13 - Ch. VII: Thence On and On to Verbotenland, pt. 2

Classical quotations interspersed here and there are wonderful helps to a guide book, don't you think?

In rural Italy there are two other scenic details that strike the American as being most curious--one is the amazing prevalence of family washing, and the other is the amazing scarcity of birdlife.

To himself the traveler says: "What becomes of all this intimate and personal display of family apparel I see fluttering from the front windows of every house in this country?

Everybody is forever washing clothes but nobody ever wears it after it is washed.

And what has become of all the birds?"

For the first puzzle there is no key, but the traveler gets the answer to the other when he passes a meat-dealer's shop in the town and sees spread on the stalls heaps of pitiably small starlings and sparrows and finches exposed for sale.

An Italian will cook and eat anything he can kill that has wings on it, from a cassowary to a katydid.

Thinking this barbarity over, I started to get indignant; but just in time I remembered what we ourselves have done to decimate the canvas-back duck and the wild pigeon and the ricebird and the red-worsted pulse-warmer, and other pleasing wild creatures of the earlier days in America, now practically or wholly extinct.

And I felt that before I could attend to the tomtits in my Italian brother's eye I must needs pluck a few buffaloes out of my own; so I decided, in view of those things, to collect myself and endeavor to remain perfectly calm.

We came into Venice at the customary hour--to wit, eleven P. M.

--and had a real treat as our train left the mainland and went gliding far out, seemingly right through the placid Adriatic, to where the beaded lights of Venice showed like a necklace about the withered throat of a long-abandoned bride, waiting in the rags of her moldered wedding finery for a bridegroom who comes not.

Better even than this was the journey by gondola from the terminal through narrow canals and under stone bridges where the water lapped with little mouthing tongues at the walls, and the tall, gloomy buildings almost met overhead, so that only a tiny strip of star-buttoned sky showed between.

And from dark windows high up came the tinkle of guitars and the sound of song pouring from throats of silver.

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.

Everywhere in Germany you see them--the cabbages by the millions and the billions, growing rank and purple in the fields and giving promise of the time when they will change from vegetable to vine and become the fragrant and luscious trailing sauerkraut; but the kings, in stone or bronze, stand up in the marketplace or the public square, or on the bridge abutment, or just back of the brewery, in every German city and town along the route.