Europe Revised — 22 - Ch. X: Modes of the Moment; a Fashion Article, pt. 3

In a week--about--he called me on the telephone and broke the sad news to me.

My English riding pants would never ride me again.

In using the shears he had made a fatal slip and had irreparably damaged them in an essential location.

However, he said I need not worry, because it might have been worse; from what he had already cut out of them he had garnered enough material to make me a neat outing coat, and by scrimping he thought he might get a waistcoat to match.

I have my English raincoat; it is still in a virgin state so far as wearing it is concerned.

I may yet wear it and I may not.

If I wear it and you meet me on the street--and we are strangers--you should experience no great difficulty in recognizing me.

Just start in at almost any spot on the outer orbit and walk round and round as though you were circling a sideshow tent looking for a chance to crawl under the canvas and see the curiosities for nothing; and after a while, if you keep on walking as directed, you will come to a person with a plain but substantial face, and that will be me in my new English raincoat.

Then again I may wear it to a fancy-dress ball sometime.

In that case I shall stencil Pike's Peak or Bust!

on the sidebreadth and go as a prairie schooner.

If I can succeed in training a Missouri hound-dog to trail along immediately behind me the illusion will be perfect.

After these two experiences with the English tailor I gave up.

Instead of trying to wear the apparel of the foreigner I set myself to the study of it.

I would avoid falling into the habit of making comparisons between European institutions and American institutions that are forever favorable to the American side of the argument.

To my way of thinking there is only one class of tourist-Americans to be encountered abroad worse than the class who go into hysterical rapture over everything they see merely because it is European, and that is the class who condemn offhand everything they see and find fault with everything merely because it is not American.

But I must say that in the matter of outer habiliments the American man wins the decision on points nearly every whack.

In his evening garb, which generally fits him, but which generally is not pressed as to trouserlegs and coatsleeves, the Englishman makes an exceedingly good appearance.

The swallow-tailed coat was created for the Englishman and he for it; but on all other occasions the well-dressed American leads him--leads the world, for that matter.

When a Frenchman attires himself in his fanciest regalia he merely succeeds in looking effeminate; whereas a German, under similar circumstances, bears a wadded-in, bulged-out, stuffed-up appearance.

I never saw a German in Germany whose hat was not too small for him--just as I never saw a Japanese in Occidental garb whose hat was not too large for him--if it was a derby hat.

If a German has on a pair of trousers that flare out at the bottom and a coat with angel sleeves--I think that is the correct technical term--and if the front of his coat is spangled over with the largest-sized horn buttons obtainable he regards himself as being dressed to the minute.

As for the women, I believe even the super-critical mantuamakers of Paris have begun to concede that, as a nation, the American women are the best-dressed women on earth.

The French women have a way of arranging their hair and of wearing their hats and of draping their furs about their throats that is artistic beyond comparison.

There may be a word in some folks' dictionaries fitly to describe it--there is no such word in mine; but when you have said that much you have said all there is to say.

A French woman's feet are not shod well.

French shoes, like all European shoes, are clumsy and awkward looking.

English children are well dressed because they are simply dressed;

and the children themselves, in contrast to the overdressed, overly aggressive youngsters so frequently encountered in America, are mannerly and self-effacing, and have sane, simple, childish tastes.

Young English girls are fresh and natural, but frequently frumpy; and the English married woman is generally dressed in poor taste and appears to have a most limited wardrobe.

Apparently the husband buys all he wants, and then, if there is any money left over, the wife gets it to spend on herself.

Venturing one morning into a London chapel I saw a dowdy little woman of this type kneeling in a pew, chanting the responses to the service.

Her blouse gaped open all the way down her back and she was saying with much fervor, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done."

She had too, but she didn't know it, as she knelt there unconsciously supplying a personal illustration for the spoken line.

The typical highborn English woman has pale blue eyes, a fine complexion and a clear-cut, rather expressionless face with a profile suggestive of the portraits seen on English postage stamps of the early Victorian period; but in the arranging of her hair any French shopgirl could give her lessons, and any smart American woman could teach her a lot about the knack of wearing clothes with distinction.

In England, that land of caste which is rigid enough to be cast iron, all men, with the exception of petty tradespeople, dress to match the vocations they follow.

In America no man stays put--he either goes forward to a circle above the one into which he was born or he slips back into a lower one; and so he dresses to suit himself or his wife or his tailor.

But in England the professional man advertises his calling by his clothes.

Extreme stage types are ordinary types in London.

No Southern silver-tongued orator of the old-time, string-tied, slouch-hatted, long-haired variety ever clung more closely to his official makeup than the English barrister clings to his spats, his shad-bellied coat and his eye-glass dangling on a cord.

At a glance one knows the medical man or the journalist, the military man in undress or the gentleman farmer; also, by the same easy method, one may know the workingman and the penny postman.

The workingman has a cap on his head and a neckerchief about his throat, and the legs of his corduroy trousers are tied up below the knees with strings--else he is no workingman.

When we were in London the postmen were threatening to go on strike.

From the papers I gathered that the points in dispute had to do with better hours and better pay; but if they had been striking against having to wear the kind of cap the British Government makes a postman wear, their cause would have had the cordial support and intense sympathy of every American in town.

It remains for the English clerk to be the only Englishman who seeks, by the clothes he wears in his hours of ease, to appear as something more than what he really is.

Off duty he fair1y dotes on the high hat of commerce.

Frequently he sports it in connection with an exceedingly short and bobby sackcoat, and trousers that are four or five inches too short in the legs for him.

The Parisian shopman harbors similar ambitions--only he expresses them with more attention to detail.

The noon hour arriving, the French shophand doffs his apron and his air of deference.

He puts on a high hat and a frock coat that have been on a peg behind the door all the morning, gathers up his cane and his gloves;

and, becoming on the instant a swagger and a swaggering boulevardier, he saunters to his favorite sidewalk cafe for a cordial glassful of a pink or green or purple drink.

When his little hour of glory is over and done with he returns to his counter, sheds his grandeur and is once more your humble and ingratiating servitor.

In residential London on a Sunday afternoon one beholds some weird and wonderful costumes.

On a Sunday afternoon in a sub-suburb of a Kensington suburb I saw, passing through a drab, sad side street, a little Cockney man with the sketchy nose and unfinished features of his breed.

He was presumably going to church, for he carried a large Testament under his arm.

He wore, among other things, a pair of white spats, a long-tailed coat and a high hat.

It was not a regular high hat, either, but one of those trick-performing hats which, on signal, will lie doggo or else sit up and beg.

And he was riding a bicycle of an ancient vintage!

The most impressively got-up civilians in England--or in the world, either, for that matter--are the assistant managers and the deputy cashiers of the big London hotels.

Compared with them the lilies of the field are as lilies in the bulb.

Their collars are higher, their ties are more resplendent, their frock coats more floppy as to the tail and more flappy as to the lapel, than it is possible to imagine until you have seen it all with your own wondering eyes.

They are haughty creatures, too, austere and full of a starchy dignity; but when you come to pay your bill you find at least one of them lined up with the valet and the waiter, the manservant and the maidservant, the ox and the ass, hand out and palm open to get his tip.

Having tipped him you depart feeling ennobled and uplifted--as though you had conferred a purse of gold on a marquis.

Chapter XI