Mr. and Miss Jones, of Manchester—The benefits of cocoa—A hint to the Peace Society—The window as a mediaeval argument—The favourite recreation—The language of the guide—How to repair the of time—George tries a bottle—The fate of the German beer drinker—Harris and I resolve to do a good action—The usual sort of statue—Harris and his friends—A pepperless Paradise—Women and towns.
We were on our way to Prague, and were waiting in the great hall of the Dresden Station until such time as the powers-that-be should permit us on to the platform. George, who had wandered to the bookstall, returned to us with a wild look in his eyes. He said:
“I’ve seen it.”
I said, “Seen what?”
He was too excited to answer intelligently. He said
“It’s here. It’s coming this way, both of them. If you wait, you’ll see it for yourselves. I’m not joking; it’s the real thing.”
As is usual about this period, some paragraphs, more or less serious, had been appearing in the papers concerning the sea-serpent, and I thought for the moment he must be referring to this. A moment’s reflection, however, told me that here, in the middle of Europe, three hundred miles from the coast, such a thing was impossible. Before I could question him further, he seized me by the arm.
“Look!” he said; “now am I exaggerating?”
I turned my head and saw what, I suppose, few living Englishmen have ever seen before—the travelling Britisher according to the idea, accompanied by his daughter. They were coming towards us in the flesh and blood, unless we were dreaming, alive and concrete—the English “Milor” and the English “Mees,” as for generations they have been in the Continental comic press and upon the Continental stage. They were perfect in every detail. The man was tall and thin, with sandy hair, a huge nose, and long Dundreary whiskers. Over a pepper-and-salt suit he wore a light overcoat, reaching almost to his heels. His white helmet was with a green veil; a pair of opera-glasses hung at his side, and in his lavender-gloved hand he carried an alpenstock a little taller than himself. His daughter was long and angular. Her dress I cannot describe: my grandfather, poor gentleman, might have been able to do so; it would have been more familiar to him. I can only say that it appeared to me unnecessarily short, exhibiting a pair of ankles—if I may be permitted to refer to such points—that, from an point of view, called rather for . Her hat made me think of Mrs. Hemans; but why I cannot explain. She wore side-spring boots—“prunella,” I believe, used to be the trade name—mittens, and pince-nez. She also carried an alpenstock (there is not a mountain within a hundred miles of Dresden) and a black bag to her waist. Her teeth stuck out like a rabbit’s, and her figure was that of a on .
Harris rushed for his camera, and of course could not find it; he never can when he wants it. Whenever we see Harris up and down like a lost dog, shouting, “Where’s my camera? What the dickens have I done with my camera? Don’t either of you remember where I put my camera?”—then we know that for the first time that day he has come across something worth photographing. Later on, he remembered it was in his bag; that is where it would be on an occasion like this.
They were not content with appearance; they acted the thing to the letter. They walked round them at every step. The gentleman had an open Baedeker in his hand, and the lady carried a phrase book. They talked French that nobody could understand, and German that they could not translate themselves! The man at officials with his alpenstock to attract their attention, and the lady, her eye sight of an advertisement of somebody’s cocoa, said “Shocking!” and turned the other way.
Really, there was some excuse for her. One notices, even in England, the home of the , that the lady who drinks cocoa appears, according to the poster, to require very little else in this world; a yard or so of art muslin at the most. On the Continent she , so far as one can judge, with every other necessity of life. Not only is cocoa food and drink to her, it should be clothes also, according to the idea of the cocoa manufacturer. But this by the way.
Of course, they immediately became the centre of attraction. By being able to render them some slight assistance, I gained the advantage of five minutes’ conversation with them. They were very affable. The gentleman told me his name was Jones, and that he came from Manchester, but he did not seem to know what part of Manchester, or where Manchester was. I asked him where he was going to, but he evidently did not know. He said it depended. I asked him if he did not find an alpenstock a clumsy thing to walk about with through a crowded town; he admitted that occasionally it did get in the way. I asked him if he did not find a veil with his view of things; he explained that you only wore it when the flies became troublesome. I of the lady if she did not find the wind blow cold; she said she had noticed it, especially at the corners. I did not ask these questions one after another as I have here put them down; I mixed them up with general conversation, and we parted on good terms.
I have pondered much upon the , and have come to a definite opinion. A man I met later at Frankfort, and to whom I described the pair, said he had seen them himself in Paris, three weeks after the termination of the Fashoda incident; while a traveller for some English steel works whom we met in Strassburg remembered having seen them in Berlin during the excitement caused by the Transvaal question. My conclusion is that they were actors out of work, hired to do this thing in the interest of international peace. The French Foreign Office, wishful to the anger of the Parisian mob clamouring for war with England, secured this admirable couple and sent them round the town. You cannot be amused at a thing, and at the same time want to kill it. The French nation saw the English citizen and citizeness—no caricature, but the living reality—and their indignation exploded in laughter. The success of the prompted them later on to offer their services to the German Government, with the beneficial results that we all know.
Our own Government might learn the lesson. It might be as well to keep near Downing Street a few small, fat Frenchmen, to be sent round the country when occasion called for it, shrugging their shoulders and eating frog sandwiches; or a file of untidy, lank-haired Germans might be retained, to walk about, smoking long pipes, saying “So.” The public would laugh and exclaim, “War with such? It would be too absurd.” Failing the Government, I recommend the scheme to the Peace Society.
Our visit to Prague we were compelled to somewhat. Prague is one of the most interesting towns in Europe. Its stones are with history and romance; its every suburb must have been a battlefield. It is the town that conceived the Reformation and hatched the Thirty Years’ War. But half Prague’s troubles, one imagines, might have been saved to it, had it windows less large and temptingly convenient. The first of these it set rolling by throwing the seven Catholic councillors from the windows of its Rathhaus on to the pikes of the Hussites below. Later, it gave the signal for the second by again throwing the Imperial councillors from the windows of the old Burg in the Hradschin—Prague’s second “Fenstersturz.” Since, other fateful questions have been decide in Prague, one assumes from their having been concluded without violence that such must have been discussed in cellars. The window, as an argument, one feels, would always have proved too strong a temptation to any true-born Praguer.
In the Teynkirche stands the worm-eaten pulpit from which preached John Huss. One may hear from the selfsame desk to-day the voice of a Papist priest, while in far-off Constance a rude block of stone, half hidden, marks the spot where Huss and Jerome died burning at the stake. History is fond of her little . In this same Teynkirche lies buried Tycho Brahe, the , who made the common mistake of thinking the earth, with its eleven hundred and one humanity, the centre of the universe; but who otherwise observed the stars clearly.
Through Prague’s dirty, palace-bordered must have pressed often in hot haste blind Ziska and open-minded Wallenstein—they have him “The Hero” in Prague; and the town is honestly proud of having owned him for citizen. In his gloomy palace in the Waldstein-Platz they show as a sacred spot the cabinet where he prayed, and seem to have persuaded themselves he really had a soul. Its steep, ways must have been choked a dozen times, now by Sigismund’s flying legions, followed by fierce-killing Tarborites, and now by pale Protestants pursued by the Catholics of Maximilian. Now Saxons, now Bavarians, and now French; now the saints of Gustavus Adolphus, and now the steel fighting machines of Frederick the Great, have thundered at its gates and fought upon its bridges.
The Jews have always been an important feature of Prague. Occasionally they have assisted the in their favourite occupation of one another, and the great flag suspended from the of the Altneuschule testifies to the courage with which they helped Catholic Ferdinand to resist the Protestant Swedes. The Prague was one of the first to be established in Europe, and in the tiny synagogue, still , the Jew of Prague has worshipped for eight hundred years, his women folk listening, without, at the ear holes provided for them in the massive walls. A Jewish adjacent, “Bethchajim, or the House of Life,” seems as though it were bursting with its dead. Within its narrow acre it was the law of centuries that here or nowhere must the bones of Israel rest. So the worn and broken tombstones lie piled in close confusion, as though tossed and tumbled by the struggling host beneath.
The Ghetto walls have long been levelled, but the living Jews of Prague still cling to their foetid lanes, though these are being rapidly replaced by fine new streets that promise to eventually transform this quarter into the handsomest part of the town.
At Dresden they advised us not to talk German in Prague. For years racial animosity between the German minority and the Czech majority has raged throughout Bohemia, and to be mistaken for a German in certain streets of Prague is to a man whose staying powers in a race are not what once they were. However, we did talk German in certain streets in Prague; it was a case of talking German or nothing. The Czech dialect is said to be of great and of highly scientific . Its alphabet contains forty-two letters, suggestive to a stranger of Chinese. It is not a language to be picked up in a hurry. We that on the whole there would be less risk to our constitution in keeping to German, and as a matter of fact no harm came to us. The explanation I can only . The Praguer is an exceedingly acute person; some subtle falsity of accent, some slight grammatical inaccuracy, may have crept into our German, revealing to him the fact that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we were no true-born Deutscher. I do not assert this; I put it forward as a possibility.
To avoid unnecessary danger, however, we did our sight-seeing with the aid of a guide. No guide I have ever come across is perfect. This one had two distinct failings. His English was decidedly weak. Indeed, it was not English at all. I do not know what you would call it. It was not altogether his fault; he had learnt English from a lady. I understand Scotch fairly well—to keep of modern English literature this is necessary,—but to understand broad Scotch talked with a Sclavonic accent, occasionally relieved by German , taxes the intelligence. For the first hour it was difficult to rid one’s self of the conviction that the man was choking. Every moment we expected him to die on our hands. In the course of the morning we grew accustomed to him, and rid ourselves of the instinct to throw him on his back every time he opened his mouth, and tear his clothes from him. Later, we came to understand a part of what he said, and this led to the discovery of his second failing.
It would seem he had lately invented a hair-restorer, which he had persuaded a local chemist to take up and advertise. Half his time he had been pointing out to us, not the beauties of Prague, but the benefits likely to to the human race from the use of this ; and the conventional agreement with which, under the impression he was waxing concerning views and architecture, we had met his enthusiasm he had attributed to sympathetic interest in this wretched wash of his.
The result was that now there was no keeping him away from the subject. Ruined palaces and churches he dismissed with reference as frivolities, encouraging a taste for the . His duty, as he saw it, was not to lead us to dwell upon the ravages of time, but rather to direct our attention to the means of repairing them. What had we to do with broken-headed heroes, or bald-headed saints? Our interest should be surely in the living world; in the with their flowing tresses, or the flowing tresses they might have, by use of “Kophkeo,” in the young men with their fierce moustaches—as pictured on the label.
Unconsciously, in his own mind, he had divided the world into two sections. The Past (“Before Use”), a sickly, disagreeable-looking, uninteresting world. The Future (“After Use”) a fat, jolly, God-bless-everybody sort of world; and this unfitted him as a guide to scenes of mediaeval history.
He sent us each a bottle of the stuff to our hotel. It appeared that in the early part of our with him we had, unwittingly, clamoured for it. Personally, I can neither praise it nor it. A long series of disappointments has disheartened me; added to which a permanent atmosphere of paraffin, however faint, is apt to cause remark, especially in the case of a married man. Now, I never try even the ............